A Time for Equal Representation

Functionality

A Time for Equal Representation

Cleaning House

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            So, we learn that our Washington leadership has a slush fund to grease the wheels of calamity resolution!

            Slip around with your underwear off, make offensive, authoritative immoral demands, and have in place a systematic recourse to resolve your indiscretions doesn’t look too good to the folks back home, boys. If we had a mechanism in place to spank you all and send you home without your parachutes, we’d do it. In fact, it is past time to thin the brush that has grown to impenetrable depths in Washington.

            Functionality

            The matter of the extra-legal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the poster child for such blatant partisan politics this morning. Finally, we learn through some degree of free and independent press the entire operation has been nothing but a shill run for and on behalf of the Democratic party. Its policies were formulated by the oversight of a PR firm. Some $60M was funneled into the outfit that was representing the Clinton Foundation.

            In a dustup last Monday morning, the newly appointed director reported to work only to find his chair filled by an internally appointed bureaucrat by the outgoing administrator. That Star Chamber matron stood her ground and filed a lawsuit claiming the President had no authority to oust her from her rightful, endowed dictatorship. The agency was created with immaculate jurisdiction!

            “The law dictates the outgoing director only has the authority to name his successor,” she argued.

            Even the agency’s budget is independent from congressional oversight. It is run through a Federal Reserve Bank and not the United States Treasury. To make things even worse, there is no paper trail explaining where the fines and penalties imposed and collected by these partisans went. We can only assume they didn’t go to any conservative cause.

            How can that be determined? The federal employee contributions out of that liberal bastion reveal that democratic candidates received support over conservatives on the basis of … 537 to one!

            Cleaning House

            In another life, I was involved in starting a business in Italy whereby we sold proprietary California fruit varieties to selected growers. My good friend, Joe Lima, and I traveled around that country from Rome to Ferrara to Bari and back meeting with growers. Through that process, we kept hearing the phraseology of “Italian style postal remedy” or variations thereof. What it meant was when the state run postal service got inundated with mail, they would simply burn it and start over.

            “Guido, yu’a gotta make a’gooda decisions for the biznuss, yu’a unnerstand?”

            Perhaps that was what Utah congressman and Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, Rob Bishop, was saying when he issued a press release supporting the notion of reorganizing the Department of Interior. His assessment wasn’t unilateral. He noted the Government Accountability Office has described the department has fallen behind in carrying out its basic statutory responsibilities. One best example is the $8B reduction in royalties from federal lands managed by the land management agencies over the past eight years. This record sits in juxtaposition to the surge of private and state lands results, especially oil and gas, in the runup to the fall in prices resulting from production and excess inventories. Despite the serious misconduct of Interior officials, private enterprise has survived and has been a true and consistent jobs producer.

            “After years of systemic dysfunction and mismanagement at the department, true change is long overdue,” the Congressman wrote.

            His vision encompasses a shift away from the current Washington-centric management system and toward a “contemporary decentralized model that prioritizes accountability, transparency and service to the American people”. Those of us who live under the thumb of the Department certainly understand the consequences of being on this side of the relationship, but the likelihood of real transformation is slim. The most basic problem is the growing chasm that exists between agency officials and the regulated natural resource dependent industries. There is no mutually beneficial relationship. There is no market consequence for bad behavior and the once silent undertow of resentment toward resource extraction and production has become an overt, full blown mission. The agencies exist to serve the public in superlatives only.

            Area Resource Management Plans are the best (or is it worst?) example.

            In the case of grazing, there simply are no examples of management alternatives to increase production on New Mexico federal lands managed by the BLM. The alternatives have consistently become to hold grazing at current levels, to reduce grazing levels, or to eliminate grazing completely. Further, any gain from forage emanating from infrastructure improvements is reserved solely for wildlife and not for livestock. In other words, regardless of the effort and or expense applied to the allotments by the producer, any gain cannot be reserved for his contributions. It is reserved for wildlife in a model that has no method of objective measure.

            Of course, the motive is purely political. It has long been political expeditious to condemn and marginalize any and all grazing endeavors. It has become a liberal, spectator sport.

            Time for Equal Representation

             With gusto, we could all suggest the requirement to adhere to local land use plans would be the first true test for Congress to legislate to the department, but that may no longer work across most of the West. The problem is the majority of historical industries have become so gutted and underrepresented that the leadership that would fill the role of enforcing local land use plans are secular urban progressives who despise all forms of extraction.

            That is the true measure of what our federal government has done to our rural communities. Even with their underwear on, too few elected leaders comprehend the problem.

            Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “When a BLM official told me a grandmother in Miami had as much to say about the management of my ranch as I do, I knew what the outcome would eventually be.”