Snapping up, locking down the land
Kevin DeAnna
Author warns Obama agenda to deliberately seal off assets
The author of “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America” warns that the federal government has been collecting properties across the country for years, even now is working to control more and ultimately wants to block off any use by the American people.
In a commentary published in Forbes, author Brian Sussman argues that every American is heir to an “unfathomable fortune” in natural resources on nationally owned land but is condemned to bankruptcy by a government that won’t let them use it.
Sussman says it’s the deliberate policy of a government “beholden to the green agenda.”
He reports that “the feds now own nearly 700 million acres of property” that contain huge amounts of natural resources the country could use in difficult economic times, including oil, natural gas, minerals, timber and water.
Instead, the federal government has permanently removed these lands from economic development, deliberately harming the interests of the country to please environmentalists.
Now, Sussman reports, “the Obama administration … seeks to sell low-valued federal land, void of natural resources, and purchase more lucrative private property to cobble together a colossal new federal estate, which will not only be off-limits to development of natural resources, but off-limits to you.”
He continues: “According to the draft, the proposed treasured landscapes will exist ‘without the trappings of visitor centers and other man-made improvements.’”
Sussman also writes that the Founding Fathers explicitly opposed any federal ownership of land, with Congress adopting a policy of redistributing land to the states even before the Articles of Confederation were adopted.
In contrast, the federal government today has “national parks, forests, wildlife areas, marine sanctuaries, wetlands, refuges [and] national monuments and landscapes.” More importantly, under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the executive branch can unilaterally declare millions of acres off the market. Instead of protecting historical artifacts or Native American burial grounds, the law is being used to prevent states from utilizing needed resources.
Such was the case with the Grand Staircase Escalante area set aside by Bill Clinton in Utah when he was president, protecting its landscapes, essentially forever, from most uses.
Sussman’s column in Forbes hits as the Obama administration has been rocked by a scandal involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s former regional administrator, Al Armendariz, who bragged about wanting to “crucify” energy companies. Al Gore has also made recent headlines by condemning unnamed “talk radio hosts” who question man-made global warming.
In an interview with WND, Sussman observed: “Being published in Forbes shows that the business community is becoming increasingly aware of the socialist motivations of modern environmentalism. This isn’t about partisan politics – if America is to survive, we have to be able to use our own resources to provide for our growing population. After all, they doesn’t belong to the government, they belong to us.”
http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/snapping-up-locking-down-the-land/print/