America's urban rural divide - Talking past each other

Good examples of the urban rural mentality gap here as well as the kind of expectations of city-country dialogue the Bundy rebellion has stirred up. I estimate that the current wave is going to die out without leaving much in terms of practical results. But next time another Hammond goes to jail or another Bundy Ranch has its cattle rounded up, the city dwellers may be surprised to discover that by now the US countryside is teeming with Bundy style rural terrorists. It may happen within the next couple of years, if not this year.

By Eric Mortenson (Capital Press) {

Date = January 21, 2016
Source = Standoff exposes urban, rural divide

Rural residents, farming and ranching groups and elected officials have criticized the occupiers’ actions. But they say the underlying anger about lost economic opportunity in the rural West is very real.

U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, who represents Eastern Oregon in Congress, said the thread tying the Hammond family’s case with the occupiers’ demands is “decades of frustration, arrogance and betrayal that has contributed to the mistrust of the federal government.”

In Portland and other urban centers, that connection isn’t so clear.

“Because it’s not on their radar,” said John Morgan, an economic development, civic and leadership planner and consultant who works with rural communities.

Harney County, where federal and state agencies manage about 75 percent of the land, has 1,200 fewer people and 10 percent fewer jobs than it did in the late 1970s. The number of logging and mill jobs in the county went from 768 in 1978 to just 6 in 2014, according to state figures.

“The resource economy is intrinsically tied to the prosperity of the rest of the state,” he said. “You couldn’t have urban prosperity without the fact that Oregon is still a resource economy. Intel can only take us so far.”

Many people living in Portland and other urban centers mock the occupiers as “Y’all Qaeda” and ridicule their beliefs. They rail about “welfare cowboys” receiving “subsidized” grazing fees on federal land.

“They’re more than happy to try and regulate what happens to the Columbia River Gorge because they see it as their playground, without stopping to understand the (economic) impact,” Morgan said.

[...]

Paul Schwennesen, a Harvard-educated Air Force veteran who raises grass-fed beef in Arizona, wrote a piece for the Huffington Post in which he described Western reaction to the Harney County situation as “deeply American.”

He said “urban elites” at both ends of the political spectrum have dismissed the standoff as ridiculous, and miss the point of it.

“Like good Tories haughtily renouncing tea dumping in Boston ‘Harbour,’ we may be shocked to find that the ragamuffins are not only saying something important, but that their message is striking a chord, Schwennesen wrote.

“What they are saying is that the federal government is too bloated, too heavy-handed, and too corrupt, and that it is most spectacularly evident on the rugged rangelands of the West.”

If Cargill or Monsanto owned the majority of the land and people were denied opportunity to make a living, all hell would break loose, he said.

He said the ground level issue is federal management of the overwhelming majority of the resource base in the West. Bureaucratic paralysis is the inevitable result when “one decision maker gets to make the decisions over a gigantic public resource,” he said.

In a phone interview, Schwennesen said reaction to his piece “split along the urban-rural divide.”

[...]

But the Hammond case — they were ordered to serve additional prison time for burning BLM land — and the wildlife refuge occupation may have opened the conversation. Walden made an impassioned speech in Congress about “federal overreach in the West” that was well-received and widely shared on social media.

Rancher Keith Nantz, manager and partner of the Dillon Land and Cattle Co. south of The Dalles, Ore., wrote an opinion piece on the issue for the Washington Post that received more than 4,200 reader comments.

In his piece, Nantz said management decisions are being made by people “four to five generations removed from food production” and who “don’t quite understand our industry.”

Nantz said online comments ranged from “absolute opposite ends of the spectrum.” The issue now has the national stage, he said, and producers should not let the conversation die off. Farmers and ranchers are getting better at networking, he said, and must continue to engage the public and explain what they do without being combative.

“We need to utilize the momentum we have right now,” Nantz said. “We need to capitalize on this movement.” }

The DOOMMM Club is now playing with open cards in Europe

Is this how "Europe" ends?

The Germans, founders and funders of the postwar union, shut their borders to refugees in a bid for political survival by the chancellor who let in a million migrants. And then -- why not? -- they decide to revive the Deutschmark while they're at it.

If this sounds a bit like one of those nefarious designs articulated by The DOOMMM Club over the last few years on Facebook, you are right. But this one doesn't come from The DOOMMM Club, but from the top echelons of Europe's political power.

BY ALASTAIR MACDONALD AND NOAH BARKIN (Reuters, Jan 18 2016) {

That is not the fantasy of diehard Eurosceptics but a real fear articulated at the highest levels in Berlin and Brussels.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, her ratings hit by crimes blamed on asylum seekers at New Year parties in Cologne, and EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker both said as much last week.

Juncker echoed Merkel in warning that the central economic achievements of the common market and the euro are at risk from incoherent, nationalistic reactions to migration and other crises. He renewed warnings that Europe is on its "last chance", even if he still hoped it was not "at the beginning of the end".

Source = End of Europe? Berlin, Brussels' shock tactic on migrants }

Just to make sure, from the beginning our bet with the Muslim immigration in Europe was not on a Muslim takeover of Europe as such, but on the rise of far right anti-EU forces threatening to unravel the project of the United States of Europe aka European integration.

Now the leadership seems to have suddenly woken up. Even more remarkable is the fact that they seem to mean business. Germany has already threatened Algeria/Morocco with suspending development aid in case these two refuse to repatriate back those of their migrants who are considered subject to deportation, while German police was reported to have carried out numerous arrests among North African migrants. Both countries are now scheduled to be soon included in the list of "safe countries of origin". That is, there's going to be no political asylum.

These new developments introduce some uncertainty into our original scenario. If the authorities can deport a large number of migrant offenders and effectively instill fear in and suppress the remaining trouble makers among the migrant population, this may go some way in calming down the anti-immigration backlash. We will have to wait and see.

In one respect, however, The DOOMMM Club still remains one step ahead of the elites. If there is radicalization on the right, it's very likely to be followed by radicalization on the left. In fact, this is one is not just likely to happen, it's probably already happening.

Targeting far right opponents - Propaganda video by Swedish Popular Front


The real question here is whether this polarization can mainstream from the fringes, undermining the center and polarizing European societies the American style.

The other side of the coin. The State of Jefferson movement

This report bridges two important events in the modern history of the US periphery. One that got most attention was the armed takeover of a wildlife refuge in Oregon. Another, that largely passed unnoticed, was a gathering of the State of Jefferson movement in Sacramento. The State of Jefferson proved to be the most tenacious of the last wave of neo secessionist movements that peaked about two years ago. Unlike others, the movement has kept growing and radicalizing.

From our perspective, the most intriguing part here is first signs of The State of Jefferson spilling over from northern California into southern Oregon.

By CASEY MICHEL (Polico) {

[...]

Moreover, much like the original Jefferson swell, the insurrectionists at Malheur have tapped into smoldering grievance, exploiting the desiccated economics of southern Oregon to spin a push into insurgency.

As one rancher declaimed at a recent meeting in Burns, Ammon Bundy “has given Harney County our biggest and best platform ever to get our message out.”

The region “has had severe economic problems,” Laufer said, drowning under “grotesque unemployment.” As such, those protesting in the region have opted for an extreme measure—either via a sanctuary standoff or separate statehood.

But while the militia continues piling its arms—and gathering support from certain mainstream circles—the hopes for a Jefferson reborn don’t exist primarily in Oregon. For that, you have to travel south.

[...]

A few days ago, hundreds of Californians gathered at the state Capitol to demand discussion on a new Jefferson. Following over two years of organizing within the pro-Jefferson camp, some 21 counties have delivered declarations for the introduction of a “State of Jefferson” bill in the California Legislature, bundled through either signature-gathering campaigns or counties’ boards of supervisors.

The modern push remains largely limited to northern California, though Jefferson spokesman Robert Smith told me that town halls on the topic are beginning to show up in southern Oregon. At least one of the protesters in Malheur is apparently a State of Jefferson supporter; a video surfaced over the past few days of one of the militants donning Jefferson attire.

But Smith was sure to distance his movement from those currently holed in Malheur: “The state of Jefferson has no intention of doing anything other than civilly and within the color of the law.”

Baird also denied any links between Jefferson and Malheur—“You can buy one of those hats on I-5 for six bucks,” he said—but cited the links threading the two movements. “I think that it’s interesting to note that the grievances all over rural America are the same,” Baird told me. “There’s mission creep by the federal government, there’s mission creep by [the Bureau of Land Management], there’s overregulation that’s affecting the way real people live their lives, and the net result is the criminalization of ordinary individuals who basically haven’t committed any crime.”

[...]

But not all rhetoric has remained quite as civil. According to the Sacramento Bee, Baird pledged to “start a straight-up fight with the people in [the Capitol].”

Source = When Oregon Ranchers Tried to Start Their Own State }

At the backdrop of the Bundy rebellion, an impoverished and demographically crumbling countryside

Another report from New York Times on the standoff in Oregon. I am linking it both because it provides a good background info and because it does coincide with the hope of many in the countryside with the beginning of the standoff that their grievances are now going to be heard and addressed. Lets say, the hearing has happened. But the addressing part is another matter altogether. It's on the addressing part that things can go very wrong. And this is why we watch them

By KIRK JOHNSON (NY Times, JAN 18, 2016) {

The pattern of poverty has shifted nationally as well. In the four decades since the late 1960s, poverty rates fell or remained stable across the Northeast, South and Midwest — but rose significantly across the West, a Pew Research Center study said in 2014.

“High incomes, great schools — it was a Norman Rockwell rural America,” said Timothy A. Duy, an economist and senior director of the Oregon Economics Forum at the University of Oregon, describing the arc of places like Burns. “It’s reasonable for people to say, ‘We’d like to turn back the clock,’ because it was for many people an ideal time.”

What happened was a steep downturn, especially in the timber industry, which has all but disappeared. Oregon lost about three-fourths of its timber mills between 1980 and 2010; Harney County lost all seven, including the one near Burns where Mr. Ward worked, which closed in the mid-1990s.

Changes in the wood industry were clearly also having an effect over those years, with more wood buyers shopping in Canada and more mills becoming automated, but many people here also said they thought the United States Forest Service did not fight back to save the mills and jobs.

People like the Wards said that when environmental groups filed lawsuits and applied pressure at the State Capitol in Salem or in Washington, D.C., to reduce logging, forest managers just surrendered. The residual anger of people caught in the economic undertow now affects how residents here think about the takeover at the refuge, and the arguments about what should happen next.

“You didn’t stand up for us then; why should we stand up for you now?” asked Ms. Ward, 51, referring to federal officials, as she sipped coffee in her kitchen on a recent morning.

[...]

The sense that government — not just federal but state as well — no longer hears the voice of places like this echoes through the community, even among those who wish Mr. Bundy and his supporters would go home.

“People feel powerless,” said State Representative Cliff Bentz, a Republican whose district covers much of eastern Oregon, including Harney County. “As the rural areas grow more and more poor and urban areas grow more and more wealthy, there’s a shift in power.”

Ms. Ward’s father, Al Albertson, 73, who also once worked at the lumber mill here, put it more bluntly. “People in western Oregon don’t even know where Burns is,” he said.

[...]

The armed protesters who took over the headquarters buildings of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge ... preach a vision of rural America on the rebound if only “government oppression” — in land use, ownership and management — could somehow be rolled back.

“Government controls the land and resources,” said the group’s leader, Ammon Bundy, at a news conference last week. And that, he added, “has put people in duress and put them in poverty.”

Source = Rural Oregon’s Lost Prosperity Gives Standoff a Distressed Backdrop }

Links: Jan 2016

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