That really makes me wonder about the vetting process.
Here is a list of bios of some of the militants, including their day jobs in some cases.
There is an article in the NY Times today about how the state of Mississippi might be the first state in the nation to lose control of their child welfare system because of chronic failure to operate and fund it successfully. And the article notes that 19 states, including Md, NY, and Washington State, are under court challenge for their systems.
A common thread is the lack of qualified foster care resulting in kids being returned to family members who take the money but whose only qualification is some family relation to the abuser. Not a good qualification in many cases.
So one should wonder about the vetting process-if it is any good they can’t find enough people and if they loosen it they risk endangering the children. Foster care is a tremendous problem-it is inadequate for the need, it sometimes funds poorly chosen caregivers, and cost a huge amount. Funding people who participate in militias is only one of the many problems in this system.
Makes me wonder if the Govt just waits them out until spring, then these dimwits will have something better to do and return to their ranches, and end their little male bonding vacation.
Reading that article, he does express concern for the current group of boys that were (wisely) removed by child protective services. Considering the difficulties in finding decent foster homes, a rural cattle ranch is hardly the worst place to put certain kids.
He’s still an idiot and an asshole.
Calling it a little male bonding vacation is a gross underestimation of the danger (no offence, snowthx). People that were at the Bundy Ranch standoff ended up being so inspired by the anger that they went on a shooting spree that left 2 police officers dead.
Vice News published a great video on the topic within the past week. Scared the ever living crap out of me. Patriot groups are deluded, angry gun fetishists begging for a confrontation. The guy who committed the terror in my link above was previously interviewed by a TV news crew as saying that he would meet any violence from the Feds with more violence. Dude, the only person who brought violence to the equation was you, when you went completely farking crazy on 2 innocent Vegas cops.
You have really never heard of professional protesters? Google it, there are a bunch of articles out there. This quote is from the Washington Times:
Seems like almost all sustained protests now pay participants to keep the crisis going.
I have to say, I’m skeptical of this story. Just the mention of right-wing boogieman George Soros sets off my bullshit detector.
Real winners we have out there, eh?
I live in Oregon and will be driving to Idaho and through Burns in June. I don’t suppose that they’ll still be there. I’m really hoping that this idiocy ends soon.
It’s pretty obvious that these guys are not very deep thinkers.
There are lots of cites to choose from if you don’t like the one I linked - here’s one from the Investor’s Business Daily. The OP asked who was funding a specific group of protestors, I provided an example of how it has been done in the past. I would not be the least surprised to find that there are wealthy backers propping these guys up.
As for Soros’ involvement, Snopes calls it “Mixture” - probably not Soros himself, but certainly funds provided by the OSF, the grantmaking network of which he is CEO and prime donor, have almost certainly been used to pay protestors. I wasn’t so much concerned with who specifically was paying, I’m sure that varies based on the cause, but just that paying people to protest is becoming common practice.
Well, as the guy in the OP says, his ranch was only paying for itself. Which means that you could say it was more of a hobby than anything–a vanity project, like a home winery or something. Most ranching is done in big corporate operations, now, I believe.
As for the money he takes from Catholic Charities, probably a lot of that essentially comes from government programs and grants which CC administers (and might have had something to do with why they took the kids away, because those programs and grants have strict guidelines–like being there for the kids).
There seems to be a lot of variation–from hypocrites who want to borrow money from the feds and at the same time occupy federal land to vets and tradesmen.
One thing is sure: these guys clearly have watched too many cowboy movies, and need to come back to reality.
It sounds like, at most, some of the protesters decided that they should be paid, not that any group ever actually promised to do so.
And Soros apparently does donate to OSF but has no say in how they spend that money, any more than you and I can direct Red Cross funding just because we donate to them.
So all of that is a far cry from saying that Soros pays protesters.
I know a lot of family ranchers, and yeah, it’s often like a lot of other small businesses that don’t quite pay the bills. Part of the whole “looking middle class” thing mentioned in the OP is that agriculture tends to be very capital-intensive, so you might have someone whose “hobby ranch” has an operating budget in the mid six-figures, but still has to have some sort of normal job to make ends meet. At the risk of coming perilously close to defending them, that’s a big part of the beef (:)) of the Bundys and the other various Sagebrush Rebellion people over the years. Those grazing fees can be the difference between a ranching operation being something that makes a good middle class living and something that’s an expensive hobby.
It’s true that they are having problems, but they may be picking the wrong fight. The problem is that the industry is dominated by 4 giant meat packers who have made the profit margins for ranchers so razor thin that they need more grazing land to even make a profit. They should be fighting for anti-trust actions to be taken against the big packers rather than asking to use public land in ecologically damaging and unsustainable ways.
That’s a hard sell. Since Reagan’s days antitrust has been focused on consumer welfare, narrowly defined, and not suppliers.
Obama saw things differently though. From the Washington Monthly article: [INDENT][INDENT]By midsummer, the USDA had rolled out a series of far-reaching revisions, addressing many of the farmers’ concerns. One of the proposed changes would have specifically banned company retaliation against farmers who tried to negotiate the terms of a contract. Another would have required any company that forced farmers to make capital investments to offer contracts long enough for the farmers to recoup some minimum amount of that investment. This series of proposed updates and revisions to the Packers and Stockyards Act later came to be known collectively as the “GIPSA rules.”
While updating an old law might not sound like a big deal, farmers widely regarded the proposed GIPSA rules as serious game changers. “Before, they would throw us a little bone once in a while,” Watts said. “But with these rules we knew they meant business.” [/INDENT][/INDENT] The interesting part is these rules didn’t require congressional action: the executive branch had the authority to pass them on their own, after a routine public comment process.
The meatpacking industry fought these fair dealing rules tooth and nail. Independent ranchers lacked countervailing power and the Bundy story let’s us know why. Their districts are deep red after all. Anyway after the Republicans took over the House in 2011, they pushed for and won a law stripping the Obama administration of power to level the playing field in favor of independent ranchers: [INDENT][INDENT]The next month, in June 2011, the House Appropriations Committee included a crucial rider in its funding bill. The rider was designed to strip the USDA of the funds it needed to finalize and implement the strongest of the proposed rules. …
The Senate supported the Packers and Stockyards revisions in its appropriations bill in September 2011. But the House, as Woodall put it, “went on a full-out offensive,” holding hostage everything from food stamps to food-safety measures. “Nobody wants to have to defend a policy position where the victims are low-income kids, and that’s where the balance ultimately was,” Woodall said. Even Senators Harkin and Johnson, who only a month earlier had strongly voiced their support for the GIPSA rules, backed down.
By November 2011, it was clear that the reformers had lost. The rider had passed. The rules as they had been intended were dead. The most ambitious, far-reaching campaign to reform the agricultural industry in forty years was over, less than two years after it had begun. [/INDENT][/INDENT] Score another win for the longstanding Republican project of shaping an electoral narrative sufficient to persuade the populace to vote against their economic interests.
Thank you davidm and Measure for Measure. Wow, just wow. I guess it’s easier for these chickens to rail against the govt than against the people that are truly responsible for their conditions.
Well, they are hardly the only members of the fleeced who rail against government.
Interestingly, the proposed regulatory adjustments weren’t radical at all, or even especially center left. Nobody considered price floors or profit caps.
One rule enhanced market transparency. The other shifted risk from the individual rancher to the corporate meatpacker. That makes sense: when a rancher fails, the shock is absorbed by the welfare system, the bankruptcy system and of course the rancher’s family. Far better and I would argue more efficient for such risks to be managed by accountants and financiers. Otherwise you are essentially expecting ranchers to make assessments of future commodity prices. Not their core competence.
You don’t need some big meatpacking cartel to explain why ranchers in the Intermountain West aren’t particularly competitive. It’s just a much more expensive way of growing beef than feedlots, or the huge private ranches in places like Texas that have much more productive grassland.
I also think the part of the article you’ve quoted I think fundamentally misunderstands the history of ranching in the region. It’s not like these ranchers were content on their own land until the big mean meatpackers forced them to eye the previously untrammeled public lands. Ranchers in the region have always primarily used public grazing land. Actually owning the huge swaths of land necessary for grazing in the climate wouldn’t be practical. The number of animals grazing on public lands in the west has been on a steady decline since the 50’s in fact, precisely because ranchers in the region can’t really compete on price.
The Bundys et al are definitely wrong on whatever cockamamie theory about environmentalists or whatever they’re running with this week, but the anti-trust one is also (to excuse another intentional pun) bullshit.
My point was this:
You’d think if his first and primary concern was the well-being of the kids, he wouldn’t think to mention the money issue at all. He’s basically admitting he was using the kids as a source of income, including not ensuring he had a source of income to care for them, or even himself, outside of the payday he got from the foster care system. This really doesn’t say “I’m in it for the kids” to me.
He’s not just playing the system, he’s using people, both the charity staff and kids who are young, vulnerable, and at a disadvantage relative to him. That’s revolting.