GOP wants to SELL our National Parks, not open them & GOP’s hypocritical obsession: National parks?! 10&8OKT13

WE all remember the publicity stunts at National Parks and Monuments the repiglicans and tea-baggers staged during the federal government shutdown last month (that they created). Only the voluntarily ignorant believed their wailing and moaning. THE truth is they have been systematically underfunding the National Park Service for the past few years, decreasing their market value, with the intent of privatizing our national park system enriching their corporate masters who have bought their political offices. Anyone who lives in an area with privatized toll roads, or has paid attention to the multiple problems of the privatized prison system and the cost the taxpayers are incurring to keep them operating knows privatization of our national park system is not the solution, adequate funding is. From Daily Kos & Salon....

There really has been much public whining and gnashing of teeth by the GOP because the National Parks are closed as a result of the GOP shutdown.  The GOP would have Americans believe that they value our National Parks and are outraged - outraged! - that the parks are closed.
Oh really?

A powerful Republican chairman in the House of Representatives just shared with his constituents his desire to begin selling our national parks. Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida was caught on video in a local town meeting. Here is what he said:"I got attacked in a previous town meeting for not supporting another national park in this country, a 200-mile trailway. And I told the man that we don't need more national parks in this country, we need to actually sell off some of our national parks."

continued....

... Unfortunately, Rep. Stearns isn't the only prominent politician who thinks of the conservation legacy of Theodore Roosevelt as just so much surplus property. Some of the current candidates for leader of the free world have also mused about putting America's national heritage on the chopping block, and the House of Representatives has actually passed or considered favorably a series of radical bills in this Congress that amount to an all-out war on the concept of holding public lands in trust for future generations.

There is a video of Rep. Stearns at Think Progress.   And more from that link:

This is not the first time Republican members of Congress have advocated selling off Americans’ public lands without clarifying how taxpayers would get a fair return for them.  Last fall, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) proposed selling off 3.3 million acres of the public lands that belong to all of us.  And former Rep. Richard Pombo proposed selling national parks to mining companies in 2005. Republican presidential candidates have also recently been confused about the tangible and intangible values of our national parks and public lands.  Mitt Romney told the Reno Gazette-Journal that he doesn’t know “what the purpose is” of public lands, Rick Santorum told Idahoans that public lands should go “back to the hands” of the private sector, and Ron Paul advocated for public lands to be turned over to the states.

See also this excellent article from Salon:

Our national parks have been underfunded for years, not days, and the damage this has caused will last far longer than the shutdown. Inadequate resources have debilitated our parks for decades.  In 1998, for example, a Government Accounting Office study concluded that the dwindling funds were not a short-term problem. “Because of advanced, continuing deterioration, some of these assets may be lost permanently,” it said.  Ten years later, USA Today ran a story with the headline, “National program for ruins in ruins,” about the inadequately funded Vanishing Treasures program, tasked with protecting the country’s archaeological sites.  The aughts have not been kinder.  According to the Center for American Progress, since 2010, Congress has cut the parks budget by 13%, leading to the seasonal closure of national parks including the Great Smoky Mountains and the Grand Canyon. Most recently, the National Parks Group accused the Appropriations Committee-approved budget, which among other travesties completely removed funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, of having its “roots in fantasy rather than reality” and putting “national parks, historic places and cultural treasures… at ever-increasing risk.”  As Nicholas Kristof wrote in August, “[O]ld bridges have collapsed. Trails disturbed by avalanches have not been rebuilt, and signs are missing.” According to the National Forest Service, Kristof reported, only an estimated one-quarter of the country’s 158,000 miles of trails meet internal standards.  The Sierra Club told Salon that the national parks need $11.5 billion worth of maintenance. Half of this is reportedly needed for roads and bridges, whose disrepair poses serious public safety threats. The amount allocated in the 2012 budget? $2.2 billion.
For Congress, though, it’s not enough just to defund our parks so they slowly fall into total, unusable ruin. In this country, it’s also important that we “Drill, baby, drill,” not to mention, “Log, baby, log” and “Mine, baby, mine.” All of these efforts create serious threats to our parks.  In September 2012, the National Park Service identified forty-two park units where non-federal oil and gas drilling is or could be happening in the future.  At the time, twelve had active oil and gas operations.  Yet for plenty of politicians, this is still not enough.  In the 2011 primaries, Michele Bachmann proposed drilling for oil in the Florida Everglades, one of the country’s most endangered ecosystems.  Joe Miller, the Tea Party candidate for Senate in Alaska, has run on a platform that includes turning the pristine Denali National Park and Preserve, the home to Mount McKinley, the U.S.’s highest peak, into an oil well.  And GOP thought leader Grover Norquist says to hell with all of it, let’s just turn them over to the states, or better yet, sell them to the private sector.

The GOP would love nothing better than to sell off (give away) our National Parks to their cronies and campaign contributors for drilling, condos, clear cutting, strip mining, whatever. As usual, Republican mendacity knows no bounds.  No surprise there.
#NationalParksHypocrisy
Please share the Salon article by tweeting!

Originally posted to JLFinch on Thu Oct 10, 2013 at 10:08 AM PDT.

Also republished by DK GreenRoots and National Parks and Wildlife Refuges. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/10/1246005/-GOP-wants-to-SELL-our-National-Parks-not-open-them?detail=action 

GOP’s hypocritical obsession: National parks?!

Republicans may pretend to care during the shutdown, but their policies put the parks in danger

Deena Shanker
 

Ted Cruz, Theodore Roosevelt National Park (Credit: Jeff Malet, maletphoto.com/AP/Valerie J. Naylor)
 
Call me crazy, but I think the National Parks are having their Best Week Ever. Thanks to the government shutdown, they’re getting more attention in a few days than they normally get all year. Even more than when Yosemite was burning last month, when it was filled with hantavirus-carrying mice last year, or when, in 1993, the constant stream of visitors were, as one official put it, “loving the park to death.”
Suddenly, reopening National Parks like Yosemite has become one of the country’s top priorities.  The Republicans are especially concerned, with Arizona State Representative Brenda Barton using the closure to call Obama “De Fuhrer” on Facebook, and to try to strip park rangers of their authority to do their jobs — which right now, sadly, include keeping the parks closed.  Just to show how committed they are to the country’s parks, the Republicans are even including the National Park Service in their piecemeal funding plan, making opening the parks more important than providing Americans with affordable health insurance.
Let’s be honest here for a second, though, guys. Reopening the parks is not going to solve their problems. Sure, it will allow the return of the more than 282 million people that visit them, not to mention the $76 million per day that the local communities earn from those visitors, but the obstacles faced by the parks — which include some actual, physical, roadblocks — run much higher than a few days of closure.
Our national parks have been underfunded for years, not days, and the damage this has caused will last far longer than the shutdown. Inadequate resources have debilitated our parks for decades.  In 1998, for example, a Government Accounting Office study concluded that the dwindling funds were not a short-term problem. “Because of advanced, continuing deterioration, some of these assets may be lost permanently,” it said.  Ten years later, USA Today ran a story with the headline, “National program for ruins in ruins,” about the inadequately funded Vanishing Treasures program, tasked with protecting the country’s archaeological sites.  The aughts have not been kinder.  According to the Center for American Progress, since 2010, Congress has cut the parks budget by 13%, leading to the seasonal closure of national parks including the Great Smoky Mountains and the Grand Canyon.

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Most recently, the National Parks Group accused the Appropriations Committee-approved budget, which among other travesties completely removed funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, of having its “roots in fantasy rather than reality” and putting “national parks, historic places and cultural treasures… at ever-increasing risk.”  As Nicholas Kristof wrote in August, “[O]ld bridges have collapsed. Trails disturbed by avalanches have not been rebuilt, and signs are missing.” According to the National Forest Service, Kristof reported, only an estimated one-quarter of the country’s 158,000 miles of trails meet internal standards.  The Sierra Club told Salon that the national parks need $11.5 billion worth of maintenance. Half of this is reportedly needed for roads and bridges, whose disrepair poses serious public safety threats. The amount allocated in the 2012 budget? $2.2 billion.
For Congress, though, it’s not enough just to defund our parks so they slowly fall into total, unusable ruin. In this country, it’s also important that we “Drill, baby, drill,” not to mention, “Log, baby, log” and “Mine, baby, mine.”  All of these efforts create serious threats to our parks.  In September 2012, the National Park Service identified forty-two park units where non-federal oil and gas drilling is or could be happening in the future.  At the time, twelve had active oil and gas operations.  Yet for plenty of politicians, this is still not enough.  In the 2011 primaries, Michele Bachmann proposed drilling for oil in the Florida Everglades, one of the country’s most endangered ecosystems.  Joe Miller, the Tea Party candidate for Senate in Alaska, has run on a platform that includes turning the pristine Denali National Park and Preserve, the home to Mount McKinley, the U.S.’s highest peak, into an oil well.  And GOP thought leader Grover Norquist says to hell with all of it, let’s just turn them over to the states, or better yet, sell them to the private sector.
If there’s any rallying call that gets the conservative base more excited than “Down with Obamacare” it’s “Up with the Keystone Pipeline.”  Though it’s not getting the same kind of coverage as the healthcare bill, that 1,700-mile pipeline is also a pawn in this shutdown game.  Its wide swath of supporters – which includes Republican leaders John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann, and Steve King – must not have seen the letter from the U.S. Department of the Interior that listed potential negative environmental impacts on seven national parks, five trails, two rivers, a wildlife refuge, and a national historic landmark.
And we can’t forget about our old friend climate change, which is having its own fun with the parks.  The National Parks Conservation Association lists disappearing glaciers and Joshua trees, thriving insect pests, wildfires, flash floods, and rising sea levels as just some of the negative impacts parks are enduring as a result of climate change.  A 2011 Reuters article reported on impacts in Alaskan parks specifically, ranging from “thawing permafrost triggering mudslides onto a key road” to “glaciers receding from convenient viewing areas, while their rapid summer melt poses new flood risks.”  But shutdown leaders like Boehner, Cruz, Bachmann and King don’t waste their time worrying about pesky problems like melting glaciers, and certainly not the impact that they can have on our national parks. They’re too busy blaming Democrats for shutting down the government.
There’s a reason our parks are falling apart: Nobody cares.  The number of people visiting parks has dropped precipitously.  According to a 2011 Kristof column, the National Park Service says there were “35 percent more backcountry campers in the national parks in 1979 than in 2010.”  If Americans aren’t taking the time to explore our national parks, why should Congress spend the time (and money) to keep them in good condition?
So if we want to support our parks, we need to do more than demand they reopen.  First, we need to visit them — and not just for them, but for us. Research has shown that spending time outdoors is 50 percent more effective than indoor exercise when it comes to improving mental health..  Then we need to fight for their conservation, adequate funding, and the recognition that they belong to all of us – whether the government is running or not.  As Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, “There is nothing so American as our national parks… The parks stand as the outward symbol of the great human principle.”
The tragedy is not that the shutdown has closed our national parks. The tragedy, rather, is that our national parks have been slowly shutting down for a long, long time and nobody is paying attention.

Deena Shanker is a writer and occasional attorney living in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter @deenashanker. More Deena Shanker. 
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/08/gops_hypocritical_obsession_national_parks/ 

H.R. 347: Get the Truth on the New "Protest Law" from THE PARTNERSHIP FOR CIVIL JUSTICE FUND 8MAR12

I have seen several e mails about the death of free speech and protest rights as described in the e mail below, but waited to see how things were going to shake out. Here are the facts about HR 347 from the good people at PCJF, check it out and share and don't let anyone scare you from exercising your 1st amendment rights!

H.R. 347: Get the Truth on the New "Protest Law" A Factsheet written by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund

From Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund H.R. 347: Get the Truth on the New “Protest Law” This past week there has been a rallying cry in defense of free speech sounding the alarm that there is brand new legislation, H.R. 347, that some have wrongly argued radically transforms the landscape for protestors in the United States. Today, President Obama signed H.R. 347 into law. Much of what has been written about H.R. 347 is not correct. We are writing this to clarify the situation and separate fact from fiction. Many of the articles and email blasts claim that the law at issue, H.R. 347, “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011,” was written in response to, and targets, the Occupy Movement and is a new full scale assault on dissent in general. There have been alerts, articles and email campaigns urging people to take action asserting that the new bill “criminalizes protest,” is “severely curtailing First Amendment liberties,” “makes protest illegal,” is “outlawing the Occupy Movement,” and makes “free speech a felony.” There is even one campaign titled, “Say Goodbye to Your First Amendment Rights.” Sounds alarming. At the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, we have received many calls and inquiries regarding the central question: how does this law affect protestor rights? We think these facts will help: Fact: H.R. 347 does not represent a new law regulating free speech rights. Most of the language of H.R. 347 has been on the books since 2006. H.R. 347 is an amendment to an existing law, 18 USC § 1752 “restricted buildings and grounds,” that has existed in various forms since 1971. The most significant amendments to the law occurred in 2006. The law is a bad law -- but it has been a bad law for years. Much of the language that people are talking about this week already exists and has existed for years. The language about “an event designated as a special event of national significance”? Already there. The language about “engaging in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to” a restricted area? Already there. The language about “conspiracy”? Already there. Fact: The purpose of the existing law, and why it’s bad. The law as substantially amended in 2006 is very problematic and people should be rightfully concerned. What the law does (but this is not new) is it creates what is in essence a roving or movable zone of federal law enforcement jurisdiction around any person who is under Secret Service protection or in conjunction with a National Special Security Event (NSSE), as distinguished from a permanently fixed location. This allows for federal prosecution of persons who commit enumerated violations of the law within that zone and some of those violations read like classic protest activities. Among other things, the law allows the Secret Service to designate what would normally be public space as a restricted area and for there to be federal prosecution of anyone who “enters or remains” in a restricted area where a person under Secret Service protection will be visiting or which is restricted in conjunction with an NSSE; or who engages in “disorderly or disruptive conduct” with the intent and effect of “imped[ing] or disrupt[ing] the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions;” or who blocks entrance to or exit from a restricted area. Certain major events are designated as NSSEs, and there are at least three on the horizon this year. They include DNC and RNC major party conventions this summer and the NATO meeting in Chicago in May. Other events that are so designated have included IMF/World Bank meetings, G-8 and G-20 meetings, the Inaugurations, and even the Super Bowl. Fact: What is new about the H.R. 347 amendments? 1. The existing law required that for a person to be prosecuted under it, they would have had to carry out those described acts both “willfully” and “knowingly.” The requirement of “willfulness” generally means that a conviction requires proof that the person knew his conduct was unlawful. H.R. 347 strikes the “willfully” requirement. The new amendments appear to intend for a person to be convicted only by “knowingly” taking the actions described even if the person does not know that the actions are unlawful. As amended, a conviction arguably only requires proof that a person “knowingly entered” a certain area. This is an effort to lower the bar for prosecutors who would, arguably, no longer have to prove that a person knew his conduct was unlawful. 2. The other major change is the inclusion of the White House and grounds and the Vice President’s residence and grounds as fixed zones of designation. You might wonder why this is even necessary. Of course, entering into the White House and its fenced-in grounds is already a federal violation. We think this particular change is to target demonstration activity, specifically that which occurs on the White House sidewalk just outside the perimeter fence (as detailed in 36 C.F.R. §7.96 it is lawful to protest on the White House sidewalk, which is under National Park Service jurisdiction). We think that the Government wishes to make it easier to prosecute protestors who step up off of the White House sidewalk and stand on the concrete ledge supporting the fence, something which tourists can be seen doing all the time. We are also concerned that the Secret Service seeks to be able to expand its jurisdiction and authority to create pop-up cordoned off restriction zones in front of the White House extending to areas where demonstrators lawfully assemble. The PCJF will be closely monitoring the use of the new amendments and the existing law and is prepared to take legal action where merited. Fact: There are no new penalties under this law. Contrary to some of what has been written in the past week, there are no new penalties in the law. The law has also already been used in the past to prosecute demonstrators. We do think that it is very likely that the Government is looking at the upcoming NSSE events which are sure to draw demonstrations and determining what is in their arsenal to arrest and prosecute persons engaged in protests. They are keenly aware of the growing social justice movement -- more than 6,700 peaceful protestors have been arrested in a sustained and coordinated attack against the Occupy movement since September 2011. This includes the 700 people falsely arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on whose behalf the PCJF has filed a class action lawsuit seeking to vindicate their constitutional rights. Fact: What Should A Person Do Who Is Concerned About Free Speech Rights? We believe in firmly defending fundamental First Amendment rights in the courts and in the streets. Challenge this law’s effect on protest, yes. But it is critical to have accurate information in hand to wage that fight and not to assert the death of free speech rights when we are not at that moment. As with any law, we are cognizant of any adverse impact on free speech and protest and dissent. While this law, including in its already existing form, is adverse, and serious, it is essential that those of us challenging abridgments of free speech or restrictions on dissent do so from a basis that is factual and accurate. It is equally important not to spread fear and inaccurate information that has the effect of chilling participation in collective action and demonstrations. So here’s what else you can do: stay vigilant about our civil rights and civil liberties and be prepared to take action to defend them; sign up for news and analysis you can trust from the PCJF, and most importantly, keep going out to the streets!