Earth hating Farm Bureau wants more socialism in farm bill

In red states like South Dakota freedom equals the right to pollute. 

After the last farm bill was enacted in 2018 Trump era Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue gave away a pool of cash in the 2019 Market Facilitation Program (MFP) payments aimed at buying off welfare farmers. 

Kristi Noem's cuckolded husband is an insurance peddler and so is her fellow Earth hater, Mike Rounds. Senator John Thune (Earth hater-SD) is already notorious for encouraging moral hazard and adding layers of government overreach to the farm bill. 

The American Farm Bureau Federation is notorious for conflicts of interest and denying the human effects on a warming climate while lobbying extensively for crop insurance in the federal farm bill and against Waters of the United States or WOTUS rules while ag bankers continue to enslave landowners.

“It’s time to get it passed, this year,” said Scott VanderWal, president of South Dakota Farm Bureau. “We didn’t really want to be in a presidential election year when we had to do this, but that’s where we’re at. We have to deal with it.” Tensions between ranchers and farmers sometimes arise when policies that favor crop subsidies encourage the conversion of grassland to cropland or reduce grazing areas for livestock. Thune told South Dakota Searchlight that balancing those interests can be achieved within the framework of the farm bill. [Cattlemen tell Thune: ‘More ranch’ needed in already overdue farm bill]

Yet, Republicans in red states are howling because the federal government and states are buying land to protect it from desertification.

So which part of ecocide don't Republicans understand?

Don't miss this terrific new piece by Eric Schlosser: The Cartel on Your Dinner Plate - The Atlantic https://t.co/CGbIHBDCQb

— Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) April 10, 2024

After SCOTUS ruling American Rivers names New Mexico's waterways most imperiled

In 1979 the breach of a dam in New Mexico released some 94 million gallons of radioactive uranium waste into the Rio Puerco.

Until it closed in 1939 the Tererro Mine in the headwaters of the Pecos River took gold, lead and other metals then left piles of toxic waste rock in their place. After major flooding in 1991 when sulfuric acid, aluminum and zinc swept into the river miner Freeport-McMoRan was held responsible for the deaths of some 100,000 Rio Grande cutthroat trout and for the subsequent decades of acid mine drainage. 

Back in 2012 the Supreme Court of the United States began hearing arguments in Sackett v. US Environmental Protection Agency to determine the extent of federal authority over waters of the US or WOTUS. In 2015, the Gold King Mine spill caused by a contractor for EPA emptied three million gallons of contaminated wastewater into the Animas River turning it bright orange damaging New Mexico communities downstream. But, in 2023 the Trump-packed SCOTUS reversed environmental protection for a majority of American citizens and enabled the corporatocracy to pollute at will.

To address the gap in clean water protections left by the Supreme Court decision, New Mexico must secure durable funding to establish a state-led surface water permitting program to protect its rivers, streams, and wetlands. The state’s heritage, environment, people, and economy depend on it. [American Rivers]

Watersheds in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico provide between 50-75% of the water found in the Rio Grande but irrigators in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas take at least 80% of that from the 1,885 mile long river. At least fifteen native fish species and their aquatic habitat once found in the southern portion of the Rio Grande are now gone because the river dries up every year.

ip image: the Rio Grande meanders through the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.

Rounds, Republicans paved the way for Trump's Covid ethnic cleansing

Republican former South Dakota Governor now-US Senator Mike Rounds is an insurance salesman by trade and has wanted to deconstruct the Indian Health Service and Medicaid for most of his life. 

So to nobody’s surprise, Rounds turned on American Indians when in the days after Donald Trump’s inauguration a career criminal commanded the US Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the Dakota Excess pipeline that violated tribal sovereignty, repeatedly cut funds for Indian education, moved to privatize Native trusts, cut foreign aid to countries with high Native populations and praised Brazil's extreme white wing autocrat who laid waste to Indigenous lands in the Amazon. 

Trump hates American Indians so deeply after losing a 1993 casino case under the 1988 Indian Gaming Act he deployed Covid as a biological weapon in 2020 to annihilate as many people as he could and so far he has gotten away with genocide. Contending tribal nations enjoy racial preference lawyers and political appointees in that administration attempted to deny Medicaid benefits to some three million Native Americans even after Republicans cut funding to the Indian Health Service. 

Under Trump's direction US Immigration and Customs Enforcement performed mass hysterectomies on Indigenous women, stripped funding for enforcement of the Violence Against Women Act and stonewalled investigations of missing and murdered Indigenous women or MMIW cases.

South Dakota's junior Republican US Senator even described the "unimaginable horrors" at the IHS after Republicans created those unimaginable horrors. 

Americans cannot afford to look back with rose-colored glasses to act as if Trump wasn’t so bad. Certainly, Indian Country cannot afford another four more years of Trump. [When Trump Said, “They Don’t Look Like Indians to Me”]

We all know South Dakota's current Republican governor is a racist so it comes as no surprise to anyone that she has been barred from four reservations and counting.

Saving the planet from Republican money no easy task

After the Soviet Union fell Republicans began their war on the environment substituting a new Green Scare for the old Red Scare. 

Today, the Center for Western Priorities found 92% of 10,000 comments encouraged the Interior Department to adopt the US Bureau of Land Management's Public Lands Rule as written or even strengthen its conservation measures.

With governments of the world facing a 2025 deadline for new and stronger plans to curb carbon pollution, nearly half of the world's populations voting in elections this year, and crucial global finance meetings later this month in Washington, United Nations executive climate secretary Simon Stiell said Wednesday he knows his warning may sound melodramatic. But he said action over the next two years is “essential.” If emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from burning of coal, oil and natural gas continue to rise or don't start a sharp decline, Stiell said it “will further entrench the gross inequalities between the world’s richest and poorest countries and communities" that are being worsened by climate change. And behind it all is money. [UN climate chief presses for faster action, says humans have 2 years left 'to save the world']

Margaret Byfield is the daughter of a couple with ties to the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion and in Nevada they grazed their cattle without permits on federal land. In 2022 her group, American Stewards of Liberty or ASL presented anti-Earth resolutions to a receptive Otero County Commission and the San Juan County Commission heard two resolutions dealing with land use issues after watching Byfield's dog and pony show. Her husband, Dan has been a lobbyist for the Texas Farm Bureau. 

Charging as much as $225 a head Mrs. Byfield recently spoke to the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association "alleging that environmentalists are atheists and casting conservation efforts as a plan by the federal government to take power from property owners."

Alfredo Herrera is kinder, and softer-spoken, a young rancher whose ancestors first homesteaded their family plot in northern New Mexico 100 years ago. All weekend long, there has been talk of “grassroots.” At the time, ASL’s website declares that 54 percent of its hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual revenue comes from small donors. (The vast majority of that money is spent on the couple’s salaries.) The group’s 990s tell a different story: “Service fees”—money that comes presumably from their county-level consulting and, lately, their summits—make up more than two-thirds of ASL’s revenue. Who do they want to own this country? If I squint a bit, this conference starts to look like a front on behalf of the oligarchs who pay the bills—the people who, if our public lands are ever privatized, will wind up the new owners. [This Land Is My Land: Inside the Growing Movement to Fight Conservation]

Learn more at the Wisconsin Examiner.