By Tom DeWeese
It was totally cynical and totally Clintonian. Four days before he was
forced to relinquish the powers of the Presidency, he created six new
"national monuments" involving a million more federal acres to
the sixty million already sequestered from the use of Americans.
These new so-called "monuments" are on land in Montana,
California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Idaho. The War on the West continued
to the last possible moment. In each case, bans on activities ranging from
timber, mining and oil drilling, as well as vehicle use, were part of the
monumentalizing of America Clinton-style.
As the Associated Press reported, "Clinton has already created
eleven new national monuments and expanded two others. Those actions set
new protections on 4.6 million acres of federal land. The new monuments to
be established today would raise that total to at least 5.6 million
acres."
Wrong. The total acreage that Clinton has attempted to sequester
amounts to more than sixty million acres when you include his ban on all
new roads and most commercial logging on more than a quarter of federally
owned land. It affects 38% of Montana's landmass. The total amount
represents an area that is seven times the size of Maryland.
Unknown to most Americans is the fact that our national forests and
parks, as well as offshore coastal areas are designated for "multiple
use."
Congress intended to insure that their natural assets would be
available to commercial and recreational use. Under Clinton's Interior
Department, every effort has been bent to further restrict access and use
for camping, hiking, hunting, fishing and off-road vehicles of every
description.
What Clinton has done, in reality, is force up the cost of every new
home to be built by $5,000 to $10,000 dollars because the U.S. — home to
70% of the forests that existed when the Pilgrims arrived — is actually
importing wood thanks to the Clinton war on the nation's timber industry.
In addition, in the past, national forests paid an estimated 25% of the
gross receipts from timber sales directly to states for county roads and
schools, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars each year. That
income is now effectively ended.
It gets worse. The forest fires that destroyed million of acres of
forest land in 2000, will be subject to the same level of destruction in
the future so long as the ban on roads continues. Without roads, such
massive fires cannot be effectively fought and contained to minimize the
losses.
It gets still worse. The people of the West have always lived close to
the land and depended on mining, oil extraction, and the harvesting of
timber as major sources of income. Literally billions of dollars in jobs,
tax revenues, and the value of huge reserves of coal and other minerals,
untapped oil, and "protected" forest land, have been effectively
denied to Americans.
In one case, in Montana, the Clinton administration called in United
Nations bureaucrats to foreclose the operation of a new Montana gold mine
whose worth is incalculable. And Montana is known as the "Treasure
State."
Clinton's seizure in 1996 of 1.7 million acres of Utah federal land to
all economic and most recreational activity killed the development of a
coal mine that would have employed a thousand workers in that economically
hard-pressed area of southern Utah, generating an estimated $20 million a
year locally.
Thus, Clinton's "monuments" constitute an attack on America's
economic base, its ability to be energy independent, and the right of its
citizens to have access to the very forests and parklands set aside for
their use.
If a foreign power had seized this land, we would have gone to war with
it. Instead, Clinton has used his powers, even in the final hours of his
presidency, to further wound and harm the nation.
