The shrinking in size of two national
monuments in Utah by President Trump through executive order was a long overdue
rebuke to federal land grabs that have enabled federal control of vast swaths
of American land, particularly in the West. As the New
York Times noted in
2016:
The United States government owns 47 percent of all land in
the West. In some states, including Oregon, Utah and Nevada, the majority of
land is owned by the federal government. Of course, it used to own nearly all
of it….
East of the Mississippi… the federal government owns only 4
percent of land.
Part of that discrepancy is due to the vagaries of the Western
expansion into the sparely populated frontier. Part of it is due to the desires
of environmentalists to turn America into a save-the-earth postcard -- take
pictures and don’t touch. President Trump, who has unlocked much of America’s
resources that were formerly held hostage by greenies and others, has
decided to return to the people of Utah control of and decision-making
power over the land of Utah, so you no longer need permission from a Beltway
bureaucrat to pick up a rock and move it one foot to the left:
President Trump signed two proclamations Monday that shrink
federally protected lands in Utah by about 2 million acres -- the largest
rollback of national monument designations in history.
The Bears Ears National Monument will shrink 85% to 201,876
acres, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument will be cut by 39%
to 1 million acres…
Trump said previous presidents overstepped their authority
in declaring vast tracts of western lands off-limits, abusing the
"purpose, spirit and intent" of a 1906 law known as the Antiquities
Act. That law requires presidents to limit the monument designation to
"the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the
objects to be protected."
"These abuses of the Antiquities Act give enormous
power to faraway bureaucrats at the expense of the people who actually live
here, work here, and make this place their home," Trump said in Salt Lake
City Monday.
One of those presidents was one William
Jefferson Clinton. Although the Trump orders only refer to lifting restrictions
on motorized vehicles and grazing rights, much of the land involved is
energy-rich and was put off limits by President Clinton to deprive Americans
access to those resources and to reward a political donor.
A large part of America’s energy dependence on foreign sources can
be traced back to September 18, 1996, when Hillary's co-president hubby
Bill Clinton stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon on the Arizona side and
signed an executive proclamation making 1.7 million acres of Utah a new
national monument, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument:
President Clinton officially set aside 1.7 million acres of
Utah canyon lands Wednesday as a national monument, with some concessions to
Utah authorities who complained the move would stunt the local economy and
block a job-generating coal mine.
Standing against the sweeping backdrop of the Grand Canyon,
Clinton declared that in creating the Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument "we are keeping faith with the future... On this remarkable site,
God's handiwork is everywhere."
But officials trod carefully around the issue of the
planned coal mine, which was to be dug by Andalex Resources, a Dutch company,
on a leased site on the Kaiparowits Plateau, considered one of the new
monument's most remote and valuable sites. Under current plans, 50% of the coal
mined from the plateau would be exported from the Port of Los Angeles.
In his remarks, Clinton implied that he intended to block
the mine, which some have said could produce high quality coal with a value of
$1 trillion.
So why would he dedicate a Utah monument while standing in
Arizona? Well, this federal land grab was done without any consultation with
the governor of Utah or any member of the Utah congressional delegation or any
elected official in the state. The state already had six national monuments,
two national recreation areas, and all or part of five national forests.
Three-quarters of Utah was in already in federal hands.
It was sold as a move to protect the environment. At the time the
Clintons were worried that Ralph Nader’s presence on the ballot in a few
Western states would draw green votes from Clinton in a race that promised to
be close after the GOP retook Congress two years earlier.
Bill Clinton's unilateral land grab in Utah declaring 1.7 million
acres a national monument and placing off-limits to an energy starved United
States up to 62
billion tons of environmentally safe low sulfur coal worth $1.2
trillion that could have been mined with minimal surface impact was in fact a
political payoff to the family of James Riady.
James Riady was the son of Lippo Group owner Mochtar Riady. Young
James was found guilty of and paid a multi-million
dollar fine for funneling more than $1 million in illegal political
contributions through Lippo Bank into various American political campaigns,
including Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential run. Connect the dots. Riady’s
relationship between the Clintons, would be long and corrupt, even extending
to donations
to the Clinton Foundation.
Clinton took off the world market the largest known deposit of
clean-burning coal. Who owned and controlled the second-largest deposit in the
world? The Indonesian Lippo Group of James Riady. It is found and strip-mined
on the Indonesian island of Kalamantan.
The Utah reserve contains the kind of low-sulfur, low-ash, and
therefore low-polluting coal the likes of which can be found in only a couple
of places in the world. It burns so cleanly that it meets the requirements of
the Clean Air Act without additional technology.
“The mother of all land grabs,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said at the time. Hatch has called
what was designated as the Grande Staircase of the Escalante National Monument
the “Saudi Arabia of coal.”
When Clinton signed the proclamation, he promised to exchange
other federal lands for the land that was taken. Hatch said a fair exchange was
impossible, since no other land in Utah had a trillion dollars worth of clean
coal.
Rep. James Hansen (R-UT) pointed out that a large portion of the
coal-rich Kaiparowits plateau within the monument belonged to the
schoolchildren of Utah. When Utah became a state in 1896, about 220,000 acres
were set aside to benefit the schools of Utah. Upon the state's founding, a
trust fund was created to collect and hold directly for the benefit of the
state schools all the revenues generated from developing this land.
Margaret Bird, trust officer for the fund, said that because the
land will not be developed, the schoolchildren of Utah stood to lose as much as
$1 billion over the next 50 years. Phyllis Sorensen, head of the Utah chapter
of the National Education Association, called
Clinton's action "felonious assault," charging that "they
are stealing from the schoolchildren of Utah." Stealing from children to
reward Indonesian billionaire donors is a move typical of the Clintons.
Before there was the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation, and the
putting up of American national security for sale in the Uranium One deal with
Russia, there was Bill Clinton creating the Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument, a monument to Bill and Hillary’s monumental
corruption.
Daniel John Sobieski is a
freelance writer whose pieces have appeared inInvestor’s Business Daily, Human
Events, Reason Magazine and the ChicagoSun-Times among
other publications.
