One of the biggest news stories of the year has been the Nevada stand-off between rancher Cliven Bundy and the BLM. The Bundy family have been grazing cattle on the land for almost 140 years (although that claim has been disputed). The BLM claims that the Bundys owe $1 million in back taxes for grazing fees, and that they have to clear off the land because of an endangered desert tortoise. 
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the state, the BLM are killing thousands of these tortoises. The BLM ran over a tortoise den on the Bundy ranch, and PETA has called them out on their inhumane treatment of the cows. Ecologists claim that the cows are actually good for the tortoises: “more cows, more tortoises”. Further complicating the story is the revelation that the powerful Democrat Senator Harry Reid of Nevada wants to build a solar power plant with the Chinese on the land. The head of the BLM is a former senior advisor of Reid. According to a BLM whistleblower, there is also be a rare earth mineral with military applications involved, and long-term real estate shenanigans involving the Reid family.
The Feds have taken a heavy-handed approach, with death threats, cries of “domestic terrorism”, scuffles and tasering. In the latest skirmish, hundreds of Bundy supporters on foot and on horses advanced on dozens of heavily armed and armored BLM agents who were pointing assault rifles at them and threatening to shoot. They managed to free 389 cows without any shots being fired. The Feds retreated and the battle was won, but Harry Reid vowed “it’s not over yet”.
Enter, Burning Man.
“Burning Man Organizer Plans ‘BundyFest’ – 30 Days of Anarchy next to Stand-off Site”, reads the headline in the Washington Times. The Daily Kos said “this year, Burning Man will be held at Bundyfest — free land adjacent to the Cliven Bundy Ranch. And it’s all free, free, free — no permits, no rules, nothing!”
Here’s the official blurb for the clothing optional, gay-friendly, 24/7 event:
Come celebrate TOTAL FREEDOM at BUNDYFEST, just across the street from the Cliven Bundy Ranch, in Bunkerville, Nevada! 240 bands, 24 hours a day, for a SOLID ROCKIN’ MONTH!!!!
*NO PERMITS REQUIRED
*CAMP ABSOLUTELY ANYWHERE
*FULL NUDITY NOT A PROBLEM
*GAY-FRIENDLY ATMOSPHERE
*PENIS ERECTION CONTEST: Erect the largest penis in the open desert, win valuable prize! (tbd)
BACKGROUND: For years, we paid permitting fees to hold Burning Man on the beautiful Playa in Northern Nevada. But now, Cliven Bundy has shown us a NEW WAY! ABSOLUTE FREEDOM! Bundy has declared the entire area surrounding Bundy Ranch as a TOTALLY RULES-FREE ZONE! ANYTHING GOES! WOO-HOO!!!
Why should Burning Man end on September 1st? Swing down to Vegas for a few days for some R&R, a few good buffets, and then HEAD ON UP TO BUNDYFEST! All 50,000+ Burning Man participants are invited to attend — and as many more as can make the trip from anywhere in the world! 100,000? 250,000? THE SKY IS THE LIMIT AT BUNDYFEST! The desert surrounding Bundy’s ranch is LIMITLESS!
As well as Burners, they’re expecting the Hells Angels and the LA Gay Men’s choir. Should be quite a mix.
Security has already been arranged:
“That’s the point! This is anarchy. This is exactly what the founding fathers envisioned for America…go down to the river, pop a squat and let it all hang out, that’s your right as an American”
So, what’s the deal? Is Burning Man getting all political now, sending hordes of Burners out to stand before the gun barrels of the BLM?
Well, not quite. “Burning Man organizer Sean Shealy” actually has nothing to do with Burning Man – in fact, he has never even been. This fact is not important enough to make it in the papers, so the story has gone global that “Burning Man is now at Bundy Fest”.
BMOrg came out to make an official statement:
“The person is not a Burning Man organizer and we actually have no information on him,” Jim Graham, a Burning Man communications representative, said in an email today.
Additionally, Burning Man posted this on Facebook last night:
“For the record, the Burning Man organization has absolutely no involvement whatsoever with the so-called #BundyFest or its supposed organizer Sean Shealy.”
We hope Bundyfest happens, another month of desert partying, why not? It’s only 500 miles from Burning Man. The Facebook page for Bundyfest launched on Monday, and already has almost 4000 likes – so there definitely is some demand there. Quite how they are going to get 240 bands playing 24/7 at a free event remains to be seen, but anything’s possible. If you promote it, they will come…
Seems like September might be a busy month for the BLM.
Cartoon from Daily Kos
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The Reid/solar power story has been debunked.
Where? Please give a reference to the debunking.
Fox News commentator Jeanine Pirro is asserting the federal Bureau of Land Management’s surge of interest in land used by Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy to graze his cattle has more to do with dollars and power projects than any interest in protecting a tortoise that also lives on the land.
In a special commentary on her “Justice with Judge Jeanine” program, she said the man she now calls “Dirty Harry” Reid, the majority leader in the U.S. Senate and a Nevada Democrat, may have had an ulterior motive for the attempted land grab from Bundy: energy projects.
She said if a solar energy project is expected to impact thousands of acres of desert land in the state, federal rules would require a mitigation zone, where animals that may be protected or endangered could be moved from the project site.
As WND reported, the BLM has mentioned Bundy’s cattle and the grazing land he uses in connected with solar power projects.
Pirro said “Dirty Harry” had been watching federal land being transferred and used for shopping malls and other projects for years until the “armed military type agents came in like stormtroopers.”
“You need snipers to move cows, Harry? Really?” she asked.
Pirro explained a solar project proposed on nearby land by a Chinese company with links to Reid would require that mitigation area.
“The BLM actually posted documents designating the mitigation area so that the solar power project can move forward,” she reported. “Unfortunately, that designated mitigation area has cattle on it.
“Harry, in my other life, I did investigations. I presented cases to grand juries,” she said. “Oh, to be a prosecutor again. Oh, to present this to a grand jury. Oh, to put ‘Dirty Harry’ under oath on the witness stand,” she continued.
WND reported a $5 billion solar-power project in the area proposed by the Chinese government and ENN Group had been proposed but was withdrawn.
But there are a multitude of projects still in development, said Fay Andersen, spokeswoman for NV Energy.
“Nevada has one of the highest Renewable Portfolio Standards in the country, determined as a percent of retail energy sales, and requiring the company to achieve 25 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025,” she explained to WND.
As WND reported, bloggers also made a connection between the Bureau of Land Management’s raid on Bundy’s land and a solar-energy project in southern Nevada financed by the communist Chinese energy firm ENN. It was to be the largest solar farm in the U.S.
Reid had lobbied heavily for the company’s business, even traveling to China. Reid’s son, Rory Reid, formerly a Clark County commissioner, became a lobbyist for ENN while Sen. Reid’s former senior adviser, Neil Kornze, now leads the BLM.
The project died last year, but the BLM’s library of renewable energy projects revealed it was only one of more than 50 solar, wind and geothermal projects planned for Nevada, California, Arizona and other Western states.
The plan to convert an increasingly large share of Nevada’s public land to renewable-energy projects appears to have been a key motivation for Reid to run a war against coal-burning electric power in Nevada that began during the second term of President George W. Bush.
On March 21, Nevada Business published a photograph showing Reid breaking ground on a project with representatives of the Moapa Band of Paiutes, executives with First Solar Inc. and representatives of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The 250 megawatt Moapa Southern Paiute Solar Project is planned to deliver renewable energy to the city of Los Angeles for the next 24 years.
The leaseholder on the Moapa Southern Paiute Solar Project is K Road Power, LLC, a New York City-based energy company which employs as business manager Jonathan Magaziner, formerly an associate at the Clinton Climate Initiative of the William J. Clinton Foundation.
Jonathan Magaziner is the son of Ira Magaziner, who served President Bill Clinton in the White House as senior policy adviser for policy development from 1993 through 1998, and is now the chief executive officer and vice chairman of the Clinton Health Access Initiative and chairman of the Clinton Climate Initiative. He also is a board member of the Clinton Hunter Development Initiative.
According to research conducted by investigator reporter Christine Lakatos, First Solar Inc. was an early green investment funded by Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment banking firm that ranked as a top $1 million contributor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Lakota also documented that First Solar investors include bundlers Bruce Heyman and David Heller, two Goldman Sachs executives who sat on Obama’s 2008 Finance Committee.
Peter Schweizer, on pages 91-92 of his 2011 book “Throw Them All Out,” also lists Michael Ahearn, First Solar’s chief executive officer, as having given generously and exclusively to Democrats. He also pointed out that billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones, another Obama bundler, owns a major stake in First Solar.
In March 2012, the Washington Examiner reported First Solar, an Arizona-based manufacturer of solar panels, received in 2010 a $16.3 million subsidy to expand its factory in Ohio. The grant came after a $455.7 million taxpayer-funded loan guarantee awarded by the Export-Import Bank to subsidize the sale of solar panels to two solar firms in Canada.
One of the Canadian firms, St. Clair Solar, was a wholly owned subsidiary of First Solar, so when First Solar was shipping its solar panels from Ohio to a solar farm it owned in Canada, the U.S. taxpayers were subsidizing the “export,” the Examiner said.
In 2012, NV Energy rebuffed pressure by Reid to get behind the $5 billion solar project that ENN Group wanted to build near Laughlin, Nev. Steve Tetreault noted in the Las Vegas Journal-Review in July 2012 that Reid said the envisioned ambitious complex “would start tomorrow if NV Energy would purchase the power,” but the company “has not been willing to work on this and that’s a shame.”
Tetreault said the Senate majority leader’s remarks were the linkage between the Nevada utility and the clean energy project.
Previously, he wrote, the project was aimed at serving utilities in California, but state officials there said they had no interest in importing power from other sources.
“NV Energy is a regulated monopoly,” Reid said, according to Tetreault’s report. “They control 95 percent of all the electricity that is produced in Nevada and they should go along with this.”
The Las Vegas Review-Journal further reported that in response to Reid, an NV Energy spokeswoman said the utility was not in the market for more renewable energy, having exceeded the state’s requirement that 15 percent of its portfolio originate from clean sources.
Tetreault noted Reid has a personal stake in pushing NV Energy to use more solar power. Reid had teamed up with the Chinese firm to invest $8 billion in the U.S. on renewable energy projects in the coming decade. Also, Reid had invited ENN Group’s chairman, Wang Yusuo, to speak at the senator’s clean-energy summit in Las Vegas during the summer 2011.
Chinese pull the plug
In April 2012, Bloomberg reported the Reid-sponsored deal to have ENN Group invest $5 billion in a solar plant and energy-generating farm in Laughlin, Nevada, was on the ropes because Reid and ENN were unable to find a utility company willing to buy the solar energy.
According to Bloomberg, Reid never stopped pressuring California, evidently concerned he would need an alternative if NV Energy could not be convinced.
The energy plant “will generate the electricity California must have in just a few years,” Reid said in March, referring to a state mandate requiring 33 percent of a utility’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020. “This project is close to California. It’s within walking distance.”
Reid’s spokeswoman, Kristen Orthman, said the senator was working on introducing ENN to utilities.
Laughlin officials were getting calls every week from investors, job seekers and local business owners wanting to know the status.
“It’s extremely frustrating,” [Clark County Commissioner] Steve Sisolak said at the time. “Everybody is so anxious and wants this project to move forward.”
Then, on June 17, 2013, the Associated Press reported ENN Group dropped its plans to build the $5 billion solar project. ENN officials informed Clark County officials the company was terminating its agreement to purchase 9,000 acres because it was unable to sign up public utilities in either Nevada or California to agree to purchase the solar energy generated.
On June 14, 2013, a Clark County commissioner explained to the Las Vegas Sun: “Alternative energies are still more expensive than fossil fuels and they [ENN] couldn’t get (the costs) down to a point where they could sell any of the power. Even if we had given them an extension for a year or two, it wouldn’t have made a difference.”
Bundy’s ‘trespass cattle’
On April 9, the U.S. Senate in a 71-28 vote confirmed Neil Kornze, a former senior adviser to Reid, to head the Bureau of Land Management.
At BLM, an agency Kornze originally joined in 2011, Kornze distinguished himself by spearheading BLM’s “Western Solar Energy” plan that produced the following year a “Final Pragmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for Solar Energy Development in Six Southwestern States.”
The document currently serves as a blueprint for the federal government to “mitigate” the potential environmental impact of the planned Solar Energy Zones, or SEZs.
The government seeks to transform thousands of acres throughout six Southwestern states into alternative habitats to relocate endangered species from private land sold to accommodate renewable-energy projects.
A BLM study titled “Regional Mitigation Strategy for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone, Technical Note 444,” dated March 2014, identifies Bunkerville, Nevada, the site of the Bundy Ranch approximately 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as a mitigation area for the Dry Lake SEZ.
The Dry Lake SEZ, about 15 miles northeast of Las Vegas, encompasses approximately 5,717 acres under management of the Clark County BLM office.
A BLM map identifying the “Bundy Cattle Tresspass Overview,” the area designated by black diagonal lines, also shows cattle from the Bundy Ranch ranging on public land adjoining the Moapa Indian Reservation, site of the previously referenced First Solar project.
BLM map of “Bundy Cattle Trespass Overview”
A document removed from the BLM website but located in Internet archive files clearly notes complaints that Bundy’s “cattle trespass impacts” include “concern that the regional mitigation strategy for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone utilizes Gold Butte as the location for impacts from solar development, and that those restoration activities are not [possible] with the presence of the trespass cattle.”
Page removed from BLM website on the Bundy Ranch “cattle trespass”
That means the grazing of Bundy’s cattle on federal lands in the Gold Butte area is not compatible with moving the endangered tortoises there as part of the “mitigation strategy” planned for the Dry Lake SEZ.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/04/judge-jeanine-takes-on-dirty-harry-reid/#3Mgau4hp2vGQq7zW.99
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgPVcDonhZs
Noble Energy hired to frack …on same land these guys are fighting about. Seems there is always a man or group of men behind the curtain.
http://www.rgj.com/story/tech/environment/2014/04/13/fracking-hits-home-nevada/7649293/
Considering the general lack of racial diversity amongst Burners, I don’t think we should climb up on our high horses so quickly, we might fall.
Has anyone noticed the pic at the very top of this page? So we understand.
Well said.
Is he racist? Maybe. Or is it a comment made by an old rancher about the literal slavery of the old South, to the practical slavery of Jim Crow, to the enslavement of inner city blacks to the Democratic political machines. He’s definitely extremist in some of his views on range management, but since the reasonable people are being pushed out of their grazing allotments, no one should be surprised when those like Bundy are the last ones standing. And for all those posting opinions that haven’t lived out here and watched this unfold over the last several decades, you don’t have a clue.
Dan Love, who led BLM cops and dogs at BRC last year (and probably this year), led the BLM cops and dogs against Bundy. The troops with the fully automatic weapons. His expertise is leading SWAT style raid teams against gatherings of people. He’ll be at Burning Man. Think about it.
from Love’s?
They made this poster, it’s going around the internet. WTF:
http://postimg.org/image/5qfeemalj/
Lol that quote is taken out of context so hard
Way to be bated into the media’s character assassination of this guy, Porter. Nobody likes a racist, but let’s stick to what is actually important in this story.
His lack of character is the central key to this story. This racist nutjob doesn’t recognize the Federal government as an entity because it is inconvenient for him to do so. How disrespectful is that to the rest of us whose coattails he is riding upon while we pay for all of the services he that he benefits from by living within the borders of the US.
Yea lets. He’s a Deadbeat Welfare Queen who has publically said he doesn’t recognize the USA while ripping off the U.S. Taxpayer, while using a bunch of Teahadist loon-bags looking for their next Ruby-Ridge incident to create a rallying cry for all the other loon-bags across the country. Any other questions?
The BLM creates a “grazing tax” in 1993 out of nowhere and demands close to a million dollars a year. He defies it and suddenly this guy is “ripping off the US”. I don’t agree with his racial views but frankly, I don’t give a shit. This is about property and the overstepping of Federal Law. I think it’s hilarious the mainstream media completely ignores this situation for days on end hoping it will not catch traction. Once they realized there was no keeping a lid on it, a nice, juicy and divisional story about race was ready to be released to the public. Based on both of your highly emotional responses it’s working quite well for the establishment. Perhaps you should question your faux “progressive” news outlet and return to critical thinking.
“…And let me tell you another thing about the Negro’s…I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton?”
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/bundy-i-want-tell-you-one-more-thing
Cliven Bundy … HERO OF THE STUPID.
He stands by his comments. http://therightscoop.com/breaking-cliven-bundy-responds-to-charges-of-racism-the-statement-was-right/