Hundreds converged on Bunkersville, NV on Saturday, April 12, 2014 to bear witness to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) seizure of rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle. After more than two decades in court, on April 5, 2014, the BLM and armed officers from other federal agencies began rounding up the Bundy cattle by helicopter, impounding them for sale at auction.

In a principled stance against the overreach of a federal agency that mismanages the lands under its control, Mr. Bundy ceased paying federal grazing fees in 1993. In an conversation Saturday morning with Fox News’s Don Massey that was livestreamed by Patti Beers (@PMBeers), Cliven Bundy’s sister Susan recounted the events that preceded her brother’s decision to “fire the BLM.”
First, BLM reduced access routes from Las Vegas to recreation in Gold Butte. The Back Country Byway program restricted vehicle traffic solely to routes designated by the BLM. According to Susan Bundy, “We have access roads to the cattle and to the water, they want them shut off!” The community at large was able to use the roads maintained by Cliven Bundy for recreation prior to the BLM’s mandate to close the land.

“When it got to the point that they said, ‘OK, you have to take your cattle off the range in the Spring, because that’s when the turtle come out of their hole.’ Well, that’s that only time we have halfway decent feed here, and that’s when the mamas are feeding their newborn calves,” explained Susan Bundy. “[The cows] don’t do anything with the turtles! The turtles are safer with them. They take them to where the waters are.”

Don Massey responded, “We’ve had a hundred years with cattle and turtle, so why all of a sudden is this happening?”

Addressing public misconceptions about the wealth of the family in relation to the size of the grazing acreage, Susan said, “You probably come from somewhere where you think cows graze on grass. Well, these cattle had to adapt to the feed that we have. They eat the brush … the tops of them … going around grooming them. It takes bigger acreage to … even sustain these cows because the foliage is far and few.”

According to Susan, her brother Cliven Bundy “does not have a problem paying grazing fees if he can pay them to the state of Nevada. He has sent money to the state of Nevada, but they don’t know exactly what to do with it, and then they quit accepting it.”

Describing the damage to the range, Susan revealed, “They have ripped all the water [piping] out … miles of piping. The cattle can’t get water.” The family saw water troughs and piping being hauled out in a dumptruck. Susan described years of range improvement work destroyed by the BLM. “My brothers put a lot of money into bringing the waters down into the desert from the springs in the mountain. We haven’t gone up to see the damage.”

According to Cliven Bundy’s daughter, Shiree Bundy Cox, her great grandfather bought the rights to the Bunkerville allotment in 1887. The Bundy family has passed grazing rights through two generations; the latest transfer to Cliven Bundy took place in 1972. Over the last century, these men “built water [lines], fences and roads to ensure the survival of their cattle, all with their own money, not with tax dollars,” according to Shiree Bundy Cox.

“[The] herd has been part of that range for over a hundred years, long before the BLM even existed. Now the Feds think they can just come in and remove them and sell them without a legal brand inspection or without my dad's signature on it. They think they can take them over two borders, which is illegal, ask any trucker. Then they plan to take them to the Richfield Auction and sell them. All with our tax money. They have paid off the contract cowboys and the auction owner as well as the Nevada brand inspector with our tax dollars. See how slick they are?

Fifty other ranchers in the area have already been bought out or ruined by the bureaucratic oversight of the BLM. In response to the BLM impoud action, armed militias traveled to the Bundy Ranch to support Cliven Bundy in his last stand against a tyrannical federal government. Livestreamer @PMBeers estimated she saw 500-700 men and women in the area on Satuday. Other news media reported crowds of 1,000 at the height of the protest.

View @PMBeers’s video from #BundyRanch: http://youtu.be/9a4Y__S7RZw

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Why didn't he just pay the fees? The reasoning about all the other things he did, disagreement with the BLM, etc. doesn't explain it to me. This a business expense that everyone who grazes on public land pays.

The whole argument about paying to Nevada is silly. It's federal land. The fees are to the federal government.

I don't pay my California DMV fees to the City of Los Angeles, even though I do most of my driving in the city.

All the stuff they added to the land to enable their business - if they have water rights, maybe that's ok - but they're also tenants on the land. It's not being done for public benefit. It's so their herd can eat, and then be sold in the market. So I don't see why any tax money would have been available for that. It would be like tax money being provided to paint over the graffiti on the wall of a liquor store: the government doesn't pay for that, even though there's a public benefit aspect. The expectation is that the business pays for it (unless there's a municipal anti-graffiti program that's paid for with taxes).

The issue of water is something, too - if they have water rights, they get to keep them, even as water becomes more scarce. They're fortunate to have what they have, but won't pay some fees to the public. If I were to try and start a water-using business, I wouldn't have water rights: the old timers would get to keep theirs.

Why didn't the BLM didn't go after him sooner? Were they just letting the fees build up until they could seize his entire operation?

Also, if the tortoise is an issue, I could see why the BLM wants to get rid of roads. No roads, no recreation, less impact.

I did a little searching and found information and opinion ranging from different perspectives.

http://occupyobservations.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-bundy-ranch-oathkeepers-and-koch.html

http://occupyobservations.blogspot.com/2014/04/bundy-ranch-dry-lake-solar-project-and.html

http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2014/04/12/the-bundy-ranch/

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/tag/cliven-bundy/

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2014/04/11/not-every-patriot-is-rushing-to-nevada-standoff/

I didn't know that it was being pushed not only by Infowars but by Glenn Beck and Matt Drudge. No wonder so many paranoid people went there.

A lot of commenters are turning it into an anti-Harry Reid issue, and also attacking "the Chinese" who want to install a solar farm with the electrical utility. It would be a less racist if they at least named the company rather than generalize it to "the Chinese"... but they don't seem to want to do that.

Nobody seems to have brought this up, but for all the hostility to the Federal government, it's possible that his ancestors were trying to work out deals with the Federal government.

Back in the days of westward expansion into what are now the western states, the Mormons were trying to get a huge amount of land from the US government (which they called "Deseret"), and they volunteered to fight wars, settle properties newly seized from the indigenous, and basically, do the dirty work for the Federal government.

So some memes going around with images of indigenous people, some clever text, and so forth, are problematic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_Battalion

Davey D Cook found a choice quote from Cliven Bundy:

“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton,”....“And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

That's direct quote from Cliven Bundy.. Y'all should know him.. He's the cat in Nevada who didn't pay his taxes and has armed himself to the teeth and has been holding off the Feds who came to confiscate his property...

A lot of folks were cheering him on and giving him props for being 'fearless' ... Welp here what he thinks of Black folks and if he's like many of these other anti-gov't Alex Jones type cats I come across, he probably doesn't think too high of Brown folks either...

There are far too many folks who even in the most dire and oppressive situations uphold a staunch white-supremacist-ANTI-BLACK attitude. Be very clear just because folks are fighting the same enemies doesn't mean they share the same cause.. Some want freedom and justice for all and the upliftment and recognition of everyone's humanity , others simply wanna chance to be the oppressor...Such attitudes are not limited to backwards ass white ranchers like Cliven Bundy..."