The Phonies in the Woods

It's a sure indicator that all-out rot has begun to sink into conservatism as a governing philosophy when even people in the red states that normally constitute the right's electoral base begin to figure that there's something wrong here.

The point no doubt came home for many of them the past three years when they decided to go fishing or camping somewhere and found that they were being expected to fork over even more money at the trailhead -- with the money actually going toward the private development of business on those lands.

Last week, Sens. Max Baucus, D-Montana, and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, introduced legislation [1] that would bring an end to the Bush administration's scheme to make the public pay twice for using public lands, all to the benefit of the resource-extraction industry.

As promised in an April interview with NewWest.Net, U.S. Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) will introduce a bill on Monday to repeal the Federal Lands Recreational Enhancement Act (FLREA), called the Recreational Access Tax (RAT) by its many detractors. Joining him as co-sponsor will be U.S. Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), making the repeal a true bipartisan effort.

So, Monday morning could be panic time in the offices of the U.S. Forest Service (FS) and other federal agencies currently involved in aggressive fee policy and widespread closure of recreational sites on public lands.

“It’s time for the RAT tax to go," Baucus told NewWest.Net in announcing the upcoming legislation. "Americans already pay to use their public lands on April 15. We shouldn’t be taxed twice."

Baucus also said, "I’ve crafted a common-sense piece of legislation that will nix this unfair fee system once and for all. Hopefully we can begin to resolve some of the controversies that have dogged communities across the West. Access to public land is a value Westerners hold dear. Families shouldn’t have to pay higher and higher fees to go hiking, camping, hunting or fishing."

The RAT tax was first installed in 2004 under circumstances that were dubious at best [1]:

Just hours before the vote on a $388 billion, 3000-plus page spending bill, Rep. Ralph Regula (R-OH) and Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) inserted a rider -- meaning no debate or vote is possible on the item -- authorizing five federal agencies to create and extend recreation access fees on most public lands for the next decade.

The sleazy tactic avoided an unwinnable vote on a wildly unpopular program. Now access fees can be collected on 600 million acres of our public land -- an area six times the size of Montana.

These fees are more than a nuisance tax; they undermine the very idea of these lands as public. By expanding opportunities for private profit, while requiring land managers to provide human-made "improvements" or service to justify charging a fee, the law could accelerate rapidly the commercialization of our legacy.

The laws have drawn the ire of sportsmen across the West, [1] and they too have noticed that there's something askew with the budgetary logic behind the RAT:

Instead of shaking down visitors for a few extra bucks on top of what the IRS has taxed them to buy and maintain the property, on top of what state game and fish departments and the Park Service have charged them for fishing licenses, on top of what the Fish and Wildlife Service has charged them to buy and maintain refuges, and on top of what campgrounds charge them to spend the night, the agencies might try not wasting the money they already have. For instance, the BLM and Forest Service could save $2 billion a year and dramatically improve fishing and hunting by desisting from below-cost timber sales and unnecessary road building. The maintenance backlog for Forest Service roads (which could circle the globe 19 times) is $10 billion. It can't even take care of the roads it has, and yet it's building new ones.

Indeed, as the Tacoma News Tribune [1] reported recently, the administration now estimates that the cost of repairing deteriorating logging roads in national parks in Washington state could cost as much as $760 million -- but they're hoping to fob off the responsibility onto the locals:

The estimate, described as very preliminary, was included in a letter to the state’s congressional delegation. In the letter, Mark Rey, the Agriculture Department undersecretary who oversees the Forest Service, suggested some of the roads could be reclassified so that they didn’t have to meet such stringent maintenance standards, and others could be turned over to the counties.

The letter is fueling lawmakers’ concerns that the administration has failed to confront the logging roads problem, refused to seek adequate funding and will simply turn what could be a ticking budgetary time bomb over to the next president’s administration.

“I don’t see eye to eye with Mark Rey when it comes to management of the forests,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. “We don’t trust him.”

Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Belfair, agreed. Washington state eventually may have to sue the Forest Service to force its compliance with the federal Clean Water Act, he said.

“I have been concerned about this for years,” said Dicks, who as chairman of the House interior appropriations subcommittee has jurisdiction over the Forest Service. “We need an administration more sympathetic to Forest Service programs besides just fires.”

And those same sportsmen have noticed the cumulative effect of the "free market" conservative approach to managing public lands:

"I fish," wrote John Voelker in probably the most quoted statement on angling since Walton, "because I love to, because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly." But RAT puts federal resource agencies in the business of attracting crowds of people, thereby disfiguring the environs of trout. It motivates managers to ignore sportsmen and promote instead activities that damage fish and wildlife and conflict with fishing and hunting. Recreation becomes a business. Our rivers, lakes, grasslands and forests become Disneyfied amusement parks.

Scott Silver at Wild Wilderness [1] has been documenting the privatization of our public lands under the Bush administration. It seems that as Bush heads toward the exits, unburdened by massive public disapproval, his cronies are doing their damnedest to leave the same ugly mark all over lands policy they've made of every other aspect of federal governance -- including national security, the military, education, civil liberties, and public health.

For instance, there's the ongoing efforts [1] to give private outfitter services exclusive use of sections of public land and special privileges on them. Or the expanding reach [1] of the private concessionaires at national parks, who've adopted the Orwellian name "Park Partners."

But all of this is what conservative governance is about, as Rick Perlstein observed [1] early on at this blog:

It was over 35 years ago, in Conscience of a Conservative, when Barry Goldwater wrote these stirring words: "I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient for I mean to reduce its size." Twenty years after that, President Reagan intoned at his first inaugural address, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

More recently, the intent became even more explicitly voiced by folks like Grover Norquist, [1] who told an NPR interviewer [1]:

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

The victims of this con inevitably are going to include the very working-class red-staters who've been most thoroughly gulled by it. Larry Craig [1] gave them a very public exposure to the underlying arrogance [1] of their conservative rulers. It seems that they're finally starting to awaken to the realization that the baby the right wants to drown is their own.

As it happens, Craig for years has been the embodiment of the conservative embrace of the corporate waste of our natural resources, ultimately at the public's expense. A few years ago he tried to eliminate funding [1] for scientific salmon counting on the Columbia River for one reason: the data the scientists were providing was forming the basis for lawsuits to force the government to stop the fishes' dramatic decline.

Craig is like a lot of western Republicans: they love to pose as "outdoorsmen" and never miss photo ops showing them out hunting or fishing. But if you look closely, you can see that it's a distinctly corporate kind of recreation, often under extremely controlled circumstances.

The embodiment of this is Dick Cheney, scion of Wyoming politics, out hunting specially raised quail on a game farm in Texas, or fly-fishing on the Teton River just below a recent hatchery release. Cheney, of course, is adamant about letting salmon go extinct in the Columbia and elsewhere: you'll recall that Cheney played a central role [1] in creating the West's largest fish kill ever, in 2003 on the Klamath.

Of course, guys like Cheney and Craig don't need to worry about such trifles because they know that, even if every public wildlife habitat turns belly-up, they can just go to their corporate pals' private playgrounds, the ranches and resorts, and blast away. Or failing that, they can head out to those new privately managed resorts in the national parks and forests. That's how the magic of the marketplace works, dontcha know?

It's about time the "little people" whose gullible support the right wraps up in an American flag started figuring out they're the ones who pay for this kind of governance. And perhaps they are.