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| Michael Swickard, young version |
Speech by Michael Swickard – for the Las Cruces TEA Party, May 17, 2012 -
I will take two local government situations and use them to explore the principle that we citizens must consent to be governed.
Let me set the table: locally our city government threatened to turn off utilities to those who do not pay the red-light camera fines. It got international attention and I am sure hundreds of other cities said, “Cool, can we do that?” Also, we are dealing with Wilderness Proposals that seek to change how we interact with our public lands. What do these have in common? Our consent to be governed.
At all times citizens must consent to be governed if we are to live in a free society. Without our consent there is no legitimate government. We must be able to decide when we will and will not give our consent.
Our country came into being because of an unjust government. The Declaration of Independence said that we will no longer consent to be governed by England. The English did not consent to our withholding our consent so we had the Revolutionary War. We won the right to be free as long as we remain willing to fight for freedom.
The first task after whipping the Brits was we had to construct a just government. So those leaders had to know just from unjust. Then those leaders had to develop a set of rules so that the American government would remain just. No easy task.
The federal government was created by the states. The states shared the power to govern with the federal government Even now they have the right to withhold it
Many Las Cruces citizens became angry at what the city wants to do to those who do not pay red light camera fines. This story starts several years ago with a political move against the local, vibrant home building industry. At the time there were well over a thousand houses a year built, which poured money hand over fist into the coffers of the city government. The city gladly spent said money hand over fist.
Then a new progressive slate of anti-growth and anti-business city leaders was elected. The once vibrant building industry cratered with thousands of people put out of work. This happened both because of the efforts of city leaders to reign in the industry along with national issues constricting building financing. Even now the month by month city gross receipts tax collections are declining. The city got fat on building revenue, so other sources of revenue were needed. Up pops the red-light cameras scam. It was adopted just as other cities were discarding theirs.
The obligatory discussions were brisk, but adoption was a foregone conclusion given the financial needs of the city. Citizen input was solicited and ignored. It was never put to a vote of the citizens. The legal sticking point was how technically to collect on the tickets. Since no police officer witnessed the infraction, the collection had to be administrative. Therein is the rub. Some people refused to pay and the city could not use the police to collect. Still, the city saw a pile of money glimmering from unpaid fines.
Administratively they decided those who do not pay red-light camera fines will get their water and natural gas turned off.
The city claims they are forced to get rough with the citizens in the name of safety even though the recent survey by an NMSU group did not support the safety aspect of the enterprise. That is the tip of the iceberg.
My air conditioner requires water to work. The city intends to turn off my air conditioning going into the summer heat season. What are they thinking? If the city wanted to stop a behavior, why would they also count on the money from the tickets? At some point there should be no offenders. But if you sign a contract with a firm that must be paid, you count on the tickets. That is why it is a scam.
Let us look at the methods of the city. Rather than abuse all of the citizens at once, which would get lots of pushback, the city intends to abuse citizens one at a time. Individual citizens can be subjected to the full tyranny of the city and must submit.
Finally, this was told to the citizens via a press release. It did not seem the city wanted to talk about this issue
The City of Las Cruces has no business being involved in utilities if they can shut off the utilities for reasons outside of the delivery of service. Taking away the ability to cool a home in the heat of summer could lead to inadvertent citizen deaths.
Semi-good news! As people protested this action, the city council, decided to study the problem more and put off enforcement until citizens quit watching. The city council waiting for citizens to quit watching Lotsa luck.
What are the core issues here? First, should there be red-light cameras, second, how should the city get their money from those who do not consent to be fined. Let us start with the core questions: is this the legitimate role of government in a free society? No, it is not. We know it is money scam, nothing more. It was adopted just as many other cities were getting out of the red-camera scam. Yes, Albuquerque quit the program.
Is it the legitimate role of government in a free society to use scams like these to finance their operations. No. This use of utilities to force administrative compliance is worthy of a communist state, not a government entity in the United States of America.
So hold that action in your mind, it was one action by a small group of misguided individuals. Let us reason the Wilderness issues here in the West.
Years ago “Wilderness” meant a place where man had not set foot. After decades of Wilderness legislation, no one can define wilderness. It means whatever this politicians or environmental lawyer means it to mean.
The intense politics around Wilderness designations make winners and losers in our society, something that government is not supposed to do. The winners are the political operatives and lawyers who make their money in courts. Some of the environmental firms are actually a bunch of lawyers we pay to abuse us. Nice. That brings us to the losers, which are the American public. Wilderness is a giant scam.
We are not talking about Teddy Roosevelt wilderness. He saw the Yellowstone region and decided to preserve and protect it. How much did that take away from our enjoyment of Yellowstone National Park? Not at all. This was because until a few years ago protection of “Wilderness” only precluded commercial intrusion. Now the new Wilderness is to preclude the average everyday American from any intrusion, something vastly different from the vision of Teddy Roosevelt.
Teddy would be dumbfounded at the ways lawyers and environmentalists are perverting our use of our public lands.
Take the Wilderness problems of Tombstone, Arizona. Their water plant was built on a mountain hillside before any Wilderness designation and served the town well. Last year a flood damaged the water pipes which the town wanted to repair. They were told the land now was Wilderness so they could not repair their water system.
How can Wilderness mean iron water pipes, roads and water collection areas? It can because the Wilderness advocates and the thousands of lawyers who make millions of dollars advocating an odd sort of Wilderness designation say that it is.
We need new terminology to understand Wilderness issues. At opposite ends of a continuum are the concepts, Nature and Urban. Nature-centric are areas whose attributes are those of nature as opposed to urban-centric whose attributes are those of the urban environment. Compare Alaska with New York City.
Where we have problems is when the two intertwine either just a little or a lot. Some places in America are Nature-centric with some urban intrusion. That is where we have the political rub. No matter what anyone says there are very little virgin Nature landscapes and all of them are in Alaska.
Other places have mostly nature-centric landscapes but there is always a little urbanization that creeps into Nature. So it is the degree of blend that matters, eh? Speaking of creeps, politicians have perverted the language of Wilderness such that Wilderness can be a place where planes fly over, there are one hundred years of roads and if you are standing in a high place you can see Wal-Mart trucks on the freeway, but it is a Wilderness. It is really Nature-centric with urban intrusions.
The question that we have spent almost fifty years working on is the purpose of our nature-centric lands. The legacy of Teddy Roosevelt was the idea to have areas of our country where people could get a good nature-centric experience and then return to their Urban-centric homes. We have lots of forests and mountains that are Nature-centric.
Then someone decided to exclude Americans and make areas where essentially no Americans can go or can go easily. The Wilderness movement today takes land with roads, houses and cattle operations and trys to clear the humans from the landscape by making it impossible for most Americans to enjoy those Nature-centric areas
This is in the name of Wilderness Preservation To be blunt: there are no “Wilderness” areas in New Mexico. All the areas have had roads; all have planes flying overhead, and all have lots of human pressure on them. Do not get me wrong, they are Nature-centric, but all have some Urban-centric intrusion. There has not been Wilderness in New Mexico for hundreds of years.
Even Alaska, as remote as it is has planes flying over and into the Wilderness areas such as the Brooks Range of Mountains. It is the most like the Wilderness stories of America in the early 1800s. But remember, even then there were lots of Native Americans already on the land. We have to go back 20,000 years or more to get land not trampled by humans.
Now do not be a burro and think I am advocating getting rid of our Nature-centric areas. I love being away from town. We have a remote ranch in our family. I have spent many a fine day away from Urban-centric settings. But it is not wilderness.
For those trying to curb the urban intrusion, is there some way to do so without scamming people into calling some place wilderness when it obviously is not? Yes, of course, which is the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt and other presidents, setting aside for the citizens great nature-centric areas to be enjoyed by all Americans.
For the record, nature-centric areas in my mind are not despoiled by having a cow looking back at me. While they are domesticated, they are not urban in the form I see them out of doors. Cows are fine.
The limits of urban intrusion can be managed in my mind but for one important aspect of this question: as long as it does not exclude Americans full access to the land. There are plenty of Nature-centric places in New Mexico to preserve, but not to exclude human entry. Incidentally, when entry must be by foot only, it excludes the majority of Americans.
Remember, we, the people, are paying millions of dollars to environmental lawyers to exclude Americans from their own land.
So our voices must be heard to the issue of our government excluding us from our own land. That they wish to preserve it in a pristine state for some future generation is a ruse. We already fly over the land; there are already roads and haze from power stations. There are literally hundreds of artifacts of human existence on the lands. It is nature-centric and valuable as such.
Let’s tie these issues together. What is the commonality of a group of city leaders introducing tyranny into the city and environmental lawyers using tyranny to keep Americans off their lands. Obvious, isn’t it. Tyranny.
Think of the thrilling days of this country as it rebelled from England. the speeches of Patrick Henry, give me liberty or death think of the men signing the declaration of independence knowing they had concurrently signed their own death warrant if the revolution was squelched by the brits and know only a quarter of the population of the colonies was for revolution. another quarter was against the revolution. That left half of the population too busy, too uninterested, too indifferent to take a side.
Today, the abusers are counting on at least half of the population to continue to not be registered to vote. And of the ones registered, only half vote Like revolutionary days a small percentage of the population commands the greater population because the greater population does not exert any political pressure on the process.
So where is the street battle in Las Cruces? Where is the street by street battle with the Wilderness groups? The TEA Party has done a great job getting people who otherwise had no interest in the body politic to realize that ignoring the problem is like polishing the deck chairs on the Titanic.
We must consent to be governed and we have the right to refuse. We must use that refusal advisedly, but must nevertheless use it when warranted. It is now time. With our presence, with our voices and with our sacred honor we must resist the tyranny here in New Mexico and the U.S. We must not give our consent to tyranny.
