Tom Toles for September 19, 2017

Exactly what the new Secretary of the Interior has in mind. He makes James Watt look like a total preservationist! Jerk!

Republicans want privatization to be done in America, just like it has been done in Russia.

It will have exactly the same result: control by oligarchs.

This is what happens when voters don’t care enough about their country to see that it is being run by representatives of “we the people” RATHER THAN “we the wealthy”, “we the corporations” and “we the ideologues”.

The ghost of TR will get you for this, Zinke!

To match the unused brain area of those implementing the said removals.

Sure, what’s the long-term health of the planet, and having natural beauty for our kids and grand-kids to enjoy versus some short-term profits??

RE-DO THE DONALD INSTEAD – {a rhyme and a ps}

Let’s scalp The Donald instead

of these Rushmore-mounted heads,

recalling that Roosevelt Ted

wanted parks to be run by the feds.

… PS:

A lobotomy too for Trump,

and a pound sliced off of his rump.

=======

Look on the bright side: Some enterprising firm could take all the chunks and carve miniature Rushmores for sale. (— They were going to erode in a few thousand millennia, anyway.

If I had the choice, I’d give up a big piece of rock before I’d give up entire ecosystems. I don’t have a choice.

I hadn’t realized that GW, TJ, TR, and AL were all part of the Confederacy.

The American motto: Anything for a buck.

The rapacious greed of Republicans is stopping America from progressing.

“Wise use” types remind me of a six year old kid with a couple of bucks in a piggy bank, and they want to smash it and spend the money. They don’t care what they spend it on, the important thing is to spend it. Resources in the ground are like money in the bank. They can always be extracted if the need becomes critical (and a bigger dividend doesn’t count as "critical.)

The Republicans won’t mind, we took some of their monuments, they take some of ours.

The Yosemite Valley could easily be damned up for a hydroelectric power plant. Oh, sorry, I guess I should not be giving them more ideas.

All that Zinke is doing is to return to the american corporations access to public land that Obama constitutionality gave to the people by executive order.

Taking away from “all the people” to give to a “few people” to profit from by ripping out resources that should have been left where they were. Have you ever seen what’s left of a place after strip miners go through an area? Maybe these people won’t be stripped miners but how they will rape the land will be with the same results. The beauty that was being saved for our children will be gone. Really, it is as simple as that. The forests will have been logged and housing projects will take its place. Or huge shopping centers or parking lots or industrial complexes or maybe chemical production plants or…… you get the picture…. don’t you?? It will be done to profit a few, not for the benefit of all, for the benefit of a few. You don’t really think that the corporations that buy those miles and acres of land that they strip from those parks will share any profits with you, do you?

Come to Eastern Kentucky and take a look around at what’s left of the countryside when the miners and corporate raiders are done with it. Water in streams that is POISON to drink, blighted landscape where NOTHING will grow, mountains with their tops cut off and dumped into nearby valleys…it’s NOT pretty.

I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma. our “next-door” neighbor was a farmer who had several oil well ‘pump horses’, a couple of storage tanks and a “holding pond” about a half-mile from his farmhouse. The area wasn’t posted, there were no “keep out” signs, but the land around the tanks and pumps looked and smelled so bad and the ‘pond’ always had lots of dead birds around it so that NOBODY wanted to be around the area! This shows that “public” land needn’t be posted or access restricted to ‘block people from enjoying ’their’ land. Corporations can’t help defiling anything they touch – but, on the ’flip’side, who really “needs” open spaces and undisturbed nature? Can’t you just take a picture? Remember the Edward G. Robinson character’s death scene in “Soylent Green”!

Will America survive the next several years?

Will we make it to the end of the month without a total disaster? Stay tuned!