Yeah, I guess it’s kind of like a toll road… although nowadays a lot of those are being sold to private corporations to run.
That is the uk version on what common land (public land) is about. There were huge amounts of it a long times back, but these days it is less common, although it does still exist and the same legal frame work about access to it does still apply, mostly based around a ‘commoners’ rights to use it for grazing livestock etc. Maybe this legal usage followed you over to the usa, and this conflict of private individual use vs the governments wishes is part of the problem, especially in relation to the growing anti-government movement amongst your right-wing?
Edit: indeed towards the end of the wiki article it does mention former colonies using this system as well, and the usa is one such example.
Of course American law is based directly on the British. But I think the commons of the lord of the manor (mostly eliminated by enclosure at the turn of the 18th century) has very little to do with laws governing public land in the US, whether federal or state-owned.
Yeah it seems different to me. Here’s a little piece the New York times on the lands out here.
There are a lot of other resources to use to find out about this stuff as well of course.
I’m happy to say that these are the current occupiers of the Malheur Field Station:
Good to see that bigwig and hazel are doing well!
Richard Adams is still alive, pushing 96 these days.
So anti-government, super racist, hates the poors for receiving welfare Mr. Bundy has… asked the American people to once again to pay for his crap. This time he wants a public attorney: http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-standoff/2016/02/cliven_bundy_seeks_court-appoi.html
He’s now got a whopping 4 kids in jail as well. The real queens of welfare are those in the Tea Party. Finicum got unpaid, vulnerable kids (slave?) labor for his ranch and was paid over $100,000, and who knows how much the Bundy clan has cost the taxpayer. Millions by now. Ammon Bundy has a failing business and still got over $500,000 with special low interest government loans which he is now defaulting on. His wife, who by the Bundy decree is potentially not allowed to work, will undoubtable be using free healthcare for herself and her kids. Obviously she should, but the irony… the irony of this all sickens me like crazy.
The American Tea Party… isn’t it grand?
I’m no fan of Finicum, but was there any evidence that he treated his foster kids poorly?
My thoughts exactly. Working hard a ranch does not necessarily mean abuse. We don’t know those kids were taken away for any reason other than their foster father turned on the government. I thought he said these were troubled kids as well so keeping busy may have benefited them. I’m not opposed to kids being raised on working farms and ranches in general, foster kids or otherwise.
Other than that he admitted he was using the foster care subsidy as income? That’s supposed to be for the kids, not to subsidize your failing ranch.
Well, that wasn’t really what he said.
Just to clarify something as the phrasing isn’t exactly clear: having one of the custodial parents engaging in criminal activity (not to mention obviously being away from the kids for a long period of time) is typically more than enough to warrant an intervention by protective services. They don’t care about fairness toward the foster parents, just the well-being of the kids. No clue on the rest of the stuff, of course, as this was something that hasn’t even reached the courts yet. Perhaps more will come out down the line.
Sounds like what he said:
"That represents an enormous loss of income for the Finicums. According to a 2010 tax filing, Catholic Charities paid the family $115,343 to foster children in 2009. That year, foster parents were compensated between $22.31 and $37.49 per child, per day, meaning if the Finicums were paid at the maximum rate, they cared for, on average, eight children per day in 2009.
“That was my main source of income,” Finicum said. “My ranch, well, the cows just cover the costs of the ranch. If this means rice and beans for the next few years, so be it. We’re going to stay the course.”"
You’re supposed to be able to support yourself without the monthly stipend…the money is to pay for the child’s needs. If he was going on a starvation diet without the foster kids income, it sounds like he was using at least part of the kid’s money on personal expenses.
Might I offer the alternative interpretation that he ran a ranch that was not really tremendously profitable, and was mainly there for the purpose of raising foster kids?
Its certainly possible that he didn’t treat the kids well, but I have seen literally zero evidence to support such a conclusion. The only thing that I’ve seen to indict the guy on this issue has been that single quote you just posted.
As I said, I have no love for the guy at all, but I have yet to see any evidence at all to suggest he was somehow bad to the kids he was a foster parent of. If such evidence exists, is be more than happy to see it.
Oh i think they should have taken them from these crazy people for sure, but not because he might have had them work on the ranch. He said his cows covered the cost of the ranch, so if the money from the children covered clothes, entertainment, other household necessities, food outside rice and beans… that’s what it’s for. I don’t now think we have evidence those kids were neglected or lived without.
I just did some digging, and its hard to find much with the internet swamped with the recent stuff, but I find an article from 2008 suggesting that he and his wife actually operated the ranch as a home for troubled youths, and generally took in boys who had run one with the law and other problems.
My girlfriend did work with such kids for most of her career, and its not easy. I’d be reluctant to pass judgement on someone taking that kind of thing on unless I had some evidence they had actually been bad.
You can make up whatever interpretation pleases you. I certainly don’t care. Maybe he was foster parent of the year, maybe not. It’s not like the Catholic Charities is going to tell us. All we have is his words, and in his words he considered that money income. That’s a pretty big no-no for foster parents.
Oh, well…case closed then.
Well, itd be a problem if he considered it profit. But if he spent that income on the kids, that’s kind of the point.
Like I said, I don’t know anything about it beyond the single quote that you had, which had been widely reported a few weeks ago, and the one article from 2008.
But just because the guy did one shitty thing with the wildlife refuge doesn’t mean that everything he ever did was shitty.