Riding Herd
“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
by LEE PITTS
– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
July 15, 2018 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 60 • No. 7
Rest In Pieces
Globaloney I BY LEE PITTS
No hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle.
W
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
hile listening to pundits and politicians recite the many glorious benefits of globalization you may find it difficult reconciling that with current cattle prices. To better understand the current escalating trade wars think of them as a not-so-friendly game of badminton. On one side you have Donald Trump representing the United States and on the other side of the net stands communist China, who has dominated the sport for decades. You, my farmer and rancher friends, are the little white shuttlecock, more often referred to as the “birdie”, that gets pummeled and slammed back and forth over the net. Bam, bam, bam. Trump started the game off with a powerful volley in February when he instituted a tariff of 25 percent on Chinese steel and 10 percent on aluminum imports. China returned the volley with one of their own. Next, Trump slammed a 25 percent tariff on Chinese technology goods exported to the U.S that would amount to $50 billion dollars! After China fired back with another round of tariffs Trump escalated the standoff again by asking our trade representative to consider an additional $100 billion in
tariffs on Chinese goods. Trump eventually slapped similar tariffs on steel and aluminum from Mexico, Canada and the EU because the current level of aluminum and steel imports to the U.S. had the “potential to threaten our national security.” If we found ourselves engaged in another World War we wouldn’t have the parts, let alone the smarts, to ramp up and produce the planes, tanks, and destroyers necessary to fight such a war.
Thanks to globalization, the U.S. aluminum industry went from producing 30 percent of the world’s primary aluminum to producing just 3.5 percent. Now here’s the part where you get stuck with the tab. The same day Trump put tariffs on technology goods from China, the communist Chinese government released a long list of 124 items that China listed for increased tariffs. Of the 124, 94 were agricultural! Pork producers, who
shipped over a billion dollars in pork to China last year, were among those who felt the blow the hardest. On April 2nd, China placed a 25 percent punitive tariff on U.S. pork in addition to the 12 percent tariff they were already paying. Corn, wheat and soybean farmers will also feel the retaliatory sting. In the case of soybeans it will especially hurt because more than 60 percent of U.S. soy exports have been sent to mainland China in recent years. No wonder that ag fans sitting in the bleachers watching this trade game haven’t been overly enthusiastic. Trump’s standing with soybean farmers is getting tested because Trump won 89 percent of America’s counties that produce soy. Even Zippy Duvall, President of the American Farm Bureau lost some of his usu-
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A Worthy Pardon for the Hammonds Trump corrects a federal injustice against two Oregon ranchers
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD, WALL STREET JOURNAL
T
he pardon power has its most compelling use when correcting a government injustice. President Trump used his authority on Tuesday for precisely such a purpose in pardoning Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son Steven. In 2011 the federal government charged the two Oregon ranchers with arson and destruction of federal property for having done nothing more than utilize the same fire-management tools that the government routinely employs. The Hammonds had set fires in 2001 and 2006—one to fight invasive species, another to protect against a wildfire. Both fires unintentionally spread to burn nearby public grazing land—139 acres in the first case, a single acre in the second. A federal jury acquitted them of most charges but found them guilty of setting the fires—which they’d already admitted. A federal judge gave them reduced sentences, saying that anything more would “shock the conscience” and be “grossly disproportionate to the severity” of their conduct. We wrote about their case in 2016. The Obama Justice Department, in its usual restraint against its political opponents, appealed and persuaded a different judge in 2015 to impose a mandatory five years each under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Yes, a terrorism statute.
The exercise smacked of retribution and coercion, since the Hammonds remain one of the last private ranching families in the Harney Basin. The feds have been on a campaign to drive out private landowners to expand a federal bird refuge around Malheur Lake. In recent years the feds have revoked grazing permits, mismanaged water to let ranchlands flood, and harassed ranchers with regulatory actions. The Hammonds refused to give in to these tactics and ended up in prison. The elder Dwight Hammond, 76, has now served three years, while Steven, 49, has served four. They have also paid $400,000 to settle a federal civil suit against them. The federal treatment of the Hammonds fueled the 40-day citizen takeover in 2016 of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. That occupation (which the Hammonds did not endorse) was inexcusable and ended in violence, though it highlighted the growing fury of Western landowners over the federal government’s bullying practices. The Trump Interior and Agriculture Departments are attempting to rein in these abuses, reminding federal employees that private landowners are crucial for conservation and economic stability across rural America. The change in policy is overdue, as was justice for the Hammonds. Appeared in the July 11, 2018, print edition.
f the obituary of our country is ever written, this is how it might read: United States of America, July 4, 1776 - November 4, 2046. 270 years of age. The last of the great super-powers died quietly at home surrounded by 350 million greedy, spoiled offspring. She had been in hospice care for 30 years. She didn’t die from a Chinese nuclear bomb, election-tampering Russians or global warming but had become fat and lazy in her old age, squandering the wealth that generations before had created. On life support, by mutual agreement the money-grabbing family members pulled the plug on the greatest experiment in democracy, liberty and freedom to have ever lived. An autopsy revealed she died of natural causes including apathy, laziness, political correctness, self-indulgence, sloth and corruption. Conceived in garages, machine shops, farms and ranches, America was born in Little Italy, the barrios, Chinatown, African American ghettos, in Hell’s kitchen, Irish and Mormon communities, on Ellis Island, upon the plains and in the great American West. She lived a life full of public service and proclaimed to the world, “Give us your poor, your huddled masses.” Condolences poured in from around the world from those who were saved by her armies, her doctors and her farmers. Foreign leaders remembered America as a loyal neighbor who always spoke her mind but who gave up her sons and daughters willingly so that others might be freed from the wicked rule of ruthless despots, murdering dictators and barbarous Ayatollahs. A veteran of foreign wars, her sons stormed the beaches of Normandy and her daughters nursed the world’s sick back to health. She willingly gave her bombs and her blood to conquer bullies like Hitler, Stalin, Hussein, Bin Laden and countless others. After she’d beaten them in battle she literally gave the shirt off her back to rebuild their cities and their econ-
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