Rural Cousins vs Their City Cousins

"Rural Landowners Getting Screwed By Their City Cousins"
By Ron Ewart, President
National Association of Rural Landowners
© Copyright October 3, 2008 - All Rights Reserved

A while back, one of our rural neighbors was hauled off to jail for a trumped-up land use violation by an out-of-control, zealous prosecuting attorney and an insane district court judge, taken with his own judicial power and consumed with making an example out of this landowner, in order to "scare" other landowners into strict compliance with environmental law.
These rural victims of alleged environmental protection law violations are everywhere in America, because rural Americans went to sleep and allowed their government and the city folk to usurp almost every single right they had under our constitution, in the name of socialism, but mostly radical environmentalism. Based on an irrational premise to protect the environment at any cost and implementing radical environmental policies, federal, state and local legislators are and have passed laws to force people into a mold that goes against the very biological grain of human existence. This irrational premise is so-called "smart growth" and "sustainable development", hatched in the United Nations under Agenda 21 and codified into law by an executive order, issued by President Clinton, without a treaty being debated and ratified in the U. S. Congress. This pack-'em-in-like-sardines UN agenda is therefore unconstitutional, but that hasn't stopped all levels of our government from implementing it. The biological grain of human existence is the desire for freedom, the freedom of movement and the freedom of "space". "Space" that people can call their own, protected by our constitution. Ask most people, especially families, and you will find that what they really want is a single-family home on a large lot, or acreage. (The original American dream) They don't want to be crammed into apartments in large cities, but that is almost the only choice left, that government, through irrational regional land use planning, gives the people, except for the very wealthy. And Why? Because the city folk and their children are and have been brainwashed by government and environmentalists, into believing that protection of the environment in rural lands has a higher priority than the constitutional rights of the rural landowners. Their goal is to "stuff" us all into big cities and leave the rest of the world pristine, on behalf of the environment. A pipe dream at best, with almost 7 Billion souls in the world and growing. Because of our profession, we have met hundreds of rural landowners and we know them to be honorable people and true to their word. They are the bedrock of what is good about America. Further, because they do OWN the land, they are good stewards of it. Many produce the very food we eat and drink. But for almost 40 years they have been under a vicious attack by their government, through legislators that are elected by city folk, lobbied incessantly by radical environmentalists. Throughout history, narcissistic dictators have brutally ruled small and large countries with an iron fist. Many dictators are still in power today. Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, China, along with many African, central and south American countries, come to mind. History books are full of dictators who have fallen to their own excesses, internal decay, or to revolution, at a high cost to their subjects. Unfortunately, as history repeats itself, new dictators will follow in the path of the old ones and will be entered into the annals of history to reside there as examples of a continuously failed ruling strategy. Nicolea Ceausescu, of Romania, was just such a dictator. We selected Nicolea because of a strategy he used to control the people. He joined the communist party in his early teens and rose up in the ranks of this secret Romanian order. (Communism was banned in Romania at the time) When the communists finally came to power, he had positioned himself as the leader of the party. When the current ruler died, Nicolea's backroom deal-making vaulted him into power, where he and his wife Elana, ruled Romania for over 3 decades, until December of 1989. Nicolea was in fact a classic paranoia case. His wife, Elana, was an ignorant peasant whom Nicolea gave immense power to, when he assumed the role of Romanian dictator. She assumed the reins of power during his bouts with paranoia. She turned out to be more ruthless than Nicolea. In a violent uprising in 1989, that killed thousands, Nicolea and his wife were tried and executed on the spot by his own soldiers, as the pair tried to escape Romania. Prior to their execution, Nicolea and his wife visited both China and North Korea. Nicolea was impressed by the methods used in North Korea to control the people and upon returning home, instituted some of the same measures. Knowing that independent life styles, like farming and ranching, fostered independent thinking, thoughts of freedom, new ideas and perhaps designs of revolution, he confiscated all land in Romania, ordered the people off their lands and forced them into apartments or tenements in the large cities to work for the government in the cities and on the farms. That's right, apartments!!! Nicolea had thousands of new apartment units built in the cities for this purpose. Does any of this sound familiar? Precisely the plan of UN's Agenda 21. But in all reality, you don't need a dictator to control people, their land, their energy, their water and their food. Even in a so-called Constitutional Republic, like America, the propensity for government will be to assume greater and greater control. In a previous book, we wrote: "Any government, even ours, no matter how all-encompassing are its constitutional safeguards for individual rights, will eventually, on the guise of making a more perfect society or protect us from ourselves, exert more and more control over the individual lives of its citizens, if those same citizens abdicate their right and duty to hold their government accountable. The increasing and pervasive nature of that control will arrive slowly, bit by bit, so that it is hardly noticeable. Each succeeding generation will succumb to wider and deeper restrictions on their freedoms and will lack the capacity or the will to resist in any meaningful way." The American government, local, state and federal, through the top-down legislative process, use the cause of "protecting-the-environment" (now a cult) to over-regulate the activities of rural landowners and force them off their land and into large cities. Because you see the environmentalists believe that landowners destroy the land just by being there and should be driven off of it. The other reason is to force people to live in high-dense urban areas so that they are much easier to control and regulate than folks who are spread out across the land that might dream of freedom, liberty, property rights and the pursuit of happiness. The Romanian dictator knew this and that is why he forced the people off of their rural lands. However, in America, regulating one segment of society (rural landowners) to a greater degree than another segment (city folk), is in direct violation of the Equal Protection Clause contained in the 14th Amendment, not to mention the 5th Amendment that requires due process and just compensation. The politicians, the judiciary and the bureaucrats have conveniently ignored these two facts, as they unconstitutionally override them with Agenda 21 policies. So all this begs the question, how different is our current government from that of the Romanian dictator? The only difference is "method". The net results are the same; social and environmental enslavement. The deed is done. We are already there. Big-city, naive ideologues have strangled the American rural landowner with social and radical environmental regulations, passed by politicians elected by city folk. Hopefully, American rural landowners won't have to resort to the same solutions to preserve their constitutional rights, as did the oppressed people of Romania. Indeed! The message from our government and city folk is: "RURAL LANDOWNER GET OFF YOUR LAND and move to the big cities." This is what dictators do and have done to make controlling people much easier. The Chinese Communists have been moving farmers off of their farms and into big cities, for years, for the same reason. Oh, and let's not forget increased regulation and the enormous cost of protecting us from the giant government fraud of Man-Caused Global Warming (G/W). Again, rural landowners could have their herds and crops limited and their carbon foot prints measured and taxed, under proposed G/W legislation. Government, at every level, will continue to pass law, after law, such that the rural landowner can do nothing with their land and they will have no choice but to leave it and go elsewhere, that is if there is an "elsewhere" to go to. When they sell, they won't get much for it because government regulations will have driven down the value dramatically. That is government's and environmentalist's diabolical plan, naively supported by most city folk. America's rural ranchers and farmers feed a hungry nation and a significant portion of the rest of the world. If they capitulate to the irrational, unconstitutional desires of the radical environmentalists, the environmentally brainwashed city folk and an out-of-control government who never saw an environmental law they didn't like, not only will their rural way of life come crumbling down, but their ability to provide the crops and the animal protein required to feed this country and part of the world, will decrease dramatically.
We wonder how long rural landowners will put up with this insanity before they finally fight back.
By the way. The rural landowner we mentioned at the top of the article, that was hauled away to jail for a trumped-up environmental code violation, is still being crucified by the prosecuting attorney and a rabid district court judge, with more jail time and fines possible. He's fighting them but at an extreme financial and emotional cost to he and his wife. NARLO is helping them as best we can. We have helped other landowners in several states, as well. Perhaps we can help you.



Ron Ewart