The Truth Behind The Bundy Ranch Standoff? It Was Actually About A $5 Billion Chinese Solar Farm And Facility Deal
And the Bundys were in the way. Harry Reid's former senior adviser, Neil Kornze, was made BLM Director helping facilitate the deal. More reasons government owned land is unconstitutional.
Note: The only reason you even heard of the Bundys is they resisted and were able to get public support. Other ranchers and land owners across the west had already been driven off their land by the government through nefarious “legal” tactics and even at gunpoint!
Nowhere does the Constitution grant the federal government power to retain acreage inside states for unenumerated purposes, such as land for grazing, mineral development, agriculture, forests, or parks.
Or conspire with powerful politicians for profit!
But I don't think it was about tortoises. No, sir. In fact, with all the gear and manpower the BLM brought to Clark County, Nev., to round up the cowboy and his cattle, it did more environmental damage to the area than Bundy ever could have dreamed of doing. - Creators.com, Joseph Farah, April 16, 2014
Some shocking facts
Fabian Calvo, the realtor in the above video formerly from Nevada, now in California, was investigating Harry Reid and family, the BLM, other federal agencies and their dealings with ranchers and other land owners. For example, the 1st Solar Project in San Bernardino happened after land owners were forced off their land.
In 2008, United States Secretary of State Henry Paulson under Obama begged the Chinese not to dump its over $1 trillion in owned Treasury debt.
The Bureau of Land Management, (BLM), has been monetizing YOUR land to offset debt by collateralizing it. The BLM was and is actively selling YOUR land! Particularly to the Chinese so they wouldn't dump our debt.
Calvo was told by a Wall Street insider friend that BLM told Wall Street to green light any Chinese financial deals.
The facts conveniently not reported:
Senator Harry Reid had a relationship with Chinese energy giant, ENN Energy Group. ENN Energy Group even contributed $40,650 individually and through its PAC to Reid over three election cycles.
The Reid family has been buying up land in Laughlin, Nevada over the years for as little as $500/acre.
Rory Reid, Harry's son, was a lawyer with the firm of Lionel Sawyer & Collins and was representing ENN and the BLM!
Rory Reid helped ENN locate a 9,000-acre desert site in Laughlin, Nevada, which is in Clark County. ENN bought the property for $4.5 million, far below its $38.6-million appraised value from Clark County, where Rory Reid formerly chaired the county commission.
ENN was planning to build a $5 billion solar farm and panel manufacturing plant.
Every other rancher had been driven out. The Bundy's were in the way.
Right from the horse's mouth
Coincidentally, Reid's former senior adviser, Neil Kornze, only 35 years old, was confirmed by the Senate as BLM director around the time BLM descended on the cattle ranch.
A PDF of the BLM’s document, “Regional Mitigation strategy for the Dry Lake Solar energy Zone: Technical Note 444,” produced by the BLM in March, 2011, has since been taken offline.
From The New American by Warren Mass, April 14, 2014:
Technical Note 444 states that the “’Regional Mitigation Strategy for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone’ recommends a strategy for compensating for certain unavoidable impacts that are expected from the development of the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone (SEZ) in southern Nevada.”
Technical Note 444 states: “The resource values found in the Gold Butte ACEC are threatened by: unauthorized activities, including off-road vehicle use, illegal dumping, and trespass livestock grazing; wildfire; and weed infestation.” (Emphasis added.)
That would be the Bundys.
The above-referenced BLM “Technical Note 444” specifically mentions the Gold Butte Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) 76 times. While the document expresses many environmental concerns, including “trespass livestock grazing,” it is important to keep in mind that the title of the document reveals the BLM’s ultimate objective, which is to create a “solar energy zone.”
One of the references listed in Technical Note 444 is “Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for Solar Energy Development in Six Southwestern States. FES 12- 24, DOE/EIS-0403,” published jointly by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The PEIS, notes TN 444, “assessed the impact of utility-scale solar energy development on public lands in the six southwestern states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.”
Timeline of events
Nevada became a state in 1864, at which time the Constitution required the government to divest itself of all property not a fort, post office, etc.
The Bundy family settled in the state of Nevada in the 1870’s.
The Bureau of Land Management, (BLM), was created in 1946 and unconstitutionally given control of lands inside the boundaries of the state of Nevada and other western states. The BLM controls almost 300 million acres in the U.S. More area than the states of Texas and Montana combined.
The dispute began in 1993, when the BLM interfered with Bundy’s grazing rights, citing protection of the Mojave Desert tortoise. They limited his herd to 150 animals on a 250-square-mile rangeland allotment. When Bundy saw his grazing fees were being used to hurt ranchers, not help them, he stopped paying monthly federal land fees of $1.35 per cow-calf pair. He insisted that local government, not the BLM, should be in control of the lands.
The BLM frequently gave waivers for wind or solar power development in areas where the desert tortoise is found.
Fun fact: The desert tortoise was only considered a “vulnerable” species. It was not considered “critically endangered” or even “endangered.” In fact, in 2013, the BLM announced it was going to euthanize hundreds of tortoises due to budget restrictions.
Bundy said he attempted to make payments to the county, as he’d done in the past until the BLM unilaterally took over, but the county turned him down.
He was now the last remaining rancher left on a 600,000-acre portion of land known as Gold Butte, managed by the BLM.
Beginning in 1998, the BLM began to get court orders requiring Bundy to remove his animals. Bundy was accused of owing over $1 million in back grazing fees. To whom? It is unconstitutional for the government to own land for grazing, mineral development, agriculture, forests, or parks.
From LewRockwell.com by Roger I. Roots, J.D., PhD, January 12, 2018:
In 2013 the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) obtained federal court orders authorizing the agency to “seize and remove to impound” hundreds of Cliven Bundy’s cattle on the public ranges around Bunkerville, Nevada. The agency interpreted these court orders broadly, and descended on the area in April 2014 with some 200 body-armor-wearing agents, semiautomatic weapons, sniper teams, undercover informants, and surveillance cameras aimed at the Bundy residence.
The BLM brought more than corralls and horse trailers. They brought backhoes, dumptrucks and earth-moving equipment to tear up water lines and other infrastructure that had been built by Bundy and his ancestors over decades. Defying county officials, the federal officers chose calving season—the very time when cows and newborn calves are most physically weak and vulnerable—to execute the court orders. They orchestrated a paramilitarized roundup operation using helicopters to terrify the cattle into stampeding to the point of exhaustion in extreme heat. At least 40 cows either died from the ordeal or were shot by BLM employees and contractors.
When Bundy’s son Dave stopped on a state highway to photograph BLM snipers on local hillsides, BLM agents threw him down, ground his face into asphalt and falsely arrested him. And when other family members stopped a BLM dump truck to inquire if the truck was carrying dead cows, BLM agents erupted in a flurry of violence.
To accomplish their illegal and unconstitutional objective, the BLM chose to blow 3 million taxpayer dollars to bring in hundreds of armed agents, armored vehicles and helicopters in what they thought was an overwhelming force. Unfortunately for them, over 1000 Americans showed up to support the Bundys, which created the stand off.
If the forces deployed in and around the Nevadan's ranch had been deployed to Benghazi, it's likely Glen Doherty, Ty Woods, Sean Smith and Ambassador Christopher Stevens would be alive today. If illegal aliens were grazing on the disputed property, there would not have been federal snipers perched nearby with American citizens in their sights. - INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY editorial April 4, 2014
The Bundy and BLM standoff
Images from 21st CENTURY WIRE.com
Meanwhile, the Obama administration was allowing China to convert its $1 trillion in owned Treasury debt into equity in oil and gas companies
In 2009, Obama reversed a Bush administration decision made in 2005 on national security concerns that blocked China from the purchase of California-based Unocal Corp. for $18.4 billion.
On March 6, 2012, The Wall Street Journal compiled a state-by-state list of the $17 billion in oil and natural gas equity interests Chinese state owned CNOOC and Sinopec have acquired in the United States since 2010.
—Colorado: CNOOC gained a one-third stake in 800,000 acres in northeast Colorado and southwest Wyoming in a $1.27 billion pact with Chesapeake Energy Corporation.
—Louisiana: Sinopec has a one-third interest in 265,000 acres in the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale after a broader $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy.
—Michigan: Sinopec gained a one-third interest in 350,000 acres in a larger $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy.
—Ohio: Sinopec acquired a one-third interest in Devon Energy's 235,000 Utica Shale acres in a larger $2.5 billion deal.
—Oklahoma: Sinopec has a one-third interest in 215,000 acres in a broader $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy.
—Texas: CNOOC acquired a one-third interest in Chesapeake Energy's 600,000 acres in the Eagle Ford Shale in a $2.16 billion deal.
—Wyoming: CNOOC has a one-third stake in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming after a $1.27 billion pact with Chesapeake Energy. Sinopec gained a one-third interest in Devon Energy's 320,000 acres as part of a larger $2.5 billion deal.
If force doesn't work, use the corrupt courts
Claiming Bundy's cattle ranching operation was endangering desert tortoises, the Bureau of Land Management treated him like he was Ted Bundy. I take that back. The serial rapist, mass murderer and necrophile got due process. - Creators.com, Joseph Farah, April 16, 2014
After the standoff, the Bundys and 15 other defendants were picked off individually and arrested and held for 18 months without a trial.
They were also placed in solitary confinement repeatedly.
In addition, Ammon and Ryan were subjected to the outrageous indignity of deep-cavity strip searches every time they were transferred from their jail cells to the U.S. District Court.
I went into that place a free man and I intended to leave it as a free man. - Cliven Bundy
Even the 9th Circuit affirmed Prosecutorial Misconduct regarding the Bundys and other defendants
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal in San Francisco denied prosecutors’ efforts to overturn U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro’s decision to stop a months-long trial in January 2018 for “flagrant” prosecutorial misconduct and her dismissal of the criminal indictment so it could not be re-filed.
“The judgment is affirmed,” Judge Jay Bybee wrote for the three-judge panel that heard oral arguments May 29. The judges found Navarro properly identified violations of “recognized statutory or constitutional” rights, and she had the authority to punish the government “to deter future illegal conduct.
Judge Gloria Navarro’s actual ruling
The ruling regarded charges against Cliven, Ammon and Ryan Bundy and more than a dozen other defendants:
Prosecutors willfully withheld exculpatory evidence from defense lawyers. She referred to it as “flagrant prosecutorial misconduct” while also declaring: “The court finds that the universal sense of justice has been violated,” inferring that the government’s misdeeds in this case were legion.
Regarding other defendants
Defendant Gregory Burleson of Arizona, whose health deteriorated since the incident, wheelchair-bound and reportedly losing his eyesight, did get 68 years on eight counts, including assault, threats, extortion, obstruction of justice, and multiple gun charges. Incidentally, undercover agents who covertly interviewed Burleson, who had a drinking problem, gave him two drinks to “loosen him up.”
Co-defendant Todd Engel, of Idaho, was convicted of obstruction of justice and interstate travel in aid of extortion. Huh? He was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison. He served 54 months and his case was thrown out in 2020. He sued the government for $100 million in a civil rights and conspiracy complaint filed Sept. 7, 2021 in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas.
Illustrating how far we have strayed from government abiding by the Constitution
“I guarantee you the constitution is on my side – not your side… (…) You (the people) can fight your argument from jail.” - BLM Special Agent in charge Dan Love regarding the Bundy standoff
“The powers that be” regarding your property rights
From the the U.N.'s Agenda 21 action plan:
Land ... cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes.
This sordid story proves why the Constitution forbade the government owning land
Biden Thinks He Can Shut Down Wyoming. How The Government Unconstitutionaly Acquired So Much U.S. Land
The federal government today claims to own or control the following percentages of the western states: Nevada – 86%, Arizona – 75%, Utah – 75%, Oregon – 75%, Idaho – 75%, Alaska – 71%, Wyoming – 65%, New Mexico – 60%, California – 55%, Colorado – 50%, Montana – 45%, Washington – 40%.
All in the name of their corrupt solar deals!
BLM. Bureaucrats' Lies Matter.