Korky Day

  It was all addressed.  The United States Forest
Service and no one else determines what happens to
United States federal forests.  It has nothing to do
with who you accuse of murder, what someone did in
Canada, or the fact that some small group of
environmentalists may be in favor of selective
cutting.  The fact is that most environmentalists do
not want any trees cut, which is why we are having
500,000 acre forest fires. 
  I know exactly what is happening.  After the
Rodeo-Chediski fire in Arizona, some sawmill owners
and loggers from Heber, Arizona, went to the forest
service and tried to get them to sell them burned
trees while they were still good for cutting.
  We can’t do it, they were told.  You have to talk
to a committee in Washington, D.C.
  So they went to talk to a committee in
Washington, D.C.  They told the committee what they
wanted. 
    A man at the end of the table told them, I have
$150,000,000, and I will spend every cent of it on
environmental lawyers before you will cut one tree. 
    So they did not cut one tree.  A year later all
of the trees burned by the fire were unsuitable for
lumber. 
    Those of us who once worked in that industry
understand.  There was a decision made somewhere in
world politics, probably somewhere in Europe,
concerning trees in the United States. Government
agencies were informed of that decision.  The lumber
industry was shut down. 
  Most of the people in that industry were not
college graduates, anyway.  They needed to be
punished.  Their place in the American economy was
taken over by things like gambling and pornography
which are more immediately profitable to political
parties and were deemed worthy of government
protection.

Korky Day

  OK, so name one point you made that I ignored.

Korky Day

  You haven’t said anything.  I do not suscribe to
the idea that there is something magical about native
American beliefs.  Mostly their religions were
superstition.  Indian tribes are better at managing
their reservation forests than the United States
government is at managing federal land, but that is
because they can still cut trees.  Neither do I
suscribe to New Age policies.  They had a small
forest fire near Sedona, Arizona, and the local
residents were bringing the firefighters cookies and
instructing them not make fire lines wider than a
foot and a half.  Two weeks later they had still not
put out the fire.  If they had experienced any wind,
they would have had another 500,000 acre debacle.

Korky Day

  Well, I think you are being a little unrealistic. 
The owners of government land in the United States
are the government, which consists of all of the
people, not just native Americans.  Nothing the
Forest Service did during all of this environmental
agitation made any sense to me.  All it looked like
to me was that they were trying to get logging and
sawmills shut down by angering environmentalists
against the lumber industry.  It happened, so now
what?
  We just keep watching 500,000 acre forest fires?

It won’t work.  Anyone can go to Lincoln County,
Montana, and see that there is no lumber industry and
no logging going on there.  So accuse away. 
  If they get a dry summer, which sometimes they
do, they are going to have a huge forest fire. 
Southwestern Montana had a 500,000 acre forest fire
in the 1990’s.  Northwestern Montana is going to go
the same way.
    I said the same thing about Arizona twenty years
ago.  So come to Arizona and look at what you call
lies and unreality.  They look like blackened tree
trunks to me.  You people have burned way more trees
than loggers ever thought of cutting.

So what was it that the people in the Soviet Union had? 
They called it socialism.  Didn’t work very well for
them.  The sawmills in Lincoln County, Montana, were
working just fine until they couldn’t get logs and had
to shut down.

The St. Regis mills at Libby and Troy, Montana were
both union mills.  So was the Louisiana Pacific mill
at Moyie Springs, Idaho, which is where my father
ended up working until he retired.  I never have been
in a union because I am just not a joiner of party
organizations I do not have to belong to.  I was not
really impressed by the union guys in Moyie Springs
when they threatened to throw my father off the Moyie
bridge because he made fun of them.  They were making
a dollar an hour less per job than the workers in the
non-union Louisiana-Pacific mill at Sandpoint, Idaho.
My father had worked at the Sandpoint mill before
working at the one in Moyie Springs. 
  At any rate, I was never confused about who was
shutting down the logging.  It was the United States
Forest Service.  First they shut down all the small
mills like the one at Sylvanite, Montana, where my
father once worked, and then they shut down the big
mills.  They shut down the small mills by stopping
small timber sales, leaving just the big mills.  They
shut down the big mill with court injunctions against
logging.  All the while they were selling timber
sales that required clear-cutting almost exclusively.
  I worked for a while for a neighbor who had a
small sawmill.  The Forest Service cut down a whole
mountainside of trees less than a mile from his
sawmill.  All of those trees were scheduled to be
burned in a controlled burn.  My employer went to the
Forest Service and tried to buy some trees they had
already cut that were just going to be burned.  No
way, they said.  All of the trees were burned.  That
was the way the Forest Service did things. 
    I have no doubt why it was done. People who
worked in the lumber industry were fairly independent
people doing something useful who represented a
threat to present government policies. If you want to
break the spirit of people, take away their living. 
  The sawmills are gone now, and cannot be replaced
without government approval.  You cannot just make a
sawmill and start cutting lumber now the way you
could when I was young.  Welcome to socialism.

Korky Day

  Well, as you say there is still logging in
Canada.  I could not really say why.  I do know why
there is no logging in Montana.  The same kind of
propaganda that you put in your post caused federal
courts to shut down logging in Montana.  So let me
ask you a question.  What did big lumber companies
have to do with timber sales other than buying them?
  What we are talking about is federal land, owned
by the government of the United States.  The United
States Forest Service, the same federal government
that shut down logging was the sole cause of clear
cutting, etc.  Every timber sale purchased by a
lumber company or logging company came complete with
a contract that had to be followed to the letter if
the company was to get another timber sale.  If the
contract said to clear cut all trees, that is what
the loggers did.  The Forest Service was the sole
cause of clear cutting on federal land.  Most loggers
I knew preferred selective cutting because there
could be another timber sale on the same land sooner,
and it looked a lot better.
  But Forest Service personnel preferred sitting in
their pickup trucks drinking coffee to marking trees
for cutting.  Then they could just go back to the
office and mark out an area on the map for clear
cutting, and everyone was happy except for Green
Party members, who always said, Look what the loggers
did.  We have to stop the loggers and shut down all
lumber companies in the United States.
  But let’s be honest about it.  The people who
shut down the lumber industry in the United States
knew why there was clear cutting.  It was Forest
Service policy.  Environmentalists were in favor of
clear cutting because it made the forests look bad,
and they could put the blame on the industry instead
of the real perpetrators, the United States Forest
Service.

No, I am not a fraud.  At the present time I am an
unemployed welder living in a rented trailer on a
farm.  How does that make me a fraud.  I grew up in
Lincoln County, Montana, the one in the extreme
northwest corner of Montana.  When I was growing up
there was a huge sawmill in Libby, Montana, the
county seat owned by St. Regis Lumber Company, a
somewhat smaller big mill owned by the same company
in Troy, Montana, where I went to high school.  My
father worked in a medium sized mill in Sylvanite,
Montana.  Those sawmills were shut down by federal
court injunctions that shut down logging.  That is
just a fact.  If you cannot get logs, you are not
going to run a sawmill.  I just visited there.  There
is no logging going on.  The forests are going back
to the condition they were in when one million acres
of forests burned there in 1910.
    You don’t believe me?
  I would certainly invite you to visit Arizona and
see the results of forest management by
environmentalists.  We have had two forest fires
bigger than 500,000 acres since 2000 here in Arizona. 
More than a million acres of trees burned here that
recently.  So why are you calling me a fraud?
  I used to work for the Forest Service fighting
forest fires when I was younger.  I know what I am
talking about.
    All you know is party propaganda.  Maybe you are
not trying to be a fraud, but you do not know what
you are talking about.

Most European countries run on case law.  Two extreme
examples were the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.  The
Politboro and the Reichstag were totally irrelevant
as to what law was in those countries, even though
they were supposed to be legislative bodies.  Stalin
and Hitler relied on courts to start and legitimize
their mass executions of certain targeted groups of
people.  Hitler started persecution of Jews by having
them brought before German judges by Brown Shirt
thugs.  The decisions of those judges started case
law which made it unlawful in Germany to be a Jew. 
The same thing was true in Russia. 
  An account is given of industrial workers in
Russia who were applauding their great leader Josef
Stalin.  They kept applauding for eleven minutes
because they were all afraid to be the first to stop
applauding.  Finally, one older worker became tired
and stopped.  Sure enough, he was taken before a
court and convicted of being a subversive.  Secretly,
the other workers were glad he had stopped applauding
because it meant they could stop also.  But they all
understood the case law involved.  The first one to
stop applauding was going to be sent to Siberia.

Well, I think we can look at what has happened in
some European countries. When all laws come from
court decisions, it becomes very confusing.  Members
of Congress start calling people in for Congressional
investigations so that they can pretend they are
judges and have something to do with making laws. 
The Executive branch of government starts issuing
executive orders. 
  But it is all based on case law. 
  The only problem I see with case law is that it
does not mean anything.  For example, Abraham Lincoln
told Americans to ignore the result of the Dred Scott
case as it applied to black people because he said
that court verdict only applied to that one case
anyway.

No, I don’t write fiction.  I came from a county in
Montana where most of the people were employed in the
lumber industry.  Now most of the people in that
county are un-employed.  What stopped the lumber
industry?
  Court injunctions against logging.  And you say
the Green Party was not involved in any way.  Well,
no matter. It still happened without the Green Party. 
There is no lumber industry any more, so I work as a
welder.  And the trees we have left are there for
500,000 acre forest fires. 
  I don’t really see why it is better to burn trees
in forest fires than it was to cut some of them and
use them, but, then I am also an independent voter,
so I have no say in the matter. 
  That is why I am anxiously waiting until
independent voters gain seven more percentage points,
and that half of the people of the United States can
start participating in free and open elections.

I have never been particularly impressed by the Green
Party.  Like all political parties today, it has its
roots in European politics and European ideals of
government.  The Green Party has been a primary
promoter of the main source of trouble in American
government, judicial activism, seeking court
decisions to stop industries like the lumber industry
which were needed in order to have some kind of
management of natural resources.  Now the lumber
industry is completely shut down in the United
States, people once employed by that industry are on
welfare, and trees have no use today except to be
burned in 500,000 acre fires.  More than half of the
trees in Arizona have burned since the year 2000.
  But the real problem with judicial activism is
that all laws now come from court decisions and the
legislative branch of government has no function
except to divide up money borrowed on state credit
between party politicians and their supporters.  The
reality of it is that the courts have lost their
authority through judicial activism because now they
are controlled by popularity and cannot even oppose
things like illegal immigration, importation of
illegal drugs, gangs, etc., so they start to rule in
favor of crime in order to stay in their positions of
power.  National parties in Europe like the Fascists,
Nazis, and Communists depended on the judiciaries of
their countries to keep them in power.  It is no
different here. 
  In 2006 Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard
embarked on a campaign to eliminate all minor parties
from Arizona politics, calling leaders of minor
parties into his office and threatening them with
prosecution because they had not filed this or that
form with the government.  When he was done, only two
minor parties remained, the Libertarians and the
Green Party. 
  The problem you minor party members have is that
the judicial activism you promote has eliminated you. 
Federal Courts habitually rule against minor parties
and independent voters, and the Supreme Court of the
United States has refused to hear a case brought by a
minor party or independent voter for more than twenty
years.  Republicans and Democrats may let your party
exist because it is a European party that has an
agenda they like, but they are not going to let you
participate in the government, and your party is not
going to increase in numbers in any significant way. 
  So we are left with only one control on party
excesses in the United States:  voter registration.
This is the one thing political parties have been
unable to control.  They can slow independent voter
registration, but they cannot stop it. Any time they
try, it angers the people and they register
independent in large numbers.  As I said, it will not
take long for independent voters to outnumber
political party members.
  You and I are probably as far apart politically
as two people could be in political beliefs, and you
are a party member.  My advice to you would be to
consider becoming an independent voter, register as a
candidate for office, or support the candidacy of an
independent who agrees with you.  I disagree with
Ralph Nader about almost everything, but he has
always been dead on concerning the illegality of what
the two major parties have done concerning his
independent candidacy. 
    I gave another person the opposite advice
because that person claimed to be independent while
promoting party control.  I said, Go be a member of a
party for a while.  Anyone who has been an
independent will get tired of that pretty fast.  In
any event, I think party control is on its last legs
in this country.  They cannot even pretend to be
providing good government.  So let’s wait and see
what happens.  I think independents are going to
outnumber party members a lot sooner than you do.

I don’t care.  You should be more honest with
yourself.  If you are going to defend political
parties, go and register as a member of one.  The
parties of today would welcome you with open arms. 
Both major parties are losing voters here in Arizona. 
  Political parties of today do three things.
  1. They appropriate tax revenues to party uses. 
You might want to look at your income tax return.
  2.  They scam money from citizens for the campaigns
of their candidates.  This is money they steal in
addition to the money they take from income taxes. 
  3.  They borrow money on the credit of the state
and use the legislature as a place to divide it up
between parties. 
  This is all very expensive.  It costs trillions of
dollars in public revenues every year. 
  So you are telling me that you think if you defend
political parties, they might give you some of the
money they have scammed from the American people.  I
don’t think they will give you much unless you become
a party member.  So go ahead and be honest with
yourself and register as a party member.

Well, as I said, I am an unpopular person, and no
more popular having explained my political views to
you.  As a party member you are compelled to punish
unpopular people, so you follow your party leadership
in doing that.  Nazi Party members followed their
leadership in punishing Jews.  Communist Party
members followed their party leadership in punishing
people who were designated as enemies of the
Communist Party.  Republicans and Democrats want to
punish anyone who registers as an independent voter. 
It is all about punishing offenders. 
  The problem you party members have is that there
are too many independent voters today for it to make
any difference.  You want to see party candidates who
exemplify the European ideals of government you
admire and take offense if anyone says they are not
good candidates.  They are not good candidates
because they want to limit and control the
participation of the people in government.  When they
are elected they are incompetent because political
parties organize faction based on the existence of
problems rather than on eliminating them. 
  In any event, I am in favor of free and open
elections.  Political party members like you are not. 
That is irrelevant to me.  Once independent voters
have increased another seven percentage points, party
candidates will not be able to maintain their
stranglehold on the American people.  The people are
going to want free and open elections, and political
parties are going to have to let them have free and
open elections.

I am unpopular as compared with Adolf Hitler, Benito
Mussolini, Josef Stalin and other party personalities
who have had the respect and adulation of party
members in various countries.  But I am better
qualified to be a national leader than these
particular people because I am not a murderer.  I
mention this because if I had lived when they did in
the countries they headed, I could not have opposed
them in an election. 
So I would rather live where there are free and open
elections in which I might participate.
I would consider Presidential elections in the United
States fairly free and open up until 1828 because to
become a candidate, all a person had to do was to
convince a sufficient number of people to support
their candidacy.  There were unpopular candidates
like me back in that time who were looked upon with
fondness by most Americans even though they voted for
popular candidates because they gave the comforting
feeling by being on the ballot that anyone could run
for office, which was basically true back then.  The
election of 1828 brought about a change because
Andrew Jackson started modern political party
campaigns by his method of running for President. 
His followers organized faction at local and state
level in favor of their candidate with brass bands,
social events, speeches, political contributions,
solicitation of money to pay for advertising, etc.,
which eventually evolved into the media controlled
elections of today.  Before that election candidates
were very circumspect in their conduct and did not do
more than make statements to be printed in the
newspapers of the time.  They were still trying to be
the kind of candidates George Washington had told
them to be.
    So if candidates like Andrew Jackson and the
candidates of today were worse candidates than the
ones who preceded them, then why imitate them?
    I have a better idea to improve the government
of the United States than any of the party
candidates, which is to let the 43% of Americans who
have registered independent participate in the
government, since it is their Constitutional right to
do so.  That makes me the best, but not the most
popular candidate.  I have a better way than any
party candidate to stimulate the economy to recover. 
I have a way to get Congress and other parts of
government to start working again.  I can do this
because I am not part of their party contentions. 
  But I have no supporters.  Americans believe that
political parties are necessary because Andrew
Jackson and Martin van Buren convinced Americans that
parties were necessary in the election of 1832, and
they have believed it ever since, notwithstanding the
fact that political parties led them into a Civil
War, recurring economic disasters, two World Wars, a
Great Depression, and on and on by having no real
plan for governing America except to copy everything
done by European political parties, which is still
what they do today. 
  So the best thing for me to do is to register as
an independent candidate for office and vote for
myself and go on with my life.  If someone asks, Why
are you doing this?, as you did, I can explain it to
them.
  If no one asks, I can still vote for someone I
agree with and believe could do the job in question,
which I do not believe any of the party candidates
will be able to do. 
    So if I find that I cannot register as a
candidate for office and vote for myself, it behooves
me to work toward that goal, which is what I would
have done under Hitler’s government or Stalin’s
government, or any other kind of party oppression.

George Washington had it exactly right.  He predicted
that organization of faction would become the pre-
requisite for representation in government, not free
and open elections.  If Arizona had the kind of law
that still exists in Canada, I would have no
complaint, but that is not the case.  In Canada, I
could go register as a candidate, vote for myself on
election day, and say I had done everything I could
do with my vote.  In Arizona I have to obtain 23,000
signatures to appear on the ballot, while party
candidates have to get 4,000.  Make it equal, and I
will be happy with it.
  No, you want to require me to vote for your party
candidate.  Sorry, I do not want to do it.  I want
free and open elections like the ones that used to
exist in the United States before Republicans and
Democrats started claiming to be national parties
with exclusive rights to participation in the
government. 
  We independent voters are not panicky and
aggressive like you party voters.  We can see what is
going to happen.  Once there are more independent
voters than party voters, you will have to let
independent voters be candidates for office, and they
will start to be elected.  It is going to happen. 
Political parties have tried since 1800 in various
states to stop independent voter registration. 
Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren were the most
successful at this.  Their efforts resulted in the
Civil War.  New York, Texas, Nevada, Pennsylvania and
other states have at one time or another tried to
require party membership.  It does not work.  What
happens is that the parties always have to back down,
and independent voter registration increases because
attention is drawn to a problem that political
parties try to keep covered up.  The problem you have
now is that 43% of the voters are independent, up
from single a single digit percentage as recently as
the administration of John F. Kennedy.  So you are
still trying to enforce un-Constitutional election
laws, and the Supreme Court tries to keep the
Republican and Democratic Parties as national parties
by refusing to hear cases brought by minor parties
and independent voters. 
    That is fine.  The Supreme Court can be as
irrelevant as it chooses to be.  All we have to do is
wait until independent voters increase by seven
percentage points.  Then free and open elections can
be re-established.

Until independent voters gain ballot access, they
will be voting for column A or column B, as you say,
unless there is the odd eccentric billionaire who can
meet the signature requirements given to independent
voters to appear on the ballot.  So what is your
recommendation? 
Now that independent voters are the largest segment
of voters, they should register as party members
because they have found that the United States does
not hold free and open elections?
I think we should get seven percentage points of
independent voters, and then we will outnumber all
party members. 
  Political parties have been successful at keeping
independent voters from being candidates for office
since 1800, when a political party took over the
government of the United States.  Where they have
been unsuccessful is in their attempts to stop
independent voter registration.  The last attempt to
stop independent voter registration here in Arizona
took place in 2005 when Gov. Janet Napolitano signed
into law a bill to eliminate the option to register
independent from the Arizona voter registration form
with the following effect on independent voter
registration. 
   
          2000-2002     107,715
          2002-2004     165,771
          2004-2006     26,384

  This decrease in independent voter registration
was only temporary as citizens in the state learned
that they could still register independent with a
voter registration form that tells them they must
register as political party members.  Independent
voter registration is now back up close to its former
level, while both major parties are losing voters in
Arizona.

Parties are the problem.  George Washington
enumerated the effect political parties would have on
this government in his Farewell Address, published
when he left office in 1796.  So everything
Washington predicted came true and some other things
he did not predict.  What you do not seem to
understand is that your minor party candidate has no
more chance than an independent of being elected
under present un-Constitutional election laws. 
Federal district court upholds 23,000 nomination
petition signatures required for an independent
candidate for the same office a major party candidate
must get 4,000 to get on the ballot and your minor
party candidate must get about 100.  Appeal this to
the Supreme Court and you will find that the Supreme
Court has refused to hear a case brought by a minor
party or independent voter for more than twenty
years.  So we have the exact same situation here that
existed in Italy about 1920 or in Germany about 1932
or in Russia about 1918.  The judiciary of the nation
upholds a self-created society as a national party
that has exclusive rights of participation in the
government.  You might want to spend some time
studying how national parties in those countries
worked out.
    So forget about taking the matter to court and
getting it resolved.  I have tried this myself.  What
has to be done is for an independent to be elected
using the un-Constitutional laws that party
politicians have put in place to give their
candidates an exclusive advantage.

Independent voters are necessary in this form of
government, whereas, political parties and their
members are not.  This was first pointed out by
George Washington in his Farewell Address.  When
Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren embarked on a
campaign in the 1830’s to convince Americans that
political parties were necessary in American
government, they set the stage for the Civil War by
organizing the pro-slavery Democratic Party at the
worst possible time.  The Whig Party of England had
just been successful in getting slavery abolished in
the British empire in 1832. 
  There were not enough independent voters in
American government after the 1830’s to affect the
government.  So we have had since that time a mirror
of whatever disasters European political parties have
put together in Europe as domestic policy in America. 
    Fortunately, we now have 43% of American voters
registered as independent.  Political party
politicians and their supporters are puzzled about
what this means.  What it means is that when
independent voters have gained another 7 percentage
points, we can re-establish free and open elections
right here in the United States to replace these
party-controlled elections that now exist.