Vol. 81/No. 28 July 31, 2017
Las Vegas protests defend ranchers framed-up by federal government
Defendants Eric Parker, Steven Stewart, Ricky Lovelien and Scott Drexler were among hundreds of people who converged on Bunkerville and stopped the government from impounding the cattle.
Bundy and family members, including sons Ammon and Ryan Bundy, who were acquitted in 2016 on frame-up charges stemming from an occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, had refused to comply with Washington’s moves to curtail their access to government land to graze cattle.
The four defendants are being retried after the prosecution failed to get a conviction against them in April. Cliven, Ammon and Ryan Bundy are being held in prison without bail awaiting a later trial. Ten others are also incarcerated.
“In 2014 my family decided we were going to stand,” Cliven Bundy’s wife Carol told the crowd. “The amazing thing is you stood with us. They are standing for what they feel and what they know is right and they are not going to back down.”
“I am the wife of Lavoy Finicum. He was murdered by our government and the FBI,” Jeanette Finicum said. He had joined the Malheur occupation, and was traveling with Ammon and Ryan Bundy to discuss the occupation with residents in a nearby town when they were ambushed by the FBI and Oregon State Police. Finicum was shot down in cold blood.
The protests in Oregon and Bunkerville were part of larger efforts by farmers and ranchers in the West to defend their right to make a living in the face of increasing federal government policies aimed against them, justified in the name of the environment.
With some 50 percent of all western land owned by the federal government — 85 percent in Nevada — these are life-and-death questions for ranchers.
Some at the rally had participated in protests earlier in the day in front of the federal courthouse and the jail where the defendants are being held. “Drain the Swamp. Start with Navarro,” read one popular sign — a reference to Judge Gloria Navarro, who recently ruled for prosecution motions denying defendants the right to mount a political and constitutional defense, as they had done in the earlier trial.
Keynote speaker Roger Stone, a former adviser to Donald Trump, attacked comments Attorney General Jeff Sessions made July 12 praising trial prosecutor Steven Myhre, and called for the president to “pardon the Bundys.”
“Why would we want a pardon? They haven’t been found guilty of anything yet,” one Bundy family member told the Militant.
Other speakers at the program included Sean Stone, son of Hollywood director Oliver Stone; libertarian anti-military Iraq War veteran Adam Kokesh; and Ace Baker, a leader of American Warrior Revolution, who helped organize the earlier rallies.
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