Riding Herd
“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
by LEE PITTS
– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
August 15, 2018 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 60 • No. 8
Country Club Cowboys
BY LEE PITTS
May your belly never grumble, may your heart never ache, may your horse never stumble, may your cinch never break.
T
here’s a not-so-quiet revolution going on in the country. It pits the same old politicians, their staffs and cronies against the very people they were elected to serve. The entrenched politicians have a great thing going, at least for them, and then along comes a President who wants to upset their applecart and return the power to the people. Only this time I’m not referring to Donald Trump and the swamp he’s trying to drain in DC. No, this swamp is in the unlikeliest of places... it’s in the desert in Phoenix, Arizona. And those fireworks you may have seen or felt on in late July weren’t fired off by some Fourth of July revelers with a bad sense of timing, or an old outdated calendar. These fireworks were lit in a conference room in Prescott, Arizona, and they represented a microcosm of everything that’s wrong in this country... and everything that’s right.
The question of an organization being “staff driven” usually pops up when something has already gone terribly wrong. Like when Oklahoma’s state Beef Council lost $2.6 million of its checkoff dollars when a staffer embezzled it, or when NCBA staffers lobbied for the government to get rid of country of origin labeling at the behest of its packer members who don’t pay into the checkoff, while ignoring the wishes of its producer members who do pay the checkoff and overwhelmingly wanted COOL. In both cases you had the proverbial tail wagging the dog.
The Tail Waggers
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
There’s a principle in Leadership 101 that says anytime you hear there’s an issue of an organization being “staff driven” versus “membership driven” you already have big problems. The key word in that sentence is VERSUS. Volunteer members VERSUS paid staffers? Is this how any dues-worthy association should work? Versus? Really?
Joining that infamous list of tail waggers we now have the the staff, past presidents and Executive Board of the Arizona Cattle Growers’ Association (ACGA). It’s them VERSUS the ACGA President Jay Whetten. There’s that dirty word again! First, let’s meet the tail waggers. Basilio (Bas) Aja is the Executive Vice President of Arizona Cattle Feeders Association. His family came to America in late 1890’s successfully raised sheep for 109 years before selling out in 2006 and switching to cattle. In addition to being a rancher
Bas has nearly three decades experience lobbying the Arizona legislature on behalf of the Arizona Cattle Feeders, Cattle Growers and the Arizona Beef Checkoff. (Although, the words “checkoff” and “lobbying” aren’t supposed to even be found in the same sentence.) According to his bio, “Bas has been the lead government relations expert for the Arizona Cattlemen’s Association for the past 20 years.” From all accounts he has done a good and effective job. Bas has a relative, Patrick Bray, who just so happens to be the Executive Vice President of the ACGA. (This reporter called Patrick to get his side of the story but as of press time I haven’t heard from him.) Aligning with Bas and Bray in this battle of the new guard versus the old guard is a Phoenix land and water developer, the largest bull breeder in Arizona and the son of one of the most respected ranchers in
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Meet The Man Behind Trump’s Hammond Pardon How Forrest Lucas — the little-known millionaire whose company name is plastered on the home stadium of the Indianapolis Colts — wields power and even Sharon Stone to protect agriculture. BY ANNE HELEN PETERSEN, KEN BENSINGER, AND SALVADOR HERNANDEZ BUZZFEED NEWS REPORTERS
T
he last call Oregon rancher Dwight Hammond Jr. made before heading to federal prison on two counts of arson in 2016 was to a man he hardly knew. Forrest Lucas, who made his fortune on oil engine additives, promised Hammond that he would do whatever he could to get him and his son, Steven, out of prison. Early the morning of July 10 aboard Air Force One, en route to the NATO summit, President Donald Trump signed an official clemency order pardoning the two men. Lucas — a 76-year-old Indiana self-made millionaire with tight ties to the Trump administration — had fulfilled his pledge. For nearly two decades, the Hammonds had been engaged in skirmishes with the Bureau of Land Management, an agency that functions as a go-between for ranchers and the federal land they lease for grazing. They pushed back, often threateningly, on regulations regarding the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, which bordered the Hammonds’ grazing allotment, and they set unpermitted fires on BLM land. After a second fire
in 2006, the pair were charged with 19 different crimes, but eventually arranged a plea deal for just two charges of arson on federal land, which carried a minimum of a five-year sentence. The judge declared that such lengthy jail time qualified as cruel and unusual punishment, instead sentencing Dwight to three months and Steven to one year and one day. The pair served their time and returned home. But the federal government successfully appealed the sentence, and on January 4, 2016, the Hammonds were ordered to return to prison. The verdict brought Ammon and Ryan Bundy — who, along with their father, Cliven, had been involved in an armed confrontation with BLM officials over the management of their grazing allotment in Nevada — to Eastern Oregon. On January 2, Ammon led several hundred people on a peaceful march through Burns, Oregon, in support of the Hammonds. At the end of the march, he made a declaration: Whoever wanted to take a “hard stand” against the government should follow him — thus launching what would become the 41-day armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. The Hammonds, however, weren’t there. Nor did they condone what the Bundys and continued on page four
A Losing Battle
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e’ve turned the corner on beef consumption and it’s back on the rise after more than a decade of falling like a sack of hammers. I attribute beef’s decline to the plethora of diets urging folks to skip the meat in favor of melba toast, coffee enemas and colonic cleansings. Sometimes it seems like half the world is starving to death while the other half is on a diet. It is estimated that 80% of ten year old girls in this country are on some sort of diet. And they have so many to choose from. There’s the diets named after places where no one is fat, like the Hollywood, Beverley Hills, Scarsdale and South Beach diets. A lot of good the Scarsdale diet did its inventor, Herman Tarnower, whose so called “friend” lost 185 pounds of lover when she murdered Herman, probably because he made her eat too many pineapple chunks with cottage cheese and kept telling her how fat she was. We also had the no-whitefood diet, eat only when hungry diet, the milk diet, and the drinking man’s diet, which consisted of martinis and whipped cream. Actually, the drinking man’s diet has been with us for centuries because in 1087 William the Conqueror only consumed alcohol in order to lose weight. Forever after he was known as William the Drunk. Most of the diets were dreamed up by doctors who had something to sell and wanted to appear on Oprah. (She purchased Weight Watchers not long ago, probably to get the wholesale price on Weight Watchers cream puffs.) There were diet books by Robert Atkins, The Doctor’s Weight Loss Book by Dr. Irwin Stillman, and the No Breakfast Plan by Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey. Some people got seriously rich from fat, like Jennie Craig, and the people behind Nutri-Systems and Metrecal, which was all the rage when I was a kid. And in 1961 Royal Crown Cola introduced the first diet soft drink, Diet Rite, which started a flood of diet drinks. I had an uncle who was hooked on Diet Rite and he offered me a taste one time.
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