Remember which candidates support public lands
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Editor,
Why are Daines and Zinke trying to refocus and recreate their stance on public lands?
Is it because we Montanans - we Americans - love our public lands. Lands owned by we the people. We realize our government sometimes makes mistakes in how they manage them. But they are still our lands. We want to keep them that way.
Long ago, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt led the charge in making sure these lands would be forever owned by all Americans. He hated the thought of our public lands ever being sold off to the rich or corporations, blighted by signs reading “No Trespassing” and “Private Property - Keep Out.”
But today’s Republicans, including Steve Daines and Ryan Zinke, don’t think that way. Both supported the Paul Ryan budget plan, which calls for selling off federal lands. Both were delegates to this year’s Montana Republican convention, when the delegates unanimously supported, without debate, a resolution in support of turning over federally managed public lands to the states. Of course, turning over public lands to the states would make them more vulnerable to private interests to pillage our resources and leave behind degraded lands for us to clean up.
We’ve seen this before in Montana. We don’t want to return to the era of greedy corporations like the copper kings, when the control of our state was in the hands of a wealthy few - the lands, waters and air despoiled, and thousands of citizens sickened or killed by pollution and unsafe conditions, because of their reckless greed.
Don’t buy the hogwash from multi-millionaire Steve Daines and Ryan Zinke. The citizen candidates in this election, Amanda Curtis and John Lewis, have vowed to never sell off the glory of the Big Sky for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
Dayna B. McClure
Polson
