By Ron Ewart, President

National Association of Rural Landowners

The evolution of the environmental movement in America, and throughout the world for that matter, has seen an amazing and alarming increase in its scope and its power. It started with the laudable goal to clean up the waste that had been dumped into our eco-systems by people and industry. Dumping waste and pollutants into rivers, lakes, the ocean and wetlands was an obvious wrong and had to be righted. But then a strange thing happened. A mindset or paradigm shift took place, first in the backrooms of the environmental movement (they smelled money-government money-our money) and then by hype and propaganda, as it began to invade the psyche of the entire culture, but mostly in large urban centers. Environmentalism had morphed into a full-blown religious cult in just a few decades. Recently, it has taken on all of the characteristics of mass hysteria, scaring little children into believing the sky is falling because of the environmentalist's manufactured crisis of man-caused global warming. But the rural folk, who were the target of this growing radical cult-like insanity, remained unaware that danger to their very livelihood and property rights was lurking in the shadows. And even the city folk remained totally unaware that massive amounts of their taxes would be used to implement a series of anti-global warming policies, based on propaganda, distortions, lies and the outright perversion of science.

This mindset was aided and abetted by government and the news media, to the point that now little children are brainwashed into thinking that we must save every wetland on the planet and send our economies back into the dark ages to stop man-caused global warming or environmental degradation. Fear, intimidation and propaganda are the tools the environmentalists use to warp the minds of large sections of the world population, including our children, from Kindergarten on up through college. Corporate America has bought into the myth of radical environmentalism with enthusiasm. They also smelled money. Think and act "green" or suffer the direst of consequences is now their unwritten byword, truth be damned.

As a result, huge volumes of environmental law have been added to the huge volumes of other laws, with the single goal, "protect the environment at any and all costs", lest yee die. There is no middle ground. Environmental law takes precedence over all other law, including constitutional law and property rights. Violate the environmental law and the consequences can be far worse than the penalties for burglary, robbery and murder. The prosecution of violations of environmental law by a corrupt judiciary has been vigorous, swift and very punitive, in order to send a clear message to the poor serfs owning rural land that they better capitulate to the "God of Green", or else. Horror stories of abusive environmental prosecutions (persecutions in effect) litter the rural landscape, which brings us to the corrupt, illegal and unjust crucifixion of Paul.

Paul, a small rural landowner in America, made the unfortunate mistake of living next to a neighbor from Hell. Paul, minding his own business, was working HIS land, doing a little ditch clearing and burning, as any responsible landowner does to maintain his property. But a neighbor didn't like what Paul was doing, so he called the "environmental police" and reported that, God forbid, Paul was doing something drastic against the environment. The environmental enforcers came out and looked at what Paul was doing, said it was OK and went away. But that wasn't good enough for the neighbor from Hell. He kept pressing the planning authorities and finally those authorities manufactured environmental code violations against Paul. Since Paul thought what he was doing was legal and had obtained permission from the authorities to do it, he decided to fight them. But the local authorities' response was, how dare Paul defend himself against the almighty government. They converted what was an alleged civil violation into a criminal act, remanded him to a district court, that under state constitutional law had no jurisdiction in the case, and set about to prosecute Paul to the Nth degree. The district court judge trumped up five contempt-of-court charges against Paul and threw him in jail for 30 days for each violation, for a total of 150 days, along with a $100,000 cash bond required to get out of jail. Had it not been for Paul's brother, Paul would have rotted there for the entire 150 days, unable to defend himself. But Paul's brother was able to get him out on a writ of Habeas Corpus in a little over 60 days, at least for the time being. So Paul persisted with his legal defense as best he could and he has been thwarted at every turn by a corrupt prosecutor, a district court judge, a superior court judge and now an appellate court, who seem to find some perverted pleasure in driving Paul into the ground with legal maneuverings, administrative rules and outright perversion of the law.

As near as we can tell from reading transcripts of the case, Paul's alleged crime was clearing out a ditch in a wetland. But wait! The wetland declaration to the area in which Paul was digging, was added after the fact, in collusion by the prosecutor and the planning director. The prosecutor trumped up a crime and was able to obtain a search warrant from a judge, giving the authorities the right to trample all over Paul's property in search of anything they could find. The prosecutor actually changed and added criminal charges against Paul, five different times. The district court judge continuously denied Paul's motions. On one occasion the court clerk "sort of" LOST Paul's legal filings. Hmmm! And just recently an appellate court denied Paul a motion hearing, with absolutely zero comment on the law or facts, even though Paul's motion documents contained hundreds of pages describing the outright falsifications of fact and law. The prosecutor and the judge used those falsifications of fact and law to crucify Paul with government's distorted version of environmental "justice".

In a recent communication with this author, loaded with frustration and anguish, Paul said this:

"Once more, it appears "the fix is in", the secret files have been passed around with orders to dead-end this thing to protect the guilty within their own ranks from answering to malfeasance, official misconduct, all of the many gross misdemeanor and misdemeanor crimes committed against me, listed and documented within the verified criminal complaints which were deep-sixed absent the probable cause hearings required by law, the many blatant and deliberate violations of law required to stage the kangaroo trial I endured, the perjury of oaths of office in usurpation of our fundamental compacts, same said as treachery and treason, and not the least, the false imprisonment and extreme hardship I have already endured. With the enormity of well over a hundred reversible assignments of error according to their own decisions, spelled out in my original appeal which was dead-ended in the wrong court within the county where this extortion and protection racketeering enterprise in the rubric of environmental fascism is rampant, I am once again clearly informed, 'you are without recourse in our "Just Us" system'. The message is clear: Resist, or attempt to expose the rampant corruption in our ranks instead of pretending we are honorable under the rule of Law, and you will be crushed."

"So once again, in the fifth year of this battle against tyranny, on impossible deadlines, I ignore life's rightful priorities, and prepare to head for our state supreme court with hat in hand begging for the right of actual appeal to an impartial panel of judges, hoping for at least one honorable person to be left in our apparently wholly corrupted judiciary, and praying for divine intervention in obtaining some justice at long last; with the sure knowledge that my cause is just, knowing that some pretense of the rule of law may still be bought by the case only by transferring sufficient wealth to the bench/bar monopoly private labor organization which has seized control of and melded our branches of government while we slept, 'and wondering afresh what might be required to awaken sufficient numbers of Americans to the present real-time overthrow of our once proud and free Republic from within, by pettifogger shysters in little black Roman bat suits and their Marxist lackeys in our former offices of public trust.' When their sacred oaths are meaningless, when their own standing prior seminal decisions cannot be relied upon, when they are utterly devoid of honor, and when they are actively engaged in doing what they are and were forever prohibited from doing, where, pray tell, is our right to and lawful forum for petition for peaceful redress of grievances?"

Where, pray tell, indeed! This case has so many areas of prosecutorial misconduct and appealable issues that the prosecutor, the judge and those that colluded with them, should be in jail themselves. Now their game is to cover up their misdeeds. The perpetrators are very aware that they have denied Paul of any semblance of due process and are out to cover up their crime by continuously denying motion after motion. If they prevail, Paul will go to jail again and have to pay additional fines for doing what most rural landowners have done for centuries, taking care of and being good stewards of THEIR land.

This story isn't over yet, but when it is, we can only hope that Paul will have the last laugh because some of these local government and judicial types are going to look very red-faced when the facts come out. And the facts will come out, either in our corrupt courts, or in the court of public opinion.

Unfortunately, the sad refrain from all of this corruption is that Paul and his family have paid a terrible price for allegedly breaking a minor environmental law and then being crucified for having the audacity to challenge the alleged violations against him in court. We can only hope that when Paul prevails, as he should, he will extract a huge pound of flesh from the authorities who abused his rights and from an electorate who sits idly by and allows these injustices to continue daily and unabated.

We applaud Paul's persistence and his inflexible drive to protect his rights, as every American should, against an abusive, out-of-control government and justice system. If we all just roll over and play dead for a government who has lost all allegiance to the Supreme Law of the Land, we might just as well snap the lock on the chains that bind us and throw the key away, where it will never be found, if we have not already done so.

So as you slumber peacefully at night and go about your daily routines, blissful in not knowing what goes on in your ignorance, remember, there are thousands of individuals just like Paul, all across America, who are being crushed under the heavy hand of a government Goliath, all alone, for the God of the Environment. A corrupt Goliath that conspires within its own boundaries to circumvent the rule of law and to cover up its transgressions with procedural skullduggery, administrative rule dirty tricks and unlawful slight of hand, for the sole purpose of declaring absolute power over the people. Either capitulate to their unlawful power, or face the wrath of all-mighty Goliath, who knows no mercy, especially if the issue is protecting the environment.

Could you be next.........? You had better hope not, because if you get in the sights of the environmental police and the corrupt prosecutors and judges who will be your judge, jury and executioner, you will face this all alone, all by yourself, and not one American, not one first responder, will come to your rescue.

The only first responder to rescue freedom, liberty and property rights is WE THE PEOPLE. But so far WE THE PEOPLE have been essentially silent and the victims of government tyranny, like Paul, multiply by the day.

Ron Ewart, President

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF RURAL LANDOWNERS

P. O. Box 1031, Issaquah, WA 98027

425 222-4742 or 1 800 682-7848

(Fax No. 425 222-4743)

Website: www.narlo.org