Overbuilt, overextended national "environmental' groups - AKA "Gang Green" - have been wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party since the massive restructuring of foundation grant funding during the Clinton years. As long as the Democrats are 100% behind neo-liberal (market-based) environmenal policies, corporate subsidies, and commodity production, national forests will pay the price. They have become another government bureaucracy. They seek government funding through various government foundations. It should surprise no one that the Tester-Baucus bill stands on bedrock Republican principles of deregulaiton and privatization, not protection or conservation.

I found the Missoulian special section interesting, especially the actual statewide employment data by sector chart. The thing that caught my eye was the total employment of data for the timber and mining industries. According to the data, those sectors combine for only 8,300 jobs in Montana -–that’s less than 2 percent of our state employment. For all the rhetoric we hear about the importance of timber and mining jobs, I had assumed it represented a much larger portion of our total jobs.
Second, and related, I was equally surprised to see that there has been ZERO net job loss in those industries since the end of 2007. Again, this surprised me given how loud those industries have been about the impact of the recession to them.
I'm not trying to be coldhearted about folks who have actually lost their jobs, it's just that we need to look at things in perspective. Hats off to the Missoulian and MT Dept of Labor and Industry for doing so.

I want to know how we create the money to pay the ObamaNation spending load by selling recreation and insurance to each other.

A non-consumer economy is based of eating each other feces, I suppose. And repairing and remodeling existing homes with slick outdoor magazines pressed into MagaBord or some such product. Anyone who proposes that we don't log has my vote. I want this charade deconstructed as soon as possible, and killing jobs while increasing government spending is a fine way for that to come about. I want government to take over our lives and give us what they think we need. Right now, that is ten percent of the vaccine to protect the most vulnerable, our children, our newly educated young adults, and the immune system challenged. But you know who is getting flu shots? Prison inmates because so many have compromised immune systems, and the courts have ordered that they have equal access to immunization and medical care. Every con who gets a flu shot is taking it from a child as our government run immunization program can't get the job done: all their effort, evidently, is into passing a national health plan. They couldn't run a good case of dysentery if all they had to eat was Ex-lax and chittum bark washed down with Beaver Fever water. Not being able to produce vaccine in a timely and effective manner is proof positive that we want them running our health care. There will be fewer of us to worry about it as a result. Over time, maybe far fewer.

Turn it all into Wilderness and burn it. That will recover the economy. Have any of you figured out that when $65 Trillion or so has been vaporized out of the cash flow and asset value of the country, and the banks, that price levels are not going to be what they were two years ago? Lumber is not going to be the same price and labor is not going to be the same price, when you have to sell a new home, on a lot, with utilities and streets, sidewalks and underground, all for less than $200,000? 60% of 2007 is the new economic model. If it cost or brought $10 in 2007, you can't get more than $6 for it today. And that includes timber.

I don't know who blows the smoke up your ass, Koehler, but logs don't sell for 2007 prices and neither does lumber. In fact, I know about random length doug fir dimension car loads that have sold for less than $135/mbf this year. And car loads of studs Utility and better, that went for less than $100/mbf shipping included. I have family logging, and he is working for $4 an hour less than he made two years ago, and 40 hours a week...no overtime. They are logging insurance company owned private timber, and nobody is making money on the deal. Not the timber owner, not the logger. Cash flow to stay alive is the reason they are logging, and only government is getting any money out of the deal in severance taxes, property taxes, payroll taxes, and capital gains. There are severe limits on capital losses, so don't give me that "they can deduct it from their taxes" ignorant line of economics babble. It is struggle to keep an outfit afloat. What I want to know is how a government timber sale is any more subsidized than a GMC auto or truck? AIG insurance? Any number of Wall Street and other banks? Cash for Clunkers? extended unemployment? Who in the hell is paying for those programs? Where is the money to pay the debt to come from? When the Chinese own it all, and that is not a far fetched idea, do you think that they will pay one iota of attention to what The Friends of Forests have to say?

Weyerhaeuser doesn't want public timber logged, and since they have held that opinion, none to amount to anything has been logged. Big Timber is who Koehler works for and who benefits the most from his incessant whine. I see Warren Buffett bought the BNSF Railroad this week. How many acres of timber, and how much timber company stock came with the deal? As long as there is a Green Lobby to stop public land logging, the MegaPulps and the TimberBarons will be making money hand over fist. They have been given the monopoly that Roosevelt and Pinchot wanted to prevent.

Have you seen a bill to make Big Oil divest itself of their monopolies that once again have formed in the last few decades of deregulation? Are the Super Majority Democrats going to break up the oil monopoly? Don't hold your breath. Not when the Pew Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, are making money hand over fist off of that oil monopoly. And a goodly part of the earnings go to the tax exempt NGOs of the environment from the tax exempt earnings of the oil monopoly foundations. A parallel government with its own funding has been created by the Congress to fuel their campaigns for election, and to insure they stay in power as elected officials. That Environmentalism is presented as "saving the earth" is a lie. Environmentalism is a vehicle to keep huge industrial monopolies intact, and profiting. It is those monopolies that fund the Koehlers of the world and keep them babbling on about not logging while his benefactors level the rest of the country side, one clear cut at a time. Open your eyes, folks. Your pockets are being picked.