Heard about the secret plan to federalize the Chicago River? How about the plot to hand over the Skokie Lagoons to the United Nations? Or to deliver the Des Plaines River into the clutches of the pointy-headed bureaucrats from Washington?
Welcome to 1998. It’s an election year–time for the true-believers to roll out their conspiracy theories, time for those citizens who get their news from talk radio to TAKE ACTION BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
Citizens, for instance, like the directors of the Illinois Farm Bureau. And the county commissioners of downstate Adams, Greene, Henderson, Mercer, Pike and Scott Counties.
Alerted to the latest assault by Washington on individual freedom, these patriots have come out in opposition to the inclusion of the Illinois River and its tributaries in President Clinton’s American Heritage Rivers Initiative. With 126 major rivers around the country vying for just 10 slots in this new program, their opposition may be enough to kill Illinois’ chances.
Good riddance, say the patriots.
Stop scaring us, they say, with those environmental studies showing the Illinois is silting-in at an alarming rate, and is well on its way to becoming North America’s longest mud flat. Our ingenious central and western Illinois farmers, they say, will find another way to move their corn and beans down to the Mississippi River and out to world markets.
Alas, I too was among those duped when Bill Clinton first announced the Heritage Rivers Initiative in last winter’s State of the Union Address. I fell for his promise that it would be a voluntary program aimed at targeting 10 historic-but-troubled waterways for special study and governmental attention. I bought Clinton’s claim that there would be no new federal regulations or encumbrances on private property; and that the federal “navigator” assigned to each of the chosen rivers would serve mainly to shepherd local initiatives, like grant applications, through the bureaucracy.
No doubt my judgment was blurred by the fact that Illinois’s nomination is being spearheaded by Lt. Gov. Bob Kustra, a known moderate who has worked for years on the Illinois River problem. And that a fellow Republican, U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood of Peoria, leads a unified Illinois congressional delegation in support of the nomination. Perhaps I should have become suspicious when Mayor Richard Daley, a government sympathizer if ever there was one, joined Kustra as co-nominator, but only after it was agreed to add the Chicago River. (The Chicago, you may recall, became tributary to the Illinois with the opening in 1900 of another Big Government tax-and-spend scheme, the Sanitary & Ship Canal.)
Then I began to read up on the real story behind Clinton’s American Heritage Rivers Initiative.
There are press releases from U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho), a flame-throwing conservative with a fondness for well-armed militias. She denounces it as a massive federal land-grab. The program, she warns, “would literally allow federal bureaucrats and Gore extremists to take away YOUR private property (even if it’s not close to a river!) and transform it into government-controlled “communities.”
The full enormity of the “federal land use scheme” is spelled out on one of those always-right web sites (www.libertymatters.org). There you’ll learn that “aerial photography and satellite surveillance will be used to police and expand the program.”
Then there are the letters-to-the-editor (always a source of reliable information) which have been popping up in local papers around the country. Several have linked Clinton’s river initiative to the United Nation’s World Heritage Sites program, a multi-national attempt to preserve and protect sites significant in world history. “The UN wants our river,” wrote one of the vigilant ones to a California paper, “Don’t let America’s land rights be stolen.”
So you wonder, after reading all this, how some 200 of Illinois’ most respected civic, business and governmental organizations could have been hoodwinked into submitting letters of support for the Illinois River nomination. From Openlands Project to the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, from Caterpillar Inc. to the Peoria Area Chamber of Commerce, these naifs probably couldn’t spot a black helicopter full of blue helmets if it landed on their front lawns.
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Thanks, however, to the vigilance of the Illinois Farm Bureau and those six agrarian counties, Illinois may be spared yet another invasive program by the federal government. Indeed, a recent study by the Northeast-Midwest Institute found that Illinois ranks with the top states at avoiding federal monetary intrusion. We placed 48th in the amount (75 cents) of federal spending here for every dollar we send to Washington in taxes.
Idaho, by way of comparison, gets $1.16 for every greenback they send away in federal taxes. Sounds like socialism to me. Somebody had better alert Rep. Chenoweth.
Then I noticed in another of her press releases that, just before introducing her bill to block Clinton’s rivers initiative, Chenoweth sponsored another bill called the Coeur d’ Alene River Basin Environmental Restoration Act of 1997. It would “provide for the stabilization, enhancement, restoration and management” of that Idaho river.
Oh Helen, you sneak.