Executive Order of 3/16/2012 gives Obama the same power as Stalin had.
Posted by strugatsky 9 years, 9 months ago to Politics
This long-worded executive order is a real shocker, while being unnoticed by the media (of course). It gives the president total control of all aspects of the economy, both business and labor sides, "in peacetime and in times of national emergency." FDR used a similar executive order during WWII, but this is "in peacetime"! These are the same powers that Stalin and Hitler had; how did that ever get by without notice? Are we really done for as a Republic and just waiting for the final crash? This is not fiction, this is really happening!
The wise man built his house upon the rock.
They take place in the not-too-distant future, where we have interstellar colonies. The U.S. and reformed Soviet Union have created the CoDominium to keep the peace on Earth. In the U.S. you have citizens and taxpayers; the citizens are kept pacified in their welfare islands by generous distribution of a drug called "borloi" grown by slave labor on one or more colony worlds. You have excess population (read: troublemakers) who are shipped out as transportees to the colony worlds. And you have colony worlds who, for the most part, barely have the capability of sustaining themselves with technological help from Earth.
And Earth is about to destroy itself as the precarious system collapses.
Falkenberg, first as a CoDominium marine under Admiral Lermontov, then as a mercenary *hired* by Lermontov, travels the various colony worlds to do what little can be done to stabilize them and make them able to survive the inevitable collapse of Earth.
Everything in the series of stories is driven by the certain knowledge that Earth's destruction isn't a question of "how", or "if", but of "when". And the need to create havens for civilization for that eventuality.
And when you guys talk about "starting a real Atlantis"... that's what you make me think of.
:)
It is a good idea to be somewhat mobile & be able to pack & carry the most important things in a quick enough time (under 12 hours) & have an alternate place to go, in case America's standing army: the DHS, starts encroaching due to an elistist-manufactured "crisis" e.g., the border with Mexico and your home is in certain danger. Just my .02.
Ok, I'll stop now.
The corollary to that has always been, "if one is going to crash, do your best and keep flying it through the crash no matter what" - with the idea that it might not be as bad of a crash that way (hope against hope when all you have in some cases is some hope - irrationally or otherwise).
Other observation/caution/question in this regard may be just as operable - "why die all tensed up in a inevitable crash?"
Seems to me there is a crash to be - wonder is of what severity? All dire predictions to-date are not necessarily a given - but certainly not desirable in any aspect and to be avoided (IMHO) at ALL COSTS.
Could be equally true that the crash doesn't kill the whole thing, and we will be able seize the opportunity to take the experiment off-line for some down-time to repair the broken bits, remove the idiots from the cockpit and re-tune the whole thing for the future before we can crank it up up again.
In any event - crashes are a matter of both routine happenstance and simple stupidity over time given that those that crash tend to become careless and complacent unless there is a very direct and imminent threat to their own pink matter, or that of their loved ones.
I think that saying that there will not be 'any' of a younger generation who are competent an who have a clue is an expression of frustration rather than reality. I think that there are many capable, productive and realistic young people - it is just not a high percentage of that population. I think that many of them would adapt to crisis by adopting useful productive philosophies. One of the things that I have observed with folks who are much younger than I is that they have been raised in a very buffered environment. There is little cause-and-effect in their lives. One has to have an innate philosophical version of 'street smarts' to see through the BS without having had any actual contact with reality. (I occasionally muse that there is nothing wrong with many folk that spending a couple of years working on a cattle ranch or on a farm would not fix: They are actually drifting in a nihilistic universe where nothing they do makes more than a vague theoretical difference.)
The Depression did not destroy the US, but it did set the philosophical tone for two generations. Perhaps one of the reasons that the Administration fights so hard to mitigate a new depression is that they fear a turnover of philosophy should we run out of bread-and-circuses and have to face reality.
Jan
In the book THE HIDING PLACE, Corrie works for a NAZI-controlled watchmaker who
Insists on delivering faulty products.
Considering the youth of today, that's exactly what our government will get.
"Most of the top brass right now are total "yes" men."
Which means they won't be the best and brightest military commanders. We might can hope to get *those* on our side, if necessary.
Of course, I have little respect for the officer class of our military today. They take their oath, they take their oath... but they don't risk their careers by fulfilling their oath and opposing Obama's unConstitutional occupation of the White House...
The current administration doesn't understand this phenomenon.
GOOD.
I'm not an Obama fan by any means, but this is rather typical continuity of operations planning for the federal government, every agency has to have an enacted and viable COOP... certainly he would. I'm sure there was a preceding one, this probably just changes some of the delegation or something.
The subsidies & payments sections probably empowers him to authorize resource for military black budgets... you can't debate the amount of money we're spending on the next generation completely optically-camoflouged stealth fighter and which contractors are involved and in what cities... but you can authorize a black budget and allow the executive branch to carry out the details outside of public print or scrutiny.
From a national defense perspective, global warming and the extremely unpredictable weather patterns emerging are the greatest threat at present. Let's say we lost 55% of the food crop with the current floods in the Midwest (very unusual as they are for July). People get a little weird by 48 hours without food, and are basically dying by day 3. In the west, with extreme drought, we're looking at one more year of fresh water reserves remaining before... I don't know, we're drinking pee-water. By about the 4th day without food, people get relatively crazy.
What happens if a carrot costs $4.00?
These are real things happening right now.
In a large urban area, such as LA or New York, you can be looking at mass insurrection very quickly. What you say is true, but it ignores police powers and other responsibilities of the government woven into state constitutions, city charters, etc.
This comes down to the fact that a "well regulated militia"... aka the national guard... doesn't have the resources, the training, or the expertise to resolve a major disaster. The feds also limit themselves via Posse Comitatus Act, and cannot quarter or deploy military forces for police purposes.
We don't have a "states rights" type of confederation, we have a system where federal powers usurp state law, but respect state law in the absence of specifically-enumerated powers. In a case like this, it is basically "federalizing" local resources and manpower and empowering them with the resources of the 50 states, rather than their own tiny local budgets and manpower.
The Founding Fathers never envisioned global thermonuclear war, a population of 350 million, or cities of 20 million people living on an earthquake fault, or threats of things like ebola arriving on a 10 hour airplane flight from Africa.
I'm sorry, but your rather shallow personal liberty argument doesn't respect the needs of protecting human life and property.
If you had an ebola outbreak in your little town... what exactly is the local sheriff going to do about that? How about the unionized nursing staff? Are you going to hope for the best or would you rather see 300 epidemiology, virology, and bacterial infection specialists trained in containing epidemics fan out and quarantine the town?
Unlike anyone else here, I've been in that situation. I was deployed to Rwanda, and some skinnies were playing with a Russian BMP 20 mm turret and turned and pointed it at the great big C-5 I was sitting in the shade under. In half a second, myself and the three guys I was with had our rifles on those two skinnies, scopes dialed in and ready to fire. I had no problem taking their head off, because I was there, not wanting to be there, but trying to "help" under orders. I wasn't giving my life for that crap.
Luckily, they turned that turret. If they hadn't, neither of those two idiots would have survived the next 5 seconds.
You assume that police, fire, and military, sworn to uphold the constitution blindly do whatever some "leader" tells them to do. There has been no evidence of that in American history. The fact that you state and insinuate that is rather obvious that you lack the understanding of the high degree of professionalism that are armed forces and police forces have.
In the Katrina example you cite, did they permanently imprison people? Did they tear up the Constitution? No. In simple cases of police detainment, it is always stated "I am restraining you temporarily for your own protection and mine". The police officer handcuffs the drunk wife-beater and sits him down on the curb to get the story of what happened. The last thing you want is the upset/irate guy taking a swing at the police officer, and now he's dead because he was drunk, upset, and took a swing at a police officer. In the case of Katrina, how do you tell who stayed around to loot their neighbors, versus the ones that were just too dumb to leave?
We can have a debate about cell phone privacy, and extreme levels of data collecting, I'll be 100% on your side there. But when it comes to the rights of someone like my son, a police officer, to not be threatened by some a-hole sovereign citizen type, for only doing his job and go home to see his family every night, its something I will not support or ever agree to.
You "assume" that all people are law abiding citizens. In my experience, that couldn't be farther from the truth. Sometimes its hard to find the good guys in a certain situation.
So, you think that the police are concerned about the Constitution. Please tell that to SWAT teams that practice on citizens, including toddlers, with flash grenades in their faces, full auto rifle fire against someone that might look like the suspect (but is not) and arresting people for anti-Obama remarks on Facebook. Yes, I would like to hear their view of the Constitution (that is the US Constitution; at this point, I think it would be necessary to point them at the document in question, lest they mix it up with some other departmental instructions).
During Katrina, they did not permanently imprison people. But they did imprison people. Why is any imprisonment for offenses not committed acceptable? And the weapons that were [illegally] confiscated were not returned. Law enforcement today has morphed into something different than it was ever intended to be. Its purpose is no longer to serve the citizen or attain justice; its purpose is to serve the State and increasingly, as your comment makes it obvious, the police see themselves in a warzone against the citizens. That is very troubling. Perhaps you may want to consider the purpose of law enforcement and whether today’s version fulfills that or not?
Modern Americans are not historical Americans. They're more like the people of Europe... And we know what their history is like.
"But when it comes to the rights of someone like my son, a police officer,"
As a person, your son has rights. Police officers have no rights. Your son has the same God-given rights as any person, but "police officer", as the name implies, is an office. Congressmen, Senators, civil servants, etc do not have rights related to their jobs. The have limited powers granted them in order to do their jobs.
"Give me liberty, or give someone else life and property...." doesn't ring as well...
This is an administration which creates chaos in order to seize power.
Then abstract into the future with the chaos scenario which would allow him to implement this plan as a type of "blitzkrieg".
You'll get it...