Failing to give the correct answer in the center square:
Posted on 03/30/2012 5:37:00 AM PDT by IbJensen
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 28, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – A little-noticed executive order issued earlier this month would allow the federal government to seize all national resources (including food), draft civilians into the military or forced “labor,” regulate all communications, and ration health care to “promote the national defense.” Congress may be briefed on the government’s actions but lacks any power to alter them. This completes a “martial law matrix” that hands all national resources to Washington, a prominent author told LifeSiteNews.com.
Barack Obama issued the executive order, “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” on March 16.
Jim Garrison of The Huffington Post summarized its provisions:
President Barack Obama
• The Secretary of Defense has power over all water resources; • The Secretary of Commerce has power over all material services and facilities, including construction materials; • The Secretary of Transportation has power over all forms of civilian transportation; • The Secretary of Agriculture has power over food resources and facilities, livestock plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment; • The Secretary of Health and Human Services has power over all health resources; • The Secretary of Energy has power over all forms of energy.
Each power includes all its component parts. For example, “Civil transportation includes movement of persons and property by all modes of transportation in interstate, intrastate, or foreign commerce within the United States, its territories and possessions, and the District of Columbia, and related public storage and warehousing, ports, services, equipment and facilities.” Similarly “Food resource” means all commodities and products, (simple, mixed, or compound), or complements to such commodities or products, that are capable of being ingested by either human beings or animals.”
“These are entirely illegitimate powers from a Constitutional perspective,” author and editor William Norman Grigg told LifeSiteNews.com. “There is not even a hint or a whisper or legitimacy here.”
“You’re dealing with someone who clearly doesn’t see the presidency as susceptible to any limits whatsoever, either legal or constitutional,” he said.
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Grigg, who is managing editor of Republic Magazine, said, “What is especially troubling is that he shows no compunction at all about exercising all of the powers that have been claimed by his predecessors and adding to that corpus of extra-constitutional presidential powers.”
These sweeping new powers may be invoked “in peacetime and in times of national emergency,” whenever they are “deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.” The president would determine when those circumstances apply.
Congress would be briefed on the agencies’ actions – annually – but could not alter policy.
The president’s defenders, including some Republicans, say the executive order only updates the Defense Production Act of 1950 and of Bill Clinton’s Executive Order 12919, written in 1994. The chief difference is the new order transfers functions from FEMA to the Department of Homeland Security.
Ed Morrissey of Hot Air wrote, “Barack Obama may be arrogant, and the timing of this release might have looked a little strange, but this is really nothing to worry about at all.”
But Grigg says the change from a wartime to peacetime emergency alone is troubling.“When you’re dealing with semantic engineering that is that finely tuned, that ooks very much like evidence of bad intent,” he said. “They have dispensed with the idea that there needs to be a discrete event that would trigger a national emergency is significant.”
The reliance on previous executive orders also troubles Grigg. “Obama has…spoken about the supposed virtues of the domestic regimentation of the entire civilian population along military lines,” he said. “That goes right back to Bernard Baruch,” chairman of the National War Industries Board under President Woodrow Wilson during World War I. He wrote in 1918, “We are living today in a highly organized state of socialism. The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state.”
“That is an aspiration that has been alive in the bosom of pretty much every collectivist since time immemorial,” Grigg told LifeSiteNews.com.
Some who support the order are troubled by its reliance on a 62-year-old law. Doug Mataconis, who believes the executive order is nothing to worry about, wrote, “The fact that the President of the United States is still exercising authority granted during the Korean War and the height of the Cold War is yet another reflection of how power, once assumed by the Imperial Presidency, is never surrendered.”
The president’s defenders in both parties say the order is merely a worst case scenario in the event of a nuclear strike or catastrophic disaster that would disable the normal flow of daily life. This would let the federal government maintain order.
“There really is no strategic or tactical case to be made for executive dictatorship as an emergency management strategy,” Grigg said. “The problem here is the assumption that the best way to deal with that kind of tragedy is to centralize power and thereby give one convenient target to our enemies. In a strategic sense, that makes no sense.”
On the contrary, widely defusing and localizing power would make it more difficult for an enemy to completely disrupt national life.
“I think there really ought to be an element of humility being displayed by the same govt that conveyed the benefit of toxic FEMA trailers to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina,” he said.
However, the greatest loss is the loss of liberty, they say. Chuck Norris wrote, “enacting this martial law even during a time of peace is an unprecedented and out-of-control abuse of executive power…Our Founding Fathers never would have allowed it, and we shouldn’t, either.”
Some say that is doubly true under the current president. “By his actions he’s displayed a disposition that can be described as dictatorial,” Grigg told LifeSiteNews.com. “It’s a case of the man and the moment having met. They created this institutional architecture of executive dictatorship. Now the dictator is taking residence therein.”
No no NO!!! We have NO MORE TIME to wait to "vote him out" nor "impeach" him! Do you "vote" a psychotic illegal immigrant squatter out of your house??? Do you "impeach" a murderer out of your house? ARREST AND DEPORT HIM NOW! Send him to GITMO with the rest of Congress where they can Rubber Stamp his governance of the Prison Yard basketball league. People wake UP! It's time to clean house, and the Left Right Paradigm has been used against us! Ron Paul 2012, End the Fed, Take out the Trash, but we'll be stuck with the mild-mannered, easy to get along with, Mitty.
If he loses in November, it's all over.
I see the chance of nationwide violence and loss of rights as being near 100%.
Whatever scenario would trigger the implementation of Marshall Law...I suspect to see it happen in August or September, culminating in October, the grandest of all October Surprise.
Think Iraq, 2003-2005. When a poorly armed insurgency nearly brought our forces to their knees. Multiply times 100.
Think how many of us there are that went to Southeast Asia in the 60s and 70s to kill people we didn't really have an problem with. Think what we'd do to someone we were actually mad at.
Sorry zero, the cat was let out of the bag about 240 years ago when the 2nd Amendment was made part of the Constitution. You can just decide the size of the conflagration - but the eventual outcome was decided long ago. Look up a quote about watering the tree of liberty.
heads up
Coupled with the agreement of Homeland Security to purchase 450 MILLION hollow point bullets...
How many “terrorists” do they expect to need so much ammo?
Um, yeah, B||!B is true pretty close to 100% of the time...
Perhaps that is why they are using the Trayvon to strike a spark and fan the flames...............
People here keep thinking he’s gonna just haul off and declare martial law out of the blue.
He won’t.
He’s too savvy for that. (Or at least his handlers are.)
It will be some crisis, and some angle where it is welcomed by most, and those who object will tie themselves in knots trying to explain how it is martial law when it’s some one-off form. Nobody will want to make the first move against it.
The Dept of “Homeland Security” just made a huge purchase of ammunition. Coincidence? I think not!
I share your concern, but I have to disagree....respectfully.
If he wins, Obozo will break the great experiment.
If he loses and his followers riot, it shows their true colors and depending on the actions of Uncle Sugar, the great experiment breaks.
What happens immediately after someone falls and breaks their arm......there comes a period of healing.
The faster this breaks, the quicker we patriots can step forward and heal our nation.
This sort of thing, although has the potential of being very ugly, could be the segway back to our founding principals.
Our government has been broken for decades. It is only now we are realizing just how dysfunctional, corrupt and controlling it has become.
I pray for the day when patriots all over this nation stand up and begin the healing journey back to the founding principals that has made this nation the greatest on the planet.
For God's glory this nation be restored!
Even at a federalies:citizen kill ratio of 10:1, the federalies run out of troops by week 2 and the surviving citizens kill all the politicians, their families, their lawyers, their enablers and supporters, and their families.
Who is “Festus” Alex?
http://www.televisiontunes.com/Gunsmoke_-_Marshall_Dillon.html
This has been gamed out at the war colleges for many decades and this is how it has turned out every time. Everyone loses.
Unfortunately, it appears that the love of liberty has been largely bred out of the American population over the last 40 years.
Digging an escape tunnel out of your basement? Probably over the top. Reorganizing your pantry for more food storage? Always a good idea, even for natural disasters. Heading to the range for some refresher training? Fun and potentially useful too! That kind of thing.
I agree with that. For a long time my tagline here was: “Nothing will change until after the war” and I still believe that. Elections don’t matter when both parties are fundamentally working against the Founding vision of the country. We will drift in a Leftward direction either slowly or quickly until patriots rise up and force a change.
First you start with race riots in the cities. Food and fuel supplies are disrupted.
Police are overwhelmed so the gov. calls in the National guard. Everyone cheers the govs, action.
Once the National Guard is on the streets by order of the gov., there will be terrorist attacks linked to foreign terrorist. This makes it an act of war. Everyone demands the fed govt. take action.
Federal govt. then takes control of the national guard troops. Everybody cheers, the govt. is taking control of the situation.
Your liberties will be returned, just like they were in Cuba, once order is restored.
First you start with race riots in the cities. Food and fuel supplies are disrupted.
Police are overwhelmed so the gov. calls in the National guard. Everyone cheers the govs, action.
Once the National Guard is on the streets by order of the gov., there will be terrorist attacks linked to foreign terrorist. This makes it an act of war. Everyone demands the fed govt. take action.
Federal govt. then takes control of the national guard troops. Everybody cheers, the govt. is taking control of the situation.
Your liberties will be returned, just like they were in Cuba, once order is restored.
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