Posted on 05/28/2015 3:58:19 PM PDT by markomalley
The Obama Environmental Protection Agency rewrote the Clean Water Act from 88 pages to 2,200 pages.
The new regulations will put the EPA in control of muddy farm puddles and prairie potholes.
(video at link)
The Wall Street Journal reported, via Instapundit:
The Clean Water Act limits the federal government to regulating the “navigable waters of the United States” like the Colorado River or Lake Michigan. In 1986 the EPA expanded that definition to seize jurisdiction over tributaries and adjacent wetlands. Now it is extending federal control over just about any creek, pond, prairie pothole or muddy farm field that EPA says has a “significant nexus” to a navigable waterway.
The agency defines waters as “significant” if they are “located in whole or in part within 100 feet of the ordinary high water mark,” or, alternatively, within the 100-year floodplain and 1,500 feet of the high water mark of waters already under the government’s jurisdiction. That’s already a lot of water, but there’s more.
The EPA acknowledges that the “science available today does not establish that waters beyond those defined as ‘adjacent’” to these “significant” waters should be regulated. But forget science. The agency says its “experience and expertise” show there are “many” other waters that could have a significant downstream effect. Thus the EPA establishes an additional standard for significance that covers just about anything that’s wet.
When I was a kid it was H2O. Now it’s H2200.
I imagine Agenda 21 factors in this somehow
So now they want to regulate my wash cloth!
Communist Manifesto
By Karl Heinrich Marx (1848)
1. Abolition of private property in land and application of all rents of land to public purpose.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state.
etc...
Does any of this ring a bell?
We are now at the threshold of sovereign state totalitarianism, and they (those who are in control of our government), are so close they can smell it.
If we cannot own or control our land, we are simply sheep or cattle, to be controlled by those who do!
In adoption of the scenario we are now confronted with by the EPA, individual ownership and hence freedom is lost!
Just think of all the things they can shut down with this. A puddle near a fracking rig, pipelines, coal mines, whatever they want.
There were also the sweetheart suits from global corporations and state and local governments in a scheme with the EPA to outlaw many wood stoves and water heaters. The result is that prices on those appliances will skyrocket, while fewer companies are granted monopolies.
There was also the coal mining shut down by the push from natural gas interest constituents.
What it really means is that if and when some big rich guy wants the property of some little insignificant unimportant guy he can use his money and influence to take the little guy’s property away from him, via the US govt. Forget the big fancy elegant conspiracy theories, it is just plain old fashioned corruption dressed up fancy. Same old, same old.
One of the things that is afflicting this country is an epidemic of Bureaucratic Personality Disorder.
Nixon will always be known for the Watergate scandal, but his real folly was the creation of extrajudicial ‘agencies’ with open-ended ‘mandates’ in perpetuity. He effectively created a new branch of government beyond the usual checks and balances provided by the Constitution.
I used to think that some kind of Manchurian Candidate takeover, or massive Seven Days in May militarization would be how tyranny would be established in a nation. The more I read about the authority that government agencies are presuming, and the things they do under cover of regulations or simply based on their own “experience and expertise,” the more I come to think that a takeover will follow a different path. Thousands of government employees, like those of Airstrip One, in various ministries - EPA,ATF, OSHA, NEA, submissive police and sheriff departments (but not proudly independent ones), etc., will simply be following the rules. They will be told one day they have a new duty and the authority to carry it out. Another day, another duty will be added. All the agencies, with all their duties, will, duty by duty, day by day, encroach against former freedoms and precedents. They will eventually have the authority to regulate your home temperature (we tried that here for a while; didn’t work well; we quit their little “money-saving” junk program), the sorting of your garbage into recyclables, internet site access, size of soft drinks, whether or not you can get sugar or bacon or a raw egg in a restaurant, automobile tire replacement and sizes, and a hundred other things. We will have become conquered by a collective tyranny of thousands of microtyrannies.
There is discussion in my county about installing meters on those of us with water wells. They intend to charge and regulate use of our own water wells.
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