PING!
Those of us who don’t listen to talk radio (the tinfoil hats interfere with the signal) have known about this since HillaryCare days. While the mechanics of her “task force” were rejected by congress (mostly because she was spending money without them), the actual protocols were accepted by several Federal Departments, and are mostly being slipped into the law even now. The SPP is only the public face of an incremental adoption of HillaryCare.
Gawd amighty! This reads like a sequel to Clancy’s “Rainbow Six!”
Hyperbole in the extreme. Garbage.
Schlafly has been right on some issues (e.g., ERA, family-related issues, abortion) in the past, but I've also noticed that she specializes in taking relatively benign things outside her area of knowledge and making absurd "end of the world" claims.
The plan is simply to have cooperative committees to handle a crisis that might strike and to try to coordinate a response. For example, if a plague broke out in Europe, the officials of the three countries could coordinate a technique to minimize the risk of the plague getting to North America.
None of the countries gives up their independence.
For Schlafly to say that "a foreigner will be the decision maker for Americans in two out of every three years" is absurd. Schlafly apparently does not understand the difference between the chair and the full committee.
The chair doesn't set policy. The chair of the Committee would not be the decision-maker. The chair simply calls the meeting ("meet in my country tomorrow at 1 pm") and does similar things.
If the full committee could override Congress (and they can't), even that would be a lot different than "a foreigner will be THE decision maker for Americans" [emphasis added] as Schlafly wrongly claims. The committee, i.e., the decision-makers of the countries, meet and try to adopt a crisis response such that one country's response doesn't increase problems for other countries.
Few people realize that in just about any country, the health department can overnight become the most authoritarian government agency there is. Essentially doctors directing men with guns, all the way up to the use of nuclear weapons to stop a major biological disaster.
The health department can disallow all constitutional rights, and there is no civil appeal. And this is not a new regime, but has existed for 100+ years. Before World War II and the invention of antibiotics, or even the widespread use of sulfa drugs, invented in 1932, quarantines were common and everyone learned to respect posted quarantine signs.
And yet, at the same time, politicians who would seek to increase their power during a medical crisis are in for a rude awakening. They are no longer in charge of things, nor are bureaucrats. It is a dictatorship of doctors.
And I think I can pretty well say that if medical doctors are in charge, it will be pretty hard to tell if they are American, Canadian or Mexican, because their concerns will be almost identical, and the execution will almost certainly be similar, and brutally objective.
Ironically, being under a technocratic regime of medical doctors is probably not too bad, specifically because they don’t *want* to be in charge, they *have* to be. And they want to return power to the civil authorities as soon as possible. This is not a bad quality to have in leaders.
And while initially, a large percentage of the population will stupidly and stubbornly resist their direction, they either become more cooperative, or they have a much better chance of becoming casualties.
But most epidemics like avian flu are like wildfires. Which means that they will pass through an area quickly. Strangely, though, in two waves. And between waves, and once it has done its worst, locally at least, things will quickly return to some degree of normalcy. The biggest after effect being that people remain standoffish and concerned with hygiene for some time. But otherwise, life will return to a great extent, to normal.
ping...
Well, why don’t we just build a wall and keep those sick birds out? How dare they think they can mess with the U.S. of A.? /s/
As far as I’m concerned, my fellow citizens’ constitutional right to move freely about the country ends when they’re carrying some bug that can kill my family.
We’re talking about contingency plans for a pandemic here, folks, and I, for one, am pleased to know that someone is thinking ahead. If perilous times require drastic measures to ensure public safety, I’m all for it.
Read the preamble if you don’t think that’s a legitimate government function.
Go to the library and read microfilm of newspapers in 1918 and think what life would be like if it happens again in this day of mass transit and multiplied population.
NAU PING
I have wondered about this.
Ping for later.
This comes from Schafly? Not the type to wear the tin foil propeller beanie.
This is pretty amazing.
Tinfoil is contagious. Fortunately I live within the protective shield of HAARP.
This is the logical end-game of the welfare state...
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants;it is the creed of slaves”.
William Pitt, 1783
Yes, they probably will.