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.”
I can see that Gunsmoke had a far greater influence on many of us than our English teachers did...
I'm not advocating anything here. The reason I post this quote is for all to contemplate the word MUST in this quote.
Jefferson did not say, “may be, ought to be, might be, should be”, he said MUST be.
Our founding fathers formed this nation under divine inspiration for the Almighty himself. They knew the hearts of men were, are and will always be corrupt. The founding fathers wrote certain things with the express intent to ferret out evil intentions within our governing body and subscribed methods in which to deal with it.
This is just one quote, there are many that deal with oppression, corruption and tyranny.
We should all take stock in these writings, it may just please the Lord to restore this nation to prosperity once again.
Thank you for your patriotism.
Active Duty + Reserves < 1% of US population
Approx .7% (including support personnel).
Hard to envision the US military used to subdue a country and a population the size of ours (even if they were so inclined, which a majority would not be).
Average ratio of sworn police / citizen 2:1000
I can envision the rabble taking to the streets and trying to burn down the cities (since it’s happened before) but I don’t see how that benefits Obama.
I would like to think that there would be defectors in great numbers among the federalies, but this could come down to race, wherein federalies of a certain race would not defect.
First of all, WHY would the feds game this out, for what purpose? The mere fact that it has speaks to the nature of the people in charge.
Second, no, not everyone loses. Yes, the free forces lose a lot - but the statists cease to exist. Did the Russians lose on the Eastern Front in WW2, or did the Nazis? Yes, it was bloody, but the Russians clearly won. That is similar to the gamed result you mentioned.
By the way, I'd love to see such a study, or at least a link to it. I'd also like to know how recent it was - because we proles have been buying about 10 million guns a year for the past several years, and have severely strained the supply of ammo in process. I'll bet that such studies would need to be revised to reflect these facts.
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