Deliberately Destroying America

By Alan Caruba | June 17, 2012 | Canada Free Press

It has taken three and a half years into Barack Obama’s presidency for most Americans to realize that he has been deliberately destroying America by driving up the nation’s debt and deficit, reducing privately held wealth, forcing millions onto the public dole, undermining its moral structure, and weakening the nation’s reputation internationally.

His latest lie is that “the private sector is doing just fine”, but the numbers tell the whole story and one can find them on an excellent blog, Economic Collapse, that offers seventy examples:

Obama Makes Good on His Promise to Destroy America’s Coal Industry [Video]

Glenn Beck: Why are leftists complaining about Obama? [Video]

By Staff Report | June 1, 2012 | GlennBeck.com

[…]

“If you are a Marxist, if you are a revolutionary, if you’re a communist, really, if you’re an anarchist, if you’re an extreme leftist, if you’re somebody who doesn’t like the system as it is on the left, what more could this President do for you,” he asked.

[…]

Just a quick look at President Obama’s first three years reveals he has:

Why Congress Must Confront the Administrative State

By Robert Moffit, Ph.D. | April 2, 2012 | Heritage Foundation

Abstract: The triumph of the administrative state has been made possible by the emasculation of the legislative power. Washington’s problem is not merely federal spending and debt; it is the arrogance of centralized power. The time is therefore ripe for a major national discussion not only about the size of government, but also about the processes of government. Americans have a choice: to be governed by the rule of law, as hammered out in open legislative debate carried on by elected representatives who are directly accountable to us, or the rule of administrators who are most certainly not accountable to us. The rule of regulators is arbitrary and unaccountable government—exactly what the Founders wished to prevent in crafting the Federal Constitution.

Steve Kroft of CBS recently interviewed President Barack Obama. In response to a question on his job performance, the President ranked himself fourth among America’s chief executives (behind Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln) in the production of policy initiatives.[1]

Critics quickly ridiculed his self-assessment as narcissistic nonsense. They’re wrong.

President Obama is transforming American government. Few Presidents have enjoyed more success in enacting such a large policy agenda in such a short period of time.

• Within weeks of his inauguration, the President signed into law a major expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and Medicaid.
• He quickly followed this up with the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “stimulus” bill), adding $831 billion to our deficits.
• In 2010, Congress passed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd–Frank bill), providing for massive and far-reaching financial regulation.
• And on March 23, 2010, he signed into law the 2,800-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). It is the largest single piece of social legislation in American history, expanding federal control over one-sixth of the American economy and the personal lives of more than 300 million citizens.

Combine this massive legislative production with his zealous regulatory program. While Washington’s bureaucratic regime has been growing since the early 1900s, under President Obama its growth has exploded. In 2009 and 2010 alone, federal agencies issued 7,076 final rules.[2]

While the President insists that his regulatory output is less than that of President George W. Bush, a closer look reveals that his “major” regulations—those having an annual impact of at least $100 million each—were more numerous. Since President Obama took office in 2009, federal agencies have issued 75 major regulations with an annual additional cost to the economy of $38 billion.[3] Taken altogether, the Small Business Administration last year estimated that the total cost of America’s regulatory burden reached $1.75 trillion—more than twice what Americans pay in individual income taxes.[4]

The U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Treasury, and Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are at the center of this regulatory storm. They alone account for 43 percent of all rules in the federal pipeline.[5] Of the 43 major rules issued in 2010, 10 were based on EPA mandates.[6] With the President’s health and environmental initiatives alone, the Obama White House has dwarfed the regulatory agenda of its predecessors.

The national health law expands the administrative power of the HHS Secretary beyond anything previously attempted. The Secretary is required to act—indicated by the statutory language “shall”—1,563 times in the final language of the legislation, and 40 specific provisions of the law mandate or permit the issuance of regulations.[7] Senate Republican Policy Committee staff estimate that the new law creates 159 new agencies or entities, but the Congressional Research Service says that the exact number is “unknowable” inasmuch as certain powerful federal offices are created administratively without direct congressional authorization.

While the law’s schedule of implementation stretches out over eight years, the most far-reaching provisions—the mandates on individuals, employers, and states—take effect in 2014. Nonetheless, in less than two years, the national health law has already generated over 11,000 pages of rules, regulations, and guidelines and related paperwork in the Federal Register.

Just consider the law’s 15-member Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). The powerful board will make its initial recommendations for detailed and specific Medicare payment cuts in January 2015, and the Secretary is empowered to put them into effect unless Congress enacts an alternative set of payment cuts to meet statutory Medicare spending targets.[8] The board’s automatic recommendations are subject to neither administrative nor judicial review, and the law further requires a three-fifths Senate majority to block IPAB’s prescriptions.

Peter Orszag, President Obama’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has observed that the extraordinary power of this new board is “the largest yielding of sovereignty from the Congress since the creation of the Federal Reserve.”[9]

In 2010 alone, Congress enacted 217 bills that became law, but that same year, federal agencies issued 3,573 final rules covering a wide variety of economic activities.[10] Today, more than at any other time in our history, we are less and less governed by the rule of law, hammered out in legislative deliberations as the Founders intended, and more and more governed by the rule of regulation. We are subject to edicts promulgated by administrators—persons we do not know and will never know, persons protected by civil service law and tenure who are not accountable to us and will never be accountable to us. Nonetheless, the administrators’ detailed decisions have the force of law.

Regulation, as law, can and does directly affect whether or not we can start or run our businesses, determine how many persons we can or cannot afford to hire, how we may or may not use our land or dispose of our property. Not only do administrators publish thousands of pages of regulations, but our fellow citizens can sometimes also go to jail for violating them.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE

Ladies and gentlemen, we are witnessing the triumph of the administrative state, but that conquest is only possible because of the emasculation of the legislative power. The Founders made Congress the lawgiver, as clarified in Article I, Section 1 of the Federal Constitution. So much of their focus, reflected in The Federalist and other writings, was on how to check and balance the predominant legislative power, to channel and contain personal ambition and factional interest, to restrain potentially tyrannical majorities and safeguard the rights of beleaguered minorities, to secure personal liberty and protect the rights of property.

Though federal power has grown steadily since President Washington took the oath of office, today the relationship between the individual and the government is changing in a qualitative way. Americans are increasingly the subjects of an administrative regime rather than the free citizens of a democratic republic with a limited government.

Picking Winners and Losers. This steady transfer of legislative power to administrators has another inescapable consequence: arbitrary rule. The champions of administrative power invariably couch their arguments in appeals to expertise. The more complex the economic sector to be planned or regulated, the more that strict uniformity in the application of the rules becomes problematic.

In broad congressional grants of power, lawmakers give administrators wide latitude in the development and enforcement of the rules, so those who make the rules can also unmake them by granting waivers and exemptions. In the case of the health care law, HHS has already granted over 1,722 temporary waivers to certain businesses, unions, and gourmet restaurants in San Francisco that don’t have to comply with national coverage rules that apply to other companies throughout the country.

Treating similarly situated Americans differently, either as individual citizens or as citizens of a particular state, amounts to arbitrary rule; and arbitrary rule is inherently unjust.

THE NEED FOR A HIGHER LEVEL OF PUBLIC DEBATE

Today’s debate over the powerful bureaucracy is usually framed in terms of economic impact: How will federal rules affect economic growth and job creation, the price of gasoline or electricity, the cost of health insurance or the quality of medical care? While this level of debate is necessary, it is insufficient. Yes, we cannot neglect the trees, but it is really the health of the forest that matters.

The big question is this: How does this bureaucratic ascendancy affect ordinary Americans? My answer: Our very civic life is at stake, not just our prosperity.

The current trend is an affront to our self-government. The tacit assumption: Millions of us are not smart enough to make our own decisions for ourselves. Rather, we need to be closely supervised by officials. They will prescribe for us, for example, what kind of light bulbs and washing machines we should use. The provision of nutritional or caloric information on restaurant menus, or food items dispensed through vending machines, is now a federal mandate under Section 4205 of the Affordable Care Act.

Our supervision, though distant and impersonal, becomes more precise and detailed. We are to become increasingly dependent on government for our well-being. Today, almost half of Americans (48.5 percent) live in households that are getting some form of government assistance, largely funded from federal revenues, but nearly half (49.5 percent) of our citizens pay no federal income taxes. But today’s Progressives are still dissatisfied. In their view, the many are to be even more dependent on the few, and the few (the hated “rich,” however they are defined) should be paying even more in taxes than they do today.

Over time, these dynamics will change the character of our people, with corrosive consequences for our political culture and our economic prosperity. America will have a progressively larger class of dependent citizens, and that spirit of freedom and independence for which the Founders risked their lives and fortunes will be broken.

It does not have to be this way. Our task is to paint the big picture, the overarching framework of American civic life. The great medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, the “First Whig,” defines law as an edict of reason, promulgated by the sovereign for the common good of the community.[11] The law instructs citizens in their rights and duties, and thus has a teaching function. That being the case, as lawmakers, you must become teachers of the Constitution, carriers of our rich political culture of republican government.

What must we do to preserve and protect the constitutional traditions of limited government, individual liberty, the separation of powers, and the unique advantages of federalism? James Madison, “the Father of The Constitution,” was not a lawyer, but he was a Congressman. And in that role, he was also a teacher: He routinely employed his formidable talents in the education of his colleagues and fellow citizens on the first principles of government.

In my reading of the public mood, you also have an eager audience. More and more Americans hunger for the wisdom of the Founders, are reading their biographies, and seek to understand their tightly reasoned arguments for the adoption of our Constitution. They are also becoming aware that there is something deeply wrong with the way in which they are being governed and that this process deviates from the intentions of the Founders. They correctly sense that modern government is ever more distant and disconnected from them. They are right.

HOW WE GOT HERE

President Obama, like President Woodrow Wilson, is a real “Progressive,” but what does that mean? In his recent speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, he recalled President Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism.”[12] A genuine Progressive, TR favored the imposition of inheritance taxes and the income tax and became the standard bearer of the Progressive Party in 1912.

Reflecting that tradition, President Obama and his ideological allies are also vigorous champions of aggressive executive power.[13] Commenting on President Obama’s governance, New York Times columnist David Brooks predicts, “When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era…. It’s a progressive era based on faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.”[14]

Welcome to the “100 Years War” of American politics. Progressivism, after all, was America’s dominant political movement from 1890 to 1920. While the Progressives are identified with social reform and the reining in of corporate interests and trusts, they focused intensely on structural reform of government, particularly civil service reform and the democratization of our politics.

No modern American political movement has been more successful. Within a relatively short span of time, progressives backed the adoption of four transformative amendments to the Constitution. They fostered the income tax (Sixteenth Amendment) and secured direct election of U.S. Senators (Seventeenth Amendment); many backed Prohibition (Eighteenth Amendment); and they allied with the suffragettes (Nineteenth Amendment). In the several states, they broke the power of the political bosses and enacted initiative and referenda and the recall of public officials.

Long before the New Deal of the 1930s, Progressives concentrated power in Washington. With the backing of the Progressives, Congress created the Federal Reserve System (1913) and the Federal Trade Commission (1914). Federal employment soared.[15] During the Great War, Congress (in the Overman Act of 1918) gave President Wilson enormous discretionary power to consolidate and rearrange executive offices and agencies. Meanwhile, dissent, especially criticism of America’s entry into the war, was suppressed.

“Permissiveness,” the hallmark of the Sixties, was never welcome among Progressives, old or new. Under the rule of the new Progressives, if you want to just “do your own thing,” you won’t. You will do what you are told. If you think you can just “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” think again. You will be forced, for example, to buy government-approved health benefits—including federally certified abortifacients—or pay a fine. You will behave. You will conform. You will comply. You will not march to a different drummer.

The old Progressives were earnest and well-intentioned—old-fashioned “do gooders.” They were also stern and sober social reformers. During the Progressive Era, Congress suppressed the lottery business and interstate prostitution. They enforced prohibition on the sale and manufacture of alcohol,[16] and they imposed taxes on narcotics. Personal vice had become a public enemy. Professor Charles Beard, a leading Progressive historian, wrote in 1930: “Perhaps no country in the world, except Russia, places so many restraints on what is called ‘personal liberty,’ the right to do as one pleases in personal conduct and on the use of property.”[17]

Because Progressivism is an old and recurrent stream in our public life, its influence on public policy is so immense that it is a given: part of our national landscape. Progressive intellectuals generally had—and still have—a profound faith in social science, a conviction that scientific expertise was the key to social progress, especially in a social and economic order that was increasingly complex. Administration was to be the change agent. Again, Beard: “Thus, in our day, a new social science is being staked out and developed—the science of administration in a ‘great society.’ If the ‘great society’ is to endure, then it must make itself master of administration.”[18]

For Progressives, true liberty was not merely freedom from, or “negative” liberty, meaning freedom from arbitrary rule or tyrannical coercion, as embodied in the venerable natural rights tradition of the American Revolution. True liberty was the freedom to be, to act, to grow personally and to fulfill one’s potential.

This was “positive” liberty. It was to be achieved by the removal of economic and customary restraints, creating fairness in social and economic relations, liberating all persons, regardless of class or condition, from the unwelcome vicissitudes of the market and providing child care, education, universal health care, and pensions: in short, security. Justification for government action would be grounded, as Beard argued, not in power, but in service. This new liberty would be secured through broad-scale central planning and social and economic regulation.

Positive liberty, therefore, was to be achieved through the positive state. Think personal “growth” in a straitjacket.

Such ideological assumptions justified a federal role in health care and a national system of social insurance (based on the German model) for pensions in the Progressive Party platform of 1912. They explain the passion for centralization of power, particularly in the executive branch of national government, where scientific expertise would be able to work its will. “Progressivism,” wrote Professor Ralph Gabriel of Yale University, “was an aspect of the rising cult of science.”[19]

But Progressivism carries within it the seeds of contradiction. While Progressives long championed the democratization of our institutions, sunlight in government, and the elimination of the baneful influence of corporate interests, they clung stubbornly to a faith that public problems could be effectively solved through bureaucratic decision-making: little bands of experts appointed to an expanding number of government boards, commissions, or panels. That is at the heart of the Progressive conception of modern government.[20]

Populist rhetoric notwithstanding, the reality of Progressive rule is profoundly undemocratic, precisely because it takes crucial decision-making that directly affects the lives of millions of citizens “out of politics.” Thus, you have the administrative state: the rule of administrators.

Read the full article here.

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The New Reactionaries

By Victor Davis Hanson | April 29, 2012 | PJ Media

Our New Regressivism

About fifteen years ago, many liberals began to self-identify as progressives—partly because of the implosion of the Great Society and the Reagan reaction that had tarnished the liberal brand and left it as something akin to “permissive” or “naïve,” partly because “progressive” was supposedly an ideological rather than a political identification, and had included some early twentieth-century Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.

But twenty-first century progressivism is not aimed at political reform. There is no new effort at racial unity. There is not much realization that we are in a globalized, rapidly changing, high-tech economy or that race and gender are not as they were fifty years ago. Instead, progressivism has become a reactionary return to the 1960s—or even well before. The new regressivism seeks to resurrect the machine ethos of Mayor Daley, the glory green days of the Whole Earth Catalog, the union era of George Meany, Jimmy Hoffa, and Walter Reuther, the racial polarization of the old Black Panther Party and the old Al Sharpton, and a Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, or Peter Jennings reading to us each evening three slightly different versions of the Truth.

The New Old Chicago

Barack Obama is trying to turn back the way of politics to the era of the pre-reform Chicago machine. He was the first presidential candidate to renounce campaign-financing funds since the law was enacted. He opposes any effort to clamp down on voting fraud. Even his compliant media worries that the president’s current jetting from one campaign stop to another in the key swing states is a poorly disguised way to politick on the federal government’s dime. Bundlers are, as was the ancient custom, given plum honorific posts abroad. Obama has held twice as many fundraisers as the much reviled George Bush had at a similar point in his administration. Obama supporters now target large Romney givers and post their names with negative bios on websites, as if we are back to Nixon’s enemies of the people. Websites sprout up that go after administration critics in Agnew style, but without the latter’s self-caricature. The 2008 criticism about ending the revolving door, lobbyists, and pay-for-play renting out of the Lincoln bedroom was, well…just examine the career of a Peter Orszag. An embarrassed media keeps silent about the new reactionary ethics, apparently on the premise that not to would endanger four more years of the “progressive” agenda. On matters of presidential style, we are likewise retro, as Obama sets records for playing golf, and in Marie Antoinette style the First Family bounces between Vail, Aspen, Martha’s Vineyard, Vegas, and Costa del Sol, often in separate jets, as if we, the people, receive vicarious joy from catching glimpses of the Obama versions of Camelot. We have Kennedy wannabes without their own Kennedy money.

Earth Day Forever

On matters of energy, Obama has regressed to the Earth Day mindset of the 1970s, when we were reaching “peak” oil, and untried wind and solar were soon to be the new-age remedy for soon-to-be-exhausted fossil fuels. Add up the anti-empirical quotes from Obama himself, Energy Secretary Chu, and Interior Secretary Salazar (inflate your tires, “tune up” your car, look to U.S. algae reserves, let energy prices “skyrocket,” hope gas rises to European levels, don’t open federal lands even if gas reaches $10 a gallon, etc.) and, in reactionary fashion, we are time-machined back to the campus quad of the 1970s. In this  la la world of Van Jones, evil oil companies supposedly connived to stifle green energy and hook us on fossil fuels, inferior energies that have nothing to recommend them. It is as if the revolutions in horizontal drilling, fracking, and discoveries of vast new reserves never occurred, as if Exxon and Chevron dodge taxes in a manner that Google and Amazon never would, as if efficient smaller gas engines, clean gas blends, and pollution devices have not made the American car both clean-burning and economical beyond our imagination forty years ago. The Obamians, frozen in amber, really believe oil is about to run out, “tuned up” internal combustion engines powering underinflated tires pollute as they did in the 1920s, and Teapot Dome U.S. oil companies need to be “crucified”—as regional EPA director and Obama appointee Al Armendariz, in fact, boasted. So we borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize money-losing solar and wind plants, while putting federal lands rich in oil and gas off-limits to companies eager to pay royalties, hire thousands, and supply the U.S. with its own energy—and all for a regressive ideology. Few see that Solyndra really is the new Teapot Dome.

Read the full article here.

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EPA’s Plans for Implementing UN’s Agenda 21

By  Larry Greenley | May 3, 2012 | The New American

One of the most successful grassroots campaigns during the past year has been the Stop Agenda 21 movement both at the local level and state level. However, we haven’t heard as much about Agenda 21 implementation at the national level.

Of course, there were President Bill Clinton’s establishment of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development by executive order in 1993 and President Obama’s “Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance” executive order in 2009. And, many federal agencies have been incorporating sustainability into various aspects of their organizations. Still, virtually all Stop Agenda 21 grassroots activity has been focused on the local and state levels.

The establishment of Clinton’s President’s Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD) started a pattern of denial by federal government agencies regarding any connection with the United Nations Agenda 21. Even though the PCSD was clearly established in 1993 in support of the UN’s Agenda 21 and its Sustainable Development proposals from the UN’s ’92 Earth Summit in Rio, the PCSD’s statements and documents never referred to the UN and Agenda 21.

We have evidence that federal officials were taking pains to make the PCSD appear to be completely separate from the UN’s Agenda 21 because J. Gary Lawrence, an advisor to the PCSD, said the following in 1998:

Participating in a UN advocated planning process would very likely bring out many of the conspiracy-fixated groups and individuals in our society…. This segment of our society who fear ‘one-world government’ and a UN invasion of the United States through which our individual freedom would be stripped away would actively work to defeat any elected official who joined ‘the conspiracy’ by undertaking LA21 [Local Agenda 21]. So, we call our processes something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.

This helps explain why virtually all federal activities in pursuit of sustainability rarely make any reference to the UN or the UN’s Agenda 21, even though these federal activities are very much in sync with the UN’s Agenda 21.

Nonetheless, there have been very significant developments regarding sustainability at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) beginning with its 40th anniversary in late 2010. On November 30, 2010, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson stated: “Today I am formally requesting President Cicerone and the National Academies convene a committee of experts to provide to the U.S. EPA an operational framework for sustainability that applies across all of the agency’s programs, policies, and actions.”

Jackson added: “Today we have a new opportunity in front of us. We have an opportunity to focus on how environmentally protective and sustainable we can be. You see, it’s the difference between treating disease and pursuing wellness.”

The National Academies of Science (NAS) responded with a detailed study, Sustainability and the U.S. EPA (aka the “Green Book”), which cost the EPA $700,000, and which was published in August 2011. The NAS also produced a five-minute video (see video also below) about this project.

Here are some excerpts from the 286-page “Green Book”:

Read the full article here.

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Government’s Trump Card: The Use of Force

By Robert Ringer | May 3, 2012 | WND

Exclusive: Robert Ringer says going the way of Europe is least of our worries

The two most poisonous words in the English language are rights and entitlements. They mean essentially the same thing, and both are subjectively created in the minds of collectivist dreamers.

Though the notion of rights/entitlements has been around since the founding, and has been heating up at an accelerating pace since FDR first introduced Americans to the welfare state, it is Barack Obama whom historians will credit with bringing the issue into the debate arena.

His nasty, Alinsky double-down style has caused millions of heretofore sleepwalking citizens to wonder if his fundamental change of America is transforming it into the kind of country they really want for their children and grandchildren.

Right now, Republicans are obsessing about “reforming” entitlements, though few of them dare talk about taking away people’s artificially created rights (a right to an education, a right to a good job at a “decent” wage, a right to “affordable” housing, a right to free health care … a right to just about anything one can imagine).

Even though rights and entitlements are really one and the same, the word rights has a much stronger moral connotation. A right sounds very official, as though it were handed down from on high, while an entitlement has a twinge of victimization to it.

But whether one refers to involuntary gifts from his neighbor as rights or entitlements, the bottom line is that they are made possible only through the government’s never-fail trump card: the use of force. And it’s not a force for good, but evil.

Mao had it right: Political power does, indeed, grow from the barrel of a gun. Patriotic Americans like to delude themselves, but the reality is that government can do anything it wants to you, your children, or your property through the threat force – and the use of force, if necessary.

Even so, most people – including some of the most sophisticated media types – tend to ignore what government’s essentially unrestricted use of force means in real terms. Their normalcy bias tells them that we have checks and balances via our three branches of government, so a Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Castro, or Chavez could never happen in today’s America. Alas, they are hopelessly naïve.

Whether it’s Waco, Ruby Ridge, taxes, silencing free speech, or regulating activities individuals want to engage in, government’s use of force is always the trump card. This was made evident yet again when a video of another Obama far-left appointee, Alfredo Armendariz, went viral last week.

Read the full article here.

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Obama Ban on Youth Farm Chores Part of Larger Power Grab [Updated]

By Kurt Nimmo | April 25, 2012 | Infowars.com

Dredging up Dickensian horrors of child labor, the Obama administration has ordered the Labor Department to apply child labor laws to family farms. The new rules would make it illegal for children to perform a large number of labor tasks that have been performed by farm families for centuries. Traditionally, adults and children alike helped with planting and harvesting in the spring and fall, but the federal government is now determined not only to make this a historical footnote, but a criminal offense.

Under the rules, children under 18 would be prevented by the federal government from working “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials” and prohibited “places of employment would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”

In addition to making it far more difficult for families to work their farms, the new rules will revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA and replace them with a 90-hour federal government training course, the Daily Caller reports.

In other words, the federal government will forcibly insert itself in the business of teaching animal husbandry and crop management, disciplines traditionally passed on by families and local communities.

Government apparatchiks will now oversee the business of local farming the same way Stalin did when he collectivized farms and “socialized” production at gunpoint in the Soviet Union. Resistance by farmers and peasants to Stalin’s efforts resulted in the government cutting off food rations, which resulted in widespread famine (the “terror-famine in Ukraine” killed around 12 million people) and millions were sent to forced labor camps.

The Labor Department’s effort to further erode the family farm falls on the heels of an unconstitutional executive order Obama issued last year establishing so-called rural councils.

“According to this new executive order, the Obama administration plans to stick its itchy little fingers into just about every aspect of rural life,” the Economic Collapse Blog noted at the time. “One of the stated goals of the White House Rural Council is to do the following….”

Coordinate and increase the effectiveness of Federal engagement with rural stakeholders, including agricultural organizations, small businesses, education and training institutions, health-care providers, telecommunications services providers, research and land grant institutions, law enforcement, State, local, and tribal governments, and nongovernmental organizations regarding the needs of rural America.

Obama’s plan to make life miserable for family farmers coincides with an effort by the United Nations under Agenda 21. Section one of the executive order mentions “sustainable rural communities,” language right out of Agenda 21. (For more on the draconian aspects of Agenda 21 and the plan to roll back modern civilization under the aegis of “sustainability,” see Rosa Koire’s Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21.)

The federal government has recently moved to clamp down on family farms. For instance, last year the Department of Transportation proposed new burdensome rules for farmers. Incidentally, DOT Secretary Ray LaHood holds a seat on the newly created White House Rural Council.

“In Late May, the DOT proposed a rule change for farm equipment, and if it this allowed to take effect, it will place significant regulatory pressure on small farms and family farms all across America – costing them thousands of dollars and possibly forcing many of them out of business,” writes Mike Opelka. “The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), wants new standards that would require all farmers and everyone on the farm to obtain a CDL (Commercial Drivers License) in order to operate any farming equipment. The agency is going to accomplish this by reclassifying all farm vehicles and implements as Commercial Motor Vehicles (CMVs).”

Late last year, House Republicans moved to prevent the EPA from further burdening farmers with a rule that would ban “farm dust.” Outrage in response to the proposed regulation came fast and furious and EPA boss Lisa Jackson was forced to back down as Democrats complained that the government was not targeting small family farms with the proposed regulation.

A concerted effort by the federal government to attack small family farms cannot be denied. Infowars.com has covered dozens of efforts, including the attack on Rawesome Foods in California, numerous efforts by the feds to attack raw milk and dairy farmers (including attacks by the FDA on Amish farmers), and a recent effort by the Department of Natural Resources in Michigan to destroy open-range pig farms.

In addition to attempting to micromanage – and run out of business – family farms through federal labor regulations, the government is trying to insert itself in the relationship between parents and their children.

The ongoing attacks on family farming are not merely misguided efforts by control freak bureaucrats. They are part of a larger “comprehensive plan of action” to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations to institute “sustainable development,” a philosophy designed to bring humanity under tight control of the global elite.

As George H. W. Bush said on September 11, 1990, the plan is “based entirely on social control mechanisms.” For the elite, controlling food – especially healthy and natural food produced by family farms – is a primary objective in their plan for global conquest.

Update:

Govt backs off new limits on child labor on farms

By SAM HANANEL

WASHINGTON (AP) — Under heavy pressure from farm groups, the Obama administration said Thursday it would drop an unpopular plan to prevent children from doing hazardous work on farms owned by anyone other than their parents.

The Labor Department said it is withdrawing proposed rules that would ban children younger than 16 from using most power-driven farm equipment, including tractors. The rules also would prevent those younger than 18 from working in feed lots, grain bins and stockyards.

While labor officials said their goal was to reduce the fatality rate for child farm workers, the proposal had become a popular political target for Republicans who called it an impractical, heavy-handed regulation that ignored the reality of small farms.

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GSA Behavior is the Rule, Not the Exception

By Robert Ringer | April 25, 2012 | WND

Robert Ringer is a New York Times No. 1 best-selling author and host of the highly acclaimed “Liberty Education Interview Series,” which features interviews with top political, economic and social leaders. To sign up for a free subscription to his pro-liberty, pro-free-market e-letter, A Voice of Sanity, click here.

Exclusive: Robert Ringer says solution is ‘to get rid of 95 percent of government!’

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground,” said Thomas Jefferson.

Throughout my life, I have watched this phenomenon play out. Much like a stock-market chart, you may see an occasional upward blip toward liberty, but the general trend-line is downward – toward bigger, more intrusive, more controlling government and less individual liberty.

No matter who the president is, no matter which party controls the House or Senate, decade after decade, this trend has continued. That’s because, with few exceptions, the vast majority in both major parties believe in statism, regardless of what they profess to believe when they’re in front of an audience or television camera.

Statism is the belief that government knows best – that it has the omniscience and omnipotence not only to understand people’s problems, but to solve them. Meaning, in real terms, it’s a belief that politicians have the omniscience and omnipotence to understand and solve people’s problems.

This preposterous notion can be best described, in the words of Friedrich Hayek, as “fatal conceit.” Most politicians believe that not only is it the government’s right, but its duty, to boss people around in order to get results they believe advance the “common good.”

Such arrogance, however, leads to never-ending hypocrisy on the part of politicians and bureaucrats. Being human, they, like everyone else, desire to improve their lives to the greatest extent possible. And it doesn’t take a politician or government bureaucrat long to figure out that the easiest way to satisfy as many of his needs as possible is through the use of other people’s money.

He is especially motivated by the fact that using other people’s money for his own benefit is generally considered to be legal. Or, if not technically legal, that his theft will get lost in the unwieldy bureaucratic system.

Which is to say that, again with few exceptions, politicians, bureaucrats and government employees are nothing more than parasites. It’s difficult for a normal businessperson to comprehend how a congressman runs his fiefdom. Can you imagine running your business 1) using other people’s money to pay your overhead and 2) not having to worry about making a profit?

Read the full Article here.

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EPA Official on Non-Compliant Companies: ‘Hit Them as Hard as You Can’ & ‘Make Examples Out of Them,’ Cites Crucifixion [Video]

By Becket Adams | April 25, 2012 | The Blaze

Are you familiar with a certain Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official named Al Armendariz?

Chances are you’ve never heard of him. We suspect most Americans haven’t. However, with the recent unearthing of the video below, that could change very soon.

Thanks to a little digging by the staff of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), attention has been brought to a 2010 video that seems to confirm what many conservative have long suspected: that the EPA is at war with the oil and gas industries.

“[O]il and gas is an enforcement priority, it’s one of seven, so we are going to spend a fair amount of time looking at oil and gas production,” Armendariz says in the video.

The top-ranking EPA official goes on to explain his philosophy of policy enforcement [emphases added]:

I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff…the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.

And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there.

And, companies that are smart see that, they don’t want to play that game, and they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up.

Watch the video here:

Read the full article here.

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Those horrible republicans… Killing the enviroment

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Obama Puts Out Figurative Bounty on Supreme Court

By Rush Limbaugh | April 03, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Obama and his attack on the Supreme Court yesterday.  It happened toward the end of the program in the last half hour and it was happening on the fly.  I didn’t really have enough time to listen in detail to what Obama said, and thus I didn’t have a chance to, in detail, reply.  I’ve now listened to what Obama said.  I’ve got three sound bites here.When I got home yesterday at about six o’clock last night I got a flash encrypted message from a friend who says, “You know, somebody in the court leaked to Obama. That’s why he went out there and did this today. Somebody called him. He lost the vote, the preliminary vote on Friday. He lost it, and somebody leaked it.” And that became an active theory that began to be bandied about amongst a lot of people that I know. Because people were saying,

“Why go out,” as Obama did yesterday…? It was in the form of a question. We must remember that he was asked a question about this. He didn’t launch into this on his own, but once he got the question, it was, “Katie, bar the door,” and he was off to the races.

And the question everybody was asking is: “Why do this? Why attack the court? Why intimidate them, why threaten them if they had voted to uphold the mandate?” And I have an answer for that. See, I know these people. I know liberals. I don’t want that statement to sound bombastic. You people here — new listeners to the program — that’s not a braggadocios statement. It’s not bombastic. It’s not outrage or any attempt to shock. I just know them, and so when somebody asks me, “Why would Obama say that if he didn’t have to? If he had been told that the preliminary vote on Friday was in his favor, why take the attitude that he took?” There is an answer to that. I don’t know if it’s right, but there is an answer.

He’s a thug.

And again, I’m not trying to be provocative when I say this. I’m just quoting Bill Clinton, folks. Bill Clinton referred to Barack Obama as a Chicago thug during the 2008 presidential campaign. This after Clinton some years earlier had told Juanita Broaddrick, “Put some ice on that lip” after she said he raped her. (I mentioned that for this “war on women” that supposedly the Republicans are waging.) But there’s every possibility that Obama feeling his oats, being told that the vote went his way, would still go out and do this, ’cause he knows there are more votes to come. I’m not predicting it. I’m just saying I could understand it.

It’s easier to understand that somebody leaked to him that the preliminary vote went against him and that the mandate fell by whatever the preliminary vote was and that explains his attitude yesterday. But I can see him saying what he said if the vote went in his favor as well, as a means of further intimidation, making sure they don’t change their minds or whatever. You might say, “Well, how would that work? Wouldn’t that just kind of make them be more resistant?” The reason this is all a crock in the first place is that (and we will go through this as we play the Obama sound bites) it is obvious that to the left this is an entirely political process.

There’s nothing judicial going on here. There’s nothing legal. This isn’t even really about the Constitution. This is about politics, pure and simple, and Barack Obama’s reelection. It’s all it is. But he says things in these sound bites which you’ll hear coming up and they’re chilling to me. “The court has to understand…” “The court must understand,” is one of his sound bites. No, the court must not — does not have to — listen to you. What is this, “The court must understand”? That is a threat! How many of you think it possible that Obama will make a trip to the Supreme Court before the vote, before the final vote? Can you see it happening? I can.

I’m not predicting it. (interruption) You’re shaking your head. You don’t think it would ever happen? Why would he be…? Why would Obama visiting the Supreme Court between now and June be any more unconscionable than what he did yesterday? (interruption) It’s a visual? No! He’s just going up to say hi to Kagan. He’s going up to say hi to Kagan and Sotomayor, to see how they’re doing. (interruption) He called ’em out of the State of the Union right to their face. Remember that with Justice Alito? Anyway, let me take a break. We’ll come back and we will get into some of these sound bites and we’ll tear this down as it happened sometimes line by line. Mike, be prepared when I say, “Stop.” There might be some frequent stops and starts as we go through this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Reuters was just as excited as they could be over what Obama did. “Obama Takes a Shot at the Supreme Court Over Health Care — President Obama took an opening shot at conservative justices on the Supreme Court on Monday, warning that a rejection of his sweeping health care law would be an act of judicial activism that Republicans say they abhor.” Warning? Warning? And Reuters is happy! (That’s right! You take it to these conservatives!) Judicial activism? You know, the debate is constantly held: “Is he really this ignorant or naive, or is this just strategic?”

Everybody knows that judicial activism is not what Obama is explaining it to be. Judicial activism is the court MAKING law. Judicial activism is the court WRITING law. What Obama is trying to say here is that the court will be engaging in judicial activism if it judges the law according to the Constitution. That’s not what judicial activism is. I know exactly what they’re doing. They’re trying to take this term, and they’re trying to redefine it publicly to fit their needs and redefine the language (as they constantly are). But, folks, I’m gonna tell you something. It is preposterous, and it’s even a little scary to hear such abject ignorance from a supposed constitutional scholar.

This is a man, Barack Obama, who was once paid to teach law, constitutional law, and he doesn’t even know the meaning of the term “judicial activism.” No one ever accuses any judges of judicial activism for following the Constitution! Judges are accused of judicial activism for not following the Constitution, for legislating from the bench, for writing their own law. This is basic knowledge. Now, maybe this is why we’ve never seen Obama’s grade transcripts, if he really doesn’t know the difference. But I suspect that he does know the difference, and I suspect that he’s trying to redefine terms here to fit. Because this has become a template argument for the left.

You remember Jeffrey Toobin? You talk about a guy who’s done a 180 here, turned on a dime. During the week of oral arguments, Jeff Toobin, CNN legal analyst, was in an abject panic. These people on the left… And again, ladies and gentlemen, this is the solid truth. They do not expose themselves to any ideological thinking other than their own. They have assumed that conservatism is racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, all of these cliches they attach to it. And they’re not interested in talking to anybody that they think is a conservative. They really are not familiar with other ideas. They don’t speak the language. We, of course, can speak liberalism as well as they do. We understand it.

Read the full article here.

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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]