Brandon Turbeville - POLICE STATE USA: New Obama Executive Order Seizes U.S. Infrastructure and Citizens for Military Preparedness

In a stunning move, on March 16, 2012, Barack Obama signed an Executive Order stating that the President and his specifically designated Secretaries now have the authority to commandeer all domestic U.S. resources including food and water. The EO also states that the President and his Secretaries have the authority to seize all transportation, energy, and infrastructure inside the United States as well as forcibly induct/draft American citizens into the military. The EO also contains a vague reference in regards to harnessing American citizens to fulfill “labor requirements” for the purposes of national defense.

Not only that, but the authority claimed inside the EO does not only apply to National Emergencies and times of war. It also applies in peacetime.

The National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order exploits the “authority” granted to the President in the Defense Production Act of 1950 in order to assert that virtually every means of human survival is now available for confiscation and control by the President via his and his Secretaries’ whim.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29835

William Hartung - Throwing Money at the Pentagon

If you’ve been fretting about faltering math education and falling test scores here in the United States, you should be worried based on this campaign season of Republican math.  When it comes to the American military, the leading Republican presidential candidates evidently only learned to add and multiply, never subtract or divide.

Advocates of Pentagon reform have criticized President Obama for his timid approach to reducing military spending.  Despite current Pentagon budgets that have hovered at the highest levels since World War II and 13 years of steady growth, the administration’s latest plans would only reduce spendingat the Department of Defense by 1.6% in inflation-adjusted dollars over the next five years.

Still, compared to his main Republican opponents, Obama is a T. rex of budget slashers.  After all, despite their stated commitment to reducing the deficit (while cutting taxes on the rich yet more), the Republican contenders are intent on raising Pentagon spending dramatically.  Mitt Romney has staked out the “high ground” in the latest round of Republican math with a proposal to set Pentagon spending at 4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  That would, in fact add up to an astonishing $8.3 trillion dollars over the next decade, one-third more than current, already bloated Pentagon plans.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175518/

Mike Adams - Obama seizes control over all food, farms, livestock, farm equipment, fertilizer and food production across America

"We told ya so" just doesn't quite cut it anymore. As the American sheeple slept, selfishly refusing to take a stand against tyranny, the Obama administration has been plotting what can only be called a total government takeover of America.

On March 16, 2012, President Obama issued an executive order entitled, "NATIONAL DEFENSE RESOURCES PREPAREDNESS." (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/16/executive-order...)

This executive order states that the President alone has the authority to take over all resources in the nation (labor, food, industry, etc.) as long as it is done "to promote the national defense" -- a phrase so vague that it could mean practically anything.

Read More:

http://www.naturalnews.com/035301_Obama_executive_orders_food_supply.html

The power to seize control and take over these resources is delegated to the following government authorities:

(1) the Secretary of Agriculture with respect to food resources, food resource facilities, livestock resources, veterinary resources, plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment and commercial fertilizer;

Scott Horton - The Drone Secrecy Farce

Following Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech at Northwestern, publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Timesresponded with renewed demands for the release of the Department of Justice memorandum (or “OLC Memo”), written by Martin Lederman and David Barron, that provides the legal framework for targeted killings. The Obama Administration came to power promising to end secret Justice Department memos like the ones that approved torture and warrantless surveillance. It also published most of the controversial Bush-era memos, which makes it look particularly disingenuous when withholding its own controversial legal opinions.

Why is it doing so? When pressed, government figures cite the same reason, always off-the-record: drone operations on and over Yemeni territory depend to some degree on the approval of Yemen’s dictator, who has insisted that they be kept secret. Indeed, according to an understanding the United States has reached with Yemen, the latter’s government will generally claim internally that U.S. drone strikes were carried out by Yemen’s own air force.

Read More:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/03/hbc-90008485

Cameron, Obama Agree: Continue War on Afghanistan

While corporate media have framed the recent massacre of Afghan civilians by a U.S. soldier as presenting problems with the war strategy and as a PR problem, President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron expressed today their joint view that the war on Afghanistan must go on.

CNN reports that

Both Obama and Cameron referred to the difficulties of recent days, a clear reference to the civilian killings in Kandahar province that brought threats of retaliation from the Taliban and a demand for justice from President Hamid Karzai's government.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/14-7

Thomas Drake - I was First Whistleblower Prosecuted Under the Espionage Act in Recent Government Rampage

On Saturday the 10th of March 2012, Matthew Miller, the ex-Director of the Office of Public Affairs for the Justice Department and Attorney General Holder's former spokesperson, posted an article on the Daily Beast asserting that the Obama Administration is right to go after 'leakers' who are not whistleblowers.

The difference between a leaker and a whistle-blower is important. Leaks of classified information can endanger American soldiers and intelligence officers and expose sensitive national-security programs to our enemies. Whistle-blowers expose violations of law, abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific threat to public health or safety.

Read More:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/12/1073513/-Government-s-War-Against-Whistleblowers-While-Leaking-Lies

Richard Schiffman - Obama’s plan for nuclear sanity

“Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon,” read the headline. This frontpage banner in the satirical weekly The Onion may not have gotten the number exactly right. The Obama administration reported in 2010 that the US possesses 5,113 warheads in the stockpile and an additional 4,500 retired, but not yet dismantled, making the grand total even higher than the spoofers had guessed.

While media pundits in the U.S. warn darkly of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, America itself is regarded as the main nuclear threat in much of the world today. The United States argues that it needs these weapons to deter attacks on itself and its allies, and that it would only use them to prevent or respond to such an attack. But people in other countries wonder why Americans need so many of them — secreted away in missile silos, on submarines and in bombers, computer-targeted to obliterate their cities at the turn of a key.

Read More:

http://mondediplo.com/blogs/obama-s-plan-for-nuclear-sanity

Tom Engelhardt - Tomgram: Engelhardt, War as the President's Private Preserve

When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble -- dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock.  There would always be people all around him, but far too engrossed in the daily paper to notice.  The tagline was: “In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the Bulletin.”

Those ads came to mind recently when President Obama commented forcefully on war, American-style, in ways that were remarkably radical.  Although he was trying to ward off a threatened Israeli preemptive air strike against Iran, his comments should have shocked Americans -- but just about nobody noticed.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175514/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_war_as_the_president%27s_private_preserve/

Chris Hedges - Supreme Court Likely to Endorse Obama’s War on Whistle-Blowers

Totalitarian systems disempower an unsuspecting population by gradually making legal what was once illegal. They incrementally corrupt and distort law to exclusively serve the goals of the inner sanctums of power and strip protection from the citizen. Law soon becomes the primary tool to advance the crimes of the elite and punish those who tell the truth. The state saturates the airwaves with official propaganda to replace news. Fear, and finally terror, creates an intellectual and moral void.

We have very little space left to maneuver. The iron doors of the corporate state are slamming shut. And a conviction of Bradley Manning, or any of the five others charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act of 1917 with passing on government secrets to the press, would effectively terminate public knowledge of the internal workings of the corporate state. What we live under cannot be called democracy. What we will live under if the Supreme Court upholds the use of the Espionage Act to punish those who expose war crimes and state lies will be a species of corporate fascism. And this closed society is, perhaps, only a few weeks or months away.

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/supreme_court_set_to_endorse_obamas_war_on_whistleblowers_20120312/

William T. Hathaway - Obama: Strategies Of Deception

To get a preview of Obama's strategies for winning a second term, we just need to read the liberal press. They are giving lip-service praise to the current protests while trying to steer them in a direction that serves the Democratic Party. Seeking to restore the fading illusion that the Democrats work in the interests of the 99%, they imply that if Obama is given a second term, his true nature will emerge and he'll crack down on the greed and corruption of the 1% and lead the country in a progressive direction. They conveniently ignore that he's done the opposite during his three years in office.

They also try to scare us into voting for him by claiming a Republican president would be much worse. In fact the differences between Republicans and Democrats are mostly a matter of image and style. Their military policies are equally aggressive, and their economic policies differ only in nuances. But the Democrats put a friendly face on their administration of capital. Their rhetoric is sprinkled with populist slogans as they're bailing out banksters and dropping bombs.

Read More:

http://countercurrents.org/hathaway100312.htm