Bill would give president emergency control of Internet
Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.
(One thing to keep in mind with all bills of this type, where the government is expanding its powers far beyond what it has authority to do, is this frequently-employed strategy: They will write the bill to encompass far more than is the actual goal, with the expectation that public outcry will cause them to take a few steps back. For instance, a bill might originate as “All tents will now house camels.” Everyone complains, “No, we don’t want camels in our tents!” And then they’ll say, “Ok, ok, no camels in your tents, you must only allow the camel’s nose in your tent when there’s a sandstorm.” And everyone says, “Well, that’s OK I guess, and there’s no sandstorm now, so it doesn’t affect me or my tent at all.” And the bill passes, and then next year, or next congressional session, they can mandate that more of the camel be allowed into your tent until the entire thing is in there. They use this with gun control, healthcare, workplace safety, environmental regulations, and everything else they do. Once the foot is in the door, they will eventually push their entire pompous bloated selves into your household, and run it according to their will.)
And of course, this would be piled on top of the movement to give the president sweeping new authority to define and declare emergencies. And now, the feds want documentation on the structure of networks around the nation, to have certified agents in charge of them, and authority to seize control of and to be able to shut down Internet access for anyone the feds don’t want online at any point in time.
The McCain-Feingold act of several years ago basically declared that no one without press credentials could speak ill of candidates within 90 days of an election – will the feds use this new authority to shut down individuals speaking out against public servants or policies?
If the H1N1 flu fails to cause a pandemic, but the mandatory immunizations do, will they shut down the internet to prevent news of the harmful side effects of the governments actions from spreading and causing revolts and riots, so that they may continue mandatory immunizations with only the mainstream media reporting the government’s side of the story?
Even if Obama doesn’t turn out to be a vicious, murdurous tyrant, who’s to say the next guy won’t be? With all Constitutional restraints on the presidency abolished, there’s nowhere to go but down.
“If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking,” said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart yesterday, “and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4% to 16%.”
WASHINGTON – In a chilling forecast, the White House is predicting a 10-year federal deficit of $9 trillion — more than the sum of all previous deficits since America’s founding. And it says by the next decade’s end the national debt will equal three-quarters of the entire U.S. economy.
That alone should be enought to assure you that the nation is on the wrong track. Yet, the current administration is ever-eager to prove that they have no idea whatsoever what they are doing, what the problem is, or how to fix it, but that they will do whatever they can to make sure that their friends and business partners get rich off the taxpayers.
Case in point:
The grim deficit news presents Obama with both immediate and longer-term challenges. The still fragile economy cannot afford deficit-fighting cures such as spending cuts or tax increases.
And yet, spending cuts are exactly what a contracting economy requires. Obama’s advisors said Tuesday that unemployment is heading towards 10 percent — and that’s from their fraudulent new method of defining “unemployed” as narrowly as possible, to keep the number as low as possible! Measuring it the way we did back in the ’80′s, unemployment would be up in the 20 percents!
So when they say they can’t afford to cut spending, what they mean is, they do not want to stop giving money to the corporate interests receiving government money. Case in point:
Amid the gloomy numbers on Tuesday, Obama signaled his satisfaction with improvements in the economy by announcing he would nominate Republican Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The announcement, welcomed on Wall Street, diverted attention from the budget news and helped neutralize any disturbance in the financial markets from the high deficit projections.
Ok, some things to remember:
- The Federal Reserve is a private company, like Federal Express and Federal Ammunition.
- The Federal Reserve is in the business of loaning money to the government and other banks.
- The Federal Reserve is raking in the cash, loaning billions of dollars that it creates out of thin air to us taxpayers, who pay interest on money that did not exist before the government borrowed it to pay interest on money it borrowed last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, going back to 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was passed.
- The Federal Reserve and the loathsome Alan Greenspan caused the bubble in housing, stocks, consumption and prices in general by keeping interest rates artificially low for a very long time in order to drive prices up and encourage investing in all sorts of idiotic schemes that would never have received money had it not been nearly free.
- Bernanke and Greenspan kept denying that there would be a bust, right up until several months after the boom busted.
- Bernanke, Obama, and the rest of them have no idea where the economy is going, all of their predictions have been wrong, none of their stimulus plans have helped, and they really have no idea what’s going on. Case in point:
“This recession was simply worse than the information that we and other forecasters had back in last fall and early this winter,” said Obama economic adviser Christina Romer.
Translation: Our economic models are worthless because we are following the worthless and wrong Keynesian economic models which have been proven wrong by 4,500 years of human history, and we’ve never bothered to read anything from the Austrian school of economics which is always right, because only the Keynesian models say that the government should meddle in every aspect of the economy and regulate every aspect of human activity because we at the top are supposed to be better at making the best economic choices for the masses than collectively 280 million people are at individually making the best economic for their own situations.
That’s why they had no idea that the recession was going to hit, how bad it was going to be, that all their stimulus would — at best — have no positive effect, and — most likely — make it worse, because when you’ve spent so much more money than you’ve earned that you are so deep in a debt-hole that you feel like the doctor’s finger after he’s asked you to turn around and cough, the last thing you and the patient want is for you to keep shoving it deeper in there, yet that’s exactly what the government is doing to us. And without even such niceties as a kiss or Vaseline!
But the bankers who own the Federal Reserve want their paychecks to keep rolling in, and the auto dealers who voted and donated Democrat and so didn’t get shut down by Obama want some income, and it’s so easy to keep taking out more loans to pay for all the previous loans, and our government is full of spineless idiots and socialists (please pardon the redundancy) who care more about pleasing lobbyists and being able to vote themselves money than keeping their oath of office or impoverishing their consitutients and running the greatest nation in the history of the world into the ground.
And yet, returning to the Constitution would solve all these problems and spur a return of prosperity not seen in a hundred years.
Let’s get it on!
