Manufacturing Consensus

America is drowning in a river of rules.  As the President's approval numbers go down, the manic production of new regulations rises to a fever pitch in case the liberal last chance is afoot.  According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, 3,752 new rules were created last year and there are 4,225 new ones in some stage of preparedness.

These rules vary from the absurd, such as regulating that dolls of 3 different races must be represented in day care centers to far more substantive power grabs. The list of aggressively abusive implementations of a "social justice" agenda is very long and growing fast. Just a few examples:

The New Hampshire News ("Fishermen Say Regulations Destroying Industry" New Hampshire News, May 10, 2011) reported on the Obama  Administration's "catch-share" regulatory system:

"Catch-shares allot a specific amount of fish that can be caught, and once that number is hit, the fishermen have to stop fishing for the season.... Bob Campbell of the Yankee Fisherman's Cooperative... said the cooperative has lost about $750,000 in business since the new regulations went into effect.  "We're off 1.1 million pounds of fish from last year, and over a million and a half pounds from the year before."

By poorly crafting a new rule about drop-sided cribs and making it retroactive, the Consumer Product Safety Commission caused millions of safe cribs in inventory to be destroyed by small businesses. ("Thousands of Cribs Headed to the Dump Unless Federal Agency Delays Regulation", Rob Bluey, Heritage Foundation, June 16, 2011)

The plan to bury small banks in steep reserve requirements and other Dodd-Frank rules to drive them out of business is pretty clear - it coincides with moves to get a death grip on the larger banks.  This pincer movement is directly aimed at taking over the banking industry. ("The End of Community Banking", Sarah Wallace, Wall St. Journal, June 29, 2010)

Not surprisingly, you might say finally, people are getting concerned about these massive power grabs by newly aggrandized agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This is an agency that doesn't care that windmills have long been slicing and dicing innocent golden eagles ("Windmills Are Killing Our Birds", Wall St. Journal, Sept. 7, 2009) but is very worried about lizards in Texas ("Protection for lizard may Threaten West Texas Oil Production", Matthew Tresaugue, Houston Chronicle, May 30, 2011).  One doesn't have to look too hard to see the EPA's blatant attempt to implement the defeated "cap and trade" scheme by other means. 

There seems to be an army of unelected "tsars" and agency underlings relentlessly clawing at the structure of our society.


When faced with clear evidence that the citizens are getting antsy about the regulatory juggernaut having left public opinion behind, the Obama Administration has come up with a new way to claim these objections are simply not happening or are the paranoiac ranting of a vocal few.  They have created a new mechanism to create evidence of concurrence with their methods.  It is called "We the People".

This Executive invention provides a mechanism for citizens to create "petitions" that "call for action" by the Federal Government.  If they get 5,000 "signatures" the issue will be "reviewed by white house staff"!   Be still my fluttering heart.


Let's face it - Obama can get 5,000 "signer-ups" in five minutes on any topic he wants just by calling the union boss in any big city.  So why bother?  Because this will be used to manufacture "grass roots" requests to implore our leader to do exactly what he wants to do. Just as lawyers use depositions to manufacture evidence, these petitions will be used to manufacture "support" for federal government conduct.


It's easy to envision a petition for "New Rules to Keep Our Children Safe" or "We believe in Global Warming", or "Why Doesn't Our President Give More Speeches?".  How about a petition entitled "Let's Get Rid of Filthy Coal", then when some rude radio person notes that coal plants and attendant communities are dropping like flies, the Administration can say it has evidence that "thousands of people" are begging the white house for this very thing.  You won't even hear of the "Let's Get Rid of Obamacare" petitions.


"We the People" is a fig leaf--and a slapdash one at that.  It is a classic case of adding insult to injury; they pretend to listen when they are just trying to find a way to make us think they are. Until Barack Obama and his entourage of zealous academics are ousted, their aggressive agenda will continue to accelerate.

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