"If Government is Arrogance, The EPA Is Fascism!"
By Ron Ewart, President of the
National Association of Rural Landowners
and founder of the
Devoted to the noble goal of getting Americans to think LIKE Americans and acting FOR America.
© Copyright Sunday, March 31, 2013 - All Rights Reserved
Note: This is our second article in the series of "Why Government is Your Enemy."
The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace. Thomas Frank, contemporary American author
Perhaps the best way to start this column is to relate an actual story of a husband and wife in Idaho who were the recipients of EPA's fascism. Michael and Chantell Sackett, husband and wife, had purchased a building lot in a subdivision in the Pan Handle of Idaho, near Priest Lake. They had obtained permits to build their home and were readying the lot for the foundation, which required some filling and some leveling of the lot.
Everything was proceeding as planned when along came an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) code enforcement officer. After inspecting the lot upon which the Sacketts planned to build, the officer filed a Compliance Order on the Sacketts stating that the lot was subject to the Clean Water Act because of its proximity to Priest Lake and that they had illegally filled in a wetland. The Sacketts were instructed by the Compliance Order to return the lot to its previous condition and if they didn't comply, the fine was well in excess of $30,000 per day. (So much for the 8th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which prohibits excessive fines.) Keep in mind that there was a home built on most of the lots in the subdivision, but the EPA never bothered any one of the other owners in the construction of their homes, even though they were closer to the lake than was the Sacketts' lot.
The Sacketts only recourse against the EPA Compliance Order was with an EPA administrator, a stacked deck at best. Essentially, the Sacketts were prohibited from any review of EPA's Compliance Order by a court. The Sacketts retained the Pacific Legal Foundation and took their case to the U. S. Supreme Court where they defeated the EPA on whether they had the right of judicial review. The judicial case is still pending as far as we know and we are not aware of any definitive outcome as yet. (Learn more about the Sackett's case at:http://www.narlo.org/sacketts.html.)
This is just one of the tens of thousands of individual stories of outright bullying by EPA, where individual property owners come up against the mighty hand of an unyielding, intransigent government bureaucracy. It is another glaring example of why government is your enemy.
Back in 1969 the Federal Government passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA became the "foot in the door" for federal, state and local governments to implement aggressive environmental and conservationist protections and policies without regard to constitutional safeguards to property rights. A year later President Nixon proposed a consolidation of several environmental agencies under one larger agency, which became the Environmental Protection Agency, literally by Presidential Executive Order. The EPA is not a cabinet level agency but the Administrator is given Cabinet Level rank. An informative article on the EPA can be found HERE.
Williams Ruckelshaus was the first Administrator of the EPA and did much to set up the organization and determine its priorities. One of the first acts of EPA was to issue a ban on DDT, an act that condemned millions of people around the world to death by Malaria, mostly because of a book entitled "Silent Spring" written by one Rachel Carson. Ms. Carson and her book, which became a best seller, are credited with sparking the environmental movement in America. An excellent article on the DDT debate can be found in Scientific American HERE, wherein they state that the deleterious affects of DDT on humans has never been proved. Banning DDT is typical of government actions wherein irrational emotion, not science, is the only rationale for the action.
We served as the chairman of a government action committee for a large Chamber of Commerce in a midsized city about the time the EPA was establishing standards for air, water and noise. We couldn't believe what we were hearing. The new standard was that no human in the general population could be at risk from any condition in the air, water and noise, a standard that would be impossible to meet at any cost. Man can limit some of the risks at considerable expense, but he can't eradicate all of them without destroying the economy.
Paul Driessen wrote a great article on the EPA entitled "The EPA's Unrelenting Power Grab." This excellent, illustrated article, in PDF format, can be found HERE. (http://www.narlo.org/epa.pdf)
We will not argue against some of EPA's responsibilities, such as cleaning up hazardous waste sites and regulating the use and disposal of toxic chemicals. However, by EPA's very size, like any large government agency, it accretes, not unlike a river delta. It just keeps getting larger and larger. Now, with over 17,000 employees and a 2012 budget of $8.5 Billion dollars it has immense power to disrupt the lives of every individual in America, not only in the cost of its policies on the over-all economy, but its ever-growing power over all land, water, air, noise and energy by virtue of legislation passed by Congress. As we speak, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers are lobbying the Congress to remove the word "navigable" from the Clean Water Restoration Act, a re-write of the Clean Water Act. Removing the word "navigable" from the Act will mean that the EPA and the Corps will have dictatorial control over any and every water body or mud puddle in America. Stories like the Sacketts will become an every day occurrence.
On March 22, 2013 the Right Scoop website reported that EPA was data mining farm and ranch information and then handing it over to extreme environmental groups, although no extreme environmental group was named in the article.
Pushed by the radical environmental community in their irrational stance on man-caused global warming, the EPA is moving to regulate CO2 emissions with a policy similar to what Obama and other environmentalists, like Al Gore want, under a CAP and TRADE scheme. The cost of this scheme will continue to drive energy costs higher and higher, force coal-fired power plants to shut down and continue the massive subsidizing of wind and solar through crony capitalism. Some may not realize that coal provides almost half the energy in the United States. Its loss could cripple America's economy. Oh, did we forget to tell you that CO2 is a natural forming compound in the air that includes all plant and some sea life, along with the Sun, chlorophyll, carbon dioxide (CO2) and oxygen, in a never-ending cycle upon which all life depends, including humans?
Environmentalism and conservationism of which NEPA and subsequent environmental acts and agencies are a part, like the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers, run hand-in-hand with world-wide socialism, social justice and environmental justice and are the product of the United Nations, which the United States has now bought hook, line and sinker. All of these laws and policies have become institutionalized and embedded in American law without a treaty being debated and ratified by the Congress. These policies are taught in our grade schools and clear on up to our liberal colleges that dump out brainwashed "kids" onto the streets to be absorbed by business and government, all the while "spitting" out the venom they were taught in schools that humans are a stain on the Earth and need to be relegated to high-dense urban areas where they can be better controlled. All three of our grandchildren, ages 9 to 17, are being brainwashed with this propaganda and two of them are in private schools.
Regarding the issue of man-caused global warming, we encourage you to read our previous article published in the Seattle Times as a guest editorial entitled, "Global Warming, A Farce" HERE. It will give you a much broader perspective that you won't find anywhere else. (http://www.narlo.org/globalwarming.html)
The EPA, like the Department of Homeland Security, is the creation and consolidation of federal government bureaucracies that operate almost virtually without congressional oversight. They grow almost without bounds, funded by the U. S. Congress. For an individual American to be confronted by one of these agencies is to have been confronted by an out-of-control, brutal, abusive and intransigent giant. Just ask the Sacketts. The only peaceful recourse is through the courts and most people can't afford to fight an ever-growing Goliath that has no regard for constitutional law, or any law for that matter, except their own. These agencies exist to serve themselves or the dictatorial edicts of a president and their very survival and growth is funded by your tax dollars that work against you.
That is why the EPA is fascism personified and that is why it is the enemy of all Americans. They just don't know it. Unfortunately, Thomas Frank's admonition in the quote at the beginning of this article was never heeded. The EPA is still infernally meddling in the marketplace, to the detriment of every American's life.
If you care about the survival of a free America, please join with us at the "Parallax Prophecies Institute" to bring the citizens of this great country back to being united Americans who fearlessly turn on their enemies when threatened, foreign or domestic, instead of being divided, weak, spineless Americans who are locked in the yoke of enslavement, pulling the royal cart of government. Join with us as free Americans peacefully, against a government that has become the enemy of the people. Remember! If you fear government, they win and you are but a slave.
Next week the Parallax Prophecies column will take on the U. S. Department of Education, another out-of-control, expensive and wasteful federal bureaucracy that has taken over the Public Education system and inserted collectivism, multi-culturalism, political correctness, trashing American history and the one-world-order, into the daily curriculum. It will become apparent that the U. S. Department of Education is not any American's friend and is in fact, a parent's worst nightmare.
Ron Ewart, President
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF RURAL LANDOWNERS
THE PARALLAX PROPHECIES INSTITUTE
P. O. Box 1031, Issaquah, WA 98027
No comments:
Post a Comment