"IN DEFENSE OF RURAL AMERICA"
a weekly column published every Sunday by
Ron Ewart, President of the
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF RURAL LANDOWNERS

For the week of:
Sunday, June 8, 2014

The "In Defense of Rural America" column archives are available HERE.

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"America - Dictatorship by Bureaucracy"
From * In Defense of Rural America *
By Ron Ewart, President
National Association of Rural Landowners
and nationally recognized author on freedom and property rights issues.
We are helping to spread freedom and liberty around the globe.
© Copyright Sunday, June 8, 2014 - All Rights Reserved

"It doesn't always take guns and chains to enslave people. It just takes a zillion unconstitutional laws and a bureaucracy to enforce them, to which the people blindly comply without resistance."

Ron Ewart

Government, at least in what is left of the Constitutional Republic of America, is (or was) about preserving, protecting and defending the individual, God-given rights of the people. Government is (or was) also about service, service to the people for functions that only government can accomplish. In America, the people established the government and the government was and is supposed to be the servant for the people. But alas, it is a fact, the servant has become the master without a shot being fired.

Government has sent hither swarms of officers and bureaucrats to pass millions of unconstitutional laws and eat out our substance. The ironic part is, these bureaucrats that harass the people were the creation of past and current Congresses and presidents, in direct violation of their solemn oaths to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and the rights of the people.

The duty of those Congresses and presidents was to provide oversight to the bureaucracies, but as anyone can see from observing just the current scandals with the Veterans Administration, the Justice Department, the NSA, the INS, the Border Patrol, the USDA, the DOE, the DHS, the IRS, the BLM, the EPA, etc., oversight is a mirage and out-of-control bureaucracies with dictatorial powers are the reality. In fact, it has gotten so bad, that bureaucracies have become an irreversible power unto themselves and the Congress, much less the president, appear to be powerless to rein them in, or stop them. It is almost as if the Congress and the president don't want to rein them in. What exists today is a culture of criminally wasteful and corrupt bureaucratic employee entitlement, funded at great expense by the hapless and virtually helpless American taxpayer.

If Congress won't pass legislation that the bureaucrats want, the president just writes an executive order, or the bureaucrats just promulgate a rule, thereby effectively repealing Article 1, Section 1 of the U. S. Constitution. What constitution? Maybe the dog ate it.

It is worthy to note that the major federal bureaucracies are under the control of the executive branch, giving the executive branch virtually unlimited power to pass and enforce law, thereby bypassing the Congress. The federal bureaucracies are essentially the president's cabinet and do the president's bidding. The only control the Congress has is the power of the purse and legislative oversight. The Congress is reluctant to employ the power of the purse and does a poor job of legislative oversight. The bureaucracies refuse to comply or ignore Congressional subpoenas, requests for documents, or appearances of witnesses for testimony, with regularity and in-your-face arrogance. Should we dare mention the IRS or the State Department?

THE VA: The most volatile scandal today involving a bureaucracy is the Veterans Administration (VA). The VA has been a scandal for decades and everyone in and out of government has known it but has done nothing. It is a prime example of the inefficiency of big government that prides itself in protecting its turf, wasting billions of tax dollars and rewarding its perpetrators with bonuses. If the VA is any example of administering a single-payer health care system for veterans as a government-run bureaucracy, the people are going to love how government runs Obama Care. In 2009 we wrote "18 Basic Principles for America." Principle number 17 states the following:

"17. The entire Veterans Administration office should be overhauled and new policies put in place with the funds to match. These new policies would create an absolute priority for treating our veterans and their families with respect, honor, dignity and the admiration that they deserve. These people gave their lives, mind and limbs in the service of our country, defending our cherished freedoms. The current VA programs are an egregious affront to these individuals and an abysmal travesty."

But then who will implement this reasonable and justifiable solution? The President? The Congress? Not likely. The VA has too many friends in high places because it is just another out-of-control federal bureaucracy living high off of our money.

MEDICARE: A recent Office of Inspector General (OIG) report on the multi-billion dollar waste, fraud and abuse in the Medicare program, determined that it was more effective financially to do nothing, rather than trying to fix the problem. If the government is so careless about spending the people's tax dollars, why then should the people care about paying those tax dollars? Why indeed!

THE EPA: Another out-of-control government bureaucracy is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It is proposing two new rules that will have a significant negative impact on the economy and a disastrous effect on local land use control and property rights, especially for rural landowners.

Remember, the Congress, to its credit, has refused for years to pass the environmentalist's (and Al Gore's) pet legislation, a Cap and Trade scheme to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the interest of slowing down alleged man-caused global warming. Comes now the EPA, at the direction of our socialist and radical environmentalist president, to promulgate rules for CO2 emissions from gas and coal-fired power plants. The overly strict new rules, without a doubt, will stifle economic growth by raising energy prices and kill much needed jobs. But the environmentalists, the president and the EPA don't give a damn. Meanwhile, China and India are pumping several factors more CO2 into the atmosphere than the US does. Thus any attempts to limit CO2 in America will have virtually no impact on alleged planet-wide man-caused global warming but it will have a huge deleterious impact on our economy.

The second rule that EPA is promulgating is a one-word change to the Clean Water Act. The Congress, once again, has failed to pass pet environmental legislation known as the Clean Water Restoration Act. So the EPA, in violation of Article 1, Section 1 of the U. S. Constitution, is going to do it for them. The new EPA rule is to remove the word "navigable" from the current Clean Water Act, thereby giving absolute power to the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers over every mud puddle, tire rut, wetland, creek, stream, river, dry wash, seasonable stream, lake, or ocean shore and its rules will supercede all state, or local regulations. If a landowner violates EPA's control over all water in America, he or she could be faced with fines amounting to $75,000 per day ….. per day mind you.

The rule will make it more difficult to farm and ranch and will essentially give the EPA veto power over local land use decisions, even on private property. This is why it is paramount that the people, especially rural landowners, oppose the rule! EPA released the proposed rule at the end of March 2014 and has only allowed a 90-day comment period. If you are interested, please submit your comments to the EPA opposing the new rule by clicking HERE. Time is of the essence.

THE BLM: Many of us witnessed the abuse of power by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) at the Bundy cattle ranch in Nevada, Senator Harry Reid's royal desert stronghold. It was all over the news for a couple of weeks. When the heavily armed BLM SWAT team was faced with a bunch of angry landowners, cowboys and militia, the BLM stood down, thankfully.

But this is just one area in which the out-of-control bureaucracy known as the BLM is exercising dictatorial power over other disputed lands in the West, to the point that an armed cadre of open carry landowners and militia are confronting the BLM along the Red River in Texas. A similar event is occurring in New Mexico.

Once again, the BLM, the EPA, the Department of U. S. Fish and Wildlife, the Forest Service, the National Park Service and the Department of Agriculture are all dancing to the radical environmentalist's agenda. This agenda emanates from the United Nations under the Agenda 21 accord, which the American government, by presidential executive order, codified into American law without a treaty being debated and ratified by the U. S. Congress.

THE DHS: The Department of Homeland Security was formed not long after the airborne terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC. This new cabinet level agency, under the president, combined 22 other government agencies into one giant bureaucracy, employing over 200,000 people with an operating budget of almost $100 Billion. It covers all Immigration and Border Patrol functions, U. S. Customs Service, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services, etc. Its original function was to:

"The mission of the Office will be to develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks. The Office will coordinate the executive branch's efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States."

So why did DHS just purchase 1.5 billion rounds of hollow point bullets and over 7,500 fully automatic assault rifles and is providing armored vehicles and SWAT equipment to major urban police departments around the country and other federal agencies, like the BLM? Was this to fend off a significant terrorist attack, or was this massive weapons build-up to be used against the citizens of the United States who are finally fed up with a Dictatorship by Bureaucracy?

THE IRS: The Internal Revenue Service, another aggressive, out-of-control government agency, viciously collects our money in the form of taxes so that it can feed all these out-of-control dictatorial bureaucracies that pass unconstitutional rules (laws) and eat out our substance and feed millions of illegal aliens with child tax credits.

What these American bureaucracies are doing is exactly what King George III did to the people of the 13 colonies that led to the American Revolution and the birth of freedom. Today, the IRS knows no law but its own and seems to be impervious to independent investigation or congressional oversight. It is a dictatorial power unto itself that Congress and the president allow to exist. It uses that power against the people in violation of due process and other constitutional protections. The income tax law may even be illegal. The President or the Congress show no signs of wanting to either reform or repeal the IRS. They like it just the way it is because it keeps Americans wrapped in invisible chains.

We have barely touched the surface of the federal bureaucracies. Then there are hundreds of local and state bureaucracies. The President's cabinet consists of 15 major bureaucracies and each secretary of each cabinet answers directly to the president. The current president has shown abnormal dictatorial tendencies and it is no wonder that all of his extreme ideologue cabinet secretaries he has appointed, act in a manner that is reflective of those tendencies. But no matter who is president, the U. S. Supreme Court has given all of the federal bureaucracies the power to operate as they see fit and their decisions cannot be challenged. In the last 100 plus years, through unconstitutional legislation from Congress and the President and U. S. Supreme Court decisions, America has been silently converted from a Constitutional Republic into a DICTATORSHIP BY BUREAUCRACY and most of the American people are clueless.

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Ron Ewart, a nationally known author and speaker on freedom and property issues and author of his weekly column, "In Defense of Rural America", is the President of the National Association of Rural Landowners, (NARLO) a non-profit corporation headquartered in Washington State and dedicated to restoring, maintaining and defending property rights for urban and rural landowners. Mr. Ewart is now engaged in a plan to expose the Internal Revenue Service with his website "Attack Watch Spies". He can be reached by e-mail for comment at info@narlo.org or by 'phone at 1 800 682-7848.

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