Is there a pattern? Obama’s Executive Order: Permanent War Economy
March 16, 2012 President Obama issued a creepy Executive Order.
Entitled “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” it authorizes the President and cabinet officials to take over crucial aspects of the national economy not only during emergencies but also in peacetime.
The order relies on a Korean War-era statute, the Defense Production Act of 1950, to further entwine the domestic industrial economy with the military. It talks of fostering “cooperation between the defense and commercial sectors.”
The stated purpose is to strengthen “the domestic industrial and technological base” so as “to ensure it is capable of responding to the national defense needs of the United States.”
This amounts to putting the economy on permanent war footing, even when there isn’t an emergency.
For instance, the Executive Order talks of the need for the economic base “to satisfy [defense] requirements in peacetime and times of national emergency.” And cabinet officials are authorized to “issue regulations to prioritize and allocate resources . . . to promote the national defense, under both emergency and non-emergency conditions.”
It amounts to a sweeping reassertion of Presidential authority. It reasserts the President’s authority “to require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders . . . to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders.”
http://www.progressive.org/permanent_war_economy.html
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I rather suspect the actual executive order isn't at issue.
"Peacetime" occurs thrice. The problematic one is that the executive branch is to *assess* peacetime production capacity. Not "seize" or "control" or even just "monitor." "Assess."
And its to take appropriate actions. This may seem threatening--after, imposing martial law, rounding up the population on trains and putting everybody in concentration camps may be viewed as actions that Mr. Obama can easily think are appropriate. (One has to wonder about that person's perceptions of the President, but I'm not a psychologist. 
"Appropriate action may include restricting contract solicitations to reliable sources, restricting contract solicitations to domestic sources (pursuant to statutory authority), stockpiling critical components, and developing substitutes for critical components or critical technology items."
Ooh. The horro of it all. Restricting contracts to reliable sources, that tool of repressive dictators everywhere. Just using domestic sources--how nationalistic, nay, jingoistic--something Hitler would have done! And stockpiling--another word for hording, creating artificial scarcities in order to make it easier to shove us into concentration camps and starve us. Or even developing substitutes for critical components. Why, the vile, loathsome reptilian creature.
Then again, I had a nice translation gig because Pratt and Whitney had to have a backup production facility for the Russian RD-180 rocket engine because it would be used to launch US government satellites. All those Russian-language documents had to be translated so that P&W would comply with the (pre-Obama) requirement for having or developing substitutes for critical components.
There are three really big problems with the article.
1. The article shows unnecessary hostility and ill-will towards the President. It fails to motivate that hostility.
2. The article picks and chooses words from the EO and fails to put them in their proper context.
3. The article picks and chooses words from the EO and fails to put them in their proper context.
Yes, I know 2 and 3 are the same thing, but it's such a *big* point that I thought it was worth mentioning twice. (Okay--who am I paraphrasing?) For example, "national emergency" is taken to mean "war." It has a definition. "War" is part of it. Whole-part fallacies aren't my specialty, but at least I can recognize them sometimes.
This is probably from the same people that think that the US's assessment of the national security threat from global warming is a good thing, or that the reliance on overseas sources of alkali rare earth metals like lithium or transition metals like neodymium is a good thing.
