Channeling 1984

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”  - Orwell/1984

When never ending war is combined with a perpetual state of emergency, you have a nation falling apart, something we see when driving over roads filled with potholes, seeing bridges rusting out and watching manufacturing jobs being sent overseas, never to return. On the emergency end of things, USA Today has it covered.

A post-9/11 state of national emergency declared by President George W. Bush — and renewed six times by President Obama — forms the legal basis for much of the war on terror.

Tuesday, President Obama informed Congress he was extending another Bush-era emergency for another year, saying "widespread violence and atrocities" in the Democratic Republic of Congo "pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States."

Those emergencies, declared by the president by proclamation or executive order, give the president extraordinary powers — to seize property, call up the National Guard and hire and fire military officers at will.

It gets better:

In his six years in office, President Obama has declared nine emergencies, allowed one to expire and extended 22 emergencies enacted by his predecessors.emerge.

Change we can believe in, right and we haven't even talked about the secretive TPP.

People are questioning the deal big time, both on the left as well as the right and it's about time.

 To try to block fast track and the TPP, liberal groups and labor unions are not organizing only among their own but are also reaching across the spectrum to conservatives skeptical of fast track and TPP. This left-right alliance has been duly noted in recent months. What has gone underappreciated, though, is just how much the opponents of the trade deals on the left are appealing to the right very much on the right’s own terms. After years of ridiculing the Tea Party movement’s talk of Obama as an autocrat on issues such as immigration and health care, the left is now pushing those very buttons on trade, noting that fast track would give Obama vast powers and that the TPP would create a new international arbitration panel where corporations could challenge local, state, and national laws. Some left-leaning advocates are going so far as to link the trade issue to the conservative litany of Obama outrages: the IRS scrutiny of Tea Party groups, Benghazi, and the “Fast and Furious” gun-running fiasco, among others.