George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 3 August 2012.]
One way morally malfunctioning politicians play both sides of the street and bamboozle the voters is by passing a law, ordnance, or regulation that satisfies one faction of their supporters, and then tell the other faction punished by such legislation that, wink-wink, it will not be enforced.
A prime example of this is the patchwork of marijuana laws now in effect across the country. The federal government says growing and smoking the weed is illegal, but various state, county, and city laws are also in place that give all kinds of contradictory interpretations of what you can and can’t do. The people are then mollified by the local jurisdictions telling them, off the record of course, what will and will not be enforced. Thereby everyone is supposed to go home, satisfied that their cause is vindicated.
What most people don’t consider is that such seemingly benign and informal policies are actually frameworks for promoting bureaucratic fiefdoms of power and corruption. The people who continue to practice what is now criminalized, with the understanding of the non-enforcement proviso, actually put themselves at the mercy of arbitrary enforcement by the state. You may then later be arrested or otherwise penalized in order to fulfill some agency’s performance quota, or for not conforming to some totally unrelated and extra-legal mandate issued by a bureaucrat.
Another example of this is the recent case of marine biologist Nancy Black being indicted by the Environmental Crimes Division of the Justice Department in a series of obviously trumped up charges in connection with her filming the feeding habits of killer whales (more here). Her prosecution is driven by the government’s ability to apply its ample and little known supply of over-criminalizing laws. Harvey Silvergate’s book Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent details how these ideologically driven travesties work. In it we learn that the staggering stack of laws makes it so that today “our normal daily activities expose us to potential prosecution at the whim of a government official.”
Then there is the politically motivated option to delay enforcement of what later is found to be an inconvenient piece of legislation. By this time we are all familiar with the upcoming tax and regulatory cliff that the country will jump off of next January. A major part of that cliff is the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act of 2011, the law that will cause the layoffs of more than a million workers when it kicks in next year. The existing Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification or WARN law requires that major planned cutbacks must be announced to affected workers at least 60 days in advance of the layoffs.
Hundreds of thousands of defense industry and related government workers will be sequestered into the ranks of the unemployed when we go over the cliff. WARN mandates that big companies like Lockheed, and other affected businesses and agencies, give the 60 days advanced notice so that people can plan their futures. But here comes the problem with that for Team Obama and all liberal Democrats in Washington. The 60 day notice limit falls on November 2nd, four days before the election – not a good time to send out hundreds of thousands of pink slips.
So here is what the administration dirtbags directed their Department of Labor to do – send out a directive telling industry that they don’t have to comply with the WARN act in the event that sequestration will occur. Never mind that the DOL has no power to abrogate a standing piece of legislation. Never mind that companies will still be subject to employee lawsuits if they follow the DOL directive. Screw the workers and bend the law as long as it helps Obama’s re-election. Now tell me that you don’t expect to hear an outcry from Big Labor, or the usual leftwing civil libertarians about all this. No, of course not. (more here)
This is how progressive big governments at all levels deal with their citizens. Their criminalizing laws, arbitrary enforcement policies, and well armed enforcement agencies are all put in place for the convenience of the political elites and bureaucrats, whose powers derive from a confounded and cowed electorate.
My name is Rebane, and I expand on this and related themes in my Union columns and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary with related links is posted. These views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] Heritage Foundation has illustrated the relative sizes of the sequestration budget cuts and their inordinate impact on defense and therefore defense related jobs.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment