The government’s secret war on you
By Tom Quiner
The Obama Government colluded with private interests to wipe out a politically-incorrect industry.
Details were provided by the Wall Street Journal in their Saturday edition. According to the Journal, a leftwing environmental group, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), was allowed to write new anti-coal regulations for the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Clean Air Task Force and Sierra Club were also involved.
True to form for this administration, e-mail communications between the EPA and the NRDC were transmitted from private e-mail servers in an attempt to hide their collusion.
The new EPA regulations have the intent of wiping out the coal industry, which the Obama administration insists causes global warming. The regulations accomplish by bureaucratic edict what liberal elites were unable to accomplish legislatively as mandated by the Constitution.
The intent of the Obama Government’s secret e-mails was to evade the law, according to Jeff Holmstead, a former EPA assistant administrator in the Bush Administration:
“I’ve been involved with EPA regulations for more than 25 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this before. It is remarkable that a senior official would use a private email account to evade federal law and secretly give an outside group a seat at the table when regulations are being developed.”
This non-scandal (since the mainstream media isn’t interested in the story) is a microcosm of the American malaise. The federal government not only doesn’t work, it pits itself against the interest of the citizens it claims to represent.
Just ask any coal miner how they feel about this story.
These secret e-mails come on the heals of revelations earlier this year of Hillary Clinton’s decision to keep her e-mails on private servers when she was Secretary of State, and then destroy them when they became a political liability.
In light of this scandal you would think that every official since Ms. Clinton would bend over backwards to honor the legality and ethics of only using e-mail on official government servers. You would be wrong.
Current Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, had to admit that he has conducted official business on private servers.
A half dozen scandals ago, the IRS flagrantly targeted conservative groups by blocking their applications to form 501(c) corporations.
One such group was a pro life group here in Iowa, Coalition for Life of Iowa. Their president, Sue Martinek, said the IRS insisted that they must give up their First Amendment rights before their application would be granted:
Susan Martinek testifies before Congress.
“In June of 2009, Ms. Richards [an IRS agent] told me verbally that we needed to send in a letter with the entire board’s signatures stating that under penalty of perjury we would not picket/protest or organize groups to picket/protest outside of Planned Parenthood. Upon receiving such a letter, she indicated that the IRS would allow our application to go through.
That didn’t make sense. Why would we – as volunteers in a charitable organization – be required to surrender our First Amendment rights as a condition of 501(c)(3) approval? Why was the IRS protecting Planned Parenthood (a multi-million dollar government-funded behemoth), against our small Iowa prayer group (operating on less than $5000 a year in revenues?) We had done nothing wrong. We had not indicated that we would do anything but peaceably assemble and hold up signs like “Stop abortion” and “Pray to end abortion.” No graphic images, no heckling, no disruption; just respectful behavior on public property.
So we sent a follow-up letter to the IRS, respectfully requesting where in the Form 1023 or elsewhere it stated we could not protest at Planned Parenthood. The IRS never answered our question.”
True to protocol for this administration, the servers housing IRS e-mail communications were destroyed.
Let me leave you with this: defense of our homeland is a legitimate role of the federal government. And yet the Obama Government uses PC speech in addressing the issue, tip toeing around the words ‘Islamic terrorism.’
A majority of Americans view our federal government as the problem, not the solution. Elites who control the levers of power dance around Constitutional checks and balances and separation of powers to impose their will on the little guy, whether he likes it or not.
From Little Nuns of the Poor in Colorado who are compelled to embrace contraception, which they consider a grave evil, to coal miners in West Virginia who are compelled to relinquish their livelihood, Americans are losing their freedoms.
That a politician like Donald Trump isn’t booed off a stage is a reflection of the government’s secret war on you. Only it’s not so secret. Trump’s sneering putdowns of our Big Government resonate with a lot people who fear what it has become.