Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Obama Czars Operate Out of Sight : Out of Sight Out of Mind

This just one more dark side of Mr Obama that he doesn't want anyone to know about or see even though a lot of people in and out of government know what he is doing but are intentionally allowing it to continue. The reasons vary - fear of retaliation forcing acquiescence is the largest. Many of course are in complete agreement with the agenda of totalitarian government controls.

Major among the willing to make the Czars function out of sight is the main stream press. Nothing to see here.

This is only a part of a larger article but still conveys the message of a government that has made the citizens enemies of the state. This was the plan from the start.

Cracking the Czars
By J.R. Dunn

As expected, Obama's second term has deteriorated into a welter of scandals unmatched by any previous administration, including those of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Watergate was a minor scandal that simply grew amid the hothouse of D.C. politics and media, while most of the Clinton scandals involved either skirt or money grabbing. The Obama scandals uniquely strike at the heart of American democracy, based as they are on Obama's attempt to transform the nation to reflect his Augustan image of himself.

The scandals have not yet had the impact they should, due largely to media manipulation, public inertia, and serious fumbling among Republicans and conservatives -- for instance, Darryl Issa allowing the odious Lois Lerner 5th Amendment protection she was not entitled to.

The only solution is to continue the pressure. Watergate required nearly eighteen months of simmering before it boiled over. The same is likely to be true here. This leads us to the question as to why one of the most potentially fertile fields for administration scandal, the Obama czars, has been so far overlooked.

As with everything else, the concept of the czar -- extra-constitutional public officials hired by the Executive branch to spearhead particular efforts on an emergency basis -- has been abused by Obama. Czars go back to FDR's "dollar-a-year" men appointed to oversee various aspects of the war effort. The concept was revived in the 1960s to attack drug abuse, presented as a crisis situation not amenable to ordinary solutions.

In truth, the "drug czars" were no more than a PR gimmick. Drug smuggling could have been (and still could be) shut down utilizing already existing resources. This has not been done for a number of reasons, including relations with Mexico, criminal infiltration of law enforcement and politics, and the fact that many leading political families - the Kennedys and Gores, for example -- have drug addicts in their ranks. It would be going too far to assert that thousands have died, a criminal class has been nurtured, and American cities crippled to assure that David Kennedy had a steady supply of heroin and cocaine, but that factor can't be overlooked either.

The drug czars were a method of making it appear that something was being done without actually going to any real effort. This remained true as the concept was expanded to include other "intractable problems" such as race relations, health care, and housing. By Bill Clinton's term, their number had expanded to eight, not a single one of whom is on record as having accomplished anything.

In his genius for sleaze, Obama saw something else in the position of "czar": a means of overcoming the limitations of the system of checks and balances that would enable him to carry out programs under the radar and without oversight by Congress -- or anyone else either. The czars were tailor-made for Obama's cards-in-sleeve method of government. A more fitting example of the perils of monkeying with the constitutional order could not be devised.

Obama has applied the concept of czar with alacrity unknown to previous administrations. He began with 32, shortly expanded to 39, and thereafter to the mid-40s. The numbers have shifted but have always remained within that range. 

How many are there now? That's difficult to say. So opaque is the cloak of bureaucratic secrecy surrounding these positions that there is no complete, accurate, and up-to-date list of Obama czars active in 2013. The administration has played a consistent game of three-card monte all down the line, abolishing some positions only to reestablish them under other names, consolidating some into a single position while spinning off others, and every other conceivable bureaucratic trick.

What have the Obama czars accomplished? We don't know. They don't report to anybody (except perhaps the Chicago Augustus himself). They don't testify before Congress. They don't publish. We don't know how many personnel are involved, or who they might be. We don't know how much has been spent by them, and on what. We don't know, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, what we don't know.

We do know the names (well, some of them). While a few are well-known figures of weight and achievement such as Paul Volcker and Ashton Carter, most are political and academic hacks of the progressive type who share in Obama's vaporous ideals and, much like him, have never directed or managed anything in their lives.

And like their master, a number of them have been involved in scandals.


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/cracking_the_czars.html#ixzz2bHmJwbj9
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