Obama escalate Security Preparedness

Quietly, and with little fanfare, President Obama signed a “National Defense Resources Preparedness” Executive Order on Friday. As the name suggests, the order intends to shore up the country’s national defense resources in advance of a national emergency.

To be fair, this is not the first time that such an order has been written. Presidents Bush (II), Clinton, Reagan, and even Eisenhower provided directives in the same spirit as President Obama’s order– providing some level of government commandeering in times of national emergency.

In the past, these orders have related to things like production capacity for defense contractors, or giving FEMA authority to resolve disputes between other departments in federally designated emergency areas.

President Obama’s order, however, takes things much, much further.

The order vastly expands the role of Homeland Security.
DHS now has authority to direct the emergency preparedness of every other government department. The Secretary of Homeland Security has effectively become the Emergency Czar.
He will have oversight of “all other national defense programs, including civil defense and continuity of Government.”

The order further provides for an effective nationalization of the entire US economy in the event of an emergency.
The Secretary of Labor, for example, will “collect and maintain data necessary to make a continuing appraisal of the Nation’s workforce needs for purposes of national defense” and then “formulate plans, programs, and policies for meeting the labor requirements of actions to be taken for national defense purposes.”
The purpose of this order, for example, is to “take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology, for national defense requirements;”
It goes on to list ‘adequate resources’:
(i) “all forms of energy including petroleum, gas (both natural and manufactured), electricity, solid fuels… solar, wind, other types of renewable energy, atomic energy”, etc.
(ii) “all usable water, from all sources, within the jurisdiction of the United States, that can be managed, controlled, and allocated to meet emergency requirements…”
(iii) “all commodities and products… that are capable of being ingested by either human beings or animals…”
(iv) “drugs, biological products, medical devices, materials, facilities, health supplies, services and equipment required to diagnose, mitigate or prevent the impairment of, improve, treat, cure, or restore the physical or mental health conditions of the population.”
Obama’s executive order puts all of these resources under control of the government and allocates them exclusively to meet the needs of government.

Furthermore, NSA’s new Utah spy center will collect and archive the complete contents of every email, tweet, Facebook post, Google search, phone call, and text message.

Is the US Government getting ready for something nasty coming?

Italy's Heritage

Few years ago a UNESCO report was proudly announced in Italy as a further proof of the cultural and artistic leadership of the country, according to UNESCO almost half of the entire world's artistic and cultural heritage was in Italy, a concentration of art, archeological sites, museums, landmark buildings that has no comparison abroad.
If properly managed the Italian heritage could be a gold mine for the battered Italian economy.
Italian government has decided to act on the state of mismanagement and decay affecting the country's heritage appointing Mario Resca former boss of McDonald’s in Italy in charge of 3,600-odd government-run museums and archaeological sites.
Mario Resca is at the same time in the Board of the Mondadori Group and Eni Spa.
He declared that he wants to start with a marketing, revenue generating promotion of our heritage.
Italy’s heritage is badly managed. Some of its museums are unwelcoming places with poor facilities. The most popular, the Uffizi in Florence, came only 21st in a 2007 World Ranking with just 1.6m visits and the 2008 ranking is even worst with only the Vatican Museum (not managed by the Italian Government) making among the top world museums (see table above) . Yet attractions that are more popular are not necessarily well conserved. The ruins of Pompeii drew 2.6m visitors in 2007, but such is the dilapidation at the site that the government has declared a state of emergency.
Civil Protection (the equivalent of FEMA in USA) had to intervene to simply manage the site and even more incredible was its intervention in the restoration process of a statue in Florence.
Since the government and local authorities are unable to manage on a normal basis any public service due to red tape, bribery and sloppiness the only solution for prompt and deadlined interventions is to declare it by decree a national emergency, then Civil Protection can intervene, use the emergency funds and solve the mess in a certain and short time.