Defense

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?

Spanish Army delinquent on its weapon purchases

El Pais is reporting how the Spanish Army is in arrears of payments for its latest toys and is at risk of not being able to pay at all.


Just wondering how the repo men will seize the assets this time, will they recruit mercenaries or send the Marines!




Translation from Spanish below:

The overall bill called special weapons' programs includes 19 weapons systems that mostly incorporate new technologies - totals 30 billion, around 3% of Spanish GDP, of which Defence has so far paid just under 5 billion.

Companies should be paid the remaining 26 billion in instalments until 2025, but defense officials themselves acknowledge that this is impossible without a drastic increase in the budget, which is unthinkable given that Spain has set a priority to reduce the deficit 6% at the end of this year and 3% in 2013 (with 2010 data, the deficit of all government is 9.2% of GDP).

Already this year the Ministry of Defence has been in serious trouble to meet their obligations.

Defence sources said they would not have enough money even if there were no additional expenditures through 2025.

In his appearance before Congress last October to present the budget for this year, Secretary of State for Defence, Constantino Mendez , already referred in the starkest terms to the situation: "We should not have purchased weapons we are not going to use for scenarios of confrontation that do not exist and, more seriously, with money that we did not have then and do not have now."