Not Satisfied With Private Industry Power Grabs, Obama Also Wants Land

This shit keeps up, and we’ll have a Serfdom instead of a Democratic Republic.
From Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican.

A secret administration memo has surfaced revealing plans for the federal government to seize more than 10 million acres from Montana to New Mexico, halting job- creating activities like ranching, forestry, mining and energy development. Worse, this land grab would dry up tax revenue that’s essential for funding schools, firehouses and community centers.

Obama could enact the plans in this memo with just the stroke of a pen, without any input from the communities affected by it.

At a time when our national unemployment rate is 9.7 percent, it is unbelievable anyone would be looking to stop job-creating energy enterprises, yet that’s exactly what’s happening.

The document lists 14 properties that, according to the document, “might be good candidates” for Obama to nab through presidential proclamation. Apparently, Washington bureaucrats believe it’s more important to preserve grass and rocks for birdwatchers and backpackers than to keep these local economies thriving.

Both Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter did the same thing, mostly to seize land, create “national monuments”, and prevent the development of energy sources:

Using the Antiquities Act, Carter locked up more land than any other president had before him, taking more than 50 million acres in Alaska despite strong opposition from the state.

Clinton used the authority 22 times to prohibit hunting, recreational vehicles, mining, forestry and even grazing in 5.9 million acres scattered around the country. The law allowed him to single-handedly create 19 new national monuments and expand three others without consulting anyone.

One of the monuments Clinton created was the Grande Staircase-Escalante in Utah, where 135,000 acres of land were leased for oil and gas and about 65,000 barrels of oil were produced each year from five active wells. But, Clinton put an end to developing those resources.

Obama could do the same in other energy-rich places unless Congress takes action. At least 13.5 million acres are already on his Department of Interior’s real estate shopping list.

This includes a 58,000-acre area in New Mexico. The memo said this should be done so the lesser prairie chicken and the sand dune lizard will be better protected. Are these animals going extinct? No. The bureaucrats wrote that the land should be locked up to “avoid the necessity of listing either of these species as threatened or endangered.”

That “praire chicken/sand dune lizzard” bullshit reminds me of the snail darter/Endangered Species Act controversy that the government used to delay the Tellico Dam project.

If anything, the government should be selling land off, not locking more up. By voting against my amendment, the Democrats tacitly endorsed Obama’s secret plan to close off millions more acres to commerce.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/02/white-house-land-grab/

Bottom line: Obama hates commerce anyway. It collides with his socialist ambitions. The best way to stymie free market capitalism and access to our own fuel resources, is to nationalize everything from banks, to auto industry, to insurance corporations, and finally land. Welcome to Stalin’s re-collectivization Part II.