(Update at bottom of post)

Are you ready kids?  (Whenever I say this to the RedLemur, he knows it’s gonna be bad…)

Barry Soetoro, current resident of the White House, has signed an Executive Order directing federal agencies to review regulations and produce a plan for changes to the current regulations based on the best science available.

Bye-bye Congress.

(All emphasis from this point on is the editor’s and is meant to highlight portions that require reading!!!)

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

January 18, 2011

Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review – Executive Order

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to improve regulation and regulatory review, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1.  General Principles of Regulation.  (a)  Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation.  It must be based on the best available science. It must allow for public participation and an open exchange of ideas.  It must promote predictability and reduce uncertainty.  It must identify and use the best, most innovative, and least burdensome tools for achieving regulatory ends.  It must take into account benefits and costs, both quantitative and qualitative.  It must ensure that regulations are accessible, consistent, written in plain language, and easy to understand.  It must measure, and seek to improve, the actual results of regulatory requirements.

(b)  This order is supplemental to and reaffirms the principles, structures, and definitions governing contemporary regulatory review that were established in Executive Order 12866 of September 30, 1993.  As stated in that Executive Order and to the extent permitted by law, each agency must, among other things:  (1) propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that its benefits justify its costs (recognizing that some benefits and costs are difficult to quantify); (2) tailor its regulations to impose the least burden on society, consistent with obtaining regulatory objectives, taking into account, among other things, and to the extent practicable, the costs of cumulative regulations; (3) select, in choosing among alternative regulatory approaches, those approaches that maximize net benefits (including potential economic, environmental, public health and safety, and other advantages; distributive impacts; and equity); (4) to the extent feasible, specify performance objectives, rather than specifying the behavior or manner of compliance that regulated entities must adopt; and (5) identify and assess available alternatives to direct regulation, including providing economic incentives to encourage the desired behavior, such as user fees or marketable permits, or providing information upon which choices can be made by the public.

(c)  In applying these principles, each agency is directed to use the best available techniques to quantify anticipated present and future benefits and costs as accurately as possible.  Where appropriate and permitted by law, each agency may consider (and discuss qualitatively) values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, including equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts.

Sec. 2.  Public Participation.  (a)  Regulations shall be adopted through a process that involves public participation. To that end, regulations shall be based, to the extent feasible and consistent with law, on the open exchange of information and perspectives among State, local, and tribal officials, experts in relevant disciplines, affected stakeholders in the private sector, and the public as a whole.

How did that public participation work out for us on Obamacare, Cap and Trade, and the Net Neutrality?

(b)  To promote that open exchange, each agency, consistent with Executive Order 12866 and other applicable legal requirements, shall endeavor to provide the public with an opportunity to participate in the regulatory process.  To the extent feasible and permitted by law, each agency shall afford the public a meaningful opportunity to comment through the Internet on any proposed regulation, with a comment period that should generally be at least 60 days.  To the extent feasible and permitted by law, each agency shall also provide, for both proposed and final rules, timely online access to the rulemaking docket on regulations.gov, including relevant scientific and technical findings, in an open format that can be easily searched and downloaded.  For proposed rules, such access shall include, to the extent feasible and permitted by law, an opportunity for public comment on all pertinent parts of the rulemaking docket, including relevant scientific and technical findings.

(c)  Before issuing a notice of proposed rulemaking, each agency, where feasible and appropriate, shall seek the views of those who are likely to be affected, including those who are likely to benefit from and those who are potentially subject to such rulemaking.

Sec. 3.  Integration and Innovation.  Some sectors and industries face a significant number of regulatory requirements, some of which may be redundant, inconsistent, or overlapping.  Greater coordination across agencies could reduce these requirements, thus reducing costs and simplifying and harmonizing rules.  In developing regulatory actions and identifying appropriate approaches, each agency shall attempt to promote such coordination, simplification, and harmonization.  Each agency shall also seek to identify, as appropriate, means to achieve regulatory goals that are designed to promote innovation.

Sec. 4.  Flexible Approaches.  Where relevant, feasible, and consistent with regulatory objectives, and to the extent permitted by law, each agency shall identify and consider regulatory approaches that reduce burdens and maintain flexibility and freedom of choice for the public. These approaches include warnings, appropriate default rules, and disclosure requirements as well as provision of information to the public in a form that is clear and intelligible.

I wouldn’t have expected anything less from the poseur in the White House who really truly believes he knows better than you or your elected representatives; “identify and consider…freedom of choice for the public.”

Sec. 5.  Science.  Consistent with the President’s Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies,

“Scientific Integrity” (March 9, 2009), and its implementing guidance, each agency shall ensure the objectivity of any scientific and technological information and processes used to support the agency’s regulatory actions.

Sec. 6.  Retrospective Analyses of Existing Rules.  (a)  To facilitate the periodic review of existing significant regulations, agencies shall consider how best to promote retrospective analysis of rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them in accordance with what has been learned.  Such retrospective analyses, including supporting data, should be released online whenever possible.

(b)  Within 120 days of the date of this order, each agency shall develop and submit to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs a preliminary plan, consistent with law and its resources and regulatory priorities, under which the agency will periodically review its existing significant regulations to determine whether any such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency’s regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives.

There it is folks; Congress is now irrelevant.

Sec. 7.  General Provisions.  (a)  For purposes of this order, “agency” shall have the meaning set forth in section 3(b) of Executive Order 12866.

(b)  Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) authority granted by law to a department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(c)  This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(d)  This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE,
January 18, 2011.

UPDATE:

A commentor left a note about finding out who is behind the executive orders. I am reposting an article from November 9th, 2010.

Institute for Policy Studies Pushing For Obama Executive Orders

World Net Daily is reporting that a Soros funded group, Institute for Policy Studies believes that ‘Progressives Won!’ and because they only lost three members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, they feel justified in writing as many executive orders as possible and ‘pushing’ Obama to do the right thing and sign them now that the blue-dogs have been eliminated. How’s that for some interesting circular thinking America? You must want progressive mandates because you didn’t vote Nancy and her anti-Constitutional cohorts out. Psychotropic drugs anyone?

Buck Up People…Progressives WON!

Dead weight gone. Good Riddance. The blame for the stalemate to come can now fall squarely where it belongs…on the anti-progressive, anti-democratic, anti-populist Republican members of Congress.

Our work is now finally beginning. The veil of a happy Democratic governing majority is finally lifted. We didn’t have it then; We don’t have it now. But what we do have now is a more solidly progressive bunch of Dems in Congress and a president presumably less encumbered by the false illusion that playing nice will get him a date with the other team.

Let’s throw our support unabashedly behind the Congressional Progressive Caucus and let’s push Obama to finally do the right thing through as many Executive Orders as we can present to him.

(Editor’s Note: Please remember that progressives like Soros and the groups he funds are only one agenda at the table. They aren’t the only ones playing the game of ‘Divide, Conquer, and Pillage America’. My money is still on the international central bankers who, in my opinion, are using the left and the far right to do their dirty work.)

Soros group wants Obama to rule by executive order

Organization cites mid-terms, claims progressives registered victory

NEW YORK – It was progressives who won the mid-term elections, particularly incumbents in a socialist-founded congressional caucus that emerged from last week’s ballots virtually unscathed, boasted an article published by the George Soros-funded Institute for Policy Studies, a Marxist-oriented think-tank in Washington, D.C.

The article recommends that President Obama govern from executive order to push through a progressive agenda.

“Progressives won in the 2010 mid-term elections,” wrote Karen Dolan, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, or IPS, and director of the Cities for Progress and Cities for Peace projects based at the radical organization.

“The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus in the House Democratic Caucus at over 80 members, emerged virtually unscathed, losing only three members,” she wrote, in the piece published on the IPS website.

“By contrast, the conservative Blue Dog Democratic caucus was more than sliced in half from 54 members to only 26. Further, of the 34 conservative Dems who voted against Obama’s Healthcare Reform, a mere 12 won re-election,” she wrote.

Dolan declared that “our work is now finally beginning.”

“The veil of a happy Democratic governing majority is finally lifted. We didn’t have it then; We don’t have it now. But what we do have now is a more solidly progressive bunch of Dems in Congress and a president presumably less encumbered by the false illusion that playing nice will get him a date with the other team.”

She went on to recommend that progressives “throw our support unabashedly behind the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and let’s push Obama to finally do the right thing through as many Executive Orders as we can present to him.”

WND reported the Congressional Progressive Caucus was founded by the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA.

Institute for Policy Studies

• America’s oldest leftwing think tank
• Has long supported Communist and anti-American causes around the world

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) was founded in 1963 as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization with seed money (derived from a fortune made in cosmetics sales under the Faberge trade name) from the Samuel Rubin Foundation. Samuel Rubin (1901-1978) was a Russian Bolshevik and the father of Cora Weiss, who headed the Samuel Rubin Foundation from its inception and is currently the principal financier of IPS. Weiss’ husband, Peter, is Chairman of the IPS Board of Trustees. He is also a member of the National Lawyers Guild and the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, both of which were created as Communist Party fronts. The Weisses selected Richard J. Barnet and Marcus Raskin to be the first co-directors of IPS, with the aim of transforming the United States by altering public attitudes, changing laws, and reversing foreign policy through an Academy that reached every nexus of the national nervous system.

Throughout its history, IPS has committed itself to the task of advancing leftist causes. It worked with agents of the Castro regime and championed environmentalist and anti-war positions in the 1960s and 1970s; it declared against the Reagan administration’s efforts to roll back communism in the 1980s; it joined the vanguard of what IPS hailed as the “anti-corporate globalization movement” in the 1990s; and it furnished policy research assailing the U.S.-led war in Iraq during the George W.Bush administraion.

IPS’s Washington, DC headquarters quickly became a resource center for national reporters and a place for KGB agents from the nearby Soviet embassy to convene and strategize. Cora Weiss headed one of the IPS’s most successful forays — into Riverside Church in Manhattan. She was invited there in 1978 by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin to run the church’s Disarmament Program, which sought to consolidate Soviet nuclear superiority in Europe — in the name of “peace.” In 1982 Weiss helped organize the largest pro-disarmament demonstration ever held. Staged in New York City, the rally was attended by a coalition of communist organizations. During her decade-long tenure at Riverside, which became home to the National Council of Churches, Weiss regularly received Russian KGB agents, Sandinista friends, and Cuban intelligence agents. Weiss became infamous for her role in the psychological warfare conducted against U.S. prisoners-of-war held in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” during the Vietnam War.

Beginning in 1964 (and continuing to the present day), IPS held seminars designed to persuade U.S. congressmen and their assistants to support socialist ideals. These included “Housing and Property” seminars that pushed for preferential mortgage-lending policies favoring blacks and other minorities who were underrepresented among homeowners. One such seminar in 1969 – which brought together speakers from big-city tenants councils, neighborhood legal services, FHA insurance, savings-and-loans entities, and the Shannon and Luchs Realty Company – was among the earliest in a long chain of events that would eventually lead to the U.S. housing crisis four decades later. Also in 1969, IPS conducted “Experimental Education” seminars for federal legislators and their aides; a notable guest speaker at these events was Bill Ayers.

The Liberation News Service, which became a news source for hundreds of “alternative” publications nationwide (with Marxist-oriented perspectives), was founded in 1967 with IPS assistance.

The Center for Security Studies was a 1974 IPS spinoff and strove to compromise the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence agencies. The mastheads of two anti-FBI and anti-CIA publications, Counterspy and the Covert Action Information Bulletin, were heavy with IPS members.

The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) was begun in 1971 by IPS fellow Joe Stork, who is now a Director with Human Rights Watch. The magazine Mother Jones was founded in 1975 by the IPS spinoff, Foundation for National Progress. In These Times, established in 1976 as a leftwing tabloid, was financed by IPS until 1982.

Also spawned by IPS were: (a) the North American Congress on Latin America, created in 1966 as a New Left intelligence-gathering agency; (b) the Holland-based Transnational Institute, a major source of anti-American, anti-capitalist literature; (c) the Institute for Food and Development Policy (a.k.a. Food First), which has spent years finding fault with the quality of America’s food gifts to the Third World and helped give rise to Medea Benjamin’s organization, Global Exchange; (d) the Data Center in Oakland, a major database that cross-indexes the annual reports of more than 1,000 corporations to detect any signs of incipient monopoly; (e) the Institute for Southern Studies, which has compiled a similar database on more than 400 Southern corporations; (f) the Council on Economic Priorities, which received IPS money with a view to exposing corporate skullduggery and passing judgment on companies’ social conscience; and (g) the Interfaith Council on Corporate Responsibility.

In 1978 Brian Crozier, the director of the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, once said: “The IPS is the perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.”

IPS has long been linked, either through funding or through its leadership, to many of the Left’s most prominent anti-war groups in the United States. Among these are the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE); Fellowship of Reconciliation; Promoting Enduring Peace; and Business Executives for National Security. Moreover, IPS is a member organization of the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, and it endorsed a May 1, 2003 document titled “10 Reasons Environmentalists Oppose an Attack on Iraq,” which was published by Environmentalists Against War. In 2003 it was reported that IPS, in conjunction with the National Organization for Women, was making some of its Washington DC office space available (at no charge) to the feminist antiwar organization Code Pink, headed by Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans.

IPS has consistently tried to derail American efforts to combat Communism. In 1985, for instance, as President Reagan pressed Congress to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, IPS fellow Peter Kornbluh arranged for Senators John Kerry and Tom Harkin to fly to Managua to meet with Communist Sandinista leaders. Convinced by the Kerry-Harkin report on the allegedly happy atmosphere in Managua, Congress denied the funds, though it reversed itself a few weeks later when Sandinista President Daniel Ortega met with his Soviet friends in the Kremlin.

The consistently anti-American positions adopted by IPS are frequently expressed in tandem with condemnations of Israel. In February 2005, for instance, IPS Fellow Phyllis Bennis published a commentary depicting the United States as a cynical manipulator seeking only to extract favorable deals for its ally, Israel, no matter how negatively they might affect Palestinians. Bennis further denounced Israel for its efforts to “demolish Palestinian homes”; its “assassination policy” (a reference to the targeted killings of Palestinian terrorist leaders); and its “land-grab known as the Apartheid Wall” (a reference to the anti-terror security fence designed to stem the tide of suicide bombers from the West Bank).

Central to the IPS worldview is the think tank’s unyielding opposition to free markets particularly, and to capitalism broadly. Viewing capitalism as a breeding ground for “unrestrained greed,” IPS seeks, through its reports and programs, to provide a corrective to “unrestrained markets and individualism.” One such initiative is the Global Economy Project, overseen by Sarah Anderson and IPS Director John Cavanagh, which seeks to: (a) undercut the Free Trade Area of the Americas; (b) foment grassroots resentment against the World Trade Organization; (c) incite opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement; and (d) promote “economic alternatives” to globalization.

In their 2004 book Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible, John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander (President of the IPS Board of Directors and a longtime critic of globalization) contend that capitalism is “a system in crisis,” and they appeal to “an alliance of leading activists, scholars, economists, researchers, and writers” to take up the ideological cudgel against globalization.

In Target America — James L. Tyson’s 1981 expose of the Soviet Union’s massive “propaganda campaign designed to weaken and demoralize America from the inside”[1] — the author stated that IPS fellow Saul Landau had “figured prominently” in “anti-intelligence activity and elsewhere in the work of the Far-Left Lobby.” Tyson revealed that Landau, in a letter to a friend in Cuba, once wrote: “I think that at age 40 the time has come to dedicate myself to narrower pursuits, namely, making propaganda for American Socialism … we cannot any longer just help out third world movements and revolutions, although obviously we shouldn’t turn our backs on them, but get down to the more difficult job of bringing the message home.” On other occasions, Landau advocated on behalf of “Revolutionary Socialism.”[2] Now an author and filmmaker, Landau remains an IPS senior fellow to this day.

IPS professes an unquestioning faith in the righteousness of the United Nations, as evidenced by its “New Internationalism” project, which was introduced in 1996 and is directed by Phyllis Bennis. Working in concert with the Congressional Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus, this project seeks to hamstring American foreign policy and bring it under the control of the UN. In recent years, this IPS project has condemned NATO military intervention in the former Yugoslavia; denounced the “unilaterally imposed” U.S.-British no-fly-zones in Iraq; sought to spark public opposition to pre-war economic sanctions against Iraq; attempted to align U.S. policy toward Israel more closely with the ritually critical stance of the UN; and impugned unilateralism in combating terror, viewing it as hostile to the function of the United Nations.

A corollary of the New Internationalism campaign advises European nations to assume a more assertive role in the Middle East. Toward that, IPS contends, European nations must “challenge more directly U.S. control of the diplomatic process.” Underlying this proposal is the core IPS belief that the United States is itself a rogue nation that poses a grave threat to international peace and stability. Phyllis Bennis made this point succinctly in a July 2004 article wherein she asked, “Haven’t we — and the rest of the world — had enough of Washington’s rogue behavior?”

Similar sentiments are purveyed by the Institute’s in-house team of scholars, which in recent years has featured such radical activists as Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Gore Vidal, Norman Birnbaum, and Richard Falk.

One of the more notable figures in IPS history is Robert Borosage, who served as the organization’s Director from 1979 to 1988.

Financial support for IPS comes from such foundations as the Ford Foundation, the Ploughshares Fund, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Arca Foundation, the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, the Compton Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the Energy Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Foundation for Deep Ecology, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Turner Foundation, and many others.

Notes:

[1] James L. Tyson, Target America (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1981), p. 2.
[2] Ibid., pp. 201, 209.

The GOP aren't the only ones we will be watching...

(H/T BB)