Obama Is Seizing Thousands of Square Miles of Land

A large part of his or any anti-freedom agenda is the confiscation of wealth and property from the private sector and Obama is leaving no stone unturned in his want to do so.

CFact is reporting on just one of his parting shot land grabs: the “Endangered Species Act” (ESA).  Once again, Obama and his corrupt White House machine are locking Congress out of the legislative process by using the ethereal power of executive orders (pen and phone). He has ordered the like-minded autocrats at the Interior Department to get busy rewriting and making new rules and regulations to further strengthen the ESA – and weaken us.

We all know the ESA was originally enacted to, of course, protect America’s endangered species. A laudable goal to be sure but, constitutionally, not the federal government’s job. In fact, strictly speaking, no “interior improvements” are constitutional. Still, protecting our furry and feathered friends from extinction is a fine thing.

But this is not the  progressive vision of the ESA. The statists at the Department of the Interior (DOI) are in charge of federal lands. They have morphed the ESA into just another vehicle by which the feds can confiscate more and more state and private property. They decide which species are “endangered” and as luck would have it, many “endangered” species just happen to reside on land which could otherwise be used to drill and extract dirty, Earth-polluting fossil fuels, build a pipeline or a border fence.

So in order to save the red headed parasitic sidewinder Beetle (not a real bug – I think) from utter annihilation, the DOI, through the ESA, declares the habit of the Beetle off limits. By sheer coincidence the bug’s habitat extends for thousands of square miles over gazillions of cubic feet of oil and gas in the Western United States. Now this entire area is magically declared federally protected land. Pretty neat trick, eh?

How can they get away with these land grabs? Easy – by revising the rules for determining what is “endangered.” Prior to the rule changes, a species was listed as threatened or endangered based on the “best scientific and commercial data available.”

But the Obamunists added that, “the principles of conservation biology” are now to be included in the data. Conservation biology “puts emphasis on biodiversity and sustainability over time. It is concerned only with plant and animal habitat and does not consider human use of the land.” In other words – it’s Enviro-weenie Pseudo-science which places man at the bottom of their list of concerns.

With the addition of “Conservation biology” the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) may now not only deem the red headed Beetle’s current habitat off limits but any habitat the FWS guesses the Beetle may roam to in the future. All are to be included in an endangered or threatened species’ “critical habitat.”

Further the FWS “has determined that critical habitat can include temporary or periodic habitat, ephemeral habitat, potential habitat, and migratory habitat, even if that habitat is currently unusable by the species.”

And just so there is no doubt who is really in charge, the FWS has unilaterally decided that it will no longer publish the text, legal descriptions or Geographical Information System (GIS) coordinates for critical habitats. It’s just too much trouble to alert the public and land owners that the feds have confiscated their land.

Not even a Communist regime could devise a better or more devious confiscation scheme. But I guess the use of the term ‘Communist’ and the ‘Obama administration’ is becoming redundant.