Tinfoil Thursday: Prepare for Martial Law!

The president was on television last night, informing the people who don't pay attention that their banks could fail. Fortunately the market is up today, but I'm sure the president succeeded in scaring the "average" people enough that a large down day in the markets will scare the shit out of people.

I was surprised Bush went on the air and mentioned the possibility of more bank failures. While I realize he wanted the "No Banker Left Behind" bailout to go through, he might have cause more harm by waking up the masses to how big our economic problems are.

The people who don't pay attention who scare me, because they are the ones most likely to panic and cause a bank run, or food shortage. They are also easily spooked by stupid things (IE if the Dow dropped by 500 today) rather than stuff that should ring the alarm bells (HELLO, FANNIE AND FREDDIE WERE NATIONALIZED).

Stupid people are typicaly just an annoyance, but stupid people in a panic are downright dangerous. I hope this doesn't sound elitist, because that isn't my intention. It's simply that uninformed and scared is a bad combination to have, especially in large numbers.

Which brings me to the topic for the first edition of Tinfoil Thursday: Martial Law!

The US military is starting domestic tours of duty soon, to act

as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks

Well there is nothing wrong with that right? We can have our soldiers helping us out if there is some 'man made emergency" or whatever the fuck they said.

I suppose one setback to this operation would be that domestic military operations are prohibited by the constitution. From Wikipedia:

The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385) passed on June 16, 1878 after the end of Reconstruction. The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services (the Army, Air Force, and State National Guard forces when such are called into federal service) from exercising nominally state law enforcement police or peace officer powers that maintain "law and order" on non-federal property (states, their counties and municipal divisions) in the former Confederate states.

The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the United States National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The Coast Guard is exempt from the Posse Comitatus Act.

The Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement.

Maybe someone should send them an email or something? Oh wait, the constiution doesn't matter anymore on this issue because of Executive Directive 51. From wikipedia:

The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (National Security Presidential Directive NSPD-51/Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-20, sometimes called simply "Executive Directive 51" for short), signed by United States President George W. Bush on May 4, 2007, is a Presidential Directive which specifies the procedures for continuity of the federal government in the event of a "catastrophic emergency". Such an emergency is construed as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions." [1]

The unclassified portion of the directive was posted on the White House website on May 9, 2007, without any further announcement or press briefings,[2] although Special Assistant to George W. Bush Gordon Johndroe answered several questions on the matter when asked about it by members of the press in early June 2007

So what do you guys think, is having our military here to perform police duties an evil plot to overthrow our Republic, or just a response to chaos that occured during Katrina?