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I read an apocalyptic novel a few months ago. It was placed in the USA, and the core assumption of the novel was that practically every agency in the federal government had armed troops. After sufficient build-up of these forces, one day the President took advantage of some crisis or other to declare martial law. Maybe this was inspired by the fact that lots of unlikely federal agencies do, in fact, have their own armed forces. Some of the stranger ones are: Dept. of Education, Food and Drug Administration, Internal Revenue Service and Post Office.
It was just a story, of course. Though one does wonder just why the Dept. of Education needs guns.
So now comes the CDC, proposing a new regulation. For those of you who are Americans, the CDC is accepting comments until October 14th. Here are some interesting excerpts:
The CDC "may promulgate regulations that provide for the apprehension and examination of any individual reasonably believed to be infected with a quarantinable communicable disease in a qualifying stage."
Understandable, quarantine people who are infectious. By force, if necessary. Only, it continues:
"a 'qualifying stage' means that the communicable disease is in 'a precommunicable stage, if the disease would be likely to cause a public health emergency if transmitted to other individuals' or "a communicable stage."
So, non-infectious people, but still infected? Well, not exactly...
"CDC defines precommunicable stage to mean the stage beginning upon an individual's earliest opportunity for exposure to an infectious agent"
[Continues...]
So you don't have to actually be infected. An "opportunity for exposure" is sufficient. They want the authority to forcefully quarantine anyone who may have been exposed to a disease. Considering the Zika virus, this would presently include a large portion of the population of Florida, as well as anyone who has been there recently.
Should they apprehend someone, what happens then? Well...
"...quarantine, isolation, conditional release, medical examination, hospitalization, vaccination, and treatment ... the individual's consent shall not be considered as a prerequisite to any exercise of any authority under this part."
If you disagree with an action they take, you can appeal, of course. Your appeal must be in writing, and sent to the CDC. The CDC will review their own action and "issue a written response to an appeal, which shall constitute final agency action.".
I do understand that unusual circumstances may require unusual actions. However, the CDC has somehow existed a long time without this regulation, a regulation that would explicitly authorize them to apprehend, detain and treat anyone, anytime, anywhere within the US, without that person's consent. So...why do they need this?
Since consent is not required, it is implicit that they will have to create an internal force to make apprehensions and enforce quarantines. So yet another federal department will have its own, private armed force. Maybe that apocalyptic novel wasn't so far fetched after all...
(Score: 5, Informative) by bradley13 on Sunday September 11 2016, @03:32PM
The Dept. of Education may not call them SWAT teams, but that doesn't mean that they don't have guns. According to the government itself, as of 2017, the Dept. of Education has formed a "student aid enforcement unit" [ed.gov]. This seems to be an example of an enforcement action that they carried out. [heritage.org]
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday September 12 2016, @12:45AM
From the second link.
Federal agents for the Education Department's inspector general executed a very broad search warrant and seized paperwork and a personal computer. Wright says the law enforcement agents -- who reportedly included 13 with the Education Department and one or two Stockton police officers -- told him they were investigating his estranged wife's use of federal aid for students. But she doesn't even live in his house.
Meh. This sounds like just typical government thuggery and incompetence. Here I was expecting them to be rounding up students with unpaid loans for the FEMA concentration camps.
This struck me as hilarious:
If these agencies occasionally have a legitimate need for force to execute a warrant, they should be required to call a real law enforcement agency, one that has a better sense of perspective.
There is a law enforcement agency with even any sense of perspective?
The below can be safely tl;dr'ed. I have my turquoise-painted titanium carbide beanie [soylentnews.org] on now, so disregard everything I just typed while under moon matrix control:
I was clicking around on Rationalwiki (yeah, bat country) last week and saw a mention of the fact that the CDC actually does have the power to round people up for concentration camps while FEMA actually doesn't. So I was thinking my conspiracy theory that puts the FEMA concentration camps at around 2019 or so needed some kind of superbug, but I didn't think Zika would quite cut it.
The dynamics of it all might pan out, though. I mean, when GRID (HIV/AIDS) was discovered, everybody was all “meh” 'cause I mean it's just gays and druggies dying, so who cares? But here comes a virus that screws with the ultimate meaning of life, producing healthy offspring, and it might just do the trick.
So, given this article, I would like to amend my conspiracy theory. TPP/TTIP get rerolled with TISA into something else, which gets ratified mid to late 2017 in response to a massive stock market crash a few weeks after Clinton's sworn in. Riots in every major city in 2018, which causes resources that would have been spent fighting Zika to fail to come into place. During the riots, there is a massive outbreak in August 2018 due to a failure to contain mosquitoes. This causes the CDC late 2018/early 2019 to begin rounding people up as a containment strategy and putting them in the FEMA concentration camps. BRICS moves away from the US dollar while all that's happening, leading to martial law, the suspension of the elections in 2020, and the beginnings of World War 3.