Fascist America: I Live in a Constitution Free Zone...And You Probably Do Too

ACLU Assails 100-Mile Border Zone as 'Constitution-Free'

Government agents should not have the right to stop and question Americans anywhere without suspicion within 100 miles of the border, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday, pointing attention to the little known power of the federal government to set up immigration checkpoints far from the nation's border lines.

The government has long been able to search people entering and exiting the country without need to say why, which is known as the border search exception of the Fourth Amendment.

"It is a classic example of law enforcement powers expanding far beyond their proper boundaries – in this case, literally,” said Caroline Fredrickson, who heads the ACLU's Washington, D.C., Legislative Office.

In a video shown to reporters at a national press conference event Wednesday, retired San Diego social worker Vince Peppard complained that he and his wife were stopped at a checkpoint on a road east of San Diego on I-94, many miles after crossing back into the United States with tiles he'd bought in Mexico.

When he refused to let the Customs and Border Protection officer search his car, the officer led him to a bench, called in the contraband dog and then "ransacked" his car.

"I didn't feel like I was inside the U.S.," Peppard said, calling the search on the side of the road embarrassing. "I felt like I was in a B-movie with Nazis asking for my papers."

ACLU attorney Chris Calabrese is certain there are more people who have been negatively affected than have complained.

As an example, he cited Seattle's domestic ferries, where DHS agents ask passengers for ID to check their citizenship and use license plate readers.

"The people who live on these islands are undergoing this extra scrutiny just when they are going to get their groceries," Calabrese said.

Be sure to hit the link and see the map there...You'll be amazed to find that Homeland Security has placed these Constitution Free Zones in such a manner as to encompass two thirds of our population. Obviously it is us, the citizens of the United Fascist States of America that are to be controlled, not immigrants. I too have to pass through one of these checkpoints--100 miles in from the border-- to go grocery shopping, and I drive away fuming each and every time. On several occasions, we've been hauled out of the vehicle to be searched and questioned. Once, in our RV, they claimed that the dogs signaled we might be smuggling an illegal alien...they searched everything, tearing through our luggage and all...apparently they thought I might have concealed a very small Mexican among my clean underwear. This is America? "Your Papers Please" for going to buy food?

It is Time

The truth is that the current system has become corrupted beyond possibility of repair, and needs to be allowed to collapse. It will do so anyway, whether we 'allow' it or not. It must collapse, so that something more attuned to the genuine needs of people can be created. Destruction must often precede creation... slums have to be razed before fine living quarters can be constructed.

When a system is corrupt it will attract only corrupt people and only the corrupt will flourish. We have provided history with a wonderful example of that. Look at the legislators who sit in not only the American Congress, but in the UK and Australian parliaments, and in governments all across the western world. Only an utterly corrupt system could elevate and reward such second-rate people.

As of this morning I see that the DOW rose almost 1000 points overnight in the US. This on the promise of politicians taking firm action. Looking to politicians to effect a solution for this situation is as futile as poking around in a parrot's entrails in an attempt to divine Saturday's winner at Randwick. Bush claims that it is an effort to preserve the free market. The free market needs no help, it needs less hindrance. It is government 'help' that has killed the economy. As Reagan once said: "the nine most scary words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' It's actually eleven words, but what's a 20% error with any government figure.

Look at the criminals who infest Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. How foolish and shifty they look as they sit blinking in front of the television cameras struggling to provide coherent answers to simple questions; and yes, on one level it is laughable, but that is our money and wealth that has been destroyed. That is the material present and future of our families that has been stolen.

Our education system is run by people whose job is to ensure that children attain adulthood without gaining any dangerous ideas about personal integrity or individual responsibility. Our media no longer even pretends to publish the news, they are merely organs of propaganda for the government, and for those vast corporations allied to government. It is time to be done with all our institutions. No part of what we have is worth saving. The corruption has penetrated and permeated from the very top to the very bottom. Society has been rotted down to the last point of resistance... the core level of the family and individual. The institutions have become a part of the problem, not the solution. The solutions can now only be at the level of the family and the individual.

The link to the entire article is in the title. An interesting read. And yes, it is time....it is well past time...almost too late.

Well....That Whole Freedom Thing Was Good While it Lasted, Wasn't It?

Cramer: It's a Worldwide Crash

Now along comes Sheila Bair and Hank Paulson, who alternately want us to believe that everything is sound (with public pronouncements that the worry is misplaced) and that there is a list of obscure banks that might have to be taken over.

Then Paulson comes to the Capitol and says the truth, that the Western world of finance is going to break, and Bair seizes Washington Mutual and tries to seize Wachovia(WB Quote - Cramer on WB - Stock Picks), no doubt to save Citigroup(C Quote - Cramer on C - Stock Picks), which could have risen, done an equity offering and joined Bank of America(BAC Quote - Cramer on BAC - Stock Picks), JPMorgan(JPM Quote - Cramer on JPM - Stock Picks) and Wells Fargo(WFC Quote - Cramer on WFC - Stock Picks) as the new titans of finance.

Which is where we are this morning, in a worldwide crash that will leave us with gigantic institutions that we have never heard of, with balance sheets that are ridiculously large that must fall, and a hedge fund community that has lost control of its asset base.

Down the Road to Serfdom

Sensing a pushback by the world's dollar-surplus regions – Asia and the Mideast – to finance the largest debtor economy, the U.S. government will now plunder its own countrymen to keep capital running "uphill." As with most statist remedies, it is being marketed as a boon for Main Street, tantalizing its inhabitants with the prospect of profits wafting westward from those malodorous Wall Street investments. However, Congress has inured the Treasury from accountability and legal recourse, giving Paulson dictatorial power over the nation's financial sector. Rather than let this bloated segment of the economy shrink and consolidate, Paulson and his successor will extend it unlimited life support, bloodletting everything else, in a final ruin of the nation.

French Premier Francois Fillon: We're on "the edge of the abyss”
Now we're in a terrible fix. People are scared and removing their money from the banks and money markets which is intensifying the freeze in the credit markets and driving stocks into the ground like a tent stake. Meanwhile, our leaders are "caught in the headlights", still believing they can "finesse" their way through the biggest economic cataclysm since the Great Depression. It's madness.

Naomi Wolf: Americans are facing a coup, as of this morning it’s happened

Lessons of the Past, Fear for the Future

Those who remember the Depression fear its return

Geneva Spickard is pretty sure America today couldn't do again what America did to live through its hardest economic times and reign as the financial power it has.

Turner Hinkle agrees. We simply don't know how.

"I'm afraid if the next depression that hits is like the one in the '30s, we would not long have a democracy," says Turner Hinkle. "I don't think the government can let it be. People are too used to having everything handed to them."

At 91, she is plagued by arthritis of the spine. She is proud of her two sons, one who became a stockbroker, one who became a doctor.

But a woman who was never afraid during the Depression is afraid now. She is afraid for her great grandchildren and for the world they have been born into.

She calls it "cruel."

Then adds, "God help them."

Americans just don't have the backbone they used to, we've got rough times ahead for sure. I'm so glad I live miles from nowhere, as life in the cities is bound to get dangerous. Small communities are the place to be, where a few old fashioned values still survive. I would be afraid for my children if we were still in the city. With today's culture it will be every man for themselves in the urban areas, rather than neighbor helping neighbor as it was during the first Great Depression.