The Unconstitutional State of America

Editor’s Note: This article is part one of the “Best of the Sovereign Investor Daily” series. It was originally published on December 19, 2012.

Despotic rulers that oppress and cause the suffering of peoples have populated the world since the beginning of human history.

That’s one of the main reasons the United States was founded — so that there would be a land where people were free, governed by the rule of law, not by the whims of men. It’s why this country used to be called the “land of the free.”

But over the years Americans have been slowly stripped of what we thought to be unalienable rights — the very freedoms that made the United States the greatest nation on Earth.

Yet, every year the U.S. State Department has the audacity to issue a report describing what it sees as the oppressive policies of other countries, the lack of due process in Russia and Iran, or the countless human rights violations in North Korea and China. Of course the report fails to mention the actions by our own government and its officials that violate individual human rights.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 have been used as a twisted justification by the U.S. Congress and by two presidents to enact unconstitutional laws that sacrifice the very principles they claim to be defending, all in the name of an elusive national security.

I point to the fact that the president of the United States now claims that he has the legal right to order the murder of people in other countries, including 16-year-old U.S. citizens such as Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, without charges or trial, as perhaps one of the more grotesque examples of his constitutional violations.

This is one of many on a list of illegal and unconstitutional actions on which I recently spoke to a group of 50 Sovereign Society members who visited Uruguay last month.

Many in the group seemed genuinely surprised when they saw the list, unable to believe such things were possible in America.

Do as I Say, Not as I Do

I began by describing the general attitude of the U.S. government towards the financial conduct of Americans, certain operative assumptions that are now in use from top-ranking officials, right down through the millions of tedious bureaucratic paper shufflers. Here are just a few:

1) You are guilty until you prove your innocence; the attitude of the Internal Revenue Service, and almost every other regulatory agency;

2) You have no right to personal or financial privacy; the government has the right to know everything about you thanks to the 2001 PATRIOT Act;

3) Any attempt to save on taxes is viewed as tax evasion, not legal tax avoidance;

4) You have no right to offshore financial or banking privacy; thanks to FATCA — Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act;

5) You may have a right to expatriation in theory, but the exit tax will confiscate much of what you own if you leave, just as the Jews who escaped from Nazi Germany.

And here are some of the current illegal and unconstitutional actions of our government:

1) Detention: National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) allows indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without charges.

2) Warrantless searches: the president can order warrantless surveillance, force companies and organizations to turn over information on citizens’ finances, communications and associations; the FBI uses “national security letters” signed by an FBI agent not by a judge.

3) Secrecy: the government uses secret legal arguments to support secret court proceedings using secret evidence.

4) U.S. military now acts as domestic police; militarization of local police SWAT teams. Aerial police spy drones are now in routine use with 30,000 authorized by Congress by 2020.

5) War crimes: federal courts are denied the power to investigate or prosecute crimes under Nuremberg principles of international law.

6) Continual monitoring: President Obama claims he can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing a court order or review.

Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste

As in the days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in the future when the U.S. economy collapses, a panicked U.S. Congress may go along with even more radical plans, just as the PATRIOT Act became law and was signed by President George W. Bush — and President Obama, as the list above shows, has gone much further than Bush in destroying our liberties.

It was Rahm Emanuel, at the time president-elect Obama’s appointed Chief of Staff, on November 21, 2008, who told the Wall Street Journal: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Interestingly, Emanuel’s words came only weeks after German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble warned in a Der Spiegel magazine interview that the 2008 global financial crisis would have political repercussions, noting that Adolf Hitler rose to power following the 1929 Wall Street crash.

“We learned from the worldwide economic crisis of the 1920s and 1930s that an economic crisis can result in an incredible threat for all of society. The consequence of that depression was Adolf Hitler and, indirectly, World War II and Auschwitz.”

Have we learned nothing at all from history?

Faithfully yours,

Bob Bauman JD
Chairman, Freedom Alliance

The Sovereign Investor