America: The Fall Of Our Constitutional Republic

There is a very good reason that our Pledge of Allegiance refers to our country as a Republic and there is a very good reason that our Declaration of Independence and our constitution do not even mentioned the word “democracy”. In a Republic, the sovereignty resides with the people themselves. In a Republic, one may act on his own or through his representatives when he chooses to solve a problem. The people have no obligation to the government; instead, the government is a servant of the people, and obliged to its owner, We the People. A Constitutional Republic has a Constitution that limits the powers of the government. It also spells out how the government is structured, creating checks on its power and balancing power between the different branches.

Many people are under the false impression our form of government is a democracy, or representative democracy. This is of course completely untrue. The Founders were extremely knowledgeable about the issue of democracy and feared a democracy as much as a monarchy. They understood that the only entity that can take away the people’s freedom is their own government, either by being too weak to protect them from external threats or by becoming too powerful and taking over every aspect of life. They knew very well the meaning of the word “democracy” and the history of democracies and they were deliberately doing everything in their power to prevent having one.

The goal of a Constitutional Republic was to avoid the dangerous extreme of either tyranny or mobocracy but what exists in America today is a far cry from the Constitutional Republic our forefathers brought forth. The truth is that the United States is neither a democracy nor a republic, despite the myth repeated by the corporate media that the United States is a democracy. Today, what we are seeing is fascism.

Webster’s dictionary defines Fascism as:

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

In a free society:

These are not the conditions we are currently living in. The items below suggest that we have all of the makings of fascism already in place:

• Powerful And Continuing Nationalism – Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic motto’s,  slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays. Like most “isms,” nationalism carries with it both good and bad characteristics. When people feel committed to larger communities or interests or to ideas of human rights and political progress, for example, nationalism can contribute to a sense of hope about the future. It can build positive personal and collective identities and a sense of self hood in the modern world. On the other hand, nationalism often encourages fears of all kinds of other people: fears of other religions or races or cultures or ethnic groups or homosexuals. This fear can be mobilized for violence and scapegoating. It can lead people to feel aggrieved and constantly at risk.

• Disdain For The Recognition Of Human Rights – Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc. The Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp is a detainment and interrogation facility of the United States military, located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. Article 1, section 9 of the constitution states, “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” This law requires a person under arrest to be brought before a judge or into court and today it is being ignored. Inmates are routinely tortured, including sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions, prolonged exposure to cold temperatures and water torture. But instead of calling it torture, our government calls it “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  This not only violates our constitution, but also the Geneva Convention.

• Identification Of Enemies/Scapegoats As A Unifying Cause – The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, (Christians, Constitutionalists, conservatives, 2nd Amendment supporters, 1st Amendment supporters, 4th Amendment supporters, Ron Paul supporters) etc. The phrase ‘War on Terror’ was first used by US President George W. Bush on 20 September 2001. The Bush administration and the Western media have since used the term to denote a global military, political, legal and ideological struggle—targeting both organizations designated as terrorist and regimes accused of supporting them.

• Supremacy Of The Military – Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. About 25%-30% of the current federal budget is spent on the military.

• Controlled Mass Media – Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. About SIX companies now control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don’t even stop to think about who is feeding them the endless hours of news and entertainment that they constantly ingest. The public opinion can be easily manipulated and shaped by those who control the media.

• Obsession With National Security – Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses. Every day we are bombarded by the mainstream media reporting on all of the evil and danger that exists in the world and all of the bad people who want to destroy us.

• Attacks On Civil Liberties – As fear is continually spread, more and more people are persuaded to sacrifice their freedoms in the name of temporary security. We could not have imagined that in the decade following 9/11, our country would engage in policies that directly defied American values and undermined our Constitution. Instead of addressing the challenge of terrorism consistent with our values, our government chose the path of torture and targeted killing, of Guantánamo and military commissions, of warrant-less government spying and the entrenchment of a national surveillance state, all of which now define the post-9/11-era. For a list of the attacks on our bill of rights, click here. Also, check out the excellent video documentary, Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties here.

• Corporate and Government Power Are Intertwined And Their Combined Power Is Protected – The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. Mussolini once said, “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.” Today, Americans are ruled by a corporatocracy: a partnership of “too-big-to-fail” corporations, the extremely wealthy elite, and corporate-collaborator government officials. As the federal government has progressively become larger over the decades, every significant introduction of government regulation, taxation, and spending has been to the benefit of some big business.

• Obsession With Crime And Punishment – Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations. Considering the sheer size and social penetration of its police and imprisonment apparatus, the United States is not only a police state, but the biggest police state in the world, by far. We are living in a country that has the highest incarceration rates in the world. 25% of all of the prison inmates in the world are locked up in the United States.

• Rampant Cronyism And Corruption – Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders. The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve in 2011 uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Other bailouts include Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns and the auto industry.

• Fraudulent Elections – Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections. If you think the mainstream media doesn’t play a role in selecting our candidates, think again. See my youtube video here.

• Dissent Equals Treason – Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage”. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalize certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor.” The word “terrorist” in the United States has now become synonymous with anyone we don’t like. According the ACLU, the U.S. terrorist watch list now has more than one million names on it. The fbi now regularly monitors Americans facebook pages.

• Create A Gulag – Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law – where torture takes place. Gulags in history tend to become ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalized. Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

• Deny Prisoners Due Process – Prisoners held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offenses, and subjected to show trials. In December 2011, President Obama signed the 2012 NDAA, codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history. The NDAA’s dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield.

• Militarize The Police – When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of men out to terrorize citizens: (the powers that be) need citizens to fear thug violence and need thugs who are free from prosecution. Over the past 10 years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more like soldiers. In recent years we have witnessed a proliferation in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police S.W.A.T. teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. It has now become routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored S.W.A.T. teams for routine domestic police work. In an effort to remedy their relative inadequacy in dealing with terrorism on U.S. soil, police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculcate a “soldier’s mentality” among their ranks. Allowing civilian law enforcement to use military technology runs the risk of blurring the distinction between soldiers and peace officers. Police departments have employed their newly acquired military weaponry not only to combat terrorism but also for everyday patrolling.

• Set Up An Internal Surveillance System And Harass Citizens – In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China – in every closed society – secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbors. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched. In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state program to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny. In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent. Our government can now monitor, without any search warrants, your phone calls, Internet activity (Web, e-mail), text messaging, and other communications. Over the last two years, more people have been spiedon by the government than in the preceding decade.

• Harass Citizens’ Groups – Next step is to infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. The American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents. The secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organizations engaged in peaceful political activities: CIFA is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary U.S. citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.

• Rampant Sexual Harassment – The state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution. Sexual harassment by the state against the people takes place in order to demotivate opposition and destroy morale; the recent TSA activities are nothing more than a power play to ensure that the people know they are nothing more than slabs of meat to the powers that be – who are of course, exempted from being sexually harassed. Americans now routinely feel the intrusive hand (often, literally) of the federal national security state bearing down on them in a way that is unprecedented in our history. To fly around our own country, Americans are now forced to accept privacy intrusions that would have left prior generations aghast.

We can change this – its called liberty.The liberty position maintains that respect for individual rights is the essential precondition for a free, peaceful and prosperous world – treat others as though you would like to be treated. To believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust in the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It permits people to work out their problems for themselves, build lives for themselves, take risks and accept responsibility for the results, and make their own decisions.

Each person owns his own life and property, and has the right to make his own choices as to how he lives his life – as long as he simply respects the same right of others to do the same. This combination of personal and economic liberty produces abundance, peace, harmony, creativity, order, and safety. Indeed, that is one of the central lessons of world history. Virtually all the progress the human race has enjoyed during the past few centuries is due to the increasing acceptance of these principles. If you are a freedom lover like I am, please share this website with others. See the video page of this website to learn more about the principles of liberty.

Also see:

• Aaron Russo’s excellent documentary, Freedom to Fascism.
• Also see this short 5 minute video which says it all.

 Click to here to see the new liberty store!

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