Thread: The Reasons We Fight The New World Order

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

The Reasons We Fight The New World Order

Countless people … will hate the new world order … and will die protesting against it. — H.G. Wells, The New World Order (1940)

Brandon Smith
Activist Post

Throughout our lives and throughout our culture, we are conditioned to rally around concepts of false division. We are led to believe that Democrats and Republicans are separate and opposing parties, yet they are actually two branches of the same political-control mechanism. We are led to believe that two nations such as the United States and Russia are geopolitical enemies, when, in fact, they are two puppet governments under the dominance of the same international financiers. Finally, we are told that the international bankers themselves are somehow separated by borders and philosophies, when the reality is all central banks answer to a singular authority: the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

We are regaled with stories of constant conflict and division. Yet the truth is there is only one battle that matters, only one battle that has ever mattered: the battle between those people who seek to control others and those people who simply wish to be left alone.

The “New World Order” is a concept created not in the minds of “conspiracy theorists” but in the minds of those who seek to control others. These are the self-appointed elite who fancy themselves grandly qualified to determine the destiny of every man, woman and child at the expense of individual freedom and self-determination. Such elites are often very open about their globalist intentions and ambitions, much like author H.G. Wells, a socialist member of the Fabian Society and friend to the internationalist establishment who put forth his blueprint for world governance in the book quoted above. In this article, I would like to examine the nature of our war with the elite and why their theories on social engineering are illogical, inadequate and, in many cases, malicious and destructive.

The ‘Greater Good’

I have always found it fascinating that while elitists and NWO champions constantly proclaim that morality is relative and that conscience is not inherent, somehow they are the ones who possess the proper definition of the “greater good.” If “good” is in all cases relative, then wouldn’t the “greater good” also be entirely relative? This inconsistency in their reasoning does not seem to stop them from forcing the masses through propaganda or violence to accept their version of better judgment.

As many psychologists and anthropologists (including Carl Jung and Steven Pinker) have proven over decades of study, moral compass and conscience are not mere products of environment; they are inborn ideals outside of the realm of environmental influences. The greater good is inherently and intuitively felt by most people. Whether one listens to this voice of conscience is up to the individual.

It is no accident that NWO elites end up contradicting themselves by claiming morality to be meaningless while pronouncing THEIR personal morality to be pure. In order to obtain power over others, they must first convince members of the public that they are empty vessels without meaning or direction. They must convince the masses to ignore their inner voice of conscience. Only then will the public sacrifice freedoms to purchase answers they don’t really need from elites who don’t really have them.

Collectivism

I don’t claim to know what ideology would make a perfect society, and I certainly don’t know the exact solutions needed to get there. What I do know, though, is that no one else knows either.

Whenever anyone takes a stage to announce that only he has the answers to the world’s problems, I cannot help but be suspicious of his motives. Rarely, if ever, do I hear these people suggest that more liberty and more individualism will make a better future. Instead, their solution always entails less freedom, more control, and more force in order to mold society towards their vision.

The utopia offered by the power elite invariably demands a collectivist mindset that the individual must give up his self-determination and independence so the group can survive and thrive. The problem is no society, culture or collective can exist without the efforts and contributions of individuals. Therefore, the liberty and prosperity of the individual is far more important than the safety or even existence of the group.

The elites understand this fact, which is why they do reserve some individuality (for their own tiny circle).

No matter the guise presented — whether it be socialism, communism, fascism or some amalgamation of each — the goal is always the same: collectivism and slavery for the masses and unrestrained gluttony for the oligarchs.

The Philosophy Of Force

If your idea of a better society is a good and rational one, you should not need to use force in order to get people to accept it. Only intrinsically destructive ideas require the use of force to frighten the public into compliance. The NWO is an idea that relies entirely on force.

Globalization has been consistently sold to us as part of the natural progression of mankind, yet this “natural progression” is always advanced through the use of lies, manipulation, fear and violence. The NWO concept is one of complete centralization; a centralization that cannot be achieved without the use of terror, for who would support the creation of a malicious global power authority unless he was terrorized into doing so?

The only morally acceptable use of force is the use of force to defend against attack. As the NWO relentlessly presses forward its attack on our freedoms, we, the defenders, are labeled “violent extremists” if we refuse to go along quietly. The NWO’s dependency on force to promote its values makes it an inherently flawed methodology derived from ignorance and psychopathy, rather than wisdom and truth.

Dishonesty As Policy

As with the use of violence, the use of lies to achieve success automatically poisons whatever good may have been had through one’s efforts. The elites commonly shrug off this logic by convincing each other that there is such a thing as a “noble lie” (both Saul Alinsky and Leo Strauss, the gatekeepers of the false left/right paradigm, promoted the use of “noble lies”) and that the masses need to be misled so that they can be fooled into doing what is best for themselves and the world. This is, of course, a sociopathic game of self-aggrandizement.

Lies are rarely, if ever, exploited by people who want to make the lives of other men better; lies are used by people who want to make their own lives better at the expense of others. Add to this the egomaniacal assertion that the elites are lying for “our own good” when they are actually only out to elevate their power, and what you get is a stereotypical abusive relationship on a global scale.

Methodologies that have legitimate benefits to mankind deliberately seek truth and do not need to hide behind a veil of misinformation and misdirection. If a methodology requires secrecy, occultism and deceit in order to establish itself in a culture, then it is most likely a negative influence on that culture, not a positive one.

The Hands Of The Few

Why does humanity need a select elite at all? What purpose does this oligarchy really serve? Is centralized power really as efficient and practical as it is painted to be? Or is it actually a hindrance to mankind and an obstacle in our quest to better ourselves? Champions of the NWO argue that global governance is inevitable and that sovereignty in any form is the cause of all our ills. However, I find when I look back at the finer points of history (the points they don’t teach you in college textbooks), the true cause of most of the world’s ills is obviously the existence of elitist groups.

The “efficiency” of centralization is useful only to those at the top of the pyramid, because it generally stands on a vast maze of impassable bureaucracy. It has to. No hyper-condensed authority structure can survive if the citizenry is not made dependent on it. Centralization makes life harder for everyone by removing our ability to provide our own essentials and make our own choices. That is to say, centralization removes all alternative options from the system, until the only easy path left is to bow down to the establishment.

I have never seen a solid example of centralization of power resulting in a better society or happier people. I have also never come across a select group of leaders intelligent enough and compassionate enough to oversee and micromanage the intricate workings of the whole of the Earth. There is no use for the elite, so one must ask why we keep them around?

The Opposite View

Arguing over what should be done about the state of the world is a fruitless endeavor until one considers what should be done about the state of his own life. As long as men are stricken by bias, selfish desire and lack of awareness, they will never be able to determine what is best for other people. The opposing philosophy to the NWO, the philosophy of the Liberty Movement, holds that no one has the right to impose his particular version of a perfect society on anyone else. As soon as someone does, he has committed a grievous attack against individual liberty — an attack that must be answered.

Our answer is simply that the people who want to control others be removed from positions of control and that the people who want to be left alone just be left alone. Association and participation should always be voluntary; otherwise, society loses value. This is not anarchy in the sense that consequence is removed. Rather, the rights of the individual become paramount; and the liberties of the one take precedence over the ever vaporous demands of some abstract group.

The most common retort to this principle of valuing the individual over collective fear is that "someone" must apply and enforce a structure of law and accountability, otherwise, society will "fall apart" into a vortex of madness and chaos. And perhaps that is true, though self-governance has never been allowed to exist in the history of man without immediate interference from elitist groups, so no one really knows for certain what would happen.

Doing away with overt government control, however, does not mean we do away with "law". Natural law, as with conscience, exists in our very biological and spiritual being, and does not require a central authority in order to be defined. Natural law supersedes the laws of men. In fact, the only man-made laws worth following are derived from natural law. The primary tenet of natural law is that no one has the right to impede or erode the inherent liberties of other individuals, as long as they also respect natural laws. The second any person violates the inborn rights of another, he has committed a trespass against natural law. His trespasses against government authority are secondary, if not meaningless. When one understands the unassailable existence and preeminence of natural law, he quickly discovers how trivial governments really are.

The ONLY reason for any government to exist is to safeguard individual freedom. Period. The original intent of America’s Founding Fathers was to establish a Nation that fostered this ideal. When government or oligarchy steps outside the bounds of this mandate, it is no longer providing the service it was originally designed for; and it must be dismantled. Unfortunately, it is a universal rule that uncompromising tyranny must often be met with uncompromising revolution.

When a new system arises that cannibalizes the old, enslaves our future, uses aggression against us and mutilates our founding principles in the name of arbitrary progress, that new system must be defied and ultimately destroyed. The NWO ideology represents one of the most egregious crimes against humanity of all time, posing in drag as our greatest hope. It is based, fundamentally, on everything that makes life terrible for the common man and everything our inherent conscience fights against.

We would be far better served as a species if we were to turn our back on the NWO altogether and move swiftly in the opposite direction. Imagine what tomorrow would be like if there were no controllers, no statists, no despots and no philosopher kings. Imagine a tomorrow where people respect the natural-born rights of others. Imagine a tomorrow where people’s irrational fears are not allowed to inhibit other people’s freedoms. Imagine a tomorrow where interactions between citizens and government are rare or nonexistent. Imagine if we could live our days in peace, independently building our own destinies, in which our successes and failures are our own, rather than the property of the collective. It may not be a perfect world, or a utopia, but I suspect it would be a much better place than we live in today.

You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com. Alt-Market, where this article first appeared, is an organization designed to help you find like-minded activists and preppers in your local area so that you can network and construct communities for mutual aid and defense. Join Alt-Market.com today and learn what it means to step away from the system and build something better.

http://www.activistpost.com/2014/07/the-reasons-we-fight-new-world-order.html#!bhIs55

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Five nations forming their own world bank: Is this the new New World Order?


Lily Dane
Activist Post

Five countries are tired of US dominance of the global financial system and are building their own versions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The group is called BRICS, and the members are all developing newly industrialized countries that are distinguished by their large, fast-growing economies and significant influence on regional and global affairs.

From the AP:

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -the so-called BRICS countries – are seeking “alternatives to the existing world order,” said Harold Trinkunas, director of the Latin America Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

At a summit Tuesday through Thursday in Brazil, the five countries will unveil a $100 billion fund to fight financial crises, their version of the IMF. They will also launch a World Bank alternative, a new bank that will make loans for infrastructure projects across the developing world.

The five countries will invest equally in the lender, tentatively called the New Development Bank. Other countries may join later.

The BRICS powers are still jousting over the location of the bank’s headquarters – Shanghai, Moscow, New Delhi or Johannesburg. The headquarters skirmish is part of a larger struggle to keep China, the world’s second-biggest economy, from dominating the new bank the way the United States has dominated the World Bank.

The BRICS grouping’s first formal summit was held in Yekaterinburg in June, 2009. Afterward, the nations announced the need for a new global reserve currency, which would have to be “diversified, stable and predictable.” While they did not directly address the perceived “dominance” of the US dollar – something that Russia has done in the past – the statement did spark a drop in the value of the dollar against other major currencies.

On Tuesday, the group’s 6th summit began in Brazil. On the agenda: the creation of a $100 billion development bank and a $100 billion dollar reserve fund, designed to boost investment in BRICS economies and reduce the power of the Western-dominated World Bank and IMF.

Thomas Wright, a fellow at Brookings’ Project on International Order and Strategy, told the AP that the BRICS countries “want a safety net if they fall out with the West.”

Congress has refused to approve legislation to provide extra money to help the IMF provide more loans to troubled countries. The most recent conflict between the BRICS countries and the US was at the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington in April when an agreed reform of the IMF failed because of a veto by Congress.

That veto caused an increase in strained relations between Brazil, and the US, reports DW:

Following the surveillance scandal revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff distanced herself from Washington, promptly cancelling her planned meeting with US President Barack Obama in September 2013.

Growing trade among emerging markets resulted in China replacing the US as the primary buyer of Brazilian products in 2009. Since 2012, the Chinese have also been Brazil’s most important import partner.

When the World Bank or IMF lends money, strings are usually attached – strings which reflect the values and interests of the US and its allies.

The BRICS countries are seeking to free themselves from that US dominance, and want to have more influence in global economic policy. They now account for 21 percent of global economic output and have contributed more than 50 percent of world economic growth in the past decade, reports Aljazeera.

As of 2013, the five BRICS countries represent almost 3 billion people with a combined nominal GDP of US$16.039 trillion and an estimated US$4 trillion in combined foreign reserves.

Russia will attempt to persuade other BRICS emerging market nations to agree to measures to prevent “sanction attacks” by the US to “harass” countries opposing its policies, President Vladimir Putin told The Moscow Times:

Putin said he would urge Brazil, China, India and South Africa to draw “substantive conclusions” from sanctions imposed on Russia over its actions in the Ukraine crisis, and said it was time to dilute the dominance of the U.S.-led West and the U.S. dollar by boosting the role of the BRICS on the global stage.

“Recently Russia has been exposed to a sanction attack by the U.S. and its allies,” Putin told the ITAR-Tass news agency.

“Together we should think about a system of measures that would help prevent the harassment of countries that do not agree with some foreign policy decisions made by the U.S. and their allies, but would promote a civilized dialogue on all points at issue based on mutual respect.”

Putin wants the emerging powers to play a bigger role in world affairs to counter U.S. influence.

“The international monetary system … depends a lot on the U.S. dollar, or, to be precise, on the monetary and financial policy of the U.S. authorities. The BRICS countries want to change this,” he said.

The BRICS countries also have suggested the impacts their system will have on the US dollar:

In July 2014, the Governor of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, said that the “BRICS partners the establishment of a system of multilateral swaps that will allow to transfer resources to one or another country, if needed” in an article which concluded that “If the current trend continues, soon the dollar will be abandoned by most of the significant global economies and it will be kicked out of the global trade finance.

Washington’s bullying will make even former American allies choose the anti-dollar alliance instead of the existing dollar-based monetary system.” (source)

BRICS headquarters will likely be in Shanghai, China. President Xi Jinping said the country will dedicate itself to “perfecting” the role developing countries play in international affairs to give them better representation and a greater say, Reuters reports:

Xi, in an interview with South American media released by China’s Foreign Ministry, said China would try to better play the role of a responsible major power and promote the rights of the developing world.

“We will … dedicate ourselves to perfecting the international system of governance and proactively push for expanding the representation and right to speak for developing countries in international affairs,” he said.

“We will come up with more Chinese proposals and contribute China’s wisdom,” Xi added, without elaborating.

James Rickards, author of Currency Wars, told RIA Novosti that the summit of major emerging “BRICS” economies in Brazil is the latest sign of the decline of the US dollar as the standard global currency for reserves and trading:

“We see the BRICS’ desire to shift away from the dollar, a unified Eurozone with a sovereign bond market waiting in the wings and a requirement on the International Monetary Fund to re-liquefy the world when the next financial crisis hits.

“Put all that together and you see that the dollar’s days are numbered,” he added.

“BRICS share one common goal in that they have all voiced objections to the dollar as the principal reserve currency and the impact of US Federal Reserve policy on emerging markets, which the Fed pays very little attention to.

“By shifting its policies, the Fed massively affects foreign currencies and makes it difficult for them to plan investments. BRICS members share a desire to end dollar hegemony. It’s easier said than done, but they’re trying,” concluded the analyst.

The US economy is already teetering on disaster. Will this push it over that edge?

And does BRICS represent a new New World Order – one that is shutting the US and its superpower allies out?

Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple, where this first appeared. Her goal is to help people to “Wake the Flock Up!”


http://www.activistpost.com/2014/07/...d.html#!bhI6iM

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Globalist Mouthpiece Calls For The Entire Planet To Adopt Digital ‘National Identification System’


Michael Snyder
Activist Post

Would you like to have a digital identity card that is automatically issued to you at birth? In one European nation, residents use such a card when they go to the hospital, when they do their banking, when they go shopping and even when they vote. This card has become so popular that this particular European country actually plans to start issuing them to millions of non-citizens all over the planet who request them. Never heard about this? Neither had I before this week.

The Economist, a well-known mouthpiece for the global elite, is calling for the entire planet to adopt this “national identification system” that the little nation of Estonia has adopted. The Economist is touting all of the “benefits” of a “national identification card”, but are there dangers as well? Could adopting such a system potentially open the door for greater government tyranny than we have ever known before?

The Economist article about this national identification scheme went largely unnoticed because it had a very boring title: "Estonia takes the plunge". But the content of the article is absolutely startling.

The Economist article calls the Estonian national identification system a “cyberdream” and makes it sound like it will solve all of our problems…

There is one place where this cyberdream is already reality. Secure, authenticated identity is the birthright of every Estonian: before a newborn even arrives home, the hospital will have issued a digital birth certificate and his health insurance will have been started automatically. All residents of the small Baltic state aged 15 or over have electronic ID cards, which are used in health care, electronic banking and shopping, to sign contracts and encrypt e-mail, as tram tickets, and much more besides—even to vote.

If this was just limited to Estonia, it would be disturbing enough. But according to the Economist, the Estonian government plans to start issuing these cards to millions of “satellite Estonians” all over the world…

That has left a gap in the global market—one that Estonia hopes to fill. Starting later this year, it will issue ID cards to non-resident “satellite Estonians”, thereby creating a global, government-standard digital identity. Applicants will pay a small fee, probably around €30-50 ($41-6, and provide the same biometric data and documents as Estonian residents. If all is in order, a card will be issued, or its virtual equivalent on a smartphone (held on a special secure module in the SIM card).

Some good ideas never take off because too few people embrace them. And with just 1.3m residents, Estonia is a tiddler—even with the 10m satellite Estonians the government hopes to add over the next decade. What may provide the necessary scale is a European Union rule soon to come into force that will require member states to accept each others’ digital IDs. That means non-resident holders of Estonian IDs, wherever they are, will be able not only to send each other encrypted e-mail and to prove their identity to web-service providers who accept government-issued identities, but also to do business with governments anywhere in the EU.

The Economist hopes that Estonia will become a model that the rest of the world will follow.

But do we really want government to have that much control over our lives?

If we need this “digital identity card” to go shopping, do banking or get health care, it would also give the government the power to revoke those “privileges” in a heartbeat.

Already there are countless examples of how governments around the world are using information databases in abusive ways. For instance, one new lawsuit in the U.S. alleges that average citizens have been put in a ‘terror database’ for doing such things as buying computers and waiting for family members at train stations.

Do we really want to go even further down this road?

And of course “identity cards” can be lost, stolen and forged. The next logical step would be to permanently implant our identity cards.

To many older Americans, such a notion sounds ludicrous, but many younger Americans are so eager to adopt this kind of technology that they are actually doing it to themselves. Just check out the following excerpt from a recent NBC News article about “biohackers”…

In tattoo parlors and basements around the world, people are turning themselves into cyborgs by embedding magnets and computer chips directly into their bodies.

They call themselves biohackers, cyborgs and grinders. With each piece of technology they put beneath their skin, they are exploring the boundaries — and the implications — of fusing man and machine.

Welcome to the world of biohacking.

It’s a niche community at the literal bleeding edge of body modification, and it attracts fervent fans from a variety of schools of thought. Some simply enjoy experimenting with new tech. Others use the magnets and chips for utilitarian purposes.

Does that sound creepy to you?

It should.

But it isn’t just people on the fringes of society that are interested in these kinds of technologies.

For example, electronics giant LG says that it wants to put an electronic tracking device on your child…

Various tech companies have introduced wearable devices over the last few years that track your steps or heartbeat and even deliver your e-mails to your wrist.

Is electronically tracking your kid the next frontier?

LG announced a new device Wednesday morning, the KizON wristband, designed to let parents keep track of their child’s whereabouts. The KizON uses GPS, WiFi and mobile Internet signals to identify the user’s location in real time and sends the information to an Android app.

And billionaire Bill Gates is helping to develop an implant that “acts as a contraceptive for 16 years”…

Helped along by one of the world’s most notable billionaires, a U.S. firm is developing a tiny implant that acts as a contraceptive for 16 years — and can be turned on or off using a remote control.

The birth control microchip, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, would hold nearly two decades worth of a hormone commonly used in contraceptives and dispense 30 micrograms a day, according to a report from the MIT Technology Review.

The new birth control, which is set to begin preclinical testing next year with hopes of putting it on shelves in 2018, can be implanted in the buttocks, upper arm or abdomen.

Whether you are ready or not, these technologies are coming.

For now, they are voluntary.

But eventually a day may come when you will be required to have an “identity chip” in order to buy, sell, conduct banking, have a job or go to the hospital.

When that day arrives, what will you do?

Related Activist Post Article:
In The Internet of Things, YOU Will Be The Key

Also please see the articles by Julie Beal at the following link which offer all of the details about the coming Global ID. http://www.activistpost.com/search/label/Julie%20Beal

This article first appeared here at the American Dream. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.

http://www.activistpost.com/2014/07/...e.html#!bhJexX

66 Percent of Americans Now Live in a Constitution-Free Zone

Thanks to the militarization and expansion of the “border” region, 197 million Americans now live within the jurisdiction of US Customs and Border Patrol.

Todd Miller
July 15, 2014

US Border Patrol agents in Yuma, Arizona (Reuters/Jason Reed)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Shena Gutierrez was already cuffed and in an inspection room in Nogales, Arizona, when the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent grabbed her purse, opened it, and dumped its contents onto the floor right in front of her. There couldn’t be a sharper image of the Bill of Rights rollback we are experiencing in the US borderlands in the post-9/11 era.

Tumbling out of that purse came Gutierrez’s life: photos of her kids, business cards, credit cards and other papers, all now open to the official scrutiny of the Department of Homeland Security. There were also photographs of her husband, Jose Gutierrez Guzman, whom CBP agents beat so badly in 2011 that he suffered permanent brain damage. The supervisory agent, whose name badge on his blue uniform read “Gomez,” now began to trample on her life, quite literally, with his black boots.

“Please stop stepping on the pictures,” Shena asked him.

A US citizen, unlike her husband, she had been returning from a forty-eight-hour vigil against Border Patrol violence in Mexico and was wearing a shirt that said “Stop Border Patrol Brutality” when she was aggressively questioned and cuffed at the CBP’s “port of entry” in Nogales on that hot day in May. She had no doubt that Gomez was stepping all over the contents of her purse in response to her shirt, the evidence of her activism.

Perhaps what bothered Gomez was the photo silkscreened onto that shirt—of her husband during his hospitalization. It showed the aftermath of a beating he received from CBP agents. His head had a partially caved-in look because doctors had removed part of his skull. Over his chest and arms were bruises from Tasering. One tooth was out of place, and he had two black eyes. Although you couldn’t see them in the photo, two heavily armed Homeland Security agents were then guarding his hospital door to prevent the father of two, formerly a sound technician and the lead singer of a popular band in Los Angeles, from escaping—even in his comatose state.

Jose Gutierrez Guzman's has become an ever more common story in an American age of mass expulsions. Although he had grown up in the United States (without papers), he was born in Mexico. After receiving a letter requesting his appearance, he went to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Los Angeles and was promptly arrested and deported. Customs and Border Protection agents later caught him crossing the border in San Luis, Arizona, near Yuma, in an attempt to reunite with his wife and children.

“Stop... stepping... on... the... pictures,” Shena insisted.

As she tells the story, Agent Gomez looked at her shirt for a second, then looked up at her and said, “You have that mentality about us. You think we go around abusing.” His tone remained faux-friendly, but his boots didn’t—and neither did those cuffs another CBP agent had put on her. Forcing her hands behind her back, they cut uncomfortably into her wrists. They would leave deep red circular marks.

On display was a post-9/11 world in which the usual rights meant to protect Americans from unreasonable search and seizure and unwanted, as well as unwarranted, interrogation were up for grabs.

While such constitutionally questionable intrusions into people’s privacy have been increasing at border crossings in the post-9/11 years, this type of hardline border policing has also moved inland. In other words, the sort of intrusions that once would have qualified as unconstitutional have moved in startling numbers into the interior of the country.

Imagine the once thin borderline of the American past as an ever-thickening band, now extending 100 miles inland around the United States—along the 2,000-mile southern border, the 4,000-mile northern border and both coasts—and you will be able to visualize how vast the CBP’s jurisdiction has become. This “border” region now covers places where two-thirds of the US population (197.4 million people) live. The ACLU has come to call it a “constitution-free zone.” The “border” has by now devoured the full states of Maine and Florida and much of Michigan.

In these vast domains, Homeland Security authorities can institute roving patrols with broad, extra-constitutional powers backed by national security, immigration enforcement and drug interdiction mandates. There, the Border Patrol can set up traffic checkpoints and fly surveillance drones overhead with high-powered cameras and radar that can track your movements. Within twenty-five miles of the international boundary, CBP agents can enter a person’s private property without a warrant. In these areas, the Homeland Security state is anything but abstract. On any given day, it can stand between you and the grocery store.

“Border Patrol checkpoints and roving patrols are the physical world equivalent of the National Security Agency,” says attorney James Lyall of ACLU Arizona puts it. “They involve a massive dragnet and stopping and monitoring of innocent Americans without any suspicion of wrongdoing by increasingly abusive and unaccountable federal government agents.”

Before she was so unceremoniously stopped and held, Shena Gutierrez shared the story of her husband at that forty-eight-hour vigil. It was another story of the kind of pervasive abuse reported by people in the 100-mile zone. There were no cameras that night to record how eleven agents “subdued” Jose Gutierrez Guzman, as the CBP put it in its official report on the incident. Its claim: that Jose “struck his head on the ground,” a way perhaps of accounting for the hospital’s eventual diagnosis of “blunt force trauma.”

Considering the extent of Jose’s injuries, that CBP report is questionable indeed. Many Border Patrol agents now use the term “tonk”—the sound a flashlight supposedly makes when it bangs against someone’s head—as their way of describing border-crossers. Jose was also repeatedly “shot” with an “electronic control device,” aka a Taser. He was so badly beaten that, more than three years later, he still suffers seizures.

“Stop stepping on my pictures!” Gutierrez insisted again. But much like the CBP’s official complaint process, the words were ignored. The only thing Gomez eventually spat out was, “Are you going to get difficult?”

When Shena Gutierrez offered me a play-by-play account of her long day, including her five-hour detainment at the border, her voice ran a gamut of emotions from desperation to defiance. Perhaps these are the signature emotions of what State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren has dubbed the “Post-Constitutional Era.” We now live in a time when, as he writes, “the government might as well have taken scissors to the original copy of the Constitution stored in the National Archives, then crumpled up the Fourth Amendment and tossed it in the garbage can.” The prototype for this new era, with all the potential for abuse it gives the authorities, can be found in that 100-mile zone.

A Standing Army
The zone first came into existence thanks to a series of laws passed by Congress in the 1940s and 1950s at a time when the Border Patrol was just an afterthought with a minuscule budget and only 1,100 agents. Today, Customs and Border Protection has more than 60,000 employees and is by far the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. According to author and constitutional attorney John Whitehead, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created in 2002, is efficiently and ruthlessly building “a standing army on American soil.”

Long ago, President James Madison warned that “a standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty.” With its 240,000 employees and $61 billion budget, the DHS, Whitehead points out, is militarizing police units, stockpiling ammunition, spying on activists, and building detention centers, among many other things. CBP is the uniformed and most visible component of this “standing army.” It practically has its own air force and navy, an Office of Air and Marine equipped with 280 sea vessels, 250 aircraft and 1,200 agents.
On the border, never before have there been so many miles of walls and barriers, or such an array of sophisticated cameras capable of operating at night as well as in the daylight. Motion sensors, radar systems, and cameras mounted on towers, as well as those drones, all feed their information into operational control rooms throughout the borderlands. There, agents can surveil activity over large stretches of territory on sophisticated (and expensive) video walls. This expanding border enforcement regime is now moving into the 100-mile zone.

Such technological capability also involves the warehousing of staggering amounts of personal information in the digital databases that have ushered in the Post-Constitutional Era. “What does all this mean in terms of the Fourth Amendment?” Van Buren asks. “It’s simple: the technological and human factors that constrained the gathering and processing of data in the past are fast disappearing.”

The border, in the post 9/11 years, has also become a place where military manufacturers, eyeing a market in an “unprecedented boom period,” are repurposing their wartime technologies for the Homeland Security mission. This “bring the battlefield to the border” posture has created an unprecedented enforcement, incarceration, and expulsion machine aimed at the foreign-born (or often simply foreign-looking). The sweep is reminiscent of the operation that forced Japanese (a majority of them citizens) into internment camps during World War II, but on a scale never before seen in this country. With it, unsurprisingly, has come a wave of complaints about physical and verbal abuse by Homeland Security agents, as well as tales of inadequate food and medical attention to undocumented immigrants in short-term detention.

The result is a permanent, low-intensity state of exception that makes the expanding borderlands a ripe place to experiment with tearing apart the Constitution, a place where not just undocumented border-crossers, but millions of borderland residents have become the targets of continual surveillance. If you don’t see the Border Patrol’s ever-expanding forces in places like New York City (although CBP agents are certainly present at its airports and seaports), you can see them pulling people over these days in plenty of other spots in that Constitution-free zone where they hadn’t previously had a presence.

They are, for instance, in cities like Rochester, New York, and Erie, Pennsylvania, as well as in Washington State, Vermont, Florida and at all international airports. Homeland Security officials are scrutinizing people’s belongings, including their electronic devices, from sea to shining sea. Just ask Pascal Abidor, an Islamic studies doctoral student whose computer was turned on by CBP agents in Champlain, New York.

When an agent saw that he had a picture of a Hezbollah rally, she asked Abidor, a US citizen, “What is this stuff?” His answer—that he was studying the modern history of the Shiites—meant nothing to her and his computer was seized for ten days. Between 2008 and 2010, the CBP searched the electronic devices of more than 6,500 people. Like many of us, Abidor keeps everything, even his most private and intimate conversations with his girlfriend, on his computer. Now, it’s private no longer.

Despite all this, the message politicians and the media generally offer is that the country needs more agents, new techno-gadgets and even more walls for our “safety.” In that context, President Obama on July 7 asked Congress for an additional $3.7 billion for “border security.”

Since last October, in what officials have called a “humanitarian crisis,” 52,000 unaccompanied children, mostly from Central America, have been apprehended by Border Patrol agents. News about and photos of some of those children, including toddlers, parentless and incarcerated in warehouses in the Southwest, have led to a flood of articles, many claiming that border security is “strained.” A Border Patrol Union representative typically claimed that the border is “more porous than it’s ever been.” While such claims are ludicrous, all signs point to more money being packed aboard what Whitehead has called a “runaway train.”

Make no bones about it, every dollar spent this way works not just to keep others out of this country, but to lock American citizens into a border zone that may soon encompass the whole country. It also fortifies our new domestic “standing military force” and its rollback of the Bill of Rights.

Resistance Inside the 100-Mile Zone
The first thing Cynthia (a pseudonym) asks the supervisory agent with the green Border Patrol hat and wrap-around sunglasses who stops her car is: “Can I have your name and agent number please?” She’s been halted at a checkpoint approximately twenty-five miles north of the US-Mexican border on a road running east-west near the small town of Arivaca, Arizona, where she lives.

The agent pauses. He looks like he’s swallowed a hornet before he barks, “We ask the questions here first, okay? Do you have some ID on you?”
This starts a tense exchange between the two of them that she videotaped in its entirety. She is only one of many challenging the omnipresence and activities of the Border Patrol in the heart of the 100-mile zone. Like many locals in Arivaca, she is sick of the checkpoint, which has been there for seven years. She and her neighbors were fed up with the obligatory stop between their small town and the dentist or the nearest bookstore. They were tired of Homeland Security agents scrutinizing their children on their way to school. So they began to organize.

In late 2013, they demanded that the federal government remove the checkpoint. It was, they wrote in a petition, an ugly artifact of border militarization; it had, they added, a negative economic impact on residents and infringed on people’s constitutional rights. At the beginning of 2014, small groups from People Helping People in the Border Zone—the name of their organization—started monitoring the checkpoint several days a week.
This Arivaca Border Patrol road barricade, one of at least seventy-one in the Southwest, functions as a de facto enforcement zone away from the border. In Border Patrolese, it’s “an additional layer in our Defense in Depth strategy.” This particular checkpoint isn’t exactly impressive—just a portable trailer with an attached tarp for shade, but it still qualifies, according to one of the patrol’s informational brochures, as “a critical enforcement tool for securing the nation’s borders against all threats to our homeland.”

The agents manning it stop every car on the road, do a quick visual check of its interior and ask the driver and passengers their citizenship. There are also dogs available to sniff each car for traces of drugs or explosives. “Our enforcement presence along these strategic routes reduces the ability of criminals and potential terrorists to easily travel away from the border,” the brochure explains.

The Homeland Security surveillance gaze in the Southwest is, in fact, so pervasive that it has even nabbed singer Willy Nelson in Texas for marijuana possession. It detained 96-year-old former Arizona governor Raul Castro and made him stand in 100-degree heat for more than thirty minutes because a dog detected the radiation from his pacemaker. In the past three years in the Tucson sector, the patrol has made more than 6,000 arrests and confiscated 135,000 pounds of narcotics at checkpoints.

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But this is no longer just a matter of inland areas near the Mexican Border. A Border Patrol agent forced Vermont’s senior senator Patrick Leahy from his car at a checkpoint 125 miles south of the New York State border. The ACLU of Vermont unearthed a prototype plan for CBP to operate checkpoints to stop southbound traffic on all five highways through that New England border state.

On Sunday afternoons in Sodus, New York, about thirty miles east of Rochester, green-striped Border Patrol vehicles can sometimes be found parked in front of a laundromat which farmworkers (many undocumented) use. In Erie, Pennsylvania, agents wait at the Greyhound bus terminal or the Amtrak station to question people arriving in town. These are all places where the Border Patrol was all but unknown before 2005. In Detroit, simply being at a bus stop at four in the morning en route to work or fishing in the Detroit River is now “probable cause” for an agent to question you.

Or perhaps it is simply the color of your skin. Arrest records from both bus terminals and railway stations in Rochester, New York, show that of the 2,776 arrests agents made between 2005 and 2009, 71.2 percent were of “medium” complexion (likely of Latino or Arab background) and 12.9 percent “black.” Only 0.9 percent of those arrested were of “fair” complexion.

Back in Arivaca, the agent with the wraparound sunglasses tells Cynthia that she needs to get out of her car. Much like Senator Leahy, she responds that she doesn’t “understand why.”

“You don’t have to understand,” he says. “It’s for my safety. And yours. Do you understand that?”

Then his tone gains an angry edge. He clearly doesn’t like having his authority challenged. “We don’t have time for this. We have criminals here, okay? If you have a political or an emotional situation here”—he makes an emphatic chopping motion with his hand—“I don’t want to hear about it. I want to see your ID.” He pauses. “Now!”

The adrenaline is obviously pumping and he is about to edge up on the limits of what an agent can do, even with extra-constitutional powers. He thrusts his hand through the open window and into the car and unlocks it. With a yank, he pulls the door open from the inside. When Cynthia is out of the car, he asks, his voice rising, “What do you think we’re looking for here?”

“I don’t know,” Cynthia responds
.
“That’s where I’m gonna educate you a little bit. Okay?”

“Okay,” she says.

“What happens through this checkpoint is that we catch smugglers of aliens, smugglers of drugs, child molesters, murderers and everything else. Okay? Does that make sense?”

This rural area of Arizona, he insists as they stand under a vast cloudless blue sky, is infested with bandits, criminals and drug dealers. “We have methamphetamine being made and manufactured,” the agent explains. “Do you think methamphetamine is a good thing?”
“Personally, no,” she says.

“Personally, I don’t think so either. I think they’re poisoning our world, okay? So when we ask you just to do something simple, like uncover something, do it! It’s a relief for us that it’s not something dangerous or something else.” By now, the agent is making the full-blown case for Homeland Security’s rollback of the Bill of Rights: the world’s a dangerous place, too dangerous for us not to have a free hand searching wherever we want whenever we want—and it’s your job to understand that new twenty-first-century American reality. He ends with a final dig at her for her initial resistance: “You’re destroying your rights, because what happens is, is that the criminals take your rights away, okay? Not us. We’re here to protect you.”

According to the ACLU’s Lyall, the fact is that the abuses of Customs and Border Protection in that Constitution-free zone are “massively underreported” and “far more prevalent than anyone has been able to document.” Many people, according to him, are simply afraid to come forward; others don’t know their rights.

In Shena Gutierrez’s case, she returned to the same Nogales “port of entry” with two other activists to lodge a complaint about the purse incident. When she refused to leave federal property (for which she now faces charges), the CBP arrested and detained her for hours. This time they did what she described as “an invasive body search.”

“I told them that I had not given my consent to be touched.” They nonetheless made her take off her wedding ring “for safety.” When she resisted, they said that they “would force it off her.” Again, the handcuffs cut into her wrists. This time, an agent kicked her in the ankle from behind. A female agent searched her thoroughly, from head to toe and in her private parts, because she “might have drugs or contraband or documents.”

As the agent groped her, she told me, she began to think yet again about what her husband had gone through. If this can happen to a US citizen, she told me, “Imagine what happens to a person without documents.”

Imagine what can happen to anyone in a realm where, increasingly, anything goes, including the Constitution.

http://www.thenation.com/article/180649/66-percent-americans-now-live-constitution-free-zone#



Now explain to me why if this happens is it that we are "flooded" non stop with illegals sneaking into this Country??? Now do they just like this abuse or is it something else?????

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