America No Longer The Land Of The Free

The President and all 535 members of Congress take oaths to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. One has to wonder how many have ever read it. They certainly seem hell-bent on disregarding it.
Article 1, Section 1 says all legislative powers are vested in Congress, which consists of a Senate and a House of Representatives. That’s apparently no longer the case, although I can’t find where that was legally changed through an Amendment.

The Environmental Protection Agency believes it holds legislative power. According to U.S. News & World Report: “Two new EPA pollution regulations will slam the coal industry so hard that hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost, and electric rates will skyrocket 11 percent to over 23 percent, according to a new study based on government data.”

There is no Constitutional authority for an EPA, nor is there Constitutional authority for Congress to cede its lawmaking powers to the EPA. But apparently, Congress doesn’t care.
The EPA is just one of dozens of Federal agencies that have taken it upon themselves to regulate and control the lives of Americans while Congress sits idly by. Many of the bureaucrats who run these regulatory agencies are appointed by the President, so they do his bidding.
When Boeing decided to build 30 percent of its 737s in South Carolina, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint in an effort to force the company back into the unionized Washington plant. In effect, the President — through his politically appointed board — was telling a company where it could and could not conduct business. This is Third World thuggery.
The President, ordered by a court to resume granting drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico, directed his Secretary of Interior to disregard the court. No drilling permits are issued. The feckless court system does nothing. There is no rule of law left in America.
We currently have wars going on in five Middle Eastern countries — Afghanistan (which should be over, since we supposedly fulfilled the goal of killing Osama bin Laden), Iraq (which should be over, since we supposedly fulfilled our goal of toppling Saddam Hussein), Pakistan (undeclared and illegal), Libya (undeclared and illegal) and Yemen (undeclared and illegal) — with no end to them in sight.
Aside from a few lone voices — Representatives Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — Congress, which alone has the authority to declare war, says nothing. In fact, 265 members of the House — Democratic and Republican alike — voted against a resolution to end the unConstitutional war in Libya.
There are grave doubts that President Barack Obama is a natural born citizen and eligible to hold the office of President. He refuses to release any documents that would show who he is and where he comes from. He finally released a long-form birth certificate that he says proves he is natural born, but more and more document experts have come forth to show the document a forgery. It is apparently a compilation of birth certificates from others born in Hawaii at the time of Obama’s reported birth. There is increasing evidence Obama committed some kind of fraud to obtain his Social Security number, which came from Connecticut, a State in which Obama never lived or worked.
People who bring up these issues are automatically dismissed by the corporate media talking heads as quacks and labeled “Birthers” in an effort to marginalize them. Congress, with the duty to investigate and remove the President if he is found to be ineligible for the office, runs from the issue. Again, the members of Congress refuse to uphold their oaths to the Constitution.
The Department of Homeland Security and local police forces have vans and trucks patrolling our streets with the capability of looking inside passing cars and into homes. The Transportation Security Administration forces airline passengers into choosing between harmful naked-body scanners or full-body groping sessions for the “crime” of buying an airline ticket. The grope-and-peek procedures are being expanded to include rail travel and attendance at sporting events and concerts, and technology is being developed to allow agents to funnel large crowds of people through mobile command centers so they can be questioned while computers monitor their physiology as they respond.
Law enforcement uses parabolic antennas to listen in on far-away conversations, video cameras to follow people’s every move and face recognition software to identify them — even if they have not been charged or convicted of a crime.
These actions are blatant violations of the 4^th Amendment. Congress does nothing… and says little.
When States do try to take a stand — as Texas did recently in considering legislation to ban the TSA from performing its gropefest/pornshow activities there — the thugocracy in Washington that is the Obama Justice Department threatened to impose a no-fly zone. This is a direct assault on Article IV Section 2 of the Constitution, which states: “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.”

Any time a State attempts to nullify a law or regulation that it deems unConstitutional, it is threatened by the Justice Department, sued or refused funds. Those funds, by the way, go to the Federal government after they are taken from workers who have no choice but to comply with the onerous tax code or go to prison.

The 4^th Amendment, the one that guarantees Americans the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, was eviscerated by a recent Supreme Court ruling that gave police license to enter a home without first obtaining a warrant if they hear what they deem suspicious sounds inside.

The USA Patriot Act, passed while the rubble of the World Trade Center still smoldered following the false flag terrorist attack of 9/11, gave the Federal government license to create all sorts of reasons and excuses to surreptitiously listen in on electronic conversations, rifle through bank records and imprison people without trial.

Local police departments are becoming increasingly militarized. In Chicago, an armed SWAT team forced its way into a home and stole the daughter of a woman who chose an alternative treatment option for her child’s behavioral problems — a treatment she originally sought voluntarily. In Pima County, Ariz., police fired 71 shots in seven seconds at a former Marine who had served two tours of duty in Iraq. Saying they were there to serve a narcotics search warrant, officers first claimed Jose Guerena shot first. That lie fell apart because the safety of his weapon was still on.

According to a report by the Cato Institute, this sort of thing is becoming increasingly common: “Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

“These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.”
The streets are no longer safe from police harassment and overreaction as, more and more, it seems police believe they are above the law. All across the country, thanks to the growing proliferation of cell-phone and video cameras, law enforcement is shown to be abusing citizens for simply doing what people do: taking photographs, talking to one another and observing police actions. It is not uncommon for people to be detained and have their cameras and cell phones taken away or destroyed if police officers believe they will be cast in a bad light.
We now have a quasi-military roaming the streets terrorizing citizens, a Congress neglecting its authority, a Supreme Court disregarding the Bill of Rights and a President — who may not even be eligible for the office — taking on the powers of a dictator through his regulatory agencies and so-called Justice Department.
America, land of the free? Not anymore.