Chile Forum

News flash, everybody. Your US constitutional rights do not follow you across the border. Once you are outside the USA, you have no more US constitutional rights.

When you enter the USA, you are not inside the USA until after you have left immigration. Therefore you have no constitutional rights while you are in the immigration checkpoint.

That's no 9-11 big brother nonsense. The US Supreme Court has always declared it to be so. I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the first rulings of the very first Supreme Court.

American tourists are always getting into trouble in foreign countries simply because they think they have constitutional protection and that foreign governments have to respect their rights. Not so.

oregon woodsmoke wrote:News flash, everybody. Your US constitutional rights do not follow you across the border. Once you are outside the USA, you have no more US constitutional rights.

When you enter the USA, you are not inside the USA until after you have left immigration. Therefore you have no constitutional rights while you are in the immigration checkpoint.

That's no 9-11 big brother nonsense. The US Supreme Court has always declared it to be so. I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the first rulings of the very first Supreme Court.

American tourists are always getting into trouble in foreign countries simply because they think they have constitutional protection and that foreign governments have to respect their rights. Not so.

Certainly American tourists in a foreign country is entirely different but to say you have no constitutional rights in US immigration is certainly wrong. You may choose not to complain or exercise your rights but you do have rights which Ron Paul challenged part of recently. http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and ... h-case-cnn

And the " US Supreme Court has always declared it to be so" is not terribly correct. It would take more time than I have but history tells a different story. While US Border security has increasing power, especially since 9/11, I would not say you have no rights. They usually take your rights in the form of protecting the US from pornography, drugs and terrorists

The Bierfeldt case was about TSA in domestic USA territory not at a "border" which is manned by ICE/CBP (dudes with guns and real law enforcement officer status unlike the smurfs at TSA). I agree with ows that the court has upheld the special status of this no-mans zone known as the border checkpoint for immigrations and customs purposes. My previous post succinctly described a USA citizen's status in that no man's land.

Another point, if you (a US citizen) are ever in a situation where you want to stop the idiotic questioning of a CBP official, ask them if you can call your lawyer, that will stop them from the idiotic questions but not a search. They can search without a lawyer being present, without RS and without PC.

Paul Craig Roberts also researched and coauthored the book on the alternative view of the Pinochet era (genuine dirty civil war with bad stuff and extremes on both sides vs. the left's view that Allende and followers were martyred angels).

He was scathingly anti-W Bush and anti-neocon and joined with many respected researchers, scientists and engineers in the push for the answers to what really happened on 11 / 09 / 01 and the justifications used for the final scrapping of the Constitution and endless corp-gov wars of incalculable human and financial costs.

I'm sure many will cast aspersions to his pronouncements just because…

I have never known PCR to be wrong about anything he has written. He is one of the few who really understands Geopolitics and socioeconomics. http://www.vdare.com is his website

2001, the "Patriot" Act. 2006, the Military Commissions Act. And now, (drum roll please)........... the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/03/a-detention-bill-you-ought-to-read-more-carefully/37116 Congratulations USA! You're now into old time Soviet Russia territory. Of course in the USA we have a hi-tech barbarism with new and improved methods of murdering and subjugating people. None of that old inefficient vise-grips on the testicles stuff for us, we have electronic devices to do that now.

If anyone has any doubt on how much a police state the US is, just watch the War on Kids http: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnwm11d6II

WARNING: some scenes are quite distressing.

I lived there when I was growing up and have good memories but that was long ago and I wouldn't go back if they paid me.

A

As if you wanted or needed any more evidence...
An interesting .pdf

The Electronic Police State
2010 National Rankings
The USA closes - only 2/100ths of a point behind Russia.

https://secure.cryptohippie.com/pubs/EPS-2010.pdf

greg~judy wrote:The USA closes - only 2/100ths of a point behind Russia.[/b]

Hmm... I'm puzzled. What does it tell us about the USA? Or Russia? Or the quality and objectivity of the report?

Good-Bye
Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03242010.html

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.

And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.

Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

The only previously MSM US columnist not afraid to tell the truth for the past decade signs off yesterday March 24, 2010.

I'll say it again like I've said it since certain realizations back in late September 2001, protect yourself because no one else can or will. But I repeat myself.

Keep a low profile, do what needs to be done and don't waste your time with those who ridicule you or who for all intents and purposes are sheep. In fact, lifting your head above the crowd or getting up on the soapbox should be avoided. Look at PCR and all the work he did to inform and educate the US public; what did it come to?

Read Atlas Shrugged and understand the whole concept of going on strike. Think, read between the lines and act swiftly and quietly on your own.

Signing off.

Noches.

Cannot find much fault with what Paul Craig Roberts has written. However, I find it ironic that libertarians would bemoan the effects of off-shoring of jobs and technology by the leading corporations (prime movers ) given that laissez-faire economics is the lynchpin of their belief system. What am I missing here?

It seems to me that only the truely liberal progressives such as Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders, and Dennis Kucinich have attempted to do anything politically abouts the matters highlighted by Mr. Roberts.

Just keep in mind that opinions are just that: opinions. They are not necessarily fact and they are not necessarily the truth. Opinions do not prove anything. All they do is tell you what someone thinks.