The latest erosion of freedom in the United States

Dateline: Wroclaw, Poland

They don’t call it the Land of the Free for nothing.

For years, the United States has embarked on a campaign to erode the freedoms of its citizens. The result is a country where thugs at the airport check your bags, grab your crotch, scrub your hands, and stick their finger in your drink in an effort to make sure no act of terrorism occurs (which they’ve proven inept at addressing. In fact, one of the last known terrorist attempts was thwarted by a passenger, not the TSA)

Just how much freedom has been lost in the USA?

One recent survey on freedom of the press showed that the United States dropped thirteen spots to 46th place overall. Thank the NSA and ongoing censorship for that.

Living outside said Land of the Free, I generally avoid much of the American hamster-wheel media. In fact, Gerald Celente and I recently discussed that the entire US media is nothing but propaganda.

However, I decided to dive into recent headlines to find as many examples as I could of the United States’ fading freedoms … and perhaps convince you of the benefits of leaving.

If you’re convinced that the erosion of freedom in the US is nothing but a series of “isolated incidents”, let’s look at one week of headlines…

A special needs student was arrested and charged with a felony for taping his being bullied.

The US school system is a total joke. Public schools now largely employ Common Core, an “education” method that teaches kids to check that 399 plus 199 equals 598 by adding three and one together and realizing that 400 “isn’t that far off” from 598. Yeah, it’s confusing.

However, years of “zero tolerance” laws have now made innocent kids into hardened felons. In Pennsylvania, an autistic teenager, tired of school officials not responding to bullying happening right in front of their eyes, recorded other students beating him up and then got charged with a felony rap for doing so.

“I was really having things like books slammed upside my head. I wanted it to stop. I just felt like nothing was being done”, he said. Ultimately, the charge cost his parents thousands of dollars and resulted in a disorderly conduct conviction on his record.

Los Angeles police “accidentally” killed a hero they confused for an attacker.

Talk about “shoot first, ask questions later”. In police state America, that’s exactly what happens… even if you’re the good guy.

Aspiring TV producer Josh Winkler ran out of his apartment to run to the aid of screaming neighbors being held up by an attacker. Winkler was slashed by the attacker and left covered in blood as he ran out of the apartment to seek help.

When cops saw him, they mistook him for the attacker and shot and killed him with a single bullet.

In today’s Land of the Free, the police have no problem shooting those alleged of committing crimes. Innocent until proven guilty is a quaint notion. Now, police shoot the good guys doing the job they were too busy stopping speeders to get to.

Of course, the police were prompt to charge the real suspect with the murder of a guy they themselves murdered.

An Illinois woman was woken up at gunpoint by DEA officers… after buying garden supplies.

Don’t plan any trips to your local garden or home improvement store soon. Unless, that is, you want your home to be raided at dawn by drug enforcement Gestapo.

Angela Kirking was greeted by four DEA agents and five local cops three weeks after purchasing a 16-ounce bottle of fertilizer. Apparently the feds are now surveilling garden stores that sell hydroponic equipment for criminals. (Bad news if you’re an entrepreneur in the garden space.)

More disturbing is the fact that cops actually got a search warrant “100%” on the basis that Kirking had visited that store.

The NSA knew about the “Heartbleed” bug for two years, and used it to gather intelligence.

The Heartbleed bug that has prompted internet users to reset their passwords was allegedly used by the US intelligence community to spy on American citizens for two years. And there were plans to further exploit the bug to gather more intelligence from unknowing Americans.

The spy agency claims they knew nothing about the bug. Then again, they claimed they weren’t spying on Americans to begin with. Here in Europe, US relations are strained to the breaking point thanks to aggressive NSA spying on foreign government officials such as Germany’s Angela Merkel.

And Barack Obama’s overhaul of the NSA is believed to include provisions that would force businesses like phone companies to keep more customer data on hand.

A US consular officer was caught selling visas for sex.

As someone who has gone through the fiancee visa process, I’ve heard all of the stories of consular officers pressuring fiancees and spouses to give officers sex in exchange for approving their visa. I can say with certainty that it happens on a daily basis in some emerging market countries, including China, where visa standards are tough.

One US consular officer in Guyana was recently caught in the act. The scandal started to unfold when people began complaining that their visa applications were late. Then, the local media — not the Consulate itself — broke the story. The consular officer not only received sex for approving visas, but a Guyanese official said he was also selling visas for US residence for up to $40,000 in a local bar.

And the local media suggests he also traded some of his sexual favors over to local drug dealers, getting cash in return for their ability to pimp visa applicants out on the open market; essentially creating an alleged human trafficking operation.

It’s a good thing the US government isn’t some banana republic. Reports say the embassy insisted on keeping the whole story “hush hush”.

Women in California prisons are being pressured into sterilization.

My free market friends might argue this is a good thing — after all, why not save the taxpayer money?

Well, because this is the same government that kills three year olds in Yemen with drones. I don’t want evil organizations sterilizing anyone. An eighty-year-old court case in the US says that prisons can forcibly sterilize inmates for the benefit of the general public.

And while these female prisoners in California weren’t forcibly sterilized, reports say doctors “strongly pressured” them to do so, perhaps even with threats of further incarceration or trumped up charges for not going along.

Half of Americans have changed their behavior thanks to NSA spying.

Freedom isn’t freedom if you can’t actually use it. And freedom of speech, as protected in the First Amendment, means nothing if no one believes the government will enforce their right to speak out.

Apparently, Americans are running scared, with half of them changing their behavior as a result of NSA spying. You can see this at work on places like Facebook. Recently, a teenage girl tweeted a fake and rather unintimidating threat to American Airlines, claiming to be from Al-Qaeda.

While making such threats is a bad idea, the interesting thing was that nearly 100% of the comments I read suggested locking her up and throwing away the key. I have to wonder how many of these commenters realize that the FBI and NSA are reading their every word and feel the need to suck up to them.

If that’s not the case, then the United States has turned into the world’s largest and most judgmental tattletale state. The last time we saw that was a place called the Soviet Union.

US regulators don’t prosecute criminals, they want to give them jobs.

At his retirement party last month, an SEC prosecutor stated that his agency did not pursue criminal cases in “Too Big to Fail” cases because SEC employees wanted golden parachute job offers from firms like Goldman Sachs after they left “public service”.

For the amount of rhetoric that comes out of Washington about “doing the people’s work” and promoting freedom, politics in the US is the worst example of a bunch of stooges biding their time for favors from their crony capitalist pals.

And, of course…

The federal government used SWAT teams and military vehicles to enforce a government land lease.

The biggest story of the week, of course, was the Bureau of Land Management’s standoff at the Bundy Ranch. It now turns out the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was behind the heist, raising questions as to just how high the scandal goes.

Basically, the US government agreed to lease land to a Nevada rancher under certain conditions which he claims they did not meet. Since you can’t fight City Hall, he simply stopped paying them the same way you’d stop paying a landlord who didn’t fix a broken pipe flooding your home.

Rather than use the court system to enforce their lukewarm claims, the government sent SWAT teams, military helicopters, and storm troopers to take the land back. They surveilled the landowners for weeks, following them everywhere they went. When they realized people were going to die, they finally backed off; but not after making one family’s life a living hell.

Don’t worry, though, other legal charges are still pending. And federal officials were all too happy to tackle a cancer victim standing near the action, as well as send a police dog after a pregnant woman.

And that’s “This Week in The Land of the Free”.