Killing the Bill of Rights, by Philip Giraldi

In 2005, President George W. Bush allegedly addressed a meeting of Republicans discussing whether to renew the Patriot Act due to its possible unconstitutionality by angrily blurting out that the Constitution was “just a goddamned piece of paper!” If the story is true, it partly explains the numerous crimes committed by Bush and his associates, including the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq based on hyped and even fabricated intelligence. It also suggests the unwillingness of proponents of overriding executive authority to accept that the American people are the inheritors of a number of inalienable liberties to include freedom of speech and association, both of which were impacted negatively by the Patriot Act and the other legislation that followed.

I often think of George Bush when I observe the antics of Joe Biden and his claque of Trotskyites at work. To be sure, thanks to the Bill of Rights you can currently say anything you want in the United States, though there are limits on that freedom if one goes so far as to offend those who are powerful. If you do upset the oligarchs who run our country through corruption of public officials, they have a thousand ways to get you. I recently wrote an article on the use of lawfare to block people and views one objects to by taking them to court on some pretext and bankrupting them through legal fees and penalties. The court system hardly represents the people in any country. It is inevitably heavily politicized by the politicians that grant it its authority and ultimately represents the big money interests that the judges consider their real peers in the Establishment.

The United States government has in fact embraced the suppression of unpopular views and the nations and groups that it finds offensive through the use of sanctions, which are essentially punishments doled out arbitrarily as the government can issue a sanction on its own authority without having to provide any evidence or make a case. And when the White House sanctions a foreign government or group, secondary sanctions kick in to prevent anyone from exchanging goods or services with the targeted entity. I recently was on the receiving end of a Department of the Treasury demand that I stop writing for a foreign website which had been sanctioned. I was warned that I might be subject to a $311,562 fine if I failed to comply. Insofar as I could determine, the foreign website was only guilty of having strongly condemned United States foreign policy, as do I and many other Americans, but the threat of the government coming down with its thousands of lawyers meant that I and other US contributors terminated our relationship.