Yves here. The latest post at TomDispatch, Creating a Military-Industrial-Immigration Complex, How to Turn the U.S.-Mexican Border into a War Zone by Todd Miller, describes how the US border with Mexico, which is being defined more and more generously, has become an R&D lab for US security operations, as well as a new profit opportunity for defense contractors, who are looking for ways to repurpose combat equipment for domestic use. To put none too fine a point on its, the police state will be perfected on illegal immigrants or in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time Americans mainly of color, and then deployed on the rest of us. The 17 city paramilatary crackdown on Occupy was just the warm-up act.
By Todd Miller, who has researched and written about U.S.- Mexican border issues for more than 10 years.He now writes on border and immigration issues for NACLA Report on the Americas and its blog “Border Wars,” among other places. Cross posted from TomDispatch
The first thing I did at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix this March was climb the brown “explosion-resistant” tower, 30 feet high and 10 feet wide, directly in the center of the spacious room that holds this annual trade show. From a platform where, assumedly, a border guard would stand, you could take in the constellation of small booths offering the surveillance industry’s finest products, including a staggering multitude of ways to monitor, chase, capture, or even kill people, thanks to modernistic arrays of cameras and sensors, up-armored jeeps, the latest in guns, and even surveillance balloons.
Although at the time, headlines in the Southwest emphasized potential cuts to future border-security budgets thanks to Congress’s “sequester,” the vast Phoenix Convention Center hall — where the defense and security industries strut their stuff for law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — told quite a different story. Clearly, the expanding global industry of border security wasn’t about to go anywhere. It was as if the milling crowds of business people, government officials, and Border Patrol agents sensed that they were about to be truly in the money thanks to “immigration reform,” no matter what version of it did or didn’t pass Congress. And it looks like they were absolutely right.
All around me in that tower were poster-sized fiery photos demonstrating ways it could help thwart massive attacks and fireball-style explosions. A border like the one just over 100 miles away between the United States and Mexico, it seemed to say, was not so much a place that divided people in situations of unprecedented global inequality, but a site of constant war-like danger.
Below me were booths as far as the eye could see surrounded by Disneyesque fake desert shrubbery, barbed wire, sand bags, and desert camouflage. Throw in the products on display and you could almost believe that you were wandering through a militarized border zone with a Hollywood flair.
To an awed potential customer, a salesman in a suit and tie demonstrated a mini-drone that fits in your hand like a Frisbee. It seemed to catch the technological fetishism that makes Expo the extravaganza it is. Later I asked him what such a drone would be used for. “To see what’s over the next hill,” he replied.
Until you visit the yearly Expo, it’s easy enough to forget that the U.S. borderlands are today ground zero for the rise, growth, and spread of a domestic surveillance state. On June 27th, the Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. Along with the claim that it offers a path to citizenship to millions of the undocumented living in the United States (with many stringent requirements), in its more than 1,000 pages it promises to build the largest border-policing and surveillance apparatus ever seen in the United States. The result, Senator John McCain proudly said, will be the “most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
This “border surge,” a phrase coined by Senator Chuck Schumer, is also a surveillance surge. The Senate bill provides for the hiring of almost 19,000 new Border Patrol agents, the building of 700 additional miles of walls, fences, and barriers, and an investment of billions of dollars in the latest surveillance technologies, including drones.
In this, the bill only continues in a post-9/11 tradition in which our southern divide has become an on-the-ground laboratory for the development of a surveillance state whose mission is already moving well beyond those borderlands. Calling this “immigration reform” is like calling the National Security Agency’s expanding global surveillance system a domestic telecommunications upgrade. It’s really all about the country that the United States is becoming — one of the police and the policed.
Low-Intensity War Zone
The $46 billion border security price tag in the immigration reform bill will simply expand on what has already been built. After all, $100 billion was spent on border “enforcement” in the first decade after 9/11. To that must be added the annual $18 billion budget for border and immigration enforcement, money that outpaces the combined budgets of all other federal law enforcement agencies. In fact, since Operation Blockade in the 1990s, the U.S.-Mexico border has gone through so many surges that a time when simple chain link fences separated two friendly countries is now unimaginable.
To witness the widespread presence of Department of Homeland Security agents on the southern border, just visit that international boundary 100 miles south of Border Security Expo. Approximately 700 miles of walls, fences, and barriers already cut off the two countries at its major urban crossings and many rural ones as well. Emplaced everywhere are cameras that can follow you — or your body heat — day or night. Overhead, as in Afghanistan, a Predator B drone may hover. You can’t hear its incessant buzzing only because it flies so high, nor can you see the crew in charge of flying it and analyzing your movements from possibly hundreds of miles away.
As you walk, perhaps you step on implanted sensors, creating a beeping noise in some distant monitoring room. Meanwhile, green-striped Border Patrol vehicles rush by constantly. On the U.S.-Mexican border, there are already more than 18,500 agents (and approximately 2,300 more on the Canadian border). In counterterrorism mode, they are paid to be suspicious of everything and everybody. Some Homeland Security vehicles sport trailers carrying All Terrain Vehicles. Some have mounted surveillance cameras, others cages to detain captured migrants. Some borderlanders like Mike Wilson of the Tucson-based Border Action Network, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation (a Native American people and the original inhabitants of the Arizona borderlands), call the border security operatives an “occupying army.”
Checkpoints — normally located 20-50 miles from the international boundary — serve as a second layer of border enforcement. Stopped at one of them, you will be interrogated by armed agents in green, most likely with drug-sniffing dogs. If you are near the international divide, it’s hard to avoid such checkpoints where you will be asked about your citizenship — and much more if anything you say or do, or simply the way you look, raises suspicions. Even outside of the checkpoints, agents of the Department of Homeland Security can pull you over for any reason — without probable cause or a warrant — and do what is termed a “routine search.” As a U.S. Border Patrol agent told journalist Margaret Regan, within a hundred miles of the international divide, “there’s an asterisk on the Constitution.”
Off-road forward operating bases offer further evidence of the battlefield atmosphere being created near the border. Such outposts became commonplace during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were meant to house U.S. soldiers deployed into remote areas. On the border, there are high-tech yet rudimentary camps that serve the same purpose. They also signal how agents of the Department of Homeland Security are “gaining, maintaining, and expanding” into rural areas traversed by migrants and used by smugglers, though to this point never crossed by a known international terrorist.
These rural areas, especially in Arizona, are riddled with migrant causalities. More than 6,000 “remains” have been recovered since the mid-1990s, deaths not for the most part from bullets but from exposure. The U.S. borderlands, according to sociologist Timothy Dunn, started to become a militarized zone as early as the 1970s — in part, in response to the Pentagon’s low-intensity conflict doctrine. With Congressional immigration reform, if it passes the House of Representatives, it may very well become a full-fledged war zone.
Since the 1990s, the strategy of the Border Patrol has been termed “prevention by deterrence” and has been focused on concentrating agents and surveillance technologies in urban areas, once the traditional migrant routes. The idea was to funnel migrant flows into areas too dangerous and desolate to cross like the triple-degree-temperature desert in Arizona. Deadly yes; impossible to cross, no. Although unauthorized border-crossings have slowed down in recent years, tens of thousands continue to cross into the United States annually from Mexico and Central America, thanks in part to the continued havoc of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which left more two million Mexican farmers unemployed.
I met Adira, a 21-year-old from Oaxaca, Mexico, in early June. She told me a story all too common in Arizona. As she described her experience, I realized that I was talking to somebody who had probably died and been brought back to life. We were only a few blocks from the border. Homeland Security had formally deported her only days before. Still reliving the trauma of her experience, she stared down, her face colorless, as she talked.
I had heard the basics of her story so many times before: to avoid the militarized surveillance apparatus, she and her companions walked for at least five days through the southern Arizona desert with little — and then no — water or food. By the fourth day, the mountains began to talk to her, so she told me, and she suspected she was coming to the end of her young life. After she couldn’t walk any more, the guide dragged her, telling her constantly: “We just have to make it to the next point.”
When they reached a road on the American side of the border, she remembers convulsing four times (just as she remembers blood bursting spontaneously from the noses of her companions). And then she remembers no more. She woke up in a hospital. There were scars on her chest. Medics must have used a machine, she thought, to shock her back to life. She found out later that somebody had lit a fire to attract the Border Patrol. She’s lucky not to be among those remains regularly found out in that desert.
In other words, each further tightening of the border is a death sentence passed on yet more Latin Americans. According to a statement by a group of Tucson organizations, including No More Deaths and the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, the border build-up in the immigration reform bill promises more of the same: “Make no mistake: this bill will lead to more deaths on the border.”
The Laboratory
In early March, DRS Technologies set up its integrated fixed-tower technology at the University of Arizona’s (UA) Science and Technology Park, just south of Tucson, an hour from the border, and very close to where Adira almost lost her life. The company was eager to show off the long-range surveillance technology it had been developing for borders in places like Egypt and Jordan.
It set up a mock operational control room to do a dog-and-pony show for the local media. Four of its IT guys then focused their cameras on an elevated railroad spur more than four miles away in the middle of the desert where two men were approaching each other to consummate a fake drug deal. One handed the other a backpack. It was all vividly watchable on DRS’s video screens. Although the odds of such a scenario actually happening ranged from slim to none, the demonstration was a reminder of just how fertile the U.S.-Mexico borderlands are for defense- and surveillance-related companies. It’s here that new generations of surveillance technology are regularly born and developed.
For almost a decade, the Department of Homeland Security has been attempting to build a “virtual wall” along the border — not a physical barrier but a high-tech surveillance masterpiece, a complex web of technology, radar, unattended ground sensors, and camera systems meant to detect anyone crossing the border anywhere. The last attempt to install such an experimental system along part of the border was in 2006. Then the Department of Homeland Security awarded Boeing Corporation a multi-billion-dollar contract to develop such a “wall,” known as SBInet. That contract was abruptly cancelled in 2011, after the costly and delayed program advertised as offering “unprecedented situational awareness” misfired regularly in the rugged terrain of the Arizona borderlands. Now, companies like DRS are standing in line for the next round of potentially lucrative contracts, as Homeland Security wants “to finish the job.”
The UA Tech Park is one place in the southern borderlands where surveillance technology can be developed, tested, evaluated, and demonstrated. It has 18,000 linear feet of fencing surrounding its “solar zone,” a solar-technology-centric research area ideal for testing sensor systems along a future border wall. On any of the roadways in its 1,345 acres, it can set up mock border-crossings or checkpoints to test new equipment and methods. It draws on faculty and graduate students from the college of engineering. In “rapid-response teams,” they offer third-party evaluations of border control technology. Some of this same technology is also being created on the UA campus, thanks in part to millions of dollars in DHS grants.
Here, too, as Tech Park CEO Bruce Wright tells me, they can test new technologies “right in the field” — that is, on the border, presumably on real people. One of the tech park’s goals, he says, is to develop the first border security industry cluster of its kind in the United States. In southern Arizona alone, they have already identified 57 companies, big and small, working on border policing technology.
The Tech Park’s director of community engagement Molly Gilbert says, “It’s really about development, and we want to create technology jobs in our border towns.” These are sweet words for the economically depressed communities of southern Arizona, their poverty rates usually hovering at around 20%. With projected global revenues of approximately $20 billion in 2013 and a 5% growth rate that has withstood a worldwide recession, the global border security industry was flourishing even before the latest immigration reform proposal. Now, it’s poised for a potential bonanza.
The key, as Wright stressed in a 2012 interview, is that the products developed for the U.S.-Mexican borderlands be marketed in the future for the U.S.-Canada border, where “defenses” are already being upgraded, for other international borders, but also for places that have little to do with borders. These might include the perimeters of utility companies and airports, or police forces with expanding national security and immigration enforcement missions.
“There’s a huge market for this technology worldwide,” Wright told me then, “because borders exist everywhere. There’s the Palestinian-Israeli border, there’s the Syrian-Israeli border, there’s the German-Polish border… Take it around the world and wherever you want to go there are borders, so the technology is very adaptable and has a market worldwide.”
The Surge
The word “surge,” last heard in relation to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, actually fits the immigration reform bill perfectly. It’s almost as if a domestic war is about to be formally declared.
After all, the bill would come close to doubling the number of Border Patrol agents, bringing their ranks to 40,000 — the size of a small army — stationed, according to Senator Lindsey Graham, every 1,000 feet along the nearly 2,000-mile border. To put that in perspective, the Border Patrol, created in 1924, took close to 70 years to reach 4,000 agents. In 2006, at 10,000 agents, it had its first major hiring surge, doubling its numbers. Many of the new agents were veterans from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This new surge will mean collateral benefits for all sorts of businesses — more uniforms, more guns, more vehicles, more maintenance. And that’s just to scratch the surface of what’s likely to happen.
As Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy put it, this will be the “Christmas wish list for Halliburton,” and the border security industry, as at this year’s Border Security Expo, is visibly licking its chops. Senator Marco Rubio laid out the following list or, as the trade magazine Homeland Security Today called it, “treasure trove” of products that it expected to be ordered if the bill passed: 86 integrated fixed towers, 286 fixed camera systems, 232 mobile surveillance systems, 4,595 unattended ground sensors, 820 handheld equipment devices, 416 personal radiation detectors, 104 radiation isotope identification devices, 62 mobile automated targeting systems, 53 fiber-optic tank inspection scopes, 37 portable contraband detectors, 28 license plate readers, 26 mobile inspection scopes and sensors for checkpoints, nine land automated targeting systems, and eight non-intrusive inspection systems.
In addition, Rubio said, the immigration bill would include “four unmanned aircraft systems, six VADER radar systems, 17 UH-1N helicopters, eight C-206H aircraft upgrades, eight AS-350 light enforcement helicopters, 10 Blackhawk helicopter 10 A-L conversions, five new Blackhawk M Model, 30 marine vessels, 93 sensor repeaters, 90 communications repeaters, two card-reader systems, five camera refresh, three backscatters, one radiation portal monitor, one littoral detection, one real-time radioscopy, and improved surveillance capabilities for existing aerostat.”
The reform package calls for “persistent surveillance” and 24/7 drone flights, although the areas of these flights are not specified. Even before the Senate reform bill came into view, San Diego-based General Atomics was awarded a contract that would add 14 more drones to the current fleet of 10 used by Customs and Border Protection (CBP, the parent agency of the Border Patrol). CBP plans to have 18 drones in flight by 2016 and 24 in the years to follow patrolling U.S. skies over cities such as San Diego, Tucson, and El Paso — not to speak, in the north, of Seattle, Detroit, and Buffalo.
Some of these drones will be equipped with the VADER “man-hunting” radar system, made by Northrup Grumman, used to detect roadside bombers in Afghanistan. Now, even more of this technology will be put to use in the borderlands, where, according to CBP, it is aready locating unauthorized border-crossers. Recently declassified documents also show that CBP has been considering upgrading its drones with “non-lethal” weapons to be able to take down “targets of interest.”
According to the New York Times, other military-industrial behemoths like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are actively looking for “revenue flows” as “wars wind down.” Teams of lobbyists, including former New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato, have been pressing the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of their corporate clients. D’Amato lobbies for the United Technologies Corporation, which stands to make millions off an immigration bill that will okay the purchase of 15 of its Blackhawk helicopters. This is but one example of the increasingly powerful set of corporate interests eager to see immigration reform pass now in the House of Representatives. A vote could come as early as Labor Day.
But whatever happens, it’s time to stop thinking of all this as “immigration reform.” It represents what may be the most intense concentration of the surveillance state in a single location ever witnessed — a place where the Constitution has an asterisk, which means that anything goes and dystopian worlds of all sorts can be invented.
The Los Angeles Times has written that, if passed, the bill “would also be a boost to defense contractors and an economic stimulus for border communities, creating thousands of jobs that could raise home prices and spur consumer spending around border security stations.” It sounds like Keynesian economics, but of a whole different sort.
In a world where basic services are being cut, an emerging policing apparatus in the borderlands is flourishing. As Mattea Kramer and Chris Hellman reported at TomDispatch in February, since September 11, 2001, the United States has spent $791 billion on “homeland security” alone, an inflation-adjusted $300 billion more than the cost of the entire New Deal.
In those borderlands, we are seeing the birth of a military-industrial-immigration complex. It seems destined to shape our future.
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Once Americans are effectively imprisoned or intimidated to the point where they can not effectively resist, then they will realize they live in a police state; and not the kinder, gentler police state they’ve become accustomed to – where it’s always someone else who is getting abused. Even the most ardent defenders of the status quo and apologists for oligarchy will get screwed, and of course, they will not admit to ever being wrong. More likely, they will simply fall in line and blame whatever the enemy or “traitor” du jour happens to be. They just can’t help themselves.
Sure glad I don’t live there anymore.
You got that right: When we become an actual police state, Americans will just blame it on immigrants or terrorists or blacks or whatever the whipping dog du jour is that day.
In America, EVERYTHING is someone elses fault, apparently. Preferably someone who looks as different from the perceived mainstream as possible.
THANKS
The US already *is* a police state. It demonstrated that clearly during the search for the Boston Marathon bombers, when they went house-to-house, clearing out the residents at gunpoint and walking through the houses.
The response to all of this from Americans is typically “Meh”.
And probably will continue to be the same.
The thing is, Lizard, we are a police state with a human face, so noone notices.
But one of these days the velvet gloves are going to come off.
Not that the velvet gloves make much of a difference anyway: Velvet doesnt soften the blow from the steel gauntlets much.
There’s a fortune to be made…
It appears that the military-industrial complex has metatasized from targeting foreign rivals to targeting foreign allies to targeting domestic foreigners to targeting U.S. citizens. And with the “Insider Threat Program,” they target each other. Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, indeed.
Seeing as how WWII got us out of the first Great Depression, maybe the PTB are planning to use an internal “war for the border” to provide the economic stimulus needed to restart the economy this time around (oh wait a minute, I forgot we’re already recovering).
Is this what nascent totalitarianism looks like? Certain segments of our population already live in a de facto totalitarian state with little to no constitutional protection. Young black folks that are subject to “routine search” stop-and-frisks, immigrants who live in fear of deportation, whistle-blowers and activists who are imprisoned and tortured. Maybe once the creeping authoritarian state starts putting a crimp in the lives of ordinary white people there will be some protest, some pushback. Part of me fears, however, that by then will be too late, and as Dr. King put it, “there are no sadder words in the English language than ‘too late'”.
First they came for the young black males, but I didn’t stand up,
because I was a white boy.
Then they came for the illegal immigrants and their children, but I didn’t stand up
because I was born here.
Then they came for the rabble-rousers and the soap-box orators, but I didn’t stand up,
because I never was much into going to protests.
Then they came for the investigative journalists and muck-rakers, but I didn’t stand up,
because I was too busy watching cat videos on YouTube.
Then they came for me, which honestly,
I should have seen coming.
One has to wonder what the long-range plan is. The only growth industry the United States seems to offer for export is population control by the use of belligerence, intimidation, surveillance, and violence. Where’s the carrot? Where are cooperation and voluntary compliance? Increasingly, there seem to be none.
For the leaders of Latin American countries still under the influence of the US — Peru, Chile, Columbia, Mexico, etc. — what’s the future of a US alliance, other than browbeating their own people into submission? Is that a sustainable long-range strategy? Will greatly increasing state violence, with all the new technology to make that possible, be able to maintain control of populaces that are progressively being ravaged and pauperized by neoliberal economic policies?
No, I think history shows that overtly repressive states get overthrown eventually…but ‘eventually’ might turn out to be a number of generations.
That remains to be seen. My own personal sphere of experience is so limited, I don’t feel qualified to even try to make an assessment. But if we want the answer to be “NO!” then lots of us will need to be committed to standing up to the violent state, come what may…my take, anyway.
“One has to wonder what the long-range plan is. The only growth industry the United States seems to offer for export is population control by the use of belligerence, intimidation, surveillance, and violence.”
And curiously, former Gen. David Petraeus is scheduled to teach 2 public policy courses in the undergraduate “Honors COllege” at CUNY this coming academic year, (for the ungodly amount of $75,000 per course which is causing a bit of a stir):
“David Petraeus’s course description for his high-paying gig next year at CUNY is up. The course is called “Are We on the Threshold of the North American Decade.” That sounds like a question to me, but there’s no question mark.
Here’s the description:
In this interdisciplinary seminar, students will examine in depth and then synthesize the history and trends in diverse public policy topics with a view towards recommendations for America’s leadership role in the emerging global economy.”
http://crookedtimber.org/2013/07/11/can-you-believe-cuny-is-paying-me-this-much-money-for-this-sht/
Note also Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) use of the term “surge” to describe the proposed new border security policy, as well as former NY Gov. Al D’Amato’s (D) lobbying efforts for the security industry.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Ah, yes. Gen. Petraeus’ other other gig. I knew I saw this somewhere:
“Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P. today announced the appointment of retired four-star General and former Director of the CIA David Petraeus as Chairman of the newly created KKR Global Institute…
With the addition of General Petraeus, we are building on the work we have done to understand the investment implications of public policy, macro-economic, regulatory and technology trends globally. We are pleased to bring all of this expertise together under one umbrella, the KKR Global Institute, to deliver the best of KKR’s insights for our investors.”
http://media.kkr.com/media/media_releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=768022
The german-polish border? WTF!!??
Olivier, that’s a rather flexible border. Probably not a good idea to put too much investment in its current location… (I kid. I think maybe they refer to maybe Germans wanting to keep Ukrainian tradesmen out of the EZ or something? Is that still an issue?)
Poland is within the Schengen zone! These guys are totally creepy. I hope they get jailed or at least seriously harrassed if ever they dare come over here.
PROIMMIGRATION– BUT
A History
Reagan gave Amnesty to 3 million in 1985.
Five years later they could become citizens.
A citizen could being in the entire immediate family
In 1990, the immigration quota was 500,000.
BUT—1.500,000 immigrated into America.
11,000,000 illegals get Amnesty?
Become citizens in 5 years.
In six years how many of those citizens will bring in entire family?
3,000,000=1,500,000—-
11,000,0000= how many? 3,600,000????
Where’s Kevin de Bruxelles when he’s needed?
Unfortunately, it seems the decades-long militarization will continue until comfortable liberals are personally affected.
Even at this late hour, most upper middle class Democrats face little personal threat from the drug war and border security and so forth. Illegal drug use is rampant at our nation’s premier college campuses and investment banks and so on.
The response to the Occupy protests were quite helpful in revealing that it is urban Democratic politicians who are primarily responsible, not rural America or evangelical Christians or flyover country or other helpful scapegoats.
Friends;
As a friend of ours who is three quarter Choctaw likes to remark; “You think you’ve got problems with illegal immigrants? Just ask us about immigration problems!”
We all know how that ended. So, why should the present apex elites think that History is going to treat them any better than their predecessors?
Yeah lets just blame ourselves and not the illegals that are breaking our laws. I do agree though that NAFTA has hurt both countries and its workers. If a country can not control its borders it will cease to exist.
Cease to exist my ass. All a country is are lines on a map backed up by government force.
And obviously the illegals are not going to get rid of the American Military. Though if they do somehow, power to em. Then we wont be causing any more fuss overseas.
Immigrants wouldn’t come here if they couldn’t get jobs. Businesses are all too happy to hire illegals for less than a citizen would make, and their cronies in government are happy to let them do it.
What’s wrong with that? You make it sound as if they are like jack booted invaters.
There is a compeling reason why they are coming here for jobs – because they need jobs and they are not to be had in Mexico. They are coming here because they are desperate.
Just shutting off the “jobs spiget” dosn’t solve the larger problem posed by neo-libieral economics.
Horse & Buggy Automation
“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
A turtle will swim across the ocean and walk across a continent, to lay its eggs, leave them behind and do it again, as a matter of course, to outdistance time and the lazy predators inhabiting it. As you can see, the empire majority talks, but it does not prosecute the bankers of its currency. Instead, it desperately seeks out any remaining producers that it may tax into submission, to maintain its ponzi. Have you examined the tax returns of all those talkers that claimed they would leave the empire if QE-Obama continued?
The empire majority will sit on its fat a- and plead equal rights to your work right up until its end, always has, and always will. Don’t expect the upper middle class to give up its make-work jobs, crumbling infrastructure, or McMansions willingly, ever. Instead, it will mollify with welfare to its own ultimate end and imprison the rest, to ensure continued compliance with the past. It’s not the rich you have to concern yourself with. Take a look; it’s the middle class hunting you down. Heaven forbid you become successful on your own merit, proving all its assumptions false.
The only thing worth going to war over is love. Prepare your children, from birth, accordingly, and expect the majority to attack them. Only an upside-down empire robot sends its children to war, under the auspices of eunuchs, to preserve the status quo of unthinking tradition. It is your job, as a parent, to wage war against the peer pressure seeking to contain your children and steal their future.
Jesus didn’t wake up to the ongoing concern and wage war with those around him. He walked away, only to return and deliver the blow, blow after blow after blow. You are not going to alter the majority’s interest in adopting false assumptions to benefit itself, but you can remove the false assumptions underpinning their lives at will. When the majority gangs up on you, it is doing you a favor, if you can enter and exit its event horizons at will.
That Boeing went down because the empire majority is depending upon automation to do its thinking for it. That’s what I mean by saying that the light circuit remains wired, but the rest of the elevator is being modernized. The automobile, the airplane and the flattop are all dinosaurs being delegated to the trash heap of History, which is why the price of oil goes up with declining consumption. How much more basic does it get than height and altitude? False assumptions may always be replaced with technology, but a thinking human will always be required so long as there are humans.
Labor is not going to replace the rich scapegoats. You don’t replace the negative battery pole because the cells have stopped conducting, because you are installing the next set of cells. Manners are rules of war developed over time, which allow you to ignore the complexity of stupidity, while you develop your priorities. The insecure, fearful, and greedy majority isn’t going to attack you directly if it can avoid it. It is going to attack your children, which it is incapable of rearing itself.
The majority wants you to focus, along with it, on the symptoms at the end of the process assembly line. Let the empire steal incremental development improvements, rather than your children, which, like Boeing, continue to fail relative to nature, while you build quantum advancements. The empire plus you equals excellence is the majority’s algorithm. Nature plus you is God’s algorithm, and the latter wins every time, when you are ready with your part of the development.
Congress is done. The Fed is done. All that remains is the US Navy. And Labor still hasn’t played trump. Bet accordingly.
if you are having problems posting, take a look at the filter actions, what/who it is calling.
”….To put none too fine a point on its, the police state will be perfected on illegal immigrants or in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time Americans mainly of color, and then deployed on the rest of us….”
Agreed.You only have to look at the media witchhunt of the white Zimmerman to know whats coming.The Hispanic bit was dropped to enable a racially motivated trial proceed against him
White people are being attacked in their own country by an invasion of illegal immigrants and then blamed for objecting and for being white.
Unfortunately a march by African American activists against illegal immigration on 15th July likely will be censored by MSM as it does nt play play well with ‘Lets get Whitey’.. in this slow motion Genocide of White America.
Because immigration TOTALLY equals genocide right?
“media witchhunt of the white Zimmerman?”
You mean the guy in a car with a gun and cell phone who tracked a black kid on foot in his nabes and who then shot him in self-defense because he was afraid for his life? That one?
Crabs in a bucket.
“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
A turtle will swim across the ocean and walk across a continent, to lay its eggs, leave them behind and do it again, as a matter of course, to outdistance time and the lazy predators inhabiting it. As you can see, the empire majority talks, but it does not prosecute the bankers of its currency. Instead, it desperately seeks out any remaining producers that it may tax into submission, to maintain its ponzi. Have you examined the tax returns of all those talkers that claimed they would leave the empire if QE-Obama continued?
The empire majority will sit on its fat a- and plead equal rights to your work right up until its end, always has, and always will. Don’t expect the upper middle class to give up its make-work jobs, crumbling infrastructure, or McMansions willingly, ever. Instead, it will mollify with welfare to its own ultimate end and imprison the rest, to ensure continued compliance with the past. It’s not the rich you have to concern yourself with. Take a look; it’s the middle class hunting you down. Heaven forbid you become successful on your own merit, proving all its assumptions false.
The empire majority will sit on its fat a- and plead equal rights to your work right up until its end, always has, and always will. Don’t expect the upper middle class to give up its make-work jobs, crumbling infrastructure, or McMansions willingly, ever. Instead, it will mollify with welfare to its own ultimate end and imprison the rest, to ensure continued compliance with the past. It’s not the rich you have to concern yourself with. Take a look; it’s the middle class hunting you down. Heaven forbid you become successful on your own merit, proving all its assumptions false.
The empire majority will sit on its fat a- and plead equal rights to your work right up until its end, always has, and always will. Don’t expect the upper middle class to give up its make-work jobs, crumbling infrastructure, or McMansions willingly, ever. Instead, it will mollify with welfare to its own ultimate end and imprison the rest, to ensure continued compliance with the past. It’s not the rich you have to concern yourself with. Take a look; it’s the middle class hunting you down. Heaven forbid you become successful on your own merit, proving all its assumptions false.
Yes, we already live in a police state but where are we headed? For a glimpse of the future let’s look at some present day clues-
1.Congress and the executive branch are pretty much puppets of the corporations and their lobbyists.
2. The current trend in states and municipalities is to bankrupt them and sell off the infrastructure to favored corporate interests- the rise of corporate prisons is a prime example.
3. Through trade agreements (Trans Pacific Partnership is a prime example) written by lobbyists corporations will achieve sovereignty, likely above that of nation-states, and will be able to legally enforce what can now be only described as “their God given entitlement to make a profit off of you” via their own international corporate law system.
Corporate serfdom, here we come.
They’re trying to turn Mexico into Gaza in American minds, and our local police force into the IDF wearing military, swat, and black Star Wars outfits. Also, do the young think they are watching movies?
Israeli/American activist and retired anthropology professor gave a brilliant description of it in Seattle a few years ago. Here it is. if you don’t have time to listen to all of it (including his take on Brazil circa the upcoming Olympics, which is already coming true) then just listen to around 11-25 min.
“The Global Pacification Industry”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVa0QbH8YcA