How to Fund an American Police State: Real Money for an Imaginary War

[marmar]

from TomDispatch:




How to Fund an American Police State
Real Money for an Imaginary War

By Stephan Salisbury


At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere.

There should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades exploding in Oakland and the sound cannons on New York’s streets simply opened small windows onto a national policing landscape long in the process of militarization -- a bleak domestic no man’s land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases growing quietly on unobtrusive server farms everywhere.

The ubiquitous fantasy of “homeland security,” pushed hard by the federal government in the wake of 9/11, has been widely embraced by the public. It has also excited intense weapons- and techno-envy among police departments and municipalities vying for the latest in armor and spy equipment.

In such a world, deadly gadgetry is just a grant request away, so why shouldn’t the 14,000 at-risk souls in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, have a closed-circuit-digital-camera-and-monitor system (cost: $180,000, courtesy of the Homeland Security Department) identical to the one up and running in New York’s Times Square? ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175511/tomgram%3A_stephan_salisbury%2C_weaponizing_the_body_politic/#more (story follows a brief intro)

[newfie11]

1. Wish I knew where in Scottsbluff that camera is

and Yeah I feel so much safer now (NOT). Our crime rate is very low and this is Ridiculous!

[LiberalEsto]

2. It's not an imaginary war.

It is a war against us. The serfs. The 99 percent. A war against anyone who happens to not be a member of the wealthy elite.

[pscot]

3. I've been nattering about this for years

but no one else seems to much give a shit. We're the generation Ben Franklin warned against in his Federalist letter.