Drones in Texas and Tanks in Tampa: Inside the Out-Of-Control Weaponized Homeland Security State

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/story/154404/drones_in_texas_and_tanks_in_tampa%3A_inside_the_out-of-control_weaponized_homeland_security_state/

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?



*** huh? and here i thought there were budget problems and we were broke?
guess not.

[pscot]

1. Fueled in large measure

by the drug war and the prison-industrial complex. And the beauty part is, the work of the police state can't be off-shored. It's a uniquely American enterprise.

[sad sally]

2. The civil society of the United States has been and continues to be undermined by the exploding

military/homeland security business - with no stopping in sight.

[An army of] a hundred thousand men, costing the taxpayers a hundred million of money, live and bring to the purveyors as much as a hundred million can supply. That is which is seen.

But, a hundred million taken from the pockets of the taxpayers, ceases to maintain these taxpayers and their purveyors as far as a hundred million reaches. This is that which is not seen. Now make your calculations. Add it all up, and tell me what profit there is for the masses?

-Frédéric Bastiat