Profit Motive Drives US Police State
July 25, 2014
Whatever else the US police state is intended to accomplish, it is also a boondoggle.
The rationalizations for the American police state are
merely excuses for the growth of a government behemoth,
which helps corporations profit from a society
kept under lockdown and in fear.
Makow Note- This was the first I heard of "Fusion Centers," a network of more than 70 Orwellian "operations centers" throughout the US. It seems to be an infrastructure to deal with a domestic insurgenc, i.e. popular revolution..
The Stealing of America by the Cops, the Courts, the Corporations and Congress
By John W. Whitehead (Condensed by henrymakow.com)
Instead of Robin Hood stealing from the rich to feed the poor, you've got the government and its merry band of corporate thieves stealing from the poor to fatten the rich. In this way, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. All the while, the American Dream of peace, prosperity, and liberty has turned into a nightmare of endless wars, debilitating debt, and outright tyranny.
What Americans don't seem to comprehend is that if the government can arbitrarily take away your property,...you have no true rights. You're nothing more than a serf or a slave.
In this way, the police state with all of its trappings...is little more than a front for ... laundering as much money as possible through government agencies and into the bank accounts of corporations.
The rationalizations for the American police state are many. There's the so-called threat of terrorism, the ongoing Drug War, the influx of illegal immigrants, the threat of civil unrest in the face of economic collapse, etc. However, as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the real motivating factor behind erecting a police state is not to protect the people, but to further enrich the powerful. Consider the following costly line items, all part of the government's so-called quest to keep us safe and fight terrorism while entrenching the police state, enriching the elite, and further shredding our constitutional rights:
*$34 billion for police departments to add to their arsenals of weapons and equipment. Since President Obama took office, police departments across the country "have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft."
*$6 billion in "proceeds of crime" assets seized...because police "suspect" they may be connected to criminal activity. Then whether or not any crime is actually proven, the cops keeps the citizen's property. Eighty percent of these asset forfeiture cases result in no charge against the property owner. ...
*$61 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, one of the most notoriously bloated government agencies ever created. The third largest federal agency behind the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, the DHS--with its 240,000 full-time workers and sub-agencies--has been aptly dubbed a "runaway train."
*$1.4 billion for "fusion centers."
These fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance and
intelligence efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, have
proven to be exercises in incompetence, often producing irrelevant,
useless or inappropriate intelligence, while spending millions of
dollars on "flat-screen televisions, sport utility vehicles, hidden
cameras and other gadgets."*$80 billion spent on incarceration by the states and the federal government in 2010. While providing security, housing, food, medical care, etc., for six million Americans is a hardship for cash-strapped states, it's a gold mine to profit-hungry corporations such as Corrections Corp of America and GEO Group, the leaders in the partnership corrections industry. Thus, with an eye toward increasing its bottom line, CCA has floated a proposal to prison officials in 48 states offering to buy and manage public prisons at a substantial cost savings to the states. In exchange, the prisons would have to contain at least 1,000 beds and states would have to maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years. This has led to the phenomenon of overcriminalization of everyday activities, in which mundane activities such as growing vegetables in your yard or collecting rainwater on your property are criminalized, resulting in jail sentences for individuals who might otherwise have never seen the inside of a jail cell.
*93 cents an hour for forced, prison labor in service to for-profit corporations .... A good portion of the 2 million prisoners in public facilities are forced to work for corporations, making products on the cheap, undermining free laborers... "Prison labor reportedly produces 100 percent of military helmets, shirts, pants, tents, bags, canteens, and a variety of other equipment. Prison labor makes circuit boards for IBM, Texas Instruments, and Dell. Many McDonald's uniforms are sewn by inmates. Other corporations--Microsoft, Victoria's Secret, Boeing, Motorola, Compaq, Revlon, and Kmart--also benefit from prison labor."*$84.9 million collected in one year by the District of Columbia as a result of tickets issued by speeding and traffic light cameras stationed around the city. Multiply that income hundreds of times over to account for the growing number of localities latching onto these revenue-generating, photo-enforced camera schemes, and you'll understand why community governments and police agencies are lining up in droves to install them, despite reports of wide scale corruption by the companies operating the cameras. Although nine states have banned the cameras, they're in 24 states already and rising.
(left, the US has over 2.2 million people in prison, about 6 times as many as Chinaon a per capita basis.)
CONCLUSION
In sum, the American police state is a multi-billion dollar boondoggle, meant to keep the property and the resources of the American people flowing into corrupt government agencies and their corporate partners.
For those with any accounting ability, it's clear that the total sum of the expenses being charged to the American taxpayer's account by the government add up to only one thing: the loss of our freedoms.
It's time to seriously consider a plan to begin de-funding this beast and keeping our resources where they belong: in our communities, working for us.
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Read this article about Fusion Centers
Most people aren't aware of Fusion Centers, but the people who are, are wondering what they are and what they do! Are they part of the local, state, federal government, military? Do they collect information on militias, illegal aliens, big businesses who are doing illegal things, you, me? And who pays for them, communities, state, federal government, military? Are they privately owned? A lot of questions, but not many answers in the public media.
Doug P said (July 26, 2014):
There is another side to this. The national debt is growing so much in "developed countries" that the financial oligarchy must be assured that the debt can be collected upon. The national debt is not just some Keynesian ideal "necessary" for the economy. Its being added to books, they intend to collect it, for this they will need a police state to prevent people from revolting after having everything they have stolen from them to pay off a phoney debt.
The debt isn't real. The only thing that makes our money worth anything is our willingness to work for it. Money is not based on a promise to the people or a substantiative value. We as people normally accept the debt as real and dutifully pay our "income tax" as if it was a tax and not something to pay for the champagne wishes and caviar dreams of our sadistic rulers.
We accept this, many embrace the police state.