Tom Engelhardt warns of machine guns in NYC, part of the shunting by Homeland Security of over $5 billion in equipment to local police, including mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles to Ohio State and Walsh County, North Dakota. Many of my veteran students insist that the enemy would be all around us if not for the military's vigilance. As a civilian, admittedly I lack the insider information they may have been given, but I wonder as one opposed to militarization of our domestic society what self-sustaining confirmation bias may have been generated, post-9/11, to justify such arguments. We are always told of foiled plots, after all. Engelhardt documents the failure post-Snowden to reform the NSA, the increasing integration of drones into our security state which itself costs a trillion a year, the ties of electioneering to endless war, and the escalating costs of campaigning, although he leaves out the Democrats, as many do...
He concludes: In sum, we, the people, are ever less in control of anything. The police are increasingly not “ours,” nor are the NSA and its colleague outfits “our” intelligence agencies, nor are the wars we are fighting “our” wars, nor the elections in which we vote “our” elections. Whole article here.
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