Militarized Police State

The video of the pepper-spraying of student #Occupy protesters by University of California-Davis campus police in riot gear was a real eye-opener.  When I went to college, the campus police were un-uniformed and as far as I knew un-armed.  Their main function seemed to be ferreting out girls in dorm rooms after curfew.

Now they might be cruising around in armored personnel carriers.  Since 1997 the Department of Defense has given away more than 2½ billion dollars of excess equipment to 17,000+ state and local law enforcement agencies including body armor, night vision gear, assault rifles, grenade launchers, armored vehicles, helicopters, riverboats and robots.  The Department of Homeland Security has a grant program under which law enforcement agencies can acquire even more equipment.

The Texas Department of Public Safety has its own surveillance drones.

In October, California’s Alameda County Sheriff’s Department hosted Urban Shield, an annual training exercise  to coordinate responses to a terror attack or natural disaster in the Bay Area.  The exercise, which included a 50-hour SWAT competition on the UC-Berkeley campus, was attended by police teams from the US and other countries, notably Israel, which as “the Harvard of antiterrorism” has had a major influence on how US police handle civilians.

A month later, Oakland and UC-Berkeley #Occupiers were overpowered by police who had participated in the exercise.

As the police become more militarized, the military becomes more involved in law enforcement.

In 2008, US Northern Command, which was added to the military’s combatant commands after 9/11 to defend the US homeland, acquired its first active army unit, a brigade combat team assigned to the command’s US Army North.  The unit, designated a Consequence Management Response Force, is being trained in “crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.”  Army Times, however, emphasized that the training is only for “war-zone operations, not for any domestic purpose.”

“Not for any domestic purpose” is to steer clear of the Posse Comitatus Act.  Enacted in 1878 after Congress ended Reconstruction and withdrew federal troops from the South, the Act prohibits the use of the US Army for law enforcement – “executing the laws” -- unless “expressly authorized by the Constitution or by act of Congress.”

The major act of Congress that expressly authorizes federal troops to execute federal and state laws is the Insurrection Act of 1807.  Earlier legislation, particularly the Militia Act of 1795, authorized the President to call up State militias (now called the National Guard) in case of rebellion against a State, if the State legislature or governor so requested, or in case US laws could not be enforced.  The 1807 Act allowed the President to use the army and navy in any case where calling up the militia was authorized.

The Civil Rights Act of 1871, aimed at the Ku Klux Klan, extended the power of the President to use militia and federal forces to any “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that deprived people in a State of their constitutional rights or obstructed US laws.

All this legislation, still quaintly referred to as the Insurrection Act of 1807, endured without significant change for the last 130 years until an amendment to it was buried in the Defense Authorization Act of 2007.  With an eye to Hurricane Katrina, recent flu epidemics and 9/11, Congress greatly enlarged the President’s authority to use armed forces for law enforcement by extending it to “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition” leading to domestic violence that local authorities cannot control.

Now, as we speak, a bipartisan Congress is about to complete the militarization of our National Police State by putting the military in charge of terrorism with the authority, say two retired Marine generals, to “indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil.”  The Marines, a former Commandant and a former commander of Central Command, urged President Obama to veto the legislation (which Obama has molded to his satisfaction) because it “would extend the battlefield to include the United States – and hand Osama bin Laden an unearned victory long after his well-earned demise.”

We might bear in mind that the terrorists with whom our National Police State is obsessed are mostly nonstate actors who rarely get loose in the US or, if home-grown, are rarely beyond surveillance.  Since real terrorists are scarce, police agencies are honing their new military skills on largely peaceful #Occupiers and students.  Whom are they protecting?

Terrorists have been prosecuted by US civil authorities in accordance with the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, but not successfully by the US military.  Turning people whom the President suspects of being terrorists over to the military subjects them to preventive detention under martial law with no right of habeas corpus.  Whom will that protect?

Peak Denial

When I was 11 or 12, I started worrying about what would happen if the world ran out of natural resources.  I can’t remember which I had in mind, but this was during World War II when availability of resources was talked about.  My father’s response was reassuring: we would invent some substitute, as we invented synthetic rubber during the war when natural rubber supplies were cut off.  Necessity is the mother of invention, as the phrase went.

I can imagine that I might have given my son the same answer -- but not my grandson.

One difference between now and when I was 11 or 12 is world population.  It was 2.4 billion then and 2.5 billion in 1950 when I entered college.  Today it’s seven billion, almost three times larger.

But in the same time period the world economy has grown almost ten times larger.  The Earth Policy Institute tells us that “consumption has begun to outstrip natural assets on a global scale."  Leaving aside non-regenerative assets like oil and fossil aquifers,

“demand has surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity.  We are overharvesting forests, overplowing fields, overgrazing grasslands, overdrawing aquifers, overfishing oceans, and pumping far more carbon into the atmosphere than nature can absorb.”

Again leaving out oil, the demand for and growing scarcity of all important commodities in the last decade has led to a surge in prices that erased the benefits of a century of declining prices.  Investment guru Jeremy Grantham believes that rising prices are very probably here to stay, representing a “Paradigm Shift” that is “perhaps the most important economic event since the industrial Revolution.”

 

“We all need to develop resource plans,” he concludes, “particularly energy policies.  There is little time to waste.”

Tell  that to the US Congress, and what do you get?  Policies that encourage overplowing, overdrawing and the pumping of more carbon into the atmosphere than nature can absorb without warming the globe and acidifying its oceans.

By way of explanation (or excuse), Grantham suggests that humans are genetically ill-disposed to dealing with “long horizon issues and deferring gratification,” possibly because “we could not store food for over 99% of our species’ career and were totally concerned with staying alive this year and this week.”  He also thinks humans are “optimistic and overconfident,” traits which may have been important to our survival.  Especially Americans.

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking Penguin 2005), Jared Diamond’s examination of human societies that succumbed to environmental problems and others that survived them, the author said that in planning the book he assumed it would just be about environmental damage.  But later he realized he had to add other factors including the only one that proved significant in every society’s failure or success -- “the society’s responses to its environmental problems.” 

The environmental issues for these societies, chiefly deforestation and soil and water problems, were similar to those we face today.  Global warming, however, is a modern issue, derived from industrialization and the growth in human population that it made possible.  President Johnson was officially advised of it in 1965, but neither he nor any of his eight successors nor any Congress in the almost half-century since has taken action.

Global warming is a long horizon issue, of course, though not so distant that it won’t affect our grandchildren.  It also requires a global response involving other nations.  But we acted with other nations to control toxic chemicals (another modern environmental issue) creating a hole in the ozone layer.  The fault is not in our stars but in our politics.

Since fossil fuel emissions account for most of the increase in greenhouse gases that cause global warming, an obvious first response to reduce and eventually reverse this increase is to raise the price of fossil fuels by taxing them or capping their use, thereby making non-fossil energy more competitive.  But enough members of Congress are indebted to corporate interests that profit from fossil fuels or depend on them to block any such response.

Most of these members claim to doubt global warming.  But considering “the consensus scientific view” that global warming is occurring and that greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary cause, their claim seems more like self-induced self-delusion -- a fig leaf we could call Peak Denial hiding their representation of the corporate interests held by the 1% rather than the interests of the 99% among their voters and the public good.

Global warming, left unchecked, will eventually create an environment that’s different from the one to which both we as a species and the food that we grow are genetically adapted.  How the world society responds to it may determine whether the society succeeds or fails.

Congress is consistently choosing to fail.  To make sure that society succeeds, we must choose a Congress that is not dependent on the 1%.