Security State: All Deposit, What Return?

War economy gave birth to the security state and the promotion of endless fears. Terrorism without borders is the latest on the war front, very possibly aided and abetted by international cyber-crime.

Billions of US dollars have been spent annually to put our soldiers in harm’s way and weapons in the hands of foreign armies, both allies and their enemies. To some extent, United States foreign policy has done more to destabilize than to stabilize the Middle East. Our involvement there has been more about oil and money than the advertized promotion of democracy, much less human rights. By contrast, our involvement in Africa has been next to nil, never mind that human rights are being trampled all over the place and genocide is on the march. There isn’t, apparently, enough money in caring about what happens in Africa. This American disinterest in the plight of African nations has been a boon for China, which has all but moved in to mine the minerals and themselves, bringing their own workers, to the impoverishment of each local populace where they make an agreement with the local despot.

On the home front, billions of US dollars are spent annually to incarcerate people and to militarize our domestic law enforcement agencies. To some extent, United States domestic policy has done more to destabilize than to stabilize our inner cities. The law has seen fit to uphold many of the most egregious cases of police brutality. In large part, allowing civilians the opportunity to stockpile small arsenals has promoted the notion that police have the right to shoot at “suspects” in the kill zone, and ask questions only when the bodies are on the slab. Frequently, what looks like a brandished weapon is no weapon at all; sometimes it actually is a weapon, at others there is absolutely no weapon. The militarized police are claiming, and taking pride while doing so, that they are being “frightened” into what is later called “effectiveness,” and the courts are upholding that position in many, too many cases. While the police are “looking out for their own,” are they also looking out for the rest of us? Shall we bring race relations into this discussion?

Police and Fire unions are among the biggest supporters of local government officials’ election campaigns, followed closely by big development companies. Police and Fire contracts, with heath and pension benefits, take a huge chunk out of any municipal government’s general fund. Some contracts allow officers to become vested in their pension within between five to ten years of service. Some officers “retire” after they are vested. Some of these officers apply for lucrative contracts in other municipalities. Double-dippers, sometimes even triple-dippers abound in a pay and pension system that is not regulated and is completely unsustainable. You have only to look at the rising number of municipal bankruptcies to know that this is true.

Taxpayers contribute most of the money that supports the security state, but are we more secure? My thought is that we wouldn’t need to have “Security Officers” posted outside our grocery stores, if we were really secure. Too many of these jobs are just for show. How can it not be so? Most of the security officers I have seen lately weigh in at over three-hundred pounds, and are attentive mostly to their electronic media. Would such a person be able to apprehend a fleeing wrong-doer? You can’t just be dressed for the part; you actually have to be able to deliver something that recruiters, these dates, call “proven effectiveness.” The world of privatized enforcement seems to include anything in a spectrum defined at one end by the small, well-armed private army (working sometimes outside the law) to the $13/hour actor from central casting, at the other.

There have been too many high profile cases, of late, where people had been arrested, tried and convicted of crimes they did not commit. Better late than never to be exonerated, I suppose, but these costly mistakes would never have been uncovered if it had not been for the growing database of forensic DNA. Meanwhile, innocent lives have been broken and wasted, and some have died before the truth could be uncovered.

The average person’s notion of how police do their work comes from the television. From what is shown on TV, most people would think that every law enforcement agency works methodically from an extremely strict set of protocols. TV police protocols say that you cannot arrest someone and hold them in custody without strong probable cause including evidence. In my town (in real life), two people were arrested for committing a string of arsons. The two do not know one another, and one was at work at the time the fires he is accused of were set; one has jobs and family and ties to the community, the other is a transient. The evidence the police have to bind these two people over has yet to be disclosed in the courtroom, but Columbo would never arrest two people just because someone said they saw the person or because a surveillance tape showed a figure that might just look like the person someone said they saw near one of the fires, if there weren’t so much shadow. There might well be a number of people on the street, if there is a fire in the neighborhood, observing. I do not know how this particular situation will play out; only time will tell. But I find it disquieting that the police do not need evidence and probable cause to bind a person over for trial. The person can be arrested, and the police then conduct their investigation while the one arrested is taken off the street, and isolated from contact with family. I would put a question forward: Does it serve justice and does it prove “effective” to set bail nearly twice as high for the transient as for the workingman? There will be no person raising bail for the transient, so what is the purpose and what does it achieve? Meanwhile, to some extent, the men have been tried in the press: the Mayor of the town has promised to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. The Mayor is up for reelection. The Mayor’s platform is, of course, “proven effectiveness.”

Where did I get the information for this blog entry? I read the newspaper everyday. I hope you do, too.  Much of what we see is a theater, a masquerade meant to imply order, which may not exist, at all. All of the issues and stories I touch on here are related; they do not occur in one-off or in isolation. We need to ask the hard questions about the money we pay for “security.” We need to have better determinations about deadly force. We need to get guns off the streets, period. We need to vote for people who might really do something about all this, rather than shoo in the incumbent rubber-stampers, whose campaigns are paid for by security unions and big business interests. Only today, the new head of the FBI, James Comey, said in interview that cybercrime is the biggest terrorist threat to our security. An argument could be made that it is the biggest threat to world order, but no one wants to go that far. Those claims will only come when economies topple, and then it will be too late.

There is a lot of investment being made in armed security. There is not nearly the same investment being made in people and justice. Major infrastructure changes needed to insure greater electronic security are “too expensive” for big business; it is cheaper for big business to send out new credit cards and pay off insurance claims than to invest in better, more secure systems. What investments are made benefit big business and all the trappings that support big business, including “security guards.” This investment maintains a crippling status quo of economic divide, but what are the returns?

Things will not change until big business gets hurt, and hurt badly. In the event, politics will not be able to save big business, and neither will security guards. For all that we may want to change the balance power, we do not want to see what happens when the hackers bring down the firewalls.

Meditations in Fast Times: 35. The Lord GOD set a seal

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others.

                35.

The Lord GOD set a seal

Upon this, my trembling heart;

Beneath such healing hands, I feel

Compassion and love—the Healer's art

—Resolving this turmoil and tangle apart.

Healed from confusion back to ease
By the touch of this Master Nurse

Whose constant care is to bring release,

From those bitter dreams that threaten to curse,

And to insure our sickness not grow worse;

We realize the earth is our hospital,

Fostered by the careless billionaire,

Who would prefer it if we take ill and fall,

To succumb to an expensive paternal care

That persist in costing the highest fees anywhere.

Warmth ascends from feet to heart,

The healed soul, moved by gratitude, inspires
Those who seek better ways and art
Than what the billionaire’s business requires,

Adding to the ranks of the healthy by building tuneful choirs.

Wine, mixed with fresh water, to drink,

Organic produce and homemade bread for food,

In spite all we have been told to think,

We are more sound, and more enhanced is our mood
—But we are more aware now, how dis-ease is brewed.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

All Those Expendable People, Where Do They All Come From?

In the wake of the court decision in the Florida case of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, I wish humanity could “wake up” and realize that all people are in need of and deserving of respect, no matter where they come from, what they look like, how intelligent or not they may be. The planet is not likely to survive very much longer, unless respect is bred and nurtured so that all people know they are needed and wanted.

There are so many people of various religious or social orders who feel they can say they are better than other people and that people who don’t believe what they believe or who don’t come from where they come from are outsiders, even worse, people who are no better than dogs. Such people are the vilest of hypocrites.

You are to treat the resident alien the same way you treat the native born among you—love him like yourself, since you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.  (Leviticus 19:34)

We all live on a fragile planet that would work for us better and longer if we were good stewards. The place to begin is for us all to realize that all life is integral, and perhaps even more symbiotic than the material lifestyles we fret about and foster.

Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. (Exodus 22:21)

Since the beginning of human existence, there has been injustice and inequity. Throughout the ignoble and iniquitous social history of humanity, women, children, the aged and ill, people with varying preferences of all sorts, foreigners and travelers, the highly intellectual, the mentally incapacitated and those who have been crippled or maimed, have each been over-run exploited, exiled, oppressed, trafficked or enslaved. In these cases, race might or might not be a factor, but most certainly, domination, generally by power hungry males of the species has been the common factor involved.

The LORD watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. (Psalm 146:9)

The same moral dilemma exists now, as ever. Is it right to oppress and suppress any group of people? Rhetorically, we know the answer to be NO, OF COURSE NOT. Every exemplar throughout time has advised that it is better to be good. Every monster throughout history has laughed in that person’s face and sentenced that person to death, invoking the “I can do anything I want because I am stronger than you are, so I don’t have to be good” logic of the sociopath.

If you come with us, we will share with you whatever good things the LORD gives us. (Numbers 10:32)

How can it be explained to controlling people, unscrupulous dictators, corrupt business leaders, hypocritical gurus and demagogues that human beings are the biggest natural resource on the planet? And in no way do I mean in terms of expendability. This is the cardinal error of the control monger, the bank executive, the authoritarian, the mob boss; the common thread of thinking, based on common actions and the results of such actions, is that people are expendable, that it is okay to use them, abuse them, even to use them up and dump them.

…when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are an expendable, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. (Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr.; I changed “a Negro” to “an expendable” and added emphasis.)

Here is a truly radical statement: If we each cared about ourselves enough to extend that caring to everyone and everything around us, the entire world would be better off.

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world... (Imagine, John Lennon)

Simplistic? A Pipe Dream? Or could it be an environmentally sound economic plan?

Right now, there is an amoral rationale among a jockeying and ever smaller group of people we might call “the Elite”—certainly these people think of themselves as such, and all the power they have and the decisions they make that affect your life and my life and the lives of people all over the world—who don’t seem to be related to us by anything other than an overwhelming powerlessness—follow the formula that says: use it up, use it all up, now and until there isn’t anymore. This is the formula of expendability. Natural oil reserves, once gone are gone forever. The drill, baby drill and frack, baby frack ethos has created a daisy chain of natural disaster waiting to happen—doesn’t anyone remember that the liquids in the ground are like joint lubricant? Pump it out, use it up, it's gone.

By the same token, we are sold and fed foods that are bad for us, so that we become unhealthy and in need of expensive medical care and drugs that frequently have known or unknown side-effects and unforeseen consequences. We are taxed on income and further taxed on homes, on transportation, infrastructure, indeed we are taxed because we are alive. This is more in the unbroken chain unsound economics; once we are pumped out, used up and gone, what next? Homelessness and worse is the answer to that question for a lot too many people.

I could be a bit in the nutty side—I’ll just go right ahead and admit that—but I think that we could build a better and more equitable community if we work the stewardship angle, where we do the very best we can do for ourselves and other people. If we keep the water clean, and make it available for everyone; if we grow natural food and make it available for everyone to purchase for their families; if we educate people for the sake of educating, rather than money; if we develop urban farming and new housing alternatives, not just here (wherever “here” is for you), but everywhere, we can create jobs that help the environment. Heck, even if all we did right now was to hire people to answer phones, we would improve the quality of life.

Do you see where I am headed? Right now, it is all about shooting down, cutting, eliminating, taxing, spending, expending, ravaging and stealing, diminishing, extinguishing.

Maybe the world would be different if we understood economic growth to be about all people equally (and responsibly) engaged in creating, making, growing, educating, earning, upholding, maintaining and sharing. If such a model were to emerge, it must work top-down as well as bottom-up; all need to be willing, invested and engaged. People: This is how you maintain your tax-base as an infinite resource, not just for earnings and for upkeep, but for GOOD!

If we lived in that kind of world, a man like Zimmerman might not have felt threatened or tweaked by the presence of a man named Martin, and we would be celebrating life, rather than arguing and rioting over laws that do not protect, legal decisions that allow people and governments and corporations to kill and steal, a way of life that makes us all expendable.

… time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. (Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now is, and has always been, the time; not just here, but everywhere.

If not now, when?

© 2013 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen