[lbo-talk] The burgeoning US repressive apparatus

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Tue Sep 7 07:31:14 PDT 2010


Marv: "The most chilling aspect of Dave Eggers’s heartbreaking book, Zeitoun, is that the federal government’s fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of a Guantánamo-like prison facility (in days!) in which 1,200 American citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional rights for months, a suspension of habeas corpus that reads like something out of a Kafka novel."

[WS:] Enough said. Does anyone still believe that a popular rebellion in the US - if it took place by some odd chance - has any chance of success?

Wojtek

On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 9:48 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca>wrote:


>
> "Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured
> at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The
> amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75
> billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate).
> That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new
> building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone,
> occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three
> Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government
> site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the
> largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans
> Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of
> 230,000 people.
>
> "This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course
> means few ever get read... Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15
> states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with
> little information-sharing.
>
> "Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone
> conversations and other communications in the United States...the rise of
> this national-security state has entailed a vast expansion in the
> government’s powers that now touches every aspect of American life, even
> when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. The most chilling aspect of Dave
> Eggers’s heartbreaking book, Zeitoun, is that the federal government’s
> fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of
> a Guantánamo-like prison facility (in days!) in which 1,200 American
> citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional
> rights for months, a suspension of habeas corpus that reads like something
> out of a Kafka novel."
>
>
> http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/04/zakaria-why-america-overreacted-to-9-11.html
>
>
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> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>



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