this is why it pains me that i'm not supposed to say "fascism." what the fuck more do people need? we have torture camps, imprisonment on whim, shit ese you know the drill. but "sensible" liberals keep telling me to get behind this compromise bill, support that anti-choice 'moderate,' and so on.

i really want to see the names on those lists.

right?

people want us to so so civilized, eh? as a nation, are we what we do? or claim to do? because fascism is as fascism does, is what i'm thinking. me and mister gump, that is. yanno. the bush junta is like a box of chocolates in goebbels' dresser drawer an all that...

i wonder if the lists will ever be known.

They were busy doing their political bullshit before 9/11 and that's why they weren't prepared or paying attention to the warning signs. The same goes for Katrina. They don't care about actual dangers because they are too busy looking for ways to suppress political dangers. I can't believe the money NY is wasting joining political groups to spy on Bush's political enemies instead of maybe getting the communications equipment they needed on 9/11 and still need. They should be preparing and training to protect the masses of American people not one moron in a cowboy hat.

Do you know about the contract with Halliburton to build detention centers supposedly for an influx of immigrants? How about the guidelines for the Army running civilian labor camps? Bush's Mysterious New Programs from Alternet Feb 23, 2006.

From my blog, Ralph Isenberg helped get a family released from T. Don Hutto, one of these family prisons. He said, "If we do this to foreign nationals, it's going to be us next."

They are preparing for an influx of political prisoners, including Americans.

well, i see 9/11 a bit differently, at the very least as USGOV collusion with outside forces. not "missing the signs." but that's a separate thread.

i've been linking those halliburton detainment centers for a while now, in this blog. i was linking those in my last blog, too. it is scary. especially when you read their own literature/press releases on what they are for. so much vagueness that you feel they were built for whomever the hell scares the govt enough, and also just to make halliburton richer. its gross, the whole fucking game is gross.

but yes, i think they foresee a lot of strife with mexico, the border, with immigrants, and families of immigrants, and with mexican americans and other americans in light of that. and i think you are right with your last sentence. i dont think it's hyperbole at all.

I was reading Donna's link, came across this section, and I thought, "oh hay look guyz the guest worker program from the state of the union!"

There also was another little-noticed item posted at the U.S. Army website, about the Pentagon's Civilian Inmate Labor Program. This program "provides Army policy and guidance for establishing civilian inmate labor programs and civilian prison camps on Army installations."

The Army document, first drafted in 1997, underwent a "rapid action revision" on Jan. 14, 2005. The revision provides a "template for developing agreements" between the Army and corrections facilities for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations.

On its face, the Army's labor program refers to inmates housed in federal, state and local jails. The Army also cites various federal laws that govern the use of civilian labor and provide for the establishment of prison camps in the United States, including a federal statute that authorizes the attorney general to "establish, equip, and maintain camps upon sites selected by him" and "make available … the services of United States prisoners" to various government departments, including the Department of Defense.

I find this headline absolutely laughable: City asks court not to unseal police spy files. "Plz to not make us responsible for invading people's privacy and wasting taxpayer dollars for suppressing political dissent to Rethuglicans, ty??"

see, i just saved myself a lot of trouble at about 16 or so. i basically realized the govt (and all agents thereof) was just a group of guys with guns who do what they want and write cool rules they call "laws" that they can change or bend or break as they see fit. this seems to cover me even to today. come the time this assessment varies from what i see, i'll adjust it.

re that link:

Lawyers for the city, responding to a request to unseal records of police surveillance leading up to the 2004 Republican convention in New York, say that the documents should remain secret because the news media will “fixate upon and sensationalize them,” hurting the city’s ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests.

"please don't read these papers we kept honestly because we need to be able to do dastardly shit and lie about it in the future and we don't want the newspapers to read [aka 'fixate'] or report [aka 'sensationalize'] our actions."

bush admin's latest:

"please dont take transcripts of what we say so we are not held accountable for our words"

and so on so on, lies, war, spying, torture, and on and on. bullies and sadists and criminals and terrible liars. if i paid any closer attention than i do i'd be vomiting all day. as it is i just curl my lip half the time at these ghouls.

The Halliburton camps take on more meaning when you get into the stuff about creating a North American Union of Canada/US/Mexico. Loads of wingnuts are on this screaming -the commie browns are coming! It is being crafted to benefit the rulers...But, with no borders revolutionaries could unite more easily thus the Halliburton camps maybe. But still it could be taken advantage of by the people for once and not by the elites, (I'm sure their dream is of 99% of the total population in factory camps working for peanuts). As well as the knee jerk racism they also dislike public attention on low wage immigrants rights because they are giving away what the ruling elites envision for everyone, low wage slaves with no rights. The racism is helpful also to divide and conquer and divert attention from the corporations that need this labour to maximise profits. The one thing that terrifies elites are the working classes uniting, racism is the most potent weapon to obstruct this. The police are completely paramilitary in equipment and tactics already and as this shows eager to move into domestic espionage for the purposes of criminalising dissent. And Habeas corpus? Still not restored.
Anyway just some thoughts.

I always assumed that when we were advocating for police reform in my city, they were spying on us or so we were told. But none of us have taken the initiative to ask for files on local activists which I'm sure exist somewhere.

I remember reading about the Fresno police oficer who infiltrated a peace group and they didn't know about it until he was killed in an accident offduty.

Anytime anyone argues with a city council member for example, they get a letter sent to them threatening them with arrest if they disrupt a meeting and the letter is cc-ed to the police department.

I sent you that link a couple of weeks or so ago about how any and all charges were dropped against the cops that did all this crap. Hope you got it. Naturally, I don't remember where I got it from.

On democracynow! , S. Goodman interviewed the city commissioner who was quite proud that only ~1800 were arrested ...considering a historical 850,000 people were protesting// he just admitted (on the record) that nearly a million people were protesting the RNC at NY (he must have forgotten that the media has been repeatedly understating the protest participation//
-- but, but i thought only mere few thousands are showing up at these protests?

also, it seems these fascists are reciting the same verbatim used by the fascists in Oaxaca // oh how efficient!!

My son is studying South America in his social studies class and asked me about US meddling and intervention there. I told him what I know but knew it was incomplete and so this morning I was doing some research for him and come across something called Operation Condor, which leads to something called Gladio in Italy, which is a part of a network of secret armies in Europe called Stay Behind. Have you heard of any of this? Stay Behind was set up after WWII because European countries were caught off guard by the Nazis and it was difficult to set up and organize resistance in occupied countries. It was for this purpose, to have resistance in place when/if the Soviets invaded. Only it didn't happen, but there was a rise in communism and pacifism in these countries and these Stay Back armies instead subverted democracy in their own countries sometimes through terrorist attacks through righty extremists which were then blamed on communists or lefty organizations. They were funded and trained through the CIA, MI6, and Nato.

This isn't conspiracy theory. This is based on court documents, official records, and statements from politicians and former members of these armies. Which makes me wonder about our media and why they haven't covered any of this, it's been known since the end of 1990 but everyone is ignoring it. This should be a huge story.

I was reading from some PDF files this morning but Wikipedia covers it well too. I know some people don't trust Wikipedia, but if you check the bottom there is alot of outside references on this one. In case anyone is interested here's a link: Operation Gladio

Donna, well the corporate media will never properly cover stories like Operation Condor, Operation Gladio, Cointelpro, etc, it's institutionally inconsistent with their objective, which is to sell beer and razor blades and cleaning products while establishing the range of permissible political thought (Chomsky, "Thought Control in Democratic Societies", "Manufacturing Consent"). William Blum and Michael Parenti come to mind as interesting writers on such subjects, plus of course Chomsky, South End Press; it's actually not that hard to find once you start digging, ya know? It's just that most Americans do not want to have their illusions of American pop-war-mythology shattered by such revelations, realizing for example that Japan and Germany came out of WWII stronger than any other countries beside the US, harsh stuff like that...

exactly. there is a lot of actual history out there. it's just subversive when introduced into our national body of propaganda.

Late to this thread, but

A few months ago I was watching the Hitler Channel (History Ch.), a program on Hitler's slaughter. It was eerie to me how prepared this country is to go down that path. Certainly all the infrastructure is there. And already we see the rounding up of "undesirables". Ship them off, in buses, on trains, to labor camps. This is a very large country, with places the gummint insists don't exist. And we have psychopaths in charge.

Later, bumming myself out.