Remember when this kind of stuff was widely regarded by liberals as the Death Of American Democracy, but then it turned out that an omniscient surveillance/police state is only a problem when the guy overseeing it has a Texan accent? Thank goodness we’ve got somebody smart running all this shit now — a constitutional scholar, people!
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Monday it has no control over how the New York Police Department spends millions of dollars in White House grants that helped pay for NYPD programs that put entire American Muslim neighborhoods under surveillance. In New York, the police commissioner said he wouldn’t apologize.
The White House has no opinion about how the grant money was spent, spokesman Jay Carney said. The Associated Press reported Monday that the White House money has paid for the cars that plainclothes NYPD officers used to conduct surveillance on Muslim neighborhoods and paid for computers that stored even innocuous information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events.
The money is part of a little-known grant intended to help law enforcement fight drug crimes. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush and Obama administrations have provided $135 million to the New York and New Jersey region through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, known as HIDTA. It’s unclear exactly how much was spent on surveillance of Muslims because the HIDTA program has little oversight.
(Emphases mine)
No control, no apologies, no comment, no opinions, no regrets and no changes: the American government in a nutshell. It’s important to look forward, people!
In light of their handling of the Occupy protesters, a lot of folks have been talking about the NYPD like it’s some kind of rogue agency beyond the reach of the law. I would respectfully suggest that this is wishful thinking at best. The NYPD has been and remains a laboratory where innovations in enforcement are tested and refined in one of the largest urban centers in the developed world. The department’s current emphases on militarization, urban pacification and surveillance isn’t anomalous — it’s cutting edge.
Don’t get too caught up on the fact that they were monitoring Muslim neighborhoods. It’s racist, and so is the NYPD, but fixating on that obscures what’s being developed and tested here. The War on Terror, like its earlier iteration The War on Drugs and various panics over sex crimes, focuses on a population that police and courts can use with impunity to test new methods, normalize a reduced sphere of privacy and autonomy, and constantly push the public’s general notion of the relationship between citizens and the state toward a more authoritarian model.
Liberals have acted like all of this is simply buggy behavior in an otherwise useful system, but these aren’t bugs — they’re core features.Expanding the police powers of the state is what these “wars” are for.
Our elites have no answer for the increasingly dystopian world they are creating, a world without voice or exit. They have no solutions for the escalating crises being generated by the neoliberal order, so they are doing the only thing technocrats know how to do — doubling down on their theoretical constructs and managing with a vengence.
One of the crises currently demanding extreme management is a surplus of people. The advanced capitalist economies have reached a stage where entire segments of the “workforce” are simply becoming superfluous, and no magical economic recovery is going to reverse that trend.When these people were workers, the owners had a real incentive to keep them pacified, and this was the function of the “Great Settlement” among industry, government-approved unions and the welfare state that gave rise to the broad post-WWII middle class. But so many of those laborers are now superfluous, and America’s owners see no need for such an elaborate arrangement when far cheaper and more…ahem…direct means of pacification will suffice. Unemployed people can’t strike, so there’s no need to make them feel like they’ve won something. The cracking of heads is sufficient.
The superfluous population threatens the viability of the state as a system for delivering an adequate and compliant workforce. In the eyes of the system’s managers, the supply of people has outstripped demand. To them, our lives are cheap. It is the system, the order that matters. They’ll do what they think neccesary to maintain it. As various crises blur into a permanent state of emergency, we will come to understand that a new social contract has been made for us: obey or suffer.
The state is preparing for war, and that’s what makes the NYPD the future of law enforcement in America.
