After a plane was driven into a building in Austin, Texas, yesterday, we were reassured by TV commentators that this was not, I repeat not, an act of terrorism. It was just another isolated, disgruntled American. How reassuring! As if we are in total fear of terrorists, but horrific acts by American citizens are no big deal. It was just a crime not an act of terror. It was the same with the Fort Hood shooter who killed 12 people. He was just another nut, not a terrorist. Get real, folks. How many Americans have been killed by "legitimate" terrorists on American soil since the attacks on 9/11/2001? Well, none. How many have been killed by disgruntled Americans? There was the Fort Hood massacre. There was Amy Bishop, the Huntsville professor who killed three people just the other day. These incidents go on and on, one or two a day. Drip. Drip. Drip. Violence in the workplace where disgruntled workers kill current or former employees or supevisors. Campus violence. Virginia Tech where a student killed 32 people. Going postal. When you sum up all these incidents, they involved thousands of people being killed by people with no former criminal records since 9/11. Call them domestic terrorists or random nuts, but they are definitely not common criminals.
So what is a terrorist? Do we really need to parse it? Politicians have us in fear of rag tag groups on the other side of the planet so they can justify $700 billion in military expenditures while here at home where the real violence occurs, why, we shouldn't be afraid at all. After all as long as these incidents are not performed by terrorists, we have nothing to fear. The terrorist/fear industry is crucial to the careers of politicians, lobbyists, defense contractors, but isolated violence undertaken by disgruntled Americans such as the Austin pilot are nothing to be concerned about. Luckily, only two people were killed yesterday including the pilot. But how much property damage was done. Probably millions. The building was largely ruined.
Meanwhile, 45,000 Americans die every year from lack of health insurance. Nobody seems to be concerned about this. Part of Joe Stack's suicide statement addresses this:
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it's time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country's leaders don't see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political "representatives" (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the "terrible health care problem". It's clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don't get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.
So was this guy crazy, insane? Many people who have not gone to such extreme measures have voiced the same sentiments. The corporate media would like to dismiss this act as well as numerous others as the acts of a random, isolated nut. But there are many random isolated nuts in the world. Some of them are more organized and live in mountains on the other side of the world. But those guys have not been effective. Yet we devote hundreds of billions of dollars to dealing with them. Politicians base their careers on dealing with them. They can't be seen as being "soft on terrorism." This is the same crew who couldn't be seen as being "soft on communism."
Yet the same guys who devote hundreds of billions of dollars to wiping out a few disgruntled rag tag gropups like al Quaida or Taliban (don't worry, they'll spring up again no matter how many #2s we kill) devote an extremely paltry sum to actual defense of the American "homeland." The Homeland Security budget is less than a tenth of the "Defense" budget. The budget for the Coast Guard which is reponsible for 12,383 miles of American coastline is less than $10 billion. No wonder that they are outspent by Mexican drug smugglers whose budgets far exceed this amount and can afford submarines! Yet US politicians are not the least concerned about this. Defense contractors grease their palms. The Coast Guard doesn't. It's that simple.
The whole Homeland Security budget for 2010 is only $55 billion. The Department of Homeland Security is reponsible for protecting US borders - both land and sea borders. They are also responsible for cyber security, protecting transportation systems (TSA), disaster preparedness (FEMA), financial infrastructure, illegal immigration, illegal drugs and much more. In other words real defense of the US is in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security. Offensive wars of aggression are in the hands of the Department of Defense which is really a misnomer. It should be called the Department of War, its original name. The so-called war on terrorism is really a war of aggression against non-state groups of rag tags which involves invading sovereign countries. Military invasions of foreign countries should be reserved for countries that have taken military actions against the US not rag tag stateless actors. Those should be dealt with by covert operations not full scale military invasions. And I fully support US intelligence gathering operations and covert operations designed to get rid of bad guys without causing civilian casualties. Infiltration and surveillance of networks of bad guys makes sense; full scale military invasions against them doesn't.
Within the budget for Homeland Security is the budget of the US Customs and Border Patrol agency (CBP) which includes the budget for the Border Patrol which is responsible for 7458 miles of US land borders including the borders with Mexico, Canada and the Canadian Alaska border. President Obama's 2011 budget calls for cuts in border patrol agents in Arizona. It's virtually impossible to find out what the 2010 budget for the Border Patrol is by googling it. This information is apparently well guarded. I did find that the 2008 budget for the whole CBP was around $10 billion. This is indeed a paltry sum compared to the budget of the US Army ($225 billion), the US Navy and Marines ($172 billion) or the US Air Force ($160 billion). If the US Defense Department was really concerned with US defense and not the pursuit of aggressive wars against rag tag groups, the Army would be protecting US borders and the Navy and Marines would be protecting the coastlines. At least a large percentage of the budgets for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force would be going to border and coastline protection and not to foreign wars. At least Mexican drug dealers would be outspent.
Instead the US has a pathetic defense of its borders and ports. It has a pathetic defense of its electrical grid and other vital facilities. It has a pathetic defense against illegal drugs, immigrants, gun and money shipments. It has a pathetic excuse for disaster preparedness. Natural disasters alone are causing many more deaths than terrorists. In short the US is spending more than all the other countries of the world combined on military adventurism while leaving the "homeland" relatively unprotected against incursions by illegal immigrants, illegal terrorists, illegal weapons, illegal money, illegal cyber attacks and natural disasters.
But this situation should not surprise anyone. When has the US government in recent years been more concerned about the safety and welfare of its citizens than the safety and welfare of its corporations and lobbyists? A lot of this blog post addresses the same concerns - but in a less personal way - as those of domestic suicide bomber and domestic terrorist Joe Stack who flew his plane into a building housing a branch of the IRS. I don't recommend taking that approach. The only point I'm trying to make is that domestic terrorism or domestic disgruntlement or whatever you want to call it is a far greater threat then al Quaida or the Taliban. The killing of civilians by the US military which killed several including children just the other day in Afghanistan is enough to stoke the continuing hatred of foreigners for the US. But despite that they have been relatively ineffective insofar as attacking US citizens on American soil. The far greater threat is the disgruntlement of US citizens who have been sold out by their government which is far more interested in protecting the rights of transnational corporations than it is in protecting US citizens. So I question US government priorities both military and civilian.
