Mar 10, 2021
"It’s Time for a Domestic Terrorism
Law," blares a Washington Monthly headline. "Tucson Police
Helping Homeless with New Outreach Program," reports Tucson,
Arizona’s ABC affiliate KGUN9. "Programs that monitor students'
social media are seen as a means of heading off the next tragic
shooting," says an article in GovTech. "How the Department of
Defense could help win the war on climate change," explains
Politico.
In
the United States, it seems no matter what crisis emerges - the
planet warming due to fossil extraction, QAnon white nationalists
storm Capitol, mass shooting, substance abuse crisis, a surge in
homelessness - the response from our pundit, think tank, and
political classes is always, almost without exception, to frame the
response in terms that empower, embolden and - most importantly -
fund preexisting carceral and militaristic responses.
To
fight the scourge of white nationalism under Trump and show we are
serious about our anti-racism, the solution is
apparently to give more
money and surveillance powers to the FBI, an organization itself
drenched in white supremacy and anti-Muslim violence. To show we
are serious about climate change, we must give the reins of crisis
management to the Pentagon. To show we care deeply about ending
homelessness and poverty or addressing mental health crises and
drug abuse, we must always ensure the police remain equipped,
resourced and well-funded in order to monitor and target vulnerable
populations.
This
"House Always Wins" ecosystem is no coincidence; it is fueled by a
patchwork of perverse incentives: security state and weapons
contractor-funded “bipartisan” think tanks and media outlets ready
with turn-key "solutions" to every social problem that further pad
the budgets of those already in power: the FBI, Pentagon, ICE, NSA,
police forces, large corporations all with their own power-serving
"security" and "extremist" experts ready to jump on every crises to
explain why those already in power deserve even more of
it.
If
the most basic environmental protections are to pass, they must
relate to US military preparedness." If Mars is to be explored,
it's to ensure the United States’s primacy over China and Russia.
If there's an outcry for mental health services for unhoused
people, police budgets surge to cover "training" and community
outreach.
On
this episode, we explore how, under our regime of austerity, the
house always wins; namely, how the security state is, by design,
enriched at the expense of much needed programs and infrastructure
like education, housing, and healthcare - with media all too eager
to convince us the solution is to instead simply further bloat the
budgets of police departments, border patrol, federal surveillance
and law enforcement.
Our
guest is University of Illinois-Chicago professor Nicole
Nguyen.