This is absolutely amazing. President Bush is openly discussing militarizing domestic emergency response capabilities. One of the key fundamentals to our way of life is that the active duty armed forces do not operate on domestic soil, and that the guard absent a declared state of war answer to their respective governors, not to the President. As lethal as the other US paramilitary groups are (and as long as the list is: CIA, NSA, DEA, ATF, IRS, FBI, border patrol, TSA, customs, Secret Service, US Marshalls, SWAT teams and other police groups, and so on) these activities are still kept purposefully distinct from the active duty armed forces controlled by POTUS.
Long live King George.
2 comments:
Nate--You can blame your own for this one. It was the Dems hue and cry about the Katrina response that brought this on.
Charles
Again, you seem to think that because I oppose the Administration in this, I naturally support the Democratic leadership as my alternative. That is simply an inaccurate conclusion. The Democratic leadership in Washington, D.C., has refused to be an opposition party for the vast majority of the last 5 years.
More substantively, there are a number of legitimate reactions to big social problems. One is to bring in the military/police state. These hawks/autocrats are found in both major parties. Another response is to say this is none of the government's business. But there are other people like me who recognize the value of collective action not in its ability to tell people how to live their lives, but in its ability to address technical problems of public good and externalities and such where individual actors alone are not as efficient or effective as government. After all, former VP Al Gore was chartering private planes to fly people out of the Gulf Coast while Wal-Mart brought its logistical expertise to bear long before the fundraising federal leadership full of cronies (rather than life long public servants) got around to even recognizing there was a problem. Yet, these efforts make for little more than good stories; they are inconsequential compared to the scale of major events such as hurricanes.
Usually, there are only indirect relationships between Presidential leadership and direct effects on people's lives. Yet, Republican control of government has systematically attacked the very programs designed to provide long-term solutions to problems exactly like those involved with protecting the vital seaport found on the Mississippi Delta. For goodness sakes, if the oil and shipping industries aren't large enough private actors to protect New Orleans, what solution is there other than government? And in the desire to send our troops all over the world, national guardsmen who normally report to governors and are critical in disaster response were literally stuck in Iraq rather than serving in Louisianna, Mississippi, and elsehwere. President Bush then had the audacity to suggest that the absence of adequate guard personnel was one of the reasons Congress should give the President authority to utilize active duty military personnel in disaster response.
The alternative, of course, is to provide resources to civilian first responders and long-term planning, as well as not depriving governors of the bodies they need to do little things like search and rescue, levee work, evacuation, food and water distribution, and so forth. After all, that's what the "one weekend a month, two weeks a year" crowd signed up for in the first place; it wasn't to be trapped (literally, in the case of stop-loss orders) in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
I don't think the significance of the request to bring in the active duty, federally controlled military can be underestimated. (Equally disturbing is federally controlled "private security contractors" (ie, mercenaries) who have been patrolling New Orleans for a while. These contracts tend to be secretive and are obviously profit-driven rather than driven by service to country and accountability to country.)
Post a Comment