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The Belgian Gulf does have a ring to it
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I donât know how anyone manages to maintain a religious faith in these circumstances. Surely if there was a godâŠsurelyâŠ
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A frightening 5min read of the road ahead under TrumpâŠ
Trump just declared these parts of America are outside the Constitution | Opinion
Opinion by Thom Hartmann
In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before weâd gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so weâd all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car.
He couldnât have been much past 20, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself.
That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a âpapers, pleaseâ society feels like from the inside.
Iâve been thinking about Torsten all week, because the reporting now says that immigration checkpoints are being set up within the United States, and that more than 213 million of us Americans live inside a hundred-mile band running inward from every land border and coastline where federal agents can now stop your car and demand proof of your immigration status. No international crossing required.
That zone, first drawn by a federal regulation back in 1953, swallows 10 entire states and cities like New York and Los Angeles, and the libertarians at the Cato Institute, who are nobodyâs idea of open-borders radicals, call it the âConstitution-free zoneâ and have gone to the trouble of mapping the checkpoints one by one.
Itâs âConstitution-freeâ because ICE has decided that the Fourth Amendment, which reads, âThe right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violatedâŠâ is just a suggestion, rather than one of the foundational guarantees of American liberty; just an obstacle standing between the Trump administration and the police state itâs steadily but relentlessly building.
In Washington, D.C., for example, a construction worker got waved over by the Park Police for a minor traffic matter, and within a minute ICE agents had surrounded his truck, asking where everyone was from and whether they were in the country illegally. Two of his passengers were taken away, and nobody would tell him where.
ICE is also now paying state and local police to help, and the money is staggering. One estimate says the total could hit two billion dollars this year alone. In Florida, police departments pocketed nearly forty million dollars for vehicles and gear. In the Florida Keys, agents threw up a checkpoint on the only highway in and out, a tourist route, and made more than three hundred arrests.
Theyâre stationed at courthouses, bus stations, train terminals, and airports too, snaring domestic travelers who never came near a border. The ACLUâs Naureen Shah put it plainly. âWeâve never seen this financial incentive scheme exist.â
When the Supreme Court first blessed these interior checkpoints in the 1976 Martinez-Fuerte decision, it authorized a brief stop and a question or two about citizenship, nothing more, no searches, no fishing expeditions. What Cato and others have documented in the years since is a steady drift into prolonged detentions, questioning about anything and everything, and drug dogs brought out with no particular reason.
And this past September five neofascist Republicans on the Supreme Court (led, in this case, by âPillsbury Doughboy Brett Kavanaughâ) went further, clearing agents in the Los Angeles area to treat the color of your skin, your Spanish or accented English, the kind of work you do, or even the corner where you wait for it as reasons enough to stop you. They now call them âKavanaugh Stops.â
One of the citizens swept up before that ruling was a young brown-skinned man born in East L.A. who kept shouting that heâd been born right here as agents pinned his arm behind his back. And if you try to flee one of these checkpoints by car at speed, a federal statute makes that its own felony punishable by up to five years.
Earlier this week, masked, armed, anonymous ICE thugs snatched and handcuffed a nun off the street in Texas and threw her into a âdetentionâ cell; she was a nurse dressed in a full habit, but her skin was brown, an apparent violation of the new Trump doctrine of Make America White Again.
If this seems to you like something out of the old world, youâre right, but we didnât need to import it from the Nazis or the Soviets. We built our own version early and often, and Trump and his Republican lickspittles on the Court and in Congress seem determined to reinvent it here in the 21st century.
Prior to the Civil War, enslaved people in this country couldnât travel a country road without a written pass, and, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, the slave patrols that were ubiquitous across the Old South would stop any Black person and demand to see it.
After emancipation, the Black Codes and the vagrancy laws did the same work under new rationalizations. And in 1892, racists in Congress passed the Geary Act, which ordered every Chinese resident in America to carry a photographic âcertificate of residenceâ at all times or face arrest, hard labor, and deportation.
It was the first time this country made illegal presence a federal crime, and Chinese immigrants understood exactly what it was, calling the papers âdog tagsâ because a Chinese laborer now carried his number in his pocket the way a licensed dog carried his on a collar, and any white man who felt like it could stop him and demand to see it.
It was âPapers, please,â made in America from the start of our republic, aimed at whoever white men decided didnât belong.
Then thereâs what I saw for myself living overseas. For part of our years in Germany, my family lived right on the East/West German line, in the little town of Höchheim, where I worked for the international relief organization Salem.
A few hundred feet from our house stood two enormous fences, both built on Eastern soil, with a raked strip of sand between them so the guards could read a single footprint, and watchtowers rose some thirty feet with men and machine guns inside. When we walked near the road, theyâd swing the guns toward us.
Now and then someone trying to cross got shot dead in that sand. The border towns we could see on the far side were lit up all night so no one could slip out in the dark, and in the spring, when the thaw shifted the ground, weâd be woken by the muffled thump of land mines going off on their own.
Years later we took a train through East Germany and the police came down the aisle with machine guns and dogs, demanding to see everyoneâs papers, and when my eight-year-old son lifted a camera to take a picture they threatened him until he put it down.
That same instinct built the apartheid pass laws of South Africa, where every Black adult had to carry a passbook they bitterly nicknamed the dompas, the âstupid pass,â and where in 1960 police shot sixty-nine people dead, most of them in the back, outside a police station in Sharpeville for the crime of showing up without one.
The Soviets ran their whole country on internal passports that told you where you were allowed to live and work, just like they erected statues to Joseph Stalin everywhere you went.
Every one of these systems existed for a single purpose: to monitor, intimidate, and control the movement and behaviors of people the state had decided it couldnât trust to be compliant. And Trump, Miller, et al apparently believe they should be the model for the new America theyâre trying to build with the help of rightwing media oligarchs, toadies hanging banners with his face on them across federal buildings, National Guard patrols in our cities, and compliant Republicans on the Court and in Congress.
Which is why today the Trump regime no longer even needs a man in a uniform to stop you and ask who you are and what youâre up to. Last spring, researchers pulled apart the official White House app for Trumpâs MAGA loyalists and found it capable of tracking a userâs precise location every few minutes, shipped with a privacy disclosure that falsely told Apple it collected nothing, while routing most of its traffic to private third-party servers to get around the Fourth Amendment.
When a security firm actually ran the app on real phones they didnât catch it broadcasting locations, so the code could do the tracking even if no one saw it happen: the Trump regime built a tool capable of following you everywhere you go and then lied to the app store about what it collected.
As I wrote in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, the surveillance state rarely arrives announcing itself. And the irony in this one is that the app wasnât initially aimed at immigrants or dissidents but at the administrationâs own supporters, the people who downloaded it to feel close to Trump with regular rants and updates straight from the Oval Office.
Somewhere along the way we even turned âpapers, pleaseâ into a video game, a Cold War diorama you boot up for the pleasant shiver of it, and now REAL ID has quietly added a document check to the airport line you already dreaded.
The old checkpoint needed a guard to ask to see your papers: the new one just scans your face and instantly identifies you, a feature thatâs now also available to police watching people drive or walk along the streets in most big American cities.
ICE is now using it to monitor protestors. As The Washington Post documented earlier this year:
âFederal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer thattransformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the countryâs most highly funded law enforcement agency.
âICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.
âThese new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens.â
The freedom to move through our own country without stopping to account for ourselves, without proving to a masked, armed, anonymous officer answering to Trump that we have permission to be on the street, is one of the most ancient things â from the days of the Roman republic to 1980s East Germany to today â that separates a free people from a police state.
Torsten understood that in 1986, which is why he was scared even while he was being decent to two strangers who could have gotten him arrested.
Weâve come here in America from the slave pass to the Chinese dog tag to biometric surveillance, facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, cellphone location tracking, and immigration checkpoints miles from any border. The through-line never changes, only the tools and the intentions of the government that uses them.
So donât let this one slide past as somebody elseâs problem just because you were born here and can carry the right documents. Call your representatives through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to rein in interior checkpoints and roving patrols and to restore the Fourth Amendment inside that so-called âhundred-mile zone.â
Thereâs also increasing resistance to Trumpâs police state instincts and programs among the more progressive members of Congress and candidates for office: support them any way you can.
Learn your rights before youâre standing at a checkpoint rather than after, and if you see a neighbor stopped, film it and bear witness. Support the groups suing to hold the line, from the ACLU to the immigrant-defense networks and civil liberties groups in your own town.
And if this piece helped you see the shape of the thing more clearly, share it, forward it, and send people to hartmannreport.com, because the whole goal of Trumpâs âpapers, pleaseâ state and the assassinations of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is that everyone learns to keep quiet, and the surest way to refuse it is to keep talking to each other out loud.
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This Trump-Zelensky press conferance was sent directly on NRK and I just watched it. What the fuck just happened !?!?
Also, poor Zelensky
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He has had to play that role in other comedies, he is familiar with it.
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His âSupreme Evil Overlordâ rant about ânow I am going to spill my operational plans on Iran and tell them openly my intentions, for there is nothing they can do about it; mowhahahahaâ! That was really something.
And here I wanted to hear about Patriot production and if a few could be sold to Ukraine now, but no, they are about to waste a fuck-ton more interceptors now against a battered regional power for reasons of pride.
Whatâs wrong with proportional retaliation. Itâs the only sensible policy. What are these idiots even doing. If you go with proportional retaliation, eventually Iran stops because they need to rebuild and sooner rather than later, Iran would find a way to deescalate. Escalation now by the US after they have just moved away their entire bomber and tanker fleet is economically dumber than dumb; and I donât even know.
The stupidity is off the charts. I still refuse to believe that they are seriously considering going back to high intensity bombing. It will cost not an insignificant sum of money, rerouting the bomber and tanker fleet, as well as personel, for another âgoâ without any strategic plan for a decisive point that could effectively find Iranâs Centre of Gravity and end this. No, they are just going to fuck around; and weâll all find out.
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A funny moment
https://x.com/saintjavelin/status/2074846453030101433
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And an embarrasing moment (there were mostly just those)
https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/2074843282308313580
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Yep, it sounds like a reset to late April. Right now the oil market seems to be suggesting they donât really believe that the US can be this stupidâŠagain.
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Tomorrow will be a reset to yesterday.
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I donât understand how they intend to openly reroute (in realtime, while Iran watches and knows what is inbound and gauges US language, meaning preemptive Iranian attack would be much more likely) all air assets and move them back to Gulf bases, as well as to Israel, once again. Itâs fucking expensive to move around that large deployments even though they have relatively few soldiers as such. It is still a 100 000 men (in the region, not brought in, but still), and this high tech air shit costs a hell of a lot of money to bring online again after having been brought offline. There is supposed to be a political win worth a hell of a lot to justify such outrageous expenses.
So I donât really believe it myself now. The military deployments have all shown withdrawal. To deploy them once again after having uprooted them, it would be so expensive. If they do that, then the war goal must be easily achieveable to justify it, but itâs not going to be easily achivevable.
Is that real? Can you imagine if âsleepy joeâ said that (and heâd have corrected himself). Oh the cotton clutching by the deplorables!
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I heard 111.
No WC to mask the nastiness today. Another person killed by ICE.
https://thehill.com/homenews/5959687-family-advocates-fatal-ice-shooting/
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