"Well, there’s been a longstanding shift in North America and Europe towards paramilitarized policing, using helicopter-style systems, using infrared sensing, using really, really heavy militarized weaponry. That’s been longstanding, fueled by the war on drugs and other sort of explicit campaigns. But more recently, there’s been a big push since the end of the Cold War by the big defense and security and IT companies to sell things like video surveillance systems, things like geographic mapping systems, and even more recently, drone systems, that have been used in the assassination raids in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and elsewhere, as sort of a domestic policing technology. It’s basically a really big, booming market, particularly in a world where surveillance and security is being integrated into buildings, into cities, into transport systems, on the back of the war on terror...." — Stephen Graham, professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University in the U.K and author of "Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism." (emphasis added)
Read the whole interview at AlterNet
Police or Paramilitary Forces? The Militarization of American Law Enforcement
Amy Goodman, Nermeen Shaikh, and Stephen Graham
Edited transcript of Democracy Now!
More evidence that Ike was right in warning against the growing influence of the military-industrial-governmental complex as a threat to democracy.
UPDATE: America Edges to Brink of Armed Police Drones
by Michael Scott-Moore, Miller-McCune at Truthout
3 comments:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128546325
A clever way to subvert the treaty deficit constraint.
What do MMTers think of demurrage?
I've never heard MMT'ers discuss demurrage. But it seems in line with policy that creates incentive for production and reduces rent-seeking.
"In complementary currencies' field, demurrage is a cost associated with owning or holding currency. It is sometimes referred to as a carrying cost of money. The term was used by Silvio Gesell. It is regarded by some as having a number of advantages over interest: while interest on deposits lead to discount the future and to place immediate gains ahead of long-term concerns, demurrage does the opposite, creating an incentive to invest in assets which lead to longer-term sustainable growth. Furthermore, demurrage acts like inflation, stimulating the circulation of the currency, encouraging economic activity, and increasing employment." — Wikipedia
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