Back in May, J.D. Hayworth (R/Minuteman-Az) had this to say:
I wrote about it in a post that provided J.D. with the definition of the word in order to clear up any confusion as to what is happening down here in the Borderlands. Now, three months later, the line is crawling with National Guard troops from all across the country as well as armed vigilante operations interspersed between Border Patrol checkpoints and local law enforcement units that are re-interpreting federal immigration laws to arrest “suspected illegal immigrants.”
sígame…
The Great Wall of America™ is growing everyday
A Border Patrol spokesman says the project will connect with existing fencing in the Douglas and Naco areas. The result, he he says, will be to create a continuous barrier between the towns – along about a 40-mile stretch of border.
In addition to these “official” barricades being constructed, the racist vigilante Minutemen have received some manna from hell.
The mesh has embedded sensors that can differentiate between human and animal contact and conditions such as high winds or heavy rain. Tied into cameras and alarms, the system can alert monitors to the precise location of any intrusion.
[snip]
FOMGuard USA represents FOMGuard Co., a South Korean enterprise that developed the fencing material.
May said the mesh security fencing was designed for use along the demilitarized zone with North Korea.
linkage (emphasis mine)
This deal stinks worse than a dead skunk along one of the dirt roads travessing the Tohono O’odham Nation. First the Minutemen ran out of volunteers to complete their original fence project. Then, their accounting practices were called into question. Now, they are getting $7 million dollars worth of technology/hardware donated?!?
Who ARE these people?
FOMGuard is the only perimeter security system in Asia passed USAF technical evaluation test over 3 years after being adopted by FCT Program of US DoD. In the test, FOMGuard got outstanding achievement that location accuracy of ±25cm, no false alarm, 100% detection for intrusion of fence top and corner,easy maintenance, interface with annunciator.
linkage (emphasis mine)
The .pdf of the actual product can be found here. Also, according to Security Middle East Magazine:
United States Air Force and Korea-based Certifications can be found here. Finally, from a 2005 Issue of Government Computer News:
Nope, nothing to see here. A vigilante militia is being GIVEN top-notch security technology to do as they wish. The silence from the government is deafening because they are giving the wink-wink nod-nod treatment to Chris Simcox and his racist band of thugs. It is the SAME hardware being used to guard military bases for FSMs sake!
M – I – L – I – T – A – R – I – Z – A – T – I – O – N
Am I the only one horrified at the thought that they may be using these walls someday for the purpose of keeping us locked in?
Crossposted from my humble blog
To read the bare-knuckled reality of the hostility being felt, read the comments section to that article. That’s the main paper for the Tucson Metro area. Sigh…
You are not.
Scary stuff, ManEe. Scary stuff indeed. Scary people too.
days I feel like Chicken Little with a tinfoil pirate hat firmly pressed against my head, but what can one do after reading about the network of government-affiliated corporations that have their grubby fingers into everything?
I have so many questions about this newest “donation”, like: Where is the data being transmitted? Who is going to actually install it? When is V2.0 arriving with volatile electric currents?
As I detail in my latest diary, they already are, both the physical as well as the emotional fencing. We’ve long ago sealed ourselves into a prison of our own making.
a good chat with a group of people at a coffee shop in Flagstaff last weekend regarding the border and how I view it as a Mexican American. They were asking me why I felt so much solidarity with the immigrant people even though I’m a 7th generation U.S. American. My reply was something along the lines of your reference to emotional fencing – I don’t feel that barrier like others. It’s on a gut level. So when I read about the deaths or blatant injustices being committed, it’s as if it is being done to someone in my extended family. Hard to explain but very real nonetheless.
I’m a midwestern white boy, born in Iowa, bred in the Chicago suburbs. I was marinated in all of the petty racist assumptions and myths that permiate this culture, even though my family raised me to be open and egalitarian. The distrust, fear and hatred is just part of the American air. I remember distinctly one of my good friend’s father, confronting with his neighbors a proposed mixed-income development in our town, circulating a crypto-racist petition opposing the development. It was full of dire warnings about how “they” would destroy property values.
I managed to hide from myself how much these outlooks had imprinted themselves on me until I moved to NYC. Being cheek to jowl with so many diverse people, all of the different languages and clothes, the smells of the foods and the divergent ideas about personal space … I felt so uncomfortable at first. Even though I thought of myself as unprejudiced and not homophobic, a little caveman in my brain would jump up and down in fearful discomfort when someone darker invaded my space, or when I came around a corner and walked into two men kissing. It was a real learning experience, to realize that even though I had intellectually accepted the beauty inherent in diversity, my culture had inculcated within me a deep-rooted distrust and fear.
Once I moved past it, as much as a person can, and got to know a broader range of people with life experiences so different from mine, my life and the joyful experience of different ways of being really enriched my life. I know first hand the ideas that Jane Jacobs spoke of. I’m a better person for those boundaries being lowered. I think we all could be if we embraced the slight discomfort of being continuously challenged by diversity, instead of running from it.
Sadly, America is going in just the opposite direction.
thank you for your honesty. I too catch myself doing those things too.It really takes me aback sometimes and I feel ashamed of those feelings. I grew up in the “burbs” of Chicago too. I was up north in McHenry County. How about you?
McHenry county too … little town called Lake in the Hills. It used to be small subdivisions separated by woods and farm fields. It looked like Schaumburg the last time I went back. Made me sad.
I went back about five years ago and was blown away how it had grown. I grew up in Wonder Lake and went to high school in McHenry. Nothing but corn fields back then.
yup, now it’s wall to wall fast food and concrete, everywhere.
Sad.
I should probably add that I left in 1986.
thanks for sharing all that. I think self-awareness is key to teaching tolerance and common sense decency. I grew up in a predominately Mexican American community (85%+ population) but also spent a few years in the heart of Oklahoma. Within my cultural bubble those of us who are darker than the others are constantly ribbed by cousins and friends, little things really, mostly in jest, but it eventually takes its toll. There’s so much nastiness in common conversation that I always laugh when people talk about how much progress the U.S. has made wrt racism. I don’t know how many times I’ve been called mojado or negro or tar baby by cousins just because I happen to be browner than their Spanish-influenced skin tone. Har har, right? As I’ve gotten older, they’ve heard more vocalized anger from me when they do it.
Another example, just last week I was talking to my mom and she said, “We think it’s funny that you refer to them as immigrants” – (mojado – wetback in English – is a common term for Mexicans, even among the MexAm community) – and I replied, “Would you call a black person ‘Nigger?'” She gasped and said, “Well, NO!!” – I explained how its the same type of accusatory/demeaning term and just not right. Opened her eyes abit to the ways our language still reflects the undercurrent of bigotry that we all have infused within us for some reason I’ll never fully understand.
I’m not perfect, no one is, but if we’re aware of it and continue to work on unlearning old/bad habits, then I think we’re on a good path.
I was unaware of it, really, even as I was feeling it. Friends had to point out to me the way my body language changed, the way I’d move on the sidewalk. It was often unconscious, sorta of mindless instinct.
I think it’s an ongoing lesson that all people need to work on. It’s work that never stops.
I always swallowed the idea that “hispanics” were some monolithic group. Didn’t grow up knowing any, after all. When I first moved east, I worked w/ a couple of twins, Puerto Ricans. Really nice, funny guys, but the way they would talk about Mexicans and “Guats” kinda stunned me. I asked them about it once, when they had gone off on an especially nasty routine about a group of “hispanics” (my word) who’d been shopping in the store. I was given a crash course on their particular perspective on other spanish-speaking people, much of it not very positive, a lot of it profane.
We all draw our lines. The trick is to not be limited by them. Sadly, though, it’s especially destructive in this country, as we spend so much time insisting that we’re “different” and more egalitarian than we really are, all while we continue to institutionalize advantages for whites.
Thanks again for another great post.
those comments are so hateful. Sigh, indeed. 🙁
comes a point where I just have to sit there and blink/cringe at so much anymosity. There will never be progress as long as such potent anger is boiling from the other side. Unfortunately, they have many supporters in Congress that agree with them. Not sure what to do except hope for some sanity to find its way into the water systems.
Now they are pushing the Mexican=Terrorist meme and unfortunatly people are buying it. It isn’t just the right wing nuts, but even progressives are taking the bait. They don’t think they are racist; they claim to be opposed to the illegality. They quote all the scary stats from CIS and FAIR and even deny the racist component of the immigration debate. Meanwhile, the hearings being held around the country this summer are stirring the pot.
No kidding, Duke’s latest post over at Migra Matters exposed them for the sham they are:
Angry rhetoric with no inclination to take a humane, realistic approach to reforming the entire immigration system…just more cowboy diplomacy, imo.
This chills me to the bone:
The Customs and Border Protection’s Expedited Removal Program has contracted with Halliburton to oversee the expansion of the federal government’s capacity to detain immigrants.
[snip]
U.S.-Mexico border control is also being privatized. After more than a decade of border militarization with “Operation Gatekeeper” and “Operation Hold the Line,” the deployment of the National Guard and plans for 700 miles of fencing, in May the government solicited bids from military contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Ericsson and Northrop Grumman for a multibillion-dollar contract to build a “virtual fence” of unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment along the border. With final awarding of the Secure Border Initiative Network set for September, the arrival of military contractors at the border is imminent.
Add Blackwater Inc., a private security firm that has run mercenaries in Iraq and New Orleans, and is negotiating a contract to train U.S. Border Patrol officers, and you get a virtual fence that has guns for hire welcoming newcomers at ports of entry.
Link
Manny, that hat you’re wearing sure isn’t tin foil. God help us.
kept popping up in my search for more info on FOMGuard, Inc. Across the pond, they are connected into a similar network of Security/Defense-related operations. When I get home from work I’ll look up the link.
The question is, what can we do about it? Many of these corps are the same group that is controlling political purse strings…
Manny, I really hate to say this, but one thing I think would be wise to consider, (in addition to any other action we can take,) is to prepare for the possibility that there just may be nothing we CAN do to actually stop any of this, not any time soon. Money is power, the corporations have it, politicians are for sale, and the Repugs are in power.
Meanwhile, we do what we can, as you most certainly do. Keep writing, keep exposing, keep at it however we each can. And, of utmost importance, continue to take excellent care good care of ourselves and each other, always. We need all the Mannys we can get.
I know it, just feeling overly frustrated today with seeing little to no momentum that fights back against it. I’ve studied history and know about pendulum swings, but for some reason I can’t shake the feeling that the other side is working overtime to make sure it stays pointed towards their money-ladened direction.
The company is called Clear Box International Security, which is a proud member of the Northern Defense Industries Limited – the War Machine thrives in all parts of the world.
Compassion, dignity, and purity.
I saw a young Manny tonight.
Tonight I saw more hope for tomorrow.
This is not from the “border” this photo is from a town right outside Portland, Oregon, USA, planet earth.
There were four dear children there that we had not seen before. They were so gentle, so warm… I cried as I photographed them.
I dedicate the below to my dear friend, Manny.
In more ways than one, you were with me tonight.
We were all touched by these four new faces.
Such lovely souls.
So expressive, so caring and so gentle.
Our true and only treasures.
Stop the Wars and Militirization NOW!
Start Peace! Start seeing people as humans!