By F. William Engdahl 26 September 2008
As street protests grow across 150 cities in the USA, and the economic crisis spreads, there are indications that the Bush Administration may be preparing for severe repression measures to quell any protest. This takes place against a backdrop of open, callous financial abuse by US Treasury Secretary Paulson and President Bush over their TARP bill for a $700 billion carte blanche to Paulson to bail out his cronies in Wall Street. Paulson, it has been revealed, holds $700 million worth of stock options in his former firm, Goldman Sachs. The unprecedented step he took with Federal Reserve chief Bernanke to allow Goldman Sachs to immediately transform into a Bank Holding company in order to get access to Federal Reserve credit, is just another indication of the outrageous climate of not mere corruption in Washington. It is of a scale of the legend of Nero playing violin as Rome burns.
Army to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations
Beginning in October, the US Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time ever, to serve as an ‘on-call’ federal response in times of ‘emergency.’ The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq. They are now training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command (NORTHCOM). The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with ‘civil unrest and crowd control.’ The soldiers are learning to use so-called non-lethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.
The deployment of Army troops for domestic law enforcement had been forbidden since Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878. Posse Comitatus Act was passed with the intent of removing the Army from domestic law enforcement. Posse comitatus means “the power of the county,” reflecting the inherent power of the old West county sheriff to call upon a posse of able-bodied men to supplement law enforcement assets and thereby maintain the peace. Following the Civil War, the Army had been used extensively throughout the South to maintain civil order, to enforce the policies of Reconstruction, and to ensure that any lingering sentiments of rebellion were crushed. The Army necessarily became involved in traditional police roles and in enforcing politically volatile Reconstruction-era policies. The stationing of federal troops at political events and polling places under the justification of maintaining domestic order became of increasing concern to Congress, which felt that the Army was becoming politicized and straying from its original national defense mission. The Posse Comitatus Act was passed to remove the Army from civilian law enforcement and to return it to its role of defending the borders of the United States.
Homeland Security?
As the US economy continues to deteriorate at an accelerating tempo, tens of thousands of illegal Mexican and other immigrants are facing tough police crackdown for the first time in years. Federal agents have arrested at least 200 people in immigration raids in Illinois, Indiana, Colorado and California over the past week. Most of the arrests took place in the Chicago area and northern Indiana. Beginning on Sept. 12, four ICE Fugitive Operations teams detained and arrested 144 people in nineteen towns in the region. Fifty-nine more immigrants were arrested in Colorado, where agents conducted raids in fourteen cities. In California, agents arrested twenty-one undocumented immigrants working at a chain of Chinese restaurants. Meanwhile, a new study by the Pew Hispanic Center has found that nearly one in ten Latinos in the United States reported that in the last year police or other authorities stopped them and asked them about their immigration status. Last year, ICE agents arrested more than 35,000 undocumented immigrants—more than double the number in 2006.
The actions of Secretary Paulson and Fed chief Bernanke over their proposed $700 billion financial bailout, as I detailed in my two previous pieces here, Finanz-Tsunami: Wird Washington die Wall Street verstaatlichen?, and Weitere Hintergründe zu Henry Paulsons versuchtem Finanzputsch, is the most brazen attempt to rob the US taxpayer to make good the criminal abuses of the major banks and financial houses that have knowingly engaged in fraud totalling trillions of dollars in the Asset Backed Securitization schemes that former Fed chief Alan Greenspan went out of his way to support. As discontent across the population spreads, and a realization begins to break through the controlled US media manipulation that ordinary Americans are being massively defrauded by their elected officials, the likelihood grows that there will be massive spontaneous public protest, peaceful or otherwise, in the period up to elections. Some observers have speculated that such social unrest, perhaps made violent by well-placed professional agent provocateurs, would provide the present Administration the pretext to declare martial law and suspend elections altogether.
