[left]The border crisis is a deliberate and manufactured crisis with the final goal of ripping off the taxpayer.
Here is why this is true:
All of Trump’s heroic boasts to deport millions and shut down the border have had the predictable result on INCREASING the number of asylum seekers to record levels. Just as when Republicans and the NRA promoted the line that Obama was coming to take your guns and to ban assault weapons, sales soared. That is why these claims were made: people will react to an announcement that the border will soon be closed by deciding to move quickly to enter and ask for asylum before that happens.
“ Within weeks of Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House in January 2017, the number of people caught crossing America’s southern border illegally fell to a 17-year low of 11,127. John Kelly, then secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), attributed the drop to Mr Trump’s executive orders on immigration. Elaine Duke, the department’s deputy secretary, gave credit to better enforcement of immigration laws. Mr Trump hailed it as “a historic and unprecedented achievement”.
If such an effect did exist, it appears to have been short-lived. On April 5th, the DHS
announced that Border Patrol agents apprehended 37,393 people in March, an increase of more than 200% on the previous year. The number of unaccompanied children caught entering illegally jumped by 300%, and the number of families detained while attempting the journey surged by nearly 700%.”
So Trump’s threats to shut down the border was not intended to deter immigration but to spur it.
Such a burst of last-minute immigration (before the border is shut down and ICE is rounding up immigrants and deporting them by the millions) creates a crisis in housing the immigrants. They end up without showers, sleeping on the floor, etc.
The media and critics go into a moral uproar…..and soon enough, a budget is passed to deal with the crisis. We are 50,000 beds short……so Congress, in a rush, passes a budget of 2.7 billion to buy 54,000 beds. I am not making this up: “For example, the Trump administration requested roughly $210 million in its fiscal year 2020 budget proposal to monitor a daily average of 120,000 people using alternatives to detention.
In the same proposal, the administration asked Congress for $2.7 billion to pay for 54,000 detention beds — more than 10 times what it devoted to detention alternatives.” How Cory Booker would ‘virtually eliminate’ immigration detention
Do he math: 2.7 billion divided by 54,000 beds means each bed is costing $50,000. Basic beds, such as will be bought, such as are used in prisons, cost perhaps, in huge volume $200. So there is a profit here, for the private detention center who will buy the beds (and have 2/3 of all the detainees) of 2.6 billion on an expense of $10 million.
This is disaster or crisis capitalism: take advantage of a crisis (such as Hurricane Katrina) or CREATE a crisis, with policies designed to produce a disaster (crisis at the border), let the media and critics decry the crisis with moral outrage, and then, in a rush, pass a budget which gives billions to private contractors to buy something on which they make a 99% profit.
That is disaster capitalism, as described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, where she details many historical examples of how crises are fabricated or produced in order to pass laws and funding in a blind rush which otherwise would be subject to scrutiny.
So while Trump is promoting migration by threatening to round up millions of immigrants, and threatening to shut down the border, Congress members and journalists, in good faith, are reporting the inhumane conditions…”people sleeping on concrete floors”….and Congress “finally” has to act and passes a bill that gives the private detention center contractors billions to buy 10 million worth of beds to help “solve” the crisis.
The crisis becomes the mask for the rip-off. It is the pretext and the cover for a huge act of theft, the ultimate privatization scam of transferring billions in public funds into private hands for millions in services.
“For example, the Trump administration requested roughly $210 million in its fiscal year 2020 budget proposal to monitor a daily average of 120,000 people using alternatives to detention.
In the same proposal, the administration asked Congress for $2.7 billion to pay for 54,000 detention beds — more than 10 times what it devoted to detention alternatives.”
The outrage is directed away from $50,000 beds to the fact that so little is spent on alternatives to detention…this is the act of distraction, the right hand is directing your attention to one “injustice” while the left hand is picking your pocket. This is the final stage of capitalism, to exploit and create crisis, using moral outrage as a distraction for unprecedented theft of public funds to enrich private corporations.
CONCLUSION: 2.7 billion / 54 000 =
fifty thousand per bed.
And no one is talking about it except me, a writer banned from both left and right wing publications…..The outrage of a lack of beds is being used to cover up the much greater outrage of a theft of 2.6 billion dollars to solve a deliberately created crisis, not just for political purposes (the crisis at the border will be used by Trump as a way to stir outrage among his base) but for the purpose of orchestrating a huge theft of public funds.
I myself can barely believe the rip-off is so huge and NO ONE among Trump’s border critics or in the media has even noticed. That is the genius of disaster capitalism: it is the magic of the master of legerdemain, to distract with moral outrage at one injustice in order to disguise a much greater injustice.
I am naming it legerdemain capitalism, the latest iteration of what Naomi Klein named diaster capitalism. In this scenario, the critics of Trump are being used to stir up moral outrage, which is then used to justify a rush to fund beds for those sleeping on the floor, AT A COST (buried in the outrage and controversy) OF $50,000 EACH!!!
So perhaps it is the case that Senator Harris, a brilliant prosecutor and quick to note a deception, has caught on that the border crisis is being used as a pretext for a massive fraud, which would require both highlighting the moral outrage AND pointing out the fraudulent nature of the funding bill designed to appear to address it.
Maybe we need to look deeper.[/left]