Journal of the Plague Year (#14)

Berkeley, CA June 22, 2020 — The Fusion Centers were working overtime this past week. 

You probably didn’t know. Reading daily newspapers wouldn’t have helped you. Nor would listening to the radio or watching TV. And unless you happen to have the internet-diving skills of an Edward Snowden or a Julian Assange (not to equate the two!) you can’t find out.

So here’s some help.

There are 53 Fusion Centers, one for each state, two for territories. They’re under the control of the Department of Homeland Security, that little regulated, multi-tentacled government branch, created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Personnel and budgets are secret. On the Homeland Security home page, you can find the Fusion Centers’ mission. To “serve as primary focal points within the state and local environment for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information among federal, state, local, tribal and territorial partners. Located in states and major urban areas throughout the country, Fusion Centers are uniquely situated to empower front-line law enforcement, public safety, fire service, emergency service, public health and private sector security personnel to lawfully gather and share threat-related information.”

Given the historical slippery slopes which “law enforcement, public safety” et al have occupied in their long histories there is nothing to inspire confidence that they, and the Fusion Centers ostensibly helping them, will do the right thing in our present circumstance. (Which is not to say that people who staff them - police, firefighters, medical personnel are anything but dedicated professionals whose valor has been abundantly proven these past few months.)

While those professionals are out there trying to save lives, what are the Fusion Center workers doing? And why is their work so oblique, and secretive? It’s not just that we have no idea what their work really is, we also don’t have a clue about how much it costs. Although we can assume that super-agencies grafted on top of already largely impenetrable and untouchable other agencies, can be expected to build expensive empires themselves. And then, consequently, impose a shortage of funds to help the most desperate and neglected people affected in crisis circumstances like the present.

You have to be a total Trumpoid and/or a total fool to think that the hundreds of thousands of people who continue to demonstrate against routine racism represent a “danger.” Looked at realistically, the present “danger” lies in the erratic behavior of the understaffed government that Trump perches on top of, day by day.

Michael Chertoff, former head of the Homeland Security Administration, architect of Muslim detention in 2001 and cog in the dysfunctional G.W. Bush administration’s horrendous mishandling of Hurricane Katrina horrors in 2005, spoke out this week, unexpectedly. Along with a couple of dozen other name brand security people,

Chertoff now says that demonstrations protesting the murder of George Floyd aren’t dangerous. They don’t mean you “have to get into low flying helicopters , tear gas, and threats to bring in the military.” Things that happened not just in the D.C. streets. 

Homeland Security and its Fusion Centers used its helicopters for “168 hours of protests in 13 cities, the largest of which was Detroit.” Another was Grand Forks ND, not normally suspected as a base for subversives.

You gotta love both sides of these ’security” guys’ mouths! The ranking official of the Customs and Border Patrol in Grand Forks, David Fulcher, assured a gullible (or just lazy) N.Y. Times reporter, “We believe in peaceful protests.“ Moreover, “the technology is not there” for airborne surveillance to “identify faces, hair color or body types. Or to see if someone is carrying a backpack or a rifle.” In other words, mistakes will be made by these secretly resourced, unsupervised military/police people. The result, which they don’t officially tabulate for you, is that hundreds have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere by joystick jiggerers in Florida or Colorado looking at screens that their agency wants us to believe are less detailed than the Google Earth views or Highway Patrol traffic cams we can access from our own computers. 

There are well documented instances of what amounts to extra-judicial, extra-territorial violence, almost all of it by U.S. government and U.S. private security companies which both surveil from the air and sometimes impose on the ground. An exact total is difficult to establish. But reading the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism web site, it has to be in the hundreds, if not thousands of victims in the Bush-Clinton-Obama-Trump years.

Chertoff’s letter mattered to those who write editorials in newspapers. But the images involved, including Trump’s absurd photo op, holding an upside-down bible in front of a burned out church near the White House, had much more resonance. And there was immediate measurable public opinion impact. Joe Biden doubled his polling lead over Trump to 9%, a record margin for a challenger to an incumbent at this stage of a Presidential campaign. For the first time Biden also raised more money than Trump.

Was Chertoff merely fine-tuning his resume to appeal to what he assumes will be a Biden administration? Was Mary Elizabeth Taylor, the only African-American senior official in the State Department, doing the same when she abruptly quit this week? A hard-line conservative whose first government job was in the office of troglodyte Senator Mitch McConnell, Taylor had also managed legislative affairs and nominations for the White House.

Taylor’s resignation on Juneteenth came as the widespread on-line protest and resistance to Trump and Trumpishness continued to grow. And Trump’s appeal continued to visibly shrink. Succeeding the bible-waving of the previous week, this week came the image of a two-thirds empty indoor arena in Tulsa, where people chose not to attend Trump’s campaign re-start. Partly the much smaller than predicted crowd was due to an on-line effort by Tik-Toc and K-pop urging their large, mostly young followers to sign up for tickets to the Tulsa event, thereby oversubscribing the free reservation system. And then to not show up to claim the tickets, blocking others who might have actually wanted to attend from registering.

One needs to remember, however, that even if Biden outsmarts and outfundraises Trump and wins by a margin similar to his present polling lead, it will mean that more than 60 million people will have voted for Trump. They are not a monolith, however. As was proven when thousands among them made the sensible decision not to turn out in Tulsa, where all responsible health officials had warned that an unmasked, tightly packed 19,000 seat arena was a public health disaster waiting to happen.

Meanwhile, an ongoing disaster happens daily in the African-American community, as it has since this country’s founding. Accidentally, tragically, it leaped to prominence in the horrifying death of George Floyd. As of now, still five months away from election day, only 29% of people surveyed share Trump’s disdain for “Black Lives Matter” marches and rallies, which the Fusion Centers are now surveilling. 

It was hardly worth losing George Floyd to get rid of Trump. But it increasingly seems Trump cannot escape the result of what is now destined to be a key moment in U.S. history. There is a dismal, infuriating history of police killing African-Americans, mostly men. This time, however, it was stark and unavoidable. Floyd wasn’t on an obscure dirt road in Afghanistan. He wasn’t in a marketplace in Yemen. He wasn’t in Somalia or Pakistan. He wasn’t executed by “security” troops, government and privatized, on the 38 bases the U.S. acknowledges having around the world. He wasn’t killed by supposedly “advanced lethal aid.” He was killed by naked force, used by someone who had abundantly displayed his unsuitability to wear the uniform he wore. While three other blue uniformed guys stood by and did nothing to try to save his life.

A lot can still happen concerning the November election. Including that election being chaotic and unfair, as we’re about to see this week in Kentucky. While the calendar creeps on, and Trump isn’t finished yet. 

He continues to pack the Federal judiciary with zealots and bigots, most of them delusional “believers” in narrow, religious based parameters of human value. (Occasional surprises like this week’s DACA and LGBTQ rights rulings should not be celebrated too fervently.) 

The judicial system is refusing to stop the misallocation of public funds to private interests, in key areas like education and health care. 

The judicial system is refusing to stop the dismantling of government agencies that protect the environment, and those of us who live in it. 

The judicial system continues to allow deportation of immigrants picked up on what one might call “suspicion of being suspicious.” Many immigrants are immediately deported, without even being tested for COVID-19. Their countries of origin, which in numerous cases they haven’t seen in decades, are poor, with limited health facilities. And as we now know just a few virus-bearing travelers can start another serious COVID-19 outbreak. 

The judicial system is poised to further restrict women’s reproductive rights. 

The judicial system seems ready to allow brute force advocates like Attorney General William Barr to resume executions. 

And on climate change the battle to save the planet will be fought with the U.S. government on the sidelines.

Unfortunately, the boundless cruelty of Trump’s minions is not limited to what happens to humans. It’s exemplified in recent rulings about animals. Among the Trump administration’s rules is an authorization to kill wolves and coyotes, including pups, during the season when mothers wean their young. And a ruling allowing the baiting of bears, including nursing mothers. and using dogs to hunt and kill them.. 

Expanding hunting rights on federal lands has been a priority under Trump It’s an issue championed by the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., an avid hunter. In February, as part of its annual convention, the Safari Club International, which promotes big-game hunting, auctioned a weeklong “dream hunt” through Alaska with the president’s son. 

“This change is all about appeasing trophy hunters” writes Timothy Egan in a follow up NY Times Opinion piece (“A Soft-Handed Predator Masquerading in Manliness” 6/20/2020) . “Well, one trophy hunter — Donald Trump Jr. You may have heard the recent report that taxpayers spent $75,000 for junior to hunt and kill a rare argali sheep in Mongolia last year while in the secure silo of the Secret Service. Trump Jr. is a hunter of privilege, jetting into an exotic locale, getting special treatment from the local government and a permit issued retroactively, using the best guides and equipment. This package was completed by an Instagram posts from the entitled First Family rich kid. He’s in camo atop a horse in Mongolia. He snuffed the life from that magnificent animal, a species threatened with extinction and the largest sheep in the world, using a laser-guided rifle that allowed him to hunt at night…”