Army units to be deployed against Americans in the event of “civil disturbance”

Originally from September 2008, I’m re-posting this here and now because of the recent lockdown in Boston in which National Guard members were mobilized to act as law enforcement. Also, this.

Whether Northern Command has actually deployed these units for this purpose I do not know. I just find it rather interesting that the Army Times reported on this, Democracy Now reported on this, but the MSM? Not a peep. Anyone who has further information on this, please feel free to comment.

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Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations

Beginning in October [2008], the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time 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, but now the unit is 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. 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 nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.

The Army Times reported this here on September 8, 2008. Text quote extensively below due to retroactive paywall.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

…

But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one.

Anyone else remember posse comitatus?

The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”

The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.

“I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered,” said Cloutier, describing the experience as “your worst muscle cramp ever — times 10 throughout your whole body.

On marriage, SCOTUS, and the Human Rights Campaign

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for and against California’s Proposition 8 today. Tomorrow they will hear oral arguments regarding DOMA.

I’m of two minds about this. No, strike that. I’m of one mind; there is no “but” here. There is, however, an “and.”

From my Twitter earlier today, where I seem to do a lot of my best thinking lately:

“Not sure how I feel abt Prop 8 and DOMA cases, except nervous. I loathe marriage, but feel ppl should be able to do it if they wish to.”

“At the same time, the LG community has focused on marriage and DADT to the detriment of transfolk, bis, queers in prison, queers of color.”

“Plus, if we had good immigration policies, healthcare for all, employment protections, marriage wouldn’t be a necessity for basic needs.”

“The law student – and yes, queer person – in me wants to see Prop 8 and DOMA fall, because discrimination is never okay.”

“At the same time, I’m angry that so much energy has been focused on marriage while basic life needs for more hard-up queer ppl are ignored.”

“I hope we win these cases. I DO. And then I want our energies to focus on those who really need it, not just comfortable white cis gays.”

I’m not the only one who feels that way. There’s a great essay out today, Why I support same-sex marriage as a civil right but not as a strategy to achieve structural change. It addresses how marriage, while it should be equally available to those who wish to partake, is not the end-all, be-all of queer equality, and it sure as shit doesn’t address the institutional problems that non-white, trans and genderqueer, impoverished, imprisoned, and homeless queer people face. I mean, shit, if you won’t see the couple on a glossy Human Rights Campaign brochure, they don’t exist in the queer community.

I want SCOTUS to strike down the bans on marriage, both at the state level and federal level.

AND

I want our queer organizations to focus on queer youth who are being bullied to death and thrown out of their homes. I want them to focus on institutional racism and the War on Drugs that leads to so many young queers of color to be incarcerated. I want them to address rape and abuse of queer inmates in the prison system. I want them to start talking again and taking action on HIV prevention and treatment while we look for a cure. I want them to address the police brutality against and the oppression and outright criminalization of transgender and genderqueer people. I want them to put as much energy into lobbying for a trans-inclusive ENDA as they did for DADT repeal so queer people can be hired and retained in their jobs. I want them to call for the fucking banks and multinational corporations to pay their goddam taxes so we might actually start on the road to economic recovery so queer people can actually find a job.

In short, I want organizations like HRC to give a fuck about someone other than comfortable, white, cisgender gays and lesbians who fit into an assimilationist’s wet dream.

And I want those people to be able to get married, too.

Shock Doctrine for the Police State

Barbara Boxer want the National Guard in schools, along with more surveillance cameras and kids wearing RFID badges.

NO.

It’s like fucking Shock Doctrine for the police state. In the post-9/11 world, the government got unprecedented spy powers. By the way, for those who haven’t heard, the Senate ok’d spy agencies and the FBI and DHS reading your email without a warrant. The 4th Amendment was nice while we had it, I guess. Every single time there’s some major tragedy, the government uses it as an excuse to beef up the police/surveillance state. And now Barbara Boxer, one of those “liberal democrats,” thinks we should be putting National Guardsmen in schools.

We all know how well that turned out last time.

Wayne LaPierre proposes some creepy as fuck bullshit

NRA Chief Wayne LaPierre called for a national database of people with mental illness.

This is really some creepy as fuck bullshit.

As though the domestic surveillance state isn’t already big and intrusive enough, now we have a gun nut calling for more state surveillance, this time specifically of people who live with a disability.

As pointed out by Miriam, this is a very bad idea.

For those who don’t want to click through to Miriam’s wonderful post, here are the basic reasons why (I added a few embellishments):

1. Mental health professionals are already required to break confidentiality and report when patients pose a clear threat to themselves or others. What’s the point of having a database with safeguards already in place?

2. It violates HIPAA like WOAH. Although, given that law enforcement can access your medical records without a warrant, and pretty much for any reason or none at all, this seems kind of like a moot point.

3. What diagnoses are included? What is “dangerous”? As has been pointed out numerous times, people with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators of it.

4. Just what the hell would the government DO with this list?

5. Most people with mental illnesses do not get treatment due to cost, availability, and stigma. A database is no good without data to report.

6. Knowing you’re going to be put into a government database would seriously discourage people from seeking needed treatment.

99% of mass murders in the United States are committed by angry men, mostly white, seeking to bolster their masculinity by shooting up crowds of people. George Sodini immediately springs to mind. Yet I don’t see any calls from Wayne LaPierre for his customer base to be profiled by the government.

Why street harassment is rape culture

I just want to walk down the damn street without getting leered at and catcalled like I was yesterday. That shouldn’t be such an impossible thing to ask for. But it is.

Here’s Why Girls Don’t Get Flattered When Guys Comment On Their Bodies

Girls start getting unwanted attention at a young age, and it happens for the rest of our lives. Men yell things at us on the street and invade our personal space on the bus or trolley when there are plenty of other seats. They try to look up our skirts when we sit down. They don’t listen when we try to rebuff them. We see reports of yet another girl raped on her way home last weekend, another woman whose body was found in a ditch. We’re told not to go out alone at night, to take someone with us even if we’re only driving to the store or the library or the gas station. We’re told to carry our keys like weapons, to park in the lot instead of the structure because it’s better to get rained on than raped and murdered. We’re told not to walk alone even during the day. We’re told close friends might rape us if they’ve had a bit to drink because they’re men, that it’s wrong, but it happens sometimes and we should be on our guard…Now imagine that one of the people you’ve been taught to regard as a threat to your body says he wants your body. If he really does, you’ll have a hard time stopping him.

Rape culture is, among other things, the continuum of largely male behavior that ranges from jokes and stares to catcalls to sexual harassment in school or the workplace to sexual assault to violent rape, and justification and condoning of all that behavior. All of it is meant to make women’s bodies and lives public property, the property of the men around them. All of it is meant as a power grab.

When you’re a stranger leering at or commenting on my body on the street, I know that’s all I am to you – a body. A set of tits. A series of holes to stick your dick in. I know you’re not thinking about the amazing fact that I can, for example, calibrate a cruise missile’s targeting radar system, or dissect a Supreme Court ruling on physician-assisted death. You’re thinking about how you’d like to stick your dick in me. I may as well be a sentient blow-up doll.

And there are a lot of men out there, roughly 9-15%, depending on the study, who won’t stop sticking their dick in me when I say “no.” And I don’t know if you’re one of those. If you are one of those men, and I can’t overpower or get away from you, my life will never be the same again.

That fear, for me, starts with something as seemingly innocuous as a “Hey, pretty baby!” as I walk by, like yesterday. Because I don’t know if you’ll follow me, want to talk, like yesterday. Or if you’ll get mad when I rebuff you, like yesterday. Or if you’ll follow me down the street yelling that I’m a stupid whore, a bitch, can’t I just take a compliment, I’m frigid-you-just-need-a-good-hard-fuck, like yesterday. I don’t know if your yelling will escalate into physical violence. If it had yesterday, I’m not sure if I could have gotten away if I’d tried to run, or if I’d been hurt worse if I’d fought back.

That fear is pretty well-founded, and well-grounded.

Know why I didn’t get catcalled or leered at today? Know why I didn’t commute in fear today? Because I didn’t leave my damn house.

Don’t comment on my body. Just don’t.

On Being Poor Today

Back in 2005 John Scalzi wrote a post, Being Poor. Several things jumped out at me.

Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.

Being poor is waiting for people at the Veterans’ Administration Regional Processing Center in Buffalo to actually look at my appeal and hoping they decide that no, I don’t actually owe them $5,300 and yes, I will get my GI Bill living stipend while I’m in school trying to better myself.

Being poor is talking to the people in the student accounts office and finding out that the state doesn’t disburse student aid until the semester is almost over because, “They want you to hold up your end of the bargain.” So apparently if you go to a state school it’s assumed you’re scum and are going to drop out.

Being poor today is realizing that I won’t be able to pay the rent next week because relying on those people to do their jobs, the only choice I had, was a mistake.

Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that’s two extra packages for every dollar.

Being poor today was figuring out what was on sale at the grocery store to match the last of my EBT money and still eat for the next week. It was buying as many sale items as possible to cook for two to four people per meal, calculating how much rice and lentils I could feasibly add to make the meals stretch and still be recognizable as a meal.

Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.

Being poor today is wanting to show this to the partner who fired me after I asked for a disability accommodation and shove the piece of paper up his ass.

Being poor today is breaking down crying because I haven’t been financially stable since I first got sick in the end of 2009. It’s having grown up poor, and crying at being back in the place I swore I’d never be again. It’s being disabled, and having that disability so sharply define my economic status.

Being poor today is being sick and tired of being poor, sick, and tired.

Stop this ride. I want off.

http://www.barackobama.com/news/entry/for-all

There’s a new way to show that you’re voting for someone who represents us all. Choose one of your reasons for voting and write it on your hand, then pledge to vote. You can share a photo on Twitter and Instagram with #ForAll. Check out some of the photos—you might even recognize a few of the faces.

WAT.

This is creepy as all fuck. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say this is some fucking Nuremberg shit right here. A pledge of loyalty to your party leader? WHAT??

We’re living in a time of unprecedented Executive power, thanks to Congress abdicating their post-9/11 responsibility and handing Chimpy McFuckface the keys to the kingdom. Obama sure as hell hasn’t given those back, and insists on grabbing for MORE Executive powers, such as the power to indefinitely detain Americans without charge or trial and kill Americans via extra-judicial drone strikes.

And it’s not just the Executive power grabs. Dissent is being suppressed in this country at such a level that United Nations envoys on Human Rights have formally requested protection for protesters. As shown in FOIA releases Occupy has been surveilled by counterterrorism units and the camps ultimately shut down in a nationwide coordinated effort by DHS. The militarization of police and branding of protesters as terrorists have effectively killed dissent in this country.

And now we have the Executive calling for his supporters to put their hand over their hearts and pledge their loyalty in a show of support.

This shit isn’t funny. It’s terrifying. I keep looking around expecting to be in 1930s Berlin.

Race to the bottom; or, Feudalism in 2012

I’m about to go grocery shopping with my brand new Bay State Access EBT card. What that means is that I’m back on food stamps.

I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to go there. In my performance-based self-evaluation world, needing help is a failure. And no one wants to fail.

I didn’t really have a choice this time. I haven’t had steady, reliable work as a full-time W-2 employee since 2009 when I got sick and subsequently lost my job. The rest of the time I’ve either been a full-time student living on the post-9/11 GI Bill or doing temp/contract work because it’s all I can find. There is so little full-time work out there for paralegals, unless you’ve got ten years’ experience in real estate, securities, or intellectual property (I do not). I’d interviewed for three full-time jobs in June and July, and was rejected all three times. That I had THAT many interviews is nothing short of Twilight-zone bizarre. The sad reality is that most job-seekers go months, sometimes a year without getting a callback, let alone an interview, let alone THREE. In the end, though, nothing panned out.

So I’ve been doing whatever temp job will have me. When I had $14 to my name I applied for food stamps and managed to hustle up a few days’ worth of housecleaning work from Craigslist for transit fare and $20 worth of rice, lentils, and milk. No one can say I haven’t done my damndest to find honest money.

Lucky me, I managed to get hired on as a long-term temp at a law firm here in Boston (obviously, I’m not going to name names). Now, to be fair, I like this firm. I like the people. I like and respect the attorneys I support. I’m learning a lot, enjoying the hell out of the work. I’m getting to be not just admin support, but I’m doing legal research and preliminary forensic accounting, drafting motions, managing discovery, prepping trial exhibits, managing schedules and court dates and dealing with clients. I keep the attorneys from going batshit crazy. I’m doing what a paralegal or a law clerk is SUPPOSED to be doing in addition to the work of a legal admin. The work I’m doing is worth $20-22/hour at the very least.

I’m netting $11/hour as a long-term temp.

$11.

That is not a living wage in metro Boston in 2012. That is not sustainable. And right now it’s the best I’m going to get in this job market.

I had a conversation with the partner I support about this. He told me that the firm was going to hire someone as a full-time employee, “but in the end we decided to maintain it as a long-term temp because it’s cheaper and we don’t have to pay for health insurance.”

/headdesks repeatedly

As if that’s not insulting enough, they’re probably paying the temp agency at least $25/hour for my services, and I’m only getting $14 of it gross. I don’t get health insurance through the temp agency, either, so they’re saving THAT money. Basically, they’re the middlemen whose entire existence serves to justify itself, and to convince employers that they can do it all for cheaper.

This is the invisible hand that keeps punching workers in the face. This is another symptom of how CEO pay has risen 127 times faster than workers in the last 30 years. This is how greed works. Make record profits, downsize and outsource, force productivity to go up with less, and continue pocketing the profits.

The partner I support bills $500/hour. I don’t grudge him that. He’s GOOD. He knows his stuff, he wins his cases, and he makes the clients happy. But Christ on a water cracker, if you’re making $500/hour, how can you allow your right hand to net $11/hour with no health insurance as a temp and require food stamps to survive? The decent people I know would find that unconscionable. And no, stop with the lawyer jokes. This isn’t about lawyers; it’s about how we live in a culture that says “greed is good.” It’s about how we’ve elevated profit above people.

There’s work out there. There’s a LOT of work to be done. But there are so few jobs, and those that are available pay so little, because we’ve managed to tie “work” to “someone else’s profit.” There is no such thing as “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” anymore. There’s “a hard day’s work for whatever pittance I feel like giving you and you’d better bow and scrape and be grateful for it.”

That’s not a healthy economy. That’s feudalism. And it’s the main reason that I, and so many others like me, are on food stamps and other assistance programs. I’m not ashamed of being on food stamps. I’m pissed about it, but not ashamed of it. The shame isn’t mine to bear. It belongs to the companies that refuse to pay their workers a living wage, to the firms that outsource to developing countries, to the bloated rich who use tax loopholes and offshore accounts to hide their money to avoid paying their fair share while exploiting the rest of us, to the universities jacking up tuition rates and the predatory lenders who enslave people just trying to improve themselves, to the Wall Street investment firms that committed crime after crime after crime in order to make just a little more money, screwing the common people while they did it.

These people are incapable of feeling shame. All they know is greed. 1920s, meet the 2010s. You two know each other already.

This Was Never About Rape

For those living under a rock, Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, was accused of rape in Sweden in 2010. A European arrest warrant was issued. He was arrested in Britain, released on bail, confined to house arrest, and then fought his extradition from Britain to Sweden. Upon’s Britain’s acquiescence to Sweden’s request, Assange determined he would not go quietly, and requested asylum from Ecuador. The Ecuadorean government announced today that they would grant that request. Heaven only knows what happens next.

I’m not going to speculate on whether Assange raped those women or not. I don’t know, I wasn’t there, he hasn’t even been tried, let alone found guilty. That’s not what has me seeing red at this moment. What has me livid is the rampant hypocrisy exhibited by the Swedish, the UK, and yes, the U.S. government. (As an aside, anyone who thinks the U.S. government isn’t involved in any European going-on regarding Julian Assange needs a cranio-rectal corrective procedure.)

This was never actually about rape. When the hell has any government ever given a damn about a rape victim? The U.S., UK, and Swedish governments are appalling when it comes to rape in our countries. I can only wish that the governments in question cared so much about all rape victims as much as they care about putting Julian Assange in prison.

In the United States, between 17-20% of women will be raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetime. A sexual assault occurs every two minutes. Women comprised 90% of sexual assault victims. Only 9% of rapes are ever prosecuted. Conviction rates are at 2%. A backlog of about 400,000 untested rape kits sit in warehouses, untouched. The problem is so bad that two Senators have brought forth federal legislation to allocate more funds for processing. One in three women servicemembers are sexually assaulted in the United States’ armed forces by their fellow troops, nearly twice the rate of civilians. Those of us who are have little to no recourse. In keeping with national averages, only 8% of those attackers are ever tried, and 10% were allowed to resign from the military rather than face charges. The vast majority of rapes go unreported. The federal government has taken virtually no action on this issue, and has stonewalled FOIA requests about it to the point that the ACLU and Servicewomen’s Action Network (SWAN) had to file suit in federal court to get the data.

The UK doesn’t do any better, and actually does much worse. An average of 400,000 women are sexually assaulted and 80,000 are raped in the UK every year. The UK prosecuted 870 suspects for rape last year, and convicted only half of them. That’s a 1% prosecution rate. 1%.

Sweden has the highest number of reported rapes in Europe, and among the highest in the world. The number of rapes there have doubled over the past ten years, with stranger rape reporting rates going down to 1 in 10. And yet, with higher law enforcement reporting averages than other countries, their prosecution rate is still a measly 13%.

Oh yeah. These countries care about rape, and justice for and the well-being of rape victims, all right. It’s so important to them to catch and incarcerate rapists that 97% of rapists never spend a day behind bars.

As a feminist, and as a survivor of Military Sexual Trauma, I’m deeply insulted and personally offended that governments with a record of treating rape like a normal, acceptable thing can suddenly find it obscene enough of a crime to turn it into an international incident and attempt to extradite an accused perpetrator from one country to another. Conveniently, this extradition order happened barely two weeks after Assange began to release the U.S. State Department cables now know as the “Afghan War Logs.” So rape is only a crime if the accused is already an enemy of a powerful state? It sure looks like that from where I’m sitting as a survivor. It’s for damn sure these governments don’t give any thought to the other millions of rape victims and their attackers. For certain, the U.S. government didn’t care about my life or well-being with a rapist in the ranks, endangering my safety.

There’s a saying we’re all familiar with: Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining. In this case, don’t try to imprison Julian Assange and then lie and tell me it’s because you care about rape. It’s insulting.

ETA: Yes, I’m also angry about much of the Left’s immediate, knee-jerk dismissal of the allegations against Assange as automatically false because “he could never do that.” Blind fanboy support is just as bad as the hypocrisy I talk about here. Accusations of rape should never be dismissed out of hand. That is not the point I’m making here; let’s save that for another day.

Click on “unsubscribe”

Mainers United for Marriage keeps asking me for money. I don’t know how they got my email in the first place, but they did. I’ve just been deleting their stuff, but today I bothered to unsubscribe. Their unsubscribe page mistakenly asks why I’m unsubscribing.

“I don’t live in Maine. And quite frankly, I’m sick of seeing the LG movement put all its eggs in the marriage basket. We should be working on jobs and employment discrimination, universal health care, police brutality against genderqueer ppl and transwomen (especially POC), HIV funding, and other issues affecting people who can’t buy their equality like the HRC crowd can. That marriage license isn’t going to pay the rent, the doctor bills, buy groceries or medicine. It’s not going to protect young queer kids of color from the school-to-prison pipeline or stop-and-frisk. It’s not going to grow us food when concurrent years of drought like this one destroy US crop yields. Also, why the hell do we want to join a failing institution in the first place? Screw marriage; I’d like a damn permanent job instead of worrying from one month to the next if I’m going to have enough temp work to cover the bills. Thanks but no thanks.”

To clarify for those who leap to the conclusion that I don’t care about marriage equality: I do care about equality, at all levels. I’m just sick of seeing a largely white, rich (or at least comfortable), cisgender movement based in D.C. continually focus on marriage to the exclusion of issues more immediately affecting those of us who are poor or unemployed, or who lack healthcare, or who are not white, or who are transgender/genderqueer, or are targets of law enforcement for intimidation and violence. If people didn’t have to depend on partners or spouses for healthcare, if people could simply designate who they want at their hospital bedsides, if non-spouses were able to inherit without crippling estate taxes, no one would need legal marriage. We’d be able to stand as ourselves and make the families of our own choosing without the need to be recognized by the state. Equality is nice, but my point is that we’re seeking equality within a system that’s narrow and discriminatory to begin with. Why should I want to be a part of that? I’d rather have real equality amongst all humans instead of the shadow of equality in a system that’s still going to be racist, classist, sexist, and imperialist.

More and more the LG movement – and let’s be honest, transgender/genderqueer people are the unwelcome stepchildren and we bisexual cis people are the bastard cousins no one wants to admit exist – is exclusionary, focusing on the concerns of people who can already buy their equality. I’m not part of that movement because I’m bi, because I’m poor, because I’m a radical rather than an assimilationist. I want a world in which difference is celebrated, not frowned upon. And the current incarnation of a movement that was started by drag queens and bull dykes is just another wealthy white assimilationist movement looking to ape the behaviors of the people society deems “acceptable.”

I’ve unsubscribed from that movement, and I did it with a smile and raised fist.