- Sep 16, 2012
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On January 17, 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower ended his presidential term by warning the nation about the increasing power of the Military Industrial Complex.
Since that growth of the American Economy and the demand for cheap, unregulated, unregistered black market labor, we have always had an influx of illegal labor, and, correspondingly, a development of government contractors which are tasked with the job of border security. These contractors hold no party allegiance, their only allegiance is to the almighty dollar.
The truth is folks, the media, the corporatacracy, and the establishment have been gas-lighting you all, and dividing you all over this issue, and blowing smoke up your ass. Everything you THINK you know about the DNC, the GOP. . . hell, even Trump? It has all been a lie.
Even what you are hearing about Biden and the folks he has been hiring is a lie. They need illegals to attempt to cross to make this industry profitable. To keep that contracts coming in.
The Border Crisis Is Forever
consortiumnews.com
". . . The Complex
In the 12 years from 2008 to 2020, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doled out 105,000 contracts, or a breathtaking average of 24 contracts a day, worth $55 billion to private contractors.
That sum exceeded their $52 billion collective budgets for border and immigration enforcement for the 28 years from 1975 to 2003. While those contracts included ones for companies like Fisher Sand and Gravel that built the 30-foot wall my son and I saw in Sasabe, many of them — including the most expensive — went to companies creating high-tech border fortification, ranging from sophisticated camera systems to advanced biometric and data-processing technologies.
This might explain the border industry’s interest in candidate Biden, who promised: “I’m going to make sure that we have border protection, but it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it.”
<snip>
Trump administration policies forced people seeking asylum to wait in Mexico, infants to appear in immigration court, and separated family members into a sprawling incarceration apparatus whose companies had been making up to $126 per person per day for years. He could have done little of this without the constantly growing border-industrial complex that preceded him and, in important ways, made him.
Nonetheless, in the 2020 election campaign, the border industry pivoted toward Biden and the Democrats. That pivot ensured one thing: that its influence would be strong, if not preeminent, on such issues when the new administration took over.
The Biden Years Begin at the Border
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas arrives at DHS headquarters following his swearing-in ceremony on Feb. 2. (Wikimedia Commons)
In early January 2021, Biden’s nominee to run DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas disclosed that, over the previous three years, he had earned $3.3 million from corporate clients with the WilmerHale law firm. Two of those clients were Northrop Grumman and Leidos, companies that Nick Buxton and I identified as top border contractors in Biden’s Border: The Industry, the Democrats and the 2020 Election, a report we co-authored for the Transnational Institute.
When we started to look at the 2020 campaign contributions of 13 top border contractors for CBP and ICE, we had no idea what to expect. It was, after all, a corporate group that included producers of surveillance infrastructure for the high-tech “virtual wall” along the border like L3Harris, General Dynamics, and the Israeli company Elbit Systems; others like Palantir and IBM produced border data-processing software; and there were also detention companies like CoreCivic and GeoGroup.
To our surprise, these companies had given significantly more to the Biden campaign ($5,364,994) than to Trump ($1,730,435). In general, they had shifted to the Democrats who garnered 55 percent of their $40 million in campaign contributions, including donations to key members of the House and Senate Appropriations and Homeland Security committees.
It’s still too early to assess just what will happen to this country’s vast border-and-immigration apparatus under the Biden administration, which has made promises about reversing Trumpian border policies. Still, it will be no less caught in the web of the border-industrial complex than the preceding administration.
Perhaps a glimpse of the future border under Biden was offered when, on Jan. 19, Homeland Security secretary nominee Mayorkas appeared for his Senate confirmation hearings and was asked about the 8,000 people from Honduras heading for the U.S. in a “caravan” at that very moment. The day before, U.S.-trained troops and police in Guatemala had thwarted and then deported vast numbers of them as they tried to cross into that country. Many in the caravan reported that they were heading north thanks to back-to-back catastrophic category 4 hurricanes that had devastated the Honduran and Nicaraguan coasts in November 2020.
Mayorkas responded rather generically that if people were found to qualify “under the law to remain in the United States, then we will apply the law accordingly, if they do not qualify to remain in the United States, then they won’t.” Given that there is no climate-refugee status available to anyone crossing the border that meant most of those who finally made it (if they ever did) wouldn’t qualify to stay.. . . . "
Since that growth of the American Economy and the demand for cheap, unregulated, unregistered black market labor, we have always had an influx of illegal labor, and, correspondingly, a development of government contractors which are tasked with the job of border security. These contractors hold no party allegiance, their only allegiance is to the almighty dollar.
The truth is folks, the media, the corporatacracy, and the establishment have been gas-lighting you all, and dividing you all over this issue, and blowing smoke up your ass. Everything you THINK you know about the DNC, the GOP. . . hell, even Trump? It has all been a lie.
Even what you are hearing about Biden and the folks he has been hiring is a lie. They need illegals to attempt to cross to make this industry profitable. To keep that contracts coming in.
The Border Crisis Is Forever
The Border Crisis Is Forever
Underneath the theater of partisan politics, there remains a churning border-industrial complex, Todd Miller reports. By Todd Miller TomDispatch.com In late February, I drove to see the Trump wall in Sasabe, Arizona. As soon as I parked, a green-striped Border Patrol vehicle stationed a
consortiumnews.com
". . . The Complex
In the 12 years from 2008 to 2020, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doled out 105,000 contracts, or a breathtaking average of 24 contracts a day, worth $55 billion to private contractors.
That sum exceeded their $52 billion collective budgets for border and immigration enforcement for the 28 years from 1975 to 2003. While those contracts included ones for companies like Fisher Sand and Gravel that built the 30-foot wall my son and I saw in Sasabe, many of them — including the most expensive — went to companies creating high-tech border fortification, ranging from sophisticated camera systems to advanced biometric and data-processing technologies.
This might explain the border industry’s interest in candidate Biden, who promised: “I’m going to make sure that we have border protection, but it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it.”
<snip>
Trump administration policies forced people seeking asylum to wait in Mexico, infants to appear in immigration court, and separated family members into a sprawling incarceration apparatus whose companies had been making up to $126 per person per day for years. He could have done little of this without the constantly growing border-industrial complex that preceded him and, in important ways, made him.
Nonetheless, in the 2020 election campaign, the border industry pivoted toward Biden and the Democrats. That pivot ensured one thing: that its influence would be strong, if not preeminent, on such issues when the new administration took over.
The Biden Years Begin at the Border
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas arrives at DHS headquarters following his swearing-in ceremony on Feb. 2. (Wikimedia Commons)
In early January 2021, Biden’s nominee to run DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas disclosed that, over the previous three years, he had earned $3.3 million from corporate clients with the WilmerHale law firm. Two of those clients were Northrop Grumman and Leidos, companies that Nick Buxton and I identified as top border contractors in Biden’s Border: The Industry, the Democrats and the 2020 Election, a report we co-authored for the Transnational Institute.
When we started to look at the 2020 campaign contributions of 13 top border contractors for CBP and ICE, we had no idea what to expect. It was, after all, a corporate group that included producers of surveillance infrastructure for the high-tech “virtual wall” along the border like L3Harris, General Dynamics, and the Israeli company Elbit Systems; others like Palantir and IBM produced border data-processing software; and there were also detention companies like CoreCivic and GeoGroup.
To our surprise, these companies had given significantly more to the Biden campaign ($5,364,994) than to Trump ($1,730,435). In general, they had shifted to the Democrats who garnered 55 percent of their $40 million in campaign contributions, including donations to key members of the House and Senate Appropriations and Homeland Security committees.
It’s still too early to assess just what will happen to this country’s vast border-and-immigration apparatus under the Biden administration, which has made promises about reversing Trumpian border policies. Still, it will be no less caught in the web of the border-industrial complex than the preceding administration.
Perhaps a glimpse of the future border under Biden was offered when, on Jan. 19, Homeland Security secretary nominee Mayorkas appeared for his Senate confirmation hearings and was asked about the 8,000 people from Honduras heading for the U.S. in a “caravan” at that very moment. The day before, U.S.-trained troops and police in Guatemala had thwarted and then deported vast numbers of them as they tried to cross into that country. Many in the caravan reported that they were heading north thanks to back-to-back catastrophic category 4 hurricanes that had devastated the Honduran and Nicaraguan coasts in November 2020.
Mayorkas responded rather generically that if people were found to qualify “under the law to remain in the United States, then we will apply the law accordingly, if they do not qualify to remain in the United States, then they won’t.” Given that there is no climate-refugee status available to anyone crossing the border that meant most of those who finally made it (if they ever did) wouldn’t qualify to stay.. . . . "
