McBorders: Bringing Gaza To A Border Near You

Once you give up the left/right party politics, it is amazing who you find yourself agreeing with, at least on occasion.
So, I listen to a podcast called unauthorized disclosure. These are leftists. You will have to suffer through some weirdness if you listen to them, but they are actually discussing something that I think is real and happening. First, obviously they are talking about Israel and Gaza, because some nasty stuff has been going down recently, but they were also talking about the World Cup and those children just sort of showing up on the U.S. Mexico border recently.

Dave Zirin on the world cup: FIFA, the sporting shock doctrine in Brazil

and

What is missing in discussions about crisis with child refugees at U.S. Mexico border.

These sort of function as part one and two. Essentially, FIFA demands a high level of surveillance around the World Cup, and the corporations that get these high security contracts have ties back to Israel. Similar things are true with borders, with the U.S. government often taking Israeli behavior as a model and there is also, no doubt, a lot of corporate cooperation back and forth. Tod Miller even pointed out the new so-called American border is the one between Mexico and Guatemala, because the U.S. exports this militarized border idea to other countries.

I believe the people in charge of these militarized borders control the borders pretty well, and, just like in Gaza, these crises are used for political advantage. Neither Hamas nor the Israeli government protect private property rights. Instead they encourage a sensation of some sort of ethnic property right. The collective property right creates a sort of segfault in the minds of most people, especially if you've been educated in government schools, through which politicians can set up pretexts to control their own populations.

The border with Mexico gives U.S. politicians plenty of pretexts to ignore private property as well, with private property owners along the border being an unwilling host to both immigrants and agents of the state.

The World Cup provides some of the context for this usurpation of private property- Dave Zirin mentions that in the London World Cup, McDonald's got the exclusive right to make french fries in the FIFA exclusion zone around the arena in which the World Cup was played- that means that all the fish&chip shops, as well as every other restaurant in that area of London was not able to serve french fries (they are called chips in the U.K) while the World Cup was going on.

So, despite the leftists annoyingly calling this capitalism, we can see it is not- it is corporatism. All of those little shop owners were capitalists- in the sense that they had saved up their hard earned money, and bought the capital goods necessary to produce french fries. It is only in our latter days of zombie socialism that such foolishness is countenanced.

FIFA's demands have resulted in worse in Brazil, because it was apparently necessary to invade the favelas, tear gas people, and generally be quite heavy handed so that all the people rich enough to go to the World Cup could have a good time.

Once FIFA's preferred level of surveillance is in place, it usually stays put. No doubt the corporations responsible for things like drones insist on long term contracts. Similar things are true of the borders. The politicians have incentives to keep these kind of issues alive and grinding on for lifetimes. Wrapped around these issues are corporate welfare, job programs, convenient scapegoats, and political propaganda that can be played by both the Democrats and Republicans, depending on which way they think the wind is blowing. They do not serve any sort of purpose for the people, as the demographic changes hitting my particular neighborhood make increasingly clear.

It is worth it to remember the Israeli government created Gaza. They actually showed up one day and forcibly removed all the Jews living there. They voluntarily gave Hamas a better place to launch rockets at their own people. If you see children showing up at the Mexico border, it is probably a good idea to assume that our government has something do with it. It may be inadvertent or purposeful, I don't know.