By Dr. David Laing Dawson
It was difficult to imagine a country as large, as diverse, as so heavily populated in large cities, as the USA, being quelled by a central power, a dictatorship.
Images of an ICE raid in Macarthur Park, military vehicles on a couple of city streets in a city of 4 million, a squadron rounding up farm workers on the flat lands of Southern California, did not strike fear. Or at least immediate fear.
But Trump’ big, beautiful bill is now law, and it provides a new 70 billion dollars to ICE, 30 for the force, 40 for detention centres along with billions more simply for immigration control.
For comparison, our RCMP has a budget of 6 billion (Canadian), and before this Bill the ICE budget was about 8 billion.
So ICE and its activities can be significantly ramped up over the next months and years. Along with the building of more “detention” centres.
Now that should strike fear and disgust and horror in every sane American.
And we can all imagine the kind of boy-man the ICE recruitment posters will attract.
So now Trump will have his SS and his brown shirts.
And this coming August, into September and October, may be the last period of time when opposition to this coup might be successful. After that, ICE and Trump will be too powerful, the population inured to images of humans in cages.
What can we do, sitting above all this with our oil, gas, water and minerals, our diverse inclusive democracy?
First I think our leaders have to stop thinking of Trump as a sane, reasonable man. He is not. Stop “negotiating’ with him. Remember, in theory, the USA has a constitution allowing for 3 EQUAL branches of government, plus “checks and balances.” And, again, in theory, Congress is in charge of negotiating trade and commerce and taxation.
So to whatever extent possible, ignore Trump and his administration, and converse with State leaders and Congress.
And prepare for chaos, violence and economic collapse in the USA. And this chaos, violence and collapse will occur in the next few months, or after several years of more open dictatorship, detention camps, forced labour to replace the farm workers, and the flight of sane, educated liberal Americans.
