Climate Memo Mondays, #58

 

58.  Climate Memo Mondays, #58, January 17, 2022
Contents
Nichols, Hope for Inclusion in 2022
Miller, Exclusion by Border Expansion and Militarization 

John Nichols.  “Sixteen Reasons to Be Hopeful in 2022,” The Nation (1-10/17-22).    “Urgent Climate Activism, The Sunrise Movement.”  “This movement won’t bend to compromising Democrats or slow down until it wins approved of the Green New Deal, which NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mass. Sen. Ed Markey have reintroduced.

Todd Miller.  Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border Around the World.  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/empire-of-borders-todd-miller/1129287145

Todd Miller’s Empire of Borders, Interrogating Miller’s Introduction by Dick Bennett, 1-16-22.   A thumbnail sketch of US expansion of borders and militarized border patrols around the world as its response to rising global temperature and refugees.

[Miller begins his book with his visit to the military base in Zacapa, Guatemala, and introduction of BORTAC.]

DB: The Guatemalan military base in Zacapa has been trained by the US Border Patrol?  Is Zacapa part of an international mission of BORTAC?
TM: The soldiers there knew about the US BORTAC-“the US. Border Patrol special forces and tactical unit,”  its “SWAT-style operations in the U.S. borderlands,” and “its ‘global response capacity. . . .’training and operations both in the United States and in other countries [Miller lists 18 p. 4] in furtherance of the U.S. Border Patrol’s mission’” (3).  “BORTAC agents were the U.S. Border Patrol’s robocops”.   BORTAC “has played a big part in pushing out the U.S. borders abroad.’” (4).  “Indeed. . .the evidence of U.S. international border expansion is everywhere” (5).

DB: Is this expanding border militarization for US security ongoing today?
TM: “In the twenty-first century, hardened borders are proliferating throughout the globe. . . .often. . .at the behest and insistence of the United States” motivated by global power and domination “dynamics” in a world of haves and have nots (5).  “The U.S. border model has been paramount to. . .managing the antagonisms. . .between the haves and the have nots” (11). 

DB:  What is the relationship between global economic inequality, travel, and borders?
TM: “Much as there is a yawning global gap in wealth, there is also an enormous chasm between those who have freedom of movement and those who do not” (2).

DB: Say again, expansion and militarization of US borders arises from fear and hatred  of the poor?  
What is the ultimate purpose of the extraordinary expansion of the geography of border security and “‘stopping migrants long before they reach U.S. shores.’”?
TM:  Borders are “being fortified against the poor, and made porous or simply erased for the wealthy and powerful” (8).     

DB: Can you be more specific about haves and have nots globally? 
TM:  The Global North (a political not entirely geographical north--the US. EU, Australia, Israel)—“controls four-fifths of all income amassed anywhere….This book examines the dividing lines this creates between the world’s included and excluded.  The wars waged along them are far away from the public eye,” and they are “resisted by the thousands in refugee camps. . .by the West Bank Palestinians,” and the millions of displaced.  “’…the border has become the new ‘antiballistic missile system,” a weapon of the powerful deployed against the displaced and the dispossessed, the most important and most hidden battlefield of the twenty-first century” (12).

DB:  Let’s return to BORTAC.  It  was created in 2004.  Why then?
TM:  “…the shift toward U.S. international border policing” occurred following 9-11 and President Bush’s creation of his “War on Terror” as set forth in the 9/11 Commission Report of 2003. Such policing existed before, but “nothing comparable in size, scope, and impact to what was put in place afterward” amounting to a “’massive paradigm change’” (6).

DB: What is an example of pre-911 policing?
TM:  The “Prevention Through Deterrence” policy. . . initiated in the early 1990s, which radically altered Washington’s tactics,” especially in the Caribbean and Mexico and “completely remade the U.S. border policing apparatus.  An upsurge in agents, technologies, and walls. . . .”   The CBP budget increased during 1978 to 2018 from $287 million to $23 billion (7). 

DB: Do climate change and border militarization have a cause and effect relationship?
TM:  “Not only has the planet’s earth-altering era of climate change, which some call the Anthropocene, been a gut punch to a place like Guatemala [and the “entire Central American dry corridor” of “Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and as far as Panama”], it’s gone hand in hand with an unprecedented thrust in border militarization across the globe.  Long-term forecasts have predicted that ecological upheavals are going to drive unparalleled levels of human migration” (3)

DB:   What is the connection between the US empire of borders and the US empire of military bases exposed by scholars like David Vine?
TM:  If you are in Zacapa, Guatemala, for example, and “you wanted to see the U.S. border [the nearest point at Brownsville, TX, almost 1,500 miles away], you wouldn’t need to travel at all; it has already come to this small city in Guatemala” at the military/border patrol base there (1).  Quoting a former head of DHS and commander of Southern Command, General John Kelly, “’the defense of the Southwest border starts 1,500 miles to the south, with Peru.’  In other words the border fortifications around Zacapa were just as important to U.S. aims as the Integrated Fixed Towers, high-tech cameras. . . .”

DB:  You identify two major paradigm changes in border policing as 1) massive expansions of US borders and financing in 1990s and f2) following the 9-11 plane bombings.  Your final words for us in your Introduction?
TM:  The changes were massive, but ”nothing new.”  “The U.S. border was much bigger than a border wall.  The American homeland, after all, was the planet.” 

DB: But is militarization necessary?  Is it the only option available to the US against the possible hordes of the desperately poor?
TM:  I think he would reply: read my books.

DB: Your subject is the convergence of climate calamity, refugees, and border militarizing around the world. Are you planning to write another book to encompass the convergence of all the major problems, especially including the US military empire and nuclear weapons?
TM:  (Fiction now, imagining): An enormous subject.  See books by Vine, Chalmers Johnson, and new book by McCoy, as starters.

References:
Chalmers Johnson.  The Sorrows of Empire and 3 other books..
Alfred McCoy.  To Govern the Globe: World Orders & Catastrophic Change. 2021.
Todd Miller. Border Patrol Nation Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (City Lights, 2014) .  Empire of  Borders : The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World (Verso, 2017).   Storming the Wall : Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (City Lights,  2019).   Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders   2021.
David Vine.   Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (2016); Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia; The United States of War:  A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State.