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Page 3 of 3 A Reality Built on Fear Around all such "facts," of course, ever more entrenched and ever more expansive sets of interests arise: companies to organize the private contractees, or to deal with the outsourcing, or to handle contracts and construction work, not to speak of whole worlds of consultants, specialists, and lobbyists. This is a reality which no future administration, nor any better empowered Congress, would be likely to reverse, no less erase any time soon. No matter how the details of the argument about NSA spying turn out, for example, it's essentially a given that the National Security Agency will continue to grow and make itself ever more available in ever more ingenious ways, trolling ever more extensively in communications of every sort. These are the facts being established on the ground, while in Washington they argue over the (sometimes significant) details and the media focuses its main attention on all of this as the essence of the news of the day.  Take for example the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), yet another sprawling, ill-organized, inefficient bureaucracy established after 9/11 and not likely to do anything but grow in our lifetimes. Around it has sprung into existence an anti-terrorism homeland-security industry (thank you, Osama bin Laden!) of staggering proportions. "Seven years ago," writes Paul Harris of the British Guardian, "there were nine companies with federal homeland security contracts. By 2003 it was 3,512. Now there are 33,890." Think about that. They are there to divide a terrorism/security pie that has, since 2000, resulted in about $130 billion in contracts and now, according to USA Today, is a $59 billion a year business globally -- one based on that surefire bestseller, fear, whose single major customer is, of course, the DHS. Not surprisingly, around those 33,000 companies, has sprung up a whole network of Washington-based lobbyists (including the lobbying firm of our previous attorney general, the Ashcroft Group), a plethora of security conferences and trade magazines; in short, the full panoply of a thriving business world. Already at least 90 officials have left the Homeland Security Department to become lobbyists or consultants in the business that surrounds it, including Tom Ridge, the first head of the department. After only five years, the homeland-security business, according to USA Today, has already eclipsed "mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue." These are truly facts on the ground and no discussion in Washington of homeland security is likely to shake them much. An industry tracker, Homeland Security Research, points the way to one possible future on which Americans are never likely to vote. "A major attack in the United States, Europe or Japan could increase the global market in 2015 to $730 billion, more than a twelvefold increase." Or consider the Pentagon's Northcom -- United States Northern Command, now responsible for "the continental United States, Alaska, Canada, Mexico and the surrounding water out to approximately 500 nautical miles," including the Gulf of Mexico and the Straits of Florida. Before October 1, 2002, there was no Northern Command. Less than four short years later, it's not only up and running but has multiple missions. It's preparing for the next hurricane (since we already know FEMA can't do the job), deploying forces to battle wildfires in the west, and getting ready for an avian flu pandemic. And don't think for a moment that where an institution springs up (especially one with a budget like the Pentagon's behind it), a world of on-the-ground realities doesn't arise as well. Just as it will when, in the near future, the Pentagon redivides its imperial domains by creating a new Africacom or United States Africa Command, supposedly to "anchor US forces on the African continent" -- a decision that will be sold around town based on "terrorism security threats," but will essentially be about energy flows and oil. Each new structure like this, each decision, will result in new facts on the ground, new flows of money, and new sets of private contractors. These are increasingly the crucial realities of our world -- and it's not the world of a republic. It's not a world of checks and balances. It's not a world where even a change of ownership in one or both houses of Congress in November would prove a determining factor. It's not a world where people out there are just "starting to question whether we're following our own high standards." It's distinctly not the world as we Americans like to imagine it, but it is the world we are, regrettably enough, lost in. It's the world created not just by a commander-in-chief presidency, but by a Pentagon-in-chief-dominated government, and by a corporation-in-chief style of imperial rule. It is a world striving for permanence, which doesn't faintly mean that it's permanent -- not in Iraq and not here. But it might be helpful if we began to register more fully not just the latest flurry of whatever passes for news, but the facts-on-the-ground that are, every minute, every hour, every day, transforming our lives and our planet. ==================== Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The Last Days of Publishing, a novel, and in the fall, Mission Unaccomplished (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews. Recommend this article...
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