Recently we picked up our free groceries down at the local middle school. Were old people on a fixed income, and we are given enough free food that we pass it on to a few other folks. Food banks now require proof of identity.
This is undoubtably connected to the fact that as we approach the cold weather, people with homes and families, many of our own neighbors and relatives, are living in fear. Unidentified government agents are grabbing people off the streets without charge, and taking them far from home. It makes no difference how much a part of our communities they are. They may have no memory of their arrival as children whose parents had no other choice but to move here whatever the cost. Some have even served honorably in our armed forces. No matter, they may now be removed to countries they have never seen, without resources or connection or even fluency in the local language.
Permanent residency is proving to be a fragile thing. If you were born here to immigrant parents, your Birthright Citizenship is now under attack by your own government, and you may find yourself cast adrift, a stateless person. But it may be impossible to revoke what is the defining root of all citizenship, because, what about the next generation? Will every person henceforward have to apply for citizenship in the land of their arrival on Earth? And where would they return to, if turned away?
People with no fixed address are also living in fear, as if having no home were not terrifying enough. Funding for shelter has been slashed. State programs paying for motel beds are running out, and not being extended. All across the Nation local ordinances are forcing people out of public view, and into food deserts. What material support there was is drying up. The real economy, the one most likely reflected in your personal savings, hasnt completely bottomed out yet, but there are already bread lines in the Capital for the hundreds of thousands of federal workers collectively fired by a new president, and its about to get much worse now under the proposed budget:
- $186 billion cut from SNAP: 45 million Americans lost their food support November 1, 2025.1;
- $930 billion from Medicaid: already shutting down community hospitals2;
None of this is affected by the oddly selective shutdown; ICE, for one, is still on the job, terrorizing communities across the Nation according to AI-assisted racial profiling recently ruled legal by SCOTUS.
The administrations announced project to dismantle the administrative state is proceeding, consistent with its apparent philosophy, according to what it can get away with. Congressional and Judicial checks are not activated, much less law enforcement in the face of so many ongoing broad-daylight crimes. Just supplying the weapons and money for a foreign country committing genocide involves half a dozen major violations.3 To the contrary, the other Branches have scrambled to uncheck the Executive.
This all makes a kind of sense if you understand administrative state as a euphemism for Constitution.
The pattern is familiar by now. It starts with administrative pressure, more paperwork, fewer options, law enforcement (stricter for individuals, relaxed for toxic chemical plants and water quality oversight), marginalizing populations with little or no access to power. Then, less stigmatized demographics feel the chill. Eventually this culminates in full-on abrogation of our hard-won Civil Rights.
Hard-won: I remember the outright terrorism of the 1950s and 60s. The cross-burnings and fire-bombings. Being physically assaulted and sometimes bleeding. Later, directly in the cause of Civil Rights, we desegregated local businesses, public schools and voting. It was a long, hard climb. Eventually racial discrimination was made illegal. That was just American apartheid. South Africa had it worse, or so we thought.
To connect everyone to the attention-mining networks it was necessary to use connection to each other as bait. Compared to the living, vibrant relationship that was baseline-normal within living memory, electronic connection is like a pinhole between prison cells. But its enough to show us that racism, apartheid and genocide are simply phases of our collective affliction.
By analogy, as castaways on a sinking chunk of flotsam our problem is not that were throwing the weaker ones overboard and fighting for the dry end of this sinking wreckage. Our problem is that we set out on this insane expedition of global domination in the first place.
This is not human nature; it is power addiction. It will be terminal, collectively, unless recovery can begin, and the odds are against us.
The private prison business is a segment of the Hospitality Industry. From the Ritz to the Crowbar Motel and down to acres of cots-under-canvas, the common theme is beds-for-rent. Back in that Dick Cheneys administration, for example, with the $350 million contract for tent-cities behind razor-wire anticipating an influx of migrants, prisons were sold to carceral entrepreneurs, creating new markets for human trafficking, like the school-to-prison pipeline. Business is booming.
The business model extends to hospitals. In the early 70s new drugs got patients on their feet and out the door so fast the hospitals nearly went bankrupt. They had to build more surgical capacity to keep up. By then I was a draftee conscientious objector, serving in surgical operating rooms, instead of being fed into the War on Vietnam with so many of my high school graduating class. Mopping the floors after open-heart surgery, or carrying a warm kidney between donor and recipient, to the sound of jackhammers in the walls. But bed rental cant cover even a daycare centers fixed costs anymore, especially now that Medicaid is under the knife. Even with no amenities and forced-labor revenues, prison bunks eat profits. At least a hotel can get by with a liquor license. A cot under a tent with a porta-potty, on the other hand, thats all gravy.
This is not the evil scheme of Fascists or Liberals, its our basic cultural structure that we all think is Natural Law: our dailly bread depends entirely on the confidence of investors. All in all, with the advent of carceral competition, were looking at a growth industry, aka, a race to the bottom.
A few hapless citizens have already been dragged into this terrifying vortex. Now that anybody can be snatched, anywhere, without charge or warrant, whatever legal constraints still apply will be tweaked to open the next categories of designated undesirables. If we cant be deported for some reason, we can be put to work. All thats really changing is our pay. With the borders slammed shut, somebody will have to do the jobs AI wont do.
Weve had the facilities to deal with large numbers of helpless people, for decades. Whether from a firestorm, a flood, a hurricane, or a sudden influx of refugees from countries US policy has turned into what No. 47 called shitholes, the refugee crisis is no longer the primary source of cheap labor. There are now enough impoverished and jobless Americans that immigration can be ended, and there will still be enough cannon-fodder to sustain the wars. The only question not addressed until recently was the logistics of moving these different populations into the aforementionedaccommodations. And the pressure is on, the rents flow only as long as those beds are warm. You could think of it as the Great Airbnb Boom of 25. Another bubble, actually, but not trivial.
And now there is something deeply malevolent and purposeful about the radical changes coming down so thick and fast. Here is a partial list:
- $45 billion was appropriated for ICE (about $44,999,999,999 more than necessary).
- SCOTUS made racial profiling legal.
- The administration ordered National Guard troops into the democrat cities to make them safe according to No. 47 because of a crime wave, or maybe it was just the refugees Governor Abbott loaded on buses5 to those democrat cities.
- Americans began to stand up and protest taxpayer-funded genocide. Students camped out on their campuses, peacefully, but out loud.
- The genocide protests were then brutally repressed as antisemitism as our taxes continued to support open genocide.
- Legal residents were kidnapped, distraught families finding them locked up for deportation.
- Spectacularly, hundreds of Venezuelans were rounded up and dumped in Ecuador to be imprisoned and abused indefinitely, for having tattoos honoring their moms, their faith, and, in one case, autism awareness.
- The National Guard was deployed in LA, the first of many such deployments.
- SCOTUS approved racial profiling by the masked ICE enforcers, who by then had started going into schools, churches, courtrooms and hospitals to do their warrantless kidnapping.
- SNAP benefits and Medicaid funding cuts are forcing ordinary people to choose between food, their soaring rent, and medical care.
- As if that were not enough, jobs are disappearing. America was already de-industrialized, and now that tariffs have not resulted in the instantaneous de-offshoring of the jobs NAFTA sent away, AI has arrived to mop up.
- The administration dumped a million and a half federal employees into this wasteland.
Is there an end-game? Is there even any limit on who can be snatched, and what can be done to them, with or without proof of citizenship?
Apparently not.
- 7,394,154 Individual Medicaid recipients will lose their coverage5 under the current budget reconciliation bill.6
There is a surge coming. Do you see it? Like the swell of a tsunami on the distant horizon?
Until now, alien and homeless have been two distinct demographics, or markets, with very different exploitation potential. Homeless a waste byproduct of an extraction industry (realestate) with almost no profit potential outside the wellfare state; alien the booming fast-food of carceral competition. The homeless sector was always sluggish. That could change only if the industrial byproduct could be traded like the commodity. All that was missing was a new extraction mechanism. And it looks like our government has finally found it.
Weve seen that done in outher markets, like depleted uranium, the popular euphemism for radioactive waste. Theres so much of that lying around. What do do with it all? Its basicaly a supply-side issue, making a commodity out of abundant government surplus. Abundance! And birth anomalies.
Since the administration has turned its gimlet eye on healthcare and food assistance, millions of ordinary folks, people with internet service and car payments and plumbing and heating bills, possibly big student debt, are staring down the barrel of insolvency and foreclosure or eviction. A very large chunk of our American economy is about to go the way of the late federal government. It wont come back just because a different party gets elected.
Total government failure (aka shutdown) has just accelerated this process, which is fine with the planners in the thinktanks engineering this demolition. They were ready. You dont build all those hoosegows just to have them standing around empty.
What will be done with all those newly disconnected people?
And all those new facilities full of empty beds?
And ICE, with that $45 billion windfall?
What will the armed forces do, if ordered to do it to Americans?
What will we do?
The purpose of three Branches of government was to prevent this from ever happening. For practical purposes, the whole government of the United States of America has been taken down and sold. Readers should be able to make a fairly good guess as to what will be done about millions of us, hardworking families, suddenly hitting the skids without food, housing, healthcare, transportation or jobs.
All our personal information is in those vast, polluting, water-wasting data-centers, out on the former farmlands wherever there isnt already a new internment facility. Were a mouse-click away by drone. Anything can be delivered, as we now know, anywhere, to anyone.
1 Map of SNAP recipients by county
2 Seven-hundred and fifty-nine rural U.S. hospitals are at risk of closure due to financial problems, with about 40% of those hospitals at immediate risk of closure. Beckers Hospital Review, June 30, 2025.
3The Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, The Foreign Assistance Act, Arms Export Control Act, The U.S. War Crimes Act, The Leahy Law, The Genocide Convention Implementation Act
4peterbarus.substack.com/p/texas-chainsaw-redux
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