• gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Harris was gonna be in charge of was addressing the root causes of this huge surge in immigration from the South. But even if we posit that she’s making a sincere effort in that regard (which, okay fine, I am fine with positing), what’s she gonna do

    In practice, hold closed door meetings with the police enforcers and tell them to be more comprehensive in their enforcement before setting them up with drones and computers and guns needed to do it, and then scoot out of town before she has to witness those enforcers torturing and extorting and working with criminal gangs and etc.

    To be fair to Harris and the Biden administration, this has more or less been US policy for a very long time

    She’s gonna show up in her little Vice President cape and order the whole of US government and industry

    FFS, I so wish more people had more than like a high school level understanding of our government - she’s going to tap into funds created by Congress for general purposes and placed under the administration of the executive branch to give grants or directly purchase computers and drones and guns (or maybe cover payroll expenses and things like that). Or, if she gets concerned about reports of human rights abuses or corruption or whatever, she can withhold that money and those materials (but we never do that, whether it’s Latin America or Israel or the Memphis Police Department, because nine times out of ten when organizations like those do bad things Americans never hear about them).

    The power of the executive branch has only been expanding since Newt broke Congress in the 90s and W got to just keep playing the War on Terror card over and over in the early 00s, but we’ve got people out here running around acting like it’s a totally ceremonial office because nobody in the media or anywhere else wants to do the hard work of explaining how the Byzantine nonsense works and why we always have such an easy time throwing millions of dollars at guns and guards.

    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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      3 months ago

      In practice, hold closed door meetings with the police enforcers and tell them to be more comprehensive in their enforcement before setting them up with drones and computers and guns needed to do it

      he’s going to tap into funds created by Congress for general purposes and placed under the administration of the executive branch to give grants or directly purchase computers and drones and guns

      Do you have citations about this stuff? If you wanna replace my flip high school understanding of how the VP can (and has been, under Biden) impacting foreign policy with something more factually based, I’m down for that idea.

      • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Off the top of my head, chapter one of this book covers a ton of this in the northern triangle area of South America specifically - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672038/soldiers-and-kings-by-jason-de-leon/

        e; Like I said, it’s Byzantine nonsense that nobody with the knowledge to speak to wants to, but a few other sources that start to get at what I’m talking about

        U.S. military assistance often goes by different names, depending on the legal authorities an activity falls under and which department or agency is overseeing or implementing it. These terms include security assistance, security sector assistance, security cooperation, and security force assistance, as well as more niche programs and terms such as security sector governance and defense institutional capacity building.

        The Department of Defense commonly uses the term security cooperation while the Department of State uses security assistance. In practice, there is a lot of overlap in roles and responsibilities, with most congressionally allocated funding falling under the Department of State’s legal authorities but executed by the Department of Defense.

        A large and unwieldy policy and legal bureaucracy—commonly referred to as the security cooperation or security assistance enterprise—has emerged to oversee, regulate, and execute U.S. military assistance. This entangled web of authorities, permissions, and funding streams makes military assistance incredibly difficult to execute effectively, track transparently, and evaluate.

        • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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          3 months ago

          Awesome; I’ll check it out. I’m not saying I necessarily agree ahead of time, but you’re not wrong that I have no real idea about it beyond some stereotype guessing.