Couple of weeks ago there was a story, little noted in the idiot media, that the Department of Homeland Security had purchased 45,000,000 rounds of hollow point ammunition. That’s forty-five million bullets.

Like a lot of news items in today’s America, this was buried beneath ads for Miller Lite, Cialis, and Ford trucks, but it certainly means something. The disturbing question is, what are the bullets for?

I do understand that the federal government is moving rather directly to shut down free speech, lock up or intimidate dissent, censor the media, and close all avenues for meaningful change, but who in the world are they planning to shoot?

Homeland Security is, after all, a purely domestic operation. Those hollow points are not aimed at terrorists in Afghanistan; unless the feds have information the rest of us are not privy to, namely that several million terrorists are massing on the border for imminent invasion, they are for domestic use against Americans.

That’s a lot of shooting of Americans, even if Sarah Palin got elected.

So naturally, being the kind of fellow who worries when heavy military operations are being planned for his neighborhood, I thought about it. What could this mean?

Think I might have an answer and you are so not going to like it.

I figure it was maybe twenty years ago, maybe more. The people who ran the country and had designs on the rest of the world realized that at some point, in order to maximize profit and keep the machine going, they’d have to export manufacturing, push ‘free trade’, outsource whatever could be outsourced, and employ the military in extending their control over people and resources.

This would inevitably ruin the American middle class and destroy unions, and that would be one king-hell lot of unhappy people. We were telling these stories about how you could go to school and graduate and get good jobs and these boys could see down the road where there weren’t going to be too many of those jobs available.

Meanwhile, the cost of college education was going through the roof. This portended a large number of college graduates who owed a lot of money and had no jobs and no way to pay the loans back. If you thought the kids in the ‘sixties were pissed off, that’s nothing compared to what was going to happen when the graduates of the early 21st century discovered they’d been royally hosed.

Right now, we have the Obama administration lying to us about economic recovery when, in fact, there not only isn’t a recovery there isn’t going to be one. To fix this, we would need to revolutionize the American economy and you know that’s not going to happen. So Obama lies, and his successor, if there is one, will also lie.

The economy depends on the ‘growth’ fallacy when the nation has reached the point where further ‘growth’ is not possible. The only thing which can grow is corporate profits, and those profits, like the millions Romney made at Bain Capital, depend on further screwing working people.

America’s owners had to see this coming. They were faced with a choice: raise the level of social welfare to a decent level in order to partially pacify the citizenry (and sacrifice some profit) or raise the level of internal military force to suppress rebellion. Guess which one they chose.

The educational system has been turned into a funnel for the corporate machine. Maybe it always has been in some measure, but the elimination of teaching civics, that alone is quite remarkable. Kids are being raised without a background in what America stands for, given only the militaristic, Fourth of July fireworks, good-to-the-last-drop propaganda. At some point it was decided that teaching kids about their rights as citizens was a bad idea.

It is inevitable, however, that the country’s owners will be faced with millions of disillusioned kids. There aren’t all those cushy jobs after all. The fat salaries are being handed out to the privileged few. Millions of pissed off kids might not be easily bought off or distracted by video games and celebrity roulette.

In my opinion, that’s the major reason for the ‘war on terror’ and the massive domestic police state apparatus, the TSA travel checkpoints, the 20,000 new domestic unarmed –– so far –– drones, the surveillance operation being built in Salt Lake City big enough to accommodate the digital information collected on every living soul in the country, the e-mail intercepts, the GPS chips embedded in drivers licenses and passports.

That’s the major reason for the FEMA internment camps, built by Halliburton, where the barbed wire on the perimeters tracks in both directions.

That’s the reason for the Patriot Act and the NDAA, the militarization of urban police forces and the joint ‘exercises’ involving Homeland Security and city police.

That’s the reason for 45,000,000 hollow point bullets.