Shocked Liberals

I don't understand the liberal shock at Arizona's racist "papers please" law. I understand revulsion, disgust and condemnation.

But not shock.

The US interventionist state handles the people of Afghanistan and Iraq in this manner, already. Its predecessors handled countless millions of people before, in the same ways - used slaves and murdered off the First Nations, employed bonded servants, and smashed unions, broke uprisings and strikes, and protected the bankers, corporations and the rich for the entire history of the American Republic.

This state edifice, run by their beloved Hopey Changey, differs little from the Bush regime that came before. Or from Clinton's time at the helm, before that. And so on. And so on.

They use the state, with its countless armed staffers, for precisely these ends. They employ those staffers to live fuller lives for themselves, to enjoy their wealth and power. From asking "papers please" to flying murder drones over the Kush, to manning check points in Baghdad, to standing guard outside a courtroom proceeding, to taking photos of teen aged protesters, to keeping files on grandmothers - the armed staffers of the state work so that capitalists can dig stuff up out of the ground, using people as instruments to turn it into commodities, this to better deprive them of the greater part of the value they create with that labor, so that they can in turn sell the stuff back to them, or to others, using the language of money to steal even more of their labor, so that capitalists and their hangers on can continue to accumulate wealth and power, in a deliberately closed system of production, scarcity and control.

Shock, from liberals, in the face of this available history, seems a wee bit more than disingenuous...