Dear George,
The Pentagon may not be able to win wars, but by God, they can plan for future contingencies. The military-industrial complex thrives on threats, whether real or manufactured. Planners know that no threat is forever. Because threats are grounded in paranoid fantasy, they tend to dissipate with time, so the Pentagon must always have another threat waiting in the wings.
Fear not, George, your planners are busily at work putting together a new threat, one that will have a strong set of legs and could well be the end-point of emergent threats.
So here it is, the newly minted threat that will keep the military-industrial complex in the black for generations to come. The social fabric will soon be frayed by a "criminalized segment of the urban poor"
“But wait!” you say. "The urban poor have been criminals since the beginning of capitalism. Capitalism wouldn’t be capitalism without the urban poor. What makes the current generation of criminalized poor different."
The answer, George, is scale. As financial capitalism continues to metastasize to every pastoral valley and cloud shrouded mountain in the world, the gap between the rich and the poor will continue to widen. A key component of this growth is to drive the peasant from his fields to the nearest favela. These sprawling slums are the growth industry of the twentieth century.
This means more poor crammed into a smaller area, which will nurture an even larger criminalized segment. I shudder to think what the ration of poor to rich will be. But there is no doubt the rich will be greatly outnumbered. It presents a nightmarish scenario of the gated fortresses of the rich being stormed by hordes of pissed-off poor.
But, not to worry. The Pentagon is on top of this growing threat. Deep within the hidden recesses o the Pentagon is an agency known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Their budget is three billion dollars a year. Of that, they spend $600 million on what they call Urban Operations (UO), a euphemism for slaughtering the poor.
The toys they’ve come up with are mind-boggling. There are flying drones the size of bugs that can flit through any window and see who is screwing whom, x-ray devices that can see through buildings. For crowd control, they have micro sonic amplifiers that can pop eardrums and ray-emitting devises that can make a person feel like his skin is on fire.
Military contractors are ready to shoot their load over this new field of dreams. Contracts are being let even as I write. If capitalism thrives on war, the Pentagon is ready to give them all the excuses they need.
However, the Third World is simply a testing ground for these new weapons. There is a bigger picture to be considered. Your administration’s dirty little secret is that the favela is America’s future. The United States is no exception to the rule that capital slithers up the pyramid until it congeals at its apex.
Slumming the Third World is a cakewalk. It simply involves driving impoverished peasants off the land and into the nearest favela where they become impoverished urbanites.
America presents a special problem. Now you are driving materially sated suburbanites into big city shantytowns. Take away a man’s TV and iPod, and you’ve created a potential revolutionary. The upside of this is that by the time the American public realizes what’s happening to them, the Pentagon will have perfected the tools of urban repression and will be ready for any contingency.
Hell, George, why do you think the Pentagon created the North American Command. How else are you going to keep America’s newly enfranchised poor in their ghettos?
There is another reason besides capitalism why favelas are such a growth industry. They are good for the environment. As our oil continues to dry up, whatever is left of it must be redirected to our movers and shakers who need total mobility to consolidate their power.
This means we must cut fuel consumption drastically. We do this by packing as many people as possible into as small an area as possible. Thus, we have the favela as the savior of Mother Earth. Slum dwellers don’t jump in their cars and drive fifteen miles to the mall. Nor do they strain the world’s food supplies.
Besides, if the bleeding hearts are starving, they'll be too weak to start any campaigns to eradicate poverty.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
6:33:18 AM 
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