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gee, back when i worked in logistics (i did, but it wasnt called that--the term is funny though) an customs inspection involved more than waving a hand-held tweaked gieger counter around.
it would involve actually looking at the contents of the container.
you know, actual customs people would actually look at the contents.
there used to be alot more inspections before the reagan period.
but under reagan, you see, that money was needed for military keynesianism and so it went away.
that meant fewer and fewer customs people and as a result fewer and fewer inspections.
and the proliferation of containerised shipping mean centralization of shipping and acceleration of volume.
more and more stuff passing through a smaller number of ports surveilled by hopelessly short staffed customs.
but the right is concerned about security.
apparently not enough to do it coherently.
welcome to rightwing world, where all that matters is what you are told matters.
when last i was involved with this white-collar mcdonalds of an industry--and this was quite a while ago--the routine was basically:
1. if you shipped from certain countries that hosted insects that agriculture was trying to keep out, your shipment would likely be inspected, which in this case ususally meant dounsed with methyl bromide.
textiles especially.
2. if yours was a first shipment into a particular port, it would probably get inspected.
3. if your shipment originated in a country that was on an alert list, you'd probably get inspected.
but that was about it.
there was a random inspection thing, but it was infrequent simply because the number of variables entering the system was very large and so random was very spread out.
it always seemed to me that if you wanted to bring whatever you like into the states, the way to do it, and do it in QUANTITY, would be to set up a regular shipping relation with a set origin firm/point and ship similar quantities each time. you would never get inspected that way.
since i left that tedious tedious industry, there has been the rise of just-in-time organization, which presupposes the above as a way of effectively bypassing customs delays.
so i see the article as ratbastid saw it: an obvious election ploy predicated on cheney's "vote for us or die" line--see you could be nuked, kids, aren;t you glad the authoritarian right is on the case, giving its meager customs staff new hand wands to wave about?
and shh...budget cuts undertaken by conservatives are not budget cuts, they're facts of nature.. the link between conservative ideology of state functions and the porosity of borders is non-existent--it's a fact of nature...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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