• In 1996 Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, adopted by a Republican Congress. That law expands the powers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to round up and deport those charged with being “illegal” immigrants without the right to judicial review or appeal. Simultaneously the White House and Congress funded the expansion of the hated la migra into the largest federal cop agency, one that has stepped up factory raids and deportations to record numbers in recent years….

• Under the Star Chamber provisions of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the U.S. government has held some two dozen people without bail in “preventative detention” on the basis of “secret evidence.” Most are immigrants from Arab or other majority Muslim countries accused of links with “terrorist organizations”—the code word the U.S. rulers increasingly use to rationalize both assaults on democratic rights at home and military strikes abroad. Altogether some 20,000 people are being held in U.S. jails awaiting the outcome of threatened deportations—a 245 percent increase just in the five years since adoption of the anti-immigrant legislation….

• During his closing days in office Clinton issued a presidential directive establishing a “counterintelligence czar,” and Bush just this week made an appointment to the new top-level spy post. According to press accounts, the position is “designed to facilitate a level of cooperation never seen before among the FBI, the CIA and the Pentagon, and will, for the first time, engage the rest of the government and the private sector as well.”

I raise the Clinton and Bush administration’s new counterintelligence czar not because there is reason to anticipate some tidal wave of repression right around the corner. But the U.S. rulers are already shifting gears from the last decade. They know they will face more and bigger battles as international capitalist competition drives them to slash wages, extend the workday, intensify speedup, cut social security protections, and crush the unions. And they are preparing to defend their class interests.  
 
 
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