In Search Of America – CleanTechnica

---

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

Or support our Kickstarter campaign!

---

Sometimes it seems Zachary and I are twin sons of different mothers. Yesterday, he riffed on a post I had done the day before about alleged energy secretary Chris Wright pressuring the IEA to focus more on burning molecules and less on making electrons from renewable energy sources. That charade “made his blood boil,” he said, and so it should.

The US under the enfant terrible from Mar-A-Loco is ranting and raving like King Kong at the top of the Empire State building — striking out in every direction at threats both real and perceived. Today, the US government is bringing Cuba to its knees with a punishing blockade of all essential imports, primarily oil.

Why does it always have to be about oil? America under Bush I rushed to defend an autocracy in Kuwait because of oil. America under Bush II rushed to pulverize Iraq on a similar pretext. Senior government officials assured us at the time that Iraqi oil would pay for everything. It didn’t.

Punishing Cuba

I was on a cruise ship a few weeks ago heading east in the Caribbean between Cuba and Jamaica. To the left, Jamaica was lit up like a jewel. On the right, Cuba was in darkness. Cuba is nearly the size of Florida, but because wealthy people are still pissed off that they lost land and businesses when Castro came to power, it has suffered more than 60 years of enforced isolation from the world.

It is as lush as any other Caribbean island, and could be a most delightful tourist spot. Instead, its people live a subsistence existence. The US president exchanges love letters with the leader of North Korea and sucks up to Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, but wants to squash Cuba like a bug. Why? Because the Mafia had to give up its casinos in Havana and the sugar barons lost their plantations? Is that really a reason to oppress people who have been steamrollered by white colonialists for the past 600 years?

Kathy, I’m Lost

Last evening, I went to a concert by a Simon and Garfunkle tribute band called Through The Years at the Emerson Center in Vero Beach, Florida. One of the songs they performed was America, a stream of consciousness tune written by Paul Simon early in his career while travelling around the country by bus. The video is below and well worth your time, but one of the verses near the end is especially powerful.

Kathy, I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike,
They’ve all come to look for America.
All come to look for America.
All come to look for America.

Today, many of us are looking for the America we once knew — before the fascists took over the country.

Four Score And Seven Years

Heather Cox Richardson, the historian and tireless chronicler of the political battles that shaped and continue to shape the United States, noted in her post on February 11 that when Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address, the words “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” did not refer to the signing of the Constitution but rather to the date of the Declaration Of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” it said. Those concepts did not make it into the Constitution, because leaders in southern states did not believe in them. Instead they believed in property rights, which included the ownership of slaves. Richardson explains:

In Lincoln’s day, fabulously wealthy enslavers had gained control over the government and had begun to argue that the Founders had gotten their worldview terribly wrong. They insisted that their system of human enslavement, which had enabled them to amass fortunes previously unimaginable, was the right one. Most men were dull drudges who must be led by their betters for their own good, southern leaders said. As South Carolina senator and enslaver James Henry Hammond put it, “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’”

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” Either people — men, in his day — were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on, “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it…where will it stop?”

In the 1850s, on a fragment of paper, Lincoln figured out the logic of a world that permitted the law to sort people into different places in a hierarchy, applying the reasoning he heard around him. “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?” Lincoln wrote. “You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”

Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups.

Building Fences

At this point, let me introduce you to a recent essay by Rachel Bitecofer, who wrote about the parallels between the Nazi concentration camps, the Japaneses internment camps (blessed by the US Supreme Court) and the detention centers the deranged president and his henchmen plan to spend more than $38 billion to construct. She writes:

Dachau became the model that standardized everything: intake procedures, guard training, disciplinary systems, classification categories. It was scalable. Bureaucratically legible. Repeatable.

And most Germans were never imprisoned there. Most believed the system was targeted, necessary, and temporary. That belief — that detention is for someone else — is what allows the system to stabilize.

The Soviet Union built the Gulag — not a single camp but a vast network administered by a central bureaucracy whose name literally meant “Main Administration of Camps.”

The Gulag was not primarily designed as a mechanized extermination system. It was a forced labor regime. Prisoners mined, logged, built infrastructure, and worked in extreme environments with inadequate food, clothing, or medical care.

But when human beings are treated as expendable labor inputs, death becomes routine. Millions died through starvation, exhaustion, exposure, and disease. Survival was not structurally prioritized.

The method differed from industrialized killing. The outcome — mass death produced through confinement and forced labor — did not. And again, the system began with administrative justification — political enemies, economic offenders, class threats. Categories that could expand. They always expand.

Now, snap back to the United States in 2026. What is being built today is not a minor enforcement adjustment. It is not a temporary surge response. It is a large-scale expansion of detention capacity backed by enormous capital investment.

Plans call for roughly $38 billion in new detention infrastructure. The system is designed to support about 92,600 detention beds nationwide, more than double the capacity that existed only a few years earlier. This is not short-term management.

This is architecture. This is system design. Federal authorities are planning an integrated detention network structured to receive, process, hold, and transfer large numbers of people continuously. Industrial warehouses are being purchased or leased and retrofitted for confinement. These are logistics structures — designed for rapid conversion and high throughput.

Large regional processing centers are planned to receive detainees from wide geographic areas, conduct intake and classification, and route individuals onward. These processing facilities are designed for short stays — often only three to seven days — before transfer.

Larger detention centers are designed for longer holding periods, sometimes up to several weeks, before further movement through the system. Facilities are frequently located in rural or remote regions, where oversight is limited and detainees are geographically isolated from legal and social support.

Transport infrastructure — buses, coordinated transfers, routing between facilities — is integral to the design. Detainees are not simply confined; they are moved through a managed pipeline.

Private contractors operate major components of the system — facilities, security, medical services, logistics. Long-term federal contracts embed detention operations into local economies and institutional budgets.

Staffing pipelines expand alongside construction. Guards, intake personnel, administrators, transport coordinators — a workforce built to operate the system continuously.

And beneath all of it is administrative structure — classification procedures, intake documentation, transfer authority across jurisdictions, and legal mechanisms that allow confinement to proceed rapidly. This is not episodic enforcement. It is permanent capability.

The public justification is simple: illegal immigrants. That phrase performs essential political work. It marks a population as outside ordinary protection. It reassures everyone else that detention is targeted and procedural.

But detention systems do not remain fixed to their initial category. In Germany, early camps held political enemies. Later they held others. The infrastructure did not change. The classification did.

In the Soviet Union, the Gulag expanded through administrative redefinition — new offenses, broader categories, larger quotas. Infrastructure makes expansion easier than restraint.

Detention is not merely a step toward deportation. It is power. Detention allows authorities to hold first and adjudicate later. To move individuals far from legal representation. To separate them from families and support networks. To apply pressure through confinement.

Once physical capacity exists, using it becomes easier — politically, legally, bureaucratically. Expansion rarely arrives as a dramatic announcement. It happens through incremental adjustments — new enforcement priorities, revised definitions, widened discretion. Each change appears limited. The cumulative effect is not.

The early presentation of Dachau shows how normalization forms. The system appears orderly, rational, controlled. Harsh realities are hidden. The language is administrative. Observers see what they are permitted to see. By the time the full character of a detention system becomes undeniable, the infrastructure is already permanent.

The guards are trained. The facilities are staffed. The budgets are embedded. The public is accustomed. And most people still believe it exists for someone else. And once places to concentrate detainees outside of the normal legal system reaches scale, they become enduring instruments of state power that can be deployed against anyone.

A detention network built at this magnitude is not a temporary response. It is a structural shift in what government can do. You do not build a system this large for a moment. You build it for an era.

You build the fences first. History shows what can follow.

Information Is Power

I find Bitecofer’s analysis especially powerful — and troubling. But equally troubling is the effort by this administration to restrict our free access to newsworthy events. Wealthy right wing billionaires are buying up America’s news and entertainment providers. Why? So they can control the messaging we get every day. We have seen this with the censoring of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel — people who specialize in exposing the burgeoning system of new fences both real and digital — designed to control what we think, what we say, and what we believe.

Let me close this post with another Paul Simon song called American Tune released in 1973. Online, one person marveled, “I’m just trying to figure out how he wrote perfect lyrics in 1973 for 2020.” I would add they are perfect for 2026 as well.

America is on the brink of being buried beneath a tsunami of hatred, bigotry, and corporate greed. To survive, it needs everyone — you and me and all our friends and family — to reject the fascists and embrace the message of the Declaration of Independence, so that America “shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Together, we can do this!