From a purely stock market point of view, the worst aspect of ICE is that the violence it so casually seems to use will shrink the domestic workforce, undermining GDP growth prospects. Not exactly the welcome mat for tourists, either. It thereby introduces an extra element of risk in holding any US-centric security, in my view, and will cause the overall market PE to slowly contract. Arguably, it’s not as harmful to the overall domestic economy and to the shares of publicly traded companies as administration plans to create inflation that will devalue the dollar. But it will, it seems to me, give the US a much greater reputational black eye. And that will ultimately cause further multiple contraction, I think. It’s already apparently causing a brain drain, by reducing the number of smart young scientists coming here to study and to start careers in research.

At the nuts-and-bolts level:-

Back in the dim past of 1968, my first job was as a platoon leader with the 5th Mechanized Infantry at Fort Carson, Colorado, a unit that had, among its other duties, primary responsibility for domestic riot control west of the Mississippi. We trained for this regularly.

After I’d been in Colorado about a month, we were packed up and sent to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, just outside Chicago, in the hope that our presence would deter at least some protesters from showing up at the Democratic Convention there in late August. Our M-16 rifles came separately, all locked up where we had no access. The same for ammunition, which was in a different area and doubly secured. We all did get little cards outlining the rules of engagement, though. The words were bureaucratic, but the gist was that if we injured a protester, we’d be court-martialed and thrown for a long time into the deepest, darkest prison the Army could find.

Many of the men in my platoon were Vietnam veterans, some recovering from combat wounds, serving out the last few months of their enlistment commitment. They were particularly frightened, less by the protesters than by the little cards, thinking that they had survived a war only to be reinjured, killed or thrown in jail in Chicago (TV coverage in Colorado showed protest groups practicing martial arts and their leaders vowing to throw lye into the eyes of police or soldiers to blind them).

We were cut off from communication with the outside world as we waited, so I have no idea what did or didn’t actually happen in subsequent fighting between the Chicago police and protestors.

How times have changed. When I read about or view video of ICE in action, I ask myself:

–don’t ICE people get any training on the use of force, or is the out-of-proportion violence we’re seeing the result of their training?

–why do they have real bullets? –why are they so heavily armed? After all, they’re deploying operatives in large numbers, which itself lowers risk to them, and they are interacting in large measure with non-violent, unarmed fellow Americans.

–where are the little cards that detail the rules of engagement? are there any? can it actually be that you can shoot anyone you feel like? do you really need ten shots from a couple of feet away to subdue someone?

–how could anyone in a position of authority decide the best course would be to cover up what appear from bystander videos to be the murders of innocent citizens in Minnesota? couldn’t you get a better story than to say that a professional healer holding a cellphone and coming to the aid of a pepper-sprayed woman was actually a bloodthirsty terrorist aiming to kill ICE operatives with the pistol secured in his lower-back holster (presumably unloaded and with the safety on, since ICE isn’t saying otherwise), so it was ok to shoot him to death after ICE took his gun away.

I remember from back then the two iconic photographs that ended up defining the war in Vietnam for many Americans. One pictured a South Vietnamese police officer in the middle of a Saigon street, casually killing with his pistol a Viet Cong captain who had been captured and who appears to have his hands tied behind his back. The other is a picture of terrified young children fleeing from a napalm strike on their village.

Stills from videos of the ICE killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota may well end up being today’s equivalent. One that I’ve seen is particularly dismaying–it shows Pretti, cellphone in his right hand, the other empty, being knocked to the ground by a group of at least five ICE agents, one of whom has already drawn a pistol and pointed it at the back of Pretti’s head.

Conspiracy theorists seem to believe that this is all a smokescreen to deflect attention from the administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files as Congress has mandated, or from Trump’s apparent cognitive deterioration.