The Pentagon is shipping 35,000 more troops to Iraq while the governor of Kansas says says their tornado victims need help but there’s a shortage of National Guard because those troops are in Iraq, not Kansas.
This is a clear example of one of the aims of open source warfare, the hollowing out of the state by slowly bankrupting it and diverting its energies into wars it can’t win. When that happens, the void gets filled by corporations and other private entities who move in to do the work the government can no longer do.
We’re seeing that with global warming now, especially here in the US. Both parties and the government are asleep at the wheel, mouthing that something needs to be done, but not doing anything. That they are preoccupied by the war(s) is a given.
So who is moving in, planning to spend huge sums to remediate global warming? CitiCorp, Bank of America, and Wal-Mart, that’s who. Citi just announced they will spend 50 billion over the next ten years to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions and to fund other projects as well. BofA is doing the same with 20 billion. Wal-Mart is planning one of the biggest solar projects ever at their own stores.
“We are taking aggressive steps toward our goal of being supplied by 100 percent renewable energy,” Wal-Mart’s vice president for energy, Kim Saylors-Laster, said.
Would it be that the federal government was taking such steps. But by spending hundreds of billions on insane wars, diverting needed energy, time and money away from the country, the government itself is becoming hollowed out and unable to act quickly and effectively. So, increasingly and by default, the real players in global warming will be the mega-corporations, because only they have the money, technology, and skills to get it done.
I think Citi, BofA, and Wal-Mart genuinely get it about global warming. Too bad our government doesn’t. But it’s too preoccupied and desperate to win a war that can not be won to focus on much else. The hollowing out of the US government, a prime goal of open source warfare, continues.
I think if you look closely, you’ll see that the U.S. may be losing the war, but the Bush administration isn’t. In so many ways, the War in Iraq supports the goals of the administration at home (expanding the role of government and eliminating pesky democratic freedoms) and abroad (expanding influence over the worldwide oil production system), and of certain Bush supporters, who have benefited and continue to benefit greatly from instability in the oil markets.
This is one of the easiest mistakes to make in analyzing a conflict: to think it’s about what they say it’s about. If is was about the War on Terror, then indeed Bush would be on the losing side, and he’d be looking for an out. But it’s not, and he’s not losing at all. He may have a 26% favorability rating but does he care? He can’t be re-elected anyway and the U.S. doesn’t have provisions for a no-confidence vote.
In the arena of global warming, there’s plenty of short-sightedness and insane denial. But in the war, the interests of our leaders diverge from ours.
[…] Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 in White Rose, Climate Bob Morris details an interesting example of Open Source Warfare: […]