From Bruce Sterling, commenting on the recent deluge of rain in Texas.
In other and even weirder Texan news, Texan state officials ignore the incompetent feds and rely on big-box commercial retail outfits to respond to weather emergencies. Can secession and the Greenhouse Republic of Wal-Mart be far behind?
If the government of a nation-state isn’t the go-to organization in public emergencies, then what core function does a government serve? We’re heading for a world where Al-Qaeda thumb-wrestles Home Depot for control of the streets.
Bottom line up front: “FEMA can’t compete with the private sector,” Jack Colley, Texas’ chief of emergency management, said. “They do it quicker, smarter, faster every day.”
This is a telling example of what John Robb discusses in Brave New War, that the US government is becoming hollowed out and increasingly unable to provide services to the public because of its preoccupation with terrorism and invading other countries. Such hollowing out is a stated goal of al Qaeda.
That’s the game plan, eventually all service will be run by the private sector, at a profit of course, while the state will be there to legitimise population control, again being done more and more by the private sector, security guards, mercenaries etc. The state will legislate to give them the power to carry out all that is needed to keep the corporate world functioning. Musolini said that it should not be called fascism but corporatism as it was the coming together of the state and the corporate world.
[…] precisely what’s happning. This is a tenet of Fourth Generation Warfare. As the state becomes hollowed out, private corporations will fill the void. This is an unavoidable process, so it behooves us to do […]