At his confirmation hearing, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis called climate change a “driver of instability” that “requires a broader, whole-of-government response.”
For more than a decade, military leaders have said that extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels are aggravating social tensions, destabilizing regions and feeding the rise of extremist groups such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State.
.. Another Pentagon report in 2015 called climate change a “threat multiplier.”
.. Climate change is already impacting the military itself, how it operates, and the countries in which we have an interest where it can result in instability, which leads to violence, which leads to conflict and where we end up moving our young men and women overseas
.. He warned the U.S. that “if one country decides to leave a void, I can guarantee someone else will occupy it.” The only other countries not in the accord are Syria and Nicaragua.
.. “Around the world, military strategists view climate change as a threat to global peace and security,” he said in a speech at New York University. “We are all aware of the political turmoil and societal tensions that have been generated by the mass movement of refugees.”
.. a three-foot sea level rise would threaten at least 128 U.S. military bases, which are valued at $100 billion. Nine of those are major hubs for the U.S. Navy.
Climate change poses ‘significant risk’ to US military, report says
U.S. military officers and national security officials reportedly believe climate change pose a very real threat to U.S. military operations and could increase the danger of international conflict.
A Washington-based think tank, the Center for Climate and Security, said in a statement that climate change “presents a strategically-significant risk to U.S. national security, and inaction is not a viable option.”
The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight
Mike Lofgren, a congressional staff member for 28 years, joins Bill Moyers to talk about what he calls Washington’s “Deep State,” in which elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. “It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Moyers.
- Wall Street provides second careers for people like David Patreus who went to a Wall Street Buyout firm as a second career.
- The vast majority of Generals seem to end up on the boards of the Military contractors.
- Silicon Valley has become part of the Surveillance State, voluntarily.
- What is the ideology: it is a form a corporatism, that steers clear of social issues, but the Washington Consensus
- deregulation,
- outsourcing,
- deindustrialization,
- financialization,
- american exceptionalism-boots on the ground everywhere, perpetual war
- Parts of the Deep State are fracturing
- Silicon Valley is protesting the NSA
- The Tea Party is protesting the Deep State
Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker on his profile of Defense Secretary James Mattis
.. He said, you’re as well off if you have read“Angela’s Ashes” and Desmond Tutu’s writings, and if you havestudied Northern Ireland and the efforts of rapprochementthere, and in South Africa following their civil war, as you are if you have read Sherman, and obviously, Von Clausewitz... He’s very aggressive. He’s reestablishing the American deterrent. If you mess with us you’re going to pay a price.