Here's a presentation at TED that may be of interest to global guerrillas readers (no video links yet -- too bad it isn't live). It's great to see GG themes get play like this.
She also discovered that the life of a terrorist was not ruled by politics or ideology, but by economics. They were constantly searching for cash...
Napeoloni began thinking that there might be commercial links between organizations. It was when she interviewed Mario Moretti, the head of the group (Red Brigades), she realized that terrorism is actually a business. When she talked to him, she realized that he thought like a banker or fellow economist...
She found in terrorism a parallel economy, that had been around since the close of World War II. It has followed step by step the trends common to any other economy. First, there was state sponsorship. During the Cold War there was a fully funded mix of legal and illegal entities, and she also points to the contras in Nicaragua. During the 1970s and 1980s, some groups carried out privatization. They gained independence and started funding themselves.
An even greater change came with globalization. Napoleoni says that now, organizations were able to link with each other and started to do serious business with crimelords. This is when we see the birth of Al Qaeda, an organization able to source money in many countries and operated in many countries. This she says, is rogue economics, which is constantly lurking in the background of history. Politics loses control of an economy and economy becomes a rogue force acting against us.
<<NOTE: she estimates that 5% of the global economy, or $1.5 Trillion in income and $7 Trillion in financial assets, is directly related to terrorism/guerrilla warfare, and reckons that 9/11 driven financial controls ala the Patriot Act caused a wholesale shift in the this economy away from the dollar/US, prompting the current financial crisis>>
"These are grim economic times, so I want to cheer you up with one of the greatest commercial success stories of the last 20 years," he says. What is it? Organized crime. Criminal activity now accounts for over 15 percent of the world’s GDP, Glenny explains. In the last two decades, it has experienced massive growth. ....Canada has become a key area for the production of ecstasy and other synthetically produced drugs. That's a game changer, he notes. Production has shifted into the Western world. The trend has been set to overwhelm our policing.
<<NOTE: Economies of this size + a revolution in military affairs (open source warfare/systems disruption/DIY weapons) = wholesale change.>>
Rob Hopkins of Transition Towns.
Hopkins outlines the qualities of the transition response: viral, open-source, self-organizing, solutions-focused, sensitive to place and scale, learns from its mistakes and is a joyful process. It’s not about winning the argument, he says, it’s about changing the climate. Transition depends on the idea of resilience, which he thinks is a more useful concept than sustainability. Sustainability wants the supermarket to be more energy efficient, while resilience questions the vulnerability of depending on the supermarket.
<<NOTE: it's interesting, although not unexpected, that TED is vanilla/boring in regards to financial capitalism and economics -- no serious ideas are being aired on the recent financial debacle, only legacy thinking. I suspect that given the large number of investment bankers, venture capitalists, etc that sponsor them, this is likely a taboo topic given the potential conclusions.>>
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