[Peace-discuss] Bad News

Tue Feb 17 17:55:29 CST 2009

Put this in your pipe and inhale it…  --mkb

Published on Monday, February 16, 2009 by TruthDig.com
Bad News From America’s Top Spy
by Chris Hedges
We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades  
of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelgänger and we  
get Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Iraqi resistance movement and a  
resurgent Taliban. Now we trash the world economy and destroy the  
ecosystem and sit back to watch our handiwork. Hints of our brave new  
world seeped out Thursday when Washington's new director of national  
intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate  
Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis  
posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security.  
It could trigger, he said, a return to the "violent extremism" of the  
1920s and 1930s.

It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced  
our most dangerous terrorists. You wouldn't know this from the Obama  
administration, which seems hellbent on draining the blood out of the  
body politic and transfusing it into the corpse of our financial  
system. But by the time Barack Obama is done all we will be left with  
is a corpse-a corpse and no blood. And then what? We will see  
accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of  
bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment  
surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears,  
social upheaval.

The United Nations' International Labor Organization estimates that  
some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. The  
collapse has already seen 3.6 million lost jobs in the United States.  
The International Monetary Fund's prediction for global economic  
growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent-the worst since World War II. There are  
2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default  
notice or were repossessed last year. And this number is set to rise  
in 2009, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be  
foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold or  
were nationalized in 2008. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S.  
companies expected to shut down this year. Unemployment, when you add  
people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers who cannot  
find full-time employment, is close to 14 percent.

And we have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing  
sector in the United States has been destroyed by globalization.  
Consumers, thanks to credit card companies and easy lines of credit,  
are $14 trillion in debt. The government has pledged trillions toward  
the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money.  
It is borrowing trillions more to fund our wars in Afghanistan and  
Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay  
these loans back. We are supposed to somehow spend our way out of the  
crisis and maintain our imperial project on credit. Let our kids worry  
about it. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around  
our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the  
mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. Contrast this with  
the national security state's strategies to crush potential civil  
unrest and you get a glimpse of the future. It doesn't look good.

"The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the  
global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications," Blair told  
the Senate. "The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and  
economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some  
even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level  
of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic  
political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s  
and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent  
extremism."

The specter of social unrest was raised at the U.S. Army War College  
in November in a monograph [click on Policypointers' pdf link to see  
the report] titled "Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks'  
in Defense Strategy Development." The military must be prepared, the  
document warned, for a "violent, strategic dislocation inside the  
United States," which could be provoked by "unforeseen economic  
collapse," "purposeful domestic resistance," "pervasive public health  
emergencies" or "loss of functioning political and legal order." The  
"widespread civil violence," the document said, "would force the  
defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend  
basic domestic order and human security."

"An American government and defense establishment lulled into  
complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly  
divest some or most external security commitments in order to address  
rapidly expanding human insecurity at home," it went on.

"Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of  
military force against hostile groups inside the United States.  
Further, DoD [the Department of Defense] would be, by necessity, an  
essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a  
multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance," the document  
read.

In plain English, something bureaucrats and the military seem  
incapable of employing, this translates into the imposition of martial  
law and a de facto government being run out of the Department of  
Defense. They are considering it. So should you.

Adm. Blair warned the Senate that "roughly a quarter of the countries  
in the world have already experienced low-level instability such as  
government changes because of the current slowdown." He noted that the  
"bulk of anti-state demonstrations" internationally have been seen in  
Europe and the former Soviet Union, but this did not mean they could  
not spread to the United States. He told the senators that the  
collapse of the global financial system is "likely to produce a wave  
of economic crises in emerging market nations over the next year." He  
added that "much of Latin America, former Soviet Union states and sub- 
Saharan Africa lack sufficient cash reserves, access to international  
aid or credit, or other coping mechanism."

"When those growth rates go down, my gut tells me that there are going  
to be problems coming out of that, and we're looking for that," he  
said. He referred to "statistical modeling" showing that "economic  
crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they  
persist over a one to two year period."

Blair articulated the newest narrative of fear. As the economic  
unraveling accelerates we will be told it is not the bearded Islamic  
extremists, although those in power will drag them out of the  
Halloween closet when they need to give us an exotic shock, but  
instead the domestic riffraff, environmentalists, anarchists, unions  
and enraged members of our dispossessed working class who threaten us.  
Crime, as it always does in times of turmoil, will grow. Those who  
oppose the iron fist of the state security apparatus will be lumped  
together in slick, corporate news reports with the growing criminal  
underclass.

The committee's Republican vice chairman, Sen. Christopher Bond of  
Missouri, not quite knowing what to make of Blair's testimony, said he  
was concerned that Blair was making the "conditions in the country"  
and the global economic crisis "the primary focus of the intelligence  
community."

The economic collapse has exposed the stupidity of our collective  
faith in a free market and the absurdity of an economy based on the  
goals of endless growth, consumption, borrowing and expansion. The  
ideology of unlimited growth failed to take into account the massive  
depletion of the world's resources, from fossil fuels to clean water  
to fish stocks to erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming  
and climate change. The huge international flows of unregulated  
capital have wrecked the global financial system. An overvalued dollar  
(which will soon deflate), wild tech, stock and housing financial  
bubbles, unchecked greed, the decimation of our manufacturing sector,  
the empowerment of an oligarchic class, the corruption of our  
political elite, the impoverishment of workers, a bloated military and  
defense budget and unrestrained credit binges have conspired to bring  
us down. The financial crisis will soon become a currency crisis. This  
second shock will threaten our financial viability. We let the market  
rule. Now we are paying for it.

The corporate thieves, those who insisted they be paid tens of  
millions of dollars because they were the best and the brightest, have  
been exposed as con artists. Our elected officials, along with the  
press, have been exposed as corrupt and spineless corporate lackeys.  
Our business schools and intellectual elite have been exposed as  
frauds. The age of the West has ended. Look to China. Laissez-faire  
capitalism has destroyed itself. It is time to dust off your copies of  
Marx.

© 2009 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges  
graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades  
a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of  
"American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."
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