We have a remarkable ability to create
our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our
Israeli doppelganger 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.