Even though Admiral Dennis Blair, the Obama administration's Director of Intelligence, as well as journalist Chris Hedges, both attribute the current financial crisis to Wall Street greed and political incompetence -- rather than underlying contradictions of the economic system -- they both realize that economic failure has dramatic political consequences. Based on historical precedents, as well as the underlying logic of the system, this means diverting the US military to maintaining the domestic economic and political (dis)order.
Redeye
U.S. Intel Chief's Shocking Warning: Wall Street's Disaster Has Spawned Our Greatest Terrorist Threat
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig, February 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/127252/
We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelgnger 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. 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.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
A change in U.S. policy toward Israel?
The following article in the California State University Sundial calling for the United States to dissolve its "special relationship" with Israel is well-written, got some positive comments, as well as the expected ad hominum attacks on the author, Prof. David Klein.
While there is a chance that US policy will change in the direction he proposes, it is highly doubtful that it will not be enough and would be done for the wrong reasons.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, largely realizes that since 1967, and especially under presidents Clinton and Bush Jr., the U.S. government bent over too far in support of the expansionists in Israel, which means all of Israel's political parties to the right of Meretz (Israel's Kucinich types). In other words, about 90 percent of the new K'nesset either wants to keep all the settlements in occupied territories, proceed with apartheid, and maintain the seige on Gaza. The moderates among them, such as the Labor Party, want to move down the same path, but with a token bantustan on parts of the West Bank headed by the Palestinian Authority. As for Gaza, I gather the generall hoping to displace Hamas and bring in the PA to do their bidding.
This legacy causes problems for the U.S. in the Middle East when it faces an Iraq dominated by pro-Iranian Shiite parties, an Afghanistan dominated by the Sunni Taliban, a nuclear-armed independent Pakistan, and loss of any credibility for the many Arab dictatorships propped up by the U.S. So, following the arguments of Wald and Meirsheimer, authors of the Israel Lobby, they want to make some mid-course corrections and push harder for a two state solution to try get out of the maze they have created.
But, even if the Obama Administration manages to pressure Israel and the Palestinian Authority into such a "solution" I doubt if it will work. Israel will still be an "ethnocracy" run by a business elite, and the little Palestinian state would either be run by the repressive, corrupt, neo-liberals of Fatah or the clerical fascists of Hamas. Both of these parties already operate a modified police pre-state, with death squads, beatings, knee cappings, and incarceration for their Palestinian competitors. And, both would end up being the agents for foreign and Israeli foreign investors, NGO's, and government aid programs.
As for the one state and even the regional solutions which appeal to many progressives, the big questions are still there. Who would run the place? How would they rule it, and for whose benefit? Who would get the short end of the stick? To simply say the one state or the regional authority would be a secular democracy totally dodges these critical questions. The U.S. is such a secular, democratic, settler state, and it is hardly a great model because the democratic part is so flawed and the economic inequality is so great. Ditto for South Africa, which ended apartheid, but not racism and economic stratification.
Daily Sundial
Support for Israel must stop
David Klein / Professor of Mathematics, CSUN
Published: Friday, February 6, 2009
When an impoverished Palestinian boy confronts an Israeli tank in front of his home, how do you explain to American taxpayers that the tank is David and the boy is Goliath?
Apologists for Israel’s devastating attack on the civilian population of Gaza last month would face a task of biblical proportions, were it not for the dearth of information available to the American people.
Israel dropped hundreds of bombs and rained white phosphorus on the Gaza Strip in a three-week period beginning Dec. 27, 2008. The Palestinian population was attacked by U.S. built F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters.
The extent of the damage is staggering. At least 37 United Nations schools were destroyed or damaged during the attack. Forty mosques were destroyed. Tanks bombed hospitals and ambulances, the University of Gaza was leveled to the ground, and white phosphorus bombs obliterated the United Nation’s main food storage facility.
Refugee centers were targeted and suffered heavy casualties. Israeli soldiers killed healthcare workers whose only “crime” was attending to the wounded.
More than 1,300 Palestinians were killed and over 5,000 were crippled, many with loss of limbs or eyesight. Half the victims were women, children and the elderly.
Entire neighborhoods were demolished, leaving tens of thousands homeless. Some survivors describe Israeli tanks arriving in front of homes and ordering families to come out. As children, old people and women came forward, in some cases with white flags, they were shot and killed on the spot.
By contrast, the number of Israeli deaths was 13, including four victims of “friendly fire.”
Israel sealed off Gaza in advance of the attack. No one was allowed to leave without a foreign passport. Women, children, the elderly, and the infirm were not permitted to flee to safety. They were forced to remain in the world’s largest open-air prison with no protection from Israel’s chemical weapons, bombs, and bullets.
Gaza, with its 1.5 million people, is the most densely populated region in the world. Since 2005, well before Hamas came to power, Gaza has suffered from an Israeli military blockade that restricts food, medicine, and other vital supplies. The tunnels from Gaza to Egypt, that Israel has repeatedly bombed, provide essential routes for the transport of basic necessities.
Pro-Israel propagandists justify the attack by charging that Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, broke a six-month cease-fire by launching rockets into Israel. But the facts tell a different story. A December 2008 report entitled “The Six Months of the Lull Arrangement” stated it was Israel, not Hamas, which broke the cease-fire.
According to the Israeli Intelligence report, between June 19 and Nov. 4, 2008, “Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire.” Then on Nov. 4, Israeli forces attacked and killed seven Palestinians in Gaza.
The report further explains, “In retaliation, Hamas and the other terrorist [sic] organizations attacked Israel with a massive barrage of rockets...” Thus, even the Israeli government admits that Israel broke the truce.
In contrast, the mainstream press, which functions as the public relations arm of Israel, blames the victims of Israel’s attack for their own suffering. Not mentioned in the Israeli Defense Ministry report, however, is the failure of Israel to lift the military blockade, as per agreement of the cease-fire, in itself a war crime.
Israel’s most recent violation of the truce agreement with Hamas is not an anomaly. By a wide margin, it is Israel that most often initiates violence.
An analysis entitled “Reigniting Violence: How Do Ceasefires End?” written by faculty members at MIT and Tel Aviv University, and a graduate student at Harvard, found during the span of years 2000 to 2008, “79 percent of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8 percent were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13 percent were interrupted by both sides on the same day).” Even more significant, “of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96 percent, and it unilaterally interrupted 100 percent of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.”
Zionism calls for a Jewish state. Israel defines Jewishness, in part, in genetic terms. A person is legally Jewish if his or her mother is Jewish, regardless of place of birth or religious belief.
In pursuit of a Zionist agenda, Israel has followed a 60-year program of ethnic cleansing, including expulsion of the Palestinian population, military occupation, and mass murder.
The attack of Gaza is only the latest in a long history of crimes against humanity. Ariel Sharon summarized Israel’s national goals when he said in 1983, “the only good Arab is a dead Arab.”
Spain’s highest court has recently launched an investigation of crimes against humanity by Israeli leaders stemming from a 2002 bombing of civilians in Gaza. If the identified officials fail to appear in Madrid, the High Court will likely issue international warrants for their arrest.
It is long past due for Americans, including CSUN students, to call upon our government to end its billions of dollars of support of Israel.
For references and more information, see Prof. Klein’s web page:
www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/boycott.html
While there is a chance that US policy will change in the direction he proposes, it is highly doubtful that it will not be enough and would be done for the wrong reasons.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, largely realizes that since 1967, and especially under presidents Clinton and Bush Jr., the U.S. government bent over too far in support of the expansionists in Israel, which means all of Israel's political parties to the right of Meretz (Israel's Kucinich types). In other words, about 90 percent of the new K'nesset either wants to keep all the settlements in occupied territories, proceed with apartheid, and maintain the seige on Gaza. The moderates among them, such as the Labor Party, want to move down the same path, but with a token bantustan on parts of the West Bank headed by the Palestinian Authority. As for Gaza, I gather the generall hoping to displace Hamas and bring in the PA to do their bidding.
This legacy causes problems for the U.S. in the Middle East when it faces an Iraq dominated by pro-Iranian Shiite parties, an Afghanistan dominated by the Sunni Taliban, a nuclear-armed independent Pakistan, and loss of any credibility for the many Arab dictatorships propped up by the U.S. So, following the arguments of Wald and Meirsheimer, authors of the Israel Lobby, they want to make some mid-course corrections and push harder for a two state solution to try get out of the maze they have created.
But, even if the Obama Administration manages to pressure Israel and the Palestinian Authority into such a "solution" I doubt if it will work. Israel will still be an "ethnocracy" run by a business elite, and the little Palestinian state would either be run by the repressive, corrupt, neo-liberals of Fatah or the clerical fascists of Hamas. Both of these parties already operate a modified police pre-state, with death squads, beatings, knee cappings, and incarceration for their Palestinian competitors. And, both would end up being the agents for foreign and Israeli foreign investors, NGO's, and government aid programs.
As for the one state and even the regional solutions which appeal to many progressives, the big questions are still there. Who would run the place? How would they rule it, and for whose benefit? Who would get the short end of the stick? To simply say the one state or the regional authority would be a secular democracy totally dodges these critical questions. The U.S. is such a secular, democratic, settler state, and it is hardly a great model because the democratic part is so flawed and the economic inequality is so great. Ditto for South Africa, which ended apartheid, but not racism and economic stratification.
Daily Sundial
Support for Israel must stop
David Klein / Professor of Mathematics, CSUN
Published: Friday, February 6, 2009
When an impoverished Palestinian boy confronts an Israeli tank in front of his home, how do you explain to American taxpayers that the tank is David and the boy is Goliath?
Apologists for Israel’s devastating attack on the civilian population of Gaza last month would face a task of biblical proportions, were it not for the dearth of information available to the American people.
Israel dropped hundreds of bombs and rained white phosphorus on the Gaza Strip in a three-week period beginning Dec. 27, 2008. The Palestinian population was attacked by U.S. built F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters.
The extent of the damage is staggering. At least 37 United Nations schools were destroyed or damaged during the attack. Forty mosques were destroyed. Tanks bombed hospitals and ambulances, the University of Gaza was leveled to the ground, and white phosphorus bombs obliterated the United Nation’s main food storage facility.
Refugee centers were targeted and suffered heavy casualties. Israeli soldiers killed healthcare workers whose only “crime” was attending to the wounded.
More than 1,300 Palestinians were killed and over 5,000 were crippled, many with loss of limbs or eyesight. Half the victims were women, children and the elderly.
Entire neighborhoods were demolished, leaving tens of thousands homeless. Some survivors describe Israeli tanks arriving in front of homes and ordering families to come out. As children, old people and women came forward, in some cases with white flags, they were shot and killed on the spot.
By contrast, the number of Israeli deaths was 13, including four victims of “friendly fire.”
Israel sealed off Gaza in advance of the attack. No one was allowed to leave without a foreign passport. Women, children, the elderly, and the infirm were not permitted to flee to safety. They were forced to remain in the world’s largest open-air prison with no protection from Israel’s chemical weapons, bombs, and bullets.
Gaza, with its 1.5 million people, is the most densely populated region in the world. Since 2005, well before Hamas came to power, Gaza has suffered from an Israeli military blockade that restricts food, medicine, and other vital supplies. The tunnels from Gaza to Egypt, that Israel has repeatedly bombed, provide essential routes for the transport of basic necessities.
Pro-Israel propagandists justify the attack by charging that Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, broke a six-month cease-fire by launching rockets into Israel. But the facts tell a different story. A December 2008 report entitled “The Six Months of the Lull Arrangement” stated it was Israel, not Hamas, which broke the cease-fire.
According to the Israeli Intelligence report, between June 19 and Nov. 4, 2008, “Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire.” Then on Nov. 4, Israeli forces attacked and killed seven Palestinians in Gaza.
The report further explains, “In retaliation, Hamas and the other terrorist [sic] organizations attacked Israel with a massive barrage of rockets...” Thus, even the Israeli government admits that Israel broke the truce.
In contrast, the mainstream press, which functions as the public relations arm of Israel, blames the victims of Israel’s attack for their own suffering. Not mentioned in the Israeli Defense Ministry report, however, is the failure of Israel to lift the military blockade, as per agreement of the cease-fire, in itself a war crime.
Israel’s most recent violation of the truce agreement with Hamas is not an anomaly. By a wide margin, it is Israel that most often initiates violence.
An analysis entitled “Reigniting Violence: How Do Ceasefires End?” written by faculty members at MIT and Tel Aviv University, and a graduate student at Harvard, found during the span of years 2000 to 2008, “79 percent of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8 percent were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13 percent were interrupted by both sides on the same day).” Even more significant, “of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96 percent, and it unilaterally interrupted 100 percent of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.”
Zionism calls for a Jewish state. Israel defines Jewishness, in part, in genetic terms. A person is legally Jewish if his or her mother is Jewish, regardless of place of birth or religious belief.
In pursuit of a Zionist agenda, Israel has followed a 60-year program of ethnic cleansing, including expulsion of the Palestinian population, military occupation, and mass murder.
The attack of Gaza is only the latest in a long history of crimes against humanity. Ariel Sharon summarized Israel’s national goals when he said in 1983, “the only good Arab is a dead Arab.”
Spain’s highest court has recently launched an investigation of crimes against humanity by Israeli leaders stemming from a 2002 bombing of civilians in Gaza. If the identified officials fail to appear in Madrid, the High Court will likely issue international warrants for their arrest.
It is long past due for Americans, including CSUN students, to call upon our government to end its billions of dollars of support of Israel.
For references and more information, see Prof. Klein’s web page:
www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/boycott.html
Doubts about "the left" supporting Hamas
Response to a post from a Belgian activist about how the “left” should support Hamas as an expression of Palestinian resistance to imperialism.
The point is not whether anti-imperialists are religious or not, the question is their class politics.
In this case Hamas, based on their charter, is an expressly anti-communist organization which openly supports the capitalist mode of production. So, what does that say about the nature of their anti-imperialism?
Or, do we support all anti-imperialists regardless of their class position and type of society they would establish upon their anti-imperialist victory. And, what about their history of support from wealthy aristocrats and business interests in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, as well as the Mossad in the 1980s?
But, let me push the question further. What is meant by the author's terms "the left", especially when the class politics of Hamas are not discussed or evaluated?
Plus, what of the role of the Israeli working class? Depending on the polls, between 5 -10 percent of the Israeli public opposed the Gaza War, and other polls indicate majority support for a two state solution. While obviously a weak solution, it could establish Hamas as the ruling party of Gaza, and possibly the West Bank, after the elimination of the Israeli occupation of those two areas. Furthermore, most Israelis, especially Israeli workers, are victimized by the Israeli state through economic exploitation, a reduced standard of living because of high military expenditures, and being conscripted for the military. How do they fit into the author's or Hamas's anti-imperialism?
And, where does one draw the line with all those who subjectively or objectively present themselves as anti-imperialists? After all, in WWII fascist Japan took up arms against British and American imperialism. They even made appeals to other countries in Asia to join their military efforts to force these Europeans and Euro-Americans out of Asia, so it could be controlled by Asians and not by foreigners. For that matter, Nazi Germany was militantly opposed to British, French, and US imperialism, and actually had some success in places like Lithuania and the Ukraine in generating support from local religious nationalists.
Red Eye
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