[R-P] Advertencia del Director de Inteligencia de EEUU: el principal criadero de terroristas es Wall Street

[Nestor Gorojovsky]

[Lo del título. No tengo tiempo para traducir. Va en inglés. Disculpen. 
Solo traduzco los dos primeros párrafos y el último. De éste se deduce 
que en la IN es hora de "descular el marxismo" otra vez, no para 
sacárselo de encima sino para reapropiárselo. Las confusiones del 
momento de la derrota tienen que quedar atrás. Nada hay más nacional que 
el pensamiento más avanzado de nuestros tiempos:]

[Los estadounidenses]tenemos una notable capacidad de crear nuestros 
propios monstruos. Nos metemos en el Medio Oriente con nuestro socio 
Israel, y en pocas décadas tenemos Jesbolá, Jamas, Al Qaida, el 
movimiento de la resistencia iraquí y ahora un resurgente Talibán. Ahora 
hacemos pomada la economía mundial, destruimos el entorno natural, y nos 
sentamos a ver qué tal salió el trabajito. El jueves pasado se filtraron 
algunas sugerencias sobre el mundo nuevo que se está gestando, cuando el 
nuevo director de inteligencia nacional de Washington, el almirante 
retirado Dennis Blair, prestó declaración ante el Comité de Inteligencia 
del Senado de EEUU. Advirtió que la crisis económica, que se está 
profundizando, planteaba quizás la más grave amenaza a la estabilida y 
la seguridad de la nación. Según dijo, podría ser el disparador de un 
retorno al "violento extremismo" de las décadas de 1920 y 1930.

Así que nuestros terroristas más peligrosos los produjo Wall Street,y no 
la Yijad Islámica. Lo que tenemos por delante es un movimiento acelerado 
de cierres de fábricas y negocios, inflación, una epidemica de 
bancarrotas, colas de asistidos alimentarios, un desempleo superior al 
alcanzado en tiempos de la Gran Depresión y, como teme Blair, un 
alzamiento social.

[...]

Los ladrones corporativos, los que exigieron cobrar decenas de millones 
de dólares porque eran los mejores y los más brillantes, han quedado 
expuestos como los artistas de la estafa que son. Nuestros funcionarios 
electivos, con la prensa, quedaron al desnudo como lacayos de las 
corporaciones, corruptos y desvertebrados. Se puso al descubierto que 
nuestras facultades de economía y nuestros cuadros intelectuales son 
fraudes. Ha terminado la era de Occidente. Miren a la China. El 
capitalismo del laissez-faire se destruyó a sí mismo. Es hora de 
desempolvar esos libros de Marx.]

Original completo en inglés


U.S. Intel Chief's Shocking Warning: Wall Street's Disaster Has Spawned 
Our Greatest Terrorist Threat

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted February 17, 2009.

/The Director of National Intelligence argued that Wall Street, rather 
than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists./

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.