Intel Chief Warns: Wall Street Disaster Our Greatest Terrorist Threat

Intel Chief Warns: Wall Street Disaster Our Greatest Terrorist Threat

www.alternet.org

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.

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No society is permanent... all so far have fallen, even the current longest lasting cultures, China and India's have experienced political collapse at one point or the other in their histories... indeed the longest lasting, ancient Egypt experienced three total political collapses in its 3,000+ year span... we will be no different.

And if history is any indication the two primary causes of those collapses are environmental degradation and social instability caused by a massive in-migration of nomadic tribes and people.

Part of the cause of the large migration of Germanic tribes into the Roman territories during the 5th century was because of the instability of the lands to the east on the Russian steppes.

With a possible world wide depression facing us the displacing of millions of disgruntled, disconnected and rootless people wandering the planet could as Adm. Dennis Blair warned pose far greater a threat to not just America, but all the industrialised nations than Al Qaeda ever dreamed of being.

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reply to post by grover


I am surprised this hasn't gotten any nibbles as it is a very pertient issue facing us today.

reply to post by grover


It might be because people read this sort of thing everyday. Everyday I wake up to read the frightening and depressing news about our economy and the worlds. Family members and friends around me all loosing jobs and loosing there homes, it's a huge fricken mess, it's turning into a free for all.

A lot of people on ATS have at least a basic understanding of what's going on and no amount of money will help fix a broken system. I have more or less accepted that the only way were going to come out of this is to change our ways as a society and in fact the world. This is the goal, I believe of the people in power. They want global instability, loss of jobs, loss of retirement funds, people to loose there homes and businesses because they want to affect a global change into a world system. While I agree with something needs to changed I don't believe in the reasons behind it. More government control has never been a good thing.

So when enough people are begging for change they will then look like saviors. When people are in fear and are hungry people will accept what a normal rational person wouldn't. So yes it's breaking down the very fabric of society then they plan to build it up again.

We see a all too similar pattern here; problem, reaction, solution.