[Fwd: US intelligence chief: World capitalist crisis poses greatest threat]

[Charles Cornell]

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Subject: US intelligence chief: World capitalist crisis poses greatest
threat
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:40:22 -0800 (PST)
From: "Lone Wolf" <phoenixx6 at gmail.com>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Newsgroups: alt.politics.socialism.trotsky

US intelligence chief: World capitalist crisis poses greatest threat
14 February 2009

In testimony before the Senate Committee on Intelligence Thursday,
Washington's new director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair,
warned that the deepening world capitalist crisis posed the paramount
threat to US national security and warned that its continuation could
trigger a return to the "violent extremism" of the 1920s and 1930s.

This frank assessment, contained in the unclassified version of the
"annual threat assessment" presented by Blair on behalf of 16 separate
US intelligence agencies, represented a striking departure from
earlier years, in which a supposedly ubiquitous threat from Al Qaeda
terrorism and the two wars launched under the Bush administration
topped the list of concerns.

Clearly underlying his remarks are fears within the massive US
intelligence apparatus as well as among more conscious layers of the
American ruling elite that a protracted economic crisis accompanied by
rising unemployment and reduced social spending will trigger a global
eruption of the class struggle and the threat of social revolution.

The presentation was not only the first for Blair, a former Navy
admiral who took over as director of national intelligence only two
weeks ago, but also marked the first detailed elaboration of the
perspective of the US intelligence apparatus since the inauguration of
President Barack Obama.

"The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the
global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications," Blair
declared in his opening remarks. He continued: "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."

Blair described the ongoing financial and economic meltdown as "the
most serious one in decades, if not in centuries."

"Time is probably our greatest threat," he said. "The longer it takes
for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious
damage to US strategic interests."

The intelligence chief noted 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 added that the
"bulk of anti-state demonstrations" internationally have been seen in
Europe and the former Soviet Union.

But Blair stressed that the threat that the crisis will produce
revolutionary upheavals is global. The financial meltdown, he said, 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."

Noting that economic growth in these regions of the globe had fallen
dramatically in recent months, Blair stated, "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 cited "statistical
modeling" showing that "economic crises increase the risk of regime-
threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year
period."

In another parallel to the 1930s, the US intelligence director pointed
to the implications of the crisis for world trade and relations
between national capitalist economies. "The globally synchronized
nature of this slowdown means that countries will not be able to
export their way out of this recession," he said. "Indeed, policies
designed to promote domestic export industries—so-called beggar-thy-
neighbor policies such as competitive currency devaluations, import
tariffs, and/or export subsidies—risk unleashing a wave of destructive
protectionism."

It was precisely such policies pursued in the 1930s that set the stage
for the eruption of the Second World War.

Blair also raised the damage that the crisis has done to the global
credibility of American capitalism, declaring that the "widely held
perception that excesses in US financial markets and inadequate
regulation were responsible has increased criticism about free market
policies, which may make it difficult to achieve long-time US
objectives." The collapse of Wall Street, he added, "has increased
questioning of US stewardship of the global economy and the
international financial structure."

The threat assessment also included evaluations of potential terrorist
threats, the "arc of instability" stretching from the Middle East to
South Asia, conditions in Latin America and Africa and strategic
challenges from both China and Russia, centering in Eurasia. It
likewise dealt with the war in Afghanistan, which the Obama
administration is preparing to escalate, providing a scathing
assessment of the Karzai regime in Kabul and the familiar demand for
an escalation of the intervention in Pakistan. Nonetheless, the
report's undeniable focus was on the danger that economic turmoil will
ignite revolutionary challenges on a world scale.

Blair's emphasis on the global capitalist crisis as the overriding
national security concern for American imperialism seemed to leave
some of the Senate intelligence panel's members taken aback. They have
been accustomed over the last seven years to having all US national
security issues subsumed in the "global war on terrorism," a
propaganda catch-all used to justify US aggression abroad while
papering over the immense contradictions underlying Washington's
global position.

The committee's Republican vice chairman, Senator Christopher Bond of
Missouri, expressed his concern that Blair was making the "conditions
in the country" and the global economic crisis "the primary focus of
the intelligence community."

Blair responded that he was "trying to act as your intelligence
officer today, telling you what I thought the Senate ought to be
caring about." It sounded like a rebuke and a warning to the senators
that it is high time to ditch the ideological baggage of the past
several years and confront the real and growing threat to capitalist
rule posed by the crisis and the resulting radicalization of the
masses in country after country.

It may have been lost on some of those sitting at the dais in the
Senate hearing room, but when Blair referred to a return to the
conditions of "violent extremism" of the 1920s and 1930s, he was
warning that American and world capitalism once again faces the
specter of a revolutionary challenge by the working class.

There is no doubt that behind the façade of Obama, the US national
security apparatus is making its counter-revolutionary preparations
accordingly.

Including Blair, Obama has named three recently retired four-star
military officers to serve in his cabinet. The other two are former
Marine Gen. James Jones, his national security adviser, and former
Army chief of staff Gen. Erik Shinseki, his secretary of veterans
affairs. This unprecedented representation of the senior officer corps
within the new Democratic administration is indicative of a growth in
the political power of the US military that poses a serious threat to
basic democratic rights.

A report that appeared in a magazine published by the US Army War
College last November, just weeks after the election, indicates that
the Pentagon and the US intelligence establishment are preparing for
what they see as a historic crisis of the existing order that could
require the use of armed force to quell social struggles at home.

Entitled "Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks' in Defense
Strategy Development," the monograph insists that one of the key
contingencies for which the US military must prepare is a "violent,
strategic dislocation inside the United States," which could be
provoked by "unforeseen economic collapse" or "loss of functioning
political and legal order."

The report states: "Widespread civil violence inside the United States
would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in
extremis to defend basic domestic order... 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."

In other words, a sharp intensification of the unfolding capitalist
crisis accompanied by an eruption of class struggle and the threat of
social revolution in the US itself could force the Pentagon to call
back its expeditionary armies from Iraq and Afghanistan for use
against American workers.

The document continues: "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 phrase—"an essential enabling hub for continuity of
authority"—is a euphemism for military dictatorship.

The working class must draw its own urgent conclusions from the rapid
deepening of the present crisis, above all the necessity of building a
mass independent political party based on a socialist and
internationalist program and fighting to put an end to the capitalist
profit system. This means, above all, joining and building the
Socialist Equality Party.

Bill Van Auken

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