Source: Alternet - "U.S. Intel Chief's Shocking Warning:

[20score]

"Wall Street's Disaster Has Spawned Our Greatest Terrorist Threat

"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."

http://www.alternet.org/rights/127252/?cID=1137983

P.S. If someone would be kind enough to PM me and let me know how to box other's writings, it would be greatly appreciated.

[patrice]

1. Done.

:hi:

[20score]

2. Thank you! You rock Patrice!

[patrice]

3. You are welcome.

:bounce:

[ihavenobias]

5. You beat me to it!

:)

BIG K & R

[patrice]

6. I know it's supposed to be evidence of somekind of insecurity, or flaw in my self-concept

but I love to help. It is pleasing to see people grow.

:hi:

[20score]

8. I'm glad you did.

People who see insecurity in those that help are maybe covering their apathy with misdirected anger. (Nuff psychology by me.)

[ixion]

4. this 'graph sums it up nicely

"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."

In other words: we're screwed.

[patrice]

7. Let's start over. Do something else.

Form labor co-operatives with their own co-housing; members invest, have equity, collaborate in business, take care of their kids, grow food, stuff like that . . .

[ixion]

10. I'm all for it....

It makes more sense as a survival strategy, and a hopefully a better way to live. I think it would do us good to live like human beings again. I think we've forgotten what that's like. Maybe we'd learn something.

On the other hand, having been a part of several various shades of communes over the years, I can say it's a difficult beast to master. Keeping the group dynamic functional is nigh impossible. And it always seems like there are those in the group who take great joy in tearing it apart, and those who seek to garner power.

And once that starts, the cycle has started all over again.

[20score]

13. Too bad they had to fall apart.

I like the idea.

[patrice]

15. Yep. Been there, done that, but . . . impossible? . . . Necessity IS the Mother of Invention.

[ixion]

20. I said 'nigh' or nearly impossible...

stranger things have happened. :hi:

It would require a quantum shift in our social structure, though, as right now communes are generally met with scorn.

But, again, I think it's a viable survival strategy, and something we'll have to do in some form if we're to make it as a species.

[patrice]

22. Yep. Like that word "nigh", sometimes the small thing (or things) are what unleashes the flood.

Yes, one of the big problems going there is how we know whom we are going there with, hence the general scorn for the notion.

[suede1]

9. Always self destructive when greed over-rides logic!

[20score]

11. Aren't they though? Years ago Bill Moyers did an excellent documentary on the secret government.

It was based on the same principle that started the Iraq War, and the same self-destructiveness involved with Wall Street today.

[suede1]

12. I'm glad he didn't stay retired.

[patrice]

24. The Money Changers ARE in The Temple.

There are 1,000,000 Dead Iraqis (not to mention Orphans and Refugees) + almost 4,000 Dead American Soldiers to pretty much proove that fact.

[democracy1st]

14. K & R

[20score]

16. Thought this would elicit more conversation.

[rolltideroll]

17. Bumpy road

Ever read the Wheel of Time? I may be geek outing myself, but it deals with time as a circular concept, and that because people react the same ( roughly) to situations, and broadly on a sociological level, we get basically the same stories that repeat throughout history. Republics degenerate into Totalitarian states slowly. In Poli Sci, I believe it is called the Iron Law of Oligarchy.We could be seeing the moment in American history where economic conditions force that slide. Before anyone takes offense, I am NOT saying Obama is in anyway a dictator,I refer to sociological factors gently forcing the switch.

On A seperate note, good to see another Pastafarian. Are we prevalent on this board?

[rolltideroll]

18. Even Better analysis,

Read The Second Coming by Yates. Best analysis of historical forces ever written. Posted below.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born

[patrice]

21. Species Memory like CG Jung's Archetypes.

[rolltideroll]

27. Jungs' theories

Creep me out sometime. But it does explain the repetition of certain symbols. I always thought that the behavior for hording and greed were basically the same thing, hardwired in us, and that is the major impediment to socialism. Even More's Utopia never addresses how they stopped greed.

[20score]

23. Great input! I agree, I been seeing that slide for years. And welcome to DU!

And as for Pastafarians, yes, I've seen more than a few.

And since social movement is never 100% linear, I think everyone would understand, Obama represents a tick up on a downward path.


(Then again, an optimist would say Bush was a tick down in an upward path.)

[patrice]

28. Ha! Love that parallelism!

[rolltideroll]

29. Churchill said, When looking back, History will seem like a series of long defeats

And thank you for the welcome, I got a daily post check out Freeper Funnies.

[patrice]

19. Sorry! I should have said more. I HAVE been thinking and trying to talk to people,

oh . . . for at least a decade now about how we create our social realities (I taught highschool Psychology including AP Psych, to rooms full of young persons taking full load AP courses) since 1986. I also grew up in a LARGE family in which the emotional and psychological dynamics became an important issue before I was 10 years old.

It is very interesting how seeking certain kinds of power does indeed create the thing that we think we are going to control. I think the need for Freedom is closely wired to our instincts for Survival, because we know if we aren't Free to Learn HOW to be, we are Dying and, being on that particular path towards Death instinctually drives those who feel that they have nothing to lose (because they can't grow toward Life and Learning anyway) to various kinds of suicidal behaviors, overt and covert (including killing others). This is one of the reasons that Hypocrisy is soooooooo instinctually aversive to most people; it interferes and confuses the drive toward Learning and, hence, Life.

Thanks for the excellent post! I will bookmark it and give it more thought later.

[20score]

25. Thanks Patrice!

You really do rock. I'm marking you as a buddy. You're insightful.

[patrice]

26. I'm old and getting fed up with the lies.

Thanks, you're my buddy too, as are others above.

:grouphug:

[suede1]

30. Give a kick for you.