Brzezinski: U.S. Recession Could Lead to Riots

[Nostalgia]

February 17, 2009 12:31 PM ET

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, thinks America's rich people should get together and create a fund to give money to America's non-rich people. Pay it forward -- or else. Here is what he alarmingly said today on MSNBC's Morning Joe program (thanks to FinkleBlog):

Where is the monied class today? Why aren’t they doing something: the people who made billions, millions. I’m sort of thinking of Paulson, of Rubin. Why don’t they get together, and why don’t they organize a National Solidarity Fund in which they call on all of those who made these extraordinary amounts of money to kick some back in to [a] National Solidarity Fund?... And if we don’t get some sort of voluntary National Solidarity Fund, at some point there’ll be such political pressure that Congress will start getting in the act, there’s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots.

Me: For a second, Brzezinski reminded me of Peter Venkman from "Ghostbusters": "This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. ... Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!" Now I have a better suggestion: How about the government let the "monied class" and everybody else keep more of what they earn so it can be spent or saved or invested.

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-...-to-riots.html

[Nostalgia]

We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelgänger 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.
Continued