Between the Devil and the deep blue sea. Those are our options in dealing with this financial mess — or so it seems if you’ve been following events since the initial government bailout of Freddie and Fannie. Our, ahem, esteemed leaders in the Bush Administration have acted in a way that’s all too familiar when there are warning signs in the air: do nothing until critical mass has been reached, then make an unprecedented power grab in the name of security. We’ve seen this before: Bush ignores a report about Bin Laden hell bent on attacking the U.S. – and one method is using hijacking airplanes and flying them into icons of western power. 9/11 happens, and what’s the response? How were we to know that terrorists would use airplanes as missiles?
The run-up to the Iraq war: a case study in scaring the hell out of Americans. You remember, right? That “New Hitler” named Saddam Hussein was this close to getting The Bomb, and if we didn’t act, well, let’s just say mushroom clouds going off in American cities would have been in our immediate future. If that wasn’t enough, just throw in a few references to 9/11, Bin Laden, terrorism and one, two, three, we have a compliant populace ready to surrender those pesky things called rights to the government — all in the name of security and overthrowing the New Hitler.
This, my friends, is crisis politics in a nutshell, and it all comes at a price. How much, you say? Well get this: we’re spending over $300 million a day in Iraq, the cost of creating our newest bureaucracy (The Department of Homeland Security) is roughly $37-40 billion a year, and now with the current financial crisis, Congress is supposed to roll over and play dead while they hand over $700 billion (perhaps $1.8 trillion) to the Treasury Secretary to bail out failing or failed financial institutions. You start to add that up, and you’ll see we’re talking about real money here. Might I add that all of this money is being allocated and spent as both candidates for president are talking about tax cuts. If it all seems a bit unreal, that’s because it is. The debt that the government is incurring won’t be paid by us here and now (because, you know, taxes are evil). Rather, it’s being pushed farther and farther into the future where our profligate debt will be some other generation’s problem. (more…)
