It must be the Christmas season, because the Fear Propaganda is back. It’s the gift to the Military Industrial Complex that just keeps on giving.
Apparently they need more volunteers to be motivated to go fight their war in Afghanistan, the war that most rational people want to end. Follow the link below from legitgov.org to read the report.
Alarm raised on threat of mass assault 04 Dec 2008– Terrorist organisations would succeed in using weapons of mass destruction within five years unless the world community “acts decisively”, according to a congressionally mandated commission set up to scrutinise WMD after the September 11 attacks. “It is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013,” according to the report, released yesterday by the commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism.
Preventing terrorism and WMDs is a worthy cause, but why scare the public with your public warnings, to what end? “Acting decisively” usually means two things these days — an excuse for more violence overseas and further erosion of our civil rights. One reason to keep us scared is to get us desensitized to seeing soldiers on the streets and thankful, eventually, that they’re there to “keep us safe”. Though that is not at all what they are there for. This soldier presence will now be ‘permanent’ and it will be interesting to see if Obama overturns this or any other weird Unitary Executive rule Bush has passed. The plan is that there will be 20,000 U.S. soldiers on the streets of America by 2011, and these are soldiers fresh from Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, we can’t afford the massively high salaries that National Guardsmen are demanding these days. (Did they join a union?)
To the un-casual observer, this looks like the solid beginnings of a fascist police state. It’s hard to imagine an explanation for U.S. military soldiers who have been fighting in wars recently on the streets of America, for any reason. they are not trained for emergency response, they are trained for counterinsurgency. These troops will be of little use after a nuclear or biological terrorist attack. They’d just get in the way of the medical personnel.
How much of this is pure BS? It’s hard to know for certain. Of course, there is a terrorist threat to some degree. There always has been, even back in the early part of the last century. And I remember very well the Oklahoma City bombings, and Timothy McVeigh, but I don’t remember going to war with Michigan, or fertilizer manufacturers. Remember the UNABOMBER? Now there was one crazy Christian! “According to the FBI . . . between the years of 1980 and 2000, 250 of the 335 incidents confirmed as or suspected to be terrorist acts in the United States were carried out by American citizens.” There must be some state anywe can go to war with. Surely people want revenge for these terrorist actions. I’m sure someone, somewhere, is thinking about it.
There is also a possibility of civil unrest after an economic meltdown, but what good would 20,000 troops do if that happened all over the U.S.?
“. . . . [a] warning was again echoed a few days ago in a leaked internal memo from Citibank.
“The world is not going back to normal after the magnitude of what they have done. When the dust settles this will either work, and the money they have pushed into the system will feed through into an inflation shock,” wrote Tom Fitzpatrick, Citibank’s chief technical strategist.
The memo predicts “depression, civil disorder and possibly wars” as a fallout from an economic collapse that many say is on the horizon.”
The bailouts are not fixing the problem with our particular type of capitalism. It would make more sense to redo our economy into something else deteremined by our new president and new Congress in 2009 than to let the current president and Congress decide anything. And in the meantime, tell George Bush to shut up about the economy, because it’s clear he never knew what he was talking about and/or he was lying to us on a daily basis.
Bush administration ignored clear warnings –Under pressure from banking industry, U.S. government eased lending rules 01 Dec 2008 The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents
It would be better to seriously fight the root causes of terrorism and nuclear proliferation than bother us their scare tactics. We elect public officials to do a job, not scare us. At the same time, I don’t like government secrecy. So the solution is clear — wait until something happens, and then tell us. Don’t tell us that going shopping fixes everything. And if our economy really is tanking, tell us. If we’re losing in Afghanistan tell us, and tell us why. But instead of honesty, we get five-year crystal ball gazing about what a terrorist might do to us.
It’s really pathetic and stupid to keep jerking the American public around like this.
Finally, Jane Harmon, of all people, told the government to retire the fear card.
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