Scare Tactics

[col. writ. 10/4/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

With the passage of the Wall St. bailout bill, a major line has been crossed in U.S. economic and political history.

The rulers can do anything, as long as they leaven it with fear.

Just like the Iraq War authorization, with enough fear Congress will roll over, and say, "Uncle."

And there was an avalanche of fear. The corporate media sold oceans of fear and dread, just as it sold facile patriotism, the Iraq War and the so-called "War on Terror."

Using individual tales of fallen 401(k)s, or of a few firings, they successfully insinuated that unless the bailout passed, you might loseyour job, or your 401(k) might turn to dust.

They ran the banner headlines of the drop of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and scared legislators into flipping their prior no votes into yea votes.

Here's the deal. What we've seen from both major political parties is the greatest transfer of public wealth into private hands in history. Indeed, it is privatization run amok.

It is a bailout, pure and simple, that the media and its masters want you to call a 'rescue', but who is rescued?

You? C'mon.

Does a government that facilitated the loss of millions of jobs; that scuttled public education; that gave away the public treasury to Wall St. bankers; that sold a long war based on lies; that allowed millions of homeowners to fall into foreclosures, give a damn about you?

A government that cared about its people wouldn't have led them to this disaster.

Think of it this way: the same government that fought for months to privatize social security, or in other words, to invest peoples' retirement funds into stocks, came up with this bailout plan.

If the government was successful, some 40 million people (those 65 and over) would've been flat broke. What they couldn't do one way, they did another, for the economic hole that another trillion dollars will blow into the deficit spells danger to this project.

If you elect a government based on its rhetoric of anti-government, of deregulation, of the 'blind hand of the market', you get economic carnage, crony capitalism, and misery for millions.

Moreover, what you have is the privatization of the State, by its rental by private capital.

For, in both houses of Congress, in both major parties, we find pols who have received tens of thousands of dollars from Wall St. Can anyone deny that this money donated to Congress was wasted? (By 'wasted', I mean to those who made those donations -- not to average Americans).

As the saying goes, 'you get what you pay for.'

It might also be said that you get what you vote for.

--(c) '08maj

{Note: Check out www.opensecrets.org for data on Congress for sale.}