The Price of Fear

Proof of the moral bankrutpcy of the Bush administration has been the way it has so freely and so often exploited fear to manipulate the American people and their Congress.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bush/Cheney used the fanciful notion of an Islamist uprising bent on destroying the United States to instill fear into their people. Remember the line about how "they hate our freedoms?" Guess what, Sarah Palin is still spinning the same bullshit.

Bush/Cheney used fear to intimidate the American people into surrendering their constitutional freedoms and allowing their executive branch to wield monarchical powers such as arbitrary arrest without warrant, indefinite detention without charge or trial.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz cudgelled Americans with fear of mushroom clouds and chemical weapons slipped to terrorists in order to get away with the invasion and conquest of Iraq.

The Bush administration has been "All Fear, All the Time."

Today's Guardian details how Bush ruthlessly used fear against his people and Congress yet again to panic them into a $700-billion bailout of Wall Street:

"It was incredibly irresponsible for George Bush to tell the American people on national television that the country could be facing another Great Depression. By contrast, when we actually were in the Great Depression, President Roosevelt said: "We have nothing to fear, but fear itself."

"It was even more irresponsible for President Bush to seize on the decline in the stock market five days later as evidence that his bailout was needed for the economy. President Bush must surely understand, as all economists know, that the daily swings in the stock market are driven by mass psychology and have almost nothing to do with the underlying strength in the economy.

"The scare tactics of President Bush, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, created sufficient panic, so that by the time of the first vote on the emergency package in Congress, much of the public believed that the defeat of the bail-out may actually have had serious consequences for the economy. Millions of people have changed their behaviour because of this fear, with many pulling money out of bank and money market accounts, and adjusting their financial plans in other ways.

"This effort to promote panic is especially striking since the country's dire economic situation is almost entirely the result of the Bush administration's policy failures. First and foremost, the decision of Paulson and Bernanke (and previously Alan Greenspan) to ignore the housing bubble, allowed for the growth of an $8tn bubble, which is now collapsing.

It is the collapse of this bubble - which has already destroyed more than $4tn in housing wealth, and is likely to destroy another $4tn over the next year - that is at the root of the economy's problems. While competent economists were warning of the bubble and the dire consequences of its collapse, the top officials in the Bush administration were celebrating the rise in homeownership rates."

Fear is the tool of disreputable politicians. Even Harper resorts to it quite freely. Those who support this kind of wet-pants politics seemingly delight in being scared - oh, be very afraid, crime, terrorists, socialists, they're all out to bring us down.

As I've written before, there's a great deal of wisdom to be found in the last line of the "Star Spangled Banner" when it speaks of the "..land of the free, and the home of the brave." Freedom is the gift of bravery. You can't be free if you're afraid. You can't be free if you allow scoundrels to prey on you with fear. The price of fear is the surrender of freedom.