I admit it. I got suckered.
When the run-up to the War in Iraq began, I was still in high school. I was young, impressionable and prone to believing the hype. When George W. Bush talked about evil-doers and their stocks of WMD and connections to al Qaeda, I bought it. There was a time when I considered President Bush a hero; he was someone that was willing to put America's blood and treasure on the line.
The WMD hysteria worked wonderfully on me.
Now there's a new hysteria, one that is sure to grip students and young people just like me who are not yet jaded enough to see through the media-industrial complex. Just like they wanted the population's blood to curdle when evoking images of Saddam launching nuclear bombs into our borders, they now want people to believe that we have encountered a new crisis and holy mother of god we have to give everything up to save ourselves!
It is absurd what our media is doing to us.
Grifters like Pete Peterson, Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles...all of these "centrist" millionaires and billionaires...they know the game. They know there is no debt or deficit crisis, but they know they can finish off the middle and lower class for good if they can win this debate.
Look at it this way: the Simpson-Bowles plan would have been the largest giveaways to the One Percent in the history of our country. They were asking for huge concessions from the middle and lower class. Give up your Medicare. Give up your Social Security. Give up your tax deductions. In return, the wealthiest among us would sacrifice a few deductions that would be immediately canceled out by lower tax rates.
Quite the game, eh?
Many progressives saw through the bullshit and urged Democrats in Congress to resist giving into the Deficit Hysteria Crowd, just as progressives knew that the Republican Party was running a long con in Iraq by creating a crisis out of nothing. The Republican Party is a party of grifters, using any means necessary to extract wealth. The grifters got their loot in Iraq with billions and billions being promised to "rebuild" the country, now they want our billions and billions to allegedly save us from turning into Greece.
They see a huge generation of Baby Boomers about to swing through the gates of Medicare and their eyes are bulging out of the sockets. They see the ranks of Social Security about to swell, so they whip up stories about a crisis. They see an opportunity for a new bubble. The housing market crashed? There's no more money to exploit there? No biggie, just tell the gullible fools that Social Security and Medicare are broken, and if they give them the money they'll make even more! It's such a good plan!
Obviously the media in our country doesn't care because...well, why should they? They serve their corporate benefactors. If the corporations cared about climate change, we'd be treated to nonstop coverage of how we have to cut down our carbon emissions. But we don't hear that.
Conservatives are now democratically elected mafiosos. They burn down your house then force you at gunpoint to give them the money to fix it (see: TARP). They threaten you with scare stories then make you give up your money to feel protected. We were told during the Iraq War that we had to give up our civil liberties in the name of freedom. Now we're told we have to give up our social programs that keep people from falling into poverty or just holding on for dear life to give it all up because...debt!
It's a scary, scary world.