Topic: Federal Reserve Bailout
Barr blasts Bush on Iraq, Bailout bill The Libertarian candidate accuses the Bush administration of alarmism, paranoia, misleading Americans, and making things “much worse.”by George Dance
(libertarian)
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
On October 7, in his strongest statement to date on the bailout bill, Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr accused the Bush administration of alarmism, paranoia, and misleading Americans to pass the bill, and claimed that its intervention "has made things much worse."
In related news, politics blog Third Party Watch reported that the Libertarian Party has begun radio advertising against the bailout, and is "committed to 2,000 spots per week over the next 29 days."
In the statement posted on his campaign website, Barr compared the tactics the Bush regime used, in its push to pass the bailout bill, to those used in its rush to war with Iraq five years ago: "In 2003, the Bush administration said that if we did not act immediately in Iraq, Americans faced imminent threats, and conjured images of mushroom clouds and terror attack. Americans, trusting that our government officials knew what they were talking about, went along with the panicked calls for action, only to be bogged down in an occupation of Iraq for the last five years."
In the same way: "When financial firms began feeling the impact of years of irresponsible lending, Bush, along with Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, began invoking similar apocalyptic scenarios -- like the Great Depression -- justifying immediate government intervention in the economy,"
"We've gone from threats of mushroom clouds and alleged vials of anthrax, to threats of massive unemployment and no credit for student loans," Barr scoffed. "And who is responsible for this alarmism and paranoia? Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, just to name a few people. Senators McCain and Obama are not friends to the taxpayers. They are two faces to the same problem: big government."
Campaigning in Ohio on Monday, Barr hammered home the same points in an interview with NBC 4 in Columbus. On the Iraq war, he stated:
The war was a mistake. It was sold to those of us in the Congress, and the American people, as something very, very different from the reality of it. The administration engaged in a very clear bait and switch, scared the American people, and urged Congress to vote for something that was not well founded. And then they took a vote to remove Saddam Hussein [and turned it] into a vote for a five-year, or possibly more, occupation. That's irresponsible. It is also irresponsible to be spending upwards of more than $400 million every single day propping up the government of Iraq. That money needs to come home to America.
As for what he called "the bailout from hell": "It was a bad bailout to begin with, it was made worse by the House's action, and made tremendously worse still by what happened in the Senate, led by Senator McCain, as the cheerleader for taking this bad piece of legislation and making it even more costly for the American taxpayers."
The result, as noted in today's statement: "Now, taxpayers are $700 billion in the hole, and the economy is continuing its downward slide."
Barr pointed out in an October 6 Huffington Post article that, after the bill's passage, the "U.S. stock market promptly dropped. Over the weekend the financial crisis threatened European banks, and stock prices across Asia and Europe tanked. So much for the argument that the bailout was necessary to calm the markets." An October 7 Los Angeles Times report, which linked to Barr's newest statement, also observed that "the U.S. stock market is down" again, while "World financial markets are in free fall."
Barr's conclusion: "The Bush administration once again misled Americans into believing extreme danger was imminent and extraordinary U.S. government intervention was required to save our country. And, once again, the intervention of the Bush administration has made things much worse."
His recommendation:
No longer should Americans look to the government as the fix to today's problems. American voters should throw out all of these politicians who hyped the danger and put taxpayers on the hook for what will amount to more than a trillion dollars. No longer can we stand for an alarmist government, which approaches our problems with a quick fix rather than a reasoned solution.
Bush, McCain and Obama should have taken a deep breath, and stayed out of the way as the market continues its painful adjustment process. Instead, they took a bad situation and made it worse -- with taxpayers picking up a huge debt.... More government is not the answer.
"It is time for a change," Barr concluded: "A change to keeping government small, and the taxpayers protected from the government's greedy hands. This change will not come from big-government types like Senators McCain and Obama. It will only come from outside the political establishment. Only through a vote for Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party will America return to a society with less government, fewer taxes and more individual freedom."
Johanna Neuman, "Did Wall Street bailout make things worse?", Los Angeles Times blogs, Oct. 7, 2008. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/presidentbush/2008/10/bailout-bad.html
The views expressed in this
article are those of George Dance only and do not represent
the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. George Dance is
solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an
employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.
The first part of the Bush doctrine was an attempt to steal Social Security funds. Remember the "privatization" push? When that failed, why then how was Bush supposed to pay off all those campaign contributors? Well, since they are all part of the military industrial complex, start a long war. The second part of the Bush doctrine. Now that his cronies are being investigated and indicted in some instances, who's to pay for their lawyers? Why the taxpayer of course. So is the economic crisis the taxpayer crisis or is it chapter three of the Bush doctrine? Seems like there were an awful lot of intelligent, common sense ideas floating around out there on how to tweak the financial systems & restore calm without spending $700 billion. But not one of those ideas was incorporated into the bailout. It is long past time for the American people to take back our government.
AbbyNormal wrote "It is long past time for the American people to take back our government." This does not make much sense because it somehow assumes that it is possible for a government to represent the American people. How can a few hundreds of representatives, or a few hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats represent millions of souls? If you get a government "your way", be sure that it will not be the way of millions of others. Goverment is always unfair and always legalized crime.
Government will always be in the hands of a few. Be them the friends of Bush, Pelosi, Obama, or whoever wins an election. The only way for the so-called people to "take back its government" is to abolish government; each american should be its own government.
Frankly, elections do not matter. McBama or Third-party, the state will always grow because one vote for X is first and foremost a vote for the principles of government. Don't vote! Stay home.
Want to comment on this
article? Leave your comment here. Your email address is
required to track your comment. However, we will neither
publish your email address nor distribute it to other
organizations or persons. The only reason we might use
it would be if we needed to contact you regarding your
comment. All comments are subject to our
terms of use policy.
