Today is Thanksgiving Day here in Canada - Monday the 13th of October 2008. It is a day when we are supposed to pause and give thanks for all that we have. Well, today that might be of particular significance. I believe that this Thanksgiving is the day when we may find out if the world’s economy survives!
After a week of an historic collapse in most of the world’s stock markets, government leaders throughout the world have been trying to put together a rescue plan by taking extraordinary measures to save the economy. The test of their success will be the opening of the Asian markets and then subsequently the remaining world markets.
My worry is that if the markets continue their downward slide, the economy will descend into chaos.
For me, the most frightening thing about the 9/11 terrorist attacks was how it completely unnerved the American government. My view is that the American push into Afghanistan to take out the Taliban and to hunt down Osama Bin Laden was a perfectly justifiable and legitimate response to the attack. But with the 9/11 attack, the American government instituted extraordinary powers that cast aside rights and liberties that had taken centuries to establish. It was deeply disturbing to me to see the very nation that is central to all of western society in such disarray under what I consider the criminal actions of the Bush leadership over the past eight years. The lies to the American people and the world to justify an attack on Iraq was despicable.
The Bush administration took advantage of the trauma of 9/11 to wage an unnecessary war and with that my very perception of freedom and security changed forever. Western civilization that I presumed to be rock solid and the inevitability of democracy to prevail is something of which I am no longer sure. Furthermore, I think that what is happening now to the economy is related to the fiscal debt of this disastrous war and it will be a significantly greater test to the strength of our whole social fabric than 9/11 ever was. I am sure that Osama Bin Laden is sitting in a cave right now very much satisfied with what he has wrought.
And now I am going to flash up my web browser and take a look at what the immediate future holds.
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