Written by John Fike   

In September 2001 Osama bin Laden launched a terrorist attack on the heart of capitalism, when al Qaeda operatives flew passenger airliners into the World Trade Center. That spectacular disaster stunned Americans with huge piles of rubble and more than 3,000 deaths, and George W. Bush grabbed his chance to start “The War on Terror.”

The president’s action pleased American hawks, but also allowed billions of taxpayer dollars to flow to the pockets of Dick Cheney’s private enterprises. As we proceeded to terrorize other nations trying to find and kill bin Laden, we also opened a prolonged and fruitless war in Iraq, then Afghanistan. We reaped the hatred of much of the rest of the world; and an astronomical U.S. deficit.
Meanwhile, other acts of terrorism were occurring with far less media attention: the terrorism launched at American citizens from inside our borders.

First, two centuries of capitalist “collateral damage” has destabilized Earth’s systems; now we face the extinction of our own species. Meanwhile, industry bogs us down in cap-and-trade, carbon pricing and green-tech diversions while raking in billions and escaping the duty of cleaning up their environmental mess.
Then the bankers had a romp on that carousel of risk called the “housing bubble,” causing untold financial misery, moving millions toward poverty with the loss of homes and jobs. More recently, a persistent fringe element of Republicans brought us to the brink of economic disaster trying to preserve health care as the domain of private enterprise.

Now let’s add the NSA’s surveillance network. Combined with Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” it creates the elements of a police state threatening the freedoms of U.S. citizens. What’s more, the scheme to disenfranchise minority voters in southern states is rolling back civil rights half a century.

Wall Street financiers packed quite a lot of middle-class cash in their pockets with the subprime mortgage debacle. As an encore they’re robbing workers’ pensions, too. They closed down some companies, and then turned company-managed defined-benefits plans into worker-managed defined-contribution plans. That leaves workers who lack knowledge of sound investment practices easy pickings for investment sharks and hedge fund managers. And the workers will wind up impoverished in retirement.

As frosting on this cake, we have the machinations of the oil-saturated Koch brothers and their billionaire cronies. They use PACs and think-tanks, pretending to be socially beneficial “nonprofits,” buying elections and favorable legislative decisions. That keeps elected representatives in line with Tea Party standards, while bolixing up our nation’s governance system.

So, tell me: isn’t there quite a bit of difference between the rubble of concrete and steel from destroyed skyscrapers, and the economic rubble resulting from the excesses of private enterprise and financiers robbing the American middle class?

But I don’t see anyone declaring a “war on economic terrorism.” We’ve not heard of SWAT teams swooping into the Koch compound in helicopters, breaking down the doors, arresting, maybe even shooting, whoever they find. We’ve seen no reports of drones aimed at southern white supremacists resurrecting Jim Crow.

Maybe ole Sammy bin Laden didn’t consider all the options. Maybe he should have given up on physical terror and taken a page from the economic terrorist’s handbook used by the billionaires, the bankers and white supremacists.

What if he had put together a PAC or a think-tank; maybe developed a new set of derivatives, or some new election laws infringing the rights of Americans? What if he had threatened to cut off the repayment of U.S. debt obligations, or put the middle class on a slide to slavery? Maybe he could have brought even greater terror to our nation. Ah, but he was an amateur.