Do you feel "safe"?

When we look back upon the George W. Bush years in this country, the notion of "keeping Americans safe" has been the mantra used by this Administration to justify any number of policies and practices that make a mockery of that for which this country is supposed to stand. Whether it's using lies about weapons of mass destruction to justify an unnecessary war that's about family grudges and oil greed, or mass surveillance of Americans, or creating "free speech zones" far away from where our leaders can see them, or bellicose fist-waving at Iran, the justification for every crime, every travesty committed by this bunch of criminals has been "Our job is to keep you safe from the terrorists."

But there are many kinds of terrorists, as we now see.

On December 9, 1994, the United Nations adopted resolution 49/60 ("Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism"), which defined terrorism as:

Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.

I'd say that under this definition, the entire mortgage/lending scam that has put the global economy on the brink of collapse qualifies as international terrorism, wouldn't you?

We've been conditioned to think of "feeling safe" as a function of how close swarthy Middle Eastern men are to us on a day-to-day basis. But sometimes terrorists wear starched white shirts and pinstriped suits and appear on CNBC every day.

Do you "feel safe" these days? Do you feel safe in your job? Do you feel safe that your invested money is going to not even necessarily grow, but even be there when you retire? Do you feel safe that you're going to be able to keep your house, no matter when you bought or how much equity you have? Do you feel safe about your future?

I know I don't.

Part of the national psyche of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was this constant, gnawing sense of dread, that It Might Happen Again. Of course these fears were fed by the Bush Administration, with its color-coded alerts and its press conferences to reveal dire threats that had no basis in truth, and its talk of drone planes and killer cows and crop dusters and poisoned pens. But while the Bush Administration and their Congressional lackeys were scaring the bejeezus out of Americans, they were silently picking our pockets to stuff even more into their own, which were already bulging with cash from the Bush tax cuts. And when Americans started to realize that their wallets had a few less George Washingtons in them, the Republicans created the Immigrant Boogeyman; as if the guy who climbs on your roof to clean your gutters is the reason you don't have a middle management job anymore. The Bush years have been characterized by fear -- fear and loathing.

And now here we are. Millions of Americans are going to lose their homes. Millions more are losing their jobs and millions more will continue to. Those who managed to put some money away for retirement because God knows we can't rely on Social Security to be there are finding that 30% or more of the value of their accounts has disappeared.

There are many ways to be terrorized. Islamic radicals may have terrorized us seven years ago. But our own government, and the titans of the financial community, took over where they left off.