The 2000's in Review: Lowlights of the Decade

Time magazine called it "The Decade From Hell." Arguably there were worse decades, but this one seems to have been riddled by more disasters and crises than most. Here, in no particular order, are the American news items that come to my mind when I think of the decade that just came to a close:




1. Hurricane Katrina: There have been a lot of hurricanes over the years, but this one did the most damage. Years after the 9/11 attacks, we found that our governmental agencies still weren't prepared to deal with large-scale emergencies.


2. The Collapse of Enron: Actually, for those of us who didn't lose a life's-savings-worth of Enron stock, the collapse of this company was probably a good thing. Its existence did very little for our real economy - it was largely a fraud all along. Maybe the scariest thing about it for most of us was that the company won awards for innovation and was highly regarded in the business community right up until the time it collapsed.

Pictured: Enron Executives Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay were tried together and convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges.



3. The Torture and Abuses at Abu Ghraib: The United States did not look good when this story came out (if you don't remember what happened, read this Wikipedia entry).


4. The Bernard Madoff Affair: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was urged to investigate the Madoff business a number of times: a total of six botched investigations were conducted, with the first occurring in 1992. Finally, Bernard Madoff's ponzi scheme collapsed under its own weight. He was arrested in December, 2008 and pleaded guilty to eleven felonies a few months later. It is estimated that Madoff and his crew (several family members worked for him) defrauded their customers out of between $12 to $20 million. If the current recession had not forced the light of day onto Madoff's scheme, it might still be in operation.


5. The Economy: Bubbles, Debt, Crashes and Bailouts: As Chris Martenson has put it, the theme of 2009 is "extend and pretend." This was explained recently in a blogpost by author and social critic James Howard Kunstler:

[To 'extend and pretend' is to] use all the complex trickery that can be marshaled in the finance toolbag to keep up the appearance of a revolving-debt economy that produces profits, interest, and dividends, in spite of the fact that debt is not being "serviced," i.e. repaid. There is an awful lot in the machinations of Wall Street and Washington that is designed deliberately to be as incomprehensible as possible to even educated people, but this part is really simple: if money is created out of lending, then the failure to pay back loaned money with interest kills the system. That is the situation we are in.

Let's face it, if anything good comes out of our financial troubles, it is that we as individuals (and/or as a nation) might finally be learning not to expect to get something for nothing. Unfortunately, we've been living in that kind of world a lot recently. Is this commentary overly pessimistic? You tell me (and back it up).



6. The attacks of 9/11/2001 and our ongoing military commitments:
Oh yeah, 9/11 was a big story too, and the military commitments (aka the War on Terror) that resulted from it continue to be a huge factor in the state of our nation. While everybody agrees that our men and women in uniform have been serving bravely and selflessly, as a nation we've chosen to ignore the reality that our military has been carrying too heavy of a burden. Although soldiers have died and been injured in every war in world history, something is different this time: our soldiers are being stretched too far, deployed into harm's way for more time than the soldiers of any previous American war. This is another example of "extend and pretend."

Do we really have the financial, human, and natural resources needed to fulfill our commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere? Maybe we won't know for sure until we find out the hard way, but I'd guess that we've bit off more than we can chew. Furthermore, isn't it ironic that we're using millions of barrels of oil from the Middle East to maintain our military presence in the Middle East? Oil has to be part of the context of why we're there in the first place.


Alright, those are the six most important American news items of the decade 2000-2009. I take personal responsibility for the content of this post - the statements here are my own and not those of Moraine Park Technical College. But I challenge you and all other readers to disagree or find any possible fault with what I've written here.