The Real Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade

The media are awash with talking
heads bloviating about the top stories of the last decade.  The
wired-in society.  The growth of organic food.  The new frugality. 
This is the ritual that reveals their true function in the culture: 
pacification.  It's their way of signaling the masses that Bigger
Thinkers are looking after things, so go back to your Wii or Survivor
or Facebook reveries.

The amazing thing is how little
is ever mentioned about the stories that really mattered, those that
affected the very nature of our society, its institutions, and the relation
of the people to their state and society.

Those stories paint a picture
of danger, of a people who have lost control of their government and
the corporations that own it.  But you'll hear nary a word about
such difficult truths from any storyteller in the conventional media.

So here, in no particular order, are my Top Ten Stories of the Naughties, the ones that really matter.

1. The Supreme Court
   hijacking the 2000 presidential election.  This isn't even
   a historical controversy anymore.  Al Gore won the national popular
   vote by 570,000.  And we now know he would have won the Florida
   vote as well if the vote counting had not been stopped by the Supreme
   Court.  This was literally a right wing judicial coup d' etat,
   so it's understandable that it's never mentioned in the "right"
   kind of circles. 

1. Bush knew of
   9/11 long before it actually happened.  Three years before
   Bush took office, the neo-cons' Project For a New American Century
   called for a "new Pearl Harbor" to galvanize the nation into a war
   to seize Middle East oil.  And even before the event itself, Bush-as-president
   was warned dozens of times of the imminent attack, the most notorious
   being the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing titled, "Bin
   Laden Determined to Strike in U.S".  Amazingly nothing was done
   to prevent the attack.  But even less is it advertised that Bush knew. 

1. Iraq was all
   premised on lies, yet we're still there.  Saddam Hussein
   wasn't pursuing Weapons of Mass Destruction.  He wasn't involved
   in 9/11. He wasn't engaged with Al Qaeda.  As with the 2000 election
   hijacking, we know all these things.  And we know they were false
   at the time they were proffered.  Yet, there we are, with no intent
   to leave, our very presence spitting in the face of International Law
   and the international community we so unctuously pretend to respect.  

1. The Global War
   on Terror.  Or more specifically, the ease with which the "GWOT"
   has replaced the Cold War as the justification for the ever-increasing
   militarization of society.  What happened to the post-Cold War
   "Peace Dividend"?  The U.S continues to spend more on the military
   than all the rest of the world combined.  It continues to maintain
   over 700 military bases around the world.  And it continues to
   manufacture excuses for foreign interventions whenever weapons makers
   and military logistics companies need more profits — which is forever.   

1. The fact that
   2/3 of all economic growth went to top 1%. 
   John Kennedy's social contract had a rising tide lifting all boats. 
   But over the last decade 2/3 of all economic growth has gone to the
   top 1% of income earners.  Meanwhile the middle class has suffered
   a $13 trillion writedown in wealth as a result of the housing collapse. 
   The banking bailout and the health care "reform" debate showed as
   never before the extent to which corporations have captured government
   and use it to redirect national wealth to themselves and their owners. 

1. The Neo-Feudalization
   of the American economy.  The top 1% of wealth holders own
   41% of all the assets in the country while the bottom 40% own absolutely
   nothing.  Meanwhile, workers are saddled with $12 trillion of national
   debt, an effective indentured servitude that will bind them to their
   corporate masters for the rest of their lives.  This is the working
   definition of feudalism, where the rich own everything and everybody
   else has nothing but their proffered labor and their obligations to
   their masters.  The Hapsburgs, the Tudors, and the Bourbons would
   be jealous. 

1. The surrender
   of civil liberties.  Despite the Fourth Amendment supposedly
   protecting us against unreasonable searches and seizures, the government
   can now read your email and listen to your phone calls without any probable
   cause.  The Obama administration has gone to court to prevent the
   re-institution of Habeas Corpus, suspended during the Bush administration. 
   We are much less free, much less protected from brutalization by our
   own government than we were just ten years ago. 

1. The failure of
   "the free market" to sustain prosperity.  The "free market"
   has long been an ideological dodge used to resist real government regulation
   of the economy.  Still, the ideal was supposed to deliver prosperity
   in a stable, sustainable matter.  Now we have the greatest global
   economic collapse since the Great Depression, with the government transferring
   $11 trillion to the banks to cover their sociopathically greedy bets
   that went bust.  All in the name of deregulation, with future regulation
   vigorously resisted.  Is this a deranged  country or what?

1. The collapse
   of the media.  We once imagined it would guard the hen house. 
   Yet that was an anomaly, a freak event around Vietnam and Watergate
   when it slipped its leash.  Since then, sixty independent media
   outlets have consolidated into five, all retailing the ideology of the
   powerful, the perpetrators, laundering their lies, covering up the truth,
   and harassing the truth tellers.  In every story mentioned above,
   the mainstream media have worked to ensure that the people didn't
   know the truth about the forfeiture of their government, their wealth,
   their security, and their rights. 

1. The meaninglessness
   of elections.  This is the most embittering revelation of all. 
   Despite the greatest electoral majority since Johnson crushed Goldwater
   in '64, Barrack Obama has betrayed everything he ran on. In every
   case where he had the opportunity to confront power — in financial
   bailouts, financial regulation, health care, wars and military spending,
   utilities and global warming, national surveillance — Obama has sided
   with the rich and powerful against the interests of the American people. 
   He has probably engendered more cynicism, more disaffection with government
   than any president since Richard Nixon.  It will deal a staggering
   blow to the hopes of mobilizing masses of people again for a real takeback
   of government.  And he's not even one year into it. 

History
paints decades with broad brushes-the Roaring Twenties, The Depression,
World War II. Historians will look back on the Naughts as the time when
Americans Lost Their Country.  It was the decade when all the
institutions that they believed would protect them — the media, the
courts, Congress, the market, a messianic new president — in fact
betrayed them. It will forever more be a different country.

But not just yet.  Did I tell you about the big move to locally-grown produce?