WHAT DO WE CALL THE DECADE FROM 2000 THRU 2009?

The "Cowboy Bush Decade" deserves a different name.

...9/11 changed everything

When you think about it, no one as yet has been able to come up with an appropriate name for this first decade of the 21st Century.

The first decade of the 1900´s was called the "Decade of New Inventions". From 1900 to 1909, the new and modern inventions that eventually changed the world included; the first typewriter, color photography, the Wright Bros. first flight, the first massed produced Model "T" Ford, Hollywood´s first film studio, the first "ship-to-shore radio/telephone", the telephone answering machine, the first Yellow Pages, the first radio talk show and even the very first comic book.

Then came the "Roaring 20´s", the decade of the "Great Depression", WW II was followed by the "Swinging 40´s"and after that was the "Baby-Boomer Generation". After them came the, "Nuclear Decade", the "Decade of Free Love 60´s", the "Peace-Nik Decade" followed by the "Flower Children of the 70´s". And finally the decade of the fall of the "Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union" into the decade of the "Internet and the Dot-Com" era.

So far, the only references I´ve heard of the decade from 2000 thru 2009 are "The Lost Decade", "The Cowboy Bush Decade", "The Devastation Decade" and the latest one, "The Decade from Hell".

But to come up with the proper name, let´s review what actually occurred over the last 10 years, starting with the last weeks of the previous decade and going forward.

It start in 1999 with the last weeks of the Clinton administration. During those last weeks, Republican Senator Phil Gramm inserted an amendment, under heavy pressure from DC Lobbyists that repealed the Glass-Siegle Act. This depression-era Law had previously separated Commercial Banking from Investment Banking. (This repeal eventually brought about a large part of the financial Wall Street and bank debacle of 2008.)

Also, in the last few years of the 1990´s, the business community and the computer industry was very nervous about the coming "Y2K" event, and the fear of the "Y2K end-of-the-world as we know it" and what it was expected to do to major businesses was amazing. The actual result of Y2K was of a minimal effect and at the worst it was just an expensive intrusion on the day to day efforts of most businesses.

The first year of the new decade actually started with a very positive attitude. There was no Y2K bug, no terrorism, nothing but laughs and lots of fireworks as the planet turned and the time zones replaced all the previous nines with zeroes.

America was totally at peace. Prosperity was reigning and the out-going US president had just announced a budget surplus of $230 billion. The only dilemma for the mostly Republican lawmakers was what to do with all the extra money. People were watching the values of their homes continue to increase and the Dow had jumped 25% in just one year. Most adult Americans were also thinking how much their 401K´s would be growing over the coming decade.

With a whole library of music now available on a device the size of the palm of your hand, technology was offering a virtual escape from the real world. Unfortunately, the real world wouldn't leave Americans alone.

Needless to say, the warnings that were received a month before the 9/11 attacks by the Bush Administration that the Muslim extremist, Osama bin Laden, was intending to attack the United States using commercial aircraft eventually became a real embarrassment. In fact, the actual title of President Bush´s August morning security briefing was: "Bin Laden determined to attack inside US". But he and the vice president chose to just go on a mental vacation and do nothing.

Of course, the actual 9/11 attacks changed America forever.

In fact, for most Americans, the actual decade didn´t really start in 2000. In reality for America, it started on September 12, 2001.

What was so astounding was that most Americans had no idea that there were those out there that hated America and its citizens to the point of doing such a horrible deed as the 9/11 attacks. Americans were shocked by 9/11. The previous screams and taunts of the jihadists had never really touched the consciousness of a peacetime America. That September morning, observing the carnage in New York and Washington and in a field in rural Pennsylvania, Americans still asked: "What do these people want from us?"

From that point on, time went pretty fast as we went to war in Afghanistan to avenge those that died on 9/11.

But then the leadership of America decided to take advantage of the current atmosphere and they diverted the nation´s attention to another opportunity to go to war. A war of choice that was predicted to be a "cakewalk". It was a war with Iraq that the president had wanted since his father had left the task, in his opinion, "undone". Misinformation and untruths were used to get us into the unnecessary war where thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and US troops died for absolutely no reason, and unfortunately, they are still dying.

The administration had originally said "This war will be over in six weeks or less and Iraq´s oil will pay for the war." So much for that concept. We are still at war, it is costing Americans trillions of dollars, and that first war in Afghanistan was virtually then ignored. Eventually, the Taliban in Afghanistan came back to be even stronger than before, and now we have two foreign wars where we are still spending our precious treasure of young Americans and billions of tax payer dollars.

And as the blissful nation later learned, the country´s outstanding economy was something of a hoax. As it was stated in a Washington Post editorial; "The optimists were routed, the pessimists validated."

As is usual for Republican presidents, the $230 billion Democratic budgetary surplus of 2000 only lasted about as long as it takes to declare a "war of choice". The US debt eventually caused the decade to end with the government running annual deficits larger than ever in US history. (And for Republican administrations that have always left deficits, having the biggest one yet is really saying something!)

On top of the wars, we then had our domestic disasters with the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Over 1,500 Americans died in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, many unnecessarily due to foul-ups by the president and the administrations appointed heads of FEMA and the new Homeland Security Administration.

About half way through the last decade, Mr. Jack Abramoff, the Washington lobbyist, had his own encounter with the Department of Corrections, as later did the Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, not to mention the highfliers at places like Enron and WorldCom.

The financial debacles in this era became a kind of "group activity". Many institutions were not, in fact, too big to fail. The long-time Wall Street firm of Lehman Brothers proved that point. In that case, being large and established proved to be a handicap in an era that favored the small and nimble.

The Internet then went on to destabilized everything from newspapers to the music industry to global security. The Muslim Jihadists also used the YouTube site to recruit their suicide terrorists.

Eventually, the negative effects of that amendment from Republican Senator Phil Gramm which repealed the Glass-Siegle Act, then made itself very clear. This all came to a head when the housing bubble burst due to all of the Republicans de-regulations, and the Bush Administration´s ill-advised home "Ownership Society".

Home loans had been made to people that should never have been given a mortgage loan and we now have a record number of home loan foreclosures and personal bankruptcies. Those 401K´s that had been growing so well, were now deflating by more than 50% and the entire economy had been inflated by the unrealistic belief that what goes up can't possibly go down. But it did, and in less than just a few weeks and months.

An African American had just become the 44th US president, when at the same time the American auto industry almost went out of business. Businesses in both big and small town America, that most people thought would never go away, did.

For the weather, it was the hottest decade on record and the glaciers around the world are still continuing in full retreat. Everyone can now calculate his or her own "carbon footprint" and even some oil companies are claiming to be "Green". The one thing that didn't change was the increase in the world´s emissions of carbon. Those just continue to grow.

However, as to new technologies, the Internet finally came into its own as did Yahoo and Google. The desk top computer has given way to the notebook and the cell phone has become a commodity and is also becoming a rival to some of the notebook computers. And every year, more and more people are shopping via the Internet .

China and India, with their billions of citizens have come into their own and through "globalization", they now perform jobs that were previously all done by Americans.

Mr. Stewart Brand, a technology spokesperson, says today that in 50 years the symbol of this decade might be the "Humvee Decade". He says. "This decade will be seen as the last blast of extravagant wastefulness of energy, material and lovely wretched excess, and probably will be viewed with a certain amount of nostalgia."

Mr. Brand may be correct. But at least for myself and for those of us that have been living through it, I think the "The Decade from Hell" pretty much does say it all.

Copyright: G.Ater 2010

Follow me on Twitter: gater01