The Real Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade

by Robert Freeman

• The Supreme Court hijacking the 2000 presidential election

This isn't even a historical controversy anymore

• 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

• Iraq was all premised on lies, yet we're still there.

• 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

• The fact that 2/3 of all economic growth went to top 1%.

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 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, indentured servitude that will bind them to their corporate masters for the rest of their lives. This is the working definition of feudalism

• The surrender of civil liberties.

Obama has gone to court to prevent the re-institution of Habeas Corpus, suspended during the Bush administration

• The failure of "the free market" to sustain prosperity.

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

• The collapse of the media.

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

• The meaninglessness of elections.

Barrack Obama has betrayed everything he ran on, in financial bailouts, financial regulation, health care, wars and military spending, utilities and global warming, national surveillance, engendered more cynicism since Richard Nixon, 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

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?