Greedy and Seedy: The Double-O Decade

Keeping in mind the old adage, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all,” how would you describe a decade that launched with a possible Y2K apocalypse and the resounding pop of the dot.com bubble, marched right into the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and continued around the First Circle of Hell with the collapse of Enron and the Iraq war? And that’s before bankers backed 18-wheelers up to housing projects and started offloading mortgage loan applications, all of which they approved.
Nice? Nice?
OK, thank you, Captain Sully, for harmlessly gliding your US Airways airbus into the Hudson River early this year (2009) to save the lives of all 155 aboard instead of smashing into the side of Manhattan.
There, we’ve said something nice. Now let’s get to the other stuff.

Just Hand Over the Election and Nobody Gets Hurt: (2000) Remember way, way back in your ninth-grade civics cIass any mention of the U.S. Constitution? Separation of powers -- anyone? If so, during the 2000 presidential election, you’d have been one up on the U.S. Supreme Court, which promptly misremembered that venerable document when, as the judicial branch, it halted the recount of thousands of contested ballots in Florida and handed the 2000 presidential (executive branch) election over to George W. Bush. (The Constitution expressly forbids footsie of all kinds among the branches.) Before that historic first and worst in the history of democracy and our country, then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the Sunshine State’s Supreme Court and Secretary of State Katherine Harris (who was the co-chair for Bush’s election efforts in Florida) resembled characters in a Federico Fellini treatment of Woody Allen’s 1971 movie, “Bananas,” in their determination to get Jeb’s big brother into the White House. Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore had a slight lead going in, and Florida’s 25 electoral votes were crucial to victory. To that end, this team of Bush dandies moved heaven and earth -- and some 22,000 mostly black, Democratic citizens off the list of eligible voters by wrongly classifying them as felons. Never the type to let voters stand in the way, top U.S. military brass (also Bush supporters) had the majority of its pro-Bush overseas ballots shipped to Florida, where they were counted -- even the 2,940 invalid ballots that arrived after the Nov. 17 deadline. When Gore dared to point out this violation, retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf (Surprise! A Bush supporter!) accused him of denying servicemen their right to vote. And those whacky butterfly ballots were so confusing that many voters realized later they’d inadvertently selected the wrong candidate. Harris halted ballot recounts and Gore contested that decision, which went to the U.S. Supremes, the country’s supposed top know-it-alls on the Constitution. They delivered the presidency to Bush.

The Absolute Most Awful Day, 9/11: (2001) Terrorists drove two hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, banking the jets’ wings just before impact to kill as many workers in the buildings as possible, and leveling the iconic twin towers. The dead: 2,976. The country reeled in grief and shock, then experienced a collective inferiority complex. “Why does everybody hate us? What did we do? ” American history books fail to mention little things like aggressive U.S. colonialism, CIA assassinations of popular leaders in foreign countries and their replacement with despised puppet governments, and the widespread rape and pillage of indigenous resources in every corner of the globe in the name of the old U.S. of A. Oops, our bad. And in Americans’ ensuing desperation for a noble leader in the wreckage and ruins just after the attacks, they mistakenly thought G.W. was one. Turns out he’d gotten the memo in August warning of the impending attacks and identifying Osama bin Laden by name, but the prez was way too busy rushing out of town for a weekend at his Crosby ranch to let such pesky details get in the way.

“Enron stock is a real bargain”: (2001) Two weeks before Enron declared bankruptcy on Dec. 2, its executives admitted making a teensy little boo-boo on their earnings statement – they’d somehow exaggerated the company’s earnings by $586 million since 1997. No surprise that Enron stock was hurtling down the toilet when CEO Ken “Everyman” Lay called an employee-wide meeting to bolster his workers’ confidence. Why, heck! This is an opportunity, he told them. With the stock’s falling prices, it’s an absolute steal! (At the time, Lay was selling off the same stock in huge chunks.) Whether anyone took his advice that day, more than half of Lay’s employees’ 401(k) savings -- $1.2 billion – was invested in Enron stock, which became worthless overnight when the energy company flat lined in one of the biggest corporate scandals in U.S. history. Most of the company’s 21,000 employees were fired and got $4,500 each in severance along with their walking papers. In May of 2006, Lay and his protégé, former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, were convicted of a total of 29 counts in a grab bag of charges, most of them for securities fraud, insider trading and for concealing Enron’s status as a goner to Wall Street with their booming brand of boosterism. The 64-year-old Lay, who proclaimed his innocence throughout the trial, faced at least a 20-year prison term and could well have died in federal incarceration had he not done so July 5 – 41 days after his conviction -- in one of the family’s two luxurious condos in Aspen. His convictions were vacated since, to date, dead men have not been able to file appeals. Skilling, serving a 24-year sentence in a fab federal bungalow in Waseca, Minn., has filed an appeal that will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in early 2010. He still works five days a week, now earning from 12 to 40 cents an hour. No word yet on whether he’s on laundry or license plate detail.

Let them eat yellowcake: (2003) The prospect of an Iraq war conjured rosy scenarios when G.W. floated the idea to his circle of advisers. “We’ll be greeted as heroes!” “Iraq’s oil will pay for it!” “It’ll be a slam-dunk!” As this decade closes, the longest slam-dunk in history is still in mid-parabola, with 4,435 U.S. soldiers dead and who-knows-how-many Iraqi casualties. The WMDs, supposedly the impetus for G.W.’s war, never existed, and many wonder if G.W. was just itching to conclude Daddy Bush’s feud with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was in bad need of a barber when they found him cowering in a spider hole in 2003, and badly in need of a head after his execution by hanging in 2006. At Bush’s first National Security Council meeting 10 days after he was elected – and 11 months before 9/11 -- Bush brought up the idea of going after Saddam. He took the terrorist attacks as the green light he was waiting for and produced stories of yellowcake uranium he said Saddam’s henchmen were obtaining to produce nuclear weapons, a story dutifully repeated by his staff before Congress. The man who will go down in history as the vacation president (by 2004, he’d relaxed at his Crosby ranch 33 times) sent thousands of troops on “military vacations” in sunny Iraq and many on repeat vacations there. Most of these dream trips transpired after that mother of all photo ops on May 2, 2003, when G.W., sporting the latest in flight suit fashion, emerged from the fighter jet that had chauffeured him to the personnel carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, where a giant banner proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.”

Hurricane hell: This decade delivered a double-whammy of deadly hurricanes and sticky, sweltering aftermath in the days before power was restored. The costliest and one of the five most deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history landed Aug. 29, 2005, on the southeast Louisiana coast and wreaked its Category 5 wrath from Florida to Texas. But Katrina’s biggest loser was New Orleans, where natural disaster combined with the manmade: years of negligence in maintaining the city’s levee system, which couldn’t hold the storm surge and broke down hours after Katrina had moved inland, flooding 80 percent of the city. Many evacuees climbed aboard buses and found themselves in Houston, where the Astrodome had been fitted with cots, kitchens and offices to help victims find missing family members. In all, 1,836 died. Even fresher on our minds is 2008’s Hurricane Ike, which became the costliest natural disaster in Texas history with its 110-mph winds that killed 112 people in the U.S. and wreaked $29 billion in damage during its Sept. 14 debut. Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula got clobbered, with many buildings leveled and elegant old oaks that once lined streets on the island uprooted or snapped in half. Seaside communities looked bombed out in the aftermath; some no longer bore any physical markings that would tip off a first-time visitor that civilization had once had a foothold there.

Lewd leaders: It was truly large-hearted of these guys, in a decade of mostly bad news, to provide the public with more than a little titillation with their outrageous sexploits. Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), whose bills were primarily aimed at protecting children from sexual predators, kicked off this parade of perversity in 2006 by sending several sexually explicit emails to teenage congressional interns, including his “favorite young stud.” Foley resigned shortly after “ABC News” revealed his cyber-correspondence. Some might argue that prostitutes are passé, but Sen. David “Family Values” Vitter’s proclivity for donning adult diapers while visiting the “D.C. Madam” in 2007 lob this senator from Louisiana straight into the winners’ circle. And he survived the scandal to co-sponsor the “Marriage Protection Amendment” with who else but Larry Craig (read on), the Idaho senator whose claims of having a “wide stance” in matters of the bathroom conjured a mental picture so hideous that only watching erstwhile house speaker Tom DeLay’s butt-wiggling on “Dancing with the Stars” could replace it in its assault on public decorum. Was it our imagination, or were strains of “Looking for Love In All the Wrong Places” playing in the background in August of 2007 as reporters told of his arrest in a gay sex sting for employing classic “come on” tactics with a law-enforcement agent in the next stall of a men’s room in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport? Those included extending his foot into his neighbor’s stall and rubbing it, for which Craig employed the old “wide stance” defense. Just to make sure the Democrats weren’t left out, N.Y. Gov. Eliot “Client-9” Spitzer resigned in 2008 after his dalliances with female employees of the Emperors Club VIP (read: call girl service) in the Mayflower Hotel in D.C. became public. And speaking of governors, S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford, who thought he’d get a little writing done on Father’s Day weekend, 2009, while hiking along the Appalachian Trail generated national headlines (“Where is S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford?”) after getting rid of his security detail and leaving his staff clueless. The conservative Republican later admitted he was on booty call in Argentina with his true soul-mate, although he was really, really sorry. Wife Jenny Sanford later ditched attempts at reconciliation and filed for divorce.

Just sign right here on the dotted line: Wouldn't you think something was fishy if you saw bankers setting up card tables outside of gypsy camps where they could approve home loan applications? Hey, it's the American dream. And bankers extended the same subprime loan approval to dead people, dogs and assorted frozen food items, and still nobody picked up on it -- despite the "lessons of Enron," (the danger of novel investments no one can decipher) that they professed to have learned so well. But when it involved their novel investments, the liability for which they could handily package and sell to others, they, well, just forgot and continued to approve toxic assets by the tonnage, naively believing that what goes up (home prices) mustn't necessarily come down -- ever. When the subprime borrowers, many of whose applications had been doctored to show unlikely annual incomes (fry cook: $87K), couldn't make their payments, subprime lenders started folding. The trouble spread to Wall Street investment banks that had been accruing gargantuan debt and liabilities with very little capital left in reserve if things went wrong. And boy, did things go wrong. Next thing you know, those buttoned-down bankers were panhandling in the Oval Office, where G.W., whose banking deregulation was the cornerstone of this unraveling, deemed them "too big to fail" and bailed them out with an early Christmas present of $250 billion. Now these same banks refuse to lend to longtime customers who've always repaid their loans on time. Is something wrong with this picture?

Not playing with a full decade: The biggest surprise of the 2008 presidential campaign had to be the emergence of that perky little soccer mom/Alaskan governor cum Republican VP candidate Sarah “the Barracuda” Palin whose $180,000 shopping spree for chic campaign threads for her and her family redefined “shock and awe” for the Republican party. Her frequent winking into news cameras during the VP debate assured one and all that she was capable of handing little ol’ details like an economy in freefall, Mideast peace and Iran’s nuke buildup. When asked by CBS anchor Katie Couric which newspapers and magazines she read, she replied “all of ‘em,” but couldn’t name one, a moment forever enshrined on youtube.com. She was, however, adept at repeating simple phrases, such as “Drill, baby, drill” to show her concern for her home state’s pristine wilderness and “Choose life!,” trumpeting her Down Syndrome toddler as living proof of both her views on abortion and her judgment in have a child in her mid-40s.

There goes the neighborhood: Who said only white guys can live in the White House? In 2008, President Barack Obama changed all that in an historic election that hailed an African American chief for the first time, generating international headlines and wrecking the racist image the U.S. has long held, despite the efforts of birthers who are still trying to prove he wasn’t born in the U.S. This promptly caused the Nobel committee to cast aside the long-held requirement of achievement in awarding its 2009 peace prize and give it to Obama for the good feelings he generated by getting elected. Despite the daunting list of disasters he inherited from President Cowboy and the continuing intransigence of Republican lawmakers whose “kill, delay or filibuster” approach to any presidential bills, Obama continues to make headway as he enters his second year as president. Democratic control of the House of Representatives and even-steven control of the U.S. Senate have made so far for a bumpy but successful ride so far for the health care bill and other Obama-inspired legislation.

Bernie made off with the money: (2008) He's sorry, guys. Did you hear that, Yeshiva University, Women's Zionist Organization of America, Elie Wiesenthal Foundation for Humanity? He really is. Bernie Madoff, former head of the NASDAQ and author of a massive Ponzi scheme called the largest investment fraud in Wall Street history, targeted mostly fellow Jews with promises of returns on investments between 13.5 and 20 percent, too good to pass up if, in retrospect, too good to be true. The amount bilked from investors totaled $65 billion, an unwelcome holiday gift to his hundreds of clients when the news hit last year in early December after he told his sons that his investment firm had been “one big lie,” FBI agents swooped down and nabbed him. Jewish hospitals and organizations lost millions, forcing some to shut their doors. After insisting he was the only responsible party to the 11 charges on his dazzling indictment, a federal judge gave him 150 years in prison for him to “feel sorry” for his clients.