Much Has Happened In 20 Years - February 2010

There have been a number of historical moments in the United States during the twenty years in which DRW Magazine has been published in the Weston, Davie, Southwest Ranches, and Cooper City areas. Among those moments have been five key events in politics and economics which are detailed below in order of significance to me.

By far, the most impactful moment in the last twenty years was the terrorist attack on New York City’s Twin Towers in 2001. For many of us on the right, it solidified our belief that our western way of life was under attack by Islamic fundamentalists. While there had been previous attacks on our embassies overseas, on the USS Cole in Yemen, at international hotels, and a botched attempt at those same Twin Towers, the well organized 9/11 suicide attack brought the war to our shores. We were fortunate to have had a President who was prepared to do what was necessary to minimize future attacks by going on the offensive against the terrorist organizations and those entities which supported or housed them.

While many people have hailed the recent election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States as historic because of his race, I consider his election historic because of the utter destruction he has brought - and still may bring - to the fabric of this country. His populist class warfare has gone beyond a rallying cry for political points. His continuing verbal vilification of the business community along with the radical regulations being proposed by his various Czars have the potential to forever change American Capitalism in countless ways. That is if our American economy does not get dragged down first by the trillions of dollars of debt Obama has already generated in his first year in office. Saul Alinsky, the father of modern American radicalism, would be proud of Obama’s attempts to redistribute the nation’s wealth and his interest in moving our country towards a more socialistic model.

The Great Recession of 2008 which is still underway brought to the forefront the ugly side of greed. Whether it was certain Democratic Senators who protected Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from being investigated for their risky loan purchases which allowed those transactions to continue, or certain Wall Street whiz kids and hedge funds who created mortgage-backed derivatives, or those individuals who knowingly speculated in the real estate market or who borrowed more than they could afford, our country and the world is now paying for a speculative bubble that nearly brought our financial system to a complete halt. And now our responsible citizens and small business people cannot get the financing they need to improve their lives and grow their businesses. Hopefully the normal business cycle will pull us out of this rut.

In 1998, the Republican-led Congress attempted to impeach President Clinton for lying under oath about an extramarital sexual liaison he had with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office of our White House. There were many – and I mean many – reasons why I did not like President Clinton during his term of office, but that gotcha effort by the Republicans sacrificed what community spirit people of all political sides still had at that time simply to get back at the Democrats for their partisan attempts to stall the great efforts of President Reagan years before with the ridiculous Iran Contra investigations. Since those days of the Clinton impeachment attempt, our country has been split ideologically, religiously, and economically like never before in my lifetime to the point that each party and its zealots will do whatever they can to defeat their opponents regardless of the potential for common ground in governing our country.

Although Al Gore did not invent the internet, I am glad that our military experts and leading universities did so and that our country has been able to exponentially benefit from it in the past twenty years. From online worldwide commerce, to unfettered (and sometimes unreliable) news postings, to the electronic communications now popular on cellular phones and portable laptops, the worldwide interconnection of computer networks has drastically changed our ways of living – mostly for the better. Imagine our lives today without Google; eBay; the iPhone and its apps; GPS systems, and YouTube.

I could mention many more significant events if I had the printed space to do so. I can only hope that America remembers and can learn from its past challenges in the next twenty years, can heal its partisan divide, and that capitalism can continue to unleash our country’s potential.