223 As tax revenues fall, States becoming dysfunctional - Endgame, by John Michael Greer

(1) As tax revenues fall, States becoming dysfunctional - Endgame, by John Michael Greer
(2) Bill to ban election spending by foreign-owned corporations
(3) "Hamilton's Curse or Blessing" debate shows limits of American thinking
(4) Buzzwords deciphered: Eric Walberg's Newspeak Dictionary

(1) As tax revenues fall, States becoming dysfunctional - Endgame, by John Michael Greer

From: Paul de Burgh-Day <pdeburgh@harboursat.com.au> Date: 05.02.2010 07:51 AM

Endgame

John Michael Greer

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

I’ve mentioned more than once in these essays the foreshortening effect that textbook history can have on our understanding of the historical events going on around us. The stark chronologies most of us get fed in school can make it hard to remember that even the most drastic social changes happen over time, amid the fabric of everyday life and a flurry of events that can seem more important at the time.

This becomes especially problematic in times like the present, when apocalyptic prophecy is a central trope in the popular culture that frames a people’s hopes and fears for the future. When the collective imagination becomes obsessed with the dream of a sudden cataclysm that sweeps away the old world overnight and ushers in the new, even relatively rapid social changes can pass by unnoticed. The twilight years of Rome offer a good object lesson; so many people were convinced that the Second Coming might occur at any moment that the collapse of classical civilization went almost unnoticed; only a tiny handful of writers from those years show any recognition that something out of the ordinary was happening at all.

Reflections of this sort have been much on my mind lately, and there’s a reason for that. Scattered among the statistical noise that makes up most of today’s news are data points that suggest to me that business as usual is quietly coming to an end around us, launching us into a new world for which very few of us have made any preparations at all.

Here’s one example. Friends of mine in a couple of midwestern states have mentioned that the steady trickle of refugees from the Chicago slums into their communities has taken a sharp turn up. There’s a long history of dysfunction behind this. Back in 1999, Chicago began tearing down its vast empire of huge high-rise projects, promising to replace them with less ghastly and more widely distributed housing for the poor. Most of the replacements, of course, never got built. When the waiting list for Section 8 rent subsidies, the only other option available, got long enough to become a public relations problem, the bureaucrats in charge simply closed the list to new applicants; rumors (hotly denied by the Chicago city government) claim that poor families in Chicago were openly advised to move to other states. Whether for that reason or simple economic survival, a fair number of them did.

Fast forward to the middle of 2009. Around then, facing budget deficits second only to California, the state of Illinois quietly stopped paying its social service providers. In theory, the money is still allocated; in practice, it’s been more than six months since Illinois preschools, senior centers, food banks, and the like have received a check from the state for the services they provide, and many of them are on the verge of going broke. Subsidized rent has apparently taken an equivalent hit. Believers in free-market economics have been insisting for years that the end of rent subsidies would let the free market reduce rents to a level that people could afford, but I don’t recommend holding your breath; this is the same free market, remember, that gave the United States some of the world’s worst slums in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The actual effects have been instructive. Squeezed between sharply contracting benefits and a sharply contracting job market, many of Chicago’s poor are hitting the road, heading in any direction that offers more options. Forget the survivalist fantasy of violent hordes pouring out of the inner cities to ravage everything in their path; today’s slum residents are instead becoming the Okies of the Great Recession. In the process, part of business as usual in the United States is coming to an end.

Illinois is far from the only state that backed itself into a corner by assuming that rising tax revenues from a bubble economy could be extrapolated indefinitely into the future. 41 US states currently face budget deficits. California has received most of the media attention so far, a good deal of it focused on the political gridlock that has kept the state frozen in crisis for years. Behind the partisan posturing in Sacramento, though, lies a deeper and harsher reality. The state of California is essentially bankrupt; nearly all the mistakes made by the once-wealthy states of the Rust Belt as they slid down the curve of their own decline have been faithfully copied by California as it approaches its destiny as the Rust Belt of the 21st century. I wonder how many local governments in neighboring states have drawn up plans for dealing with the tide of economic refugees once California can no longer pay for its welfare system, and the poor of Los Angeles and other California cities join those of Chicago on the road?

I could go on, but I think the point has been made. State governments are the canaries in our national coal mine; their tax receipts are one of the very few measures of economic activity that aren’t being systematically fiddled by the federal government. The figures coming out of state revenue offices strike a jarring contrast with the handwaving about “green shoots” and an imminent return to prosperity heard from Washington DC and the media. Across the country, every few months, states that have already cut spending drastically to cope with record declines in tax income find that they have to go back and do it all over again, because their revenue – and by inference, the incomes, purchases, business activity, and other economic phenomena that feed into taxes – has dropped even further. Now it’s true that state budgets get hit whenever the economy goes into recession, and keep on hurting even when the recession is supposed to be over, but compared to past examples, the losses clobbering state funding these days are off the scale, and a great many programs that have been fixtures of American public life for as long as most of us have been living are facing the chopping block.

A different reality pertains within the Washington DC beltway. Where states that fail to balance their budgets get their bond ratings cut and, in some cases, are having trouble finding buyers for their debt at less than usurious interest rates, the federal government seems to be able to defy the normal behavior of bond markets with impunity. Despite soaring deficits, not to mention a growing disinclination on the part of foreign governments to keep on financing the same, every new issuance of US treasury bills somehow finds buyers in such abundance that interest rates stay remarkably low. A few weeks ago, Tom Whipple of ASPO became the latest in a tolerably large number of perceptive observers who have pointed out that this makes sense only if the US government is surreptitiously buying its own debt.

The process works something like this. The Federal Reserve, which is not actually a government agency but a consortium of large banks working under a Federal charter, has the statutory right to mint money in the US. These days, that can be done by a few keystrokes on a computer, and another few keystrokes can transfer that money to any bank in the nation. Some of those banks use the money to buy up US treasury bills, probably by way of subsidiaries chartered in the Cayman Islands and the like, and these same subsidiaries then stash the T-bills and keep them off the books. The money thus laundered finally arrives at the US treasury, where it gets spent.

It may be a bit more complex than that. Those huge sums of money voted by Congress to bail out the financial system may well have been diverted into this process – that would certainly explain why the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have stonewalled every attempt to trace exactly where all that money went. Friendly foreign governments may also have a hand in the process. One way or another, though, those of my readers who remember the financial engineering that got Enron its fifteen minutes of fame may find all this uncomfortably familiar – and it is. The world’s largest economy has become, in effect, the United States of Enron.

Plenty of countries in the past have tried to cover expenses that overshot income by spinning the presses at the local mint. The result is generally hyperinflation, of the sort made famous in the 1920s by Germany and more recently by Zimbabwe. That I know of, though, nobody has tried the experiment with a national economy in a steep deflationary depression, of the sort that has been taking shape in America and elsewhere since the real estate bubble crashed and burned in 2008. In theory, at least in the short term, it might just work; the inflationary pressures caused by printing money wholesale could conceivably cancel out the deflationary pressures of a collapsing bubble and a contracting economy – at least for a while.

The difficulty, of course, is that pumping the money supply fixes the symptoms of economic failure without treating the causes, and in every case I know of, governments that resort to it end up caught on a treadmill that requires ever larger infusions of paper money just to maintain the status quo. Sooner or later, as the amount of currency in circulation outstrips the goods and services available to buy, inflation spins out of control, the currency loses most or all of its value, and the economy grinds to a halt until a new currency can be issued on some sounder basis. In 1920s Germany, they managed this last feat by taking out a mortgage on the entire country, and issued “Rentenmarks” backed by that mortgage. In the wake of the late housing bubble, that seems an unlikely option here, though no doubt some gimmick will be found.

It’s crucial to realize, though, that this move comes at the end of a long historical trajectory. From the early days of the industrial revolution into the early 1970s, the United States possessed the immense economic advantage of sizeable reserves of whatever the cutting-edge energy source happened to be. During what Lewis Mumford called the eotechnic era, when waterwheels were the prime mover for industry and canals were the core transportation technology, the United States prospered because it had an abundance of mill sites and internal waterways. During Mumford’s paleotechnic era, when coal and railways replaced water and canal boats, the United States once again found itself blessed with huge coal reserves, and the arrival of the neotechnic era, when petroleum and highways became the new foundation of power, the United States found that nature had supplied it with so much oil that in 1950, it produced more petroleum than all other countries combined.

That trajectory came to an abrupt end in the 1970s, when nuclear power – expected by nearly everyone to be the next step in the sequence – turned out to be hopelessly uneconomical, and renewables proved unable to take up the slack. The neotechnic age, in effect, turned out to have no successor. Since then, for most of the last thirty years, the United States has been trying to stave off the inevitable – the sharp downward readjustment of our national standard of living and international importance following the peak and decline of our petroleum production and the depletion of most of the other natural resources that once undergirded American economic and political power. We’ve tried accelerating drawdown of natural resources; we’ve tried abandoning our national infrastructure, our industries, and our agricultural hinterlands; we’ve tried building ever more baroque systems of financial gimmickry to prop up our decaying economy with wealth from overseas; over the last decade and a half, we’ve resorted to systematically inflating speculative bubbles – and now, with our backs to the wall, we’re printing money as though there’s no tomorrow.

Now it’s possible that the current US administration will be able to pull one more rabbit out of its hat, and find a new gimmick to keep things going for a while longer. I have to confess that this does not look likely to me. Monetizing the national debt, as economists call the attempt to pay a nation’s bills by means of a hyperactive printing press, is a desperation move; it’s hard to imagine any reason that it would have been chosen if there were any other option in sight.

What this means, if I’m right, is that we may have just moved into the endgame of America’s losing battle with the consequences of its own history. For many years now, people in the peak oil scene – and the wider community of those concerned about the future, to be sure – have had, or thought they had, the luxury of ample time to make plans and take action. Every so often books would be written and speeches made claiming that something had to be done right away, while there was still time, but most people took that as the rhetorical flourish it usually was, and went on with their lives in the confident expectation that the crisis was still a long ways off.

We may no longer have that option. If I read the signs correctly, America has finally reached the point where its economy is so deep into overshoot that catabolic collapse is beginning in earnest. If so, a great many of the things most of us in this country have treated as permanent fixtures are likely to go away over the years immediately before us, as the United States transforms itself into a Third World country. The changes involved won’t be sudden, and it seems unlikely that most of them will get much play in the domestic mass media; a decade from now, let’s say, when half the American workforce has no steady work, decaying suburbs have mutated into squalid shantytowns, and domestic insurgencies flare across the south and the mountain West, those who still have access to cable television will no doubt be able to watch talking heads explain how we’re all better off than we were in 2000.

Those of my readers who haven’t already been beggared by the unraveling of what’s left of the economy, and have some hope of keeping a roof over their heads for the foreseeable future, might be well advised to stock their pantries, clear their debts, and get to know their neighbors, if they haven’t taken these sensible steps already. Those of my readers who haven’t taken the time already to learn a practical skill or two, well enough that others might be willing to pay or barter for the results, had better get a move on. Those of my readers who want to see some part of the heritage of the present saved for the future, finally, may want to do something practical about that, and soon. I may be wrong – and to be frank, I hope that I’m wrong – but it looks increasingly to me as though we’re in for a very rough time in the very near future.

(2) Bill to ban election spending by foreign-owned corporations

From: Denver Media Service <ron@denvermediaservice.com> Date: 01.02.2010 09:48 AM From: Greg Dempsey

http://michaelsantomauro.blogspot.com/2010/01/sen-al-franken-introduces-bill-to-limit.html

SEN AL FRANKEN INTRODUCES BILL TO LIMIT SUPREME COURT RULING

Sen. Al Franken introduced a bill aimed at curtailing  foreign influence in U.S. elections, a measure prompted  by a Supreme Court ruling last week his office said  overturned not just federal campaign finance laws but  also a 20-year-old Minnesota law prohibiting corporate  spending on elections.

Franken’s bill would ban election spending and contributions by corporations  primarily financed by foreign nationals, whose boards of directors or stock  ownership are controlled by a majority foreign nationals. Companies that  allow foreign nationals to participate in political activities like political action  committees would also be barred.

All other companies would be required to disclose exactly how much of their firm is controlled by foreign nationals or, if they can’t, how much of their  financing comes from foreign nationals.

(3) "Hamilton's Curse or Blessing" debate shows limits of American thinking

From: Jonathan Graham <phoenix.x@bigpond.com> Date: 04.02.2010 09:51 PM
Subject: Hamilton's Curse or Blessing?

Professor Thomas DiLorenzo's Hamilton's Curse (2008) is partly a response to the well-written and well-argued book by John Steele Gordon, entitled Hamilton's Blessing (1997), on the political debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton on the problem of debt that shaped a nation and the modern world.

Hamilton's Curse:
How Jefferson's Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution - and What It Means for Americans Today
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Paperback - Dec. 8, 2009)
http://www.amazon.com/Hamiltons-Curse-Jeffersons-Revolution-Americans/dp/0307382850

Hamilton's Blessing:
The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt
by John Steele Gordon (Paperback - Jan. 1, 1998)
http://www.amazon.com/Hamiltons-Blessing-Extraordinary-Times-National/dp/0140270159
Revised Edition to be released March 30, 2010
http://www.amazon.com/Hamiltons-Blessing-Extraordinary-National-Revised/dp/0802717993

Other books on Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Alexander Hamilton (1755 or 1757-1804) and the National Debt.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Thomas+Jefferson++Debt++Alexander+Hamilton+&x=-174&y=7
And
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Jefferson++National+Debt+++Hamilton+&x=-174&y=7

Other iconoclastic books by Professor Thomas DiLorenzo
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=Thomas%20DiLorenzo ==

http://www.amazon.com/Hamiltons-Curse-Jeffersons-Revolution-Americans/dp/0307382850

Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution--and What It Means for Americans Today

Thomas DiLorenzo

Product Description

Two of the most influential figures in American history. Two opposing political philosophies. Two radically different visions for America.

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were without question two of the most important Founding Fathers. They were also the fiercest of rivals. Of these two political titans, it is Jefferson—–the revered author of the Declaration of Independence and our third president—–who is better remembered today. But in fact it is Hamilton’s political legacy that has triumphed—–a legacy that has subverted the Constitution and transformed the federal government into the very leviathan state that our forefathers fought against in the American Revolution.

How did we go from the Jeffersonian ideal of limited government to the bloated imperialist system of Hamilton’s design? Acclaimed economic historian Thomas J. DiLorenzo provides the troubling answer in Hamilton’s Curse.

DiLorenzo reveals how Hamilton, first as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and later as the nation’s first and most influential treasury secretary, masterfully promoted an agenda of nationalist glory and interventionist economics—–core beliefs that did not die with Hamilton in his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. Carried on through his political heirs, the Hamiltonian legacy:

• Wrested control into the hands of the federal government by inventing the myth of the Constitution’s “implied powers”
• Established the imperial presidency (Hamilton himself proposed a permanent president—–in other words, a king)
• Devised a national banking system that imposes boom-and-bust cycles on the American economy
• Saddled Americans with a massive national debt and oppressive taxation
• Inflated the role of the federal courts in order to eviscerate individual liberties and state sovereignty
• Pushed economic policies that lined the pockets of the wealthy and created a government system built on graft, spoils, and patronage
• Transformed state governments from Jeffersonian bulwarks of liberty to beggars for federal crumbs

By debunking the Hamiltonian myths perpetuated in recent admiring biographies, DiLorenzo exposes an uncomfortable truth: The American people are no longer the masters of their government but its servants. Only by restoring a system based on Jeffersonian ideals can Hamilton’s curse be lifted, at last.

88 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars

By J. D. Seagraves (Michigan) - See all my reviews
         
In Hamilton's Curse, author Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo traces the roots of America's economic and political systems to the first secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. We are truly living in "Hamilton's Republic," says Dr. DiLorenzo -- but this is far from a good thing.

While it is Thomas Jefferson's face that graces Mount Rushmore, and tremendous lip service is paid to his greatness as a political thinker and president, in reality, Jefferson's ideas have been entirely marginalized, while those of his arch rival Hamilton now form the backbone of the American political establishment. The Revolution of 1776 was a Jeffersonian Revolution to throw off the yoke of British mercantilist imperialism and install it its place a voluntary union of free and independent states. Hamilton and his acolytes, however -- no matter how bravely and earnestly they fought against the Red Coats -- wanted to import British mercantilism to America with the U.S. aristocracy (Hamilton and his Federalist buddies) on the receiving end of the mercantilist spoils system. In fact, DiLorenzo argues that the Constitution itself was a virtual coup against the free republic of the Articles of Confederation for the purpose of increasing the authority of the central government -- key to Hamilton's plans.

But Hamilton couldn't create the unitary nationalist government in one fell swoop. Indeed, his plans to install a permanent president -- an American king -- with the power to appoint state governors and veto state legislation failed miserably. But as soon as the Constitution was ratified, Hamilton (who argued the pseudo-Jeffersonian case for its ratification in the Federalist Papers) set about subverting it. It was Hamilton who invented the concept of "implied powers."

Hamilton had George Washington's ear, and while historians act as if our first president was an "independent," the fact is that he almost(?) exclusively appointed Federalists -- meaning men who supported ratification of the Constitution -- to the bench. These were by and large men who simply wanted to increase the federal government's power over the states, and thus America was on the wrong path from the onset of the first presidency. The Federalist near-monopoly on the judicial system gave Hamiltonianism a foothold even as it suffered electoral defeat after electoral defeat -- starting with the election of Hamilton's arch rival Thomas Jefferson to the White House.

Indeed, it wasn't until the War Between the States, as DiLorenzo calls it, that Hamiltonianism -- which had lost on the battlefield of ideas -- was installed on the actual battlefield, by brute military force. Lincoln was a Whig before he was a Republican, and the Whigs were the ideological descendants of Hamilton's Federalists. With Lincoln as their standard bearer, the new Republican Party had a full-fledged Hamiltonian agenda consisting of protectionism, high taxation, national centralism, corporate welfare, militarism, and national banking. These were the true issues over which the "Civil War" was fought, says DiLorenzo.

The Hamiltonian Republicans reigned over America almost uninterrupted for the next 52 years, until Woodrow Wilson -- a Hamiltonian of the Left -- was elected. Under Wilson, Hamiltonianism reached its zenith (or nadir), as the income tax, direct election of senators, and Federal Reserve all came into existence. Entirely gone was the Jeffersonian republic of "states' rights." DiLorenzo also says that the American "Progressives" who brought about these horrors were directly influenced by the German Historical School -- which itself was strongly influenced by Hamilton. Thus, things came full circle.

DiLorenzo concludes this wonderful book with a road-map to ending the curse. Unfortunately, I have virtually zero faith that Americans are ever going to wake up and reassert Jeffersonian principles. As DiLorenzo explains, we now have several generations who have been taught Hamiltonian/Lincolnian myths in institutionalized schooling to the point that both the Left and the Right view Hamilton as a great hero. In reality, he was perhaps the greatest scoundrel in American history. If only Aaron Burr's bullet could have spared the man but killed his wicked ideas! ==

Comment (Peter M.):

I did not include the "Blessing" book. It was to depressing, touting the benefits of a national debt. But the "Curse" book has its limitations too. It says nothing about Big Business. If you have Small Government, and a laissez-faire approach, Big Business will call the shots. The only way to control it is with Big Government.

That need not mean Communism in the Stalinist style; or the Welfare "Nanny" state we have now, in which the disintegration of the Family is actively promoted, with the State stepping in to replace it through Welfare payments, Social Workers etc.

Australia had a different model from the 1940s to the 1980s: Big Government, in that Government owned much of the economy (which thus could not be sold to foreigners), but intact Family life, no Welfare and no Nanny measures. There was no Litigation industry - you took responsibility for what happened. Handshakes rather than contracts.

With Privatization and Deregulation, Government handed operation of the economy to Big Business (including foreign-owned business), and settled instead to control the minutiae of what had hitherto been "private" or "domestic" life.

(4) Buzzwords deciphered: Eric Walberg's Newspeak Dictionary

From: efgh1951 <efgh1951@yahoo.com> Date: 29.12.2009 02:56 PM

Words new and old

by Eric Walberg

http://ericwalberg.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=215:2000-2010-decoding-the-decade-buzzwords&catid=41:culture-and-religion&Itemid=94

The 3rd millennium's first decade was replete with buzzwords, many of them neologism arising from unremitting cyber innovations. As the world careened into what will henceforth be known as the Internet Era, we had such neologisms as

-the dotcom revolution, so named for the way internet addresses are written, "com" suggesting the commercial focus of the medium. This term along with Internet itself dates from the Stone Age of the 20th century internet

-wikipedia (2001), "wiki" being Hawaiian for "quick", the world's first collective encyclopaedia, produced online by millions of users, now in dozens of languages, though increasingly regulated, especially when dealing with living persons;

-blogging (2002), referring to the explosion of personal sites which the Internet allows;

-photoshopping (2006), referring to the now common practice of touching up electronic images or making collages to suit one's needs;

-twitter (2006), mobile software allowing anyone anywhere to link instantaneously with anyone anywhere (as long as they are wired in);

Oh, and don't forget the great spoof of the decade, Y2K, the gimmicky shortform popularised by the fear that the now-computer addicted world would "crash" when the clock struck 2000

These neologisms are entering all world languages, including Arabic, as the world gravitates towards an English-language based new world order. They are not such innocent playthings, however. In the world of politics, they represent a powerful means for their owners to promote an agenda other than greater freedom of communications. Moldova's communists were displaced in a twitter revolution, and Iran's Ahmedinejad almost was, as crowds of Western-savvy young people converged on their respective capitals, intent on overthrowing their governments after disputed elections. China especially is attempting to prevent these innovations in the blogosphere from being used to erode government authority.

The fact must be confronted that most of the Internet is in Jewish hands (Google, Yahoo, Facebook), and, given the organisation and power of the Israeli Lobby in the US and Europe, the ability to monitor, tap and store infinite quantities of personal data as well as control access to certain information suddenly brings us face-to-face with the spectre of Orwellian mind-and-body control. The highly lucrative world of Google and others is a boon whose owners are Zionists. Google co-founder and billionaire Sergei Brin is a big supporter financially of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which just happens to fund Jews from the diaspora to settle in Israel. Blog and youtube sites considered harmful have been "disappeared" without explanation. Anti-Zionist/ Jewish critique has been blocked as "hate promotion", and anti-Muslim/Arab critique condoned as "freedom of speech".

Many existing words took on new significance as buzzwords during the decade. Buzzwords include

-Al-Qaeda, jihad and caliphate, all Arabic, reflect the great irony of the decade – just as every action results in a reaction, the Western invasions of the Arab/ Muslim world following 9/11 have led to a much greater awareness of Arab/ Muslim culture, even a realisation that many of the accoutrements of Western life – from silk pajamas to date squares and hookahs – come from their rival in the clash of civilizations.

-Not to be left out, the Jewish world became more and more the object of outspoken support and, at the same time, of critical attention throughout the decade, with the Holocaust (denial), (anti-)Zionism, Jerusalem and Gaza never leaving headlines for long.

-Refugees (2005) are on the increase, not only due to US invasions and civil wars around the world, but in the US itself, reflecting the shameful destruction of New Orleans by a particularly powerful hurricane Katrina, the severity now admitted by the legal system as due to government incompetence and the US's crumbling infrastructure, even as its military budget goes through the stratosphere.

-Derivatives and subprime lending (2007) refer to particularly odious financial schemes dreamed up and regulated by those who made billions from them, providing no real benefit to anyone but themselves.

-Bailout (2008) is a constant reminder of Western governments' obeisance to the world's bankers.

-Obama and Obamania (2008) have reached every nook and cranny in the world with the first black US president in office, as he continues to wrestle with the problems of the US empire, another buzzword which came and then went, as the US faces decline on all fronts – political, economic, environmental and health.

-Two Bushisms that strike terror in the listener are surge (2007) and Shock and Awe (2003), the ghoulish name given to the invasion strategy in Iraq in search of nonexistent WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction). Bush's Hollywood-inspired "Bring `em on!" challenge to the Iraqi insurgents was taken up vigorously with close to 5000 US soldiers returning in body bags (officially). One of his more memorable malapropisms was misunderestimate (2002), and forever associated with his reign is hanging chad (2000), referring to faulty election ballots in Florida, which contributed to what was almost certainly a rigged victory of Bush over Al Gore. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and rendition – all legacies of Bush – speak to the shameful fact that the empire promotes and even revels in torture.

-Chinglish (2005), albeit a neologism, is no doubt what we will all speak in another few decades if China maintains its present meteoric rise.

-Nanotechnology highlights the increasing importance of miniaturization in technology to the point of operating on the atomic level; though it dates from the1950s, it is just now coming into its own.

-Global warming consequences, such as increasingly violent and frequent hurricanes and tsunamis (2004), have literally flooded the world of economics, where financial tsunamis threaten the world economy, now that it is connected electronically and mostly free from government control. The 2008 world financial meltdown showed that with a vengeance.

-The world faces unremitting pressure from Disneyfication, as movies turn to fantasy worlds, 3-D effects and virtual reality to distract audiences.

-From playstations to the more pseudo-high-culture Harry Potter, and sci-fi serial movies such as Star Trek and Matrix, fantasy and virtual reality displaced our connection with reality.

-We now are satisfied with truthiness (2005), popularised on US political satire programme "The Colbert Report", reflecting the lack of honesty in our public life and the distorted reality which our media feeds us.

***
Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/