By Brent Budowsky

The lost decade that will thankfully come to an end began with a huge bubble of shameless greed and wanton wealth that was labeled the Nasdaq bubble, which ended in a collapse accompanied by huge paydays, mammoth bonuses and lucrative stock option deals for those who caused it.

The lost decade now ends with a huge bubble of shameless greed and wanton wealth that was labelled the greatest crash since the Great Depression, and was accompanied by huge paydays, mammoth bonuses, and lucrative stock option deals for those who caused it, while working stiffs paid for this largesse with giant bailouts and suffered from this greed with 17% real jobless.

Try this. Most people don’t realize it, but a date can be googled, and one can reread all the news and stories from that date. Google March 10, 2000 and add Nasdaq which was the time when that market reached 5,000. The stories might as well read from today. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are destined to repeat them.

Near the beginning of this lost decade a President was warned about a terrorist who planned to fly airplanes into buildings in New York and he ignored those warnings and showed contempt for those who gave them. And now, near the end of the decade, we spend Christmas worried about another attack from terrorists who plan to explode planes over the oceans.

Near the beginning of the decade we could have killed the terrorist at Tora Bora and we had won the Afghan war. But then, our leader chose an unwise war that should not have been fought in Iraq, and the terrorist got away, and now, we face a long hard slog in a war that was won years ago, before victory was given away for a quagmire.

From the beginning of this lost decade until the end, the powers-that-be learned nothing. So a decade that began with greed ended with greed. A decade that began with terror ended with terror.  A decade that began with war ended with the same war, once won, but now a war that seems destined to continue in perpetuity.

A decade that began with a giant surplus of budget and finance ends with the nation indebted like a banana republic, owned by a nation we once called communist, and for what?

Those who build the nation with their hands are under siege, while speculators who shuffle the papers of the homeowners they foreclose will raise their glasses of champagne on New Year’s Eve, toasting themselves for a job well done, savoring the bubbles that were paid for by taxpayer money while slandering those who object as socialists!

Meanwhile, while some celebrate their vast unearned income, others suffer the Grapes of Wrath.  While those who profited so handsomely from the beginning of the decade until the end live in glory and splendor as masters of the universe the numbers of homeless vets rise, the armies of hungry children grow, the noose of joblessness tightens around the neck of a fifth of the nation, real wages fall and real pain soars throughout the nation in this decade that was lost.

Imagine if our $12 trillion of national debt had been used to educate the children, to create jobs for the workers, to better the health of the people, to grow food for the hungry, to tap the sun and the wind to fuel the nation still imprisoned, at the end of the decade as we were at the beginning, by the dangers of pollution and the dictatorships of oil!

Imagine if we had used even a trickle of these trillions of dollars of debt to buy body armor and humvees for noble and heroic troops, who died preventable deaths while those with neither nobility nor heroism gorged on greed with tax cuts that enriched their fortunes, during a war drenched in profiteering that should have been prosecuted as crime, at a price the nation could not afford, with consequences the nation did not deserve.

Imagine what we could have done, but did not do, in this lost decade where the good should have been so much better, where the greed should have been rejected so long ago, where the pain should be so much less, where the price will now be paid for a generation by those who did not profit a penny from this outrage, and who are forced to subsidize this gluttony that the leaders of the nation should have protected them from, but didn’t.

History will judge harshly the burdens the the guilty have crushed onto the backs of the innocent, the wrongs the old have crushed onto the backs of the young, and the injustices that those with the most have crushed onto the backs of those with the least, turning the Biblical injunction on its head.

It is sad and sorry but true. This has been a lost decade, by standards of what this nation can be. The winners are those with the greed that began it, and end it, in a decade that should have been so much better, in a nation that deserved leaders so much wiser.

But history has its turns, and maybe the next decade will be better.  As the man we miss so much once told us, the cause endures and the dream shall never die.

Brent Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and to Bill Alexander, then chief deputy majority whip of the House. He holds an LL.M. degree in international financial law from the London School of Economics. He can be reached at brentbbi@webtv.net .