This was the year that was

These are my choices for the top ten stories of 2003. I can’t rank them. I’m not sure how they
can be ranked. I do think that these are all important, and I offer them to provoke you into
recapitulating your own experiences of the year. If I have left out a story you would put in your
top ten, do use the comments section below and add your choice.

1. Certainly the war in Iraq, the US occupation of the country, and the Iraqi hostility and
organized resistance is a turning point in many ways. It signaled a new American foreign policy
and a willingness to engage in preemptive war.

2. The war has had many effects, most of which are big stories in themselves. One is the
willingness of the Shrub administration to lie about political affairs. The biggest lie, of course,
centered about the claims that Iraq had a vast storehouse of “weapons of mass destruction.”
Moreover, it turned out that Rove, Ashcroft, Cheyney and their Reagan administration cohorts
had been planning this war for some time.

3. While the costs of the war have been enormous, they enabled the administration to rationalize
a basis for cutting back on social services and to weaken social security. At the same time, the
war permitted the war hawks to funnel huge profits to the international corporations which
service the military in all of its dimensions.

4. The war and the elusive threats of terrorism resulted in greater police powers being designated
to the federal government, the creation of massive police bureaucracies –the Department of
Homeland Security and the Transportation Safety Administration.

5.These agencies together under the umbrella of the Patriot’s Act have challenged basic civil
liberties, taking the country another step closer to what some analysts have called a “friendly
fascism” -- an authoritarian government condoned by the people to protect themselves from the
terrors outside.

6. This was a year marked by the government’s assault on the environment as POTUS supported
a weakening of clean air and water legislation, selling off more national forest land, opening the
Alaskan reserves to increased drilling, cut back on the clean up of super fund toxic waste sites,
tried to exempt the military and federal government from being held responsible for their
environmental disruption.

7. At the same time the Shrub and Attorney General Ashcroft have clamped down on the
openness of federal agencies to freedom of information queries and have acted to corrupt the peer
review process as scientists currently practice it. This year it will likely sidetrack significant
research, for example, on pollution and even children’s health.

8. The Balkan wars and the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq revealed not only a gross
disregard for the environment, but a chilling disregard for human lives. Through the use of land
mines, the US leaves behind a legacy of death. The estimates of the number of land mines lying in
wait around the world exceeds one million. As bad as that is, an even more chilling legacy comes
from the use of depleted uranium in the fabrication of munitions. The combination of radiation
and the chemical toxicity of a heavy metal has created an even more devastation than the original
nuclear bombs ranging from the Gulf War syndrome to an over 300 per cent rise in leukemias and
an even greater rise in other malignancies. In Iraq alone, there has been an unbelievable rise in
birth defects and congenital disorders including an almost 450 per cent increase in cases of
Down’s syndrome among Iraqi children

9. Although the political elite has been chorusing an economic recovery at year’s end, it was a
recovery for the wealthy. The average salary for CEOs at 200 of the largest corporations was
$11.3 million. This is about $5,000 an hour as compared to the $9 an hour earned by one fourth
of the workforce. But for most of the workforce, unemployment has remained high, and new jobs
are not being created fast enough to accommodate the growth of new workers or re-employment
of experienced workers. Salaries for those employed rose by less than one per cent in 2003.

10. “This is what democracy looks like,” is one of the repetitive chants that echoed through many
of the demonstrations last year. It was not a sentiment shared by the news media who had a quite
different perspective on the democratic process. The recall and gubernatorial election in
California were regularly described as a “circus,” and many pundits called for eliminating the
process of recall. The news people seem almost outraged at the multiplicity of Democratic
candidates in the primary electioneering, and have virtually preselected the candidates. A typical
reaction was articulated by media pundit, Elizabeth Drew writing in The New York Review of
Books: “Voters should hear from candidates who have a chance of winning the nomination.
Sharpton, Moseley Braun, and Kucinich have none, but at this point it’s impossible to get them
off the stage.”

Story 11 in my Top 10 is the rapid growth of the antiwar movement, the development of a vocal
and savvy opposition, and the spinning of a web of communication on the Internet that facilitates
the growth of resistance. As George Orwell wrote, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth
is a revolutionary act.”