Today begins the second decade of the 21st Century, and what a terrible first decade we’ve had to endure. It would be nothing short of wonderful if there was any justification for the optimistic forecasts being issued by economists but, sorry to say, we’re being deliberately misled. There is nothing in the works that will provide relief to the needy. Nothing.

Today’s Singapore’s Business Times reminds us of the troubles that affected the financial world in this so-called “recession”, and those were the events that garnered all the headlines. Conditions on Wall Street and in banking circles are all that mattered as far as the elite are concerned.

“It started with such promise”, The Times review began. The dot.com wave which began in 1998 was indeed the way to go back then, but when technology companies failed to generate dizzying profits, investors promptly pulled out and those firms lost more than $ 5 trillion in market value. “Dot.com” – now referred to as “dot.bomb” – is just the first of the recent Ponzi-like scams that took in gullible Americans.

“As if the technology crash wasn’t enough,” continues The Times, “American energy firm Enron had to add to the downward spiral and reinforce the point that really, nothing is forever.” Instead of reinforcing a point, The Times should have asked the question, “Is anything on the up-and-up?” Enron, “America’s Most Innovative Company”, according to Fortune Magazine, was found in October of 2001 to have greased and cooked the books in what was considered to be the largest corporate scam at that time, and following that a string of accounting scandals were uncovered in large U.S. firms like WorldCom and Tyco. Lots of heads rolled.

One of the biggest failings in the first ten years of this new century, as a result of its entanglement in subprime mortgages, was the fall of the supposedly infallible Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank. It was the collapse of this bank that started the plunge of worldwide stock market values, and it is also the largest Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in history. Banks especially saw their stock prices nosedive as a result of the ongoing financial storm, The Times points out, but Goldman Sachs managed to survive the onslaught and became the only bank in the decade to remain a top gainer.

The Times says not a word about the unemployed and the homeless, however. Only the well-heeled in financial circles are all that matter. Trillion dollar bailouts and multi-million dollar executive bonuses are the only concerns of The Singapore Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes Magazine. As for the remaining 99.99% of the people? Let ’em eat cake. But the defining moments in world history are still ahead of us. Talk of “recoveries” and “turnarounds” may delay the inevitable, but the longer officials sit on their hands the more drastic the inevitable will be.

We’ve made repeated attempts to present our 21st Century shipbuilding program to the powers-that-be, but so far, we’ve been ignored. Sooner or later though, our program will be acknowledged.