Y2k was 8 years early with the financial meltown of 2008 and american economy failing

Y2k was 8 years early with the financial meltdown of 2008 and american economy failing, do you remember back to the Y2k fear of 1999 were everything was meant to fail and not work as the clocks hit midnight into the year 2000?, well i think that this worry and fear was 8 years too early because by 2008 a lot of things did fail when it came to the economic meltdown and financial crisis, then obama came into office and said he would fix it but has not either.

i think people were just 8 years or so early with there fears for Y2k as a few years after banks did fail and the economy did crash.

"Y2K - Fear, Anticipation
As Americans Stockpile
For 2000
By Steve James
12-31-99

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fear of flying, fear of terrorism, fear of the Apocalypse or just plain fear of the unknown gripped many Americans in the waning days of 1999.

After celebrating their caviar hopes and champagne dreams on New Year's Eve, thousands of people expect to dine well into the new year on Spam, soup, dehydrated fruit and bottled water, perhaps huddled in dim light around heat generators.

Despite assurances by President Clinton's chief adviser on year-2000 issues that Americans were not gripped by a siege mentality or hoarding food and supplies, many were stocking up anyway, just in case.

Some fear that outdated software will prevent computers from distinguishing between the years 2000 and 1900, resulting in widespread malfunctioning of systems that control important functions such as air traffic control, defense, banking, utilities and government administration.

Lou Marcoccio of GartnerGroup Inc., a business technology adviser, cited a survey showing 70 percent of Americans planned to buy emergency items in anticipation of possible power cuts or food shortages. Sixty percent said they would draw money from the bank before Jan. 1, 15 percent said they would get alternative power sources, and 50 percent said they would fill car fuel tanks.

Emergency Survival Food Service was doing a roaring online trade in dehydrated meats, fruit and vegetables, not just to hard-core survivalists, who predict a Y2K breakdown of law and order, but also to ordinary families who just want to make sure they have two weeks' worth of food.

``The year 2000 computer bug is a major threat to our way of life,'' the Evanston, Ill.-based company said on its Web site. ''Computers can render our country vulnerable to an electronic Pearl Harbor, a surprise attack launched in cyberspace by an enemy state of terrorists. Food will become scarce and it will become a form of currency more powerful than money itself.''

Chief Executive Officer Steve Bernard, however, was a little less alarmist in a telephone interview with Reuters. ``What's the worst thing that can happen? Nothing. And then you can still eat the food,'' he said, adding that his company had shipped a $250,000 food package to a church group and a year's supply to two couples in Britain.

Millions of Americans were also stocking up the old-fashioned way, even if they were not suffering from what Long Island psychologist Leon Zacharowicz labeled ``millennial delusion'' -- a fear that something catastrophic or apocalyptic will happen as the year changes to 2000.

``We're selling every flashlight and every two-burner (propane) stove,'' said Mike Damico, manager of a Kmart store in Manhattan. At a nearby hardware store, Weinstein & Holtzman, New Yorkers were snapping up flashlights, batteries and propane stoves. Owner Jeffrey Hymowitz said he had sold more than 600 flashlights this month, compared with 75 normally.

The New York City Housing Authority sent letters to its 600,000 tenants urging them to stock up on food, water and batteries and develop an ``emergency plan'' to deal with potential blackouts or banking problems. Meals on Wheels, which distributes hot food to the elderly, has sent 45-pound care packages to 16,000 New Yorkers.

``I'm waiting for disaster,'' one shopper, Jay Wishner, told the New York Daily News. ``Do I have cases of food! Cases of rice, containers of water, canned ham and vegetables!''

Across the Hudson River in New Jersey, it was the same story. ``If nothing happens, I'm going to have a generator,'' said Frank Seidl, a Trenton fireman buying the emergency power equipment in West Windsor on a frigid day. ``If something does (happen), I'll have heat for my family.''

U-Haul International Inc., which operates a network of 960 propane stations across North America, reported a steady increase in propane sales in recent weeks and said sales were up 30 percent this week compared with the same week last year.

``It appears that people are concerned about the upcoming Y2K weekend and want to have their propane tanks topped off for their grills and heaters, just in case,'' said Richard Herrera, U-Haul's vice president for retail sales.

Several makers of processed food that stores easily said sales were up in the last months of 1999. Hormel Foods Corp., which makes Spam luncheon meats and canned Dinty Moore stews, said it was seeing signs of ``Y2K-related pantry inventory build-up'' which helped boost the company's fiscal fourth-quarter profits.

Fruit and vegetable canner Del Monte Foods Co. said it expected sales in the December quarter to be 1 million to 2 million cases higher than normal due to buying ahead of Y2K.

Spokesman John Faulkner of Campbell's Soup Co. said the company's soup shipments increased 2-3 percent at the end of Campbell's first fiscal quarter in December. He said Campbell had received requests from large-volume club stores for more 12-packs of soup, a request attributed to Y2K-related buying.

U.S. banks are packing their vaults with spare cash. Currency in circulation, at a record $589 billion on Dec. 8, has set new highs every week this quarter.

A spokesman for the Brink's security company, part of Pittston Co., said it had been working with the Federal Reserve and banks for over a year to handle the extra volume of money shipments. He declined to give details.

Fear of terrorism prompted the city of Seattle to cancel its New Year's party, and in New York, where some 8,000 police officers will be patrolling Times Square Friday night, officials denied rumors that they had bought 250,000 body bags and planned to use the ice rink at Madison Square Garden as a temporary morgue in the event of a terrorist attack.

Even as he announced a New Year's contingency plan for New Jersey's largest city, Newark, Mayor Sharpe James acknowledged the danger of scaring the public. ``The worst thing we can do is to make people think the sky is falling,'' he said.

Federal Aviation Administration head Jane Garvey took James' words to heart and will fly from Dallas to San Francisco on New Year's Eve -- to show there is nothing to worry about.

Airline ticket sales are way down due to public fears that air traffic control will be disrupted. In addition, airlines are taking a cautious approach. As a result, airlines have cancelled most of their flights over the Friday-Saturday year change. There will be only 45 airliners in U.S. skies at the stroke of midnight (EST), compared with an average of 5,500 to 6,000 military and civilian planes aloft on any given afternoon in the United States, the FAA said.

Psychologist Zacharowicz said it may be irrational, but fear of the millennium can be real to those he is treating. ``As you get closer and closer to New Year's Eve, people are talking more and more about their anxieties.

``But it's the extreme action -- that person building a bomb shelter -- that we have to be careful of,'' he told the New York Post."

from this site rense.com

money missing back in 2002 american recession could be predicted with economy faults

money missing back in 2002 american recession could be predicted with economy faults, could not the recent economic downturn of been predicted if you look back to articles from 2002 and further back there all kinds of signs that things were not right with the american economy, there were whistle blowers coming forward to expose the inherent faults and problems in the economy and machinery that controlled the money in america from big business to big banks.

but it was not until the whole system crashed in 2008 that people said oh look i think the system has crashed, but before the economy crashed people were saying everything is fine with the american economy and there is nothing going wrong, but if you looked below the surface and read between the lines you could see that there were things going wrong all over the place, but because these articles were seen as just separate incidents and not the big picture people would be dissociated from how it all added together to cause the big problems now being faced by americans with there economy in a bad state and president obama not being able to put a fix and solve these problems either.


this article shows that back in 2002 things were going wrong.

"Cynthia Cooper, Coleen Rowley and Sherron Watkins

They took huge professional and personal risks to blow the whistle on what went wrong at WorldCom, Enron and the FBI—and in so doing helped remind us what American courage and American values are all about.

Posted Sunday, December 22, 2002; 4:31 a.m. EST
This was the year when the grief started to lift and the worries came in.

During the first weeks of 2002, two dark moods entered the room, two anxieties that rattled down everybody's nerve paths, even on good days, and etched their particulars into the general disposition. To begin with, after Sept. 11, the passage of time drew off the worst of the pain, but every month or so there came a new disturbance—an orange alert, a dance-club bombing in Bali, a surface-to-air missile fired at a passenger jet—that showed us the beast still at our door.

In the confrontation with Iraq, in the contested effort to build a homeland defense, we all struggled to regain something like the more secure world we thought we lived in before the towers fell. But every step of the way we wondered—was this the way back? What exactly did we need to be doing differently?

And all the while there was the black comedy of corporate fraud. Who knew that the swashbuckling economy of the '90s had produced so many buccaneers? You could laugh about the CEOs in handcuffs and the stock analysts who turned out to be fishier than storefront palm readers, but after a while the laughs came hard. Martha Stewart was dented and scuffed. Tyco was looted by its own executives. Enron and WorldCom turned out to be Twin Towers of false promises. They fell. Their stockholders and employees went down with them. So did a large measure of public faith in big corporations. Each new offense seemed to make the same point: with communism vanquished, capitalism was left with no real enemies but its own worst impulses. It can be undone by its own overreaching players. It can be bitten to pieces by its own alpha dogs.

Day after day, one set of misgivings twined around the other, keeping spooked investors away from the stock market, giving the whole year its undeniable saw-toothed edge. Were we headed for a world where all the towers would fall? All the more reason to figure out quickly, before the next blow to the system, how to repair the fail-safe operations—in the boardrooms we trusted with our money, at the government agencies we trust with ourselves—that failed.

This is where three women of ordinary demeanor but exceptional guts and sense come into the picture. Sherron Watkins is the Enron vice president who wrote a letter to chairman Kenneth Lay in the summer of 2001 warning him that the company's methods of accounting were improper. In January, when a congressional subcommittee investigating Enron's collapse released that letter, Watkins became a reluctant public figure, and the Year of the Whistle-Blower began. Coleen Rowley is the FBI staff attorney who caused a sensation in May with a memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller about how the bureau brushed off pleas from her Minneapolis, Minn., field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now indicted as a Sept. 11 co-conspirator, was a man who must be investigated. One month later Cynthia Cooper exploded the bubble that was WorldCom when she informed its board that the company had covered up $3.8 billion in losses through the prestidigitations of phony bookkeeping.

These women were for the 12 months just ending what New York City fire fighters were in 2001: heroes at the scene, anointed by circumstance. They were people who did right just by doing their jobs rightly—which means ferociously, with eyes open and with the bravery the rest of us always hope we have and may never know if we do. Their lives may not have been at stake, but Watkins, Rowley and Cooper put pretty much everything else on the line. Their jobs, their health, their privacy, their sanity—they risked all of them to bring us badly needed word of trouble inside crucial institutions. Democratic capitalism requires that people trust in the integrity of public and private institutions alike. As whistle-blowers, these three became fail-safe systems that did not fail. For believing—really believing—that the truth is one thing that must not be moved off the books, and for stepping in to make sure that it wasn't, they have been chosen by TIME as its Persons of the Year for 2002.

WHO ARE THESE WOMEN?
For starters, they aren't people looking to hog the limelight. All initially tried to keep their criticisms in-house, to speak truth to power but not to Barbara Walters. They became public figures only because their memos were leaked. One reason you still don't know much about them is that none have given an on-the-record media interview until now. In early December TIME brought all three together in a Minneapolis hotel room. Very quickly it became clear that none of them are rebels in the usual sense. The truest of true believers is more like it, ever faithful to the idea that where they worked was a place that served the wider world in some important way. But sometimes it's the keepers of the flame who feel most compelled to set their imperfect temple to the torch. When headquarters didn't live up to its mission, they took it to heart. At Enron the company handed out note pads with inspiring quotes. One was from Martin Luther King Jr.: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Watkins saw that quote every day. Didn't anybody else?

What more do they have in common? All three grew up in small towns in the middle of the country, in families that at times lived paycheck to paycheck. In a twist that will delight psychologists, they are all firstborns. More unusually, all three are married but serve as the chief breadwinners in their families. Cooper and Rowley have husbands who are full-time, stay-at-home dads. For every one of them, the decision to confront the higher-ups meant jeopardizing a paycheck their families truly depended on.

The joint interview in Minneapolis was the first time the three had met. But in no time they recognized how much they knew one another's experience. During the ordeals of this year, it energized them to know that there were two other women out there fighting the same kind of battles. In preparation for their meeting in Minneapolis, WorldCom's Cooper read through the testimony that Enron's Watkins gave before Congress. "I actually broke out in a cold sweat," Cooper says. In Minneapolis, when FBI lawyer Rowley heard Cooper talk about a need for regular people to step up and do the right thing, she stood up and applauded. And what to make of the fact that all are women? There has been talk that their gender is not a coincidence; that women, as outsiders, have less at stake in their organizations and so might be more willing to expose weaknesses. They don't think so. As it happens, studies have shown that women are actually a bit less likely than men to be whistle-blowers. And a point worth mentioning—all three hate the term whistle-blower. Too much like "tattletale," says Cooper.

But if the term unnerves them a bit, that may be because whistle-blowers don't have an easy time. Almost all say they would not do it again. If they aren't fired, they're cornered: isolated and made irrelevant. Eventually many suffer from alcoholism or depression.

With these three, that hasn't happened, though Watkins left her job at Enron after a few months when she wasn't given much to do. But ask them if they have been thanked sincerely by anyone at the top of their organization, and they burst out laughing. Some of their colleagues hate them, especially the ones who believe that their outfits would have quietly righted all wrongs if only they had been given time. "There is a price to be paid," says Cooper. "There have been times that I could not stop crying."

Watkins, Rowley and Cooper have kick-started conversations essential to the clean operation of American life, conversations that will continue for years. It may still be true that no one could have prevented the attacks of Sept. 11, but the past year has shown that the FBI and the CIA overlooked vital clues and held back data from each other. No matter how many new missile systems the Pentagon deploys or which new airport screening systems are adopted, if we can't trust the institutions charged with tracking terrorists to do the job, homeland defense will be an empty phrase. The Coleen Rowleys of the federal workforce will be the ones who will let us know what's going on.

As for corporate America, accounting scams of the kind practiced at Enron and WorldCom will continually need to be exposed and corrected before yet another phalanx of high-level operators gets the wrong idea and a thousand Enrons bloom. And the people best positioned to call them on it will be sitting in offices like the ones that Watkins and Cooper occupied. The new Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires CEOs and CFOs to vouch for the accuracy of their companies' books, is just one sign of what Cooper calls "a corporate-governance revolution across the country."

These were ordinary people who did not wait for higher authorities to do what needed to be done. Literature's great statement on unwelcome truth telling is Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People. Something said by one of his characters reminds us of what we admire about our Dynamic Trio. "A community is like a ship," he observes. "Everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm." When the time came, these women saw the ship in citizenship. And they stepped up to that wheel."

this article was from wanttoknow website and is from time magazine a i think