DOTE Predictions For 2012

Source: Decline of the Empire

This post will be up until Thursday morning. I’m taking tomorrow off. Enjoy — Dave

The future ain’t what it used to be
   — Yogi Berra

It’s time to make our 2012 predictions. I’ve never claimed to have a Crystal Ball. We’ve got too many contemporary Nostradami as it is. I’m a trend watcher. But to make this a little more fun, I will make some specific predictions this year.

In last year’s post I wrote—

I could go out on a limb here and predict various collapses and crises, but I might be wildly off the mark. Being wrong would put a serious dent into my well-earned reputation for infallibility, so that’s not a good way to go

After that I made some “predictions” which can not fail regardless of what year it is.

• There will be not be a redistribution of the wealth in 2011—unless, of course, you regard the rich getting richer and everybody else getting poorer as a redistribution.
• There will not be a suddenly blossoming of environmental consciousness in which America takes the lead in halting the steady deterioration of the oceans, the warming of the climate, and the mass die-off of animal and plant species all over the world. Scientific knowledge will continue to be conflated with misunderstood Mayan prophecies.
• Those on Wall Street will not suddenly realize that avaricious acquisition of everything is not the sole purpose of Life On Earth.
• Our elected representatives in Congress will not put themselves on trial, find themselves guilty of wanton corruption, gross negligence, meanness of spirit, mind-boggling stupidity, and all-around depravity, and then go on to amend all the rules of our political system to reinstate a Democracy, or failing that, a Republic.

I also said—

• There will not be a people’s revolution in the United States.

I’m not sure whether #Occupy Wall Street qualifies as a people’s revolution or not. The French Revolution it was not. There are still far more people in the Apple iCrap consumer cult than there are protesters. What do you think? Was I wrong?

I’ll be more specific this year, putting at risk my well-earned reputation for infallibility. Here we go.

• This is an election year, so our collective misery and delusion will increase exponentially in 2012. By the time this charade is over, suicide will look like a viable option. (Don’t do it.) I believe Hopey-Changey will retain the Imperial Mantle in November. He will scare the crap out of people, especially seniors—they vote—and soon-to-be-retiring Boomers, by asserting over and over again that the Republicans want to take away their Social Security and Medicare. (Which they do). This strategy will work, despite the fact that the economy will be in the toilet. (There will be a “new” recession.) On the negative side for Hopey-Changey, disaffected youth will not turn out as they did in 2008 because of a glaring deficiency of Hope and Change. It doesn’t matter who gets the nomination on the Republican side. (It will be Willard Romney.) If Ron Paul runs as a libertarian alternative, Obama will win in a landslide.
• There will be a global financial crisis of some sort next year. Don’t ask me how it will happen or how deep it will be. And don’t ask me when it will happen, because I just don’t  know the specifics. Nobody does. How could they? This is chaos theory, folks. So, how can I make this prediction? Because there’s way too much risk built into the global finance system, which is more interconnected and fragile than it’s ever been before. And of course there’s Europe. (The current monetary union based on the Euro, in its current form, will not last the year.) Derivatives trading worldwide is largely unregulated. We’ve never seen gambling on this scale before. The global banking world is a casino. The humans have introduced far more risk into the system than they can manage. Ipso facto, global finance will blow up, if not in 2012, then in 2013.
• China is going down the tubes in 2012. Yeah, I know, people have been predicting this implosion forever, but their real estate bubble has turned the corner—they’re on the deflationary downslope of the curve—and their export model doesn’t work anymore. It will take China at least a decade to switch to a more consumption-oriented economy. You can’t skip that step, as China has done up to now. There are several Fundamental Errors in China’s growth model. The people are starting to protest, and that revolt will get more serious as economic circumstances deteriorate. Housing bubbles go only one way—to the poorhouse. It’s time for China to pay the piper.
• A gamma-ray burst from the collision of two neutron stars—the lethal radiation is on its way—will fry all life on one side of the planet (the lucky side) on October 23, 2012 at 3:31 PM Eastern Standard Time. The lethal burst will last 22 seconds.

Just kidding!

• Contemporary popular “music” will get worse, if that’s possible. Crap is what you get when corporations produce music by formula to appeal to ignorant, docile “consumers” living in a dissociative trance those very same corporations labored mightily to create. Just how wide is the gap between Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Jay-Z, Kanye West and Justin Bieber on the one hand, and John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, The Temptations, Bob Dylan and John Lennon on the other? I don’t know. How far is it to Alpha Centauri? My thanks to the great musicians working today (e.g. Diana Krall, Brad Mehldau). There’s still an audience for their music—in Tokyo.
• After the aforementioned global financial crisis, gold will cost you well over $2000 an ounce. The S&P 500 will tumble. 
• There will even more extreme weather events in 2012 than there were in 2011. Toss in a few ecological catastrophes as well. Gross Domestic Product will grow as a result as we repair the damage. Who said climate change is bad for us?
• In 2012 more people will come to grips with the fact that the Federal Reserve is largest holder of U.S. Treasury debt. It will occur to some of them that a government issuing trillions of dollars of debt which is then bought up by its central bank may be in big trouble. So far, nobody (including Bloomberg) seems to care. In fact, demand for our paper IOUs is said to be insatiable. That’s why Paul Krugman says we can print more paper to stimulate the economy and pay for future retirement benefits like Medicare and Social Security, which is sort of like jolting a dead parrot which has been nailed to its perch with a million volts of electricity to see if it will twitch.

And finally—

• Nothing of fundamental importance will change on Planet Stupid. Our Ultimate Fate remains the same. Pardon me for quoting myself.

  We are in the process of destroying a great many things which are real — air, soil, water, energy, resources, other species, our health — for the sake of something that exists chiefly in our imagination: money.

Next year we can laugh at my predictions, all except for that last one.

Read more at Decline of the Empire