• Mitt for a King -- Willard Romney (I like to call people what their Mama named 'em) will eventually squash all challengers. This is not exactly earth-shattering news. It seems to be the general MSM consensus now anyway, but it still needs comment here. I don't really buy the trope that the current batch of GOP contenders is so lackluster that people are just going to 'settle' for Romney as the least-worst. After all, conservatives have everything they could hope for in a batch of candidates: there's a corporate slickster (Romney), a self-proclaimed legislative powerhouse (Gingrich), a moderate internationalist (Hunstman), a cultural warrior (Santorum), a consistent true-believer libertarian (Paul), a Bushey, great-hair governor (Perry), a spunky Hillary-esque scrapper (Bachmann), and until a few weeks ago, a successful black CEO (9-9-9-inches Cain). There are plenty of able people in there (at least in the conservative worldview, especially in comparison to Obama's qualifications at the time of his election), so I'm not sure where the serial flirtations of the GOP faithful come from. Maybe everyone is still in thrall to an unrealistic Reagan ideal. Or similarly, maybe they are so used to TV and movie heroes that the faults and foibles of actual mortals have become unpalatable. Or perhaps there are just too many incoherent threads in the GOP tapestry, and they are not weaving together smoothly this time around.For the last 20 years or so, grassroots conservatives have been played for suckers by every opportunistic, bombastic, narcissistic, and hypocritical snake-oil salesman to come down the pike; and this perennial exploitation is starting to take its toll. The conservative now seems to want:small government (in tax matters) but big government (in military and morality); hands-off government (in money matters) but hands-on government (reviving school prayer and banning abortion); no government programs for deadbeats ('welfare') but government programs for others (Medicare and Social Security); an end to the Fed's easy 'fiat' money but also a sophisticated modern economy (which can't be run on gold). In essence, conservatism has become a schizophrenic mish-mash of backward-looking nostalgia and forward-looking capitalist boosterism, without a sense that the implementation of the latter is the main impetus behind the former. But enough on that. Mitt will emerge from this maelstrom as your Republican candidate for President.
• European Dissolution -- I am certainly not an expert in finance or international economics, but from everything I read, Europe is at an impasse. As it is currently constructed, the Eurozone severely limits what individual countries can accomplish. Not being able to turn on the printing presses in their own currencies, the struggling countries cannot inflate their way to better trade balances and reduced debt. Instead, the only way out is austerity, which is proving, unsurprisingly, to be contractionary. Much like China, Germany, the plowhorse of Europe, cannot accept that its own internal debt must rise in order for peripheral debt to decrease. So the 'producers' continue to lecture the 'leeches' about their profligate ways, a motif that is arising everywhere in the developed world as the powerful seek to vacuum up even more of the bodily fluids of the powerless. Unless the European central bank models itself after the Fed, and starts buying individual Eurozone countries' debt (essentially 'printing money'), then there will be no way out for Europe. The whole region will either limp along with anemic growth, having to control increasing public outrage in the streets, or a few of the 'deadbeat' countries will just say 'fuck it' to the whole damn thing, default, and go about repairing their internal economies via national currency inflation. My bet is the latter.
• American Inertia -- despite the radical promise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the United States will continue to limp along without doing anything of actual import, because the increasingly-useless mainstream media will be obsessed with Election 2012. This will give politicians enough cover to diddle around and make empty speeches and grandiose promises,  just long enough to bridge their way to the autumn electoral fetish-fest. I just can't foresee anything that will actually change people's frame of reference for approaching economic, social, and ecological problems. The total capture of public discourse by business imperatives renders any alternative view of social arrangements stillborn. There is no conceivable way for anyone to find a popular platform from which to launch ideas that criticize economic growth, maximized consumption, individual careerism, and technological progress. There is no space -- no atmosphere whatsoever for philosophical, ecological, or moral challenges to the socioeconomic status quo. There is only one language of power now, and it preaches that The Profitable is The Good. The American identity is so closely tied to this Gospel of Wealth that it will ultimately prove to be our undoing. A civilization built only on the ideals of the businessman is doomed to consume itself. 2012 in the US will thus be another year of overstuffed sleepwalking, as we medicate our psyches with drugs and gorge our bodies with frito-filled tacos. Official unemployment will likely hover around 8% through the end of the year, but declining workforce participation and general underemployment will hide a much starker reality. Economic growth will probably surge to 2.5 or 3%, which will make investors and CEOs happy -- but just as the last three decades have shown, that growth will not accrue to the bottom line of regular citizens. Inequalities in income and wealth will grow more pronounced, and wages for all but the most highly-skilled will sag. So.....more of the same in the good ol' US of A.
• Romney Wins -- against the general backdrop of American sluggishness, Willard will win in November. Obama is indeed a gifted orator and campaigner, and he will have a huge monetary advantage. But he has just not done enough to help make sense of the continued economic sluggishness, and the litmus test of "are you better-off than you were four years ago?" will not favor the incumbent. It will be close though. Killing bin Laden and getting the troops out of Iraq will draw a lot of independents and lefties back into the fold. But I just think that the Obama shtick will have worn too thin by next fall to bring him reelection. He has tried to be too many things to too many people. Perhaps the best symbol of this is keeping Timothy Geithner on while booting Elizabeth Warren to the sidelines. Obama talked tough about greedy bankers on camera, but he made sure that the people pulling his policy levers would never actually challenge the hegemony of corporate and financial interests. And of course, his justice department has not called any of the crooks who cooked our economy to account, except for one scapegoat dude, I think, who got a couple years in Club Fed. Yes, Obama will have tons of money, and he will probably come off pretty good in the debates. But I think Romney's game is too good this time around. He will get his own share of campaign cash, once the primaries are over, and he'll be off to the races. He could really solidify things by picking a dynamic VP and a solid cabinet, and then it will be lights out. [A personal note on this: as an avowed lefty-type, albeit of a decentralizing stripe, I reflexively fear another Republican presidency. But the last 3 years of Obama have been highly frustrating. I am becoming more convinced of Jesus' words in Revelation 3:16: "So, because you are lukewarm, and nether hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." Perhaps the best thing, in the long run, is to give the GOP total control for a couple years. And instead of fighting the opposition tooth and nail, as the Republicans have done recently, the Dems should just acknowledge the conservative mandate, and actually call on Romney and a GOP Congress to put their loftiest ideals into practice. Give them no excuse and no quarter -- just lay down and let them have their way. My guess is that Romney will try to keep things centrist and reasonable, but Boehner and Rand Paul and Paul Ryan will yank the country towards an Ayn Randian dystopia. And then we can all see, once and for all, that eliminating the regulatory state will not result in a magical shangri-la of flourishing entrepreneurs and sleekly beautiful Ubermenschen. Maybe a realistic liberal plan for the future has to be sewn in the burnt soil of conservative collapse. Maybe...]
• The End of Device Fetishism -- OK, this one probably falls squarely in the I HOPE category, but I've just had enough of the rapid, serial upgrading of phones, tablets, computers, TVs, and all that other electronic claptrap. I know this seems to put me in the luddite, old curmudgeon camp, but that's not really my point. I actually view the obsession with gadgets as the ultimate symbol of our cultural bankruptcy. It is one thing to welcome liberating technology, like the cell phone and the computer. But it is something else entirely to engage in restless adolescent lust after the latest devices on a regular basis. This 'device fetishism' has so many deleterious effects that it is impossible to do them justice here. But here are a couple examples. Device obsession squashes the social. No matter how many group video games you play with your 'gaming community,' the sheer physical fact is that people are cocooned in their own private simulacrum, oblivious to interpersonal and natural surroundings. People plugged into their iPods are not engaging in conversation, or hearing the ambient noises that are flowing and burbling all around them. Reading books and articles on a smartphone or tablet might seem like you're getting the exact same content as exists in paper books, magazines, and newspapers, but the different physical formats actually change the style of learning for the reader. The size and shape of a physical object like a book allow for a quick sense of the overall context of information, whereas the digital format erases almost all trace of breaks, segmentation, and separation. The sameness of appearance in digital formats tends to make everything seem like part of one overall stream of 'information,' having a uniform quality. Ideas, aphorisms, poems, essays, journalism, scientific studies -- these all become 'content' in the device-driven world. The scathing majesty of a Nietzsche aphorism looks exactly the same as the boilerplate John Grisham twist, or the ridiculous tweet of some jackass b-movie actor. The endless pursuit of upgraded devices is also, obviously, utterly unsustainable to a populace that is seeing its wages eroded and its debt levels swell. And finally, the manic replacement of G3 with G4, of LCD with plasma, of iPod XXX with iPod YYY is a completely adolescent fixation. Jealous, grasping, lusting peer-orientation does serve a cohesive social function, in a limited evolutionary sense. After children make the psychic break with their parents and begin to assume their own individual identities, the mimicry of peers in the teen years serves to provide actual social substance to the emerging person, as well as creating a social cement that will ensure the survival of the community (group selection is actually going through a bit of a revival in evolutionary biology circles right now). By the end of adolescence, however, the hyper-competitiveness and intense peer-orientation is supposed to give way to a new sense of autonomy, self-assuredness, and maturity. The grasping after external objects to signal one's worth or one's membership in the in-group is supposed to fall away, to be replaced by a new focus on higher questions of meaning, relationship, and community. For more on this relationship between consumption and the adolescent adult, see here). Needless to say, the device is killing us, in a larger sense -- a subject to which I will return in the coming weeks.
• Collective will be the new Cool -- Again, kind of a pipe dream, but I'm totally convinced that it's gonna happen sooner or later, either by choice or necessity (choice would be better). As mentioned 9 gajillion times before in this blog, the ratios amongst work, production, and reward will render the One-Person-One Job/One-Family-One- Dwelling social form unsustainable, and people will have to form more collective home bases from which to approach the wider economy and society. We're already seeing this now by default, as high school and college graduates have to stay with or move back in with their parents, in significant numbers. And as more and more baby boomers retire with insufficient funds, and if Social Security gets shaved down due to fiscal contraction (which seems fairly likely), expect seniors to move back in with their adult children in substantial waves. And culturally, we actually do demonstrate our deep longing for community, from workplace sitcoms to reality shows to the rise of hiphop 'crew culture.' In 2012, some brave voices will tie all of these loose communal strands together, and back them up with some solid evidence for the advantages of decentralized, localized economics -- and the result will be a new Community Chic.

OK, that's enough for now. Have a great New Year everyone, and here's to the fresh possibilities that each annual turn of the calendar brings. 2012 certainly promises to be much more exciting than the wet blanket year we just finished.

Oh yeah, and the Bruins repeat as Stanley Cup champions.