Goodbye 2010 Rant, Next Year Will Get Worse...

Mikhail Gorbachev
Simon Tisdall
Yuri Schmidt

"Don’t retreat. Instead — reload!” - Sarah Palin

The next few days everyone will be talking about the best things that happened during 2010. The lists are fun to go over, but I think we've already wrung enough meaning out of our past events, and most things that happened this year have been pretty depressing. Yet, it feels like a set up for 2011, where we again will be faced by our failure to come together and find solutions to our economic problems. It will be felt worse by cities and state governments that are required to have a balanced budget each year, with California leading the way. Statistically, the number of police officers who have been shot and killed in the line of duty has risen over 2010, even though the number of people sentenced to jail went down.

Our infrastructure is crumbling; the money our cities should have spent on maintaining roads, bridges, and buildings were shuffled off into other areas, and soon the landscape of our cities will look more like the were transported from the third world. The city where I live has already cut back to the bare bones because we are good libertarians. We have sold off our two police helicopters, laid off police , fire, park, and maintenance workers, and we still will have millions in deficits to deal with this coming year. We are considered to be one of the better off cities, there are thousands in worse economic conditions than we are, and we will see cities trying to go bankrupt in 2011, which will play hell with the bond markets. Our economies will get worse this next year before it begins to get better, and last longer than it should if we can't figure out how to provide jobs for folks. This Spring may see an exodus of New Yorkers spreading out through the Hamptons, surrounding the houses and compounds of those who benefitted from the tax cuts, and demanding to be hired as domestic help, gardeners, and nannies for their progeny...

To atone for all of this the Republican Party plans to change things in a major way in the House: on January 5th they will have a full reading of the Constitution. But, will all GOP members be required to be there, or will CSPAN show one lonely reader speaking to an empty chamber? Wait, there's more! In a nod to the tea party's obsessions, they will then: "require all bills to cite the constitutional authority to enact any given law."

"It appears that the Republicans have been listening. We're so far away from our founding principles that, absolutely, this is the very, very tip of the iceberg. We need to talk about and learn about the Constitution daily." - Jeff Luecke, a Tea Party organizer

"I think it's entirely cosmetic. This is the way the establishment handles grassroots movements. They humor people who are not expert or not fully cognizant. And then once they've humored them and those people go away, it's right back to business as usual." - Kevin Gutzman, a history professor

It feels like the Republicans are just planning more political masturbation. After Barack Obama was elected, I felt that the Republican Party was going to re-define itself, become more welcoming to new ideas and people of differing ethnic backgrounds. Instead, it listened to the whinings of the extreme conservatives, whose philosophies had just been proven to not work in the real world. In fact, their dominance in policy over the past 20 years had created an arrogant bureacracy in government that dictated to people and never listened to them. We ended up with an economic climate that created chaos in the markets by hampering the duties of its regulators, getting rid of as much regulation as it could get away with, and without any oversight, the greed machines took over and nearly brought about total global economic collapse. We now have a military that has increased its annual budget by over $500 billion, has been constantly engaged in wars and military skirmishes for the last 20 years. We have created a labyrinth of spy agencies that still cannot work together or predict any major political upheaval that took place, and would rather go after wikileaks than all major terrorist groups. And now we have Mutt and Jeff dictating all further political strategies, when they have constantly proven to be failures... These people's times have come and gone, they need to be put out to pasture and replaced by a lot of younger ones. Michael Steele, who was elected to show that the GOP also supported Black leaders, needs to be replaced by a gay Mexican-Chinese, whose families were recent immigrants, and now run medical marijuana dispensaries...

I'm usually drawn to the pessimistic year-end essays like David Rothkopf in Foreign Policy: "I however, am a New Year's curmudgeon. The holiday is a fraud celebrated by idiots. Our arbitrary slicing of time into comprehension-sized chunks and then celebrating the false distinctions between December 31 and the first of January is a big honking nonsense.


The fact that this ersatz holiday then motivates people to put on silly hats and drink to excess to celebrate the non-event event compounds the ridiculousness of it all and makes it dangerous to leave the safety of your couch. .." It's purple prose like this that brings tears to my eyes, then spend the next ten minutes cleaning off my glasses. I will venture to make one prediction for the next year. The next terrorist act to happen inside of the US will have traveled through Canada and snuck across the border of our Northern neighbor...

I wish there will be less dictators, but for some reason we seem to need a constant reminder of how to be cruel to our fellow human beings while feeding a meglo-maniacal ego. It's all about the hidden bank accounts and plundering a country's wealth and resources, the ultimate in privatization of capitalism. I understand that the textbook is being written by Vladimir Putin, with a special section on the Chinese and how to dictate by committee...