2013 Forecast Part II

The pace of change and transformation that we saw in 2012 is accelerating in 2013. As a result the future is coming at us much faster than anyone is fully prepared for. The world is changing faster than we can comprehend. Technological breakthroughs are sourcing much of this change.

Some aspects of the 23rd century world envisioned in the Star Trek series will soon be everyday features of our reality. For example, the 3D printers that are coming on line share some features with the Star Trek replicators.

The printers are able to make material items and also biologically relevant materials like replacement organs and even meat using stem cells as the raw material.

We’re just as the start of a revolution in home manufacturing. In the near future, rather than going out to stores, you’ll just order a file on line and use your personal 3D printer to make what you want. 2013 will be the year that this technology comes into its own.

We’re also very close to another famous Star Trek device, the tricorder. The tricorder was a hand help diagnostic device that could give immediate data on any health condition in a person.

Using adapted smart cell phone technology, the individual patient in partnership with their doctor will soon be able to see immediate real time read outs of health conditions specific to the individual person’s changing unique physiology.

Computers which store and retrieve data through controlled quantum states are also very close to replacing the silicon chip. This won’t happen in 2013 but the proof of concept will be firmly in place by the end of the year.

It won’t take more than a couple of years for fully functional quantum computers to come into our lives with much greater speed and computer power.

Continued advanced in nanotechnology will be another technological trend for 2013. This technology works in concert with the 3D printers to produce revolutionary changes in the materials out of which our world is constructed.

The dramatic technological leaps that are underway will have a long term beneficial effect on our civilization and open the door to meeting some of the ecological challenges we face going forward. However, there is also a short term disruptive effect. Many features of our everyday economic reality become either less relevant or completely obsolete.

If we have the ability to make our own materials at home with 3D printers, for example, there is less need for stores, warehouses, and transport of goods. Moreover, robots are rapidly replacing human beings in many industries.

One-third of all manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the United States since the year 2000. Although some of this is due to outsourcing to countries that pay lower wages, advances in robotics have been a major contributor.

In the long run, we’re going to have to redefine the meaning of work and the expectations we have of people with respect to how many hours per week they spend providing the goods and services we depend on.

We’re quickly moving into uncharted waters with respect to what counts as realistic economic expectations. The current 7.7 unemployment rate in the United States may come to be seen as an index of relative economic health.

This means it doesn’t help to look to historical precedents to get an idea of what is reasonable to expect or even to have as an economic goal. The conservative and Republican regressive outlook of trying to impede progress or restore the United States to a previous state of affairs is both foolish and counterproductive.

This is one reason why the sequester is sabotaging to the positive economic momentum that has been slowly building over the last several months or so. We need to invest in scientific research and education. This is our hope for continuing to be a leader in the world.

The federal government has a big role in this since over half of the basic scientific research in the United States is funded by the government. Moreover, the government can play a big role in leveling the playing field with respect to ensuring education opportunity for people of different economic means.

Fortunately we have a progressive president in Obama and a Democratic majority in the Senate. What is unclear going forward is the extent to which the Republicans will be successful in using their majority in the House to obstruct or derail Obama’s second term legislative agenda.

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama laid out an ambitious progressive agenda for 2013 that included immigration reform, gun control, universal pre-school, and climate change legislation.

At least with regard to immigration reform and some modest gun control policies, my reading is that these two issues are going to make it through the Congress in 2013. On social issues, the Republicans are much less likely to act as a unified caucus and vote as a block. With just a few Republican votes in the House, important bills can get through.

With respect to economic issues, the prospects are less certain. Although the Republicans had to give ground on the deal to avert the fiscal cliff and the automatic end to all of the Bush era tax cuts, they came back with renewed determination on the across the board budget cuts in the so-called sequester and have prevented any action to keep that from going into effect.

Their recent budget plan is almost the same package that Romney and Ryan ran on in 2012. It would seem that their economic game plan is relatively unchanged from what was supposedly voted down in the last election. One element of this plan is a repeal of Obamacare. They seem unwilling to compromise on any deal that involves an increase in revenues.

They have trumpeted the sequester as a win for their plan of cutting government even while they openly admit that it’s not the best thing for the economy and will cost jobs.

They seem to have a tunnel vision focus on reducing the deficit as the most pressing economic concern. In contrast to what most people believe, however, the deficit has gone down significantly in every year of Obama’s administration except the first when the stimulus increased it.

If the economy continues to grow, we’re on track to have the deficit completely under control by the end of Obama’s second term without the need for any additional draconic budget cuts.

This is a formula for economic stalemate between the two parties for 2013. My reading is that tax reform and any meaningful changes to entitlements are not happening this year. The economic can will be kicked down the road.

The Republicans are hoping to take over the Senate in 2014. The Democrats want to win back a House majority in 2014 and buck the trend where the second term of a president’s party loses seats in the House in the off year elections.

My reading is that the Democrats will come out ahead in this scenario and pick up seats in the House in 2014 while retaining a majority in the Senate.

Congressional Republican economic positions are becoming increasing out of phase with public opinion. The doom and gloom perspective of the Great Recession that helped them win so big in 2010 is giving way to a growing sense of relative economic prosperity.

The public wants government services and whatever concern they have over the deficit and the national debt is going to diminish as the economy recovery gains speed later this year and in 2014.

Although the sequester is currently largely perceived as irrelevant to people’s everyday concerns, it’s going to take a bite out of a lot of things that people care about in the coming months. It’s a foreshadowing of what Republican economics is really about, and it will result in a further erosion of support for the Republican brand.

The 2016 Presidential race is starting to come into clarity. For the Democrats, Hillary Clinton wins the nomination easily if she runs. There is a second hand report that she has already decided to run. We won’t know for sure until late in 2014 or early 2015. Her health and age may be a factor since she’ll be 69 by Election Day in 2016.

My reading is that she wants to be the first woman president and that she will run and eventually win in 2016 to become our new president.

Marco Rubio has been touted as new face of the Republican Party. He would appear to be exactly what the Republicans need. He’s young, attractive and has a compelling personal story of success from modest origins.

Moreover, he’s Hispanic and has the potential to appeal to middle class voters as someone more like them in history and lifestyle. He speaks the rhetoric of demographic inclusion the Republicans so desperately lack.

His response to the State of the Union Address was supposed to be his big introduction to the American electorate. It would appear though that an untimely drink of water has doomed his chances to be president.

At the present moment, he’s just not ready for prime time. The water incident had the effect of cracking his well polished image and there isn’t much substance behind the façade. He is like a Hollywood frontier movie set where when you look behind the store fronts you see that they is nothing behind the surface.

Moreover, Marco is an intellectual equal with Sarah Palin. In spite of his somewhat populist rhetoric, he’s an extremely conservative candidate aligned with the Tea Party.

Rubio could still end up being the nominee if the Republicans ended up with the same dubious cast of characters they had in 2012 to run against him. My reading though is that Rubio is not going to be the nominee because there is someone else out there who is much smarter and will crush him in the debates.

I don’t mean Chris Christie. He’s already been ostracized by the conservative wing of the party. Although he’s a candidate that could possibly win in the general election, he’ll not be perceived as conservative enough to make it through the primaries.

My reading is that Ted Cruz will be the nominee. The party isn’t going to go for someone who could appeal to independent voters. The crisis the Republican Party is in is going to result in a default to ideological conservative consistency.

The party is not going to embrace the future and go for a broadening of their appeal to emerging demographics. They are going to regress and pick someone that is an unmistakable representative of their core conservative beliefs.

Although Cruz was born in Canada, his mother was a US citizen at the time so he’s still eligible to be president.

It will be interesting to see how the so-called Birther Movement reacts to Ted Cruz as a presidential candidate. The same reasoning that sees Cruz as eligible to be president makes it a moot point where Obama was born as long as his mother was a US citizen at the time which was the case.

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After Election Reflection

In the election of 2012, Obama won every state he won in 2008 except for Indiana and North Carolina. Thus, he won by a comfortable margin of 332 to 206 electoral votes. This, as it turns out, was exactly what I predicted in my post just before the election. There was a majority of relatively quiet Obama support that came out to vote. He won the popular vote by a margin of 4.3 million votes.

Obama’s electoral margin was so substantial that he could have lost Florida, Ohio, and Virginia and still have won the election.

On the Senate side, the Democrats were able to defend 22 out of 23 seats that were up for election while the Republicans only defended 7 of 10 of their seats. Thus, the Democrats actually gained two seats in the Senate. I was right on all the Senate races except for Montana and North Dakota where the Democrats somewhat surprisingly prevailed.

The only Republican pickup of a formerly Democratically held seat was in Nebraska, while the Democrats flipped Republican seats in Maine, Massachusetts, and Indiana. This includes the independent, Angus King, who won in Maine and who is going to caucus with the Democrats.

My prediction was off in the House races where I said the Democrats would add a net of 18 seats. However, the final total is going to be just 8. I thought the voters would turn out many of Tea Party freshmen Republicans. This was true in a couple of races with Allan West losing in Florida and Joe Walsh in Illinois. However, the Republicans held on to most of the seats they gained in 2010.

What I failed to take into account was the effect that redistricting had on the election. The huge Republican wave in 2010 put Republicans in charge of many state legislatures and governorships. In many cases, they used this political leverage to gerrymander congressional districts to their political advantage making some districts safer for Republicans and combining others districts to pit Democratic incumbents against each other.

The 2012 election was a major watershed in America and in the world story. We could just as easily be facing the prospect of 4 years of total Republican domination of all phases of government. We could have elected a socially conservative plutocrat as our leader.

Looking at the election through the lens of the 2012 narrative, the election was a decision point where the majority of American voters decided to support a relatively progressive agenda for the challenges our civilization faces in this country and the world.

At least for now, we’ve passed up the regressive alternative of trying to return to the past. We’ve got leadership in the White House and the Senate which has a much better chance to putting us in phase with the changes happening in our society than the Republican alternatives who want to roll back, deny, or resist change.

The election supports the guarded optimistic thesis I’ve put forth in my book 2012: The Real Story that Americans are in process of manifesting a net increase in their spiritual intelligence with respect to discerning what’s really important for us in these times.

Democracy survived in spite of the efforts of Republican super PACs to buy the election with the money of millionaires and billionaires.

The efforts of Republican controlled legislatures to suppress the vote of minorities through voter identification laws, fewer early voting days, greater barriers to registration, fewer polling places and voting machines in minority districts, and general election malfeasance did not work, for the most part. People were willing to wait in lines for six hours and longer to push back on this attempt to disenfranchise them.

Some of these efforts to suppress the vote of Democratic leaning constituents were blocked by the courts.

In this election, we had more trustworthy election results than what prevailed in 2000 and 2004.

As I described in my book, many things seem to come together to support a positive election result for the Democrats. Todd Aiken and Richard Mourdock self-destructed with their comments about rape. Mourdock’s comments came well after the furor over what Todd Aiken said about legitimate rape and women being able to control whether or not they get pregnant in rape. Romney never recovered from the disclosure of his disparagement of the 47% of people who don’t pay income taxes.

Moreover, the Republican were battered by hurricanes with one coming just as they were about to start their convention and another right before the election highlighting President Obama’s commander-in-chief strengths.

I don’t see these and similar Republican setbacks as a series of unfortunate events. My reading is that there is some healing intention at work trying to guide the United States and the world toward a positive outcome of the 2012 extended time frame ending in 2020.

There is a conspiracy at work here. It’s a conspiracy of higher consciousness beings trying to nudge civilization in the direction of more life affirming choices for all life on Earth.

Events, even when they are outside of our control, have the capacity to reveal the truth of which choice is better as the principles react to what has occurred. I see Hurricane Sandy as a meaningful coincidence, even if it was not influenced by anything other than nature.

If there are in fact unseen spiritual forces at work trying to shepherd humanity to a better future, there could have been no better foil for this purpose than Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate for president.

In the transitional turmoil of the extended 2012 time frame, one of the biggest challenges we face is a restructuring of our economic strategies and institutions. The blind self-interest of corporate greed and the political influence of wealth inequity threatens to destroy the ecology of our planet. There are competing narratives about how to deal with our ecological impasse as it is reflected in economic dislocation and disruption.

With Romney’s defeat and the Democratic wave in the Senate, one version of Republican economic philosophy would seem to have been discredited. Although with his many conflicting promises it was unclear exactly what Romney’s economic plan was, his selection of Paul Ryan as his vice presidential candidate was an implicit endorsement of the Ryan budget.

The basic principles of Romney/Ryan economics involve maintaining preferential tax incentives for wealthy people, rolling back government regulations on corporations, reforming entitlements, and balancing the budget through draconian cuts to social services.

What we learned from the election is that a majority of people, and especially minorities, did not buy into the fantasy that a trickle down economic approach that preserves and reinforces the present situation of wealth disparity is going to benefit them in the long run.

Romney’s presidential bid served to highlight the stark realities of a plutocratic economic agenda which is based on a premise of the moral superiority and governing legitimacy of wealthier people versus the less economically advantaged.

In his now infamous secretly recorded comments to a $50,000-a-plate donor dinner on September 17th, Romney said that the 47% of Americans who do not pay income taxes “…believe they are victims… My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

After the election in a conference call to donors, Romney removed all doubt that these were his real views when he said that the reason Obama won the election was because he gave “gifts” to minorities, single women, and young people.

What he was talking about are measures that Obama helped get through Congress that benefitted various groups. Young people had reduction of interest rates on student loans and were able to remain on their parents’ health plan until age 26. Single women had contraceptives covered under their health plan. Amnesty was extended to some children of illegal immigrants. And health care was made available to minority groups who would otherwise not be covered.

In this case and in the previous 47% remarks, we have a keyhole look into the radical honesty that occurs when plutocrats talk to what they believe to be a restricted audience of other plutocrats.

The Obama programs may look to the rest of us as being cases where the President is acting to fulfill his promise to create more economic opportunity and social justice. However, these same policies are seen by Romney as cynical political pandering to special interest groups.

Apparently Romney thinks that the less economically advantage population are character challenged and morally deficient because they vote on the basis of immediate short term tangible rewards rather than from principle. So, for example, single women aren’t voting to protect reproductive freedom, they’re just going for contraceptives.

This is a perspective which see people in the lower half of the economic spectrum as being deficient in character because they have the wrong values.

Romney not only insults the moral intelligence of the majority of voters who supported Obama but their intellectual intelligence as well. From his point of view, they failed to see through Obama’s Santa Claus scam to win the election by filling the stockings of these dependent child-like voters.

Romney was one of the wealthiest individuals ever to run for president. His campaign serves to bring to light the pernicious background assumptions of a plutocratic governing philosophy. The rich should rule because they are smarter than others and have better character and higher moral principles. That is how they got to be as wealthy and powerful as they are.

Various Republican 2016 presidential hopefuls and other figures have lost little time in distancing themselves from Mitt Romney and his offensive plutocratic sentiments. The man who only a short time ago was their greatly esteemed leader set to lead them out of the Republican nightmare of an Obama presidency is now the despised failed campaigner.

The repudiation of Romney as an individual though will not automatically lead to a fundamental reassessment of his basic economic philosophy with respect to the future direction of the party. It is too easy to claim that the 2012 presidential election disaster was a failure of the narrative rather than a repudiation of its underlying philosophy. The narrative is how the story of what the philosophy is trying to manifest is presented.

The temptation is to present a book with basically the same content but with a different cover and hope for a different result.

We can be certain that the Republican Party will attempt to redefine itself and try to come back stronger than ever in 2014 and 2016.

The Republicans are still in control of the House with 234 seats to 201 for the Democrats. And, in 2014, the Democrats have to defend 20 seats in the Senate to only 13 for the Republicans. Six of these Democrat seats are in the red states of Montana, Alaska, South Dakota, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Louisiana. Almost all of the Republican seats are in very red states where they are almost certain to win.

Moreover, in almost every previous midterm election after a president has been reelected, the party in the White House has lost seats in the House.

The strength of the Republicans in the last few years has been their ability to create a coalition of those who support social conservatism, plutocratic economics, and a libertarian focus on smaller government.

Romney as a leader of the party held this coalition together. However, with Romney’s defeat and virtual banishment, the party lacks a clear leader.

One thing is relatively clear. The Republicans will no longer be able to maintain their unified front in opposition to some sort of compromise on budget issues. They’ve kicked the can down the road until after the election with respect to various impasses on budget issues. Now, with the election settled, they will have to deal.

There has been a lot of soul-searching on the part of the Republicans trying to make sense of their presidential election debacle. In this respect, some are even looking at some of the contracts they signed. For example, some Republican legislators are recanting their pledge to not increase tax rates as embodied in Grover Norquist’s tax pledge. 95% of the Republicans in Congress had at one point signed onto this pledge.

However, it’s obvious to everyone, including a significant number of Republicans, that the budget crisis cannot be resolved without new revenues. My reading is that compromise is coming on budget issues. We’re not going to go over the so-called fiscal cliff with tax rates going up for everyone and mandated dramatic budget cuts.

Going forward there are going to significant cracks in what has heretofore been a more or less solid wall of Republican opposition to everything Obama tries to get done on basic issues. My reading is that our country is not going to be stuck in total political gridlock for the next few years.

Compromise though is tantamount to surrender to super conservatives and even with the relative lessening of influence of the Tea Party, these factions play a major role in deciding who runs for President and for House and Senate seats in the Republican Party.

Changing demographics were one of the well-documented reasons the Republicans lost the presidential election and did poorly in the Senate. Hispanics who made up 10% of the electorate in 2012 supported Obama and the Democrats by a whopping margin of 71% to 29% percent.

So, to be viable going forward in presidential politics, Republicans need to broaden their appeal to minorities and to Hispanics in particular. This clears the way for meaningful immigrant reform. My reading is that this is what we will see in 2013.

But, this will also infuriate the super conservatives of the Republican Party.

With respect to the 2016 Republican presidential field then, we will see an all-out war between the super conservatives and the more pragmatic and moderate Republicans.

My reading is that the Republicans will nominate a super conservative for President in 2016 and again lose badly.

With respect to the Republican names currently being bandied about for 2016, I don’t see any getting the nomination. It’s none of the above. Chris Christie might seem to be a strong candidate, but he’s currently morbidly obese and unlikely to lose weight in the next four years. Also, he alienated many Republicans in the last days of the election by saying positive things about how Obama handled the hurricane in his state. Elephants tend to have long memories.

Marco Rubio is another person whose name is already in consideration. He has the advantage of being young, attractive, and Hispanic. However, with respect to his qualifications to be president, Marco is more or less the Hispanic version of Sarah Palin.

The most charitable thing you can say about Mitt Romney is that he has a complex ideological character. In some respects and on some issues, he’s very conservative. On others, he appears to be moderate or even liberal. This ideological ambivalence is not lost on the Republican voters. They will want someone that stands on principle. From their point of view, Romney lost because he was not consistently conservative enough.

Paul Ryan might try to run but his economic vision has already been repudiated in the last election. I don’t see Sarah Palin running in 2016 either. She won’t want to put herself through the painful scrutiny that she has already endured in running for vice president. Mike Huckabee could be a strong candidate except that he lacks the motivation to compete.

I think we’re going to see someone like Rick Santorum or Ted Cruz winning the Republican nomination in 2016.

The Republicans have a huge challenge in reconfiguring their brand. Very conservative people don’t do well with the integration of new information. They tend to double down on what they already believe even in the face of factual evidence that flatly contradicts their beliefs.

Moreover, the majority of the American electorate is trending in the direction of being more liberal on social issues. Candidates who take a strong stand on socially conservative issues do so at their peril.

Minority voters will continue to grow as a percentage of the total electorate. To the extent to which Republicans adhere to a plutocratic economic philosophy, it’s hard to see how they are going to win over these voters whose aspirations are to achieve or maintain a good middle class lifestyle.

The Republicans are losing the demographic battle in no small part because they are out of phase with the 21st century. Younger voters, 18 to 29 years of age, being more in tune with what’s happening in our time, supported Obama and the Democrats by a 60% to 40% margin. As we go forward, the older Republican voters will be dying off and more young people will be coming of voting age.

So, I don’t see the Republicans winning the White House any time soon. Moreover, my reading is that the Democrats are going to hold on to their advantage in the Senate in 2014 and 2016. With respect to the House, I see the Democrats regaining the majority by 2016 and losing almost no seats in 2014.

What we’ve seen in the last few decades is a situation where the balance of power has swung back and forth between the two parties. However, the extended 2012 time frame introduces new dynamics never seen before. The Democrats are more in phase with the transformations happening in our civilization and so their appeal to the nonpartisan middle of the electorate is going be more compelling than would otherwise be the case.

The super conservatives are not winning and so the apocalyptic scenario of domination by a right wing authoritarian government is not in our immediate future.

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2012 Election Predictions

Here are my final 2012 election predictions.

My reading is that the election will be decided relatively quickly and decisively after Obama wins Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. Thus, we are not going to have a repeat of the election chaos of 2000 where nobody knows who wins for days or weeks.

I have Obama winning all of the battleground states except for North Carolina. That would give him 26 states plus the District of Columbia for 332 electoral votes. I see Romney winning 24 states to give him a total of 206.

The breakdown is as follows: Obama wins Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

For Romney: Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and West Virginia.

The Senate races are a mixed report. My reading is that the Senate configuration will be unchanged with respect to Democrats, Republicans and Independents. That would give the new Senate 51 Democrats, 2 Independents who caucus with them and 47 Republicans. I see the Republicans picking up three seats formally held by Democrats but losing three that they currently hold. The rest of the Senate races will see the party that currently holds the seat winning.

Since the Democrats had to defend 23 seats and the Republicans only 10, this is a strong showing for the Democrats. I see the Republicans losing 30% of their seats that came up for elections.

The three Democrats pickups I see are Elizabeth Warren over Scott Brown in Massachusetts, Joe Donnelly over Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Angus King, an Independent, winning the Maine Seat vacated by Olympia Snowe.

The three Republicans pickups are Deb Fischer over Bob Kerrey in Nebraska, Denny Rehberg over Jon Tester in Montana, Rick Berg over Heidi Heitcamp in North Dakota.

Other close Senate Races I see as follows: Democrat Claire McCaskill over Republican Todd Aiken in Missouri, Democrat Chris Murphy over Republican Lisa McMahon in Connecticut, Republican Jeff Flake over Democrat Richard Carmona in Arizona, Republican Dean Heller over Democrat Shelley Berkley in Nevada, Democrat Tim Kaine over Republican George Allen in Virginia, Democrat Tammy Baldwin over Republican Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin, Democrat Sherrod Brown over Republican Josh Mandel in Ohio, Democrat Bill Nelson over Republican Connie Mack in Florida and Democrat Bob Casey over Republican Tom Smith in Pennsylvania.

Other winners will be Democrat Diane Feinstein in California, Democrat Tom Carper in Delaware, Democrat Daniel Akaka in Hawaii, Democrat Ben Cardin in Maryland, Democrat Debbie Stabenow in Michigan, Democrat Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota, Republican Roger Wicker in Mississippi, Democrat Bob Menendez in New Jersey, Democrat Jeff Bingaman in New Mexico, Democrat Kisten Gillibrand in New York, Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse in Rhode Island, Republican Bob Corker in Tennessee, Republican Ted Cruz in Texas, Independent Bernie Sanders in Vermont, Democrat Maria Cantwell in Washington, Democrat Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Republican John Barasso in Wyoming.

With respect to the House races, I see the Democrats picking up a net of 18 seats. They needed 25 to gain a majority so they fall a little short of that goal.

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The 2012 Presidential Campaign After the First Debate

President Obama and Mitt Romney had their first presidential debate October 3rd in Denver. The consensus was that Romney had a great performance and the president was not at his best.

Prior to the debate, it had looked as though President Obama was running away with the election and the debate was Romney’s last ditch effort to turn things around.

Now it would seem that Romney’s campaign is re-energized and Obama is on the defensive. However, things are not quite what they seem. My reading is that the October 3 debate will prove to be a perversely auspicious moment for the progressive movement and the attempt of the Democrats to keep the White House, maintain a majority in the Senate, and win back House seats from the Republicans.

Americans tend to look at their presidential debates on the model of a spectator blood sport. From this point of view, to win the debate you have to try to establish some kind of dominance in body language, tone, and memorable one-liners. You lose if you show any evidence of discomfort or disgust or don’t match your rival’s jabs with comebacks which show an equal facility in verbal judo. Style matters much more than substance.

From the stylistic perspective, Romney’s performance was clearly better than Obama’s and so he was judged to have won the debate. However, looking at it from a substance point of view, Obama was, at the very least, on a par with the points Romney made.

The president at times seems alternatively confident, bemused, disgusted, and fatigued. He kept the focus on the issues rather than going after Romney’s character. The debate could have degenerated into an exchange of personal attacks but Obama maintained the dignity of his office and didn’t go down that road. He side-stepped the provocations that Romney provided in that respect. He didn’t go after Romney for his 47% comments. That was a smart move because Romney had a mea culpa rehearsed piece he wanted to plug in there.

So how does this debate “setback” actually advance the cause of the Democrats? Republicans are now fully enrolled in a belief that Romney is heading for victory in November. Had he done poorly in the debate, money, effort, and enthusiasm that was designated for his campaign would have been redirected into Senate and House races.

The reality is that Romney is going to lose badly anyway. To win he would need to sweep almost all of the swing states and he’s currently behind in nearly every one of them. Most of the electorate has already made up their mind and he will not have won over enough of the remaining undecided people from a single debate performance. The vast majority of the people who watch these things are partisans there to cheer on their guy, not undecided persons trying to make an informed choice.

Romney may have won the debate on style points but on substance he created problems for his campaign that will in time significantly erode whatever benefit the perception of his performance in the debate gave him.

The Denver debate exposed the sociopathic culture of the entire Romney campaign. Sociopaths are often charming individuals who are skilled in manipulating people by telling them whatever they think people want to hear irrespective of truthfulness. They are very accomplished liars with the ability to tweak an outrageous untruth or a half-truth so that it seems fully credible.

Some of the ads that the Romney campaign has put out contain blatant misrepresentations of this sort. One is about a statement Obama seems to be making about the economy. However, this is not something Obama said himself but where he’s quoting McCain’s campaign from 2008 (“If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose”).

When three of these egregiously misleading ads were pointed out to the campaign by Rachel Maddow on MSNBS, a spokesperson for the campaign replied, “We are not going to let our campaign be dictated to by fact checkers.”

There were plenty of lies and distortions in Romney’s first debate and fact checkers have been busy documenting them since then. However, it takes a while for the truth to filter out into the general voting population and people expect politicians to twist the truth so they are often given much more latitude than we would ever given anyone else in this respect.

But the bigger problem Romney has is that what he was saying in Denver is not logically consistent with positions he’s maintained before and even with other things he said in the evening. The debate was Romney’s etch-a-sketch moment where he reconfigured himself as a moderate in order to appeal to independent voters.

This is not the same man we’ve been listening to for all these months, especially in the Republican primaries. This is a man who seems to be reborn with a new progressive attitude. This new Romney doesn’t want to simply repeal Obamacare. He wants to save some popular parts of it such as the new rules about people seeking insurance who have pre-existing conditions. He now sees the value of federal regulations. There are even parts of Dodd-Frank he wants to keep. “And there are some parts of Dodd-Frank that make all the sense in the world.” He said, “I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income individuals.” He also said, “… I’m not going to cut education funding. I don’t have any plans to cut education funding and –and grants that go to people going to college.”

Before Romney had proposed a 20% tax cut for everyone. Nonpartisan budget analysts have said that would generate a 5 trillion dollar hole in the budget over a 10 year period of time. Yet now he says, “My number one principle is, there will be no tax cut that will add to the deficit,” and also, “I will not under any circumstances raise taxes on the middle-income families.”

A major feature of his economic plan is to balance the budget. However, since no new taxes are in the offing, the new revenues will have to come from closing tax loopholes and from growth. “Look, the revenue I get is more people working, getting higher pay, paying more taxes. That’s how we get growth, and how we balance the budget.”

If you closed enough tax loopholes to make up a 5 trillion dollar hole, this is going to have to be something that adversely affects the middle class. There just aren’t enough wealthy people to make up the difference through ending deductions for the well off. It would end up being a major back door tax increase for the middle class.

Counting on growth to make up the difference is like saying, “Trust me, this is going to work. You don’t have to worry.”

Romney’s inconsistent positions and promises were highlighted in the Denver debate. After a while the luster will begin to fade from the snake oil he’s selling. Even if you want to believe Romney, the suspicion grows that he can’t deliver on what he said because it’s inconsistent with itself and can’t be effectively applied in the actual world in which we live.

The down ballot Republican candidates will have to decide which Romney they support and which version they want to disavow.

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2012 Forecast Part II

This blog is my forecast for 2012 covering concerns which were not addressed in the previous overview of 2012. These will be economics, world events, technology, and alien disclosure.

With the exception of alien disclosure, there is a lot of anxiety in the collective consciousness now about these issues because there is intuitive awareness that big changes are ahead for us.

So, from a prophecy perspective, it’s helpful to distinguish between what’s on line for us between now and the rest of calendar year 2012, what’s happening in the immediate years after 2012, and what’s going to be the state of the world ten to twenty-five years in the future.

With respect to economic changes, what I see for the remainder of calendar year 2012 is more of the same of what we have already seen in the early months of the year.

For the United States, I see a continuity of a relatively weak recovery with jobs being added and unemployment very slowly going down. The stock market will slowly inch up and close the year with the Dow at around 14,000.

Europe will still be in a process of recovery from the Great Recession for the rest of the year. It’s the financial version of post traumatic stress syndrome. I see Europe making small steps forward in some countries and small steps backwards in others. It’s relative stability though.

What I do not see for calendar year 2012 is anything like the financial meltdown, runaway inflation, and devaluation of currencies that many 2012 financial doomsayers have described. There is no big financial crash happening in 2012. Greece will not default. The Eurozone will not collapse.

Financial realities are relatively stable now and I see this stability continuing for the next few years. However, somewhere down the line there is going to be some major restructuring of the economic state of affairs for our planet.

The world wide hegemony of the capitalist economic paradigm is not leading to a world where everyone wins. Wealth inequality within nations and between wealthier and impoverished nations is growing at a frightening pace. National debt is also a huge problem for the United States and Europe.

World economies ultimately rest upon planetary resources and energy production. These resources are reaching critical limits.

Our technological advances can help us in some areas such as energy production not dependent on fossil fuels. But technology alone cannot save us from future economic calamity. It takes political will within countries and cooperation between nations to manifest what’s possible for us as a species. That’s currently lacking.

We now have the technological capacity to feed, clothe, and house everyone on the planet. But, clearly, this is not happening.

Whether the long range economic future is hopeful or bleak will depend on the rate of growth of the baseline spiritual intelligence of humanity as a whole.

In spite of the uncertainty of how these long term financial and economic issues are going to be resolved, I don’t have any intuition that our current financial resources and equities are going to suddenly disappear in the future. I don’t see that happening.

Although my forecast doesn’t offer clear guidelines for safe investments for the long range future, I’m pretty clear that buying up gold and silver bullion is not the answer.

There is coming a time, within a couple of decades at the very latest, when we’ll be able to manipulate the atomic structure of matter and make whatever elements we choose from any other materials.

Collectible gold and silver coins might be a good investment, at least for a short time. However, advances in 3D printers will eventually be able to counterfeit them.

Looking down the road at the post 2012 world, it’s counterproductive to hoard anything in anticipation of the possibility of a collapse of civilization. Whatever we focus our attention on grows. Hoarding or preparing some kind of survivalist resource base for the worst case circumstances just makes this more likely to occur.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t make common sense preparation for natural disasters. Having some disaster preparations in place is a rational course because, even without the worst case scenario of the disintegration of civilization, we’ll likely have situations like power outages at some point in the future.

With regard to world affairs, there are currently three problem nations in the 2012 calendar year. These are North Korea, Iran, and Syria.

None of these countries pose any substantial threat to the security of the United States With the re-election of President Obama, we’ll have no new wars of preemptive action against them with commitment of combat troops.

However, in the case of Syria, there will eventually be United States involvement similar to the way we provided military support for the NATO campaign in Libya.

North Korea is still involved in a power struggle of political transition with their new leader Kim Jong-un. The real power in North Korea rests with the military. Consequently, what we’ve seen from Jong-un so far is a lot of militaristic bravado. The failed launch of a three stage missile is the latest provocation.

My reading on Jong-un is that he is someone who has a legitimate concern for the well being of the people of North Korea. Moreover, my intuition is that his vision is reunification with South Korea. However, he cannot go down this road until he’s confident that he has the support of enough of the military establishment to pull this off.

Within three to five years, though, North Korea will cease to exist as an independent state.

There has been a lot of anxiety about Iran and their nuclear ambitions and whether they will be attacked by Israel. As I have already discussed in the last blog, my reading is that Israel is not going to attack Iran, not in the immediate future, or ever.

What is not fully understood is that Iran does not have any immediate plans to make a bomb. Had they intended to build a bomb, they would have done so by now. Their nuclear program is just a bluff.

The freedom and democracy movement will catch up with Iran in the next year or so and then real chaos will ensue in that country. It’s going to take two or three years. But, before Iran becomes a greater threat to world stability, their theocracy is going to be overthrown by the people.

We’ve already got chaos in Syria and more to come. The entrenched regime of Bashar al-Assad is not going to be brought to an end through any kind of diplomacy. It’s going to take an all-out civil war with many countries participating on the side of the people by providing money and material support and eventually air support. This is going to intensify before the year ends and continue through 2013.

With respect to terrorism in the United States for the remainder of the year, I’m not seeing anything on the psychic radar at all.

With regard to new technologies, the most exciting area is in new energy sources. In my forecast for 2011, I said that there would be new energy technologies that came into play in 2011, but cold fusion would not be one of them.

Unfortunately that seems to be correct. The so-called E-Cat device of Andrea Rossi has proven to be pretty much a nonstarter. He simply does not have the technology he claims to have.

My reading is that low energy nuclear reactions are possible and we will eventually make energy devices on this basis. However, the practical applications are still down the road three to five years from now.

We’re not currently in a political climate that is favorable for world changing technology advances. This is not going to change in 2012. After the election in November of 2012, though, with the re-election of President Obama and more Democrats in the House, there will be a better opportunity to bring forward innovations.

There are many political forces that have vested interests in preserving the technological status quo. Unfortunately, what is real and unreal, what is true and untrue, and what is world transformative and what is irrelevant are all battleground concerns of competing political factions.

One thing I did not get right in my 2011 forecast was the reading that alien disclosure would occur in the fall of 2011. It didn’t happen.

The conclusion of my forecast for the rest of 2012 is that we’re in for a pretty bland, relatively uneventful year. Well, that is, except for one small detail. Alien disclosure is happening in the fall of 2012.

Presidents are not kept in the loop anymore with respect to secret government UFO research. So Obama is currently not informed of what the black ops UFO part of the government knows.

What I see happening in the fall is a breaking of the code of silence of this secret government entity which has indisputable knowledge of alien visitation. My reading is that is going to come from a strange alliance of progressive and super conservative secret government operatives.

The motive of the conservatives is to disrupt the re-election campaign of President Obama. As it stands now, Romney with his 50% disapproval rating looks like a sure loser to Obama in November. If the economy continues with the current pace of improvement, Romney is going to lose baring some unforeseen world event that puts Obama in a bad light.

If sixty years of government secrecy and disinformation about UFOs is suddenly revealed though, this could cause a backlash against the current administration. It would be clear that we had been lied to for sixty years or more and that past presidents have been complicit in a conspiracy of disinformation.

How credible is it going to be that Obama knew nothing of this prior to the disclosure?

The progressives feel like people can handle the truth about UFOs and that it’s time to end the secrecy. Moreover, they believe that Obama is going to win anyway. My reading is that they are correct on both counts.

Once we know for sure that we’re not alone in the universe, this creates a sharp line of demarcation between a before and an after of human history. It doesn’t affect the calendar year 2012 much coming late in the year, but it’s going to have profound effects for the post 2012 era. These consequences will be the subject of a future blog.

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2011 Forecast: Part IV

As mentioned in Part II of my 2011 Forecast series, alien disclosure in the fall of 2011 will create a striking before and after script for the year. However, it will take some months before the impact of disclosure results in substantive change. The exception to this is in the area of energy technologies.

There is currently upheaval, revolution, and chaos in North Africa and Middle Eastern countries. With Gaddafi’s imminent fall in Libya, this will make three long term autocrats who have been kicked out of power. We want to know how far the revolutionary wave will go in 2011 and how many more regimes will fall. Also, what type of governance will replace the fallen dictators?

The worst case scenario, Islamic radicals and fundamentalists taking over in Tunisia, Egypt, or Libya, is not going to happen. It will be months and even years before the outcome of the people’s revolution is fully manifested.

What I see happening relatively quickly are some really positive steps towards human rights and democracy. However, they will still fall short of addressing the full extent of the people’s unhappiness with their governments. In particular, the economic plight of the people will not be redressed in the short run.

In the longer run, a year or two down the road, I see the countries mentioned above experiencing an economic turnaround as the governments becomes more responsive to the needs of the people.

I’m not seeing a lot of total regime change in the rest of the region in the near future. Much depends on how the revolution turns out in the three pilot countries that overthrew their dictators. If, as I predict, there is a significant improvement in the quality of life of ordinary people in the long run, this will fuel another revolutionary wave in a year or two.

In the meantime, I see a lot of countries with autocratic governments trying to head off the wave by making some concessions on human rights and more representative government. Also, as in Saudi Arabia, some governments are trying to provide direct economic support.

The crisis in Libya has impacted world oil prices. My reading is that this will be a short term blip on the economic world picture. Gaddafi will be deposed before the middle of March and then there will be a quick return to full oil production in Libya. In the meantime, Saudi Arabia is going to make up the shortfall on the world market with increased production.

The Great Recession will finally be at an end around the middle of 2011. I see a strong economic surge in the United States and the rest of the world for 2011. The stock market will continue strong throughout the year ending at about 14,500. Unfortunately unemployment will also remain relatively high. At the end of the year, I see unemployment at about 8 percent.

On the political front in the United States, we’re heading into a season of political gridlock with a Democratic president and Senate and a Republican House of Representatives with 87 freshman Republican members. The 112th Congress will go down in history as the least productive Congress ever in terms of important new legislation that is passed.

The Congress will have to deal with budget and debt ceiling issues. This is where the game of political chicken will come into play. In the 2010 elections, the Republicans rode a wave of popular support for instituting fiscal reforms of government.

However, delivering on these promises presents a challenging political landscape for them to navigate. They cannot really play their trump card and refuse to raise the debt ceiling or shut down the government by refusing to pass a budget. Thanks to Newt Gingrich’s failed 1995 strategy of government shutdown, they risk losing popular support if they go to this extreme.

The alternative is compromising with Obama and the Democrats. If they do this, then they risk being seen as hypocrites and individuals of weak principle. This makes establishment Republicans more vulnerable to the take no prisoners attitude of the Tea Party in subsequent elections.

My forecast is that they will continue to kick the can down the road with short term measures which put off the final decisions. It seems they have already done this with a two week continuing resolution to keep the government funded past March 4.

All of this endless bickering makes Obama look good by comparison since he is perceived as someone who can reach out to the Republicans and make compromises as he did on the extension of the Bush era tax cuts to the wealthiest for two years.

As the economic situation improves in the United States and the world, the focus on deficit and debt will become less of a front burner concern for ordinary Americans. Moreover, the fiscal measures so important to the Republicans will result in reduced government services and benefits to the average citizen. This will fuel a Democratic wave in the 2012 elections.

I see some really interesting technological breakthroughs happening in 2011. There will be new energy innovations offering the promise of a world not dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. Alien disclosure plays a role in this because it demonstrates the feasibility of new energy sources. The aliens did not get to our shores by conventional energetic means.

Also some alien technology derived from crashed alien spacecraft has been in the closet for many years and can now come into play.

I see a whole spectrum of new energy technologies coming into being in 2011. I do not see cold fusion as being one of them. However, I do see one form of new energy using water as the raw material and splitting off the hydrogen and the oxygen.

On the biological frontier in 2011, I see the cloning of a human being. Also I see progress in stem cell research that offers the prospect of being able to reprogram adult stem cells to regenerate organs.

On the computer front, there will be a technology breakthrough that uses light to store and transmit information.

Stay tuned for a really exciting 2011.

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Making Sense of the Midterms: Part III

Will the elections of 2012 be like the midterm elections of 2010? Certainly, if the election were held today, Obama re-election effort would be in deep trouble. The Republicans would win control of the Senate as well as maintain their hold on the House.

If this were to be the case, our country would be in serious jeopardy. We would then have a very right wing government. Social conservative issues would come to the head of the priority list for congressional action and it would be the Democrats who would be trying to stem this tide with filibusters.

In many respects, it would be like turning the clock back to the era when George W. was in charge. We cannot afford this type of government though in the 2012 time. The challenges we face on every front require a visionary and progressive response.

Global warming would be just one such challenge. Republicans are very close to making the denial of global warming part of their official platform. They deny either that global warming is happening at all or, if it is happening, they claim the activities of human beings are not responsible.

There is a strong anti-scientific bias on the part of conservative Republicans. If they dominate our government, we would have lost a great deal of our ability to adapt to the changing realities of the 2012 time.

On the economic side, a government of conservative Republicans would make big cuts in both spending and taxes. The effect would be that the middle and lower classes would bear even more of the burden of supporting government than is currently so.

Wealthier people though would get more tax breaks and benefits. There would be a broad rollback of social services across the board as governmental help to the disadvantaged portion of our society is cut back.

With respect to the presidential race, much depends on who the Republicans put forward as their candidate. The four front runners are Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich. There are many others mentioned, but the reality is that it takes so much money and other resources to win a presidential nomination that, if a prospective candidate hasn’t made a name for themselves by now, it’s already too late.

The best candidate the Republicans could put forward would be Marco Rubio. But, as he’s just been elected Senator, he won’t be running until 2016.

All the major candidates have liabilities. Newt Gingrich is an intellectual and someone whose moral character is so flawed that he is widely despised even by Republicans.

Mike Huckabee is a good candidate in some respects, but he’s the social conservative Republican candidate and that’s too narrow a base to win the nomination. Moreover, he’s been virtually invisible since 2008.

Mitt Romney is the establishment Republican with the best chance to win the nomination and beat Obama. But if the Tea Party doesn’t implode between now and 2012, he is going to be dead meat. Romney supported TARP and still supports it. He’s going to be anathema for the Tea Party people who make up a sizeable percentage of Republican primary participants.

Sarah’s main liability is a 52% disapproval rating among the American public as a whole. There are serious questions about her electability. However, she is widely admired in Republican circles and the darling of the Tea Party.

My reading is that she will run away with the nomination. She has made herself into a media star and been continually in the news since 2008. Moreover, she is more or less immune from criticism, at least in the eyes of her conservative base. She is like one of those science fiction monsters that just get stronger the more you throw at them as they absorb energy. Her appeal is emotional and symbolic. It has little to do with logic or arguments.

Palin’s nomination pretty much makes Obama’s reelection a cake walk. People are going to want someone they can trust for the chief executive. By 2012, some of the projections Obama has been subjected too will have worn off. These are both the projections that he’s the incarnation of the Messiah or that he’s is a socialist and the anti-Christ.

The 2012 election will not be like 2010 in one very important respect. More people are going to be motivated to vote with presidential candidates on the line. Many of the demographic groups which were under represented in the 2010 midterms will come back into play in 2012.

Less than 40% of the eligible voters turned out in the midterms of 2010. It was over 60% in 2008. Moreover, 2010 saw a dramatic decrease in the voting of demographic groups that favored Democrats in 2008. Participation by young voters was down 55%, African-Americans 43%, and Latinos 40%.

If we do indeed have Obama versus Palin, the scary prospect of Sarah Palin in the White House will jolt people out of voter apathy.

My reading is that the economy will continue to improve in 2011 and 2012. There will be modest growth and this will ease the deficit crisis to some extent. I see unemployment remaining relatively high at about 7.5 to 8.0 percent by election time in 2012. However, emergency measures to stimulate the economy will no longer be needed.

The Great Recession will finally be over and the sense of economic extremity will no longer be the only issue on voters’ minds.

However, this doesn’t mean we’ll be out of the woods economically. We’re looking at a 2012 trend of a problematic work force in the United States.

Manufacturing and lower skill work is being shipped overseas to cheaper labor markets. There will be job growth in highly skilled and technical fields, but the escalating cost of technical and higher education will make it more difficult for people to quality for these jobs.

There is economic turmoil in the entire world currently and this is going to continue between now and 2012. The issue is not scarcity of resources, but how these resources are allocated. The wealth inequity issue is a global concern. The world-wide capitalistic economic paradigm is creating a scenario where more and more people are becoming disadvantaged with respect to the Plutocracy.

The economic system of our planet is going to have to be restructured. How this is going to be accomplished draws sharp contrasts between progressive and conservative political factions.

The Republicans have had their wave and now they are going to accountable to the voters. They’ll have to put some specifics into their plans for the economy. When they get down to details, many of the independent voters who supported them in 2010 are going to be experiencing voter’s remorse.

With a divided Congress though, there will plenty of room for each side to blame the other for inaction and ineffectiveness.

Mitch McConnell, the Senator Minority leader for the Republicans was very candid when he said that the “single most important thing that we want to achieve” after the election “is for President Obama to be a one-term President.”

We’ll see then a continuation of the Republican strategy of opposing all Obama initiatives. Power becomes more important than policy and the country suffers as a result. The new Republican opposition to the START treaty is one recent example.

The incoming congress will mark a new low point in congressional gridlock. We can expect brinkmanship around budgets and increasing the national debt ceiling. My reading is that the Republican overreach will lead them to do the same kinds of things they did in 1994. For example, we’ll see a shutdown of the government over the issue of increasing the debt ceiling.

In some respects, the Republican leadership will follow the playbook of the Tea Party. Rather than confronting the real challenges we face, it’s much easier to seek distraction through acting out. Often symbolic moves take the place of substantive change.

The Republican initiative to have a moratorium on earmarks is one such move. If all earmarks are eliminated, however, it will only amount to one half of one percent of the budget. Moreover, it’s not really a cut in spending because federal agencies can still spend the money for the various projects anyway. This is because earmarks are sourced from money already appropriated.

The more partisan and ideological people are, the less open they are to taking in new information. Research on beliefs shows that often individuals actually become more intransient in their opinions when presented with contrary facts. A statement like: “Eliminating earmarks will not by itself reduce spending” would be an example of something super partisan folks just can’t accept.

There are still many people who believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was involved in the 911 attacks.

The political peril of the 2012 elections is that the Republican wave of 2010 will continue into 2012 and give us a government of ideological, conservative Republicans who are not open to changing their minds no matter what new information comes into play. This is surely what we don’t need for the tumultuous 2012 time.

Even with the reelection of President Obama in 2012, he is going to be unable to initiate any progressive change with a conservative Republican House and Senate. The Senate is especially vulnerable in 2012. There are 33 Senators up for reelection then and 23 of them are from the current Democratic caucus.

Moreover, there are several Democratic Senators up for reelection in red or purple states: Kent Conrad in North Dakota, Ben Nelson in Nebraska, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Jon Tester in Montana, Jim Webb in Virginia, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

Also, it’s going to be difficult for the Democrats to win the 25 seats they need to take control of the House in 2012 once the Republican legislatures get finished gerrymandering all of the House districts from the 2010 census.

What’s not taken into account yet in the political forecast for 2012 is the impact of world events. Between now and 2012, we’re going to have disclosure of alien presence on planet Earth.

My reading is that this is now going to happen in early 2011. (This is a revision from my earlier forecast of November, 2010. There will be more on this in a future blog.)

This event will give us a more planetary focus. Who we are as a species will come into play. This helps shift the focus from who will be the best party to improve the economy and business to issues of values and priorities.

Moreover, with Sarah Palin as the implicit leader of the Republic Party as their standard bearer for 2012, we can have more attention placed on basic questions of what’s important, real, and true. It’s going to be an election about whose reality do you want to subscribe to.

The split up into different reality consensus groups is one of the features of the 2012 time frame. Eventually we’ll have more consensus groups than just progressives and conservatives.

But for the immediate future, we’ll have two competing realities. One reality will involve those who can embrace the transformations our civilization is going through. A second reality will encompass those who want to stop change from happening or go back to the way the world was in the past.

The nonpartisan, independent voters will be the deciding factor and they will have to choose which picture of reality they want to believe in.

Who would have thought that Sarah Palin would play such a pivotal role in the reinvention of civilization? Her presidential campaign will be a sharp contrast to Obama’s vision. This contrast will get people energized into political involvement.

I am still optimistic about the future and the political outcomes for 2012. The political cycles of which party has the wave on their side are happening in much quicker succession than ever before in history. This is part of the acceleration of change in the 2012 time frame.

However, progressives have to be careful not to succumb to the complacency of thinking that, with Obama as president, all is well with the world. The fraud that the Tea Party represents has to be exposed and the conservative-corporate conspiracy has be acknowledged and confronted.

What needs to be healed is coming to awareness in our culture. This is in part economic and political dysfunction.

It’s disheartening to reflect on what political darkness we need to succumb to before we will yearn for the light. Without the Bush presidency, we would not have a progressive visionary like Barack Obama as our president. And without Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, and the rest of the Tea Party political zealots, we would be still be stuck in the illusion that there is no conservative-corporate conspiracy.

Big changes are needed in our world. Therefore, we unfortunately seem to need big turmoil and truly frightening political possibilities to awaken us from our political slumber and mobilize us into action.

The transformation of culture and civilization that is part of the story of the 2012 story was never going to be a smooth, incremental progress. The reactionary elements of our society are going to push back and try to arrest and reverse change and restore some idealized past that is no longer either functional or possible.

Yet, we still have some semblance of a democracy in our country. With complacency no longer an option, my reading is that there will be a Democratic Party wave in the 2012 elections.

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Making Sense of the Midterms: Part II

In Part I of this thread, I said that one of the factors in the Republican wave of 2010 was how people are responding to the crisis of this 2012 time frame. When you perceive that you’re in a dysfunctional political and economic configuration, any change can seem positive. The Republicans were the other option available. To a great extent, people were acting out against a system they no longer felt was serving them.

Moreover, the relative inability of the Democrats to get their message across to voters in the 2010 midterms was due in no small part to a concerted effort by Republicans to take advantage of the economic crisis to return to power.

My reading is that there is something more sinister at work here than just politics as usual. The Republican gains in the 2010 elections are in no small measure the result of a corporate-conservative conspiracy with an agenda of inciting and manipulating fear and anger for political gain. This is the second major factor in the Republican wave.

To substantiate a conspiracy, we need to define what we mean by this loaded term and then see if there is any real evidence. A conspiracy is “a secret plan or agreement to carry out an illegal or harmful act, especially with political motivations.”

We expect politicians to be a morally challenged group. We expect there to be a certain amount of corruption in our political institutions. However, notwithstanding overt acts of illegality, there is a compelling case for harm resulting from the conspiracy.

To put it simply, those voters who voted for Republicans hoping for a government more supportive of their immediate economic concerns have been scammed. This is harmful to our society because it’s classic sociopathic behavior. You charm people into believing you support their interests and concerns while all the time plotting to take advantage of their gullibility to enrich yourself and your friends at their expense.

The harm I see from the conspiracy comes about through a disconnect between rhetoric and reality. To take just one example, the Republican Party is now on a crusade to make lower tax rates for the richest Americans permanent.

Their first argument was that if the Bush tax rates expire for individuals making over 200,000 per year and their tax rates to go to 39% from the current 35%, this will have a major negative impact on small businesses.

However, only about three percent of small businesses would actually be affected. So the Republican plan doesn’t help the average person. It just puts money in the pockets of already well-off people. This tax break for the upper income people would exacerbate the deficit problem to the tune of 1 trillion dollars over the next ten years.

The Republican leadership has now augmented their argument claiming that this tax break for the wealthy will help the economy because it will ensure stability and reduce uncertainty. The argument is that, if the corporate interests know what their tax rates are going to be, they will then start hiring new workers in an atmosphere of renewed confidence.

However, the big corporations are already sitting on 2 trillion dollars in cash reserves so the issue of employment is clearly not scarcity of money. And if a tax break is denied to them, they would still have certainty about their tax rates in the future.

The beliefs that people form about what’s happening in today’s world are often not grounded in anything like a critical perspective that looks for information from various sources to determine what is really going on.

People’s beliefs are sourced by their perceptions. These perceptions are subject to manipulation by sociopathic elements that have no hesitation to lie, put forth disinformation, and twist and distort the actual facts of any situation to their advantage.

Representative Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party partisan and Minnesota Congresswoman, went on television just before Obama’s Asia trip and said the trip was going to cost tax payers $200 million dollars a day. She was promoting an internet rumor from an anonymous source. This story was picked up and repeated by conservative media personalities Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage.

According to the Government Accountability Office, a similar trip by President Clinton to Africa in 1998 cost just over 5 million dollars a day.

There is compelling evidence that there is indeed a conspiracy to manipulate our perceptions. We see it every day in virtually any exposure to media. It is advertising. We are so accustomed to this on-going assault on our view of reality that we are asleep to its influence and impact. We may think we see through it, but it still affects us.

Corporations invest a lot of resources in behavior modification. They have their own scientists and they conduct secret research. This corporate conspiracy is harmful to the public to the extent that it motivates people to buy products and services that are detrimental to health and well-being. Junk food, cigarettes, and alcohol are the items that come immediately to mind. There are many more.

What keeps corporate greed from going completely out of control are various government regulations which, among other things, require content labeling for food products and warnings on cigarettes. There is on-going polarity between the interests of corporations and the interests of the public as represented by the government.

So when we see the rise of some political phenomenon such as the Tea Party, we have good reason to wonder if some other interest is being served rather than proactive civic responsibility to correct the abuses of government.

Take, for example, one of the chief goals of the Tea Party Movement, limited government. I don’t think they mean they would be happier if we had fewer FBI agents, or soldiers, or fewer people to administer the Social Security Agency. They are talking about, among other things, a rollback of government intervention in economic crises.

The Tea Party Movement originated in protests against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Obama’s stimulus bill, and against a plan by Obama to help homeowners facing foreclosure refinance their mortgages. It was a Seattle blogger, Keli Carender who first organized a protest against the stimulus and an on air commentator for CNBC, Rick Santelli, who famously ranted on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange against Obama’s plan to help people with troubled mortgages.

When I say that there is a conservative-corporate conspiracy at work in today’s politics, I’m referring to a strategy to manipulate people’s perceptions to believe that some political agenda or posturing is something other than what it actually is. The Tea Party and what it advocates is just such a sociopathically tinged political entity.

The same people and resources that are routinely used to achieve behavior modification in the area of consumer behavior are hired by political groups to sway public opinion through emotional and symbolic appeals that are often wildly unrelated to the substantive issues at stake in the campaign. The corporate conspiracy to make up our minds for us outside the range of critical perspective becomes a political conspiracy to do the same.

The term “tea party” is synonymous with protest by ordinary citizens against perceived governmental abuse. This certainly makes it seem like an honorable and even patriotic endeavor.

But when you take something that people have positive symbolic resonance with and link something else to it that undermines the very basis of the original positive elements, this is just the detrimental sociopathic aspect at work. People are going to be drawn in and scammed without quite realizing what is going on.

In the advertising world, this identification scam is reflected in products like the cowboy ads for Marlboro cigarettes. You show the brand with some well constructed romantic scene of cowboys and the open range and then the mind will form a link between the product and the good feelings you get from the image.

The goal of well-managed image of the Tea Party is to link their super conservative political brand with ideas like liberty, fiscal responsibility, and grass roots push back against power elites.

But the Tea Party people are not reformists, they are reactionaries who are trying to preserve some status quo situation which benefits them to the detriment of everyone else. They are trying to protect power and privilege not make our society more just, more democratic, or even more prosperous for everyone.

Their stated purpose is not to improve government but as they state explicitly to take back government. Their real goal is to engineer a complete takeover by the most conservative political elements.

As mentioned in Part I, there are genuine concerns about the moves the Democratic majority Congress and President have untaken to attempt to head off a total economic meltdown. The government became a major share holder in banks, automobile companies, and AIG with bailouts. The federal deficit has ballooned to a frightening and unsustainable level.

We certainly need a consideration of these concerns that brings in viewpoints from across the political spectrum and that welcomes all economic philosophical perspectives into rational debate.

However, the Tea Party movement actions have actually been detrimental to this debate because they have somewhat successfully engaged in a political power grab in the guise of genuine social protest. They have been about as useful to solving the real issues we face as road rage is to traffic congestion.

You would think that if the Tea Party were a legitimate populist movement of economic and political reform, it would attract people of all races, ages, political affiliation, and economic status. But what we find is that the Tea Partiers are almost all white, 45 years of age and older, have greater financial prosperity than the average American, and are, almost without except, all conservative Republicans.

You would think that if they had sleepless nights about what the government was doing, they would have mobilized themselves into action when President Bush first proposed TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, that bailed out the big banks. But the Tea Party was nowhere to be seen until February, 2009, shortly after Obama was inaugurated as President.

TARP has been retrospectively condemned by the Tea Party Movement, but this was not the case when it was proposed by Bush and passed through the Congress in 2008. Sarah Palin was in favor of it in those days. John Boehner shed tears in the House of Representatives pleading for its passage.

I am not suggesting here that Carender and Santelli were taking orders from some secret back room group to throw their matches into the gasoline of public discontent about economic issues. My reading is that this is not the way the Tea Party came into being. The Tea Party people are not, at least for the most part, explicit conspirators.

However, they are enablers, and they are subject to outside influence through Fox News and the conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

The Tea Party people are implicit conspirators. They are the sometimes willing and often unwitting dupes of the explicit conspirators. Many of the Tea Party people are sincere individuals with a passion for pushing back against what they see as economic and governmental dysfunction.

But, whatever honorable motivations they may have had in the beginning, they have largely allowed their movement to be co-opted by the more explicit conspirators. The latter would be the leadership of the Republican Party in collusion with various moneyed interests, the Plutocracy.

The Tea Party came into being as a consequence of the economic meltdown. Its rationale was to do something to respond to the circumstances that lead to the destabilization of the economy they perceived was threatening their way of life. However, their energies got misdirected at the response to the crisis from Congress and the White House.

They could have been protesting the actions of the banks, trading companies, rating agencies, and predatory lenders that caused the crisis. Instead, they’ve been instrumental in moving the Republican political agenda forward. Now we have as the new speaker of the House, John Boehner, who is more connected with lobbyists than anyone else in the entire Congress.

Without fully realizing it, the Tea Party is empowering the very individuals that bought us to the very edge of total economic disaster.

Some Tea Party identified political figures apparently see their economic philosophy in alignment with what the explicit conspirators are about. For example, Rand Paul, the newly elected Tea Party Senator from Kentucky seems to have been inspired by the character Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street. Gekko’s famous line from that movie was “greed is good.”

“What is greed?” Paul asked. “Greed is an excess of self-interest, but what drives capitalism? Self-interest and profit. They are good things.”

But when you have free markets and limited government to the extent that government controls are taken away, the consequence is always the same. Corporate greed goes out of control and crashes the economic system for everyone.

It’s not hard to understand how the passions of the Tea Party people came to be an instrument of the corporate-conservative conspiracy. What brings the Tea Party folks and the explicit conspirators into pragmatic alignment is the prospect of electing conservative politicians. The Tea Party is trying to take over the Republican Party for that purpose and to elect politicians more to the right than the establishment Republicans.

The explicit conspiracy, though, directs their energies and co-opts them to the extent that their “protests” totally avoid any hint of criticism of the Plutocracy and its shadowy influence on our politicians and government.

The conservative political media shapes the agenda and effectively recruits implicit conspirators. Fox News is a twenty-four hour propaganda machine in total lockstep with the explicit conspiracy.

My reading is Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and other conservative media figures are not sitting in on the strategy meetings of the explicit conspirators. They maintain the illusion of being independent commentators. Yet they are in close touch with the heart beat of the conservative-corporate conspiracy in indirect ways. They are willing servants. Feed them rumors and that’s what they will talk about.

They are professional rabble rousers who actively stoke the anger and fear of their listeners. They knew this will boost their ratings and make them rich and successful. There is no accountability to tell the truth because they see themselves as entertainers.

But exactly who are the explicit conspirators? The answer to this question confronts us with the shadow of American politics. They are the leadership of the Republican Party and various members of the Plutocracy. These plutocrats are the extremely wealthy, managers and executives of the biggest corporations and financial institutions plus a vast army of lobbyists.

One of their recent meetings was a Republican strategy session sponsored by Koch industries in the fall of 2009. The billionaire Koch brothers are leaders in the explicit conspiracy. Among the attendees were Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media billionaire, and owner of Fox news and other media sources like the Wall Street Journal, also hosts Republican planning meetings.

What the plutocrats believe in is government of the rich people, by the rich people, for the rich people. Their agenda is complete control of all levels of government in order to protect their wealth and privilege. For some this is just naked self-interest. However, for others the rationale is that plutocratic control is actually beneficial for society as a whole. My reading is that this is what John Boehner believes.

This reasoning can be put in the form of a syllogism. Whatever is good for the economy is good for the nation. Whatever is good for the rich people is good for the economy. So whatever is good for the rich people is good for the country.

The first premise is suspect on ecological grounds. For example, drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge might be good for the economy but bad for the country. However, it’s an idea that most voters in the 2010 elections accepted without question.

The second premise is an economic theory sometimes called “trickle down” economics. The idea is that as the richest people prosper their money oils the wheels of capitalism and industry and there is more employment and prosperity for everyone.

However, the last 30 years or so of American experience offers stark disproof of this theory. For in that time frame, the richest people have steadily increased their wealth and their percentage of total wealth whereas everyone else has either lost ground economically or stayed the same. The average income in the United States went from $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. That a gain of $303 in twenty-eight years. And then there was the economic crash.

What the people with the most money do has a tremendous impact, of course, but it doesn’t automatically translate into economy prosperity for the country. The rich people are mostly investing their money in financial assets not spending it or using it to grow the economy. It’s the consumer demand generated by the middle and lower classes that actually drives the economic engine.

What we’re seeing in today financial reality is a growing gulf between Wall Street and Main Street, between wealth management and business in the ordinary sense of what generates goods and services.

Today the wealthiest 20% own 85% of the total wealth. The bottom 40% own practically 0%. If we extrapolate this trend into the future, it is indeed a dark picture. This increasing economic polarity between the very rich and everyone else threatens to undermine the very founding principles of our democracy. The Plutocracy’s control and influence over our election process and the actions of the elected officials seems sure to increase.

Consider, for example, the increasing cost of running for elected office. It now costs tens of millions of dollars to run for the Senate. With the recent Supreme Court ruling giving corporations the right to make direct unlimited contributions to campaigns and political parties, we can see that campaign reform is rapidly devolving. This is especially so since the Republicans have filibustered any attempts to pass campaign reform legislation.

You could make a case that the Plutocracy already is in control of our government and elected officials and has been for quite some time. Even President Obama, for example, picked Erskin Bowles to be the Democratic co-chair of his bipartisan federal deficit commission. Bowles is currently on the board of Morgan Stanley, one of the biggest investment firms.

Certainly, it’s true that the Plutocracy has been bipartisan is its efforts to influence both Democratic as well as Republican politicians. President Clinton will have to shoulder some of the blame for decisions that weakened governmental regulations and sowed the seeds for our present economic impasse.

However, this political season was the perfect storm for Republicans. The unreasonable expectations that Obama’s presidency would make everything in our political and economic landscape suddenly better were bound to lead to disappointment and a decline in his approval.

The desperate economic conditions he faced as he took office were the legacy of past presidents. This saddled him with a virtually impossible task if the assessment of his effectiveness was going to be the few months between January 2009 and November 2010.

The emergency measures he undertook, such as the federal stimulus bill, set him up for criticism that he was going down a path of governmental overreach and fiscal irresponsibility.

So with this picture in mind, what is coming up in 2012? This will be Part III of this thread.

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Making Sense of the Midterms

In the midterm elections, we witnessed a dramatic reversal of fortune for the Democratic Party from their elections gains in 2008. When all the close races are sorted out, there will be a net loss of 63 House Seats, 6 Senate seats, 6 Governorships, 19 state legislatures, and 680 state legislative seats.

We want to know how this reversal came to be and what it portends for our political future heading into 2012. Are we looking at some kind of ongoing conservative ascendency in American politics, or will the progressive spirit once again resonate with the voters as it did in 2008?

The 2012 cycle of elections will be one of the most important in human history. Whoever controls the government of the United States from 2012 onward will have a pivotal role in determining how we adapt to the dramatic changes of the 2012 time and whether the history of this time will be one of breakdown or breakthrough.

The short answer to the question of what happened to the Democrats in the midterms is they lost the narrative. Elections are not primarily about voters’ rational decision processes. It is almost always about which emotional and symbolic appeal wins the day. The Republican Party controlled the narrative.

The GOP narrative was about opposing Obama’s legislative initiatives that were passed through the Congress with almost no Republican support. These were federal stimulus, health care reform, and financial reform.

To some extent, the Republicans co-opted the Tea Party’s agenda of cutting taxes, limiting government, cutting spending, and reducing the federal deficit.

It’s pretty clear that economic concerns were paramount in the election. People reached the judgment that the Republicans were going to do better with the economic challenges than the Democrats had in their two years in control of the White House and Congress.

If you’re a progressive thinker like myself, you might wonder how this narrative translates into a positive vision of economic prosperity and putting people back to work. How did the Republican Party suddenly become the new best friend of the working class? Why did the Republican/Tea Party’s agenda resonate with so many people?

My reading is that the Republican successes in the midterms are sourced by two main elements. The first element relates to how people are responding to the extraordinary challenges we face in the 2012 time.

The second element is a conservative-corporate conspiracy that is manipulating the anger and fear that originates from the first factor and in some cases inciting it.

I’m come back to the second factor in Part II of this thread. But, first, it is important to acknowledge some reflection of truth in the Republican/Tea Party narrative.

Our civilization is in crisis. This, of course, is just the 2012 time frame of rapid change and decision crossroads we have to navigate. My reading is that the level of economic concern we see in today’s world is ultimately sourced in an explicit or subliminal understanding that the world’s present economic structure is unsustainable.

The issues of overpopulation in some areas, depopulation in others, pollution, environmental degradation, peak oil, exhaustion of other natural resources, and global warming put the planet on the cusp of ecological catastrophe.

Moreover, our capitalistic economic paradigm is based on a model of perpetual expansion. As we’re reaching the limits of planetary resources, this simply can’t continue.

To deal with these challenges, we need a really visionary approach that looks past the present moment to what is going to be needed for a sustainable future. But people don’t want to think about limits and the restructuring of how we live.

In the United States, for the most part, we are in denial about the scope and seriousness of these planetary issues. We’re sleep walking toward 2012 while fear and anxiety about the future increase.

How people respond to crisis ranges from relatively dysfunctional and unhealthy to more functional. The unhealthier responses usually involve acting out against others or self or an attempt to restore the past to the pre-crisis condition.

This last strategy of regressive restoration is dysfunctional because it’s usually based in a denial of the circumstances that led to the crisis in the first place. The focus is on an idealized past where everything was copacetic.

A healthy response to crisis is one which fully acknowledges the underlying factors leading to crisis and embraces the positive changes needed to restore functioning on a new level of meaning.

Let’s assume, for example, that someone suffers a loss of significant relationship like divorce or a loss of employment and livelihood. An individual could give up trying to cope and go into victim regarding their situation. Then they would not seek new work or a new relationship. This would be one form of acting out against oneself.

Acting out against others would not necessary involve violence. It could manifest as blaming others for your circumstances and not taking personal responsibility. Scapegoating and anger against identified enemies would come into play.

If, in our example, individuals pursued a regressive restoration strategy, this would mean trying to find someone as similar as possible to the lost relationship or a job just like the one they lost. This doesn’t have to be an unhealthy strategy. Often it is.

If there is something in ourselves that is sabotaging intimacy in relationship or if there is something in our previous marriage partner choice that we can’t really live with, then finding someone just like the last person will only result in the same unhappy relationship as before. You divorce one person who was an alcoholic and then marry someone else who also has a drinking problem.

In the employment situation, the loss of a job can be an opportunity to change significant aspects of our lives and break out of where we’re stuck.

In my own case, I didn’t get tenure at my job teaching philosophy at a university in North Carolina. I had an offer at another university to continue my career as a full time philosophy teacher. However, it was also in North Carolina. Instead, I chose to come live in California and pursue new lines of work.

It takes courage and vision to embrace the transformation possible in the healthy responses to crisis. If you take time to reflect on what needs to be learned about yourself and your partner choices before recommitting to a new relationship, this usually means you’re not going to be in relationship for a while.

If you choose to use your joblessness as an opportunity to reinvent yourself, your prosperity is probably going to take a hit, at least in the short run. You’re taking on insecurity in the search for new meaning in your life.

The transformational strategy in response to crisis has built-in challenges. It is more likely going to take longer, cost more, and subject you to unforeseen and unexpected circumstances beyond what you initially imagined.

This is because the vision of positive change is bigger than the moment. The vision has to be bigger than the moment if it’s going to take you to new meaning. It must be something beyond what you’re familiar and comfortable with. You’re going for goals beyond what you’ve yet achieved.

If you have a conservative frame of mind, you might question at this point why there has to be new meaning. What’s wrong with the old meaning?

From my progressive bias, I see conservatives as individuals inherently (constitutionally?) opposed to change and defenders of the status quo. But from their point of view, most of what is held to be important, real, and true does not change. It is inviolate, i.e., sacred and sourced in unquestioned religious doctrine.

When this perspective becomes politicized, we see overt aversion to change as in the bumper sticker which says: “I’ll Keep My Guns, Freedom, & Money. You Can Keep The Change!”

It’s understandable then why Obama would be the conservatives’ arch enemy. He is the apostle of progressive reforms in our society. Moreover, he’s a true visionary, someone who is going for the positive changes that he believes are needed to insure a future where there is quality of life, justice, and opportunity.

But his vision is bigger than the moment and we don’t see immediate results. His economic moves, such as the federal stimulus and bank bailouts, most likely saved the world from another Great Depression. But the recovery of the GDP to a positive growth number didn’t result in unemployment levels returning to pre-recession levels in the time between his inauguration and now.

That’s because the world has not yet recovered from the Great Recession and our country has been slower than some to restore full economic growth.

He took on health care reform as a priority because he felt that economic growth would be sabotaged in the long run if health care continued to be a dysfunctional system for a large percentage of Americans.

And, he championed financial reform, in an effort to prevent the circumstances that led to the world-wide economic meltdown in 2008.

My reading is that in the long view of history, Obama’s legislative initiatives will be hailed as truly inspired moves. However, this does little good for him and the Democratic Party in the political environment of 2010.

The midterms have been characterized as a referendum on Obama’s policies and there is some truth in that. Some of the things Obama has done have been emergency measures. For example, he’s supported the bailing out of banks, automobile makers, and, insurance companies as well as taking on an outsized federal deficit to put stimulus money into our ailing economy.

He then gets branded with these temporary measures as the direction he wants to take the country in the long run.

Also, some of the big legislative priorities he got through the Congress were not perceived as having immediate benefit. Some of the health care reforms won’t take effect until 2014.

Reform of Wall Street financial practices might seem irrelevant to people’s immediate economic concerns, especially if they have no investments in financial assets.

Notwithstanding these points, however, it is still difficult to grasp how the Republican swing in 2010 produced such a stark reversal of the political mood of 2008. The Republicans, after all, did not have a positive legislative agenda to speak of during the election. Their agenda was to oppose almost everything Obama tried to do.

My reading is that part of the reason people were so quick to dump Democrats in favor of Republicans is that there is more chaos happening in our collective lives than just economic discontent. The 2012 time frame brings up issues of values, priorities, and identity.

We’re moving into an era of existential confusion where the basic questions of existence are up for reexamination. Who are we as a people, a species? What’s really important to us? What should our priorities be in this uncertain world?

The survey question “Do you think the United States is moving in the right direction?” is going draw a majority of no answers in this 2012 time regardless of who is in power. This is in part due to the fact that the whole world is going in the wrong direction. Awareness of this is present in us, at least at a subliminal level.

In times of crisis and uncertainty, there is often a trend towards conservative political choices. Whoever has confidence and conviction can attract a lot of voters who want stability and direction.

On the other hand, whoever tells the truth about the challenges we face and outlines the complexities of these challenges is going to be at a horrific political disadvantage in the short run.

The big lesson of the 2010 election for Obama and the Democrats then was about the need to communicate their vision of positive change in a way that could connect with people at an emotional and symbolic level.

See Part II of this thread for a continuation of this analysis of the midterms.

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The Reluctant Messiah of 2012

As we move into the 2012 time and contemplate even greater changes than what we have already experienced in the last few years, there is the hope that some great leader will emerge to help us navigate this most challenging time in human history.

Could there already be among us someone whose vision, creativity, passion, and spiritual focus can make the difference at this crossroads of history where one road leads us to catastrophe and the other to transformation?

Some had hoped that Barack Obama would be the one. There are many positive things that Obama has initiated and championed. However, in his role as President of the United States, he will clearly not be able to take us where we need to be without a lot of help.

Yet, there is someone who is up to the task. Unfortunately, this individual is currently heistant to step forward. Let’s look at the reasons this person gives for why “not now and not me.”

Our reluctant Messiah has three basic rationalizations for not coming forward. The first is straightforward: “I’m not ready.” From this complaint, we learn that our prospective Messiah person is not caught up in the narcissism of a narrow ego focus.

There is a serious intent here to make a difference in the world and a sober sense of responsibility. Since what is needed for the 2012 world is nothing less than a reinvention of civilization, we can concur that this is no job for someone with limited spiritual intelligence.

My sinking suspicion is that this person is also caught up in a limit assessment perspective on themselves. A limit assessment is a self judgment based on the belief that, if a certain outcome has not manifested by a certain time, it never will. This is like saying to oneself: “It’s too late in the game for me. If it has not happened by now, it is never going to happen.”

Moreover, it would appear that a false sense of humility has come into play as well. The reluctant Messiah says: “Who am I to change the world? What difference can my contribution make compared to others who are already fully engaged?”

It would certainly be helpful to identify this individual so we could give them some encouragement to come out of the shadow.

If you want to know who the reluctant Messiah is go look in the mirror. Yes, you, reader!

Change is going to happen in our world in the near term and the question is whether we’re going to have a graceful transition to a better world or a catastrophic outcome. It is my reading that it is the destiny of the human species to embrace the positive story of transformation in the 2012 years and beyond.

But destiny is not history. We have to choose for transformation to make it so. And without the specific and unique contribution of the reluctant Messiah, we are simply not going to make it. The positive story of human history requires a growth in the spiritual intelligence of humanity.

From my reading, it’s pretty clear that from where we are now, nearing the end of 2010, humanity is not quite up to the tasks required. Overall intelligence and spiritual intelligence is growing on the planet but 2012 is just around the corner.

Although we long for a singular spiritual or political hero to emerge to guide us in the difficult days ahead, this archetypal expectation of a Messiah is not appropriate for the world of today. We are in a post Messiah phase of civilization. Never again will single individuals have the influence and culture changing impact that we’ve witnessed in our history.

Cultural change can no longer flow only from the top down. It has to happen organically from a change in the collective consciousness of millions of people. Leaders will still play a role in shaping cultural change, but the influence of any one particular individual is mitigated by the responses of millions of people to what is happening.

Communication and information technology is the primary reason for this. Whatever happens in any part of the world is instantly communicated to every part of the world. The internet has a huge role in the evolution of our culture.

We are becoming a species with a shared collective consciousness. Following Peter Russell, we could say that a global brain is starting to develop. This shared sphere of mental activity is in some respects like the brain of a single person trying to coordinate all the different organs of a human being.

But the existence of a brain does not guarantee a healthy or even functional mind. An unhealthy mind can motivate self-destructive behavior or acting out against others. So this global brain phenomenon is a mixed blessing.

The Terry Jones Quran burning stunt illustrates this point. Jones, a fundamentalist Christian pastor of a flock of about fifty people, seized upon the idea of staging a public burning of Qurans on the anniversary of 9/11. It’s questionable whether Jones ever intended to burn Qurans. The Gainesville, Florida police would not have permitted it in any case since he didn’t have a burning permit.

My reading is that he wanted to do something really provocative to attract attention to himself and revitalize his shrinking base of support. In this respect, Jones is doing exactly what Joseph McCarthy did in the 1950s. The Muslims are then the new communists, those evil people intent on world domination and destruction of American society. As Jones is fond of saying, “Islam is of the devil.”

But no Qurans were burned in Gainesville. Jones said that God told him not to do it. Moreover, he said he would never burn Qurans. There were a lot of practical reasons for this change of heart: death threats, the influence of the FBI, Defense Department, and State Department.

However, my reading is that what made the difference was some positive push back from the global brain through the collective efforts of many people who publicly and privately send Jones a message to cease and desist.

My reading is that this positive thought wave to do what was best was interpreted by Jones as the voice of God. So catastrophe was averted? Well, not exactly.

Seeing how much media attention and instant celebrity Jones received for his stunt, others have imitated Jones. Videos of Quran desecrations by attention seekers, atheists, and extremist Christians have gone out to the world.

So, whatever we do in this new interconnected, interrelated world is going to have an effect for good or ill. We are either going to be part of the problem or part of the solution.

Speaking from painful personal experience, what I would like to say to my fellow reluctant Messiahs out there is that what you do will make the difference. It’s time to let go of the defense mechanisms that rationalize keeping your light in a closet.

With respect to the somewhat justified reason of not being ready, there are two relevant points. First, you’ve had a lifetime of preparation already. If you’re a young person that resonates with what I’m saying, you’ve come into this life with much more wisdom and inspiration than you know.

The second point is that there is no way for anyone to be fully and totally prepared for the coming changes. We live in unprecedented times. There is no blueprint for this future except what we make up in the present.

The limit assessment complaint is really a defensive mechanism to save us the trouble of confronting our potential. The illusion is that if you don’t engage, if you don’t play, you don’t really lose.

The third complaint boils down to something like “I’m not worthy.” But as Henry Ford said: “Whether you believe you can, or you can’t, you are right.” Actually, no one is more worthy than you. That’s because you are a spiritually intelligent person, i.e., someone whose deepest concerns extend beyond the scope of your personal life, family, and tribe.

But, make no mistake. I appeal to the reluctant Messiah to use more of what you have. This is not a call to self-sacrifice in the sense of forgoing individual goals and putting all our attention on planetary concerns.

What is needed is just to be true to yourself by aligning with your deepest sense of what is important, real, and true. Individuate and then you will serve the transformation of culture on our planet.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be a leader, organizer, innovator, or entrepreneur to make a difference. Your role may be to hold a space for those who are more actively engaged. Meditation and spiritual advocacy will also change the world.

For others, inspirations have been coming in calling us to take the risk of directly engaging the world in a new way. We are then called to confront our fears. When we look at these fears we see anxieties about going broke, appearing foolish, or losing control over our lives through going too far beyond the familiar borders of our comfort zone.

But are these not threats that we have to face in any case due to the volatile and rapidly changing nature of the world of the 2012 time? There is no guarantee that playing it safe will spare us from being tumbled by the big waves that are coming. If we take the risk to stand up on the surf board, we have a chance to ride the waves rather than being wiped out by them.

Choose for transformation in your life and you can be the person that makes the difference in the 2012 time.

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