NOTE: The Moderate Voice often runs Guest Voice columns from readers from the right, left and center who don’t have blogs or who have blogs or websites and enjoy posting here due to our diverse readership. Their opinions do NOT necessarily reflect that of TMV or its writers. One of our most frequent and popular periodic contributors is Michael Silverstein, aka Wall Street Poet. He offers his 2007 (and beyond) Predictions here:
Predictions for 2007 (and beyond)
By Michael Silverstein
1. Rather than gradually stepping aside and easing the way for his successor during his last two years in office, George W. Bush will engage in extremely aggressive and unsuccessful foreign policy gambits. This period will come to be known as “The Lame Schmuck Presidency.”
2. In a heroic parental bid to bolster the reputation of his son, the first President Bush will claim that his own failures were the result of not heeding the advice of his own vice-president. “If I’d only listened to Dan Quayle, I could have reshaped the Middle East, too,” he’ll state.
3. Recognizing the role that conservative think tanks have played in American policy-making in recent years, these institutions will be outlawed and their senior fellows obliged to take adjunct positions in midwestern junior colleges.
4. With neither the Democratic nor Republican presidential hopefuls clicking with the American electorate, third party candidates will proliferate. Half-a-dozen billionaires will appear on “Larry King Live,” and an Oprah-Bloomberg ticket will eventually appear on ballots in 40 states.
5. Finally heeding demands for more democracy, Saudi Arabia will hold its first ever free presidential election. The winning bin Laden administration, however, will not be recognized by the United States.
6. Kim of North Korea will defect in return for a case of Hennesey and a date with Sharon Stone (all his DVDs are at least 10 years old).
7. Contrary to present expectations, the environment will emerge as the biggest issue of the 2008 campaign. Killer hurricanes, wacky climate changes, and spewing volcanoes will trump Iraq and economic woes as big election issues. You can only mess with Mother Gaia so long without awful consequences, and these days the old gal is royally pissed.
8. In a major religious upheaval, all of this country’s leading religious institutions will focus their energies on helping the currently living, not the as yet unborn and the long brain dead.
9. A horrendously debt-ridden United States will be forced to accept ever greater doses of foreign aid from Venezuela, but our leaders will continue to claim that these funds don’t come with strings attached.
10. The Green Zone in Baghdad will declare itself independent from the rest of the country. Ahmed Chalabi will be the new nation’s first president.
11. Though long considered virtually impossible, the quality of network television will decline further. The rerun season will last nine months instead of the current six. And all Public Television programming will be fund raisers.
12. Though a 40-hour week will remain the legal standard, the average American will work 82 hours weekly. The extra hours will all be voluntary, however, so overtime pay will not be necessary.
13. By ignoring inconvenient realities such as soaring health costs that real people pay in the real world, official inflation rates will remain very modest.
14. Crushing credit card debt will create a huge new class of American peons, while multi-million dollar annual bonuses will continue to go to Wall Street M&A specialists. By averaging incomes of the slipping many and the high-flying few, economists will declare that average living standards are rising, and hail “a wonder economy.”
15. The last vestiges of any religious meaning will finally be removed from Christmas, and the months leading up to the holiday will be formerly recognized as a national period of obligatory shopping. Shopping shortfalls will bring fines; in case of actual abstinence, imprisonment.
© 2006 Michael Silverstein
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.