The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or thwap's New Year's Predictions for 2011

"This one goes up to eleven."

Here we go. This is basically stream-of-consciousness blather. If I am right about anything then you all owe me 5 cents each!

There will be no federal election in the spring. The NDP will cover itself in dishonour and sell-out to the harpercons for a mess of pottage.

There will be an election in the summer though as harper will produce some new abomination that nobody can stomach. harper will emerge from the election 3-5 seats poorer. Everyone else will be about the same.

harper might not go. He's an ego-maniac and this will be his only gig. (John Manley's got the CCCE and the NCC is small potatoes in comparison. Aside from politics and wingnut welfare, harper has no marketable skills.)

There might not be a coalition. Our leaders are pretty stupid after all.

McGuinty will be returned with a minority government. Tim Hudak's and his OPC's will be shown too batshit crazy for prime-time.

Obama will continue to tack rightward as the US economy slowly implodes. Unemployment will rise slightly (from its already disastrously high level), real estate values will decline, household debt will increase despite decreased consumption because of declining asset values.

The class war in North America and Europe will continue but there will be increasing resistance creating a financial and currency crisis. (The European banking crisis will deflate the Euro which will work against US attempts to competitively devalue the dollar.)

All that plus speculation in world food markets will cause an economic meltdown in the global south, prompting riots and political instability.

China will attempt to insulate itself and focus on relying on domestic demand to take the place of exporting for debt-driven North American consumption. This will require a gradual, controlled raising of wages domestically which will be difficult to pull-off in the face of pent-up worker demands and rising food and housing costs.

India will attempt much the same thing though in a smaller way as material living standards for the vast majority have declined over the past decade, the export economy did not penetrate much of the wider economy, so the insufficiency of developing the domestic economy will not produce a noticeable change for the country's poor.

Rob Ford will be mired in incompetence and scandal. He will be disowned by even the Toronto Sun who will not even think about apologizing for their golden boy. Rather than being the greatest mayor Toronto has ever seen, as Don Cherry predicted, he will inarguably be the worst, far surpassing Mel Lastman, and this will be only Year One.

We will have reached the tipping-point ecologically. Massive heat-waves and hurricanes will batter the tropics and mid-latitudes. Harvests will fail totally in an alarming number of areas. Species extinctions in the oceans are going to begin to have a domino effect producing hunger in those countries where domestic fish harvests were an important part of the people's diet.

Afghanistan will continue to decline as Karzai and the warlords continue to loot the country and abscond with the shrinking funding from the N.A.T.O. authorities. N.A.T.O. (and Canadian) combat deaths will be reduced as Obama becomes increasingly desultory about actually achieving anything and restricts the troops to defensive roles.