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(Warning, LONG post!)
A glimpse of what October 2012 looks like under a McCain presidency:
John McCain is dead of a malignant brain tumor in early 2010, his health so severely compromised due both to the campaign and the strains of trying to run a failing country that he was hospitalized by late 2009. Sarah Palin has become president, though for the most part her staffers have her in a bubble to keep her from knowing what's going on in the outside world. In reality, most of the decisions are made by a secretive cabal of the advisors that the RNC have placed around her, giving her almost no information about what's going on save what THEY want her to know. Congress is back in Republican hands, and after the near miss of 2008, the Republicans have now amended the laws in such a way that no chance of a repeat of 2008 will happen
Anger is the dominant mood. After the election, angry protests were fanned into riots by the police with help from the military, who then used this as an excuse to announce martial law in certain cities, blaming those same blacks and socialists for the actions. This wasn't all that radically different from what had gone on before except for the fact that police now had the authority to search at will and seize property upon the slimmest of pretexts, and corruption consequently skyrocketed (especially as police budgets were reduced). Police had access to intelligence files on all individuals, and people involved in "political crimes" were being jailed in increasing numbers, often with no notification of their whereabouts. Curfews are becoming standard, and they are especially enforced if you're a minority. Lynchings and other hate crimes have also become commonplace. If you have any money at all and you're a homosexual, you are living in Canada right now.
The country itself is broke, after its credit rating was downgraded to AA from AAA, forcing the mass fire sale of trillions of dollars of treasuries at rock bottom prices. In the summer of 2011, the Treasury department unilaterally made the decision that $10 US now equals $1US, after real inflation reached more than 85%. The US military is still in Iraq and Afghanistan, but only because there is quite literally no money to bring them home, and desertions are now reaching 20% per year at the enlisted level and 5% at the officer level, because neither officers nor enlisted personnel have been paid in over six months.
In the US, the official unemployment rate has reached 8%, but that's only because the definition of unemployment has been restricted so radically. Unofficially, it's nearly 40% for white males, and more than 85% for black males. Suburbia has become devastated - in many cases, whole neighbourhoods are now in foreclosure, and there have already been clashes between communities of former homeowners and police working on the side for the banks and collection agencies now springing up (because municipal police budgets have also collapsed). Houses are now no more affordable than they were three years before, not because prices are too high but because no one has a job. Malnutrition is becoming an epidemic, as are cholera and diarrhoea. Tax collections are essentially non-existence in many states, and twenty two states are technically insolvent.
Oil prices, after plunging in 2008, started creeping back up in 2009 due to repeated massive inflationary tactics and real scarcity. By 2010, the average price of a gallon of gas was $7 a gallon, by 2011, it is $15 a gallon and climbing. This doesn't reflect increased demand in the US, but rather reflects the decreasing ability of the government to subsidize that production, higher consumption of oil in other parts of the world (especially in China, which has turned its own dollar holdings to good use in colonizing Africa and South America and turning them into vibrant new markets for Chinese goods). McCain's investment in nuclear energy was made too late to do much good - the four working nuclear plants that have come online cost billions of dollars up front, and have only increased the country's ability to produce electrical power by about 1%. The fiscal crisis of 2011 has essentially tabled the remaining dozen nuclear power plants - all of which are half-completed hulks that will likely have to be torn down before they can be rebuilt due to the stress of weathering.
What this also has meant is that brownouts and even blackouts have become common. The planned rolling blackouts have devastated businesses (though informal distributed generator networks have begun to spring up as a consequence of this) and the unplanned blackouts have become even more common and even harder to work around. Some places, especially ex-burbs, have no power much of the time, and have become the new slums.
Jets are becoming a faint memory - the cost of flying a jet is becoming prohibitive except for the exceptionally well heeled, and most airports are down to perhaps 1/10 the volume of even a few years earlier. Truck traffic is down considerably as well, for the same reason - gas costs too much. Train traffic has risen, but failing infrastructures have made train travel a risky proposition at best, and not all the failures are accidental. Train robbery, long since relegated to the dustbins of history, have become much more common, though typically the strategy is to block the tracks, then crack open the shipping containers and steal what can be stolen. Piracy at sea is similarly becoming more commonplace.
There are protected enclaves, complete with their own security forces, where the wealthy live, though even they are beginning to feel the strain on their bank balances (those that aren't offshore, in foreign currency) and their lifestyle. The rich have to be very careful about leaving their enclaves, however, as anyone with obvious wealth becomes a target for kidnapping for ransom or sometimes outright assassination.
The media are still king in this sector, after having orchestrated the loss of Obama in 2008, and they are now controlling the message that people should become more godly, more religious, with the religions in question being the particularly virulent forms of fundamentalism that encourages both obedience to the state and a profound hatred of those who may choose to be Un-American in their thoughts and actions - defined as those people who protest the decision of the state (or just happen to be different in some way). For those who hew to the status quo, Sarah Palin is considered a saint, the Eva Peron of the United States of America, and the extreme poverty that these people face is due to the actions of racial minorities (especially blacks) and "socialists" (progressives and liberals).
It is a nation of demagoguery, and secessionist pressures are high throughout the country. Within five years it is likely that those areas farthest from the immediate control of Washington will attempt to leave the union, possibly assisted by the creation of regional trading blocs that start circulating their own internal currencies, likely starting with the West Coast, then New England, then possibly the Midwest (though this will not have yet happened by 2011). It is a nation self-destructing.
A glimpse of what October 2012 looks like under an Obama presidency:
One of the first actions that Barack Obama took upon gaining the White House in 2008 was to perform an internal audit first upon the auditors of the executive department and of the GAO, firing those people who had exhibited gross incompetence or corruption and replacing them with people who were neither. Once this task was done, the next stage was to begin the process of auditing both the government and those businesses (especially in the financial sector and milindustrial sphere) that had also significantly lined their pockets illegally or unethically. Electronic regulation systems were put into place in both areas to keep such transactions more translucent (if not necessarily completely transparent)
Once enough of the accounting had taken place to start determining irregularities, those involved with those irregularities were also either removed or heavily fined and limited from seeking future government contracts. Indictments were also forthcoming, though this process was ongoing through much of Obama's term.
Legislation revisited after Obama came into office also gave considerable more control over banks that had been involved in the bailout, including the revision that such bailout involved preferred rather than non-preferred stock, meaning that the government had the opportunity (for a limited period of time) to effectively hire and fire boards of directors and C-level officers of these organizations. Additionally, policies were put into place to force banks to renegotiate loans for properties that were financially underwater (the mortgage was appreciably higher than the value of the property), while mortgage origination became part of the authority of the government (as did oversight of state real-estate appraisers). Finally, Gramm-Bliley was overturned in early 2011, and a formal wall was re-established between retail and investment banking.
The next course of action involved stabilization of the currency, a process begun even before the election itself. Congress passed new legislation introducing tariffs against China if they did not let their currency float. In a tense stand-off in mid-2009 (with both Chinese and US ships in the Gulf of Japan), the Chinese agreed to a compromise that allowed the Remninbi to float to up to 15% above or below the US dollar, which effectively forced Chinese goods to rise by 15% relative to US goods.
Economic stimulus packages were passed targeting mixed fuel cell hybrid automobiles, with the packages themselves basically tied to progress in achieving these goals. By 2011, after GM split up into three smaller (and more agile companies) about 25% of their total line of cars were such hybrids. Indeed, divestment became the modus operandi of large corporations that found that, due to more transparency due to electronic regulations, that the tax advantages of being large were no longer worth the effort.
By mid-2010, although the economy itself was still shedding jobs, the numbers had slowed considerably, and certain sectors – education, information technology, alternate energy, and biomedical research, were actually experiencing spot applicant shortages again. H1B visas were dramatically scaled back, and could only be issued if the company in question could prove that there were no qualified applicants within the US.
The formal invasion of Iraq ended in May 2011, though a multinational peacekeeping force was maintained in the former Green zone, headquartered in what had been the larger part of the US Embassy in Iraq. This force also provided stipulation for other countries to negotiate with the Iraq government to bring in contractors. The CEO and board of directors of Halliburton and Blackwater were arrested under the RICO provisions. In 2010, the Patriot Act was also rescinded, and Guantanimo Bay was closed and returned to the Cubans as part of normalization relations after Fidel Castro died in that same year.
Afghanistan was perhaps the only major policy failure, primarily because the increasing desertification of the country had made it inhospitable to habitation. Intelligence (now increasingly reliable on the ground) also indicated, as many had suspected, that Osama Bin Laden had in fact died roughly eight years before.
In late 2009, Obama convened a summit of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, each facing their own battered economies, and together they hammered out the Davos accords, which laid out the foundations of an international monetary system, one that ended the era of dollar hegemony. The terms were not especially favorable to the US, though they were better than the alternative, which would have involved the US effectively defaulting on trillions of dollars worldwide. As a consequence of this, the feared de-rating of US treasuries didn't occur, and the US was able to restructure its own debt in a more manageable way.
By fall of 2011, the US economy was beginning to recover from a severe recession, due in part to re-employing people on infrastructure improvements, from train tracks and systems to the development of distributed electrical systems to the reinvigoration of the American educational system. Standards of living had fallen somewhat, but even manufacturing jobs were beginning to increase as the incentives to outsource jobs to other countries faced higher fees, tariffs, and restrictions. Health care became nationalized by the government being forced to buy out the insurance companies and HMOs in 2009, during which Obama used the opportunity to introduced standards of accounting and reporting into that industry as well, developing a mixed public/private health care system that provided basic service needs but also allowed supplemental care packages by private providers.
Moreover, intense and increased investments in algae based biofuels were beginning to pay off in terms of production, though it would still be some time before they were producing fuel at the volume necessary. Jets were increasingly being replaced by slower (but much more fuel-efficient) turbo-props, and dirigibles as well as high speed trains were replacing trucks and jets as the primary mechanism for moving things around. Half a dozen nuclear reactors were just coming online by 2011 (utilizing a French design), which, while still controversial, helped considerably to stabilize the economic grid.
Finally, by 2011, the hold that the traditional broadcast media had on the marketplace of ideas was broken by a strengthening of the FCC provisions concerning media ownership, the passage of a formal Net Neutrality bill, and the ever stronger role of the Internet in people's lives.
There were, of course, still problems. The fall-off of oil production in the Middle East was accelerating, leading to greater instability in Saudi Arabia especially. The Russians had established forward bases in Iceland, and were in and on-again/off-again war with Georgia. Climate change was still an issue, though one increasingly approached by shifting FEMA from a response-oriented agency to a proactive one that served to limit growth in high impact areas.
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Large business will generally hate Obama, though there will be a number of exceptions. Information technologies, energy technologies, infrastructure companies and the the biomedical field will all do very well under him. Those that have most benefited under George Bush will likely benefit least from Obama. On the other hand, I can see him making a huge difference in the way that the economy itself is shaped that will get us out of a serious economic downtown, simply because he's the kind of person who is able to look at problems and see solutions that are out of the box.
McCain tends to be too limited by his own ideology and history, and is inclined to see every problem as one that he personally must solve. Obama, on the other hand, has shown a gift for thoughtful delegation, for creating consensus and for getting people to come to the table. The idea of McCain convening world leaders – and worse, compromising on the role of the dollar – is almost intrinsically absurd, but it is something that Obama would do naturally. Moreover, this all assumes that McCain survives long enough to deal with these crises in a rational manner, and the evidence is becoming increasingly suggestive that he won't.
This then brings up Sarah Palin. Palin would become either a tyrant or a puppet, and in either case she would likely be very easily manipulated. She has already shown a penchant for demagoguery, and she would impose her own very select and limited views of what is right and wrong upon the American people. Her past history suggests that corruption comes naturally to her, and with her in the White House, it is very likely that the United States would enter into a mix of totalitarianism and anarchy. I can foresee no scenario where, if she was elected, the country itself would not be tearing itself apart in civil war within six years.
Consider this when entering the voting booth.
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