Sira Sudhi Sudhindranath's Predictions

1. The DONORcrat Party will lose both the GA Senate seats in the runoff in Jan 2021. The party faithful will be upset by this, but the Biden DONORcrat administration will secretly celebrate it. Can there be a better excuse for fulfilling their promise that “nothing will fundamentally change” than this defeat?

   Warnock and Ossoff won their elections. Sira was wrong about this. However, those wins were likely influenced by Biden promising $2,000 checks if they won. Those $2,000 checks were reduced to $1,400, and that's still up in the air. Will Georgia voters ever believe Democrats again?

2. Trump will leave the White House with no further drama than what is going on right now. No coup attempts, no military interventions, no marching in handcuffs and other dramatic stuff.

   Given the attack on the capitol on January 6, Sira was wrong about this prediction.

3. The Biden cabinet will turn out to be full of pro-war, pro-Big Oil foreign policy “experts”, pro-Wall Street financial “experts” and pro-Big Insurance health policy “experts”. In other words, essentially retreads from the previous DONORcrat administrations. Plus a few never-Trumper Republicans, who will keep admonishing the DONORcrats for not moving further to the right than they already have.

   It seems to be trending this way. The Intercept ran a story titled JOE BIDEN IS FILLING TOP PENTAGON POSITIONS WITH DEFENSE CONTRACTORS. It's surprising that Biden didn't bring back Timothy Geithner (Treasury Secretary under Obama). OK, that last sentence was humor.

   Ukraine. Sira was correct about pro-war policies.

4. Trump will start a right-wing cable channel (TNN?) and hire his favorite Fox News personalities. The leftovers will team up with the Lincoln Project Republicans to start a new media alliance whose job is to support the DONORcrats - as long as they keep moving right. TNN ratings will soar, sinking Fox News, and the drowning Fox News personalities will find refuge in MSDNC or CNN.

   Late 2021: One Fox News personality, Chris Wallace, has left Fox to work at CNN. In September, John Harwood, a frequent critic of Donald Trump, was fired from CNN. In October, Brian Stelter, who was thought of as a left-leaning host, was fired from CNN. The media is slowly shifting to the right, as Sira suggests.

   In late 2022, when railway workers were threatening to strike to get sick leave included in their upcoming contract, most CNN news stories took the side of the railway companies and criticized labor for the $2 billion loss to the economy should a strike shutdown the railways.

5. There will be a COVID vaccine that would be reasonably effective and safe, but coverage in the US will be dismal not just because of the non-believers, but more because of the for-profit insurers and for-profit pharmaceutical corporations.

   Early 2020: Sira is correct about this. Many people that I know (who want the vaccine) are scrambling to find someplace where they can get an appointment. I know of one person who risked flying on an airplane to another city in her state to get the vaccine. Another has a vacation home in Florida and is considering flying to Florida if she can get an appointment there. Clearly, our for-profit healthcare system doesn't stand up to crises like this one.
   It's far better with the Biden administration than with Trump, but we need Medicare For All and Biden and the establishment Democrats are against it.

   Mid-2020: The vaccines became generally available, and a high percentage of Americans were vaccinated. Of course, few people are talking about how much money this cost us and the pharmaceutical industry profits during this pandemic.

6. Military budgets will keep getting big increases every year. Russia will continue to be the boogeyman, though depending on the situation, China might be added to the list, just to keep it “bipartisan”. All domestic policy and foreign policy disasters will be blamed on Russia and its “agents” in the Green Party, People’s Party, alternative media and the like.

   It's looking good for Sira on this one. Democrats voted for the $753 billion defense authorization bill without getting anything significant for it—well, anything that would help ordinary Americans. Either the Democratic Speaker of the House is not a good party leader, or the Democratic party is not interested in leveraging its power for the good of the people. Since Nancy Pelosi has been lionized as a great party leader for years, it's likely the latter.

   And then Ukraine happened. Putin demanded that Ukraine not become a member of NATO. The Russian leader didn't want another country bordering his own to possess NATO weaponry. But instead of using diplomacy to resolve the conflict, everyone involved sought out their military options instead. Putin became the boogeyman, as Sira says, and the Biden government supplied arms to Ukraine.

7. The DONORcrats will get wiped out in the 2022 House elections. If they are lucky, they will manage to hold 200+ seats. More likely, it will be in the 165-175 range. In the Senate, they will fail to make headway even though they will be defending only 12 seats and the other party will be defending 22 seats. I think it will be a 52-48 win for the GOP.

   Early 2021: It's looking like Sira will be correct. A good portion of the population are feeling betrayed by this administration. Biden is against the $15 minimum wage. His promised $2,000 checks are now $1,400. The Democrats appear to be in no hurry to get out the relief checks.

   Late 2021: Biden is being praised for passage of the Infrastructure Bill—legislation that both parties and their donors wanted. Both parties were successful in killing the Build Back Better Bill that their donors hated but would have helped average Americans. Members of the Progressive caucus were the only ones willing to leverage their power to try to force a vote on the bill but were later vilified by the mainstream media and clueless talk show hosts like Bill Maher.

   November 12, 2022: Yes, Sira was wrong about this but the bigger story is that everyone else was wrong—including me. We may never take polling seriously again. Also, when Sira made the prediction, the January 6 Insurrection, the Supreme Court overturning Roe, massive election denialism, poll workers and voters threatened by right-wing hoodlums with guns, the Herschel Walker insanity, and much more had not yet occurred. Who could have predicted the degree to which fascism would take hold in this country?

8. All the 7 (or 8 or 9?) foreign wars will continue unabated. But the war on Syria will get escalated to a whole new level after 2022. Any progressive Democrat or any other anti-war group protesting these military actions will be branded a “Putin puppet”, “Assad apologist”, etc.

   Early 2021: After just 36 days of his presidency, Biden ordered air strikes on Syria. A Pentagon spokesman used rhetoric about the Biden Administration prioritizing diplomacy over military action. Yet, their actions don't seem to support this. Instead of showing Iran remorse for Trump's cancellation of the nuclear deal and trying to craft a new deal, some talking heads on TV are praising Biden for his tough stance.

   This air strike may be a diversion from the failure of the Democrats to include a federal minimum wage hike in their COVID relief bill. If this strike was intended to be a wag-the-dog scenario, it didn't work. There's far more discussion and complaining about minimum wage on social media than this air strike.

   This makes Sira's prediction look good, even if it is happening much earlier than he predicted. It's not a good harbinger of what's to come from the Biden administration.

   Late 2021: Biden removed our troops from Afghanistan. Sira didn't address this, so this text is neither green nor red.

   The Biden Administration is risking war with Iran according to Democracy Now!

9. Biden will try to “improve” the ACA by passing a Republican favorite - allowing insurance companies to sell health insurance across state lines. Of course, Joseph Biden (D-MBNA) knows a thing or two about this. Allowing credit card companies to issue credit across state lines helped them sidestep the more stringent usury laws of some states, and to totally screw the cardholders. So, that is a “success story”, in his view.

   Adding additional detail: Many states have their own insurance commissioner who sets rules for their state. Allowing insurance companies to sell their products nationally may remove the protections these commissioners provide for their citizens. Of course, some of these commissioners are likely corrupt anyway. Ed

10. Depending on how much pressure there is from TNN, Biden will be impeached sometime during 2023 or early 2024 - if he is still around. The Hunter Biden Ukraine saga is sordid enough that some investigations into it will result in enough material for 2 or 3 counts of impeachment.

    November 12, 2022: Given that the Democrats held their majority in the Senate, but we do not yet know about the House, it's possible that the House may impeach Biden or hold a hearing on Hunter Biden, but the Senate will not vote to convict.

    September 2023: The Republicans are talking about impeaching Joe Biden but they don't appear to have settle on the crime he committed, other than being father to Hunter Biden.

    December 2023: The GOP is trying hard to impeach Joe Biden by trying to link him to Hunter Biden's questionable activities. Hunter wants to testify to an open session of Congress but House Republicans want a closed session, presumably so they can spin some fantasy to the press if the session does not reveal serious-enough wrongdoing.

    If the Democrats were smart (they're not) they would arrange for a tough conservative prosecutor and a respectable conservative journalist (there must be a few) to interview Hunter Biden on network TV, with none of the questions known by Hunter beforehand. (I suggested this to AOC today [12-13-2023])

11. The Republicans will nominate a candidate in 2024 who will have the blessings of Trump as the leader of TNN (if it is not Trump himself again). There is no way they can ignore a candidate who got 10 MILLION more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. This candidate and his VP pick, whoever it may be, will win against the Biden-Harris (or Harris-<some other DONORcrat>) ticket more convincingly than the Trump-Pence team won in 2016.
    
    In the Senate, the DONORcrats will be defending as many as 23 seats while the other side will be defending just 10 seats, and will sink further, perhaps to a 45-55 tally, or worse. In the House, if they have already been beaten badly in 2022, the DONORcrats will manage to hang on. But if the rout was not total in 2022, this time around it will be completed.

12. The Republicans will invoke their highly successful “Two Santa Claus Theory” strategy and start screaming about the budget deficits again. Biden will once again surrender to them and present the previous DONORcrat Party administration's “Grand Bargain” of 2011 again, where he offers to cut Social Security payments in exchange for... nearly nothing. And this time, the Republicans will accept it.

    The Republicans are already beating the deficit drum. It doesn't seem to matter to their base that it was THEM that caused the deficit. As for Biden cutting Social Security, he said he'd do it in the past. So did Hillary Clinton.

13. Biden will reintroduce a “new, improved” version of the TPP. Any pro working-class group opposing it would be smeared as a “Russian operation” and the TPP will be passed with a clear bipartisan vote in both the House and the Senate. About 40 Democrats and 70 Republicans in the House and 10 Democrats and 5 Republicans in the Senate will vote against it. This will be one of the things that will pave the way for a Trump 2.0 to emerge in the 2024 Presidential contest.

    Sira is correct. Biden has proposeded a TPP replacement named Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF, pronounced EYE-pef).

Timeframe for items 1-6 is 1-4 years. For item 7 it is 7-10 years.

1. The so-called spring/summer counteroffensive by Ukraine will end up achieving nothing, except the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men.
   Ed: April 4, 2024: Zelensky changes the draft rules to conscript more of its young men.

   Ed December 2024: Ignoring missiles for a moment, and in spite of Putin having to bring in North Korean troops, it seems like this is a war of attrition, which makes Sira correct.

   Ed December 2024: Biden giving the go ahead to Ukraine to fire inside Russia with U.S.-made medium range missiles steps up this war an insane degree.

2. US/NATO will keep pretending that a Ukrainian victory is just “around the corner”, just as they have done in the past - Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq...
3. The Biden administration will try to keep this fraud going until the 2024 elections. But the elections are more than a year away, and the Administration's fairy tales will begin to fall apart in ways that even the loyal Empire stenographers in the MSM wouldn't be able to hide.
4. The Administration will be viewed with skepticism and suspicion by the swing voters who would demand to know what its strategy would be as the war that would be entering its FOURTH year soon. This will further fuel the prospects of candidate Trump who has been claiming that he will end the Russia-Ukraine conflict if he is elected President again.

Ed: Sira is correct. Trump won the election with the promise to end the war.

5. Sometime during the next 2-3 years, the US will abandon Ukraine, dump the whole mess on to the laps of both west and east Europe, and start pivoting towards China. The entire Ukraine mess will become the responsibility of the grossly incompetent leadership of the UK, Germany, France etc. The process will be speeded up further if, as I expect, a Republican President (most probably, Trump) takes over in January 2025 after the elections.
6. However, a direct and open confrontation over Taiwan could be prevented by the various US corporations with supply chains extending deep into China. In that case, the US pivot will be toward a war with Iran instead. The pretext would be that Iran has been supplying weapons to Russia, among other things. The bloodthirsty chickenhawk neocons that reside in the DC swamps would rather prefer a war with China, but would settle for a war against Iran (“Boys go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran.”)
7. Meanwhile, Ukraine will disintegrate into several regions as shown on this map:
   

   The areas in pink (and purple) will be under Russian control. A less likely scenario is for Russia to be also in control of all the regions east of the Dnieper river as well. What remains of Ukraine will be a landlocked region consisting of the green and yellow areas. In terms of industry as well as agriculture, it is east Ukraine that is more developed, so what remains of Ukraine will end up becoming a very poor and corrupt rump state.

   The region that is colored olive green has been historically under the control of mostly Poland, but also Hungary and Romania. It will become extremely unstable as these countries jockey to get back the lands that they had once controlled. All three are NATO countries, so NATO and its fans will pretend that it is not happening.

   Also, the instability could extend north of Poland, with tensions between Poland, Belarus, Lithuania (also a NATO member) and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The number of ways in which these things can turn into a huge mess is practically endless.

   Of course, most Americans would not know (or care) about the mess that their leaders have turned Ukraine and the entire region into. After all, how many of these people care (or even know) what is going on in Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya now?

1. As expected, it will once again be Biden v Trump in November this year. But the DONORcrat Party will have problems with Biden, not just on the question of his dementia, but on multiple issues, led foremost by his unconditional support for the genocide in Gaza. It is too late for the DONORcrats to replace Biden with Newsom. And even if they do, it will hurt them even more in the crucial swing states in middle America. Other alternatives like Harris, HR Clinton, Buttigieg et al are even worse than Biden.
   
   Ed: I have to point out that Biden's "dementia" pales in comparison to Trump. I offer Trump Derangement as evidence.
   Ed December 2024: While Biden's dementia was minimally apparent at his State of the Union on March 7, 2024, it became far more apparent during his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024 culminating with the gaffe "...if we finally beat Medicare". Biden's support for Israel's Gaza genocide alienated young voters who were labeled anti-Semetic. When Kamala Harris said she could think of no difference between her platform and Joe Biden's, the stage was set for her to lose the election - if that had not already been decided. So, Sira was correct.
2. The Chicago DNC Convention is not going to be a smooth affair at all. It will be swamped by anti-genocide protestors, perhaps even on the Convention floor. Things might not get as bad as 1968, but that would only be because of severe restrictions on protest activities since any form of protest these days could be casually and cavalierly labeled as "terrorism".
   Ed: Yes, there were protests over Gaza, but the Chicago police arrested many of the protesters. I don't recall mention of terrorism but there was plenty of mention of ant-Semitism, which has come to mean the same thing in the U.S., given Israel's power over U.S. politics.
3. In the Presidential election, Biden would win about 220-250 electoral votes and Trump would get 280-310. (Most poll predictions are in the same general area. As of now, the most common prediction I am seeing is a 312-226 win for Trump).
   Ed: Bingo! Sira called this correctly. Trump won 312 electoral votes and Harris won 226.
4. A wildcard is the stock market. If it goes south, Biden could go south of 200 electoral votes. In any case, the chances he goes below 200 are higher than the chances of him going above 300.
5. In the Senate, the DONORcrat Party will be defending as many as 23 seats while the other side will be defending just 10 seats. It will be a 52-48 win (or better) for the Republicans.
   Ed: Sira is correct. The Republicans won 53 seats in the Senate.
6. In the House, it is likely to be more balanced and even, but the winning party will probably have a 15-20 seat lead at best. (Editorializing here - if Trump wins, it would be best if the DONORcrat Party wins at least the House, since IMO, a Republican President + DONORcrat Congress is probably the least harmful of all the combinations that we can think of).
   
   Ed: Responding to Sira's editorializing: So, the best case scenario is a government in stasis; one that can do as little harm as possible. Even with this, Trump and his Project 2025 partners will use executive orders to bypass Congress as much as possible.
   Ed: Sira overestimated the number of seats the winning party controls. The Republicans have only a seven vote margin in the House.