Hope, Change and Recession, Volume II

The year 2010 proved pivotal in American politics. It began with the president signing the Affordable Care Act, giving Americans universal (or so it was claimed) access to health insurance ¿ something proposed first by Teddy Roosevelt a century earlier. It ended with a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives thanks to the reactionary Tea Party faction and corporate money spent to stir up the rightist grass roots. Outside the US, Britain elected a coalition government of Tories and Liberal Democrats, the latter's first taste of power in decades. Greece continued to sink under the weight of its debts, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq-Nam continued to waste lives and money, and Wikileaks released thousands of largely irrelevant classified documents that still managed to upset the powers that be.