We’re told the recession is nearly over, again, but our system’s foundation reveals more weakness at each structural repair attempt by capital’s construction crew, also known as our government. This particular crisis will pass, but soon lead to others more serious until we make the economy work for the betterment of all, and not just benefit some at ever more deadly cost to everyone else.
Corporate America has increased profits by reducing its work force and their salaries, then forcing them to borrow money they should have been paid, and compounding the felony by collecting interest on that debt. The present recession is part of that attack on the working middle-class, as millions bought homes at rates they could not afford. The hustlers who sold them mortgages based on invisible assets built a financial pyramid, which only existed in their electronic religious temples. When material bills came due and capital had to produce substance for its own debts, what happened?
Corporate government rushed to the aid of corporate finance with trillions of taxpayer dollars, which could then be loaned back to taxpayers at even higher interest rates. As the system becomes more severely crippled, measures to save it become more blatantly outrageous, often bordering on madness. And reactions to this massive welfare program to save capitalism have produced outbursts of near lunacy.
For the first time in history America has a president who is only half-white, causing mental agony for the still significant racist minority. Along with those who still believe Obama represents substantial change, they are near the breaking point. This despite the fact that Obama was selected by America’s rulers, to be elected by America’s ruled, to save private capital, and make that salvation seem a positive change for the public taxpayers. As if Obama’s sincere but often hallucinating supporters weren’t bad enough, the situation has led the barely conscious opposition into a passionate crusade approaching mass hysteria. They charge Obama with being a socialist, or of having been born in another country. This reinforces the notion that America is the world’s leading producer of weapons, garbage and imbeciles, but severe mental stress doesn’t lead to clear reasoning, and we are an extremely stressed population.
All of us are disoriented by the distortions and lies we get from our mind managers, and starry eyed believers who thought this hybrid speech maker was some agent of change in anything but rhetoric have little right to laugh at anyone else. We all need a wake up call.
The latest scheme to "change" our blood-for-profit health care system will do nothing more than provide public assurance for the continued domination of private insurance. The president disregards the majority’s desire for a system like Medicare to cover everyone, and obeys the dictates of insurers and pharmaceutical monopolies. The politically brain dead who call him a Marxist should know that’s closer to the corporate socialism of Mussolini and Hitler, than the democratic theory of Marx. This health care hustle is another scheme to save the minority at the expense of the majority, accompanied by rhetoric from our designated reformer that says we’re getting "change we can believe in." That’s if we believe in the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy.
Like everything else in the marketplace, political control is a purchased commodity, and organized corporate capital has far more buying power in the electoral mall than the disorganized public. That kind of power cannot be overcome by combining our dollars to compete with national lobbies, but only by combining our democratic actions to run the money changers out of the political temple. To affect real transformation we need to wrest control from interests so unprincipled they are selling humanity’s future in pursuit of their own private gain. And driving some of us crazy in the process.
Our heads are filled with stories of unjust treatment in Iran, while emptied of the daily atrocity that is Israel’s treatment of Gaza. We increase murder in Afghanistan as it continues in Iraq and spreads to Pakistan, and we’re told democracy is on the rise. We are warned about elected leaders in South America who oppose global capital, but we hear little about the elected leader in Honduras, exiled for the sin of disobeying his oligarchs on behalf of his people. Meanwhile, we have many here in a near psychotic state which has them rallying against an economy which does not exist but might work for their best interests if it did, or passionately supporting the economy which really does exist but works against all their individual and collective interests, because it does.
We need homeland security, but that has nothing to do with any outside threat. We have to control the political economic terrorists at home who are pushing us closer to disaster, while their media distracts with horror stories either far from our ability to affect, or directly attributable to our unconscious support for their continuation. We can neither remain enamored of a photogenic figure smoothly offering us loans with our own money in order to keep the banks in power, nor sink to the depths of hateful ignorance which finds us at each others throats because those throats are at our economic level or below, while our real enemies are so far above that economic level they can seem invisible.
Democracy is not simply attending a meeting, raising funds or voting in an election. It is the combined actions of citizens taking control of their destiny, by any means necessary, demanding, and getting, government answerable to them, and not entrenched wealth or foreign interests. The last election misled many to feel that democracy was finally achieved, but the present situation should make it clear that was not even remotely the case. We have a long way to go, and for our own good, we’d better get there soon.