Does "Change" Mean Anything?

"What is government if words have no meaning"     Jared Loughner

Two years ago Americans voted for change. Two years later Americans again voted for change. This voting ritual is generations old but the only change we’ve seen is in the skin tone, ethnicity, gender or sexuality of those selected by one minority to be elected by another. The word has no meaning. Absolutely nothing has changed about the substance of our problem:

 A dysfunctional system is destroying democracy, faith, sanity, morality and the natural environment in which they all exist.

The recent tragedy in Arizona was a direct result of that social dysfunction but ignorance purveyors have used it to indict only that state, or small groups, or individual personalities, finding them guilty of creating a frustrating climate easily manipulated to bring angry division to the American public, thereby making that public easier to control.

The people at the top of a political economy that exports costly jobs while importing cheap labor remain secure while scapegoats are blamed for being unemployed natives, employed illegals or overburdened taxpayers. The wars that have cost thousands of lives, billions of dollars and created threats to Americans that never existed before are expanding to new nations. Those bloody actions are opposed by a majority, which also calls for tax increases on the richest Americans, but government consistently rules against them and for its minority owners.

The corporate state provides brainless entertainment to help control the national consciousness, and news and political commentary that make the entertainment seem brilliant by comparison. We are all but guaranteed misguided reaction at best, and homicidal lunacy at worst. If the Arizona terrorist had chosen broadcasting instead of violence, he might have had his own show on Fox, CNN or MSNBC.

The present congress will be even worse than the previous group that was of the ineffectual president’s own party. He no longer has the majority with which he did nothing but obey his corporate employers, so he can be even more bipartisan and further enrich billionaires and their servants who privately profit from all our public loss. No less a teacher of capitalist economics than Bernie Madoff reminded his investors that a profit on one side always means a loss on the other. He practiced what he preached to create fabricated billions and was sent to prison, but those who locked him up are still doing it to create fabricated trillions. Instead of being in jail, they are running the global empire. Their private profits are our social loss. Meanwhile, we are distracted by self-serving and often near imbecilic ravings that pass for political democracy as our society disintegrates while creating new billionaires.  Is it any wonder that some people seem to be losing their minds?

The minority leading us to social degradation will maintain control until the majority creates a truly democratic state. In the short term that may seem as likely as visits from extra terrestrials, but there may not be a long term unless we transform the morally perverse and environmentally poisoned corporate empire that threatens all life on earth.

Right now we’re still attacking scapegoats within, or fighting outside forces non-existent until we create them. Mind managers label our problems as creeping socialism or stalking fascism, with little understanding of what those words mean. The bitterness of language is countered by attempts to make certain words criminal, with charges of “hate speech” leveled by supporters of alleged “free speech”. A nation committing hate crimes of mass murder all over the globe has its citizens despising one another and paying little attention to the systemic roots of their problem.

Just as corporate capital’s White House cheerleader has done nothing to change the economy, the new congress will do nothing to change the relationship of the USA to Israel. That sordid union with a racial supremacist nation held in contempt almost everywhere but in the American government has billions of our dollars and thousands of our lives expended in wars for its support. And the president and congress will continue raising the budget for private banking by cutting the budgets for public service. The problems that outrage millions are blamed on everything but their source and so distressed Americans helped elect the new congress. But the change they are offered by the right is as much language distortion as the change previously offered by what passes for a left. The problem is that politicians who supposedly represent competing parties are united as employees in support of the minority-controlled system. That system is what must be changed, not simply the hired hands administering its needs at public expense.

The popular big government versus small government argument disguises the reality of a corporate state owned by a tiny minority, with political factions fighting to share in its wealth. The overwhelming majority of Americans are not served at all but are in fact robbed in this false debate that results in continued damage inflicted no matter which faction operates on behalf of its wealthy minority controllers.

We suffer financial inequality so blatant it’s a full time public relations job for consciousness controllers to keep us dulled into believing their tales of outside terror and inside socialism. Looking at America objectively would make it easy to assume that most of us are ignorant, stoned, drunk and homicidal. But majorities oppose the wars and support taxing the rich, while a substantial minority is growing in resistance to the uncritical relationship with Israel. As soon as we stop blaming those below us and start dealing with those above us we may give real meaning to the words government and democracy. We are slowly joining the world in  a  global revolution to transform reality and not continue endlessly re-branding failure. We’re  just not doing it fast enough to give it meaning. We need to speed up the process.