Democracy: The Cure For Depression

This is written before the November elections but it’s easy to predict their outcome;  the minority owners of the USA  will win . Finance capital, corporate wealth and Israel will still dominate  America and  people will still live under a government purchased by that minority . This is a democratic system  the way terminal cancer is a healthy organism. In fact, our social disease - capitalism -  is a terminal condition.


The 20th century  crisis called the Great Depression was survived by putting the economic cancer in remission with a primitive form of social democracy. It minimized the worst outrages of private fundamentalism with public spending which  lightened  burdens on at least some of the people. Its real purpose was to insure that  minority wealth  remain in control . Better informed capitalists understood that a complete breakdown might bring revolution and some kind of economic palliative was needed. Enter the “New Deal” which  made it possible for taxpayers to subsidize  the socially needed stimulants that profit seeking private capital would not finance. This introduced the novel idea of government spending to  prop up the private economy with public money, as  now. The point then and now was to protect  the dominance of private capital  by sanitizing the worst aspects of its fundamentalist fanaticism while  placing  the cost of social needs on the backs of the general public.


The protections for the corporate rich  have grown even worse  since then and we now have “recession” with greater inequality in wealth than  during that “depression”. The disease which was  in remission for a generation has returned to  terminal condition and now  threatens far more than the American people. In  pandemic global form it menaces the entire planet. The human and ecological destruction caused by manic pursuit of private profit at public expense has never been more obvious even with consciousness control attempting to hide its reality.


Whether  labeled a military industrial complex , climate change , media mind abuse,or corrupt government , the system  rewarding minorities that live comfortably while much of humanity goes hungry, is murdered in wars and lives in debt, poverty or colonized misery is no longer tolerable . This  election will hardly bring   change in that global condition nor even advance  democracy in the USA save in isolated cases . But democracy means  more than periodically  marching  to the polls and selecting from a pre-chosen group of professional employees of the ruling minority. It should involve  citizens in the everyday life of the national community but that’s something we have only entertained in theory . Elections like the present  fiasco make it more urgent we put that theory into practice.

This  campaign of political pornography had more billions spent than ever before and  candidates with no message  but that their opponents were criminals, bigots, nazis or psychopaths , while they were sent  to liberate us from such fiends. One wing of the ruling party claimed the other was using  foreign millions to elect its slate of monsters without mentioning the American  billions being spent on the whole sordid process. And while screeching about foreign influence on American politics it said nothing  about Israeli control exercised over national government and major media, since any mention of this can mean instant unemployment or a new career of public appearances to apologize for daring to say what many people think. The result of this hypocrisy and  treachery is that the people lose and the disease gets worse.

In order to move from a terminal condition and go beyond remission to a healthy  democracy we have to stop depending on representatives who not only carry the illness but spread its malignancy . Not an easy task in a society partitioned into competing individuals with occasional minority group cohesion, but  powerless  when up against the minority with trillions of dollars and massive weaponry at its disposal. Not easy, but hardly impossible and given the  worsening conditions we experience, absolutely necessary. Moving from identifying simply as self  or member of a minority to an identity as part  of an American majority is absolutely necessary.

Groups working for peace whether in the middle east or in local communities need to come together since none  will succeed without unity among all who want a  peaceful and socially just world. Those who demand government insured health care  need to join  with all workers, not just minorities, and form coalitions to bring a shorter work week which will enable small  businesses to hire more employees without fear of horrendous health care expense. We need to raise the minimum wage  for all and create a maximum wage as well and  an  economic stimulus  that devotes hundreds of billions to public job creation rather than to private financial forces  responsible for the present  near collapse. Public banks are an obvious way to help  finance what society  really needs rather than continuing the  obsessive and masturbatory economic focus on our nation’s private parts.

And foreign policy needs to be taken away from rich minorities operating for war profits  and to  benefit a foreign nation at the cost of  American tax payers  manipulated into supporting success for others which guarantees their own failure. The control of private capital over public minds  must be fought and the propaganda  countered with unbiased and respectful exchange of information that promotes understanding, unity and peace. That is in complete opposition to the  competitive, disrespectful and bigoted model we live under which defies logic by calling itself democratic freedom in action.

The terminal  system is economic but the potential victim is life itself and the cure for the disease is democracy, in politics , economics and morality. That is the work of the present in order to create a future. This election only makes it more imperative that we do that work.