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.
