Does “Change” Mean Anything?

From Dissident Voice

by Frank Scott / January 14th, 2011

"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?

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That's not "change we can believe in."