Real Change

On Tuesday America will elect Barrack Obama as its next president. The corporate media continues to talk of “tight races” in “key states” but I can’t imagine that anyone who knows anything about what is going on in America really believes them. By now it should be obvious even to the most die-hard neocons that John McCain and his born-again sidekick Sarah Palin are about to be wiped off the political map of the United States.

The Republican Party is in serious trouble and the Democrats, under Obama’s leadership, could do much to rectify the obscenities of Bush’s eight years in office. With absolute, filibuster proof majorities in the both the House and the Senate they could change whatever they felt like changing, literally. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal from the start and crimes against humanity, you say? Well, they could end them in one day, simply by voting to cut off the funding to continue W’s massacres. Of course, they could have done that back in 2006 when they defeated the Republicans the first time around, but they didn’t.

Come to think of it, in 2006 they could have also impeached Bush for any one of a number of his crimes against the US constitution, but that too was undoable. “Impeachment is off the table”, said the newly elected House majority leader, Nancy Pelosi (the same woman who later on would so whole-heartedly push for the tax-payer funded bailout of the Wall Street Banksters).

Gordon Gekko from Wall Street "Greed is good"

And speaking of Wall Street and the class of thieves that continues to run America, the Democratic controlled Congress and Senate could have passed laws two years ago to re-regulate the investment banks that were selling the toxic “sub-prime” securities that are now wrecking financial havoc across the globe. But they didn’t. They had better things to do, even though many of them, I’m sure, had a very good idea of what was going on and a realistic vision of where the housing bubble and the billions being spent on the Iraq war would lead us. They knew and could have done a lot when there was still time to prevent the disaster, but chose not to.

Instead, when the meltdown began and the stock market was losing an average of five to seven hundred points a day, the Democrats were the most enthusiastic supporters of the initial 700 billion dollar give-away (to the same criminals who had caused the disaster in the first place). The entire Democratic leadership stood behind the most massive wealth transfer from the poor to the filthy rich in the country’s history. “We must save the banks and the bankers to save the people”, they told us. A bit like the US soldiers who used to torch South Vietnamese hamlets with their Zippo lighters to “save” them from the Viet Cong.

In 2007 the US Census reported that roughly 40% of the nation’s wealth was controlled by the richest 1% of the country and that the top 10% owned almost two-thirds of America’s wealth. These are figures that were published last year before the crisis and the bailout and the daily stock market slides, and yet they remind me more of the kind of income disparity you’d expect to find in a Sub-Saharan nation or a Latin-American dictatorship à la Pinochet, not in the United States. And yet that is what we’ve become. An oligarchy where a miniscule minority of the population sets domestic and foreign policy and every four years holds elections so that the rest of us can participate in electing their representative, who will run their property (the United States) for their exclusive use and benefit.

I, however, am sick and tired of this system of lies and terror and hope that sooner or later the people of America will finally rise up against their autocratic rulers and take back what is rightfully theirs. Change is not just necessary, as Obama tells us, it also has to be real.