Finding a New Way

I want to bask in the optimism that the Democratic Party is promoting; I want to believe in Barak Obama; I want to close my eyes and pretend that this man will erase the nightmare that has been inflicted on the world for the last eight years; I want to imagine a Utopian America where this charismatic man will plant and tend the seeds of change; I want to wear an Obama pin and feel proud. I want to believe in Democracy again. As is the case, every time I wake up from this lovely reverie, I feel the disappointment and frustration bubble beneath the surface of my political soul. I remind myself that Obama is nothing more than the latest Manchurian creation specially designed and marketed by the Democratic Party, the same party that so often as acts the “good cop” of Wall Street after every disastrous Republican rape of our nation, to deceive the American left.

I have read too many books, watched too many films, and listened to too many songs, to believe that the any candidate for either party could possibly:

a.) Stand and fight for the issues that matter to me.
b.) Make any significant change in a system that was never designed for citizenry or Democracy.

I am sitting in my kitchen listening to Dead Prez, wondering why I even bother writing these posts. I am no longer trying to convert people to a more sane view of American politics. Citizens come to their own political understanding based on the experiences of their individual lives. In revolutionary circles this process of enlightenment is called “radicalization.” No amount of discourse, no amount of debate, no amount of blog posts that I can ever write will radicalize any person that is not ready to face the facts of the reality of what it means to live in a Republic rooted in the capitalistic garden called Wall Street.

Until you are ready to see that the problems in America, that these puppet politicians pretend to debate, are not errors in a morally upright America, but rather that they are necessary features of the system itself, than nothing will change. Until you are ready to see that the entire system needs to be rethought from the ground on up, nothing will change. We need to reassess our values. We live in a consumer based society that values wealth and promotes growth as signs of success. Our politics and politicians reflect these ideals. Voting “left” or “right” Democrat or Republican is a game that Capitalism plays to keep the masses subdued and occupied. The ruling class wants you to believe that they are giving you a candidate that will bring you what you want, but they have no intention of ever going against their own class interests. Why would they? They rule and will continue to do so until the people take the power back. Do you honestly think that they would offer you a candidate that would diminish their wealth and power?

They see that you have become agitated by their power-grab since 9-11, so they will cool the pot by offer up a charming man to sell you promises he is not expected to keep. Let’s make this one black and really give the people hope. A historic event, you will chant. Real change is coming! But really it will be business as usual, except we the people will have lost our anger. We will be further from our moments of radicalization. We will believe that Obama is there for us. We will forget that a ruling class offered Obama to us with their own interest at heart. We will forget our rage and radicalizations and go back to business as usual, as the ruling class takes more for themeselves, but this time from out of our sight.

I am just curious why people cannot see that there is no way a Democratic candidate, no matter how “liberal” they try to paint him, will ever bite the hand that feeds him. The two-party system will never work for the people. It was never designed to function this way. This idea that the government of the Untied States is for the people by the people is the biggest lie ever told. There can be nothing further form the truth. The government is today, and has been since the birth of this nation, a simple tool for the ruling class to consolidate their wealth. If you can’t see that then you must be a member of the ruling class and there is no need for you to read my words, or not willing to see the truth. Otherwise, take a look around you: see people rotting in jail cells, families mired in debt, farmers losing their lively hoods to grow corn for agribusiness, your children being sold merchandise before they can walk, your music, your art, your sports all designed to generate wealth.

No government, deliberately created by one class for their self-interest, will ever work for the behest of another class, except on the verge of a revolution, and then they will only parade reform candidates that will subdue an agitated populace. This phase of reformation is where we find ourselves as Americans, and Barak Obama is the puppet Wall Street has groomed to subdue our earned American rage.

Before I go on, I can already see some readers shaking their head and say things like, “What do you want some communistic revolution like Mao or Stalin?” While there are elements of Marxism that I admire, I am not advocating a socialist revolution. I am simply advocating an awakening to the situation we find ourselves in, not as nation, but as human beings. We have gone too far. The model we have been brainwashed to love is literately destroying our planet. Forget politics for a minute, and think about reality. We are buying ourselves to death! Growth, wealth, capital are not the right answers! We need a new vision.

Before we can make change, we need to help more people come to their individual moments of radicalization. We need to educate people to the depths that capitalism has sunk our societies. What we decide to do after we realize what we truly need to live a happy and sustainable life, not based on profit, greed, and wealth, will be determined after we are awakened to this reality.

We are not ready for political change because we still think we can fix a broken system, never realizing the truth is that the entire system must be rethought and built.

I don’t want to continually repeat myself. So I will to take a closer look at Obama’s speech and see if I can’t open some minds that way. I am not here to promote any candidate, although I think it is important to allow third party candidates enter the debates, so that someone can speak for the issues I find important. Ask yourself, why the two-party system will never allow Nader to debate? What are they afraid of? Please do not comment about how Nader is not a viable candidate. I am tired of that argument; I am writing this post to lead readers to rethink their personal politics about the nature of America's relationship to capitalism and politics.

I found someone who had run Obama’s speech at the DNC through Wordle and created this tag cloud.
I want to bring to your attention the biggest words; these are the words that were used the most often:

America
American
McCain
Country
Need
Make
Promise
Washington

Looking closely at his speech one thing is obvious, Barak’s puppet masters are appealing to one of the most powerful American lies. The focal strand of his speech was a steady reference to the Horatio Alger myth, which states that wealth and success through hard work, courage, determination, and concern for others is a viable reality for any American. While millions of Americans, from farmers, to factory workers, to soldiers, and most of the middle class have woken up to the reality of the American dream, the Democratic party wants us to believe through the simple words of this charismatic orator, families buried in credit card debt, addicted to a consumer culture that targets children still in diapers, will somehow make good. Obama is dangerous because he gives hope to a populace that doesn’t need hope but needs a cultural revolution. The Democrats what us to believe that America has lost her way, that the evil Republicans have steered a noble nation astray. They want us to believe that this soft spoken, African America, will bring us back to the American Way, but what we need to see is how throughly the global economic system is destroying our lives. The American Dream cannot function when it is being crushed by the weight of corporate America.

What people refuse to believe is that Wall Street has always followed its own imperial needs. The people have never played a part in what the government of the United States has or hasn’t done. The ballot box has always been the most ineffective tool for the American people.

The American system is not broken. There is no one who can fix it. The Bush administration was not some irregular band of boogey men who corrupted our “values” with unnecessary wars. The American system is working better than its created ever dreamed. The American experiment, no matter how many melting-pot, or rags-to-riches myths we are indoctrinated with in grade school, is a system designed to enrich the ruling class. Period. The population is subdued with this idea that they too can make it rich, but the reality is an ever-increasing culture of debt, consumption, and despair. Neither Obama or the Democratic party will fix America, because America aint broke!

If we want change, true change, we must as a nation, rethink our priorities and values. We are a nation based on the idea that profit always comes before people. No political speech will ever change that. Capitalism is the economic system that we have been shackled to, and until we wake up to that reality, we will never see change. Obama no matter how good intentioned, although I don’t believe he is, can ever change the capitalist system that has bred him as their latest spokesman to pacify an angry, debt-ridden nation.

Why didn’t his speech cloud include words like peace, love, green, revolution, compassion, education, community, and sustainability? Instead he chose to return to America’s favorite comfort food-The American Dream. I am surprised he didn’t invoke Manifest Destiny.

Let’s take a look at his speech:

through hard work and sacrifice, each of us can pursue our individual dreams but still come together as one American family, to ensure that the next generation can pursue their dreams as well.

This is the main theme of his speech. I think I have elucidated my point fairly well up to this point, but let me consolidate my ideas here: I cannot believe in a candidate who does not criticize the myth that has crippled millions of Americans. To make things worse, not only can he not admit that the American Dream has failed most Americans, but instead he is continually urging us to believe in a fiction that needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. A reasonable candidate would not ask middle and lower class Americans to reinvest in a system that has robbed them of their wealth for generations. A reasonable candidate would question a system that rewards big money interests over the needs of its citizenry.

at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women - students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors -- found the courage to keep it alive.

Simply put, no they did not! Ordinary men and women have never had an interest in perpetuating an imperialistic system. Ordinary men and women have found the courage to work themselves to the bone as they watch the wealth flow upwards to banks, credit card and drug companies. They have seen their jobs move overseas as Free Trade Agreements, designed to make companies rich, have gutted their communities. A reasonable candidate would criticize the IMF and World Bank! A reasonable candidate would not stand in a sports stadium at a convention sponsored my Lockheed Martin and AT&T spouting lies about how the American people have always found the courage to defend a system designed to keep them complicit.

More of you have cars you can't afford to drive, credit card bills you can't afford to pay, and tuition that's beyond your reach.

Again, rhetoric like this is dangerous, because it assumes that debt is an anomaly whose blame can conveniently be placed at the Republican’s door. But debt is part and parcel of a consumer based economy. Obama himself is responsible for not fighting legislation, which would regulate credit card companies forcing them to put caps on interest rates. It is unfair and dishonest for him to preach against a part of a system he has never had the courage to criticize. A reasonable candidate would not ask his citizens to believe in a system that has failed them. A courageous candidate would offer us more than the American Dream.

These challenges are not all of government's making. But the failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush.

I apologize for being repetitive, but the passage above proves my point exactly. It is easy for the Democrats to blame the problems of the middle class and poor on a greedy Republican regime, but the reality is that Washington is not broken. It is simply not designed for the rights of regular Americans. Just take a look at who sponsored the convention. These companies are the beneficiaries of the government of the Untied States of America. Until the people educate themselves and lay the groundwork for a cultural revolution that will create grassroots parties to work outside the system, not to simply reform it, nothing will change.

You see, we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.

When have the Democrats ever demonstrated their version of progress? Does anyone honestly believe that the Democratic Party is operating on some other economic plane; that somehow they are not operating on the same system that rewards wealth? Are we to believe that Democrats are not, at this very moment, lining their coffers with millions of corporate dollars?

It's a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road.

Is that why Clinton passed NAFTA, and gutted regulations on the FCC, allowing near monopolies in the media?

government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves - protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.

It’s passages like the one above that beg some key questions. Let us assume that Obama is not just playing politician, that for one second he actually believes in the statements he is making, rather than following a script handed to him from party headquarters. Does he, or anyone who will vote for him, actually think that he can make any changes in the system I have so laboriously described?

Call me a cynic, but this is my main complaint about the two-party system: Even if Obama was MLK or Malcom X for that matter (He is far from both) do you think he could make any changse in a system that has never “protected us from harm and provided every child a decent education; kept our water clean and our toys safe; invested in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.” These ideas are not profitable, and so they have no place in a capitalist society. No one man can ever change that from within the system. We need an alternative to the present system of government.

Change means a tax code that doesn't reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.

Again sounds great, but if you are voting for Obama, do you honesty think the Democrats who have never stood up for anything, will be able to create a more just tax code? Do you not think that the same lobbyists he derides will want some profit on their investment in this campaign? Why would companies paying to have Obama elected not want something in return?

I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95% of all working families. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle-class.

in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

I'll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I'll ask for higher standards and more accountability. And we will keep our promise to every young American - if you commit to serving your community or your country, we will make sure you can afford a college education.

Either he is lying, or he is too naïve to believe he will be able to implement such empty promises. This rhetoric is politics at its most base. You can promise change all day long, but when you have no intention of delivering it, your words become shallow.

the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. Change happens because the American people demand it - because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.

This last passage is the ond true thing Obama said all night. The problem is that Obama doesn’t realize that any member of the Democratic Party, just by being a member of the corporate party is trying the same old politics with the same old players. Change happens when people demand it, in the streets, not at Mile High Stadium.