�Where�s our change? We paid our dues. Where�s our change?� chant the protesters called �hecklers� in the press. On April 21, 2011, members of Courage to Resist, mostly military activists against war, were among the supporters at President Obama�s 2012 fundraiser at Regis Hotel in San Francisco that paid $5000 dollar for a table. But when this �two dozen� rose to press �the president in song on the unjust confinement and tortuous treatment of alleged WikiLeaks whistle-blower US Army intelligence analyst PFC Bradley Manning� (Couragetoresist.org), the speaker at the podium turned to Nancy Pelosi: �Did you do this?� Pelosi indicated she did not, and then the man of change, spoke to the protesters, now being escorted out of the room by security, �Nice song.� Nice song! Serve, torture at our command, die but keep quiet. Peace Man resumed his speech, no doubt, a speech expounding on that change you can believe in.

Unfortunately, the members of Courage to Resist and the other over 100 supporters of Obama did pay their dues for change - not the kind they could believe in - but change nonetheless.

Along with other taxpayers, these activists actually paid for the right of the U.S. government to continue its partnership with the Wall Street bankers and the corporations, that is, persons recently in receipt of the right to free speech (Citizens United vs. FEC).* Ultimately they paid for the right of corporatism to be the dominating force in the world with the right to drill and contaminate the Earth and privatize the public sector, including the industries of health care, transportation, education, and military. The right to rapidly privatize water and our daily means of subsistence on this Earth - without further obstruction from regulators and protesters - is the change.

If we view the world through the promises of capitalism, then change would seem unbelievable, and the collective sense of betrayal is justified. How easily have Americans accepted the notion of good and evil, then and us, success and failure? It seemed so sane, so enticing. Americans wanted more. The powerful arose from within the rank and file of good Americans and their want of more. As the powerful grew ever more powerful, they promised that the benefits of their growth would trickle down like water to their fellow citizens, who continued to believe that more was better. And even now, where in many cities the water from kitchen taps is contaminated, deep in their hearts, Americans still believe. We paid our dues! Where is our change?

State media conducts polls and discussions: Do Americans believe the financially elite 1% should be taxed? What substantial change will be gained if the super wealthy are taxed? Will more of their money added to the pool of American taxpayers radically change the U.S.�s domestic and foreign policy? Such polls and discussions serve as nothing more than meaningless distraction. The corporations with personhood and rights and the 1% with royal privileges who have long been exalted in American society will only exercise those rights to squeeze more of the life from the 99% percent of the population.

The person in your shoes, in your clothes, in your car; the person holding the iPod or the cell phone has less rights than Nike, the Gap, Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, Apple, Microsoft, Comcast, or Motorola - and these are humanitarian-oriented persons! These persons have more clout with U.S. regimes, particularly since Reagan and including the Obama Regime, consisting almost exclusively of Wall Street�s and the corporations� most �powerful� actors and orators.

Capitalism is the problem!

�Motherness� is a highly de-valued characteristic of capitalism; therefore, it cannot mother the Earth and its people; it smothers. �That power to make, to create, to transform� (Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions), it kills. Capitalism, to use Allen�s words, cannot �value peacefulness, harmony, cooperation, health, and general prosperity,� for it represents a highly imbalanced configuration of life. �All that goes into the maintenance of life over the long term� is belittled and repressed while �all that helps regulate and control change� is privileged.

Capitalism gives birth to Fascism and now Fascism has rights!

So it is no surprise that along with its partnership with the corporations, the U.S. is militarizing the CIA. �get ready for lots more drone strikes,� writes Spencer Ackerman in �Drones Rejoice!� at Wired.com, April 27, 2011; Obama, shuffling the actors, places former Afghanistan Commander Petraeus at the head of the CIA while Panetta, �a Democrat,� moves to head the Pentagon.

The fascist takeover is underway, but American citizens are distracted by meaningless polls and, of course, Lady Gaga!

Arab citizens understand the problem. U.S. polls collecting the opinions of people in the Arab world know that a key region of the world is keening aware of the corruption of corporate capitalism.

In �Is the World Too Big to Fail? The Contours of Global Order,� (Tom Dispatch, April, 2011), Noam Chomsky argues that these polls of Arab opinions reveal that the overwhelming majority of Arabs �regard the U.S. and Israel as the major threats they face: the U.S. is so regarded by 90% of Egyptians, in the region generally by over 75%.� Chomsky continues:

These polls on the Arab�s opinions on the U.S.�s foreign corporatization of that region of the world make the polls on U.S. domestic taxing of the rich look as trivial as a game show, for the latter opinions pose no threat to the U.S./corporate relations. It is ultimately entertainment - a nice song.

The �powerful� 1% percent should be taxed. We want change.

Despite all the changes since, there is every reason to suppose that today�s policy-makers basically adhere to the judgment of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt�s influential advisor, A.A. Berle, that control of the incomparable energy reserves of the Middle East would yield �substantial control of the world.� And correspondingly, that loss of control would threaten the project of global dominance that was clearly articulated during World War II, and that has been sustained in the face of major changes in world order since that day (Chomsky).

The evil dictators out there are made in the U.S.A. just as are the Republicans and Democrats, the good guys, over here. �Elections have become a charade, run by the public relations industry,� writes Chomsky. �The best marketing campaign� of 2008, featured presidential candidate Barrack Obama! �Executives were euphoric. In the business press they explained that they had been marketing candidates like other commodities since Ronald Reagan, but 2008 was their greatest achievement and would change the style in corporate boardrooms.� We are told that $1 billion is needed for the miracle to repeat itself. In the meantime, while Peace man�s drones kill women and children daily, Obama, Chomsky writes, surrounds himself with the euphoric business leaders, placed in top positions.

�The public is angry and frustrated, Chomsky writes, but as long as the Muasher principle prevails [�everything is fine as long as the population is quiet�], that doesn�t matter. Nice song! says Peace man.

Apparently, there are jobs in marketing the commodities for the next round of elections in 2012 - and democracy is one item among those commodities. It must be packaged, too, in the image and likeness of corporatism and made to appear Green and a good for all while speaking openly and confidently about American interests. Building and drilling contracts, seed and hydroelectric deals, and above all, security against the terrorists, and you have the makings of Democracy. Here in the U.S., smashed and bloody little bodies and dismembered limbs are the good guy�s best selling video game!

Democracy makes money repressing that brand of Democracy that is by and for the people. So it is no wonder that Chomsky writes: �the U.S. and its Western allies are sure to do whatever they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world.� The dictator�s usefulness as a commodity comes to an end only when the people challenge the regime, and when they do, they quickly realize they are challenging the U.S. Empire. �Destabilization,� Chomsky writes, is �illegitimate� because it represents a threat to democracy as defined by the U.S./Corporate State.

We witness this every time the legal, military, and paralegal mechanisms to �regulate and control change,� embargoes, isolation, torture, and war, are hurled at the evildoers, but Americans have long accepted the illusion that stabilized regimes, like stabilized urban police states here in the U.S., are those in which citizens remain quiet.

Chomsky is right to note that the history of racism has obstructed the road to �authentic� Democracy. �Racism in the literary culture has been a rank obscenity; far worse in practice, needless to say. It is much easier to eradicate polio than this horrifying plague, which regularly becomes more virulent in times of economic distress.� True, since the ever busy, deeply embedded corporate think on good and evil has never failed to galvanize citizens around a tree and a body to promote cuts to social services, generally code for cuts to the working class and the poor. The indifference to human life has been palpable. But the privatizing and union busting goal of Emergency Financial Management Systems could very well alter that perceptive on human life as the U.S./Corporate State in Michigan, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Oregon and elsewhere begins intensifying the war between the Corporate and other, the disenfranchised and de-classified as persons other.

And I am sure Chomsky knows that racial distinctions erased in a U.S. racist�s order, where the good colored is the best servant the corporations, will not need every worker working. Just a few good managers emptied of memories for the free-market Empire.

Those who paid dues to be stamped Property of the Fascists Who Brought You the Horrors of Regime Changes, 9-11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Torture, Rendition, and Trillions in Debt cannot continue paying dues to a system that leads to the destruction of the Earth and its inhabitants! Otherwise, we will all meet in that place where fascists have rights and tyranny rules; where women and children run for their lives from drones and areas contaminated by depleted uranium, or flee dry lands created by human-made droughts and areas confiscated by corporations for the planting of genetically modified seeds�and who will we shout at then?

*Citizens United vs. FEC, See �Big Brother: Thought Control at Koch,� The Nation, Mark Ames and Mike Elk, April 24, 2011.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.