Wait a minute! Now McCain, the champion of change?

      "Words, words, words," muttered Hamlet, still a bit unclear about how to proceed in the face of his growing suspicion that his father, the King of Denmark, had been murdered by his uncle. Words. A genuine human invention. With them we do business, pray, seduce, try to solve our own problems or those of others...and yet they have this nasty habit of back-firing.

     Take the word change. That seems to suggest a new course of action, although it might just mean that your shirt is full of sweat so you go home to put on a freshly washed and ironed one, changing one shirt for another. Is there any way of knowing whether the new shirt will be any better than the old one? Well, maybe. If you know that the clean shirt is new, made better, fits better, is more appealing to the eye...

    In politics, though, talk about change can be a very thorny issue. To begin with, change assumes a different meaning according to your ideology. It means one thing for a U.S. conservative, such as John McCain, something quite different for a liberal or progressive, such as Barak Obama.

     Then there is a more practical, or maybe even ethical problem: once you have pronouced yourself for change, how can you make sure that your promises come true? If you incorporate "change" on your campaign menu and are elected you've either got to do what you promised or do an about face. But there is an additional problem: what the politicians understands when he or she talks about "change" to get votes may not coincide with what takes place once installed in the seat of power and surrounded by powerful lobbies, the Pentagon, the "Establishment," bombarded by pressure from multinational banks and corporations...

    We might ask therefore whether individual politicians, motivated by high ideals and ethical values, can really introduce any profound changes in a system that operates on the basis of its own laws of behavior. We need not mention the traumatic events that surrounded the end of slavery under the presidency of Abraham Lincoln; what happened when President John Kennedy attempted to respond to popular protests demanding equality of opportunity for minority groups; how diverse movements in the l960's and 70's were either absorbed or repressed: the women's rights movement on the one hand and black nationalism on the other.

    Of course you might argue that the end result was change. True. But the changes came about rather as a need of the whole system to adapt itself to changing circumstances than any fundamental break with the status quo.

    The U.S. economy is in the midst of one of its periodic slumps, and therefore both candidates are going to offer proposals for "change." The conservative Republicans, at least officially, base their economic and social notions on a sort of marriage between evangelistic Protestant thinking and the "free market." There is supposed to be as little meddling of the State as possible in economic affairs, to allow for free competition, big business is tantalized with enormous tax reductions--on the theory that if they pay less taxes they will invest more, and the resulting productivity will "trickle" down to the common citizen. But in practice, these policies end up in support of monopolistic practices and make competition from small enterprizes extremely difficult. Furthermore, everytime any important economic groups get into trouble due to speculation or administrative mal-practice the Federal Government is there to bail them out: this is clear in the present case involving  $200 billion dollar injection to save mortgage financers Freddie Mae and Fannie Mae. So...what has happened to the conservative notion of free market? In the past there have been numerous other cases where the State, unloved by most conservatives, came on the scene to bail out mega-corporations: Lockheed Aircraft, Penn Railroad, Chrysler, just to mention a few.

 

(To be continued)