Four years of deepening depression, mass unemployment and soaring poverty have created a towering rage in working class communities and among youth.

For all of its problems with misleadership by students and liberals the Occupation movement is spreading like wildfire. “The website Occupy Together counts 865 participating cities, including solidarity rallies on every continent save Antarctica.” Alternet 10 08 2011

It’s clear that the Obama administrations claims that the recession was over in 2009 are as bogus as Bush’s claim on the carrier deck that the Iraq War was over in 2003. Wages are down at double the amount since Obama announced that the recession is over. He not only lied, he mislabeled.  Recessions can be turned around, but depressions can’t and this depression is only going to get worse, much worse. That will occur sooner rather than later when European banks begin falling like dominoes.

The entry of some unions and, independently, large numbers of union member into the nationwide demonstrations validates the Occupation movement and gives it much needed strength. That’ll be needed because it’s becoming clear that the ‘authorities’ are getting worried by its spread and the depths of the rage surfacing in these mass actions.

The depression that created Madison and now the Occupation movement can’t be solved by either party because their root cause is capitalism itself. Both parties are last ditch defenders of capitalism. The upshot of that is that elections won’t have any effect on the crises except to polarize people even more and make them more demanding.

As soon as the elections are over huge numbers of newly radicalized leftist workers and students will go into opposition to whichever party wins. More than ever elections and an electoral strategy are meaningless. The time when millions would fall for excuses and false promises of hope and change are over.

The question is now one of initiating campaigns to create a workers government to prosecute the criminals who attacked our standard of living, attacked our unions, attacked  immigrant and imported workers, created and artificially maintain massive unemployment and underemployment (holding at 16% for over two years) growing homelessness and poverty rates that now include 1 in 6 people.

Madison and the Occupation movement, in spite of misleadership, are just the tip of the iceberg. There is a rage building among working people that’s finding expression in mass movements for change that’ll shake the rulers of the country to their knees and give us the chance to replace their damaged and deranged government with a decent government.

Struggles like that happened from 1775 to 1783 when we replaced royalist governments and again from 1859 to 1865 when we dug a grave for the Confederacy and buried the slaveocracy. A repetition, even if it takes years to come to fruition, is, from a historical point of view, long overdue.