The new year teases us with traditional promises of hope and change for this next notch on the global calendar. Most of us at some level realize not much changes, and we live much like Sisyphus rolling a giant stone up each hill cycle before falling back into the valley of perennial status quo.

We stage elections that promise change and find our outrage ignored. If Iraq shines as the current litmus test for foreign policy failure and political fallout why does today's headline point out the "the old guard back on Iraq policy" in the Los Angeles Times? Why are we planning on sending more troops? Obviously, elections mean nothing in a land dominated by industrial monopolies where corporate interests always outweigh public interests.

Does anyone think a real health care solution will happen in a country where nearly fifty million people remain uninsured? We sit by and watch insurance companies routinely deny coverage when an illness threatens the bottom line, delay coverage for purely financial reasons, cancel coverage on individuals by looking for mistakes on applications or claim forms, raise premiums while slashing coverages and make record profits in times of national disasters. Mr. T remains the philosophical giant of our age with his astute national observation, "Pity the fool." The fool would be us.

We buy the idea we matter so much, but we find we matter less and less. If we mattered so much why are wages so low in an era of record profit taking by our corporate masters? Why are we working around the clock tied to corporations with contrived communication devices and earning less? We only seem to matter as a market share of eyes viewing advertised crap on a tightly controlled media net. How many phones must a family own today? Have people looked at those phone bills and questioned why the cost of communication has jumped by more than three to four times during this new millenium? Does anyone notice the stark lack of communication and entertainment alternatives today as merger and acquisitions remove democracy and choice?

The idea of consumers dictating the economic health of the nation is stupefying. In the retail world we shoppers have only benefited WalMart and Target, as we find everything purchased about as valuable and long lasting as a roll of toilet paper. On the internet we have benefited AOL, eBAY, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo who continue to make the individual increasingly irrelevant while reaping vast financial gains.

As a nation we no longer make our own clothes, make our our own cars, make our own electronics or produce our own energy. We now deny a decent education to more than 75% of our population while allowing only the wealthy and their chosen poster-children to have access to the highest learning standards, which are all found in private schools.

We do watch a lot of professional football to the benefit of thirty-two owners, their battered and drugged employees and the Busch family. We watch a lot college football that rewards a handful of the same schools each year with huge sums of television and bowl money that excludes more than 90% of colleges from the take. Think about all that money going to the NCAA while higher education tuition costs continue to climb to unaffordable levels for the majority of families. Think about a dishonest failed pro-football coach getting 32 million dollars to coach a college team in Alabama while half of that state is illiterate.

I find rolling that stone each year less enjoyable. I wonder what Sisyphus is thinking.