  The violation of the Noether relation between symmetries and charges is
reduced to the time dependence of the charge associated to a conserved current.
For the U(1) gauge symmetry a non-perturbative control of the charge
commutators is obtained by an analysis of the Coulomb charged fields. From
this, in the unbroken case we obtain a correct expression for the electric
charge on the Coulomb states, its superselection and the presence of massless
vector bosons; in the broken case, we obtain a general non-perturbative version
of the Higgs phenomenon, i.e. the absence of massless Goldstone bosons and of
massless vector bosons. The conservation of the (gauge dependent) current
associated to the U(1) axial symmetry in QCD is shown to be compatible with the
time dependence of the corresponding charge commutators and a non-vanishing
eta' mass, as a consequence of the non locality of the (conserved) current.
