At the Crossroads of America

The Calling of our Times


Throughout history, it is few the men and women who are living at moments such as these, when monumental shifts in human existence can be touched and its ramifications seen over the bright sunrays of hope. It is few the men and women in the short sand clock of human civilization whose waking conscious and steadfast courage can propel future generations forward in time, to lands promising and cultures flourishing, in an instant breaking free from the grip of absolute inertia that has hijacked an entire society.

One such moment of human crossroads, which destiny has placed upon our modern civilization to endow us with its great responsibility, will in a few days time stampede onto the shores of the American Empire, testing the confines of our existence in times of great global distress and bitter national division. At the crossroads of America do we find ourselves immersed, confronted by two most different paths whose choices will invariably confront the essence not only of all Americans but the citizenry of the globe as well.

Our decision on election-day 2004 will say as much about who we are as what we want to become, in short time transforming our destiny to the society that will exist into the future. We are each others’ gate keepers, and through the monumental decision we must make the future course of humanity will take. The referendum of the next few days is as much one regarding us as a society as it is on the presidency of George W. Bush. Do we approve of what has transpired, of what has been committed and of what has and continues to be done in our name? Do we condone all that has been lost, our reputation, our humanity, our nation? Have the last four years been an anomaly, a freak period of time not accepted or sought by the American people? Do the policies of the corporate administration have resonance and complicity acquiescence among us, or are they to be discarded and erased from our collective conscious? In our answers to these questions America will thus come to be defined.

Fortune has chosen our generation, tens of millions of voting Americans, as the torchbearers guiding the entire human race through the black abyss of the last four years, into introspections of alternate universes and parallel worlds, of dreaded pasts and more frightful futures, placing within us the great burden of deciding the next step in human history, of a return to past dark ages or a forward march towards renaissance and rebirth. It is us, living at this moment in time, mere pebbles of sand in the vast expanse of the universe, random anonymous energies in the long history of Earth, that stand to decide what shape America and by extension the world will take at the doorstep of the twenty-first century. This is our calling, and our burden.

Whether we revert back in time or leap forward into greatness, the choice is ours, having it placed before our feet by the energies of the universe, testing the constructs of the human mind, allowing us the chance to decide our own fates, whether by collective error or through a sudden burst of enlightenment. Just beyond the reach of our own existence lie answers known and expected, yet within the confines of what we know and see history changes with the passage of time and through decisions of those who dwell inside the human condition. For those who came before have had to live with the choices made, occasionally prospering through achievement, sometimes suffering through failure and oftentimes condemned through bankruptcy of wisdom.

Yet, as always seems to be the case, it is future generations to come that suffer most through the mistakes of their parents and grandparents. It is the sins of the fathers that condemn their children to hell. Sojourning through the wrong path in the face of crossroads ahead scars the future as well as the present. Born without choice, devoid of opportunity and confronted by the wrongs of ancestors past, those of the future must live with the detrimental consequences of wrongs, errors, indifference and inaction. Instead of granting a better world to our offspring, the legacy of what we have done, or what we failed to do, encages the many who are to come. Thus the burden of our failure to choose wisely will condemn millions of faceless entities whose destiny we are helping to seal even before they take their first breath of air. It is at the crossroads of humanity where man achieves its greatest victories or suffers its most monumental defeats.

Just as we inherited the mistakes of the past so then, if we are not careful or wise, will we repeat the vicious cycle once more, yet again making the world we inhabit a more burdensome place for our children and grandchildren. Throughout history, generation after generation fails to heed the echoes of times past and the warnings recorded by our forefathers, failing to learn from the lessons of human existence written and rewritten time and again, from walls to stone tablets to scrolls to books to digitized Internet, unable to grasp the repetitive predictability and disastrous inevitability of human nature, of our society and civilization, of our appetite for violence, conquest and exploitation, of our reliance on unwise leaders, warmongering statesmen and corrupt, greed-infested decimators of human life.

And so, as many of us help condemn the lives of millions who have yet to understand, as we continue forgetting disasters, quagmires, debacles and failed monuments to inept leadership, in essence failing to understand the greater reactions to our ignorant actions, we must look inward and blame nobody but ourselves for the consequences our decisions unleash upon our progeny, our planet, its many diverse inhabitants and the future course of human existence. In taking the wrong path at the foot of America’s crossroads, we also take the country and indeed the planet over treacherous mountains and bottomless canyons from where six billion energies may never return.


Only We the People


At the crossroads of America do we stand in front of, We the People, born equal and free, only unequal in life and circumstance, environment and opportunity. Through We the People can a once great nation again flourish, becoming a bright beacon once more leading the fraternity of nations, transforming itself from warmongering destroyer of the planet into humanitarian purveyor of goodness. Only We the People – forgetting the forty percent whose world consists of bubbles, blind patriotism, denials, belief in lies, ignorance, delusions and an inability to accept reality – can awaken us from the insidious nightmare we have been trapped inside for the last four years. Only We the People can take back our country from the claws of despotism, tyranny, corporatism, human evil, criminality, debauched democracy and crony capitalism. Only We the People can reclaim what has been usurped from us, our rights, liberties, freedoms, happiness, security and wish for lasting peace.

We the People, that amazing amalgam of black, white, brown and all shades in between, of all skin mutations and diversity, of all spectrums of the human race, from all corners of the globe, the time to reclaim America to its rightful owners has arrived. We are the world, a nation composed of all peoples and ethnicities, a grand experiment of pioneers marching forward towards the inevitability that is the coming fusion of humanity. We are the experiment, a mixture of different environments and genes, a melting pot of dynamism, a cocktail of diversity ready to forge a new era of civilization, ambassadors and representatives of the world, a virtual cornucopia of beliefs, ideas, talents and opinions whose many cultures continue to blend together in advancement of our eventual fusion as a people. We are the People, and ready we stand to restore balance to our nation and help make right what has been made wrong.

Only We the People can stand together, marching shoulder to shoulder to the voting booths, stomping on fear and insecurity, correcting what was never right and banishing what never belonged.


No Longer…


No longer do we wish the government to make fear and insecurity national policy; no longer do we wish the government to export death, violence and destruction to less developed nations; no longer do we wish to live in a state of perpetual fear and perpetual war; no longer do we wish evils to be committed in our name; no longer do we wish corporate control over our lives, manufacturing wars for profit and imperial feudalism; no longer do we wish to continue the advancing police state upon our society; no longer do we wish corporate executives holding the reigns of power, sitting in offices creating, altering and modifying laws favorable to the corporations they prostitute for; no longer do we wish the government helping polluters destroy our planet, poisoning our air, water and land in the process, making toxic our foods, lungs, and bodies; no longer do we wish healthcare to be a privilege instead of a universal human right; no longer do we wish lies upon lies, nor deceptions, brainwashing and distortions from a government elected by us to serve only us.

No longer do we wish profit over people, nor $450,000,000,000.00 per year for the military-industrial complex and $200,000,000,000.00 for the Iraq disaster; no longer do we wish the evisceration of social programs that contribute to the health, education, infrastructure and well-being of the people; no longer do we wish death, maiming and destruction of Arabs and Muslims, marketing them as terrorists in order to conduct perpetual war for perpetual profit; no longer do we seek foreign policies designed to anger, breed hate, foster blowback, enslave, pilfer, exploit and decimate untold millions whose only crime is living in lands possessing natural resources and cheap labor; no longer do we wish a Department of War, a Middle East policy under the control of Israel or a government infested with delusional neoconservatives; no longer do we wish the elimination and decimation of American education that only succeeds in making automatons and serfs of our children.

No longer do we desire crony capitalism that breeds wars, exploitation, greed, selfishness, gluttony and conditioned consumption; no longer do we wish the existence of debauched democracy where money dictates laws and wealth controls government; no longer do we wish the Almighty Dollar becoming the sole arbiter in human affairs, becoming the new religion of greed, working for the wealthy and against the poor; no longer do we wish the existence of profiteers and warmongers; no longer will we stand for corrupt leaders, inept administrations, morally bankrupt politicians and ignorant, feeble-minded, easily manipulated, unwise, puppet Presidents bereft of scruples, honor, integrity and concern for the average American citizen.


America as the Embodiment of Bush


At the crossroads of America do we stand, and on it can we see the eyes of the world intently peering in our direction. Ominously they stare, afraid of the consequences that might be thrust forward if the path of Bush do we choose to follow. Our right to democracy, that once noble institution proudly exported to other nations –though only in mirages and charades – is now the world’s concern, for it has over the last four years been transformed into the same sham our government teaches to dictators and puppets and implements on despots and tyrants in the so-called ‘third world’. The world watches in frightened anticipation, wishing it too could cast votes to extinguish once and for all the burning bush setting fire to the global village, not trusting the American populace to fix what was blatantly stolen and to forever make extinct the evil pestilence scouring the Earth.

Rightly or not, the last four years under the House of Bush have imputed Americans of all creeds, colors and classes with the personality of the man who expropriated the White House away from democracy, freedom and liberty. Worldwide, we are now seen as a nation of attention-deficit robots devoid of world knowledge or concern for anything beyond our borders. We are seen as selfish, gluttonous warmongers and imperialists concocting wars for profit, empire building and market colonialism, all at the expense of the rest of the world. Americans have become, in the eyes of the people of the world, easily manipulated and controlled beings living lavish lifestyles, distracted by bread and circus, and having cheap products through developing country slave labor and resource exploitation and pilferage.

More and more, we are seen as the ‘bad guys’, those humans our media plays as the enemy of good, always dying at the hand of the ‘good guys’. We have become evildoers incapable of empathy for the peoples of the world or the degrading state of the environment, even as we reduce to nothing everything in our path, overproducing and over-consuming like a voracious plague of locusts laying waste to fields of produce. When the world thinks Americans, it imagines a populace gun friendly, trigger happy and communications shy, a nation of rifle-toting cowboys needing new enemies, new Indians to wage war on. For us the sword is mightier than the pen, we only solve problems through the barrel of the gun and seek solutions only through violent confrontations, forsaking the fraternity of nations and the diplomacy of statesmen for the isolation of empire and criminality of preemption.

To the globe, America has become a bully nation, an immature child born to privilege, silver spoon fed from birth, educated by the fictions of television and forgotten by parents consumed by selfishness. It throws temper tantrums when it does not get what it wants, it ignores international law and the collective wisdom of the world while basking in the false bubble of its abundance, wealth and exorbitant lifestyle. Insecure in its existence and unwise to history, ignorant to culture and devoid of the emotions of constant suffering its policies help foster, outgrowing itself too fast and afflicted with the growing pains of adolescence, full of hormonal changes, chemical imbalances, a depression-filled life and Ritalin-laden dependence, America is seen as a danger onto humanity, an evil empire whose people are sheep and leaders wolves. To hundreds of millions, we are a terrorist nation, the most dangerous country in the world, a rogue pariah using our wealth and power to decimate innocents, to humiliate thousands and to destroy entire cultures and societies.

We are now torturers, dehumanizers, sadists and criminals, degenerates espousing the principles of Christ yet unleashing human evil onto the world, apathetic to the AIDS pandemic in Africa, the endemic poverty in Latin America, genocide in Sudan, slaughters in Chechnya and Palestine, ethic cleansing in Tibet and the growing American gulags roaming the plains of Earth. We have become the hypocrites of our race, monsters with an insatiable thirst for blood and destruction, shameless creatures of crusading circumstance lacking morality or respect, colonizers, occupiers, rapists and invaders of resource-rich lands, needing the force of tanks and bombs in order to ‘pacify barbarians’, institute greed-infested globalization and corporate crony capitalism onto ‘primitive’ peoples.

In order to save Iraqis, America and its armies must destroy them, and the world has taken notice. Thanks to Bush, vengeance is coming our way, traversing rough waters and scorching deserts, intent on bringing revenge for the devastation of sons, daughters, mothers and fathers. Thanks to Bush, karma will soon be knocking on our hollow doors, its blowback coming back to haunt us for the demons we have unearthed throughout the globe. The principles of action and reaction, cause and effect cannot be denied, where an eye for an eye only leads to more blindness and where violence only begets more violence. We are human, after all, unable to control our violent demons and animalistic passions, fearing what we don’t know, unable to forgive, forget, turn the other cheek, love our neighbor and seek peace over conflict. Make no mistake, Bush has made the world a much more dangerous place, one riddled with fear, terror, revenge and ceaseless fighting, resulting in the future death of thousands of innocent people. Simply for this reason, he belongs in The Hague.

The respect and love once espoused by billions throughout has been lost. The cherished principles of freedom, democracy and human rights once championed are now seen as hypocritical charades hiding the true evils of market colonialism, corporate domination, resource robbery and labor exploitation. It is no longer safe to wear Old Glory abroad. It is no longer prudent to advertise our nationality, lest we become a target of hatred, and this is a crying shame. The embarrassment our government and the Bush administration have created will take many, many years to obliterate. The ill-feelings against who and what we are might take generations. The last four years under Bush have made a mockery of America and its people. We have been made, for all intents and purposes, the laughingstock of the world, a people devoid of humanity and filled with the devastation of greed, a populace not willing or able to re-enter the world of reality or truth, preferring living in clouds of mirages and deceptions to bursting our bubble of arrogance and ignorance.

Under Bush, pre-planned wars have been declared and waged based on lies and deceptions; new wars are already in the works, most probably against Iran and Syria. Four more years of wars are inevitable; a decade of death and destruction in Iraq is assured. Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis will die in the next few years, few of them resistance fighters, most of them women and children. Thousands of American soldiers will be killed, thousands more maimed in body and mind. Under Bush, the conscription of our young in the form of a draft is a certainty, as is the redistribution of our taxes away from social programs, healthcare and education to help support incessant violence in the Middle East. More troops to Iraq and the Middle East, more billions of dollars needed to kill and more war to expand profit and empire can we expect thanks to Bush’s colossal mistake.

His ‘catastrophic success’ has turned out to be a full-blown Vietnam all over again, winning battles yet losing the war, and lost has this cause become. The greatest foreign policy blunder in American history will forever scar us, becoming our downfall, burying us in waves of desert dunes from where the ruins of empire’s past still lay. We are just not prepared to admit it yet, for to do that would be to admit defeat, bursting our infallible balloon of invincibility and greatness. This is Bush’s lasting legacy to America.


We are Not Bush…We are American


At the crossroads of America we find ourselves in, finally handed the option to exorcise from our midst what has been done to us and the world. The opportunity to right what has been made wrong is upon us, as is the chance to correct world opinion and our worsening reputation among the nations and peoples of the planet. For we are not monsters nor deviants, we are not warmongers and indifferent degenerates, living in a moral cavity and being bankrupt in humanity. We are not Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Powell, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rove, Rice and their yes-men and women minions, nothing but young vultures prospering from other peoples’ misfortunes. We are not neocons, empty of humanity and satiated with delusional debauchery. We are not corruption, nor war criminals nor murderers. We are not warmongers nor profiteers hypnotized by greed and controlled by the corporate world. We are not the American government, capsizing the world in order to save a sinking ship.

We are American, millions of good, decent, honorable, loving and peace-seeking humans, wanting nothing more than a life living in harmony with all others, content in daily existence, seeking happiness and meaning in our lives, preferring peace to violence, unity to division. We are not Bush, and the world needs to know this. At the crossroads of America are we presently standing on, ready to send a message worldwide, ready to declare independence from the last four years, ready to divorce ourselves from the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Bush administration. We are not Bush, we are not the last four years, nothing but a microcosm in the vast vortex of time, an anathema to the goodness of American citizens nationwide.

From the progressive wonders of California to the conifer forests of the Northwest to the Great Plains of the Midwest to the wonderful deserts of the Southwest to the historical and cosmopolitan cities of the Northeast millions of Americans are fed up with what has been done to our nation and to the world under our name. We can now stand united, saying enough is enough, the time for change is now.

The last four years have been an aberration, a mistake of universal proportions, a nightmare where an American president and his administration hijacked an entire nation, manifesting fear, discord and evil onto the great wonders of humanity and abusing the horrors of 9/11 to launch wars over profit and battles of greed. The last four years have been devastation, ruination and incrimination, corruption, Enronization and terrorization, beginning with highway robbery of a nation’s mandate, continuing with the pilferage of our treasure, the senseless death and maiming of our loved ones and ending with the destruction of both man and land in the cradle of civilization.


It is Time for Change


It is time to end the national nightmare. It is time for change, for a return to a semblance of normalcy, and, while electing John Kerry is not the final solution or an answer to our vexing problems, it is a means to an end. It is a start, a most needed new beginning from where all other solutions might spring forth. America must begin to heal from a most painful scab that until now has refused to mend, continuing to pus with each new Bush disaster. We must let go of the inner demons of 9/11 that still possess us, refusing to release us from their grip of fear and vulnerability, a formula that hypnotized us to the pre-planned evils Bush and his masters had conceived for us. It is time to make right all that has been wronged.

America must ignore the millions who still hover inside the clouds of debris from 9/11, refusing to let go, those to which reality has yet to clear, still enraptured by hate and revenge, still lusting for Arab blood and Muslim suffering, refusing to believe truths in the face of obviousness, ignorant to facts and blind to patriotism, wrapped in the flag and seeking refuge in the cross. They cannot and will not see what billions worldwide cannot fail but to understand. And so we must see for them, becoming their eyes and minds, hoping our numbers are greater than theirs, hoping positive energy is ready to once more claim her righteous place sitting alongside the good in humanity, reinforcing our strengths and our morality and the unwavering vibrancy of our greatest assets.

At the crossroads of America do we find ourselves at, staring us right in the face, ready to test the will of the American people and the strength of our convictions. Are we ready, willing and able to take away the mandate that was stolen from us, returning it to the People? Are we willing to undo wrongs and make them right, to retake the government and once more make it of, by and for the People? I believe we are, and I believe John Kerry will become the next President of the United States.

For the will of the People cannot and will not be denied a second time, no matter how much fraud or corruption takes place, no matter how much post-election chaos results, no matter what the corporate media polls say, and no matter how much Republicans fight to keep power. On November second, the People will make sure that no amount of fraud denies us of democracy, of rightfully placing in office a man worthy of the Presidency, of not being robbed again and of restoring the greatness that was once America to its rightful place.

The anger is too strong, the awakening too omnipresent and righteousness too enveloping. An understanding of what Bush and his masters are has become apparent; knowledge of what they are doing and have already accomplished has permeated the conscious. The embarrassment on the United States wrought by Bush is known. The realization that only calamity has followed Bush’s leadership is upon us, as is the devastation of his policies and the failure of his administration. Many millions have become aware that this administration and this president have been a catastrophe, a monument of all that is wrong with America. Reality and truth will prevail, the principle of justice will return, and in the end, Americans will return the nation back from the brink of implosion and the nightmare of the last four years will vanish with the awakening of a new dawn.

Human energy accumulated from throughout the world, billions strong, united in spirit and cause, joined hand in hand, will be an unshakable force leading to the banishment of a negative energy at odds with the goodness of humanity. The will of billions will trump the disaster of the few, returning humankind back from the black hole of America under Bush.

The ramifications of not succeeding are unbearable to fathom. To give Bush acceptance over the last four years, in essence approving all his actions, murders and devastations, would be catastrophic, sending the world a message that we are indeed Bush, and he is us. If this is the case, may whatever metaphysical entity you believe in have mercy on us all. Everything we deny about ourselves will have come true, and terrorists, murderers and criminals we will have become in the eyes of billions.

At the crossroads of America do we stand, ready, willing and able to purge our nation from the pestilence of the last four years, ready to exile Bush and his cronies to the bowels of history, forever locked in dark closets and forgotten spaces. At the crossroads of America do we find ourselves in, ready to return from parallel universes and alternate worlds, ready to rejoin the peoples of the world, forever made humble by the devastation sowed by a group of miscreants who were unleashed on our nation and planet.

We are at the crossroads of America, looking directly at two distinct paths, forever turning our backs on one and slowly yet confidently walking in the direction of another. In the hope of a new tomorrow can a bright and warm daybreak be seen.
America, the right path awaits us.

The ‘Catastrophic’ Success of the Republican Party

‘Third World’ Election

As much as America and the world wish to believe Florida will not be rigged with electoral fraud this November, the sad truth is that all the mechanisms needed to steal the state in favor of George Bush are already firmly entrenched. Thanks to Jeb Bush, Jim Crow manipulator of mandates, corrupt fraudster, decimator of democracy and brother of the president, and the Republican Party, which in essence controls the logistics of and the keys to running the election, Florida has already declared tens of thousands of voters, mostly black and Democratic, ineligible. Many more voters, of all creeds and colors, will be disenfranchised on election day, be it through intimidation, coercion, government intervention, criminal negligence, corruption and fraud, and, of course, through electronic voting machines, most of which are owned by staunch Republican supporters.

Thus, it is fair to say that the election scheduled for November is already stolen, the purging of votes already assured, and the swindling of the 2004 Presidential election has become, for all intents and purposes, an absolute inevitability. In the most crooked state in the union can the lynching of American elections vividly be seen, becoming the poster child for the systemic evisceration of America’s cherished principle of democracy. Already, throughout the nation, instances of Republican Party meddling with electoral procedures and citizens’ right to vote have surfaced, from Florida to Nevada to Oregon to Ohio and everywhere in between, trying desperately to garner any advantage in any of a dozen states deemed as swing states, where the outcome will be so close that 10,000 votes could mean the difference between winning electoral votes and losing the presidency. With so much at stake, and with American democracy a mirage of its former self, Republican minions and vultures are hard at work, once more disenfranchising thousands from an election that will decide the future destiny of the entire planet.

The so-called ‘third-world’ elections that we chastise, laugh at and condemn, thinking ourselves so enlightened to seriously contemplate ever having to experience them on our soil, those elections full of fraud, uncertainty, corruption and voter disenfranchisement, have landed on the shores of the cradle of liberty. After Florida 2000, teeming with fraud, corruption, court appointments and the usurpation of power by the losing – and much lesser – candidate in a most ignoble coup against the American people, November 2004 will see the erosion of yet more votes through the haze of clandestine mechanisms that have and continue to be methodically plotted out by a Republican machine that must win at all costs. After all, absolute power corrupts absolutely and addiction to the Almighty Dollar makes demons of already dishonorable miscreants.

When so much is at stake for the ravenous vultures roaming the Earth in search of food, only the carcass of the American electorate will suffice. Victory by any means necessary is their call to arms; corruption, fraud and deceit are their weapons. Florida is but a small cell in an increasingly malignant tumor, and diseased are we all as the cancer slowly killing us awakens once more to destroy the very principles this great nation was founded on. In Florida, the clandestine war against the people has already begun, a microcosm of the wider battle being waged in lands plain and flat, forested and cloudy, and warm and humid. The virus of Florida has spread like plague to all corners of the land of the free and the home of the brave.

In fact, throughout the country, millions of eligible voters will either not be allowed to vote or will have their vote uncounted, lost, made void, distorted or manipulated. From electronic voting machines that have no paper trail – which will count thirty percent of votes cast nationwide – to the unreliability of archaic voting machines, usually sent to poor neighborhoods, to the systemic suppression of votes, mostly poor, minority and rural by Jim Crow-like tactics, to the purging of registration cards, usually those of Democrats, this election is being stolen once more, right in front of our eyes, using stealth-like methods in close, battleground states.

When so much power and control is at hand, with the reigns of authority on the line and with ultimate hegemony over the future course of America granted the winner a few million votes disenfranchised in key swing states, in an election predicted to come down to the wire, could mean the difference between impotence of power and corporatist domination of the American people. Florida 2000, and the four years subsequent, should remind us all of this reality.


Easily Manipulated Electorate, Conditioned for whom to vote


To the malfeasant swine roaming the halls of power and feeding off the garbage of greed, democracy is extinct, nothing more than a ploy that has become an exercise in manipulation, used to increase power and dominion over an electorate more and more oblivious to the detrimental ramifications their vote helps to birth and the further erosion of their lives fostered by the entities they help elect.

When the most powerful man in the world is elected based on the question of “which of two candidates would you most like to have a beer with?” the decline of the nation’s intelligence and its ability to competently elect its leader should be seriously studied. When a populace elects into the highest office in the land the person they would prefer to watch a baseball game or NASCAR event with, and thereafter share BBQ ribs and a beer, based on nothing more than a genius campaign marketing strategy that brands a worthless son of privilege into an everyday working man and war president, can it be fair to say that the population has reached a level of ignorance that might very well spell the end of the Pax Americana in the coming years?

It is not a reassuring phenomenon when tens of millions have no qualms keeping in office a bumbling, incoherent idiot with no concept of intelligence, empathy, wisdom and humanity, a man who deviously condemned thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis to certain death, maiming and psychological hell based on ego and lies, manipulations and deceit, in the process setting the United States back decades by ruining the economy, scorching the environment, imploding the world alliance network, endangering global security and by immersing America in its greatest foreign policy debacle that will take decades to rectify at the cost of many human energies and national treasure.

With a citizenry dumbed down and conditioned to vote based on image, personality and likeability, making decisions based on ten-second sound-bites and catchy-phrases, ignorantly believing the distortions, falsities and propaganda of campaign advertisements, and through our short-attention spans and incessant amnesia that guarantee we will forget the happenings of the past while ignoring the issues of the present, American democracy is in shambles, a shell of its former self. We cannot seem to see the disaster of the last four years, the implosion of the next four, nor the ramifications of giving a mandate to an administration and a president exploiting our very existence for the continued ascendancy of the corporate world.

Make no mistake about it, American democracy is dead, nothing more than a twisted catharsis of make-believe empowerment from which the masses are manipulated into believing their voices are heard even as they traverse a black hole of falsity. American elections are a charade when half the eligible electorate decides to stay home watching Wife Swap or The Apprentice, sitting on the couch, stuffing their mouths full of Cheetos, oblivious to the sinister forces their indifference has set free, instead of casting votes to decide the destiny of the nation and the future of their children.

Today, American democracy and the election we cherish are a chess match played by the nation’s elite oligarchs and corporatists, where we are the pawns, nothing more than millions of disinterested and ignorant voters who are manipulated through careful marketing campaigns designed to affect our emotions, passions and ideologies. The tools of corporate marketing manipulation, conditioned fear, religious conviction, blind patriotism, economic fragility, psychological insecurity, hereditary bigotry, acquired ignorance and lack of education are exploited, converting the populace into an amalgam of voters manipulated into voting for the party that best succeeds at tapping into the human psyche.


Republican Leadership, Corporatist Owned


In America’s case, it is the Republican leadership, those evildoers extraordinaire, exploiters of fear and insecurity, usurpers of patriotism, pilferers of freedoms and rights, enemies of free speech and assembly, those hypocrites espousing the cross yet holding the gun, preaching poverty yet seeking wealth, espousing compassion yet controlled by greed, praising Jesus while emulating Lucifer, warmongers and sadists, unscrupulous deceivers of truth and compulsive liars of fiction, the party of corporate elites, government oligarchs and fascist corporatists, that are best at delving inside the human mind, using, abusing and exploiting unenlightened and conservative environments of the rural and isolated persuasion, spawning the insecurities of ignorant, homophobic, xenophobic and macho WASP males cocooned in blind red, white and blue patriotism, and instilling the fear of the Almighty onto millions of bible-thumping, Armageddon-seeking, Confederate-clinging followers of false present-day prophets and believers of primitive fairy tales.

It is the Republican leadership that has defecated on American democracy by its utter malfeasance in November 2000 as well as its continued attempts to suppress a citizen’s right to vote. It is the Republican leadership that has terrorized security moms and NASCAR dads by brainwashing millions that Arab dark-skinned bogeymen hate us for who we are, not what we do, and are jealous of our freedom, not resentful of our foreign policy. They terrorize the populace so that complicit and acquiescent we become to the dictates of an invasive agenda set years before 9/11 that is designed to extinguish social programs, privatize government, instill their backwards conservative agenda, enrich corporations, make war perpetual, profit ceaseless and democracy obsolete.

The atrocities of 9/11 and its collection of raw emotions that have yet to be forgotten by the American people are a rather convenient method by which these vultures feeding on corporatist crumbs can control, manipulate and indoctrinate their masters’ plans into both society and our daily lives, transforming a once great nation into a splinter of its former self.

Using Arabs and the Islamic faith as scapegoats and our still seething yet ignorant thirst for vengeance as the catalyst for perpetual, preemptive and profit driven war, the Republican-corporatist leadership has given rise to a new era of fear and insecurity, much like those days long since gone of Cold War fears and Soviet Communist paranoia. With the once prosperously marketed evil of communism having achieved its purpose, for decades serving as the bogeyman that worked to condition and control Americans to the wishes of the ownership class, a new enemy of tantalizing potential had to be invented to continue the subjugation of the masses.

This new enemy would be marketed as an unseen ghost and an ambiguous goblin, lurking here, there and everywhere, invisible and hiding, coming out of closets dark and eerie, ready to slaughter Americans and destroy our way of life. They hate our freedoms and who we are, we are told. They are from a different civilization and religion, and they hate our Christian ways. With no tangible state sponsor, composed of borders and visible terrain, or an existent home that can be blown to dust these barbarians are said to spread throughout the world, thus becoming the catalyst – and the excuse – for American military – read military industrial complex – intervention in any land deemed a “haven for terrorists.”

The corporatist agenda to extend American tentacles to all lands vitally strategic, resource rich and geopolitically imperative for the continued expansion of the Pax Americana, and its corporate overlords in particular, can thus be implemented on a thoroughly conditioned, insecure and fearful American public through the mirage that is the “war on terror.” An economy based on fear, insecurity and paranoia suits the corporatists, capitalists and ownership class just fine, as war, death and violence will perpetuate without end, resulting in limitless profits, wealth and expanded power, the growing fusion of the corporate world to government – which will persist unobstructed to the great detriment of the masses – and the continued regression of the American people into comatose sheep unknowing, indifferent and easily led into lives unhappy and increasingly schizophrenic, more and more dependent on the fictitious escapism of consumerist television and the hypnotic control of hallucinatory pharmaceutical drugs.

The corporatist and ownership classes that control this nation thrive off of war, enriching and empowering themselves at the expense of the middle and working classes. Their many mechanisms are designed to control us, from the television we watch, the education we are conditioned with, the exponentially-growing hours we work and the system we live in and belong to. They thrive on division of classes, on hatred of differences, on the ignorance both caused and cursed by lack of education.

For them power remains in their grip the more we fight, bicker, struggle and divide amongst ourselves. It is when we are transfixed with each other as enemies, as we so commonly are, and not united against the real degrader of our lives and happiness, that they prosper and gain yet more control and dominion over us. It is when we are divided against one another that they eliminate our rights and freedoms, erode our education and happiness, intoxicate our environment and health. When we pay little attention to their growing grip over government our lives are made to suffer; when we acquiesce to the corporate-friendly votes their blood-sucking leeches cast in the Congress our future progeny becomes condemned; when we transform knowledge into ignorance and scrutiny into conformity our taxes are wantonly raped and loved ones sacrificed, under the rubric of profit and greed driven warfare, to the dictates of the corporate and ownership elite further enriching itself at the expense of our blood, sweat, tears and life energies of loved ones.

The corporatist, capitalist and ownership classes seek division of labor, division of social class and division of races. They seek to divide and conquer, purposefully constructing a system whereby perpetual castes will linger in rural and urban centers of inescapable fates, destined with indigence, lack of opportunity and a heavy shackle of entrapment from where capitalism’s dark shadow can forever hide the sunshine of talent or ability. They debilitate our educational systems, each decade succeeding more in dumbing down America’s children through regressing and degenerative mechanisms disguised as sound public policy. The corporatist cocktail of degradation acts to deny millions of our young the freedom and power that comes with knowledge, making extinct immense talents that only need the nutrients of both a worthy education and opportunity to blossom. Instead, talent is gutted, opportunity is destroyed, promise becomes ignorance, futures are predestined and millions upon millions are conditioned from birth to become the slave labor force of the ownership class.

This system, this way of existing is what the Republican leadership stands proud to sponsor and strive to attain. The exploiters and the subjugators, the greed-infested and the money-addicted, those that choose profit over people, poverty over well-being, the wealth of the few over the benefit of the many, these are the individuals who most gain from having the Republican Party in control of the halls of power. Yet the surprising thing is that it is exactly those who stand more to lose, those who are the exploited and those whose lives are made worse that help appoint and retain these vermin in office.

Lack of education and ignorance go hand in hand; unenlightened minds usually result in blind religious conviction. Is it any wonder, then, why the Republican leadership and the ownership class strive so ardently to eliminate any semblance of knowledge and education in American schools and why they push Christian fundamentalism in society? Is it any wonder why the continued dumbing down of America must persist? Why do you think our educational system is being gutted, under-funded and, more and more, being transformed into the brainwashing instrument of corporations, the government and the ownership class?

Ignorance is their base, the bastion of success from which the fountain of subjugation flows, that is why. Unthinking sheep are their constituency, their keys to the continued reign of power; subservient, easily manipulated and dumbed down individuals thus become their unquestioning army voting against their own interests; religion, with its control of an individual’s knowledge or lack thereof, its ability to arrest societal progress and its successful conditioning methodologies that brainwash from birth, has become their saving grace, the ultimate trump card that delivers millions of votes. In our unenlightened and unwise minds the Republican leadership finds its greatest weapon from which to harvest the continued war against the American people.

Conservatives: Exploited, Used and Abused


Fear has become the Republican leadership’s only re-election platform, the only policy their administration has successfully implemented in the four years since their usurpation of power, hoping its hypnotic strangulation over increasingly paranoid citizens imprisons our analytical and reasoning minds away from realizing the decimation of America’s future created by Bush and his administration. Fear has become the new Republican Party recruiter and best friend to the corporatist leadership. Real fear, however, should arise if they are given another four years in office because the hell they will unleash might very well condemn 290 million Americans to an implosion that will not be easily experienced.

Taking advantage of good, decent American citizens still captured by the enveloping demons of 9/11 and the incessant horrors that no society had ever been overexposed to thanks to the repetitious and perpetual bombardment of psychologically penetrating images shown on television, the Republican leadership has preyed on the still-fragile emotions of millions whose entire psychology was altered on that most fateful of days.

Honorable, decent conservatives from all walks of life, seeking security and happiness, leading good lives, are included in this group. The leadership of your party is using you for votes, capital and blind support of its corrosive policies. You are being used and manipulated to maintain them in power, to further enrich the wealthy and the capitalist elites that exploit every muscle and bead of sweat you excrete working for them.

In truth, they care not an ounce for you. You are simply a machine born to work, sweat and bleed for their true constituents, meant to be exploited, underpaid and robbed of valuable wages. At every turn, be it in healthcare, education, worker rights, social security, prescription drugs, the environment, women rights, labor laws, the coming draft of your children and the future outsourcing of your job, the Republican/corporatist leadership will place the interests of the corporate world way ahead of yours. It is not even close.

You are but a serf in a system designed to milk you for every breath of air you have, while your feudal lords feed and enrich themselves off the production and consumption pattern they have hard wired into your daily existence, yet you think they serve your purpose, and that, by voting for them, they will look after you and your family. This is but an illusion.

You are being used by a leadership that manipulates your fears, emotions and passions into voting for them, even when the only voices they hear are those of their pimps in the corporate halls of governance. You are but a soldier ant and worker bee, born to work and breed, forming part in the great assembly line of subjugated, middle and working class laborers called human procreation. You are only useful for the energy you possess, becoming the battery that runs the capitalist machinery, pushing the buttons on keyboards, driving the trucks of commerce, manufacturing parts in monotonous assembly lines, taking care of the fields that once belonged to you, running conveyor belts and meat grinders that injure you, forever chained to the division of labor and conditioned to become the voracious consumer your entire life has taught you to be, fulfilling your role as one more anonymous and oppressed cog in a capitalist system that imprisons your body and tortures your mind, exploiting you through prolonged working hours, deficient wages, ever-decreasing benefits, eroded labor rights and exponentially-growing frustrations.

The Republican Party leadership, that perceived model of conservative thought, a group of corrupt and unscrupulous men living off the laurels of family wealth and never having experienced the harsh life you have always known, for years in bed with corporate and elite interests, seeks the impotence of the many at the great benefit of the corporatist/capitalist/ownership few, thriving off the further polarization of the social classes and the continued and growing gap between the wealthy and the working masses. This is your party, and your blind vote to keep them in power assures the continuation of the time honored tradition whereby your ancestors forever remained stagnant and trapped in a destiny predetermined for them, where you are prevented from advancing forward, conforming to the dictates of corporate rule, and where your descendants will have to bear the brunt of the devastating policies, enacted thanks to your vote, that are and will continue to wreak havoc on our planet and society.

You are being used and abused in principles contrary to your beliefs. The party you subscribe to exploits your hereditary conditioning, your insecurities and fears, your bigotry and ignorance, your religious beliefs and conservative ideals, attaching itself to your values and exploiting your noble concerns. They seek only your vote, and once they have it, they obliterate the mirage of concern and compassion they once pretended to share with you, instead whoring themselves to the corporate and capitalist interests they serve. Your interests are abandoned for those of the corporate Leviathan, and soon you find your wages frozen or lowered, your job outsourced or threatened, your environment raped and your debts exploding, your rights and freedoms vanishing, your son or father conscripted into the hell of war, your parents’ healthcare costs soaring and the education of your children nonexistent.

This reality is manifested through your vote to the corporatist/Republican Party.


The Terrorist and Malignant Party


Knowing that the population still suffers from unyielding memories of falling towers, crashing planes and cloud-filled avalanches of debris, that a collective post-traumatic stress has yet to dissipate and that the emotions of fear, hatred, vengeance, sorrow and mental anguish still fester, Republican-corporatist leaders continue to unscrupulously exploit to their advantage both our fragile egos and the bursting of the security/fantasy bubble that for too long protected us from the horrors that befall hundreds of millions of fellow humans throughout the world.

You see, the Corporatist/Republican Party creates and exacerbates the illusory threat of Arab bogeyman terror to better able to control and oppress us. With an enemy that grows thanks to our own ignorance of the world outside our borders the corporatists can continue waging war against us. They terrorize and use fear to silence patriotic dissent and necessary debate, using terror to brainwash the emotionally fragile and ignorantly bred. Monopolizing the power of the American flag in times of uncertainty and insecurity and using it to squash protest and dissent, they have released upon our lives the most devastating annihilation of environmental laws and regulations in decades, sending us back thirty years. They have, thanks to Florida 2000 and the aftereffects of 9/11, commandeered the government straight into the pockets of the corporate Leviathan, creating a nefarious trail of corporate-friendly laws, regulations and appropriations and a revolving door of corporate executives, lobbyists and lawyers that now infest and control policy making decisions in Washington that have put the rights and lives of the American people in the backburner, now coming after the interests of the corporations they serve and protect.

The Republican Party is the party of the corporate Leviathan and the military-industrial complex. It is the party of the wealthy and the elite that comprise the ownership class. It is the party of self-described royalty, of silver-spoon fed juniors like George W. Bush who grow up thinking themselves endowed with the powers of wealth and immune to the troubles of reality. It is the party of lunatics such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, the American Taliban and Christian fundamentalists who strive to divide, segregate, stir hatreds and impede the natural flow of human progress through their regressive ideology of bigotry and ignorance and literal belief in primitive myth.

It is the Republican leadership who hungers for war and violence, wasting land and humans for the profit of their masters. It is they who send our loved ones to die for absolutely nothing but corporate interests, resulting in the maiming of thousands in both body and mind and forever fating us to the energies of karma and blowback. Wars for profit, slave labor and natural resources are commenced not for saving freedom and democracy but for instituting corporatist capitalism and market colonialism onto other peoples and their lands, transforming our loved ones into the mercenary army of the corporate Leviathan.

The Republican Party is the party of book burnings and censorship, of homogenous boringness and ethnic superiority, of bigotry and selfishness, and of the overall attempt at regression of an ever more pluralistic society. It is the party of socio-economic segregation and racial oppression, of long gone slavery, apartheid and present day feudalism. It is right wing Republicans in power who hate dissent and protest, free thought and equal education to all. Ignorance is their succulent nutrition, knowledge their devastating kryptonite. They cringe at the prospect of equal pay for women, equal benefits and rights for gays and equitable selection and hiring of minorities to help make right centuries of hardship and lost opportunity. They fight against the wonders of diversity, the benefits of equality and rights of individual freedom.

It is the Republican Party that does more to maintain the status quo in inner cities, cementing poverty and hopelessness, destroying any semblance of education and employment, preventing those who live there from ever seeing the light of day. It is they who have decimated small farms through their marriage to agri-business; they who have contributed to the death of thousands through their long-lasting flirtation with and stalwart support of the pharmaceutical industry, trying everything in their power to prevent cheaper importation of drugs, preferring the death of Americans than the lower profit margins of their masters. They are the party of profit over people, the Almighty Dollar over the American citizen, the benefit of the few over the greatness of the many. Their constituents are Halliburton and General Electric, Ford and Monsanto, AOL and the Carlyle Group, the pharmaceutical industry, the defense industry and Big Oil. They are the Party of Enron and of all other CEOs making hundreds of times what their blue collar workers make.

They despise the environment and the planet we inhabit, granting big business the power to pollute our skies, waterways, soils, oceans and cities. They ignore science and its realities, preferring instead to bask in the glow of ignorance and delusion. Casting aside the imminent and catastrophic danger of global warming, a threat more dangerous to humanity than that of terrorism, they subsidize the purchase of SUVs and oil exploration instead, every year making it easier for carbon dioxide emitters to release more heat into our atmosphere. They are the party that without remorse allows the poisoning of our bodies through the toxins spewed by their contributors who pollute the air we breathe, the water we drink and the foods we ingest. Hundreds of thousands of people die every year as a result of lax laws and regulations enacted by those in power, as corporations lace our foods with chemicals, additives, preservatives, hormones, toxins, poisons, artificial flavors and a plethora of cancer causing pathogens that now linger inside our bodies, our breast milk and within the bodies of our little ones.

It is the Republican Party leadership that terrorizes our nation, using fear as an election gimmick and a controlling instrument of paralysis, manipulating and playing with our emotions and insecurities for its personal gain. It is the Republican Party that stands as a malignant cancer upon our nation. They are the Party of liars and of greed, of corruption and dishonor, of smear and intimidation. They are the Party of corporate welfare, giving hundreds of billions of dollars ($180 billion this coming year) in tax relief to their patrons. It is the party of the military industrial complex, presenting it with a $450 billion annual defense budget and an already wasted $140 billion more in Iraq so that it may continue building instruments of destruction through the pillage of our wages. It is the Terrorist Party, harborer of fictional fears and threats, home of the corporate Leviathan and the Corporatist oligarchs, home of toxic indifference and poisonous arrogance, neither compassionate nor caring, a tyrannical leadership devoid of humanity, a malignant tumor onto the nation that continues to exploit the emotions of millions for the benefit of a few.

This is the Republican Party, silencing elected moderates who speak wise and true, hijacking tens of millions of good and honest conservatives, using their own beliefs and ideologies as bait, exploiting votes and support, later to devastate lives and discard promises made but never meant to be delivered. George W. Bush, while a miscreant and an embarrassment, is not the true problem. Sure, his administration must be made extinct, yet his disappearance will not hinder the corporatist/Republican leadership that has hijacked an entire Party and the millions of good people it once served.

George W. Bush is the symptom, not the disease.


Taking the Fight to Them


The interests of the Corporate Leviathan in maintaining power are enormous, and so the Party that serves its interests will undoubtedly grow in wealth and power. It is for this reason that the Party serving the interests of the corporate world must be destroyed. Bush is but a puppet whose strings are attached to the hands of the corporatist elite, running the nation like a corporation diagnosed as a psychopathic entity. As long as the corporatist and ownership class control the buildings of government through their legion of vultures and parasites, the peoples’ interests will not be served. Rather, we might soon find that corporations and their masters will possess even more dominion over our lives, and on the road to perdition we will find ourselves marching on, becoming a subservient, exploited and oppressed people whose existence we suddenly find to be reminiscent of the serfs of centuries long since past.

The Democratic Party is headed in much the same direction, though certainly a lesser of two evils, yet the truth remains that it is the Republican Party leadership, or its present mutated form, that has transformed itself into a conduit for big business and the capitalist elite that comprise the ownership class. In the last few years its agenda has been a ‘catastrophic success,’ and we are much worse off as a result. Four more years of the same will no doubt lead to a nation bordering on implosion, a citizenry on the verge of borderline paranoia and depression, and a form of governance dictated by a corporate Leviathan whose insatiable appetite for profit and power could further devastate our environment, society and the lives of 290 million people.
Whether we take back a nation now in the hands of corporatists and corporations will be decided in a couple of weeks. The perilous manifestation of our failure to act accordingly will be hard to contemplate. In most ominous times do we find ourselves living in, ensnared in a war being waged against us as we continue to lose battle after battle, retreating further into trenches of defeat and surrender. Whether we finally decide to fight back or not remains to be seen.

The uphill struggle will not be easy, but it must be climbed relentlessly and without cowardice, with conquest and victory as the only viable option, for to allow ourselves to capitulate to the powers of the corporate Leviathan, its corporatist masters and Republican henchmen would be devastating for the present course of human events and the future freedom of those that have yet to come.

Eternal Darkness of the American Mind

The prevalent and continued decline of the Empire’s mind can be attributed to the evolving degeneration of American capitalism, through the inherent evils it espouses, its subjugation and control of human nature, and its consequences on a society entangled and indeed dependent on the very mechanisms of exploitation of self, addiction to materialism and the pandemic of greed. This latest stage of capitalism, the most sinister to arise from the realm of human conscious, has replaced once nobler, controllable, equal and just instruments. It is simply the erosion of capitalism, after having flourishing in previous stages of development, into a phase that has mutated beyond the control of humans and into a realm of damaging and malevolent repression and exploitation.

Thriving off of human nature, feeding and growing from its ability to dominate our animal instincts, our wants, needs and desires, capitalism as we know it today has become an unrelenting disease, jumping from host to host, contaminating a society that, more and more, lives in utter disconnect from a greater world community and that allows itself to be manipulated, dumbed down and owned by elite capitalists whose control over our lives grows more discernible every day. It is capitalism on steroids, a bulging muscled beast that has succeeded in mutating American society, transforming our culture to one whose assembly lines of human procreation manufacture millions of consumers, producers, worker bees, soldier ants and growing generations of unthinking automatons.

American capitalism in the first decade of the 21st century is the inevitable result of an economic form of governance whose stages have, over the last two centuries, and with exponentially-increasing dominance, power and control over our society, created a vicious cycle of evolving degeneration that today runs amok, destroying the environment and planet, human health and intelligence, individual thought and free-thinking minds, democracy and a once grand societal experiment of equality, justice and freedom. It is American capitalism, then, that now lives off of human exploitation and ignorance, breathing in and usurping our energy, exhaling poisons that blacken our eyes and minds while enveloping the Empire’s horizons with a darkness that infects us with its various forms of disease that are making our society, culture and way of life the nightmares of yesterday’s slaves and the controlled programs hardwired into tomorrow’s automatons.


The Light that brings forth Darkness


The darkness that has encircled the Empire and its people has over the last fifty years grown thanks to the continued evolution of the television monitor and the ever-expanding media tentacles of the corporate world. The TV has become the single biggest tool for the corporate beast, having morphed in the last few decades into the apparatus by which consumerism, materialism, belief in fantasy, mental manipulation, love of the almighty dollar and the virus of greed are extracted and exploited from the masses, thus enriching the corporate beast with both the treasure and the controlled, easily manipulated mind of the American populace.

As the popularity of the television media has grown over the years and with Americans watching more and more hours of the instruments of fantasy, propaganda and brainwashing fostered by the corporate Leviathan, the collective American mind has dissipated in power and intellect, over the last few decades degenerating and becoming instead a sponge readily accepting and believing anything and everything implanted into it by the monitor – the axis by which everything in our home revolves around – that now serves as its brain.

The television, that glowing light now reigning as the center of our homes, robbing us of analytical minds and healthy bodies, that invention celebrated and adored, has become the single biggest weapon the corporate capitalists have to dominate, control and program us. It lies as the great culprit in the continued regression of the American mind and erosion of intellect, the further dominance by corporations of our daily lives, the decay and festering ignorance of our youth, the indifference to world affairs and apathy to the plight of the peoples of the globe, the unconcern towards government politics, accountability and transparency, the growth of our world renowned amnesia and short-attention spans, and the increased conditioning of and appetite for violence, death and destruction.

From birth it becomes our adopted parent, our consumerist advisor and materialist shaman, guiding us with its hypnotic light through the dense fog of capitalistic indoctrination. Training us from birth how to become good parasitic consumers, bombarding our still undeveloped brains with fantasy and psychological manipulation, illuminating our virgin minds with a rapid influx of images that no incipient human mind has ever been subjected with, the television begins to distort our concept of reality, marketing fantasy and fiction, promoting and distorting human needs and wants, rewiring our fragile mind to suit the needs of the corporation and the government it owns. Almost from birth the programming making us obedient consumers trapped between the fantasy we see and the reality we experience distorts the life we live, forever to psychologically confuse the mammalian brain inside our skulls.

Indifferent to suffering, displaced from reality and sequestered from the constructs of human behavior, the innocent mind is, through television, manipulated to seek what it can never attain. The perfection of fiction, the happiness of fantasy, the allure of what will never be and the mesmerizing glow of a world beyond what humanity could ever become is nonetheless absorbed into our conscious understanding and subconscious being, haunting us seemingly from cradle to grave. Throughout our lives the belief that what we see on the screen is reachable invariably results in a reality altogether different. We entrap ourselves in a vicious cycle of a lifetime of production and consumption, as if buying and producing enough goods and services will lead to the perfection we have been conditioned to believe can be attained.

What follows over the course of one’s life, naturally, is a perceived belief in failure that the perfection we desperately seek to emulate and the fictions ingrained in our minds escaped us, thereby blaming ourselves or our loved ones for the unclimbable mountaintop whose passage no human could ever reach. The subsequent unhappiness that follows, of never reaching the beauty, wealth, happiness and perfection of the fictionally created characters we become enamored with, combine with other factors prevalent in our capitalist society to depress our emotions and feelings about ourselves and the life we lead. Even the accumulation of money, material goods and modifications of our physical selves fail to transport us into the fantasy world that invades our living rooms on a nightly basis.

In many ways, the Molotov cocktail of capitalistic unhappiness has led to the enormous growth in, demand of and addiction to pharmaceutical mind altering and hallucinatory drugs so prevalent in society today that act as conduits of escapism from the unhappy lives we portend to lead. It is these drugs, now pervasive in American society yet nonexistent for centuries and millennia before that have arisen along with the degrading stages of capitalism we now find ourselves immersed in. It is the television, along with the other tentacles of modern day capitalism, that is causing an eroded conscious of human psychology through the indoctrination of the human brain, from the time of birth, of seeking the perfection that in the human condition does not and cannot possibly exist but that thrives in the realm of television, movies and video games.

Seeking meaning and happiness through the possession of material goods and wealth, becoming insecure of our bodies and beauty by the incessant bombardment of human perfection and kneeling down to pray to the Almighty Dollar in front of its altar called the television, Americans are finding that the goals espoused by the corporate Leviathan are unattainable. When compared to the perfection we have seen on the monitor from our early age, the life we lead is boring, unexciting and imperfect. The real world thus cannot compete with the vision the corporate capitalists have marketed for us in order to manipulate buying patterns, control behaviors and expand profits margins.

The cause for concern among Americans is the effect capitalism and its tentacles, including the pervasive disease of television, is having on our psychology. The rise in pharmaceutical drugs designed for the human brain and our psychological behaviors should act as the canary sent down the mine shaft. More and more, America is a nation of pill poppers unhappy and depressed, preferring the escape of hallucination and the zombie-like behavior of anti-depressants to the realities facing us today. With 11 million children on anti-depressants and many more adults dependent on drugs, questions must begin to be raised as to the causes of such utter degeneration, the likes of which no society has ever experienced. This is but one more symptom of a disease the corrosive tumor of capitalism has engendered onto a society that offers so much wealth, freedom and materialistic bliss yet lacks enduring waves of human happiness or enlightenment.

Corporate owned television produces mind-numbing, ignorance-laden, thought-controlling, escapism-filled, fantasy-saturated and propaganda-laced programming designed for one simple reason: to hook us like fish out of water so that we are subjected to a barrage of advertisements that, it is hoped, inspire us to spend our hard earned wages on the products that best manipulate our human needs, wants, emotions and passions. Fiction-filled shows, laced in the aura of televised perfection and beauty, endeavor our minds to seek what cannot in reality exist. They are created so that addicted we become to the characters and story lines, thus becoming loyal viewers and possible prey. These programs are formulated to attract whichever demographic and target market a corporation wants as loyal consumers. The advertisements and products designed for this particular target are then plastered throughout the enormous window of opportunity, blitzkrieging our eyes and minds with a volley of images that attack our psychology, emotions, animalistic behaviors and human passions.

Methodically the attack starts in our youth as the marketing vipers seek to incarcerate us into their vast array of products from as early an age as possible. They know that once they succeed in squeezing into their grip a young child the strong possibility exists that a loyal and conditioned customer they will have for an entire lifetime. It is the undeveloped, susceptible, easily manipulated and conditioned mind, devoid of analytical thinking and human experience that the corporate marketers drool over. It is their Holy Grail, a virgin mind easily exploited and programmed, naïve to humanity and ignorant of experiences, slowly but surely becoming the mental and physical slave to those whose incessant brainwashing fills the airwaves. In the most pure and innocent among us the corporate sharks enjoy their greatest meals.

Copied from organized religion, which for centuries has perfected the formula for conditioning and brainwashing children into controlled and subservient followers of archaic myths and primitive fables, the systemic usurpation of innocent minds guarantees loyalty, lifetime consumers, unthinking individuals, psychologically fragile drones and easily controlled beings. With the twist of a marketing campaign, corporations can dictate tastes, trends, consumption patterns and the direction a society or a target market takes. Through the television, we thus become putty in the hands of those who are experts at exploiting our senses, feelings, emotions and passions.

Manipulating our minds and rewiring our thoughts, the television, nothing more than the mechanism by which the corporate world controls and dominates us, has transformed human thinking and behavior like no other instrument in our history. Our minds are being bombarded with image after image, fantasy after fantasy and manipulative emotion after manipulative emotion. Our still primitive brains have never evolved to this reality, and the damage can be seen in the rise of attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, lack of discipline and loss of intellectual capacity in children. It can be seen in a society that has not been able to adapt and handle the blitzkrieg we see on our monitors on a daily basis and that cannot escape the conditioning and brainwashing the corporate world and our government so readily apply into our minds. The proof is all-encompassing, surrounding us like a thick fog, doing tremendous damage to the still undeveloped brains of youth, shackling and controlling almost every activity we do as adults, and haunting our daily life until death finally opens the gates of escape.


The Bubble of Ignorance


From the cradle to the grave, the television works its corporate magic, helping make America the most consumerist, materialistic, gluttonous and wasteful society to ever grace the green lands of Earth. We gorge on food, we waste like no other, consume as if our life depended on it and pollute with devastating effect. Like a plague of locusts we are devouring the natural resources of the planet, indifferent to the plight of the oceans, the forests and the other 6 billion people we share this small planet with. Our thirst for oil can only be met through war, destruction and death, our appetite for cheap products and labor enslaves billions of humans worldwide and the need to quench our addiction to material wealth is rapidly hemorrhaging an Earth ready to purge us from its surface.

We are four percent of the world’s population yet contribute 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. We are four percent of 6.2 billion humans yet indifferent we remain to the damage our greed unleashes onto humanity. Global warming is now the greatest threat facing mankind, yet we ignore its truths and our complicity. Our greed and voracious appetite to consume blinds us to the rape of ecosystems, the extinction of cultures, the devastation of nations and the ever-growing despair among the billions of humans not lucky to live inside the belly of the beast.

We are 290 million people, most of whom believe the lands and inhabitants of this Earth have been placed by the Almighty in their rightful position as exploitable property and servants of America, the only nation allowed to dictate its commands on all others, even when tens of millions of us have not a clue or a remote idea that an outside world of peoples and nations exists outside our borders. Even as the globe becomes a giant village, where the actions of one affect all others and the collective destiny of humanity depends on the unity of the entire spectrum of world citizens we seem to care not a trickle what occurs outside our borders nor understand the complexities of human interaction.

Through the catastrophe we have created in Iraq our ignorance and lack of knowledge can be witnessed. In our failure to learn alien cultures, religions, beliefs and societies, by failing to understand peoples beyond our shores and remaining oblivious to the hatred our policies have created our lives have been made less safe, not more, condemning us to a fear that has augmented our already paranoid schizophrenia even more. The colossal mistakes in Iraq, Vietnam, the continued support of Israeli dehumanization of the Palestinians and our continued shunning of the global community are testament to the decline of world knowledge and the exponentially-growing ignorance that only serves to endanger our lives and further alienate the billions who once admired what America once stood for.

Cocooned and protected by a bubble that insulates us from the truths and realities affecting billions living at the edge of starvation, suffering, indigence and under constant threats of disease and death, we rejoice in our own arrogance and perceived omnipotence. Unfeeling and apathetic humans we have become to a planet and its inhabitants that more and more depend on the interconnectedness of man and synergy of nations to survive from the disaster humankind always seems to unearth. Yet instead of embracing the rest of humanity we isolate ourselves from it, hiding behind our wealth, our gluttony, our arrogance, our perceived aura of superiority and our incredible and ever-growing ignorance both of ourselves and the rest of humanity.


The Black Hole of American Education


In a nation of vast wealth, tremendous resources and great diversity one would expect ignorance to be extinct, intelligence to be all-encompassing and world and human knowledge to be absolute. Instead, in America we find the opposite to be true. Our educational system, reeling from under-funding, incompetence and a crater-like hole of indifference, resembles the quality of learning one would expect in an under-developed nation in Africa, where per capita investment in education is worth $8 dollars per year. The education system has failed miserably in the last few decades to instill the knowledge in our children necessary to foster free-thinking and analytical minds capable of being privy to the past history and present course of human existence.

Today, education to the vast majority of Americans is a fiasco. Instead of liberating minds it is enslaving children, programming our young to always stay in between the lines, becoming obedient drones whose independent thoughts are superceded by the corporate and state dictates. Textbooks and curricula distort American history, brainwashing our future to a revisionist past that fails to convey the state terrorism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, enslavement, incessant war and crimes against humanity it took to secure the home of the free and the land of the brave. The whitewashing of our past crimes, and what it took to achieve our present wealth, has been erased from memory, instead giving way to the fictional romance and revisionist nostalgia of how the United States became the Empire it is today.

By failing to teach history, with its plethora of lessons and truisms for understanding who and what we are, our government is making sure that it is repeated, once again to condemn entire generations for the mistakes they will commit. For those who have no concept of humanity nor its easily decipherable nuances and behaviors that manifest themselves through the eons of human existence will only repeat the errors of times past that perpetually linger in the human condition.

By preaching and indoctrinating that our nation can do no wrong, that it epitomizes the enlightenment of human thought, that we stand on the moral high ground of human affairs and that our government seeks only the protection of freedom, liberty and democracy is to do our progeny a great disservice, for to live in delusion and fiction only assures that all that is purged from history’s texts will resurface. The naïve assumption and distorted belief in our grandeur and altruism, simply because the state makes it so, robs us of understanding of why today the world hates America.

Instead of thinking on our own, demanding answers, seeking accountability and questioning authority we acquiesce to the terrorism the state spawns around the globe, its grip and control over our lives, and the crimes against humanity committed in our name. But because we have been trained to believe in the sanctity and perceived goodness of the state, where it has our best interests at heart, where it never lies and is incapable of the worst horrors of human evil, we fail to halt the handful of miscreants that power has endowed with our collective destiny.

The economic genocide labeled ‘sanctions’ imposed on Iraq in the 1990’s that exterminated up to a million and a half human beings, 2/3 of them children, is a perfect example of the wickedness our government is capable of unleashing thanks to our silent passivity. The murder of three million Vietnamese by bombings, chemical poison and endemic disease and indigence brought on by American devastation is another poignant example.

The so called ‘war on terror’, and our indisputable belief in its valid implementation by the state, allows us to see the blind faith we place in a government that has mutated into a tool for the corporate Leviathan and the military-industrial complex. Never do we question or seek the truth to what might very well be a fiction that only serves to enrich wicked capitalists through the implementation of fear to control the populace and the introduction of perpetual war for perpetual profit.

The fictional war on terror is designed to breed insecurity and fear so that assembly lines continue spitting out profit and the corporatist ideology of total power and control arises. Enemies are thus manufactured, much like those Communist Reds we were once conditioned to hate and fear, thereby planting paranoia and schizophrenia onto a populace that blindly wraps itself around the flag every time our elected leaders press the buttons of psychological manipulation. It is because of our inability to stand up and question the state that this ‘war on terror’ charade will continue to haunt our waking conscious and devastate our exponentially-growing fragile psyches.

It is our government that is perpetuating the vicious cycle of violence and whose actions will result in real terror being imported to our cities and streets. It is our government that, through our inability to question authority, will assure that perpetual conflict never ceases and terror remains planted firmly in our minds. The eternal darkness of the American mind is therefore helping to cement fear, insecurity and psychological stresses on our present population and future progeny.

American education has and continues to create unthinking automatons trained to follow the decrees of the state and the mandates of authority. Trained to never think for themselves, children are today prepared for standardized tests while being denied important liberal arts subject matter that instill analytical thinking, creativity and inquisitive thought. Thanks to the evisceration of educational funding and the appointment of George Bush to the White House, however, millions of children are today being programmed like robots, robbing them of intellect, knowledge and the power of liberation that education engenders. This is not by coincidence, as the corporate owners of government have succeeded in creating a populace whose only function is to become the slave labor of the capitalist elite.

Millions of children, many bursting with incredible talent and ability, are being deprived of opportunity, instead destined to remain fragmented in their allotted caste, becoming the work force of the corporatist few, content to sacrifice the keys to mobility for the comfort of exploitation. With minds that do not think or question, the few controlling the reigns of our society are free to implement the tools to further empower themselves at the expense and degradation of the masses. It is when the people are ignorant to what is being done to them that the powerful have succeeded in spawning the eternal darkness of the American mind. This is our reality today.


As American as Apple Pie

Conditioned through shows, movies and all-too real video games to violence, war, death and destruction, our minds easily accept the horrors of war and human evil unleashed by the state. War and violence has become as American as apple pie, resurfacing every decade to grease up the assembly line of death and the conveyor belts of human destruction. We have become rapacious animals addicted to bombs, bullets, explosions and guns, seeing in ourselves a Rambo society needy of enemies and battles. We are a war culture, carefully cultivated by the state and the corporate world, breast-fed the sanitized and whitewashed parameters of violence. In our minds, death and destruction are but special effects, the enemy a necessary entity providing the blood and guts that grace our monitors and screens.

To us, war remains a PG-13 or R rated Hollywood produced movie or show, full of pyrotechnics and special effects, heroes and enemies, good guys and bad dudes. Yet our love for war and violence is based on the fictions and creations of Hollywood, offering us only a detached semblance of reality. This, in turn, becomes our perception of real war, death and destruction, a completely distorted view of a reality that hundreds of millions worldwide have experienced.

In America, war is a video game, a Hollywood action movie where blood and guts are spilled and the hero, usually the US, is always declared the winner. The enemy, nowadays Arab bogeymen, are ingrained into our minds as the propaganda used to condition us to the war on terror is inculcated into society. In truth, the horror of war and violence, excluding 9/11, is as alien to our lands and cities as the sheer misery befalling billions of humans living outside our shores. It is because our nation has been safe for so long that we fail to understand violence and hinder war. Europe, after centuries of war, finally understands that war and violence are not a solution to anything human or a means to a viable end.

Our answer to trouble is always in the form of a smart bomb or a guided missile or through the barrel of a gun. Yet it is brains, not brawn, that makes humans out of animals. It is our humanity, not our weaponry, that brings about solutions. It is intelligence and knowledge, not ignorance and arrogance, that creates friends and brings forth adoration. Force can never foster emulation; occupation can never win hearts and minds; guns can never birth democracy; state terrorism can never defeat the hatred and thirst for vengeance it unearths. Five beheadings of Americans can never become more barbaric than the aerial bombing of cities, where hundreds of innocents are dismembered, maimed, killed and yes, even beheaded. We do not possess the monopoly on the moral high ground, and if a few beheadings are barbaric and medieval, then what are we to call the terrorism raining down from the sky above that exterminates and maims men, women and children?

Our government is as much a terrorist as those in Beslam, Bali, New York and Madrid. It is time we stop thinking ourselves the enlightened culture we are not. It is time to stop a hypocrisy that seems to validate the atrocities we commit while castigating those made against us. Up to 30,000 Iraqis have died from our candy-like cluster bombs, guided missiles, rampaging soldiers and hollow-tipped bullets. In our name the government falsely imprisoned thousands, raped hundreds and tortured untold numbers of innocents. In our name tens of thousands have been injured and millions now suffer the effects of our occupation. Let’s stop the bull manure. Our silence makes us all complicit in the state sponsored terrorism the Bush administration and the US military have exported into Iraq. Iraqi lives are not worth less than American ones simply because they are Arab or possess darker skin or believe in a different religion. They are human, like you and me, breathing air and bleeding red, burying loved ones and living under constant fear, so stop the hypocrisy.

American society must escape the chains of bondage our minds are presently trapped in. The dungeon that is our conditioned psychology must be burned to the ground if we are to exorcise the brainwashed demons that linger in our beliefs and society. We must do this to free the young from the darkness encircling them. They are our future, and our hopes, and must not be made to suffer the pandemic presently strangulating our society. Let us not condemn another generation of Americans to the virus destroying free thought. If we do they will be made to suffer from a perpetual fear and an incessant insecurity, forever fighting, killing and dying as cannon fodder for the corporate wars for profit and power. If we fail them they will grow up lacking the freedoms and rights we once took for granted.


Into the tunnel of the surreal


American society at the beginning of the 21st century is undergoing a monumental transformation into dimensions bordering on the surreal. As capitalism exerts tremendous pressure on parents to become machine-like, efficient-seeking, Puritanical work ethic slaves of the corporate Leviathan the television has become parent, teacher, role model and best friend to America’s youth.

It is manipulating, conditioning, brainwashing and programming their minds, creating obedient drones and unthinking sloths. Attention spans are being made extinct, collective amnesia is all-encompassing and anti-depressants are replacing candy as our children’s yummy treats. Relevant news and valuable knowledge are considered boring, not fast-paced or hip enough in a society born with a remote control in hand. Reading, the great empowerer of minds, has been all but abandoned by our young generations, replaced by the video game and the television. If books bring knowledge, which enables power, then television creates ignorance, which fosters mental indigence. Parents have stopped teaching, rearing, raising, disciplining and loving. Children have stopped learning the concepts of human interaction; they are losing all semblances of empathy, discipline and knowledge. The corporation now owns our youth’s future; the state now engineers their minds.

Capitalism has eroded happiness while birthing depression. It has programmed us for its wars and crimes, making us subservient and acquiescent beings. Like a marionette it controls us, pulling all the strings to get its desired results. Into the tunnel of the surreal our society finds itself, trapped in darkness, shackled to murky walls of shame, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yet unable to move an inch away from the corrosive grip the latter stages of capitalism have on us.

In time this economic form of governance will implode upon itself. The wickedness of its existence and the demons of human nature it resurrects make this truism an inevitability. The exploitation, subjugation, and greed it fosters will one day soon force it to collapse under its own weight. Too many people are made to suffer; too much inequality and injustice roams the planet. The symptoms of its disease are presently wreaking havoc on American society. The signs are visible to anyone who can see how fast the degeneration of America has taken place, coinciding with the enormous rise of crony capitalism that has created unsustainable levels of consumerism, materialism, waste, unhappiness, corruption and greed.

The implosion of what today we call capitalism might take ten years before it commences, perhaps fifty, yet in human history this is but a hiccup of time, a mere nanosecond in the vast history of Earth. The love of the almighty dollar and her sister greed will be the downfall of the capitalist elite and the sinister form of governance that continues to devastate American society, our Earth, its lands, air, water and inhabitants. The eternal darkness of the American mind is but one more sign of an inevitability that is beginning to creep over the horizon.

In time, it will be the masses who will one day awake, once more ready, willing and able to experience a human renaissance, standing up in the face of everything malevolent that has taken place, demanding change and an evolved form of economic governance based upon the principles of equality, justice, morality and worldwide humanity. The vicious circle of capitalism, where only the few benefit and the many are in essence enslaved cannot sustain its circular motion for very much longer. The weight of its own crimes and the decline of its historical path are cracking its foundations.

Soon, the eternal darkness of the American mind will dissipate, allowing us the freedom to once more gaze upon the horizon where we can see the magnificent sunrise that has for too long been denied but that will finally rise to show us the path to a better day.