Commons, constitutional Right

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution states that the role of government is to provide for the general Welfare. We the people, together with local, state, and federal governments, can only accomplish this if we properly protect the Commons, something which neither our system of quasi-free-market capitalism nor today's re-election-focused politicians deem important. The average, hard-working American, however, relies daily on things that make up the Commons, including roads, bridges, radio waves, wi-fi, seams of coal, deposits of natural gas, clean and smog-free air (vital to the health of all persons), clean and potable water (vital to the health of all persons), and national and local parks. Where once, however, a person suffering cold had the right to walk into the woods and collect for herself a few armfuls of wood, now those trees belong to individuals who sell that wood for profit. When something that belongs equally to everyone is sold by one just person, for no other purpose than his or her personal gain, the beauty of the Commons is shattered, Nature's bounty serving not the interests of all persons equally but only the interests of a few, specifically.

Among the gravest dangers facing America today is our loss of appreciation for things that have intrinsic value, that have worth beyond the merely monetary; our system of Me-First capitalism has so infiltrated and poisoned our minds that we think that everything comes with a price-tag, that everything is for sale. If we just admitted to being a nation of whores, a nation focused on the accumulation of personal wealth, if we just fessed up to selling ourselves into wage-slavery in order to maintain our electricity-dependent, non-self-sufficient lifestyles, then our estimation in the opinions of mankind might not be so low; but, as things stand, we come across as childish and hypocritical assholes who complain about the poor state of our lives while sitting around all day watching TV and shoveling food processed by other downtrodden corporate wage-slaves into our ever-expanding stomachs. The notion of the Commons relies on communal sacrifice, on inter-personal sharing, and on the idea that some aspects of our lives – love, mercy, humility, equality, and generosity – cannot be pigeonholed but must remain beyond the realm of definition, classification, and exploitation. To bring about this state of affairs and to rescue our tender humanity from the ever-grasping paws of profit-hungry corporate interests and the greed of unscrupulous men, we must stand together, protecting what belongs to us all with Life, Fortune, and sacred Honor.

The Declaration of Independence defines government as that body which brings about the Safety and Happiness of the people. Furthermore, it grants us the right to alter or to abolish our government should it become destructive of our Safety and Happiness. Friends, Yankis, fellow patriots, we demand that our governments protect the Commons diligently, since clean air, pure soil, clear water, and guaranteed civil rights make us Happy and Safe and poisoned air, barren soil, polluted water, and preferential treatment for avaricious, self-interested individuals makes us Unsafe and Unhappy. The government of the United States of America does not exist to pay $400 billion to defense contractors, to cut taxes for wealthy corporations and rich individuals, to stop funding education, to stop funding programs that assist the poor and the elderly, to attack and kill persons merely suspected of committing grave crimes (such as Al-Awlaki, Osama Bin Laden), to subjugate foreign peoples in order to gain access to their mineral and fuel resources, or to restrict the ability of its own people to consume whichever drugs they decide best; the government of the U.S.A. exists to insure domestic tranquility and to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, which it does best by protecting the Commons and making sure they stay free to all who may require their bounty. As long as we remain undisciplined and look the other way, however, and as long as we participate in the travesty of conspicuous consumption, we shall remain the enemies of the Commons, blind to the fragile truths which can save us from ourselves. To free the person, free her mind. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

occupy the commons

Roads, meadows, highways, bridges, seams of coal and ore, airwaves, forests, streams – all these things and more make up the Commons, meaning that they belong to each person equally, and that persons have the inalienable right to access them in times of need. Under the capitalism-driven corporatization that has of late transformed America into a sterile and desolate place hostile to individuality and intangible value alike, however, these things that were once the common property of all persons are now harvested, packaged, and sold with the purpose of making just a few hundred thousand of the hundreds of millions of citizens who live here rich beyond reckoning.

Fellow lovers of liberty, if we aim to free our common property from the stranglehold of money-lust, making it accessible to all, the way it used to be, we must occupy it with our bodies. Camp out on your local bridge! Ride your bicycle in out in the street, right next to the pitiable fools trapped inside their cars! Fill the radio with static, and jam the television signals! Only by making our presence known can we even begin to effect change, and only by putting our bodies in harm's way can we ever prove to a candid world that we deserve freedom, equality, and justice. Do we we have the guts to stand up in the face of inequality and injustice and demand that things change? Do we dare put down our tablet computers and switch off our cellphones and look around for the first time in a decade and marvel at just how bad things have become for persons who choose not to live the cookie-cutter, debt-fueled, consumption-oriented life?

Recent legislation is turning America into a police state (the Patriot Act, NDAA 2012), and I suspect that talking as I am talking here and examining ways to reclaim the Commons will be viewed by law enforcement as a crime, and that the federal and local police will try to paint me as a rabble-rouser and a corrupter of the minds of the youth. If, however, a love for Nature and an interest in the happiness and well-being of my fellow homo sapiens is a crime, then I am a criminal of the worst and most dastardly sort! Let us fight to keep the Commons the property of all persons equally, reminding the gullible and the television-addled people of this world that they do not have to live their lives under the cruel lash of wage-slavery, a lash that never ceases to strike. If we do not fight, if we do not bring our struggle out into plain view, then the capitalists and their cronies in the world's national banks and national legislatures will have won. They are already effecting their subjugation of liberty, equality, and justice, enveloping average persons in the false comfort of a mass-produced, corporate-designed culture of conspicuous and continuous consumption that rewards executive officers and majority shareholders for exploiting the Commons and selling back to us that which was already ours, all along.

Dear friends, we are not subjects, and we are not slaves – we are proud and self-sufficient people who work hard without complaining much, who come up with new ways to do and to make things, who protect Nature and care for our neighbors, and who know when things have gone too far. And gone too far they have – too far, certainly, to be remedied without massive societal upheaval and lots of bloodshed. If we must reclaim the Commons by force, then let us do just that, take matters into our own hands, and fight. Strassenkampf, Strassenkampf, alle auf die Barrikaden. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

first to go

As an inconsequential blogger with a limited readership and few people perusing my various sites (except, perhaps, those sites specific to street art), I am today still writing and kicking and living and breathing, but who knows for how long. The executive office of the United States – that run by President Barack Hussein Obama – violates regularly the rights of individuals, removing them to foreign locations and holding them prisoner without trial (in a process known as rendition), in clear violation of national and international laws (see here for a fantastic article re: the Charter of the Forest). The president and his equally-corrupt counterparts in the U.S. Congress and Senate allow large and well-financed companies – known as corporations because they have the same rights and privileges as actual persons but cannot be sent to jail for the crimes they commit – to rape the lands and seas of their vast resources, keeping the American people stupefied and misinformed via elaborate and ubiquitous advertising that allow these corporations to profit immensely from the sale of the Commons, those being things that belong to everyone equally, those being things such as the ore and metals in the ground, the chemical compounds dissolved in the air and in the soil, the clear and running water that each of us needs to stay alive, and living and growing things such as cotton, trees, soybeans, corn, oats, cows, pigs, peppers, wheat, chickens, etc.

Because I speak of these things, writing often about the overreaches and the abuses of our sitting president, his predecessors, and their well-heeled corporate cronies – they who shift from corporate officer to appointed official, and back again, in a never-ending cycle of sycophantic, avaricious nepotism – because I speak of these things, banging the dinner-gong to the tune of my own unraveling, for this reason, I will be among the first to go. When our leaders in Washington decide it is time to round up dissidents such as me and to put us in prisons and into labor and death camps for re-education and to keep the minds of the general population free of any doubt about the validity and sustainability of our current economic and political systems, then it will be clear that my bleating was not merely the bitter moaning of a spoiled little whorphan, but that my attempts to get the people of this land to think critically about their lives and about how much television they watch and about their lack of self-reliance and about their whole-scale adoption of conspicuous-consumption-oriented capitalism were more than self-righteous chest-beating.

The only problem about the previous sentence is that none of these here words will exist once I am black-bagged, detained, and murdered, because they will have been wiped away, removed from the world-wide-web, with a single mouse-click deleted from the annals of history, disappeared into the aetherless void with the swift aplomb of a South American dictator. Except, dear friends, we now have North American dictators, Enemies of Liberty such as all Congresspersons and Senators who were in office during July of the year 2012, and Mr. Obama, who signed NDAA 1540 into law, thus allowing the federal government to detain and hold indefinitely American citizens who defy marshal law. (This piece of legislation, ratified unanimously by the White House and Congress, violates the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America and international treaties, including the Geneva Convention.)

Yes, my brothers and sisters, because I speak out, because I write on americanifesto and liesmith about the downfall of our democracy and the erosion of our constitutional protections and the rape of the Commons, I shall be among the first casualties of the wave of injustice that is even now swamping this once-fair land. It has been my pleasure to be able to write; it has been my pleasure to be able to bang away for a while on the drums of civil discontentment; but, I think things will become much darker here in America after Obama is appointed to another four years, and I think that things will become worse for people such as me far sooner than they will become better. So, my brave, silent readership, if I suddenly stop posting to my eight separate blogs, and if I stay silent for more than a week's time, it means that I was taken by the federal government of the United States of America, tortured by the federal government of the United States of America, and killed by the federal government of the United States of America, and that my lifeless corpse is rotting at the bottom of some forgotten pit at some unnamed military base in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere. C'est la vie, though, and fuck 'em, since I shall gladly die defending the last few remnants of goddesses Liberty and Justice, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit