on getting news

The man got his news from one source, and one source only. He didn’t need to diversify his sources, because “This is America, daggonit, and as an American in America I’m allowed to do as I please.” The talking heads appearing on his favorite conservative-leaning television station told him everything he needed to know, and he liked it that way.

He also listened to his wife, of course, who sometimes passed along knowledge and advice gained from her circle of friends and family. Which meant he got news from at least two sources. He also listened to the pastor of his church, of course, and read such bible verses as appeared on the mobile application a grandchild had installed on his phone. Which meant he got news from at least four sources. He also listed to some of his conservative-leaning friends, whose opinions tended, at times, to match his. Which meant he got news from at least eight sources.

And yet, when pressed, he insisted that he got his news from one source, and one source only. The man was fearful, you see, and stubborn. He had learned to stick to his guns no matter what. Even if it meant being wrong, and lying to himself, and riding roughshod over the gut-knowledge that he was acting foolishly. Even if it meant being cruel to others, and attacking them personally because of their views. Because, in America, where the gentle nonconformist gets steamrolled daily by ten million angry yes-men, corporations don’t profit when people are open-minded or learn from mistakes.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

on corporate rule

A horse keeps being a horse even if a group of people call it a cow. And a house keeps being a house even if a group of people call it a tractor.

Similarly, a republic ruled by corporate interests keeps being a corporatocracy even if a group of people call it a democracy. When corporations receive trillion dollar bailouts for the failure of the financial risks they took; when corporations can exploit natural resources for their own profit then sell them back to the very citizens who owned said resources in the first place; when a country fights world wars to promote or protect the profit-making ability of its corporate rulers; in such instances a republic is a corporatocracy and must be recognized as such.

There is nothing wrong, ultimately, with a republic being ruled by corporations, so long as the citizens of that republic know the truth of things and aren’t purposefully blinded by consumerism, nationalism, or patriotism. Giving citizens a cheap and easy way to flee the consequences of corporate rule and institute a new Government as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness is, however, a honorable, legal, and moral necessity.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

corporate rule falters

As a self-appointed bane of America's corporate ruling-class, I speak often of the risks posed by these quasi-humans and their propensity to homogenize and sterilize any and every process and action they undertake. I have been encouraged, however, in recent months, by what appears to me to be a slipping of the corporate hand. Contrary to the image they work so hard to portray in countless and persistent television advertisements, in home-improvement centers such as Lowe's and Home Depot, for example, I wander the aisles for long periods of time without being approached or spoken to by those stores' employees; if I am approached (by anyone other than poorly-disguised undercover police officers who shadow my every move, all but begging me to steal something), I am called such things as, “Guy,” “Bro,” “Man,” or “Dude,” and only rarely, “Sir.” Such is the laxity of these corporations' wage-slaves that they stand around frequently in clusters talking to one another about anything but work, about kids or sports or how much their lives such, in earshot of paying customers who might need help finding something; such is the impotence of their bosses in middle-management that mandatory training-sessions aimed at fostering within their hearts a sense of decorum or self-pride appear to be wasted effort.

Whereas I initially placed the blame for such unprofessional behavior squarely on the shoulders of the under-educated and fiscally-misguided employees who live in this area of South-Central Pennsylvania, in my recent travels I have noticed similar behavior exhibited by employees stemming from other regions, as well. Therefore, I suspect that the once-iron grip of corporate rule – a grip that for many decades has relied on employees' fear of retribution or job-loss, their honest desire to serve the customer, and pride in their small-but-important contribution to goals clearly defined in their corporations' mission statement – that such inherent and priceless values have been steam-rolled into oblivion by incessant demands to increase profits and the need to keep stock-values rising, to the detriment of service to the customer. I have noticed the grip of corporate rule slipping in states such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, at stores such as those mentioned above and at Sam's Club, Auto Zone, and at branches of different grocery-store chains.

Could my mind be so filled with vitriol for undemocratic, greedy corporations that I am seeing something that is not there, or could my observations contain a hint of the Truth? Am I so fed up with the way that corporations are destroying the fabric of American society that I nitpick even their slightest professional errors, making mountains out of mole-hills? While I admit to longing for a time when the Commons belonged to all persons equally and when we Yanki were self-reliant and self-respecting individuals who cherished things of intrinsic value and who contributed willingly to communal success instead of just looking out of ourselves all the time, I recognize the futility of my struggle to resurrect such lost values and my resemblance to a fool tilting at windmills; if, however, I do not fight to free the American Dream from the stifling grasp of materialism and conspicuous consumption, who will? If I do not sit here in this cold room every morning banging away at this netbook with a pot full of hot, green tea at my side championing the rights of gays and lesbians and hurling barbs at the creeping menace of homegrown religious extremism, who will? Few Americans are as stupid as I am to stake Life, Fortune, and sacred Honor on the notion that we as a people have a duty to defend Liberty at all cost, to work tirelessly to ensure that all of our fellow humans are treated equally, and to fight governmental over-reach with such foolish brashness as I tend to do; I blame this behavior in part on Silas Nickerson, my 18th Century ancestor, who took up arms in our War for Independence, joining a rag-tag band of homegrown terrorists who were fighting with a distant tyrant for their right to decide for themselves how best to make themselves Safe and Happy. I wonder if old man Silas would applaud my efforts, or if he would succumb to the siren-song of Me-First capitalism, signing away his hard-won freedom for 60 months of interest-free financing. Hrm.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on the audacity

Attention, liberty-loving, self-respecting Americans who mind their own business: the forces of greed, deceit, and religious oppression are running for president. Anyone supporting the notion of equality amongst humans ought help to combat this threat. Long have we winced when our leader spoke of ruling us according to the rules found in Christian bible, which is just one of the countless different religious books that we Americans turn to every day. Messieurs Romney and Ryan just announced that if they should be appointed by the electoral college to the presidency that they would add to our secular Constitution a line defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Not only would such an amendment violate the rights of gay and lesbian Americans of sound mind and legal age to wed whomever they should wish to wed, it would contaminate a pure and honest document with the hateful directive of YHWH, the Christian's jealous (Exodus 20:3) and genocidal (Joshua 6:17) godhead. This, however, is not the gravest threat facing our nation at this time; the greater threat comes from the Republican Party itself, and from its mindless, lie-spewing, line-toeing members, light-skinned and well-to-do individuals, puppets marching in jackbooted lock-step with tears of joy in their eyes as their leaders gut the welfare state and destroy the last remaining remnants of fragile, precious Liberty.

Millions march across the globe to protest the greed of vulture capitalists, the avarice of our corporate overlords, and the cruelty of consumption-oriented capitalism, and yet the members of the Republican Party in America chose as their candidate for our nation's highest office a 1%er, a silver-spoon-sucking, income-tax-evading, private-jet-flying, local-job-destroying douchebag whose first name rhymes with shit. And why shouldn't they? They long ago sold their souls to the first corporate bidder to dangle an envelope stuffed with greenbacks in front of their milky gazes, forfeiting sacred Honor for cash, a paltry exchange. This author is not trying to say that only the Republican Party is a donation-addled behemoth that cannot possibly represent the varied interest of one hundred and sixty millions of American voters; the Democratic Party is just as deaf to the cries of the poor, as blind to the whites of its lies, and as polluted with the foul stink of corporate funding as are its donkey-sucking counterparts across the aisle. It is shocking, though, that the Republicans would prove so disconnected from reality, so stultified in what passes with them for thinking, so bedazzled by the righteous fury of religious conservatism that they would even seriously consider openly releasing the platform they drafted for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. It appears, however, that my hope for the future of this land was little more than cruel and short-lived fancy, that my belief that we Americans were still a compassionate people bent on uplifting those without means and on perpetuating the notion of personal Liberty was little more than foolhardy delusion.

Beyond this author's whining and my dislike for theocratic rule, the audacity of the 2012 Republican presidential platform is what really chaps my buns, that a party that once included Abraham Lincoln and Theodor Roosevelt could forget that our founding persons conceived this nation as one of Liberty, equality, Safety, and Happiness for all, not as a piggy-bank for brainwashed, super-rich, goose-stepping religious extremists. (America's native religious extremist groups are just as dangerous to our common Safety and Happiness as are foreign religious extremist groups such as al-Qaida or Hezbollah.) A Constitutional ban on gay marriage would destroy the right of each American to choose whom to spend his or her life with, be that person black, white, yellow, tall, short, fat, skinny, hirsute, balding, sick, healthy, gay, straight, whole, crippled, or born without hands. Ultimately, it is not the Republican Party's business, nor is it the business of the federal, state, or local government, nor it is not the business of heterosexual individuals to tell homosexual or transsexual individuals how they should live their lives. So let's all start minding our own business, and focus on making our own lives long, and happy. Stand up, speak out, fight injustice, and keep America free of morally-justified terrorism. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on privileged protesting

In these United States, different types of people protest differently. On the one hand are wealth-backed lobbyists and representatives of special-interests who are invited into the personal chambers of Congresspersons and Senators where they voice their concerns, bitch, moan, and explain their reasons for being aggrieved after having handed over a check for many tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand are citizens who cannot afford to give elected officials envelopes filled with cash on a monthly or weekly basis and who therefore must stand outside in the elements, holding signs in their chapped and blistered hands and perhaps telephoning once or twice a day with their state representative's personal secretary in the hope that she might allow them to speak – even if only briefly – to the person who is supposed to be their go-to-guy in Washington. Furthermore, in this, our Corporate Republic of America, certain fabulously-rich individuals can hire slick-tongued, crafty motherfuckers to set up vacations at ski lodges in posh resorts, to which Senators and Congresspersons are invited and where they are wined and dined, harangued and harassed, and bought and sold to such an extent that when they return to Capitol Hill they initiate and support legislation favoring the narrow interests of their new corporate overlords rather than pursuing with single purpose the diverse interests of three hundred millions of common and average citizens. This is how things go in America today, a country whose government was once slightly representative but which now exists merely to increase and to protect the profits of a military-industrial complex that demands constant war and corporations that have been allowed to grow so large that they get away with not paying taxes, degrading and destroying our commonly-shared environmental, stealing and mismanaging the investments of millions of hard-working persons, and brainwashing the public via ubiquitous and constant television, radio, and billboard advertising into thinking that all is well with the world.

All is not well with the world, ladies and gentlemen. The economic system known as capitalism is being used to destroy Nature and to shuffle unimaginable riches into the pockets of fewer than a thousand families across the globe. Television is rotting the brains of millions of previously self-respecting and self-reliant individuals, encouraging them to kill themselves slowly by sitting around all day and not getting out for a nice walk, exposing them to the stale crumbs of televised truthiness rather than forcing them to think critically about the bullshit seeping from the mouths of their favorite painted talking heads.

We did not arrive at this state of affairs accidentally – this was engineered by precisely those individuals who run the aforementioned giant corporations. But who is protesting the downfall of democracy and the desecration of Ladies Liberty and Siblinghood? Only a few hundred thousand people are actively battling this unjust state of affairs, among them the members of Occupy, the Indignados, and the Anti-Fascists, or antifa, who are all carrying on the proud tradition of warring against injustice that started back in the late 1840s, when the members of something called the Paris Commune first took up arms against the overreaches of the state, inspiring Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to write a short pamphlet called the Communist Manifesto. And, unlike persons who choose to bribe and to corrupt elected officials to get their way, Occupy and antifa do their protesting out in the street, for all the world to see, eschewing back-door dealings for peaceful marches through tear-gas, pepper-spray, and hails of rubber bullets so as to bring attention to the marginalization of Lady Justice, who cannot easily protect herself, as she must remain blindfolded. So, friends, by rising up, speaking out, and never taking the easy way out, you too can help make this world a better place for all people, not just for the super-rich. 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

an open letter to America's founding persons

Dear individuals who founded or influenced the founding of the United States of America: may you have a good day. I write to you across a long stretch of time – nearly two hundred and forty years – with greetings and supplications. Much is being said of late in this fine land you crafted so long ago about your intentions, your motives, and your goals. Friends, woe is befallen us, for we have taken the essence of the nation you designed in the Declaration of Independence and trampled it unceremoniously to dust. As Dr. Franklin warned after the ratification of the Constitution in 1787, we have not been able to hold on to the republic you created; rather, we have allowed the forces of blind and inexorable avarice (which we now refer to rather as corporation-based, consumption-driven capitalism) to all but ruin the seemingly boundless promise of your intended nation. No longer does government exist to serve the People – now its punishes with fines and imprisonment those of us who drink deeply of the Blessings of Liberty and who pursue our Happiness as we see best fit without infringing upon the Life, Liberty, or Property of any other person or persons; now it exists not to foster the free mind, the free life, or the free will but to punish the People for not living according to the rules it proclaims will bring the most benefit to the most people, rules, however, which are designed by and written for the benefit of a few hundred thousand of the richest citizens (and their respective corporate bodies) who enjoy privileged access to policy-makers due to their vast wealth, lack of humility, and insufficient focus on the Shared and Common Causes (making all people, equally, Safe and Happy) which should bind us, as countrymen, to one another, indelibly. Justice, friends, has been banished behind such dark and oppressive curtains as hang in our houses of deliberation; her blindfold has been removed in order to combat a poorly defined danger known as terrorism; and her sword now strikes down such persons – both native and foreign-born – as have not even been given a decent or fair trial by a jury of their peers. As mentioned previously, laws exist that promote neither the general Welfare nor that insure the domestic Tranquility but that subjugate the People to the whims of heavily-armed, fear-obsessed, oppression-minded police forces and that divert the vast wealth generated by the collective labor of this nation's citizens into the pockets of those few of us who have the best political connections and the broadest corporate reach. The noble cause of a more perfect Union has been replaced by the nation-wide homogenization of goods and services that has eroded the independent and self-respecting nature of the People, replacing it instead with a sheep-like mentality under which we slave primarily to fuel personal over-consumption of foodstuffs, electricity, and images that are piped at great expense into our homes where they move about on magical picture-boxes hanging from the walls.

Such is our suffering, and more. We move about not under our own power but atop and within auto-mobile metal boxes that are powered by the burning of a liquid pitch, an inflammable black goo that is pumped from the ground in distant places by hirsute, turbaned foreigners who use the profit from the sale of this oil to fund terrorist groups that in turn murder the People and maim our friends. Rather than raising and storing our own crops, we rely on foods that throughout their lives are sprayed regularly with an unknowable mixture of dangerous and volatile chemicals before they are moved nearly to our doorsteps via larger self-propelled metal boxes that travel upon thousands of miles of rock-and-liquid-pitch-paved roads; rather than raise our own livestock, we rely on meats that throughout their lives are injected regularly with an unknowable mixture of powerful medicines and growth-promoting chemicals before they are moved nearly to our doorsteps upon the aforementioned roads. And, due to this lack of autonomous locomotion and this over-abundance of foodstuffs, we have become lazy and fat, suffering therefore from fatness- and laziness-related diseases and dying of them by the hundreds of thousands.

Oh, dear brothers and sisters, you who stamped this nation out of the dust, who risked Life, Fortune, and Honor in order to create a nation dedicated to the Safety and Happiness of a free and independent People, please accept our apologies for destroying all that which you risked to create, and for desecrating and neglecting all that which you worked so hand to bring about. We are weak, we are spineless, and we hardly deserve even the last, dying remnants of that which you so diligently created. Please, dearest fore-fathers and fore-mothers, please forgive us, for we knew the dangers of the path we have stumbled down, choosing it however because it offered us the least resistance. America delenda est.

場黑麥 menterefecterem fecit

on the proxy identity

The American citizen is lost, floundering in a sea of substitute identities. It is not really his fault, however – he has learned it from his parents, from television, from his great aunts, step-uncles, and distant neighbors. We lack in this nation even a loose consensus on What It Means To Be An Upstanding And Self-Respecting Individual; no organization has stoop up and said, If you do this and that you will be different from everyone else and not walk around wearing the same shirt bought at the same giant discount retailer as everyone else. Our unique national character is being watered down by those goods as are sold at only a handful of retail locations that can be found in nearly every city, town, and village from coast to shining coast; our individual taste, our very ability to be one-in-a-million, has been substituted for faceless homogenization by corporate marketing committees who make hefty profits by paying overseas manufacturers to mass-produce cheap products featuring pictures of the hottest movies and books and then convincing us through a ceaseless avalanche of advertising to buy them (while lobbying to keep it illegal for the American people to ourselves make our own products printed with the same pictures).

Instead of delving into the nether-regions of our souls, and finding therein peace, or enlightenment, today's American busies himself with memorizing football statistics and with discussing those statistics with others; instead of making sketches or painting a picture of the bright and verdant out-of-doors, he watches hour upon hour of television while his latent artistic ability sits dormant, and unused; instead of educating and understanding himself to the extent that he can make intelligent, non-sports related conversation about a breadth of topics, he purchases – at a significant mark-up – a name-brand motorcycle and the name-brand clothing to go with it. But, it seems, people will choose the path of least resistance every time, doing whatever everyone else is doing and getting really, really mad when someone points out that they are acting as if they were sheep being led to the slaughter. And a slaughter it is – more like a sacrifice – with our best talents wasted on leisure, our best minds ruined by TV, our best personalities crushed by the petty demands of consumption-driven capitalism, our best bodies ridden to oblivion on the backs of terrorism-supporting motorcycles. We may have once been a proud and shining People, but, today, we are little more than clones bought and sold by our avaricious corporate slave-masters; America delenda est.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

happy evacuation day

  On this 25th of November, let us celebrate the last British forces to leave new york city at the end of the American war for independence, and refrain from needlessly spending money at corporate shopping locations. jp

  場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

declaration of corporate supremacy

  When in the course of pursuing profits it becomes necessary to remind the People for whom it is they toil, and to formulate the rules by which they shall lead their lives, we, the assembled capitalists and corporations headquartered in these United States (but by no means necessarily operating here), only occasionally and perfunctorily respectful to the Opinions of Mankind, declare that the economic well-being of our executive boards and voting members by far outweighs the Right of the People to Safety and Happiness. The original Declaration of Independence, that document upon which the United States was founded, those words that might have given mankind the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, is, and has for some time now been, a dead and forgotten document, its declaration of unalienable rights null and void, its formulation of the core principle of the role of government - to bring about the Safety and the Happiness of the People - ground to dust under the jack-boot of our Capitalistic Greed.

  We hold these Lies to be enforceable through police action: that a small percentage of Americans should by rights reap the profits generated by the labor of who work in this country and across the known world; that we have the right to speculate and to risk the invested monies of those Americans stupid enough to have entrusted us with their savings, and, when our speculations fail and millions of Americans lose their hard-won gains, to be safe and secure in our gated communities, our ill-begotten money protected by the federal government, our risky businesses kept from failing by the taxes paid by the very people whom we had hoodwinked originally; that we shall profit from the sale of drugs, such as alcohol and tobacco, that are legally available to the People, drugs that kill them by the hundreds of thousands and maim them by the millions, while supporting the persecution and the imprisonment of the People in for-profit penitentiaries owned and run by us, for the crime of consuming drugs not to our liking, such as marijuana, drugs that have no discernible negative affect on their health or on their Happiness; that the US government should wage un-winnable wars against faceless foes (see the "war on terror") so that we may continue to manufacture, develop, and sell arms and weaponry, wars that might be won only if every person on Earth were placed in concentration camps and lobotomized forcibly; that we have the Right, through unscrupulous and down-right false advertising, to convince the People that unbridled consumption and unchecked personal debt are the bedrock of the American Dream, that Happiness does not grow from within, that it is not a fragile state of mind that blossoms from patience and self-understanding, but that it is something we cram into our wallets and pocket-books, that we spend in our shopping plazas, that we waste on useless items that supposedly make life easier but that constitute little more than clutter; that it was our patriotic duty to abandon the American manufacturing sector for foreign shores, sacrificing the jobs of millions of our countrymen to boost our profit-margins, allowing children across the Pacific Rim to work as slave-laborers in free-economic-zones so that unemployed Americans could buy cheap goods that break soon after the first use; that we have the Right, regardless of the complaints of tree-hugging hippies, to rape and destroy the land for short-term gain, to poison the streams with runoff from our mine, to clear-cut the once-great forests for export, and to pump the animals we slaughter for food full of steroids and antibiotics instead of providing them with clean and open places in which to live out their short and pathetic lives; that we have willingly and to vast personal profit rejuvenated the methods of the ancient Romans for controlling the lower classes by providing them with bread (fast food) and circuses (television), methods that poison the body and the mind but that keep the rabble blessedly quiet and contented throughout their pitiful and mostly worthless lives; that we will run our corporate societies, not as democracies, but as totalitarian fiefs, while convincing our workers that, through hard and dedicated labor, they might reach the highest rungs of our bogus organizations, while, in reality, they will, after infighting, backstabbing, and reckless self-promotion, find themselves flung out into the cold, the pathways to our fleeting and hollow ranks closed to all but a most rapacious and lustful few.

  At no point in the long yet subtle Process of making a mockery of this once great Nation did we pause to consider that our hoarding of the nation's wealth would violate the Constitutional directive of promoting the general Welfare, although we will, by funneling the collective wealth of all Americans into the pockets of our cronies and fellow oligarchs, secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity, not to all Americans equally, but to those who have, as we have, dutifully sacrificed their sacred Honor on the altar of the Insatiable Hag of Materialism, to those who have shat, as we have shat, upon the once-grand notion of Liberty and Justice for All. We have stopped our ears to the Voice of Justice, preferring rather the Shriek of Lies, preferring rather to profit from spying on the People (through the sale and maintenance of the materials necessary to the surveillance society), under the unpatriotic and anti-American Patriot Act, rejoicing in the violation of the flimsy protections once, but no longer, afforded the People by the Constitution.

  All this we pledge, and more, for: we have the means to lobby the Legislature for our own gain; we have the money with which to live comfortably for ten lifetimes while millions of American children go to bed hungry each night; we have convinced the People that consumption is preferable to ingenuity, that watching TV is preferable to creative expression and the telling of stories, that there is a universal formula for Happiness, a formula that starts with a dollar sign. We, therefore, the capitalists and corporations headquartered in these United States, Assembled, appealing to none but our majority share-holders, by our own authority and the might of our wrongly appropriated wealth, brazenly Publish and Declare, that this Country belongs to Us now, that the dream of a more perfect Union has no place in the world of top-few-capitalism, that eighty percent of all Americans shall toil ceaselessly to make us, those of the remaining Twenty Percent, rich beyond reckoning, that government is instituted not to secure the Rights of the People but to satisfy our every Desire, and that the People have no Right either to alter nor to abolish their government, as it long ago abandoned Them to satisfy the needs of the most monied few, as it is now too late, and They waited too long to act.

  So suck it, you hard-working American fools, and while you are sucking it good and hard, remember that you have abandoned everything for which your ancestors once fought and died.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp