Dandelion Salad
by Manuel Valenzuela
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Originally published in July 2004, this essay remains as relevant now, if not more so, than it did then. We the People’s true enemey is corporatism, predatory capitalism run amok, emasculating the corporate world to levels never before seen. It is this world, composed of profit margins and cost-benefit analysis, that ignores the human soul and cherishes the Almighty Dollar, engendering creative chaos, war and complete catharsis of the individual spirit, that is the true enemy of humankind, the true terrorist entity upon which the People’s War on Terror must focus upon.
If we continue lethargic and pacified, the corporate Leviathan will swallow us whole, making of us one more morsel of a gluttonous appetite that is destroying Earth and imprisoning billions of human beings. This enemy, already killing millions of individuals on a yearly basis, all clandestinely buried six feet under, all in the name of profit and power, all ignored and obfuscated, hidden under the noses of the world entire, will in the years to come become an even greater threat than it is at present.
In the last century we battled totalitarianism; in this century we will battle corporatism. The following essay should be interpreted as a call to action, following in the footsteps of those words of the past, stated by wiser men and greater principles. For if not today, when? If not when, then our failure will be the purgatory of those inheriting the tomorrow. The coporate world has become our tyrant, our mass murderer, our brain and puppetmaster. When we wake up to this reality, then perhaps our planet and our destiny will find salvation in the incredible potential of this the human race, this primate with the capacity for so much good, and so much evil.
We the People, the people of the World entire, not just those residing inside the bowels of predatory capitalism itself, must accept that there is a war against us, and we must resist, rebel and alter the course of human events before the course of corporate events shackles us to the prison of our minds and the domain of serfs, slaves and the destiny of so many that have come before. Viva la Revolucion! The Revolution of We the People, 6 billion strong.
Zapatista Manifesto:
TO THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO:
TO THE PEOPLES AND GOVERNMENTS OF THE WORLD:
BROTHERS AND SISTERS:
The flower of the word will not die. The masked face which today has a name may die, but the word which came from the depth of history and the earth can no longer be cut by the ears with its cannons.
Our fight is caused by hunger, and the gifts of bad government are lead and paper for the stomachs of our children.
Our fight is for a roof over our heads which has dignity, and bad government destroys our homes and our history.
Our fight is for knowledge, and bad government distributes ignorance and disdain.
Our fight is for the land, and the government gives us cementaries.
Our fight is for a job which is just and dignified, and bad government buys and sells our bodies and our shames.
Our fight is for life, and bad government offers death as our future.
Our fight is for respect for our right to sovereignty and self-government, and bad government imposes laws of the few on the many.
Our fight is for liberty of thought and walk, and bad government builds jails and graves.
Our fight is for justice, and bad government consists of criminals and assassins.
Our fight is for history and the government proposes to erase history.
Our fight is for the homeland, and bad government dreams with the flag and the language of foreigners.
Our fight is for peace, and bad government announces war and destruction.
Housing, land, employment, food, healthcare, education,
independence, democracy, liberty, justice and peace. These were our
banners during the dawn of 1994. These were our demands during that long night of 500 years. These are, today, our necessities.
Foundations
Thunderous booms echoed throughout the vast expanse of the land known as the United States, from the conifer forests of the Pacific Northwest to the magnificent Charles River flowing through historical Boston. An amalgam of bright lights bursting in air filled the night sky as Independence Day arrived yet one more time to remind us of the long ago birth of a new nation through the defeat of oppression, tyranny and exploitation. Millions of Americans raised their heads upwards into stars long since forgotten, hidden by our man made lights, blanketing dark skies yet unseen by human eyes. Instead, resounding echoes of exploding fireworks filled the sky, captivating us with their vast array of colors and shapes.
Independence Day in America is a remembrance of times long past and gone, a time to give thanks to those who came before in time and space, placed by fate to fight for freedom, against domination and despotism, towards a new dawn in human civilization. All men, it was believed, were created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights, among these Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. To secure these rights, a government is created deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed. This government, it was believed, was to be of, by and for the people.
Never did the Founding Fathers envisage what love and devotion to the Almighty Dollar and his sister greed would unleash upon the once heavenly and diverse lands of their fledgling nation. Never did they comprehend the erosion of democracy the latter stages of American capitalism would bring forth, nor the cronyism, corruption and loss of integrity and honor at the highest levels of governance. Like a flashflood rushing down a dry-river bed devouring everything in its path, American capitalism has been an unstoppable and furious calamity, eroding democracy and the very foundations America gives thanks to on the Fourth of July.
An Enemy Like No Other
The growth of the corporate Leviathan over the last hundred years has coincided with the diminishing rights and power of the people. When out of the 100 richest economies in the world over 50 are corporations, it is easy to decipher what entity has contributed to our dwindling freedoms, rights, democracy and power. The tremendous growth of the Leviathan has spawned new generations of unscrupulous capitalists eager to exploit entire populations, hundreds of millions strong, in order to continue the exponential growth of the Leviathan, its minions and masters.
Never before has humanity faced an enemy like the Leviathan, oozing power and control, owning the mechanisms by which the masses are brainwashed and programmed, having fused with a government that now acts as one more tentacle by which it controls the citizenry. We have become the blood injecting oxygen into our enemy, the food that sustains it and the nutrition that grants it energy. Humanity’s greatest threat has become a beast demanding global empire, molded out of our own clay, exploiting our own laws and rules, thriving off our easily manipulated and controlled minds.
Behind it, masked in power and thriving in orgasmic levels of control sit the elite, the oligarchs, exploiters of humanity and high priests of the Almighty Dollar. At the altar of greed they sacrifice their fellow human beings, at the temple of their god we are all made pawns. The engine of exploitation called capitalism enables them to prosper; the control of government grants them the purple robe of power. Over the last hundred years they have waged war against us, winning battle after battle, making lost powers the masses once possessed. Controlling those who govern, those who entertain, those who decide and those who create has given them unlimited means by which to assault us.
From all directions we are being bombarded, slowly being transformed into beasts of burden, unthinking and indifferent, ignorant beings programmed to consume what we produce, albeit at inflated prices, allowing our rights and freedoms to be eviscerated, our happiness to be manipulated, our minds to be numbingly conditioned by media and chemically oppressed by a plethora of pharmaceutical pills.
War Being Waged Against the People
What reality once was has disappeared into the fog of what the Leviathan deems it to be. We are being used and abused, serving the few at the top, becoming the four course dinner the elite succulently feast on. We are at war, or, rather, it has been declared against us. We just do not know it yet. Every battle lost sinks us deeper into the belly of the beast, gripped to the dungeons of the nadir we continue to breathe. Invisible shackles envelope our every appendage as unsuspecting slaves we have been made to be.
Battles have been and continue to be waged against our freedoms, destroying more of them each passing year. We might believe America to espouse the most freedoms in humanity but in truth it grants its people some of the least in the developed world. It is only our belief because we want to make it so, because those in power reinforce the illusion of it being reality. And with the continued marketing of dark-skinned bogeymen lurking in every corner, eager to inflict ‘evil’ on America’s sons and daughters, these freedoms will only continue to disappear, until the day arrives our progeny have nothing left to fight for because there is nothing left to remember.
The noble experiment of democracy our Founding Fathers birthed over two centuries ago has been malevolently turned into a charade hiding the sinister fangs of debauchery and crony capitalism. This exercise in futility is now more a vote over who will become the grandest corporate puppets in the land than an endeavor to empower the population. Government in Washington has become an oxymoron, a place where legions of lobbyists rock the cradle of representatives, showering the mechanisms of power and control at spineless, malfeasant and immoral individuals.
It is in the halls of power, where once noble and just men walked, that the war against the masses begins. Where virtuous blood once flowed now tainted and smeared toxins now pollute, becoming an insult to a long gone tradition of enlightenment. An Almighty Creator has been replaced by the Almighty Dollar, flooding the great Potomac and its surrounding banks with the hypnotizing captivation of greenbacks polluting all minds that drink from the blessed chalice of corruption. It is so-called American democracy – another oxymoron – that grants cover to crony capitalism and corporatism, simply the latest reincarnation in a long and undistinguished line of ruthless and exploitative governance to help decimate the masses.
Worker rights, healthcare, education, Jeffersonian equality and liberty are now but mere drops falling from the once fluid faucet of American ideals. The ‘peoples’ representatives selling themselves to the highest bidder in the whore house named Congress continue to degrade the office they hold, becoming champions of corporations, not people, condemning millions for billions in profits.
At every level the American people continue to be swindled and cheated by the same government implicitly designed to serve the People, not the Leviathan. Corporate and foreign government lobbyists help feed addictions to money, power and control by presenting fat coffers of the Almighty dollar into the pockets of those wretched souls captured by greed, enrichment, power and exploitation. The Almighty Dollar is the ticket that grants access to power, suddenly transforming seemingly busy individuals into attentive listeners. It is here that average citizens cannot compete, and it is why laws and regulations favor the corporate dominated world and the elite that comprise it.
The privileges granted by wealth not only buys off our ‘representatives’ and their inherent powers to shape the direction of the nation but also assures the continued domination by corporations over every aspect of our lives. Suppressed wages continue to decline relevant to inflation, working hours continue to increase, powers once embedded in the working masses have vanished, benefits are slowly being made harder to attain and well paying jobs are being outsourced and replaced by minimum wage opportunities. In the land wishing to export equality abroad, the gap between rich and poor only continues to increase, all the while the middle class is subjected to disproportionate sacrifice in time of need that places a heavy burden on its capacity to save money and that in effect lowers its status relevant to that of the rich.
Education in America is becoming an endangered social necessity thanks to the apathetic cowardice and pathetic submission by our chosen ‘representatives.’ Millions of children are purposefully being made ignorant energies devoid of free-thinking minds. Schools are becoming conveyor belts of incurious and unquestioning children whose future is being decided before ever attaining even a semblance of opportunity, or chance. America’s education budget is being decapitated, its diverse curriculum being shredded to pieces, making extinct art, music, philosophy, social and natural sciences, redesigned to create slaves and future members of the working class instead of the enlightened torchbearers carrying the prospect of hope through the keys of opportunity.
Higher education is being made harder to attain as increases in tuition and costs places a heavy handed burden on working and middle class students. Universities are slashing programs and courses in order to meet expenses, thereby offering students a less fruitful all around education. The barrier to entry has purposefully been elevated so that blue collar workers exist into perpetuity. Higher learning, a necessity for the richest nation on Earth, is being denied to millions, being made more expensive and less able to educate. Instead of encouraging America’s children to pursue enlightenment, the government and the elite hinder their capacity to learn. There is something terribly wrong when a nation places so many obstacles to its citizens in pursuit of higher learning. The effects, however, are as naturally devastating as they are encouraged.
When the Leviathan controls, slave labor and a working class majority is exactly what America strives for. The assembly line spitting out products and services must continue churning out profits at the expense of the working class. Subservient armies of workers, underpaid, underappreciated and uneducated, transformed into drones unquestioning and compliant, must exist in large numbers in order for the economy to expand and the Leviathan hegemony to grow. Denying millions of Americans a worthy education assures this spring of success from ever drying up.
The Leviathan needs legions of citizens to produce its goods cheaply; it needs mindless drones that will without conscious purchase its products at inflated prices. It needs uninformed and incurious millions to vote for its puppets, ask not a question and seek no accountability. It must be allowed to continue clandestinely waging war against the American people without interruption, without the knowledge of the citizenry and without awakening the placid condition of our existence. Gentle ripples cannot be allowed to become enraged tsunamis.
The Leviathan and the corporatist form of governance needs soldiers to help pilfer, conquer and exploit the lands and people of the world. It needs cannon fodder to wage war, well-trained grunts to press triggers, direct tanks and press the buttons launching carnal death onto the peoples of the world. It is from our children that the Leviathan gets its power to exploit foreign lands, robbing them of precious natural resources, and condemns billions to slave like existences in wages, labor and life. From the poor of America the poor of the world are subjugated, enriching the elite and making more powerful the putrid seeds of American capitalism disguised as benevolent democracy. War is but a sad tale of exploited poor condemning subjugated poor, for the benefit of the few and the hegemony of the exploiters.
Poverty stricken boys and girls from rural and urban settings, already denied equal and worthy education, thrown into the rotting cesspool of lost opportunity and purposefully robbed of a fruitful future are socially engineered to desire entry into the elite’s armed forces, pushed seemingly from birth towards servicing the death machines of the military industrial complex. Thus, the poor from one nation will be trained to kill the poor of another, and together the explosive Molotov cocktail called war will they form.
America’s poor and working class children will sacrifice life, limb and mind for the benefits of the few at the top. From the bottom the rich feed, destroying lives and minds, condemning thousands to live altered lives and destitute futures as they struggle to understand the evils forced upon their consciousness. Our children are maimed in body and their minds infected with the inner demons of war. Back home, it is the masses that help finance the Leviathan’s battles and wars; it is us building and designing the very same instruments of death and human evil our children kill and die with. It is from our pockets, purses and wallets that weapons of death and destruction come into existence. From our wages our children are trained to kill, to destroy and wage human evil onto the world. Our sacrifice helps make our children obedient, compliant and brainwashed soldiers of death, becoming a plague of virus wrapped in blind patriotism, believing everything those who govern espouse, willing to die not for freedom and democracy but for enslavement of their kind and the imposition of corrupt capitalism through the barrel of a gun.
Sinister Correlation of Power and Terrorism
A Leviathan comprised of terrorists runs amok, perpetrating crimes against humanity and the planet that is killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. Yet these terrorists control power, and are instead labeled industry and corporations. From their evil is spawned environmental degradation that penetrates lungs and bodies, creating cancers and disease. From their evil are spawned fabricated foods, chemicals, additives, preservatives and hormones that are altering our behaviors, our bodies and perhaps even our genetic composition.
Corporate terrorists are polluting waterways, the air we breathe, the land we live on and the Earth we dwell in. These miscreants care nothing about us; to them we are but the consumers from which to harvest profits and the assembly line from which to garner the next generation of producer and consumer.
Their policies have and continue to eviscerate futures, talents and opportunities, condemning untold billions to lives living in perpetual castes. It is from this careful and methodical social engineering that once promising human energies are transformed into the pawns of those in power, becoming exploitable and subjugated entities remaining in their predetermined lot while enriching the few at the top.
Corporate terrorists send our children to war, sent to die or get maimed in body and mind. They ruin us with interest payments, riddle us with growing debt and deny us medical attention needed. They help turn healthcare into an exercise in class warfare, dividing us into the treated and untreated, the rich and poor. Playing God, these terrorists determine who lives and dies, who heals and who withers. Putting profits over people, money over morality, these charlatans get rich off of others misfortune and suffering. Disease is their mistress, their reason for being. To them, it seems, healthcare cannot be universalized, communalized or socialized. To these terrorists it is a privilege, not a right, available only if fate has endowed you with the ability to pay.
While Arab terrorists are marketed as those we must most fear, it is the corporate kind that kills hundreds of thousands each and every year. It is they who are committing mass acts of genocide, it is they perpetrating crimes against humanity and the planet. It is they whose policies help impoverish hundreds of millions worldwide, using their mechanisms to create a mass slave labor workforce. It is they who do not allow peace from evolving that should be called terrorists. It is they whose pursuit of perpetual war for perpetual profit that sleep and dwell in caves of human evil.
It is those who purposefully instill fear into our minds for political reasons who we should fear most. It is those robbing us of treasure and of loved ones that belong in The Hague. It is hypocrites who spawn death of innocents and destruction of lives under the rubric of claiming to rid the world of evil that are evil themselves. It is those who torture and semantically bend the rules of international law who are terrorists. It is those who decapitate and maim thousands through missiles and bombs that have the same moral cavity as those who behead on video. Just because they govern America does not make these criminals less of a terrorist than others. Simply because they claim victory does not make them champions. Because they can foster unrelenting propaganda does not mean they are saviors to the world.
It is those who see War as Peace, Ignorance as Knowledge, Lies as Truth, lack of Education as Progress, Occupation as Liberation, Death and Destruction as Moral Superiority, Greed as Good, American Capitalism as Freedom and Democracy and Poverty as Wealth that the world should be fighting and purging from power.
Are we to label as terrorists individuals who decimate futures and abilities by preventing opportunity, increasing indigence, eviscerating education, polluting land and humans, manipulating minds, exploiting their brethren and controlling us through fear and insecurity? Should the Leviathan be labeled the greatest threat facing humanity, the ultimate cold blooded terrorist? To many of us, the answer is yes.
American Democracy a Sham
The feces stained hallways of Washington are slowly rotting with the defecation of what America once stood for. Democracy is now controlled and dominated by the rich and elite, the few at the top addicted to greed and the Almighty Dollar. Ordinary citizens can no longer enter the corridors of power, either as constituents or as representatives. The bar to holding office continues to be raised, millions of dollars are needed to win and keep a seat of power. Today only the most unscrupulous vermin, those elite few with special interests to uphold and wealth to increase can sit in the hallowed domes of government.
You think democracy as we believe it to exist still lingers? Not when over forty Senators and one-hundred Representatives are considered millionaires, many placed in office to help expand their own interests; not when certain lobbies determine and in essence select who will win elections through pressures and contributions; not when the corporate media pushes us to vote for whomever they want in office through distortion, manipulation, deceit and coverage; not when laws and regulations are passed that only favor corporations; not when cherished buildings of governance are beset with corporate executives, lobbyists and puppets running the mechanisms of the nation’s management; not when freedoms, rights and social services are being made extinct, destroying what took decades to achieve; not when corporations dominate our daily lives through their vast array of tentacles; not when government has morphed with corporations to create a new corporatist world washing away centuries of what ‘We the People’ have struggled to attain; not when our choice for President comes down to two elites molded from the same clay, in many instances espousing the same interests; not when democracy means choosing from two parties battling each other for who will become the puppet to those in power; not when money determines who runs, who loses and whose interests are furthered; not when America is being dumbed down so that an informed and questioning citizenry no longer exists.
We the People are systematically being turned into We the Sheeple. Our government is now of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation. Our Founding Fathers are no doubt turning in their graves, unable to comprehend what has become of the cherished principles of We the People, of democracy, of American ideals and of the once noble institution of American government. We the People are being used and abused, bamboozled into believing the corrupt vices of our so-called leaders. We the People are now nothing more than hundreds of millions of hungry bodies and ignorant minds, manipulated to pursue materialistic worlds that exist only in the realm of fiction, programmed to instill in our society the vices of greed through the attainment of the Almighty Dollar and molded to stay silent even as war is waged against us, killing scores through environmental poisoning, ceaseless contamination of foods, educational evisceration and healthcare indifference.
We the People
Republican, Independent and Democrat, it does not matter from what spectrum we derive our beliefs, all of us are pawns in a game of hegemony and wealth. Many of us vote against our own self-interests, losing wealth, power, freedoms and rights, preferring instead to vote based on ideology. Those in power know this all too well, which is why they concoct these seeds of division from which to garner votes. Democracy in America is now a scam, a cynical manipulation of the masses that serves not our interest but those of the hand that controls the puppets.
We the People are all in this together, caught in the middle of thunderous cannons attacking us from all directions. Those in power need to divide us, they need us to split into conflict-laden entities that will never unite. They understand that strength in numbers must not be allowed to occur. They know that divided we all stand, blind to our common enemy, bereft of communalism toward each other, eager to fight ourselves instead of our masters. Not since the Civil War has this nation been so divided; yet not since that time has the nation been in such peril. America as we have known it is being melted away; the beast called the corporate Leviathan controls us more each day. It now owns a government that fails to serve ‘We the People’; our interests have been vanquished, our rights trampled on. Laws, rules and regulations now only help to increase corporate power over our lives.
War has been brought to us and our children. The coming struggle for our future is of necessity, not choice, and we must heed the warnings being trumpeted before all that remains is an assembly line called human procreation whose conveyor belt spits out willing automatons and serfs without meaning, without happiness, without freedom and without free-will. Together we must stand, marching in unison, fighting a common enemy, providing for the common defense, struggling for our way of life, a future devoid of chains and for descendants still able to breathe the air of freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is time. If not now, when? We the People stand at the threshold of a momentous decision, one whose decision will determine fates and directions. A growing storm gathers energy, its power derived from our existence and indifference. In its ominous blackened clouds can be seen the energized lightning charges ready to continue the devastation of America and its citizens. An enemy the likes of which humanity has never been privy to gathers in our midst, eager to continue the usurpation of what we hold to be most cherished and absolute. Like a freight train it continues to storm through; whether we stop it dead in its tracks is a choice for us to decide. We the People are all in this together. Perhaps the time has come to take our government and country back, returning this nation to what it once was, and to the greatness its potential once espoused.
The course of history changes many times, in many ways, taking many forms using many actors. One more fork in the road is upon us. Whether we choose the right path is up to us. Together, united as one, Americans of all colors, creeds, religions and ideologies can help defeat the greatest threat to ever attack this great nation. For our children, for their future and that of the entire planet we must act in unison. This is our greatest challenge, our biggest battle, where the collective future of humankind now rests. Unhindered the Leviathan will splurge on us, gorging on its exploitation of our existence, making itself more powerful, exerting tremendous hegemony over our lives. The Other Superpower must awaken. It must rise from its doldrums. We are the many, they the few. If Together we stand, then Together we will survive.
America’s Founding Fathers saw the gathering storms of tyranny and oppression fast approaching over the horizon, compelling them to write the powerful words below that declared a monumental Independence spawning an evolved and progressive form of human governance. Wanting to escape a corrosive and exploitative system, they bequeathed to their descendants a future devoid of the form of government they so abhorred. The question thus becomes: will we have the courage to act as they once did?
Declaration of Independence
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature´s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.
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Dandelion Salad 