‘Third World’ Election
Editor’s Note: The forthcoming USA presidential election concerns the whole world. However, it is primarily a matter for eligible USA voters. Any articles published on the World Crisis Web on the subject of the election are presented to stimulate free thinking and debate, and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the editor.
Manuel Valenzuela
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.
The Banana President wants four more years, and his gorilla handlers are doing their best to bring them about.
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.
Published Thursday, October 21st, 2004 - 05:20pm GMT
Manuel Valenzuela is social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, internet columnist, and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now on sale at Authorhouse.com through secure webpage transaction.
Article courtesy of Information Clearing House
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