Liberty grew lopsided

The Tree of Liberty grew lopsided, one side of it green and youthful, the other brown and decayed. Watered for many decades only by the blood of patriots, we the American people had all but forgotten the Tree planted to mark the sacrifices our ancestors had made to free us from foreign oppression.

Since the days when the yoke of British domination had been shrugged off, the fetters that had enslaved us to the will of a distant king cast away, we had allowed instead a domestic tyranny to sink its roots deep into our fertile soil. Wide it had spread its tendrils, grasping vines dripping with poison that had permeated all branches of government in such a way as to make it indistinguishable from the dominating fetters long before shattered. Such was the reach of this tyranny that it had climbed halfway up the Tree of Liberty, to choke the last of its life away. When one of its roots was dug out, however, the other roots would grow thicker, the persons empowered by this tyranny too rich and greedy, their stranglehold on the throat of Lady Justice too firm. But the blood of tyrants could water the Tree of Liberty back to her former glory, and but through united effort could We the People rid ourselves of the oligarchy that ate daily of our sustenance. We had allowed the vines of tyranny to cut us off from one another, though, its sickly leaves our tablets, televisions, and cell-phones through which broadcast the hollow speech of angry talking heads.

Only by standing together, three hundred millions united and strong, could we prevail against these tyrannical injustices. Splintered as we are, however, the sacrifices made by our brave forebears will come to naught, and the Tree they planted for us will soon be pulled crashing down.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

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 not necessarily operating here), only occasionally and perfunctorily respectful to the Opinions of Mankind, declare that the economic wellbeing 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 all who work in this country; that we have the right to speculate with 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 forcibly lobotomized; 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 are 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 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 saturate the lands with chemicals to make plants grow instead of learning from the soil, to poison the streams with mine-tailings, 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 quasi-totalitarian states, 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 Capitalisic Greed, 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 Shreik of Lies, preferring rather to profit from spying on the People (through the sale and maintenance of the materials necessary to the surveilance society), under the falsely-titled and unpatiotic Patiot 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 preferrable to ingenuity, that watching TV is preferrable 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 ninety-nine percent of all Americans shall toil ceaselessly to make us, those of the remaining One Percent, rich beyond reckoning, that governemnt is not instituted to secure the Rights of the People, and that they have neither the Right to alter nor to abolish their governemnt, even though it long ago abandoned them to satisfy the needs of the most monied few, as it is too late, and they waited too long to act.

  So suck it, you hard-working American fools, suck it good and hard.

dollar stores = commie outposts

  As of today, 25May2011, millions of Americans are directly supporting the People's Republic of China, America's primary economic competitor and one of the sole remaining bastions of the socialistic worldview. All across our nation, in cities great and small, from the rolling central plains to the rugged western coastline, countless numbers of American citizens contribute directly to the ascending might of the Middle Kingdom.
  Dollar stores, which sell products ranging from shower curtains to miniature cast-resin busts of zebras, stand at the forefront of the Chinese invasion of, and inevitable dominance over, the American economy. Purchasing an item that reads, Made In China, directly shuttles funds into the rapidly growing Chinese economy (where most of the consumer items sold in dollar stores are made) rather than into the pockets of native-born producers. In the 1980s, the capitalistic-minded oligarchy that holds the vast majority of the wealth in America saw an opportunity to further boost their profits, destroying the manufacturing economy in this country by paying others to manufacture for us. As hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens lost their manufacturing jobs, they were forced to buy the cheapest products in order to survive; they turned to dollar stores, thus supporting the very people who had taken their jobs in the first place. The capitalistic oligarchy effectively enslaved the American consumer to the whims of foreign nations by shifting production overseas, to free-economic zones that are, in everything but name, slave camps.
  Personally, I welcome our soon-to-be Chinese masters, and would like to say, Ni-Hao-Ma (roughly, Greetings, exalted one). As a Son of the American Revolution, my lineage in America runs deep. I, however, am not blindly patriotic, nor am I inextricably tied to our prevailing economic model, top-few capitalism (in fact I find it intrinsically un-American). I am, however, as of this moment personally boycotting dollar stores, not to harm the Chinese economy, but in quiet mourning for our lost manufacturing economy. Join me if you wish, but know that this choice requires sacrificing a little more money for everyday goods.
  So, remember - if you aren't buying American products exclusively, don't complain about the downfall of America's manufacturing sector; if you truly consider yourself a patriot, buy American.

All hail the wise and benevolent Central Committee!

场黑麦