Lie Smith: rich

Across the United States of America, the National Guard is being mobilized to protect the homes of the country’s richest inhabitants. Tens of thousands of armed soldiers are moving into place, forming tight cordons around affluent neighborhoods that might possibly at some point in the near future perhaps be threatened by hordes of starving wage-slaves. Armed with the most advanced weapons available, including main battle tanks and attack helicopters, the U.S. Army appears poised to beat back even the most braven assault against the only segment of society that really matters.

Piggybacking on efforts to further shift the tax burden from those who have the most financial resources to those who have the fewest, the decision to use the military to protect America’s privileged few was probably made at the highest levels of the Trump administration. The cost of said mobilization will, of course, also be shouldered and executed by the poor, the needy, and the disenfranchised.

Secret plans obtained by WikiLeaks have exposed the impending activation of Project Cherry Pick, a nation-wide police action which calls for the most physically attractive children of poor families to be rounded up for training in the art of physically pleasuring the rich and the powerful. A flawed democracy, the American empire seems to be backsliding rapidly into an oligarchic tyranny not seen since the debauchery and excess of pre-collapse Rome. Hope remains for those willing and able to keep their hearts pure - and their sixes covered.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

13 August 2016

tail and run

Our leaders are scumbags our cops break the law our money’s worth little our glaciers have thawed we poison the waters and dig up the land the sinister killing the dexterous hand. Huge banks receive trillions of dollars to stay afloat open solvent for a few more days the Army’s lost trillions too oh what a bummer but hey listen to this feel-good song for summer. Let’s fiddle along as the whole structure burns and be done with worry and doubt and concern instead lining up with our jackboots on tight with blood set to boil with torches alight. America’s bounty must not be spread out to hardworking peons and upstanding louts - it’s that of the elite who sit at the top who’ve found in taxpayers a sure source to tap who milk and who bilk us then turn tail and run to where they have hidden their wrongly gained sums. If this standard business continues apace there won’t be much left here on Earth for our race but paved-over wetlands but clouds of sour rain but legions of innocents suffering pain. To return to balance most us of must die (at least sixty percent if not eighty-five) whether from starvation or terror event - Mom Nature won’t rest ‘til her full wrath is spent. Sleep well in this knowledge do not get upset for there is some hope and promise for us yet provided we turn from our self-centered ways in these next few shallow and woebegone days.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

28 January 2012

encylopediamericanifesto: panem et circenses

Beyond its propensity for outright hostility against citizens loyal to the rightfully elected government of the United States, the military-industrial complex and its cohorts in the rapacious plutocracy has done injustice to the fed and to the American people alike in that instead of clever or devious tactics it prefers as the tool to craft for the ages a new order an ancient Roman method called panem et circenses.

A ruling body exercises panem et circenses, or bread and circuses, by attempting to control the rage of an urban population using compelling, addictive entertainment and delicious, cheap food. The typical city dweller in ancient Rome resembled the modern homeless person in appearance and in morals both – by all accounts, he was as likely to be sexually promiscuous as he was to binge drink, and if he could drink and fuck while watching gladiators fight to the death, he was contented. But the modern urbanite is rich, and so he pays good money to watch the circuses on TV at his home, where he will eat from paper bags a meal of fast food suffused with fat and sugar that was prepared for him by silently desperate wage-slaves. The urbanite does these things because he is a good boy, and because good boys follow the rules – he watches the commercials and he buys all the useless and superfluous crap, and he does not mind that his conspicuous and incessant consumption (and that of his semi-affluent cohorts) makes only 0.05% of the US population wealthy beyond imagining. The richest of the rich, this group is comprised of those individuals who own television companies and fast food chains: it stacks chips like a boss while the remainder of the population, the 99.5%, descends into orca-fat obesity and chronic laziness.

But it is not enough for the Point Oh Five to control the messages you hear and see or to dictate which foods you eat – these Rapacious Plutocrats have wrested the shaping of a new order for the ages from the federal government of the United States of America (which is the agent selected by Destiny to be the perpetrator of the whole Shaping a New Order for the Ages business). The people who own the TV stations and the fast food shacks become rich beyond reckoning upon the backs of the wretched citizens who fork over their meager wages to keep themselves sated of food and to spend their time staring at images dancing on a magic box.

While the fed has at times acted foolishly, I place more of my trust in it than in a cadre of individuals whose minds are so twisted with the pulsing whorish thrust of money that their balance-sheets matter more than the vitality and diversity of the American people.

Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

11 October 2011

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

17 May 2011

on Safety and Happiness

The Declaration of Independence, to use business parlance, is the mission statement to the Constitution's business plan. Without the Declaration, the Constitution is a merely an outline for civil government. With the Declaration, the Constitution is a malleable, living document whose purpose is to make real the few driving ideas behind the Declaration: that all persons are equal, that together they share the inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and that their government exists solely to bring about their Safety and their Happiness.
We hear in our legislative bodies and in the press of great battles being waged along moral and idealistic lines, yet seldom do we hear this fundamental question: Will this piece of legislation bring about the Safety and/or the Happiness of the greatest possible majority of the population? Instead, we are told: that the rich will suddenly turn into magnanimous fountains of job-creation if their taxes are lowered further; that the elderly will somehow thrive when forced to purchase their own health-care plans in exceedingly complex markets; that our statue to the goddess of Liberty, she who stands proudly in New York Harbor, is a liar, her flame now extinguished, the promise of our land's vast potential reserved solely for the growing masses of native poor who already huddle here.
We have lost sight of the essence of the American Dream, the idea that each person who here dwells may determine the parameters of his or her Happiness, and that as long as those parameters do not constrict or endanger the parameters set by other people, he or she has the inalienable Right to Pursue that Happiness. Without Safety, however, the parameters of Happiness are largely symbolic, and no attempt to Pursue Happiness can be successful. For this reason, our founding fathers distilled the myriad purposes of government into just two fundamental reasons for government: to effect, i.e. to create, to bring about, to make, the American people Safe and Happy.
Does our current government expend every conceivable effort to make us Safe and Happy? I must applaud the extraordinary efforts of Director Mueller and the reformation of the FBI under his watch. Aside from my personal experience with the wild-eyed agents who targeted me in their desperate search for a scape-goat (see here), I believe the FBI is performing admirably in its efforts to fulfill the first promise of the Declaration - to keep the American people Safe. Furthermore, our police and fire departments (with some exceptions, of course) are also performing their efforts in this regard in admirable fashion.
While the fulfillment of the promise of Safety is widely pursued and well-funded, the fulfillment of the promise of Happiness has been at best neglected, at worst countermanded. We have allowed an economic system (capitalism) to spread in this country, a system that rewards a few for the labor of all, a system that affords a few the capacity to Pursue their Happiness with wild abandon while denying the vast majority of the population the capacity to do the same, a system that reduces every year thousands of hard-working Americans to wage-slaves living one personal disaster away from abject poverty. Rather than allowing each American to consume whichever substances she deems most likely to affect positively her state of mind, her Happiness, we have: outlawed all but the most deadly, and mundane (alcohol and tobacco): routinely incarcerated individuals found to possess any substance other than these mundane and deadly few; funneled vast sums of money into the hands of pharmaceutical corporations that engineer and distribute street drugs under different names; deemed it wise to feed our children synthetic cocaine and synthetic amphetamines to help them succeed in school.
Our government's efforts to live up the Declaration's promise of Safety are commendable, but without equally expansive efforts to bring about the Happiness of all Americans equally, the Safety efforts are for naught. In order for the American citizen to start down the Path to Happiness, three key requirements must be met: food, clothing, and shelter. Should these key requirements be in place, the individual will be able to determine the breadth of his abilities, which will then allow him to determine a way to support himself through the effortless expression of those abilities, otherwise known as Productive Happiness. Our current, capitalistic approach, is one that requires the individual to labor constantly in fields not necessarily optimally balanced against his abilities, thus keeping him from determining the parameters of his Happiness, from living a life of Happiness; capitalism in America therefore violates the second promise of the Declaration.
For many reasons, this is not a desirable state of affairs. A tiny fraction of our population does not have the right to receive the fruits of the labors of a majority of that population. We cannot allow some drugs to be tolerated and others not. We cannot afford to waste the untapped potential of our citizens by providing them with no better place to express their abilities than from behind a convenience-store cash register. We cannot allow millions of American children to suffer daily from food insecurity (see here). We can and we must provide for the Safety and Happiness of all Americans equally.
So, next time you see politicians fighting over whatever piece of legislation is on the table, write or call their offices and ask if the legislation in question brings about the Safety and Happiness of the greatest possible majority of American citizens. Together, we can realign our country with the dual promises of the Declaration of Independence. Together, we can unleash the great untapped potential that simmers within each of us. Together, we can fulfill the promises of Safety and Happiness first to each American equally, and then equally to all mankind.

Ultima Ratio Regum

John Paul Roggenkamp

07 May 2011

on rational egoism

  Much has been ado of late about the theory of rational egoism championed by Ayn Rand. Politicians have taken up the call, among them Rand Paul, stating clearly their opinions of the Lumpenproletariat, i.e. the growing segment of the American population that has little or no capital; the poor. According to the theory of rational egoism, the poor and the destitute are parasites on society, while the rich are the wise and money-generating hosts on whom these parasites prey.
  A small number of people in America have been allowed to amass large amounts of money and property, either by individual effort or through inheritance. Such vast quantities of capital are not necessary to house and to feed and to clothe the families and dependents of this tiny, monied elite. To protect their vast holdings, the monied elite has corrupted our elected officials, using the power inherent to capital to craft legislation favorable to them and theirs, thus becoming a plutocracy. To protect its vast holdings, this plutocracy has convinced the American people, using ingenious methods of propaganda, that the essence of the American Dream is to have capital, to be rich, to claw one's way at all cost into the closed ranks of the plutocracy, when these vast quantities of capital can only be brought into being by the united actions of all members of society, by the combined efforts of all people who labor in America.
  The Constitution of the United States of America does not establish a capitalistic system in this country. It does not anywhere mandate that a few hundred families are to receive the fruits of the labor of tens of millions of American citizens. Instead, it states that this country is established to promote the general Welfare, to insure domestic Tranquility, and to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity. When the capital that is brought into being by millions of laboring citizens is funneled into the pockets of a few dozen, when whole populations are left to fend for themselves, denied quality schooling and medical care, when millions of Americans pass on to their Posterity not Liberty but enslavement to the ceaseless demands and empty joys of materialism, we can no longer honestly call ourselves the Children of the Constitutional Convention.
  America has abandoned the principles set forth in the Constitution. Instead of employing the enormous amount of capital created here every day in the interest of all citizens equally, instead of providing each American woman, child, and man with the basic tools (i.e. food, clothing, shelter) necessary to even consider a method for obtaining Happiness, instead of ensuring that we are and shall always be able to pursue: "Our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it" (J.S. Mill, On Liberty), instead we have allowed a small, selfish group to highjack our most fundamental principles and to convince us that money - dirty, ever-corrupting money - is a more important component of our lives than unadulterated Happiness.
  There is a storm coming. We have allowed those at the bottom (the poor) to go hungry for too long, and to grow too envious of those at the top (the rich). We have allowed the rich and the well-connected to escape Justice through presidential pardon and access to prohibitively expensive legal representation. We mock the concept of Welfare; we have reduced it to a pitiful and deplorable concept few self-respecting people care to support. Once the great swelling masses of the poor come to look past the smokescreen of propaganda, our domestic Tranquility will be shattered.
  The Randian notion of rational egoism only serves to further obfuscate the true, founding principles of this country - that all Americans are created equal, and that they all have the Right to an equal share of the capital that exists and that is created in this country. We spend billions of dollars preparing for potential future conflicts against foes that do not exist, yet we reduce funding to our educational system, thus ensuring the perpetual mediocrity and persistent under-achievement of our nation's youth. We cut the rates at which the plutocracy is taxed while it wallows in more money that it could possibly need to live comfortably. We hear a president call shopping our patriotic duty, and, instead of denouncing roundly this farce, we dutifully max out our credit cards.
  It is easy to blame the politicians for these failures, while We the People alone are solely to blame. We hear from our politicians that the richest few among us should not shoulder their portion of the national burden, and we accept this meekly and without complaint. We listen quietly as powerful forces attempt to elevate one religion (Christianity) over all others, and accept this brazen assault on the concept of religious freedom as inevitable and just.
  We, the People, are failing.
  We, the People, are watching with disinterest as the forces that guide this country are corrupted and bent to the will of those who have most benefited from our decline into capitalism.
  We, the People, cannot afford to allow the greed inherent to rational egoism to further erode our Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. We must stand tall, and we must fight.
  Otherwise, we will have sacrificed Lady Liberty to the god of Greed on the altar of Consumerism.
  This aggression will not stand.

Ultima Ratio Regum,
John Paul Roggenkamp

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