Welcome to Amerikkka. Today, we celebrate 225 years of economic tyranny and repression in the good old USA. Now, before you discount me with these trite phrases that were implanted in your mind in grade school, hear me out. I will deal with your fucking platitudes later.

Our country, despite popular myth, was not founded on freedom for all. Just freedom for the rich. We live in a country whose laws were built entirely to protect property rights. Read the original Bill of Rights if you deny that. Personal liberty and capitalism are contrary doctrines. Capitalism promotes the system of wage slavery which removes the freedom of decision making from us. Instead, the decisions are made by the large syndicates, the banks, the lobbyists, the stockholders; in a word: the rich. We have no direct say in our so-called democracy about ANYTHING. Decisions are made by representatives (the rich) who are influenced by corporations and PACs (the richer). There is nobody who represents me in my local, state or federal governments currently. Representatives represent two things: their checking accounts and the idle masses who are univocal about everything. Every once in a while, on very special issues (abortion, capital punishment, etc.) the masses are polarized on two sides of an issue, but they usually favor one of the two polar opposites without much thought or reason. Nobody listens to the racial, economic or political minorities in this country. We have no voice, we have no justice. And don't begin to cite this last presidential election as "proof" of the minority voice: if my choice is between a rich George W. Bush and an even richer Al Gore, then there is no choice. The choice has already been made narrowed down from 6,000,000 to 2. That gives me NO freedom of choice.

We live in perhaps the most repressive regime on the planet. I keep hearing all of this dogma about human rights violations in China. While Huey P. Newton was being hunted down by our government, he noted that the safest he had ever felt is in the People's Republic of China. America wrote the book on repression. For every horror you can name in China, I can name three horrors which government has unleashed on its own citizens in the past fifty years. Nixon's "Enemies List", the concentration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, the FBI's COINTEL-PRO program, the state sanctioned murder of Fred Hampton, the political prisoners Leonard Pelitier and Mumia Abul Jamal; there are countless acts of indiscretion in the past fifty years alone which our government has advocated. When I was a kid, people would always say, "Be glad you don't live in Russia, people go do jail for disagreeing with the government over there". Revolutionaries get murdered in the USA for disagreement.

So celebrate July 4th with fireworks. Large, large fireworks: bomb your local Fleet Bank, tear down a GAP billboard, vandalize Wal-Mart, boycott Disney, confront police officer who violates a traffic law, interrogate a US military soldier, do something ANYTHING which will send a message that this Independence Day, we are celebrating our future independence from capitalism. Until the we are dependent. Celebrate your independence, not being in dependence.

07/04/01