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We're still mostly asleep!
We allowed ourselves to be lulled into deadly apathy.
While we slept, the criminal cabal took over our country.
We must come fully awake and create a New America.
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Most Americans were fooled into thinking that voting for Barack Obama in 2008 was voting against lies, corruption, and militarism. Americans must awaken to the fact that the Obama regime is totally controlled by the criminal capitalist cabal that continues to destroy our Constitutional liberties, loot our tax dollars and our Social Security fund to finance senseless, murderous wars, and wreck our country in every way possible. | | |
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- Americans are being duped into thinking that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are legitimate (even after the WMD lies have been exposed).
- American soldiers are going into a battle situation which is suicidalbecause of lack of planning and necessary protective devices.
- American soldiers are being told by their political/religious leaders (the cabal pseudo-religious neo-conservatives) that giving their lives for their cause is courageous and patriotic.
Most Americans are still fast asleep, allowing themselves to swallow delusions of grandeur and cabal propaganda. Nationwide, Americans are deluding themselves that their 2008 election of a Democratic Congress majority actually produced a countervailing force in Congress, when the cowardice and inaction of the Democrats stare us in the face. Most California voters, for example, are still under the reactionary Republican spell, doing the unthinkable of electing cabal henchmen such as Governator Schwartzenegger and Representatives Brian Bilbray and Darrell Issa.
So Americans mustn't delude themselves that they're awake. The pitiably weak outcry at the Democrats and their Republican collaborators in producing a healthcare bill of and for the healthcare insurance and pharmaceutical corporations is a farce.
Educating Ourselves During this Dangerous Time
We must recognize the absolute necessity of changing ourselves and our country in a permanent manner:
- We need to educate ourselves so we understand:
- How we allowed ourselves to be lulled asleep by a tyrannous gang of crooks
- How we can prevent it happening again
- We must create a new American commonwealth of, by, and for all the people.
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America is such a rich and dynamic country that it's easy for its inhabitants to merely enjoy its fruits and feel no obligation to understand and preserve its precious heritage.
But the Obama junta and its Republican and Democratic collaborators are becoming so outrageous in their corruption and oppression, that a few Americans are momentarily becoming aroused from their slumber of ignorance. Now we must make sure that the cabal doesn't lull Americans back into total somnolence again. Our first task is to gain an understanding of what kind of people we've allowed ourselves to become and how we've permitted our nation's principles to be degraded and destroyed.
We're going to have to do the hard work of waking up to what elements in our makeup allow us to be duped by reactionary ideologies, lies, and divisiveness. It will be necessary for us to create a means of educating ourselves, to gain an understanding of ourselves and our world.
A Pedagogy of the Oppressed In creating this new pedagogy, we can learn a great deal from a man who worked with people like ourselves to develop techniques of self-education in activist groups. Paulo Freire developed what he called a "pedagogy of the oppressed" by working in literacy campaigns throughout northeast Brazil in the early 1960s. The techniques he and his co-participants developed were so revolutionary that when a military coup seized power in Brazil in 1964, Freire was immediately jailed. Released seventy days later, Freire was told to leave the country. He did so, and began working with similar groups in other parts of the world to continue developing a people-centered "pedagogy of the oppressed."
You may find yourself reacting to the word "oppressed." It may seem to you that a "pedagogy of the oppressed" would have no relevance to you and other Americans because you don't consider us to be oppressed. What do you consider it to be when Americans are needlessly dying in two totally fraudulent wars, when working people are losing their jobs to corporate outsourcing and bankster bailouts, when a despotic administration spies on citizens and tortures war prisoners, when no-bid contracts to cabal cronies are putting America into appalling debt?
Oppression!We're being economically, politically, and socially oppressed--and it has degraded many Americans into mindless humanoids. These people are so brainwashed by cabal propaganda that they can't see that Americans are being duped into dying for cabal war profits? The fact of the thousands of dead American soldiers stares you in the face every time you turn on your TV or read your newspaper.
To see just how far the oppressive brainwashing has debased many Americans' minds, consider this analogy. We're appalled when we see the carnage caused by Muslim extremist suicide bombers. How could they sacrifice their lives for their ideology and their religion? we ask. If we look closely at the essence of Muslim suicide bombers, it's this:
- They've allowed themselves to be totally possessed by a political/religious ideology.
- Their ideology and their political/relilgious leaders tell them that giving their lives for their cause is courageous and patriotic.
If we look honestly and discerningly at what's happening in America it's almost identical:
Discovering Ourselves
 Realizations such as the above allow us to come awake to the fact that reactionary forces have brainwashed many of us into a mindless state. So it's essential that we educate ourselves as to the condition of our minds and the full reality of what's happened and is happening in America and the world.We must comprehend the bewitched mind-state that many of us are still in. A useful way to become aware of our benumbed mental condition is to look full in the face at some of the obvious absurdities and lies which the cabal political/relilgious/economic charlatans pass off as the veriest truth:
- Lie: The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are for the purpose of bringing democracy to struggling people.
Truth: The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are to allow the cabal to seize oil, loot billions of tax-payer dollars, and re-configure the Middle-East.
- Lie: We're fighting against terrorism.
Truth: There is NO connection between Iraq and the 9/11 catastrophe and the cabal is collaborating with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
- Lie: If you're not for our troops you're for the terrorists.
Truth: We're in sympathy with our troops in a genuine way, not the jingoistic way -- in synch with our troops so much that we detest seeing them senselessly slaughtered by the capitalist cabal.
- Lie: We must remain in Iraq and Afghanistan until we achieve victory.
Truth: There is no way of being victorious in the civil war conditions which the cabal has deliberately imposed on Iraq and Afghanistan and remaining in Iraq and Afghanistan is only the pretext for prolonging the cabal's war profiteering.
A Pedagogy for Literary and Intellectual Illiterates
We don't like to think of ourselves as illiterate in any sense, but let's look at the facts.
Some thirty million adults in the U.S. do not have the skills to perform even the most basic tasks such as adding numbers on a bank slip, identifying a place on a map, or reading directions for taking a medication. Eleven million Americans are totally illiterate in English.
Only twenty-nine percent of Americans have basic reading and computing skills. One out of every twenty Americans lacks the ability to understand what is going on in the world or to develop an informed opinion for voting. | |
Portrait of adult literacy in America
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Percent in each prose literacy level, 2003
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Below Basic
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Basic
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Intermediate
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Proficient
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14%
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29%
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44%
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13%
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30 million
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63 million
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95 million
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28 million
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Able to perform no more than the most simple literacy activities
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Simple activities such as understanding a pamphlet for prospective jurors
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Moderately difficult activities such as finding information in reference materials
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Complex activities such as comparing viewpoints in two different editorials
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Freire worked to help third-world people overcome illiteracy. Today, his insights can be applied to two different kinds illiteracy in American and world citizens:
- Literary illiteracy: Those who cannot grasp the sense of letters or symbols
- Intellectual illiteracy: Those who can "read" (in the grammar school sense) but who cannot read in the sense of understanding the meaning of the words they scan
- There are Americans today, for example, who "read" about such things as worker layoffs and American corporations relocating their manufacturing plants in China or Indonesia, but who don't understand the meaning of what they "read."
- Another kind of modern-day "illiteracy" occurs as people "read" or "hear" the "news" in newspapers or on TV, and allow themselves to be taken in by the propaganda that such "news" involves.
Now, more than ever, we need to begin developing a critical consciousness in all of us who are oppressed by the criminal cabal. We're up against a number of obstacles:
The lack of awareness that we are the oppressed, that we are members of an oppressed class
The lack of solidarity among oppressed people
The loss of the tradition of commonweal and human rights
The indifference of oppressed people to their situation
Living in an age of repression, we become accustomed to it. So what if our schools no longer teach people how to read or think, no longer help students gain an understanding of why human liberty is so precious and precarious. Our movies, TV shows, and books present images of "cool," illiterate, violence-prone savages dressed in the latest styles and exhibiting the popular ego-centered attitudes. Unable to understand the creativity of a well-written novel or screenplay, no longer capable of appreciating the depths of classical music, people today move in a grey world of ego-gratification and violence. Soon the false values become identified as the true, and we have movies such as Pulp Fiction, The Godfather, and As Good As It Gets touted as masterpieces.
"The world's power structures have always 'divided to conquer' and have always 'kept divided to keep conquered.' As a consequence the power structure has so divided humanity--not only into special function categories but into religious and language and color categories--that individual humans are now helplessly inarticulate in the face of the present crisis. They consider their political representation to be completely corrupted, therefore, they feel almost utterly helpless."
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path |
We only become aware of the oppressive nature of contemporary society when we become the victim of unemployment or a mugging or some other mishap. Trained to be oblivious to the plight of others, we fail to see the hundreds of thousands who suffer from homelessness, lack of medical care, and wage slavery.
Since people are encouraged to  pursue their own interests, there is no feeling of solidarity and hence no possibility of concerted effort to overcome the oppressive conditions. It seems perfectly normal that a two-class society is rapidly developing, with new billionaires being created every year while millions of workers are laid off, denied welfare, and their tax money stolen by wealthy looters. Meanwhile the American working class is subjected to such scams as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars swindle, the Patriot Act fraud, and the no-taxes-for-the-rich con job.
We must begin to awaken ourselves to what's happening in the world and taking action to overcome the oppressive conditions. And here Freire's books are exceptionally helpful.
"Who are better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive society? Who suffer the effects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity of liberation? They will not gain this liberation by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it. And this fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors' violence, lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity."
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed |
As oppressed people we must become aware of what has happened to us and develop our own sense of what it means to be truly human.
 "How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be 'hosts' of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization." |
As we begin to struggle against oppressive conditions, we must retain an optimistic attitude, with assurance that the struggle for freedom will ultimately succeed.
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"In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit , but as a limiting situation which they can transform." |
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Creating a New America
 Let's remind ourselves of why we're examining and re-educating our personal mental and moral states and working toward a transformed America. We recognize that the partial awakening of some Americans in their outrage at banksters looting taxpayer money is a momentary outburst of popular outrage. Putting the Democrats in control of Congress and the Whitehouse, we recognize, doesn't solve our fundamental problem of the manipulation of American political and economic systems by corporations for their own profit and power.
So we need to begin a long-range program of re-educating ourselves so the destructive forces are unable to program and brainwash Americans into an acquiescent stupor. The capitalist cabal must face a fully-awakened citizenry intent on terminating their corruption and tyranny.
We recognize that there are basic flaws in our political and economic structures to allow the cabal to seize power and obliterate American principles and values. So we have to make basic changes not only in ourselves but also in the basic design or our government and our economy. It's clear that we must begin to evaluate just what in our heritage we can use in building a new America. Our past and recent experience has made it evident that we must transform our psychological, political, and economic foundations so our nation becomes a true commonwealth, operating to the benefit all citizens.
This will require our adopting more appropriate values to undergird this new society. We'll need to examine our current TV-radio-movie mindless gratification culture and substitute positive role models and humanizing and unifying ideals.
 We can't continue in our present mode of cultural irresponsibility, celebrating criminals, illiterates, and inane "celebrities," and expect to have an enlightened citizenry. The current Keith Olbermann show is an allegory for the schizoid cultural state America is in. On the one hand the Olbermann show highlights infantalizing "Oddball" bizarrities, which Keith himself admits are regressive. While Olbermann periodically presents an outstanding Commentary which gets at the heart of the present totalitarian oppression, helping to inform Americans about what's really going on in the world, he remains enthralled with Obama, thecabal con-man.
In creating a new America, we must understand what values, structures, and principles we need as foundational elements. We will need to revivify the values of genuine intelligence, authentic fellow-feeling, true person-enhancing art, service to others, and genuine (not inflated) self-esteem.
|  | | As we go forward in this long-term operation of self- and societal transformation, we can be assured that our opponents have adopted values and a definition of power which are ultimately self-defeating: money, control of political and economic systems, ignorance, and egomania. | | | |
By adopting the elemental, deathless values of truth, justice, freedom, understanding, unity, and fellowship, we can be certain that our struggle will ultimately succeed.
Prayers of Steel
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper
through blue nights into white stars.
Carl Sandburg
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