The opportunity to choose is utterly meaningless and irrelevant when the supposed choices that are offered are fundamentally the same ones with different packaging.

In the 21st Century, different packaging is in this instance essentially what is known as corporate branding, which means that �messages, images, and imagery target a mass (and often undiscerning) audience. These messages, images, and imagery rarely have anything whatsoever to do with reality.� The objective of corporate branding is of course� massive manipulation, not the dissemination of truth or the positing of reality.

No genuine democracy can survive or function in the absence of a well informed populace. The United States of America holds fake elections, with fake choices, manipulated by a well entrenched corporate plutocracy designed to ensure that� the process of democracy is hollow and but a cruel fake. Such is the present political and economic state of affairs in this nation.

The Democratic and Republican parties offer the masses of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people the de facto non-choice of either euphemistic� death by drowning or death by hanging. Thus, no real choice is offered at all. As the politicos of the Democratic Party foxes and the Republican Party wolves feed, like swine, from the bottomless blood-drenched� financial trough of the corporate / military elite, democracy is rendered null and void.

Ultimately, nothing short of a total break with and from the corporate Democratic and Republican parties can offer any viable possibility of attaining a genuine people�s democracy in this nation. The notion that these corporate politicians can be pushed to serve the interests of everyday people is absurd. Money (and lots of it)is the common denominator� to which these politicians swarm and which greases their palms, at the repeated expense of everyday people and democracy itself.

Greed and the lust for power have no color or gender boundaries. It�s time for people in this nation to grow up and smell reality. It�s time to reject and disconnect from the entire corporate-stream media, including the corporately sponsored Public Broadcasting System (PBS). (Remember how proudly PBS touted its corporate sponsorship by the so-called �green� giant British Petroleum (BP), prior to the horrific� oil volcano and ongoing ecological disaster emanating from the Gulf of Mexico?!) Even now, the corporate-stream media, the Obama / Biden administration, and the rest of the corporate suckling piglets of the Democratic and Republican parties pretend that the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has somehow been fundamentally fixed, when in fact its immeasurably terrible consequences have only just begun and will continue for decades if not centuries.� Of course, the same can be said with respect to the continued U.S. bloodletting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan (to name but a few)while civilians in those countries are murdered and many� U.S. troops continue to return in body bags or deeply psychologically scarred. But it�s basically okay, or so the corporate stream media would lead us to believe. It�s not okay!

Indeed, the �hope and change� of Barack Obama and his wily �Democrats� is a fool�s gold. And the antics of the Republicans is ridiculous, cruel, and just more of the same. It is time for everyday people to take democracy back, out of the hands of the corporate snakes and bandits and their surrogates!

Corporations are ruling supreme while the so-called �Patriot Act,� �Extraordinary Rendition,� FBI and other assorted government raids ( against the people of this nation who legitimately dissent this government�s horrible and misguided policies) have rendered the U.S. Constitution as nothing more than a gutted, tattered, document---in practical terms--- not even worth the paper it is inscribed upon.

Take a stand and make a real choice. The non-choice of death by drowning or by hanging offered by the Democratic Party and the Republican Party wolves is unacceptable. Cease being lethargic and don�t be fooled again!

Recognize the Democratic and Republican Parties for who and what they really are---enemies of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people. Notwithstanding corporate-government subterfuge and repression, we must keep working to form a broad united front for a people�s democracy throughout this nation.

It cannot be over-emphasized that literally everything is at stake in this people�s struggle for justice, human rights, and democracy.

There�s so much work to be done!!! Onward then my sisters and brothers. Onward!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS NewsHour, formerly known as TheMacNeil/LehrerNewsHour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book). Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.