“We are sick and tired of our people having to go to Vietnam and other places to fight for something we don’t have here.”

-Fanie Lou Hamer

“Treat the earth well. We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.”

-An Oglala Sioux proverb

Even empires have their time of reckoning, invariably brought on by their own incessant lies, insatiable greed, and pathological drive for domination. However, the pertinent question pertaining to today’s U.S. corporate/ military empire is; to what extent will those within the heart of the ‘American’ empire resist its hypocrisy, tyranny, and hegemony?

This nation and world is now in the third year of the slippery tongued, Nobel ‘Peace’ Prize laureate, predator-drone missile toting, corporate-serving U.S. president, Barack Obama, who has already done as much, if not even more, to severely harm ordinary, everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this country and throughout the world than did his inarticulate predecessor in those eight years of insanity.

To ensure the installation of Barack Obama, the elite of the U.S. corporate / military apparatus (including the de facto U.S. state corporate-media), utilized and counted on the absence of the one thing that so many ‘Americans’ sorely lack, i.e. critical thinking. This continues to be utilized to its fullest extent by the U.S. corporate-government and its corporate-stream media allies today. Had the majority of ‘Americans’ (including an inordinate number of Black Americans) utilized critical thinking, the admonishment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that we measure others by [a person’s] character” rather than the “color of [their] skin,” would have been heeded. Sadly, Dr. King’s admonition has been ignored to the great detriment and peril of this nation and world.

Like lambs running to the slaughter, many millions of ‘Americans,’ devoid of critical thought, euphorically embraced the Obama brand. Now, in hindsight, it is becoming painfully clear to an ever-increasing number of the U.S. population that Barack Obama was nothing more than a cynically expedient corporate-media version of “shock and awe,” which targeted, and continues to target, just plain ordinary, everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people of this nation.

Even as this column is being penned, the Obama / Biden regime is utilizing (in Libya - North Africa) the same US / UN camouflaged ‘no fly zone’ war tactics used by the previous George W Bush regime, which led to the ongoing (and now expanded) U.S. debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Every single day Barack Obama, notwithstanding his double-speak, sounds and acts like the well-honed, insidious, and vastly more articulate George W. Bush that he actually is, and his pigmentation has absolutely nothing to do with it.

As with J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional Grima Wormtongue character, hypnotically spinning webs of deceit and betrayal, Barack Obama has betrayed, and continues to betray, his cynical “hope and change” rhetoric of over two years ago. As the economic and political pain of everyday people grows at home, and bloody U.S. wars are widened and drag endlessly on, so Barack Obama’s lies and deception grow expedientially.

From Barack Obama’s extension of the unconstitutional so-called ‘Patriot Act’ and ‘extraordinary rendition,’ to his continued gutting of the U.S. Constitution, to his ‘Justice’ Department attacks on anti-war activists, to his closeted love-fest with mega pharmaceutical, insurance, nuclear power industries, and other Wall Street vultures, to his refusal to close the Guantanamo U.S. gulag and his widening of U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa, and elsewhere, to his supplying of military hardware to the brutal Saudi Arabian dictatorship (which has recently invaded Bahrain with quiet and tacit U.S. approval), Barack Obama has consistently demonstrated his dismally low regard for any real “hope,” “change,” or human rights and justice for everyday people at home and abroad. Just when one might think that Obama can get no worse - he sinks to a new low, all in the name of some kind of fleeting ‘democracy’ which people in this nation are increasingly coming to realize is bogus.

For poignant clarification of Barack Obama’s numerous and ongoing betrayals, and what everyday people urgently need to do in order to address these betrayals, it is enormously important to watch the definitive and powerful new Scott Noble / Metanoia film titled, Lifting the Veil: Barack Obama and the Failure of Capitalist ‘Democracy.’ The film speaks for itself. To watch this film in its entirety, click on the following link: http://metanoia-films.org/compilations.php.

The hope of everyday people for real systemic change is to be found in us, ourselves, not Barack Obama or his corporate Democrat and Republican Party accomplices. Hope is utterly meaningless unless it is actualized; and it is we everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people who still possess the capability of actualizing our collective hope.

Time is running out for ourselves, our offspring, and Mother Earth herself. We must take heart and not allow ourselves to be “neutralized” by the subterfuge, lies, and manipulation on the part of the U.S. corporate / military government and its insipid corporate media. It must be a revolutionary and collective love for everyday people, with all of their / our imperfections, that imbues us with the determination to organize, organize, and organize some more - even as we speak truth to power! WE are the people; and if we but realize it - WE have the motivation and the means!

Remember the words of the Indigenous Native proverb: “Treat the earth well. We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.” Thus, we must struggle for the needs of the majority of everyday people in this nation and around the world, not the greed of a bloody few.

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 News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. 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.