Whenever Black Americans have dared to think of the electoral process as a farce, they have been punished, marginalized, ostracized, condemned as �anti-American,� and forces are mobilized for the extermination of �terror.� Figures such as Paul Robeson, Pauli Murray, Claudia Tate, Angela Davis, and the Black Panthers come to mind. Recently, the former Black Panther, Geronimo Pratt, died in Tanzania. Pratt spent 27 years in prison for a crime the Hoover�s COINTELPRO operation and Los Angeles police knew he did not and could not have committed, could not have committed since he was in Oakland at the time Caroline Olsen was murdered in Santa Monica. But the decorated Vietnam veteran with a political conscious �terrorized� Americans.

El Hajj Malik el Shabazz, Malcolm X, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were not the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton�s of their time. King was conscious of Mao�s philosophy, although in public, he denounced it. He had a pipeline to President Lyndon Johnson, but denounced him and the Vietnam War. Turning his back on the Democratic Party and Johnson�s �poverty campaign,� King organized a nationwide poverty campaign and welcomed the poor, the working and the unemployed to join him in Washington D.C. in front of the White House. (What an act of terrorism!). He was exterminated. Malcolm X admired the self-sacrifice of Che Guevara and the courage of the Cuban Revolution and planned to take the case of injustice in the U.S. to the United Nations. And we know what happened.

An assassin�s bullet struck King when he was most discontent but angered by the U.S. government�s denial of justice. He, like Malcolm (a hands-on organizer), was not a joiner of the political farce in Washington D.C. in part because both refused to pursue personal ambitions, defeat or compromise with the system.

The remains of these individuals are buried but not their vision of a truly democratic way of being in relation to other humans, other species, and Mother Earth.

Once on this soil, life, liberty, and justice had nothing to do with the electoral process.

It was not then and is not now easy, nor perfect. But because the Indigenous people recognized in the well being of Mother Earth the well being of her inhabitants, they pursued customs and laws that prohibited the exploitation of life. We are but one species among all others, caretakers not tyrants.

But this philosophy of the sacredness of life �terrorized� Americans. They had their own brand of life, liberty, and justice.

Today, a vote for the politician of �life, liberty, and justice,� is a vote for corporate capitalists and the continuation of record-breaking profits for the few. It is a vote for war, genetically modified foods, nuclear power and oil drilling, the privatization of schools, prisons, and health care, social services, nature, and the loss livelihoods, and life, a vote against Haitian and Mexican immigrants, regulations, tax cuts for the super wealthy, clean water and air, and most important, Mother Earth. This is our world today because we are Americans!

This brand of �American� was denounced by those individuals, including Malcolm X and King, who thought beyond the electoral process.

Today, a vote for �life, liberty, and justice� capitalizes on re-enforcing fear and ignorance. State budgets gut social services but maintain funding to build more prisons. In the U.S., victims of �natural� disasters are subject to the interests of corporate capitalists. In the victims, we should recognize what Professor James Petras calls the �perverse� relationship between �huge public funding for �homeland security� and the increased insecurity of vulnerable Americans in already identified danger zones� (�Empire or Republic: From Joplin, Missouri to Kabul, Afghanistan�).

�An Orwellian misnomer,� writes Petras. That is Homeland Security.

Anything diametrically opposed to corporate capitalist way of thinking is a danger to their way of thinking. �legally-constitutional activities� then, Petras writes, costs American taxpayers billions as Homeland Security �employs thousands to investigate, spy and harass citizens.� In addition, Homeland Security spends �tens of billions on overseas infrastructures � buildings, bases, camps -and over 900 billion in arms.�

Petras: �HS and the Defense Department forcefully intervene militarily throughout the world via overt and clandestine operations�while it fails to engage domestically to protect American civilians who are left defenseless in the face of predictable natural disasters.�

But are corporate capitalists and their political puppets concerned with incidental deaths when massacres and rape are tolerable so long as the material resources and profits flow?

How did the Indigenous people manage for centuries without the benevolence of the farce of the electoral process and the corporate capitalists?

We are living, writes environmentalist leader and thinker, Vandana Shiva, under an �economic dictatorship� (Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace).

�Economic democracy, Earth Democracy,� Shiva continues, requires an end to the �most inhuman aspects of economic globalization� - an economic globalization that drives �peasants to suicide, the poor to hunger and thirst, the youth to unemployment.�

The electoral process is a carcass filled with vile corruption and greed; it is a threat to the well being of our planet and its human and non-human populations for it is the mechanism by which the corporate capitalists drain the life from all living creatures.

It has become vital that Black Americans think outside the electoral process box and challenge corporate capitalist think not by participation in the electoral farce but by presenting the mother of all horrors to an unjust system: a commitment to ending corporate capitalist terror.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.