There is absolutely nothing that everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people cannot collectively accomplish if they have “a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it.”

The mainstay of the political system of the United States of America, continues to be the perpetuation of ignorance and mythology - keeping people in a perpetual state of “sleep” and concomitant denial. Thus, people fail to exercise even their common sense.

People innately recognize that there is something fundamentally wrong and unjust with the body politic of the system of governance in this nation, but the constant barrage of U.S. corporate-stream disinformation, misinformation, and crucial omissions ensures that people are, more often than not, kept in a state of grogginess - and hideously manipulated by politicians of both the Democrat and Republican parties - who are beholden to the relatively tiny, avaricious corporate elite of Wall Street, et al. This of course is not democracy. It is corporate plutocracy - de facto corporate rule.

An increasing number of people in this nation know, for example, that U.S. wars and military adventures throughout this planet have little or nothing to do with the so-called “national security” for the many, and virtually everything to do with amassing wealth and profit for the corporate few. Yet, like unwitting inmates in an insane asylum, the people repeatedly find themselves as the cannon fodder and political ping-pong balls of the corporate-owned Democrat and Republican parties. Even when Barack Obama - the corporate-backed Chief Executive of the U.S. government - signed, on the weekend of December 31, 2011 the heinous and draconian indefinite detention law (i.e. the so-called National Defense and Authorization Act) into existence, many if not most of the U.S. populace were in a state of slumber, asleep - utterly oblivious to the fact that the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution had been made, in real terms, null and void in this land.

Now, even the pretense of human and constitutional rights has been obliterated. Why is this? How could this have happened? The answer is not complicated. Too many people were asleep. They were asleep thanks to the corporate-stream “news” media and the corporate politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties who are in service to the small corporate elite of this nation. The vast majority of people in the U.S. had, in the words of Malcolm X, been “bamboozled” and “hoodwinked” yet again.

However, the illusion of democracy in the U.S. continues to be propagated by the corporate-controlled politicians, their systemic gate-keepers, and the corporate-stream media. In this corporate selection year of 2012, the twin demons - the Democratic and Republican parties - are urging people to vote for one corporate-controlled candidate or another, as if participating in such a fraud has anything whatsoever to do with democracy. It does not. In fact, it has everything to do with perpetuating a deception and an illusion. Everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow women and men would do well to remember the words of Albert Camus: “What better way to enslave a man than to give him [or her] a vote and tell him he is free.”

The everyday people of this nation, and by extension the entire world, are in grave peril. This cannot be over emphasized.

It is the entire irretrievably corrupt, hypocritical, corporate-controlled U.S. system that must be unequivocally changed by everyday people. It must be totally and utterly scrapped and creatively replaced with a model that is a work in progress - a model that is based upon collective human needs, not avaricious corporate greed, economic austerity and perpetual wars.

Beware of the systemic gate-keepers masquerading as “progressives,” etc., who will urge that you vote for Barack Obama, or for that matter, for some other corporate-backed clone, be they Democrat or Republican. One does not change the system by supporting it. The first step in changing the system is recognizing that it does not serve, first and foremost, the interests and needs of everyday ordinary people, and that said system must be utterly dispensed with. We must have, as Malcolm X stated, “a thorough understanding of what confronts” us “and the basic causes that produce it.” The “basic cause” of the pain of the people, in this instance, is the system itself and those who perpetuate it, regardless of whatever guise it may be under in which these systemic gate-keepers function.

As Malcolm X further stated, the people must “first” be awakened. Then and only then will we “get action” on the part of everyday people. Notwithstanding their misleading rhetoric, the systemic gate-keepers and their corporate masters are terrified at the very thought of people waking up to who and what they really are and what precisely this system is really about. This is why, for example, both the Democrats and Republicans are busily attempting to co-opt, neutralize and/or otherwise crush the Occupy Movement in this nation. It should be remembered that these systemic gate-keepers are, in essence, pernicious parasites pimping the pain of the people. In the words of Steve Biko: ““The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

The awakening of the people has already begun but it has much further to go. It is a long and protracted struggle, filled with many challenges and pit-falls, but in the final analysis, with collective creativity, persistence, and adherence to principles, the everyday people will prevail!

Each one teach one. 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.