Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.

-Frantz Fanon

What better way to keep a people enslaved than to install one who purports to be of the oppressed, to do the oppressing.

Even as the shameless hypocrisy and rhetorical obfuscation (otherwise known as veiled lies) from Barack Obama, and his corporate-owned Democrat and Republican party cohorts, bombard the everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people of this nation, the deepening agony of ordinary people is obscured by the corporate-stream media�s endless, repackaged vomit.

The United States, thanks to Obama�s extended �Patriot� Act and his recently signed draconian indefinite detention law pertaining to U.S. citizens [i.e. the so-called National Defense Authorization Act], has quietly and without fanfare slipped into the abyss of legalized fascism. Yes, legalized fascism is still fascism by any other name. Sadly and dangerously, these occurrences have been overwhelmingly lost upon the psyches of so many people in this nation. The U.S. Constitution with its inherent rights, in the year 2012, is no longer worth even the paper upon which it was written. Indeed, democracy and de facto corporate-dictatorship cannot exist simultaneously. But who is paying attention?

The reign of terror, in the form of U.S. predator-drone missiles and bombs reigning down from the skies on the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north Africa, etc., far from diminishing, has been increased ten-fold by a corporate-owned U.S. president, congress, and judiciary that have gone stark raving mad. The everyday ordinary people of this nation and planet be damned!

Barack Obama, this double-talking, bait and switch, supposed former �community organizer� who mysteriously rose from relative obscurity to become U.S. president and Commander and Chief of the U.S. military has carried out what his blatant right-wing predecessors could not. He has ushered in a corporate-controlled legalized police-state in this nation accompanied by perpetual U.S. wars abroad. He has used the pulpit of his presidency to articulately propagate an endless stream of disinformation, misinformation, and egregious omission of a kind never before witnessed by this nation.

There were those who proclaimed that Barack Obama would, as U.S. president, bring about a �redistribution of wealth;� and indeed he has. Beginning with his trillion dollar criminal �bail out� of the Wall Street robber barons and his quashing of the need and desire for single payer universal health care, etc., he has adroitly overseen the largest de facto transfer of wealth from the 99% of everyday people to the wealthiest 1% of the corporate elite in the history of the United States - all in the cynical name of �hope and change.� Barack Obama oversaw the trillion dollar criminal �bail out� to the corporate elite of the banking, pharmaceutical, and insurance corporations, etc. while offering everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people pathetic, measly, propaganda-serving programs such as �cash for clunkers.� Be assured that now that we have no constitutional rights in this nation that are legally bound to be respected, Obama and his Democrat and Republican corporate accomplices will intensify their attacks against Social Security. Do not be fooled or misled by Obama�s bait and switch rhetoric.

In the very name of cutting the military / war budget, Barack Obama skillfully utilizes loopholes and hidden corporate and Pentagon military expenditures to in fact increase the U.S. budget for wars. He wages bloody wars while talking peace. He has enormously increased the amount of private, well-paid corporate paramilitary mercenaries in (for example) Iraq, while publicly declaring that the U.S. role in that nation has diminished. Be not deceived.

Of course Barack Obama could not effectively pull the wool over the eyes of everyday people without the compliance, complicity, and willing subservience of the U.S. corporate-stream �news� media. The role of the U.S. corporate press / media continues to be to keep everyday people psychologically imprisoned and stunted within the fallacious and insane so-called �lesser of the evils� paradigm of the Democrat and Republican parties. The evil of the two lessers is still abundantly evil and unacceptable. Under the present corporate-controlled system, both �democracy� and elections are an utter farce.

It is bitterly ironic that while Barack Obama has rhetorically adorned himself with the mantles of historical figures such Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he ignores Lincoln�s words that one �cannot fool all the people all the time;� and Obama�s bloody, warmongering polices make an utter mockery of the anti-war legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These are the realities pertaining to Barack Obama - the alleged former �community organizer.� Under this system of corporate domination, no serious or genuine �community organizer� of and for the people would ever receive many millions of dollars of corporate support (as has Obama) and subsequently be installed in the White House, as the head of the U.S. Empire. We must use our common sense!

Once more, we must reflect upon the need for total systemic change - which change will only be brought about - by the everyday people themselves / ourselves. Keep in mind that the draconian laws such as the �Patriot� Act and Indefinite Detention [NDAA] have nothing whatever to do with the security of everyday people and everything to do with the security for the corporate elite and the concomitant repression of everyday people in this nation and throughout this planet of Mother Earth.

Expect more lies and simultaneously more well-coordinated political repression from the U.S. government at home and abroad. But also expect to be a part of, and look to, the collective power of everyday people in this legitimate protracted struggle. If we do not collectively resist, then it will be us �for whom the bell tolls.� Let us, for the sake of this nation, and humanity as a whole, �fulfill� our �mission� rather than �betray it.�

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.