OPPRESSION
by Mark Evans
IS There oppression in America today, the "land of the free and the
home of the brave"? Is it not oppression that there are fifteen million
homeless souls in America, driven like cattle who can find no pasture, marginalized,
and treated like criminals by the law?
Is it not oppression that the land, once taken by force from the Native
Americans, was stolen again and given to the railroad magnates and the timber
barons, who have raped and looted it these seven generations?
The earth does not belong to any man, nor should it. The Indians knew that.
We are merely stewards upon it. The Torah also states, "The land shall
not be sold forever." But they have parted my garments among them and
over my vesture they have cast lots.
Is it not oppression that four hundred white men control seventeen trillion
dollars worth of the resources of North America? Have you seen the jungle
camps or visited the cardboard shelters of those who are without? Is it
not oppression that seven families control five grain cartels that control
the merchandising of all the grain of the world? All barley, all corn, all
millet, oats, rye and soybeans, all wheat, rice and potatoes-controlled
by seven families?
Tom Jefferson's vision of an educated, agrarian America of yeoman farmers
was crushed by the system of usury-debt capitalism, excessive railroad rates,
and brokers gambling in grain futures on the stock exchanges of New York,
London, and Chicago.
The troika of bankers, grain cartelists, and businessmen-in-government betrayed
the promise of a continent for prosperity (true abundance, not the chimerical
promise of politicians) that existed in potential for the many, but was
murdered by the greed of a few.
IS IT NOT oppression that the family farm has been sold down the river and
that Agribusiness has gobbled up the Midwest, that Standard Oil owns more
than a quarter of the Central Valley, that the lumber cartels-Georgia Pacific,
Boise-Cascade, Louisiana-Pacific, and Weyerhauser occupy the forests?
IS IT NOT oppression that the powers-that-be are building more prisons to
house "repeat offenders"-America's angry children, who grew up
twisted, victims of a vicious system that was constructed to benefit the
two percent who own ninety-eight percent of the wealth?
IS IT NOT oppression that the CIA runs the heroin and cocaine traffic into
the U.S., while the DEA, state and local law enforcement hypocritically
bust non-union drug dealers, pushers who haven't paid their dues, and the
occasional user, for window-dressing? The War on Drugs is a War on Us-the
tailor-made excuse to implement police-state, neofascist programs such as
the Crime Bill. Who benefits? It is only the bond-holding class.
Ah, the bond-holding class, that worthy elite of fine old families, oppressors
all, whose greed knows no bounds, whose insolence is amazing. A people conscienceless,
amoral, who would have us build bigger prisons to keep all those "ruffians"
and "ne'er-do-wells" off the streets. A dialogue inside a bond-holder's
head:
"Yes, and while we're at it, why don't we just throw in those poets,
Marxist intellectuals, radicals, social agitators, and other trouble-makers.
Three strikes you're out are two too many. How about one strike? After all,
nature abhors a vacuum, and a prison, once built, must be kept full.
"But for the present, just build the prisons and the "reeducation"
labor camps. Prisons always run in the red, and we like that because the
banks which have bought the bond issues the states have floated to build
the prisons, tender us a tidy dividend.
"By and by we'll mount a media blitz on television explaining why we
have to put these incorrigibles to work in prison to pay their way, so to
speak, and then we'll job them out to slave for a few measly cents a day
to corporations which, of course, we own."
It is oppression that the establishment media has propagandized the suburbanites
into believing the answer is bigger prisons and that the middle classes
have believed the lie.
It is oppression also that says "There are too many people, and that
the homeless are "useless eaters." But this lie, more subtle,
has been tailored to fill the pipes of liberals and "deep ecologists"
and acquiesces to the holocaust of the homeless.
Let those who think there are too many people fly over the vast, uninhabited
former forests of the Pacific Northwest now decimated and looted by the
Wall Street junk bond cronies of Reagan and Bush, but owned, still, by a
very few corporations, which inherited or purchased them from the timber
barons, who got them by fraud.
"Exodus ," Bob Marley said. But where to go? And how to get there?
The real struggle here, as in Chiapas, is land reform. The means to end
the oppression of the homeless? A series of class-action suits to nationalize
the looted timber lands and open them to homesteading again. And then the
homeless refugees and they who have no work may do the work that's to be
done-the planting of the pear and pine, the apple and the fir, the walnut
and the vine, and corn and cucumber. And thus restore the earth that has
been raped and robbed by greed and lust and the oppressor's hand.
Mark Evans
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