PREFACE

 

"The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed."

—William Jennings Bryan

The preceding quotation often has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln, when, in fact, it was written by William Jennings Bryan, who served as Secretary of State from 1913–1915 under president Woodrow Wilson and was a great orator.1 Known as the Great Commoner, Bryan gave a speech on what a growing number of us know now: that the rich shall always be with us, just like the poor.1 In fact, if the rich are with us it is a certainty that a lot of poor folks will be also. If it were not for the rest of us to take from, where would the accumulation of money for the rich come from? They exist from ripping off others. The tool that the rich use to rip poor people off is called "interest." Calling it that is a masterpiece of double speak. It's called interest because it is one of the most boring goddamned things in the world.

Eternal vigilance means to keep bringing down the rich and pulling up the poor over and over again. Kind of like tilling the soil, if we are responsible, loving human beings we are plowing under the rich and elevating the poor constantly. And if we do it just exactly the right way, we won't deplete the soil. Sadly, this kind of action is usually just one of the kinds of agriculture that extends the lifetime of the soil for a longer period of time so folks don't notice the gradual decline, from Eden to dust bowl. Both industrial farming and eternal vigilance are ultimately unsustainable and destructive without the renewal that only their death can provide.

We need a more radical form of "crap rotation" right now because the soil that is our society soon will no longer be nurturing. When I say "we," I mean all of us, and most specifically, I mean the disappearing middle class. We are the last ones left to get that the same wealthy upper class scum who are the perpetual traitors of our poorer brethren are ripping us off too. Profiting from rip-offs is the essence of corporate capitalism. And corporations don't die. The Supreme Court says they are people. So they are people who never die. It's no wonder then that as each new generation of young people come up they are so easily fucked over by these persons, many of whom are way over a hundred years old, and practiced in the art of taking and not giving back.

As long as we keep using the system invented ten thousand years ago of locking up the food, private ownership, and waging war to protect the store, the eternal conflict between the rich and the other rich will keep on keeping on and those of us in the middle will keep on paying for it. To hell with the poor and the middle class, unless they are needed for cannon fodder or to build something for the rich. This is soil depletion of the worst kind. But it is slow enough that, like the frog in the infamous heating water in the pot story (which is a lie, by the way) that is too weak to jump out of the pot before realizing he is being boiled alive.

The terrible message of current times, demonstrated by the weakness and im-potency of President Barack Obama to pull off any of his campaign promises during his first years in office, is that we have no choice but to re-empower the "money powers that prey upon the nation" if we want to keep the poor and middle class from losing their shelter and their means of getting around and declining to the point of dying out. Propping up the banks and the car companies is like trying to restore slavery so the slaves can survive. In fact, it was restoring slavery so the slaves could survive. That is what Barack Obama has been doing since being elected, including making health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies more entrenched and protected than ever in the name of health care "reform." The first black president is the ultimate achievement of the rich. They have attained dominance. The rich have won. The class war is over. They have all the money and all the troops. And what they have structurally in place cannot be beaten from within. This system cannot be reformed from within.

Here is how the system works. Here are three steps you can use to fuck more and more people out of their money and have it accumulated by fewer and fewer people.

1. Form a corporation that lives forever. Start fucking people out of their money. If they litigate, keep the court case going until they run out of money or time and die waiting. Remember, you live forever and have access to almost unlimited resources, but they are limited to a mere lifetime and what they can scrape together.

2. Make sure political campaigns in your system are financed by contributions. As long as you can keep this up, corporations will control the political system and the economy, simply because, with extremely rare exceptions, no one can win an election without corporate money.

3. Keep fucking the people out of their money; only talk them into paying you for keeping it from them as well. Let a few new people in now and then who want to have some of the money you are fucking other people out of. These are called bankers and accountants. That's why they call it, when you get fucked out of all of your money—bankruptcy. Keep up recruitment of hucksters to maintain control. Reward them with big bonuses for being good at ripping off from others an amount much greater than what they get.

These three steps are a habit network that is ensconced in corporate capitalism and sustained by the law of the land.

The only thing being elaborated on now is that the corporations that keep track of the money that people are being fucked out of can fuck them out of a little bit more with loans. The so-called banking industry gets paid for (1) keeping track of just how much the original corporations have fucked people out of, and then (2) loaning un-payable amounts of play money to the fuckees when they can't make ends meet, and then (3) using the bad loans to create more phantom wealth based entirely on lies. These packages of worthless lies are then sold to investors with the claim that they have value. These are called derivatives. It means rich crooks derive more money by stealing it from whoever of the other crooks has a little bit left.

An ever-increasing number of people worldwide are having the slowly-dawning realization of just how true all of this is, and with it there is a growing anger at the perpetrators. And soon, no amount of lying in commercials and other forms of propaganda will serve to prop things up anymore. This system is destined to self-destruct. It is unsustainable. We are going down.

Can't We Come up with Something Better than This?

As one last impotent, sheepish, and whiny protest, as the great majority of us are flushing down the toilet bowl of economic history, I ask: Can't we come up with something better than this system? Particularly since the rich corporate cannibals are now, without any doubt, destroying the world, as we speak. Is just letting that

happen really the best we can do?

We just say, "Yes, Massah… Whatever you say, Massah… Here have another bite of my child, Massah… Hope you enjoy your meal, Massah… Thank you for letting me serve you my children, Massah."

Cannibalism Exits Right Now

The truth is that a rapacious form of cannibalism currently exists and is growing more powerful every day. This system is run by fools and psychopaths who are laughing all the way to the bank and, once there, they are laughing like hell with the bankers.

We are all in need of a worthy substitute for this system (and I do mean all of us, even the rich) or we shall all be eaten soon, and suddenly, billions of us at once. We must bring about the end of rich people rule in some quick, ecologically-sound fashion or we are almost all going to die from it. This system is called corporate capitalism or, as I have become fond of calling it, korporate kannibalism.

Corporations are the front for personal greed and the malice aforethought of rich, greedy people. And even worse, evidence provided in this book seems to indicate that, given the right circumstances almost all of us would be fundamentally the same as rich, greedy people. Apparently, according to valid research, almost all of us would fuck people out of their money until they died, given the chance, and knowing we could get by with it. This is, as they say, "only human nature." We apparently cannot "heal" or "cure" or "change" this form of cannibalism in any reliable way. Our best hope is to simply use it.

The Korporate Kannibal Kookbook is about the problem being its own solution, or, in other words, cannibalism being the answer to corporate cannibalism. It is also about the greater virtue of this new cannibalism, which is the essence of compassion because it is, by far, the most humane approach to the upcoming big die-off for humanity, which is structurally in place and without drastic interference, bound to happen. Without radical change to the current course of history, without radical intervention, we are doomed, soon, to almost all (or all) die at once and lose our chance at further, more cooperative, and more conscious participation in evolution.

The cannibalism I advocate merely involves feeding a very small number (relatively speaking) of rich people to a whole lot of poor people, and also taking all of those rich people's property and re-distributing it to the rest of us. This is simple, elegant, appropriate, just, fitting, and virtuous, and I expect you will be as convinced as I am, perhaps in another paragraph or two.

The Empire Is Consuming Us, So Let's Name Names and Get Cookin'

Believe me. The numbers are mind blowing. Just the top twelve hundred richest people, or just the leaders of the top one hundred or so corporations is all we have to do in! By my estimates, killing and eating less than .001 percent of humanity, and taking all their shit would solve damned near all of our problems! Redistributing their wealth and possessions could save half of humanity! That is, by killing and eating less than .001 percent we save 50 percent of humankind! The scheme involves sacrificing twelve hundred and ninety-two people, almost all of whom are rich, fat, thieving scum, to ensure the lives and well being of three billion other people, mostly children.

This is the simplest, most effective, and tastiest solution (if we cook 'em right) to damned near everything that is killing us by the tens of thousands on a daily basis and soon to be threatening the entire future of humanity.

Then, when our delicious solution is carried out properly, using the fairest system of justice the world has ever known, (this book goes into detail about six other big ideas other than eating corporate cannibals.) The system of justice I referred to above is based on actually knowing the truth about what is going on—coming right up in chapter 8, "The Truth Machine" —so we can re-establish balance.

Those of us who remain can establish a maximum amount of property that any human being (or collective of human beings, such as a corporation) is permitted to own. We will have the option of eating anyone who violates the standard. And we can revoke the corporate charters of any institution that surpasses the limit of what may be earned and kept. They can be discorporated, much like their leaders will have been, unless they pay the bribe to avoid being consumed.

This book is a guidebook on how really to be a consumer—with some taste and refinement—and to keep consumerism from consuming us by consuming a bit more selectively.

What the Hell Happened to Me?

I hardly know myself anymore. I used to be known by some great labels—Civil Rights Leader, Non-violent Anti-war Protestor, Psychotherapist, Author of Books and Articles about Love, Forgiveness, and Permissive Child Rearing. I was the picture of compassion.

I Googled myself to rediscover my identity, and even that didn't work. I am fed up with being owned and operated by assholes, even if they are like I would be if I was them, and I have come up with a solution to our mutual problem. It is a good solution, but it has damaged my image a bit. Damned if I know what happened. Something happened to me.

I think what happened to me is something like what might have happened to you. A rude awakening to reality occurred. My idealism fantasy died. I got pissed off at people for hurting people I loved and after I worked at it and forgave a lot of enemies, one day I didn't fucking get over it anymore. This is a big shift, maybe backwards, from my former self, the author of popular books in the Radical Honesty series written over the last twenty years.

One thing that happened was I grew older. Like Sigmund Freud and dozens of other clinical practitioners throughout history, as I grew older, I found my initial interest in healing and helping people turning from individual and family and marital problems to community and global and universal problems. And now the source of both sets of problems appears to be the same. It's called civilization. When Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents he was pretty much disillusioned with human beings too.

The fundamental prescription offered in my previous books was based on my experience as a clinical psychologist in Washington, D.C. where I helped a lot of people live happier lives. I have books of stories of lives changed for the better. I know that what I did with people worked most of the time. People who were suffering found relief. Radical Honesty was about listening, connecting, and being fully present—like good parents, teachers, therapists, uncles, or aunts listen to the people they care about and the children they love. The best book of mine where the outcome of good listening shows up is The Truthtellers: Stories of Success by Radically Honest People (Sparrowhawk Publications, 2004). In that book people tell stories of the results of reconnecting with people from whom they have been alienated and through undoing lies and being honest, forgiving them. This honest listening and honest response is done in order to solve both individual personal problems and conflict of a social nature in families.

All this healing being brought about, I realized, was occuring, nestled in the context of the merciless and murderous corruption of the government of the United States in the last half of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first.

The theme of all my earlier books was always the same. It was about redemption and forgiveness through honesty. I wrote that people, by being radically honest, can escape the jail of their constantly judging minds, listen and connect, actually hear what others are saying and get what they are feeling, and become friends with the people around them, have empathy for them, and bond with them anew. They start out wanting to break through the barriers of habit and the phoniness of their established, superficial relationships based on lies and pretence. They end up feeling that the other person has actually broken through to them, and stuck with them, and both parties are grateful for it.

Now I think this same kind of therapy offers a healing greatly needed on a larger social scale for the sake of our survival as a species. And, as did Freud and Jung and Erikson and Maslow and many others, when I attempt to apply what worked to make people in families and relationships less miserable, anxious, depressed, and conflicted— and to make some even happier—it appears that what works on a smaller scale looks like it could work fine on a larger scale. That could be simple, except for one thing: the negative influence of rich people and their wars and deprivation-based economy. We can't simply forgive rich people for past sins and then let them continue on in the same way. The escalation of their ways and means of murder for profit is now killing the world.

That is why, after having spent a lifetime helping people bring renewal, love, and forgiveness into being, I now write a book about killing and eating rich people—because the wealthy ones I am suggesting we eat are themselves eating people at a merciless and continuously escalating rate! Their apparently endless appetite will only expand unless we do something drastic about their mercenary, murderous, and wasteful ways. They kill children for breakfast. They fuck children for entertainment (literally and figuratively, as they include the Catholic Church and sex trafficers, and other gigantic gangland corporate entities) before lunch, and fuck over children for supper. And they kill some of them for amusement in the evenings and starve thousands upon thousands at night through neglect and unconsciousness.

I cannot begin to make this sound as bad as it actually is. I can only hope to offend your sensibilities to the core in hopes that you will awaken and join us and help get the goddamned barbeque pit ready for these perverse monsters.

For the sake of all children and innocents, and all the other current victims of predatory capitalism, I say let's kill and eat the cannibals who are killing and eating our children as we speak. The most efficient and compassionate thing to do for the sake of humanity is to immediately capture coporate capitalists and kill them and redistribute their wealth and their protein. We need to shoot them right now to stop them from killing more of our children. I can think of nothing more humane and effective or merciful than the immediate slaughter of the slaughterers in the midst of their slaughter. There is not enough time to try to inform them and transform them. They are incurable anyway. Corporate capitalism is a generic disease implicit in civilization. The United States of America has just formalized it more effectively than ever before in history. We are the evil empire.

What is this? Have I gone insane? No. I am in the process of going sane! It may be hard for you to recognize this from the standpoint of your own craziness, but if you can suspend judgment and consider the possibility that I might have a point, and take in a little more data… Just get this one thing: Killing of humans by humans is happening and will continue for sometime into the future regardless of what you or I do. We can only influence who gets killed and save as many innocents as we can. This is the way things are.

This level of compassion is not the dreamworld of non-violence in which I myself have been a delusional participant for forty years. That has not worked. To the degree that it did work it was because a violent threat loomed on the horizon and the retreat of the perpetrators of classist violence was able to avoid a bloodier defeat. I am tired of corporate capitalists killing my children, my brothers and sisters, my beloved friends, my fellow human beings, and my fellow living creatures. Rich Americans are my enemy and yours and the enemy of humankind. The killing fields the world over are created out of, and for the sake of, greed for greater wealth for the already wealthy.

I will give you the complete evidence in this book, which is based on thorough research by people I love and trust, so that you can see why I want to kill corporate capitalist cannibals and feed them to the hungry and what is left of the middle class, and eat my share of the motherfuckers myself, in a ritual designed to deepen my compassion and committment to loving others. I know this sounds crazy and I put it that way because I want you to see the contrast writ large. Stick with me a little longer and see if this makes sense once you have more information. It at least makes much more sense than conventional wisdom and morality.

The Dilemma of Empathy Bringing about Murder

We are all fundamentally empathic beings. All of us. Even the ones who are too sick to know it. Even many corporate capitalists. Almost all of us have some compassion, except for the true sociopaths, who unfortunately are primarily the ones now in charge because they have organized to control the rest of us mere neurotics. By writing their own self-protection into law, they have built a system to sustain their uncaring and ill-informed form of cannibalism. Dick Cheney is a prefect example.

We all need intimate affiliation with others in order to be healthy and happy. But, as I have pointed out in a half dozen other books, we live in a culture in which intimacy is blocked at every turn, because phoniness, secrecy, and lying are contrary to intimacy and they are the social norm. If intimacy is to happen within the system, someone has to charge for it and make a profit. Intimacy for sale, since intimacy requires honesty, is a very hard thing to pull off, because a huckster has a hard time being honest when getting the sale is the most important thing. What results from that attempt is a pathetic sentimental substitute for intimacy and a kind of prostitution that is not even that much fun. Corporate capitalism is what has provided the opening for the sociopaths to take charge and set up the worldwide economic order to assure that things will stay that way—commercial, cheap, phony entertainment instead of love, truthiness instead of truth, husk instead of seed, bullshit instead of honesty.

At both the individual and collective levels, we are living in a world where we are entertained by each other's performances in front of each other in the daily dance of routine superficiality, but we don't get nourished by contact at a simpler and deeper level. This discrepancy between the "act" and the actual experience of being in contact is now institutionalized, codified, and taught in every second in school, at home, on television, and even on the Internet. Civilization now depends on TV and the Internet. As long as we remain civilized, we will remain defeated and doomed.

How do we fix that? Most people know the sensation of disconnection vaguely and intuitively and feel like they are starving, but they consider it to be normal because everyone else is disconnected and starving, too. And like any good AA member will tell you, the first step is to "admit that we have a problem."

First, we have to somehow withdraw from the ongoing booming, buzzing confusion of the world game we are all playing, where we live in abstractland instead of our bodies, and we are not related to gravity and each other as present-tense, noticing beings. In my work, I have called the mutual breakthrough to contact with sensation, gravity, and others "radical honesty." Honesty is the basis of all intimacy. And intimacy is the basis of happiness, and we are only happy if we are authentically connected because we are essentially social animals.

Without authentic intimate contact with others, we shrink up and die. The institutionalization of the shrunken and the dead is called corporate capitalism. It tries to substitute entertainment-for-a-fee, for the nourishment of commonplace experience in contactful relationships with others.

The wisdom my clients and I have gained from thirty years of clinical practice and doing tons of workshops, does apply to healing the social alienation and our murder-for-profit culture. But not without full confrontation and taking back from the bloody hands of our oppressors—by any means possible—that which has been taken from us. Our empathy with the great majority of the oppressed must bring us to stop the opressors and put into place something that keeps them down.

I want to be fair, including being fair to rich people. What I am proposing can be done so much more fairly than the careless slaughter currently in place and sanctioned by the fat fucks in commerce and Congress who are engaged in conventional corruption. Some of these goddamned killers and child molesters need killing— and quickly—and I know how we can do it. We could save billions of lives by redistributing the wealth and protein of perhaps as few as a thousand people. Can you believe it? It's true! I'll show you!

This is tough love, tough compassion. The toughest. But practical. It's a new system for killing and eating old fat fucks, rich from a lifetime of murder, instead of letting them kill children. It is a terrible, but necessary form of practical compassion, and a hell of a lot less terrible than the slaughters, poisonings, torturous killing, and deprivation of innocents going on as we speak.

But you might as well nip your peacenik tendencies in the bud. If you think you can save the children without killing the fat fucks, and fighting, killing, and eating some of their goddamned goons as well, you are delusional. I am not just a guy in a diner. I am a good man, an intelligent person, someone who loves people, a clinical psychologist, a best-selling author, father, friend, and successful member of the human community of my time. I was born in the lower class in America and have advanced to the middle class—if you can call that an advance. I have degrees and enough money to live well and travel the world. This is my considered professional opinion after a lifetime of service to others: Eat the rich! Now! Take all their shit and pass it around! Give it back to the people it has been stolen from!

There are good reasons why I have reached this conclusion. Here, is one, just one, example of more information to come: a simple beginning fact for you to chew on. This is the way wealth is distributed right now, today, in the United States of America. As Joe Bageant says in his book Rainbow Pie (Portobello Books, 2010), "Given the terrible polarization of wealth and power in this country (the top 1 percent hold more wealth than the bottom 45 percent combined, and their take is still rising), we can no longer even claim equal opportunity for a majority. Opportunity for the majority to do what? Pluck chickens and telemarket to the ever-dwindling middle class?"2

The polarization of wealth needs to be faced and handled on a global scale immediately, because it is absolutely deadly to our own citizens and to people throughout the rest of the world.

Soon there will be a mass realization of a simple fact: There are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them. We could change who is being served and who is serving this meal. I am going sane. Come on and join me. If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em! Let's get cookin'.

Brad Blanton

Sparrowhawk Farm

November 1, 2010