Artist/Band:
Immortal Technique
Lyrics for Song: Open Your Eyes
Lyrics for Album: The 3rd World [2008]
We're here because of you
We're here because you were there
We've arrived from every corner of the planet to this
nation to seek the fulfillment of a promise of America.
We were promised a better life in our home countries,
where we were told that privatizing water and electricity
will make things run more efficiently.
Instead the quality remained almost the same and the
price was increased until it became an unaffordable luxury.
Some corporations are more efficient than government,
but their motivation is not the health or the well
being of the people; it's only about profit,
everything else: their image,
their human resources, their public relations,
only exist to protect the reality behind it.
Once upon a time, we were told that nationalization
would prevent growth by limiting competition; that
our countries were nothing without the companies that
invested in us and so they privatized everything.
Everything in our country was owned by people that
had no connection to our culture,
by those who never had our interests at heart,
they didn't care about our survival or well being,
they just wanted to turn a profit by raping our land,
by exploiting our people, our industry and our resources.
They took everything we built and made it theirs.
First by creating racism to justify slavery,
building the capital for capitalism,
and then when they gave us what they call liberty,
everything we had was still owned by them.
Our governments told us that socialism was the real
enemy and that we would have freedom,
but the foreign powers and corporations were the ones
with real freedom; the freedom to take all the wealth
generated by our work and our land and gave us only
a small percentage of the scraps from the table.
Their lust for power and their greed drove them to
betray not only us but themselves and the word of their own God.
(Open your eyes before you die)
And while some used missionaries and donations to off
set this abuse, other countries and companies were
blatant with their crimes,
using war, disease, and sanctions that killed millions.
They supported corrupt governments that were almost
like the old slave masters in their oppression of the
people, because their loyalty was to those who enable
them, restored them and kept them in power,
they became the bastard children of American industry,
kleptocracy, governments of thievery.
They protected the corporations and went to war against
their own people to preserve those profits.
The puppet rulers were given billions of US tax dollars
to fund civil wars, right wing death squads,
execute political dissidents,
sympathetic clergy and, even overthrow democratically
elected governments. And so the age of revolution began
again; they painted it as godless terrorist versus
the free world and the market.
But the free market has never been free,
because the market does not regulate itself.
It is manipulated like a puppet and it survives because
of its image. Destroy the image and the enemy will die.
Such is the same in the rap industry.
But the major label super powers treat the underground
like the 3rd world. When they need new assets,
new artists to prostitute a side-ins and put on a shelf to use their songs
When they needed new concepts,
music and publishing to steal from the producers,
they came to the underground,
to the 3rd world, they took our culture,
our property and our industry and our resources,
even using our own people to help them exploit us.
But behind the mask of efficiency,
they claimed that we need them to succeed.
They're no better than us; they're economic advertising
was always a lie, a few got rich but most were given
an illusion of wealth, almost as if it was designed for failure.
Opportunity comes at the price of soul and the music,
so remember what they are underneath the fancy architecture,
glittering rented jewelry,
the cars, the IMF loans, the seeds with suicide genes,
20 year contracts and oil bloody money.
Build your defenses my independent brothers and sisters.
They'll stop at nothing to get what they want.
They paint the 3rd world
(underground) as savage and backward.
But the super powers are no less corrupt; they've just
learned to disguise it better,
'cause they fix elections too,
they embezzle tax money, they go to war for resources,
they fund terrorism for their own benefit,
and when there's enough at stake.
.. history's taught us that they'll even assassinate their own president.
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