January 21, 2012
Dear Member of Congress
Although some in Congress state now they oppose SOPA and PIPA, the American people don't believe for a minute that a corrupt Congress will not find a way of selling out to the highest bidders on this or any other issue, so to be clear: SOPA/PIPA would put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. SOPA and PIPA would build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.
In a world in which politicians choose to allow corporations with big money to regulate the Internet based on the influence of big money, Wikipedia — and sites like it — cannot survive.
Congress says it's trying to protect the rights of copyright owners, but the "cure" that SOPA and PIPA represent is worse than the disease. SOPA and PIPA are not the answer: they would fatally damage the free and open Internet. Congress says this won’t affect American sites. Well what’s to stop other countries from doing to us what you want to do to them? What’s to stop corporations from manipulating the laws and abuse them, simply to wipe out competitors that provide free services and content? What’s to stop them from using this law to make the Internet another source of milking the masses which is all they ever want even if it means destroying lives, businesses, jobs and our very economy as we have seen them do already?
No one, absolutely no one, anywhere, here or abroad, should start screwing with the Internet. Since government can’t abridge freedom of speech and the press, in an end run around the First Amendment, Congress has consolidated the media and given corporate media in the hands of FIVE people, the power to censor, filter, spin and propagandize our right to know, which is the purpose of a free press. Now Congress proposes to do the same thing with the Internet: give corporations the legal means to censor, filter and decide what information we are to have, what we should know, because the government can’t.
We are sick of living in a plutocratic oligarchy. We are sick of the corruption. Stop selling our Bill of Rights, our health, our military, our income, our environment, our freedoms and our very lives to the highest bidders. Passing legislation simply because lobbyists can buy our corrupt Congress is abhorrent to the constitution and everything we hold dear in a democracy.
With the occupy movement and the Tea Party pulling together on this issue Congress and the oligarchs its serves should think of the consequences of a people united rising up to take back their country from a government so corrupt it revolts the American people.
The Founders designed a government of, by and for the people, not of, by and for the highest bidders. It is cause for a massive uprising at this point.
Most Sincerely
YOUR NAME
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