Mad as Hell -- Recall the Legislators

Petition. We, the undersigned, ARE MAD AS HELL, AND WE'RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE. We've been growing more aware of legislators acting contrary to the public's interests, and we don't see any reason to wait until November 2010 to throw them out. We hereby call upon our fellow citizens everywhere to join in organizing to RECALL and REPLACE legislators who do not support all of the following DEMANDS.

That's basically the petition. But this national petition is merely an attempt to gather consensus and momentum; each local organizing committee will need to draw up its own list of demands. The following demands -- for peace, healthcare, labor rights, and an end to corporatocracy -- are merely suggestions.

1. BRING ALL THE TROOPS HOME NOW. Our occupations, bombs, and torture make us less safe, by making new enemies faster than they kill the old ones. The real "lesson" of the Iraq war, the Vietnam war, and the American Revolutionary war, is that a determined people will outlast a foreign occupation. The real "lesson" of 9/11 is that we are vulnerable even to poorly armed enemies; the only real protection is to become friends with everyone. We must end not just the current wars, but our entire tradition of belligerence: Our nation has been at war almost constantly for the past century, mostly for lies, ideology, and profiteering, not for defense. Expose the Military-Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower warned about. Close down our 750 overseas military bases. Close the SOA and CIA, who have propped up brutal dictatorships and overthrown democracies for the interests of a few corporations. Put on trial the death merchants (Boeing, Raytheon, Halliburton, Blackwater, etc.) and their pet congressmen, who have squandered trillions of dollars and millions of lives on unnecessary wars.

2. NATIONAL HEALTHCARE. It is time to stop pretending that "free enterprise" provides the best answer to everything. Our healthcare is vastly inferior to, and yet more costly than, the systems of Japan, Canada, and western Europe. Aetna, Kaiser, Humana, etc. have achieved record profits by increasing premiums and reducing benefits, leaving thousands to die needlessly. Put on trial for negligent homicide the executives of those companies, and the politicians they paid to ignore the public's overwhelming call for national healthcare.

3. LABOR RIGHTS. It is time to stop pretending that working people are a "special interest," or that management is somehow more deserving of rights, decent wages, or decision-making power than the people who do the actual work. Raise the minimum wage to a living wage; to do less is not only exploitive but stupid. (As auto tycoon Henry Ford explained, if workers are underpaid, they can't be consumers.) Full employment, literally. Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. And the politicians who claim "EFCA takes away choice" should be jailed for fraud.

4. END CORPORATE PERSONHOOD, CORPORATE WELFARE, AND CORPORATOCRACY. It is time to overturn the misguided 1886 Supreme Court decision that gave corporations the rights of people but not the vulnerabilities or responsibilities (you'll never see a corporation sleeping under a bridge or jailed for murder). Union Carbide paid only a tiny fine for poisoning Bhopal; Exxon stalled on paying for its 1989 oil spill until most of the plaintiffs had died; Coca Cola's murder of Colombian labor organizers goes unpublicized; the list goes on and on. Deregulation has brought us toxic toys and toxic mortgages, and has put at a competitive disadvantage those business people who are honest and who actually care about their community; it is time for massive re-regulation. Investigate the Federal Reserve. Replace so-called "free trade" with fair trade. When a business is "too big to fail," it should be owned and controlled by the people.

5. MANY OTHER ISSUES. For brevity, this page omits many other issues (civil liberties, sustainability, etc.). But your local organization can recall and replace your legislators for whatever reasons the public chooses.

6. REFORM THE NEWS MEDIA. We need to put on trial not only legislators for crimes listed above, but also the news media for their complicity in concealing those crimes.