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Freedom Speech at Liberty Hillby Byron De Lear Byron@DeLearforCongress.org Freedom Speech at Liberty Hill by Byron De Lear, Green candidate for US House of Representatives, California, 28th District Liberty Hill, San Pedro, *** Hello all champions of freedom here at Liberty Hill -- hello champions of peace. We are all gathered here today in the spirit of support for the freedoms any legitimate government is obligated to defend. The First Amendment freedoms of speech, religion, petition, the press - and of course the right to gather and assemble. But there has been a little 'dis-assembly' going on in this nation - a little 'de-construction', tearing down hard fought for protections and rights, taking away and redefining core American values into some Corporate-Big Brother Orwellian reality. Our nation now suffers the unwarranted spying and wire-tapping of Americans, with politicians using the war flag unfurled to justify the trampling of our precious Bill of Rights. This must stop - it has crossed a line. Today we are here to honor the work and life of Upton Sinclair and we come together to talk about what needs to be said. Sinclair said, "The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery." To expand on this shows that any division of industry strictly privatized becomes a form of unbalanced dominance - a subtle form of slavery. Another form of control and slavery today are the unjust sympathies of the main stream media and its predilection to support moneyed interest unconditionally. Some folks, well they can just buy a lot more First Amendment than others, can't they? This is un-American. In today's information and communications revolution freedom of speech is just not enough - for there are deafening channels of distribution that drown out any substantive dissent into virtual silence. A new conception of free speech must be heard. Equal and free speech must be heard. Defending the internet from being privatized will bring us closer to equal-free speech. Clean money and fair elections will take us incrementally towards equal-free speech. Getting the corrupting influence of big money out of our corridors of power will make equal and free speech that much louder. The point is to not just only react to the power grab and withdrawal of civil liberties, but to envision and forward what an upgrade to 'freedom of the press' and what a 21st century version of 'freedom of speech' would look like. Let me be unreasonable. All Americans should have access to today's basic tools of communication through community operated and publicly owned broadband. The internet is the new public library, isn't it? Information is a right -- not a commodity. James Madison said, "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and if a people intend to be their own self-governors they must wield the power that knowledge brings." This access to information and knowledge must be open to all Americans who seek it. Let's put the rung so far out of corporate reach that only the people can grasp it. ## The First Amendment that we are here to honor is in danger. Threatened by a cabal of legal wizards casting spells comprised of legalese summoning illusions to obfuscate their dangerous and outright violations of our Constitution. Justifying torture. Overturning a vote. Which brings us to another doctrinal crisis in our midst - which is the gross absence of any Constitutional language securing the basic foundations of our representative democracy: the vote. The cornerstone of our republic. Folks, today one of our most sacrosanct institutions -- our electoral system -- is under attack. It's under attack by the fact that the proprietary source code that instructs the voting machines as to how to count the vote is being held in private hands. Unconscionable. More than 1/3 of all votes cast in our nation are made on touch screen machines driven by proprietary source code - 90% of all votes cast are counted by software that's unverifiable. All the political wrangling and policy punditry that we spend our time, heart and soul upon becomes rather academic if we cannot tell who is voting for whom - or who is voting for what. Today voting standards are as wide and varied as the States are themselves, when you walk into a Home Depot in St. Louis Missouri and buy a 2 x 4 it's the same size 2 x 4 you would buy at a Home Depot in Los Angeles - a dollar in New York is the same dollar in Sacramento. Consider this -- overnight we've seen how ATM machines and UPC Barcode became an everyday fixture in our lives and in our economy - let's use that same stimulated motivation to secure and standardize the American voting experience. Why shouldn't our vote be counted as religiously as the IRS counts our tax dollars? Worthy of a constitutional amendment is the shoring up and protection of our most direct means to affirm the peoples will into our vaunted corridors of power. The 28th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States should coalesce all the different methods of counting our vote into one national standard - and guarantee the independent verification of ballot results. These pressing concerns our nation is now facing has lead me to run for the House of Representatives on the United States Green Party ticket. Guaranteeing a vetted electoral process and true freedom of the media are the kinds of solutions the evolution in politics will bring to our nation. Demand them. Own them. Stand for nothing less. Equal free speech and a secured electorate will reconstitute our nation into what's it's supposed to be - into what we know it could and should be. The America the dreamers dreamed. This article is the work of the author(s) only and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Green Party of the United States. If you wish to send a message to the editors regarding this or any item on the website, please email us.
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