[GPSCC-chat] Boxer & Feinstein are co-sponsors of PIPA / SOPA. Wikipedia tells you how to write them. Please do it.

[Spencer Graves]

Hello, All:


	  I'd like to encourage you to respond to the request from Wikipedia 
for you to contact your representatives and senators, asking them to 
support an open Internet including opposing the "Stop Online Piracy Act 
(SOPA) in the US House and the "PROTECT IP ACT (PIPA)" in the US Senate. 
  Senators Boxer and Feinstein are both co-sponsors of PIPA, so they 
need to hear your concerns about that bill.  Below please find emails I 
sent to Boxer, Feinstein, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren.


	  If you try any English language Wikipedia site today, it will provide 
a form that should make it fairly easy for you to contact your 
representatives and senators.


	  The primary issue is the future of democracy itself, and whether we 
will continue to increase welfare for the wealthy while further 
impoverishing the rest of us.  The commercial media in the US has a 
major conflict of interest in disseminating any honest information about 
the real political decisions in Washington.  They make huge profits 
selling ads during election years.  They also do not want to offend 
major corporations, who could spend their substantial advertising 
budgets elsewhere.  For these reasons, Most of the political reporting 
in the commercial media focuses on the "horse race", avoiding content 
such as the fact that ultrawealthy campaign contributors routinely get 
between $300 and $7,000 return on every dollar spent on campaign 
contributions.  Solyndra executives collected roughly $100,000 for Obama 
and received $500,000,000 in federal loan guarantees.  This only made 
the news, because Solyndra went bankrupt.


	  If you value democracy, please follow the invitation of Wikipedia to 
contact your US senators and representative.  My emails to them are 
copied below.  I also encourage you to forward this (or create your own 
version) and send to all your email contacts.


       Thanks,
       Spencer


#########################


email to Senators Boxer and Feinstein:


Dear Senator:


       Could you please reconsider your sponsorship of the PROTECT IP 
Act?  I side with the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Wikipedia, 
Google, and many others this legislation would have a chilling effect on 
public debate worldwide.  Beyond this, I believe this industry should be 
broken up, because they have abused their oligopolistic powers in many 
ways.  For example, from what I read, Pakistan is on the verge of 
becoming a failed state, largely because of biased reporting in the US 
that has pushed the Obama administration to do what they have done to 
create this fiasco.  Similarly, they stampeded the US into invading Iraq 
in 2003 by failing to report that Saddam Hussein had received his 
weapons of mass destruction from the US, according to the 1994 Riegle 
Report of the US Senate Committee on Banking, etc.


       Sincerely,
       Spencer Graves


email to Representative Lofgren:


Dear Representative Lofgren:


       Thanks for your opposition to SOPA.  I side with the Electronic 
Frontiers Foundation, Wikipedia, Google, and many others this 
legislation would have a chilling effect on public debate worldwide. 
Beyond this, I believe that the multiple extensions of the copyright law 
beyond the 28 years stipulated in the first copyright act passed in the 
US does NOT promote the useful arts, as described by the US 
constitution.  We need copyright law, but copyrights beyond 28 years 
simply provide rents to bribery.


       Sincerely,
       Spencer Graves


-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Technology Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph:  408-655-4567
web:  www.structuremonitoring.com