A DECLARATION OF CONCERNED CITIZENS
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the people to decry the political leaders that represent them, a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they declare the causes that impel them to their deep discontent.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, representatives of the people are chosen, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any representative becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to remove him or her from office peacefully and civilly, and to elect new representation, basing its decision on such principles and organizing its preferences in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect the people's common safety and happiness.
Prudence, indeed, dictates that political leaders established should not be deposed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shown that citizens are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by expelling the leaders to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under a growing despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such false representatives, and to choose new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the people of the United States for these last five years, and such is now the necessity that impels them to demand new leadership.
The history of the current executive, President George W. Bush, is a history of repeated injuries and abuses, all having in direct object the establishment of a tyranny of fear, economic domination, and Empire over the ordinary folk and natural environments of the Republic of these United States. To prove this, let clear facts be submitted to a candid world.
- He allowed the administration of his brother, Governor of the State of Florida, to remove insidiously the names of tens of thousands of American citizens from the voting rolls in the year two-thousand; he then permitted the judicial branch, not the people, to appoint him President of the United States, overturning more than two centuries of the democratic process of a free nation. Over the course of four years, he hastened the collapse of the integrity of the world's first modern democracy by allowing corporate privatization of the voting process.
- He refuses to cooperate with the legislative and executive branches of government, he schemes to overturn two centuries of senatorial procedure that would check his radical agenda, he expels journalists who ask honest questions, and he slanders those who would run against him for office.
- He pollutes willfully the free press of our free nation with staged public events and propaganda bought with our tax revenue.
- He presides willingly over the largest loss of jobs in a half century, and promotes as "good" the outsourcing of our work to foreigners.
- He enacted a series of massive tax cuts aimed directly for the benefit of a tiny elite of wealthy tycoons who want for nothing.
- He suppresses the wages of ordinary Americans, encourages them to drown in ever-increasing depths of debt, removes the safety net of common sense bankruptcy laws, and excites the usury of predatory lenders.
- He empties our treasury, creating the largest federal budget debt in our history, remarkably, from the largest federal budget surplus in our history.
- He carves out the largest trade deficit our nation has ever endured, and places our very economic security and independence in the hands of foreign creditors.
- He promotes the reckless privatization of the public trust of our Social Security, manufacturing a false crisis where there is none.
- He starves our schools, leaving countless innocent children behind.
- He withers federal money for our state and local resources, our police and our firemen, rendering the communities in which we live vulnerable to attack and natural disaster.
- He, from the party of Theodore Roosevelt, fosters monopolies by encouraging the mergers of multi-national conglomerates that pledge no allegiance to our country, its constitution, its first amendment, its labor laws, or its people.
- He kept among his closest associates and best campaign contributors a billionaire who effected the largest business fraud and bankruptcy in the history of the United States, while simultaneously engineering manufactured electricity blackouts to the undefended citizens of our nation.
- He awarded, with our tax dollars, the private company of Halliburton a multi-billion dollar government contract, for which it was not obliged to compete with other companies, and which currently offers compensation to his Vice President, who, while employed with them, illegally profiteered with a state sponsor of terrorism.
- He poisons our rivers, dirties our skies, razes our forests, scoffs at the proven reality of global warming, ransoms our future health for the quick profits of corporations.
- He enjoys premier health care at America's expense, and under his watch deprives tens of millions of uninsured Americans of realistic access to care.
- He, from the party of Abraham Lincoln, divides America by religion, by gender, by race, and by sexual orientation in order to cultivate the baser instincts of his supporters.
- He exhibits no understanding of a founding principle of our free nation, the separation of church and state. Proud of his record of executions in Texas as governor, he often parades his belief in a "culture of life."
- He calls it virtuous that he does not read the news, he has difficulty reading speeches written for him, and he shows a lack of curiosity or care in matters that is alarming in a chief executive.
- He spreads clouds of fear over our great land in order to restrict our liberties, and to distract attention away from his failures and his abuses.
- He presided over the worst attack ever to be perpetrated on our shores. He and his family hold long-standing and lucrative business ties to the Saudi Arabian family of the mastermind of that attack.
- He has labeled, recklessly and without regard for history, his war against terror a crusade.
- He cruelly opposed the surviving family members of the September 11 attacks in their efforts to create a bi-partisan commission to investigate those attacks.
- He was negligent regarding the security of our nation prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, failing to take heed of a report, read to him while on vacation, that clearly stated al-Qaeda's determination to attack within the United States.
- He decided upon an unprovoked invasion of Iraq long before seeking the constitutionally mandated congressional authority to do so.
- He ubiquitously, loudly, and aggressively stated cloudy, unvetted and unproven intelligence reports as fact in order to gain support for an invasion of Iraq. To harvest his illegitimate war, "facts were being fixed around the policy."
- He removed important intelligence and military resources away from the hunt for al-Qaeda to prepare for this invasion. As a result, Osama bin Laden, perpetrator of September 11, remains at large.
- He shamelessly declared in his State of the Union address that Iraq had purchased uranium, an allegation proven to be false by his own administration prior to the address.
- He, while waging a war on terror, allowed his administration to expose the name of an American covert intelligence agent who was investigating terrorist networks, a felony crime and one that his own father once labeled tantamount to treason.
- He invaded Iraq, after Saudi Arabia the second largest source of oil in the world, a sovereign nation that had never harmed our land, had no connection to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and contained no weapons of mass destruction, resulting in thousands of wounded and permanently maimed Americans, the deaths of over one thousand six hundred American men and women, hundreds of Coalition soldiers, private contractors and foreign workers, and, by one estimate, over one hundred thousand innocent Iraqi children, women, and men.
- He squanders over three hundred billion of our tax dollars through this misadventure, effectively ignoring the threat from North Korea, avoiding the genocide in the Sudan, and abandoning his stated commitment to Afghanistan.
- He weakens our armed forces by failing to provide them with life-saving armor and cultural training. The damage he has done to our troops has resulted in dangerously lowered recruitment levels and, consequently, increased risk to our nation's security.
- He causes millions of once moderate Muslims to despise our nation, swelling the ranks of al-Qaeda and escalating dramatically the number of terrorist incidents worldwide.
- He denies basic constitutional rights to U.S. citizens, rejecting national law.
- He denies basic human rights to non-citizens, defying international law.
- He has made torture an American value, an act that has blackened for a generation or more the good name of our country. As a result, he has emboldened others to the torture of our own captured soldiers and citizens, and put our troops squarely in harm's way.
- He, most grievously of all, daily transforms through his unilateral and imperialistic actions the solidarity, sympathy and generosity of the whole world toward us in the wake of September 11 into a thorough hatred and distrust of our nation.
In every stage of these destructive and unhealthy actions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury and a growing arrogance.
A President, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define an anti-democratic tyrant, is unfit to be the chief executive of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our legislative bodies. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common democratic purpose to disavow these wrongs, which, unchecked, will inevitably hasten the decline of our great republic and pervert it into an empire.
The list of injuries presented above is of the gravest concern; how much more will unfurl in the coming years? How much has occurred and is concealed from our sight?
We, therefore, the people of the United States of America, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name of our free and democratic Republic, solemnly publish and declare, that these United States ought to be free of the current executive administration and its President, George W. Bush, and that all of our efforts will be aimed at removing him peacefully and democratically from office through the sacrosanct right of our votes, our devotion to the rule of law, and our justified moral indignation. This document, available to all and owned by all who consent to it, may be seen as a confirmation of our commitment.
For the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.