� Ridding America Of The Warmongers������ : Information Clearing House -� ICH

� Ridding America Of The Warmongers : Information Clearing House -� ICH
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One way to reform Congress is to stop elected officials from accepting donations, (i.e., bribes,) and instead to conduct their business exclusively with public funds. In “Free Lunch”(Portfolio), Pulitzer Prize-winner David Cay Johnston writes, “Let each member of Congress spend however much he or she deems necessary to do his or her job. If we can imbue representatives and senators with the power to make laws, surely we can give them the authority to manage their own expense accounts.”

Johnston explains, “This would come at a price: No more free trips, no more free meals, and no more gifts. Senator, if you need to inspect the cleanliness of the sink behind the bar at a resort in Tahiti, go right ahead, just give us the receipts with an explanation of the costs. We will collect the receipts from every elected representative monthly and post it all on the Internet in a format that makes for easy analysis.”

Johnston urges, “Every dollar, and every meeting, must be disclosed. And we will pay for it all, subject only to the usual penalties for embezzling, the punishments accorded by the full House or Senate because of their exclusive right to judge the fitness of members, or the decision by voters to oust a spendthrift.”

“The time for preventive action is now,” writes Francis Boyle in “Protesting Power,”(Rowan & Littlefield). Civil resistance is one important strategy. People power can overcome power politics. Popular movements have succeeded in toppling tyrannical, dictatorial, and authoritarian regimes in former Communist countries throughout Eastern Europe as well as in Asia, Latin America, and recently in the Middle East. It is time for Americans to exercise people power here in the United States.”

Boyle explains that under the First Amendment, civil-resistance protesters are exercising their right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” He writes that amendment “does not require their assembly to be ‘lawful’ in a positivist technical sense, only that it be peaceable. Certainly ongoing criminal activity committed by officials of the U.S. government itself is the type of grievance the American people should have a right to petition for the redress of by means of civil resistance.”
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