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NO MORE
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[And you thought we were kidding when we suggested Rocky Anderson
as a candidate for President. This is from a speech the Salt Lake City mayor gave on April 29]

MAYOR ROCKY ANDERSON - We are gathered here today to say, "No more!"
No more killing.
No more expenditures of almost $6 billion per month on this tragic war.
No more denial of health care coverage for over 42 million Americans,
when we are paying more for this outrageous war than what it would cost
for universal health care throughout the US.
No more dependence on foreign oil, while we could become independent if
we focused resources wasted in the Iraq war on clean, renewable sources
of energy.
No more attacks on immigrants who work so hard to build better lives.
No more inaction by Congress on fixing our hypocritical and
inconsistent immigration laws and policies.
No more complacency by our news media, much of which has served


as little more than a bulletin board for false government propaganda.
No more raping and pillaging of our people by the outrageous profiteers
in the oil industry, by the health care insurance industry, and by the
billionaire buddies of Bush and Cheney like the crooks at Enron and
Halliburton.
No more war in Iraq.
No more reliance on fiction rather than the science of global warming.
No more historic deficits forever demonstrating that our President and
our Congress are total hypocrites and liars when they call themselves


fiscal conservatives.
No more torture of human beings.
No more holding people in detention camps without charges,


without lawyers, without any semblance of due process.
No more sending people off to be held and interrogated in countries
where torture and brutality is expected to occur.
No more arrogant, blundering, incompetent leadership of our military.
Which means no more Donald Rumsfeld.
No more manipulation of our media.
No more arrogance and incompetence posing as leadership


in the White House.
Which means no more Bush and Cheney.
And no more arrogance, incompetence and timidity


posing as leadership in the United States Congress.
No more illegal wiretapping without warrants.
No more complacency by the American people.
No more members of Congress who voted to turn into felons 12 million
people our nation has encouraged to come here to work.
No more disastrous cuts in funding for those most in need in our
cities. . .
No more lies about a tie between Iraq and 9-11. . .
No more butchering of the English language.
Which means, of course, no more George Bush.
No more killing thousands of innocent people.
Which means no more of the Bush Administration.
And no more of those in Congress who have sat passively by while the
slaughter continues. . .
No more apathy by the American people.
And no more refraining from saying "No more"!

We are gathered here today because we care deeply. We are gathered
today because we can't and won't remain silent in the face of tragic
dishonesty, tragic violations of international law and human rights,
outrageous war mongering, and continually shifting excuses for
beginning the war, a war that has resulted in the unnecessary deaths of
probably more than 100,000 Iraqis and almost 2400 American members


of the United States armed forces. . .
We are not gathered here because we seek to divide this nation.


In fact, we seek to unify this great country behind principles of justice,
compassion and an end to an outrageous, unnecessary war.
And we are not here because we are "nut cakes.". . .

Nazi Germany was a society composed of millions of people who did


not question and who did not object. They followed. They followed
blindly. They left it for their leaders to make the decisions, even
the decisions as to what each individual would do, including the most
inhumane treatment toward other people.
That culture of blind obedience was not one where most people asked
themselves, "What should I do?" The answers were already furnished by
leaders bent on world domination, leaders who thought nothing of
torturing, killing, and maiming millions of innocent men, women, and
children.
People were not gathering together to say "No more." Rather, they were
calling out "Heil Hitler," abdicating to political leaders the moral
choices they each could have and should have made as individuals.


In short, they forfeited the most important part of what makes each of us
human.
We are gathered here to assert our moral autonomy, our moral power,


our moral insistence that we will not be a part of the dishonesty, the
brutality, and the hypocrisy behind the current war of aggression.


And we will call out together for an end to the insanity, an end to the
obscenity known as the Iraq war.
At times like this, silence is complicity. Silence is an affirmation
of the status quo. We will see change only when the people assert
their own moral authority and no longer leave it to the self -serving,
shiftless, sycophantic servants of the corporate rapists and pillagers
of our people, like Dick Cheney's buddies at the
sole-source-contracts-in-Iraq-profiteer Halliburton; like Exxon, the
plunderer of almost every person in our nation; and like the
pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies that have made

certain the American people do not have affordable, universal health
care coverage.
Rwanda was a culture of blind obedience. Tens of thousands of people
heeded the call to slaughter their Tutsi and moderate Hutu neighbors,
most of whom used machetes to hack men, women, and children to


death. These were not people who asserted their personal moral authority. . .
No more can any person asserting free agency stand by in good
conscience. . .
Let us each embrace our moral authority, let us each embrace our
humanity, let us each embrace our responsibility and insist in every
way within our means: no more human and civil rights violations; no
more hatred and inhumane treatment toward hard-working immigrants


and their families; no more killing and maiming. No more Iraq war.

https://citizensedproject.org/rocky.html