Those Who Control the Flow of Information Control Everything

We now have two bills in our Congress, which if passed (and there would have to be an override of the President's promise to veto them) will cripple the Amendment Right of Free Speech on the internet for Americans. This is what such countries of totalitarian government as China and North Korea infamously already do. Because public libraries in America are gradually disappearing due to underfunding or a complete collapse of funding under various state and local governments, because bookstores are disappearing due to bankruptcy and cut-throat competition from Amazon.com, because higher education is becoming less affordable to more and more people (and therefore a resulting decline in access to the contents of academic libraries), because print newspapers are disappearing, because network and cable news channels are becoming more and more biased and agenda-oriented, because of all these reasons free democratic citizens of the United States are finding their access to information increasingly curtailed and the internet becoming increasingly vital to remain properly, adequately and accurately informed. If the internet becomes regulated by a federal agency with a conservative political agenda (and we know this would be the result since it is the conservatives who are supporting these noxious bills masquerading as "anti-piracy" legislation), then Americans will be plunged into a total state of ignorance and therefore be more broadly subject to manipulation by the mechanisms of narrow-minded and fallacious propaganda. Please call, email or tweet your federal representative and senators, and tell them that as a constituent, as a registered voter, as a free American, as citizen of the United States, you do not support either SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act). Their titles seem perfectly reasonable, but they are veritable Trojan Horses nefariously enclosing what are effectively carte blanche regulatory controls on what sites (both domestic and international) legally get to function on the internet and be accessed by web-users in the United States. We will lose our means of practicing real democracy if we lose the internet due to arbitrary discretionary ad hominem and ad hoc pronouncements from authorities who are the puppets of lobbyist interests who seek a monopoly of political and economic power. Let us roll these Trojan Horses unopened out of our venerable City of Democracy, and then burn these false wooden horses along with their ill-begotten provisions (whose term aptly fits the metaphor here used -- legislative riders).