WALKING FOR CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM
by "Granny D" "Granny D" (Doris Haddock) took on the challenge of walking across America from California to Washington, D. C. to convince Congress that people want campaign finance reform. She left Los Angeles on Jan. 1, 1999, walking ten miles a day, in spite of arthritis and emphysema. The following excerpts are taken from her speeches along the way.
While money has always strongly influenced our politics and always shall, the idea of big business money so thoroughly controlling our democracy is brand new. Business corporations are something we allow to be chartered in our states for business purposes, not for the purpose of getting in the way of our democracy, which is the affair of individuals. Business corporations have only been interfering directly since 1978 when an ill-advised Supreme Court decision mistook corporations for people in granting their right to political speech.
Corporations are, however, not people. The decision to allow their political activity needs to be reversed while we still have a chance of reclaiming the idea of government of the people. The resources of corporations must not be allowed into our campaigns. They overwhelm the process.
We must begin to fairly charge corporations who profit from the use of public airwaves. We must charge them in sufficient amounts so that we, as a free people, can afford to provide candidates with air time for statements and debates. Mass media is now the speakers' platform in the town square, and we must regain free use of it for our candidates if we are to be a free people, and if our candidates and public officials are to be freed of the time-eating, ethics-devouring money chase.
People need good information in order to be good citizens. The availability of the Internet is a magnificent new tool to make democracy visible. If the chairman of a powerful legislative committee in your state receives thousands of dollars from industries he or she regulates, is that fact easy for the public to see at a glance on your Internet site? Make the process as clear as glass, and the normal values and manners of society will have their reforming effect. Be the person who turns on that light, opens that window, makes the sausage machine visible in every glorious detail. You have the information, or you can get it. The public needs it.
I believe that the present Congress has spent a wasteful do-nothing year, titillating themselves with lascivious tidbits of naughtiness, instead of attending to the business for which we elected them.
Shame on those who take, take, take special interest money and refuse to uphold the laws put in place in 1907 by our then president Theodore Roosevelt. Laws to sweep big business out of our way so we can conduct the very serious business of a democracy without their greedy interference.
--June 27, 1999, St. Louis, MO
I am walking from the Pacific to the Atlantic at age 89 to bring attention to the fact that ordinary Americans like me care desperately about the condition of our government and the need for campaign finance reform.
It is my belief that a worthy American ought to be able to run for a public office without having to sell his or her soul to the corporations or the unions in order to become a candidate. Fundraising muscle should not be the measure of a candidate-ideas, character, track record, leadership skills: those ought to be the measures of our leaders.
I have walked through a land where the middle class, the foundation of our democracy, stands nearly in ruins. Main streets have given way to superstores. Towns have died. Family farms, family businesses and local owners have given way to absentee owners and a local population of underpaid clerks and collection agents. People are so stressed in their household economies, and in the personal relationships that depend on family economics, that they have little time for participation in the governance of their communities or of their nation. They struggle daily in mazes and treadmills of corporate design and inhumane intent. They dearly believe their opinions matter, but they don't believe their voice counts.
They tell me that the control of their government has been given over to commercial interests. They cheer me on, sometimes in tears, but they wonder if we will ever again be a self-governing people, a free people.
With the middle class so purposefully destroyed--its assets plundered by an elite minority--it should not surprise us that the war chests of presidential candidates are grotesquely overflowing with cash while children go hungry and elders must eat pet food to survive. I have met these people. The wealth of our nation is now dangerously concentrated. The privileged elite intend to elect those who have helped them achieve this theft and who will help them preserve their position of advantage. That is what accounts for the avalanche of $1,000 checks into presidential campaigns. . . .
It is said that democracy is not something we have, but something we do. But right now, we cannot do it because we cannot speak. We are shouted down by the bullhorns of big money. It is money with no manners for democracy, and it must be escorted from the room.
The wealthy elite used to steal what they needed, and it hardly affected the rest of us. Now they have the power to take everything for themselves, laying waste to our communities, our culture, our environment and our lives.
A century ago, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt pushed corporate money out of politics. In his absence, and in the absence of backbone in the parties and in the Congress, the slick operators have slinked back into town, and in many cases have been invited back or even coerced back into town by elected leaders who have the gall to think that the democracy our children died for is no more than a dirty bag of barter for their enrichment. They are traitors to everything good America stands for, and it is time for us to get out that rail again.
Here is what Teddy Roosevelt said in 1907:
"Our government, national and state, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks today...The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done."
Teddy Roosevelt said it well. Business corporations are not people. They are protective associations that we, the people, allow to be chartered for business purposes on the condition that they will behave.
We must look to whether we can still afford, as a people and as a planet, to give these little monsters a birth certificate but no proper upbringing, no set of expectations, no consequences for antisocial behavior. We are simply tired of the damage they do, and we are tired of cleaning up after them.
If they are to be allowed to exist--and they are indeed important to us--they must agree to be responsible for their own activities, start to finish, without requiring public dollars to be used to clean their rooms up after them. The era of corporate irresponsibility must be ended immediately, particularly in regard to the degradation of our political and cultural and natural environments, while we still have the power to act. Parents know that there comes a time when infantile behavior persists, but the child is too large to do much with. We Americans still can act in regard to the corporations we have given birth to, but not by much of an advantage. Our advantage will evaporate early in the 21st Century if we do not act soon.
Friends, does it matter if it is Rupert Murdoch or Michael Eisner--instead of Marshall Tito or Nikita Khrushchev--who owns everything and decides everything for us, even if, through the stock exchange, we all have a powerless piece of this new, mass collective? The soul of democracy is diversity, not concentration. Diversity requires the human scale, not monstrous scale. . . .
On the road so far, Americans have taken me into their homes and fed me at their tables--shown me the children for whom they sacrifice their working lives and for whom they pray for a free and gentle democracy. And I will tell you that I am with them. I am with their dream, and I know you are, too. We are all on this road, and we must stay on it together, forgetting our minor differences until, together, we achieve the necessary objective of restoring democracy for individuals and allowing each individual an equal voice in the civil discussions we have as a self-governing people.
--July 23, 1999, Dearborn, MI