We Stuggle for Survival
Doris Haddock's remarks in Boston on June 7, 2000 in support of the citizen-approved election reforms which were in danger of being dismantled that day by the legislature.
Thank you,
We elect our representatives to represent our values and our needs in shaping public policy and allocating community resources. In this work, the regular citizen doesn't stand a chance if elected representatives must first go to wealthy special interests to fund their campaigns. The representation game is over before it begins.
It is nothing particularly new. But in the past, the wealthy lived among us. We shopped in their stores on Main Street and their children went to grade school with ours. We shared the same community interests and values.
We are now talking about inhumane organizations of inhuman scale and international allegiance. They care not if our main streets or our families prosper or if they blow away. We must not have these monsters influencing our community decisions. We must not allow them to provide funds for our candidates, where those funds will deny us proper representation.
We struggle here for the very survival of representative democracy. The people of Massachusetts have seen this problem and they have acted at the ballot box to create a new way to fund candidates, free of excessive influence by wealthy special interests.
But those same wealthy interests have their agents in this state house, and they will destroy what the people have done at the ballot, if they can. It is called the overturning of an election, and the method of this coup is the continuing use of campaign contributions to corruptly purchase public policy.
The people have have spoken clearly in favor of this historic reform. Did the members of the House not hear them? Do they need for the people to speak again--this time in the coming House elections?
At the ballot box, the people have provided for the public financing of candidates who choose to say No to all special interest campaign donations. Their action comes at a time when citizens believe that their voices in government are drowned out by floods of special interest money, and they are right. No one seriously argues that point anymore--the flood is too great Pubic interest groups on the left and right, from the Cato Institute to Common Cause, agree that, for every dollar given to a candidate by a special interest group, over ten dollars in special tax breaks are given in return. This is nothing less than full public financing, but it is a poor system of public financing. By directly funding qualified campaigns with public funds, we can eliminate nine of the ten dollars paid by taxpayers --now paid in the form of tax loopholes for special interests.
Any true conservative would trade a corrupt system of public financing for a clean one that costs the taxpayers one-tenth as much.
Any true American would trade a corrupt system that deprives Americans of their proper representation and therefore of their fundamental political freedom, for a reformed system that makes our politics once again the arena of our ideas, not our billfolds.
Thank you.