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.
Later in the day she made a second speech
Thank you.
As a citizen of Massachusetts, if you contact your elected representatives in state government because you have a problem or perhaps an idea for the improvement of the law, you had better hope it is not an idea that would change how lawyers do their business, because lawyers have visited your elected representatives a few times before you, with checks in their hands. In 1998 alone, they passed along 14,369 campaign checks, totaling $3.2 million. Your good idea might get a polite nod at the statehouse, but money talks and you will walk, and so you might as well walk with me.
If your idea is about insurance or real estate, be advised that 8,606 checks and $2.5 million passed hands from those industries before you shared your opinion. That money talks. They say giving money is protected free speech, and that's what they mean--though it is hardly free, as the citizens pay dearly for it in the form of special interest tax breaks and protective laws that cost the citizens dearly.
If your idea or complaint is about construction quality or development patterns, understand that, before you arrived, 2,837 checks were given to your representatives by the construction lobby. And 5,248 checks from other business lobbies. If you have a problem with the way HMOs or other medical organizations treat you, be advised that 4,509 checks from those companies have preceeded you into the room, so you might as well save your breath. These contributions were all in 1998, and they are even higher in this year's election.
Your position as a free man or woman in a self-governing land is being taken from you. You have no real voice, no real representation, and that means your freedom is slipping away.
Money talks, the people walk. And so we will walk until this tainted, special interest money is taken out from between we the people and our elected representatives.
The people in Massachusetts have spoken overwhelmingly at the polls. They have had enough of this corruption. Will they have to speak a second time at the polls, to turn out those members who dare to overturn the will of the people? I think the people might do that, if it comes to that.
In the meantime, money will talk, and the people will walk.
So let's walk together.