From our overstocked archives, a speech by your editor at a rally on the steps of the Capitol fifteen years ago
Sam Smith - I have three objections to our current system of campaign financing.
The first is literary. Being a writer I try to show respect for words, to leave their meanings untwisted and unobscured.
This
is alien to much of official Washington which daily engages in an
activity well described by Edgar Alan Poe. Poe said, "By ringing small
changes on the words leg-of-mutton and turnip, .... I could
'demonstrate' that a turnip was, is, and of right ought to be, a
leg-of-mutton."
For example, for centuries ordinary people have
known exactly what a bribe was. The Oxford English Dictionary found it
described in 1528 as meaning to "to influence corruptly, by a
consideration." Another 16th century definition describes bribery as "a
reward given to pervert the judgment or corrupt the conduct" of someone.
In more modern times, the Meat Inspection Act of 1917 prohibits
giving "money or other thing of value, with intent to influence" to a
government official. Simple and wise.
But that was before the
lawyers and the politicians got around to rewriting the meaning of
bribery. And so we came to a time not so many months ago when the
Supreme Court actually ruled that a law prohibiting the giving of gifts
to a public official "for or because of an official act" didn't mean
anything unless you knew exactly what the official act was. In other
words, bribery was only illegal if the bribee was dumb enough to give
you a receipt.
The media has gone along with the scam, virtually
dropping the word from its vocabulary in favor of phrases like
"inappropriate gift," "the appearance of a conflict of interest," or the
phrase which brings us here today: "campaign contribution."
Another
example is the remarkable redefinition of money to mean speech. You can
test this one out by making a deal with a prostitute and if a cop comes
along, simply say, "Officer, I wasn't giving her money, I was just
giving her a speech." If that doesn't work you can try giving more of
that speech to the cop. Or try telling the IRS next April that "I have
the right to remain silent." And so forth. I wouldn't advise it.
As
George Orwell rightly warned, "When there is a gap between one's real
and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long
words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
My
second objection to our system of campaign financing is economic. It's
just too damn expensive for the taxpayer. The real cost is not the
campaign contributions themselves. The real cost is what is paid in
return out of public funds.
A case in point: Public Campaign
recently reported that in 1996, when Congress voted to lift the minimum
wage 90 cents an hour, business interests extracted $21 billion in
custom-designed tax benefits. These business interests gave only about
$36 million in campaign contributions so they got out of the public
treasury nearly 600 times what they put in. And you helped pay for it.
Looked
at another way, that was enough money to give 11 million workers a 90
cent an hour wage increase for a whole year -- or, to be more 1990s
about it, to give 21,000 CEOs a million dollar bonus.
This is
repeated over and over. For example, the oil industry in one recent year
gave $23 million in campaign contributions and got nearly $9 billion in
tax breaks.
The bottom line is this: if you want to save public money, support public campaign financing.
My
final objection is biologic. Elections are for and between human
beings. How do you tell when you're dealing with a person? Well, they
bleed, burp, wiggle their toes and have sex. They register for the
draft. They register to vote. They watch MTV. They go to prison and they
have babies and cancer. Eventually they die and are buried or cremated.
Now this may seem obvious to you, but there are tens of
thousands of lawyers and judges and politicians who simply don't believe
it. They will tell you that a corporation is a person, based on a
corrupt Supreme Court interpretation of the 14th Amendment from back in
the robber baron era of the late 19th century -- a time in many ways not
unlike our own.
Before this ruling, everyone knew what a person
was just as everyone knew what a bribe was. States regulated
corporations because they were legal fictions lacking not only blood and
bones, but conscience, morality, and free will. But then the leg of
mutton became a turnip in the eyes of the law.
Corporations say
they just want to be treated like people, but that's not true. Test it
out. Try to exercise your free speech on the property of a corporation
just like they exercise theirs in your election. You'll find out quickly
who is more of a person. We can take care of this biologic problem by
applying a simple literary solution: tell the truth. A corporation is
not a person and should not be allowed to be called one under the law.
I
close with this thought. The people who work in the building behind us
have learned to count money ahead of votes. It is time to chase the
money changers out of the temple. But how? After all, getting Congress
to adopt publicly funded campaigns is like trying to get the Mafia to
adopt the Ten Commandments as its mission statement. I would suggest
that while fighting this difficult battle there is something we can do
starting tomorrow. We can pull together every decent organization and
individual in communities all over America -- the churches, activist
organizations, social service groups, moral business people, concerned
citizens -- and begin drafting a code of conduct for politicians. We do
not have to wait for any legislature.
If we do this right, if we
form true broad-based coalitions of decency, then the politicians will
ignore us only at their peril.
At root, dear friends, our
problem is that politicians have come to have more fear of their
campaign contributors than they have of the voters. We have to teach
politicians to be afraid of us again. And nothing will do it better than
a coming together of a righteously outraged and unified constituency
demanding an end to bribery of politicians, whether it occurs before,
during, or after a campaign.
