No “Clean Money,” No Peace!

By Randy Kehler

ou may have read about “Granny D” (a.k.a. Doris Haddock), the 90-year-old New Hampshire great-grandmother, now a folk hero, who on February 29 completed a 14-month, 3,100-mile, one-woman trek from Los Angeles to Washington to protest the corruption of our democracy by big money. But chances are you didn’t read about what happened immediately following her welcome rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol (though it received a brief mention in wire service stories the next day): Sixteen activists calling themselves the “Doris Haddock Democracy Brigade” staged a “Democracy Speak-Out” in the historic Capitol Rotunda.

M.A. Swedlund (right center) reads ‘A Citizen’s Address to Congress’ in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda last October 26. Randy Kehler is holding the banner at the center. Photo by Nick Penniman.

‘Granny D Is Right!’
With a couple of hundred tourists and Granny D supporters watching and applauding, four members of the brigade unfurled a 10-foot banner emblazoned with the words, “Granny D Is Right!” and proceeded to read aloud individually composed messages to the members of Congress, indicting them for serious “crimes against democracy” committed under the guise of business-as-usual campaign finance. With their voices echoing across the cavernous Rotunda, they accused Congress of causing great harm to people and the environment in their subservience to the interests of giant corporate contributors. Then they called for full public financing of all federal elections.

The leaflet they were handing out named Congress’ principal crime against democracy: “Taking money from corporations, industries, and other Big Money interests you are supposed to be regulating on our behalf. … In 1997-98 alone, you and your parties took $9,900,000 from food processing corporations, $11,400,000 from military/weapons corporations, $28,000,000 from oil, gas, and chemical companies, $31,200,000 from insurance corporations, etc., ensuring that we will not have, among other things, a safe food supply, nuclear disarmament, clean air and water or universal health care.”

The leaflet continued, “We demand that you: (1) pass reform legislation that includes full public financing of all federal elections, thus allowing candidates to finance their campaigns without being forced to commit these crimes; and (2) until such legislation is in place, excuse yourselves from voting or deliberating on any legislation affecting the economic interests of your corporate-related campaign contributors.”

The Capitol Police arrested and handcuffed the four Brigadiers for “demonstrating in the U.S. Capitol” (a DC. statute, in effect, suspends First Amendment rights in such places) and escorted them from the Rotunda. As they left chanting “Granny D is right: Our democracy’s for sale!,” a second group of four emerged from the crowd and unfurled another large banner that read, “End Legalized Bribery—Clean Elections Now.” Like the first group, they proceeded to read aloud their spirited indictments of Congress; after a few minutes they were similarly whisked away by the police. However, they were immediately followed by a third group, which revealed a banner reading, “Take Congress Off the Auction Block!” As soon as the third contingent was led away, a fourth and final group unfurled a 30-foot banner that read, “Stop Crimes Against Democracy—Public Funding for Public Elections!”

By that time, the crowd was unrestrained in their enthusiasm (or at least in their curiosity, in the case of one group of high school students, whose guide had completely lost their attention). At one point, amid outbursts of applause, one well-dressed onlooker angrily shouted out to the police making the arrests, “Why are you arresting them? They are exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech, to petition their government for a redress of grievances! Don’t arrest them!” And then pointing to the Senate and House chambers on either side of the Rotunda, he called out, “You should be arresting the members of Congress! They are the ones committing crimes!” The crowd loved it.

This was the third Democracy Brigade to engage in a public speak-out in the Capitol Rotunda in recent months. Its members came from as far away as Maine, Chicago and Oregon, and included a Green Party gubernatorial candidate, a researcher for a women’s rights group, a house painter, a retired clergyman, a community gardens organizer, a young mother, a retired professor of engineering, an activist great-grandmother (no, not Granny D), a college intern, a woman veteran and a former government official.

The first brigade, calling itself the Henry David Thoreau Democracy Brigade, took action last October 26 following a rally for Clean Money reform (full public financing of elections) on the Capitol steps outside. The second brigade, dubbed the Long Waite Democracy Brigade—so named in (dis)honor of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, whose statement from the bench in 1886 that corporations are “persons” under the 14th Amendment has permitted more than a century of criminal mischief by giant corporations—conducted a democracy speak-out January 31.

Connecting the Dots
Last week a group of us had supper with an impressive Guatemalan woman who’s been a human rights activist in both Guatemala and this country for many years. After mentioning some of the many issues she’s worked on and campaigns she’s been part of, she said, “But, of course, all these things are related. I believe we have to connect the dots.”

There are lots of ways of connecting the “dots” of injustice, usually by means of attitudes and beliefs, practices and institutions, that underlie or affect them all. But certainly one of those ways, here in the United States at least, is through challenging the institution of privately financed election campaigns—the system of legalized bribery, extortion and conflict of interest by which our public elections are privately financed by big, mostly corporate, “contributions.”

I originally got involved in trying to change the way our elections are financed because, after nearly a decade of working for nuclear disarmament, I became painfully aware that votes by members of Congress to reverse or escalate the arms race have much more to do with the interests of their military-industrial contributors than the wishes of ordinary constituents. My friend Mary Allen Swedlund, a local activist from Deerfield, MA, had the same experience. The chair of a school committee and mother of two grown daughters, she participated in the first Democracy Brigade action in the Capitol Rotunda. In her personal statement to the court prior to sentencing, she explained:

“One Thanksgiving in the early ’80s my extended family was sitting around our dinner table when my sister asked what we thought we might be doing in 20 years. Each person answered in turn with a fairly predictable answer until it came to my nine-year-old daughter. She said ‘I won’t be alive in 20 years because by then there will have been a nuclear war.’

“The next week I joined a local group that was working on the nuclear weapons freeze, not because I thought we had much chance of being effective but because I wanted to give my daughter some hope so she could dream of a future.

“Ten years later we had accomplished more than I had ever thought possible. We had changed how the whole country looked at nuclear war. Yet we had had virtually no effect on government policy or the production of nuclear weapons. How could that happen? How could 70 percent of the American public support a nuclear [weapons] freeze and not change the legislative view at all? … [B]ecause the will of big contributors came before the will of the people.”

Long-time Quaker peace and justice activist Frances Crowe from Northampton, MA, still going strong at age 80, was also arrested in the first democracy speak-out. Her participation, like Swedlund’s, was motivated by what she sees as the explicit link between militarism and campaign finance corruption. “I did not thoughtlessly travel to Washington to leaflet in the Rotunda of the Capitol,” she told the court. “I came to carry out my deep concern to abolish nuclear weapons, and all weapons of mass destruction and war. I have worked since Hiroshima on this concern.

“We are living in an insane world. The needs of our society are great, as you, Judge Morrison, see daily in the courts—needs for health care for all, better education, more low-income housing, more public transportation, more child care and a good jobs bill. Yet the military budget continues to escalate. We have spent more than five and a half trillion dollars on nuclear weapons since 1940. For that amount of money we could have the ‘Beloved Community’ Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of so eloquently.

“The first step in turning this around is to get corporate money out of politics. The major arms dealers—Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Boeing—all gave large contributions to my senators and representatives for their campaign war chests. Congress has been bought off. They are totally dysfunctional to participate in the democratic process.”

Working Together
Soon after I began my own work on the “money in politics” problem, it became obvious that this “dot” doesn’t connect only to the dot of weapons and war. It also connects to almost every other major public policy-related problem and injustice most of us care about, from industrial pollution and environmental racism to children in poverty and the gross unfairness of the tax system, from the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund to the corporate takeover of our health care system and the genetic altering of our food supply. Instead of a genuine political democracy based on the sacred principle of “one person, one vote,” we have a money-based plutocracy that serves up government of, by, and for Corporate America. That unfortunate reality provides a revealing link between so many of those dots of injustice.

It also offers one very compelling way for many of us to work together on something that deeply affects virtually all of our issues (in addition to the work we do separately on the particular issues that most concern us). Veteran Vermont activist and writer Marty Jezer has said that abolishing privately financed elections “is a reform that makes other reforms possible.” I think he’s right.

Taking up nonviolent civil disobedience as a way of bringing about this sweeping reform doesn’t mean abandoning all the other important work on this issue that’s been steadily gaining momentum—the research, public education, lobbying, ballot initiatives and constitutional challenges to the current, money-based electoral process. Instead, it should be seen as an additive to it, one that is as essential to this country’s emerging political reform movement as it has been in the labor, women’s, civil rights and other historic social movements.

In the mid-1980s, continuous weekly sit-ins at the South African Embassy in Washington marked a turning point in the U.S. government’s behavior toward the pro-apartheid government of South Africa. Over the last decade ever larger numbers of protesters engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience each year at the infamous School of the Americas (Assassins) in Georgia have already had an impact on funding for the SOA and may one day be seen as having been pivotal in changing the United States’ interventionist military policies. Just so, we can hope that an escalating wave of actions protesting crimes against democracy and demanding publicly financed elections will prove to be a watershed in the struggle for genuine democracy and a politics of human dignity and equality.

Randy Kehler, a long-time WRL member, peace and disarmament activist and war-tax resister, was arrested in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol last October 26 as part of the Henry David Thoreau Democracy Brigade. He lives in Colrain, MA, with his wife Betsy Corner.