Letter to the Editor
The catchy title of the Wisconsin State Journal’s recent article, “Issue ads become an issue,” by Dee J. Hall provoked strong feelings in me. To think that such secretive, shady, underhanded, chicanery-like political and economic practices can be legitimized as “free speech” and protected by Wisconsin campaign laws and the Constitution of the United States makes me sick at my stomach. Is this really what our forefathers fought and died for?
Why do we continue to call what we do during election time as exercising our individual freedom and liberty when we have forfeited these rights only to the rich and powerful? In this instant, how arrogant and what a shame that the spokesman for the mighty and the powerful, when asked how much his group was spending and where the money came from, could only brag that his special interest group’s spending is the “right to unfettered campaign ‘speech’ and constitutionally protected. Since when does secret money and the right to free speech become the same thing?
Where were the American people when our state legislature sold our individual voting rights to big moneyed interests? When did we first allow giant corporations to pay for our elections and by so doing take away from each of us a free and unfettered right to vote for a candidate who is economically free of the influence of the rich and most powerful? When did special interests groups become more important than a free and economically unfettered franchise?
If you feel as I do please demand that your elected representatives vote to ban the use of private money to finance public campaign elections. If this takes a constitutional amendment, then so be it. Both your children and mine and their grandchildren deserve northing less. Let us return our democracy to all the people.
Please see the Madison chapter of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP)’ website http://nsp.madisonwi.us/ or call Beth Wortzel at 255-8838
Respectfully,
William R. Benedict
