THESE ARE MOST COSTLY CONGRESSIONAL RACES IN U.S. HISTORY

HOLLY YEAGER, FINANCIAL TIMES - Next month's midterm elections will be
the most costly congressional races in US history, with business
interests contributing three-quarters of the estimated $2.6 bn that will
be spent, says a non-partisan research group. In a report to be released
on Wednesday, the Center for Responsive Politics predicted that
Republican candidates, parties and advocacy groups would spend $1.4 bn
while Democratic interests would spend $1.2 bn.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e7eed3b8-6398-11db-bc82-0000779e2340.html

SAM SMITH, US CAPITOL RALLY SPEECH, 1999 - 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.

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