Campaign reform

Thank you for your incisive editorial, “The $3 billion campaign” (Nov. 13). Campaign financing, as you point out, gets worse and worse and the prospects for keeping, much less expanding, our democracy get less and less.

You end by stating, “The solutions are at hand … all the public has to do is demand them.” I don’t think that will happen, or if it does, it will only be done through the auspices, hard work and perseverance of a political party. Only an organized popular force can locate, arouse and elicit a demand of this kind from an otherwise intimidated and conned populace. Such a demand must be a leading, perhaps for a time the leading, theme, motif, platform plank of a political party.

It also follows that the Democratic and Republican parties are incapable of doing this: They have immersed themselves so deeply in the monied morass of our politics that they can’t mount a credible and effective effort to save our democracy.

Speaking for the Green Party, I say we are 100 for thorough, serious, campaign finance reform. It is one of our most key planks, if not the most key at this juncture. We practice what we preach. In our electoral campaigns, we have taken no corporate money, no money from special interests; we rely only on individual contributions. And if, and as, the public gives us the opportunity to hold government office, we will use our clout to get real campaign finance reform. John Rensenbrink Topsham