A Letter to The Editor of Columbia Press

I am writing this blog while eating Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

Ben & Jerry's happens to be my personal favorite ice cream brand. In fact, it just became my ultimate favorite ice cream brand of all time.

Not only I like their creativity with flavors and their progressive business model, but they are also very outspoken on the issue of money in politic. Ben Cohen, the 'Ben' of Ben & Jerry's, even started the Stamp Stampede campaign which you can legally stamp on a dollar bill to spread the #GetMoneyOut message to wider people. In fact, whenever I have dollar bills, I just stamp them right away. (You should better buy their stamps and join their causes right now!)

My personal StampStampede stamp

When I went to their site, I saw the Take Action! section and there is a link that says "Write a letter to the Editor of your local paper". It directly takes you to FreeSpeechForPeople.org and you could find a local paper around your zip area and write a letter to their editor. 

I thought, "This might sounds cool. I will do it right away!"

So I sent a message to two local papers, Columbia Daily Tribune and Columbia Missourian, and this is what I wrote:

Dear editor,

The U.S. Supreme Court has a chance now to fix the enormous mistake it made in the Citizens United decision.  A Montana case challenging that Supreme Court decision has just been appealed back to the Court (American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock).

Citizens United vs. FEC decision just turned five this month, and it continues to damage the democratic system of our government. This Supreme Court ruling gave corporations a personhood, which means they have a constitutional "free speech" right to spend unlimited amount of money influencing our elections.

The corporate interest groups are using these moneys to create more TV ads and give political candidates a bigger chance to win a higher seat. Now I’m appalled by how our airwaves are already being filled with vicious campaign ads, and it’s only February! Just imagine how much worse things will get as the year goes on.

Every major Presidential candidate now has a Citizens United -enabled super PAC that allows corporations and the ultra-rich to spend limitless sums, anonymously, to buy our elections. 94% of elections are won by the candidate who spends the most money. That’s not an election, that’s an auction.

Corporate personhood - and campaign contribution as "free speech" - is the biggest threat to democracy, and now it ended out country's democracy by making politicians to rely on a legalized bribery from corporations.

This has to be stopped. Even 80% of Americans, want Citizens United overturned [http://j.mp/PHart]. As President Abraham Lincoln has said in his famous Gettysburg address that the government "of the people, by the people, [and] for the people". Free speech is for people, not corporations.

It is time we undo the damage by Citizens United. The Supreme Court has just been handed an opportunity to fix this mess. It should take it.

Justices Ginsburg and Breyer just issued an extraordinary statement, calling on their fellow Justices "to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway." [http://j.mp/GBstmt]

Even Justice Scalia recently said, "If the system seems crazy to you, don't blame it on the court.” [http://usat.ly/zQbXPU] Well, I do blame it on the Supreme Court. Its decision in the Citizens United case two years ago is destroying our democracy.

It might take large time and energy to fix the system, but it definitely worth it by the end. We must restore our democracy, and bring back the republic for our people.

Sincerely,
Jay Whang - college student