granny d has died

Doris Haddock lived for a long, long time, so I suspect she knew that sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

The first I ever heard of her was 10 years ago when she was 90 and making her celebrated walk across the U.S., to publicize what she felt was the most important political issue facing the country: campaign finance reform. She paused to appear as a guest speaker at the Reform Party's national convention that election year, and I watched and listened to her on C-Span, not knowing who she was. I was riveted when she declared that "What's keeping us from real campaign finance reform today are the twin judicial fictions that money is speech and that a corporation is a person." I had never heard anybody speak to the subject so plainly and with such concision.

Afterward I bought and read her book, "Walking Across America in my 90th Year." It was a fun and instructive biography as well as a chronicle of a 90-year-old old woman with emphysema and a bad foot trekking, limping, and skiing the 3000-mile width of the Lower 48, and I'd recommend it.

Speaking on the subject of our corporate masters at a Chatauqua assembly in 2003, Granny D said, The CEO's of their corporations make tens of millions of dollars a year, not on the long range expectations of profits, but on this year's, this quarter's profits, and how those profits affect stock prices. They can't think more than a year out. The real problem is that they also own all the broadcast networks now, and they finance the careers of most of the politicians.

These people do not go around the world spreading peace, justice and democracy. They spread credit card debt, cell phones, sweatshop conditions, factory farms for hogs and not much better for people. They are in it for the money, and they want to economically enslave people, not free them. I will bet that Iraqis will see bills from MasterCard before they see a meaningful ballot, just like us. This is a new wave of economic colonialism, and, like previous waves, it is done in partnership with armies and rulers.

Granny D was one of my heroes. Her passing had to happen sometime, of course, but I'm still sad that it did.

She turned 100 this past January, and died yesterday at her home in New Hampshire.