In the Aug. 15 Portland Press Herald, Lyn Sudlow of Maine’s Sierra Club Chapter (“Maine Voices: Protecting our environment starts with protecting our democracy”) hit it on the head.

We are not able to protect the environment and combat climate change (and, I would add, protect our health, our schools, our voting rights, our jobs …) if we don’t have a working democracy to work with.

At present, the big corporations and big money hold all the cards: the right to almost unlimited “free speech” in the form of campaign contributions (granted by the Citizens United, McCutcheon and Buckley decisions), which privilege comes from corporations themselves having been granted “personhood” and so the Bill of Rights, in prior Supreme Court cases.

Sudlow presents Sen. Tom Udall’s SJ Res 19 for a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics; Reps. Chellie Pingree’s and Mike Michaud’s Government By the People Act; and Maine Citizens for Clean Elections’ citizen initiative to strengthen Maine’s landmark Clean Election Act.

But there is another citizen initiative circulating in Maine, and it goes further and strikes at the root of the problem.

The We The People Maine citizen initiative calls for a constitutional amendment to reverse “corporations as people” and “money as speech.” This petition is circulating now and will be at the polls in November, along with the Clean Elections initiative.

These initiatives are complementary, and both should be signed by voters if we want to get our democracy back.

Beedy Parker

Camden