BAD BILLBOARD BILL Guest Editorial

GOVERNOR DAUGAARD; PLEASE VETO SB-157

By Tom Katus*

The BAD BILLBOARD BILL, SB 157 has passed and will go into law.  The vote:  42 to 26.  It took 10 BILLBOARD Lobbyists, being paid tens of thousands of dollars by the BIG BILLBOARD CORPORATIONS to get this vote!  We had 0 dollars and the people to represent.  You now know what runs your State Government!

A sad day for the citizens of South Dakota, and local control of its municipalities and counties...

--Lisa Modrick

Scenic Rapid City Committee, Inc.

SD LEGISLATURE BOUGHT BY SIGN COMPANIES

-- Sign at Occupy Rapid City Rally, March 3rd.

The people of Rapid City and West River are livid about the majority of East River’s Legislators’ arrogance to override a local initiative, for which scores of us circulated petitions to have a vote on billboard control. That vote of 6,000 + was more than 2/3rds majority of the people.  I am certain that citizens of Brookings, Sioux Falls, Aberdeen, Watertown, Mitchell, and Pierre would feel similarly affronted if an initiated measure in their city, securing more than 2/3rds of the vote were overturned by the Legislature.

The undue influence of moneyed interests in the federal government has lead to widespread cynicism of the people and a Congressional approval rating of 11%.  Now the East River majority in the SD Legislature is acting equally irresponsibly and thwarting the will of the people.

We have many divisions in this State, including age, gender, race and partisanism.  However, the greatest division remains the split between East and West River.  When I served in the Senate and when I ran for State Treasurer, my major theme was to work hard to overcome these East/West Divisions and bring ALL South Dakotans together.

Last month, I lead a delegation of Legislative Fellows selected from throughout the US by our State Department to visit Nepal. We spent a week meeting with political leaders and non governmental organizations (NGOs) assisting them with their constitutional review.  Nepal is transitioning from an authoritarian centralized government to a federal democratic system. I was asked to address their National Lawyers Association, on behalf of our group, on the US Constitutional review process culminating at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in July, 1789.  I stressed that perhaps the greatest strength of our federal system is extensive LOCAL CONTROL.  A fellow delegate who is a Councilman from Concord, New Hampshire reinforced this view.  The Nepalese were very impressed with LOCAL CONTROL, and are hopeful they can institute it in their country.

Thus, it is particularly disheartening to return to SD to find that a majority of our East River Legislators has overturned the people's will.   Governor Daugaard has made some excellent strides in reaching out to ALL our people. His positive decisions on Valhalla and the Black Hills Playhouse are commendable. Vetoing this onerous legislation, would certainly reinforce his strength in the Republican Heartland of West River.  While such a stance may irritate the deep pocket sign companies, it will definitely make him more popular with 6,000+ Rapid City voters and the tourism industry. Tourism has much greater economic impact on the State than three wealthy sign companies and their 10 paid lobbyists!.

 But regardless of the politics of any such decision, a veto would be the right thing for ALL the people of South Dakota.  I am hopeful that he will once again rise above politics and do the right thing. I urge Governor Daugaard to veto SB 157.  I am confident that we would have sufficient strength in the SD House of Representatives to sustain his veto.

*********

Tom Katus served as a State Senator (2007-08), is a member of Scenic Rapid City and Occupy Rapid City. 

A Case for Public Campaign Funding

            An e-mail message from the political party I am registered with informed me that it had come to their attention that after several requests, there had not been any donations associated with that e-mail address.  If they were wrong, then they apologized.  However, if they were correct they wanted to know why there hadn't been any donations?  Further, they wanted to know, what would take to get me to make a donation? There were several responses to choose from and I chose to tell them I was supporting the party in other ways and that frost warnings for Hell might break me out of donating slump.

            To say that I’m conservative in my spending and donating habits is not completely true.  I don’t have any spending habits and for a very long time I haven’t donated money to anything other than contributions to my wife’s charitable attitude towards our descendants.  If you listen closely, you can hear me squeak when I walk by.  So when a political party, candidate, or other entity asks me for money they are generally wasting resources.  Wasting resources is one of the reasons for my prohibition on campaign donations. 

            Quite a while back, I made a couple donations of twenty-five dollars each.  For me those were major monetary transfers.  After the checks cleared, the requests for more money ramped up so much that my twenty-five dollar checks could not have funded the effort for more than a few months.  It didn’t matter that there wasn’t any response to the requests.  The requests started to include warnings that each one was going to be the last and that model was repeated periodically for years.  Once you’re in the database as a contributor, the files never seem to be purged of deadbeats.

            When the money isn’t being wasted on ineffective mailings, what is it being used for?  Swift-boat style attack ads or misleading spin-speech?  I don’t like that stuff coming from campaigns that I don’t agree with, why would I fund that garbage for an issue or politician I support?  I know, I know, because it works.  That’s not good enough for me because I don’t have money to throw around like that.  When I consider what I could have done with those two donations of twenty-five dollars each, it really grates on me what the recipients did with them.

            Consider for a moment what could be done with the millions, maybe billions of dollars, of campaign war-chest money if it were to be spent on something other than political indulgences.  A lot of the problems the politicians and campaigns claim they are going to fix could get fixed with the campaign donations and without any additional tax money being spent.  It is all relative to how much money you have to spend.  If you have lots of money, then you can have fun spending on whatever you want including spending some of it on politics.  If you spend lots of money to get things to go your way, then the people who don’t want that to happen – including people with less money -- will use up their limited resources trying to match your contributions and/or you’ll out spend them so much that they will eventually give up and you win.  It’s a game for the super rich and it is good source of income for professional political advisors, for many professional political campaign organizers, and, most certainly, for advertisers. 

            Politicos say that public funding won’t work for political campaigns.  One claim is that there wouldn’t be enough money to run the campaigns.  I agree that there wouldn’t be enough money to run the campaigns the way they are run now.  However, if campaign funding was severely limited, then perhaps, the campaigners would have to stick more to the facts and the issues.  Even if a campaign wanted to run a negative attack, the limited funding might tend to force the attack to be a more truthful negative attack since there wouldn’t be funding for the big shotgun-blasting-mud-slinging-see-what-sticks type of negative campaigning that we have to endure now.   

            Wouldn’t it be nice to have a few nights during the month proceeding the election when the candidates and the campaigns spent some time describing the issues as they see them and telling us what they intended to do to make things better?  You could have some paper and a pencil ready to take some notes for comparisons.  After you did your comparisons, you could decide how you wanted to vote without all the confusion and frustration that we go through every election cycle now.  With the money you saved by not having to make political contributions to save the shade trees on your street or enrich some political candidate’s campaign advisors, you could go out to eat after you get done voting.  You might even have money to contribute to a truly worthwhile cause where they used your money to accomplish something.

Free Speech and the Influence of Money on Democracy

If you like to pass along false rumors and innuendos about the President -- any president -- and the President’s policies, you can be reasonably confident you’ll never be called out for it by a member of your own political party.  In my opinion, the Republicans excel at this ability, but the Democrats cannot be far behind with this flawed sense of party loyalty.  The news media helps to perpetuate the concept, by ignoring any responsibility for fact checking much of what it passes along to the public.  Nothing new here I suppose, but there are some journalistic accounts of the media exercising its supposed position as “watchdog for the public.” 

The lure of advertising dollars has corrupted the “eye of the public” function of many media outlets in the world today.  The need to maintain large readership/viewership numbers in order to entice advertisers is too strong a need for corporate media businesses.   Unfortunately, the general public has been all too willing to let this undesirable development come about.  Reporting the news is more about money than journalism.  

While we’ve been sleeping, the people that benefit the most from this situation have been quietly solidifying their power over our society.  Numerous examples exist of this constant struggle to promote favor for the few at the expense of the majority.  Some of these examples include eliminating protections for workers and the public safety.  Alarm at this development is small since only a minority of people is able to relate to the overall negative trend.  Far too many people belong to the group of trusting voters who believe their political candidates will become their trusted representatives in power once they get into office.  The truth -- for those willing to seek it -- is less than encouraging with regarding elected representatives and who they represent when they get into office.  Representing the people in public office is more about money than civic duty and protecting the interests of the public.

The Tea Party claims to be an organization that evolved from public dissatisfaction with the political process in this country.  That may or may not be true, but regardless of the virtue of the party’s origins, some observers believe that the Tea Party has been co-opted or corrupted by powerful moneyed interests.  The two major parties seem to be controlled by the people within them that are more concerned with continuing their careers than with promoting ideology to benefit the public welfare.  

Assume for the sake of discussion that you are qualified in everyway to hold an elected office.  What are the chances that you could win an election to an office outside of the state you live in?  Then ask yourself how much money has to do with your answer.   Now ask yourself, who controls the money?

The press and other news media used to hold the upper hand with its ability to gather information and report that information to the public and the public had to rely on them for news information.  Now days many people carry camera phones and other small recording devices.  This is a scary development for entities that would like to filter, disguise, or block knowledge of their activities from the prying eyes of the public.   Even without the official press doing its job, in some ways it is harder today to hide questionable activities from the public.  Some of the responsibility for exposing these questionable activities has been taken over by people involved in demonstrations of public dissent.   Organized dissent worries those entities that don’t want close public scrutiny of their activities. 

Motivated opinion comment/letter writers continue to send their opinions to newspapers and other media outlets in the hope that those letters will be posted and read by others.  Some of those comments and letters do get posted or published and the Internet has made it easier for people to make public comments.  However, compare the impact of any single letter or comment writer’s efforts with the impact of well funded groups or large corporations.  Both are expressions of free speech, but are they equal?