Mining companies dumped millions of dollars into their campaign against the Clean Water Initiative and somehow convinced us it was too much to ask a mining operation to not poison a salmon stream. I was called by a fake pollster whose questions were paragraph long arguments against the measure. Unbelievable. Maybe Don Young is right. We are the dumbest people on earth.
Case in point: the defeat of the Clean Elections Initiative, which allowed a candidate to trade shoe leather and signatures for a pittance of cash from the state to run a few ads. Opponents added up the maximum possible cost (12 million, I think) and waved it around like it was an Adak earmark. They forgot to mention it won't cost any of us a dime. We don't pay taxes in Alaska. In fact we get a nice goody package worth over twenty grand apiece from taxes we shake down from corporations- mostly resource extractors. The cost of Clean Elections would have shaved a couple of hundred dollars from your state gift basket. And it becomes one of the gifts in your basket. So big corporations are going to fund the candidates either way-- they would just rather hand the money over personally. Wouldn't it be nice to have a few public servants who don't start their terms of office in debt to a pack of lobbyists? The hard working Tim June deserves some help getting this back in front of voters so we can look at it again.
http://www.renewableresourcescoalition.org/Clean_Water_Initiative_1.pdf
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