Inside Look
It was intriguing and hard to understand the advertisements sponsored by the Governor’s office promoting the bond sale to address the fledging pension funds. The one in which the Governor was filmed in his office promoting the bond amendment as being about jobs was the most troubling. It is hard to imagine how this could be about jobs yet the jobs card was played much like the race card is played when there is no other means of gaining support through actual facts or evidence.
While the bond amendment did fail, it showed us what lengths the administration was willing to go to in order to prevail on its agenda. First, a prominent citizen spoke out on the issue and financed an educational campaign designed to help fellow citizens understand what they were being asked to support. As the facts began to reach the people, rather than dispute the facts raised, the Governor chose instead to threaten this individual with greater scrutiny of his business practices. Does this imply that the various state agencies having jurisdiction over the businesses in question were not doing there job? I think not, the businesses in question are among the most highly regulated industries in the state and it would be hard to find a single entity that has done more for West Virginia than Massey Coal.
Massey Coal and Don Blankenship have provided thousands of jobs, paid millions in taxes and has earned the right to speak out on any issue it chooses. It is corporate and individual citizens like this that create jobs and pay the taxes necessary for state government to function, not state government. Targeting or threatening a citizen such as that which occurred should never be tolerated and should give us an inside view of the thought process that must be in play here. Do we really want government officials who resort to such tactics in order to control their agenda?
To claim the bond amendment was about jobs is disingenuous at best. Now we have to question everything we are told because the administration is willing to promote its agenda by fabricating justification and threatening those who oppose its views.
While the bond amendment did fail, it showed us what lengths the administration was willing to go to in order to prevail on its agenda. First, a prominent citizen spoke out on the issue and financed an educational campaign designed to help fellow citizens understand what they were being asked to support. As the facts began to reach the people, rather than dispute the facts raised, the Governor chose instead to threaten this individual with greater scrutiny of his business practices. Does this imply that the various state agencies having jurisdiction over the businesses in question were not doing there job? I think not, the businesses in question are among the most highly regulated industries in the state and it would be hard to find a single entity that has done more for West Virginia than Massey Coal.
Massey Coal and Don Blankenship have provided thousands of jobs, paid millions in taxes and has earned the right to speak out on any issue it chooses. It is corporate and individual citizens like this that create jobs and pay the taxes necessary for state government to function, not state government. Targeting or threatening a citizen such as that which occurred should never be tolerated and should give us an inside view of the thought process that must be in play here. Do we really want government officials who resort to such tactics in order to control their agenda?
To claim the bond amendment was about jobs is disingenuous at best. Now we have to question everything we are told because the administration is willing to promote its agenda by fabricating justification and threatening those who oppose its views.
posted by Laymansview | 8:02 AM
1 Comments:
the Gov. has his own personal staff member follow him around 24/7 to document his life. I wonder how much the good taxpayers of WV have to pay for that?
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