5/8/18

Daugaard struggling to write legacy


South Dakota's racist climate science-denying governor is trying to put the best face on his tenure.

Republican Denny Daugaard is presiding over spikes in childhood obesity, violent crime, suicide rates, homelessness, acute hunger, mass incarceration, coverups and a poisoned environment. The South Dakota Republican Party is polarized and an historic split could drive it to the brink of extinction. South Dakota is a perpetual welfare state and permanent disaster area.

A Feeding America survey shows at least 105,880 people in South Dakota are food insecure. Homelessness in the state is rampant; drunk driving, meth use and teen binge drinking are off the charts. Only 30% of the electorate turn out to vote.

There are no checks on executive power and the governor's cronies routinely raid the state's general fund. The state is second in addiction to gambling and teachers' salaries surf the bottom of the US. Wage slavery is the state's biggest claim to fame and South Dakota dairies are wreaking habitat havoc. Infrastructure is crumbling and the state's bureaucracy is overbearing and unwieldy. Ag groups want federally subsidized crop insurance and the right to pollute. Corruption and graft have become ordinary. Hatred of immigrants threatens the state's already hurting tourism economy.

Pollution from industrial agriculture has made waterways poisonous, the state has no modern statute addressing financial assurances for pipeline leaks. Trophy fishing for threatened species is a tourist activity. East River, South Dakota is a dead zone. Fireworks are the likely source of Mount Rushmore water pollution. Mercury makes fish inedible.

Racism is endemic and white immigrants have been accepted while displacing and disgracing American Indians. South Dakota wrongly puts thousands in nursing homes. Mass incarceration fuels the white foster home industry: a pet project of the governor's wife. The state's relations with tribal nations trapped in South Dakota are at historic lows.

South Dakota is hiding evidence in the deaths of Brady Folkens, the Westerhuis family and Rich Benda. Republican Attorney General Marty Jackley routinely benefits from court deals with his campaign donors while the South Dakota Newspaper Association reads like a bulletin for the Republican Party.

The annual criminal costs of video lootery in South Dakota have reached $42 million and the social costs an estimated $62 million. $9 million were lost because state and local sales taxes weren’t collected. When video lootery began in 1986 104 charges were filed for robbery, grand theft and aggravated theft. There were 1,037 cases in 1990 and last year they went past 4,000.

Crashes, anthrax, Legionella, shigella, bovine TB, suicides, flooding, wildfires, hail, ecocide, crime, corruption, disease, drought, destruction, distrust and dependence: these are the Daugaard years.

But, applaud the nutball Republican efforts diverting attention from the party’s culture of corruption where murders and their coverups are commonplace by clogging the legislative session with christianic religionist argle-bargle.





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