Friday / Weekend Open Line

We’re happy to provide a place for the public to get documents of interest, be they city, county, old or new.  We have posted a few documents we’ve received in the last few days as requested by our readers regarding Vance County’s outlook from yesteryear.  If there are additional documents you would like to see, or if you’d like to provide additional documents you feel the community could benefit from please contact us. This goes forever, not just this weekend while the topic is hot.

Yesterday, we received the 2010 EDC  strategic plan. This plan is now considered outdated by the current EDC and they are preparing to make a new plan.  We’ve also received a 1990 strategic plan and have posted that as well.

Today local entrepreneur Art Pope was in the news, with a 10 page article in the New Yorker magazine.  The article focused on Mr. Popes political contributions in North Carolina and its influence.  The article offers contrasting quotes such as:

Marc Farinella, a Democratic political consultant who was Obama’s 2008 campaign director in North Carolina, and is now an adviser to the state’s Democratic governor, Beverly Perdue, says, “In a very real sense, Democrats running for office in North Carolina are always running against Art Pope. The Republican agenda in North Carolina is really Art Pope’s agenda. He sets it, he funds it, and he directs the efforts to achieve it. The candidates are just fronting for him. There are so many people in North Carolina beholden to Art Pope—it undermines the democratic process.” Farinella contends that the Citizens United decision is likely to make the problem worse. Because Variety Wholesalers is privately owned by the Pope family, Pope “has access to huge quantities of corporate funds,” which now can be channelled freely into politics. Still, Farinella notes, “there are very few people in North Carolina who understand who Art Pope is.”

and

Pope said that he was particularly affronted when “people throw around terms like ‘So-and-So tried to buy the election.’ ” In his view, such language evokes “images of actually bribing someone when they vote . . . or bribing a legislator after they’re elected. That’s illegal, that’s corrupt, and that’s something I’ve fought very hard against in North Carolina.” Pope sees himself as a reformer. The money that he spends on politics, he said, strengthens American democracy, by providing voters with more information and more choices: “Most of the efforts that I or my company have supported have been to get the message out on the issues, so that voters can make an informed choice.” He added, “To donate money, or make an independent expenditure to educate voters on the issues, or on voting records of the incumbents—I mean, it helps citizens make informed decisions! It’s the core of the First Amendment!”

Shortly afterwards, the CATO Institute released an article defending Mr. Pope, in which the article from CATO itself has already been criticized that it did not disclose Mr. Pope’s foundation donated $800k to them. Quote from the CATO Institute follows:

People who give millions of dollars to ideas and politics can expect some criticism. As a First Amendment absolutist, I think Art Pope has a right to use his money to support candidates he favors, and the New Yorker has a right to use its money to accuse the voters of North Carolina to be dumb enough to vote for whoever a businessman tells them to vote for. ‘Cause, you know, it couldn’t have been a general national swing against the Democratic agenda that caused voters to turn out Democratic majorities in the North Carolina legislature.

Like it or not, the seeds of the political scenery are growing for 2012.

Discuss and more in the Friday / Weekend Open Lines!