By Brett Bursey

Director, SC Progressive Network

Upon our state’s preparing to secede from the Union, James Petigru observed, “South Carolina is too large to be a lunatic asylum and too small to be a republic.” True to form, it seems our legislators insist on swimming against history’s tide and holding fast to all manner of lunacy.

On Thursday, Feb. 19, the legislature will be holding hearings on bills that may prove Petigru wrong about limits on the size of an asylum.

The Senate Agriculture Committee is taking up (again) a bill (S-232) at 10am in 406-Gressett, to include nuclear power as a “renewable” resource. While it is a fantasy of the nuclear industry to catch the renewable energy wave by painting nuclear fusion green, there is not a damn thing renewable about nuclear power except the industry’s audacity. (Remember in the 1950s when radiation was measured in “sunshine units”?)

These same lunatics run the asylum that passed legislation last session to let private corporations charge rate payers – up front – to build nuclear reactors. SCE&G predicts a 37 percent increase in your utility bills over the next decade to subsidize construction that can’t get private financing or insurance. It’s likely that the final bill will be twice what SCE&G claims.

A rational legislature, concerned about our energy future, could have put a similar golden carrot on the stick that led to the development of real renewable resources.

How many of us would install solar panels if we could pay for them incrementally over a decade? How many good and enduring jobs could be generated if we put support behind real renewables? The $4.5 billion dollar reactor is predicted to provide 500 jobs after construction. That’s a cost of $9 million a job.

At the same Senate Agriculture hearing Thursday, Sen. Robert Ford will be pushing a bill (S-44) that opens our coast to offshore drilling and expedited DHEC licenses. It remains to be seen whether the Obama administration will remove federal prohibitions on coastal oil and gas drilling.

Ford, you may recall, is the black legislator who said America isn’t ready for a black president. At the time, Ford was on Hillary Clinton’s payroll.

This column ran in the online version of The State‘s editorial page. John Crangle’s group, Common Cause South Carolina, is a member of the SC Progressive Network.

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By Bob Edgar and John V. Crangle

The avalanche of scandals of the past six months simply adds to the mountain of evidence that America must change the way it pays for its elections. The cases of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich illustrate the problems of America’s pay-to-play political system.

Our highest-bidder style of campaign fundraising is an open invitation to more scandals at every level of government. It also invites public cynicism because those who want something from government – whether it’s a tax break, a lucrative contract or favorable legislation – make the largest contributions to political campaigns.

It is difficult today to tell the difference between legal contributions to political candidates and illegal contributions made with an express quid pro quo. Lawmakers who serve on committees with jurisdiction over specific issues and sectors of the economy receive much of their campaign money from the very industries they are supposed to regulate. The most appalling cases of this are congressional committees that are supposed to watch Wall Street, but outrageously fail to do so.

In the wake of an $800 billion trillion stimulus package that features road work and other infrastructure projects in the states, we are likely to see this pay-to-play culture get even worse. The ultimate solution is to create a voluntary system of public funding under which federal and state candidates run vigorous campaigns funded by a combination of small contributions and limited public dollars.

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