Eyman gets new bankrollers

[eridani]

http://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2010/06/tim-eyman-got-may-boost-from.html

For many years, Tim Eyman has derided the state's business community — "Big Business" — as one of his enemies. But this year, with his sugar daddy Michael Dunmire apparently unwilling to cover the cost of hiring mercenaries to collect signatures for Eyman's schemes, the Mukilteo profiteer has turned to some new corporate friends to fill his coffers with cash.

Eyman's new pals include Cononco Phillips and Tesoro and two trade associations: the Washington Bankers Association and the Washington Restaurants Association. The former three donated $25,000 and the latter donated $20,000, all in May. Each contribution was made during a different week last month.

Eyman didn't waste time transferring the money to Roy Ruffino's Citizen Solutions to pay petitioners. Eyman wrote half a dozen five figure checks to Citizen Solutions in May alone. If Citizen Solutions was paying its mercenaries fifty cents a signature, then Eyman would have gained hundreds of thousands of signatures.

Progressives hardly need another reason to dislike either Conoco Phillips or Tesoro (which are part of the dirty fossil fuels industry), but now we've got one. The bankers' association's support of Tim Eyman is especially ironic and badly timed considering that America's common wealth is the only reason our banking system didn't collapse when the Great Recession hit home in 2008.

Seeing that contribution on the PDC's website this morning also makes me glad that NPI does not bank with a bank. Instead, we belong to a credit union, and like every other member, we are a part owner of our credit union. It's our financial institution, always looking out for our economic security.

If you haven't moved your money to a credit union yet, let the bankers' support of Initiative 1053 serve as an inspiration. Officers from the following banks are currently serving on the Banker's Association board in some capacity:

U.S. Bank (Byron L. Richards, Chairman)
Fortune Bank (Dave Straus, Chairman-Elect)
Viking Bank (Patrick Redmond, Immediate Past Chairman)
Bank of America (Kerry Biddle, Treasurer)
Cashmere Valley Bank (Ken Martin, Government Relations Committee Rep)
Northwest Commercial Bank (Kurt Graff, WBA PROS Chairman)
Columbia Bank (Melanie Dressel, Director)
Washington Trust Bank (Jack Heath, Director)
The Bank of the Pacific (Dennis Long, Director)
Cascade Bank (Carol Nelson, Director)
Community 1st Bank (Eric Pearson, Director)
Sound Community Bank (Laurie Stewart, Director)
Wells Fargo (Patrick Yalung, Director)
According to the WBA's website, the above named individuals are " responsible for the prudent stewardship of the fiscal resources of the association." That means they are the ones who approved the $25,000 contribution to Tim Eyman's latest attempt to wreck representative government in Washington.

Shame on them.

How fitting that the WBA's current treasurer is from Bank of America, one of the most corrupt, greedy, and powerful banks in the world, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, otherwise known as the bank bailout. Have you no shame, Kerry Biddle? You and your cohorts? Benefiting from our common wealth while simultaneously working to undermine it?

No doubt you're afraid the Legislature is going to revoke some of the special tax breaks you currently enjoy when it convenes again and faces another big budget deficit. So you prudently decided to write a check to Washington's most shameless politician, who represents the antithesis of everything that is good about our state, and who once took hundreds of thousands of dollars of his supporters' money and pocketed it for his own personal profit while lying about it.

[tavalon]

1. It's always a relief to see a Tim Eyman proposal

There is so much to research about the local initiatives, but when I see that Eyman is attached to one, I can skip the research. I vote no on all Tim Eyman's initiatives without a bit of research. It's like a freebie. No on Tim Eyman.

[Salviati]

2. The only initiative that I would have voted for with Eyman's name on it...

Would have been the one to have him officially declared a horse's ass.

Otherwise, I'm in the same boat as you :)

[SeattleGirl]

4. Same here!

He is definitely a horse's ass!

[Raster]

3. Hear! Hear! More than once I've taken down an Eyman signature collector with a few facts about Tim

and his initiative business. And that's what it is to Eyman, a business. It's a job, or as close as Eyman will ever get to one. I doubt he's ever done an honest day's labor in his life.

[demigoddess]

5. he always gets a no from me. I once saw him on tv, with

his initiative to lower car taxes. He was moaning about the fact that he could not afford to buy a new car for his wife because the tax was so high. The car parked in the garage next to his wife's was a mercedes. I thought he was just too stupid to find a car in his 'price range'. Most people if they can't afford the car and the tax, they buy a cheaper car and allow the difference for the tax. I guess he was into propaganda.