JACKSON — Well, our old friends (I say facetiously) at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s biggest business lobby, are back in Mississippi with their vicious and false TV attack ads, this time trying to destroy the senatorial candidacy of Democratic former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove.
Is the Chamber going to get away again with totally ignoring the state’s campaign finance disclosure law as it did in 2000 when it poured over $1 million in TV ads plus printed propaganda into Mississippi to pack the state Supreme Court with its four handpicked candidates?
Then-Secretary of State Eric Clark and Attorney General Mike Moore, both Democrats, tried vainly to make the gargantuan business lobby comply with Mississippi’s campaign law and disclose where the money was coming from and how it was spent. But they were blocked by the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals, where the chamber knew it had friends.
Consequently, we never found out where the chamber money came from. It stands to reason, however, big corporations bankrolled the ads to implant a corporate imprimatur on this little state’s judicial system.
Now is Republican Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann going to demand that the U.S. Chamber, which is spending thousands on TV ads obviously to defeat Democrat Musgrove, comply with state law? It’ll snow next week if that happens.
But let’s get to the chamber’s anti-Musgrove ads, quoting from printed alleged “sources.” One that really hits me in the eye is taken from a 2003 Sid Salter column saying Musgrove spent money “like a drunken sailor.” As a World War II sailor, and on behalf of other sailors, I deeply resent the use of that tired old epithet.
I pulled out a piece I wrote in May 2001 about Musgrove having vetoed 45 appropriations passed by the Legislature for being over-budget, and lawmakers (including Republicans) immediately overriding all the vetoes, then going home. Nothing like that ever happened before or since.
The beef between Musgrove and lawmakers was over his insistence on using a 1 percent revenue growth estimate for the 2002 fiscal year budget and lawmakers upping it to 3.7 percent. Drunken sailor, huh? It turned out Musgrove was right and lawmakers wrong, and later that year he had to make heavy mid-year budget cuts.
As the nation sank into recession, fiscal year 2002 became the first of a deep three-year budget crisis that hit Mississippi and 42 other states. At its worst in 2003, the state’s revenue shortfall (to fund obligated state services) fell to about $500 million. Note: $341 million of it was to pay debt service on state bonds that quadrupled during the 1990s regime of Republican Kirk Fordice.
Musgrove in 2003 rejected even a Stennis Institute study calling for raising some taxes to avoid stiff cuts in many services, especially higher education, to balance the state budget. Consequently, lawmakers cobbled together a budget by cutting every program except public schools, dipping into rainy-day funds, scouring fees from special fund agencies and diverting the annual payment into the health care trust fund created in 1998 from the $4 billion tobacco settlement.
That’s why the claim in the U.S. Chamber ad that Musgrove, after inheriting a surplus in 2000, left the state with a $700 million “deficit” is such a big fat lie. A deficit? There’s no such animal in Mississippi. By law lawmakers can’t appropriate a state budget not balanced by estimated revenues.
Another outrageous blurb in the chamber ad claims that Musgrove RAISED taxes. The truth is Musgrove made a mistake in NOT increasing some taxes to put more money into the state revenue stream during the three-year revenue crisis. Many forget that a 2003 Stennis study funded by the Kellogg Foundation recommended raising the state’s top bracket income tax from 5 to 6 percent to produce $284 million.
Once again we see the Karl Rovian Republican strategy at work: Repeat a lie often enough on television and soon people will believe it. And again we see Chamber President Tom Donohue mastermind a plot to take over the internal politics of this Deep South conservative state.
Musgrove with his squeaky voice is not easy to love, but it’s grossly unfair to see his record Swift-boated by hidden-donor attack ads. I have my own beef with the diabolical Donohue. Some years ago I acquired a few shares in Union Pacific Railroad. Last year’s stockholder report showed Donohue as a director, hauling down $157,000 just to attend board meetings.
As a young Naval officer fighting across the Pacific in World War II, my pay was $250 a month — most of my gunnery crew probably less — to risk my life for my country, and I didn’t complain. But when a guy gets $157,000 to plop his fat backside at corporate board meetings and talks about spendthrift swabbies, I’m mad.
