Responsible Environmental Stewardship

Click here for Recycling in Rapid City: How, What & Where, an SDDIA-RC publication.

Clean Water Resolution adopted by Pennington County Commissioners
Click here: www.sddia.org/documents/waterresolution.pdf

Dear Mayor Hanks:
Democracy in Action members congratulate you on your election as mayor.
Our organization has a strong interest in local government, and we would like to open discussions with you on how we can work together to address the following DIA environmental goals: .
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• Making recycling mandatory.
• Protecting the Rapid Creek floodplain from future construction .
• Using city rights to Rapid Creek water in lieu of pumping from underground aquifers.
• Conserving water .
• Working with the Pennington County Commission to address septic tank issues not covered by city ordinance .
• Funding stormwater drainage and treatment appropriately.
• Using city resources to support and promote the Farmers’ Market.
• Addressing global warming by becoming a Cool City

Civil Public Policy Dialogue

Bill Moyers writing in Christian Century April 17, 07 on democracy and journalism:
So here is the deepest crisis as I see it: we talk about problems, issues, policy solutions, but we don’t talk about what democracy means—what it bestows on us, the power it gives us—the astonishing opportunity to shape our destiny. i mean the revolutionary idea that democracy isn’t merely a means of government, it means of dignifying people so that they have a chance to become fully human. Every day I find myself asking, why is America forsaking its own revolution?

“Take Back Our Language: The Reframing of Political Issues” by Shirley Frederick October 2006
According to linguist George Lakoff people do not think in facts. They think in frames. If a fact doesn’t fit the frame, it fails to register. Some examples of frames:
Language always comes with what is called "framing." Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like "revolt," that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly…and they are throwing off their rulers, that would be considered a good thing. That’s a frame.
If you then add the word "voter" in front of "revolt," you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like "voter revolt" …
Here's another example of how powerful framing is. In Arnold Schwarzenegger's acceptance speech, he said, "When the people win, politics as usual loses." What's that about? Well, he knows that he's going to face a Democratic legislature, so what he has done is frame himself and also Republican politicians as the people, while framing Democratic politicians as politics as usual — in advance. The Democratic legislators won't know what hit them. They're automatically framed as enemies of the people.

Global Cooperation

"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who ae cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."------Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Protection of Civil Liberties

Re: Limitations of Presidential Power
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to know that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”
John Adams

"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud" is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of the people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching....... The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt,.....until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society."
John Quincy Adams

Re: Women's Equality Day
August 26 of each year is designated in the United States as Women's Equality Day. Instituted by Rep. Bella Abzug and first established in 1971, the date commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, the Woman Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave U.S. women full voting rights in 1920.

Economic Opportunity

Native Justice and Racial Reconciliation

Democracy in Action Postion on Bear Butte
Democracy in Action supports efforts to preserve Bear Butte and protect it from commercial encroachment because it is a significant sacred cultural site for indigenous people and an endangered National Historic Landmark for everyone.