Dear Tacoma City Council,

It is with interest that I noticed Clear Channel's "road spam" on all our billboards.  I have to tell you - I really didn't realize how many there were and how ugly they are until Clear Channel brought my attention to them by talking down to me and trying to mislead me about the "rights" corporations have to blight our city's landscape.

Originally I had hoped that a private party had bought them all up to bring (hopefully) the whole nation's attention to our national constitution, and was disappointed to find out that it was simply a massive corporation hoping to coerce and bully a city's population with a specious and wrong-headed concept of "corporate constitutional rights".  I've always heard that corporations are given rights by the communities in which they serve - rights which, by the way, can and should be taken away when they act irresponsibly or illegally.

The First Amendment was not designed to apply to corporations.  Corporations do not, by law, have the same rights as citizens, in fact, corporations do not have any rights not explicitly granted to them by the citizens, and Clear Channel's suggestion to the contrary is disingenuous and irresponsible.  In addition, the legal arguments Clear Channel is using have been struck down multiple times in the past - they carry no weight.  The dispute with the city is an important one, potentially precedent-setting, and could have ramifications for the rest of the country.

For a corporation, life is all about selling things.  For us, life is about much more than buying things.  The state of Maine figured that out and made it the law.  For thirty years, there have been no billboards at all in the state of Maine.  The right of a population to determine whether public property can be used for commercial interests is not in question.

If Clear Channel refuses to remove the billboards, the city should take them down, or as it was put more colorfully by a poster at exit133.com,"Every single illegal billboard in Tacoma MUST be toppled, systematically dismantled and the parts destroyed utterly by fire".  I couldn't agree more.

I, for one, as a citizen of Tacoma, encourage the city council to stand firmly behind the ordinance passed 10 (!) years ago, and force Clear Channel to comply.  Tacoma is well within its rights to insist that corporations do not throw their trash all over Tacoma, just as we as individuals are within our rights to insist that we not get phone calls and junk mail; that we not get advertised and spammed and billboarded and commercialed to death, constantly, from all sides, at all times.  If Clear Channel hired someone with a microphone to stand in each location where a billboard is now, and shout their message over a loudspeaker 24 hours a day, those people would be jailed before their first day's shift was over.

Stand Firm!  Personally, I will be doing everything I can to help create a public backlash against Clear Channel for being such a rotten neighbor.

Andrew Bacon  .  Editor

Tahoma Organizer

editor@tahomaorganizer.org