A black fox stood in the yard. Motionless, it watched the ground squirrels. I didn’t see it have much luck. Neighbor said he saw the fox with two in the mouth. That was before it was so unbearably hot. Recent temperatures in eastern Montana were only a couple degrees cooler than the hottest place on earth, Death Valley. More rain is welcome.
The fox moved on. At the mailbox, the shadowy political tricksters are ever-present. The election mailers keep coming. The names of the shadow groups change. The money behind the curtain is from the same dark circles as the last election and the one prior. They insist that only they and their corporate pals know who’s electable, but in reality, nobody really knows.
Big money keeps regurgitating the same-old-tired playbook that stirs enough emotions to motivate us to swallow the hook, line, and sinker. But mostly, the shadow groups’ game is to keep workers divided, distracted, and triggered. And they got all the money in the world to market us.
Not long ago, in my lifetime, it used to be that you could get up in the morning, go to work, put in an honest day, and be able to afford a place to live. You could earn a few weeks’ worth of vacation, send a kid to school, and buy a few nice things. We enjoyed an economy where if you work hard and play by the rules, a worker could get ahead and our kids could do better than we did. The last decades changed those opportunities.
Recently, the CEO of Microsoft talked about how the job losses due to artificial intelligence development could look very similar to the vast job losses due to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Congress passed that job-offshoring boondoggle in the early 1990s.
NAFTA outsourced a million American manufacturing jobs from places like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Politicians shipped work across the southern border where wages and benefits cost a whole lot less to help corporate owners. It hurt working-class Americans, devastated jobs and the security families spent generations creating. Mills closed in Montana.
Next, the corporate wing of Congress gave China its much-sought-after Permanent Normal Trade Relations status. Millions more American jobs were lost from the Rust Belt states, New England, and the Carolinas as work was suddenly outsourced and offshored overseas. Mines closed in Montana.
Later, a corporate Congress voted to give the troubled Wall Street financiers a massive taxpayer-funded bailout as working-family homes were foreclosed and job losses drained American wallets, hurting everyday people in places like the Flathead. The message from Congress was clear. Big Money matters and everyday workers can just suck it.
The political charlatans that fed us the corporate bailouts of the past want us to again trust them with our pocketbooks. If the last decades showed workers anything, it’s that living has only gotten way more expensive with corporate politicians running the state and Washington, D.C. Not many in Montana trust Congress with more of their hard-earned cash.
Corporate insiders have run Montana politics for so long that their staffers have transformed into highly paid consultants. They funnel and spend untraceable political money from outside the state to crown or demonize targeted candidates. It’s a game with real-life consequences for the rest of us.
These shadowy groups use bucketloads of money from artificial intelligence, crypto, or data-center billionaires who live somewhere, but clearly not Montana. From the farm, it looks like these shadowy groups are trying to ensure their guy is in charge to make the rules on how much homeowners’ electric bills will spike due to the artificial demand for national computing power.
Healthcare advocates are already announcing that family insurance premiums will spike another 10 to 20 percent come next year. With average family insurance premiums costing over $25,000, another double-digit premium increase is hardly welcome news. It’s baffling that the people running Montana just don’t get or care how bloody expensive living is for working families.
A couple of statewide candidates in Montana clearly put people first. I think you can see who they are and don’t need an old Democratic farmer like me telling you where to look. It’s easy to identify a corporate or working-stiff candidate, if you look just a little bit.
Sly as a fox, corporate politicians remain cagey, difficult to track, and spend millions tricking us into believing their overblown hype. The insiders have run the game for a very long time. The flyers, they insist, will continue until voter enthusiasm returns. A million bucks here, a million there. It’s like play money to the consultants.
The working-class folks that I know and the people I see doing the daily work throughout this valley simply want a government that helps make living just a little bit easier and less expensive. Hard-working people seek a square deal, a fair shot at getting ahead, and a little bit of dignity in an excruciatingly pricey Montana. Do remind us where the buck stops. Give ‘em hell, Harry.