Montana is Not “a Product” and Government is Not “a Business”

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte has boasted that “Montana is an easy product to sell” and recently referred to himself as our state’s CEO.

He’s dead wrong on both counts. Montana is a state, not a product — and government is not a business. We have elected officials whose duty it is to serve the people with the greatest good for the greatest number — not CEOs whose job is to maximize profits for corporate shareholders.

Of course Gianforte is not the first nor the last person to come to Montana and evince the attitude that Montanans don’t recognize the value of what we have — and then go on to “market” what we hold dear to wring financial profit from the state’s incredible natural assets and hardworking citizens.

In truth, the other side of marketing, which so many governors, both Republican and Democrat, have mistakenly believed was their job, is maintenance of those natural assets and our people — not auctioning them off to the highest bidder.

Like any asset, natural or otherwise, you simply cannot put more and more pressure on a finite resource before the resource itself is degraded. And right now under Gianforte’s administration, make no mistake, our resources and people are being degraded.

Gianforte’s view of Montana is not unlike that of the railroad, timber, and cattle barons or the Copper Kings. That view sees what can be cut, mined, drilled, grazed and taken from the land to produce profit for the takers — not what can and should be “maintained and improved” as mandated by Montana’s constitution.

But how has that worked out? Well, the railroad barons got vast holdings of federal lands to supposedly build lines and maintain rail service to “settle the West.” Yet today Montana has no passenger service on its southern rail line and there are no rail lines going up all the valleys in which the government so generously granted the railroad barons every other section of public land.

Even worse, those vast tracts of once-public lands have been mercilessly clearcut, leaving stumpfields and thousands of acres of knapweed infestations among the spiderwebs of eroding logging roads thanks to a decision by Plum Creek’s board of directors to “liquidate” their timber holdings.

And liquidate they did, with a vengeance and nodding approval from its CEO, just as Gianforte is now doing with state forests. That’s what CEOs do — liquidate assets to produce revenue. But Montana’s budget surplus means we don’t need to and shouldn’t be razing our forests for money.

Meanwhile, if you look at the “maintenance” part of the equation, the toll is tragic. Our deer are now laced with Chronic Wasting Disease, our once world-famous rivers are dry and hot irrigation ditches with crashing trout populations. And our parks and campgrounds are so overrun with tourists Montanans have to get reservations to go to places they’ve gone for years.

Nor are our fellow Montanans in any way, shape, or form “shareholders” since the “dividends” from marketing the state do not accrue to the populace, which now finds itself incapable of even affording a home in their own state. No, the profits from marketing Montana go to the developers, the subdividers, and the luxury resort and private hunting lodge owners.

And so the governor, like carpetbaggers of the past, sees Montana as a commodity to be sold and profits reaped. As for future generations, Christian evangelicals like Gianforte don’t worry too much about the future since they’re very sure the rapture is imminent. But “get as much as you can as fast as you can” is no way to run a state – especially with Gianforte as its “CEO.”

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