Welcome to the Colony of Montana ⎯Billionaires & Busted Dreams
Fri May 11, 2007 at 07:39:07 AM PDT
Mythbusting Part One: Memoirs of a Muckraking Montana Maven
Today’s New York Times has the story of the gated community for the uber wealthy "The Yellowstone Club" in Big Sky, Montana. Further to the east, Montana can also "boast" eight of the ten poorest counties in the United States where the myth of an America "rich enough to give us all a farm" is coming to an end. The great divide isn’t the Continental one that cuts through Montana. It’s the increasingly huge divide between the uber rich and the rest of us.
While in the little town of Livingston, Montana, the charitable organization "Loaves and Fishes" serves 85 meals a day to the "working poor", other residents are flying in on private jets to fly fish where they shot "The River Runs Through It."
Take a quick peak at "A Ski Community Where There’s No Such Thing as Too Much" and then we will travel east through the colony that soon all America will be like.
http://select.nytimes.com/...
This article says it all about the scale of social inequality in Montana and the U.S. Mega homes, mega churches and mega malls get bigger and bigger. Mega billionaires fly in to nest on the Front Range. In timber baron Tim Blixseth’s Yellowstone Club it’s all about scale.
Each house is built to a grand scale. Take the River Runs Through It home, a $16 million, 10,000-square-foot house now under construction, tucked into the lodgepole forest with a drop-dead view of Cedar Mountain. Connecting the guesthouse and the main house is a room with a glass ceiling, glass walls and a glass bridge, with an enclosed and heated $80,000 "river" flowing beneath it.
The home has six fireplaces and a two-sided infinity Jacuzzi. There’s an outdoor fireplace with a built-in barbecue and a waterfall. The home is covered with "live edge" lap siding, which are overlapping boards sawn from a Douglas fir tree with the bark still on the bottom edge.
Inside there is a stand-up Jacuzzi with another waterfall. And there are nine sleeper chairs in a home theater.
The Club has 4 restaurants and
Members can also visit the caviar bar, with a towering mahogany back bar, in the Warren Miller Lodge at the bottom of one of the main ski areas. There are 21 condominium units, starting at just under $6 million. Caviar starts at $120 and runs up to $350 per serving.
Meanwhile back at the ranch,actually due north and east of my ranch, there are eight of the ten poorest counties in America according to The Economist magazine in an article in 2005. I stumbled on a blogger named John Crabtree whose site had the story. http://cfra.blogspot.com/...
"The Poorest Part of America" on Blog for Rural America⎯John Crabtree
The article focuses on one county, Judith Gap. (Note: since the article they built a giant windfarm there and I don't know if there is any impact from that to change this particular county). And the author gets to the heart of the problem. Like Ireland used to be before it finally built fish processing plants for its fishing industry, Montana is still a colony. It has virtually no food processing of its agriculture and no building of furniture for its timber and no catalytic converter business for its paladium.
There are a few signs of innovation. Montana and North Dakota are both trying to grow more organic crops, for which margins are higher, and state coffers are swelling because of the energy boom. But little effort has been made to process foods rather than just grow them. For instance, both North and South Dakota are leading producers of wheat and soyabeans. Yet according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, the two states have less than 1% of their population employed in the food-processing industry. The crops go out by the truckload to provide jobs elsewhere.
Moreover, the cash is being distributed in an increasingly unequal way. In 2004, 405 farmers in Judith Basin County received $4m in farm subsidies. That would imply an annual hand-out of $9,900 each, but the average for the top 20 recipients was $55,850 apiece. More of the money is being grabbed by big farmers. In one way such consolidation is welcome, but it hardly squares with the egalitarian ambitions of the Homestead Acts.
Ah, yes, the myth of being upwardly mobile gets busted again.
As for the idea that rural America feeds the world, the truth is that it no longer even feeds America. Americans buy ever more of their food from more fertile and cheaper places like Brazil (though they have to pay more for it than they should, thanks to America's high tariffs). Meanwhile, providing this huge, sparsely populated area with services such as health care, schools and transport looks an increasingly expensive proposition for an ever more urban and suburban country. The years when Uncle Sam "is rich enough to give us all a farm" are drawing to an end.
Can anything be done for rural America and should we even try?
This is from the website The Center for Rural Affairs: http://www.cfra.org/...
The study Trampled Dreams we published in 2000 found that for all states in this region, nearly all job growth in rural, agriculturally-dependent communities during the late 1980s to late 1990s was in non-farm self-employment or small business. I think this represents the entrepreneurial character that still exists in the region, a character that remains from the days of homesteading and settlement. Yet we do virtually nothing through our public policy for this type of economic development that actually works in rural communities. An example from Nebraska, that actually has one of the best state-wide small business development policies in the nation, demonstrates this point. Last year the state spent about $500,000 for the development of small and micro- businesses; they also spent nearly $176 million in tax breaks and tax avoidances for industrial and corporate development, none of which went to the smallest rural communities in the state. That disparity is universal nationwide.
"The entrepreneurial spirit that still exists" is the key phrase here.
It does still exist in the nooks and crannies of our thin democracy. It exists at the edge of our democracy as Francis Moore Lappe chronicles in her book "Democracy's Edge". It exists in our hearts and in our minds' dreams. But it's getting harder and harder without real policy changes.
And before we can do that, we have got to be truthful. That's where mythbusting and muckraking come in. Hope stinks. We need to cattle prod these representives to do the right things.
I know you all want to dream of open spaces that are still there for your young ones to dream about; a place filled with cattle and cowdogs; antelope and buffalo with lots of line dancing and friendly games of horseshoes. You want to think of Montana as Big Sky country with beautiful trout streams for the guys and cowboys with great butts leaning against the fenceposts for the gals. Speaking of the cowboy mythology, when a friend asked me where she could get a rancher like I did, I reply, "I got the last one with good teeth." Sorry, but money for dental care just isn't there for the regular rancher. "Boy, mythbusting is not pleasant work," I thought as I looked at the disappointment on my friend's face.
I just read too much about our beautiful scenery sometimes. It is great and I feel very privileged to be married to the last of a breed; the cattle rancher. At the same time, it hurts me to read from a resident in Judith Gap who said, "It's hard to be happy about the beautiful scenery when you don't know whether you can afford to stretch that five dollars until the end of the week and get medicine for your sick child."
Bill Moyers has asked us to tell the stories and in that effort to change the story of America from "the gospel of wealth" back to "The American Dream".
Are we going to become a community again or just a bunch of people living next to each other. I think we have one last chance to decide which side we are on.
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