Yesterday (Tuesday) evening, activist David Cobb lit up the Labor Temple in Bozeman with a fiery presentation about the history of corporations, American democracy, and how the dumbfounding, ironic, and insidious mixing of the two has given us the mess in which we live.  Cobb, who has worked as a lawyer and been active in the Green Party, is now a leader with Move to Amend, which is aimed at passing a constitutional amendment ending corporate personhood and declaring that money is not speech.  

The structure of the presentation was a story of corporations throughout American history.  Cobb told the audience that stories are key to how we interpret the world and view our place in it, and that new stories are necessary for any transformation.  "If you want to be persuasive, facts don't matter that much," but stories do.  Cobb's story was about how transnational corporations have come to rule over us.

Cobb took the story of corporations back to Roman times (from which the word dates), where they originated as a voluntary complement to taxes.  That is, while taxes were a mandatory way of putting private resources toward a public use, a corporation was a voluntary way in which individuals were remunerated for their contribution.  Corporations, in this basic sense, Cobb argued, are good.  Corporations during this era were conceived as having a specific temporary purpose (such as constructing a road), and when they fulfilled that...

Editor's Note: The article was not titled; we have taken the liberty to give it one.

The story of the North American bison (Bison bison) should be familiar not only to those who study biology or conservation, but to anyone who has taken a high school level American History class.  Prior to settlement by Europeans, there may have been as many as 25-30 million bison on the continent of North America.  A decade before the turn of the twentieth century, however, their numbers had been reduced to approximately 1,000 (Lueck 2002).

Around the year 1500, the bison’s range extended from as far northwest as Canada’s Yukon Territory to as far southeast as the panhandle of Florida (Callenbach 1996).  Now its wild range is effectively limited to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) containing parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. This is partially due to aggressive management by the Interagency Bison Management Plan (IBMP) (Bidwell 2010). There is ample evidence to support the distinction of the bison as a keystone species of grassland ecosystems (Knapp 1999), and therefore it would be reasonable to infer that the grasslands of their historic range could benefit from the bison’s return.

            A keystone species is a species that has large effects on its ecosystem even though it is not a dominant species by measures of population or biomass.The loss of a single keystone...

The recent article in the Lewistown News Argus, “Increasing water requests for oil drilling worry Musselshell coalition” points out one of the main concerns of The Madison Aquifer Alliance -obvious disregard for Montanans, Montana water rights and Montana Law by out of state companies in the rush to exploit our oil and gas resources.

Little oil and gas development has occured in Central Montana and yet we are already seeing illegal water use. We are very concerned with the repercussions multiple fracking operations would have throughout Central Montana in regards to water use and potential contamination.

The statements made by the court appointed Chief Water Commissioner for the Musselshell River about proper water use and permit procedures are telling. He said one company spokesman he talked to (in regards to the 6 - 9 months time frame to switch a water permit) indicated “they were not willing to wait that long-that they’d just take the water and pay the fine.”

Not all companies will so blatantly break the law. The out of state company in the article may have had a “misunderstanding”, but this demonstrates some will resort to illegal activity. The fines are not effective and oversight is lacking to negate illegal water use. This is troubling for anyone who depends on water for their livelihood and who have established a...

February 29th will be a national day of action against corporations who are part of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  In Bozeman, a picket will be held at Wells Fargo at 12:00 to draw attention to the bank's $120 million investments in two private prison corporations (GEO Group and CCA), who have used ALEC to increase their profits through aggressive anti-immigration legislation.  There are many other corporations in Montana, however, who are members of ALEC and have used similar tactics.  In fact, nearly everyone in Montana is affected by ALEC directly - they pay electric bills that are almost double what they were before the state's public utility deregulated in 1997.  The bill that set that process in motion was pushed by Enron through ALEC.

The PBS investigative documentary The Power Brokers (you can get it at the public library) tells the story of how the Montana deregulation bill was drawn up secretively in a hotel room in Helena, passed, and unleashed on the public.  

As part of the rise of neo-liberal politics in the 1980s and 1990s, states - beginning with California - raised the idea of opening their state-owned...