Zinke on wife’s birthday: Wouldn’t you agree our anniversary is coming?

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 3 Comments
Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) and a gun in the living room

Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) and a gun in the living room

Montana’s man in Congress, Representative Ryan Zinke, unleashed a novel argument last week: the President shouldn’t have attended the Paris summit on climate change, because ISIS is the bigger threat. Commander Zinke pestered Secretary of Defense Ash Carter on that subject in a House Armed Services Committee meeting shortly after Thanksgiving.

“We have ISIS, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda, North Korea, an emerging China and Russia. Mr. Secretary, where would you rack and stack global warming with that list?” he asked. Although Carter initially declined to order that list of terrorists, nations, and weather patterns, Commander Zinke pressed on. “Would you agree the imminent threat, the 5-yard, 5-meter threat—the most damaging threat facing us today—would be ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the non-nation state terrorist activities?”

Carter agreed ISIS was the imminent threat, probably because hearing “rack and stack” and “5-meter threat” made him dive into a combat roll and shout “affirmative!” But man, I’m pretty sure another two feet of sea level will dampen us whether they’re beheading apostates in Raqqa or not. And I’m pretty sure the number of people who will starve, steam, or thirst to death in 2080—probably in the billions, if our grandchildren ever meet somebody nice—is more than ISIS could kill with a whole battalion of radicalized health inspectors. But the immediacy of ISIS makes global warming a bullshit problem, as Commander Zinke explained on Facebook:

I agree with President Obama that his climate summit will “send a message” to ISIS. The message is crystal clear: Obama is out of touch, he doesn’t understand the threat of radical Islamic terrorism, he is more concerned about his legacy than anything else, and he is willing to do anything to avoid confronting ISIS head-on.

It was kind of a stretch. I submit that Commander Zinke would rather talk about ISIS than global warming or virtually any other subject because it’s the kind of problem you can shoot at. They are bad and we are good, which makes them easier to discuss than how to get billions of people and dozens of industrialized nations to sacrifice money and comfort on behalf of animals and people who haven’t been born yet. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!

$2.3 million later, Tester reverses on fiduciary rule

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 0 Comment
Sen. Jon Tester before the tragic events of Operation Mayhem

Sen. Jon Tester before the tragic events of Operation Mayhem

Back in 2010, Montana’s Senator Jon Tester voted in favor of the Dodd-Frank Act and its authorization of the federal government to create a fiduciary rule. The fiduciary rule is dry, but it’s important. Generally understand as a response to financial advisors’ tendency, before the 2008 crisis, to push clients toward investments that paid high commissions rather than ones that suited their needs, the fiduciary rule would require advisors to put their clients’ financial success ahead of their own.

That makes sense, especially after you’ve watched subprime mortgage derivatives wreck the world economy. Lawyers are required to prioritize their clients’ interests, and so are clinicians. Maybe that’s why the fiduciary rule is overwhelmingly popular—except, of course, with the financial services industry. It has also recently become unpopular with Sen. Tester, who joined Republicans in attempting to block implementation of the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule last month.

In unrelated news, the financial industry has donated $2.3 million to Sen. Tester this year, bringing his career receipts from that sector to $3 million. Maybe he just wanted to give us all an object lesson in how  conflicts fiduciary of interest work. Either he has reaped monetary benefits at the expense of the Montanans whose civic investment he manages, or he knows a really good reason why the fiduciary rule is bad that he should explain to us right away. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. I’m going to make scrambled eggs and oatmeal for lunch, because I’m sick, and I demand pastes.

Greg Gianforte: quiet on religion, still animated by ideas

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics
Billionaire and maybe gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte—photo by Wolcott

Billionaire and maybe gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte—photo by Wolcott

Last time we checked in on Greg Gianforte, he had just cited the example of Noah, who was still working at age 600, to argue that “the concept of retirement is not biblical.” It was a pretty exciting quote, implying as it did that a man who had sold his own business for $1.5 billion A) regarded the Genesis story of Noah and the great flood as literally true, and B) wanted us to keep working until we died. The press had fun with it. It was kind of a shame, since this admittedly batty comment overshadowed Gianforte’s main policy idea, which was to encourage professionals who had left the state to “come home and bring their jobs with them” as telecommuters.

Montana has the second-lowest average wages of any state in the union. Unemployment is low, but pay is terrible. I was shocked, when I first arrived here for grad school, to find jobs for skilled carpenters advertising $8.50 an hour. Our per capita income is 38th, but that’s because of resource extraction, rental income, selling pieces of the ranch to Californians, et cetera. If you work for a living, Montana is a bad place to do it.

Gianforte’s focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the state therefore seems well-placed. Before he sold it to Oracle, the company he founded paid hundreds of employees around Bozeman an average wage of $92,000 a year. He is a tech guy, an engineer. He believes the problems in Montana’s employment system have solutions, and we can find them if we think carefully enough.

One cannot help but notice he has tweaked the system of his candidacy, as well. I sat down with Gianforte for about an hour last week, and he did not mention his religion until I asked about it. Even then, all he would say was that no one has the right to force their beliefs on anybody else. I found him likable and smart, and clearly excited by ideas—this time, classical economics instead of biblical creation. You can read all about our interview in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Montana declares victory in Real ID

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 1 Comment
Clint Sample, American hero

Clint Sample, American hero

Probably you don’t even know this, because your state kowtows to the federal government, but last week was the deadline for state driver’s licenses to comply with Real ID requirements or stop being valid to board commercial aircraft. What’s Real ID? The Department of Homeland Security says it’s a system of standards to make state-issued identifications harder to forge. The Montana legislature says it’s an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights, which is the kind of argument that hasn’t been decided in favor of a state since, I dunno, Dredd Scott.

Nevertheless, the great state of Montana made it illegal to comply with Real ID in 2007. We also started making our driver’s licenses a little harder to fake, including the futuristic expedient of not printing everything on that clear top layer you can peel off with an X-acto knife. It’s almost as if Real ID were a good idea, and the problem was that it came from somebody else.

But the real problem, according to the legislature in 2007 and the governor and attorney general now, is privacy. The feds might use Real ID to gather information about our driver’s licenses, even though the DHS explicitly said it wouldn’t do that, and even though there’s no evidence it has. But that hasn’t stopped Governor Bullock and Attorney General Fox from declaring victory over Real ID in a press release after the DHS extended our deadline to comply by one year.

That’s a dubious kind of victory. It’s also a little unseemly for Montana’s executive branch to defy the federal government on this specious privacy issue when the DHS has been proven to invade our privacy in much more real and problematic ways. I don’t remember Bullock standing up to the feds when we learned that the NSA was collating our emails, texts, and phone records. You can read all about these contradictions in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. I’ll be here at my desk, watching the leaves fall gently on the unmarked van that’s been parked outside my house since Tuesday.

Of human bondage

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 0 Comment
Not the good kind

Not the good kind

Remember when I told you that Montana politics is really interesting and you should follow it even if you don’t live there? They can’t all be gems. Even Batman has to sit at his desk and sign papers from time to time, and all the exciting projects of municipal government are funded by tedious financial instruments. This week’s column in the Missoula Independent is about one such tedious instrument, bond issues. As readers across the country know, Missoula passed a $42 million parks and trails bond last year. Right now, the electorate is voting on a $158 million bond to improve the public schools, which is a damn sight more important than lighted softball fields. Next year, we’ll probably vote on another bond issue to renovate the public library, which falls somewhere between parks and schools in its value to the public.

These bonds originated from different sources, but they all get paid for by the same property taxes. It so happens that Missoula has been spending a lot of money lately, not just with bond issues but also with settlements to various employees. The county risk fund is currently running an $800,000 deficit, which doesn’t come out of the same kitty as schools, parks, or libraries but still gets paid by the same tax base. And the city is about to pay anywhere from $50 million to $150 million to buy Mountain Water—a cost that will be underwritten by ratepayers, not property taxes, but will fall on homeowners and renters alike.

The upshot of all this money spent is that taxpayers perceive The Government—multifarious in its structures but uniform in its source of revenue—as an out-of-control money vacuum. The good people of Missoula are in danger of bond fatigue, which is a problem. It puts projects like school infrastructure and ritzy parks in the same race to voters’ wallets, rushing to get funded before people shut down and stop paying for anything. There’s got to be a better way, and with all these leaders running around, thinking up citizen’s initiatives and five-year plans and whatnot, we should be able to come up with something. Somebody else think of a good way to organize bonding programs. I just point out these problems; I don’t solve ’em. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.