Private Jets and Billionaire Ribbons
The MAGA Vision for America Is On Full Display in Montana
Late last week, Montana’s MAGA delegation raced to get in front of the cameras at the grand opening of a shiny new Amazon warehouse in Belgrade, on the outskirts of Bozeman. The 52,000-square-foot facility is one of three in our state, and expansion plans indicate there will be many more, including another already announced in Kalispell.
While our small Main Street businesses have always had to work hard to survive, they struggled particularly during the pandemic. Meanwhile, the Amazon corporate behemoth gained a tremendous advantage, nearly doubling in size during the same period. The company is now so profitable that its founder, Jeff Bezos, covorts with Donald Trump and flies himself and his friends into space on his own rockets for fun.
Like other huge corporations, Amazon is also highly skilled at deploying armies of efficiency experts and cost accountants to leverage every conceivable advantage over local businesses, and Amazon has been deploying that advantage with incredible speed, wringing the last drop of profit from every transaction.
Announcing the corporate decision to build warehouses like the new one in Belgrade, the Amazon CEO touted their thinking, “Over the last several months, we’ve scrutinized every process path in our fulfillment centers and transportation network and redesigned scores of processes and mechanisms, resulting in steady productivity gains and cost reductions over the last few quarters.”1
I have heard numerous efficiency experts speak at large corporate meetings. I know what this means, so I’ll translate: “We have money, and scale, and we see an opportunity to put more Montana small businesses in the grave, so we are going to do it.”
Those efficiency experts understand that if they strangle enough small businesses, local workers will be left with no choice but to seek low-paying employment at their warehouse. And there, too, Amazon presses its advantage; multiple articles, insider reports, investigations, and whistleblowers have documented the various ways in which Amazon maximizes profit by treating workers like mechanized cattle.2 When those workers attempt to stand up for themselves, the company has a well-deserved reputation for being ruthless in its largely successful efforts to suppress workers who seek to form a union.3
No one should be surprised that wealthy corporations behave in this manner. What is surprising is the way in which our representatives, who are supposed to represent Montanans, lap it up. They should know that the aggressive anti-labor actions of Amazon are particularly offensive in this state, which has a proud and hard-fought union heritage. This is a place where oligarch copper kings ruined our rivers, abused workers, corrupted our politics, rigged the taxation system, and amassed obscene wealth. Working people of this state who rose up and said, “hell no,” and in so doing became an example for the entire country. I guess they don’t teach that history to Montana Republicans?
While the roots of Montana's organized labor movements reach back more than a century, there are many direct parallels to today. Montana copper kings leveraged their advantage of scale and wealth, elected themselves, and even forced workers to shop in company-owned stores. (Amazon is planning to open its own grocery stores as part of its next Montana expansion phase.)
Of course, Motanan’s congressional delegation celebrates all of this because they are the modern Copper Kings. Ryan Zinke, a man who entered politics a few years ago with little personal wealth, is now worth more than $32 million. He can often be found lounging around his Santa Barbara estate, entertaining his favorite partner-oligarch, including executives from the oil and mining industries. In addition to his other half-baked schemes, he earned nearly $ 1 million per year coaching those executives on how to evade our regulations to extract profit from our state. He did this after he rolled back national monument designations at the behest of those oil oligarchs and then was forced out of his interior post due to a long list of corruption so embarrassing that even the Trump administration had to remove him.
Steve Daines made his money during the tech boom alongside Greg Gianforte. Daines, who recently facilitated a public land swap that awarded his billionaire Yellowstone Club buddies ownership of some of the finest public wildlife habitat in the world on the east side of the Crazy Mountains, is a senator who enjoys manipulating the system so that large corporations like Amazon pay obscenely low taxes. This big smile on his face must stem from his awareness that despite making billions in profit, Amazon pays an effective tax rate of about 6%.4 Of course, he wants that rate to be even lower.
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte governs a state with a median personal income of less than $40,000 and housing expenses among the worst in the country. He could chamption leveling the playing field, or make damn sure that modern day copper kings stop getting all the advantages. But he does the opposite, flying around in his jet as he gleefully welcomes even more low-wage, small-business-killing copperkingery to our state; “I’m proud to welcome Amazon’s continued growth in our state and look forward to more partnerships like this one.”
Daines took it even further as he celebrated the idea of a massive billionaire owned corporate warehouse in his Bozeman backyard flexing its efficiency muscle to bury small Montana businesses; “And to think they will be delivering 11,000 packages a day out of this facility and working to get to same-day delivery right here in our neck of the woods is truly remarkable,”5
Tim Sheehy, who moved here, bought three ranches and then charged people more than $12,000 to hunt elk,6 wasted no time flexing his billionaire connection in DC after he was elected. Sheehy quickly capitalized on Secretary of Interior and Yellowstone Club Member Doug Burgum’s love of Oligarchy to obtain contracts from the federal government that saved his company. He wants more oligarchs to join him, claiming he was pleased that the Amazon ribbon-cutting ceremony would “send a clear message that Montana is open for business.”
There’s just no way to get around it. These super-wealthy modern copper kings care only about themselves and their fellow oligarchs who fly their private jets into Bozeman and then take a black car up the Gallatin Gateway to escape the struggling little people. This was disgusting a hundred years ago, and it’s disgusting now.
If you’ve spent any time in this wonderful place, you know that our magic lies in our towns and small businesses, as well as in our wild places and family ranches. But all of that is directly threatened by the MAGA vision for Montana. As Raph Graybill often eloquently stated on our campaign, “They just have a fundamentally different vision of what Montana and the country should be. We want the middle class to thrive; they want all of us to serve just a few of them.”
https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/amazon-shifts-regional-fulfillment-model-faster-prime-delivery/647708/
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/02/amazon-safety-citations-osha-department-of-justice
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-virginia.html
https://news.mt.gov/Governors-Office/Governor-Gianforte-Cuts-Ribbon-on-Amazons-New-Facility-in-Belgrade
How our live and let live state has elected ALL of these filthy rich land grabbers is just stunning. They are literally selling off all of Montana…the businesses, the land, and the people. WAKE UP!! Change your vote to someone who will actually do something for YOU…the working people of Montana.
Exactly. And the reason these toads don’t hold public meetings is that they’re extremely unlikeable people. The voter perception is that Dems don’t care about them. We have to change that perception. There is virtually no elected GOPtile who could spend 10 minutes face to face with the average voter and come out with a vote.