Road Agent Bait and Switch

You can’t take your bird dog hunting on lands being mined or filled with oil rigs, even if they are “public” lands, by Hedges, in The Daily Montanan.

While Montanans were right to celebrate removing the sale of public lands from the recent Congressional budget bill, some may not know that our representatives still voted to put millions of acres of public lands on the chopping block. Selling public lands was just one of a dozen different ways that the billionaires’ budget bill privatized our public lands. Just try big game hunting, bird-watching, camping, hiking, or biking on public lands mined or fracked for corporate profit, and see how quickly you’re escorted away. This is the bait-and-switch our elected representatives pulled on Montanans. They crowed about removing provisions requiring the sale of public lands, but the new law mandates quarterly oil and gas lease sales on public lands, regardless of whether it makes economic sense. It slashes royalty rates, guaranteeing that the public does not receive the compensation it is due for public resources. It lets industry decide which land needs to be offered for oil and gas leasing – regardless of who else uses that land and for what purpose. It increases the duration of drilling permits so that companies can retain leases and tie up public lands for longer periods of time. And, appallingly, it reinstates the practice of allowing noncompetitive leases on public lands, ensuring that the public will not receive the true value of the public resources that are being given up. But it gets worse. We know that coal mining has devastated huge swaths of public lands and waters that agricultural users depend on. However, instead of helping communities transition away from expensive, dirty coal towards cleaner energy, it incentivizes even more coal mining on public lands and slashes royalty payments for mining corporations. It expedites new coal leases and mining permits on public lands, even though coal mining is at historic lows and projected to continue declining. For example, the bill allows the notoriously corrupt Signal Peak mining company to mine more than 50 million tons of coal without consideration for the surface landowners whose water has been lost due to the mine’s operations. And finally, the bill mandates the opening of four million acres of federal land to coal mining, without providing details about where those lands are, what resources they hold, or what the impacts may be. In short, it’s a firesale, thanks to our bait-and-switch congressional delegation. If they repeat the tired trope that they are trying to increase jobs or support “all-of-the-above energy,” I say hogwash. If that was true, they wouldn’t have gutted incentives that help create thousands of good-paying solar and wind jobs in Montana and across the country. And while our congressmen hide behind press releases hyping this new law, keep in mind that it will result in not only lost and destroyed public lands, but higher energy bills, increased wildfires, increased drought, more flash floods, and more intense heat waves. A changing climate isn’t a conspiracy theory or a partisan issue; it’s a fact that we can and need to deal with. Heat waves are worsening, extreme weather is killing more people, and drought is reducing rivers such as the Dearborn to a trickle in June. This bill will set us back decades, so remember who to thank for making those problems worse now and in the future. Sens. Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy and Reps. Ryan Zinke and Troy Downing, you’ve given us higher deficits, less public land, lower revenues, higher electric bills and more heat, wildfire and drought. You have jeopardized our public lands and our future for your rich friends’ profits. We are definitely less safe thanks to you.

One Big Sweetheart Deal

The fix was in by Valentine’s Day when President Trump received Montana Senator Steve Daines’ letter of support “that the expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act must be made permanent and not sunset.” The love note came at the end of the most intense period of tax policy lobbying in the history of our United States’ Congress, and seven weeks before the bipartisan Congressional Research Service reported that after reviewing seven different studies of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act it found limited evidence of positive economic effects. Another noticeable finding was that the wealthy owners of private corporations pocketed over half their company’s Tax Cuts.

Daines’s Valentine to Trump means now, instead of costing $1.9 trillion over a ten-year period, extending the expiring provisions will cost $3.3 trillion to $4.6 trillion over the next decade. Of course huge volumes of political contributions will continue pouring into the campaigns of those who vote for this permanent reward for being wealthy and well-connected.

It is illegal under federal bribery laws to give or receive anything of value in exchange for an official act. ProPublica, The New York Times and OpenSecrets have documented how large donors and Corporate PACs financially support candidates who back tax policies favorable to them, and the Koch Brothers, focusing $20 million of their Americans for Prosperity independent expenditures on extending the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, are already positively advertising for their Tax Cut Sweetheart: Montana’s very own U.S. Senator Steve Daines.