Montana, Big Sky, Rural Towns Smaller

Big Sandy, Montana's native-son Jeff Ament, the bass player for Pearl Jam was one of the many Big Sandy High School students who left after graduation to make his way in America and found fame and fortune as a result. What kind of town do his classmates who stayed have?

Two of the three banks have closed, the movie theater's marque is unlit, most of the restaurants have closed and Big Sandy High School has lost a third of it's student population, fewer farms, fewer kids in school.

The previous Presidents Bush and Clinton had pushed for the passage of The North American Free Trade Agreement which was supposed to benefit America's "Family Farmers" by increasing exports of American farm products as well as manufactured goods from our nation's then expanding factories and textile mills.

What happened in the intervening decade and three years?

Big "agribusiness" has grown even bigger as the mega-corporations buy-up what were once family farms landholdings at favorable prices at bankruptcy auctions. With commodity crop prices down the remaining small farmers don't have the money to purchase their former neighbors acreage.

The 2006 Congressional election gave Montana voters an opportunity to express their displeasure with the current adminstration in Washington, D.C. and send somebody to the United States Senate that will represent them rather than the Mega-Conglomerated Agricultural, Energy and Mining Corporations that have benefited from NAFTA.

Jon Tester, a Democrat , who has never lived anyplace than the farmhouse on his family's farm goes to Washington. Jon Tester has considerable local political experience, he was president of the Montana Senate and has served the people of his state in that legislative body for eight years. Of course, there is really no "farm system" (like Major League Baseball has) to prepare a legislator for the Senate Rules that govern the operations of that American institution, or the behind the scene (the Senate's "cloakroom") actions of it's members that defines the word "politics."

The first President Bush's administration was the architect of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Bill Clinton adminstration that followed constructed the consensus that allowed it to be signed. American companies were "packed and ready to go" south of the border to Mexico, where Maliquedora tilt-up buildings were waiting to be filled with the machinery of the formally geographically distributed factories and manufacturing plants that were now consolidated under one roof.

All this was designed by graduates of the Harvard Businees School, "Masters of Business Administration", who had studied methods of increasing efficiency and "cutting costs." Of course, by making employee wages 10% of what they were in the United States, that money not spent would now result in greatly increased corporate profits.
The Mexican government proudly announced that "3 million jobs were created in the first year of NAFTA." The 9 million jobs that were lost in the United States as a result of NAFTA in the thirteen years of it's existence have not been mentioned by the US Department of labor.

Family farms in Mexico were adversely affected by NAFTA and that is the reason that 12 million former Mexican farmers have crossed the borders to work in the United States. Farms in Mexico were very small, just a few hectares, so that a farmer and his family could grow corn, beans, chile peppers, tomatoes, raising chickens and pigs that made up their basic diet; selling the surplus at the various local market places.

That local economy was destroyed by American Agribusiness's exporting all the above named commodities in such large quantities that the prices paid to local farmers dropped below the cost of production for the Mexican farmer.
NAFTA was supposed to provide future prosperity for the now interlocked economic destinies of the two most populated North American Countries, but the results for the American people and the ungoing political turmoil in Mexico belie that promise.