Wednesday, May 19, 2010

If someone had told me some years ago I'd be posting to a BLOG, I'd have told em they needed help from the folks in long white coats. However, here it begins.

Making a long story as short as possible for now, I live in the old, barely-surviving, historic mining town of Butte, Montana, USA. Butte once earned the reputation and name "Richest Hill on Earth" as a result of the asssortment of underground, hardrock mines that dotted the Butte Hill. They all began pretty much independently in the late 19th century but eventually almost all ended up in the ownership of the Ananconda Copper Company or ACM. It was the usual story folks. A few fat-cat mine owners, ran the place and over the men and their families that actually kept the fat-cats fat. Had it not been for the miners and their families, those "Copper Kings" would just as likely have been "Dung Kings", and ended up in life, shoveling pig crap out of hog yards somewhere. Eventually the miners had enough, and unionized, despite the best efforts of ACM, even with the help of the federal government in the early 20th century.

These days, ACM is long gone. It grabbed it's money over about a century and left town. After that, along came Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) that apparently was dumb enough to have bought out ACM just about the same time as the Superfund law went into effect, and thus made ARCO the Potentially Reponsible Party for millions of dollars worth of the cleanup of the nasty messes left behind mainly by ACM and it's predecessors. That brought in the US Environmental Protection Agency (aint that name a joke huh?) and what was left of the sham government locally for Butte and Silver Bow county. Truth is, ACM had owned the local and state governments for about the same period they ran mining and ore smelting in Montana. What was left after ACM departed, was a motly collection of half-baked politicians with little or no ability at leadership, guidance or direction. Like the people of Butte, they had jumped whenever ACM told them to, asking first how high to jump.

Now, rumor has it that today, there is a sort of shadow-government, made up of a handful of folks really that learned to keep themselves and a few other folks employed off government grants for mostly meaningless boon-doggle projects. It is the rumor that they actually control the boys in the courthouse. That would not surprise me at all. The ones I have enountered, pretty much, could not blow their own noses if their brains were dynamite. The ones actually elected by the voters, get elected or re-elected because frankly, no one else stand for election. The rest of the town is too busy trying to keep body and home and family together economically with litte or no real support from the boys in the courthouse, unless of course, they are those handlers lurking in the shadows. What most folks seem to come down to in elections is a choice between Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumber. Voters like me however, tend to write in our own names, the name of a family pet, or just "neither of the above" at times. Yes, the choices are just that bad. You have either the good old boys, with good old Butte family names, or some relative newbies to city-county governments that are, as one friend describes them "lightweights". Oh yeah, that is a good description.

So, three or so years ago, I decided to get involved in community affairs though three volunteer organizations. Since then, what I had suspected for about 15 years before was actualy true. Local government here could not pour urine from a foot-covering device, if the instructions on how to do it were printed in big letters on the heel. I've quickly found, like many other volunteers in Butte, that if you let it, the frustration and down right anger at how poorly things are really done here can get to you.

So, here I am with this BLOG thing. Shoot, I dont even know what BLOG stands for and don're really care. What his does is give me an outlet to post the ventings of a fellow who wants to do right by the community and is constantly confronted by nit-wits that run local government, who's only interest is their own electibility of if an employee of local government, maintaining their situational ethics and by that their jobs. Trust me friends, there is a lot to vent about. If you let it, trying to counter the actions of local government, is something akin to trying to teach a pig to dance.

Most of what you will hopefully see here in future is about historic resources and the conservation/preservation of those resources. However, from time to time you may well see some pieces about the so-called reclamation being done by ARCO-EPA and the local yocal government. Elections are coming as well, so there will perhaps be some about that.

Hope you stayed tuned!

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