CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Montana on the Verge of Massive Blunders with Data Centers, NorthWestern merger

Photograph Source: NASA – Public Domain

Montana, the fourth-largest and one of the least populated states in the Union, has been savagely ill-treated in the past and left with injuries that continue to plague us long after those who made the decisions aren’t in office or alive to be held accountable.

Elected officials, at the local, state, and national level have and continue to make enormous mistakes, largely in service to corporations not “We, the people.”

How about the Berkley Pit, one of the largest bodies of toxic water in the world the Copper Kings left behind when they took the riches Butte’s workmen had pried from rocks and fled for the East Coast.

Or how about the stump fields that now characterize much of Montana’s once-forested lands?  Plum Creek, a scion of Burlington-Northern Railroad, decided to “liquidate” its “timber assets” — also known as forests — and did just that, leaving massive knapweed-filled clearcuts behind.  Those vast swathes of lands were granted to BN’s predecessors by........

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