Weekend at Bernie's

On Saturday (May 20) I attended the political rally for Rob Quist with special guest Bernie Sanders in Butte, Mont.

It began with two locals sharing their healthcare stories. A woman who had battled cancer three different times, is now facing loss of healthcare due to pre-existing conditions. While “high risk pools” are the Republicans’ answer to this problem, those pools will drive up the cost of healthcare for people in need that many will have to simply choose against enrollment. When this woman dealt with high risk pools before the ACA, she paid $15,000 out of pocket every year.

The next speaker, Stuart McCarvel, talked about his son’s leukemia diagnosis while attending the University of Missoula. Though he had insurance at first, it was lost when he was unable to work. Incredibly, the Affordable Care Act went into effect at that time. Without the ACA, he would never have been able to afford all the treatments. Now, thanks to a lucky bone marrow transplant, he is still alive, despite a six-month life expectancy at the time of his diagnosis. However, medications that keep his body from rejecting the transplant are very expensive, and covered by the ACA. Thanks to the pre-existing conditions portion of the new bill, that coverage would be lost.

Many Montanans are recognizing this special election as a one-topic election; a vote for Quist is a vote towards a better healthcare plan.

Bernie Sanders, when he went up to speak, sounded just like every time you’ve seen him on television: angry, and pointing, and talking about the decline of the middle class. Statistics that he shared on income inequality were staggering. The share of wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent is almost the same as the bottom 90 percent.

The average wealth of the bottom 90 percent of families is equal to $80,000 in 2012— the same level as in 1986. In contrast, the average wealth for the top 1 percent more than tripled between 1980 and 2012.

These numbers aren’t to convince anyone that wealthy people are bad – but they are worth noting when considering that the new healthcare bill will bring giant tax cuts to the top 2 percent of the wealthiest people in America, while yanking health coverage for many low income and older people. This isn’t American, it isn’t freedom, and it isn’t “small government.” Montanans will not benefit from this type of bill and should be demanding representation that will fight to save the middle class.

I could have gone to a similar rally in Missoula, where I live, but it was really special to see it in Butte. It is poetic to see Bernie Sanders in a city where mining corporations capitalized on the mining boom and ensured the dramatic, crushing bust. These corporations chose to destroy the workers’ unions and subjected working Montanans to unthinkable working conditions. In the end, all that wealth ended up on the east coast in the pockets of the owners of the companies. Meanwhile, Butte became a poor city full of empty mansions.

In Michael Punke’s “Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917,” these realities are written so well they could be fiction – if only. The brutal irony is that in the end, Butte has become a democratic bastion in a red state that seems to have forgotten the history of the richest hill on earth. With great corporate power came great oppression and disenfranchisement of the people; with great money came great financial disparity.  We should learn from Butte’s history, for it is truly Montana and American history. We need to stand united as a working middle class and demand better policies that benefit us. To do so, we’ll need a representative in Congress with our values – and that’s Rob Quist.

Don’t forget to vote on Thursday, May 25.