Marty Jorgensen likes to fish for walleye, hunt for elk and deer, and give a pheasant a good chase every once in a while. He doesn’t just dabble in the great outdoors — he is the great outdoors.
The 61-year-old Havre, Montana, native who grew up on a farming ranch said he cannot do any of those things if the land he cherishes is scarred by seeping pollution coming from pipelines or the water is corroded by leaks coming from underground; he explained the plants and critters the game ingests would be too contaminated to risk eating the animals he hunts to put food on his table.
“As a pipeline contractor, we built this work with pride, with safety and quality,” he said. “It’s a different world than it was 50 years ago, and we take that into account. We know how to protect the environment and make the landowners pleased with the way we leave the land and their property.”
It is an attitude that underscores his stridency about the precautions put in place by the company and the industry he has been working in for over 30 years. In short, what happens here means more to him than any bureaucrat or activist living 1,800 miles from his home in Montana.
Jorgensen also said he likes his job as the president of Barnard Pipeline in Bozeman, Montana.
“I have the oversight of our job selection, our estimating, our job execution, overseeing quality, production,” he said. “I’m heavily involved in the daily works.”
Related: America’s elites are waging class war on workers and small biz.
In America, class warfare is often disguised as culture war, and culture war is often cloaked by talk of race. But underneath it all, the class warfare is still there. Whether accidentally or intentionally, America’s upper classes seem to wind up harming the working class and small businesses, always in the name of some high-minded cause.
On immigration, for example, the go-to move is to call people who object to open borders racists and nativists. But what’s behind it? As Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein commented: “A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers . . . One equally surefire way to short-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.” Immigration as a way of keeping working-class wages down.
Likewise, efforts to defund police or de-police neighborhoods are treated as anti-racism, but their actual, predictable effect is to make poor and working-class neighborhoods much less safe, in order to make wealthy woke activists feel good about themselves. Similarly, Anthony Lukas’ classic book, “Common Ground,” told the story of how wealthy white activists placed most of the burden of desegregating Boston’s public schools on poor black and white families, while those behind the policies retreated to leafy suburbs, far from the problems they had created, or made worse.
nypost.com/2021/03/04/americas-elites-are-waging-class-war-on-workers-and-small-biz/