August 20, 2007 5:45 PM

Making Industry Clean Up After Itself

You know how corporate lobbyists and Republican lawmakers always tell us that if we force Big Business to do anything it will mean job cuts, wage cuts and general economic disaster? Well, check out this story from the Billings Gazette about my old boss Brian Schweitzer to see how that's just plain false a lot of the time:

"Gov. Brian Schweitzer's aggressive approach to getting BNSF Railway to clean up a decades-old underground pond of pollution in Livingston seems to be paying off. Almost a year and a half after Schweitzer told the railroad that Montana intended to clean up the contaminants and bill the company for the work, BNSF has drilled dozens more wells to find out where the pollution is and has built a special plant to clean up both air and water fouled by decades of rail work."

The company swears that, no no, really, they really were going to clean everything up...eventually. Uh-huh. Right.

What we see here is the benefit of tough-nosed populism. Instead of using taxpayer subsidies or tax incentives to bribe the company into cleaning up the mess it made, Montana's governor just kicked them square in the rear end. And lo and behold, nothing horrible happened. In fact, something good did - the company started doing what it was supposed to do.