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Voted #1 Radio Station in the Missoula Valley, Trail 1033's Official Podcast makes exclusive on-air interviews, performances, new music and interesting conversations available to you on demand.
Enjoy daily uploads following community interviews on the Morning Trail show with Robert Chase, occasional live performances from both new and landmark bands and artists. Check out the Lunchbox every weekday at Noon, as Mike Smith dishes up a great block of themed music, interviews and more. New music your thing? Every Tuesday 6PM-7PM, enjoy The New Show hosted and produced by Tommy Evans.
Catch so much more interesting and timely conversation and, of course, amazing music from Robert, Mike and Tommy - LIVE- on The Trail 1033FM in Missoula and around the world at trail1033.com every day from 6AM until 9PM.
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Mike Smith: It's me, I'm back. We are The Trail 103.3, Pearl Jam played live in Missoula a few shows ago, we welcome Jeff Ament into the Trail Studio.
Oh, by the way, I said it's me. It's Mike Smith, yes, joining you this afternoon
A friend, Jeff Ament, in the Trail Studio from Pearl Jam, the band with ties to Missoula PEST, Montana Pool Service, and a new picture book called Seven-Inch—Jeff, welcome to The Trail.
Jeff Ament: What's going on, Mike?
Mike Smith: Been a minute.
Jeff Ament: Not much.
Mike Smith: I was going to try to run down the whole drummer situation for Pearl Jam. I know you guys are going to work that out.
Jeff Ament: Yeah, we have a really top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art drum machine that we're playing with in rehearsals right now.
Mike Smith: Yeah?
Jeff Ament: I think that's what we're going with.
Mike Smith: Okay.
Jeff Ament: That sounds so Pearl Jam.
Mike Smith: Okay, well, if you're listening to that, if any members of the Ten Club are tuned in—and then also probably some fans of Sam Forstag tuning in today—he's in the house. Sam!
Jeff Ament: Go, Sam!
Sam Forstag: That's me.
Mike Smith: Jeff, do you want to give kind of a little introduction, if you were introducing Sam here?
Jeff Ament: He did such a great job with the intro.
Yeah, I think Sam here has been a huge proponent of helping small towns, helping rural Montana. That's where I came from. So hopefully we can get into some things like affordability, education, and small-town hospitals.
Mike Smith: Healthcare.
Mike Smith: Sam, you probably know what town you're in and where you are. You've been all over the state lately. How's that going?
Sam Forstag: It's going well. We just screeched in from Eureka, where we were this morning. We were in Libby last night for a town hall with former Governor Roscoe, who was co-hosting with us.
Mike Smith: Well, I have that on my list of questions to ask. You've got some endorsements from folks, and some of them have Ds behind their names, some of them have Rs after their names, and some of them are just a guy like Jeff.
Jeff Ament: Mm-hmm. I like endorsing you, so...
Sam Forstag: Yeah. I mean, we need to make sure politics is done in a way that normal people can access.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Sam Forstag: Congress certainly doesn't feel like a place where there's a whole lot of normal people right now. And as important as any particular policy we're fighting for is just getting back to a place where you can sit down with someone you don't agree with on everything—
Yeah, and find some common ground. That's kind of part of the project there.
Mike Smith: I think sometimes what makes a good politician is somebody who's not necessarily in lockstep with you, but maybe you're in agreement with 80% of what they believe in.
Sam Forstag: Someone told me early on in this thing—I don't know if you're running for anything higher than my union's local—they said, "If you meet a politician and you agree with them on everything, they probably just lied to you."
Mike Smith: Yeah, something happened.
Mike Smith: Jeff, we used to—I know there's one politician in particular who you see on a fairly regular basis—but I feel like, on both sides of the aisle, we used to see politicians in this state more than we do now. We don't see this current crop of politicians as much.
Jeff Ament: Yeah. I mean, Jon Tester was one of the last people in Congress who was actually a Main Street politician. He was somebody who loved to go door to door, talk to people, disagree with them, and listen.
That's the thing I'm sort of missing right now with politics in general. I don't think they're listening to people, and I think they're out of step.
When you hear the president talk about how much money we're making—what's "we"? I guess the president is supposed to mean the entire country. That means people working at 7-Eleven and people working three jobs to pay the rent.
I think they're talking about the billionaires and people making money in the stock market.
Mike Smith: Yeah. Well, this radio station has had a nice relationship with Jeff over the years, and with John and other folks. We're always suggesting that people get informed, get up to speed, get registered to vote, and whatnot.
But I thought that this week, your opponent was maybe not as much your opponent. The president flew in on a mission to stump for your opponent.
Sam Forstag: He did. He was out there.
Mike Smith: Does that feel kind of weird? Do you suddenly feel like, "Wow, I'm out here"?
Sam Forstag: Oh, yeah. Having the most powerful man in the world put your name in his mouth is a hell of an odd feeling.
But they're doing it because they're scared. They're scared that we've actually got a chance here to take our state back and start taking the country back for working people.
It's pretty darn rare for a working person to make it into Congress, and we've got a chance to change that right now. We just got changed to a toss-up race today.
Mike Smith: Okay.
Sam Forstag: So they're saying that, too.
Mike Smith: All right, Sam, let's say you're in campaign mode right now.
Sam Forstag: Yep.
Mike Smith: Trying to get all the votes you can, trying to get those undecided people. That's probably an interesting crew you're meeting out there, those undecided voters.
But let's say you win and get sworn in. Where do you start?
Sam Forstag: I think I start by finding an apartment where I'm probably going to share a room with two other guys.
Mike Smith: Yeah, right.
Sam Forstag: Because it's more expensive than Montana.
Mike Smith: Amazingly.
Sam Forstag: But step one, in terms of getting things done, is making sure we get the right committee assignments. We need to serve on Natural Resources so we can rebuild our public lands agencies, which have just gone through a full-fledged assault in the last year and a half.
We're down 25% in the Forest Service, and by and large, the people we lost are the people who actually make it work, swing the tools, and do the work on the ground.
When we get there, I want to fight to make sure the first bill we put on the floor after we win this seat is something that's going to help people afford things like housing.
The things right in front of people's faces every day are that Montanans across the district are struggling just to afford housing, healthcare, or childcare. Those are the things that can unite us. That's what we're talking about here.
Mike Smith: I've read something about you believing that somebody should be able to get by on one full-time job.
Sam Forstag: Yeah, that's the basic notion of this campaign. Every Montanan—and everybody in this country—should be able to work one good job and keep a roof over their head, have health coverage that actually gets them care when they need it, have childcare, and have a secure retirement on the back end.
And while you're at it, you shouldn't have to worry that our public lands are being sold out from under us to whatever corporate donors tried to buy a congressional seat.
Mike Smith: When it comes to public lands, you've been out there on those lands. You've parachuted into public lands as a smokejumper.
It's one thing for politicians to take a picture hunting and fishing and whatnot. But how do you put public lands into legislation and ideas? How do you move that forward? And where do the people you run into stand on public lands?
Sam Forstag: I think our public lands are one of the most unifying issues we've got. It doesn't seem to be the case in Congress right now, but I think this is a great unifier. It's a great equalizer.
Some of the most beautiful land in the country belongs to all of us, right here in Montana and across the West.
We've seen tens of millions of acres lose protections or face rollbacks in places like Alaska, Minnesota, Arizona, and Utah. These are protections that generations of Montanans and other people fought for to make sure we had them today.
None of this came easy. We've got to fight for them, too.
What I tell people is that our public lands aren't just lines on a map. There are a lot of people working their tails off to make them work, and we have fewer people than ever doing that.
Let's reinvest in ways that make sense. In a lot of areas, the people with the best ideas are the ones on the ground doing the work.
I think you could find a GS-5 Forest Service employee making $17 an hour who probably has a better idea of what it would take to rebuild the Forest Service than some corporate executive cosplaying as a firefighter in the U.S. Senate.
Mike Smith: Jeff, you've been on a tractor. You've been on a farm. You grew up on a farm in Big Sandy, Montana.
We had a farmer, a rancher, in the Senate. We don't anymore. How are farmers doing in the state? What's happening with farmers, and what are you hearing from Big Sandy and elsewhere?
Jeff Ament: Well, funny enough, I talked to a kid I grew up with about a month ago. He's very much a lifelong Republican, probably a third-generation Republican.
He said he's not switching his vote yet. And I think it's maybe the first time in his life he's looking at the big picture, because he can't buy diesel.
He's like, "Well, maybe I'm not going to summer fallow this fall because I literally can't put fuel in the tractor."
All it takes is one bad year, and a lot of those folks are going to lose their farms.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Jeff Ament: Farms they've had for generations.
That's where I grew up. Half of my friends are still back there trying to make that stuff work, so I have a really big interest in making sure those people can run their fourth-generation farms and make a living.
It's the same thing Sam's talking about: Everybody should be able to have healthcare, put their kids through school, and get a retirement. Farms are in a precarious situation.
Mike Smith: Yeah. Sam, I just noticed my Toyota Tacoma out there. I just noticed the light went on on my way back here to the station.
Sam Forstag: Good luck fillin' her up.
Jeff Ament: Yeah, so I can loan you ten dollars.
Mike Smith: I'll get halfway home with Jeff's ten bucks in gas.
But how did we get here? Where are we going? Where could we be going?
Sam Forstag: We're in a spot where diesel is north of six bucks a gallon, and farm and ranch bankruptcies have tripled in the state over the last year.
In large part, it's because we're in another endless war that nobody asked for and that Congress certainly did not vote for. As a result, we're all paying for it at the pump. Farmers and ranchers are paying for it. They're having to decide whether they're even going to have a second harvest, and we're paying for it in our tax dollars.
We've spent north of $100 billion on yet another war that is not making any of us richer at home, at a time when we just lost 28,000 jobs at the VA.
Those priorities are all backwards.
The way we fix that is the same as in a lot of other places: We restore some balance to what we're seeing in Congress.
Checks and balances, like it says in the Constitution. Congress is the one that's supposed to have the power to declare war, not the president.
If we're going to make the decision to put American lives at risk, every member of Congress should have to put their name on the line and say it's worthwhile. We didn't see that with this one.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Sam Forstag: We can fix that by passing a War Powers Resolution, by saying, "Let's not go to another war until we're actually doing right by the people who went and served this country the last time."
Mike Smith: Yeah. Jeff, I know your friend John used to break from his party from time to time.
Sam, where would you break from your party? What are some things you would break with your party on? Maybe there's somebody on the other side of the aisle with whom you don't have a lot in common, but perhaps there's one thing you do have in common. What are some of those things you'd break for?
Sam Forstag: Unfortunately, time is short, but I'd say one place we can start is campaign finance. Democrats aren't all on the right side of that issue.
We have this Citizens United Court decision, which has allowed about $3 million in dark money to flood into just this race so far, and a quarter of a billion dollars into Senator Tester's race alone last time around.
That's obscene at a time when people are being priced out of house and home.
Every year since that court decision in 2010, there's been a resolution to overturn Citizens United. The most co-sponsors that have ever put their names on that bill is 64 out of 435.
The problem isn't reserved for one party.
When we get there, I'll put my name on that bill. I'll vote to ban corporate PACs altogether, because corporations should have no say in our elections. We'll ban super PACs and have some accountability, frankly, for people in both parties, because the only way we get at the root of these problems is by getting money out of the election process.
Mike Smith: They tried years ago. A few of us in the room are old enough to remember McCain-Feingold. That was a Republican and a Democrat getting together to say, "Hey, this is ridiculous. There's so much money."
Sam Forstag: Yeah.
Mike Smith: And it's interesting, because at the end of the day, we the people look at this and think, "See, this is what I like. I like talking to a candidate, having a candidate come knock on doors."
By the way, are you knocking on doors? Do you have somebody grab a clipboard and go out there knocking on doors on your behalf?
I remember Jeff's friend John said that was one of the reasons he won every time—because he knocked on more doors than anybody else.
Is that the most rewarding part of the campaign? And do you wish you could spend more time doing it?
Sam Forstag: Yeah, because every time I knock on someone's door—like Kathleen in Columbia Falls last week, who's on a fixed income and told me that her entire Social Security check gets eaten up just paying the rent on a two-bedroom apartment.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Sam Forstag: And she's still got to figure out how to pay for groceries and medication.
I've got to think that if every single member of Congress were required to knock on doors every year, we'd see some different policy priorities in Washington.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Sam Forstag: I don't think that's the case right now.
But we're also knocking on doors across the state. If anyone wants to get involved, go to SamForMontana.com. We're doing door-knocking every two to three days in Missoula and in cities and towns across the state.
That's the only way you cut through the obscene amounts of money being poured into this thing. Face-to-face conversations.
What else can people find on your website?
Sam Forstag: You'll find an excruciatingly detailed policy platform, because policy is my love language, and that's what I want to be held accountable to.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Sam Forstag: I think the details matter. They'll find places where they can sign up to volunteer, and links to social media where we're tracking all the different places we've visited for the 80-plus town halls we've held.
Because when it feels like no one's listening, quite literally, oftentimes nobody is listening.
When a whole bunch of my union members and fellow coworkers were being cut at the Forest Service, I tried going to Ryan Zinke's office, the congressman here.
You'll find it on Google Maps, but if you go to the edge of town, there's no label on that door. There's no one staffing the office. There's nobody to talk to.
And our current member of Congress hasn't held an in-person town hall in this state in over three years.
Mike Smith: That's a problem, whoever is in office, for sure. That's a problem—not being able to have that outreach.
I think that breeds anger out there, understandably so. But I don't think that's done much to bridge the divide.
I do kind of miss the days—and again, I'm showing my age—I remember Max Baucus wandering around the state. You'd eventually end up shaking his hand and chatting with him a little bit. Or Brian Schweitzer would throw you a football, and you could chat with him for a little bit.
Maybe we can get back to some of those old days.
Sam Forstag: Yeah, and the way democracy is actually supposed to function: showing up, listening to constituents, and answering questions, even in the hard times—especially in the hard times.
That is the job and duty of an elected public official. We're not seeing it from most of our federal delegation in the state, unfortunately.
But we can change that right now.
Mike Smith: The one final thing—and we kind of talked a bit about the Forest Service and whatnot—the headquarters for the Forest Service here in Missoula got moved.
I don't know the details on the complete reduction, but can you talk a little bit about that?
Jeff and I were talking about how that was kind of part of Missoula's identity. Jeff came down from Big Sandy; I was over in Bozeman. Jeff was here a few years before I was, but that seemed to be part of the identity.
You were always running into people who were proud of their Forest Service job.
Sam Forstag: Yeah, and me too. Smokejumping—even if it didn't always pay what it should—was the best job I ever had. Getting to parachute into the most beautiful stretches of public lands with no one else around.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Sam Forstag: I got out of fire, but this reorganization they're pushing through for the Forest Service is somehow managing to take public land managers farther away from decision-makers in Washington, D.C., while also taking them farther away from the people on the ground doing the work by closing down our regional office here.
This plan involves closing ten regional offices across the country and replacing them with 15 state offices.
There's no efficiency to be found there. But that's a move toward land transfer and privatization.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Sam Forstag: The real efficiencies would come from investing in exactly the people we've lost.
Two Valentine's Days ago, we lost 360 Montanans in the Forest Service on the first day of firings. Eighty-five percent of them were making less than $20 an hour.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Sam Forstag: Those are the people who make these things work. Those are the people who could go out and fight fires before they start, while investing in fuels reduction and fire mitigation, rather than waiting until we have a 2,000-acre fire in Alberton that costs us all $56 million.
A little bit of preventative medicine, whether in forest management or healthcare, could go a long way toward saving us taxpayer dollars. Frankly, it could make us a richer place in so many ways by making sure elderly folks don't end up on the streets or have to wait until it's an emergency to get healthcare.
Mike Smith: And speaking of healthcare, my wife is up working at St. Pat's right now. There are a lot of hardworking healthcare folks putting in shift work and whatnot, and it's not getting any easier up there.
There's a lot of talented people in the medical profession and other healthcare-related fields. But where do you see us going with that? It seems like a huge, monumental task, but something to roll up your sleeves for.
Sam Forstag: Yeah, it's pretty bad, and there's a lot of reasons to be angry right now.
I met someone in Dillon two weeks ago at one of our town halls. He said, "You know, Sam, it seems like it takes a special kind of optimism to jump out of a perfectly good airplane."
We've got to carry that optimism into the way we're fighting this.
At a time when 22,000 Montanans just lost Medicaid coverage last year, and another 30,000 to 40,000 are projected to lose it because of these paperwork requirements, people are feeling this in a way that gives us an opportunity to fight for some big solutions.
What I'd like to see is a healthcare system where people actually have a choice. Give everybody the choice to join Medicare if they so choose, so we're not stuck with what we really have right now, which is plans from two private insurance corporations.
Both of those plans went up by more than 24% last year.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Sam Forstag: You pay more for care every year, and the care gets worse. That doesn't serve patients, and it doesn't serve providers. It only serves those corporations, which made $37 billion in profit among the top seven last year.
Mike Smith: Yeah. Jeff Ament from Pearl Jam is in the studio, along with Sam Forstag, talking about some of these ideas. I appreciate you guys coming in on a Friday.
This is The Trail 103.3. I'm Mike Smith, and again, I made the decision, when I heard Sam was available to come in and talk, because looking at the news, it seemed like we needed to rebalance the tables a little bit in terms of your opponent getting a lot of free airtime.
That's what we're extending to you. We urge everyone to get registered to vote. Go to the Secretary of State website, the Missoula Votes page, get your ballot, get it turned in, follow up, and make sure your ballot has been processed.
However you're voting, whoever you're voting for up and down the ballot, make sure you're participating.
I wish we could spend more time here. I know we've got to send you on down the road to do some of your other stuff, but there are three initiatives on the ballot.
Yeah, here I am getting into another big conversation. But those three initiatives—how do you stand on them?
Sam Forstag: All three of these are ways we can actually protect the democratic process in this state.
Initiative 194, the Montana Plan, is a way at the state level to get corporate spending out of our elections. I hope everybody will vote for I-194, because that strikes at the root of the problem.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Sam Forstag: It's a problem that prevents working people from making it to public office.
We have two other initiatives to protect the ballot initiative process. This is one of the democratic reforms Montanans have fought for to push back against corporate influence.
We shouldn't have to have a ballot initiative to protect ballot initiatives, but we do. So let's put it in the Constitution and make sure we're not dealing with what we've seen in the past, where we pass something through a citizens' initiative and it gets overturned in the next legislative session.
Mike Smith: It seems like we've gotten some cool things done with initiatives in this state.
Sam Forstag: Yeah. We have done a lot to make sure people aren't going to jail for petty crimes, to protect things like healthcare access, and to provide more funding for public lands.
Let's preserve that process. For I-130, I-132, and I-133, I would encourage everybody to vote for all of those.
A lot of this is about restoring balance. It's about actually getting power back to everyday working people and saying that politics should not just be a place for the rich and powerful. The depth of your pockets should not determine the loudness of your voice in the United States.
Jeff Ament: My dad used to call that Montana logic—things that make sense. I think all those initiatives are no-brainers. They're logical.
I'm hopeful people will read the entire initiative and not just look at what the ads are saying on TV, and vote the way the state has historically voted.
Mike Smith: Yeah. Jeff Ament from Pearl Jam, Sam Forstag, candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives.
Those are kind of our parting thoughts. Well, have a great week. I know you're just kind of working throughout.
Sam Forstag: Yeah. Thank you for that. I won't be far, and I'd love to come back on.
We've got 18 days until the election, so I do hope everyone goes online and looks for themselves. Find the facts. We're seeing millions of dollars of dark money flowing here, and you don't have to trust what you see on TV.
If you want to look up the campaign, go to SamForMontana.com.
If you want to check your voter registration, you can register through Election Day in Montana. Go to VoteMT.org. That's a website that makes it easy to find out if you're registered.
I'd just say that if there's any way to get out of this hole we're in as a country right now—which, frankly, both parties have dug for us—it's not through more anger. It's not by tearing each other down. It's by lifting each other up and getting engaged.
It's just like when you're the first person parachuting into a remote wildfire: We say no one is coming to save us. It's up to us.
And right now, it feels like a moment when we can save ourselves.
Mike Smith: I think anybody deciding to put their life over here and run for public office should be commended. So thank you, Sam, for coming in today.
Jeff, we'll have another long conversation about Pearl Jam, some other drummers, and whatnot—where we're going with that.
Hang on, I've got a song for us here.
Jeff Ament: You're so thoughtful with these kinds of songs, Mike.
Mike Smith: Well, this one's from a band—best segues. It's a band I really enjoy, so here we go.