Montanans Want Corporate $$$ Out Of Our Elections!
Montanans hate what corporate money has done to our political process. It’s time to fight back!
A ballot initiative, The Montana Plan – Transparent Election Initiative, will shut down Citizens United and corporate money in our elections. If you are unfamiliar with the Transparent Election Initiative and how it will stop corporate influence in Montana’s elections, please visit transparentelections.org.
The Transparent Election Initiative has finally been approved as a statutory initiative (I-194) after Attorney General Knudsen fought to keep it off the November, 2026 ballot as a constitutional initiative. The signature gathering phase has begun!
“For citizen initiatives, proposals to enact or revise a law, a successful petition requires at least 5% of registered voters in the state at large – or 30,121 signatures. That number must include signatures from at least 5% of the electorate in 34 different legislative House districts.” https://montanafreepress.org/2026/03/11/its-signature-gathering-season-how-does-the-process-work/
Ballot initiative petitions must be submitted before June 19th. The bottom line is there will be a very short window for collecting signatures before the Secretary of State’s deadline to put the Initiative on the November ballot.
How You Can Help
- Verify your voter registration status and House District at MyVoterPage.
- Volunteer to collect signatures. You will need to complete signature gathering training. Please check https://bozemanresists.com/#calendar for in-person and virtual trainings in March and April.
- Indicate your intent to sign the petition supporting the Initiative and/or volunteer to gather signatures https://sign.mttei.org/petition or use the QR code link shown here.
- Check out signing events in your area – https://sign.mttei.org/events
- Share this information with your family and friends!
Check out https://transparentelection.org/states and How to get rid of “Citizens United” by Robert Reich.
Nationally, organizers are working on a Constitutional (federal!) amendment to “restore reasonable limits on money in our campaigns and elections.” To learn more about the For Our Freedom Amendment, please watch Heather Cox Richardson’s interview with Amendment organizer and author of “Corporations Are Not People,” Jeff Clements. The details of the For Our Freedom Amendment are at https://americanpromise.net/our-plan/.
Latest News for the Transparent Election Initiative
Find More Resources at IndivisibleBozeman.org!
- Did you miss the “Eyes On Ice” webinar last month?
- Interested in joining the fight against authoritarianism but not sure how?
- Researching how you can protect your employees and your community against immigration-related actions?
- Looking for news about No Kings 3?
Visit Indivisible Bozeman’s new website! It’s all there and more. Sign up for information about volunteer opportunities, participate in on-line safety & de-escalation training, join a network of like-minded, peaceful activitists, learn about your rights as an employer and community member, subscribe to the email newsletter. Check out IndivisibleBozeman.org!
Auntie J's Reading List
Highly recommended reading for non-melanated folx, ages teen through senior citizen.
Kudos to those who have read some of these books already. Now, read the rest!
- HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST, by Ibram X. Kendi
- BIASED, Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, by Jennifer L. Eberhardt, PhD
- HOW TO RAISE AN ANTIRACIST, by Ibram X. Kendi
- STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING, by Ibram X. Kendi
- THE NEW JIM CROW, by Michelle Alexander
- THE 1619 PROJECT, By Nikole Hannah-Jones
- A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, by Howard Zinn
- AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
- AN AFRICAN AMERICAN and LATINX HISTORY of the UNITED STATES, by Paul Ortiz
- WHITE WOMEN, by Regina Jackson, Saira Rao (good for ALL genders)
- THE SUM OF US, by Heather McGhee
- HOW THE WORD IS PASSED, A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America; by Clint Smith (particularly good as an audiobook)
- THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS, by Isabel Wilkerson
- BLACK AF HISTORY, by Michael Harriot
- WILD GIRLS, How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, by Tiya Miles
- LYNCHING IN AMERICA; Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, by The Equal Justice Initiative
- THREE OR MORE IS A RIOT, by Jelani Cobb
- WE REFUSE, A Forceful History of Black Resistance, by Kellie Carter Jackson
AI + Data Center Gold Rush
Risking Our Environmental Future
In an October conversation with Drilled, award-wining journalist Karen Hao discussed how Silicon Valley giants appear to be following the oil and gas industry’s playbook of disinformation and deceit; how Altman and OpenAI’s secrecy and disingenuous rhetoric transformed the field of AI research into corporate PR; and why the destructive trajectory of AI scale and commercialization is not inevitable—no matter what its power-hungry proponents would have you believe.
Karen Hao is an American journalist. Currently a freelancer for publications like The Atlantic and previously a foreign correspondent based in Hong Kong for The Wall Street Journal and senior artificial intelligence editor at the MIT Technology Review, she is best known for her coverage on AI research, technology ethics and the social impact of AI. Hao also co-produced the podcast In Machines We Trust and wrote the newsletter The Algorithm.
In her groundbreaking book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, award-winning journalist Karen Hao argues that AI—and the profit-driven infrastructure that surrounds it—is a colonial project. What OpenAI boss Altman and his fellowideologues in Silicon Valley are pursuing, Hao says, is not just corporate power but imperial power. They are building empires. And as history shows, empires are built on resource extraction, particularly the old-fashioned kind: of labor, energy, minerals, land, water.
Link to podcast –
https://omny.fm/shows/drilled/drilling-deep-karen-hao-on-how-big-ai-is-gambling-with-the-planet-s-chips
Link to Karen Hao’s Wiki –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Hao
Link to additional episodes of Drilled (true crime podcast about climate change) –
https://drilled.media/podcasts/drilled
Additional information on the impact of AI data centers –
More Perfect Union – I Live Next To Amazon’s Largest Data Center. They’re Stealing Our Water YouTube
Rolling Stone – ‘The Precedent Is Flint’: How Oregon’s Data Center Boom Is Supercharging a Water Crisis (you’ll have one shot to read this before it falls behind a firewall)