By: Tony Teso

Tony Teso — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:40:48 +0000

Letter to the editor: The robber barons are a confession, not a defenseTim Petta asks us to give Camden and Mac Spiller “a chance” and offers the Gilded Age industrialists as the model we should want them to follow. He has picked his analogy more honestly than he knows. The men he names did build industries, and they did give away fortunes late in life. They also broke strikes with private armies, crushed competitors into a single national monopoly, and bought the newspapers that told the public what to think about all of it. If the Spillers are emulating Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford “in part,” the public is entitled to ask which part, and to notice that Petta has carefully declined to say.
So let us say it plainly, because the letter will not. Maddox Industrial Transformer, the company the Spillers co-own, has acquired more than thirty properties in Battle Ground through over a dozen corporations in six years. Its CEO sits on the board of a church whose pastor has spoken publicly about the importance of “governing unbelievers.” That same network now has the mayor on its payroll, a school board member among its employees, and the deputy mayor married to one of its workers. And as of last week, it owns The Reflector, the only newspaper in north Clark County. That is not philanthropy. That is the consolidation of a town’s economy, its press, and its government into a single private hand. Petta wants us to read that consolidation as kindness. The word for it is not kindness.
Notice the move the letter makes when the facts get uncomfortable. It retreats from economics into religion: critics, it implies, are really just bigots who object to the Spillers’ Christian faith. This is a substitution, and a dishonest one. No one credible objects to the Spillers being Christians. People object to one company owning the bakery, the cigar shop, the farmers market, the convention center, the newspaper, and a working majority of the people who hold local office, while its closest religious ally tells a Tacoma audience that his church wants “a very strong say in how things are done.” A businessman is free to worship as he likes. He is not thereby entitled to own the town, and pointing that out is not persecution.
Petta’s final flourish gives the game away entirely. He notes approvingly that two of his industrialist heroes “held print media as part of their holdings,” and writes this days after the Spillers bought the community’s only paper. He means it as reassurance. It is the opposite. When the same people who own the storefronts, employ the mayor, and fund the church also own the press, the question is not whether they will tell their own story. The question is who is left to tell any other one. A monopoly on commerce is a problem. A monopoly on commerce that also owns the newspaper is how a town stops being able to argue with itself.
“Give them a chance” is the language of someone asking you to suspend judgment precisely when judgment is most warranted. Battle Ground does not owe anyone the benefit of the doubt in exchange for a renovated coffee shop and a Fourth of July fireworks show. It owes itself a free press it does not depend on the Spillers to provide, elected officials who do not draw a Maddox paycheck, and a public square that remains genuinely public. The robber barons did transform their communities. Some of those communities never got the leverage back. That is the chance Petta is actually asking us to take, and it is the one worth refusing.

By: Nancy Tarr

Nancy Tarr — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:37:04 +0000

It would be great if the Spillers would specifically address the fears of many of us who have heard they want to turn Battle Ground “Christian Nationalist”. I’m not sure what that even means, and why people are fearful exactly. The people who are concerned are gay, or have trans children for example. There are many citizens who do not want interpreted morality dictating our lives. As long as they do as they say and improve the community for all its members, I would give them a chance. There is fear that there will be a push to change the community by pressuring “undesirables” to leave. For example, our mayor wants to celebrate nuclear families. Does that mean there is something wrong with not nuclear families? He didn’t want to proclaim June pride month like so many others. And we believe he is close with the Spillers.

Those are a few thoughts I have about the Spillers, who I assume have good intentions. Just what exactly that means for people who don’t fit their vision of desirable community members is my concern.

By: David

David — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:32:48 +0000

Rockefeller thought “competition is a sin”, and acted like he believed it. After oil he went after medicine, and has done far more damage there.
They were rich Oligarchs who got things done.
Other Oligarchs – who opposed the formation of the federal reserve – found themselves on the bottom of the ocean with the Titanic. At least that is what I heard years ago, and haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary yet.

Comments on: Letter: What made and can make America great

By: Tony Teso

By: Nancy Tarr

By: David