Central Minnesota Political

Due to growing climate chaos corn, especially in the southern half of the Midwest, will have an increasingly difficult time pollinating and making seed. Corn yields, Central Minnesota Political wrote in its January 5th article, will begin to decline as summer temperatures begin to rise.  That information comes to us from the Fourth National Climate Change Assessment, I wrote here   https://tinyurl.com/yaf6d26d Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, assistant professor of applied economics and management at Cornell University, is out with a new study in Science Advances that puts that environmental fact in an economic context. You can read it here http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/12/eaat4343 Ortiz-Bobea, and his colleagues, found the same problem with hot temperatures and failed pollination that the authors of the Climate Assessment found.  Ortiz-Bobea “The study found that, in the 1960s and ’70s, a 2-degree Celsius rise in temperature during the summer resulted ...

Minnesota Republicans in the Legislature are once again trying to take from the poor and give to the rich. Listen to this from a press release from Representative John Poston earlier in the week.  “Rep. John Poston (R-Lake Shore) joined fellow Minnesota House Republicans at a press conference Tuesday urging the new DFL House Majority and Governor Walz not to raise health care costs on Minnesotans by restoring the sick tax—a 2 percent tax levied on most patient services in Minnesota, including things like baby deliveries, chemotherapy treatments, routine doctor visits, emergency room visits, and more.” “Proposing a $600 million tax increase on health care services when the state has a $1.5 billion surplus is irresponsible and unfair to Minnesota families,” said Rep. Poston. The tax Poston is talking about is commonly known as the provider tax. It’s called a provider tax because it’s paid by health care providers and not patients. It has been in place for over two decade...

Among those of us who receive a monthly Social Security benefit the Social Security program is priceless. But Social Security is often portrayed as a drain on the nation’s economy by many in the main stream corporate media. They say our self funded, but government mandated, retirement program is a budget buster. Recently, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare ( https://www.ncpssm.org  ) looked at Social Security from a different perspective. Social Security, they discovered, is a powerful economic driver.  The Committee’s state by state analysis showed that there are 965,018 Social Security beneficiaries in Minnesota. Those nearly one million beneficiaries contribute $15 billion annually to the State’s economy. The Committee took their analysis to the level of the Congressional District. Minnesota’s CD7 has 149,594 recipients whose monthly payments pump $2 billion annually into the district. “Social Security provides a lifeline to benefic...

This note from Michigan Member of Congress  Rashida Tlaib came to me via the the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. You may be interested in reading it. Tim Central Minnesota Political Hi, PCCC community. I'm Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a bold progressive who is committed pushing bold ideas like Medicare For All and a Green New Deal in our new Congress...AND starting the impeachment conversation around Donald Trump. We can do both. And we must do both because we cannot normalize this President's actions. As we fight his backward policies, history is depending on us to right this ship and foster accountability for rampant law breaking and attacks on democratic norms. At the end of this email,  I'm going to ask you to chip in to my next re-election because many people are already out to get me for standing up for what's right.  But first, let me spell out clearly why we must begin the impeachment conversation now. President Donald Trump is a direct a...

“Projected changes in precipitation, coupled with rising extreme temperatures before mid-century, will reduce Midwest agricultural productivity to levels of the 1980s without major technological advances,” according to the Fourth National Climate Change Assessment. Most media reports on the Fourth National Climate Change Assessment present the big picture for the future of the United States under a changing climate. In fact, it seems most reporters didn’t get past the Assessment’s Executive Summary. April Baumgarten, a reporter for the Grand Forks Herald and the Forum News Service, seems to have been somewhat of an exception. The report is made up of 1,600 pages with 29 chapters. Ten of them focus on various regions of the U.S. Baumgarten studied the section on the Northern Great Plains for her December 16th article. For purpose of the Climate Assessment, the Northern Great Plains’ eastern boundary is the Red River. So, seeking to add to Baumgarten’s study of the Assessm...

Gesen writes that, by the 1980s, Russian no longer knew how to think about themselves. "After fifty years of purges, arrests, and, most damaging, unrelenting pressure on what had become an isolated thought universe, the Russian intellectual landscape was populated by barely articulated ghosts of once vibrant ideas. Even Communist ideology was a shadow of its former self, a set of ritually repeated words that had lost all meaning." . . . and quoting Yugoslav Marxist dissident Milovan Djilas, "Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to resemble itself as science." Russia continues to struggle with "an isolated thought universe" while Donald Trump and his side kicks such as Mike Pence and Paul Gazelka try to create similar conditions here with their attacks on the press and science and their elevation of lies to empty truths. We must resist this with all out capacities because it can happen here. But the...