Central Minnesota Political

Climate activists across the globe and around the U.S. will be striking on Friday, December 6th. Here in the U.S. the strikers will be demanding that politicians seeking office in the 2020 elections publicly state their unqualified support of Green New Deal legislation if they want the electoral support of the climate strikers. Thanks to Wikipedia Here in Minnesota, the student led movement “Fossil Free Minnesota” is also demanding that the University of Minnesota divest its investment portfolio of fossil fuel companies. The organization, which has been campaigning since at least 2013, states as follows: “Because it is unconscionable to pay for our education with investments that will condemn the planet to climate disaster, we call on the University of Minnesota to immediately freeze any new investment in fossil-fuel companies and to divest within five years from direct ownership and from any commingled funds that include fossil-fuel public equities and corporate bonds.“...

The brutal wave of killings, threats, kidnappings, beatings, torture, and disappearances of labor and social movement activists in Honduras continues, directed at Afro-Indigenous women, LGBTQI activists, campesinos, trade unionists, independent journalists, and opposition political activists. On Saturday November 16th, two men shot and killed Jorge Alberto Acosta in a billiard parlor four blocks from his house in La Lima, Cortes, Honduras. Jorge, 62, was a leader for SITRATERCO, the oldest union in the country, which represents Chiquita banana workers. In early 2018, 2,800 banana workers held a 77-day strike after Chiquita illegally relocated its medical center — which had provided full healthcare to working families for over 60 years — to a far-off location and replaced it with an expensive, low-grade private medical center.  Workers on the picket line were met with live bullets from military police and mass layoffs from Chiquita. After the strike ended, Jorge ...

By John King Guest columnist Climate scientist Sam Potter addressed the perils of climate change at the Long Prairie library November 2.  Potter outlined the basic science of climate change and then went on to explain some of the disturbing changes Minnesotans may experience as a result. Potter, a 2005 graduate of Long Prairie High School, did undergraduate work in mathematics at Morris and received his PhD from Princeton University in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science.  After doing climate related research at the University of Washington in Seattle Potter returned to Minnesota in 2016. He has been a frequent speaker at climate change meetings throughout the state.  Potter shared graphs and data with the audience illustrating how carbon dioxide has accumulated year after year in the atmosphere as a result of the burning of fossil fuels.  The heat-trapping gas is now over 410 parts per million, higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years. Scientists ...

A group of local activists has been hounding Minnesota based Cargill in recent months. The group points out that Cargill is playing a major role in the destruction of the Amazon, and other South American, ecosystems and, thus, our shared climate. The issue came to a head in recent months with the vast fires not only in Brazil but in Bolivia, Paraguay, and other countries. Thanks to Cargill protesters The extent of the destruction underwritten by Cargill is mind boggling. It has been laid out by research done by Mighty Earth and Mongabay. The Mighty Earth report, entitled The Companies Behind te Burning of the Amazon, is wide ranging and implicates not only Cargill but its custoers such as Wal Mart, McDonalds, and Sysco. The Mongabay report focuses in on the Cargill-McDonalds connectionally, especially as it relate to poultry and soy. Here are some of the introductory bullet points from the Mongabay report:   • British fast food restaurants and grocery chains, inc...

There are twenty-seven Democrats in the Congressional Caucus that call themselves Blue Dog Democrats. Two of them, our very own Collin Peterson and New Jersey Representative Jeff Van Drew, voted against formalizing the impeachment process. Blue Dog logo - thanks to Wikipedia The motto of the Blue Dogs is Bold Leadership and Common Sense Solutions.The Blue Dogs identify themselves as fiscally conservative, centrist Democrats. The caucus professes an independence from leadership of both parties, and a mission of fiscal responsibility and promoting national defense, according to Wikipedia. These are principled positions to stake out. Independence is to be valued. Fiscal conservativeness, although open to interpretation, is to be encouraged. So is Bold Leadership. And it was Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s cautious, but ultimately bold leadership that the Blue Dog Democrats, minus Reps. Peterson and Van Drew, chose to follow. Collin Peterson may have thought that it was a common ...