Central Minnesota Political

U.S. airlines received a $15 billion subsidy in December’s COVID relief package. The subsidy was for the companies to re-employ thousands of their furloughed employees and keep them on the payroll until at least the end of the first quarter of this year. Congress, and the President, attached no other strings to the huge subsidy, even though airlines social costs, in terms of climate disruption, are huge. In 2018 airlines produced a billion tons of CO2 and benefited from a $100 billion subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, a report published in the November 2020 journal Global Environmental Change, pointed out. The report, summarized in The Guardian on November 17th, drew together data to provide a global picture of the impact of frequent fliers. The conclusion reached by the study’s authors, led by Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, is that a tiny fraction of the global population benefits from the highly subsidized airline industry while the rest...

Dream s United/Sueños Unidos as LP-GE high school student Itzel Salazar to interview some Long Prairie residents about how they felt aout wearing a mask. Three of the seven interviews, in Spanish and English, follow. Others can be found in the January La Voz Libre.Itzel took the photos. -- Tim Tony Burciaga - MN Fresh Supervisor Why do you wear a mask? I wear a mask to be safe and not to catch anything. How do you feel about wearing your mask? Seriously! Honestly? How do I feel? It's safe but I get anxious. I'm not used to it. Well, nobody is used to it. There is a time at work where we have to wear it 24/7. It's really super hard for me. Ten hours having my mouth covered; it gives me really bad anxiety. Would you wear a mask if your friends didn't? Yes! Every time I leave my house. I follow the regulations at the store or anywhere I go I wear a mask. Do you feel safer with your mask? Yes, I do definitely. Have you or any one you know have been affected b...

A claim that the terrorists that stormed our Capitol last week were actually led by antifa activists has gained a lot of momentum among right wing reactionaries and their media sources over the last days. The false claim originated from a group of well paid science deniers with a long history of climate science denial and propaganda, according to DeSmog, a blog that follows the PR in climate science denial. DeSmog also reports that it was the same groups that immediately began trying to shift the focus from the attack on the Capitol to the demonstrations against police killings of African Americans last summer. DeSmog points to The Heartland Institute, partly funded by Exxon Mobil, and its Executive Director Marc Morano and William M. Briggs, a policy advisor for The Institute, as among the leaders of the liars pack. Some other prominent climate science deniers that were promoting the antifa lie last Wednesday were Breitbart columnist James Delingpole and Steve Milloy. Milloy pub...