[image_credit]Photo by Esther Lin on Unsplash[/image_credit]
Also from MPR, this by Kirsti Marohn: “Walleye fishing on Mille Lacs Lake will return to catch-and-release only starting Tuesday. For the past several years, anglers haven’t been able to keep walleye they catch on Mille Lacs during the summer. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has imposed stricter fishing regulations in an effort to boost the lake’s walleye population. This spring, anglers have been able to keep one walleye of a certain size. But that’s ending for the summer, to avoid the state exceeding its share of the lake’s walleye harvest.”
Says Greg Stanley in the Star Tribune, “The Giant Slide was open. Bands were out. Thousands of people were able to walk through the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, mostly without masks and with the smell of bacon, cheese curds and freshly baked cookies. … About 70,000 people attended this mini-State Fair, during a fundraiser that ended Memorial Day to help the fair and some of its vendors recoup losses from the pandemic-canceled 2020 event.”
Babs Santos at FOX 9 reports: “Staff at a wildlife center about an hour north of Minneapolis are doing everything they can to find a group of wolves that managed to escape from the property last week. In Anoka County, the Wildlife Science Center is home to 120 wolves. Recently, the population grew with the birth of a new pup; however, when the pup was removed to be bottle fed, the pack lost its mind. … Four wolves escaped that night, out of a pack of 10. They were likely determined to find the pup they believed was missing, and they’ve now been missing themselves since Thursday.”
For MPR, Brian Bakst reports: “The move for amnesty for coronavirus rule violators — restaurants, gyms, event centers and others — is tangled up in the deliberations over a new state budget ahead of a special session set to convene this month. … Affected businesses should know in the next two weeks whether lawmakers will intervene. Republicans in the Minnesota Senate have pushed to void penalties for any businesses that didn’t adhere to Gov. Tim Walz’s executive orders that he says were meant to mitigate virus spread. Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka has raised the punishment waiver during private negotiations with Walz and leaders of the DFL-controlled House.”
In the Star Tribune, Faiza Mahamud writes: “A group created to foster the financial independence of north Minneapolis residents has revived an effort to create the first Black-led credit union on the North Side. The Association for Black Economic Power (ABEP) has brought on new staff and board members to bring to fruition Village Financial Cooperative and is seeking $6 million from the city to get it off the ground. ABEP leaders said they have found a prospective site at 927 W. Broadway and that they would need up to $20 million to start the credit union by the end of next year.”
KSTP-TV reports: “The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS on Monday that crews recovered the body of a person in the Loring Park pond. The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office said its Water Patrol unit was dispatched to Loring Park pond at 8:26 p.m. on a report of a man struggling in the water. A crew from the Minneapolis Fire Department attempted to help the person with a tube raft and saw the victim go underwater at about 8:33 p.m.”
For the AP Stephen Groves reports, “South Dakota’s public universities shouldn’t be teaching certain concepts of race and racism, Gov. Kristi Noem said Tuesday, in line with a nationwide GOP movement to keep critical race theory out of classrooms. In a letter to the Board of Regents that oversees the state’s six public universities, the Republican governor targeted critical race theory and the Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘1619 Project’ …. However, David Burrow, the Chair of the History Department at the University of South Dakota, said the current conservative ire aimed at critical race theory is ‘searching for a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist.’ The goal of the history department is teaching students to investigate historical records to form their own interpretations, he said, not indoctrinating them into a particular view.”
The concept of amnesty for COVID rule violating businesses shows the total absence of public responsibility on the part of the state’s GOP. Why should businesses – which are not entities from outer space, but are the product of human beings and human decisions in every case – be exempt from laws that the rest of us mere mortals are expected to follow? Should Paul Gazelka be exempt from traffic tickets and the resultant fines because it’s inconvenient for him to drive at or under the speed limit? Who gets to decide which laws Minnesota businesses can ignore? The state’s Republicans should not be allowed to get away with pretending they believe in rhetoric about the “rule of law” if/when scores of business owners can openly flout laws because those laws are inconvenient and costly.
In decrying teaching about racism in this country, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem displays the intellectual bankruptcy of the rabid right. Instead of history, based on fact, she (and they) apparently much prefer hagiography, based on myth.
As wages go up so do prices. So inflation will cut into whatever increase they may think they are getting. Get back to work people.
In other words, continue to accept low wages because otherwise, the things you can’t afford to buy will become more expensive.
That’s today’s lesson in conservative economics, ladies and gentlemen!
You’re mistakenly assuming the price of goods is based only on wages. As productivity goes up, more goods can be made with fewer employees and prices go down.
That argument is flawed. Prices go up anyway regardless of wages.
It’s called economics. A shift in the supply curve means a new higher spot on the demand curve. Thus higher prices.
Printing and borrowing lots of money, which the US government has been doing for the last 15 years means inflation also.
It’s called b*** s***. Wages are only one part of the costs that go into the price of a product, and the effect of a wage increase can be offset by higher productivity. “Printing and borrowing lots of money” does not lead to inflation, since inflation rates have been low for several years now (don’t tell me you’re a gold bug. That would earn you hales of derisive laughter).
Some inflation is a good thing, as it encourages investment.
The jobs numbers have been very disappointing for several months. Much easier to get handouts.
1) Considering most states offer less than 2/3 a UI applicant’s previous wage in benefits, an extra $300 a week is hardly a handout. 2) If you think about when the COVID vaccines started rolling out en masse (meaning, you didn’t have to fall into a certain category to get one), the jobs numbers are where they should be. 3) Perhaps American workers are finally starting to realize what we’ve given up? Service workers are the backbone of the American economy – there is not one industry in this country that does not depend on service workers – yet they are the most consistently underpaid and undervalued. Middle-class and lower middle-class employees, often “trained” to look down on service workers seeking a living wage, are also underpaid by their corporate masters. Perhaps the “benefit” of a corporate discount on your Metro Pass doesn’t even out to losing ten hours per week to commuting. 4) Many folks who are still unemployed are parents who require childcare. Maybe their kids’ school didn’t open up this year, maybe their daycare centers haven’t opened back up yet, maybe households where both parents previously worked are now down to 1 parent working as a result of new childcare issues.
Your “handouts” comment lacks empathy and a deep understanding of the overall picture.
So what makes you think productivity will group? Better yet replace lower level workers with kiosks and other automation. They never get sick, don’t require paid time off and show up everyday.
Beat way to get and have a job is to get a skill.
In the real world, you can’t just walk down the street and pick up “skills” off the nearest tree.
Acquiring the skills that right-wingers like to talk about requires both time and money. If you are working two jobs or a single job with unpredictable hours, and you barely make it to the end of the month as it is, how are you supposed to acquire these skills? Skills classes cost money and take time, and if both are in short supply, people are going to feel stuck.
Even if every underpaid worker went and acquired an advanced skill, the scut work that keeps a society running would still be there. Could service workers being replaced by kiosks and robots? Yeah I saw ordering kiosks in fast food places in the U.K. two years ago. But note that they still had humans frying and assembling the burgers and fries.
And frankly, there are a lot of jobs that I wouldn’t entrust to a robot. A Roomba may be able to do routine vacuuming but it doesn’t actually know which areas need extra passes or need extra cleaning before vacuuming. Would you want robots replacing daycare workers, one of the most important and underpaid type of service workers? Could a robot stock grocery shelves without a human telling it what goes where? Do you want to appreciate trash haulers? Try visiting a city where they’re on strike in the summer. Ever worked in a corporate office where the grand pooh-ba is utterly dependent on his administrative assistant to get anything done at all? I worked in a whole series of such offices when I was temping.
Those service workers are more essential to the everyday functioning of the economy than all the Wall Street traders and all the overpaid corporate executives put together. Deep down, the oligarchs know this, and it has long been their dream to replace human workers, first satirized in Carl Sandburg’s poem “The Machine, Yes the Machine” in the first half of the twentieth century. If you don’t know the poem, you might enjoy looking it up online and seeing how little the oligarchs’ attitudes have changed over the years.
If all the disdained service workers disappeared off the face of the earth, the high-and-mighty “captains of industry” and the “geniuses of Wall Street” would be as helpless as the Southern plantation owners were when their enslaved work forces left, but if the Big Money Types disappeared, the supposedly stupid and lazy “little people” might not even notice for several days.
Perhaps high schools should get back to teaching useful skills needed for real life. You’re right about leftist technocrat oligarchs wanting to replace us with machines.
You misspelled “libertarian technical oligarchs.” Actual Leftists, as opposed to mainstream Democrats, would want more workers’ cooperatives and in larger companies, representatives of rank-and-file workers serving on corporate boards.
Can you please identify the “leftist technocrat oligarchs” who directed the grocery stores to replace human cashiers with automated check-out lines?
It’s very easy for people to tell business owners how to spend their money. They will also be the first to complain about higher prices. No economy can pay semi/unskilled workers $40,000/year to start without consequences.
No economy can supply its ownership class with returns far exceeding their actual value and expect to survive without societal revolt either, but perhaps you’re of the opinion that another few thousand years of feudalism is preferable to paying the underclass a bit more?
I can’t help but find it amusing that the business interests of this country were all smiles when they vanquished the fight for $15 movement not that long ago and now here they are in 2021 unable to find job applicants for just about any job paying less than $15/hr.
What’s really amusing is that this is a lesson in applied capitalism, and the business people don’t like it one bit. Workers are determined to obtain a certain price for their services, and will not supply the demand for those services, until they are paid what they believe they are worth.