The Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA), a union of 20,000, consisting mostly of Registered Nurses, is the first major union endorsement for Ginger Jentzen’s campaign for Minneapolis City Council. Last year, the MNA went out on a historic six-week strike of almost 5,000 RNs across the Twin Cities.
This endorsement is based on years of common work. MNA endorsed the attempt to put $15 minimum wage on the ballot in Minneapolis this past year, a campaign that Jentzen helped lead as director of the local 15 Now chapter. Jentzen is a long-time member of Socialist Alternative and formerly an organizer with Occupy Homes MN which helped fight evictions in the Twin Cities during the massive foreclosure crisis caused by the 2008-2009 crash.
In 2013, Socialist Alternative member Ty Moore only narrowly missed out on winning a City Council seat by around 200 votes. This year, Ginger’s campaign is broadly viewed as a viable campaign with a real chance of winning.
This history, combined with the successes of Kshama Sawant in Seattle, shows that it is possible to get socialists elected to office on the basis of movements.
A Step Toward a New Party
The repeated failure of the Democrats to fulfill promises made to unions shows the need for unions to be willing to support independent candidates outside of the two-party system.
The MNA has shown the way forward by not only endorsing a socialist candidate, but by doing so early – before the Democratic primary. The labor movement needs to learn from the role of Minneapolis Democratic Party establishment which fought tooth and nail to prevent $15 from appearing on the ballot. It is the big business nature of that leadership that causes the repeated failure of the Democrats to fulfill promises made to unions.
Endorsing independent candidates is important, but in order to build real political power for working people in this country, we will need to build a party of the 99%! One that doesn’t take corporate cash and is beholden to working people – not the bosses!

There’s a problem in Alaska, and it’s three months in the making. Since at least Feb. 7, when it was first detected, an ongoing natural gas leak has been poisoning the Cook Inlet, a 180-mile watershed stretching between the Gulf of Alaska and Anchorage. The seepage is the result of a ruptured underwater pipeline, which has been spewing hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of gas per day. The worst part? The leak may not stop anytime soon.

The pipeline belongs to a gas production facility built in 1964 by Shell, the most ancient of 16 offshore oil and gas platforms that currently take up residence in the Cook Inlet. The problem pipeline is now owned by Hilcorp Alaska, a company that waited until Feb. 20 before announcing, in a letter to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, that it could not shut down the pipeline for fear of releasing crude oil into the ocean (in addition to natural gas), as it could take in a rush of cold seawater, which could shatter the entire pipeline. Furthermore, it stated that it could not yet repair the pipeline, due to heavy ice cover and dangerously strong tides currently surrounding it.

That ice has also created another problem: Because of the cover, it is not yet possible for scientists to get a realistic assessment of just how much damage is being done – and still could be done – to the environment and wildlife. Of particular concern is the safety of whales in the area, especially the belugas, who have been endangered since 2008. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stated, “If a significant hypoxic zone is created by a continuing natural gas discharge, Cook Inlet belugas and multiple physical and biological features of their critical habitat could be adversely affected.”

The gas leak might not have reached the eyes of the public as quickly as it did, had it not been for environmental nonprofit group Inletkeeper, which captured video footage of the disaster and uploaded it to YouTube. The group plans to sue Hilcorp; its advocacy director, Bob Shavelson, said, “Basically Hilcorp is saying, ‘we cannot respond to an event in the Cook Inlet in the winter.’ Our response to that is, ‘if you can’t address an event – whether it’s a gas spill or an oil spill – in Alaska in the winter, then you should go back to Texas, because you don’t have a right to do business here.”

While Hilcorp is apparently dragging its feet on coming up with a solution to this leak, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has told them that the clock is ticking. The agency said that the natural gas discharge could endanger the public, as well as marine mammals, and has given them until May 1 to either completely repair the line or shut it down altogether. The problem, of course, is that the deadline is nearly a month and a half away, and gas is still leaking. This unpleasant fact has not been lost on concerned environmentalists.

“This dangerous leak could stop immediately if regulators did their job and shut down this rickety old pipeline,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re disgusted with the Trump administration’s lack of concern about this ongoing disaster. Every day the leak continues, the pipeline spews more pollution into Cook Inlet and threatens endangered belugas and other wildlife.”

The Center was one of seven environmental groups that have now submitted a letter to the Trump administration, demanding that the pipeline be shut down immediately. The other groups were Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife, Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands, Greenpeace, and the Eyak Preservation Council.

As the NOAA explained, this leak could create a hypoxic zone, which would exacerbate the situation. According to Chris Sabine, a chemical oceanographer with the administration, such a zone occurs when water saturated with methane is metabolized by bacteria, producing additional carbon dioxide and depleting oxygen levels in the inlet. This can harm fish and impact the food supply for the area’s estimated 340 beluga whales. An additional problem is that the extra CO2 could make the water more acidic, weakening the shells of some animals. The noise produced by the leak could add further stress, making some whales abandon their habitat.

Inletkeeper’s Bob Shavelson continued, “Hilcorp has put forth various excuses why it cannot shut down the leaking pipeline in Cook Inlet’s icy conditions, including that water would infiltrate the gas line, and other reasons. But the fact remains that Hilcorp simply wants to maintain production and profits without interruption.”

Greed is, of course, one of the traits of fossil fuel corporations. Dirty, obsolete energy like natural gas and oil – and the companies that promote it – will be in the crosshairs of activists during this year’s People’s Climate March. The upcoming mass demonstration is planned for Apr. 29 in Washington, D.C., where President Trump and his administration have embarked on anti-environmental campaigns and turned a blind eye to disasters like the one currently tainting yet another sensitive ecosystem.

“We will give people struggling with addiction access to the help they need,” Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail in 2016.

We’re in the midst of the worst opioid epidemic our country has seen. More people died last year from opioid overdoses than ever before – 33,000. Opioid abuse now kills more people nationwide than car accidents or gun deaths.

The problem runs most rampant in America’s heartland – in states like Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Ohio alone, which gave key electoral votes to Trump, has three of the top 10 cities with the worst overdose rates in the country, with Dayton coming in at number one.

So why is Trump supporting a health care bill that experts have said will only make our opioid problem worse?

Specifically, the GOP’s Obamacare replacement would eliminate the law’s requirement that Medicaid cover basic mental health and addiction services. This expansion currently covers half the cost of Ohio’s medication-assisted addiction treatment. All in all, 1.3 million Americans get treatment under it.

Studies have shown that a major cause of the opioid problem is patients becoming addicted to the painkillers their doctors prescribe. Even Trump seems to understand this.

“We prescribe opioids like Oxycontin freely,” Trump said in October 2016. “But when patients become addicted to those drugs, we stop doctors from giving patients the treatments they medically need.”

And yet, that’s exactly the problem the new GOP health care bill perpetuates.

The bill would allow insurance companies to turn away drug users, causing patients to lose affordable access to lifesaving treatments like Suboxone, Emily Kaltenbach of the Drug Policy Alliance told Vice.

The new health care plan would also make doctors more likely to prescribe opioids for chronic pain, Northeastern University law and health professor Leo Beletsky says, because their patients won’t be insured for alternative treatment options like physical therapy.

Republican senators from Ohio, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Colorado recently released a statement saying they wouldn’t support any “poorly implemented or poorly timed” change in “access to life-saving health care services.” But Trump is pushing for it anyway.

On the campaign trail, Trump also promised his rural and Appalachian supporters that he would fight for harsher sentencing for drug dealers. But piles of evidence prove that harsher punishment doesn’t stop the flow of drugs into these vulnerable communities. In fact, it only makes the drug trade more lucrative.

When all’s said and done, the health care policy that Trump supports could increase the opioid treatment gap – those who can’t get substance abuse treatment because they can’t afford it or that care just isn’t available – by 50 percent, according to a Harvard Medical School and NYU report.

That would bring the number of people who remain untreated for addiction up to 640,000.

Trump promised his voters that he would end the opioid epidemic and “make America safe again.” But it’s those same communities in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia that trusted the president to make good on those promises who stand to lose the most.