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The headline tells the story, Nystrom against Stauber, (who is still whoring shamelessly and incessantly to mining interests), but being able to present and caption that image was worth the time to post it all.
UPDATE: Worth quoting from the item:
Nystrom cites her deep roots in the region as an advantage. “The race that I’m running is local,” she said. “I’m a fourth generation of this area. I’ve served on the city council. I served on the Minnesota Council on Disabilities. People can look at my history and see that ‘She is beyond committed to helping with this health care crisis.’”
Stauber voted against legislation in May 2019 which would have prevented states from disregarding federal guidance that requires health insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing health conditions.
“I had no intention of running for Congress,” Nystrom said. “But my background is being a health care advocate. We’re in a health care crisis and this was all before COVID.”
Stauber’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests from the Minnesota Reformer for an interview.
Question: How could Stauber have cast such a swinish vote?
Answer: By following Trump's swinish healthcare leadership. Sucking up to the Obfuscator in Chief. Stauber's a Republican after all, without the courage to join Lincoln Project, instead wanting Trump recognition of his pet aim to ruin the Boundary Waters Canoe Area ecology with crappy sulfide mining because it might yield a few short term jobs while risking poisoning the environment for half a millennium or more. Mining companies are only as careful as forced to be since care impacts shareholder bottom line, and Stauber says all kinds of stuff:
Nystrom said she’s seen layoffs of health care workers, resorts unable to open their indoor dining and the only pharmacy in Cook County closing this summer.
“We have to make sure that we’re supporting more than just one industry,” she said.
Stauber voted against the recent $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package that the House passed that would have extended unemployment benefits, extended billions to states and funded another round of $1,200 checks for Americans. He argued that the package should not allow undocumented immigrants to receive stimulus checks, and that the bill extends “policies that allow individuals to make more on unemployment than working.”
[...]
In the online debate, Stuaber said one way for jobs to come back to the district and for Minnesotans to rebuild their economy was to turn to mining. He stressed that allowing the copper and nickel mines of PolyMet and Twin Metals Minnesota would “protect our way of life.”
“I have fought and will continue to fight against job-killing regulation, and anti-mining and anti-jobs groups,” Stuaber said.
Nystrom wants a comprehensive report on the environmental impacts of a possible nickel and copper mining project near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area — the state’s crown jewel and most visited wilderness area in the U.S., with 250,000 visitors a year.
“Iron-ore mining built the Iron Range and they’ve proven that it can be done in an environmentally safe way,” Nystrom said. “But the truth is copper-nickel mining has never been proven to be done in an environmentally safe way.”
Environmentalists and conservationists fear sulfide mining would damage the Boundary Waters if the toxic contaminant from the mine leaks into the thousands of streams and lakes that make up 1 million acres.
Minnesotans are opposed to mining near the Boundary Waters, according to a Star Tribune/MPR News Minnesota Poll that found 60% of registered voters in the state did not support building new mines near the wilderness, while 22% did.
“The Twin Metals mine is the wrong mine in the wrong place,” said Jeremy Drucker, the senior adviser for the environmental group Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters. “You don’t put one of the most toxic industries next to one of the most pristine wildernesses.”
Twin Metals, which is owned by a Chilean conglomerate, has been trying to get a permit to mine copper and nickel for more than 10 years. Shortly before Obama left office, his administration put a 20-year moratorium on mining near the Boundary Waters.
But the Trump administration has had its own ties to the Chilean company. In 2016, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner rented a condominium in D.C. from Andrónico Luksic, who was the CEO of Antofagasta, a subsidiary of Twin Metals Minnesota, the New York Times reported.
Antofagasta has ramped up its lobbying in the past year, spending $900,000, according to lobbying records.
A 2016 report from the Conservation Economics Institute evaluated the economic impact of the Boundary Waters from tourism and recreation and found that 1,000 full and part-time jobs stem from the Boundary Waters and provide $77 million in annual economic output.
“Outdoor recreation provides for stable employment and is sustainable over time due to limited associated environmental damage coming from this export industry,” according to the report.
Similarly, James Stock, a Harvard economist professor, assessed over 20 years what the economic impact of building the Twin Metals mine would have on the region.
“Over time, the economic benefits of mining would be outweighed by the negative impact of mining on the recreational industry and on in-migration,” Stock wrote. “This leads to a boom-bust cycle in all the scenarios we examine, in which the region is in the end left worse off economically than it would be under the withdrawal.”
Earlier in the item, a bald lie told by Stauber, to promote his narrow view:
“We can mine safely using the best environmental standards and labor standards,” he said during a Sept. 28 online debate hosted by the area chambers of commerce in Chisholm, Grand Rapids, Hibbing and Virginia.
First, mining companies never use "best environmental standards" and instead get away with all the risk they can, since profits are theirs and the risks can be socialized to taxpayers when the outcomes of risk can be remediated and all the profitable ore has been extracted and exploited. It is the history of mining, worldwide. Take the money and run.
Sulfide mining has a record of leaving ill-redeemable havoc and devastation to the lands. The record of disaster after disaster is undeniable.
BOTTOM LINE: In talking down true risk, Stauber lies. In terms of preserving water quality in the Boundary Waters, the most visited of our National Parks and the crown jewel of outdoor Minnesota, Stauber could give a shit. In terms of sound healthcare for our nation's people, all of us, Stauber could give a shit. A true short-term profit-focusing people-are-fungible Republican in all ugly aspects imaginable.
FURTHER: left.mn - latest Stauber post.