I'm wondering why the roads are so bad here in Minnesota when we had the long-time congressman, Jim Oberstar, as chair of the House Transportation Committee--- could it be that most of the funding allocated for roads, highways and bridges made its way in the form of profits into the pockets of engineering and construction firms who skimp on materials creating shoddy roads, highways and bridges and while Oberstar was shaking hands with construction workers boasting to them how they owed having their jobs to him with his other hand behind his back waiting to grasp a handout from management?
They talk about the "bridge to no-where" in Alaska while James Oberstar secured millions of dollars for funding for a road out into the Big Bog up here in northern Minnesota so a Canadian firm can truck away the profits in a peat mining boon-doggle that could destroy this entire freshwater aquifer--- the largest freshwater aquifer in the lower 48.
True, Minnesota is mostly DFL--- when most people vote.
However, most people don't want top vote anymore because the "F" for farmer means nothing anymore; the "L" for labor just stands for a bunch of corrupt high-paid union officials who go out for lunch with management to have a good laugh over the problems workers complain about... and the "D" definitely has very little to do with democracy.
Brian Melendez, the MNDFL Chair who as a corporate attorney makes more than one-million dollars a year; rather than supporting Mark Dayton's call to "tax the hell out of the rich" to fund socially necessary and useful programs like public education, sent his party hacks out across the state to assure big-business interests who are among his law firm's clients, that they wouldn't have to worry because most Democrats in the Minnesota State Legislature wouldn't go along with his "crazy ideas to tax the wealthy."
Mark Dayton like Rudy Perpich, is going to have to fight the big-business interests who control and manipulate the DFL to their ends.
When we can say that the DFL fights to strengthen democracy (by-the-way; how many DFL'ers did you hear speak out against the Red Squad raids on peace and socialist activists?); fights to protect what remains of the family farms and for the rights of farm workers employed by big-agribusiness; and stands up to extend the rights of all other workers protected by state and federal labor laws to 40,000 casino workers now employed in the smoke-filled casinos at poverty wages and without any rights because of the creation of these "Compacts" created by the Democrats at the behest of casino managements who now contribute the bulk of campaign funding to these Democrats for their loyalty... then, and only then, can we once again be proud to boast that Minnesota is a "DFL state."
There are many people who would like to forget that we are the DFL because the Democratic Party and the socialist Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party merged. Many Minnesotans want to know why sleaze-balls like John McCarthy and his Minnesota Indian Gaming Association are calling all the shots in the MNDFL instead of those loyal to the ideas and thinking of our greatest and most respected governors, Floyd Olson and Elmer Benson and Congressman John Bernard.
Olson and Benson's portraits hang in our state capitol building alongside those of the other governors but their ideas have been smothered... not by Republican Tea Baggers, but by corporate Democrats.
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