WASHINGTON — Their cause has brought them to Mexico, the oil fields of North Dakota and on ride-alongs with Minnesota police, and it’s meant letters and floor speeches about events a world away, in Nigeria.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Rep. Erik Paulsen have joined an expanding, bipartisan group of lawmakers looking to tackle sex trafficking in the United States and around the world. When the U.S. House returns to work next week, it will vote on a series of anti-trafficking bills, including a couple from Paulsen, and Klobuchar said the Senate is planning on taking up of a few of its own.

Among their goals: expand nationwide what has worked in Minnesota, a “safe harbor” law meant to treat girls who are trafficked as victims of a crime rather than criminals themselves.

“We’ll give safe harbor to young girls or juveniles, maybe being human trafficked or sex trafficked or in prostitution, so they have no fear of prosecution, that they’ll get the counseling that they need and deserve as victims,” Paulsen said. “It helps law enforcement because when you remove that fear of criminalization, they share more about the bad guys. It’s worked very effectively in Minnesota.”

Bipartisan package up soon

Klobuchar and Paulsen came to focus on sex trafficking in different ways.

Klobuchar dealt with sex crimes when she was Hennepin County prosecutor, and she said she “saw the devastating effects on these young girls, when they were sold into prostitution.”

In the Senate, she’s worked with a bipartisan group of lawmakers to write legislation aimed at the problem. Her allies include Cindy McCain, Sen. John McCain’s wife, who traveled to Mexico with Klobuchar last month to talk about human trafficking with officials there. Last week, Klobuchar gave a floor speech calling for increased U.S. efforts to help find the 276 girls kidnapped trafficked by a terrorist group in Nigeria.

In an interview, she said combating sex trafficking should be “a major tenet of our foreign policy.”

“We have seen time and time again that when girls are not basically treated as doormats, that they are contributing members of the economy and the whole society changes,” she said.

Paulsen said he had a “natural interest” in protecting exploited women because he’s the father of four daughters, an interest only deepened by stories of sex crimes in Minnesota and around the country (he participated in a trafficking roundtable last week in North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields, where an economic and population boom has meant more sex crimes as well).

Paulsen went on ride-alongs with Bloomington and Minneapolis police last year, where he heard first-hand about the department’s anti-trafficking measures. Last fall, he brought the issue to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who worked with lawmakers to craft a package of bills they intend to move before the month is out.

Paulsen introduced two bills that were wrapped into the package, including one requiring foster homes to warn law enforcement when children go missing (a full list of the bills is in this April memo from Cantor's office). In the Senate, Klobuchar has bills meant to increase penalties for federal trafficking crimes, and the pair worked on two similar bills modeled after Minnesota’s new safe harbor law.

The idea behind safe harbor laws is simple: previously, trafficking victims were arrested, treated as criminals and charged as such (for prostitution or other crimes). But Minnesota’s law, one of a dozen such laws around the country, says trafficked children under 16 are not to be charged, but given access to rehabilitation services instead. The rationale is that the girls will be given a chance to recover from their trauma — and hopefully be willing to assist law enforcement in locking up their traffickers if not facing prosecution of their own.

Paulsen’s and Klobuchar’s bills wouldn't establish a national safe harbor law but rather offer federal financial incentives for states to implement their own.

“Not only do you better for them,” Klobuchar said, “you also do better for the cases, because they’re more likely — if they get help rather than ending up in jail — they’re more likely to testify against the pimps that run the sex rings, if they think that they at least have some future and people are trying to help them.”

So far, the group of lawmakers pushing sex trafficking bills has been a bipartisan one, and given leadership's support, the House is likely to pass the bills next week. The Senate isn't moving as quickly, but both Klobuchar and Paulsen said they expect lawmakers to pass at least some anti-trafficking measures this session.

“There is just a natural opportunity for an elected official to say, ok, what can we do to make a difference?” Paulsen said.

Hundreds convicted of sex trafficking in Minnesota

Advocates and lawmakers say sex trafficking is surprisingly prevalent in Minnesota and the Twin Cities, which the FBI ranked among the top 13 cities in America for sex trafficking crimes last year. More than 600 people were charged with sex trafficking violations in Minnesota in 2011, according to the State Court Administrator’s Office, and nearly 400 were convicted. Officials blame the Twin Cities’ location and transportation system, a major population center in the middle of the Midwest, sitting at the confluence of two major interstate highways.

Social justice and advocacy groups, who work with hundreds of woman and girls victimized by sex trafficking every year, say they tried for years to get the issue on politicians’ radars.

In 2005, state lawmakers responded. The Legislature established, with help from a federal grant, a special division within the St. Paul Police Department, the Gerald Vick Task Force, focused on combating sex trafficking around the city and state.

The Ramsey County attorney’s office secured a record 40-year prison sentence for a man convicted of trafficking in January, and county attorney John Choi says he’s doubled sex crime convictions since he took office in 2011.

Choi credits the safe harbor law. In February 2011, the county attorneys in the seven-county metro area announced they would stop prosecuting minors who were trafficking. Later that year, the state Legislature passed a state-wide law saying the same thing. Since then, Choi said, law enforcement has been able to more aggressively pursue pimps and johns rather than focusing on the girls themselves.

“We have to think differently,” he said. “We are not saying, ‘we’re going to prosecute you,’ because we can’t. Instead, you develop a much more robust and trustful and meaningful relationship, and that has made all the difference.”

Advocates: more funding needed

“It was a journey to get there, to get the safe harbor law passed,” said Vednita Carter, the founder and executive director of Breaking Free, a St. Paul-based advocacy organization devoted to providing services to victims of sex trafficking. “Minnesota, in comparison to some states, has really jumped on board, and has really listened.”

Minnesota is unique in allocating funds to implement components of its safe harbor law, and lawmakers set aside $2.8 million last year to expand women’s shelters and appoint support staffers around the state.

But Artika Roller, the Pride program director at the Family Partnership, said that still won’t be enough to meet demand — there are only four beds in Minnesota’s shelters set aside for trafficked girls right now, she said, and the new funding will open 18 more.

Breaking Free helps between 400 and 500 woman every year, Carter said. Roller said her program works with 250 adult woman and 100 minors annually.

“And if that’s just our program working with that many people, we know we are really not scratching the surface of providing the services for victims of trafficking,” she said.

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry

Minnesotans are celebrating Hmong American Day today, with events at the state Capitol this morning and a closing ceremony this evening at the History Center.

May 14 is recognized as the 39th anniversary of the day that Hmong began leaving Laos after helping the United States during the Vietnam War. About 70,000 Hmong have settled in Minnesota.

Organizers say Hmong American Day can help Minnesotans learn about the Hmong people’s culture, history, and alliance with the United States during the Vietnam War. It also highlights Hmong resilience: "Despite war-torn global displacement, the Hmong continue to thrive and influence Minnesota’s local economy, political leadership, artistic innovation, cultural vibrancy, and academic excellence."

Gov. Mark Dayton will speak at an opening ceremony this morning on the state Capitol mall. Also on the speakers list are:

• U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison
• State Sen. Foung Hawj
• St. Paul City Council Member Dai Thao

A closing ceremony will be held 6-8 p.m. at the History Center.

It might be useful to begin by pointing out that, in the Twin Cities, there are three Mississippi Rivers. Not literally, but in a sense. We — and by “we” I mean “I,” or at least until I spoke to handful of knowledgeable people in the course of preparing this column — tend to think of the Mississippi as a monolithic entity. It isn’t.

Each of these three rivers has its own set of peculiarities and idiosyncrasies that determine how people have interacted with it over the years, and how it can be used — or use us — for purposes as disparate as industry, recreation, and habitation.

The first is the prairie river, which is the Mississippi from the headwaters in Itasca as it lolls its way down to the St. Anthony Falls and the locks there, on the banks of Minneapolis. It has defined banks. It has no flood plain. It’s not, as they say, meandering.

The character changes when the river arrives at the soon-to-be-shuttered Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam, right in downtown Minneapolis. Here it becomes the second river, from the falls to the top of the bend near downtown St. Paul — this is the river of the gorge.

The third river, and the one of interest to us today, is where the Mississippi grows up. Below the gorge it becomes the wide, meandering river we (again, “I”) have most commonly imagined it to be. It’s useful to keep this last part in mind when returning this week to the banks of the Mississippi River under downtown St. Paul.

The river down here is much different from that in Minneapolis. For the most part, it’s in a floodplain, where the water levels rise and fall pretty dramatically. If you go down there this week, you’ll find the water very high after all of the rain, lapping up against and in some cases overtaking some of the amenities and structures closest to the river.

St. Paul is up on the edge of those bluffs, back turned to the river. You can see where there’s a disconnect between city and river that has an actual physical barrier.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

The Mississippi in St. Paul feels like more of a working river than up by downtown Minneapolis.

This part of the river in downtown St. Paul is still where most of the barge traffic happens. In that sense, it sometimes feels like more of a working river than up by downtown Minneapolis. Starting at Lambert Landing near Lowertown (“PORT OF ST. PAUL” reads a sign on the river) and walking the mile underneath the Robert and Wabasha bridges to what’s now known as the City House, you see barges of all sizes docked up against the edge of the river.

Hidden powers

When inspecting one such covered barge, sagging low in the water under the weight of its cargo, I notice a familiar place name. Its port of origin is Jeffersonville, Indiana, on the Ohio River not far from where I grew up, over 700 miles away. It’s in seeing these barges and thinking about their points of origin that you begin to understand the enormity of the Mississippi’s role as a central nervous system for commerce in the interior United States. So many of the important cities of the East, Midwest and South — Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Omaha, St. Louis, New Orleans, Memphis — are connected to each other culturally, historically and economically by this river and its tributaries. This is maybe why St. Paul, with its breweries and steeples and barges, often reminds me more of other German Catholic river towns like Cincinnati or St. Louis than the flat, Protestant Plains cities to the west and south.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

A barge hailing from Jeffersonville, Indiana.

Of course, I don’t inspect the barge too carefully. The river looks placid from a distance, gently rolling along, but up close, you can see it churning away in the areas between the barge and the docks. I watch a stick floating down the river get caught in an invisible riptide, then be sucked violently under the barge, and I think of a passage from Captain Bob Deck’s great St. Paul towboating memoirs "Deck on Deck," published in 2010. Here Deck is speaking to his captain, right before stepping aboard his first barge in the 1970s. The captain informs him of “rule number one”: 

Then he turned and stuck a finger in my face. “And rule number one is: Don’t fall in! If you fall in the river, you are dead! It’s that simple.”

“Well, yeah, I guess I wouldn’t want to drown.”

“Hah! You’d be lucky to drown! More’n likely you’d get chopped into pieces by the propellers. They’d suck you right under the boat and cut you into bait.”

Of course this refers specifically to falling off a boat or barge, but you can see where falling even from the banks could be deadly. The river is powerful and capricious.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

There are a handful of these mounds below Shepard Road, in the public green spaces, built during some of the renovations in the past decade.

On a recent walk, Dan Dressler of the National Parks Service pointed out some little-known public art flourishes that commemorate this power and capriciousness: the so-called flood mounds. There are a handful of these mounds below Shepard Road, in the public green spaces, built during some of the renovations in the past decade. They mark the heights of flooding over the years, the highest one commemorating the flood of 1965. Standing atop it and surveying the floodplain, imagining all of it below water, you begin to understand the challenge that St. Paul has historically faced in connecting to this part of the river — the difference between where the river sits now and that height is pretty significant.

Harnessing the power

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

St. Paul Municipal Grain Terminal and Sackhouse

Of course this power can be harnessed to great effect. The story of the St. Paul Municipal Grain Terminal and Sackhouse — now known by the pleasant but pointedly neutral name “City House” — is instructive in how the river can be used as an economic and political tool.

The Grain Terminal was built beginning in 1927, the work of the Equity Cooperative Exchange, a collective of grain farmers throughout the Midwest who were determined to bypass the monopolistic grain and milling interests based in Minneapolis. In fact, if you read contemporary accounts, farmers in the region used “Minneapolis” as a metonym for the entire fat-cat crony capitalist system that makes current use of “Wall Street” seem tame in comparison.

By owning and operating their own grain terminal in St. Paul, the idea was that the cooperative could compete with the railroads as a way of shipping product, and directly control the flow of grain from the farms into the urban markets, unencumbered by the machinations of the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce and the various milling associations that worked in collusion with the railroads to monopolize the grain trade.

It largely worked. In fact, only a few decades later, the idea of a farmers cooperative was pretty uncontroversial in the Midwest, an accepted part of the economic reality that would have been considered wild-eyed radicalism in the first decades of the last century.

The Grain Terminal had fallen into disrepair in the latter half of the 20th century, and a lot of the infrastructure surrounding it fell into decay or was razed in various revitalization efforts of the years. Now restored and used as an event and meeting space, it’s very picturesque — the elevator itself has been given a fresh coat of white paint and period lettering that would make a Red River wheat farmer weep tears of pride. It also serves as an important historical marker in the area, a quiet reminder of the ways in which the river can be a tool for economic, political and cultural power. 

Claim your river

These debates over how the river will be used continue. When I spoke to Whitney Clark of the Friends of the Mississippi River recently, he contrasted the vision of Minneapolis Grand Rounds originator Horace Cleveland — the riverside as a public-spirited parkland that belongs to everyone — with some of the recent residential developments along the waterfront, which put access and enjoyment largely in private hands. The questions over how to handle the old Ramsey County jail (memorably dubbed “SPACEJAIL ’79” by writer Nate Patrin after last week’s column) provide a quick glimpse at how some of these development issues might play out. How can these sites be developed? Can moves once hailed as improvements and now seen as mistakes be corrected? Who — and maybe this is the most important question — is the river for?

An important first step in answering that question might be to claim ownership of the river yourself as a key part of the history, culture and civic identity of the Twin Cities.

Enjoying the panoramic view from the plaza atop the old jail and then walking down below to Shepard Road and taking in the docks, the place names painted on the sides of the barges, the recreational facilities, the historic buildings, the remnants and survivors of industry, the private developments, and the rest of it, you’re walking beside a cultural and natural asset every bit as important to us as mountains and oceans are to other great cities. That’s something to bear in mind when considering what will be done with the river and the surrounding lands in the coming decades. 

Creative Commons/Wonderlane

This finding strengthens the suggestion from other research that the emerging years of adulthood — 18 to 25 — are particularly impressionable and significant in terms of shaping people’s later attitudes and values.

When people enter young adulthood during times of economic hardship they tend to be less narcissistic later in life than people who come of age when the economy is strong.

That’s the finding from a fascinating study published this month in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“Whereas previous research has shown that parental behavior during childhood predicts later narcissism, the present findings suggest that macroenvironmental conditions play a similar role at a later stage of development,” writes Emily Bianchi, the study’s author and an assistant professor of organization and management at Emory University in Atlanta.

Narcissists are defined in the study as people who “regard themselves as superior to other people and believe that they are entitled to good outcomes, excessive admiration, and unyielding praise.”

A trio of studies

Bianchi’s study is actually three separate studies. In the first one, 1,572 people born between the years 1947 and 1994 filled out an online survey that included the 40-question Narcissism Personality Inventory as well as some questions that measured self-esteem.

Bianchi then took that data, adjusted it slightly for age (narcissism typically declines as people age), and looked to see if there was any correlation between the participants’ narcissism scores and the average U.S. unemployment rate during the years the participants were 18 to 25 years old. (The participants who were born during the late 1940s and late 1970s experienced the best economic conditions during young adulthood, while those born in the early 1960s and late 1980s encountered the worst.)

Bianchi found that people who were 18 to 25 years old during periods of high unemployment (average unemployment: 7.7 percent) scored, on average, 2.35 points lower on the 40-point narcissism inventory scale than those who entered young adulthood during periods of low unemployment (average unemployment: 4.3 percent).

This correlation held even after Bianchi adjusted for education and gender. (Men tend to be more narcissistic than women.) And it was not explained by dips or rises in self-esteem, a personality trait associated with but not the same as narcissism.

Importantly, the correlation was not found among slightly older adults — those aged 26 to 33 during an economic downturn. This finding strengthens the suggestion from other research that the emerging years of adulthood — 18 to 25 — are particularly impressionable and significant in terms of shaping people’s later attitudes and values.

Bianchi then repeated the study using data collected from a larger, more nationally representative sample of 31,000 people born between 1930 and 1984. The findings were similar.

“People who came of age in worse economic environments were less likely to regard themselves as unique, special, and deserving,” she writes.

Narcissistic CEOs

Bianchi then set out to investigate whether or not the differences in narcissism observed in the two studies manifested themselves in people’s behaviors.  She decided to test this by looking at CEO pay. Other research has shown that narcissistic CEOs tend to make sure they are paid much more than the next most highly paid executive in their company. (As Bianchi explains, "CEOs have some control over their own pay and almost complete control over the pay of other executives.")

Bianchi gathered 2007 data on about 2,000 CEOs from major publicly traded companies in the United States. She chose the year 2007 because it was the last year before the recent financial crisis, and thus a year in which CEOs didn’t have to worry too much about others’ perceptions of their pay.

She found that CEOs who had been 18 to 25 years old during economic recessions paid themselves relatively less than those who had come of age in more prosperous times.  The association held even after controlling for age, gender, company revenues and assets and type of industry.

The effect was most pronounced when total compensation was considered. “CEOs who came of age in the most prosperous times paid themselves 2.26 times as much as the next well-paid executive, whereas CEOS who came of age in the least prosperous times paid themselves 1.69 times as much,” writes Bianchi.

Of course, all three studies have their limitations. As Bianchi herself points out, her findings show only a correlation, not a causation, between economic conditions in early adulthood and narcissism later in life. It's possible that other, as-yet unidentified factors may explain the results.

An explanation for rising narcissism?

There has been a lot of debate, including among researchers, about whether or not narcissism has been on the rise among American college students in recent decades. If it has (and, again, the issue is hotly debated), this study’s findings may offer an explanation.

“If narcissism is rising, the strong economy of the late 1980s and 1990s may help account for this rise,” says Bianchi. “Indeed, the most widely cited publication on the growth of narcissism charted rising egoism between 1979 and 2006, a time period that began with a deep recession and continued with several decades of mostly robust economic growth.”

“Thus, growing narcissism among American college students over this period may reflect a long stretch of rising prosperity,” she adds. “If so, then the Great Recession may knock this upward trajectory off course.”

You’ll find an abstract of the study on the Psychological Science website.

The decisions by both International Monetary Fund director Christine Lagarde and Robert Birgeneau, former chancellor of the University of California, to withdraw as planned commencement speakers are only the latest in a rash of controversies this commencement season.

Other planned speakers, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, women’s rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, have all either been disinvited from speaking or withdrew in the face of significant student protest.

The phenomenon isn’t new; it’s become such a rite of passage in the spring that some free-speech advocates have started calling the spring “disinvitation season.” But it’s a trend that some believe is growing, and that many observers worry is shifting college campuses away from being a free marketplace of ideas.

“It’s incredibly disappointing that commencement speakers get cancelled because of the controversial nature of their remarks,” says Ken Paulson, president of Vanderbilt University’s First Amendment Center and dean of the College of Mass Communication at Middle Tennessee State University. “We need more people to come in and raise hell on college campuses and provide challenging ideas and concepts.”

“By booking someone to speak at your commencement, you’re not issuing a blanket endorsement of who they are or what they do,” he adds. “Given the amount of boring commencement speakers we’ve all heard, you’d think it would be refreshing to hear someone provocative.”

Ms. Lagarde, the IMF chief, was scheduled to speak at Smith College until a petition began circulating among students criticizing the IMF as “a primary culprit in the failed developmental policies implanted in some of the world’s poorest countries” and demanding that Lagarde be reconsidered as the commencement speaker.

On Monday, Lagarde withdrew.

On Tuesday, Mr. Birgeneau withdrew as commencement speaker for Haverford College in Pennsylvania. The controversy over Birgeneau started several weeks ago when more than 40 students and faculty wrote Birgeneau a letter, demanding that he meet nine “conditions” before speaking at the Haverford commencement. They cited the University of California’s decision to use police force on students participating in Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. Those conditions included publicly apologizing and writing a letter to Haverford students explaining the events and “what you learned from them.”

Birgeneau responded tersely in a letter: “First, I have never and will never respond to lists of demands. Second, as a longtime civil rights activist and firm supporter of nonviolence, I do not respond to untruthful, violent verbal attacks.”

But on Tuesday he apparently changed his mind and backed out of the speaking engagement.

In both cases, the Smith and Haverford presidents expressed their disappointment with the decision but seemed to have little control over the outcome.

“Those who objected will be satisfied that their activism has had a desired effect. But at what cost to Smith College?” asked Smith President Kathleen McCartney in a statement. “I remain committed to leading a college where differing views can be heard and debated with respect.”

Haverford President Daniel Weiss had also pushed back against students’ demands, calling Birgeneau “one of the most influential and important higher education leaders in our generation” and admonishing students that their letter with demands “read more like a jury issuing a verdict than as an invitation to discussion.”

But despite his efforts to work with the protesting students, he was unable to come up with a solution.

In many instances, it’s a voluntary decision for speakers to back out, not a "disinvitation." Last week, Ms. Rice also voluntarily dropped out after Rutgers protesters called her a “war criminal.” But many free-speech advocates say they amount to the same thing.

“People say, ‘These are people who withdrew,’ but I assume that when the pressure gets high, the first thing a university president would do is talk to the speaker and give them an opportunity to decline,” says Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which champions free speech on campus. “By the time you have students and faculties demanding that someone be disinvited, it’s already too late.”

Mr. Lukianoff cites the Ayaan Hirsi Ali case this year as an example in which someone refused to back down in the face of student protests, and Brandeis University ultimately caved to those protests instead by officially disinviting her. (She was to be a recipient of an honorary degree, not the primary commencement speaker.)

Protesters had criticized Ms. Hirsi Ali’s fierce condemnation of Islam, and Brandeis justified its decision by drawing a distinction between a speaker designed to provoke discussion and awarding an honorary degree, which might be viewed as a blanket approval of someone’s work. “We cannot overlook that certain of her past statements are inconsistent with Brandeis University's core values,'' the university said in a statement.

But Hirsi Ali issued a statement of her own condemning Brandeis’s decision. "Neither Brandeis nor my critics knew or even inquired as to what I might say," she said in the statement. "They simply wanted me to be silenced.”

Lukianoff, like Mr. Paulson, acknowledges that the silencing of speakers is nothing new, but he says it may be getting worse. And he blames, in part, a culture on college campuses that so restricts free speech that students “think they have a right not to be offended.”

“We’ve been teaching a generation of students through speech codes, through censorship in some cases of really quite mild speech … to think like censors,” says Lukianoff. “If you create an idea that people who have done or said things you dislike should never be allowed to speak on your campus, there’s kind of no bottom to that pit.”

Lukianoff says that the majority of speakers discouraged from campuses are social conservatives, but notes that that’s not always the case. Obama appointees like Eric Holder and Kathleen Sebelius have been protested, as have relatively apolitical people like actor James Franco.

In some cases, even when universities have insisted a speech be allowed to go on, protesters have succeeded in shutting it down in process. That was the case this past fall when students at Brown University managed to halt a speech (not a commencement address) by New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly. Students angry about the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy essentially booed Commissioner Kelly off the stage, preventing a lengthy question-and-answer session that had been planned.

That “sent a really powerful message to university presidents and administrators that unless they really stand up to students and faculty members, they might figure out a way to shut down a speech no matter what,” says Lukianoff.

“I think we’re training people to seek out echo chambers,” Mr. Lukianoff worries. Instead, he says, students should be learning “that you should be skeptical when you’re too confident in what you believe, and should seek out smart people with whom you disagree.”

This article is one in a series of occasional articles funded by a grant from the Northwest Area Foundation.

Efforts to crack down on payday loans in Minnesota could again be headed to “Wait’ll-next-year’’ status.

Yes, the Minnesota House has passed a bill that would put tougher restrictions on operations that charge the state’s poorest interest rates of 250 percent-plus.

And yes, the governor on Monday tried to shed more light on the business practices that operate in the shadows of decency.

“I urge the Senate to put the House bill to a vote and see whether legislators of both parties are willing to stand up to protect the interests of the people of Minnesota, rather than the economic interests of payday lenders,’’ the governor said from his bully pulpit.

The House bill more strictly limits payday lenders’ repeat business, with tougher checks on borrowers’ ability to repay.

But even with a weaker Senate bill, Deputy Majority Leader Jeff Hayden is having a hard time rounding up votes.

“It’s bogged down,’’ said the Minneapolis DFLer. “The industry is fighting anything we try to do.’’

This is one of those baffling issues. Why is it so difficult to put tougher restrictions on an industry that seems to have a strong odor? Why does Minnesota continue to protect business practices numerous states outlawed and the Department of Defense condemned? Why has this issue become partisan, with virtually no Republicans supporting clamping down on the industry?

Or is it really that partisan, when you look at campaign contributions?

Soaring business, soaring traps

A MinnPost series last year underscored the industry’s growth. Between 2007 and 2011, payday loans in Minnesota skyrocketed from 170,000 to 350,000 annually, totaling almost $100 million. The state’s biggest payday loan company, Payday America, pocketed $6 million in 2011 payday profits.

In House committee testimony this session, Anna Brelje told her story to explain how the process works — and exploits.

She was 24 years old, had a medical crisis (no insurance) and ended up in debt. Even working fulltime, she couldn’t keep up with her bills. She borrowed $300 through a payday loan operation, couldn’t pay it back in two weeks, so next payday borrowed again to pay back the first loan.

Sen. Jeff Hayden

“I ended up trapped,’’ she said; in a two-year period, she paid more than $2,500 in fees.

Out of the trap now thanks to a decent job, Brelje became a leader in the fight against the practices. She’s also involved her Minneapolis church, Holy Trinity Lutheran.

Several religious organizations have also pushed legislators to act.

In some ways, this seems like a classic case of those with the greatest needs having the least Capitol clout.

Rep. Joe Atkins, DFL-Inver Grove Heights and commerce committee chairman, shakes his head at the situation.

“The people that get caught up in these traps are not stupid people,’’ Atkins said. “They’re people who are just desperate and they’re struggling to get by. Everyone else gets protected.’’

But Sen. David Hann, the Senate minority leader, sees things differently. Tighter restrictions on the payday loan operations might end up hurting the very people they intend to help.

“I don’t know what side the angels are on in this situation,’’ Hann said. “As I understand it, the people who are using these mechanisms to borrow money can’t avail themselves of traditional ways. These are mechanisms are a way to get a loan. There are people who don’t have means to get credit elsewhere. There has to be an accommodation.’’

Rixmann: GOP power, DFL donor

Let’s take time out to deal with a rumor that floats around the Minnesota payday loan issue:

Brad Rixmann is founder and CEO of Pawn America, which owns Payday America. Rixmann also is a major player in Republican Party politics. He is a big donor. He was an honorary chairman of Tom Emmer’s gubernatorial campaign.

That leads to the rumor that Rixmann has heavy influence on the Republican House and Senate caucuses.

Hann says Rixmann’s name never has come up during caucus discussions of payday-loan crackdown efforts.

Pawn America

Brad Rixmann

Still, Hann was asked, given that GOP legislators frequently say unions shape DFL policies, isn’t it reasonable to suggest outside influences shape GOP policies?

“Frankly, when you talk about an individual donor, it doesn’t compare to the magnitude of a union,’’ Hann replied. “When you talk about a union, you’re talking about both money and people on the ground. There is no individual contributor who can compare to that.’’

Rep. Tim Sanders, R-Blaine, is a member of the House commerce committee and a bill foe.

The Rixmann influence? “His name hasn’t come up,’’ Sanders said.

But Republicans don’t control the Legislature — Democrats do. They could pass any bill on their own. Why don’t they?

Well, as long as we’re talking Rixmann donations, know this:

In 2013, Rixmann gave $10,000 to the DFL Senate Caucus, $5,000 to the DFL House Caucus, $500 to the 52^nd Senate District DFL, and $4,000 to Gov. Dayton, according to the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board.

While the funds obviously didn’t buy Dayton’s or the House’s support, Senators might have some explaining to do about their fifth-largest 2013 individual contributor. Rixmann also gave the Senate DFL an additional $24,750 between 2006 and 2012, according to the CFPDB.

Understand, Rixmann was more generous with Republican causes. Still, his name is known — if not mentioned in caucus sessions — among DFLers as well as Republicans.

Cap doesn’t mean ‘need is just going away’

Rixmann was not available for comment. But Chuck Armstrong, chief legislative officer for Rixmann Companies, did explain why the business is blocking legislative efforts to cap how many annual loans a customer could take out.

The House bill’s main portion would prevent a customer from getting more than four loans a year. The weaker Senate version would cap that at eight. The House also requires tougher credit-worthiness checks.

Rep. Joe Atkins

But the big issue is the caps — payday lenders count on repeat borrowers. And some of those borrowers testified that they repeatedly count on payday lenders.

“To cap it doesn’t mean the need is just going to go away,’’ Armstrong contends. 

Currently, most of Payday America’s 20,000 customers use the service more than eight times in a year, he said. Payday America, at least, allows customers to take out only one loan at a time, he adds.

Armstrong admits that, on the surface, it’s easy to paint a bleak picture of the operations such as Payday America. But, he said, despite statistics showing people paying more than 200 percent interest on loans, the majority of Payday America’s customers pay back their loans in two weeks.

“If you borrow $350 and you pay it back in two weeks, it’ll cost you $35,’’ he said. “Our customers are very deliberate in their decisions. ... Our customers love us.’’

(The state’s Department of Commerce reported that in 2011, Minnesotans using payday loans paid fees and other costs for loans that amounted to an interest rate of 237 percent. These institutions get around the state’s tough usury laws because they are licensed as Industrial Loan and Thrift operations, not payday lenders. This is what is called a big loophole.)

During the session, Armstrong said, Payday America customers sent 10,000 e-mails and letters to legislators urging them to oppose the proposed restrictions. On the company’s website, there is an invitation for customers to urge legislators to block proposed changes.

The opposition’s trump card is that if the Legislature did pass the proposed restrictions, the licensed lending business might be forced to close. That would mean the only avenues for loans would be via the Internet or on from street corner loan sharks.

“The real danger is the Internet,’’ Armstrong said. “There are Internet predators. We’re a brick-and-mortar, licensed business.’’

Refusing to stop the 'terrible treadmill'

With time running out, it appears that those lobbying to stop legislative action hold the stronger hand.

“The whole point of what we’re trying to do is get people off that terrible treadmill where they keep borrowing to pay back an earlier loan,’’ Hayden said. 

But just to get the Senate version of the bill through the Senate commerce committee, headed by James Metzen, an old DFLer long known for being friendly to anything associated with banking, Hayden had to water down his bill.

“The Senate is just more conservative,” Hayden said.

Will the measure get off the floor? On Monday, several people pushing for legislative action met briefly outside the Senate chamber with majority leader Tom Bakk.

What was said?

“He told us they still don’t have the votes,” said Meghan Olsen Biebighauser, a Holy Trinity organizer who helps lead religious opposition to payday lending.

Someone else in the group said, “Don’t you think he could get the votes if he really wanted them?”

Here is more evidence that the red state boycott of Medicaid expansion is the real failure:

The Hospital Corporation of America, which has facilities in 20 states, reported a big gap in Medicaid and uninsured admissions between expansion and non-expansion states. In the four states it operates where Medicaid expanded under the ACA, the company saw a 22.3 percent growth in Medicaid admissions, compared to a 1.3 percent decline in non-expansion states. The company also had a 29 percent decline in uninsured admissions in the expansion states, while non-expansion states experienced 5.9 percent growth in uninsured admissions, chief financial officer William Rutherford said.

When the Supreme Court allowed states to "opt out" of the Medicaid expansion provision of the ACA, those red states decided to use this as some kind of means of foiling the law. They must have believed that they could put more pressure on Obamacare this way and that would lead to the death spiral they hoped for.

Unfortunately, they used the constituents of their own states as the pawns to be punished in this "showdown".

A lot of the uninsured are the working poor. They have needed health care all along and the purpose of the ACA and the related Medicaid expansion was to reach them - to give them what they need.

The ACA tried to make this transition as painless as possible for the individual states. The Feds would pay the bills. The Feds would provide the sign up mechanism. It only required one thing from the governors and legislatures of the states - ACCEPT IT.

But Republicans used control of the states as their way of fighting a law they disagreed with. A law that was THE LAW, but that they still disagreed with. So they risked the health care of their own state residents to play political games.

The evidence is overwhelming that millions of people in these states could get health care without much difficulty if their own state government had simply allowed it to happen.

The rate of uninsured people has gone down. Gallup and Pew research confirm it. But how much further could we have progressed if Red State politicians had not played political games with people's lives?

It is a question that will continue to be asked.

This post was written by Dave Mindeman and originally published on mnpACT! Progressive Political Blog. Follow Dave on Twitter: @newtbuster.

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Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is in southern Louisiana this week, touring off-shore oil production sites in the Gulf of Mexico and discussing energy policy.

Bachmann has long pushed for less regulation on energy production.

She's part of the 2014 Offshore Energy Tour with Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise. Others on the tour include U.S. Reps. Susan Brooks of Indiana, Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Steve Womack of Arkansas.

Bachmann said of the tour: "Domestic energy production plays a huge role in America’s economic and national security by increasing jobs and growth and decreasing our reliance on foreign energy sources. We need to continue to unleash American energy production, both onshore and offshore

Scalise said the point of the tour is to "... see first-hand the extraordinary process of producing American energy in the Gulf of Mexico, and how these projects create jobs, grow our economy, and increase America's energy security."

Wikileaks has released a 2008 cable from the then-U.S. ambassador to Russiawarning of potential large, nation-splitting trouble between the Russian and Ukrainian populations in Ukraine if Ukraine pushed for NATO membership.

The events that set off the current Ukraine crisis were not about NATO membership, but otherwise the six-year-old cable from Ambassador William Burns eerily foreshadowed recent events. A non-partisan career diplomat who served under the last four presidents (the two Bushes, Clinton and now Obama) Burns has since risen to be deputy secretary of state.

In 2008, Ukraine and NATO were exploring the idea of NATO membership for Ukraine (also the former Soviet republica of Georgia, neither of which has been admitted to the alliance).

The full 2008 cable from Burns about this possibility is here. I've highlighted in italics below some of the key phrases that make the cable seem so relevant now.

In the key summary, Burns wrote:

"Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine's intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Bucharest summit, Foreign Minister Lavrov [Georgi Lavrov is still foreign minister] and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat.

"NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains 'an emotional and neuralgic' issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. Additionally, the GOR and experts continue to claim that Ukrainian NATO membership would have a major impact on Russia's defense industry, Russian-Ukrainian family connections, and bilateral relations generally. In Georgia, the GOR fears continued instability and 'provocative acts' in the separatist regions."

(GOR stands for Government of Russia.)

The recent crisis was set off by the moves of the deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich to back out of a plan for closer Ukrainian economic ties to Western Europe and instead to accept aid from Russia. I have no sympathy for the pro-Moscow kleptocrat Yanukovich, but the overthrow of an elected president by street mobs, which included violent neo-Nazi elements, which is mostly overlooked by the U.S. mainstream coverage, is also highly problematic for those who claim to favor democracy.

Whatever you may think of the rebellion and separatist movements of the predominantly Russian regions of Ukraine and whatever you believe about the level of involvement by Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin (for whom I likewise have little sympathy), the origins of the crisis seem pretty well foreshadowed by what Burns wrote six years ago about the "emotional and neuralgic" nature of the issue, for Russia the nation and for ethnic Russians in both Ukraine and Russia.

Two new television ads on behalf of two Republican candidates for governor will be on the air shortly.

Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson tries for humor in a spot in which he helps his teen-aged son, Thor, learn how to drive.

As Thor crashes through obstacle barrels labeled MnSure and veers around cones, Johnson compares his son’s driving to Gov. Mark Dayton’s handling of state government.  “The only thing he gets right are the hard left turn,” Johnson says in the ad.

Johnson campaign manager Greg Peppin says the ad will run statewide but will be “a targeted buy.”  Translation — it won’t be saturating the airwaves.

The second ad appears to be the first independent expenditures of the campaign season.  Compete Minnesota has created an ad www.CompeteMN.com. on behalf of Scott Honour, airing in the Twin Cities on cable outlets and also online.  Entitled, “The Difference,” the ad claims that Honour is the only gubernatorial candidate to advocate the full dismantling of MnSure and features supporters extolling Honour’s capabilities.

Compete Minnesota’s state filing shows that as of April 14, the group had more than $250,000 cash on hand, which came from three contributors.  Alec Gores of the Gores Group, a private equity firm where Honour worked for several years in Los Angeles, contributed $200,000 of the total amount.

The Metropolitan Council says that the new Green Line light rail line has attracted 121 new building projects worth $2.5 billion.

At that's before it's even started running between downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul along University Avenue.

Projects, both commercial and residential, within a half-mile of the rail route are blossoming, the Council said. The total investment amount will go even higher, because costs of some of the projects haven't been announced. And the amount doesn't include such publicly-funded projects as Target Field, TCF Stadium or the new Vikings stadium, but does include the $243 million Union Depot renovation.

The council says the spending along the rail line is in line with reports from other cities: a new 20-mile light rail line between central Phoenix and Tempe attracted $3.5 billion in private investment between 2001 and the line’s actual opening in 2008; the Dallas light rail system has seen more than $1.5 billion in private real estate development adjacent to rail stations since 1997.

The official start date for the Green Line is June 14, and a report Tuesday from MPR said test runs are taking more than an hour to make the 11-mile trip from downtown to downtown. That's considerably longer than the goal of 40 minutes.

And KSTP reports that officials are spending $300,000 to modify the new light rail cars to be better suited for disabled riders, following a complaint from the Minnesota State Council on Disability.

House Democrats are scrambling to get critical Republican support the day before a vote on an $846 million bonding bill — a final 2014 session piece yet to pass.

Construction borrowing bills need a 60 percent threshold to pass, but House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt said his caucus is not yet willing to put up the eight GOP votes needed until Democrats put more money into the Lewis and Clark water pipeline in the southwestern part of the state, among other projects. House and Senate Democrats reached a final agreement on a list of bonding projects Wednesday. 

“Apparently the House and Senate DFL went in some back room and cut a deal between themselves but did not include us in that process,” Daudt said. “Obviously we want to pass a bonding bill that everybody can agree to, but at this point we are not there yet.”

Legislators are required to adjourn by May 19. House Capital Investment Committee chair Alice Hausman said time is running short. “It has to be tomorrow,” she said. “We are at the zero hour now; there is no more time.”

The final bonding bill provides $22 million for the water pipeline project, which is stalled after federal funding dried up. Republicans say nearly $70 million is needed to finish the critical infrastructure project.

“There are a lot of things in the bill that, frankly, we think are of a lot lower priority than things like Lewis and Clark,” Daudt said, “Snow-making equipment and theaters and these sorts of things.”

Democrats are working under an agreement made between the four caucus leaders last year to only bond for $1 billion this biennium — $150 million last year and roughly $850 million this year. They have proposed spending an additional $200 million from the surplus to fund additional projects, but that bill doesn’t need GOP votes to pass.

Daudt claims Democrats are working around that agreement by funding a House priority — $51.5 million for a planetarium and reconstruction at the  University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum of Natural History. DFLers would take that project out of the construction bill — freeing up $51.5 million in bonding under the cap — and allow the university to bond for the project while the state repays the debt.

DFL House Speaker Paul Thissen said that is not going back on the arrangement, adding Republicans have been included in the discussions all along. He added that the latest version of the bonding bill goes “above and beyond” for Republicans, funding $80 million more in GOP projects than a proposal that was debated last year.

“That bill is a bill that they should provide the votes on if [Minority Leader Kurt Daudt] is going to hold his word,” Thissen said. “And if he breaks his word and the bonding bill goes down, it’s on him.”

Other major projects will get funding in the bonding bill, including $126 million to complete the restoration of the state Capitol building, $240 million for higher education projects on the Univeristy of Minnesota and MNSCU campuses and $100 million for housing projects. The proposal includes several key priorities for Gov. Mark Dayton, including civic center funding for Rochester, Mankato and St. Cloud, $56 million for upgrades for the St. Peter Security Hospital and $7 million for the Minnesota Sex Offender Program in Moose Lake (go here for a full list of projects).

Lawmakers took out a provision that overturned a requirement for fire sprinklers in all new larger homes. Dayton threatened to veto the bill if the proposal was included.

The cash bill will mostly include local road and bridge projects, including many for Republicans, Thissen noted.

“I thought that was the deal — a handshake deal next year we will deliver the votes if it’s this size and all our stuff is in. Not only is all their stuff in, there’s more,” Hausman said. “Talk about breaking a deal? This is such hypocrisy because they want more.”

Thissen and Daudt are meeting Wednesday afternoon to try and work out their differences before Thursday’s vote. Despite contentious negotiations, both anticipate there will ultimately be a bonding deal struck yet this session. The House has to pass the bill before sending it to the Senate for a vote.

“There should be a bonding bill this year,” Thissen said. “Quite frankly there’s way more than 81 people in this body that want and need a bonding bill to get done.” 

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate appears ready to refight last year’s battle over student loan interest rates.

A group of Democratic senators, led by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and including Sen. Al Franken, introduced a bill last week to allow borrowers to refinance their student loans to last year’s low 3.9 percent interest rate (for federally subsidized undergraduate loans). That rate was borne out of a deal setting annual student loan interest rates at the yield of Treasury bonds, plus a few percentage points.

Congress easily passed that plan last summer, and President Obama signed it into law, though it inherently meant rates would rise as Treasury bond yields increased. And that’s exactly what happened last week: bond rates went up, and undergraduate borrowers will now pay a 4.6 percent rate on their new student loans.

The Democrats’ bill allows borrowers to refinance their student loans to the flat 3.9 percent rate, much as a homeowner could do with his mortgage.

Borrowers currently can't refinance their students loans, which Democrats said Wednesday is unfair given the increase in American student loan debt. At a press conference, Franken told the story about a Hamline University student who will graduate $100,000 in debt, whose loan payments equal half his current income.

“We need to do this, we need to let students refinance their debt the same way that people do on their homes, the same way that everybody is able to do, except for students,” he said.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said the Senate will vote on the bill in early June, but it’s unlikely to go anywhere this session. The government stands to lose money by allowing refinancing of student loans, but the senators didn’t know how much on Wednesday. Likewise, they plan to pay for the bill by raising tax rates on millionaires, though they didn’t have an estimate on how much that new tax would bring in. Republicans in the Senate and House — where Minnesota Rep. John Kline chairs the education committee and helped craft last year’s deal — are certain to oppose anything that raises tax rates or otherwise costs the government money.

“This is a matter of values,” Franken said. “There are people who make a lot of money who pay a very low rate on their income. And it’s really about: Are we subsidizing millionaires or billionaires, or are we trying to help our students?”

Democrats have political reasons for bringing up a bill as likely to fail as this one. It’s part of Senate Democrats’ “fair shot agenda,” an effort to force Republicans to vote against potentially popular legislation in an election year. The student loan bill will follow the path set by equal pay legislation and a minimum wage hike — it will fail on the Senate floor, but live on when campaign season begins in earnest.

“There’s a real question here: Does Congress work for the rich and the powerful, for those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers, or does Congress work for the rest of America?” Warren said Wednesday. “We believe the rest of America should have a fair shot at an affordable education.”

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry

We’re the first … . The AP reports, “Minnesota enacted the nation's first law Wednesday requiring smartphones and tablets sold in the state to have remote shut-off feature as a way to deter theft. The ‘kill switch’ bill was signed by Gov. Mark Dayton after lawmakers passed it last week. The measure takes full effect in July 2015, but advocates are hoping the wireless industry will make technology updates sooner.”

The governor also signed bills making it easier to expunge criminal convictions and harder for felons to get guns.  

The second guy arrested in that Mankato assault case says he’s completely innocent. Curt Brown of the Strib says, “When authorities asked [Trevor] Shelley if he had struck [Isaac] Kolstad, he ‘stated that he did not.’ Told that surveillance cameras in the area might have captured what happened, ‘Shelley maintained that he did not hit anyone.’ ... Shelley allegedly told [a witness] at 3 a.m. that he ‘wound up and hit him as hard as he could.’”

Dan Browning’s Strib piece on a Mayo cancer experiment is a fascinating read.“Stacy Erholtz was out of conventional treatment options for blood cancer last June when she underwent an experimental trial at the Mayo Clinic that injected her with enough measles vaccine to inoculate 10 million people. The 50-year-old Pequot Lakes mother is now part of medical history.”

Not exactly Walter White … . Tad Vezner of the PiPress says, “Two police officers patrolling a St. Paul public storage building were stunned when a door opened, revealing a full methamphetamine lab, bubbling beakers and a woman passed out in a chair. … Officers approached one unit and smelled a strong chemical odor from inside — before the door suddenly opened. [Matthew] Krause emerged and ‘appeared very surprised to see police’ … .”

In his MPR column, Bob Collins covers the official response from Target exec Jeff Jones to an employee complaint that ran in Gawker last week. This was the one that said, “Target has no original ideas, they are just reacting to what other companies are doing and jumping the bandwagon. They have a culture that makes decision via consensus, so it takes FOREVER to make a decision and implement even the smallest change.” To that Chief Marketing Director Jones replies, “While we would have preferred to have a conversation like this with the team member directly, speaking openly and honestly, and challenging norms is exactly what we need to be doing today and every day going forward.” And that private, direct, strictly in-house conversation would have been beneficial to the employee’s career, yes?

An amusing story from Stribber Jeff Strickler on a long-time car salesman who now handles the negotiating for car buyers. “After spending five decades in the car business, Weinberg has launched Auto Buying Service, where he helps prospective car buyers save money — for free. Doesn’t that mean that sometimes he’s talking them out of buying the very things he used to try to talk them into buying? ‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘but I’m playing for the other team now.’”  So I want that Mercedes, but I’ve only saved enough for a ‘78 Datsun … .

Still seeking “balance” … . Nick Crow of the Janesville Gazette tells us, “The Janesville School District made a mistake by showing the video ‘Kids React to Gay Marriage’ at Craig High School on April 11, Superintendent Karen Schulte said Tuesday. ‘Once I viewed the video, I felt like it was biased to one side of the (same-sex marriage) issue,’ Schulte said. ‘It's not something we would typically do. When looking at controversial issues, we need to look at both sides.’" Which I assume means teaching “flat Earth” after those silly science teachers get through their biased “round Earth”propaganda.

A commentary responding to a response to a letter… from Will Shapira, about public funding of sports stadiums. In the Strib he says, “The author of the May 13 commentary“Stadium foes really should ‘get over it" neglected to mention that at critical junctures in the legislative journey of bills for Target Field and the Vikings stadium, a way somehow was found to do an end run on the law that requires a referendum on every proposed local tax increase. … good government trumps Big Sports any day … the Twins’ and Vikings’ financial contributions to community projects are merely business investments, the cost of doing business and being allowed to socialize their private profit at taxpayer expense.”

Lubricate your eyeballs, because there’s going to be some rolling as you watch this … .  City Pages’ Jessica Armbruster, noting the New York Times visit to Hennepin and Lagoon to interview Uptown fashionistas about their “look” writes, “There's a enthusiastic student who opines that Uptown is ‘hipster central,’ a tattoo shop employee who only wears black, and a barista/pizza server who loves her green hat because she's adverse to washing her hair and growing out a bad haircut (girl, we've all been there). They all feel that clothing is an extension of who they are (a common trope in fashion Q&As). The final interview subject is pretty interesting, however: a PhD candidate from Afghanistan who sees his love of fashion as a way of breaking through stereotypes.” And you there, wearing the torn and faded Harmon Killebrew t-shirt, cargo shorts and sandals with crew socks … ?

Jim H. Johnson Jr., a nationally respected geographer, demographer and professor at the University of  North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will outline six demographic trends dramatically transforming Minnesota and other states at The Minneapolis Foundation’s annual meeting on Thursday.  

Johnson grew up poor and has been studying inequality, urban poverty and sociological changes in the United States for more than two decades.   

“You’re in the middle of it, all the trends,’’ Johnson said of the Twin Cities’ metro area. For example, Hennepin County and Ramsey County are growing slowly or losing population, while increasing in numbers of people of color, he said.  

As the “distinguished professor of strategy and entrepreneurship’’ at UNC,  he’s a driving force behind the Global Scholars Academy, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade charter school in Durham, N.C., that serves poor neighborhoods. The program is touted as a way to transform those neighborhoods.

“It’s a laboratory school, a beta test site for …educating poor kids. Our goal is to develop a franchise-able model of public education’’ that involves parents and pairs kids with successful mentors, he said.

“We focus on an entrepreneurial approach to poverty alleviation, job creation and community economic development,” he said. “We don’t assume the government is going to assume the problem. We think the private sector has a critical role to play in creating successful communities.’’       

Johnson, director of UNC’s Urban Investment Strategies Center, said he will discuss these six trends:

1. “The South rises again:” There’s heavy migration from other parts of the nation to those warmer climate states.  

2. “The browning of America:” Just look at population growth and see the largest growth among people of color, he said.

3. “Marrying out is in:’’ Marriage across races doubled between 1980 and 2008.

4. “The silver tsunami is about to hit:’’ Baby boomers are entering retirement with increased expectation of longevity.   

5. “The end of men?” Men’s status in society is “deteriorating,’’ Johnson said. They’re not finishing school and there are significantly more men than women in their prime working years who are disabled.

6. “Cooling water from Grandma’s well… and Grandpa’s too:’’ More grandparents are raising their grandchildren across all races and ethnic groups, he said.

Johnson speaks at 11:30 a.m. on May 15 at the Hyatt Northstar Ballroom, 1300 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis.

(A disclosure note: The Minneapolis Foundation, which is hosting the talk, sponsors MinnPost’s Community Sketchbook.)

Rep. Erik Simonson

The first year of MNsure open enrollment is complete, and I think it’s worth noting what hasn’t happened. None of the doomsday predictions made by opponents of health care reform ever came true.

What did happen? For one thing, more than 200,000 Minnesotans used the health insurance exchange to purchase comprehensive, affordable health insurance coverage.

As of April 23, MNsure has enrolled 50,096 Minnesotans in a Qualified Health Plan, 41,403 in MinnesotaCare and 108,675 in Medical Assistance.

To put it in the proper perspective, MNsure officials had hoped 135,000 Minnesotans would sign up for private or government health plans in the first year. We surpassed those expectations and left them in the dust.

Minnesota is part of a national trend. The Affordable Care Act also blew past projections. Despite ongoing – even obsessive – efforts by Republican lawmakers to derail the program, more than 8 million Americans signed up for the ACA.

Numbers like these make the doomsayers look a little foolish in retrospect.

Here to stay

Now even die-hard opponents, like Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers – the fourth-ranking Republican member of the U.S. House, which has taken more than 50 votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act – are saying that the ACA and MNsure are here to stay and the debate should shift to making them work better.

I’m in complete agreement. We can’t go back to the days when a person could be denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition or low-income families are priced out of comprehensive policies.

When an organization –a company, state or country – embarks on an endeavor of this size, there’s bound to be a severe learning curve. That was true for MNsure – particularly on the IT side.

MNsure’s early problems have been well documented. But we quickly addressed those issues and will continue to look for better ways to operate right until 2015 Open Enrollment begins later this year.

Better website will help enroll small businesses

A better website will also help us enroll more small businesses. As of April 16, only 144 employers had enrolled in MNsure, covering just 726 employees. The biggest reason they stayed away from MNsure was that they didn’t have the time to spend on the website trying to sign up online.

This problem isn’t unique to Minnesota. The federal site, HealthCare.gov, decided to delay online enrollment for small businesses for one year.

But these are concerns about the process of actually enrolling in MNsure; there can be no denying the benefits of the policy.

MNsure is providing Minnesotans with excellent insurance plans that won’t deny coverage for anyone with preexisting conditions, does not have lifetime limits, include out-of-pocket spending caps and will cover preventive care.

We have the lowest health insurance premiums in the nation, because we created our own health insurance exchange. And federal tax credits available only through MNsure help make health coverage even more affordable for thousands of Minnesotans.

The roll-out wasn't perfect, but the result will change the lives of thousands of our friends and neighbors for the better, and I promise you that we will continue to make progress heading into the future.

Rep. Erik Simonson, DFL-Duluth, represents District 7B in the Minnesota House of Representatives.

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Is this like clowns in a clown car? The PiPress' Tom Webb and Nick Woltman report that "nearly 100 lawyers" crowded into U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson's courtroom, where "more than 140 lawsuits" over last Christmas season's massive data theft have been consolidated. "I know Target would like to have big, long, indefinite stays," the paper quotes the judge as saying. "I don't think that's appropriate."

The Strib's Paul McEnroe reports a now-fired Hennepin County jailer and a school cook have been federally indicted for arming the "BTG" gang through straw purchases. "At least seven weapons, large amounts of ammunition and firearms magazines were pursed over several months," McEnroe writes. The corrections officer, unsurprisingly, is on the lam. 

The VA has had (much) better weeks of PR, but Cong. Tim Walz is vouching for at least one facet of the local operation. Tim Krohn of The Mankato Free Press says, “There is no evidence of a secret wait list at Minnesota VA clinics, but U.S. Rep. Tim Walz says he is pursuing a ‘full accounting of the data and the medical scheduling process used locally.’ … The goal is for a wait of no more than 14 days to see a VA provider. Walz said that in Minnesota it appears the average wait time ‘is hovering around two to three weeks and sometimes longer.’”

Kind of a major bungle … .Alejandro Matos of the Strib says, “Six years after it was founded, a museum celebrating the history of blacks in Minnesota remains closed and at risk of losing nearly $1.4 million in state funding. … The home, yard and carriage house are in disarray, with peeling paint, exposed wires and construction materials scattered in the yard. A distressed ‘Summer 2011’ sign sits on its front steps, and the phone is not in service.”

She should consider herself lucky … . The AP says,“A former Minnesota woman who lied to a grand jury about raising money for men who left the state to join a terrorist group in Somalia was sentenced Wednesday to three years of probation and ordered to perform community service. Saynab Hussein, 24, of Nashville, Tennessee, showed remorse during Wednesday's sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis.”

The owners of the RV with the dead body in it have been ruled out as suspects … . Sarah Horner of the PiPress says, “ ‘We were immediately aware of who the owners of the RV were, they have fully cooperated and are not considered suspects in anything,’ Anoka County sheriff's office Cmdr. Paul Sommer said Wednesday. Sommer added that investigators would release further details about [Kevin] Casserly's death when they are able to do so.”

Grab your binoculars … .Andy Rathbun of the PiPress reports, “A rare duck has birders in the Midwest flocking to Grantsburg, Wis. The garganey, a Eurasian species rarely found in North America, was first spotted at Crex Meadows Wildlife Area on April 25 and still could be seen there Monday, said Kim Wheeler, a natural resource educator for the wildlife area. ‘This bird has never been seen in Wisconsin before, and it's not very often (seen) in the Midwest’ … .” If this sets off a stampede like those ice caves … .

And everything has gone so well … . Also in the PiPress, a story by Mary Divine on Stillwater’s chronically newsmaking mayor. “Ken Harycki, who has served two four-year terms as Stillwater mayor, announced Wednesday night that he will not seek re-election. Harycki, 51, said that he made his decision in January and that a March 20 raid by federal agents on his accounting and payroll business had no bearing on it.” I hope he’ll still ride in the Log Jam Days parade … .

Inevitably … . Michael Rietmulder, in vita.mn tells us, “Talk to Minnesota’s young microdistillers about their whiskey ambitions and you can practically feel their hearts fluttering. But whiskey takes time, and good whiskey takes even more time. So instead, these mash-minded entrepreneurs are turning to unaged spirits to find their financial footing before filling whiskey barrels.” Hmm, I may rent me a storage locker and start cookin’ … .

Is it sweeps month? KARE-TV’s Trisha Volpe reports on a flicker in the Jacob Wetterling kidnapping case… . “Investigators still looking for Jacob Wetterling nearly 25 years after he was abducted are taking a new look at the similarities between Jacob's disappearance in 1989 and other incidents involving abductions and assaults on children just a couple of years earlier. … Investigators in Stearns County are now taking a closer look at several stranger assaults that took place in Paynesville in 1986 and 1987. There were at least five assaults and the victims were all teenage boys. One of the boys was grabbed right off of his bike.”

Points to the Strib for running local attorneyJoe Bollettieri’s rip job on their coverage of the Philip Nelson assault case. “The above-the-fold front-page headline in the May 13 Star Tribune reads, ‘Flurry of blows leaves 2 lives in ruins.’ The implication seems clear — there are two victims in this story. ... The idea that there is some equipoise between the consequences faced by a person who gets kicked in the head and those faced by the person who kicked him is reprehensible.” It's a fair point for discussion.

When Metro Transit’s Hiawatha Line opened a decade ago, the Route 180 Mall of America express bus, which served the same endpoints over very different routes, was eliminated. When Metro Transit’s Green Line LRT opens next month, it will quickly render more than 500 daily parallel bus trips superfluous.

Or not. Turns out, the agency plans to eliminate only one of the three routes, which run, often literally, adjacent to the line, and it will not reduce its fleet or total bus trips.