Category Archives: Uncategorized

After five years years, the Minnesota Independent will end its run on Friday. The Minnesota Independent was the first on-line news organization to win a Page One award from the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists in 2007, and its coverage has continued to win awards since then. Like its parent organization, the American Independent News Network, MnIndy has offered a distinctly progressive journalistic voice. Continue reading →

In March, Jimmy John fired six workers involved in a unionization campaign for putting up posters (see below) that charged Jimmy Johns workers were pressured to work while sick. “Jimmy John’s workers don’t get paid sick days. Shoot, we can’t even call in sick,” said the poster, which urged people to “Help Jimmy John’s workers win sick days” by calling the owner. On November 9, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint charging that Jimmy John’s “unlawfully disciplined, threatened, and ultimately terminated” the workers because of their union advocacy. Next step: a hearing before an administrative law judge in January. Continue reading →

About 40 people gathered at the Wells Fargo bank in West St. Paul November 5 in solidarity with the Occupy movement, which designated November 5 as Take Your Money Out Day. “We are indigenous, people of color, low-income, the ones most impacted by this greed,” said a press release from the Occupy Robert Street group led by Danza Mexica Cuauhtemoc. In contrast to the main Occupy events across the country, this group was mostly Latino and Native American. Continue reading →

Want to know where the rich people live? How much more it costs to rent in Highland Park than in Frogtown? Whether Minneapolis or St. Paul has a higher percentage of jobs in the finance and insurance sector? All that and more is in the neighborhood profiles put together by the Wilder Foundation using census data from the past two decades. Continue reading →

Occupy Oakland met the police this week, and the results were not pretty (see video above.) One of the Occupy protesters ended up in critical condition. He’s Scott Olson, a 24-year-old Iraqi war vet, and he was apparently hit in the head by a tear gas canister fired at him by police. Continue reading →

UPDATED 10/27/2011 — Drunken students with loud parties. Stick-in-the-mud old folks who want to have lights out at 10 p.m. Merriam Park and Mac-Groveland have seen the town versus gown conflict play out year after year. This year’s battleground is in City Hall, where a moratorium on the conversion of single-family homes to student housing is under consideration. Continue reading →

The 1968 exhibit opened October 14, to a cheerful crowd, many of whom remembered the year in different ways. At the button-making station in the lobby, a couple ordered up competing Gene McCarthy and Richard Nixon for president buttons before heading on to the rest of the exhibit. Cheerful young people, (over)dressed in “hippie” paraphernalia, guided visitors, some of who were older people wearing their own resurrected finery.  Upstairs, enjoying chili in the members’ lounge, one man held forth on how “we need to go back to the 1950s when there was real freedom and the government couldn’t tell anybody what to do, couldn’t force people to get medical treatment for a kid with cancer. That’s a violation of freedom.” Shades of the Tea Party … or was it the John Birch Society? Continue reading →

Local community councils scored a win with the St. Paul City Council’s October 12 decision to veto St. Paul Port Authority plans for a single-story warehouse/office development just a few blocks from the Central Corridor. The Union Park District Council had appealed earlier approval of the plan by city staff and the planning commission, over opposition by Union Park District Council, St. Anthony Park Community Council, and the Desnoyer Park Improvement Association. The St. Paul Chamber of Commerce denounced the city council decision. Continue reading →

Did you know the first printed news in the Americas was published in Mexico, in Spanish, more than a hundred years before Ben Franklin and English-language newspapers? And that the first printing press on the continent was brought to Mexico City in 1535? I didn’t know, until I listened to Felix Gutierrez, a professor of journalism and communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, when he visited the University of Minnesota in September as a guest of the journalism school. He’s an impressive scholar, and the pre-eminent historian of Latino media in the United States. Continue reading →

As I sat in the office working on a New Normal story, I heard chanting outside. Though I couldn’t make out the words or see the crowd, I knew that several groups had been organizing around foreclosure issues and Wells Fargo, so I grabbed the FlipCam and went on outside to cover what was — sure enough — a crowd chanting, “They got bailed out, we got sold out!” Continue reading →