Category Archives: Uncategorized

“The State of Minnesota is facing a crisis requiring the declaration of a ‘State of Emergency.’ Paraphrasing the 1968 Kerner Commission Report, the United States is ‘moving toward two societies, one black, and one white — separate and unequal.'”

This blunt warning is part of A Crisis in Our Community: Closing the Five Education Gaps, a report on the racial disparities in education in Minnesota. Continue reading →

Take a book, leave a book — that’s the motto of the Little Free Library, an organization begun by Todd Bol in Hudson, Wisconsin. The Little Free Library arrived in the Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood in St. Paul in September, thanks to Sage Holben, who is supervising the Little Free Library at 4th Street and Bates, when she’s not working in the Metropolitan State/St. Paul Public Library a few blocks away.

“These libraries are ‘planted’ in front of homes and become part of a neighborhood investment,” Holben explains. “People can take a book and replace it when done, and/or add others.” She thinks this is the first and only Little Free Library in St. Paul, though she has heard that there might be one on Portland Avenue. Continue reading →

Carla Olson and John Schatz stood in front of the fenced-in, weed-covered site at 650 Pelham Monday morning, holding a sign and inviting people to sign a petition opposing the Port Authority’s current plan for development of the property. Continue reading →

Minnesotans are joining the OccupyWallStreet crowd this weekend, in at least two ways. First, there will be an OccupyMN event at the Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis. Originally scheduled for the Federal Reserve Bank, the event was rescheduled to “reclaim the Government Plaza as the ‘People’s Plaza.'” The occupation/demonstration/event begins at 9 a.m., and you can keep up on late-breaking developments and changes at http://www.occupymn.org (Twin Cities Daily Planet reporter Ibrahim Hirsi will be there to cover whatever happens.) Other Minnesotans are heading to Washington to occupy Freedom Plaza in an ongoing protest. Continue reading →

Minnesota student test scores came out this week to the usual fanfare of attention, including sounding of alarms by school critics and trumpeting of successes Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts. The Minnesota Department of Education produced a really pretty Powerpoint that shows … not much change. Continue reading →

You are sitting on a bench in a mall, waiting for a friend to join you. As you wait, you write in a notebook, look around at other people, check your watch to see how much longer you have to wait.  And then the security officers arrive to question you, because writing in your notebook is suspicious behavior. After prolonged questioning, you are released, but a report is sent to local police, who will keep your record on file for 20 years in a file headed “suspicious person.”  The national security police may also have been notified that you have been stopped as a “possible terrorist.” Continue reading →

Several items across my desk this morning on the perennial favorites of sex, drugs, money, guns, and politics. Let’s start with the money and guns story, since that one comes from Minnesota. Continue reading →

What kind of country do you want to live in? That’s one of the questions posed in a fascinating, in-depth series airing on PBS right now. They started with a pie chart (reproduced below), which shows distribution of wealth in three countries. You can go here to take the quiz, guessing which pie chart represents which country, including the United States.

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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-selling investigation of how people in low-paying jobs live, is being re-issued on its tenth anniversary. Unfortunately, as Ehrenreich notes in a new afterword (published in TomDispatch),

When you read about the hardships I found people enduring while I was researching my book — the skipped meals, the lack of medical care, the occasional need to sleep in cars or vans — you should bear in mind that those occurred in the best of times. The economy was growing, and jobs, if poorly paid, were at least plentiful. … [B]ut the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s. Continue reading →

If your household earns $50,221, you are smack in the middle of U.S. households by income. That might make you middle class in income, but class is based not just on how much people earn, but also on how much they have. Continue reading →