Tag Archives: economic stimulus

February 24, 2009 · 7:20 am

News Day 2/24/09: T-Paw ready to eat the pizza / Wind on the wires / Coleen vs. Big Bob / Mpls school desegregation, and more

T-Paw will take the money Governor Tim Pawlenty said Minnesota will take all the money it can get from the $787 billion economic stimulus plan, even though he has called it “a meandering spending buffet.” Continuing the food metaphors on Monday, , writes Kevin Diaz in the Strib, T-Paw said “For every dollar we send out … we only get 72 cents back. So, if you’re buying the pizza, it’s OK to have your slice, even if there are some anchovies on it.” Only a few of his GOP counterparts are still talking about turning down the stimulus money, reports NPR, including Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who objects that the stimulus package is “filled with social policy.”

Wind on the wires: Bigger isn’t better Wind power is great green energy, but the proposals for 130-foot transmission towers marching across MN are a bad idea. Here’s my explanation of what’s wrong with the proposed $12 billion grid, and where to look for a greener solution.

Burris blowing it Illinois Senator Roland Burris has failed to mount an effective PR defense, according to Politico, after new allegations about his involvement with disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Both an Illinois prosecutor’s office and the Senate Ethics Committee are now investigating charges that Burris failed to disclose conversations with Blagojevich’s brother about raising money for the governor, when he testified under oath in impeachment proceedings. Burris admitted the conversations in a February 5 affidavit, and then, on February 16, admitted that “he actually tried to raise money for the governor at the same time he was expressing interest in the Senate seat.”

Ditching desegregation Minneapolis wants out of the Twin Cities’ desegregation district, writes Norman Draper in the Strib. the West Metro Education Program began in 1989, with Minneapolis and 10 suburban districts planning to promote racial integration and narrow the achievement gap. WMEP has two magnet schools: the Interdistrict Downtown School in Minneapolis and the Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resource school in Crystal. Minneapolis superintendent Bill Green said the schools have had little impact on the achievement gap and have done little to change racial disparities between Minneapolis and the suburbs. The Minneapolis school board is scheduled to vote on the proposal March 10.

RNC back to court As the RNC8 defendants go back to court this week, with motion hearings before a new judge, FBI whistle-blower-turned-activist Coleen Rowley is set to file notices of claim against Sheriff Bob Fletcher, Ramsey County and the State of MN, reports Chris Steller in MN Independent. The complaints focus on “aggressive ‘police state’ action during the RNC ,” and on Big Bob’s refusal to comply with requests for information since then. Rowley knows her way around a Freedom of Information Act request. While she’s fililng them now, it was her job to respond to FOIA requests as an FBI agent in the 1980s.

Fast trains on fast track High speed rail gets $8 billion under the economic stimulus package, reports Brian Naylor at NPR, and MN may be among the beneficiaries. While California is ready to roll with bonding already approved, the Minneapolis-Chicago corridor is one of the half-dozen priority corridors identified by Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood.

Scholarship aid for state budget? The fed stimulus bill includes more money for Pell Grant scholarships, raising the max from $4731 to $5500 in 2010-2011. Because MN state grants and Pell grants are tied together, that won’t mean more money for low-income MN students, reports Jenna Ross in the Strib. Instead, it will mean the state grant fund will save money as the fed funds make up a larger part of the MN grant package. Unless the legislature changes the grant formula, the MN treasury, rather than low-income students, will benefit by $60 million from the increase in fed scholarship money.

MN Job Watch With MN unemployment claims up more than 60% in January 2009, compared to January 2008, WorkForce Center employees are seeing the psychological impact on people who have worked all their lives and now face unemployment and no job prospects, reports Lisa Peterson in the Daily Planet. While 80 percent of MN unemployment claims are made on-line, that doesn’t work smoothly for everyone:

Applying online can be tricky, though, especially for those who may not have the tools to navigate the system. For example, one question refers to whether an applicant was “Laid Off,” “Terminated,” or “Discharged,” which frequently confuses applicants, especially those with limited language proficiency. Simple errors can delay benefits for days if not weeks.

In Plymouth, a four-month lockout by the Progress Casting Group’s foundry continues, with no end in sight, reports Larry Sillanpa for Workday MN.

“We’ve got a lot of guys who have worked there for 30 years or more, one’s been there for 47 years,” said Hill, who has been Shop Chairman for 10 years. “45 percent of the workers have 10 or more years.”

Now all 200 of the AFL-CIO-affiliated members are out of work as scab replacement workers do their jobs.

Leave a comment

Filed under news

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

February 17, 2009 · 8:56 am

News Day 2/17/09: Never-ending recount / Zombie banks / Battered by spouse? Get out of town / More …

Never-ending recount The judges ruled Friday on which sets of absentee ballots would be considered (not counted, just considered for counting), and Coleman’s lawyers struck back Monday, asking them to reverse their ruling, reports Jay Weiner in MinnPost. Weiner sees the move as preparation for an appeal after the judges’ “final” decision on who won … and there’s still no word on when that decision will come. Trial, and posturing, continue today.

Zombie banks “A zombie bank drains bailout capital but doesn’t respond with any meaningful lending,” reports MPR’s Chris Arnold. When the government props up a zombie bank, it’s not lending but it won’t die. Andy Kessler, a former hedge fund manager, says zombie banks “eat the fabric of the economy,” and warns: “I’ve watched every single one of those zombie movies and everybody knows you can’t cure zombie-ism … you gotta shoot ’em, you gotta get rid of ’em, cut their heads off, put the silver bullet through their hearts–and get some healthy banks.” As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner proposes a complicated package of private investments and public loans to buy toxic assets from banks, the zombie bank explanation sounds a timely warning. Arnold and his guests discuss solutions such as wiping out the zombie banks, and then creating new healthy banks with taxpayers as the shareholders or taking over troubled home loans and giving them to smaller community banks to restructure.

Get on the bus and get out of town Finally find a way to escape that abusive spouse and get your children to safety? Now Twin Cities victims may be given tickets to ride the old grey dog to Bemidj, Brainerd, or Albert Lea, because metro-area shelters are out of room, reports Joy Powell in the Strib. With little affordable housing, shelters and safe houses have seen average stays go from 20 days in 2005 to 37 days in 2008, and there’s just no more room in either shelters or public housing. The recession has brought more violence at home. The statewide domestic abuse crisis line has seen calls rise from an average of 500 a month in 2006 to 900 a month now. Many victims remain in dangerous situations because there is just nowhere to go.

MN Job Watch The stimulus package will increase unemployment benefits by $25 per month, across the board, as well as extending the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) through December. A federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program extended benefits by 13 weeks in July, and by an additional 20 weeks in November. The 20-week extension was due to expire in March, but will now run through December.

The MN Green Jobs Task Force wants a new Green Enterprise Authority to coordinate state agency efforts to attract new green-collar jobs, reports Tim Pugmire on MPR. The task force also wants tax incentives and bonding for renewable energy projects.

Stimulus and MN deficit MN Management and Budget Commissioner Tom Hanson said that MN will get up to $2.8 billion to bolster the state’s general fund, paykng for health care, education and state stabilization aid, reports Tim Pugmire for MPR. The money may make up some of the increase in the state budget deficit, which is expected to grow from the current $4.8 billion to as much as $7 billion when the next state economic forecast comes out on March 3. The federal money comes with strings attached. T-Paw will have to restore proposed cuts in health care programs and might have to give up an accounting shift for education funds.

But that still leaves most of the MN budget carnage in place. Sheila Regan writes in the TC Daily Planet about the impact of the T-Paw proposal to basically dismantle the Perpich arts high school and arts education center.

Could be worse? Kansas is suspending income tax refunds, reports AP, and may miss this Friday’s payroll for 42,000 state employees, as the legislature and governor fight over the state deficit. And in California, reports BBC, Gov. Arnie Schwarzenegger ordered layoff notices for 20,000 state workers after CA legislators failed to approve a $40 billion budget. This on top of two-day-a-month unpaid furloughs already in place for state workers and delayed tax refunds for everybody.

Leave a comment

Filed under news

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

February 12, 2009 · 9:45 am

News Day 2/12/09: Between bailout and stimulus / $7 billion MN deficit? / MN Job Watch / Housing prices, and more …

Between bailout and stimulus Sick of reading about it / thinking about it / worrying about it? So am I, but I still keep trying to understand how and why we bail out the bankers and bash the poor. One of today’s better analyses:

Steve Perry, writing in MinnPost collates a number of analyses of the latest bailout and concludes: “Thanks to the ways the money is being used–to keep the banks in private hands and their shareholders out of harm’s way–the chances that these unthinkable sums will actually prevent continuing disaster appears to diminish by the day.”

And the sums are truly unthinkable: Bloomberg reports that the total amount of bailouts, and government loans and pledges to banks, and stimulus is close to $9.7 TRILLION — “enough to send a $1,430 check to every man, woman and child alive in the world … almost enough to pay off every home mortgage loan in the U.S., calculated at $10.5 trillion by the Federal Reserve.”

Meanwhile, Congress continues to quibble over the economic stimulus package, now nibbled down to $790 billion by cutting such unworthy projects as $20 billion in school construction funding and additional amounts in Medicaid spending, according to the Washington Post.

And back to Perry:

The ultimate peril of our monstrously overgrown financial sector–which, pre-crash, accounted for about 20 percent of GDP and 30-40 percent of U.S. corporate profits, proportions that are absolutely unprecedented in U.S. history-is that government has a very hard time seizing control of the banking system when the banking system, for practical purposes, has seized control of the government.

A billion here, a billion there Gov. Pawlenty said that MN’s $4.8 billion deficit could grow to $6 or $7 billion by March. That’s almost 20 percent of the state’s budget, notes the Strib. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis predicted that the recession will last through 2009 — not exactly a surprise. The Fed predicts MN unemployment rates of 7.8 percent, but the hardest-hit part of the region will be the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, with a predicted 14 percent unemployment rate.

MN Job Watch Toro cut 100 salaried and office jobs Wednesday, three-quarters at its Bloomington HQ, reported the Strib. The company earlier accepted 50 voluntary retirements.

More than a thousand Minnesotans are applying for unemployment benefits each month, and four out of ten will be unemployed for 26 weeks or more, exhausting their benefits, reports Annie Baxter on MPR. For most of them, a federal extension will give them up to an additional 33 weeks, and possibly another three months after that. Lee Nelson, the state’s head unemployment benefits attorney, told MPR that, “Minnesota paid out a whopping $45 million in jobless benefits and extensions the week before last,” and payments are likel to keep increasing at about a million dollars a week.

According to the Washington Post, more employers across the country are contesting worker applications for unemployment benefits, claiming employee wrongdoing or quitting, in an attempt to keep their claim level and rates down. Department of Labor figures show record highs of just over 25 percent of claims being contested.

The play’s the thing Penumbra became the latest TC theater to announce budget woes Wednesday, cutting its operating budget by 24 percent, but maintaining plans for a half-million dollar renovation and keeping all staff on board, reported Rohan Preston in the Strib. Penumbra will postpone production of August Wilson’s “Radio Golf” from May to October.

Revise, not recount Secretary of State Mark Ritchie proposed changing election laws to require fewer automatic recounts and to allow voters to vote early and in person, and to register online. Meanwhile, the recount court is considering Coleman and Franken arguments on what categories of absentee ballots should be considered, and the end is not yet in sight.

Buyer’s market? The median home price in the Twin Cities fell 24 percent in January, writes Christopher Snowbeck in the PiPress. The St. Paul Area Association of Realtors reported a median home price of $155,000.

More on the local housing market: Lenders discriminate. Housing is segregated. Communities of color are hit harder by the foreclosure crisis than anyone else. That’s the ugly face of racial discrimination in the Twin Cities revealed in a 54-page report released by the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Flowers for sheep Sheep will eat most of the flowers raised by Gaza farmers again this year, but Israeli authorities have agreed to allow the export of 20,000 carnations to Europe for Valentine’s Day. According to BBC, “Cut flowers, along with strawberries, were some of Gaza’s main exported raw goods, providing a valuable source of income to thousands of families in the Gaza Strip” before the Israeli blockade stopped almost all exports in June 2007. Before the blockade, exports brought in half a million dollars a day.

Leave a comment

Filed under news

Tagged as , , , , ,

February 11, 2009 · 8:26 am

News Day 2/11/09: MN to Somali / Salting the lakes / Schools slash spending / more …

Minneapolis to Somalia Leaders in the Somali and Muslim community denied that a Minneapolis mosque had anything to do with recent disappearances of young Somali men from the Twin Cities, blaming unnamed people within the local Somali community for stirring up rumors, reports Nelima Kerré in the Twin Cities Daily Planet. While the press statement, and leaders at the press conference, did not name individuals, a commenter on MPR’s website pointed the finger at Omar Jamal. Differences within the MN Somali community reflect political and clan differences in Somalia. Jamal is related to the recently-resigned Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf, while the young men have allegedly gone to fight with Al-Shabab, the youth and military wing of the Union of Islamic Courts, which opposed the Ethiopian-backed government of Abdullahi Yusuf. A former leader of the UIC, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, was elected president in January.

Around the world in 60 seconds Taking a quick look at BBC this morning:
Drug war battles in the farming town of Villa Ahumada and in a prison in Torreon (all in northern Mexico) killed 21 people on Monday, including at least six police officers executed in Villa Ahumada before the army arrived on the scene. Yesterday Mexican army troops arrested the police chief and 36 officers in Cancun, on suspicion that they were connected to the torture and execution last week of an ex-army general who had just taken charge of a crime-fighting squad targeting drug traffickers in Cancun.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has agreed to serve as Zimbabwe’s prime minister, eleven months after the presidential elections were stolen by discredited, corrupt, but still-President Robert Mugabe. Millions of Zimbabweans remain in desperate need of food and health care, and the country has been swept by a cholera epidemic.
The commander of Azerbaijan’s air force was assassinated yesterday, shot to death outside his home. Lt-Gen Rail Rzayev had headed the country’s air force since about the time of independence in the 1990s, and was deeply involved in large-scale military acquisitions in recent years. BBC: “In October 2008, the International Crisis Group described Azerbaijan’s armed forces as “fragmented, divided, accountable-to-no-one-but-the-president, un-transparent, corrupt and internally feuding”.
Tamils in diaspora are uniting in protest over government indifference to the suffering of civilians, as Sri Lanka troops continue a major offensive aimed at wiping out the rebel Tamil Tigers.

Face of People’s Bailout Joli Stokes could lose their Richfield home this year, victims of predatorylending practices. The People’s Bailout legislation proposed by MN DFL legislators is targeted at helping Minnesotans who, like Joli, face foreclosure, as well as others facing unemployment and welfare cuts, reports Madeleine Baran in the TC Daily Planet.

The legislation proposes a two-year suspension of the current five-year limit on welfare benefits for low-income families. Currently, families are cut off welfare benefits after five years. This plan would allow families an additional two years of financial support. Low-income housing advocates say that although the welfare grants are already low, an extension would prevent homelessness for many Minnesotan families. An unemployed adult with two children receives $532 in cash assistance and $413 in food support each month.

The legislation also includes a thirteen-week extension of unemployment benefits, a moratorium on foreclosures, initiatives to secure federal funds for job-creation programs, and recommendations against state worker layoffs.

Housing starts down January building permits hit a new low, reports Jim Buchta in the Strib:

The decline in construction spending has been accelerating over the past several months, evidence of just how much money is evaporating from the local economy. It affects everyone from the crews who dig foundations to the corner-store retailer that sells grass seed.

MN Job Watch MTS Systems Corp (Eden Prairie) will cut 150 jobs, writes Liz Fedor in the Strib. The cuts represent about six percent of the MTS work force. In New Hope, 70 workers at HD Bath and Remodeling will be out of work on April 1, writes Jackie Crosby in the Strib in a ripple effect from Home Depot’s decision to shut down smaller home improvement brands.

On the national front, General Motors announced Monday that it will cut 10,000 salaried workers. The NYT reports that the cuts come a month after buyout offers to the hourly workforce and three months after 5,100 jobs were cut. GM sales fell 11 percent in 2008. And, while Wal-Mart has generally profited during the recession, the Strib publishes an AP report that the retail giant is cutting 700-800 jobs at its Arkansas HQ.

Just what we need A huge high-voltage power line is marching toward MN, reports the Strib, at least if ITC Holdings Corp gets its way. The company wants to build a 3,000-mile, 765,000-volt, $12 billion “Green Power Express” line to take wind-generated electricity from the west to population centers like Chicago.

The bailout plan Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced a bailout that most commentators found confusing, and that investors found depressing, judging by the dive in the Dow Jones and Nasdaq, reported in the Washington Post and similar downturns in European markets, attributed to the bailout announcement by BBC. In a nutshell, the $1.5 trillion plan would “would more closely scrutinize the risks banks are facing and offer public and private capital to those that need it; create a fund, with a starting value of $500 billion, to buy up toxic real estate loans; and commit up to $1 trillion to reopen lending markets for consumer, student, small business, auto and commercial loans,” according to WaPo.

Paul Krugman quips that he was going to call the plan TANF 2 —” temporary assistance to needy financial institutions, without, you know, any of the means-testing or work requirements involved when poor people get help.” He says it’s hard to tell what the plan means at this point.

Salting 10,000 lakes A U of M study finds that hundreds of thousands of tons of road salt goes into area wetlands, ground water and lakes, reports the Strib. Well, where did you think it was going?

Schools slash spending St. Paul schools will cut 265 positions for 2009-2010, but board member John Brodrick warned that “this is not the end,” reports Doug Belden in the PiPress. The budget will be finalized in June, and school board members will meet the public at a “listening session” at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Hubbs Center at 1030 W. University Ave.

The Anoka-Hennepin school board decided to “lay off scores of teachers, reduce its textbook purchases, cut one day off the school calendar and scale back bus services to climb out of a $15.8 million budget hole,” reports Norman Draper in the Strib.

Recount – maybe some movement? The court told the Coleman and Franken lawyers to “streamline proceedings,” reports Chris Steller in MnIndy.

1 Comment

Filed under news

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

February 9, 2009 · 8:35 am

News Day – February 9: Stimulus and sabotage; Fletcher’s cops go to jail; St. Paul pays protester; Milking the consumer, screwing the farmer; Holocaust-denying bishop in MN; and more

Stimulus and sabotage If you want to understand the depths of the country’s economic trouble, and what to begin doing about it, Nobel Prize-winning economist Pau Krugman is must reading. He has a regular column and a blog at the New York Times. You can subscribe to either or both through a variety of RSS feeds. A sample from last Friday’s really scary column:

It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world. …

Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won’t have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that’s why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective — to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts — are so destructive.

It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.

As you think about Republicans’ attempts to sabotage the economic stimulus package, remember how well they did with with the bank bailout, per the AP report published in the Strib

The Bush administration overpaid tens of billions of dollars for stocks and other assets in its massive bailout last year of Wall Street banks and financial institutions, a new study by a government watchdog says.

The Congressional Oversight Panel, in a report released Friday, said last year’s overpayments amounted to a taxpayer-financed $78 billion subsidy of the firms.

There’s much more, if you can bear to read it. (Or you can read the official report.)

More wrong answers in MN T-Paw’s broadband committee decided that MN should not use stimulus money for ready-to-go broadband projects in MN. Steve Alexander writes in the Strib that the Pawlenty’s Ultra High Speed Broadband Task Force’s rejection of the funds came after Comcast and other private providers objected.

The list of ready-to-go broadband projects in Minnesota included a $27.5 million municipal broadband system in Monticello, a $5.4 million Minnesota Department of Health plan to expand rural health care, and a $2,500 project to extend high-speed Internet service to a library in Worthington. Other projects included a $19.6 million plan to provide high-speed Internet to 11 Minnesota communities, including Cannon Falls, Zumbrota and Lake City, and an $18.5 million Internet-TV-telephone system in North St. Paul.

And in another area, Met Council chief Peter Bell says he wants to use stimulus money to pay off the operating deficit, rather than to expand metro transit. MPR reports:

Bell’s suggestion for how the money could be used for something it isn’t intended for, illustrates a dilemma facing stimulus supporters — that money will be moved from account to account to keep everything legal, but in the end nothing gets done that wasn’t going to get done anyway.

Milking the consumer, screwing the farmer MPR forwards a brief report from the West Central Tribune about plunging milk prices, which fell from about $20 a hundredweight last fall to half that now. Farmers are losing money — nothing new there — and consumers haven’t even noticed. I’ve been working on an article on the food industry recently, so I can offer a little more detail.

The farmer sees very little of the consumer food dollar — about 17 cents for the wheat in a loaf of bread or ten cents for the corn in a box of corn flakes. All the rest goes to processing, marketing, advertising, and everyone else’s profits.

Milk provides the most dramatic example. There are approximately 12 gallons in a hundredweight of milk. (Farmers get paid by the hundredweight, consumers pay by the gallon.) At the tip top of the farm price cycle, the farmer got $1.71 per gallon of milk. That same gallon of milk cost $3.80 in the supermarket. The farmer’s price for milk at the beginning of 2009 had dropped to about 92 cents per gallon. The price in the supermarket? Still over $3.80.

Quote of the day Remember that Holocaust-denying Catholic bishop, who also thinks that “Judeo-Masonry brought about the first two world wars”? Turns out he headed up a seminary in Winona, and lived there from 1988-2003, according to a long and interesting article in the Winona Daily News. But the quote of the day, from a September 2001 letter written by Bishop Richard Williamson, came to me last week, courtesy of my web-surfing partner:

…[A]lmost no girl should go to any university! The deep-down reason is the same as for the wrongness of women’s trousers: the unwomaning of woman… [S]ince she is not respected and loved for being a woman, she tries to make herself a man. Since modem man does not want her to do what God meant her to do, namely to have children, she takes her revenge by invading all kinds of things that man is meant to do..…[O]nly in modern times have women dreamt of going to university, but the idea has now become so normal that even Catholics… may have difficulty in seeing the problem. […A]ny Catholic…recognizes that women should not be priests – can he deny that if few women went to university, almost none would wish to be priests? Alas, women going to university is part of the whole massive onslaught on God’s Nature [of] our times. That girls should not be in universities flows from the nature of universities and…girls.

(You read it here, and you might have trouble finding it elsewhere – the bishop or his Society of St. Pius X have removed his papers from the web.)

MN Job Watch As PiPress union employees reluctantly voted to accept management’s proposal for a one-week unpaid furlough between now and April 30, Strib employees got minimal good news, reports David Brauer in MinnPost. A bankruptcy judge reversed the Strib’s earlier position, and said that the newspaper must pay 43 workers who accepted buyouts between April and September 2008 the full amount of their buyout contracts. The Strib had asked the court for permission to make the payouts. On the other hand, Strib publisher Chris Harte warned that revenue continues to slide, and axed many benefits for non-union employees while asking union employees to accept a double-digit pay cut.

In Owatonna, SPX is laying off 100 workers, about 14% of its workforce. The cuts are part of 400 layoffs nationwide for the NC-based company, which makes tools, shop equipment and automotive components.

The Recount grinds on On MinnPost, Jay Weiner captures the mind-numbing tedium of the recount trial, without losing sight of the weight of the decisions being made. Is an end in sight? No.

We, the People “The idea of self-government is in the first three words of the Constitution. What are these words?” That’s just one of the questions on the new on-line citizenship study guide being piloted by the Minnesota Literacy Council. Katherine Glover writes in MinnPost that the new citizenship self-study materials are part of a larger project called Learner Web, which is developing programs includeing GED prep, computer skills and family literacy for eventual release to the public in the form of open source software. The MLC decided to go with citizenship prep software because of “Teacher Ron,” Ron Mazurowski, who has been teaching citizenship for more than 10 years and helped to put together the material. Check out the materials on-line.

St. Paul pays protester The city will pay $5,000 to anti-war activist Mick Kelly, who sued the city after he was arrested while passing out leaflets outside a Barack Obama rally at the Xcel Energy Center in June. The leaflets promoted RNC protests, and Kelly was later shot by police with a non-lethal weapon during the RNC. Kelly plans a second lawsuit over that incident. City Attorney John Choi emphasized that the settlement did not include any admission of wrongdoing by the city, reported Laura Yuen on MPR.

Ramsey County Sheriff’s employees sent to jail Two employees caught taking money in an FBI corruption sting were sentenced to nearly three years in prison on Friday, reports David Hanners in the PiPress. The two were close friends and confidants of Sheriff Bob Fletcher. Their attorney continued to insist that the two had only taken the $6,000 as a joke, writes James Walsh in the Strib, but U.S. District Judge Patrtick Schiltz “told the men that their actions were no laughing matter, but a violation of the public trust.” Fletcher declined to comment.

Leave a comment

Filed under news

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

February 5, 2009 · 11:18 am

News Day – February 5: DHS and MN Somalis, Snyder closing stores, World/National notes

Maybe more news later … working to finish a freelance article today, in addition to the usual TC Daily Planet editing, so I’m in even more of a time crunch than usual.

Homeland Security “engages” with MN Somalis The Department of Homeland Security has an Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. (Who knew?) That office is coming to MN to “engage” with the Somali community, reports Laura Yuen on MPR. The feds will talk to key local government officials this week, and plan a community roundtable for some time in March.

The FBI has recently suggested that about a dozen young MN Somali men may have gone to Somalia to fight with the Islamist Al Shabab militia. According to BBC Al Shabab “are the youth and military wing of a group of Sharia courts known as the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) – who controlled Mogadishu and much of southern and central Somalia in 2006.”

Somalia has not had an effective government since 1991, but the UIC stopped much of the violence, crime and banditry in the areas they controlled. They were driven out by an Ethiopian invasion, supporting a Somali transitional federal government with the political backing of the United States.

Abdullahi Yusuf served as president of that transitional federal government for four years, but resigned in December as Ethiopian troops pulled out of Somalia. Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein has attempted to reach a peace agreement with Islamist militants, and a former leader of the UIC, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, was elected president in January. During its six months as the effective government of most of Somalia, the UIC was seen as comprised of moderates and hardliners, and Ahmed was identified with the moderates.

MN Job Watch Minnetonka-based Snyder Drug Stores will close 19 of its 47 corporate stores in Minnesota in March, reports MPR. Thirty independently-owned Snyder store will not be affected. The closings will leave “hundreds” of Snyder employees jobless.

GOP legislators are pushing legislation mandating a wage freeze for all public employees, according to Mark Brunswick in the Strib. The two-year freeze would apply to lump sum and cost-of-living adjustments as well as salaries for state, local, MNSCU, and school district employees — which sounds like no collective bargaining for two years and nullification of contracts already in place.

WORLD/NATIONAL NOTES – Gaza, DTV, Children’s Health Care, Half a Million?

Gaza aid intercepted by Israel Israeli military forces stopped a Lebanese ship bearing medical supplies, food, clothing and toys for Gaza, along with ” eight activists and journalists, as well as the former Greek-Catholic archbishop of Jerusalem, Monsignor Hilarion Capucci, who had served time in an Israeli jail in the 1970s for his membership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO),” reports BBC. Yesterday, in Gaza, UN officials said that Hamas seized “thousands of blankets and food parcels that were meant to be distributed to Palestinian civilians in Gaza” that the UN was preparing to distribute to civilians.

DTV on hold until June–mostly The House agreed to delay DTV implementation until June 12, removing the last barrier to delay. Despite the delay, some broadcasters may still turn off their analog signals on the original February 17 date, as they are not required to continue broadcasting on analog, reports Julio Ojeda-Zapata in the PiPress. In other media-tech news, the Minnesota Daily reports that Minneapolis wi-fi should be completed by the end of March. The Daily report recalls earlier promises that the system would be complete by April 2008.

“Only” half a million dollars The Obama administration plans to cap exec salaries at half a mil for those companies receiving new federal bailout money. That’s more than the presidenet of the U.S. makes, but not enough, according to a business salary experts quoted in the NYT:

“That is pretty draconian, $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. … Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief executives and other senior executives $500,000 or less in total compensation. He said such limits will make it hard for the companies to recruit and keep executives, most of whom could earn more money at other firms.

The Daily Kos puts the case for salary caps succinctly:

Remember, it was the guys making $20 million and more per year who created this mess.

So, what’s required to get competent managers in these positions? Remember that McCaskill pegged her maximum CEO salary to the salary of the President of the United States. Are we to believe that a CEO making $20 million per year is 50 times more impressive and talented than the President of the United States? (OK, granted, the answer to that question is different today than it was three weeks ago.) And are we to believe that the only reason anyone does a job, in particular these high profile, very powerful jobs, is for the money?

Score one for the children President Obama signed the children’s health bill yesterday, expanding coverage for uninsured children, reports the NYT:

The Congressional Budget Office says the bill will enable states to cover more than four million uninsured children by 2013, while continuing coverage for seven million youngsters. The bill will increase tobacco taxes to offset the increase in spending, estimated at more than $32 billion over four and a half years.

In a major change, the bill allows states to cover certain legal immigrants — namely, children under 21 and pregnant women — as well as citizens.

1 Comment

Filed under news

Tagged as , , , ,

February 3, 2009 · 10:56 am

News Day – February 3: Let them eat arts, RNC mistrial, undercounting the homeless, and more

Let them eat arts T-Paw’s plan to turn the Perpich Center for Arts Education into a charter school may have bipartisan support, writes Norman Draper in the Strib. Make that bipartisan support for killing the Perpich Center, which has been a proud national model of a statewide arts school and a center for arts education that sends staff to assist in arts education across the state and provides training sessions and resources for arts teachers from across the state. This is not a slam on charter schools – the fact is that the Guv’s move means cutting all the funding that enables Perpich to provide arts education for students and teachers, leaving it with state funding that pays only a per-pupil allotment equal to the funding formula for every other public school student. “Converting to a charter” in this case means taking away state resources, with no way to replace them. The Strib quotes Rudy Perpich, Jr.: “As my parents said, ‘Arts are always the first thing to be cut.”

Free–at last, sort of, at least for a while The jury deadlocked in the federal trial of RNC protester David McKay, accused of Molotov cocktail making and possession. While a March 16 retrial date has been set, the judge let McKay go free on bail. Writing in the PiPress, David Hanners reported that jurors apparently deadlocked over McKay’s claim that he would never have had anything to do with Molotov cocktails, but for the goaoding of federal informant Brandon Darby. McKay’s attorney said he was “a kid who came here to throw trash in the street,” not a bomber.

First-hand history recovered Almost a century after Lakota Chief Martin White Horse dictated stories about his community to Florence May Thwing, the typewritten document detailing 100 years of Lakota (Sioux) history has been re-discovered in a trunk by Thwing’s great-granddaughter. The winter count includes an entry for each year from 1790 to 1910, reports MPR:
(1835) In the year of stars moving in the sky.

(1845) In this year the Sioux Indians were starving and dying for lack of food because there had been no buffalos in their country for a long time. So they took the head of an old buffalo and painted it red, and placed it in a tepee and worshipped it with much singing and other things, and asked this buffalo head to send them buffalos to where they are located inside the boundary line. Their prayers were successful and many buffalos came to the place where they were camped, so the Sioux had again plenty of food.

MN Job Watch Macy’s announced Monday that it will cut 7,000 jobs, about four percent of its workforce, AP reports in the Strib. According to the Strib/AP report, Macy’s is centralizing, and its central buying, merchandise planning, stores senior management and marketing functions will be located primarily in New York. No word yet on any job cuts in MN, but Macy’s already closed its regional HQ in Minneapolis last year, cutting about 950 jobs, and announced the closing of its Brookdale store last month.

In Eden Prairie, ADC Telecommunications announced a general hiring freeze and plans for unspecified layoffs, reports Leslie Suzukamo in the PiPress. ADC announced layoffs of 160-190 MN workers in October as part of a global reduction in force. The Eden Prairie-based company has about 10,500 workers worldwide, and announced a quarterly loss of 17-23 cents per share.

TPM says RNC Chair Michael Steele is coming “straight outta Hooverville,” with his bogus claim that: “Not in the history of mankind has the goverment ever created a job,” saying “This is such transparent nonsense it’s hard to know where to start … Has Steele every heard of government road building? Defense spending? … ” Ann Markusen writes in MinnPost that “Few elements of the forthcoming stimulus program would pump money into the economy faster and more efficiently than the funds to states to refresh depleted unemployment insurance, social safety nets, and college aid programs.”

(Under)counting the homeless January is the wrong time to count homeless people, reports Madeleine Baran in the TC Daily Planet, but that’s the time mandated by the federal government. In a related article, Session Weekly reports that one in eight Minnesota households spends more than half its income on housing, and that the average cost for rentals is now higher than $900/month. All that, as Twin Cities home values fell 10 percent last year, according to Jim Buchta in the Strib.

Leave a comment

Filed under news

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

January 29, 2009 · 10:00 am

News Day – January 29: Stimulus heads for MN; St. Paul “cutting the bone”

Economic Stimulus – despite GOP no votes President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package passed the House without a single Republican vote, despite his outreach efforts. Paul Krugman, Nobel-prize winning NYT economics columnist asks, “Aren’t you glad that Obama watered it down and added ineffective tax cuts, so as to win bipartisan support?” The Daily Kosexcoriates the eleven Dems who voted against the stimulus, and especially Blue Dog Jim Cooper (D-TN) for “his FU to Obama” after getting the Pres to agree to a February “fiscal responsibility summit.”

Back in MN, the Strib and both pick up an AP report saying that MN will get more than $477 million from the plan to upgrade highways and bridges, as part of the $30 billion national transportation package.

Cutting the bone “Anticipate park and library closures, and public safety reductions.” That’s the message from St. Paul, in light of reductions in Local Government Aid under the Pawlenty budget plan. The PiPress reports that city’s entire budget is about $200 million annually, and that Mayor Coleman says the city has to cut $43.8 million. That, says council member Melvin Carter, means cutting the bone. For example, closing all libraries and eliminating all 34 rec centers would save only $36 million.

And — big surprise here — Tom Scheck at MPR reports that business groups like Pawlenty’s tax cut plans, which would reduce business taxes by $268 million over the next two years.

Goodbye, Challenge The MN Housing Finance Agency said it will cut $8.5 million from the Challenge Program, which funds new affordable home construction, in response to the governor’s budget cuts. Session Daily reported that the agency plans to focus on rehabilitating existing housing stock and subsidizing rentals, and wants $1.5 million transferred from the state Disaster Relief Contingency Fund to help 80 families currently living in shelters, which would require declaration of a federal disaster.

MN Job Watch U.S. union ranks are growing, reports the Washington Post, showing “the first significant increase in 25 years.” The numbers are still small, with union membership growing from 12.1 percent in 2007 to 12.4 percent in 2008, according to the BLS. In the 1950s, union membership was about one-third of the work force. Union leaders said most of the growth came in government workers, as private employers continued to use union-busting tactics to intimidate employees. The BLS report says only 7.6 percent of private-sector employees are unionized, compared to 37 percent of government employees. According to an AP report, Minnesota union membership dropped from 16.3 percent of the work force in 2007 to 16.1 percent in 2008, with the number of union workers dropping from 400,000 in 2007 to about 392,000 in 2008.

In other MN job news, the Rochester Post-Bulletin reports that IBM laid off workers yesterday, but has not released number son how many, and may be making more cuts.

Ramstad to Harvard The PiPress reports (via AP) that former U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad is heading off to Harvard. Ramstad will be a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Institute of Politics.

Bad news drives bank stock prices higher That’s right. Financial stocks rose even as banks showed bigger losses. Wells Fargo stocks went up 31 percent, reported Chris Serres in the Strib, despite its announcement of “a multibillion-dollar loss, falling revenue and a doubling of bad loans.” The Strib says that investors thought the news would be even worse. And they may also be reacting to hopes for more bailout money. To be fair, Wells Fargo’s losses have something to do with a one-time event:

Wells Fargo executives, by contrast, appear to be preparing for the worst by taking dramatic steps to shore up its balance sheet after buying Wachovia, which is saddled with many exotic mortgage loans that are going soar as the housing market deflates. On Wednesday, Wells Fargo said it took $37.2 billion in credit write-downs Dec. 31 related to Wachovia’s loan portfolio. The bank also increased its allowance for loan losses — money banks set aside to cover bad loans — to $21.7 billion in the fourth quarter from $8 billion as of Sept. 30.

Leave a comment

Filed under news

Tagged as , , ,

January 26, 2009 · 9:03 am

News Day – January 26: Sex, money, jobs and politics

A three billion dollar question? That’s the Pawlenty estimate of the amount MN could get from the federal economic stimulus program, writes Bill Salisbury in the PiPress, and T-Paw thinks a good chunk of that money could go to resolving the state’s deficit. Not so fast, says Assistant Senate Majority Leader Tarryl Clark, who says the federal package will be aimed at job creation, not budget relief. The TC Daily Planet reports on the economic stimulus wish lists that Minneapolis and St. Paul have sent to the MN congressional delegation. The focus? Heavy on roads and bridges and parks.

Senator, Governor, the race goes on As the recount trial begins today in St. Paul, former House Minority Leader Matt Entenza filed with the Campaign Finance Board, indicating that he will be running for governor in 2010, reports the Strib.

Another harassment suit for Jonathan Palmer Leah Ellis claimed in a 20-page complaint filed last week that Jonathan Palmer, now director of the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center in St. Paul, sexually harassed her, offering her $20 to strip for him, caressing her and retaliating when she resisted him, write Dave Orrick and Emily Gurnon in the PiPress. Toni Carter, board chair of the center, expressed confidence in Palmer and said he would stay on as director. The lawsuit says Ellis complained to Carter about Palmer’s behavior but was told to handle it with Palmer, and that other female employees also complained about sexual harassment in the work environment. Workplace lawsuits are not new to Palmer.

In August, former Minneapolis city employee Melissa Heus won a $15,000 settlement from the city in an employment-related claim against Palmer, said city spokesman Matt Laible. The claim arose when Palmer was director of the Empowerment Zone program, a federally funded, city-run revitalization program.

MN Job Watch New layoffs announced last week include 100 jobs from Arctic Cat’s Thief River Falls plant, says the Strib, and 110 from Polaris Industries’ Roseau plant, which will no longer make the Polaris Ranger utility vehicle, according to MPR. Andersen Windows announced another 160 layoffs on Friday, reports MPR, on top of permanent reductions of 50 workers and temporary layoffs of 400 announced earlier in January. Andersen said the latest layoffs will last at least through the first quarter of the year.

Hutchinson Technology cut its Sioux Falls work force in half less than two weeks ago, and announced Friday that it will close the plant and lay off the remaining 300 employees over the next three months, reports MPR. Sioux Falls assembly operations (computer disk drives and electronics products) will shift to Eau Claire and Hutchinson plants.

Strib union employees who took a buyout last spring and summer are getting the shaft, writes David Brauer at MinnPost, as the Strib, now in bankruptcy, says “future payments will be capped at $10,950 each — even if workers are due tens of thousands more.”

And in better job news The U.S. Census Bureau is looking to hire about a thousand people and is having trouble getting applicants. The census job site is at http://www.2010Censusjobs.gov.

The Minneapolis City Council voted to go ahead with scheduled pay raises for non-union employees, reports Steve Brandt in the Star Tribune. The group includes the 125 of the city’s highest-paid officials, and another group of 148 ranging “from fire cadets to senior attorneys.”

The Cedar Rapids Gazette reports that about 40 workers displaced by the trouble at the Agriprocssors kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa have been recruited to work at the Long Prairie Packing Company in Long Prairie, MN. About half of the workers are from the Pacific island of Palau, with the others coming from a variety of places around the world. Under a “Compact of Free Association” with the U.S., Palauans can travel and work in this country without visas or green cards. Wages of $11.65 in Long Prairie compare favorably with the $9 an hour they were making in Postville.

JOBZ failing at jobs T-Paw’s favorite jobs program has some problems delivering, according to a recent AP article in Finance & Commerce. The article says 315 companies are in full compliance with the pledges they made to get JOBZ tax breaks, five will lose the tax credits for falling short of job creation goals, and 57 have been terminated for failing to meet targets, going out of business, or violating the JOBZ law, with 46 of these “subject to repayment provisions.”

The JOBZ tax breaks from 2004-2006 totaled about $46 million. According to the AP article, state officials expect a quarter of the companies with JOBZ deals will miss job-creation goals as the recession continues. One employer promised, in 2004, to create 25 full-time, $12-an-hour jobs by the end of 2007. Then he got an extension. Then he downgraded the target to 12 jobs. Now he says that, despite saving more than $!50,000 in taxes since 2004, the company will go under in 2010 when the tax breaks end.

Senate Taxes Committee Chairman Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, who sponsored the original JOBZ bill “said a significant number of companies were missing targets even before the downturn, and he wants to see more evidence that JOBZ is working before granting any leeway.”

A 2008 legislative auditor’s report criticized JOBZ, concluding that “it has not been adequately focused or administered.”

Bye-bye, Big Stone? Less than a week after the MN PUC shot down a challenge to the Big Stone II coal plant, the federal Environmental Protection Agency put on the brakes. MPR reports that the EPA says the SoDak-issued air quality permit doesn’t deal adequately with important air quality issues, including monitoring for SO2 and NO emissions that contribute to acid rain. Environmentalists say the Big Stone plant would also add to global warming. Sierra Club says the EPA decision “likely spells the end” for $1.6 billion Big Stone II plant construction, but others are not so sure. At the very least, the decision slows the process and requires additional permitting. Read the decision here and here.

Off to war About 560 Minnesota National Guard soldiers head out to training in Texas in April, before being deployed to Iraq and Kuwait, reports the PiPress. The soldiers are from units in Montevideo, Appleton, Marshall, Madison, Olivia, Morris and Ortonville.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , ,

January 23, 2009 · 9:35 am

News Day – January 23

Cut the trees and plow under the wetlands? And this time, writes Dennis Lien in the PiPress, it’s MN House DFLers who are ready to trash the environment in order to avoid changes to the flawed “Green Acres” program. Here’s a (relatively) simple explanation.

Part One: Property taxes are levied based on land value. Farmland costs less and is taxed at a lower rate than higher-priced commercial, industrial and residential property. Near urban areas, developers and speculators are willing to pay more for farmland, driving up its value and tax burden. Farmers can’t afford to pay the higher prices, and so are driven to sell, increasing urban sprawl.

Part Two: Forty years ago, the “Green Acres” law said that farmers could pay taxes based on farmland value, rather than development value, so long as they were farming the land. Most non-industrial farms, like the one I grew up on, contain a mix of land, including woods and wetlands as well as corn and soybean fields. And then, Lien writes:

Declaring that only productive farmland qualifies for the tax break, lawmakers stripped wetlands, woods and other areas from the program. Afterward, some farmers faced with large tax increases began doing things such as bulldozing their trees to make sure they could remain part of the program.

Session Daily reports that on 1/22, House Republicans tried to suspend the rules and rush through a repeal of last year’s changes without going through hearings. DFLers refused, saying they have several bills in committee, and will hold hearings, beginning next week.

Go, Robyne! In media news, Fox9 news anchor Robyne Robinson launches “Community Commitment,” a 30-minute quarterly public affairs program, on Saturday. The show will debut at 8:30 a.m. Saturday on KMSP and re-run at 11:30 a.m. Sunday WFTC, according to the PiPress. Strangely, there’s no mention of the show on the Fox Twin Cities website, and even a search doesn’t turn up a mention of the show. It is listed in the 8:30 a.m. time slot, but without any description. Not quite the way to promote your star, folks!

And in DC The economic stimulus package stumbles through Congress, and probably won’t reach President Obama’s desk until mid-February, as Republicans and Democrats debate the amount of money to put in it and how much of that money should go to tax cuts rather than jobs programs or other direct government spending. In MinnPost, Steve Berg says MNDOT “is busy figuring out how best to spend the gusher of cash soon expected from the Obama administration’s recovery plan.”

The International Herald Tribune reports that President Obama took action Wednesday on the Iraq front, quoting a presidential statement that said, in part, “I asked the military leadership to engage in additional planning necessary to execute a responsible military drawdown from Iraq.”

BusinessGreen.com reported on the environmental front, “In a traditional game of political whack-a-mole, the Obama White House has moved quickly to freeze all pending regulations proposed by the former president’s administration, including president Bush’s attempts to roll back large swathes of environmental legislation.” The Bush administration finalized 157 “midnight regulations” in its final quarter, and either lengthy and onerous reverse rule-making procedures or Congressional action will be necessary to roll back any of these regs, which include controversial environmental deregulation as well as restrictions on women’s rights to medical care.

In other early moves, the NYT details President Obama’s moves to open up information flows from the White House, freeze staff salaries, and strengthen ethics rules.

What’s going on in DR Congo? There may not be much MN connection with the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I want to understand what is happening there, so I read and write about it. This blog noted a few days ago that the Lord’s Resistance Army has massacred hundreds of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The LRA is active in the northeast region of Congo, but that is only one front in Congo’s wars. Today’s major developments come in the southeast, where Rwandan and Congolese troops fight Hutu and Tutsi rebels.

BBC explains that the Congolese Tutsi rebel CNDP (National Congress for the Defence of the People), which declared a ceasefire last week, has long insisted that the Hutu rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), are targeting Congolese Tutsis. However, the CNDP itself stands accused by the United Nations of massacres and abuses under the leadership of “megalomaniacal” General Laurent Nkunda. The conflict and the militias spilled over from neighboring Rwanda after the 1994 genocide in which Rwandan Hutus slaughtered more than 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis. The Rwandan government has been accused of supporting Nkunda’s forces.

Last week the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) last week declared a ceasefire in its long-standing war with Rwandan Hutu rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). Some CNDP members rejected Nkunda’s leadership and left his command.

Today, the NYT reports, Rwandan and Congo troops worked together to capture Nkunda. Rwandan troops were sent into Congo to pursue Nkunda, though he, like Rwanda’s government, is Tutsi. The NYT explains:

“Rwanda and Congo have cut a deal,” said John Prendergast, a founder of the Washington-based Enough Project, which campaigns against genocide. He said Congo had allowed Rwanda to send in troops to vanquish the Hutu militants, something Rwanda has been eager to do for some time.

“In exchange, the Congolese expected Rwanda to neutralize Nkunda and his overly ambitious agenda,” Mr. Prendergast said. “Now the hard part begins.”

Now, says BBC, the “next step is for the joint Congolese-Rwandan force to tackle the FDLR Hutu rebels,” some of whom were involved in the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

Signs of hope NWAF’s Horizons project is sowing hope in small towns such as Evansville, Hoffman and New York Mills, reports Echo Press in Alexandria:

Always on the lookout for ways to help her town, Muriel Krusemark, Hoffman’s economic development authority coordinator, said she and several other local residents decided to apply for Horizons after hearing about the positive impact it had on nearby New York Mills, a past program participant. …

New businesses are opening up in town, she said, and the city recently finished a Main Street Galleria with space for 23 local retailers. …

Krusemark said Hoffman residents also have plans for a community garden, a computer and communication center and a mentorship program for local youth, as well as other projects.

“If we accomplish half the things we have on our list, it will be a way better community to live in,” she said. “With the people we have on these committees, I can’t believe we won’t accomplish at least half these things.”

Leave a comment

Filed under news

Tagged as , , , , , , ,