VOICES | Is U.S. a financial basket case?

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One would have to have an MBA from Harvard to comprehend fully the complexities and nuisances involved in this Wall Street-federal government debacle during the past fortnight that is so rapidly changing our entire monetary system. However, what we do know is that the U.S. Treasury is having to fork over $700 billion (with a “B”) of our tax monies to even the playing field. What effect that will have on our surviving economy is still uncertain. According to some in the know, it will threaten the stability of our entire fiscal system, precipitating a catastrophic financial meltdown. One financial guru put it this way: “This will be the first time in the history of capitalistic economics that a world superpower has transformed itself into a Third World nation within a month’s time.”
He predicts that, like existing Third World nations, we too will probably have to resort to getting help from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund ( that we helped to create) rather than being a major contributor.How did we allow ourselves to get into this situation to start with? Continue Reading

VOICES | McJustice

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Even young schoolchildren learn about the need for fair and impartial courts to protect our rights, resolve disputes, and keep dangerous people off the streets. Democracy, we learn, depends on it. Minnesota courts face budgets that don’t keep up with inflation and the growth in demand. At times, they have faced outright cuts. The Governor and many Legislators argue that any administrator can make modest reductions without a serious negative impact. Continue Reading

VOICES | Pawlenty education plan: much smoke, little substance

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Last week, Gov. Tim Pawlenty trumpeted his “Teaching Transformation Act,” a series of education proposals for the 2009 general legislative session. Among other things, the plan would require most school districts to tie teacher pay increases to student achievement, raise standards for undergraduate teacher training programs while making it easier for non-teaching professionals to become teachers, and set up summer school programs for eighth-graders needing help in math and reading. While the rhetoric might be agreeable, the policy relies more on smoke and mirrors than substance. The governor has made noise about education before, most notably in 2003 when he convened a blue-ribbon panel to tell him what constitutes a “basic” education. The panel looked at the state’s education standards and determined the resources necessary to achieve those standards. Continue Reading

VOICES | McCain the suspender: Let’s keep politics out of politics

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Purely as a question of self-interest, John McCain’s exit-the-stage gambit makes sense. With cries of impending doom filling the air, he’s got nothing to gain by sticking around to discuss a subject he ill understands and to be pelted with quotations of the Hoover-like things he’s already said, such as proclaiming the economy “fundamentally strong” at the start of last week. Since Wall Street’s latest and grandest blowup just hours later, he’s lost ground in the polls day by day. There are those who think the real point of McCain’s whole exercise is to can the vice-presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, but that’s a grace note if it happens, far less urgent than McCain’s own immediate need to find a pretext for disappearing until a bailout is done and the acute phase of the crisis seems past. The ploy also serves the larger Bush administration push to get a deal through Congress with a minimum of reflection and revision, as they so spectacularly succeeded in doing with the Patriot Act and the Iraq War resolution. Continue Reading

VOICES | City’s lack of an affirmative action plan demeans us all

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Affirmative action policies and practices are supposed to assist underserved and underrepresented populations in at least the offering of economic, employment, services, and other opportunities that are made available to White people. The City of Minneapolis, which is the largest employer and purchaser of goods and services as well as spending hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis for construction, has not had an affirmative action plan in at least 15 years. The last recorded affirmative action plan that can be found in the City has an effective date of 1989. The Minneapolis Civil Right’s Ordinance section 139.70 clearly states that every department in the City is to submit an affirmative action plan to the city council on a yearly basis. The city council and the mayor are your elected representatives who were elected to represent your interest. Continue Reading

VOICES | The right thing

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When John McCain first announced her as his running mate, the most common response—by Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike—was “Sarah who?” The mainstream media quickly filled in the brushstrokes of Sarah Palin’s political career. She served on the city council and as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population 5,500, and has been governor of Alaska for 20 months. Of course, the media weren’t content with “just the facts, ma’am.” A deluge of information about Palin’s personal life- including her family-building choices, the names of her children, whether or not she was trying to force her pregnant teenage daughter into marriage … Continue Reading