Mn-prog-events Mailing List: Progressive Calendar 08.17.05

[David Shove (shove001]

            P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R     08.17.05

1. Vs Randy Kelly       8.17 1:30pm
2. Ed Schultz/Crawford  8.17 2pm
3. DeLaSalle/Park Board 8.17 5pm
4. Citizens for PRT     8.17 7pm

5. CWA rally v Qwest    8.18 11am

6. Black film fest      8.19 7pm

7. Rhoda Gilman - Green vision for StPaul
8. Ari Berman   - The strategic class
9. May Swenson  - Question (poem)

--------1 of 9--------

From: William McGaughey <2wmcg [at] earthlink.net>
Subject: Vs Randy Kelly 8.17 1:30pm

³Randy Kelly Must Go² Rally at City Hall on Wednesday, August 17

A group of landlords, homeowners, and property owners unhappy with the
current St. Paul city administration will be holding a rally in front of
the St. Paul City Hall on Wednesday, August 17, 2005, starting at 1:30
p.m.  The rally will include at least 20-25 participants and one of Mayor
Kellyıs opponents in this yearıs election.

Despite Randy Kellyıs alleged ³pro-business² policies, St. Paul has become
known as one of the nationıs least hospitable cities for small property
owners.

For further information, call Les Lucht at (651) 489-7436 or Bill McGaughey

[The only way to get rid of Randy Kelly - and (ahem) anyone like him - is
to elect Elizabeth Dickinson mayor of StPaul - ed]


--------2 of 9--------

From: toddseabury [at] visi.com
Subject: Ed Schultz/Crawford 8.17 2pm

Ed Schultz will be broadcasting from Crawford, Texas on Wednesday and Thursday.
His show runs from 2-5pm on 950AM.


--------3 of 9--------

From: Chris Johnson <issues [at] chaska.org>
Subject: DeLaSalle/Park Board 8.17 5pm

Please come to the next Park Board meeting, 5pm, Wednesday, August 17
and/or the included Public Hearing on the proposed give away of park land
use to DeLaSalle High School via a so-called Reciprocal Use Agreement at
6:30pm, Wednesday, August 17, 2005 in the board room at the Park Board
administrative building located at 2117 West River Road. The hearing will
be held during the regular commissioners meeting (more meeting information
here). The time each speaker gets has not yet been set, but at the last
such meeting, it was 90 seconds per person.

More information on the DeLaSalle proposal:
http://www.mplsparkwatch.org/taxonomy/term/22

More information on the general meeting:
http://www.mplsparkwatch.org/node/331

--
From: bfclegg [at] visi.com

Yesterday, a petition was filed with the Environmental Quality Board
(EQB)requesting an Environmental Assessment Worksheet (EAW)be prepared for
the DeLaSalle athletic complex project. The EQB determined that the
petition was valid and also determined the the Responsible Governmental
Unit to prepare the EAW was the City of Minneapolis (NOT the Park Board).
Yesterday afternoon, City staff notified the park Board and their
attorneys in writing "Per State Rules (4410.3100), there is an immediate
stay on all final government actions until the City has either decided no
EAW is warranted or completed all required environmental reviews."

Clear and straightforward, right?

Well, believe it or not, Park staff and counsel is already taking the
position that giving away land for 70 years is not "final" action.
According to this group of the Best and the Brightest, stewards of our
parks, "final" action will only occur when the design is approved (the
location of the port-a-potties and the shade of the astroturf).

It continues to amaze me that the majority on our Park Board is so anxious
to accomodate a private institution that they are willing to ignore their
own law and circumnavigate the environmental laws they are duty bound to
uphold.

Please come to the "public hearing" (also a violation of the ordinance by
the way) next Wednesday.
-
Thanks Ryan for pointing out that this is not just a few Islander
residents who oppose this project.

The Sierra Club, Preservation Alliance, Friends of the Mississippi River
and Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy are all on record as
opposing park board action till a Citizens Advisory (CAC) process and and
Environmental Assessment Worksheet (EAW) have been completed.

The Prospect Park, Nicollet Island/East Bank, St. Anthony West and Marcy
Holmes neighborhoods all are on record opposing the project as presently
proposed.

Over 1300 petition signers (only 200 live on the Island - do the math) are
opposing this project.

City of Minneapolis staff has told the Park Board's lawyer in writing that
further action is stayed till the EAW is completed.  The Park Board's own
ordinance requires a CAC before any action can be taken.

Never-the-less, the Park Board is cramming this down tomorrow.

If you picked a jury of 9 Minneapolis citizens, none with kids who are
DeLaSalle alumni or who used to work there, and asked them to decide
whether turning over primary use of parkland that cost over $1 milllion 20
years ago to a private institution was a good deal, the answer would be
clear.

Please come to the public hearing tomorrow at 6:30 at MPRB headquarters
and tell them what you think.
- Barry Clegg Nicollet Island

[The Park Board privatizing majority of 5 is a disgrace; it should be
stopped now, and voted out in November - ed]


--------4 of 9--------

From: Margaret Beegle <beegle [at] louberts.com>
Subject: Citizens for PRT 8.17 7pm

There will be a general meeting of Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit at
7pm on Wednesday August 17, at Minnehaha United Methodist Church (corner
of 37th Ave. and 50th Street, Minneapolis, MN), 3rd Floor. All are
welcome.


--------5 of 9--------

From: stpaulunions.org <larkinl [at] mtn.org>
Subject: CWA rally v Qwest 8.18 11am

CWA LOCAL 7201 RALLY
Qwest Downtown Headquarters in St Paul
Market Street between Kellogg and 4th Street
Thursday, August 18th
11am-1pm

Solidarity Rally for Qwest Workers
Please Wear Red

More than 4,000 CWA members in Minnesota - - and 25,000 members in 13
states - - have been working without a contract since Saturday as
make-or-break negotiations continue with Qwest in Denver.  Members have
overwhelmingly given strike authorization if a satisfactory settlement is
not reached.  Qwest has abandoned attempts to force workers to accept more
mandatory overtime, but still is seeking concessions in health insurance,
retiree health care, pensions and part-time work, union representatives
say.  Workers at the telephone company have gone three years without a pay
raise.  The rally will be held weather permitting and hot dogs, chips and
root beer will be served.

Questions can be directed to Sean McVay, CWA Local 7201 Vice President at
651-774-7201


--------6 of 9--------

From: ed
Subject: Black film fest 8.19 7pm

The Twin Cities Black Film Festival takes place: Friday, August 19-21,
At the Mpls Community and Technical College
1501 Hennepin Ave

There will be a Opening and Closing Night Premieres, Panel Discussions,
Festival Parties, a Hollywood Fashion Show with a Very Special Celebrity
Guest, 25 Independent Film Projects, Movie Pass Giveaways plus much, much
more! http://www.tcbff.com/events.html


--------7 of 9--------

From: Rhoda Gilman <rhodagilman [at] earthlink.net>
Subject: Green vision for StPaul

Just in case you've missed it, the following letter appears in the current
issue of the Villager.

GREEN VISION FOR ST. PAUL

Recent issues of the Villager reveal disturbing things going on in St. Paul
--  another link forged in the chaining of Grand Avenue with a CVS pharmacy
opposite Bober Drug; an even bigger box than Wal-Mart with the expansion of
Target in the Midway; Mayor Kellyıs determination to turn Ayd Mill Road into
a part of the freeway system; and what is probably just the first step in
cutting bus routes and schedules to our neighborhoods.  These all mean more
cars, more bad air, more locally owned business going under, fewer services
for people and a less livable city.  Where has St. Paulıs vision gone?

Readers can find a renewal of it on the Green Party of St. Paulıs web site
(www.gpsp.org).  The vision spelled out there is not of a city that reaches
for growth and sprawl at any cost but of a community where fairness to all
and quality of life are the highest goals.  It recognizes that small
business is the real engine for producing more jobs and that an investment
in the local economy will continue to circulate in St. Paul, not just send
profits elsewhere.  It recognizes that the party is nearly over for cheap
fossil fuel and that a city looking to the future will invest now in
conservation, renewable sources of energy and clean, efficient public
transportation.

The vision calls for schools that are seedbeds for active citizenship, not
military recruitment, and that teach conflict resolution along with basic
skills.  The vision would support our neighborhoods by improving services
and safety and taking full advantage of our fine cultural institutions, our
seven colleges, our river, and the historical aspects of our buildings and
parks.  Sales taxes that burden the poor would be gone, and homeowners would
pay property taxes adjusted to their  income, not to the market value of
their homes.

Is this something new and radical?  Of course not.  It is a vision that used
to inspire St. Paul, and one that Greens invite everyone, regardless of
party affiliation, to help shape and contribute to.  It is not out of reach,
and immediate steps toward it can be made.  Two of those steps are passing
an ordinance that limits the size of big box stores and electing a mayor who
will represent St. Paul, not the national agendas and big money of the two
major parties.

Rhoda Gilman
West 7th


--------8 of 9--------

The Strategic Class
by ARI BERMAN
The Nation
[from the August 29, 2005 issue]
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050829&s=berman

In July 2002, at the first Senate hearing on Iraq, then-Senate Foreign
Relations Committee chair Joe Biden pledged his allegiance to Bush's war.
Ever since, the blunt-spoken Biden has seized every opportunity to dismiss
antiwar critics within his own party, vocally denouncing Bush's handling
of the war while doggedly supporting the war effort itself. Biden carried
this message into the Kerry campaign as the candidate's closest foreign
policy confidant, and a few days after announcing his own intention to run
for the presidency in 2008, he gave a major speech at the Brookings
Institution in which he criticized rising calls for withdrawal as a
"gigantic mistake."

The Democrats' speculative front-runner for '08, Hillary Clinton, has
offered similarly hawkish rhetoric. "If we were to artificially set a
deadline of some sort, that would be like a green light to the terrorists,
and we can't afford to do that," Clinton told CBS in February. Instead,
she recently proposed enlarging the Army by 80,000 troops "to respond to
threats wherever danger lies." Clinton, a member of the Armed Services
Committee, appears more comfortable accommodating the President's Iraq
policy than opposing it, and her early and sustained support for the war
(and frequent photo-ops with the troops) supposedly reinforces her
national security credentials.

The prominence of party leaders like Biden and Clinton, and of a slew of
other potential prowar candidates who support the US invasion and
occupation of Iraq, presents the Democrats with an odd dilemma: At a time
when the American people are turning against the Iraq War and favor a
withdrawal of US troops, and British and American leaders are publicly
discussing a partial pullback, the leading Democratic presidential
candidates for '08 are unapologetic war hawks. Nearly 60 percent of
Americans now oppose the war, according to recent polling. Sixty-three
percent want US troops brought home within the next year. Yet a recent
National Journal "insiders poll" found that a similar margin of Democratic
members of Congress reject setting any timetable. The possibility that
America's military presence in Iraq may be doing more harm than good is
considered beyond the pale of "sophisticated" debate.

The continued high standing of the hawks has been made possible by their
enablers in the strategic class--the foreign policy advisers, think-tank
specialists and pundits. Their presumed expertise gives the strategic
class a unique license to speak for the party on national security issues.
This group has always been quietly influential, but since 9/11 it has
risen in prominence, egging on and underpinning elected officials,
crowding out dissenters within its own ranks and becoming increasingly
ideologically monolithic. So far its members remain unchallenged. It's
more than a little ironic that the people who got Iraq so wrong continue
to tell the Democrats how to get it right.

It's helpful to think of the Democratic strategic class as a pyramid. At
the top are politicians like Biden and Clinton, forming the most important
and visible public face. Just below are high-ranking former government
officials, like UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright and Assistant Secretary of State Jamie Rubin. These are
the people who devise and execute foreign policy and frame the substance
of the message. Virtually all the top advisers supported the Iraq War;
Holbrooke, who's been dubbed the "closest thing the party has to a
Kissinger" by one foreign policy analyst, even tacked to Bush's right,
arguing in February 2003 that anything less than an invasion of Iraq would
undermine international law. Many of the officials held high-ranking
positions in the Kerry campaign. Holbrooke, frequently mentioned as a
potential Secretary of State, urged Kerry to keep his vision on Iraq
"deliberately vague," the New York Observer reported. Rubin appeared on
television sixty times in May 2004 alone. Nine days before the election,
Holbrooke addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and
reiterated Kerry's support for the war and occupation, belittled European
negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program and endorsed the Israeli
separation wall. Hardly a Dove Among Dems' Brain Trusters, read a headline
from the Forward newspaper.

Underneath the top policy officials are the anointed regional experts, who
play an instrumental role in legitimizing the politicians' arguments and
drumming up support inside the Beltway for impending conflicts in faraway
lands. Brookings fellow and former CIA official Kenneth Pollack's book The
Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq played precisely that
function for wavering Democratic elites in the run-up to war, turning
"more doves into hawks than Richard Perle, Laurie Mylroie and George W.
Bush combined," wrote Slate's Chris Suellentrop in March 2003. "In
Washington, it's not uncommon to hear fence-straddlers qualify their
ambivalence about an Iraq war with the sentiment, 'Of course, I haven't
read the Pollack book yet.'"

The likes of Pollack are greatly bolstered by a second front of national
security specialists at prestigious think tanks like Brookings, the
Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for American
Progress. Though they often toil in obscurity, the think-tank officials
form a necessary echo chamber for the political class, appearing on
television and writing issue briefs while providing, through their
organizations, a platform on which candidates can appear "robust" in the
national security realm. As one example, Stephen Walt, a leading foreign
policy expert and academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government,
says that "Brookings was basically supportive of the war in Iraq. If
Brookings is signing on to a major foreign policy initiative of a
Republican Administration, that doesn't give the Democratic mainstream
much room to mount a really forceful critique of the incumbent foreign
policy." Much of Kerry's campaign platform--with its calls to add 40,000
troops to the military, preserve the doctrine of pre-emptive war and stay
the course in Iraq--read as if it had been lifted verbatim from a
Brookings strategy memo.

At the bottom of the pyramid are the liberal hawks in the punditocracy,
figures like New Republic editor Peter Beinart, Time writer Joe Klein and
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. These pundits, along with purely
partisan outfits like the Democratic Leadership Council's Progressive
Policy Institute (PPI), help to both set the agenda and frame the debate.
The journalistic hawks churn out the agitprop that the more respectable
think tanks turn into "serious" scholarship, some of which eventually
becomes policy, or at least talking points, when adopted by the
politicians.

Central to the liberal hawks' mission is a challenge to other Democrats
that they too must become "national security Democrats," to borrow a
phrase coined by Holbrooke. To talk about national security a Democrat
must be a national security Democrat, and to be a national security
Democrat, a Democrat must enthusiastically support a militarized "war on
terror," protracted occupation in Iraq, "muscular" democratization and
ever-larger defense budgets. The liberal hawks caricature other Democrats
just as Republicans long stereotyped them. The pundits magnify the
perception that Democrats are soft on national security, and they
influence how consultants view public opinion and develop the message for
candidates. In that sense, the bottom of the pyramid is always interacting
with the top. It matters little that people like Beinart have no national
security experience--as long as the hawks identify themselves as national
security Democrats, they're free to play the game.

Today, despite the growing evidence that the Bush Administration's actions
in Iraq have been a colossal--some would say criminal--failure, what's
striking is how much of the pyramid remains essentially in place. As the
Iraqi insurgency turned increasingly violent, and the much-hyped WMDs
never turned up, the hawks attempted a bit of self-evaluation. Slate and
The New Republic both hosted windy pseudo-mea culpa forums. Of the eight
liberal hawks invited by Slate, journalist Fred Kaplan remarked, "I seem
to be the only one in the club who's changed his mind." TNR's confession
was even more limited, with Beinart admitting that he overcame his
distrust of Bush so that he could "feel superior to the Democrats."
Pollack took part in both forums, and then earned five figures for an
Atlantic Monthly essay on "what went wrong." Even at their darkest hour,
the strategic class found a way to profit from its errors, coalescing
around a view that its members had been misled by the Bush Administration
and that too little planning, too few troops and too much ideology were
largely to blame for the chaos in Iraq. The hawks decided it was
acceptable to criticize the execution of the war, but not the war
itself--a view Kerry found particularly attractive. A "yes, but" or "no,
but" mentality defined this thinking. Having subsequently pinned the blame
for Kerry's defeat largely on the political consultants or the candidate
himself, the strategic class has moved forward largely unscarred.

Biden and Clinton still have more influence than antiwar politicians like
Ted Kennedy or Russ Feingold. No one has replaced Holbrooke or Albright.
Pollack continues to thrive at Brookings and, despite never visiting the
country, has a new book out about Iran. Shortly after the election,
Beinart penned a 5,683-word essay calling on hawkish Democrats to
repudiate "softs" like MoveOn.org and Michael Moore; the essay won
Beinart--already a fellow at Brookings--a $650,000 book deal and
high-profile visibility on the Washington ideas circuit. Subsequently a
statement of leading policy apparatchiks on the PPI publication Blueprint
challenged fellow Democrats to make fighting Islamic totalitarianism the
central organizing principle of the party. Replace the words "Al Qaeda"
with "Soviet Union" and the essay seemed straight out of 1947-48; the
militarized post-9/11 climate of fear had reincarnated the cold war
Democrat. A number of leading specialists signed a letter by the
neoconservative Project for the New American Century asking Congress to
boost the defense budget and increase the size of the military by 25,000
troops each year over the next several years. The "Third Way" group of
conservative Senate Democrats recently introduced a similar proposal.

"There's an approach which says, 'Let's raise the stakes and call,'" says
former Senator Gary Hart, a rare voice of principled opposition in the
party today. "That if Republicans want a ten-division Army, let's be for a
twelve-division Army. I think that's just nonsense, frankly. It's stupid
policy. Trying to get on the other side of the Republicans is folly, both
politically and substantively."

If Hart is correct, then why does so much of the Democratic strategic
class march in lockstep? There's no simple answer. The insularity of
Washington, pressures of careerism, fear of appearing soft and the absence
of institutional alternatives all contribute to a limiting of the debate.
Bill Clinton's misguided political dictum that the public "would rather
have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right"
applies equally to the strategic class.

"Everybody's on the make," says Steve Clemons of the New America
Foundation, who led the fight against John Bolton from his blog, The
Washington Note. "They're all worried about their next government job.
People pull their punches or try to craft years in advance what sort of
positions they're gonna be up for. The culture of Washington is very
risk-averse." Adds Walt, "It's pretty hard to go wrong right now taking a
hard-line position. There's enough places or institutions that will take
care of you. Outside of academia, if you take positions on the other side,
there's just nowhere near the level of institutional support."

Those insiders who doubt the wisdom of a hawkish course often get the cold
shoulder if they stray too far from the strategic line. After criticizing
the rush to war, Ivo Daalder of Brookings became the foreign policy point
man for Howard Dean's insurgent campaign. Many of Daalder's colleagues at
Brookings and elsewhere sharply criticized Dean, and afterward unnamed
Democratic insiders bragged to The New Republic that Dean's advisers would
never work again. That, of course, didn't happen, but Daalder and others
have since tempered their opposition rhetoric. Today Daalder blames the
antiwar movement for Dean's defeat and calls for more troops in Iraq.

For daring to tackle the liberal hawk consensus in his recent book America
Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, Anatol Lieven, who is
British and until recently a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, got lumped
into the "anti-American" category by Jonathan Tepperman of the Council on
Foreign Relations in the New York Times Book Review. "It is hardly an
anti-American position to suggest that Americans today can learn much from
the work of great Americans of the past like Reinhold Niebuhr and J.W.
Fulbright," Lieven wrote in reply. He has since left Carnegie and joined
Clemons at the New America Foundation, a centrist think tank that has
acquired a maverick reputation. New America, along with places like the
Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy--an anti-imperial umbrella of
thinkers on the left, right and center--now form a sort of dissident
establishment.

Owing to their distinction, the Democratic strategic class, consisting of
the party's leading foreign policy thinkers, could have provided a
powerful check on a reckless Administration intent on rushing to war.
Instead, it bears partial responsibility for the war's costs: more than
1,800 American fatalities, thousands of maimed and wounded US soldiers,
many more dead Iraqi civilians, spiraling worldwide anti-Americanism,
surging world oil prices, a new breeding ground for Al Qaeda, multiplying
terror attacks abroad and mounting economic insecurity at home.

At the same time, talking tough on Iraq has been a disastrous moral,
tactical and political miscalculation for Democrats. A recent Democracy
Corps poll found that Iraq tops the list of factors motivating voter
discontent toward President Bush. "This is a country almost settled on the
need for change," political consultants Stan Greenberg and James Carville
write. Yet Democrats will only prosper if they pose "sharp choices,"
something the strategic class has been unwilling or unable to do. A few
small progressive think tanks, helped by the dissident establishment, have
tried to pry open badly needed institutional space for a bolder national
security policy. A few courageous elected officials are attempting to drum
up Congressional support for withdrawal. Thus far, the hawks have drowned
them out. Unless and until the strategic class transforms or declines in
stature, the Democrats beholden to them will be doomed to repeat their
Iraq mistakes.


--------9 of 9--------

 Question
 May Swenson

 Body my house
 my horse my hound
 what will I do
 when you are fallen

 Where will I sleep
 How will I ride
 What will I hunt

 Where can I go
 without my mount
 all eager and quick
 How will I know
 in thicket ahead
 is danger or treasure
 when Body my good
 bright dog is dead

 How will it be
 to lie in the sky
 without roof or door
 and wind for an eye

 With cloud for shift
 how will I hide?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

   - David Shove             shove001 [at] tc.umn.edu
   rhymes with clove         Progressive Calendar
                     over 2225 subscribers as of 12.19.02
              please send all messages in plain text no attachments