Mn-prog-events Mailing List: Progressive Calendar 06.12.14 /3

[David Shove (shove001]

PROGRESSIVE CALENDAR  06.12.14

1. Midstream Poetry 6.12  7:30pm

2. Jim Hightower   - A Bold Shift in America’s Minimum Wage Debate
3. Patrick Toomey - NSA Says It’s Too Big to Comply With Court Order
4. ed -                   - Ecclesiastes for the people   [poem]


-------1 of x--------

Midstream Reading Series
When: Thursday June 12, 7:30–8:30pm.    2014
Where: Blue Moon building,  corner of 39th and (3820) East Lake. Upstairs.
Air-conditioned. Entrance just west of the Blue Moon coffee house; up the
stairs and to the left. Not wheel-chair accessible. Plentiful street
parking.
  Best to arrive 10-20 minutes early to get coffee and food/dessert from
the Blue Moon, and to be seated by 7:30 so we can begin on time. And, the
venue will easily hold about 30; after that, standing or floor-sitting room
only. The early bird gets the seat. Please occupy the up-front seats first.
Be an up-front person.
Original poems and stories read/performed by their creators:
      Van Anderson    Janet Jerve    Guthema  Roba    Tracy Youngblom

Van Anderson published Tending the Garden with North Star Press in 2013.
This collection of poems includes many types of “gardens,” from his
backyard garden to the “garden” of the Earth and the Garden of Eden. The
poems celebrate garden creatures and garden work, the beauty of nature in
all gardens and the life cycle of birth, death and rebirth so clear to
those who tend their plots.  Van has published a number of poems in
literary journals, but his professional life focused on the education of
young people. He taught English for decades in private and public schools,
most recently at Edina High School. He was the president of the Edina
teachers union for many years. He also had stints as a freelance writer and
a medical journal editor.  Now retired, he lives in south Minneapolis with
his wife; they have three adult children. He continues to garden and write
regularly.

Janet Jerve has taught poetry in Minnesota public schools. She has also
worked as a writer for nonprofits. Stories she wrote for a collaborative
project funded by Pew Charitable Trusts helped raise national awareness of
the need for foster care reform, and in 2008, the House and the Senate
unanimously passed the largest piece of child welfare legislation in the
past 25 years, improving the lives of thousands of children and families.
Janet’s poems have appeared in a number of journals including Poetry East,
Water~Stone Review, Lake Effect, Great River Review, and Emprise Review.
Her poetry was also included in A Ghost at Heart’s Edge, an anthology of
stories and poems on adoption published by North Atlantic Books, Beloved on
the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude, and The Heart of All That Is:
Reflections on Home, published by Holy Cow! Press. Excavation, her debut
book of poetry, was published by North Star Press in June 2013.

Guthema Roba’s first book of meditational poetry Please Come Home was
published in 2011 by North Star Press.  His second book Wake up and Roar
comes out in June this year.  Before he moved to the states in 2001, he
lived in Ethiopia, East African country, where he  worked for a government
library. Letting go of the past and dissolving into now, his poetry emerges
from the deep sea of silence reminding us of what really matters in our
daily life.  Currently he works for Hennepin county library and lives in
Robbinsdale with his wife and daughter.

Tracy Youngblom's debut poetry collection, Growing Big, was published in
2013.  Many individual poems and stories are forthcoming or published in
journals such as New York Quarterly, Dogwood, Shenandoah, Cortland Review,
Potomac Review, North Stone Review, Briar Cliff Review, Frostwriting, and
the anthologies 33 MN Poets and In a Fine Frenzy:  Poets Respond to
Shakespeare.  Tracy was a recent Finalist for the Loft-McKnight Awards in
Poetry and a previous Pushcart nominee. She teaches English at Anoka-Ramsey
Community College where she was a recent nominee for the Board of Trustees
Award for Teaching Excellence. In her spare time, she loves to run, hike,
garden, and play Trivial Pursuit.

Before and after: The Blue Moon, downstairs, has coffee, sandwiches,
desserts. Merlin’s Rest, a bar/restaurant 3 blocks west, has a full bar,
good food, a late hours kitchen, some outside seating
   For further information:David Shove shove001 [at] umn.edu     651-636-5672


--------2 of x--------

A Bold Shift in America’s Minimum Wage Debate
By Jim Hightower

At last, our political leaders in Washington are taking action for low-wage
workers and the middle class, striking a bold blow for America's historic
values of economic fairness and common good.

Gosh, I hope you don't think I meant Washington, D.C.! No, no — the same
old corporate mentality of stiffing workers and stripping any semblance of
ethics from the work ethic still rules in that plutocratic roost. Rather
than Washington, D.C., it's Washington state I'm talking about,
specifically the progressive forces of Seattle who've just produced a
landmark $15-an-hour minimum wage. Instead of just talking about the
widening gap of inequality and wishing our do-nothing Congress might give a
damn about the millions of hard-working Americans being knocked down, the
good people of Seattle are providing some much-needed national leadership.

"We did it — workers did this," said Kshama Sawant. She has been a leader
of Occupy Seattle, and then became the tenacious, articulate leader of a
large grassroots coalition of low-wage workers called "15 Now." Last year,
Sawant was elected to the City Council by putting the case for the $15 wage
floor directly to the voters.

In addition, Mayor Ed Murray campaigned last year for raising the minimum
to $15 — indexed to inflation. Having won, he pulled together a 24-member
working group of both labor and business interests this year, and they
spent the last four months working together to hammer out details of the
local ordinance. On June 2, all nine city council members voted unanimously
to adopt it.

Achieving this was not exactly a breeze, for the forces of corporate
avarice always pull out all the stops to defeat any move to improve the lot
of ordinary working families. When it comes to raising the minimum wage to
at least a bare level of human decency, pulling out all the stops
invariably includes corporate PR deceptions, such as pretending that
helping workers would put an intolerable squeeze on little mom-and-pop
stores.

But wait — who are those large guys looming in the shadows, back behind mom
and pop, carefully guarding the cash register?

Why, they're multibillion-dollar, brand-name chains.

These corporate behemoths — not mom and pop — are the chief exploiters of
millions of low-wage American workers. They're rank profiteers, constantly
lobbying in Congress, states and cities to hold down wages, benefits and
hope — even as they wallow in record profits and shell out exorbitant,
multimillion-dollar paychecks to their top executives.

Sure enough, when the people of Seattle agreed to raise the minimum pay in
their fair city to $15 an hour, an outfit called the International
Franchise Association wept crocodile tears for local small business owners,
pledging to unleash a pack of lawyers to sue the city, hoping a federal
judge will nullify the will of local voters and overturn the "unfair" wage
law. Don't look now, but IAF is not local and does not represent mom and
pop. It's a Washington, D.C., lobbying consortium made up of franchised
corporate chains intent on keeping America's wage floor beneath the poverty
level.

The chairman of IAF's executive committee is a McDonald's executive. Its
board of directors sparkles with a who's who of super-wealthy corporations,
including Coca Cola, Marriott Hotels, Dunkin Donuts, Pepsi Food Services,
Taco Bell and just about every other fast-food chain you can think of.
Excuse me if I don't weep over the "tragedy" of them finally being made to
pay honest wages.

While our thoroughly corporatized Congress continues to side with such
low-wage exploiters, cities and states across the country are standing up
for America's workaday majority and the common good. Paying a fair wage is
not a matter of corporate accounting, but a measure of our wealthy
society's moral character. The political fight is far from over, but the
good people of Seattle have done all of us a big favor by moving the wage
debate from the miserly, self-centered turf of the corporate bottom line to
the moral high ground of social justice, where it really belongs. Seattle
is just the start of this movement, so let's keep it going. For more
information on the spreading $15-an-hour movement, visit www.15now.org.

This article was published at NationofChange at:
http://www.nationofchange.org/bold-shift-america-s-minimum-wage-debate-1402503787.
All rights are reserved.


--------3 of x--------

Too Big To Comply? NSA Says It’s Too Large, Complex to Comply With Court
Order
by Patrick Toomey
Published on Tuesday, June 10, 2014
by Blog of Rights / ACLU

The crucial question is this: If the NSA does not have to keep evidence of
its spying activities, how can a court ever test whether it is in fact
complying with the Constitution? (Credit: Public domain)In an era of
too-big-to-fail banks, we should have known it was coming: An intelligence
agency too big to rein in — and brazen enough to say so.

In a remarkable legal filing on Friday afternoon, the NSA told a federal
court that its spying operations are too massive and technically complex to
comply with an order to preserve evidence. The NSA, in other words, now
says that it cannot comply with the rules that apply to any other party
before a court — the very rules that ensure legal accountability — because
it is too big.

The filing came in a long-running lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation challenging the NSA's warrantless collection of Americans'
private data. Recently, the plaintiffs in that case have fought to ensure
that the NSA is preserving relevant evidence — a standard obligation in any
lawsuit — and not destroying the very data that would show the agency spied
on the plaintiffs' communications. Yet, as in so many other instances, the
NSA appears to believe it is exempt from the normal rules.

In its filing on Friday, the NSA told the court:

[A]ttempts to fully comply with the Court's June 5 Order would be a massive
and uncertain endeavor because the NSA may have to shut down all databases
and systems that contain Section 702 information in an effort to comply.

For an agency whose motto is "Collect It All," the NSA's claim that its
mission could be endangered by a court order to preserve evidence is a
remarkable one. That is especially true given the immense amount of data
the NSA is known to process and warehouse for its own future use.

The NSA also argued that retaining evidence for EFF's privacy lawsuit would
put it in violation of other rules designed to protect privacy. But what
the NSA presents as an impossible choice between accountability and privacy
is actually a false one. Surely, the NSA — with its ability to sift and
sort terabytes of information — can devise procedures that allow it to
preserve the plaintiffs' data here without retaining everyone's data.

The crucial question is this: If the NSA does not have to keep evidence of
its spying activities, how can a court ever test whether it is in fact
complying with the Constitution?

Perhaps most troubling, the new assertions continue the NSA's decade-long
effort to evade judicial review — at least in any public court. For years,
in cases like the ACLU's Amnesty v. Clapper, the NSA evaded review by
telling courts that plaintiffs were speculating wildly when they claimed
that the agency had intercepted their communications. Today, of course, we
know those claims were prescient: Recent disclosures show that the NSA was
scanning Americans' international emails en masse all along. Now, the NSA
would put up a new roadblock — claiming that it is unable to preserve the
very evidence that would allow a court to fully and fairly review those
activities.

As Brett Max Kaufman and I have written before, our system of oversight is
broken — this is only the latest warningsign flashing red. The NSA has
grown far beyond the ability of its overseers to properly police its spying
activities. That includes the secret FISA Court, which has struggled to
monitor the NSA's compliance with basic limits on its surveillance
activities. It includes the congressional oversight committees, which
operate with too little information and too often appear captive to the
interests of the intelligence community. And, now we are to believe, it
includes the public courts as well.

No intelligence agency should be too big to be accountable to the rule of
law.

Patrick Toomey is a fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union's
National Security Project


--------4 of x--------
ECCLESIASTES FOR THE PEOPLE

And indeed there will be time..

Time to hang Ronald Reagan in effigy, and time to watch him trickle down
Time to hang Ronald McDonald with him; he can be his opening clown.


-ed

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

                                              Shove Grove