Lisa Goodman

Conrad Sverkerson is a legendary figure at First Avenue. Conspicuous for his dreadlocks (although more recently sporting a Jewfro), the iconic rock club’s stage manager has spent more than two decades making sure shows go off without a hitch.

Now there’s a movement afoot (or at least one blog post) to land Sverkerson a job at another iconic Minneapolis locale: City Hall. The Minus Manhattan blog is encouraging voters to write in his name for the Ward Seven city council post currently held by Lisa Goodman.

The impetus for this campaign is the recent opening of Hennepin and First avenues to two-way traffic. The plan, which has been championed by Goodman, is supposed to spur business development along the downtown corridor. But First Avenue (the rock club) has complained that the new street design eliminates a critical area where bands (and beer trucks) load gear in and out of the venue. Now all the equipment will have to be lugged from a block away. Chris Riemenschneider deftly described the conundrum in the Star Tribune a couple of weeks ago.

A block might not sound like that far of a jaunt. But can you imagine lugging 10 cases of Summit beer, a $10,000 soundboard, a $15,000 case of guitars or the entire Wu-Tang Clan herbal supply that far through the snow and ice in February?

On top of that, the First Ave staff figures it will have to hire security workers to safeguard the equipment. Plus, it worries that touring bands might balk at the situation altogether and go somewhere else to perform.

But Goodman expressed zero sympathy for the downtown rock club. “Why should they get any preferential treatment?” she asked Riemenschneider.

Of course, to some the answer to that question is obvious: First Avenue is a cultural jewel that makes downtown Minneapolis a vibrant place worth visiting. Even if Sverkerson isn’t working the stage. Hooters and the Hard Rock Cafe can’t really make the same claim.

For more on the race: Ward Seven: Despite full campaign coffers, lawsuit clouds Goodman’s prospects

Photo: iStockphoto

A watchdog group, Stimulating Broadband (SB), which keeps tabs on stimulus spending on broadband infrastructure, says Minnesota is the only state holding back details about how the state plans to spend its broadband stimulus money. Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s administration says it doesn’t have to disclose the information. It’s the second time in two months that Pawlenty has come under criticism over broadband policy. Minnesota submitted a list of funding priorities to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) detailing how the state plans to spend stimulus money to expand broadband coverage statewide. But Pawlenty’s office won’t reveal which projects — which it selected from a master list of applications received from counties, townships, cities, businesses and nonprofits across Minnesota — it’s recommending for funding.

The governor is invoking a state statute that says applications about nonpublic businesses are private until funding decisions are made. As the Minnesota Progressive Project noted on Tuesday, many of those applications have been made public, including one of the state’s largest counties, Ramsey County.

Diane Wells of the Telecommunications Division of the Minnesota Department of Commerce, told SB:

“Minnesota has undertaken its [Broadband Technologies Opportunity Program] evaluation process following guidelines the state has for reviewing RFPs. Under that process, the results of our evaluation would not be made publicly available until the completion of the full process, which for purposes of the BTOP broadband grants, we have defined as when the NTIA issues the awards. Thus the recommendation from Minnesota to the NTIA is not a public document at this time.”

The second time SB asked for Minnesota’s prioritized list, it received a response from a government attorney. In an email, Alberto Quintela, Jr., wrote, “The Minnesota Department of Commerce has been informed by the Minnesota Department of Administration that, pursuant to Minn. Stat. 13.591, subd.4 (2008), documents generated in response to the NTIA’s communication to the states on the opportunity to comment on grant proposals submitted under the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) are protected nonpublic data until completion of the federal evaluation process and the awards are made.”

When asked for comment on the case, Jeneba Jalloh Ghatt of the Ghatt Law Group told SB in an email that it is strange for Minnesota to be so secretive — especially since every other state SB has approached has supplied the information.

“At the outset, the state of Minnesota has to realize that others have elected to release their rankings. Given that it was never a secret and was quite ‘public’ that NTIA sought the rankings from all of the states in the first place, it is unclear why the ultimate rankings would be considered ‘non public.’”

“It is also unclear whether Minnesota can keep the letter hidden for long,” Ghatt wrote. “At top, the decision to treat the NTIA response as non-public fuels a growing debate over whether States preferred public and government projects over private ones. It would appear that Minnesota could be shielding its rankings from the same type of criticisms other states are facing.”

That criticism comes as Minnesota selected a telecom-backed group to conduct the state’s broadband mapping, which could, in turn, benefit the telecom industry. That decision was made without the input of the state’s citizen broadband task force, whose members were appointed by Pawlenty.

MnIndy file photo

The University of Minnesota is the latest public body to make a mess with multiple beverage-marketing deals. The U of M has canceled a contract with Red Bull because the energy-drink company’s on-campus ads conflicted with the university’s separate, exclusive contract with Coke. Last year it was the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board that couldn’t keep its dealings with the same two drinks straight.

Selling corporations exclusive access to citizen-consumers, while lucrative, creates perennial problems for public institutions.

The U of M had to back out of another deal last year, with Victoria’s Secret, after the lingerie retailer’s taste in Gopher-branded attire didn’t measure up to the university’s “image” and “values.”

Last week, the university’s marching band director denied the band had formed the TCF Bank corporate logo at the university’s new TCF Bank Stadium, so named under a $35 million contract with the bank. Rather, he said, when the student-musicians formed the letters “TCF” on the field during the opening game of the football season, they were spelling out the name of the building.

Once the line is crossed, public bodies cheerfully go above and beyond the obligations they create for themselves to corporate sponsors.

This month, the public Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission’s decision to let the Minnesota Vikings sell naming rights to various parts of the Metrodome bore fruit, as the field and several gates got new corporate names such as “Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.”

Public agencies doing double-deals with beverage multinationals and slapping corporate logos on publicly funded educational facilities is another, but the Minneapolis park board took the trend one step further in the summer of 2008, when it sold Red Bull a permit to install huge cubes marketing its product — in the guise of a photography exhibit — on the bike lanes that run down the middle of the historic Stone Arch Bridge. Several bike-pedestrian crashes ensued.

Photo: wikipedia

To the victor go the spoils, the saying goes. And so on Tuesday Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak took delivery of 10 pounds of hamburger from Jim Schmitt, mayor of Green Bay, Wisc., in fulfillment of the friendly wager they made on the Vikings-Packers football game. But the Vikings’ win wasn’t the only news since the mayors made their bet. On the day between the bet and the game, the New York Times published an expose on the serious health hazards of hamburger meat, focusing on a Minnesota victim and corporation and a processor in Wisconsin.

The Times article probed the source of hamburger meat that sickened Stephanie Smith of Cold Spring, Minn., in 2007, sending her into a medically-induced coma and eventual paralysis from which she is still trying to recover.

The meat was produced by the Minnesota-based Cargill, under its “American Chef” label. It was processed from sources around the country and hemisphere at Cargill’s plant in Butler, Wis.

Rybak’s reward for the Vikings’ 30-23 victory at Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome: “10 lbs. of All-American Hamburgers, Seroogy’s Chocolate, and Wisconsin-made cheese,” according to his office.

The Times article didn’t mention “All-American Hamburgers” and there is no reason to suspect that Green Bay’s gift is any different from any other hamburger — besides, as its name suggests, being made from exclusively domestic sources.

“I want to thank Mayor Schmitt for giving us a taste of Wisconsin in addition to the delicious taste of victory we’re still savoring,” Rybak said in a statement, adding that the hamburger and other booty would be donated to Sharing and Caring Hands, a local charity that serves needy individuals and families.

Processed meat also hung in the balance with a separate wager between the states’ governors: Wisconsin sausage versus Minnesota pork.

A statistic from Michele Bachmann made Glenn Beck go, “Whoa!” on his radio show Wednesday morning: The federal government owns or controls 30 percent of private wealth in America. Beck exclaimed that the stat was new to him and even to his aghast studio crew. Where’d she get that? Bachmann (again) cited as her source an unnamed Arizona State University professor. The Minnesota Independent found the prof and asked him where he got the number.

It wasn’t through Nobel Prize–level methods, Prof. William Boyes told MnIndy by email:

I simply added up how much of GDP [gross domestic product] was govt run or govt controlled.  I gave an approximation that is pretty conservative. I suspect the actual number is more like 40%; if health care goes through then it will rise to over 50%.

Bachmann seems to have got the stat from this July 7 Washington Times paraphrase:

William Boyes, an economics professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, estimates that the government now owns or controls businesses that generate about one-third of U.S. economic activity.

The congresswoman added “According to” and quote marks and posted that sentence at her Townhall.com blog the next day. She has continued to cite it since, though usually without Boyes’ name attached.

Commentating like Cokie

Over the airwaves, Bachmann has company. Pundit Cokie Roberts said this on the Oct. 4 edition of ABC-TV’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”:

You know, right now, 40 percent, 40 percent of GDP is state, local, or federal money. I mean, that’s an incredible number. So that, you know, adding more [government spending] to that, I think, is going to … distort things even more. And the public is so concerned about it.

That inspired Politifact to try to nail down how much of the nation’s GDP really is in government hands. The answer turns out to be tricky: It depends on whether you count the payments such as Social Security that the government transfers among citizens.

Such transfers aren’t really government “spending,” though they may be what Bachmann and Boyes mean by “control,” even if the way the funds are spent isn’t in government. If transfer payments aren’t included in the figure, government spending is less than 20 percent of GDP. But by including transfer payments and adding in local government spending, Politifact rated Roberts’ figure “mostly true.”

Politifact bemoans that government statistics on its role in the economy simply haven’t kept pace with government responses to the recession such as stimulus spending, corporate bailouts and other programs. Boyes’ napkin-math is pretty much all we have at the moment.

Asked if the figure could be found in any published research, Boyes said “not that I know of” and recommended visiting the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation websites for more information.

Coalescing against the Constitution

On another topic on Beck’s radio show, Bachmann couldn’t seem to make up her mind. She praised Beck for “the September 12th 9/12 movement you instigated,” but also said, “People aren’t crazy. They haven’t been ginned up by talk show hosts.”

(Beck returned the favor by recommending listeners visit her website and make a donation.)

Bachmann said the 9/12 movement is a “huge tent” for people devoted to the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, repeating an image she conjures up often of those documents being the fabric of the tent.

Then it got kinda confusing: ”The very parchment of those documents is the tent that we are coalescing against,” Bachmann said.

Photo: David Harvey, Flickr

We crossed a line in the turf this month when the publicly owned place where the Minnesota Vikings (alone, now) play football was renamed “Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.” Let the re-branding of one of Minnesota’s greatest statesmen begin. 

The Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, the public body that owns and operates the Humphrey Metrodome by authority of the State of Minnesota, gave its blessing for the Vikings to sell naming rights for various parts of the facility.

The Mall of America gave the Vikings an untold sum to buy naming rights to the field for three years. As the Star Tribune’s Steve Brandt points out in his “Dateline Minneapolis” column:

It’s just another example of the commercialization of the public realm in the Twin Cities. We pay most of the bill to erect stadia and arenas through sales taxes, tickets or state bonds but the sponsors who kick in the relatively few last dollars in the deal get the naming rights. There’s Target Center. Xcel Energy Center. TCF Bank Stadium. And Target Field is on the way.

Two doors down from the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota is a business-school building where every classroom carries a corporate logo. The university’s marching band has twice formed the logo for TCF Bank — at the opening game at the university’s new TCF Bank Stadium, and at the university’s final football game at what is now Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Stadium.

Brandt laments “how far we’ve ebbed in our sense of the distinction between the public and private realms.” But that’s what makes the Mall of America the perfect private purchaser for a public place-name. The mall was the site of a landmark 1999 Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that free-speech rights don’t extend to its public spaces.

Say, speaking of free speech: Here’s how one of Humphrey’s best-loved quotes – from his famous speech to the 1948 Democratic National Convention when he was mayor of Minneapolis — could be rebranded for today:

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of naming rights, I say to them we are 29 years late. To those who say that this naming-rights program is an infringement on the state’s rights, I say this: The time has arrived for the Mall of America to help the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission to get out of the shadow of state’s rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of naming rights. People — human beings — this will be the issue of the 21st century. People of all kinds — all sorts of people — are looking to the Mall of America for leadership, and they’re looking to the Mall of America for precept and example and shopping.

Image: mnhs.org

“The Road to TCF Bank Stadium” is being shown on the Big Ten Network cable TV channel and at the U of M website (or below).

It’s 22 minutes long but apparently fills a half hour on TV, with breaks between seven sections carrying titles like “Game Day Experience” and “Teamwork.”

You can glimpse the band form the “TCF” logo in a small box during the ending credits, but it’s easier to see in a separate short showing the entire Sept. 12 opening game against Air Force in only two minutes, using time-lapse videography.

Dusk has fallen, the field lights are on, and the band comes out to form a giant “M” for Minnesota at the 1:40 mark. The students in the marching band then transform their “M” into the letters “TCF” as they appear in the bank’s ads and signs.

Update: Tim Diem, director of the university’s marching band, tells the Minnesota Independent the band was simply displaying the name of the stadium. “If they’d named it Veterans Stadium, we would have spelled out ‘Veterans,’” Diem says. He disputes that the band had formed a corporate logo: “It’s the name of the building.” The home opener at TCF Bank Stadium was the second time the band did the “TCF” formation, according to Diem. They also did it last year at the Metrodome, when like last month, he says, “We were putting on a celebration.”

The longer video has a variety of people saying nice things about the university, the stadium, and the process that got TCF Bank Stadium built. Says Dave Mona of the Gopher Radio Broadcast Team:

I was afraid I’d see a ton of advertising. You’re not going to see — This is not a NASCAR. This is a college football stadium. I think people will be pleasantly surprised. Even though there’s a lot of corporate money in here, it’s very subtle.

But those “subtle” ads and logos that do make it into the stadium reach young adults in the midst of an important rite of passage, on the cusp of becoming full-fledged consumers. As U of M child-development Prof. Rich Weinberg sees it from his bleacher seat:

It’s been almost 28 years, I believe, since we’ve had a generation of students that have had the opportunity to experience this. And I really feel strongly that it’s not just by being in the classroom that’s important, but the whole socialization as a young adult really includes this experience.

Of course, even U of M classrooms carry corporate logos these days.

In the video, you’ll watch in vain for any explanation of TCF Bank’s $35 million naming-rights deal beyond a listing for the bank under the heading “Significant Corporate Sponsors & Donors.” That blurs a line that’s distinct in the lengthy contract between the university and the bank: TCF is paying for advertising.

Yet TCF Bank Chairman Bill Cooper seems to like that line blurred. Here’s what he told Mona and Star Tribune sports columnist Sid Hartman on their “Sports Huddle” show on WCCO-AM last Sunday:

It’s kind of half charity and half business. We’ve seen a lot of business out of it.

Here’s “The Road to TCF Bank Stadium”:

Photo: Paul Demko, Minnesota Independent

Shortly after 10 a.m. on Monday two yellow school buses pulled up in front of the corporate headquarters of UnitedHealth Group in Minnetonka. Roughly 100 people, carrying signs that read “Health insurance reform now,” filed off the buses. A half dozen protesters then locked arms, sat down on the sidewalk and blocked the entrance to the office tower.

“We’re here today at UnitedHealth group to stop business as usual,” Tee McClenty, an emergency room technician at St. John’s Hospital in Maplewood, told the crowd. “Why? Big insurance has a lot to lose if bold reform happens this fall. And it needs to. We’ve waited too long and we need a public option now.”

UnitedHealth Group is the nation’s largest private health insurance company. It has drawn the ire of reform advocates by spending more than $600,000 per day on lobbying efforts in Washington, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The insurance firm has also been criticized for providing its top executive with lavish pay, including $744 million in stock options. The protest was organized by the nationwide coalition Health Care for America Now and was the third such event directed at UnitedHealth Group in recent weeks.

The Rev. Grant Stevenson, president of the social justice organization ISAIAH and pastor at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in St. Paul, also addressed the gathering.

“We know that if the insurance companies win, we lose,” Stevenson told the crowd. “There’s a choice to be made and Congress needs to be on our side. Congress needs to stand with you and with me and with the people that we care about. The insurance companies cannot continue to direct the way that health care is delivered and paid for in this country. It’s wrong.”

The assembled protesters then took turns explaining how the current health care system had failed their friends and family. “Business as usual is not working for people with preexisting conditions like my son,” said one gentleman. “Business as usual is not working for the millions of people who lost their jobs in the economic downturn,” added another woman.

After about 20 minutes, a half dozen squad cars from the Minnetonka Police Department arrived on the scene. When the six protesters blocking the entrance refused to voluntarily vacate the premises, the police handcuffed them and transported them to the Hennepin County Jail. They were cited for trespassing. Among those arrested were Julie Schnell, president of Service Employees International Union Healthcare Minnesota, and Anna Brelje, political director for the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation.

Egan makes a case for cooperatives’ roots out West:

The West is the native ground of co-ops. It’s in our collective DNA. People buy their tents, sleeping bags and bikes from the nation’s largest consumer co-op, REI, founded in Seattle in 1938, now with 3.5 million active members.

Egan notes that another Seattle-area co-op, Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, serves even the most rock-ribbed conservative counties of Idaho. That organization and Minnesota’s HealthPartners are frequently cited models for how co-ops could cure the national health crisis.

But both were built on a concept of mutual assistance and democratic governance developed by grassroots, country cooperatives that Keillor describes in “Cooperative Commonwealth: Co-ops in Rural Minnesota, 1859–1939.”

The most familiar descendant of that era may be Land O’ Lakes, the dairy marketer that proved that Minnesota co-ops could go national, and even international. The less well known farmers’ mutual fire insurance organizations in Keillor’s book are ancestors of the health care co-op idea that Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has been pushing since June (and which Sen. Amy Klobuchar is now mulling):

Farmers had incentives to organize a polity of the overcharged, bypass the private insurance market, and purchase insurance from themselves in a mutual.

Mutuals were, simply, insurance companies owned and controlled by their policyholders. Some mutuals evolved into profit-maximizing companies and ceased being true, low-cost, policyholder-controlled companies. A farmers’ mutual, however, retained its cooperative, low-cost character.

It’s also a state where Starbucks has suffered setbacks in labor disputes. Though a name change to something innocuous like “15th Avenue Coffee and Tea” won’t help the company escape barista rebellions, it could help Starbucks make inroads in a Minnesota coffee scene heavy with indies and home-grown chains like Dunn Bros. and Caribou.

Starbucks is suffering a slide in business, last week reporting a 5 percent decline in the second quarter on top of bigger drops the two previous quarters, a slump that caused the company to announce the shuttering of 600 stores this year.

Starbucks’ malaise got mocked by U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann last fall — “What’s next, Starbucks too big to fail?” she asked then — but nationwide closings have hurt even in sparsely Starbucked Minnesota, including four in Bachmann’s district.