Economy

The Minnesota Council of Nonprofits (MCN) announced today that the organization will support the health care reform package moving through Congress, but only if it includes provisions for nonprofit agencies.

Minnesota is among 22 states that have had to borrow money from the federal government to pay unemployment benefits during the ongoing economic crisis. The state’s unemployment insurance system is currently more than $155 million in debt, according to a new report.

A protracted partisan skirmish has left hundreds of thousands of Americans without unemployment benefits — an impasse Senate Democrats hope to break this week.

In 2000, evangelist Chuck Ripka says he had a vision from God: He was to start a faith-based bank in Otsego, and with the backing of the Lord his Riverview Community Bank could not fail. In fact, God told Ripka that he would create such an “acceleration” in the bank’s success that Ripka would be [...]

Pity the U.S. Senate committee witness who tries to slip a fishy statistic past Al Franken. The fearsome Harvard math major punished conservative economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth for claiming that Democrats’ reforms would jack up bankruptcies for medical reasons. 

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 [...]

A statistic from Michele Bachmann made Glenn Beck go, “Whoa!” on his radio show this morning: The federal government owns or controls 30 percent of private wealth. 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.

In Minneapolis’ southeast corner, all candidates for the city council share concerns about saving small businesses and keeping big developers in check. But beyond this agreement, the three candidates vying for the seat now held by Sandy Colvin Roy offer distinct choices for Ward 12 voters.

When the Labor Department last week revealed that the economy shed more than 260,000 jobs in September, Republicans knew exactly where to place the blame. On the “tax-and-spend policies” of Democrats. What the GOP fails to note is that job creation has trailed almost every other indicator of economic recovery in the wake of recessions going back at least 20 years.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann had a chance Friday morning to question the top lawyer for the Federal Reserve Bank during hearings into an audit of the Fed proposed by Rep. Ron Paul (with whom she’ll share a stage at the University of Minnesota tonight). “The Federal Reserve seems to have the power to do anything [...]