I was on the air with Justice and Drew on Monday, February 6th talking about Obama's Midnight Madness and the expansion of the Met Council's boundary. The segment starts at 24:25. Some good back and forth conversation, and you'll learn about my hobbies.
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Thursday, at a suddenly announced, three hour long public meeting, Governor Dayton pursued the nuclear option and dropped his "Adam Bomb" onto the negotiation around Southwest Light Rail. Specifically, Dayton plans to have his unelected board of minions, the Met Council, obligate tax payers to nearly $100M in debt through what is known as "certificates of participation". This would be in lieu of the state contributing $135M, as the project requires, and as the legislature has rejected. My previous posts laying out some of the details on this are here and here.
Of course, this flies directly in the face of a statement from Met Council Chair Adam Duininck that the council would not try this scheme. According to this article from MPR News, fellow participants in the scheme, the Counties Transportation Improvement Board (CTIB) and Hennepin County Regional Rail Authority, need to hold public hearings and vote on tossing in $20.5M each before the end of the month. Nothing says democracy like an unelected board throwing together a last minute scheme with "hearings" to rubber stamp decisions they couldn't pass through the duly elected legislature, all while obligating taxpayers to nearly $100M in debt. These actions further poison the well in terms of transportation policy in the Twin Cities and the state, and again demonstrate the absurd outlier nature of the unelected, unaccountable and sprawling Met Council. We need wholesale reform of the Council, and of the governance structure for transportation policy. Only then will we be able to move forward as a region. At the end of the day, it's hard to characterize Duininck's previous comments on this matter as anything but an outright lie: I came across this excellent quote in the NY Times from a former Conservative MP in the UK about the Brexit vote:
“People want to vote for the people who make our laws and set our taxes; they want to talk to them and be able to throw them out” An excellent point, whether it is about Brussels or an unelected, unaccountable, ever-expanding in scope Met Council. Power to the People.
This piece by Mark Hendrickson in Forbes completely nails the Obama approach to destroying wealth, undermining small businesses and individual independence as a means to political domination. Specifically, he is implementing at the national level the "Curley Effect", which is a 'political strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.”'
Here's how our Corporatist in Chief plays it: "Everything Obama has done has been designed to strengthen Democratic constituencies (e.g., stimulus spending steered predominantly toward unions and strategically allied state and municipal entities; waivers from Obamacare for unions; a hefty 23 percent increase in the Index of Dependence on Government during Obama’s first two years) and to weaken Republican constituencies (e.g., making small business formation more difficult by impeding venture capitalists; refusing to amend Sarbanes-Oxley; using Dodd-Frank regulations to discourage loans; fewer waivers from Obamacare; proposing lower tax rates for large corporations, but not on the “S” corporations that are the preferred choice of small business owners; constant efforts to raise taxes on the “rich”—which means, as we’ve seen in Detroit, California, and other Curley effect victims, higher taxes on the middle class)." Exactly.
A reminder on why you can never sleep on the Met Council's efforts to undermine democracy. Met Council Chair Adam Duininck declared in July 2015 (PDF) that "The Metropolitan Council will not commit the 10% state share for the [Southwest Light Rail Transit] project without support from the Legislature." (See screenshot below.) In other words, he agrees the state needs to authorize paying for the state portion of the transit project. Yet now Duininck seems to be threatening to renege on that commitment, stating "we are talking with our project partners, including the cities, CTIB and Hennepin County, on any possible ways to fill the remaining gap [to fund SWLRT]." Which is it, Adam? Do you and the Governor intend to abide by basic principles of democracy in this country, or do you intend to try a bogus end-around on the process? The July 2015 exchange points to one way the Met Council might try to do this. In essence, the Council would auction off the Motor Vehicle Sales Tax money it receives, bundle up that cash and use it to pay for its pet project, all without any approval from anyone. Specifically, Duininck and gang would have the Met Council issue "Certificates of Participation" as a way to raise the cash that the Council can then use however it wants - in this case to pay for the state's part of Southwest Light Rail. It seems almost certain that this type of bogus scheme is being conjured up by the Met Council and Governor Dayton as part of negotiations for a special session that would ram through funding for the controversial SWLRT. Are we going to let the Met Council - 100% appointed by Governor Dayton - go nuclear and drop this Adam Bomb on the democratic process? Let your legislators and Governor Dayton know that this will not stand, and that this is just one more indication as to why the Met Council needs fundamental reform on all levels. And what we definitely do NOT need is to give unelected, scheming officials another $280M a year in tax funds to use however they would like. I had a chance to talk with Mike Max on WCCO Radio today about Start Reading Now. It's a short 10 minute interview, but it hits on all the key aspects of how we address summer setback and closing the achievement gap.
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Kevin TerrellSure, e-books have a place in the world. I just prefer real ones, in order to make the job a bit harder for any real life Winston Smith who might be out there. Archives
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