Minnesota Realty Blog n News

Today, at last, former 6th Ward city council member Dean Zimmermann goes on trial for alleged corruption.

His supporters have been chanting the “innocent until proven guilty” mantra ever since his home was raided last September. Soon they will stop. Zimmermann will likely be found guilty–the Strib reports that 90 percent of Federal cases result in conviction, and the feds say that they have Z on video and audio tape negotiating to receive bribes.

My first impression of Zimmermann was formed at the Ralph Nader rally at the Target Center in 2000, where approximately 11,000 people paid to see the presidential candidate. Somewhere in the middle of the overly long program, Zimmermann, and Cam Gordon the present 2nd Ward council member, shook the audience down for money, badgering the crowd. Some gave–more were alienated. One guy in the audience near me asked, “Who are these assholes”?

Minneapolis is the only city I’ve lived in that has “activist” real estate agents, stock brokers, developers, and small business owners. Dean Zimmermann is the latter, a petty bourgeois hack who happened to come up in the countercultural mileu of late sixties/early seventies Minneapolis. Active in the fabled “Coop Wars,” he was a member of the Stalinist C.O. He admits his “brief” membership in the spin off cult the “O.“

Bizarre obsession with revolution through politcally correct business plans, justifications by invocation of the “little guy,” a certain left-leaning hubris, and a flair for showmanship have marked Dean Zimmermann’s life since. As has an anti-intellectual “good ole boy” populism that diminishes all of us on the left.

Expect all this to be on evidence at the trial as the defense tries to spin corruption into gossamer threads of political purity.

–Loosestrife

Original post by Loosestrife

On this date in 1934, over a 100 Minneapolis police opened fire on unarmed striking Teamsters in at 3rd and 6th, killing 2 and injurying 67. Many workers were shot in the back as they attempted to flee.

The outrage that followed brought an end to protracted battle between labor and the Minneapolis “Citizens Alliance,” an association of local employers and civic leaders that operated as a de facto shadow government insuring that Minneapolis remained a “open shop”/anti-union town.

The Citizens Alliance through a fine-tuned system of thuggery, propaganda, philanthropy, and political influence had held off union organizing in Minneapolis for decades. Labor’s growing strength forced the capitalist hand in 1934, as Citizens Alliance organized gangs roamed the streets in open battle with striking Teamsters.

While the Citizens Alliance was essentially crushed by labor’s victory in 1934, its spirit of capitalist/corporate control of the city’s life carries on in various Minneapolis institutions.

The pro-business voice of the StarTribune is a muted but recognizable continuation of the elitist cant of the daily papers of open shop Minneapolis. The Citizens League continues the Alliance’s work in a think tank form, influencing public policy in well-written reports that assume that the business has all answers. R.T. Rybak and Peter McLaughlin, opponents in the Mayor’s race, both represent the compliant business oriented politics of Minneapolis politicians, required by the business community both then and now.

The Employers Association perhaps continues the “work” of the Citizens Alliance most identifiably, albeit under the auspices of being “your strategic partner in HR and management.” Dig underneath that slick home page and the standard HR training functions though, and you find some interesting stuff. EA offers services in “Union Petition Avoidance,” as well as consultation in how to effectively deal with unions. EA originated in 1936 as Associated Industries of Minneapolis “to help employers resolve labor-management disputes peacefully and to harmonize employer-employee relations.”

So when you looking for the origins of Minnesota Nice–be sure to include 1934 in your search. Forced to give up their open animosity towards all things working class, the Citizens Alliance types reinvented themselves as peace-loving corporate managers looking for harmony between employers and employees. The managed consent of local politics, the cool quiet of public debate, the elevation of the public/private partnership to the level of nirvana, and the lavish praise afforded corporate giving all have roots in the 1934 Truckers strike.

As does the sunny corporate mug of the Target Corporation. I have posted before on the hypocrisy of local progressives’ attacks on WalMart while they pull their punches on Target. Really, the people of northwest Arkansas see WalMart almost exactly as the people of Minnesota see Target, as a benfactor contributing jobs and money to the local community.

Target is our own personal WalMart, appealing to Minnesota’s need to feel superior to the unwashed south while developing ways to better surveil us, plastering our city in red and white plastic, and keeping unions out of its stores. The abyss is close to home.

This week, the Strib listed “Top Donors in Key Minnesota House Races,” and one learns that Target is a leading contributor to the reelection campaign of John Kline in his 2nd district race against Coleen Rowley. Kline’s voting record is horrendous, and he is arguably the worst of Minnesota’s congressional representatives. He is anti-enviroment, anti-education, and anti-civil rights.

Yet, Target glides on by while labor and the progressive community avert their gaze.

So, on this day, raise your Target marketed glass to the workers in 1934 who fought hand to hand to wrest this town from total corporate dominance. Then smash that glass on the sidewalk in front of the Target corporate head quarters downtown. You’ll be on camera, but you are anyway.

And when the cops come to take you away, ask them if they are willing to toast the workers who, by being shot in the back by Minneapolis’ finest, helped the same to win their collective bargaining rights.

–Loosestrife

Original post by Loosestrife