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Hey #Minneapolis! It's not the highest-profile election on the ballot, but there’s a genuinely interesting race for the school board at-large seat. It’s a seat that’s going to matter in the near future as the district goes through some very difficult budget years.
As usual, the inimitable @naomikritzer has a good writeup:
https://naomikritzer.com/2024/10/16/election-2024-minneapolis-school-board-at-large/
To Kritzer’s comments, I’d add that Kim Ellison has, in my view, an ugly track record of being union-hostile.
1/
By “union-hostile,” I don’t mean the outright union-busting of, say, Starbucks or Amazon. I mean that she’s been dismissive of teachers, their concerns, their needs, their intelligence, their motivations, their union, and their understanding of their own problems.
Her stubborn unwillingness to •listen• to educators is not the primary cause of the district’s problems, but it has been a major exacerbating factor. She’s treated the union as her enemy in a zero-sum game. That’s disqualifying.
2/
(The primary cause of the district’s problems, grossly oversimplified but roughly true: MN state funding changed in the 2000s in ways that — by design! — punished districts with more immigrants, more charter schools, more students of color. We are now ~20 years into systemic underfunding.
The most recent legislative session marked a big shift in a better direction, but that funding is (1) at least a decade late, (2) not equal to what was lost, and (3) only just now starting to arrive.)
3/
On another note, @naomikritzer’s roundup of the presidential race tells you nothing you don’t already know if you’re at all paying attention to politics — but as always, her writing is a delight to read, and it’s one of the crispest summaries I’ve read of the big picture:
https://naomikritzer.com/2024/10/17/election-2024-us-president/
And who knows? For folks in your life who aren’t plugged in to politics, this writeup might be a good one to share.
/end #uspol
@inthehands @naomikritzer I like the article about the board seat but there are some pretty serious issues with the presidential article write-up.
With full disclosure that I'm only voting Green b/c I live in Alabama and PSL isn't on the ballot there
@level2wizard
Yeah, we’re going to have to agree to disagree with that one.
Stein is a con artist. She pops up every year to capitalize on the •highly• justified discontent with the Democratic Party, pockets the money, and invests it in the capitalist machine between elections (big oil, Wall St, pharma, you name it) while doing fuckall to actually shift the general electorate left •or• make third parties viable in this country.
No thank you.
I sympathize with where you're coming from here -- and again, I am not in a swing state; I would be voting for PSL if votes for Claudia de la Cruz would count here; and, come to think of it, I hate GPUSA and have since before they were the current iteration of the greens.
Butch Ware, the Green VP pick, is worth listening to. Perhaps it is also worth noting that politicians pocketing the money is, in fact, what they do. It's astounding how our congresscritters get v rich somehow /1
@inthehands The other choices in AL are the libertarian party (god, no), and the constitution party or whatever they're calling themselves these days (god, no), and rfk jr (lol, lmao, and god no)
/fin