Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Feeding Our Future Was a Perfect Storm
It was supposed to feed thousands of kids during the pandemic. Instead, the folks behind Feeding Our Future allegedly spent $250 million on personal luxuries. A staggering 70 people have been charged (there have been seven convictions so far), and it looks like we’re just getting started.
So, how does something of this scope happen? A perfect storm of grifters with the right connections and oblivious people in power, according to this really great rundown of who knew what from J. Patrick Coolican and Kayseh Magan for Minnesota Reformer. (Shoutout to the Reformer for really banging the fraud-accountability drum in recent years.)
Those ties range from the optimistically credulous to the questionably connected. There’s Minneapolis City Council Member Jamal Osman, whose wife ran one of the shuttered meal sites (so far she has not been charged); Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, whose former policy aide Abdi Salah was feeding him talking points from (now convicted) FOF leader Aimee Bock; and Attorney General Keith Ellison, who at one point was supportive of FOF, seemingly unaware that his office was representing one of the defrauded parties at the time.
“That’s what’s so striking about the case, though it’s often overlooked: The perpetrators had political ties to influential Democrats,” Coolican and Kayseh Magan conclude.
Disgraceland’s Future in Limbo
Last week, south Minneapolis’s Disgraceland announced that, after over 30 years of shows, the underground punk venue would be no more. “Hey everyone we are heartbroken to announce that the owners of beautiful DISGRACELAND are this time for real selling and flipping the house,” organizers explain in a social media post, noting that as renters they would need to be out by the end of the month.
But don’t pour one out yet, as there could still be a reprieve. According to an update on Disgraceland’s Instagram feed, the owners, who had previously rebuffed any talk of selling to the punks, are now open to offers. “Unfortunately none of our current crew are in a position to make this purchase but we are working with someone who can maybe do that,” the Disgraceland team writes. “We also have a realtor.”
So now what was planned as Disgraceland’s two-day farewell show this weekend has turned into a fundraiser, featuring a cookout and a packed lineup.
Another Local Lawsuit for ICE
It’s getting to be routine, and that’s scary. Last week, Chinese grad student Ziliang Jin, who is studying cartography and geographic data systems at the University of Minnesota, learned that ICE had terminated his visa due to a “student identified in criminal records check.” The crime? Speeding and parking tickets. Becky Z. Dernbach writes for Sahan Journal:
A review of Minnesota criminal records reveals that Jin has four convictions for minor traffic violations: two convictions for “abandoned motor vehicle,” one for parking where temporary “no parking” signs were posted, and a speeding ticket for driving 80 miles an hour where the speed limit was 60.
The lawsuit argues that these petty misdemeanors would not ordinarly meet the legal threshold for deportation. “The government is trying to remove him because he has not learned how to park a car in the winter in Minnesota and a speeding ticket,” says David Wilson, a lawyer on Jin’s case.
So far, Jin is one of seven students (that we know of) in Minnesota who have had their visas revoked. Two others have already filed lawsuits: Doğukan Günaydın, a Turkish MBA student at the U of M who has been detained at the Sherburne County Jail for nearly a month, and Thai nursing student Rattanand Ratsantiboon, who was previously enrolled at Metro State. Both had been flagged for DUI convictions.
Leave This Little Free Library Alone!
Libraries are awesome; this is Racket’s official stance on the matter, and that includes Little Free Libraries, the cutest way to find your next read. But not everyone loves community joy. Case in point: Little Free Library No. 53947 in Crystal has been vandalized twice over the past eight years. Not cool!
“It happened again last night where all the books were removed and put on the wet ground,” writes Rebecca L. Holloway via a GoFundMe page. “The library was pulled off the post and left open to collect rain, a sitting stump was pulled out of the ground, and the library flag post was pulled up.” Double not cool!
While Holloway says the lil library in question is “lucky” to have “only” been targeted twice, the public response has been faith restoring. So far, the fundraiser has made $550 of an $800 goal. The library owners say they want to rebuild, this time with a bench and a special section for children’s books. Any extra funds will be donated to other LFLs in the area.
