Category: Constituent Rally

On The Issue of Student Debt & Hunger in Southern MN

7/25/2019

About 20 constituents came together on July 25, 2019 to share our concerns about student debt and hunger here in CD-1. When Rep. Hagedorn and his staff close themselves off from voices in the district, they remain under-informed about the issues facing constituents and are, therefore, incapable of addressing them. Jim Hagedorn, HEAR OUR VOICES!

In 2018, a MSU survey found that almost one third of its students had trouble affording food. Rep. Jim Hagedorn caused quite a stir a few months ago when I claimed that people don't go hungry in southern Minnesota. Since then, he has doubled down on these claims saying it was praise for the productivity of Minnesota farmers. No word about the fact that many people can not afford to buy that food. And at our last meeting with his staff, they did not seem to have any knowledge that student hunger was even a problem.

On the debilitating student debt, Hagedorn has said, in essence, it's their own fault. They chose poorly. And during a visit to a group of low-income high school students, he said that they should not expect the government to help them shoulder the cost of college.

As state legislatures cut support for higher education, tuition is rising at astronomical rates at the same time that a college degree is increasingly mandatory for stable wages and participation in the workforce. Sky-high student loans and interest rates are crippling workers just starting out who, instead of investing in homes and businesses and starting families, are drowning in debt.

People cannot be free if they can’t afford the lives they want to lead. And a democracy like ours cannot function without an informed, educated citizenry.

And now, Trump is threatening to kick $3 million people of food stamps. “The new proposal says that if your gross income is 130 percent above the federal poverty line — for a single person, that's a little more than $16,000 — and if you have more than $2,250 in assets, you will no longer be able to receive benefits.”

We call on Rep. Hagedorn to make a statement acknowledging the problem of student poverty and hunger in our district and pledge to vote against any proposal that would deny your constituents access to life-supporting programs like SNAP.

Indivisible Gets Physically Locked out of Rep. Hagedorn's Office

6/27/2019

Here we are (35 of us) at Congressman Hagedorn’s office in the Brett’s building for our regular weekly visit to share our concerns about the humanitarian crisis at the border. When we got there, Brett’s building employees warned us that we would not be able to go up as a group, they called the police on us (police said we were not doing anything wrong), building employees insisted on escorting us to the office in groups, and then they locked the door.

Hagedorn office staff said they would limit us to 15 minutes *total for our whole group* in future and blamed us for disrupting their work day. This *is* their work. Their job is to serve constituents. We are constituents. How dare they use a privately owned office building to clamp down on our democratic rights.

Rep. Hagedorn's "Telephone Town Hall" Isn't A Town Hall

6/18/2019

Every week, a group of us has been visiting Jim Rep. Jim Hagedorn’s office to ask for an open, accessible town hall so that he could hear from his constituents and announced publicly in advance so as many people as possible could attend. We heard that he held a “telephone town hall” in which some people received phone calls inviting them to participate in a town hall already in session. In the middle of a work day with no prior notice or announcement on social media or on his website.

On June 16th, in response to Rep. Hagedorn's "telephone town hall", we decided to hold a special office visit event in honor of Father’s Day and the founding fathers’s vision of representative democracy - one in which our representative is meant to listen to his constituents and work to represent their interests in Washington. It is for this reason that there are in-District work days and that representatives are up for election every two years.

31 people came out for our (Founding) Father's Day visit to Jim Hagedorn's office! We gathered in Jackson Park and enjoyed a speech by "Patrick Henry", sang songs, pledged allegiance to the flag, wore costumes in honor of the idea of democracy that the founding fathers created, and then we went into the office in small groups and shared our frustrations with last week's conference call masquerading as a town hall and shared our thoughts about Hagedorn's votes and divisive remarks.

Forward>>

On The Issue of Student Debt & Hunger in Southern MN

Indivisible Gets Physically Locked out of Rep. Hagedorn's Office

Rep. Hagedorn's "Telephone Town Hall" Isn't A Town Hall

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