Affording Your Life with Attorney General Keith Ellison

Welcome back to Affording Your Life! We are kicking off Season 4 by talking all about inflation, price gouging, and what the recent bank failures mean for everyday people.  

My guest today is Dr. Lindsay Owens is the Executive Director of the Groundwork Collaborative. Widely known for her ability to communicate pressing economic concepts and arguments, Lindsay has been credited with changing the way we understand inflation, by leading the charge to expose—and articulate—the role of firm pricing power and corporate profiteering in price increases.  

For the season three finale, we're continuing last week's conversation about the Fairview and Sanford Health merger. Carrie and Elizabeth are back to talk more about the Fairview and Sanford Health merger. Carrie is the Manager of the AGO’s Charities Division and Elizabeth is an Assistant Attorney General in the Civil, Wage Theft, and Antitrust Division.  

Affording Your Life will be back for Season 4 on April 12.

In November 2022, Fairview and Sanford Health announced their intention to merge their organizations. As part of that process, our office is conducting a review of the transaction. Here to help us understand the merger and what it means for Minnesotans, I have Carrie Washington and Elizabeth Odette. Carrie is the Manager of the AGO’s Charities Division and Elizabeth is an Assistant Attorney General in the Civil, Wage Theft, and Antitrust Division.  

Today's episode is the first episode of our series on the merger. Tune in next week for part two!

Today’s guest is Joe Meyer, the Manager of the Residential Utilities Division here in the Minnesota AG’s office. Joe and his team advocate for residential and small business consumers when they have issues with their utility services and take action against utility companies when they violate the law and hurt Minnesotans.

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The mission of my office is to help Minnesotans afford their lives with dignity and justice, and our Consumer Action Division is critical to advancing this mission. Today’s guest is Parker Maertz, the Manager of our office’s Consumer Action Division. We are going to talk about the function of the Consumer Action Division and how our office can help you. 

This week on Affording Your Life, I am joined by Claudia Lainez, to talk about her experience growing up in El Salvador and her work as an organizer, fighting against the injustices faced by workers, including wage theft. Claudia is the Worker's Center Coordinator at COPAL, a grassroots organization that seeks to impact the quality of life for Latinos in MN.

For the first episode of 2023, I called my friend, Terri Gerstein to discuss the issue of wage theft, the importance of prosecuting employers who steal from their workers, and the next frontier for worker protections. 

Manufactured home communities provide a great source of affordable housing that can be modern and well-maintained, nothing like their outdated public perception. However, keeping housing conditions healthy and thriving requires vigilance and a willingness to challenge ownership and management companies that don't keep their end of the deal. Assistant Attorney General Katherine Kelly and Investigator Nina Grove lead our office's Special Outreach and Protection Unit, which has protected the rights of hundreds of renters in the past year. 

We visited the residents of Viking Terrace in Northfield, Minnesota to hear about how they stood up to shoddy management— and won. Katherine and Nina also discuss how our office can help anyone finding themselves in a similar situation. 

Special thanks to the community members that shared their experiences with us: Jorge and George Zuccolotto, Dawn DeLacruz, Nathaly Sanchez Hernandez, Mar Valdecantos, and Pastor Abe Johnson of Emmaus Baptist Church. 

Protecting Minnesota family farmers is a top priority of the Minnesota Attorney General's Office. This episode is a recast from 2020 when I sat down with Assistant Attorney General Joe Meyer to talk about market consolidation in Agriculture and what we can do to create a more fair economy. 

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For the Season 3 kick-off, I chat with Richard Painter and Lindsay Owens about what's really going on with inflation. Spoiler alert: corporate greed. 

Richard Painter is a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. From February 2005 to July 2007, he was associate counsel to the president in the White House Counsel’s office, serving as the chief ethics lawyer for the president. 

This week we are talking about how to Prevent Evictions, with two Assistant Attorneys General, Katherine Kelly and Mike Goodwin, on the front-lines defending tenants. 

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The Season 2 launch is here. Attorney General Ellison kicks off Season 2: How to Afford Your Life in a Pandemic by giving an update on the work the Attorney General's Office has done to protect tenants, prevent price-gouging, and how to stay socially connected while we are physically apart.

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