Local
Thursday, January 9, 2025 at 6pm
A presentation and discussion on unions and the state of the labor movement in Ohio.
Join us in person at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church (30 W Woodruff Ave, Columbus, OH 43210) or online at tinyurl.com/CORSmeeting.
Ohio’s Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones wants to restart his ICE contract during the second Trump presidency. However, Butler County Jail officers abused immigrants and violated the jail’s contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) repeatedly during the first Trump administration.
In 2021, Sheriff Jones claimed he terminated the Butler County Jail’s ICE contract himself after claiming the Biden administration was going to fire him. A lawsuit to hold this jail accountable for abuses against immigrants remains pending in federal court.
Sheriff Jones – as many Ohio immigrants know too well – is an ultra-conservative anti-immigration blowhard from outside Cincinnati who is a regular guest on right-wing media such as Glenn Beck. He has been referred to as Ohio’s “mini-Trump” and has struck fear in hardworking Ohio immigrants who work jobs rejected by white American workers. Butler County, for instance, has a large chicken rendering plant where many workers are Hispanic.
This article first appeared on Ohio Capital Journal
Environmental activists have been pressing the company buying an Ohio coal plant said to be the nation’s deadliest to retire the facility. But that seems unlikely, given statements it made in a regulatory filing that it provided to the Ohio Capital Journal.
The buyer, Energy Capital Partners, has boasted of helping plants make the transition away from coal. It hasn’t answered questions about its plans for Gavin, but in a Dec. 11 filing before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, it expressed no such plans for the Gavin Plant.
“As with any electric generation facility, (Energy Capital Partners) and Javelin expect that the Gavin facility… will continue to operate for so long as they are legally able to do so on an economic basis,” it said.
Tuesday, January 7th at 6:00pm
Buckeye Environmental Network will be holding an informational webinar for the community and media to learn more about the ARCH2 project and its implications. Presenters include: eastern Ohio-based environmental scientist and retired chemistry teacher Dr. Randi Pokladnik, who will be presenting the health and environmental impacts, and Sean O’Leary, a researcher with the Ohio River Valley Institute, who will discuss the economic impacts of hydrogen and how the region has already suffered economically from fracking.
Register for the webinar at the following link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vduyqrzsrHt0C6ZX8B9f5CQDFQBv605Ya#/registration
The freezing cold bites hardest on those who don’t have a home to head to at the end of the day. It doesn’t stop. Some may be lucky enough to have an abandoned home (“bando”) that provides shelter but not utilities. There are encampments with tents around the city that provide strength in numbers. Shared resources last longer and different hustles combine to provide more varied goods. But not long enough if the City of Columbus bulldozes your encampment after threatening “trespassers” with arrest.
On the night of the Winter Solstice – the longest night for those with nowhere to go – candlelight vigils are held across the US mourning and remembering the unhoused residents who have passed. According to the Columbus Coalition for the Homeless, 112 local unhoused passed in 2024 in Franklin County. The Coalition believes 400 unhoused passed over the previous three years.
I’m personally honored to inform you that Palestine’s entry to this year’s Academy Awards, the brilliant film FROM GROUND ZERO, has recently been voted by the members of the Motion Picture Academy — one of only 15 films worldwide — for this year’s Oscar shortlist for BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE. I am a proud Executive Producer of this acclaimed movie — AND IT OPENED TODAY in theaters across America.
FROM GROUND ZERO, the first film ever from Gaza to be elected to the shortlist for the Oscar in the category that honors what used to be known as the Best Foreign Film of the Year, is unlike any movie you’ve ever seen — filmed during a mass slaughter of over 50,000 civilians, the vast majority of them children, women and the elderly. In a brisk and powerful one hour and fifty-two minutes, it weaves together 22 short films made by 22 courageous Palestinian filmmakers living and surviving in Gaza over this past year — all of it told in under 2 hours!
President Trump may commute the sentences or pardon convicted criminals who have broken the law for him. Anyone involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the capital may get these considerations. Rudolph Giuliani may get a pardon so he won't have to pay out any of the millions of dollars of claims against him. The president may even pardon himself and other close friends and relatives for crimes they may have committed. He might not even reveal these pardons publicly until they are needed like having a "Get out of jail free" card. As a result, he might not have to pay E. Jean Carroll anything or anyone else who has ever had a judgement against him. We may only be able to call him a "former" 34-time convicted felon.
Many farmers who supported Trump may be surprised when he helps put them out of business. New INS raids will deplete fields of migrant workers who do agricultural labor that no American would do. Many of these farmers may also be arrested for trying to help poor people support their families. Expect food prices to skyrocket.
With the genocide in Gaza far advanced, and having lost the recent election when supporting peace might have won it, the Biden administration -- on its way out the door -- has told Congress it wants to send yet more weapons to Israel, the majority of which it would take a year or several years to deliver.
The incoming Trump administration plans to continue the slaughter and destruction.
Is this last-minute proposal from Biden part of a competition for greatest support of mass killing? Or is it a move to demonstrate bipartisanship before the storm, by doing something that most of both parties' elected officials support?
Either way, this is a time to make clear to everyone in Washington that the demand for peace and compliance with laws and basic human decency has not gone away, that -- on the contrary -- it is growing.
Sundays, January 5, 12, 26 and Feb 2, 2025, 3:00 - 4:30 PM
The Israeli war on Gaza – widely considered genocide – did not begin on October 7, 2023. This series will look at the background of Zionism and colonialism that laid the foundation for ongoing wars and today's violence in the Middle East. Palestinian dispossession, we will see, began more than a century ago.
Jan 5: CONQUEST AND COLONIALISM IN THE MIDDLE EAST DURING THE 20TH CENTURY: The roots of the contemporary Middle East go back to the First World War and its aftermath; the birth of Zionism as a political movement.
Jan 12: MANDATES AND REPRESSION IN PALESTINE AND BEYOND: The failure of the British colonial attempt to shape Palestine in conformance with the Balfour Declaration; Palestinian resistance and the first proposals for partition; Zionist terror; British, French colonialism in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
Jan 26: ISRAELI INDEPENDENCE AND “NAKBA”: The UN proposed partition of Palestine, Israeli declaration of independence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from 1947 to the present; Arab and Palestinian resistance.