News

The Columbus community offered Bienvenido! to Marina Alvarenga from El Salvador on November 1, 2017. Alvarenga was on a tour through the country to speak with Central American activists about the current conditions in El Salvador and her campaign for Cabinet Department in 2018.

The event served as a reunion for former members of the Columbus, Ohio – Copapayo, El Salvador Sister City Project, an organization that was active throughout the late 80s to mid-90s that sent several delegations of local activists to bring humanitarian aid to the Salvadoran village during that country’s civil war – as well as other activist groups such as Pastors for Peace.

A big chunk of American democracy is riding on Tuesday’s Virginia election.

The outcome could turn on how well Democrats protect the right to vote….and the right to have the votes accurately counted. 

If Democrat and anti-Trump activists do not work to guarantee everyone’s access to the polls, they could very well lose the election.  The GOP has perfected the use of Jim Crow tactics to prevent from voting countless black, Hispanic and other ethnic citizens by electronic and other means.  The Democrats have been weak at best at protecting those votes. 

They can also expect a “last minute surge” for Republican candidates, followed by “glitches” in electronic voting machines, especially in rural areas where election boards are controlled by Republicans.  If experience in states like Ohio, New Mexico, Wisconsin and elsewhere are any indicator, ballots will be “found” for the Republicans and “lost” for the Democrats in key swing districts.  These could easily determine the outcome. 

Columbus is a city where an authoritarian Democratic Party machine holds firm control over all city politics, backed by the checkbooks of their suburban millionaire and billionaire allies, like Les Wexner and Ron Pizzuti. The Republican Party is pretty much a nonentity. Green Party candidates have tried to take on the machine as a third party without luck so far.

Ohio plans to execute Alva Campbell on November 15, 2017, in revenge for his 1997 murder of Charles Dials, a crime to which Campbell confessed and pled guilty. However, the person Alva Campbell is today is not the same person he was when he committed his crimes.

Campbell’s case was infamous in central Ohio. He feigned illness and attacked the lone deputy sheriff who had left Campbell unrestrained while escorting him to the hospital. He then carjacked Charles Dials and ended up killing the 18-year-old before being re-captured. None of this is in dispute.

Also not disputable: Alva Campbell is a very sick man[AB1] who may well die “naturally,” possibly within months. The optics are ugly. The photograph of Campbell was taken in late September. A clemency application by Campbell’s attorneys thoroughly lists all of Campbell’s medical conditions at length. A short excerpt from the application states:

Ohio House Bill 381: This bill introduced in October is new attempt to bail out Ohio’s two nuclear power plants, Davis-Besse and Perry on Lake Erie. Proponents say it has more support than the previous incarnation, HB 178 introduced earlier this year, since it asks for a smaller subsidy. Both bills have an entirely fictitious premise, which they call ZEN, or zero emissions nuclear. Nuclear power has zero emissions? Enormous amounts of carbon dioxide are produced in the front and back ends of nuclear power. While the nuclear chain reaction itself does not release greenhouse gases, it produces the deadliest substance on earth – radioactive waste. HB 381 would be paid for by increasing ratepayer electric bills. Call your Ohio House Member and tell her/him NO to HB 381.  

Over a hundred concentration camps now colonize Ohio’s landscape including a federal prison, 87 county jails, 25 state-funded adult prisons, three privately-operated adult prisons, seven juvenile prisons and five Immigration Custom and Enforcement cages. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, “...every state in this country is more likely to incarcerate its residents than almost every nation on this planet.” Ohio’s incarceration rate is greater than the incarceration rates of Cuba, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Iraq, China, Haiti, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, or Pakistan. The State of Ohio has approximately 262,000 people on probation/parole, 50,257 adult prison inmates (ODRC, Sept 2017) an estimated 18,190 jail inmates and 505 juvenile inmates. Its adult prison population is superseded only by Pennsylvania (50,580), New York (50,864), Georgia (54,353), Florida (99,119), California (131,436), Texas (147,053) and the Federal government (196,500).

OCTOBER 12, 2017 – COLUMBUS, OHIO: The Estate of Jaron Ben-Rasu Thomas has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Columbus Division of Police. The lawsuit brings civil rights, wrongful death, survivor and loss of consortium claims. The family seeks declaratory, injunctive, and monetary relief for the violations of the Fourth Amendment rights of Thomas to be free from excessive use of force and his common-law right to be free from reckless conduct directly and proximately causing his pain, emotional distress and death. The lawsuit was filed on October 12, 2017 in the Southern District of the United States Federal District Court. 

A viral cell phone video of a nine-minute long police assault of an unarmed man inside a Livingston Avenue convenience store on September 1, horrified and sickened many people who viewed it.

The video, shot by a bystander inside the store, shows a black man being attacked and brutally beaten by men, who look like skinheads, who turned out to be plainclothes members of the Columbus Police gang unit. The store owner insists he did not call the police on Timothy Davis, who had not committed any crime in the store. Later, the officers can be heard on police bodycam video saying they followed Davis into the store because there was a warrant for his arrest.

Politicians reversing themselves on key policy positions is often portrayed as weakness. Governor John Kasich has surprised both Republicans and Democrats by taking principled positions that directly contravene the positions of his party – most notably on health care and immigration reforms. Whatever else you might think of him, it’s a hard sell to call Governor Kasich weak.

My dad slumbered quietly as the Twin Towers fell sixteen years ago. He stirred and murmured, “What’s that?” I replied, “Nothing Daddy,” even though my eyes glued to the TV in disbelief. In that moment, I was glad Alzheimer’s had stolen his memory.

As a kid, I wondered why my dad, a brilliant steel industry engineer, jetted each week to New York and back. When the World Trade Center complex opened in 1973, I knew. He bragged in 1993, “We build them to last!” when terrorists detonated a bomb in a garage below one of the Towers, injuring many, but leaving the structure intact. This time, I watched in horror and wondered how Saudi pilots could destroy America’s most iconic buildings. I needed to look back only one week for a possible answer.

Seven hundred miles away in rural southwest Michigan, the feds were cleaning up a bloody standoff that left marijuana advocates Tom Crosslin and his partner Rollie Rohm dead at the hands of FBI snipers.