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For security officers in central Ohio, the struggle for a union contract has been a long one. In April 2013, security officers and janitors held a rally for a living wage and affordable health care outside the Motorists Insurance building in downtown Columbus.

“I’m committed to my job, but it’s hard to get by on low wages with no benefits,” said Thurman Elliot, a full-time security officer employed by Allied Universal. “My wife is sick, and because I don’t have affordable health care through my job, we both have to rely on Medicaid.” 

Decades ago, downtown office buildings employed security workers in-house, with decent pay, benefits, and pensions. But in recent years these jobs have been outsourced to contract companies who have paid security officers only slightly over the state minimum wage, with few or no company benefits.

The immensely powerful, deeply moving and historic protests of our nation’s athletes against the absurd rantings of our Great Dictator make one thing abundantly clear: the diversity of this nation is not going away.

But The Star Spangled Banner should. It’s a lousy song with a racist message.  We need a new anthem—-or to acknowledge many of them.

Likewise the dotard illegitimately occupying the White House. We can do better.

So let’s combine the campaigns.

Words to the Star Spangled Banner were written by Francis Scott Key, a slaveowner. He commemorated the failure of the British to conquer Baltimore in the War of 1812, an utterly useless conflict. The Brits had just burned our nation’s capital, partly in response to our burning their Canadian headquarters at York, now Toronto.

It is not easy being number one. Columbus is the best in the nation at only one thing. When it comes to the killing of black people, the Columbus Police Department is the New York Yankees, a dynasty team of history. Although they end more black lives per capita than any other metropolis in the nation, this time they did not extend their Babe Ruth like record as well as they clearly intended.

Timothy Davis walked into a convenience store in his own neighborhood to get change. Undercover officers followed him in, attacked him, handcuffed him, and continued to beat him five on one. He was stripped naked and left in a coma. Four uniformed officers showed up to join in the beating. Video clearly shows cops screaming for him to put his arms behind his back while holding his arms forward. The video clearly one cop repeatedly stomping on his head. Another screams “Got that taser? Tase this motherfucker!” The scene rapidly spirals into an orgy of violence where 10 white policemen beat him, while one attempts to block the camera and the store owner tries to seize the camera. Clearly they are not proud of what they are doing.

Why does it seem, ever since the Charlottesville incident, that so many racist roads lead to Ohio? James Alex Fields, Jr. of Maumee, Ohio, ran his car into the counter-protestors, killing Heather Heyer and injuring several others. The “Huffington Post” of the white supremacist movement, The Daily Stormer website, is the creation of Worthington’s own Linworth High School graduate Andrew Anglin. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are 27 white supremacist groups in Ohio.

It may not be just the overt racist groups we should consider – sometimes the haters could be civil servants, like firemen from northeastern Ohio, as the following story reveals.

Shawnee Township Fire Chief Todd Truesdale’s 45th birthday inspired his fellow firefighters to throw him a party with a Nazi-themed birthday cake – decorating the cake are the words “German Fire Dept” encircling a swatiska, on the left-hand corner sits a tall replica of an oven also with a swastika on the side, and cake decorating frosting depicts presumably Jewish people marching toward the oven.

My name is Micah Naziri. I am a doctoral student; have penned numerous published articles and books; I am months away from getting my PhD and then beginning teaching part time at a local university; I am a business man, a real estate investor and an activist.

Last Saturday, August 19, I was asked to attend a protest in the City of Columbus. Myself and a small group of activists with largely executive protection, martial arts and military backgrounds, were asked to be at the Christopher Columbus statue protest at Columbus City Hall in dual roles as activists and security. The concern was that an incident like the domestic terrorist attack in Charlottesville would happen here.

As we have at numerous other protests where security was needed, we showed up wearing relevant political anti-racism t-shirts and concealed our lower faces in the event that local Neo-Nazis showed up and took pictures to identify us. We had visible, legally-carried weapons – not to intimidate the public or the police, but to intimidate the Nazis who had pledge to counter protest.

Leaders of Everyday People for Positive Change announce their support for the Fraternal Order of Police Capital City Lodge #9’s recent vote of “no confidence” in Columbus elected officials. Jonathan Beard, a resident of Franklin Park, the Ward 55-elected Central Committee member of the Franklin County Democratic Party and chair of Everyday People, stated: “We come at this from very different perspectives – on one issue we differ dramatically from the FOP: to a person we believe Officer Rosen deserved to be fired for his continuing abuses of power. However, we stand in 100 percent unity with FOP Capitol City Lodge #9 in the belief that our city council does not deserve the confidence of the Columbus public.”

To understand the status of marijuana in Ohio, one must start at the beginning. No, not in prehistoric times as one of humanity’s oldest crops, nor in 1851 when medicinal efficacy was first documented in the “Report of the Ohio State Medical Committee on Cannabis Indica.” Skip past the Uniform Controlled Substances Act of 1969 that Ohio used to classify the plant as so vile as to cause the arrest of 20,000 residents each year. Move beyond legislation that Republican Governor “Big Jim” Rhodes signed in 1975 making Ohio the sixth state to decriminalize small quantities.

Well HALLELUYAH!!!

Al Gore now says he opposes the Electoral College.

A mere 16 years of lethal silence has been shattered!

Eight years of George W. Bush and eight months of Donald Trump ago Gore won the US popular vote by some 500,000 ballots. 

But the Electoral College intervened.

He went to the Supreme Court to protect a recount in Florida that would have won him the election.  But the infamous Bush v. Gore shut him down, 5-4.

Despite all the money and public effort that went into trying to protect the White House from George W. Bush, Al Gore went silent.  He resurfaced with a high-budget film about climate change. 

But Gore has said and done virtually nothing about the stolen election of 2000… or about protecting any US elections thereafter.

He continues to ignore then-Gov. Jeb Bush, his opponent’s brother, stripping some 90,000 black and Hispanic voters off the registration rolls in an election allegedly decided by 537 votes.  Since 2000, Al Gore has done nothing stop the massive disenfranchisement that helped sweep Trump into the White House. 

Built by native peoples roughly 2,000 years ago, the Ohio Earthworks – such as Serpent Mound and the Newark Octagon – are on the threshold ofachieving global recognition by the United Nations.

An Ohio Earthworks application for World Heritage Site inscription as designated by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has been in the works by Ohio archaeologists and other experts for over ten years and is set for submission sometime in 2018.

Currently, the Ohio Earthworks are on the “US Tentative List”, but those working on the application told the Free Press they believe it’s just a matter of time before Serpent Mound and the other earthworks become inscribed. There are over 1,000 UNESCO sites across the globe, but Ohio has none.

Inscription would no doubt rectify the past as European settlers and their ancestors demolished many of Ohio’s pre-historic effigies, mounds and burial sites, seeing them as nothing more than piles of dirt.

Angst, fear and loathing are the overwhelming emotions six months into the disastrous Trump presidency. Just exactly who, or what, do we have at the helm of the United States Ship of State, and the little red button that could end life as we know it?            

This month’s Free Press cover depicts a Trump regime floundering in rough sea waters, with the Don confident, but clueless.

The planet and its leaders are watching in horror as the ship appears to be capsizing. Trump and his fools enrich themselves, all the while gleefully decimating domestic social programs, dooming the environment and destroying our nation’s relationships around the world.

Charles Wince, the artist, is asking: just who is steering this ship of fools?

A buffoon? A bully? An oft-bankrupt billionaire businessman? A Benito Mussolini in the making?

Simply put, what we have is an international criminal hell-bent on continuing his crime spree within and without his corrupt administration. Making the world safe for oligarchy.

Casinos, luxury hotels equals money laundering