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   In keeping with a long tradition of protesting the celebration of Columbus Day, dozens of people gathered today, October 12, 2015 by the statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus City Hall. Signs read "Columbus was a mass murderer," "Tear down this statue," "Stop Celebrating Genocide," "Abolish Columbus Day," and more. Speakers talked about how Columbus' visit to the U.S. brought oppression and death to the indigenous people and fomented racsism and homophobia. The crowd included a diverse group of people including Native American activists. A march to the OSU campus followed the rally. At the lead was a banner proclaiming today as "Indigenous People's Day." Not long ago, after many years of protest by Native Americans and supporters, the Santa Maria ship was removed from the river by City Hall, and City Council once declared the week in October that included Columbus Day "Indigenous People's Week." There was no response from City Council today except for police presence during the rally at City Hall.

The Poindexter Legacy Committee (“PLC”), a project of the Coalition for the Responsible and Sustainable Development of the Near East Side (“CRSDNES,” or “the Coalition”) and the Poindexter Historic Advisory Committee, submitted on September 22nd a proposal for the repurposing and rehabilitation of the last two remaining historic buildings at Poindexter Village, the former public housing community on the Near East Side.
  The owner, Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority (“CMHA”) has held off on demolition of the last two buildings after community objection to the mass demolition of the historic complex – the first public housing community in the nation addressing housing needs for black Americans in the segregated 1940s. Its opening was attended by President Roosevelt, as he sought to help Americans recover from the Great Depression, and launched public housing as one means of improving the lives of Americans.

The Ohio State University endowment reached the $3.6 billion mark in 2014 and ranked 22nd out of 800-plus US public and private colleges and universities, this according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
  The Ohio State endowment, or “Long Term Investment Pool,” is managed by both internal and external fund managers, and like many college endowments, is managed for the long-term with relatively low risk. The endowment’s yields for the most part are earned from global equity, hedge funds and real assets.
  The endowment is heavily financed by the university’s current “But for Ohio State” campaign, the largest fund raising endeavor in university history, as over 230,000 donors in fiscal year 2015 contributed $405 million.
  Any Buckeye alum will tell you the university has upped its game when it comes to soliciting donations for the endowment, as regular phone calls from Ohio State phone banks continue. And no doubt the endowment has helped the university pay for capital improvements, research and retaining top faculty.

Issue 1: Ohio Bipartisan Redistricting Commission Amendment

What’s the issue?

   Issue 1 attempts to end the blatant partisan gerrymandering of Ohio’s state legislative districts.

ger·ry·man·der (ˈjerēˌmandər/), verb. Definition: gerund or present participle:
“gerrymandering” -- to manipulate the boundaries of (an electoral constituency)
so as to favor one party or class.

    Issue 1 creates a redistricting commission, including members from the two major parties, that would redraw Ohio’s House and Senate districts. The plan requires that four out of seven members of the commission vote to approve a redistricting plan and one of the votes must come from the major party that is not in the majority on the commission. Essentially, Issue 1 gives Ohio’s major opposition party veto power to prevent unfair district rigging.

Pros and Cons

Washington is girding itself for what will be an historic visit by Pope Francis this week. So many are expected to flock into the city that government employees are encouraged to work at home. The pope will address a joint session of Congress, celebrate mass, meet with the president and tend to the impoverished. He may meet with the low-wage workers who serve food to the senators and not just with the senators. He will then go to Philadelphia and New York, give an address on climate change and possibly celebrate mass on Wall Street.

Already the political crossfire has begun, with conservatives assailing the pope for not understanding modern markets. One columnist condemned him as a false prophet, standing against “modernity, rationality, science and … the spontaneous creativity of open societies.”

The Columbus Free Press has been no great fan of city council president Andrew Ginther’s undistinguished career in the public sector; his face graced our 2013 Halloween cover, and we invited readers to use it as their Halloween mask as Ginther seems to be something that he was not – that he was a Republican masquerading as a Democrat, in our article “Gintherstein – A Democrat with Republican Chops,” http://columbusfreepress.com/article/gintherstein-democrat-republican-chops)”. And now it looks like the wheels are coming off his planned coronation as the city’s Mayor, and we feel a little nostalgic about that. I mean – if we don’t have Andy Ginther around, who in the hell will we have to expose or lampoon anymore? His tenure has provided such rich material for alternative press as he has turned Columbus into a crony-supporting corrupt political backwater of a town, while he stumbles from one abuse of public trust to the next.

The latest politician to leap toward the GOP nomination is widely known as America’s most anti-green governor. But he has a critical decision coming up that could help change that. Ohio Gov. John Kasich has established a national reputation as a leading enemy of renewable energy and enhanced energy efficiency.
   When he took office in 2011, he opened fire by killing a $400 million federal grant to restore passenger rail service between Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati. Columbus is the largest capital city in the western world that people cannot get to by train. It also has no internal commuter rail, making it what some have called “the mid-sized town technology forgot.” The rail grant had been painstakingly crafted over the better part of a decade by a broad bi-partisan coalition. It was poised to create hundreds of jobs and provide new opportunity for a number of small towns languishing along the restoration route.

Sara Nuber Thomas is a local amateur archaeologist who writes a blog called Expedition Finn: things to do in Ohio with a kid. The blog is named after her son of course, and through her day-trip expeditions she came across a 100-year-old archaeological map that showed the Central Ohio region dotted with Native American mounds and other peculiar looking earthworks. They wanted to see the mounds for themselves, and so they set out.

But what they found probably won’t surprise anyone, and she took pictures of what they saw and posted them on her blog. She ended up capturing images of aging country roads and newly built suburban houses, and of farmland too, but all the pictures were barren of anything created by the Native American pre-history cultures that once flourished here.

Black Lives Matter activists are under surveillance and attack here in Columbus.
   A Columbus Police report obtained by the Columbus Free Press indicates that the police would have been justified in shooting Torri Sablan, a prominent local civil rights activist, as she rode along with friend Ashley Henderson when they transported Alexander Paraskos to the hospital on August 1st this year.
    The police report included the chilling abbreviation Just. Hom. Circ. This means “justifiable homicide circumstance” – indicating the police would have been justified in killing Sablan.
   Police records describe LEOKA circumstances, indicating a “Law Enforcement Officer Killed or Assaulted.”
   How a going-away party thrown by activists and an innocent asthma attack turned into a potential police homicide situation is hotly disputed. Sablan and Henderson are black females and Paraskos is a transgender male -- all well-known political activists.