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A headline in the Saturday, November 30 Columbus Dispatch screamed: “Family’s well not tainted by driller.” The lead asserts that, “Natural gas that caught fire after it bubbled from a faucet in a Portage County house did not come from a nearby shale well, state officials have concluded.” The question is, can we trust these state officials? The investigation conducted by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) needs to be closely examined. The ODNR is at best a “captured agency” which has been accused repeatedly of promoting the oil and gas industry and specifically fracking, the practice of horizontal drilling. The freepress.org reported earlier this year that formal complaints were filed against ODNR employees for falsifying “production records on wells.” Reports were also made to the FBI that the ODNR was covering up 1200 gas wells that were on record without tax ID numbers in southern Ohio.

Recently Ohio Right to Life brought a bill to the Ohio General Assembly that would change substantially the way adoptions are done in the state. HB 307, known as the Infant Adoption Reform Bill, shortens the time that an adoption in Ohio can be challenged post-finalization, decreases the time a man is eligible to file with the Putative Father Registry, permits individuals and couples to advertise for a child to adopt and increases the Ohio adoption tax credit from $1500 to $10,000. ORTL president Mike Gonidakis claims that these measures will reduce abortion rates and encourage adoption by relieving potential adoptive parents (popularly known in adoption reform as “paps”) from the stress and expense of a long drawn-out, often expensive, adoption process. There is nothing in the bill, however, to indicate how making the adoption process easier and cheaper will increase newborn adoption rates since newborns are traditionally in short supply. Nor does it address how to increase the adoption of hundreds of available children warehoused in the state's over-burdened foster care system.

By Joseph Mismas Managing Editor at Plunderbund.com The State Auditor’s Office released much-anticipated audit reports for JobsOhio and for Ohio’s Development Services Agency late last month that reveal some extremely disturbing shortcomings at both organizations, including a lack of procedures for identifying potential conflicts of interest and over one million dollars in undocumented payments. WHAT IS JOBSOHIO? Shortly after taking office, John Kasich, with the help of Ohio’s GOP-controlled legislature, created JobsOhio as a semi-private organization tasked with leading Ohio’s business development efforts. Much of the power and responsibility (and a lot of staff) from Ohio’s Department of Development (DOD) was transferred to JobsOhio, and the state agency was renamed the Ohio Development Services Agency (DSA). Unlike the state’s development departments, JobsOhio was made exempt from Ohio’s public records and ethics laws. The group was then given control of Ohio’s future state liquor profits to help fund its development efforts and pay its staff, some making over $200,000 per year.

Earlier this year the FBI and the state Inspector General’s office investigated mineral rights lease flipping and falsification of public records in Noble County. Environmentalists at the time claimed it was a precursor to massive fracking planned in the rural Ohio area. One family affected by this was the Bonds. They charge that state officials are harassing them and covering up the theft of gas and mineral leases at the behest of Ohio Governor John Kasich and his quest to unleash the forces of fracking on rural Ohio. The investigation focuses on Form 7, a public record that is filed with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) to identify who actually owns the mineral rights under the surface land. Each Form 7 is supposed to be accompanied by a mineral lease recorded at the County Recorder’s office. In the Muskingum water conservancy area there are massive discrepancies between the Form 7s filed with the ODNR and the County Recorder’s records. Greg Pace, an environmental activist confirmed to the Free Press that at least one of the Form 7s appears to be fraudulent with a tampered notarized signature.

Columbus City Council President Andy Ginther's recent re-election may appear to have been a shoe-in under the current electoral rules and political landscape, but after an examination of his campaign finances, it appears to be more of a buy-in. There is big money in politics, and in Ginther's case, that money came from all over. Ginther's friends gave to Ginther, and Ginther gave back. The Free Press examined Ginther's campaign filings with both the Franklin County Board of Elections and the Ohio Secretary of State's office. The figures in the two sets of documents do not appear to match each other. The Secretary of State's office lists only contributions to and from PACs on it's website, in spreadsheet format, while the Franklin County Board of Elections provides only facsimiles of the actual filed documents. Ginther began his political career as a consultant and executive at Triumph Communications and worked there during part of his council tenure until 2011. He has not failed to remember the friends that gave him his first leg up.

Should Mayor Michael Coleman run for re-election and win in 2015, he will be the longest serving mayor in Columbus history. He has not announced his intentions for the 2015 general election at this time and it is far too early for a candidate to file. These tiny details have not stopped Coleman from raising bundles of cash through his campaign committee, Coleman for Columbus. It appears to be a standing committee for a candidate permanently on trail, with records of contributions stretching back nearly as far as the Ohio Secretary of State's website records go. The contributions continued to roll in after Coleman's re-election in 2011. So far in 2013 he's received over $75,000 in contributions, topping his previous year's fund-raising for his unannounced campaign. During three days in late June this year, immediately following his junket to Las Vegas for the annual meeting of the US Conference of Mayors, Coleman's treasurer made many trips to the bank. Those three days of handshakes and backslapping seemed to have garnered the mayor over $11,000. A significant portion of these contributions came from firms in the construction industry.

This past summer two busloads of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma hit the road to pay a visit to the Ohio Historical Society at its headquarters adjacent to the state fairgrounds. The Oklahoma Shawnee were not on vacation mind you, but on a mission: to give the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) a history lesson. And as one OHS employee recalled in a diplomatic tone, “We’ve learned from our past.” The Oklahoma Shawnee had gotten wind that the Serpent Mound in southern Ohio – the world’s largest effigy mound and recently named by National Geographic as one of “Great Wonders of the Ancient World” – was becoming a popular destination for New Agers. Indeed, over the past three years at certain New Age-themed events the mound was surrounded by hundreds of admirers as their reverence for the mound was clearly on display.

For several years now the United Food and Commercial Union (UFCW) has financially backed a drive to organize Walmart’s low-wage workers and target Black Friday for a day of protests and strikes. The UFCW has quietly convinced a small number of Walmart associates across the nation to form a non-union organization called OUR Walmart, or Organization United for Respect at Walmart. OUR Walmart members feel their cause to be historic as they speak out for a living wage and greater benefits. But they seek an even bigger concession, and it won’t cost the Waltons, the family that owns Walmart, or their stockholders a cent – greater respect. Two Black Friday protests are planned for Columbus and its suburbs beginning at 9 am at the Walmart at 3657 E. Main in Whitehall and the Walmart at 6674 Canal Winchester Blvd.

Protestors descended upon the Wendy’s at 9th Ave. and High St. on the Ohio State University campus on Saturday, November 16 to demand that the Dublin-based corporation join the Fair Food Program. Of the five largest fast food companies in the country, Wendy’s is the only holdout against the Program. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has built an historic partnership between farmworkers, tomato growers and eleven leading food corporations based on human rights, dignity and developing a sustainable tomato industry. A boisterous, chanting crowd with drums and megaphones demanded the end to substandard poverty wages. Signs called for Wendy’s to pay one penny more a pound to benefit the workers. The prevailing piece rate today for tomato workers is 50 cents for every 32 pounds of tomatoes harvested.

The website says it all: RadioactiveWasteAlert.org. The billboard with a young woman guzzling liquid with a radioactive warning on it under the phrase: “Don’t Frack My Water, Protect Columbus” set the stage for one of the most important public forums in the city’s history. If we had to summarize the major themes that emerged from the Tuesday, November 12 Radioactive Frack Waste Forum, the first is this: the public has a right to know that much of the process allowing radioactive waste into the central Ohio watershed near Alum Creek is the result of hidden, behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Ohio legislators and Governor John Kasich. Second: the frack waste is undisputedly radioactive and carcinogenic. Radium 226 found at 3000 percent over the allowable limit by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a long-established link to many forms of cancer, including breast and bone cancer. Third: All landfills leak. If you put radioactivity into them, it will come out. Fourth: Ohio has become a radioactive dumping ground for the fracking industry and is now importing the waste prohibited by the regulators in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.