People

Mumia Abu-Jamal and his supporters are closer than ever to winning his release after 38 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), former district attorneys, and other political higher ups who participated in the frame up are now shaking in their boots because an innocent man may be given a new trial in which judicial, police and prosecutorial misconduct will be exposed.

Formerly hidden evidence disclosed by current District Attorney Larry Krasner justifies a new trial and Abu-Jamal’s immediate release. That decision is currently in the hands of State Superior Court judges.

Pam Africa, of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal and a MOVE member, said “Abu-Jamal should have been released by Krasner on the basis of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct--as many others have been recently. By doing this,  Krasner would be following the color of the law.”

In March, 2020, Democratic voters will have a choice in the 3rd Congressional district which encompasses most of Columbus. The incumbent, Joyce Beatty, is seeking her 4th term. She has held the seat since 2013. Beatty is well funded by corporate sponsors and supported by the local party apparatus, which also depends on corporate funding. Beatty has a net worth of over 4 million dollars (get source)

The New York Times sent a reporter to Ohio to cover the contest, resulting in October 13th article “The Democratic Debate Is Coming to Ohio, Where a Party Battle Is Already Underway”. The article pointed out that Ms. Harper has raised $323,000 in just 3 months as a first time candidate. Harper has raised money from nearly every ZIP code in her district. (Ms. Beatty, who hasn’t reported third-quarter fund-raising, had $1.3 million cash on hand as of July.) Harper has received donations from 2670 donors compared to just 169 for Beatty.

Every Columbus progressive and lefty knows who Joe Motil is and thank goodness we have him. But with the City Council vote just days away, do you know Liliana Rivera Baiman? She’s one of three Yes We Can candidates seeking to unseat several incumbents, known by many as the endorsed Democrats.

If you are unfamiliar with Liliana, a former Dreamer from Mexico, one of the first things you should know is how her passion to organize and lead was inspired at a very young age when her family moved to the hardscrabble Texas town of Dickinson.

Her father was a construction worker, her mother a custodian. There were three siblings and several uncles, also from Mexico. At one point the family numbered a dozen. Even though all adults had jobs, they still needed to find something affordable.

So the extended family moved into a three-bedroom trailer where their next-door neighbor's house was the headquarters for a large and active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

What an honor! I am extremely proud to be named the 2019 recipient of the Free Press “Libby” Award for Community Activism. I’m guessing that such an accolade means that I know a thing or two about the subject matter, activism. So please allow me to expound on what it means and what it takes.

First, Dictionary.com an activist as “an active, vigorous advocate of a cause, especially a political cause.” Yep, that’s me, and my cause for more than twenty years has been marijuana, aka cannabis and hemp.

Born from a passion for social justice, my inspiration to become an activist took fire with our nation’s draconian War on Drugs. The late 1990s saw a raft of wrongs smear its battlefield. In Tulia, Texas, almost half of this tiny town’s black male residents were arrested and incarcerated on trumped up drug charges. Blind to the real threat, schools locked down classrooms so drug dogs could sniff backpacks for marijuana. Drug testing. Mandatory minimum sentencing. Civil asset forfeiture. Stop and frisk. But most egregious was the murder of activists Rollie Rolm and Tom Crosslin by the FBI at the Rainbow Farm in Michigan.

Bill Lyons was involved in the passage of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights and the Rights of Nature in Ohio, that passed with 61 percent of the vote this past spring – a first for this type of law protecting an ecosystem in the United States. The bill, initiated because of the lake’s toxic algae, was so ground-breaking that it received national attention and recently ended up as a question on Jeopardy. But strange language creeped into the State of Ohio budget this May undermining the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, stating that, “…nature or any ecosystem does not have standing to participate or bring an action in a common pleas court; it prohibits any person, on behalf of nature or an ecosystem, from bringing, or intervening in, an action in such court; and it prohibits any person from bringing an action against a person who is acting on behalf of nature or an ecosystem.”

Climate Strike Activists
Thank you, young people of the world, for helping energize the rest of us to address the urgency of climate change! Among the state’s organizers of the local Climate Strike on September 20 are the Columbus area’s Sophie Roome, with the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 campaign, Catherine Adams of Westerville High School, and local environmental activist Elizabeth Hixon. Many, many more teens, youth, and young professionals led the effort in Columbus. Several hundred people gathered mid-day at the Ohio Statehouse to call upon our leaders and the populace to make the changes necessary to prevent climate change from destroying the planet. Kudos to all the kids who bravely walked out of school to join the strike downtown, or to resolutely skip classes to stand outside their school buildings in solidarity with the international strike.

For the most part, theFreep supports Sen. Sherrod Brown and his daughter Elizabeth Brown, current Columbus City Council Pro Tem, or temporary council president, but this is no endorsement for re-election.

Mrs. Brown is an advocate for Columbus City Schools and a staunch fighter for women’s rights. She initiated the Columbus Families Together Fund, which provides legal help to keep local immigrant parents together with their children.

But when we reached out to her to see if she is actively pushing for air-conditioning in all city schools, the Freep did not hear back.

It makes us wonder whether her past position as an economic development manager with Columbus city government and her current position as chair of the city’s Economic Development Committee has anything to do with her silence on the sweltering issue.

Could the city have avoided this absolute embarrassment and shame, where our city’s marginalized children, who need the best educational system and setting possible, are instead treated like second-class citizens?

Kylie Dreamz, LLC is a girl’s apparel and accessory line with the purpose of empowering little girls of color who are often underrepresented. The new business is owned by seven-year-old Kylie Scroggins; a second grader in Galloway, Ohio. Kylie officially launched her business on August 17, 2019.

According to Kylie, she “Does not see a lot of brown girls on shirts in the stores.” Kylie’s mother, Kortney Ester, also shares her daughter’s frustration with the lack of representation for girls of color and suggested to Kylie that she starts her own clothing line. Mainstream clothing lines are getting better with including African-American girls, however the race is so broad and unique in shades and features, that it seems that only the more popular characteristics make the cut, which is unfair  and sends a negative message to girls who have opposite features. Kylie is doing something about that.

When Donald Trump used to call out the “fake news” for being biased during the 2016 presidential election, it was a not-so-subtle way for him to appeal to Bernie Sanders’ supporters who felt the same pain. The blatant bias shown towards anyone who challenged the media’s favored candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 was so obvious that CNN contributors were eventually busted for feeding debate questions to the Clinton campaign. Heck, The Washington Post ran sixteen negative articles on Sanders within a span of sixteen hours. So the notion that media outlets were potentially biased against Bernie or anyone else was not completely far-fetched.

Naturally, as the 2020 presidential race kicks off, the question now becomes with Sanders running again, will the media’s anti-Bernie bias still exist? After all, if these major news outlets simply favored Clinton in 2016, certainly they wouldn’t have any lasting ill-will towards Vermont’s senior senator, right? Unfortunately, the media has already answered this question with a resounding “hold my beer.”

I don’t typically get personal in my columns for The Free Press -- I usually rant about the latest antics of the two party system or the Ohio Republican Party -- but it’s time for me to reflect on my last year and a half in Ohio because now I’m leaving. Although my move is subject to several variables (including the ol’ bank account) it could possibly be for good. We’ll see.