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I’m a 75-year-old steelworker, with real mobility problems from decades of hard work, especially as a steelworker. I’m living on a good, United Steel Workers (USW) negotiated pension, like thousands of my fellow steelworkers, thanks to Sherrod Brown.
I worked at Lorain Works, USX, in Lorain, Ohio and, like thousands of my fellow steelworkers, looked forward to the day that I finally could retire, take it easy, and enjoy a decent life supported by a good Union (USW) Steelworker pension.
Hiring, then retirements, go in large waves in steel mills as the company puts on or takes off whole “turns” of workers.” So, when I prepared to retire when I hit my 30-year anniversary in 2002, I was part of a big wave of retirements.
It was at this time that USX mgt. decided to change their top group, change their name and challenge our union contract. Their first move was to deny their pension liability to 3,000 Republic steelworkers and their families.
From the American Friends Service Committee
For decades, AFSC has worked to end the use of the death penalty as well as life and long-term sentences.
Please join us in urging Congress and state governors to end the death penalty once and for all. The death penalty flies in the face of moral values, common sense, and history. Death sentences do not deter crime, are disproportionately handed to people of color, and have been given to numerous individuals who were later exonerated.
Earlier this year, the state of Alabama put a man to death using the untested execution method of nitrogen hypoxia. The execution was carried out despite U.N. experts warning that the method could lead to excessive pain and constitute torture.
Killing anyone—by any method—is immoral and should be outlawed. In recent years, the use of the death penalty has declined sharply across the U.S. Since 2019, three states—Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire—have abolished the practice completely.
Now it's time for the federal government and all states to follow suit.
For too long, policymakers have neglected Ohio’s childcare system, and the littlest Ohioans suffer the consequences.
As police violence continues against Ohioans, the Ohio Coalition to End Qualified Immunity (OCTEQI) believes the only way to end police violence is to change policy. And the only way to change the policy that allows police violence is by putting a citizen-led initiative on a state ballot to end qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that allows public officials to escape consequences for unreasonable behavior even when they violate someone’s rights. It has become a barrier to justice for victims of police misconduct.
Students need our support right now.
As of April 30, over 1,100 students have been arrested for protesting on campuses. Instead of listening to student demands, university presidents are calling the police and armed guards to shut down their activism. Like a majority of people in the U.S., students want a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to genocide. It has been over 200 days of Israeli massacres of Palestinians. It must end.
I’ve watched the developing protests around our nation, here in Columbus,
with a feeling that some things just haven't changed.
Fifty-four years ago I’d gotten off work, was at the Neil Avenue entrance to OSU,
watching a small, peaceful, student protest develop. Someone for a Black
Student Union had just called for Black Studies to be part of basic education at OSU, and a
young student started saying something about Vietnam. A fearsome looking line
of troopers in riot gear were just off the campus line.
Suddenly, a cartoonish looking guy with an obvious Woolworth’s wig
stepped from behind the police line, and closed the street gate to the campus.
A young student with a crude armband quickly reopened it.
This was repeated 3-4 times, when the police line surged forward, using
their batons on protestors. That got the expected reaction, bottle/rock, they
were quickly reinforced, escalated and began grabbing, arresting protesters.
That was the start of the so-called “student riots!” Peaceful protests had
been going on there for weeks. Within a few days, similar actions cost four young
State Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney (D-Westlake) today responded to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s plans for another statewide voter purge clouded in darkness that will happen two weeks before voting in the upcoming presidential election. The Cleveland-area lawmaker sent a third letter to LaRose’s office after his refusal to provide public records requested related to LaRose’s quiet 2023 purge of nearly 27,000 people from Ohio’s voter rolls six days after November absentee ballots were sent out and reiterates a demand for transparency and cooperation with the public to ensure that no voter is incorrectly removed from the voter registry.
“The secretary of state seems more excited about canceling Ohio voters than providing answers and transparency to his process, which seems plagued by politics and inexperience. That’s why I’ve repeatedly asked for an official audit and public records so we know exactly what’s going on, ”said Rep. Sweeney in her letter to Sec. LaRose’s office. “ The problem with purging is that it has removed eligible voters. That’s unacceptable. We need answers.”
Rocco Di Pietro’s The Normal Exception: Life Stories, Reflections, and Dreams from Prison is an outcome of the author’s ten years of teaching college courses to prison inmates in New York, Ohio, and California.
A thoughtful observer, Di Pietro offers illuminating commentary on people's roles and the relationship
between prison and life outside the walls. Incarceration, he points out, “was only one way to transgress
out of the matrix of society; the artist, the poor, the homeless, the ill, the addicts, and psychological
cripples of every sort were also some of the other ways one could slip through the cracks.”
The book consists of essays that Di Pietro had assigned his students to write, interspersed with the
author’s thoughts on the content. For me, the most striking impression taken from these stories is how
many of these individuals had been living in prisons of other sorts long before their incarceration. Many
of these stories are harrowing, and the words of one woman are indicative of the suffering: “Though I
was incarcerated, I began to feel freer than I had in a long, long time. No longer did I live under an