Local

April is many things each year but it is also when there is fundraising for reproductive organizations in Ohio, especially Women Have Options - Ohio, which collects and distributes funds to women needing abortion assistance - for travel, for abortions, for whatever the fund is available to provide to support a woman facing the choice of an abortion in this very unfriendly and reproductively unjust times. It is the annual FUNd-a-thon!

 Donate on behalf of Social Workers for Reproductive Justice.

Please go to the BLUE DONATE HERE button >> to join the WHO-O 2022 online fundraising event and support Social Workers for Reproductive Justice today!   DONATE HERE

Dozens of Ohio General Electric workers protested Wednesday, March 23, about job cuts recently announced that impact nearly 200 local workers in the Central Ohio region.

The Ohio Debate Commission, a nonprofit created in 2018 to facilitate debates among candidates vying for the highest statewide offices, says that US Rep. Tim Ryan’s condition that all US Senate Democratic candidates be on stage during the scheduled March 28 debate have been met. A debate that will go on even if the primary is postponed due to the redistricting mess at the Ohio Statehouse.

In February, Ryan said if either Columbus attorney Morgan Harper and Columbus tech executive Traci “TJ” Johnson failed to qualify, he would not participate. But both Harper and Johnson have met the “candidate participation criteria” required by the Ohio Debate Commission, which is hosting the March 28 debates at Central State University.

Johnson’s participation was in doubt as she only announced her candidacy in January.

Russia’s war in Ukraine -- like the USA’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- should be understood as barbaric mass slaughter. For all their mutual hostility, the Kremlin and the White House are willing to rely on similar precepts: Might makes right. International law is what you extol when you aren’t violating it. And at home, rev up the nationalism to go with the militarism.

 While the world desperately needs adherence to a single standard of nonaggression and human rights, some convoluted rationales are always available in a quest to justify the unjustifiable. Ideologies get more twisted than pretzels when some people can’t resist the temptation to choose up sides between rival forces of terrible violence.

 In the United States, with elected officials and mass media intensely condemning Russia’s killing spree, the hypocrisy can stick in the craw of people mindful that the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions started massive protracted carnage. But U.S. hypocrisy in no way excuses the murderous rampage of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Wednesday, March 23, 10:30AM - 12:00PM COLUMBUS WORKER RALLY & PRESS CONFERENCE

WHERE: U.S. Senator Rob Portman’s Office, 37 West Broad Street, Columbus, OH

WHAT: Ohio GE Workers Rally with Picket Signs and Banners for Press Conference at Sen. Portman office in Columbus, Deliver Petition Calling for Action to Stop Oho Job Cuts

SPEAKERS: 

Carl Kennebrew, President of IUE-CWA national labor union 

Tim Burga, President, Ohio AFL-CIO 

Will Evans, President, IUE-CWA Local 84704

Barb Basore, GE Lighting Bucyrus plant worker whose family has provided a combined 500 years of service to the company

I’ve just become aware of and read the 2020 book by Ned Dobos, Ethics, Security, and The War-Machine: The True Cost of the Military. It makes a pretty strong case for the abolition of militaries, even while concluding that it may or may not have done so, that the matter should be taken on a case-by-case basis.

Dobos sets aside the question of whether any war can be justified, arguing instead that “there may be cases where the costs and risks generated by a military establishment are too great for its existence to be justified, and this is even if we think that some wars are necessary and consistent with the demands of morality.”

Death by Democracy documents the death of a society governed of, by and for the people.

A local Ohio activist penned each chapter of Death by Democracy, recording how they “fought City Hall” to put a citizen’s initiative, ordinance or charter amendment on their municipality’s ballot. Each narrator tells a sincere and courageous story of a group endeavor to prevent or stop pollution from affecting their community.

The title of this book may seem overblown, sounding somewhat like “click-bait,” but there’s actually a valid reason “death” could result from the desecration of democracy experienced by these groups over the past decade in Ohio.

This morning, employees at Columbus’ 88 E. Broad St. Starbucks location delivered a letter to Starbucks’ CEO announcing that they “choose to join in the national labor movement of Starbucks stores.”

The Starbucks location in the heart of downtown is the first in Columbus to announce a union drive, joining three other locations in Ohio and more than 140 across the country in attempting to unionize. “We know your company can be better, and we choose to stay and help it grow from within,” they wrote.

The store in the Key Bank building facing 3rd street serves government employees, office workers, downtown residents, houseless community members, and tourists.

“We get a good mix of people,” says Damon Shnur who’s worked at this downtown Starbucks for nine years and is part of the location’s organizing committee for the union drive. “I think a lot of our clientele is also just very excited for us. They’re very excited about unionizing in general, but I think they will be very excited and supportive of us.”

Tuesday, March 22, 2022, 2:00 pm EDT
Cleveland State University Student Center SC 313, 2121 Euclid Avenue 44115

I have written about Columbus’ identity crisis and the failure of its media and especially the non-daily, non-news Columbus Dispatch in both the Columbus Free Press and ColumbusUnderground, but I have only touched briefly on WOSU, the Ohio State University-owned, local National Public Radio affiliate. (See “Columbus’ identity crisis and its media”; “Response to Columbus Alive, ‘The list: Reasons that Columbus Underground opinion piece is trash,’ by Andy Downing and Joel Oliphint, Columbus Alive, July 26: A visit to journalism fantasy land”; and “The Columbus Dispatch: The decline of a metropolitan daily newspaper.”)