Local
Victoria Sadowski is a 26-year-old grad student at OSU who pays $975 in rent and fees for a single bedroom at Heritage Apartments in Grandview, an aging complex where hundreds live.
In comparison to some of the luxury apartments going up around town, Sadowski’s single bedroom is just about average, as long as you ignore the water damage and holes in the wall.
Sadowski’s part-time job barely covers her monthly expenses – and now this, the pandemic’s grim fallout staring an entire generation of young renters (and many others) in the face.
Sadowski was hoping Heritage Apartments might be #InThisTogether and offer tenants a break. She inquired how they may help loyal tenants. Take several hundred off rent for the next several months, perhaps.
Afterall, Heritage Apartments is owned by Village Green Management Company, which has become one of the nation’s largest privately held apartment companies over its 100-year history.
As Wendy’s greenhouse defense crumbles, allies look to hold company accountable at tomorrow’s annual shareholder meeting…
Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster to Wendy’s: “Given the life-or-death stakes of unsafe working conditions under COVID-19, how can Wendy’s justify its continued failure to join the Fair Food Program?”
Last week, we posted a reflection on the news of a massive COVID-19 outbreak at a greenhouse in upstate New York owned by Mastronardi Produce, one of the largest greenhouse growers in North America and, according to an article from 2019, a supplier to Wendy’s. The overcrowded housing conditions – with workers staying in budget hotels “where they lived four to a room and slept two to a bed” – were the perfect Petri dish for the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus. The outbreak was so severe that it is even being blamed for the death of the husband of one of the hotel employees who cleaned the farmworkers’ rooms and contracted the virus as a result.
Here’s an excerpt from last week’s reflection:
Thursday, May 28, 12-2pm; Friday, May 29, 3-6pm; Saturday, May 30, 3-5pm; these on-line events require advance registration
World BEYOND War is planning three days of online activities, May 28-30, to talk about nonviolence strategies, to hear from organizers who have successfully shut down weapons expos in their communities, and to learn about viable pathways to convert from a war to peace economy.
Day 1: Thursday, May 28, 12noon-2pm Eastern Time (GMT-4): Mary-Wynne Ashford will kick off #NoWar2020 with a virtual workshop on “Nonviolence Strategies: 101 Solutions to Violence, Terror, and War.” Mary-Wynne is a retired Family Physician, former Co-President of the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, and former President of Physicians for Global Survival (Canada). Her workshop will address ways that we can use nonviolence principles at the personal, community, and international level. Register here!
Working Man is a modest story set against the economic landscape that has left thousands of factory workers without jobs. It’s like a fictional counterpart of last year’s award-winning documentary American Factory. (Until it isn’t—of which, more later.)
Peter Gerety stars as Allery Parkes, who has spent decades toiling in a small-town plastics factory. He’s so devoted to the job that, after the owners shut the plant down, he breaks in through a back door and continues reporting to “work” every day. Unable to restart the assembly line because the power has been shut off, he simply switches to cleaning the machinery rather than running it.
Like a modern-day version of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener, Allery stubbornly clings to a job that no longer exists.
A brief scene in the beginning reveals that the plant shutdown isn’t the first heartache Allery has faced. Years earlier, he and wife Iola (Talia Shire) lost their son to suicide, leaving a mark on them and, no doubt, their marriage. Maybe that helps to explain why Allery is so loath to accept this latest loss in his life.
Art & Activism: A Workshop on Resisting Drone Warfare
Wednesday, May 27, 2020, 7:00 PM
Essam Attia. Essam served for three years as a geospatial analyst in the US Army, he then earned a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts and went on to create his most notable artworks, Drone Zones and The Drone Campaign. These seminal works garnered international press and have been featured in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News. Online - Register here.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020, 2:00 - 6:00 PM
Protest for Human Rights for Immigrants in the time of Covid-19. Bring your own mask. Some free masks will be provided. Social Distancing rules will be respected. It's time to tell the Governor and the public that the state can no longer neglect the health and human rights of immigrants. America needs us!! Hope to see you there! Location: n front of the Statehouse, Broad and High. Facebook Event.
On May 8th, a seemingly innocuous document showed up on social media entitled “CSI – BIA – Medical Marijuana (Comments Due 5.25.20).” As an “Active Rule Package” submitted by the Pharmacy Board, it referred to “Executive Order 2011-01K and Senate Bill 2 of the 129th General Assembly, which require state agencies, including the State of Ohio Board of Pharmacy, to draft rules in collaboration with stakeholders, assess and justify an adverse impact on the business community (as defined by S.B. 2), and provide an opportunity for the affected public to provide input on the following rules.” OK, sounds meritorious.
The official sounding doc listed eight sections of the Ohio Administrative code to be amended. It made a few semantic modifications, added legal guardians, deleted THC tiers and revised the notorious “90-day supply.” OK, fair enough.
But the devil, as they say, is in the details. Given no more than cursory mention is Section 3796:8-2-03 (Forms and form variations considered attractive to children) where four little words – “cookie, or other confection” – could change everything.
Over the previous five years the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections twice told the ICE-contracted Morrow County Correctional Facility its infectious disease control plan was out of compliance. The jail was cited in 2016 and again 2018.
What’s more, the jail was told to collaborate with its local health authority – the Morrow County Health District – to update and improve the plan. The jail is one of four Ohio jails contracted to hold ICE detainees, and about an hour’s drive north of Columbus.
In November of 2019 after another inspection, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (ODRC) finally found the jail’s infectious disease control plan in compliance.
Nevertheless, as of mid-May, every single inmate at the Morrow County Correctional Facility had tested positive for COVID-19, this according to U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of Ohio Sarah D. Morrison (a Trump appointee), who so far has ordered the release of 15 ICE detainees from the jail after the ACLU sued ICE.