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Lao Tzu said that silence is a source of great strength. This principle was evident on September 12, when about 400 people of faith marched in silence from the First Congregational Church in downtown Columbus to the Ohio Statehouse.

It was a revival, on a much larger scale, of the Moral Monday rallies held at the Statehouse before the November election two years ago. Started by Rev. William Barber in North Carolina, the Moral Monday movement reclaims the moral narrative from the religious right, which in recent years has defined morality almost exclusively in terms of restricting reproductive rights and condemning LGBTQ people.

Rev. Susan Smith modeled the silent march on an event from the height of the civil rights movement. “An attorney’s house was bombed,” she said. “They marched from the University of Tennessee to city hall. All you could hear was the shuffling of people’s feet on the pavement. When you’re marching and you’re silent, people don’t know what to do, except listen. The power comes in the very silence.”

Members of the Ohio Community Rights Network gathered outside the Ohio Statehouse on September 12 to demand the right to ban fracking wastewater injection wells and shale natural gas pipelines in their local communities. They compared the impact of the proposed Nexus Pipeline on Ohio communities to the threat posed by the Dakota Access Pipeline to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

Actors impersonating Ohio Governor John Kasich, Secretary of State John Husted, and the oil and gas industry performed a street theater piece that was both entertaining and deadly serious.

As a film historian I was a sucker for Drama Queens from Hell, playwright Peter Lefcourt’s homage/rip-off/mash-up of movie maestro Billy Wilder’s 1950 immortal masterpiece Sunset Boulevard. To be fair, Lefcourt’s two-acter also contains an original story that imaginatively, wittily riffs on Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett’s saga about a young screenwriter’s (William Holden as Joe Gillis) relationship with an aging silent screen diva (Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond) dreaming of a comeback and her butler/chauffeur and former director (Erich von Stroheim as Max von Mayerling) in her decaying mansion, located at that eponymous boulevard of broken dreams. All three thespians were Oscar-nommed, as was the film for Best Picture, while Wilder and Brackett scored a screenwriting Academy Award.

 


Soon after the 9/11 terror attacks 15 years ago today, then-US EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman assured New Yorkers the air was safe to breathe.

Now she has issued a “heartfelt” apology, admitting that her misleading advice caused people to die. But will she also apologize for pushing lethal atomic reactor technologies that could kill far more people than 9/11?

Back in 2001, Whitman went public to “reassure the people of New York and Washington D.C. that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink.” She also said, “The concentrations are such that they don’t pose a health hazard….”

The Environmental Protection Agency itself later said there was insufficient data to offer such assurances.

Over Labor Day weekend a group of Columbus residents took action against the systemic racism that drives police brutality by restricting the lifeblood of the system: corporate profits. They held an economic blackout (or boycott) of all large corporate enterprises, including chain stores and banks.

About 100 protesters kicked off the blackout by marching from Franklin Park to the King Arts Complex, where organizer Karla Carey explained the blackout strategy. “This weekend we’re asking that if you have to spend money, that you reinvest it in the black community, to keep the black community thriving.”

African Americans only spend about 3 to 5 percent of their dollars in black-owned businesses, Carey said. “Economically, we need to have our voices heard. This makes a difference to the big chains and corporations.”

The discussion then turned to police brutality.  “Ron O’Brien has held the office of County Prosecutor for 18 years,” Carey said. “Not one Columbus police officer has been indicted in a police-related shooting. If you’re OK with that, then don’t vote in November. But if you’re not, vote for Zach Klein.

Dear Ohio Activists and Concerned Residents,

Many of us have been watching the events unfolding on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. The Native Americans who live on the Standing Rock Reservation are not willing to simply stand by and watch a destructive pipeline project ruin their water and desecrate their sacred land. The company behind the project is Energy Transfer Partners/Enbridge.  The U.S. government is willing to break treaties with the Native Americans in order to allow the pipeline to be built, putting corporate profits and greed above the rights of the people and nature on the reservation. We fully support and applaud the efforts of all the residents at Standing Rock

 

I was fortunate enough to view a screening of the new Snowden movie Wednesday evening with some of the whistleblowers who have cameos in it and with its director Oliver Stone. I'm not allowed to review it until Saturday night, but it is a truly great movie and has the potential to be the most widely seen, heard, or read thing of any political decency or truth in the world this year. That's not, however, why I'm glad I saw it.

The following letter is being delivered to the leaders of every nation on Earth at their UN Permanent Missions in New York before the upcoming U.N. General Assembly, which begins on September 13th.

This year’s UN General Assembly comes at a critical moment for humanity – 3 minutes to midnight on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock. Recognizing our country’s primary role in this crisis, 11,644 Americans and 46 U.S.-based organizations have thus far signed this "Appeal from the United States to the World: Help Us Resist U.S. Crimes," which we are submitting to all the world’s governments. Please work with your colleagues at the General Assembly to respond to this appeal.

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