BREAKING News: “Keystone XL Pipeline Clears Major Hurdle; State Department Report Raises No Major Objections.” However, this study was outsourced and was done by a Canadian Company with financial ties to the company building the pipeline.

The Koch Brothers bought the only refinery in North America which can refine heavy oil from Sunoco about two years ago in anticipation of the Pipeline being built. The heavy oil now refined by that specialty plant comes from Venezuela. It costs much more than oil from the Tar Sands. The Koch Brothers are spending large sums to get conservatives who have no interest in the environment, to support building the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Secretary of State Kerry, who has the responsibility of evaluating it, recommends that the Keystone XL Pipeline be built. President Obama will make the decision soon. Secretary Kerry hates Venezuela because the leaders stole his wife's Heinz tomato farms and ketchup factory in Venezuela.

Our national economy should be a vibrant job market for our communities, and not one that benefits wealthy corporations at our expense. This is why I’m urging my elected officials to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

To know the TPP, I had to learn about NAFTA. The North-American Free Trade Agreement, signed by President Clinton in 1994, was to herald job creation and improve trade relations among the U.S., Canada and Mexico. However, 20 years later, American jobs are outsourced, income inequality has increased and Mexican farmers who have subsequently lost their jobs are coming to the US for work, causing immigration tension. This is what happened when regulations were manipulated in the name of “free trade.” The adminstration and corporations are now suggesting another free trade agreement, the TPP.

Eleven-hundred workers in eastern Ohio are trying to regain their jobs because AEP is increasing unaffordable rates to electrical consumers like Ormet, the company where these workers had jobs. Workers shouldn’t be caught in the middle of corporate greed.

Will you join us at our phone banks at the Ohio AFL-CIO (395 E. Broad St, Columbus) to call Union members and working families, to demand fairness for workers, from AEP?

Good jobs---with family-sustaining pay, retirement security, and healthcare---are at risk, and AEP, the Public Utilities Commission, and Gov. Kasich all have a hand in this. Politicians who are attacking jobs with so-called right to work are not even acting to save good, Ohio jobs. Our phone banks will talk with union members and allies about keeping these workers on the job and we will connect them by phone with an AEP office to leave a message that working families and electricity users don’t accept this.

What: Phone banks to Save Ohio Jobs & Beat Back Right to Work
When: Tuesdays & Wednesdays: 4:00pm - 6:00pm and 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Where: Ohio AFL-CIO, 395 East Broad St, Columbus

Not many citizens of Columbus are aware that if the police think you report too many crimes – or complain about them – Columbus’ finest will put you on a “list” and simply ignore your complaints.

The history of how a whistleblower or concerned citizen becomes a “chronic complainer,” blacklisted by the Columbus Police, is well-documented in public records.

Take for example Bernadine Kennedy Kent, the woman who initiated the federal investigation into vendor theft and fraud in the Columbus City Schools system. At the same time Kent was acting as a whistleblower and igniting a federal investigation into the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) funds, she was being blacklisted by the Columbus Police.

How to become a chronic complainer

Iraq vet Ross Caputi’s film opens with a fleeting synopsis of the American heartbreak — and the bandage we tape across it.

His documentary, Fear Not the Path of Truth, is about the U.S. devastation of Fallujah, in which he participated as part of Operation Phantom Fury in November 2004, but the first couple minutes give us an overview of his hometown, the “former industrial city” of Fitchburg, Mass.:

“But the factory jobs are long gone, so there’s really only two types of people that live here. They’re the people with good-paying jobs in Boston or Wooster who come out here to build big houses at relatively cheap prices. Everyone else gets by doing work on those houses, doing their lawns, putting additions on them, painting them.

“If there was a point of unity among all the racial and economic divisions in this little city, it had to be the troops. Everyone respected the troops.”