On Monday, State Representative Mike Foley joined about 75 Columbus security officers, janitors, and community members for a rally outside the Motorists Mutual Insurance building downtown. Workers, faith leaders, and elected officials called on business leaders of Columbus to support the good jobs our city needs to stanch the rapidly rising poverty rate.

As the unemployment rate in Central Ohio continues to drop, concentrated poverty in our city has doubled. This is because more and more jobs in Columbus pay very low wages that trap working families in a cycle of poverty. Janitors and security officers—who clean and protect the offices of Motorists Mutual and Columbus’s Fortune 1000 companies—are among the thousands of working people in our city who can work full time and still qualify for public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid.

“Everywhere near the building, the stench of death was overpowering. Men in surgical masks sprayed disinfectant in the air.”

We move from tragedy to tragedy with hellish regularity.

“The scope of injuries,” Jim Yardley writes in the New York Times, “was horrifying: fractured skulls, crushed rib cages, severed livers, ruptured spleens. One survivor lost both legs. . . . A teenage girl named Sania lost her right leg. Another teenager, Anna, lost her right hand.”

This wasn’t from a bomb in Boston. It was from a collapsed building outside Dhaka, Bangladesh — another shocking sweatshop disaster, this one claiming the lives, according to the most recent count, of 385 people, with many more missing and at least 1,000 injured. Eight people, including the owner of the building, which housed five separate garment operations employing more than 3,000 people, were arrested. Workers, the Times reported, saw cracks in the walls of the building the day before it collapsed. They were told to go to work anyway.

Over 100 students, alumni of Columbus Bishop Watterson, and community, labor supporters, packed the meeting room of the local Unitarian Church last Saturday, rallying to support beloved 19 year Watterson teacher, Carla Hale, who was fired by the Catholic Diocese for “violating the morality clause.”

Carla had just lost her mother and had returned to work, as a teacher at Bishop Watterson High School, after the funeral. However, instead of the condolences she received from students, staff and other teachers, the administration of that Catholic facility called her in and fired her. The diocese had, they stated, received an “anonymous letter” pointing out that her mother’s obituary stated that she was survived by Carla “& her partner.”

“That is really a disgusting double-standard,” said Bill Clarson, who, with his wife Jane, were just leaving the Unitarian Church. “When you see how they’ve treated the priests who’d molested children, just moving them and covering up, for them to fire a wonderful teacher, who’d done nothing wrong is just plain wrong!”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's new advocacy group FWD.us is running TV ads in support of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And Facebook is censoring graphics that protest.

RootsAction is running a petition on our website and on Facebook telling Zuckerberg to stop.

FWD.us is a group of plutocrats who, instead of advocating for education funding, are advocating for the immigration of educated workers. And in order to win over certain members of Congress, FWD.us has funded two front groups, one for Republicans and one for Democrats. Both are buying TV ads supporting Congress members who support tar sands and drilling in ANWR.

Why is FWD.us dragging the world backwards? Click here to tell Zuckerberg and his billionaire buddies that our grandchildren would appreciate a livable climate more than the knowledge that we further boosted the wealth of the already obscenely wealthy.

After you sign the petition at RootsAction, please be sure to click the link to share it on Facebook.

March 23, 2013 was a chilly day in Augusta, Georgia, when hundreds of families gathered to claim free food from a local supermarket that had been foreclosed. What greeted the hungry people of this neighborhood instead was a line of sheriff's deputies and barricades around the store's entire stock. Local charities had declined to pick up the food, diapers, tolietries, and clothing. Under instruction from the bank, Sun Trust, sheriffs deputies supervised as all the food was put into a dumpster while hungry families watched in horror and disbelief.

The locally-owned store, Laney Supermarket, is a historic landmark that serves a community where unemployment is above 40 percent. The area has few other nearby markets. Until the owners failed to pay rent and were evicted by the property owner, Sun Trust, they offered rides to those who needed them to and from the market. According to the owner, "You know, sometime[s] I would drive three miles from over here, [and] pick them up. After they do their shopping I take them home."