Issue 1, to be voted on August 8th, wants to raise the number of votes required for citizen-initiated Ohio Constitutional amendments (the ones people bother you about in the Kroger parking lot) to pass from a simple majority (50% + 1) to 60%.

Pushed by right-wing government officials scared of being held accountable for their actions, this is a direct attack against democracy in Ohio. It will give even more power to an increasingly authoritarian and out-of-touch Statehouse. Proponents claim Issue 1 will end outside special interest influence on Ohio’s Constitution, yet Illinois billionaire and 2020 election denier Richard Uihlein has donated $1 million to pass Issue 1. If Issue 1 were to pass, democracy in Ohio would be dead.

Free Press readers may know that Dennis Kucinich is the campaign manager for Robert F Kennedy Jr.  He has had a long standing relationship with Bob Fitrakis and the Free Press.  Recall that Congressman Dennis submitted articles of impeachment against George W Bush in 2008. His political career began as the youngest elected mayor of Cleveland, where he fought and won against privitization of the electric industry by First Energy.  The Democratic party in Ohio assisted in removing him from office during a redistricting process which favored Marcy Kaptor.  During his time in office, he advocated for creation of a Department of Peace, to counter the influence of the Military Industrical Complex. 

We encourage readers to subscribe to Mr. Kucinich on substack, here. https://substack.com/@denniskucinich

A mere 55 years after his death, the U.S. government has restored J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy.

Oppenheimer, of course, is the father of the atomic bomb. He led the Manhattan Project during World War II, which birthed Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing several hundred thousand people and ending the war. What happened next, however, was the Cold War, and suddenly commies – our former allies – were the personification of evil, and they were everywhere. The American government, in its infinite wisdom, knew it had no choice but to continue its nuclear weapons program and, for the sake of peace, put the world on the brink of Armageddon.

Hello, H-bomb!

War, the building block of the world’s governmental entities for uncounted millennia, had evolved to the brink of human extinction. Official government policy amounted to this: So what?

Part One

It should surprise no one that in 21st  century United States, young children’s learning to read is a landmine within academic capitalism where sales profits trump diverse children’s basic learning and equitable, humane bases for their futures. Unknowledgeable governors and politicians weigh in, confusing the public and offending teachers. Recent articles and essays in national and local media overflow with this, as the References show.

Today, with more force than usual across states and cities, the episodic “reading wars” erupt with passion and ignorance, and large financial stakes. At their oversimplified base, the “reading wars” pit one of a number of different forms of “phonics” against various forms of “phonetics.”

It is rarely noted that the issues are at least two hundred years, not two decades old, and that they have to do with much more than different ways of teaching children to read—and less often mentioned, write, spell, and do arithmetic.