Workers posing on signing day

Early Monday morning, the hourly workers at Starbucks, located at 1784 North High St., petitioned the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for an election and demanded union recognition from CEO  Howard Schultz and local management. An overwhelming majority of workers at the store signed union authorization cards and a petition demanding union recognition.

These baristas are the third in Columbus and the ninth in Ohio to join the Starbucks Workers United movement that has swept across the country. Workers at the international coffee chain have filed for elections at hundreds of locations across the country and have won representation in over two hundred and fifty of them. 

These coffee workers join with their union siblings downtown at the 88 Broad St. location and in Westerville at the South State St. store in demanding dignity, respect and improvements at their workplace. This petition highlights the growth of the movement in the Midwest, where union density among Starbucks shops in Ohio, Michigan and Illinois grows to rival the spread of the campaign in the company’s historic strongholds of Seattle and New York.

Logo

NORML Appalachia of Ohio and Sensible Movement Coalition added Corning, Kent, Laurelville, Rushville & Shawnee to the list of Sensible Cities in Ohio. This makes a total of 36 communities including Toledo, Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. With these communities no longer tied to archaic Marijuana Laws, local law enforcement can now concentrate on legitimate criminal concerns. 

Don Keeney, Executive Director from NORML Appalachia of Ohio stated, “another election cycle, where Ohioians exercise their right to Home Rule. It’s a great feeling to guide them on a true path of democracy, the way it was intended. We’re seven years into the process and close to three million citizens, in 36 cities, towns & villages have been freed from Ohio’s oppressive laws. We will continue with our goals, one community at a time.” 

Any citizen of Ohio can initiate the process of placing the Sensible Marihuana Initiative on the Ballot, in their community, by simply contacting NORML Appalachia of Ohio.

Joe Motil

Joe Motil, former Columbus City Council candidate and longtime community advocate who is circulating petitions to run for Mayor in the 2023 May primary election states, “I wish to congratulate Columbus City Councilwoman Elizabeth Brown on her appointment as President and CEO of the YWCA. And I also want to thank her for occasionally displaying a much-needed independent voice on City Council. If elected as mayor of Columbus I would have enjoyed working with her.”

Motil further states, “So now, with Ms. Brown’s appointment, that takes care of the issue of two city council incumbents (Shayla Favor and Liz Brown) that live in the same council district and will not being running against each other in the 2023 Columbus City Council district elections. And the timing of this announcement also plays right into the usual City Council and Franklin County Democratic Party playbook. Just in time to give a new appointee some advantage of incumbency on City Council prior to the May 2023 City Council Primary District Elections. Odds are that the new appointee will not live in the same district as any of the current 6 City Council incumbents.”         

Bill Cohen

Friday, November 11, 2022, 7:30 PM
Civil rights sit-ins.  Bell-bottoms. Anti-war marches.  Student Power.  Afros.  Miniskirts.  Hippies.  Riots.  Space flights.   The generation gap.  Those hallmarks of the turbulent 1960’s will be rekindled at this year’s annual “Spirit of the ‘60’s Coffeehouse.”  
Bill Cohen will lead a candlelit, musical, year-by-year journey through the era, with live and familiar 1960’s folksongs, “news reports” of sixties happenings, displays of anti-war buttons and posters, fun trivia questions, and far-out sixties fashions.  Proceeds from the suggested $15 donations (at the door) will go to the Mid-Ohio Food Collective.  The show begins at 7:30 p.m. in the church basement, but get there early for a good seat.  The program is suitable for ADULTS and MATURE TEENS. 
Location:  King Avenue Methodist Church, 299 W. King at Neil.   Free parking is also available in the lots just South and West of the church.  
For more information, call Bill at (614) 263-3851 or e-mail BillCohen@columbus.rr.com.

Remarks from this webinar.

Sometimes just for fun I try to figure out what I’m supposed to believe. I’m definitely supposed to believe that I can choose what to believe based on what pleases me. But I’m also supposed to believe that I have a duty to believe the right things. I think I’m supposed to believe the following: The greatest danger in the world is the wrong political party in the nation I live in. The second greatest threat to the world is Vladimir Putin. The third greatest threat to the world is global warming, but it’s being dealt with by educators and recycling trucks and humanitarian entrepreneurs and dedicated scientists and voters. One thing that’s not a serious threat at all is nuclear war, because that danger was switched off some 30 years ago. Putin might be the second greatest threat on Earth but it’s not a nuclear threat, it’s a threat to censor your social media accounts and restrict LGBTQ rights and limit your shopping options.

 No amount of post-election puffery about Joe Biden can change a key political reality: His approval ratings are far below the public’s positivity toward the Democratic Party. Overall, the Democrats who won the midterm elections did so despite Biden, not because of him. He’s a drag on the party, a boon to Republicans, and -- if he runs again -- he’d be a weak candidate against the GOP nominee in the 2024 presidential campaign.

 While the electorate is evenly split between the two parties, there’s no such close division about Biden. NBC reported its exit poll on Tuesday “found that two-thirds of voters (68 percent) do not want Biden to run for president again in 2024.”

Gary Witte

November 10, 2022

Our city is in a desperate housing crisis. The evidence is all around us. Huddled masses of beggars at intersections, shelters at capacity, tent squatters springing up on many vacant lots, thousands of families waiting for available Section 8 housing, while hundreds also suffer evictions every month. Meanwhile, thousands are wondering how they will survive the coming harsh winter. 

This city (whose Mayor proudly claims Columbus as the “Opportunity City”) offers very little in opportunity to those stuck in poverty and who are homeless.

The City Council continues their catering to the wealthy and greedy developers while turning their backs on the needy and those in poverty. The wealthy get tax breaks and perks while the poor get empty promises and bulldozers slamming through their tents. This is mean-spirited, cold-hearted, morally disgusting and indefensible.

So, yes, I am guilty of trespassing and camping on the front lawn of Mr. Hardin’s beautiful home.  It was an act of premeditated civil disobedience that protested the lack of hospitality shown to our brothers and sisters in peril and at risk.

Cheerleaders

I argue in recent essays that the currently unbridged and apparently unbridgeable gulf between college students’ academic--including classroom--lives, and the anachronistically- termed “extracurricular life”--once actually called the “extra-curriculum” as opposed to the curriculum--is almost as difficult to talk about as to take reconstructive measures. Critics who ignorantly see Student Affairs or Student Life programs as a “shadow curriculum” competing with “THE Faculty” exacerbate the sense of conflict. As usual, the ever-rising tuition-paying students suffer.

Over time, this opposition is embedded into the structures and functions of almost all institutions of higher education, regardless of how contradictory it is, and how negatively it functions.

Student Life without student lives

Black Lives Matter sign

Thursday, November 10, 2022, 6:00 - 7:30 PM
Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) is a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial justice. At our October meeting we will be focusing on our Alternatives to Calling the Police Project and how folks can get involved. We will have some snacks to share, but feel free to bring your own or something to share as well! Register here

After the election comes . . . the coverage, which always, at least in the mainstream media, seems to reduce everything to winning and losing, to strategy and tactics, rather than to the deep issues shaping the future.

The mainstream-created context of this year’s midterms amounted to: Will there be a “red tsunami”? That is, will the GOP, riding joyfully on the back of the bucking bronco of inflation, overwhelm Sleepy Joe’s Democratic Party and grab control over the House and Senate? Or will the Dems hold on, luck out, lose only minimally?

And the post-election news, of course, is the latter. The count continues as I write and not all election results, at national and state levels, are known yet, but what is known indicates that both parties more or less held their own and there definitely was no red tsunami. For the Democrats, this is the equivalent of a big victory.

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