Busting Myths: A citizen vs. Louis DeJoy and his crippling of the U.S. Postal Service

Post office

For more than 18 months I have suffered failing service from the U.S. Postal Service. Beginning with Donald Trump’s appointment of the unqualified campaign contributor Louis DeJoy, who also invests heavily in competing delivery services, my household along with countless others no longer receives either daily or on-time deliveries. DeJoy claimed that he acted to control costs and cover the poorly designed postal workers’ retirement fund. But at the same time, he actively cut back on legally mandated services and endorsed Trump’s and his allies’ partisan and illegal efforts to repudiate legally endorsed mail-in balloting (which my household has done for more than a decade legally and without incident, and safely during the pandemic).

Support reproductive justice

Women posing

April is many things each year but it is also when there is fundraising for reproductive organizations in Ohio, especially Women Have Options - Ohio, which collects and distributes funds to women needing abortion assistance - for travel, for abortions, for whatever the fund is available to provide to support a woman facing the choice of an abortion in this very unfriendly and reproductively unjust times. It is the annual FUNd-a-thon!

 Donate on behalf of Social Workers for Reproductive Justice.

Please go to the BLUE DONATE HERE button >> to join the WHO-O 2022 online fundraising event and support Social Workers for Reproductive Justice today!   DONATE HERE

Columbus Worker Protest at Sen. Portman Office on Ohio Job Cuts

People with a sign

Dozens of Ohio General Electric workers protested Wednesday, March 23, about job cuts recently announced that impact nearly 200 local workers in the Central Ohio region. These GE workers, who are union members of IUE-CWA, held a rally and press conference at the Columbus office of U.S.

Ohio Debate Commission: No inkling that Ryan will back out of debate with Harper, Johnson

Senate candidates

The Ohio Debate Commission, a nonprofit created in 2018 to facilitate debates among candidates vying for the highest statewide offices, says that US Rep. Tim Ryan’s condition that all US Senate Democratic candidates be on stage during the scheduled March 28 debate have been met. A debate that will go on even if the primary is postponed due to the redistricting mess at the Ohio Statehouse.

In February, Ryan said if either Columbus attorney Morgan Harper and Columbus tech executive Traci “TJ” Johnson failed to qualify, he would not participate. But both Harper and Johnson have met the “candidate participation criteria” required by the Ohio Debate Commission, which is hosting the March 28 debates at Central State University.

Johnson’s participation was in doubt as she only announced her candidacy in January.

From Moscow to Washington, the Barbarism and Hypocrisy Don’t Justify Each Other

Russia’s war in Ukraine -- like the USA’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- should be understood as barbaric mass slaughter. For all their mutual hostility, the Kremlin and the White House are willing to rely on similar precepts: Might makes right. International law is what you extol when you aren’t violating it. And at home, rev up the nationalism to go with the militarism.

 While the world desperately needs adherence to a single standard of nonaggression and human rights, some convoluted rationales are always available in a quest to justify the unjustifiable. Ideologies get more twisted than pretzels when some people can’t resist the temptation to choose up sides between rival forces of terrible violence.

 In the United States, with elected officials and mass media intensely condemning Russia’s killing spree, the hypocrisy can stick in the craw of people mindful that the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions started massive protracted carnage. But U.S. hypocrisy in no way excuses the murderous rampage of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Columbus Protest at Sen Portman Office on Ohio Job Cuts

Logo

Wednesday, March 23, 10:30AM - 12:00PM COLUMBUS WORKER RALLY & PRESS CONFERENCE

  • WHERE: U.S. Senator Rob Portman’s Office, 37 West Broad Street, Columbus, OH

  • WHAT: Ohio GE Workers Rally with Picket Signs and Banners for Press Conference at Sen. Portman office in Columbus, Deliver Petition Calling for Action to Stop Oho Job Cuts

  • SPEAKERS: 

    • Carl Kennebrew, President of IUE-CWA national labor union 

    • Tim Burga, President, Ohio AFL-CIO 

    • Will Evans, President, IUE-CWA Local 84704

    • Barb Basore, GE Lighting Bucyrus plant worker whose family has provided a combined 500 years of service to the company

Supporting Wars But Not Militaries

I’ve just become aware of and read the 2020 book by Ned Dobos, Ethics, Security, and The War-Machine: The True Cost of the Military. It makes a pretty strong case for the abolition of militaries, even while concluding that it may or may not have done so, that the matter should be taken on a case-by-case basis.

Dobos sets aside the question of whether any war can be justified, arguing instead that “there may be cases where the costs and risks generated by a military establishment are too great for its existence to be justified, and this is even if we think that some wars are necessary and consistent with the demands of morality.”

So this is not an argument against raising a military and waging a war, but (possibly) against maintaining a standing permanent military. Of course the case that we’ve always made at World BEYOND War is that no war can ever be justified, taken in isolation, but if it could be it would have to do so much more good than harm as to outweigh the enormous harm done by maintaining a military and done by all the obviously unjust wars facilitated or created by maintaining a military.

Book Review: Death by Democracy

Book cover

Death by Democracy documents the death of a society governed of, by and for the people.

A local Ohio activist penned each chapter of Death by Democracy, recording how they “fought City Hall” to put a citizen’s initiative, ordinance or charter amendment on their municipality’s ballot. Each narrator tells a sincere and courageous story of a group endeavor to prevent or stop pollution from affecting their community.

The title of this book may seem overblown, sounding somewhat like “click-bait,” but there’s actually a valid reason “death” could result from the desecration of democracy experienced by these groups over the past decade in Ohio.

New Great Game: Can Venezuela Negotiate an End to US Deadly Sanctions?

How the tables have turned. A high-level US delegation visited Venezuela on March 5, hoping to repair economic ties with Caracas. Venezuela, one of the world’s poorest countries partly due to US-Western sanctions is, for once, in the driving seat, capable of alleviating an impending US energy crisis if dialogue with Washington continues to move forward. 

Civic Duty Voting, Chaos in Texas, Insanity in Ohio

Our GREEP zoom #87 leaps into the issue of Civic Duty Voting with the great MILES RAPOPORT, former Secretary of State of Connecticut.

Miles has served as president of Common Cause and Demos.  He is most recently the co-author, with E.J. DIONNE, of 100% Democracy being published this week by New Press.

Miles’s discussion of universal mandatory voting is groundbreaking and fascinating.  He’s a great presenter and his hour with us is utterly riveting.  

We then hear from MYLA RESON and election protection activists SUSAN YOUNG and TERRI BURKE about the major challenges facing voters in Texas.  Leading that agenda is a brutal race for Attorney-General, where a grassroots victory could be a game-changer nationwide.

We follow with an astounding dive into the unreal rabbit hole that is Ohio.  As we hear from RACHEL COYLE,  DAVID DEWITT and STEVE CARUSO, GOP fanatics have trashed public mandates to draw fair and balanced districts for upcoming elections for the state legislature and US Congress.  

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