Student Organizers Demand President Johnson and the OSU Board of Trustees Divest from Fossil Fuels

Students outside at a rally

October 29, 2021, 1:00 PM
OSU’s Bricker Hall (190 N Oval Mall building 001, Columbus, OH 43210)
Just ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, a coalition of U.S. youth climate advocacy organizations will kick off a campaign to end fossil fuel expansion by 2022 by targeting financers of the fossil fuel industry. Columbus organizers are joining in on a national day of action by calling on The Ohio State University’s President and Board of Trustees to completely divest from all fossil fuel projects immediately and reinvest in renewable energy. A coalition of students and Columbus community members will rally in front of OSU President Johnson’s office to take a stand against Ohio State’s investment in the climate crisis. Ohio Climate Youth for Climate Justice is a youth-led movement organizing radical action to address the climate crisis with the focus and urgency that the issue deserves.

Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists & Cincinnati Socialists Summit

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Thursdaym Octobetr 28, 7-8:30PM
Zoom
Join the Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists as we discuss and apply revolutionary ideas.
This week, we will be meeting on zoom from 7:00-8:30pm, where we will be collaborating with Cincinnati Socialists to discuss housing and reproductive rights. Hope to see you there!

 

Boo Manchion

Dissecting The “Georgia Way” For Future Grassroots Organizing

First we’re filled in by CYNTHIA PAPERMASTER of Code Pink on the efforts to free JULIAN ASSANGE from his unjust captivity and torture in the UK.
 
Then we hear for the bulk of the zoom from the great RAY MCCLENDON on how grassroots organizing in Georgia helped put Joe Biden in the White House and, truly miraculously, send a black and a Jewish Senator to the US Capitol.
 
Those two Senators gave the Democrats a 50-50 split in the Upper House and put the decisive vote in the hands of Vice President Katherine Harris, changing everything.
 
But how it was done also changed everything, as we hear from the Political Director of the Atlanta NAACP, who helped coordinate one of the most successful grassroots campaigns in US history.
 
This “Georgia Way” is now the subject of a major upcoming book and documentary film that will serve as a national paradigm for confronting the Trump-Bannon fascist assault on our democracy.
 

Jerusalem’s ‘Liveliest Parties’: Has Biden Proved Different from Trump on Palestine?

When Joe Biden was declared the winner in the US elections last November, expectations in Ramallah were high. A Biden Administration, compared to the brazenly pro-Israel Trump Administration, would surely be much fairer to Palestinians, was the conventional wisdom at the time. 

 

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

Several million dollars’ worth of fiction exploded the other day, leaving cinematographer Halyna Hutchins — age 42, a wife, a mom — dead, and plunging Alec Baldwin, who accidentally shot her, into a state of unimaginable hell.

This happened on Oct. 21, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the set of the movie Rust. Despite the enormity of coverage the incident has gotten, I remain bewitched with incredulity over one unanswered question. Baldwin, the star of the movie, a Western, and one of its producers, was practicing his gun draw, using a prop gun he’d been given — except the gun wasn’t a prop. It was real. And it was loaded.

My question, of course, is: Why?

Issue 7’s John Clarke opens up about “personalized” attacks, turf battles over clean energy

Person hold Make American Green Again sign

This past summer the Ohio Environmental Council (OEC) stated that Issue 7 “is thin on details and short-circuits the city’s ability to mitigate the causes of climate change.” 

“Because the city is already moving toward 100% clean energy, the creation of the funds in the ballot initiative is superfluous at best, and outright thievery at worst,” wrote OEC staff attorney Chris Tavenor in an email. “The initiative’s language calls for the transfer of funds into the hands of a privately held corporation, and it further permits that corporation to receive ‘administrative’ fees for the distribution of subsidies. Simply put, a corporation has placed itself in a position to benefit from taxpayer dollars when the city has already created a program in pursuit of similar goals: Clean Energy Columbus. Columbus does not need a private corporation as a financial third party in the pursuit of energy efficiency, clean energy, and electric affordability.”

A recent Dispatch headline offered this scathing condemnation as well, “Weaselly ‘green energy’ group tries to con Columbus voters out of $87 million.”

Ohio Education Promotes Racism and Restricts Equity, Again

Racism with no sign through the word

In the past two months, the state of Ohio actively retreated from its commitment to promote equity and combat racism in its schools. The reactionary march backward constitutes a withdrawal from constitutional principles, American social commitments, historical trends since at least 1954, and very likely its own laws. The partners in this reactionary dance are the right-wing, Republican-dominated state legislature; Attorney General Dave Yost; Gov. Mike DeWine; and the State Board of Education. I have written about the intertwined issues elsewhere.

THE SERPENT: Theater Review

On October 26 I saw Tom Stoppard interviewed on PBS’ Amanpour & Company and the British playwright stated that “theater is a storytelling art form.” While I hold the bard who wrote 1966’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in high esteem (see my review of A Noise Within’s 2016 production of Arcadia: “Arcadia”: Tom Stoppard’s complex Byronic drama to the manor born – People's World (peoplesworld.org)), there are some intrepid souls in the realm of the stage who’d beg to differ with Stoppard’s definition/description of theater.

Climate Emergency Includes the Threat of ‘Nuclear Winter’

When world leaders gather in Scotland next week for the COP26 climate change conference, activists will be pushing for drastic action to end the world’s catastrophic reliance on fossil fuels. Consciousness about the climate emergency has skyrocketed in recent years, while government responses remain meager. But one aspect of extreme climate jeopardy -- “nuclear winter” -- has hardly reached the stage of dim awareness.

Wishful thinking aside, the threat of nuclear war has not receded. In fact, the opposite is the case. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been moving the “Doomsday Clock”ever closer to cataclysmic midnight; the symbolic hands are now merely 100 seconds from midnight, in contrast to six minutes a decade ago.

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