Bald man with gray goatee at a official city meeting

Why did Bryan Clark, who managed the anti-Issue 1 campaign last year, have a seat at the table at Columbus Charter Review Committee meetings? Last year Clark, chief policy advisor for Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther, took a leave of absence from the mayor’s office to manage the campaign against Issue 1, the citizens’ initiative proposing an expanded City Council with district representation.

Issue 1 was defeated at the Aug. 2 special election. Many activists believed that Issue 1 lost because of an expensive propaganda campaign by the opposition full of blatant distortion about how large Council would get and the costs to taxpayers if Council expanded.

Clark was among several city employees who made repeated presentations at the Charter Review Committee’s 12 meetings. He was continually at the table in front of them to answer questions and make comments. He and J. Edward Johnson, city council’s director of legislative affairs, were so involved with the committee’s final recommendations that one member suggested calling it “The Clark-Johnson Plan.”

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Alcohol is a big problem on college campuses and underage drinking is a major slice of the problem. The connection between excessive alcohol consumption and violence and sexual assault is well established.

Ohio State University has its share of student drinking issues, as have most U.S. colleges. When OSU decided to sell beer to students at football games last season, it needed a public relations gimmick to cover over a dubious decision.

So athletic director Gene Smith and his minions came up with the following story line: We'll use some of the beer profits to hire more OSU police officers.

It turns out that the first season of beer peddling netted the athletic department over $1 million. Recently, OSU held a PR fest to announce the hiring of more police with the beer money.  

Last time I checked the OSU athletic department's annual revenue was $167 million and it was turning a tidy profit of $13 million. Smith could put $1 million a year into hiring more police any time he wants to and hardly miss it.

rump proposes to increase U.S. military spending by $54 billion, and to take that $54 billion out of the other portions of the above budget, including in particular, he says, foreign aid. If you can’t find foreign aid on the chart above, that’s because it is a portion of that little dark green slice called International Affairs. To take $54 billion out of foreign aid, you would have to cut foreign aid by approximately 200 percent.

Alternative math!

But let’s not focus on the $54 billion. The blue section above (in the 2015 budget) is already 54% of discretionary spending (that is, 54% of all the money that the U.S. government chooses what to do with every year). It’s already 60% if you add in Veterans’ Benefits. (We should take care of everyone, of course, but we wouldn’t have to take care of amputations and brain injuries from wars if we stopped having the wars.) Trump wants to shift another 5% to the military, boosting that total to 65%.

Now I’d like to show you a ski slope that Denmark is opening on the roof of a clean power plant — a clean power plant that cost 0.06% of Trump’s military budget.

Blonde woman next to the Broadview Hts sign

Freep Hero: Tish O’Dell and CELDF

The Free Press hero is Tish O’Dell, who campaigned for and won a Community Bill of Rights that banned fracking in Broadview Heights, Ohio. O’Dell and her group, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) have helped 28 communities including Columbus fight to protect clean air and water as a right. There will be a CELDF “Community Rights for Social Justice” conference at the Northwood-High building in Columbus Saturday, March 4. CELDF is making civil disobedience a democratic and civic duty.

The Free Press Salutes

Purple background with nuke plant blowing up in a mushroom cloud

What may be America's most dangerous, decrepit and disastrous nuke is facing Judgment Day. And it could cost you both your money and your life. The infamous Davis-Besse reactor, near Toledo, is at the breaking point. It is poised to lose hundreds of millions of dollars for its owners and Ohio rate payers. So, of course, the "free enterprise" Republican legislature is poised to give those nuke operators a massive bailout. To the tune of more than $4 Billion (that's not a typo).

Natural Gas is cheaper. New gas plants far in excess of DB are under construction. Ohio has tremendous wind resources, far in excess of anything we will ever need and far more than it would take to replace DB. Thanks to spectacular technological advances in recent years, that wind power—along with new solar panels—is cheaper, safer, cleaner and more reliable than the nuke, and would create thousands of jobs beyond the few hundred at Davis-Besse.

Three women's faces

In February, Columbus City officials announced a massive giveaway to a major developer to build upscale housing at Easton. The city and school district will forego a total of $68 million in property taxes over the next thirty years. In return, The Georgetown Co. will make a total of $5.75 million in contributions toward development in the Linden area – $4.25 million of which will be repaid to them using a tax increment financing district, or TIF. The deal also requires Georgetown to create a total of 500 full-time, non-retail jobs over the next 11 years. Ostensibly the income tax revenue from these jobs would offset a portion of the lost property tax - but the penalty for missing the goal is only $100,000 per year.

Photo of brown haired woman with gray suit on

Tuesday, February 28, 6-9pm
Kafe Kerouac,  2250 N. High St.
Learn more about the Green Party and the 10 key values.
Meet and greet Green Party current, prospective and past candidates.
Get involved! Learn about upcoming Green Party activities and how to help with campaigns.
Celebrate Connie's Birthday! Come and talk some politics with the Green Party state co-chair on her birthday.
This event is being hosted by Committee to Elect Connie Gadell Newton

Comrades and friends, I am not writing to advise you how to resist the Trump regime. There are as many action proposals in circulation as there are anti-Trump groups, with “resistance” the buzzword of the moment. But resistance against what, exactly, and for what purposes? Most of the tactical proposals I have seen are strangely devoid of political content. It seems that anti-Trump is more a mood than a movement with shared aims. It is a negative sentiment shared by most of the identity and interest groups that formed part of the Democratic Party coalition (or, as the President himself would put it, by the losers) during the 2016 election.

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