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Let your public officials know that injection wells are NOT safe

Ohio is becoming the dumping ground for toxic out-of-state fracking wastewater. Meanwhile, there are mounting concerns about the Class II injection wells that are taking this waste.

Call or email the following officials to alert them to the ProPublica study discussed below. Demand a moratorium on Class II injection wells until an independent, scientific environmental impact study is conducted.

ODNR Director, James Zehringer: James Zehringer; 614.265.6879
Chief of Ohio Division of Oil and Gas, Rick Simmers: Rick Simmers; 614.265.6608
Head of Ohio’s Injection Well Program, Tom Tomastic: Tom Tomastic; 614.265.1032

Fact checking

George Edwards---An Activist Every Day! 3/24/18---10/5/12

The working class and people lost a great leader, activist, fighter for justice and equality this past week when 94 year old GEORGE EDWARDS died. While his accomplishments were many, significant and will have positive influence on our lives for generations, what those who knew George will remember most was his all abiding humanity. While a lifelong champion of worker’s rights, civil rights and peace, George was as at home with a beer watching the game, gardening, hiking, camping or visiting friends as he was at a meeting of his beloved steelworker unionists.

Born in 1918 in South Dakota, his family moved to Tennessee and homesteaded land in what is now the Great Smoky National Park. His father worked in the Indian Service until becoming frustrated with mistreatment of native peoples.

Veterans and allies arrested in New York as Afghanistan war enters year 12

Twenty-five people, most of them U.S. military veterans, were arrested while laying flowers at a war memorial in New York City Oct. 7. They were engaged in a peaceful vigil to honor those killed and wounded in war and to oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan as it entered its 12th year.

The vigil was held at Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza in lower Manhattan and began with a program of music and speakers including Vietnam veteran Bishop George Packard, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Chris Hedges, and Iraq combat veteran Jenny Pacanowski. At 8:30, the protesters began reading the names of the New York soldiers killed in Vietnam who are commemorated at the plaza and the military dead in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At 10:15 pm, the police informed the group that the park was officially closed and that if they remained they would be arrested. Many chose to continue reading names and laying flowers until they were handcuffed and taken away. One of the arrestees was Word War II Army combat veteran, Jay Wenk, 85, from Woodstock, NY.

The veterans had four aims:

Demand an end to the 11-year war in Afghanistan

The Coddling of the Corporate Rich and the Big Corporations

Romney would like to deal with the jobs’ problem by rewarding the corporate rich, often way up there in the top of the 1 percent of income and wealth distributions, with further tax cuts for themselves and others like them and for their corporations, coupled with corporate-friendly regulation, and government spending that favors the interests of their corporations. The Romney/Republican approach to jobs is based on a trickle-down, neoliberal, free market economics that assume that only the rich, particularly the corporate rich, can bring the U.S. prosperity and robust economic growth that will make everything just fine for the majority of Americans.

Last three days before election early voting reinstated in Ohio...sort of

NPR reported that a federal appeals court on Friday reinstated in-person early voting in the swing state of Ohio on the final three days before Election Day, returning discretion to local boards of elections.

The ruling by the three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati came in a case targeting a state law that ends early voting for most residents on the Friday evening before a Tuesday election. The law makes an exception for military personnel and Ohio voters living overseas.

"The State’s asserted goal of accommodating the unique situation of members of the military, who may be called away at a moment’s notice in service to the nation, is certainly a worthy and commendable goal," the court ruled. "However, while there is a compelling reason to provide more opportunities for military voters to cast their ballots, there is no corresponding satisfactory reason to prevent non-military voters from casting their ballots as well."

War, Vets, and Moral Injury

It’s not just suicide. It’s also drug overdose, car crash — quasi- or secret suicide, carried out in fearful isolation.

Young Iraq and Afghanistan vets are dying in increasing numbers by their own hands in “a largely unseen pattern of early deaths that federal authorities are failing to adequately track and have been slow to respond to,” according to a recent story in the Austin American-Statesman based on a six-month investigation of the causes of death of 266 Texas veterans, out of the 345 known to the Veterans Administration to have died since their return from duty. At least 142 of those deaths were self-inflicted in one way or another.

These are the forgotten dead. Their autopsy reports, the American-Statesman story tells us, “paint a mosaic of pain, desperation and hopelessness among a significant number of Texas veterans.” And of course it goes beyond Texas. Similar numbers, similar stories, similar wreckage, can be found in every state.

Ignore debate zingers, focus on issues

As Wednesday’s presidential debate approached, the political junkies were gearing up for a shoot-out. Much attention was paid to the political horse race. Much debate commentary was about technique: Was President Barack Obama crisp? Did Mitt Romney use the zingers he has reportedly practiced? Did he get under the president’s skin?

This is all cute but irrelevant. The debate should focus on the future. And it should pay attention to stark realities that have largely gone unmentioned in the campaigns.

† The candidates need to be asked what they plan to do to put people back to work and how they plan to create an economy that works for working people. Romney argues that austerity — harsh cuts in spending — is what is needed. But Europe has given us a case study about what happens when austerity is applied to a weak economy: rising misery, spreading poverty and growing despair. Why would we want to repeat that here?

Mountains of evidence on election tampering documented in book on election integrity movement

CICJ Books has just released "Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Rise and Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, 2000-2008" by Marta Steele.

Marta Steele has done yeoman work for the election integrity movement. She has plowed through more websites and blogs than one can even imagine. She set out with the nearly impossible task of writing the definitive historical narrative of the folly of electronic voting in the United States between 1988 and 2008. More shockingly, she accomplished that task.

Electronic voting machines are perfectly designed to steal elections. That's their principle purpose. Ireland has just gotten rid of them altogether. Germany, Japan, Canada, Switzerland all use paper ballots. Why? Because you can actually count them in public, and then count them again.

Protect the Vote! Election Protection & Video the Vote volunteers needed

Election Protection Observers
The Free Press (Freepress.org) in conjunction with the Green Party will be placing observers for the 2012 election. We need volunteers. All observers must be eligible voters in Ohio.
If you are new to this, you may not know that we can appoint one observer at the county level. County level observers can observe in a different county from their county of residence. County level observers can observe at any precinct throughout the day, and also can observe the vote counting* process in the evening of election day (approximately 7:30 to midnight) Our goal is to place one county level observer in 44 of the 88 Ohio counties, and have that county level observer spend the evening at the county BOE.

If you are willing to help, I need some feedback.

1. Can you observe at the county level outside of Franklin County and spend the evening at that Board of Elections? If so, which county would you prefer?

2. Can you observe at the county level outside of Franklin County but not able to observe in the evenings? If so, which county would you prefer?

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