Utter chaos in Ohio’s gerrymandering war and the California’s big green shift define our GREE-GREE zoom #90.

We are now officially the GREEN GRASSROOTS EMERGENCY ELECTION PROTECTION Coalition.  Saving the planet is inseparable from saving our elections.  

Today’s amazing gathering deals with the blood war over Ohio’s Congressional and Legislative districts, now being sabotaged by a GOP determined to trash the will of the Buckeye State as expressed by two popular referenda demanding a fair districting process.

We hear from COMMON CAUSE, the LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS, INDIVISIBLE and more on a battle that could determine control of the US House, the Ohio Legislature and thus our future.  JOEL SEGAL fills us in on the Constitutional legalities.

ANDREA MILLER briefs us on grassroots organizing for 2022.

Then we hear from TATANKA BRICCA and SARA NELSON and more on fight to take California—and thus the United States and the world—to green power.  WENDI LEDERMAN fills in from Florida.  

This is a powerful, packed excursion in the election and energy democracy.  Don’t miss it!
 

I call the public’s attention to today’s radical, unprecedented, unconstitutional, and inhumane campaign to ban books in schools. It combines intersecting dimensions that span history, education, child development, and respect for the text and legal and cultural traditions of “We the People,” “Public Welfare” and “Public Interest.” It includes the rights of children, for which we fought from the late 19th century into the present.

I write as a historian of literacy and education, and children and youth; a teacher of college students for almost 50 years; and a concerned citizen. My colleagues and friends include authors of national prize-winning, young adult novels banned in several states on false grounds.

The Kenyon Student Worker Organizing Committee has been fighting for improved working conditions on Kenyon’s campus for the better part of 2 years and Kenyon College is quietly at the forefront of union-busting amongst the higher-education community, spending thousands of dollars an hour to take away the rights of its undergraduate student workers with implications for undergraduate and graduate workers nationwide.

There is a reason why Israel is insistent on linking the series of attacks carried out by Palestinians recently to a specific location, namely the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. By doing so, the embattled Naftali Bennett’s government can simply order another deadly military operation in Jenin to reassure its citizens that the situation is under control. 

 Indeed, on April 9, the Israeli army has stormed the Jenin refugee camp, killing a Palestinian and wounding ten others. However, Israel’s problem is much bigger than Jenin. 

This morning, workers at the Westerville Starbucks, 533 South State Street, petitioned the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a union election to join the Starbucks Workers United movement that’s currently sweeping the country. The store is the second in Columbus behind four locations in Cleveland and one that filed this week in Cincinnati, becoming the seventh in Ohio and pushing well over 200 nationwide.

Workers at the Westerville Starbucks wrote a letter to Starbucks CEO saying that “the company has now deemed it too expensive to provide adequate coverage for us to properly serve the community we love,” echoing a sentiment streaming out from locations from across the nation.