On March 7 at 3:15 PM, 25 members of the Ohio State University community including undergraduate and graduate students, staff , and alumni entered Bricker Hall and began a sit-in outside of President Drake’s office to demand OSU end its business relationship with the fast food giant Wendy’s. The sit-in is the latest escalation of the years-long, student-led “Boot the Braids” campaign to remove Wendy’s from campus during which students have fasted, and marched, in protest of the fact that Wendy’s refuses to protect farmworker human rights by joining the CIW’s Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program.

Some people are attached to the idea that the Democratic National Committee will “rig” the presidential nomination against Bernie Sanders. The meme encourages the belief that the Bernie 2020 campaign is futile because of powerful corporate Democrats. But such fatalism should be discarded.

As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Of course top Democratic Party officials don’t intend to give up control. It has to be taken from them. And the conditions for doing that are now more favorable than ever.

The effects of mobilized demands for change in the Democratic presidential nominating process have been major -- not out of the goodness of any power broker’s heart, but because progressives have organized effectively during the last two years.

U.S. military spending eight years ago was at $1.2 trillion per year, when one added in the nukes in the Energy Department, the Homeland Security Department, the CIA, interest on debt, veterans’ care, etc.

Yemen:

How the House voted, Feb. 13, 2019, 248-177, to end it: roll call.

On International Women’s Day 2019 (March 8), hundreds of farmworkers, students, people of faith, community leaders and allies from across the country will march from Goodale Park to Ohio State University President Drake’s office as part of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) nationwide “4 for Fair Food” human rights tour. The CIW will be joining  the campus-based “Boot the Braids” campaigns to end the schools’ business relationships with the national fast food chain, Wendy’s, until it joins the CIW’s Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program.

In breaking news ahead of the tour, it was announced that Wendy’s will not be invited back to the University of Michigan, making UM the first university to “boot” Wendy’s from campus.  The decision to not invite Wendy’s back was declared through formal resolutions from the Michigan Union Board of Representatives, the UM student government, and the local Ann Arbor City Council.