Wednesday, September 1, 2010 @ 7:00 PM.
Gateway Film Center – 1550 North High Street
Presented by the Columbus International Film + Video Festival and the Ohio Environmental Council (OEC)

The CIF+VF kicks off its 2010 Early Bird Screenings with a fundraiser for the Ohio Environmental Council. “Living Downstream”, a film by Chanda Chevannes, Living Downstream is a powerful reminder of the intimate connection between the health of our bodies and the health of our air, land and water. Based on the acclaimed book by ecologist and cancer survivor Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., Living Downstream is an eloquent and cinematic feature-length documentary. This poetic 85-minute film follows Sandra during one pivotal year as she travels across North America, working to break the silence about cancer and its environmental links.
(right click, select Show All)

Tickets are $8.50 for adults and $5.00 for students. Convenient $1 parking (up to 4 hours) is available year round in the GFC garage located right next door to the cinema on both 9th and 11th avenues (purchase $1 parking at the box office).

444-7460
Email: info@chrisawards.org
http://www.livingdownstream.com/
Check out the Free Press review: http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/17/2010/3916

On Saturday I marched with ten thousand people in downtown Detroit demanding “Good Jobs Now” as part of Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “Rebuild America” rally. I then visited my desolate boyhood westside Detroit neighborhood, Brightmoor, to remind myself what happens when an advanced nation foolishly refuses to have an industrial policy. Brightmoor was a thriving community in post-World War II society, when we actually manufactured things at home instead of outsourcing them to oppressive Third World regimes.

I visited the shell of my burned out childhood home at 12802 Stout and tried to recall the neighborhood when all the houses were occupied by autoworkers and those who worked in related industries like tool and die. My Dad worked just across the street from our house at O. Keller Tool and Die. Now in that 12-block radius, where I delivered the Detroit Shopping News, there are whole blocks without occupied houses. On Vaughn, a street where I used to deliver papers, there’s only four unoccupied houses where there used to be dozens. My old junior high school, Harding, looked like it had been shocked and awed in wartime as it lay half in rubble, being knocked down because no one lives in Brightmoor anymore.

They’re now talking of letting this thriving former working class neighborhood to overgrown meadows and orchards. This would be an improvement over the desperate poverty and gangs that remain in the area. The massive destruction of a working class neighborhood would not have been allowed in Canada, Japan, or western Europe. In Detroit, the complete devastation of one of the richest cities in the20th century is accepted. In my travels to the 9th ward in New Orleans, I saw stark devastation. On TV I see the ravages of natural disasters in Haiti and Pakistan. But the unprecedented destruction of Detroit is not caused by natural disasters. It was made by politicians – made in America – through policies of greed. The unnatural disaster in Detroit is little more than the result of patterns of disinvestment by transnational corporations and a misplaced mantra of “free trade” that found more profit in outsourcing jobs to authoritarian China than making things in the Motor City.

People need to see the destruction for themselves. In the case of a few of us who attended the Brightmoor reunion just outside the city in Hines Park, we actually remember what Detroit was like when we had a saner industrial policies in those forgotten pre-Reagan days. We know exactly what a neighborhood feels like and a community of people with actual jobs living in occupied houses. The Rebuild America rally says it all. As long as we spend 3 trillion dollars illegally attacking Iraq and hundreds of billions more fighting an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, there will be o rebirth of Detroit or America.

Glenn Beck can talk about America’s divine destiny, but if he was a righteous man, he would fight for the displaced workers of Detroit, not shill for the wealthy who destroyed it and ruined the American dream. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis fighting for better pay for sanitation workers. For Beck, who spends most of his time attacking any moderate attempts by the Obama administration to prop up the economy, to any way to associate himself with social justice, is an injustice and travesty. From Father Coughlin to Rush Limbaugh to Glenn Beck, the bribe tools of the corporate media structure, they will always blame those who are powerless and take the thirty pieces of silver from those who have the real power.

Sponsored by the Drexel Theater, the Free Press, and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund.
253-2571, truth@freepress.org

An age-old question on government abuse asks: “Who watches the watchers?” In Columbus, the answer is easy, it’s Copwatch.

Active and visible in the OSU campus area since the May 17, 1996 confrontation between Columbus police officers and 12th Avenue partiers, their slogan is “Refuse to be Abused”; their logo depicts an eyeball for the “O” in the word Cop. A pamphlet they’ve handed out every weekend this fall states: “We have cameras. We have lawyers. We have people who can be seen, and people who can’t. We are watching cops right now in the OSU area.”

And all of it’s true.

Like many seemingly subversive and radical ideas and innovations, the Copwatch concept originated in Berkeley. It is a direct linear descendant of perhaps America’s most well-known militant Copwatchers-the Oakland-based Black Panther Party and the Berkeley-based student liberation movement that brought us the student Free Speech Movement and clashed with the police over Peoples Park in the ’60s.

Like its Bay-Area predecessors, Copwatch was first organized in February 1990 on the south side of Berkeley in response to “police brutality,” according to Berkeley’s Copwatch handbook. The ongoing struggle between the University of California at Berkeley administration and campus-area residents over the removal of the Peoples Cafe from Peoples Park once again brought “people together out of a mutual understanding that this violence, which is targeted at the poor, street people, people of color, activists and hippies is a direct result of pressure from the university, many Telegraph Avenue merchants and landlords to gentrify the area,” the handbook explains.

In its initial manifesto proclaiming “Who is Copwatch?” the organization asserted: “We have come to feel that the very people who are supposed to safeguard our persons and property have actually come to represent a major threat to us.” They weren’t alone and their idea began to spread across the country.

In 1994, the Minneapolis Anti-Racist Action chapter, an organization whose national headquarters is in Columbus’s north campus area, started its own version of Copwatch. One of the Minneapolis founders, Justine-Copwatchers are generally reluctant to use their full name for fear of police harassment-conceded that “Our philosophy is a little different than Berkeley’s.

“We have more of a critique of the state, and what the police work to do, to uphold racist laws and a class-based society and suppress the poor,” she explained. Unlike Berkeley, the Minneapolis Copwatch focuses mainly on the downtown areas where they claim that African-American youth are routinely harassed on Friday and Saturday nights. Justine said that, “Curfews are strictly enforced on black youth and we didn’t see that being done in other areas, so it provided us with a way to have a greater public presence” by monitoring the police.

The instructions in the Minneapolis Copwatch handbook call for much more aggressive action than Berkeley’s. Their teams of four “intervenors” are told that, “It’s your job to find out what’s going on, be a witness, and prevent false arrest and harassment.” The more Gandi-ist Berkeley chapter says, “Treat everyone you come in contact with in a friendly and polite manner”; the Minnesota chapter advises, “Don’t get into philosophical debates with pigs, it’s pointless.” The Minneapolis Copwatch literature proclaims: “We don’t talk to cops!” They instruct their members: “They are our oppressors and you are committed to fighting oppression.” They define one of the notetaker’s tasks in the handbook as recording “Stupid or fucked-up quotes from the cops.”

Despite their more militant tactics and rhetoric, Justine said that only four Copwatch members have been arrested in its two years of existence, all misdemeanors involving interference with official police business.

On the other hand, the fledgling and much less confrontational Columbus Copwatch had four of its members arrested in a two-week period between October 13 and 27, and are adding a different element, the lawsuit. Attorney Jim McNamara said he plans to file suit on Wednesday, November 27 in the Franklin County Common Pleas Court against the city of Columbus and Columbus Police Officer David J. Dennison and, as yet, unnamed John and Jane Doe officers. The suit, filed on behalf of plaintiffs Shammas Jones, Chris Wisniewski, and Walter Leake alleges “assault and battery,” “false arrest,” and “malicious prosecution” against the officers and the city.

The lawsuit stems from the Columbus Police Department’s actions in the south campus area on the evening of May 17, 1996. It also led to the founding of Copwatch in Columbus. Jones, then a third-year Criminology student, stood behind the police and videotaped them as they charged down 12th Avenue firing tear gas and wooden bullets and making random arrests.

The reason for the confrontation between a couple hundred police and throng of 12th Avenue party-goers remains a mystery. The lawsuit states: “This large police presence was not in response to any emergency situation or civil disobedience. Rather, it was a pre-planned action.” McNamara claims that testimony in the Shammas Jones criminal trial-where a jury unanimously acquitted of all criminal charges-demonstrated that the police planned the confrontation with the partiers “up to 10 days earlier.”

McNamara contends that Jones merely “observed, videotaped, and then turned to walk away” when “he was attacked from behind by the police, Maced in the face, knocked to the ground, pushed and struck violently and repeatedly.” The suit alleges that the police attacked Jones “because he had videotaped improper police actions.” Jones asserts that the portion of his tape that showed the police misconduct was erased while in police custody.

“I don’t have any knowledge of that,” said Commander Steven Gammil, the CPD officer in charge of the situation on the OSU campus the night Jones, Wisniewski and Leake was arrested.

So outraged was Jones by the police action he refused an offer by the city of Columbus to dismiss all criminal charges against him, including disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, if he signed an agreement promising not to sue the city and the officers.

Co-plaintiff Chris Wisniewski, a member of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), was shocked by the police assault on Jones, an African-American, and “paused and made a critical comment on the police action,” according to McNamara. Wisniewski, the suit claims, was also “attacked from behind” and arrested.

Co-plaintiff Leake was Maced “in a police show of force to clear the area quickly,” says the suit. Neither Wisniewski nor Leake were charged with criminal conduct. “Look, there’s three steps here. First, the police hurt you physically if you attempt to witness their actions. Then they arrest you, and finally, they charge you if you happen to catch them on videotape,” McNamara asserts.

Within a week, ARA activists aware of the Copwatch in Minneapolis, took to the streets. On May 31, a dozen Copwatchers demonstrated on the corner of 12th and High with a banner asking a simple question: “Is South Campus a Student Neighborhood or a Penal Colony!?” Diverting from the Minneapolis model, Columbus Copwatchers emphasize not only non-confrontational observing of south campus police activity, but educating area residents of their Constitutional rights. Every weekend night on campus they hand out literature containing “Practical tips in dealing with the police.” One tip advises, “Do not ‘bad mouth’ the police or run away, even if you believe what is happening is unreasonable.”

The summer months weren’t much of a test as to the police’s receptiveness to the Copwatch tactics. News coverage on NBC4 showing police brutality, with video depicting an officer repeatedly punching an arrested student, helped create a friendly environment for Copwatch activity.

Autumn quarter at OSU became the real challenge. It started well enough with Shammas Jones being acquitted on September 23. But then things got ugly. After OSU’s victory over Notre Dame, police provided little or no law enforcement as a small but determined group of celebrators vandalized and overturned cars on 12th Avenue. Public sympathy for south campus residents quickly vanished. With great fanfare, OSU President Gordon Gee disposed of due process and suspended several students suspected of taking part in the vandalism, which occurred off-campus and not under the university’s jurisdiction.

Copwatch members claimed that the Columbus Police Department let the vandalism get out of control to punish 12th Avenue residents critical of their May 17 actions and to manipulate public opinion. It worked. With elected officials and the public at large decrying student vandalism, the police were virtually given carte blanche to control the south campus area.

Liquor control agents posing as store clerks and pizza delivery men invaded the south campus area to crack down on underage drinking. They routinely enter area residences that host weekend parties, checking I.D.’s, making arrests and confiscating kegs. And the mainstream media began to report routinely the number of campus arrests each weekend along with the Buckeye football score. OSU student Anthony Tarantino commented that the police “are taking away all our freedoms. They’re watching us all the time. It’s like we live in a police state.” Another student, Donald Cox, said “The cops are screwing everything up. We need gas masks to party. It sucks.”

The emboldened police immediately cracked down on Copwatchers. On October 13, a Copwatch member was arrested for videotaping police arrests. The tape he shot clearly shows that he was complying with police orders. Columbus Alive viewed a video provided by McNamara that shows the police ordering the Copwatch videographer to the sidewalk, a safe distance away from the arrest. The police later push the videographer into a crowd of students and arrest him after he asks them if they want to “get macho for the camera.”

“What Copwatch was doing is perfectly legal,” argues McNamara.

On October 19, Copwatch organized a rally, in conjunction with ARA’s national convention, of some 300 people to march against police brutality in the south campus area. Police squad cars followed the peaceful demonstration and waded into the crowd at Blake Avenue and High Street to arrest a marcher for walking in the street. In making the arrest, they Maced several demonstrators, including this Columbus Alive reporter. Police later denied using Mace to the media.

Copwatch members and police clashed again on October 27. Both Josh Klein and Ann Pussel were arrested while peacefully videotaping an arrest near 12th and High. And fellow watcher Patricia Sikora was ticketed when she followed the police cruiser to the Franklin County jail to bail them out. Columbus Alive obtained a tape of the incident that is strikingly at odds with the police arrest report submitted by Lieutenant Rich Mann. In Mann’s report, “Mr. Klein then walked right up to the officer’s face, pushing his camcorder into their faces. He was again ordered to leave the area. Mr. Klein then walked to the sidewalk taunting and crying at officers.”

The tape tells a different tale. Officers indeed ordered Klein a safe distance away to the sidewalk. At that point, a male companion of the man being arrested says to the Copwatchers, “That’s fucked up. It takes a whole precinct to arrest him.” Police officers, clearly not in any danger with their man arrested and in the cruiser, take offense to the companion’s remark and walk up to the camera. When they put their hands on Klein, he says “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.” In Mann’s version-not substantiated by the tape-Klein says “I don’t have to leave. Don’t you fucking touch me.” Upon arrest, fearing that his tape would meet the same fate as that of Shammas Jones, Klein passed his camera off to Ann Pussel, who was immediately arrested for interfering with police business.

McNamara vows to produce, in addition to the tape, at least three eyewitnesses who support Copwatch’s version. On October 31, the U.S. Justice Department announced an investigation of evidence of patterned discrimination by Columbus Police officers giving Copwatch members some hope that their arrests have not been in vain.

Doug Browell, chief labor attorney for the city of Columbus, commented Tuesday, “We don’t try our cases in the press. So I really have no comment on [the investigation.] What I can say is that the city is cooperating with the investigation as much as possible.”

Ron Zeller, owner of the south campus restaurant Street Scene and self-professed “Copwatch Watcher,” has strong opinions on Copwatch tactics. “Copwatch serves some good purposes, but they’ve overstepped their bounds a little bit.” While he supports the police and criticizes the Copwatchers for interfering, he concedes that the crux of the problem is the government’s policy that tries “to legislate moral and social problems.” He said that out of the 29 altercations he’s had at Street Scene, 27 involved non-college students. “Just today I had a 28-year-old who wanted to throw a beer bottle at the TV set because the Buckeyes lost to Michigan. He’s not a student. There’s too much Section 8 housing in the area. Too much density in the 12th Avenue area and that’s the landlord’s fault, not the students.” He frankly admits that he believes there’s “discriminatory enforcement of the liquor laws in the campus area.”

In anticipation of an OSU victory over Michigan, 400 riot police moved into the south campus area last weekend. No major confrontations or arrests of Copwatch members were reported.

Now comes the winter of Copwatch’s discontent and litigation. It’s not quite as exciting as Huey Newton brandishing a gun and a copy of the Constitution and facing down the Oakland Police in the 1960s, but it may be as equally important in our current climate of rough-’em-up police tactics and prison-building that the police know that they’re accountable to the communities they’re sworn to protect and serve.

“A hacker has discovered a way to force ATMs to disgorge their cash by hijacking the computers inside them,” reads the AP lead.

The AP goes on to warn that, “The attacks demonstrated last week targeted stand-alone ATMs. But they could potentially could be used against the ATMs operated by mainstream banks.”

What the Associated Press and corporate for-profit media fail to report is that Diebold, one of the world’s leading ATM hardware and sofware providers, also manufactures electronic voting machines with similar problems.

The similarities between hacking a Diebold ATM and a Diebold/Premier election machine are startling. For example, the hacker, Barnaby Jack, Director of Security Testing for Seattle based IOActive, Inc., stated “Every ATM I’ve looked at, I’ve been able to find a flaw in. It’s a scary thing.”

It’s even scarier that all major studies of electronic voting machines have found the same flaws.

The AP tells us that “Jack found that the physical keys that came with his machines were the same for all ATMs of that type made by that manufacturer.” This has long been reported by election protection activists concerning voting machines.

Jack found that you could hack the ATM machines over the internet. The same accusations were made of voting machines in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio is 2004 after election results fell significantly outside the exit poll margins of error.

This is coupled with recent revelations by Diebold that their machines were physically attacked and illegal software was installed on them in Russia. Here’s the quote from Diebold’s website:

“Criminals broke into a number of ATMs in Russia and installed illegal software. This crime required an aggressive, physical break-in with high-tech expertise once the inside of the ATM was accessed.”

The assurance from Diebold as to the reliability of their ATMs and, by inference, Premier voting machines, amounts to a confession of vulnerability: “It is important to stress that Diebold ATMs with properly configured operating systems, firewalls, passwords and other physical and logical security measures are not at risk for most software exploits.”

Note the key operative word here for Diebold ATMs and voting machines is that “most” hacking attempts will not be successful, but what about the others?

All evidence suggests that some have hacked into election results in Florida in 2000, Georgia in 2002, Ohio in 2004, and in other elections worldwide.

The use of mainstream computers to hack elections was pioneered by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. “Our man Marcos” in the Philippines desperately manipulated mainframe computers to rig his re-election, which failed because of the Corzaon Aquino and the people power movement who refused to accept the illegally programmed results.

Why is it, on this anniversary of Bill Moss’ passing, that we can readily accept people are hacking into ATM machines, but ignore the fact that people are also hacking Diebold, ES&S and other electronic voting machines and stealing more than money. They are stealing our democratic legacy.

Here in Ohio for the 2010 election, 54 out of 88 counties used DRE machines (electronic voting machines) with 34 others using computerized optical scanning voting machines which are also easily hackable.

Also, highly partisan Republican-connected election machine service companies with a long history of activism in the Right to Life movement, now maintain virtually all of the computerized electronic voting machines outside the major cities in Ohio. According to data from the Ohio Secretary of State’s website, Triad is now servicing electronic and computerized voting machines in 50 counties, up from 48 in 2008 and significantly grew from the 44 they serviced in 2004.

Recall that allegations were made before Congress that Tried often arrived unannounced prior to the Ohio recount in 2004, inserted patches and reprogrammed computers.

If we were to honor the memory of Bill Moss, we would take a stand for democracy and demand that private, for-profit vendors with their secret proprietary software codes would be forever banned from U.S. elections.

America has the know-how and technology to make sure nobody hacks our elections. Like other democracies in the world that have figured it out, it is called “paper and pen.” Fully transparent, hand-counted paper ballots.

While most people in Ohio were suffering from scarlet and gray fever last Saturday, 1,000 mourners from all over the state marched in Cincinnati to honor the memory of homeless activist Buddy Gray.

Buddy was the co-founder of the Drop-In Center homeless shelter in Cincinnati. But he was more than that. Buddy was no mere advocate, who sold his people out for 30 pieces of silver from the town’s elite.

Back in 1991, when Governor George “I am your shepherd” Voinovich got a politically motivated inspiration to abolish General Assistance (G.A.) and wage war on the poor in the name of Christian virtue, Buddy brought a dozen people from the Drop-In Center to a Statehouse protest. Buddy and his mostly homeless co-conspirators posted an eviction notice at the governor’s office, moved his furniture into the hall, and sat down.

The state police were not amused. They took the brunt of their frustration out on Buddy, I suspect because he looked like an aging hippie. They stuck fingers up his nose, they choked him, they beat him, kicked him and twisted his neck by pulling on his ponytail.

When I photographed the assault on Buddy and told the police to quit brutalizing him, they obliged by choking me. In the last speech I heard Buddy give, he predicted that the governor’s vicious cuts and documented lies that “able-bodied men” were the ones being cut off of G.A. would come back to haunt our society. Buddy foresaw that it wasn’t simply the money, but the medical benefits that went to the homeless-many of them under visible stress and some de-institutionalized mental patients-that would lead to social disruption.

On November 15, 1996, Buddy was shot to death in his office at the Drop-In Center by a homeless man with a history of behavioral problems. Just the sort that was kicked to the curb by our pious governor.

Buddy looked and acted like an Old Testament prophet. He knew that you could not serve two masters: either you stood with the poor and oppressed, or you bowed to the wishes of the rich and powerful. Buddy died unbowed, unbent, and an unrepentant advocate for “the least of his brethren.”

Family affair
Well, well. The Sunday Dispatch almost broke a story on the mayoral investigation of the Columbus Police Department. Their coverage had been so careful it bordered on conspiracy. There’s plenty more for the Daily Monopoly to dig up if they suddenly decide to give a damn. The Big D seems to have figured out the Chief Jackson/Commander Burns prostitution connection, now let’s try once again to teach the old dog a new trick.

Sit. Roll over. Speak. Say the name “Commander Curtis Marcum.” Good dog! More than a few officers have seen the thousand-or-so-page report on the murder of retired police Sergeant Mt. Vernon Johnson. James Moss, also a retired police sergeant and the director of Police Officers for Equal Rights, commented on my radio show Sunday that he has been to Washington D.C. three times in the last year to inform the Justice Department of patterns of discrimination in Columbus and the peculiar circumstances surrounding Johnson’s death. Moss, who claims to have read the investigative report, says former Supervisor in the Police Intelligence Bureau Commander Marcum and several members of his family were involved in the sordid tragedy of Mt. Vernon’s murder.

A law-enforcement source confirms Moss’s allegation. Reportedly, the story goes like this: Commander Marcum’s mother kept the kitchen at Mt. Vernon’s high-stakes west side gambling house. She also was in Mt. Vernon’s gambling book well over 200 times in less than two years. Curt’s sister gambled there as well.

But, still more curious, are questions surrounding Curt’s younger brother, a regular player and loser in Mt. Vernon’s game that should have made him a prime suspect, yet he was never questioned. Law-enforcement sources allege that he was a cocaine user and small-time drug dealer who used to sell drugs from a house in the 2400 block of Indianola. The investigation team knows that there’s no way in hell that Curt was unaware of Mt. Vernon’s gambling operation and suspect that Commander Marcum was using his position in the Police Intelligence Bureau to protect his family.

Floods, drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt.

DIRT! The Movie–directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow–takes you inside the wonders of the soil. It tells the story of Earth’s most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility–from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation.
The opening scenes of the film dive into the wonderment of the soil. Made from the same elements as the stars, plants and animals, and us, “dirt is very much alive.” In modern industrial pursuits and clamor for both profit and natural resources, our human connection to and respect for soil has been disrupted.
DIRT! the Movie–narrated by Jaime Lee Curtis–brings to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has. It shares the stories of experts from all over the world who study and are able to harness the beauty and power of a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with soil. The real change lies in our notion of what dirt is. When humans arrived 2 million years ago, everything changed for dirt. And from that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked.
But more than the film and the lessons that it teaches, DIRT the Movie is a call to action. The only remedy for disconnecting people from the natural world is connecting them to it again. What we’ve destroyed, we can heal.
This event is sponsored by the Central Ohio Sierra Club, Simply Living, the Columbus International Film and Video Festival, the Free Press, and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund. The movie is free and open to the public. Donations will be accepted. 253-2571. truth@freepress.org

Vincent Carbone, or was it Vito, called Tommy Banks an “exquisite gentleman” when asked about Tommy’s controversial building project with the Governor’s former Chief of Staff Paul Mifsud. This is understandable since the Carbone family and Banks are in the construction business together.

What is equally clear is that Mayor Greg Lashutka’s investigation of Police Chief James Jackson will involve his self-proclaimed “cousin” Tommy, and here’s why. In the spring of 1995 or thereabouts, Tommy allegedly was facing possible rape charges involving an incident at his newly built home in Gahanna. Law-enforcement sources say that Banks invited a teenager working at his property into his big new house for a tour, and it turned ugly. Allegedly, Tommy sexually assaulted the teenager, at least that’s what she told her employers and others. Sources report that Tommy “stuck real close” to Chief Jackson during this period. Reportedly, pressure was put on the victim, as well as insinuation that nothing would come of her complaint. Maybe that’s why the alleged victim never filed a formal charge.

Hard to believe? Not hardly, if you know Tommy’s track record. For example, while Columbus Alive was investigating the above incident, another report turned up on Banks. The Gahanna Police Department filed an Ohio Uniform Incident Report on April 29, 1996. The report, #96-00916, contains allegations from a Gahanna resident who claimed that Tommy Banks stalked her for over two months from February 15 to April 28, 1996. The victim, according to the report, stated that Banks “continually harassed and threatened” her. Allegedly, the married Banks repeatedly asked her out and harassed her by phone. He appeared at her place of employment and “damaged her vehicle when she tried to leave,” according to the report. Banks, the file notes, “threatened to harm her or her family.”

And then it gets even more interesting. The victim stated “that Mr. Banks had told her he has connections with the Mafia and is extremely wealthy and powerful; and that if she refuses him he’ll have her killed.” The complainant told police that she simply wanted to document the threats in case Banks took the action, the report states.

This is typical Banks, according to those who have worked with him. Upper Arlington architect Dennis Green, currently involved in a civil suit with Banks, has stated under oath that Banks threatened him as well. “Tommy Banks was flashing around a Teamster ring, it looked like a Masonic ring, saying he didn’t think I’d show for the meeting and he might have to have some of the boys from Cleveland ‘pick me up,’” Green said.

A former Banks employee who worked with Tommy at his Huntington office, which features double-paned glass and where visitors have to be buzzed in, told Alive that Tommy’s office manager and close personal friend Nancy Rogers, who keeps many of Tommy’s business secrets, “…could never leave here because they’d find her at the bottom of the river.”

“He [Banks] always carries a gun,” the employee stated, “As a joke he likes to take it halfway out of the holster and threaten to shoot you.”

Some sense of humor; no wonder the Chief likes to run with him. Banks, a former employee of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department, was fired by Sheriff Earl Smith. As part of a legal settlement, Banks is still allowed to play cop on “special duty” directing funeral traffic. Smith recalls that the settlement limits Banks to carrying his gun while on-duty only. The Gahanna Police report lists Banks as a “Franklin County Sheriff’s Officer-Reserve.” It also lists Banks’ pager number. When I paged Banks for comment, he left a brief message on my answering machine. A call from his lawyer, Ritchey Hollenbaugh, soon followed. Banks’ paid counsel demanded to know how I got Tommy’s pager number. When I told him about Tommy’s “menacing by stalking” file, Hollenbaugh pleaded ignorance. But still, he wanted to know “Why are you hounding my client?”

Seems Hollenbaugh regards my columns and the news stories in the Columbus Alive as inappropriate, particularly a recent one that dared point out that Banks’s construction application to The Ohio State University for the $75 million Schottenstein arena management job contained two obvious factual errors. One, Tommy had neither the bachelor’s degree he claimed to have been awarded-by OSU-in business administration; and two, he doesn’t really have the OSU master’s degree in engineering he listed. But Ritchey was able to clarify that for me. “It’s not a misrepresentation, it’s a mistake. Misrepresentation would be a falsification. A mistake is inadvertent, like a typo,” he explained.

Now I understand. I have Tommy all wrong. He’s made a few mistakes. And so has the Chief for allegedly protecting him. Inadvertently. I should have known, with my double Ph.D’s in Astrophysics and Brain Surgery. Oops! Typo. And I really appreciate Ritchey’s parting counsel, or was it a threat? “Be careful out there,” he said.

Fitrakis has a Ph.D. in Political Science. Honest.

The BP Gulf Coast Fiasco Part 2 with Harvey Wasserman & Dr

Progressive networking, art, music by Cafe le Spritz, and refreshments.

1021 E. Broad St., side door, parking in rear
253-2571
truth@freepress.org

http://www.wcrsfm.org/fightbackjuly2

To hear
DAVID COBB
Attorney, activist, national spokesperson for “www.MoveToAmend.org”
2004 Green Party Presidential Candidate

Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule tour
Speaking on
Corporate Personhood must be stopped – Real Democracy is possible!

First Unitarian Church
93 W. Weisheimer Rd.
Columbus

Salon At Solar Stage 6:15 pm Saturday
See page 39
http://comfest.com/program/2010/viewer.swf

7:30pm

Drexel Theater
2254 E. Main Street, Bexley
Sponsored by the Drexel, the Free Press and the Central Ohio Green
Education Fund

With our country teetering on financial ruination, politicians once
opposed to the legalization of Marijuana are finally coming to their
senses. However, it’s foolish to think we are anywhere near ending
this national nightmare. Please don’t wait until you or someone you
care about ends up in prison, get involved now
35 years after Nixon started the war on drugs, we have over one million
non-violent drug offenders living behind bars.

The War on Drugs has become the longest and most costly war in American
history, the question has become, how much more can the country endure?
Inspired by the death of four family members from “legal drugs” Texas
filmmaker Kevin Booth sets out to discover why the Drug War has become
such a big failure. Three and a half years in the making, the film
follows gang members, former DEA agents, CIA officers, narcotics
officers, judges, politicians, prisoners and celebrities. Most notably
the film befriends Freeway Ricky Ross; the man many accuse for starting
the Crack epidemic, who after being arrested discovered that his
cocaine source had been working for the CIA.

AMERICAN DRUG WAR shows how money, power and greed have corrupted not
just drug pushers and dope fiends, but an entire government. More
importantly, it shows what can be done about it. This is not some
‘pro-drug’ stoner film, but a collection of expert testimonials from
the ground troops on the front lines of the drug war, the ones who are
fighting it and the ones who are living it.

www.AMERICANDRUGWAR.COM

Join us to meet and network with like-minded socially active
individuals. If you were upset to hear about the torture of cattle
recently in Ohio, you’ll want to be there for the presentation by the
group Ohioans for Humane Farms. We also have some refreshments, maybe
some music, art, and good conversation.

truth@freepress.org
253-2571

First, the good news. Both Dennis Kucinich and Ted Strickland won their Congressional races. Make no mistake about it, these are victories by progressive Democrats against reactionary Newtonian Republicans.

Kucinich and Strickland were vilified by their right-wing opponents as “liberals,” “Communist-sympathizers,” or “godless.” In Northeast Ohio’s 10th Congressional district, Governor George Voinovich stopped in personally to denounce “the 1930s-style populism” of Kucinich. His opponent, Republican Representative Martin Hoke, portrayed Kucinich’s concern for working people and support for unionism as coming out of the “Communist Manifesto.”

Also, Hoke repeatedly red-baited Kucinich by alluding to some mysterious plot and unpaid “consulting” by Communist Party official Rick Nagin. Hoke’s retro-’50s hokeyness and McCarthyist smear tactics didn’t work. Kucinich proudly boasted of his “100 percent labor voting record” as an Ohio state senator, and reiterated his commitment to the environment and keeping a multi-state radioactive waste dump out of Ohio.

Strickland, an ordained Methodist minister, was attacked by his opponent as a godless secular humanist liberal. Among Strickland’s alleged un-Christian activity is his admitted “first priority” to provide health care insurance for 10 million U.S. children who now lack coverage. Strickland also rightly pointed out that his opponent, Republican Frank Cremeans, voted both to raise taxes on the working poor by eliminating the Earned Income Tax Credit and favored allowing millionaires to move offshore to avoid taxes.

The Strickland and Cremeans races were perhaps the two most vicious Congressional races in the U.S. The choice was clear-cut: Gingrich or progressivism. The progressives won both, despite being outspent by at least 3-1.

Now the bad news. In three other key races, all involving freshman Republican representatives, the Democrats lost. In two of the races-Representative Steve Chabot of Cincinnati vs. Mark Longabaugh and Representative Steve LaTourette of Madison vs. Thomas Coyne, Jr.-much more moderate Democratic challengers were relatively easily dispatched. Both Longabaugh and Coyne refused to engage in the knockdown, drag-out reactionary-versus-progressive campaigning that brought victory to Kucinich and Strickland.

Styling themselves more as Clintonesque “New Democrats,” the candidates were soundly rejected by the voters, thus proving the old axiom: given a choice between a real Republican and near-Republican they’ll choose the real thing every time.

In the third race, State Senator Robert Burch narrowly lost to Representative Bob Ney. Burch declined to cloak himself as a New Democrat and made direct overtures to the Perot supporters. If Burch had been given money from the Democratic Party Congressional Campaign Committee or the AFL-CIO he would have won. Burch’s district was initially rated one of the 10 most winnable by a Democrat in the nation.

Instead, a couple hundred thousand dollars was wasted on Cynthia Ruccia’s pathetic and futile New Democrat, gone-a-gay-baitin’ campaign against Representative John Kasich. Her bizarre Congresswoman wannabe slamming-the-prison-cell door commercial was not only truly twisted beyond belief, but played to Kasich’s strength.

Anyway, perhaps the even more pathetic Franklin County Democratic Party can get off their “Republican-lite” binge and field some progressive candidates for a change.

Of course, there’s always the problem a la Mary Jo Kilroy that the party might field a progressive who then feels immediately obligated to run as a centrist.

Acts 2:45
Speaking of red-baiting, I had the pleasure of spending election night on WCBE doing political commentary with Ms. Republican Right-to-Life Janet Folger. Janet, with her lightning-quick mind, honed through countless hours of Rush Limbaugh agi-prop told the listeners that I was a “communist” because I believed in the “redistribution of wealth.” There’s nothing worse than a self-righteous Right-to-Life Christian who’s not familiar with the Good Book. Having spent my youth as a fire-breathing, proselytizing evangelical Christian, let me simply refer Ms. Folger to Acts, 2:45:

“Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as he had need.” And to the Sermon on the Mount, Christ’s comments to Nicodemus, virtually every prophet in the Old Testament, etc., etc.

Inquiring minds
Speaking of religious matters, the Franklin County Democrats need to convene a political inquisition. Franklin County Chairperson Denny White and his top advisers should be figuratively put on the rack and grilled on the following races: Why was Republican Probate Judge Lawrence Belskis allowed-with that ethnic name-to run unopposed? Why did you put up your best political name, Tony Celebrezze III, against Richard Metcalf, who has been elected to public office in Franklin County since the Eisenhower administration? Why didn’t Celebrezze run against the eminently odorous and highly beatable Jesse Oddi, who had never won election in Franklin County? Why didn’t Beverly Farlow get more funds? And, are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Republican Party?

In July of 2007, Prince William County, Virginia became ground zero in America’s explosive battle over immigration policy when elected officials adopted a law requiring police officers to question anyone they thought was “probably” undocumented.

9500 Liberty reveals the startling vulnerability of a local government targeted by national anti-immigration networks using the internet to frighten and intimidate lawmakers and citizens. Alarmed by a climate of fear and racial division, residents form a resistance using YouTube videos and virtual townhalls, setting up a real life showdown in the seat of county government.

The devastating social and economic impact of the “Immigration Resolution” is felt in the lives of real people in homes and in local businesses. But the ferocious fight to adopt and then reverse this policy unfolds inside government chambers, on the streets, and on the Internet. 9500 Liberty provides a front row seat to all three battlegrounds.

Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley

Sponsored by the Free Press and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund
Truth@freepress.org
253-2571
www.9500Liberty.com

May 3, 2010

Back when “tin soldiers and Nixon” were “cutting us down” in 1970, a group of Ohio State University students and campus activists started an underground newspaper in Columbus. Driven mostly by the murder of four students at Kent State – Allison Krause, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer, and Bill Schroeder – shot during a demonstration that was opposing President Nixon’s illegal attack on Cambodia and the Vietnam War, the Columbus Free Press was born.

Not surprisingly, the Free Press was the first western newspaper to expose Cambodia’s killing fields thanks to international law professor John Quigley’s reporting from Southeast Asia.

In the first issue of the Free Press, the October 11, 1970 issue, a Free Press opinion attacked a special grand jury’s decision not to indict Ohio National Guardsmen for the Kent State killings. The Free Press wrote at the time: “The jury conveniently disregarded the FBI report which stated that the guardsmen were not ’surrounded,’ that they had tear gas, contrary to claims of guardsmen following the shooting.”

The Free Press went on to point out the obvious facts: “…a film of the shootings shown on a northern Ohio TV station on the night of May 4th shows the guardsmen retreating up the slope, then turning, kneeling, firing a volley, and rising to fire a few more scattered shots before regrouping and going over the hill. Panic may have aided in the shootings, but it was not the cause. THE GUARDSMEN FIRED ON ORDER, and the men who gave the order and the others who carried it out are free.”

Of course, the same could be said of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who waged an illegal war against the people of Iraq and murdered over a million civilians, yet still walk free. And the war endures under President Obama. The Kent State precedent of letting known murderers move among us set the stage for the smiley-face pro-torture policies of the Bush years.

Former Free Press Editor Steve Conliff did his best to bring Governor Jim Rhodes to justice for inciting the National Guard to violence against peace demonstrators. At the 1977 Ohio State Fair, Conliff pied Big Jim, exemplifying the underground press motto – If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own. Hardly the people’s tribunal longed for by the Free Press staff, but nevertheless, great political theater.

Local Free Clinic physician Pete Howison performed an experiment at Conliff’s trial, proving that pie-ing did not constitute a violent assault. Conliff was found not guilty.

Rhodes was pied by proxy again in 1990 on the 20th anniversary of the shootings, when his statute, then on the Ohio Statehouse grounds, took a direct hit to the face by a strawberry cream pie, thrown by Dr. Pete Howison. A photo of the red goop symbolically dripping down Rhodes’ face appeared in the next Free Press issue.

In 1992, the Free Press moved into an East Broad Street office that had an unusual wall in the back erected only three-quarters of the way up to the ceiling. When the office started leaking after a rainstorm, I climbed over the wall to determine the damage. Ironically, I found the original ACLU legal files containing documents from their lawsuit against the National Guardsmen at Kent State. The morgue photos of the dead students are seared into my brain.

When Jim Rhodes died, the Free Press made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from his FBI file. Here we learned the dirty truth of Rhodes’ ties to the mob and the FBI’s use of that information, some would call it blackmail, to win concessions from the governor. As the Free Press wrote in 2003, a January 14, 1963 memo noted that: “He [Rhodes] is completely controlled by an SAC [Special Agent in Charge] contact, and we have full assurances that everything we need will be made available promptly. Our experience proves this assertion.”

The FOIA file revealed that the SAC contact was none other than Robert H. Wolfe, publisher of the Columbus Dispatch.

Dispatch reporter Bob Ruth had earlier disclosed to the Free Press that Rhodes had run a gambling operation in the OSU campus area. His headquarters during the 1930s was allegedly Gussie’s State Tavern, across the street from the law school. Serendipitously, the building would later house the shop Tradewinds, one of the early headquarters of the Free Press.

The FBI would cut the corrupt numbers man Rhodes all the slack he needed because: “He is a friend of law enforcement and believes in honest, hard-hitting law enforcement. He respects and admires [the] FBI.”

In 2007, the Free Press decried “The lethal media silence on Kent State’s smoking guns” in an article I co-wrote with Harvey Wasserman. When tape-recorded evidence surfaced 37 years after the fact proving the original Free Press editorial to be correct, the mainstream for-profit corporate media, including the Dispatch, ignored it.

Rhodes’ good friends in the FBI had in their possession a tape that documented that the guardsmen were ordered to fire. Prior to the shootings, Terry Strubbe, a Kent State student had hung a microphone out of his dorm window and captured 20 seconds of sound, including the gunfire. In an amplified version of the tape, a Guard officer is heard shouting: “Right here! Get set! Point! Fire!”

Those, like the Free Press, who argued that there was an order to shoot the students were dismissed per standard mainstream media protocol as “conspiracy theorists.”

It’s never too late to embrace the truth. Rhodes was a mobster being blackmailed by the FBI who agitated his guardsmen against the students and was in the middle of a heated primary campaign for U.S. Senate. The day before the shootings, Rhodes is on record stating that student peace demonstrators were the “strongest, well-trained militant revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America. They’re worse than the brown shirts and the Communists and the night riders and the vigilantes. They are the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”

The Free Press demands a Truth Commission on the Kent State shootings. Let all sides present their evidence, even the well-trained propagandists and coincidence theorists who specialize in blaming the victims, usually for political or monetary gain. Four remain dead in Ohio and justice remains unserved.

–
Bob Fitrakis has been of the Free Press since 1992.

Original article published at:
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2010/1828

Join us for socializing, sustenance, social justice and song. Sponsored by the Free Press and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund.

1021 E. Broad St., side door, parking in rear
253-2571
truth@freepress.org

“Song of the Soul:
Stories of Hospice in South Africa”
Janet Parrott – Director/Producer/Editor from Columbus, Ohio
Sponsored by the Film Council of Greater Columbus, the Free Press, the Drexel and the Central Ohio Greed Education Fund

Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley
truth@freepress.org, 253-2571

How many hours are in a month? Don’t ask the police chief’s son, Officer Jason Jackson. Law-enforcement sources say that Jason’s figures just don’t add up for the “special duty” police security he coordinated for the South of Main project. You remember the South of Main project? Chief Jackson’s good buddy Tommy Banks “rescued” the project from the evil clutches of the non-profit South of Main Development Corporation headed by the dreaded Shawn Thompson. Or so the spin goes.

The real battle was over who would control the housing assets in the future: a non-profit or a for-profit entity. Say $10 million is put into “low-income” housing stock, primarily public funds. How long does it have to serve “low-income” residents? What happens after 10 years when the property is worth some $30 million? Who owns it then?

The non-profit South of Main was taken out of the picture when it was squeezed by certain bankers and city officials. Thompson was inflexible when it came to understanding the needs of very powerful people. She insisted that the low-income housing assets belonged to the community through a non-profit organization. The Columbus Police Intelligence Unit entered the fray, apparently siding with mysterious “for-profit” persons-whoever they may be. A raid by the Columbus Police effectively killed the South of Main Development Corporation. So far, no criminal charges have ever been brought against the South of Main, although it was widely alleged that they were mismanaging their finances.

Anyway, hear the one about Tommy and the Chief wanting to go into business together? Something to do with housing. Since Banks took over the South of Main project, sources say it looks as though over $100,000 in security has been provided by Special Duty Columbus Police. And Officer Jason Jackson has worked hard coordinating those assignments. In one month, police worked so diligently that they billed for 200 hours more than exist in an actual month.

Oops! Inquiring minds want to know whether he was a victim of the late, great “new math” movement, or protecting his dad’s future housing assets. Who’s mismanaging finances now?

Lucky dog
Speaking of mismanagement, former Police Intelligence Supervisor-now reassigned-Commander Curtis Marcum handled the South of Main raid for the Chief. Maybe he should’ve raided his brother-in-law Tony Lombardi’s place. Who knows what he would’ve turned up. Perhaps Lombardi’s reported card-playing buddy Franklin County Prosecutor Michael Miller. According to a police intelligence report, Miller allegedly likes an occasional high-stakes game of cards upstairs at The Refectory. You know, the same type of game that got retired Police Sergeant Mt. Vernon Johnson killed. And who better to spin stories with over a friendly game of poker than Lombardi? Lord knows Lombardi’s reportedly got some tales to tell.

Like the little matter of being a suspect in two murders, according to police intelligence files. James D. Colliver, Lombardi’s partner in the car dealership Contemporary Cars, met an untimely demise. Redrum! 187! So did Frank Yassanoff soon after he filed charges in 1970 against Lombardi for allegedly falsifying auto titles. Hopefully, Lombardi has better luck at picking cards than business partners. Just like Bojangles’ dog, they got a tendency to “up and die” on him.

On the topic of luck, Lombardi’s had pretty good luck in the Franklin County Courts. A grand theft charge was dismissed in June 1975 and a charge of passing bad checks was dismissed in November of the same year, according to a police intelligence report. Sure, there was the little run of bad luck in May 1983 when Lombardi pled guilty to two charges of passing bad checks, but what the hell. It could’ve been worse. After all, the prosecutor dismissed 10 other counts pending against Tony.

More bad news in March 1984 when he was convicted of gambling, yet “luck was a lady” that year and he got a one-year suspended sentence. There’s probably a really good reason why the prosecutor’s office dropped a unauthorized use of dealer’s plates charge against Lombardi in 1984. And the little matter of the allegations concerning kickbacks to a Bureau of Motor Vehicles employee during that period were never substantiated.

So, this Chief Jackson thing is really just a witch-hunt and Commander Marcum is being a scapegoat just because he has a lucky dog of a brother-in-law. And anyone who says otherwise, or anything about any of Marcum’s family members being in Mt. Vernon Johnson’s bookie book, is just an unlucky liar.

Burns me up
Did you hear the rumor about a really lucky police commander formerly in Internal Affairs-recently reassigned-who just happens to be holding a very valuable electronic Rolodex? Now suppose the names of some very powerful people-law enforcement leaders, politicians, judges-who frequented high-priced prostitutes were in that Rolodex? No, it’s not the Heidi Fleiss scandal, it’s a Cowtown Caper. One Anthony D. Mennucci ran a high-priced call girl ring in Columbus and his Rolodex, once securely in police custody, has disappeared.

The key question in the Chief Jackson investigation remains: “Why did the chief go so easy on former Internal Affairs Commander Burns?” This investigation ain’t about “racism,” it’s about who runs the prostitution and gambling rackets in Columbus. Bet on it.

You are invited to join us
Saturday, May 1, 2010
5:30-9:30pm

Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio
67 Innis (south of German Village off High Street)

$15 individual, $25 couple, low-income negotiable
(pay at the door only)

Dinner will begin at 6:00pm – the awards ceremony at 7:00pm

2010 Honorees:

In celebration of the Free Press 40th anniversary, we will honor four individuals with the Libby Award for Community Activism

Margie Daffey
Michael Gruber
Connie Everett
Bob Studzinski

Stan Embry – Bill Moss Award for Outstanding African American Activist

Marc Morin – Native American Indian Center Selma Walker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Human Rights Activism

For more information: truth@freepress.org, 253-2571

Free Press Second Saturday Salon

6:30-midnight. Join us for food, drink, music, art, progressive networking, and a visit by filmmaker John Ennis, director and star of “Free For All” — shot in Columbus about the stolen 2004 election.

Location: 1021 E. Broad St., side door, parking in lot in rear.
Phone:614-253-2571

What really happened in the 1992 sheriff’s election in Franklin County? This question is currently being probed by the Ohio Elections Commission. On Monday, the Commission found insufficient evidence to investigate money-laundering allegations against Sheriff Jim Karnes, former Franklin County Democratic Party Chair Fran Ryan, and the Franklin County Democratic Party. The commission will investigate allegations against Karnes’ 1992 campaign manager and former Elections Commission member, Greg Kostelac, and has suspended him as an investigator for the commission.

New information obtained by Columbus Alive sheds more light on the Kostelac investigation. Kostelac admits that he personally delivered $14,000 in checks made out to the Franklin County Democratic Party to Ryan on October 26 and 27, 1992. He acknowledges that Mark Wolfe, Franklin County kingpin in the adult entertainment industry, arranged for seven contributors to give $2,000 apiece.

An audiotape of a conversation between former Franklin County Republican Party Executive Director Terry Casey-now a private political consultant and associate of Kostelac-and a member of the Smith campaign crew reveals that there was a falling-out between Karnes and Kostelac immediately following the election. “Greg’s no fan of Karnes,” Casey informed the Smith campaign earlier this year, and there was “…no deal with Karnes” and Mark Wolfe. The campaign donations solicited from Wolfe by Kostelac were “motivated by wanting to screw Earl…. Karnes [was] kind of oblivious” to Greg’s deal, according to Casey.

Casey lobbied hard to keep Kostelac from being investigated: “…he’s not a dumb guy, [it's] very, very important to keep Greg out of it.” In Casey’s analysis, then-Party Chair Ryan “didn’t have a clue” on how the 1992 Franklin County campaigns were going. “[She]…didn’t think Karnes had a chance. [She thought] Farlow could beat Miller,” Casey said. The latter is reference to the race for county prosecutor between Bev Farlow and successful incumbent Michael Miller.

Casey implies that Kostelac was forced in desperation to go to the pornography industry because of poor political decisions on the part of Ryan.

In her defense, Ryan says: “Everyone knows how hard I worked to get out the sample ballot and the election tabloid. And if I did something wrong, why would I list every donation from Greg right down to the dollar; and why would I have left that file in the Democratic Party headquarters if I had something to hide?”

Ryan insists “that Greg approached me. It was my understanding that he wanted to work for the party. After all, he wanted my job.” After Ryan’s resignation, Kostelac applied to chair the Franklin County Democrats and was not selected. Later, he applied to be chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, also unsuccessfully.

Casey also said that Kostelac went so far as to “whet Wolfe’s appetite” with a nasty, negative “TV script” about Smith to entice the donations. Casey refers to “Karnes’ stupidity,” as Kostelac circumvented his candidate’s wishes and cut a deal directly with Ryan.

Ryan is on record stating that Kostelac asked her for a loan and she told him: “…if he raised money for the party, then I would give him a loan.” The problem is that Ryan’s statement just doesn’t add up unless Kostelac was trying to launder money. Kostelac raised $14,000; he gives it to Ryan; she loans him $8,000, which the Karnes campaign pays back. That equals $22,000 for Fran and $0 for the Karnes campaign. The question remains, why didn’t Kostelac simply put the $14,000 into the Karnes campaign?

Alive has learned that other factors played into Kostelac’s decision as well. Kostelac was having financial problems at the time he took the money from the porn industry. An invoice dated November 18, 1992 from Kostelac to Ryan refers to an “oral agreement” between the two that would result in Kostelac being paid $6,000 if three conditions were met. First, Kostelac must raise the money to pay himself; second, Karnes must win the election; and third, the Karnes campaign had to pay back the $8,000 loan to the Franklin County Democratic Party.

According to Sheriff Karnes, his campaign paid Kostelac nothing. “I kept asking him ‘What do I owe you?’ and he kept saying ‘You don’t,’” Karnes recalls. Party insiders and Karnes campaign workers report that at the post-election victory party at La Scala Restaurant, Kostelac took possession of the Karnes campaign cash box instead of turning it over to the treasurer, reportedly to “settle up with Fran.” Sources report that this was the beginning of a falling-out between Karnes and Kostelac. Highly placed Karnes campaign sources and Franklin County staffers all report that the final break between Karnes and Kostelac came after Kostelac asked the Karnes campaign committee for a personal loan.

Sources in the Karnes campaign report around “five hundred dollars in bounced checks” from Kostelac. Alive has also learned that Kostelac bounced checks to various political campaigns and organizations. Check #1412 for $100 from Greg Kostelac and Associates dated October 25, 1993 to the Franklin County Democratic Party was returned for “insufficient funds.”

Tapes released by the Smith campaign indicate that at least two of the contributors lined up by Mark Wolfe may have gotten some or all of their campaign money from other individuals, possibly in violation of campaign law. One of the individual contributors who was given part of the $14,000 from Wolfe, Dr. Joanna Demas, states that “…It’s possible that he [Tom Wolfe, Mark Wolfe's brother] gave me a majority of the money. But I made that donation because I believed in what I was doing. Now, maybe I was naive in not asking why is this made out to the Democratic Party and not to Jim Karnes.”

Cynthia DeSantis, a local hairdresser, was tapped while staying at Tom Wolfe’s house in Los Angeles. DeSantis, who also was one of the $2,000 contributors, states that she was “doing a favor for my best friend.” That friend was identified as Mark Long, an employee of Mark Wolfe. DeSantis says that, “I believe it was cash.”

On Friday, April 2, 7:30 PM, Dr. Robert Fitrakis, Editor, The Columbus Free Press, and Professor, Columbus State Community College, will lead a discussion of the film, “Capitalism: A Love Story.” The film will be shown, starting at 7:30PM, with the discussion of the film to follow. The showing and the following discussion are both free and open to the broad Columbus community.

Here are some key facts given emphasis within the film: Ronald Reagan opposed workers’ rights. During the Reagan administration, major corporations laid off tens of thousands of American workers while making enormous profits. “Since 1980, 2 million workers have been cut from the U.S. manufacturing payroll. Millions more have accepted – or been forced to accept – reductions in earnings.” As productivity increased, from 1980 to the
present, working people’s wages remained essentially frozen.

The richest had their taxes cut in half. The top marginal rate decreased from 70% in 1980 to 28% in 1989. Historical marginal tax rate tables are posted on the website of the Tax Policy Center. By 2008, total household debt grew to nearly one hundred percent of the GDP. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis provides data on household
debt and on GDP. The stock market rose enormously from the time of Reagan’s election to the present. CEOs pay increased greatly from the time of Reagan’s election to the present.

According to Fortune magazine, GM made $4.86 billion in profit in 1989, while laying off over 40,000 workers. In Germany, unions help hire and fire the board of directors so the workers have a say in what’s going on.

Shortly before Christmas 2008, Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors fired its entire unionized workforce of over 250 people, giving them only three days notice, and failing to pay legally required vacation
and severance pay.

Purchasing life insurance policies on non-essential employees is a common corporate practice, one referred to in the insurance industry as “Dead Peasants” insurance. Citigroup’s research department wrote three memos for investors concluding that wealth and power in the U.S. were increasingly concentrated in the hands of the top 1%, stating the top 1% of the population now have more financial wealth than the bottom 95% combined.

New York Times, April 24, 2009: “Although the average person has never heard of it, MERS – short for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems – holds 60 million mortgages on American homes, through a legal maneuver that has saved banks more than $1 billion over the last decade but made life maddeningly difficult for some troubled homeowners.

The FBI warned of an approaching “epidemic” of mortgage fraud in 2004. CNN, September 17, 2004: “Rampant fraud in the mortgage industry has increased so sharply that the FBI warned Friday of an ‘epidemic’ of financial crimes which, if not curtailed, could become ‘the next S&L crisis.’” The FBI says that 80% of the mortgage fraud was induced by
the banks, not the individuals seeking loans.

Rocky Mountain News: “The FBI report said research indicates that 80 percent of mortgage fraud nationwide ‘involves collaboration or collusion by industry insiders.’”

Again, this film showing is free and open to all. Dr. Fitrakis will discuss the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision affecting the ability of corporations to finance political contests within America. If related information is desired, please contact the Church Office at (614) 296-6304.

With Sincere Regard,

Earl Wurdlow, Facilitator
Community Leaders Forum

Editor’s Note: I received this letter from Da’rryl Miguel Durr who is awaiting execution on Ohio’s death row. The state of Ohio plans to murder him on April 20, 2010. There are questions as to Mr. Durr’s actual guilt. This is nothing new in Ohio.

I received an award for Best Criminal Justice Reporting in Ohio for my investigation into the state’s wrongful execution of John Byrd (See the story in The Fitrakis Files: Free Byrd and Other Cries for Justice in our Online Store). The state of Ohio made similar mistakes in the conviction of John Spirko. Governor Ted Strickland commuted Spirko’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole because of “the lack of physical evidence linking him to the murder.” Then-Governor Bob Taft had no problems allowing Byrd to be murdered, despite the lack of physical evidence and he endorsed the political maneuverings of then-Attorney General Betty Montgomery who fought blood and DNA testing requested by Byrd that would have exonerated him. Durr’s case, like Spirko’s and Byrd’s before it, is another clear cut example of inconsistencies in the state’s case. Once again the prosecution is fighting a DNA test as in the Byrd case. When there’s any doubt about the guilt of a condemned prisoner, the state should err on the side of caution. – Bob Fitrakis

Dear Mr. Fitrakis, how is your spirit?

I am an innocent prisoner here on Ohio’s death row. I am writing to you in the hopes that you may be able to help me in much the same way you were able to help John Spirko many years ago by publishing “Justice for John Spirko. Lies…deceit…deception. Ohio Justice System Dirty Little Secrets.”

Let me explain. I have evidence (and believe that the state is withholding other evidence) that if investigated would exonerate me. Here is a brief summary of evidence that exists:

1) Police reports that classmates and school officials reported that the alleged victim Angel Vincent, alive after the date of death. The jury never heard this and no appeals court has seriously considered it.

2) The states own scientific investigator tested blood, saliva, hair and soil samples, as well as fibers, collected from me and found nothing to tie me to the case. Trial lawyers never had this evidence tested to see if it linked anyone else to the crime. Recent DNA tests on slides collected from the body found by police were negative for any biological material from me and the state is fighting further DNA testing on other evidence they have. Their claim is that due to their mishandling of evidence collected, testing revealed no biological evidence that was useful, and what evidence that remains could be contaminated. They also claim that they lost, destroyed or misplaced any other evidence collected in my case. They refuse to look.

3) The defense never checked weather reports, (See State v. Keenan (1993) 66 Ohio St. 3d 402) following statements, made by the states only witness, that it was raining outside on the night of the crime, the alleged crime took place in January the middle of winter and it was snowing then. This would prove, as in Keenan, that events described by the witness could not have happened.

4) The defense never preserved an exculpatory tape with the voice of the states witness confessing to, and apparently planning the crime.

5) During my trial, judge Ralph J. McAllister told my trial lawyers that “I want to see his nigger ass in the chair for messing with white women”. An affidavit by trial lawyer Jerry Milano was ignored by all appeals courts. Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Moyer, in review of this claim, said there was not enough evidence to recuse the judge from my case. Circumstantial evidence is enough to execute a man in Ohio but it is not enough to get a judge recused from a case in which race was an omnipresent factor. I’ve included a copy of one of the articles that appeared in various newspapers around the state about this.

6) The defense never challenged the identity of the body even though the initial coroners report claimed the body was that of an adult between the ages of 25-35. Whereas Angel Vincent was 16 at the time of her disappearance.

7) The state witness had numerous contacts with the police and never claimed to know anything about the crime. She had been the victim of a robbery in Independence, Ohio and spoke to the police yet never claimed a crime had been committed. She gave numerous false addresses during this time.

The defense never questioned the states witness concerning statements she made on the stand that indicated she suffered from a mental disorder. during trial she was questioned concerning her threats to kill herself, and her child, if I didn’t come stay with her. She was afraid of being replaced in my life by someone else. She claimed it was because I made her feel like nothing. Shortly after I came to prison, she began to abuse, neglect, and molest her daughter. Later she abandoned her. ~~She has been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Had my lawyers known this at trial, or questioned the mental state of someone threatening to kill herself, I believe it would’ve changed the outcome of the trial.

These are but a few examples. I’ve written various Innocence Project organisations for a while now trying to get someone to investigate my case but it has been to no avail. I hope that you will reply to me in some fashion,

May YAHWEH bless and keep you in His perfect care.

Da’rryl Miguel Durr 207889
878 Coitsville-Hubbard Road
Youngstown, Ohio 44505

Durr State’s MOJ

Lawyer ask Chief Justice to disqualify judge

Letter requesting Clemency Support

Response on Lawyer asking Chief Justice to disqualify judge

What do Gary Hart, Bob Packwood, Thomas Ferguson and Franklin County Clerk of Courts Jesse Oddi have in common? Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.
Next Tuesday, without giving it much thought, Franklin County voters are likely to go to the polls and “Retain Jesse Oddi” for Franklin County Clerk of Courts. Maybe the cry should be to restrain Oddi.

I recently talked with employees from the Clerk of Court’s office, who all march in parades for Jesse, raise money for his campaign, and have Oddi bumper stickers on their autos. The public image these employees present is that of adoring their boss; in reality, they say they’re terrified of losing their jobs if they don’t.

Oddi is portrayed as one of the most despicable public servants imaginable-but not by the competition, by his own employees who say he’s a shakedown artist. Employees claim that their supervisors routinely record how many spaghetti fund-raiser dinner tickets they sell for Oddi or whether the Oddi bumper stickers are on their cars. One employee claims that a supervisor “kept asking me for donations. She said ‘What about your job? You ought to worry about your job.’”

Donna Born, a former supervisor now on medical leave from the Clerk’s office, admits that she “forced them to buy these tickets.”

“Yes, my division had 12 people,” she explains. “We would sell 150-200 tickets at $25 apiece. The employees knew that they had to buy or sell a set amount of tickets. I also forced them to march in parades. We would pass around sign-up sheets on county time and they had to give me a reason if they couldn’t march.”

It is illegal for public employees to engage in partisan political activities while on the government payroll. But according to Oddi’s employees, that may be the least of his sins. Born and others claim they routinely cover for Oddi as he engages in repeated liaisons with female staff members, who are reportedly rewarded with job advancement in exchange for granting sexual favors.

“I covered for him,” Born said. “I’d have to tell his wife Elaine that it was me calling his house [instead of another woman] to report that the alarms went off downtown; it wasn’t true,” she said. Oddi-who displays a fondness for open-collared shirts, gold chains and who supposedly had a plaque in his office that read “Italian Stallion”-has cultivated a close personal relationship with one particular supervisor, according to Born and several other employees. Born claims that some employees who have been there “about six years” are making far more money than long-term employees who aren’t as friendly with Oddi.

As Born explains, “Jesse is a real touchy-feely-type guy. He likes to pat your butt and kiss you, to massage your shoulders and rub your body.” One female employee stated that Oddi would “come and massage my shoulders and run his fingers through my hair.” Another female employee was more blunt: “I knew if I went over and gave Jesse a [sexual favor] he’d give me a raise.”

All employees told tales of catching Oddi with his hands either “up her skirt” or “down her blouse.” When pressed for details, employees point to Oddi’s suite at the Great Southern Hotel as a key place for female employees to negotiate a raise after a dinner at Chutney’s.

Jacqueline Bracken, Oddi’s election opponent, has tried desperately to expose Oddi’s sleaziness and corruption. Oddi’s employees tell a similar tale. Employees report that eight Clerk of Courts employees went to the Dispatch almost four years ago, right before Oddi’s appointment, with similar allegations and documentation. The Big D did nothing, they said. Not surprising; while seemingly obsessed with Judge Deborah O’Neill’s alleged sexual escapades, the big boys at the Daily Monopoly ignore Oddi’s odor as they search for the holy grail of journalism, the truth about O’Neill’s “panties.”

Indeed, on Saturday, in another apparent attempt to run Judge O’Neill out of office, the Dispatch put her photo on page one with a story claiming she’d done something wrong by allowing blacks into a jury pool. The Dispatch’s O’Neill fetish kicked the possible Jerry Hessler “mistrial” story to page two, sans photo.

The accounts of Oddi’s misdeeds don’t stop here. One long-time law-enforcement source calls Oddi the “county’s premier fixer.” All employees questioned by Alive report that documents are routinely “backdated” in Oddi’s office, and that Oddi can make legal files “completely disappear.” Think about it: Jesse Oddi, Clerk of Courts, is the man in charge of all the court documents in Franklin County. Bracken says it’s not easy to run against somebody who has the open reputation for being able to make a drunk-driving charge, for instance, disappear. Two employees claim that the system is designed not only to destroy the physical file but the corresponding microfilm as well.

If Jesse Oddi is elected Clerk of Courts in Franklin County, citizens here owe Palmer McNeal an apology. McNeal, a former county auditor run out of office by the Wolfe Family Newsletter for a minor misuse of his county credit card, is a mere peon compared to the “Italian Stallion.” Ferguson and Packwood-pikers. Gary Hart-bush-league lecher.

All hail Jesse Oddi. The little stud that could.

by Bob Fitrakis

Every 30 years or so, the American Left recreates itself: the Communists and Socialists of the 1930s’ “Red Decade” later became the decentralized, radical Students for a Democratic Society and New Left of the 1960s. And it looks like it’s the multiculturalism and direct action of Anti-Racist Action (ARA) for the ’90s.

The program for the ARA’s Third Annual Conference, held last weekend, screamed: “Do Something!” It had a photo of an activist taking a swing at a bloated, pot-bellied, berobed, coneheaded Klansman. Entering the old North High School, where the ARA conference was held, I got the sense that something was indeed happening here. Grizzled veterans of ’60s and ’70s anti-war and anti-imperialist movements mingled freely with the next New Left. Before the weekend was over, I had attended workshops on racism and fascism, marched and been Maced at-and been cited as the leader of-a demonstration against police brutality. Welcome to activism ’90s style.

At the opening of the conference Friday night, the mostly “straight-edge” Generation X participants-wearing “Fuck Racism” T-shirts, the “Mean People Suck” slogan taken to its logical extreme-exuded an aura that made the Weathermen look like the Brady Brunch. But, how much was posing and posturing? This new generation of anti-racist militants has grown up knowing no movement victories. The Civil Rights movement-which brought the end of legalized apartheid in America in 1965-is ancient history. The anti-war struggle is like those war stories that the World War II GIs used to tell their kids and grandkids in the ’50s.

This new breed of activists has done battle in the cities, suburbs and small towns of North America against the rising tide of neo-fascists and neo-Nazis ushered in by the rhetoric of the Reagan and Bush eras and the infamous political “wedge issues” of immigrant and welfare-mother bashing, a tide not quelled by the hollow promises of President Clinton’s law-and-order-centrist policies.

And this is true not only for the Americans present, but for the large Canadian contingent as well. The dozens of ARA members from Toronto are hardened by their ongoing battle with white supremacists in the Great White North. Toronto is the home of Ernest Zundel, a key player in the international Nazi movement. From his fortress at 206 Carlton, Zundel runs Samisdat Publishing, one of the largest Nazi propaganda operations on the planet. His chief goal is to deny the Holocaust, producing such publications as: “Did Six Million Really Die?” and “The Hitler We Loved And Why.”

Canadian courts have dismissed Holocaust denial charges against Zundel, instead characterizing his work as concerning “ethnic conflict between Germans and Jews.” Yeah, and those death camp ovens were used for making bagels. Zundel’s racist skinhead (“bonehead”) followers revere him as a hero and chant, “Six million more!”

But like the conference cover photo depicts, when government action fails in Canada, this new breed of anti-fascist activist is willing to use other means: Zundel’s property was recently torched. Shedding light on the rise of the American Religious Right on the conference’s opening night was an old friend of mine from Detroit, Russ Bellant. His new book, The Religious Right in Michigan Politics, is the first to investigate and document the origins and objectives of the popular group the Promise Keepers (PK). Many are familiar with former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney’s original 1990 vision: to fill a stadium with Christian men willing to “reclaim” authority from their wives, capitalizing on the male backlash against the women’s movement and the gender-bashing so prominent now on talk radio.

As Bellant explained, the vast majority of men of various denominations that attend these PK rallies come with good and sincere intentions. I know, my older brother Nick and my younger brother Dave, both plagued by marital problems, now call themselves Promise Keepers. Bellant pointed out how McCartney, while serving as assistant football coach at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, “encountered and was deeply influenced by the Word of God (WOG) Community.” WOG, according to Bellant, practices a “shepherding/discipleship” form of worship that requires total submission to a person called “the head.” He calls Promise Keepers’ views fundamentally “anti-democratic” and potentially “totalitarian” in nature.

“The use of sophisticated lighting and sound in a stadium setting, psychologically playing on people’s emotions, breaking down the denominational differences, and merging nationalism and religion really echoes the Nazi rallies of the Third Reich,” Bellant argued. Bellant demonstrated how virtually all top Christian Right leaders-Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition, D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministry, and Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ-have signed on to the Promise Keepers. The “family values” rhetoric and homophobia are part of a larger “cultural revolution” the PKs hope to bring about. Robertson, Kennedy and Bright, along with James Dodson-the author of Promise Keepers Manifesto, Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper-are all members of the super-secretive radical right Council for National Policy (CNP), according to Bellant.

“The Council for National Policy is not an organization most of you have heard of. Unlike the Christian Coalition, the Council wants to keep itself secret. The Council was created by business and political leaders who were also leaders in the John Birch Society. Its membership includes former Indiana Ku Klux Klan leader Richard Shoff, Jerry Falwell, TV censor Don Wildman, anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlafly, a handful of pro-apartheid activists and registered agents for the old South African regime, and leaders of the Unification (Moonies) Church,” detailed Bellant.

The CNP members represent the political elite of the radical right and essentially they plan and fund the major projects of the American Right, in Bellant’s analysis. The big bucks come from Jeff Coors and family members of Coors Brewing Company, Linda Bean of L.L. Bean, and Richard DeVos Jr. of Amway and Texas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt.

“While they appeal to black members, their real agenda is to destroy affirmative action, and they have links to white supremacist ideology,” Bellant concluded.

Surviving a radical demo

Activists attended Saturday sessions such as “Leonard Peltier/Political Prisoners”; “Black-Jewish Relations”; “Lesbian and Gay Oppression”; and the essential “Surviving Radical Demos” to name a few. Having attended, participated, organized and covered literally hundreds of protests and demonstrations in my life, I thought I knew how to survive a radical demo in the mid-’90s. To err is human…

I was asked to bring my portable PA system to the conference at 6 p.m. Saturday for the “Copwatch Rally & March.” No big deal, just another case of journalistic participant-observer in the alternative press. Soon I was wondering who was organizing the event. When I arrived at the kickoff point at Arcadia and High, security guru Chris “The Anarchist” handed me a mike and asked me to speak. “About what?” I queried. “You know, about why we’re marching.” Luckily I was saved by a Columbus Copwatch member who politely asked the gathering horde of Klan and Nazi fighters “to remember that your actions will have repercussions on us in this community.” Virtually all got the message: Give peace a chance tonight.

I briefly addressed the assembled. Having a Ph.D in political science, I knew to announce the intent of the march to the estimated 10 percent that were no doubt undercover cops: “We intend this march to be a lawful demonstration, to protest police brutality and walk the streets of America without fear of the police…” I said more about the Antioch students being beaten at the Federal Building, and the TV4 footage showing the brutalization of students on 12th Avenue, but my main mission had been accomplished: protecting myself from “inciting a riot” charges. Wise move.

A small contingent of anarchists from the “Love and Rage” group unfurled a red-and-black flag. Banners were held with slogans reading “No Police Brutality” and “No Nazis, No Killer Cops, No Fascist USA, Anti-Racist Action.” Appropriate slogans for the 20-something generation whose educational benefits have been cut while government prison spending has been quadrupled.

Other marchers lit torches-lawful, but virtually unheard of in Columbus-creating an eerie and disturbing mood. These weren’t drunken freshmen frat boys reveling in a football victory frenzy. We crossed High Street and more than a hundred people began marching south.

Police squad cars with lights flashing immediately began to “escort” the marchers. They persisted, despite our insistence that we knew our way to 12th Avenue. And as a police helicopter began to hover overhead, I heard an unfamiliar chant: “Aim high, pigs in the sky!”

Just before Blake, in front of the Radio Shack and 24-hour video store, shit happened. Stuck hauling the PA system, I heard a scuffle and turned to see a weird scene. My mind at first rejected it: there was a female police officer without riot gear, attempting to arrest a male marcher. He had his hands raised out to his sides and she was screaming and pulling on his arm. Someone was pulling on his other arm, a literal tug-of-war. Someone in the crowd was yelling “Fuck the pigs!” Seems one Jason Robert Maffettone, 27, of Hoboken, New Jersey had stepped off the curb in Columbus, “jaywalkers gulch.” Omigod.

Officer Julie Appenzeller, sworn to serve and protect the people of Columbus from all jaywalkers, foreign and domestic, was just doing her job. Startled and disbelieving male officers stood by their gal as the crowd and I shouted “No police brutality! Let him go!” The infamous “Have Mace-will spray you” Columbus cops drew their black cans. When you’re chanting into a mike, you can’t always pay attention when someone’s aiming at your big round head. Just my luck. I met up with Officer Generic Cop, 6’1″ with black hair and a mustache, who of course finished first at the police academy in Mace target shooting. I didn’t actually see the Mace; I felt it when it drenched my eyes. For 10 to 15 seconds I was really mad. This asshole clearly hadn’t read the U.S. Constitution, nor Columbus police procedure on Macing. He’d flunk my American Guv class. Moot point as my eyes began to burn, lungs sear, and nose clog up. Still, chanting into a mike on a sidewalk does not constitute menacing a police officer.

Let’s see, five minutes into an anti-police brutality march and I’ve been Maced. Go figure. I pride myself on never getting Maced. I hadn’t been Maced since the day after the Klan killed civil rights marchers in Greensboro, North Carolina. My mind raced. When was that? 1979? ’80? Anyway, it was probably tear gas. Or was it pepper gas at Kent State in ’78?

Deja vu all over again. I was on my knees choking and crawling, my Columbus tax dollars at work again. Being the brave journalist that I am, I thought I’d best crawl into the video store to wash out my eyes. Luckily my alternative press fame had preceded me. The clerk greeted me with a cheery: “Hi Bob!” The Earl Smith-Jim Karnes debate over porno shops aside, it seems the only restroom was in the Triple X adult section of the store. Half-blinded but still able to make out the images of assorted sex toys, I made my way to the counter. “Bathroom,” I pleaded. The clerk had seen it all before. “Honest, I’ve got Mace in my eyes. It’s not a Pee Wee Herman thing.” He advised, “Just ride it out. The water will only make it worse.” A voice of authority.

Outside, things had calmed down and I found myself at the end of the march. Fortunately, one young ARA activist was carrying a squirt tube of Bausch and Lomb sensitive eye contact lens cleaner. “It’ll work, dude. Like, I sprayed myself with some Mace and tested it.” It was like a miracle. No Columbus activist should leave home without it.

Freed of the speaker system, now safely stashed at an ARA safe house on High Street thanks to Chris “The Anarchist,” I moved to the front of the march. There I met 30 or so police in riot gear, and reporters from the Columbus Dispatch, TV4 and 10.

I had a new goal. Keep from getting Maced again. Tensions mounted as the marchers, now swelled to nearly 300, found themselves pinned against a construction fence in the middle of the campus. Would the police attack? Undoubtedly, they were wondering the same about us. Instead of confronting the police, we found an opening at the Wexner Center and snaked through the campus. Thank God for secular humanist bastions of liberalism. One lone campus police car escorted us several blocks back to High Street. We figured the campus cops were unlikely to Mace us, but they might order us to do a big group hug.

The moment of truth. Should we walk down 12th Avenue? What the hell, it’s still America, why not? The march ended almost without incident as we re-emerged at 15th and High and gathered in the open space in front of the Wexner Center.

Just before the end of the march, a lone police commander joined the marchers. The word went out that he was looking for Fitrakis. No doubt, I thought, to congratulate me for my fine work in averting a riot. Wrong again. The first tip off was when he wouldn’t shake my hand. And then his first words stung like the Mace: “I’m Commander Marcum. Why are you writing those lies about me?”

How the hell was I to know he’d been reassigned from supervisor of Police Intelligence to riot patrol at OSU? And anyway, those tips about his family’s links to gambling in last week’s Alive were from my most reliable law enforcement sources. I asked him what the real story was, but he wouldn’t tell me. “Your paper’s printing lies.” Later that night the police reported that no Mace was used on the demonstrators.

The next day’s Dispatch reported that I “led” the rally. I didn’t mean to, but as my old marching buddy Mark Stansbery explained it, “There really was no leadership. And after Bob got Maced, he was really pissed.”

The ARA doesn’t really have leaders. It’s a new movement of leaderless resistance to police brutality and the prison industrial complex.

The Dispatch also reported the post-Macing chant as: “Police brutality, we’re sick and…tired of it.” Insert “fuckin’” where the ellipse is. That’s the mood of these young ARA activists. America is incubating a whole new generation of hard-core fascist-fighters that are sick and tired. “And tired of being sick and tired.” They’re not the Promise Keepers, but they are the product of America’s broken promises and dreams.

7/16/1998
FEATURED ARTICLE
The Shapiro murder file
Police accidently release a report linking
Leslie Wexner and the Mob
by Bob Fitrakis

The ghost of Arthur Shapiro—a prominent local attorney who was slain in a 1985 “mob-style murder”—continues to haunt the City of Columbus. Shapiro’s doomed soul was resurrected recently when the Columbus Division of Police released the controversial—and once believed destroyed—document investigating his death.

Columbus Alive obtained a copy of the “Shapiro Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis” report through a public records request on Friday. As previously reported in Alive, the report confirms that the name of central Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner was linked “with associates reputed to be organized crime figures.” The names of businessman Jack Kessler, former Columbus City Council President and current Wexner associate Jerry Hammond and current City Council member Les Wright also appear in the report.

The ghost of Arthur Shapiro—a prominent local attorney who was slain in a 1985 “mob-style murder”—continues to haunt the City of Columbus. Shapiro’s doomed soul was resurrected recently when the Columbus Division of Police released the controversial—and once believed destroyed—document investigating his death.

Columbus Alive obtained a copy of the “Shapiro Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis” report through a public records request on Friday. As previously reported in Alive, the report confirms that the name of central Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner was linked “with associates reputed to be organized crime figures.” The names of businessman Jack Kessler, former Columbus City Council President and current Wexner associate Jerry Hammond and current City Council member Les Wright also appear in the report.

In June 1991, the document’s potentially explosive revelations caused Columbus Police Chief James G. Jackson to order the public record destroyed the same month it was completed. When confronted by Channel 4 News with the document last week, Jackson said, “I thought I got rid of it.” He termed the report “scandalous.”

Another high-ranking law enforcement official familiar with the Shapiro investigation disagrees. “The report is a viable and valuable document in an open murder investigation, although it’s a horrible mistake to make it public,” the official said last week.

City Attorney Janet Jackson called Columbus Alive Tuesday and confirmed that the unredacted document was accidentally released to Alive in response to our public-information request. The report “was released quite frankly in error,” Jackson said, adding that publication of its details could be “very embarrassing” to many people.

In response to a request to Police Chief James Jackson for comment on the release of the file, Sherry Jones of the Columbus Division of Police said Monday, “The chief has no comment.”

In 1996, following a mayoral investigation of Chief Jackson and other top police officers, the Columbus Civil Service Commission found Jackson guilty of destroying the Shapiro report. He received a five-day suspension for the destruction of a public record and another charge of showing favoritism in the discipline of Commander Walter Burns.

Elizabeth A. Leupp, an analyst with Columbus police’s Organized Crime Bureau, began researching and writing the report in early 1991. She sent the report to Intelligence Bureau Commander Curtis K. Marcum on June 6, 1991. Sources say the report remained “hidden” until Jackson ordered its destruction. Marcum bypassed the police legal bureau in carrying out Jackson’s order, according to the mayoral investigative team.

This team, initiated by Safety Director Thomas W. Rice Sr., and under the direction of Assistant Safety Director David D. Sturtz, stumbled on to the destruction of the Shapiro report while investigating missing documents relating to escort services and prostitution. A ledger seized from Marcum’s office contained a reference to Jackson’s order to destroy the report. Reportedly, the only reason the document still exists is because Deputy Chief Robert Kern gave a copy to the Columbus FBI office.

Following the sensational mob-style slaying of Shapiro on March 6, 1985, the report noted that “an analytical project” was started “because of the strong similarities between this homicide and a Mafia (L.C.N.) [La Cosa Nostra] ‘hit.’”

Shapiro was a partner in the now-defunct Columbus law firm of Schwartz, Shapiro, Kelm & Warren. The firm “represented the Limited,” according to the report, and “prior to his death, Arthur Shapiro managed this account for the law firm.” Homicide squad investigators described Shapiro as “a quiet, shy, private, secretive person” who “tended to be a ‘loner.’”

Just prior to his murder, Shapiro “was the subject of an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service because he had failed to file income tax returns for some seven years prior to his death, and he had invested in some questionable tax shelters,” the report stated. His death “occurred one day prior to Shapiro’s scheduled appearance before a Grand Jury in the I.R.S. investigation, and there was some conjecture that Shapiro was in position to provide information to the Grand Jury that would have been damaging to some other party.”

Who wanted Shapiro killed and why remains a mystery to Columbus police.

“Thus, while the motive remains unclear, the suspect is an individual who (a) knew Shapiro and had some personal/professional contact with him; (b) would benefit from his death or from ensuring his silence; (c) had close contact with L.C.N. figures or trusted L.C.N. associates; (d) had the personal financial resources to afford the cost of the contract (‘hit’),” reads Leupp’s analysis in the report.

The Shapiro report relied on information from Columbus Police Intelligence summaries, reports from the Organized Crime Bureau, information from both the Pennsylvania Crime Commission and the New Jersey Crime Commission, major media news reports and intelligence data from MAGLOCLEN—a law-enforcement data bank that gathers and verifies reports on organized crime.

The report analyzed “unusual interactive relations between the following business organizations” and then listed: the Major Chord Jazz Club, in which Jerry Hammond was a prinicipal; The Limited; Walsh Trucking Company; the re-named Schwartz, Kelm, Warren and Rubenstein law firm; Omni Oil Company; the Edward DeBartolo Company of Youngstown, Ohio; and local developer John W. Kessler.

Wexner’s business “relations” with Francis J. Walsh, the owner and chief executive officer of Walsh Trucking Company out of New Jersey, were explored. Alive found that a Limited spokesperson told Women’s Wear Daily in the July 25, 1987 issue that “Walsh has done an excess of 90 percent of the Limited’s” trucking business around the time of Shapiro’s murder. The spokesperson estimated that the current figure was “30 to 35 percent of the Limited’s business.” The Limited, Inc. was described as “Walsh’s single largest customer.”

In July 1984 the New York Department of Law Organized Crime Task Force issued a subpoena for Walsh’s bank records. National Westminster Bank of New York, in response to the subpoena, notified Frank Walsh Financial Resources Company. “The notice was addressed to Frank Walsh Financial Resources at One Limited Parkway”—the address of The Limited.

“Both [Youngstown real estate developer Edward J.] DeBartolo and Walsh have been identified as associates of the Genovese-LaRocca crime family in Pittsburgh (now called simply the Pittsburgh Family),” the police report states.

As Columbus Alive previously reported, Walsh Trucking Company was incorporated in the state of New Jersey in May 1973 and has had a controversial business history. In August 1984, a federal jury ordered Walsh Trucking to pay $39.6 million to a smaller competitor that had sued, claiming that Walsh sabotaged its business in New York City’s garment district and destroyed its truck routes. The jury found Walsh Trucking guilty of conspiring to monopolize apparel shipping. In 1987, a U.S. Appeals Court overturned the verdict.

In 1988, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Walsh was charged with making “illegal pay-offs to reported mob figures and officials of Teamster Local 560 which had been under judicial control in an effort to rid it from mob influence.” The May 16, 1988 indictment drew media interest when it named as “unindicted co-conspirators” convicted Genovese crime family boss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, alleged crime family captain Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianniello and three former officials of Local 560—the Provenzano brothers, Anthony, Nunzio, and Salvatore. The Provenzanos, alleged mobsters, have been convicted of various charges in the past and linked in media accounts to the murder of former Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa.

“DeBartolo and Walsh were still considered associates of the Genovese/LaRocca crime family, and Walsh was still providing truck transportation for The Limited,” in 1990, the report stated.

In 1984, DeBartolo and Wexner were partners in a two-month takeover war against Carter-Hawley-Hale stores, the largest West Coast retailer and owner of the prestigious Nieman-Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman stores. Two-and-a-half years later, in November 1986, The Limited and the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation again attempted a hostile takeover of Carter-Hawley-Hale stores with a $1.8 billion cash offer.

The New York Times described the DeBartolo Corporation as “the nation’s largest developer of shopping centers.” The Times referred to Wexner as the “restless, aggressive chairman” of The Limited. Forbes magazine estimated Wexner’s personal fortune at $2.7 billion in 1987, stating, “On paper, at least, he is one of the dozen richest people in America.”

A 1989 New York Times article described “the DeBartolo organization” as a company that “develops shopping malls and owns sports enterprises ranging from the San Francisco 49ers and the Pittsburgh Penguins to small tracks in Louisiana and Ohio.” In September 1990, Edward DeBartolo Jr. was fined $500,000 by NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, according to the Los Angeles Times, “for transferring ownership of the team to Edward DeBartolo’s Corporation without league approval three years ago.”

DeBartolo Jr. made national news late last year when he resigned as chairman and chief executive officer of the 49ers on December 2, 1997 because he was the subject of a federal grand jury hearing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on charges of gambling fraud. DeBartolo bought the 49ers for a reported $17 million in 1977, becoming the youngest NFL owner at age 30. The Rocky Mountain News reported on April 2 this year that DeBartolo was negotiating a deal subject to NFL approval whereby he “would gain full ownership of the franchise in return for giving up his share in the family-Edward DeBartolo Corporation.”

Leupp concluded, “From the predicate facts presented, it appears that Les Wexner had established contact with associates reputed to be organized crime figures, one of whom was a major investment partner and another was using The Limited headquarters as a mailing address.”

“It is not known whether there are other such figures among Wexner’s associates, but it can be hypothesized that the Genovese/LaRocca crime families might consider Wexner a friend,” Leupp speculated.

The Shapiro report noted that “the primary illegal activity of the LaRocca family is gambling…. Its operation extends into the West Virginia panhandle and eastern Ohio. The family has also become well entrenched in legitimate businesses. These include, but probably are not limited to, construction, trucking, food service and vending businesses.” At the time the report was written, the Genovese crime family was considered “second in strength, power, and wealth to the Gambino LCN family.”

A 1991 report by the Pennsylvania Crime Commission assessed that the Genovese/LaRocca network “appears to be strong and capable of continued growth throughout another decade. It has asserted itself as the primary crime group in the [Pittsburgh] area and, by becoming more active in narcotics, has demonstrated its ability to be a full-service criminal organization.”

While investigating the Shapiro homicide, Leupp probed the relationship between the former City Council president and Les Wexner: “Like Arthur Shapiro was, Wexner is considered a very secretive, very private person, and little is known about his business transactions that might raise questions of ethics and legality. For example, while it cannot be proved, it is hypothesized that W & K Partnership was an investment of Wexner and Kessler in Jerry Hammond’s Jazz Club hoping to influence favorable zoning and annexation considerations for ‘Wexley.’”

Sources close to the Shapiro investigation report that early on, investigators wondered whether or not Shapiro had been involved in the preliminary stages of Wexner’s New Albany development project.

John W. “Jack” Kessler co-founded the New Albany Company with Wexner. The Cleveland Plain Dealer explained the genesis of the New Albany project in a February 21, 1993 article: “Legend has it that in 1986 or so, Jack and Les were cruising in Les’ Land Rover near New Albany, about 12 miles from downtown Columbus. They saw acre after acre of empty farmland. Virgin soil. And thus the billionaire, getting a vision thing, declared to his buddy, this will be my new home.” This account places the New Albany project just after Shapiro’s murder.

The politically controversial New Albany project initially involved a tremendous amount of secrecy. As the Plain Dealer explained, “Wexner and Kessler formed the New Albany Co. and spun off a bunch of paper corporations to cover their footprints. Then their minions knocked on doors and made the proverbial offers you couldn’t refuse.”

One of the keys to the development’s success was changing a Columbus policy dating from the 1950s that refused to extend water and sewage contracts to such developments unless they were annexed into the City of Columbus.

The Shapiro report noted that “SNJC Holding, Inc. is named as an investor in the [Major Chord] Jazz Club. It was incorporated August 6, 1987 by James H. Balthaser, attorney with Schwartz, Kelm, Warren and Rubenstein. This law firm was/is legal counsel for The Limited.” SNJC Holding shared Suite 3710 at the Huntington Center with the Wexner Investment Company.

“It was reported that Jerry Hammond purchased Suite 405 in Waterford Tower in August 1988, and there was some question of whether Mr. Hammond’s income at the time would support the mortgage payments. Within the next 18 to 24 months, Mr. Hammond left his position with City Council and with the gas company and the jazz club closed,” Leupp observed.

Contacted for comment on the report Monday, Hammond gave the terse response, “Don’t know anything about it.”

Leupp’s report stated that “Arthur Shapiro was reportedly in direct contact with Vice-Chairman Robert Morosky (‘Number Two’) at the Limited.” And that in June 1987, Morosky “abruptly and inexplicably left his employment with The Limited amid rumors of friction with Les Wexner.” Details of the Morosky-Wexner break-up were covered in the September 1987 Columbus Monthly.

The Shapiro report raises significant questions concerning the business practices of Ohio’s wealthiest citizen, Les Wexner, particularly his association with alleged organized crime associates. As Leupp noted, “While there is no question of ethics or legality on the surface, it is noted that some business organizations and individuals have co-located and become submerged without merging with Wexner and his varied business interests. Most notably is Stanley Schwartz and the large Schwartz, Kelm, Warren and Rubenstein law firm.”

Alive called Wexner’s spokesperson, Al Dietzel, four times for comment about the allegations raised in the police report. After initially offering a phone interview at a specific time Tuesday, Limited spokesman James Temple later said that Dietzel would not be available for comment.

Chief Jackson, under oath during the mayoral investigation, at first couldn’t recall any order to destroy the Shapiro file. Later, when confronted with the ledger and other evidence, both Jackson and his attorney Bill Wilkinson claimed that he destroyed the public document because the chief said it contained bizarre and half-baked theories implicating prominent people that would expose the city to possibly billions of dollars in damages if the document ever became public.

That’s one hypothesis.

The Shapiro report has its own “concluding hypothesis.” Leupp wrote: “Arthur Shapiro could have answered too many of these sorts of questions, and might have been forced to answer them in his impending Grand Jury hearing; Stanley Schwartz might now be able to answer some of the same questions for the same reason, but does not face a Grand Jury, is immersed in the pattern himself, and now has a powerful incentive to maintain discretion.”

Schwartz has since passed away and his law firm closed. Attorney James Balthaser found employment at Thompson, Hine and Flory, the same firm that employs Jackson’s lawyer, Wilkinson.

One of the recommendations made by the mayoral investigation team into the practices of the police department was that Chief Jackson should reconstruct the “Shapiro Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis” report. With the report now public, Jackson needn’t worry about this recommendation. The Shapiro murder remains unsolved.

The specter of Arthur Shapiro continues to haunt Columbus, Ohio. A partner in the prominent Columbus law firm Schwartz, Shapiro, Kelm, and Warren that represented transnational corporations like The Limited, Shapiro took two bullets in the head 25 years ago in a Mob-style slaying.

Columbus’ daily monopoly, owned by the conservative Wolfe family, ran a bizarre front page Metro section article entitled: “25-year-old killing still puzzles.” The intent of the Dispatch’s article is clear by the second paragraph: “Twenty-five years later, the slaying remains unsolved, but investigators point to the same man they suspected from the beginning.”

The paper points its finger at the late Berry L. Kessler who died while incarcerated in 2005. The fact that the late sheriff of Franklin County Earl Smith had other more distinguished suspects, as did the state’s former inspector general, a former city of Columbus safety director, as well as sources in the FBI and IRS, eludes the self-proclaimed “Ohio’s Greatest Home Newspaper.”

The Dispatch, in classic cover-up single sourcing, relies solely on the word of Columbus police detective James McCoskey. He told the paper that in investigating Kessler during the Shapiro homicide investigation he found “…a connection, but nothing we could take to court.” Twenty-five years to the day Shapiro was murdered, the Dispatch runs this quote as if it was a new and startling revelation.

So without any new evidence, why would the Columbus Dispatch dig up the old story? In January, CICJ Books published a collection of investigative pieces entitled “Cops, Cover-ups and Corruption” that I wrote while I was a reporter at the Columbus Alive between 1996-2002. In the collection is an award-winning story “The Shapiro Murder File.” The article won a national award for linking a few of Ohio’s most well-known business people to organized crime through a file that had been destroyed by the then-Columbus chief of police, James Jackson.

The Dispatch has since bought up the Alive, ending its brief reign as Ohio’s only muck-raking newspaper. They also eliminated all of the investigative articles that myself and other reporters like Harvey Wasserman wrote from the Alive website. Perhaps there was not enough room on the computer to maintain the copy.

Chief Jackson was charged in 1996 for “improper disposal of a public record for ordering the destruction of a report on the Shapiro homicide,” according to the Dispatch. What they did not write is the more obvious. Columbus’ chief of police destroyed documents pertaining to an ongoing and unsolved Mob-style slaying of a prominent individual tied to central Ohio’s only billionaire – Les Wexner.

The Dispatch’s key paragraph reads as follows: “The Civil Service Commission eventually upheld the charge against Jackson, who said the report was so filled with wild speculation about prominent business leaders that it was potentially libelous.”

The Dispatch pretty much leaves it at that. An unredacted copy of the Shapiro file obtained by the Alive analyzed “unusual interactive relations between the following business organizations” and then listed, among others, The Limited; Walsh Trucking Company; the renamed Schwartz, Kelm, Warren, and Rubenstein Law Firm; Omni Oil Company; the Eddie DeBartolo Company of Youngstown, Ohio; and local developer John W. Kessler.

Jackson destroyed the Shapiro murder file not because of “wild speculation” but because of a detailed analysis linking two of Ohio’s richest men, DeBartolo and Wexner, to the Genovese/LaRocca organized crime families. A similar news story appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988.

The Dispatch, in dismissing the detailed Shapiro murder file report, writes that the document “…speculated that millionaire businessmen in Columbus and Youngstown were linked to the ‘mob-style murder.’ The truth, police investigators say was less complicated.”

The paper only cites one police source: McCosky. It attempts to masquerade Wexner as a “millionaire” when he’s the capital city’s only billionaire, and they refuse to name the well-known DeBartolo family of Youngstown.

One can only wonder why the Wolfe family of Columbus and their paid minions at their daily newsletter are so interested in discrediting perhaps the most important public record in the recent history of Columbus – one that shows real connections between powerful individuals, companies and an organized crime family.

The facts are less complicated. The Columbus Dispatch is covering up for its wealthy friends as it always does.

–
Bob Fitrakis is the author of six books in The Fitrakis Files series. Cops, Coverups and Corruption can be purchased from the http://freepress.org in the Online Store. Originally published by http://freepress.org.

Finally! The Columbus area ministers who filed a complaint to revoke the non-profit status of the secretive “Family” are to be congratulated. “The Family,” founded in 1935, has a public agenda of promoting “prayer breakfast groups” but their real agenda has always appeared to be preying, not praying. The non-profit behind “The Family” is the Fellowship Foundation. It’s 501(c)(3) mission statement reads: “To develop and maintain an informal association of people banded together, to go out as ‘ambassadors of reconciliation’ modeling the principles of Jesus, based on loving God and loving others.”

At least they’re not hypocrites. At the notorious swinging pad known as the C Street house at 133 C Street, Washington D.C., owned by the Family, U.S. representatives and senators practice their mission of “loving others.” They rent rooms for a reported $600 per month where they stay as “short-term” guests. Most recently one of their Christian brethren, former Congressman and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, was caught up in a highly publicized affair with an Argentinian woman. Also, last year, Congressman Chip Pickering’s wife sued him for divorce, alleging he had an affair “…while living in the well-known C Street complex in Washington D.C.” In June 2009, long-time guest at the C Street complex, Senator John Ensign, also admitted to an extra-marital affair.

In this former convent, once belonging to St. Peter’s Church, members can practice Christian love with foreign and domestic booty. Ensign’s affair was with his former campaign treasurer and the wife of his co-Chief of Staff, Doug Hampton. Although Hampton probably saw it coming, since he was a friend and fellow Family worshipper.

The preference for keeping it “all in the Family” is part of the 10-page complaint filed by the Columbus pastors. The complaint claims that “an exclusive residential club for powerful officials may be masquerading as a church.” The complaint goes on to argue that the activities at the C Street complex “are shrouded in secrecy. Its powerful residents reportedly adhere to a code of silence….This lack of transparency shows a disdain for the political, legislative, and economic accountability that defined constitutional democracy.”

Nothing really new here. Think about the bizarre behavior of Rev. Moon and his crazy Christian Moonies who were tied to the Koreagate sex scandals in the mid-1970s. All of this is documented in the Fraser Committee Report issued in November 1977. It found that the “Moon organization was being used a political tool on behalf of the Korean CIA to influence U.S. politics.” The Moon organization emerged in Ohio politics when they provided key volunteers and resources in John Kasich’s first Congressional victory in 1982.

Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen refers to the Family as “the ‘Christian’ Mafia.” A good starting point for background information is Madsen’s “The Cedars if Arlington” found online at the Wayne Madsen Report.

Whenever non-transparent organizations with codes of silence meddle in national and international politics, we should beware, because booty calls often morph into blackmail. At least we know the agenda of the Moonies – we need to uncover the real agenda of the Family. That’s why the Columbus pastors have done a great service by issuing the complaint against this mysterious Christian “Family.”

To understand Martin Scorsese’s well-crafted psychological thriller Shutter Island, viewers should do an internet search on the following three terms: MK-Ultra, Manchurian candidates, and Operation Paperclip. For the extended value-added search, throw in the combination of “CIA” and “LSD.”

Shutter Island is being released at a very propitious time. Just look at Saturday’s (Feb. 21) front page of the New York Times. Above the fold we have two related stories, the first, under the inaccurate headline “A new report, a new verdict, in terror fight.” A more accurate title would read “U.S. government and Obama administration reaffirm Bush administration commitment to torture.”

The post-World War II U.S. administrations and its rising security-industrial complex covertly embraced torture and secret dosing of unsuspecting people with psychedelic drugs to control their behavior and create assets and assassins during the Red Scare. Now, overt torture done in the name of “fighting terror” has been embraced by the administration of Mr. “Hope and Change.”

The Times announced that the recent government report that exonerated “…the lawyers who gave justification to the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation tactics” officially “…brings to a close a pivotal chapter in the debate over the legal limits of the Bush administration’s fight against terrorism and whether its treatment of Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture.”

This means the first modern nation that banned torture in its Constitution now officially endorses torture by redefining “cruel and unusual punishment.”

J.S. Bybee, now a federal judge, and John Yoo, now a professor at the University of Califormia Berkeley, serve in the renewed roles of Operation Paperclip Nazi war criminals brought to the United States following World War II. There is little difference between Bybee/Yoo and von Braun/Strughold.

Werner von Braun got a pass from being hung at Nuremberg because he was useful in the U.S. military, and later the space, industries. Hubertus Strughold, the father of U.S. space medicine, was directly responsible for the inhumane torture of human subjects at Dachau. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Edward Daniels, was at the liberation of Dachau, and discovered a Paperclip Nazi on Shutter Island continuing to experiment on human subjects, only now with the sanction by the U.S. government. Only a frontal lobotomy will silence his quest for truth.

Our new mass frontal lobotomies come by way of the mainstream media with imprecise headlines and official acceptance of unacceptable government decisions. Torture by any other name, or sanctioned by a memo, is still torture.

The second front page Times article entitled “F.B.I. Shuts Book on Anthrax Case, Fatal to Five in 2001″ gives us the government’s version of “the lone gunman.” Dr. Bruce E. Ivins is a minor-league version of Lee Harvey Oswald. We’re to believe that he, and he alone, sent the trillion-spores-per-gram Ames strain silicon impregnated U.S. military grade anthrax through the mail.

Nowhere in the article will you find mention of Battelle Memorial Institute, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. The Times reported earlier on Battelle’s “Project Jefferson” and “Clear Vision,” and curious characters like William C. Patrick III and Ken Alibeck. Alibeck is the former number 2 man in the Soviet illegal biochemical program who consulted at Battelle with Patrick, another Battelle consultant who wrote a paper on sending anthrax through the mail.

Readers might want to google Battelle, the security-industrial complex’s favorite non-profit, and their Shutter Island-like facility in West Jefferson, Ohio. The FBI originally told the Free Press that they were looking at Battelle in West Jefferson, and the profit motive of a newly-formed company that stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars off of anthrax vaccines.

We’re now to believe that it was Ivins, according to the Times, “a biodefense expert who cast blame on an alternate personality called ‘Crazy Bruce’” and anyone who doesn’t believe this story will be called the “C” word: conspiracy theorist.

Ivins, like Edward Daniels in Shutter Island, had his flaws and makes a perfect patsy for the “lone mailer” theory. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, allegedly stalked two women who were able to confirm that it was “Crazy Bruce,” his other personality, who sent the letters. As the Times dutifully reported, “‘Crazy Bruce,’ who surfaces periodically as paranoid, severely depressed, and ridden with incredible anxiety.”

Just like the movie Shutter Island, there’s a “Rule of 4″ coded message that Ivins left, according to the FBI. The Times noted, that “Ivins embedded a complex coded message in the notes that he mailed with anthrax in 2001. The coded message, based on DNA biochemistry, alluded to two female colleagues with whom he was obsessed.”

So says the FBI; so reports the New York Times. The government also initially denied they brought Nazi war criminals into the United States, and that there was a secret harassment campaign against U.S. citizens called COINTELPRO. And, that they were dosing unsuspecting people with LSD and BZ and other psychedelic and mind-altering drugs. We should all see Shutter Island and shudder at the fact that it’s closer to the truth than we’ll ever get in corporate-controlled newspapers.

http://www.wcrsfm.org/node/779

34 years. It doesn’t even sound like a real number to me. Not when one really thinks about being in a jail cell for that long.

All these years and I swear, I still think sometimes I’ll wake up from this nightmare in my own bed, in my own home, with my family in the next room. I would never have imagined such a thing. Surely the only place people are unjustly imprisoned for 34 years is in far away lands, books or fairy tales.

It’s been that long since I woke up when I needed to, worked where I wanted to, loved who I was supposed to love, or did what I was compelled to do. It’s been that long-long enough to see my children have grandchildren. Long enough to have many of my friends and loved ones die in the course of a normal life, while I was here unable to know them in their final days.

So often in my daily life, the thought creeps in-”I don’t deserve this”. It lingers like acid in my mouth. But I have to push those types of thoughts away. I made a commitment long ago, many of us did. Some didn’t live up to their commitments, and some of us didn’t have a choice. Joe Stuntz didn’t have a choice.

Neither did Buddy Lamont. I never thought my commitment would mean sacrificing like this, but I was willing to do so nonetheless. And really, if necessary, I’d do it all over again, because it was the right thing to do. We didn’t go to ceremony and say “I’ll fight for the people as long as it doesn’t cost too much”. We prayed, and we gave. Like I say, some of us didn’t have a choice. Our only other option was to run away, and we couldn’t even do that. Back then, we had no where left to run to.

I have cried so many tears over these three plus decades. Like the many families directly affected by this whole series of events, my family’s tears have not been in short supply. Our tears have joined all the tears from over 500 years of oppression. Together our tears come together and form a giant river of suffering and I hope, cleansing. Injustice is never final, I keep telling myself. I pray this is true for all of us.

To those who know I am innocent, thank you for your faith. And I hope you continue working for my release. That is, to work towards truth and justice. To those who think me guilty, I ask you to believe in and work for the rule of law. Even the law says I should be free by now, regardless of guilt. What has happened to me isn’t justice, it isn’t the law, it isn’t fair, it isn’t right. This has been a long battle in an even longer war. But we have to remain vigilant, as we have a righteous cause. After all this time, I can only ask this:

Don’t give up. Not ever. Stay in this fight with me. Suffer with me. Grieve with me. Endure with me. Believe with me. Outlast with me. And one day, celebrate freedom with me. Hoka hey!

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,

Leonard Peltier

Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee PO Box 7488 Fargo, ND 58106
Phone: 701/235-2206
Fax: 701/235-5045
E-mail: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

Time to set him free… Because it is the RIGHT thing to do.

Friends of Peltier
http://www.FreePeltierNow.org

Who says crime doesn’t pay? Not the V Group, the Voinovich group of companies that specializes in building jails. You see, the Guv’s younger brother Pauly is at it again. His Cleveland-based architectural construction company may be connected to a man under indictment and investigation for alleged “influence peddling.” Seems Vincent Zumpano was indicted on October 3 in Steubenville for allegedly trying to bribe a county commissioner in order to secure a jail construction contract for Pauly’s firm.

Pauly’s company, officially, is “mystified.” And those 473 long distance calls from Vincent’s place of employment to the Voinovich firm between December 1992 and December 1995, as reported in the Cincinnati Enquirer and Cleveland Plain Dealer don’t prove nuthin’. And that’s why the Dispatch has the good sense not to write about it, but chose instead to put on Saturday’s front page aWashington Post wire story about bad sportsmanship among band leaders in Virginia!

More calls went to former employee and lobbyist for the Voinovich firm and the Governor’s original “transition director,” Phil Hamilton. Sound familiar? Remember Joe Gilyard and an Alive cover story six weeks ago about the Gilyard-Hamilton relationship? It’s the same old story, same old song and dance, my friends. Here’s a quick take from Joe, fired by the Guv after he suggested that little brother Pauly may not be on the up-and-up. “This is exactly the type of thing Phil Hamilton wanted me involved in. They used to phone me, fax me, send messages constantly. He wanted me to let the counties know that the V Company had ‘the inside track’ on jail contracts.”

With Governor George’s much-coveted senatorial campaign now only two years away, isn’t it time to pull a Clinton? You know what I mean. Like when Wild Bill let the state police nab his out-of-control cokehead brother Roger. Think about it, Guv. Time’s runnin’ out.

V is for Voinovich
Meanwhile, Pauly continues to “hook us up good” here in Franklin County. You see the architectural firm of Voinovich-Sgro went-without any political influence whatsoever-and got themselves an unbid contract of nearly $1 million to design and manage a $2 million, I mean, $8 million-wait, now $11 million-Franklin County jail renovation.

Our illustrious county commissioners-all Republicans, same party as the Guv, wink, wink, nod, nod-approved the unbid contract last May. Good thing that Voinovich-Sgro is only the architect ’cause if it was the construction manager a 1988 state law would have required competitive bidding, which would have saved millions.

So the cost overruns are really the fault of those really bad construction managers, not Voinovich-Sgro. So much wasted taxpayer money, those bastards. Maybe Voinovich-Sgro could begin to phone and fax those evil construction managers, the Voinovich Companies, every day. I suspect they know the number.

Maybe they could build some special luxury condo cells, you know, like those corporations build at sports stadiums. Then, if Voinovich-Sgro turns in The Voinovich Companies for ripping us off, the construction manager company officials would have a place to stay in the style to which they have become accustomed. Is free enterprise great, or what?

Sybil Hall?
Another one of my favorite county officials is Treasurer Bobbie Hall, universally hailed as a financial whiz. That’s why I take her so seriously when she touts Bob Dole’s tax cut and attacks Bill Clinton as a “big spending liberal.” Reminds me of the movie Sybil with Sally Fields. You remember: Sally did that multiple personality schtick. Hall’s doing the same thing when she suggests that county property owners don’t need a 1 to 2.5 percent discount on our property taxes by pre-paying the bill monthly instead of paying in a lump sum.

Hall recently informed the Dispatch that she looked into the tax-saving program, “but has not seen a need or a benefit to the county’s finances.” Sybil, Sybil? Let me talk to Bobbie Dole, the tax-cutting gal!

Metcalf’s double-dipping

Look for Anthony Celebrezze III to justly blast Franklin County Recorder Richard Metcalf later this week in a commercial on “double-dipping.” Campaign insiders say the initial script is something like-use your best deep political voice-”He’s been on the public payroll for 45 years. He’s making $110,000 a year.”

Yes indeed. Seems a loophole in the law allows the former retired judge and public servant to collect some $60,000 to $65,000 a year in from the Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) while bringing in $50,000 or so as our county recorder.

Look for Metcalf to counter with the usual “He’s got a well-known name and he’s been in office a really, really long time . . .”

Ain’t democracy grand?

As former Sheriff Earl Smith sees it, “That guy in the other paper missed the whole point….I wasn’t obsessed with pornography, we had a health problem, an AIDS epidemic. And when we tried to close the bookstores we ran right into organized crime.”

Referring to a recent front-page article in a local weekly, Smith-who is once again facing off against Karnes for the sheriff’s post-says he doesn’t much care whether people watch triple X videos or read dirty magazines, but he hates the illegal “drugs and prostitution” and money laundering that seem to accompany the porn industry. Of course, the money laundering he loathes isn’t by organized crime, but by the campaign manager for now-Sheriff Jim Karnes’ 1992 campaign.

Greg Kostelac, a local attorney and then a member of the Ohio Elections Commission, claims for the record that he did nothing illegal. But the courts may decide that question. Kostelac apparently took porn money that can be tied directly to organized crime in Cleveland and gave it to the Franklin County Democratic Party. Here’s the rest of the story.

In 1990, then-Sheriff Smith busted an adult bookstore in New Rome. According to Smith, documents seized in the arrest linked local porn czar Mark Wolfe to Ruben Sternum, the mob’s guy in Cleveland: Wolfe had sent a $100,000 check to help post bond for Sternum.

Now comes the 1992 elections. Payback time for the big bad Wolfe. In the waning days of the hotly contested Smith-Karnes race, Wolfe, with the aid of his brother Tom and employee Mark Long, reportedly gave money to six trusted acquaintances: Daryl Castle, Herbert Rogers, Cynthia DeSantis, Joanna Demas, Walt Erwin, and William Joyner.

On October 26, Long, Castle, and Demas wrote $2,000 checks to the Franklin County Democratic Party; one day later Erwin, Joyner, Rogers and DeSantis also each wrote $2,000 checks to the Party. Clean, freshly scrubbed porn money.

The last-minute influx of the $14,000 into Dem coffers set off a heated battle over the money. Current Democratic Party Chair Denny White was running for county recorder that year and his campaign staffers wanted some of the money; Tom Erney and Rob Lidle lobbied hard for a cut for Denny. But to no avail. The Dems, under the leadership of Fran Ryan, “loaned” the Karnes campaign $8,000 on October 30.

Ryan supposedly put the remaining $6,000 into the coordinated campaign effort for all candidates. Kostelac says that $2,200 went into an ad buy at This Week newspapers. The ad was a letter from the Fraternal Order of Police attacking Smith and promoting Karnes.

Kostelac has admitted that the $8,000 loan was used to mass-reproduce copies of Marty Yant’s Columbus Alive! article “Tin Star Tyrants.” At the time, Kostelac was serving as Yant’s attorney in a federal bankruptcy case. On November 23, 1992, after Karnes’ narrow victory, the Franklin County Democratic Party paid him $6,000 for “expenses” reportedly for working on the campaigns of White, Linda Evans, Patrick O’Reilly and other Democrats.

The problem is, Kostelac may not have worked on these campaigns. When Linda Evans was asked what Kostelac did for her Clerk of Courts campaign in 1992, she replied, “Nothing.” White has also stated that Kostelac did not work for his campaign, but says that Kostelac may have had some “arrangement” with Ryan, who paid him. “I just don’t know. It was before my tenure as chair,” White said.

However, it’s an open secret that White staffers exploded when they found out about Kostelac’s expense check. This, in part, may have led to Ryan’s hasty resignation as party chair and White’s ascension. White says no; other party members say yes.

Smith claims that he asked White about the money laundering and White confirmed it, yet refuses to provide the documents “without a subpoena.” White says that Smith called him “over a year-and-a-half ago” and “while I’ve pledged to cooperate with any government agency investigating the party’s activities, I wasn’t going to let Earl Smith go fishing in the Democratic Party files.”

Wise decision. Seems Smith is out to catch the “big one.” And he’s got some questions he’d like answered. “Where did the $6,000 go? Was it income for Greg Kostelac? Was it reported to the IRS? Was it given to Marty Yant for writing the story?” Kostelac says no money went to Yant and everything else was perfectly legal.

Well not quite everything. Cindy DeSantis admits to “doing a favor” for her friend Mark Long, who provided $2,000 in “cash” to be laundered to the Democratic Party. Long, now deceased, had worked for Mark Wolfe. Dr. Joanna Demas admits that Mark Wolfe’s brother “Tom gave me the majority of the money…maybe I was naive.”

And perhaps so was Kostelac, who made the mistake of telling his new running buddy, Terry Casey of Republican Party fame, the naked truth about the porn cash.

The Supreme Court’s atrocious Citizen’s United green light for unlimited corporate campaign spending had a willing accomplice—the American Civil Liberties Union.

Why?

As long-time supporters, we are horrified by the ACLU’s betrayal of political reality and plain common sense.

Standing proudly with the victorious corporate hacks on the steps of the SCOTUS was none other than the legendary First Amendment crusader Floyd Abrams.

Keith Olberman has called him a “Quisling” for aiding and abetting this catastrophic confirmation of corporate “personhood.”

The ACLU has long been the go-to stalwart of First Amendment rights. Its list of accomplishments is long, impressive and essential.

The ACLU has bravely faced divisive, expensive controversy. Long ago it defended the right of American neo-nazis to march through Skokie, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago.

The ACLU has also defended the right of such loathsome haters as the Ku Klux Klan to gather and speak.

In these and other such cases, the ACLU has been right, and has courageously paid a price.

But perhaps the organization has confused those valid First Amendment cases with a Citizen’s United decision perpetrated by the most virulent judicial opponents of individual speech in the history of the Court. In reference to this case the ACLU says it “has consistently taken the position that section 203 is facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment because it permits the suppression of core political speech, and our amicus brief takes that position again.”

We respectfully—but vehemently—disagree. Simply put: money is not speech, corporations are not people.

Given the immense sums of cash these corporations have to spend, the Citizen’s United decision is the equivalent not of guaranteeing individual Nazis the freedom to march, but instead of granting the Party itself the right to drive tanks down the street, guns ablazing.

It’s not the same as giving individual Klan members the right to hold a rally, but rather for the organization to do public lynchings as part of a terror campaign aimed at taking tangible power.

Nowhere in the Constitution do the Founders mention the word corporation. There were a small handful of them at the time of ratification, all strictly limited by state charter to where and what kind of business they could do. They bear scant resemblance to the multi-national behemoths we confront today. Those who wrote and ratified the First Amendment would be horrified by their very existence.

The moneyed power of these corporations and their access to the First Amendment through the myth of “personhood” has been the ultimate pox on American politics since the 1880s.

It has been reported that the ACLU Board is now considering endorsing limits on campaign spending. Abrams has been reported ( http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/25/liberals-vs-free-speech-aclu-e ) as arguing that “The worst thing you could do – the absolutely worst thing you could do – is transform a civil liberties organization into a liberal political organization.”

But this decision has transformed the ACLU into a conservative political organization, working to arm the ultimate enemies of democracy with unlimited monetary and political power.

We are confident the activist community can survive this latest assault on democracy. It will not be easy, but it can be done.

A good first step would be for the ACLU to face reality and now oppose the false claims anti-human money machines have made on our sacred Bill of Rights.

–
Attorney Bob Fitrakis & Historian Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection. Bob’s Fitrakis Files are at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. Harvey’s History of the US is at www.harveywasserman.com.

The same types of machines that helped put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000, and “re-elect” him 2004, may now decide who wins the all-important “60th Senate seat” in Massachusetts. The fate of health care and much much more hang in the balance.

As Bay Staters vote to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, most will be marking scantron ballots to be run through easily hackable electronic counters made by Diebold/Premier.

A paper ballot of sorts does come through these machines. But the count they generated was seriously compromised in the Florida 2000 election that put George W. Bush in the White House. Similar machines played a critical role skewing the Ohio 2004 vote count to fraudulently re-elect him.

In 2004, Lucas County (Toledo) Ohio, incorrectly calibrated Diebold scantron machines left piles of uncounted ballots in heavily black districts in the inner city.

The Free Press also found that on optiscan machines in Miami County, Ohio the reported totals were significantly higher than the actual number of people who signed in to vote.

Ironically, the cheated candidate in that election was Massachusetts’ now-senior Senator John Kerry. Kerry is circulating email appeals warning that this election is a “jump ball” in which “shady right-wing organizations and out of state conservatives have descended upon the state in droves.”

But Kerry himself has infamously said nothing about the theft of the 2004 election. Neither he, the Democratic Party, nor the Obama Administration have done anything to change a system in which elections can be stolen by the very-well-funded Republican-owned companies that make and administer the vote-counting machines. A dozen election protection groups from around the country have now issued an “orange alert” warning that the Massachusetts vote count could be “ripe for manipulation.”

Thus Kerry’s new colleague could be “selected” by the same means that deprived him of the White House.

According to Selectman Dan Keller of the western town of Wendell, some Massachusetts communities — including his — do have hand-counted paper ballots.

But most of the state relies on Diebold scantron counters which can be manipulated in numerous ways, including switching calibrations and moving ballots from precinct-to-precinct or county-to-county, thus reversing intended votes from one candidate to another.

According to Brad Friedman at BradBlog (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7650 ) LHS Associates sells and services many of the machines being used in this special election. Though the vast majority of elected officials in Massachusetts are Democrats, control of the vote count can be a grey area where voting machines are involved, especially given Sen. Kerry’s 6-year stupor over the stolen 2004 election, a record of inaction amply matched by the Democratic Party and Obama Administration.

According to Friedman, LHS “has admitted to illegally tampering with memory cards during elections,” and has a Director of Sales and Marketing who has been “barred from Connecticut by their Secretary of State.”

The stakes in this election cannot be overstated. The deceased Senator Kennedy’s seat holds the key to a filibuster-breaking 60-seat Democratic majority in the Senate. State Attorney-General Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, is a supporter of the Obama health care plan, and an opponent of atomic power.

Coakley’s opponent, conservative Republican State Senator Scott Brown, has been running a Tea Bagger-style “populist” campaign.

Poll results differ substantially as the campaign winds down, but all show a close race. Thus Diebold, a thoroughly tainted player with deep Republican roots, could hold the key to the election by shifting the outcome in just a few key precincts.

After internet-based reporting broke the story of the stolen 2004 election, thousands of election-protection activists turned out to monitor the 2008 vote count. Among other things, careful exit polling was done to provide a close reality check on official vote counts. Poll monitors interviewed voters and carefully scrutinized voting procedures and how ballots were handled and counted.

Often overlooked are voter registration manipulations, which were used in Ohio and elsewhere to strip hundreds of thousands of voters of their right to cast a ballot. In Ohio alone, more than 300,000 legally registered voters were electronically removed from the voter rolls between the 2000 and 2004 elections. Most were in heavily Democratic urban areas.

In 2008, the Free Press found that the number of purged Ohio voters jumped to more than a million.

Thus the fact that the electoral apparatus in Massachusetts is apparently in the hands of Democrats may not matter. Private vendors like LHS and Diebold have the actual control over the final numbers.

In Massachusetts, a recount only occurs if the final results are less than half of one percent, and as election reform activist John Bonifaz points out, Massachusetts does not require random audits of the computerized vote counting machines to compare the computer results to the optical scan ballots marked by the voters. Bonifaz notes that in the Al Franken-Norm Coleman Minnesota Senate race in 2008, “everything was ultimately hand-counted.” The problem in Massachusetts hinges on whether the race is close enough to trigger a recount, which candidates can peition for within thirty days.

Exit polls remain the gold standard for election integrity throughout the democratic world. But in Ohio in 2004, the exit polls indicated that the election results were reversed and that Kerry actually won. Jonathan Simon, election integrity expert, points out that the exit polls in 2008 in Minnesota “…had Franken winning by 10%! This is a huge disparity, not remotely reflected by the recount.”

“Could the exit poll have been that badly off? Or could a large number of ballots, 200,000 or so, been swapped out before the recount? Here is where the chain or custody, or lack thereof, comes in. These ballots were not exactly under heavy surveillance during the month-long period between election day and recount completion,” Simon said.

What will matter in Massachusetts is how thoroughly election-protection advocates are able to scrutinize voter certification, access and ballot security. Billions of dollars—and much more—are riding on the outcome of this election. Those who believe it cannot or would not be stolen are simply in denial.

Given the Democratic party’s astonishing lack of leadership on so many issues, it is entirely possible that Scott Brown could legitimately beat Martha Coakley in this election.

But it is also possible that the outcome could be manipulated by the companies in control of the registration rolls and vote counts. It will be up to citizen election protection activists to make sure that doesn’t happen yet again.

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman broke many of the major stories surrounding the theft of the 2004 election, and have co-authored four books on election protection, which appear at www.freepress.org, where they are publisher and senior editor, and where this story first appeared.

President Obama should know that his silence in regards to the military industrial complex is a betrayal of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Rev. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 – exactly one year after, to the day, he profoundly indicted U.S. militarism. Obama unleashed same militarism in his so-called Afghanistan surge. King’s “Silence is Betrayal” speech, given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, denounced “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift.”

In the middle of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the lack of a Green New Deal and jobs programs that make the U.S. less energy dependent are leading to imperial folly in Central Asia. Obama’s popularity erodes as he embraces the same militaristic policies that destroyed President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. As the architect of the War of Poverty, Michael Harrington, used to say, “The War of Poverty was not lost in America, it was lost in the jungles of Vietnam.”

As more than 30,000 new troops pour into Afghanistan, as the government of the United States runs a trillion-dollar yearly deficit, and the annual defense budget approaches $600 billion, not including the $200 billion war budget for Afghanistan, King’s words remain relevant today.

With the U.S. accounting for half of all military spending on Earth and the fact that we could hire every unemployed worker in Afghanistan for a mere $4 billion, we could use the remaining $196 billion war budget to rebuild the infrastructure of the U.S.

The real battles being fought out in the U.S. and in Central Asia echo King’s struggle for economic justice alongside the sanitation workers in Memphis. President Eisenhower understood that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

King, despite his inner search for truth, did not come easily to opposing the politics of the Johnson administration as the Vietnam War raged. King’s great spirit, that seemed to instinctively speak truth to power, feared “the apathy of conformity” in “his own bosom.” King courageously overcame being “mesmerized by uncertainty” and instead, spoke out forcefully.

Dr. King broke the “silence of the night” and found his famously distinct voice, set apart by its universal tone of moral resonance. He looked into the hell-black “darkness that seemed so close around us” and urged people of conscience “to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls ‘enemy’.”

King, like Christ, knew that the Vietnamese people, like the Afghanistani people, are our brothers and sisters. His speech was an attempt to reach out to dehumanized American foes and “hear their broken cries.”

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values . . . a true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, ‘this way of settling difference is not just,’” King spoke.

Looking out into the great waves of history, King observed that, “The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursue this self-defeating path of hate.”

King pointed out, then as now, “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.” There is yet time to draw back from the siege of Baghdad; to say no to the clash of cultures, to end the empty and self-destructive rhetoric of perpetual war in the name of perpetual peace.

If we don’t make that choice, King put it well: “If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality and strength without sight.”

President Obama still has a choice today. Thus far, he has chosen to ignore the true legacy of King and pursue the dream of imperial folly.

Original article:
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2010/1801

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They’re here. Yes, indeed. New evidence published in this week’s issue of The Nation directly links Columbus’s own Southern Air Transport to the Contra cocaine network reputedly protected by the Central Intelligence Agency.

In December 1985, Robert Perry, now the director of The Nation Institute’s Investigative Unit, co-wrote the first news story about Contra drug trafficking for the Associated Press.

After the October 5, 1986 crash in Nicaragua of a Southern Air Transport aircraft that was carrying arms to the U.S.-backed Contras, Perry flew to Nicaragua and copied down the entries in the crashed plane’s flight logs. The entries made by co-pilot Wallace “Buzz” Sawyer, who, along with two others, died in the crash, indicated that Sawyer flew a Southern Air L-382 from Miami to Barranquilla, Colombia on October 2, 4, and 6, 1985.

In 1986, Wanda Palacio broke with Colombia’s Medellin Cartel and became an FBI informant. According to The Nation, Palacio also informed Massachusetts Senator John Kerry that she had witnessed cocaine being loaded onto Southern Air Transport (SAT) planes, an admitted CIA-owned airline from 1960-’73, then under contract to the Pentagon.

On September 26, 1986, Senator Kerry hand-delivered an 11-page statement from Palacio to William Weld, then an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department. Palacio asserts that she was with cocaine kingpin Jorge Ochoa at the airport in Barranquilla in ’83 as a cocaine shipment was loaded onto a SAT plane, according to The Nation. She claims that Ochoa told her it was “a CIA plane and that he was exchanging guns for drugs.”

Palacio claims in early October 1985 she again witnessed Ochoa’s aides loading an SAT plane with cocaine. She also confirmed to Kerry staffers that Sawyer was one of the SAT pilots she saw loading cocaine in Barranquilla in early October. SAT officials admitted that Sawyer flew their planes, but steadfastly deny involvement in cocaine smuggling.

Not that we would expect them to admit it. On August 7, 1987 in a Senate deposition, Palacio stated that “the FBI stopped working with me all of the sudden because of this Southern Air Transport deal…Justice doesn’t want to hear me.”

With the CIA-Contra drug connection now national news after the publication of Gary Webb’s series in the San Jose Mercury News, and recently reprinted in the Dispatch, questions need to be asked about the use of taxpayer’s money to bring the infamous Southern Air Transport to Rickenbacker Air Base.

Webb documents how the Contra cocaine network spread crack into the inner cities of Cincinnati and Dayton. Evidence suggests that there was clearly a Colombian cocaine connection in Columbus in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In 1990, the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department under Earl Smith made the single largest drug bust in its history when they confiscated 48 pounds of cocaine from Fernando Solar.

Solar, according to Smith, led the Sheriff’s Department to New York and an apartment building where vehicles were being compartmentalized for drug trafficking. They issued a warrant for one Carlos Wagner. Wagner was later detained by U.S. Customs Agents who confiscated half a million dollars from him and allowed him to return to Colombia. He was later arrested in Houston when he re-entered the U.S. Wagner turned out to be a “mule,” Smith says, for Colombian drug dealer Rudolphio Trahiellio in San Francisco.

In 1992, the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department played a vital role in Trahiello’s arrest in cracking one of the largest drug rings in the U.S. Solar, Wagner and Trahiello are reportedly in prison, but Southern Air Transport remains at Rickenbacker Air Base, courtesy of Ohio taxpayer’s dollars. Why?

Buck up in the September 4 Columbus Alive, I wrote a news article entitled “The High Price of Bucking the System” about the firing of Voinovich administration official Joe Gilyard. Gilyard, former director of the Office of Criminal Justice Services, repeatedly claimed that Voinovich Company lobbyist Phil Hamilton continually pressured him to illegally release money for Voinovich Company projects.

When I asked him why there was so much pressure, Gilyard claimed that “Pauly Voinovich and [the governor's former chief of staff and former Voinovich Companies vice president] Paul Mifsud were in a hurry to repay money to a savings and loan they had busted out.”

Gilyard offered no substantiation. But, a Cleveland Plain Dealer article dated September 8, 1994 provides additional insight. Seems Pauly defaulted on a $6.8 million construction loan for a housing project in 1990, just before Gilyard was appointed. The lender was Columbus-based Mid-America Federal Savings & Loan, which later failed and was taken over by the Resolution Trust Company.

Dale Bissonette, a former chief financial officer of the Voinovich Company, pleaded guilty to bank fraud in connection with the case. Good thing we got Pauly V building the Franklin County jail for $2 million-oops! forgot the overruns-$9 million. Gilyard was fired; Voinovich is at large in Franklin County. Stop him before he builds again.

Door Prizes!
Discussion to follow.
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You may be interested in two new items from The Free Press:

The Fitrakis FIles: Cops, Cover-Ups & Corruption – $15
by Bob Fitrakis

In this sixth volume of “The Fitrakis Files,” columnist and investigative
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Free Press 40th Anniversary 2010 Calendar : $5
Celebrate the Free Press’ 40th anniversary in 2010 with a one-of-a-kind
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In peace…

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Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley

CALL+RESPONSE is a first of its kind feature documentary film that reveals the world’s 27 million dirtiest secrets: there are more slaves today than ever before in human history. CALL+RESPONSE goes deep undercover where slavery is thriving from the child brothels of Cambodia to the slave brick kilns of rural India to reveal that in 2007, Slave Traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined.

Luminaries on the issue such as Cornel West, Madeleine Albright, Daryl Hannah, Julia Ormond, Ashley Judd, Nicholas Kristof, and many other prominent political and cultural figures offer first hand account of this 21st century trade. Performances from Grammy-winning and critically acclaimed artists including Moby, Natasha Bedingfield, Cold War Kids, Matisyahu, Imogen Heap, Talib Kweli, Five For Fighting, Switchfoot, members of Nickel Creek and Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, Rocco Deluca move this chilling information into inspiration for stopping it.

Music is part of the movement against human slavery. Dr. Cornel West connects the music of the American slave fields to the popular music we listen to today, and offers this connection as a rallying cry for the modern abolitionist movement currently brewing. Written, directed and produced by Justin Dillon of the band, Tremolo.

Tickets – On Sale Now! $5 in advance and $7 General Admission/$6 Students at the door. Tickets are available online at www.drexel.net, at Drexel Theatre Box-Office or by calling Samantha Sudai at
(614) 493-7930. Call + Response is presented by Bexley resident & student Samantha Sudai. More information on the film is available at www.callandresponse.com

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There can be no greater gift that you can give your loved ones, or the world, this holiday season than Robert Greenwald’s documentary “Rethink Afghanistan.”
While President Barry Obama was busy resuscitating Lyndon Johnson’s “bright and shiny” Vietnam lies in his national address Tuesday night, the American people should instead have been given a more sober assessment by Greenwald as we forge into the valley of fallen empires.

Obama is President primarily because, as a state senator in Illinois, he made a speech opposing the folly of occupying Iraq after 9/11. During his presidential campaign, famed Afghan hawk Zbignew Brzezinski emerged as a key advisor on central Asia. In his book, The Grand Chessboard (1997), Jimmy Carter’s former national security advisor makes it clear that controlling the oil and gas fields of central Asia and the pipeline that runs through Afghanistan and Pakistan are the keys to dominating the 21st century.

The joke among hardcore peace activists during the Obama campaign was that Obama had an “exit strategy” from Iraq – sending the troops to Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the American empire proves all too predictable. Obama pitched his strategy as “disrupting, dismantling and defeating” the Taliban, al Qaeda, and extremists. The problem is that the 30,000 troops in Afghanistan will embolden, empower, and resurrect the Taliban, al Qaeda, and extremists.

The U.S military will be no more successful in occupying the difficult terrain of Afghanistan than was the once powerful Soviet Red Army. Every new armed American troop will serve as a recruitment poster for the Taliban. The insurgent strategy is quite simple. Go into a village, fire rounds toward U.S. troops, flee, and wait for the inevitable American military response by artillery, planes, or drones.

The devastated villages that we’re destroying in order to save them, then become prime recruiting grounds for the extremists we claim to be fighting. President Obama is absolutely correct when he says that the status quo in Afghanistan is not sustainable. That status quo includes more than 250,000 war refugees, a government that defrauded the people and stole the last election, massive corruption and drug-running.

We’ve spent nearly $200 billion in Afghanistan, and as Greenwald points out, for $4 billion we could hire the 40% of Afghan people who are unemployed to rebuild their own country. Afghanistan is unsustainable because it’s filled with desperate and poor people who are being occupied by a foreign empire from the western hemisphere, whose chief interest is in the country’s geo-strategic importance in the battle over the central Asian oilfields to its north.

So when the Taliban pays $8 a day to fight the infidels, it’s often the best option available for the war-ravaged people.

Obama argues that U.S. security is at stake in Afghanistan. It’s not. The Taliban, originally supported financially by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and incubated in the madressas of Pakistan, are primarily nationalists who stayed within the borders of Afghanistan. Sure they harbored al Qaeda, but the Taliban is not an international terrorist network. Al Qaeda was, for the most part, because it was U.S. trained and financed to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Occupying Afghanistan because al Qaeda used to be there makes less sense than bombing Florida, New York, and Oklahoma because al Qaeda operatives who attacked us on 9/11 trained to fly there in the 1980s.

The most bizarre part of Obama’s speech was when he told the Afghan people that the United States has “no interest in occupying your country.” But Afghan people know that the armed American soldiers are not coming over to participate in a “hug-a-thon against hunger” and that the high-tech U.S. tanks are not bookmobiles.

Obama seeks to “isolate” those who are killing innocents. Surely he will be successful, since it is the United States with its massive military presence that will be killing the innocent people of Afghanistan, isolating us from positive world opinion.

Obama claims that those of us who argue that this is his Vietnam misunderstand history and points to the 43 nations that are backing us in Afghanistan, implying we were alone in Vietnam. We weren’t. Some of our NATO allies sent troops to Vietnam as did our SEATO allies: Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Also, South Korean troops joined us.

Also, the other similarity is obvious: a corrupt immoral South Vietnamese government that was tied to the drug trade.

Obama once again borrowed from Lincoln and talked about government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In reality, Obama is pitching a war of “volunteers” drawn disproportionately from the ravaged American working class, by a president who was elected in the name of peace, and for a small group of oil oligarchs whose only real concern are the oil and gas deposits in the former Soviet republics just to the north of Afghanistan.

–
Bob Fitrakis is Editor of http://freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

Also, Mark Stanbery has written a draft letter to the editor on the subject. Please use this information and write your own letter to the editor as another outlet to demonstrate the people’s disagreement with the President’s decision:

On the letter to editor, see attached, it is really rough draft with NPP stats of cost of war, “Can we afford this war?” title.
Peace, Mark D. Stansbery

Sample Letter to the Editor: DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT

Can We Afford this War?

The Cost of War in Afghanistan continues to confound people in leadership and on the streets. In tracking the US cost of the war in Afghanistan the ledger must include: an individual cost of war casualty counter, state-level numbers and trade-offs., and Federal Budget Outlays including Supplemental Funding Bills.

Jo Comerford , the National Priorities Project Executive Director, a research organization that analyzes and clarifies federal data, stated that, “With President Obama moving forward with his campaign promise to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, the US public faces two important questions as we reach his administration’s troop escalation: What will be the cost and impact of more troops, for both the US and Afghanistan? And what are the Obama Administration’s long-term goals?”

Seven years ago, the “global war on terror” began in Afghanistan as a military response to the September 11 attacks. In March 2003, the United States also invaded Iraq. Today, US forces are deeply engaged in both countries with some 200,000 US troops in the region, of which 137,000 are in Iraq and about 68,000 in Afghanistan, with the Obama Administration requesting at least an additional 30,000 troops.

Visit www.nationalpriorities.org to access this information and other timely federal budget analysis tools and reports. The American Friends Service Committee can be found on-line at www.afsc.org.

The controversial Libyan leader, who helped train and fund insurgent groups all over the world, now wants to compete in the marketplace of ideas — and he and his supporters think his Green Book may offer a new perspective. One Green Book idea: every citizen is entitled to one mortgage-free house, or tent. That’s the way it is for 5.5 million Libyan citizens.

Following al-Gathafi’s recent trip to the United States, where he spoke for an hour and a half at the United Nations — questioning the assassinations of Kennedy and King — former U.S. Congresswoman organized a delegation to visit Libya and attend the First International Conference of the Green Book Supporters Society.

After a 9-hour flight to Frankfurt, Germany and a 3-hour hop to the shores of Tripoli, I arrived Thursday morning, October 22, greeted by Society supporters at the airport. The 11-member U.S. delegation was whisked off to the Bab-Al Bahre Hotel to mingle with hundreds of representatives from around the world.

But many Green Book supporters were shocked to see an U.S. delegation. We were the first of any note since President Ronald Reagan attempted to assassinate al-Gathafi with F-16 fighter jets in 1986, instead killing his 5-year-old adopted daughter. United States sanctions against Libya were lifted in 2004 and in 2006 the U.S. removed the country from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, but the U.S. has been slow to engage with al-Gathafi. In the meantime, the countries of Africa voted him the President of the African Union and businessmen from China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia have flooded the scenic Mediterranean port city of Tripoli. Construction cranes are everywhere and 2000 miles of undeveloped and unpolluted Mediterranean coastline beckon.

Initially I thought I was in Libya as a reporter, although I began to get suspicious of what was written on my nametag when delegate after delegate asked me for my analysis of President Barack Obama and what was happening in U.S. politics, post-Bush. On Thursday and Friday I worked with the U.S. delegates in drafting a statement of friendship to be read at the conference. It ended: “We know that a better world is possible. We are here to build it in solidarity with each and every one of you, and with our brothers and sisters around the world.”

My thoughts were that if Richard Nixon could embrace Chairman Mao and his Red Book supporters, we can dialogue with al-Gathafi. After all, as the Colonel likes to point out, he was the first man to send out a warrant through Interpol to arrest the terrorist bin Laden.

Journalist Wayne Madsen and I wandered through the old walled city of Tripoli, run-down and hard hit by the U.S. sanctions yet currently being renovated in anticipation of a flourishing tourist trade. Libya is in the process of building the largest airport on the African continent and expects it to be a destination for people from all nations. While we were warned that we shouldn’t be there without an interpreter or guide, we felt safe strolling through the incredible ancient fortress.

Four of us shopped in Tripoli’s central market. Sadly, I found it virtually impossible to buy any authentic Arab wear. Most of the clothes being sold were knock-offs of U.S. styles with names like “Calvin Place,” manufactured in China or Cambodia. Also the ubiquitous satellite dishes offered four English-speaking channels: the BBC, CNN, Fox’s Action Movies, and another U.S. action-adventure channel. I wondered about the wisdom of showering the Libyan people with movies like Mission: Impossible and Rambo Part III.

On Sunday, the conference of 400 or so participants convened. Oddly, a conference organizer ushered me into the first row of VIP-reserved seats, right in front of the Secretary General. I wasn’t sure why. Unexpectedly, the U.S. delegation interpreter asked me to read the Society’s founding charter. Puzzled, I asked why. He replied, “You are the head of the U.S. delegation.” How did I become the head? “Your badge says so,” he told me. In some ways, I figure I’m at fault for not taking basic Arabic in college. Apparently with Congresswoman McKinney representing the North American continent, I somehow became the leader of the U.S. delegation.

It could have been worse. I could have been asked to play ping pong a la China in the ‘70s. During the introduction, I managed to catch the phrase “Green Party Governor Ohio.” Al-Gathafi’s Party is also called the Green Party. I hope there wasn’t some confusion here between the ruling party of Libya and the tattered remnants of aging environmentalists who gave me 1% of the vote in the 2006 election. After giving the speech before a sea of TV cameras, and only occasionally stumbling over the word Jamahiriya (Republic), I improvised by ending with the slogan “All power to the people, all power to the People’s Congress!”

Suddenly they postponed the conference on Sunday and Abdurahmane, our interpreter, told us we were going to meet a special guest. Conference members boarded buses and headed along the seashore highway in Tripoli. The bus pulled into a military compound and we were ushered through heavy security. What else could it be — we were destined to sit in al-Gathafi’s big tent.

I never thought I’d be hanging out in his tent, in a compound with a shrine dedicated to his dead daughter. Once again, I found myself in the front row next to Congresswoman McKinney. Behind me, a man called my name “Ro-bert.” He began “I wrote the statement you gave yesterday. It was the Great Leader’s idea that someone from America should read the speech. You did well but you improvised a little.” I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

Finally, the Colonel came in and we observed a moment of silence for the thousands of Libyans kidnapped and relocated by Italian occupational forces on that day in October 1911. Al-Gathafi spoke for more than an hour. His speech’s theme was clear — corporate capitalism was failing in the West and the Green Book’s version of socialism offered an alternative.

He stressed over and over again that people should actually read his Green Book and not listen to Western propaganda about it. He emphasized that true democracy must be rooted in the religious and cultural traditions particular to each society. He specifically cited the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran as sources for law and democracy. His voice was strong and he spoke slowly. It is clearly legacy time for the aging leader of both Pan-Arab and Pan-African unity.

Why must there be People’s Congresses: “The rich create the Parliament, they own the press.” Denouncing the rich, he stated, “They have a right to steal, you have the right to protest.” Al-Gathafi commented specifically on the United States: “The wealth of society is the property of all Americans and should be distributed that way.”

In our current climate of economic collapse, the ideas in al-Gathafi’s Green Book may make sense to some. Yet, it seems implausible that the great vilified enemy of the U.S. will rise from the ashes of near assassination to influence U.S. politics. Still, who knows? It is intriguing that a robed, revolutionary Bedouin living in a tent in Tripoli seemed to have a more realistic assessment of the U.S. economy and democracy than most of our own elected officials. Next time, let’s let him set up his tent in New Jersey or New York City and maybe a few more people could dialogue.


Original Article Published At:

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2009/1788

Is election reform brewing in the Buckeye State? In an extensive and well-argued editorial the Dispatch made the case for the integration of key state government databases into a statewide electronic voter registration system under the control of the Secretary of State’s office, as proposed in pending legislation.

Ohio’s voter registration databases are in disarray. In the 2008 presidential election, many voters found their right to vote challenged in Ohio because of discrepancies in state and federal databases. For example, under Social Security I am listed as Robert John Fitrakis, but on my driver’s license it’s Robert J. Fitrakis. On the voting rolls I’m Robert Fitrakis. If the states would integrate their databases and establish a single form for voter registration, bizarre challenges over middle initials and names may become a thing of the past.

But privately controlled non-transparent electronic voter registration systems pose a great threat to democracy. Each county keeps its own records, a few have told the Free Press they don’t know how to use the Secretary of State’s data system. Many counties have outsourced their voting rolls to private vendors using secret proprietary software – the same vendors who also own electronic voting machines suspected of manipulating election results.

Ohio purged more than 1,250,000 voters between the 2004-2008 elections. Many of these voters lost their ability to vote because of electronic poll books using proprietary software and hardware provided or controlled by private companies with questionable loyalties. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s Everest study of voting machine security indicated that while the hardware and software connected with electronic voting is vulnerable to hacking, there is virtually no security in place to protect the electronic poll books that contain the registration lists.

In 2004, nearly 10,000 Cleveland area voters learned this the hard way when a Diebold electronic poll book had a supposed “glitch” and purged them from the rolls just prior to Election Day preventing them from voting.

The Dispatch’s logic on several vital points is impressive, although certain safeguards against any centralized database manipulation must be in place. The specter of former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell still haunts Ohio elections.

It is worthwhile to take the Dispatch editorial point by point. The capital city’s daily monopoly begins with an obvious criticism: “Ohio’s county boards of elections spend more time and money shuffling paper around in an outmoded voter registration system than on anything else.” Citing the example of Maricopa County in Arizona, they note that online registration costs are 3 cents per registrant, compared with 82 cents for those registering on paper. The cost saving comes from pushing a button at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and sending the exact same data to the Secretary of State’s office and the county boards of elections versus filling a registration form out on paper, mailing it to both of those entities and having it keyed in.

A key point not mentioned by the Dispatch in this process is that every eligible citizen that registers to vote should be given a copy of that registration by the BMV or, say, the Ohio Dept. of Job and Family Services, which can be used as proof of registration if there’s any dispute when casting a vote.

Paper trails and receipts are a necessity in guaranteeing voting rights. Systems must be in place to assure that central database activity initiated by the Secretary of State must be transparent to the public, and should never be controlled or manipulated by private companies using proprietary software.

The Dispatch editorial was driven by an issue near and dear to the Free Press editorial staff – the unacceptable high numbers of Ohioans who were forced to cast provisional ballots in the last two presidential elections. These back-of-the-bus Jim Crow ballots, as the Free Press has documented repeatedly, are primarily cast by minorities and the inner-city poor.

As the Free Press reported following the 2004 election, “An earlier analysis in the Free Press of the 155,428 unofficial provisional ballots recorded at the Secretary of State’s website found that a clear majority, 85,096, came from the 15 counties Kerry won.”

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/985

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2009/3629

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2009/3630

What the Dispatch editorial fails to note is that a shocking 10% of all Ohio voters on Election Day 2008 were forced to vote provisionally. Provisional voters reached record numbers in 2008 with Ohio reporting 193,000 provisionals cast on Election Day. Election observers noted up to 20% provisional ballots cast in some inner city precincts. Free Press research documented that in comparable battleground states like Missouri and Virginia, very few voters were forced to vote provisional ballots — only .02% (7,000 voters) and 01% (4,500 voters) respectively. Ohio’s numbers are so staggeringly high in contrast, they should be challenged by under the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The Dispatch comes down firming on the side of Ohio public agencies asking Ohioans if they want to register to vote or update their voter registration data. “Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner; Franklin County’s Republican deputy elections director Matt Damschroder, and the Brennan Center for Justice in New York all agree that any Ohio election-reform law should require workers at BMV and Job and Family Services offices to ask clients whether they want to register to vote or have their registration updated…” the Dispatch wrote.

But why stop there? Every public college and university in the state should be required to do the same thing. Last time I checked all the public higher education institutions had computer systems capable of transmitting data. Better yet, all of the public high schools in Ohio should be required by law to ask their students if they want to register to vote on their 18th birthday and transmit that data to the Secretary of State’s office as well as their local board of elections.

Ideally, the solution should be for the state of Ohio, and all states for that matter, to assert an affirmative duty to register all citizens automatically to vote when they are 18 years old. The right to vote should never be taken away from a citizen because a private company controls the poll books or because a partisan political party challenges someone’s identity based on minor discrepancies in a public database.

Join local progressives to meet, network, and socialize, with music, art, food.
Art display by Malcolm J and Paul Wilbur, folk singer, and poets.
Hear about Bob Fitrakis’ trip with Cynthia McKinney to Tripoli.
Showing “Re-Think Afghanistan.”
Co-sponsored by the Central Ohio Green Edudation Fund.

1021 E. Broad St., side door, parking in rear.
truth@freepess.org, 614-253-2571

Tuesday, October 27, 2009
7:30pm – 10:00pm
Drexel East
2254 E Main St
Bexley, OH

Filmed over a twelve-month period, from Rochester, NY and Cleveland, to Seattle, Los Angeles and San Diego, WE ALL FALL DOWN also shows how an out-of-control "mortgage machine" has today led to home foreclosures nationwide, featuring interviews with families who have been devastated, as loan defaults and evictions spread from the poor to middle-class sectors of the populace, in turn creating millions of abandoned and disintegrating properties in neighborhoods and cities throughout the U.S. Their emotionally moving stories reveal the all-too-real personal consequences for Americans caught up in this financial spiral.

Click Here for Complete Screening Information Available on the Festival Website

This screening is co-sponsored by the Free Press, the Film Council of Greater Columbus and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund with the Drexel Theater.

http://www.chrisawards.org

After the movie, join us for a musical event:

We have a tremendous opportunity in Columbus, to hear
ANNE FEENEY – progressive singer/songwriter
ANNE FEENEY is a wonderful labor/feminist singer/songwriter in the Woody Guthrie mold (& there ain’t many of those)!! She is someone who doesn’t just write songs about the struggle for justice, she is there, on the picket lines, in the sit-downs, singing for the strikers, marching in the marches and standing up for what is just, regardless of the consequences.
Requested donation: $10.
In her only Columbus visit in many years, Anne will play at:
1021 E. BROAD ST, COLUMBUS, side door, parking in rear
October 20 – 7:30 pm.
253-2571
truth@freepress.org

http://www.annefeeney.com/

Who is Dr. Larry James? A man who in his biography claims responsibility for “Fixing Hell.” Whose hell did he fix? Or did he look the other way while the Devil’s work was done?

Between 2003 and 2007, Army Colonel Larry James served as Chief Psychologist of the Joint Intelligence Group and a senior member of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT). James’ job was advising on interrogation and “behavior management” for the men and kids at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. In 2004, he functioned as the director of the Behavioral Science Unit at the Abu Ghraib prison.

That’s right. His past includes both the notorious Gitmo and Abu Ghriab, the infamous torture site in Iraq.

Having retired from the U.S. Army, James is currently the Dean of the Professional Psychology Department at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. James is licensed to practice psychology in Louisiana, Ohio, and Guam. Human rights advocates argue that Wright State is absolutely wrong in appointing James as Dean because of his questionable past.

Public records indicate that while James served at Gitmo in the spring of 2003, “…abuse and interrogations was widespread and cruel treatment was official policy,” according to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The Center argued that James’ “conduct” at Gitmo should “warrant immediate investigation.”

“Detainee and government reports of abuse during the period of Dr. James’ first deployment include beatings, rape threats, religious and sexual humiliation and painful body positions,” the Center stated.

Under James’ tenure, Guantanamo developed and implemented the Camp Delta “Behavioral Management Plan.” The Plan called for treating new detainees in a way that would “enhance and exploit [their] disorientation and disorganization.” How was this accomplished? Prolonged periods of solitary confinement that are known to cause hallucinations, extreme anxiety, muscular atrophy, weight loss, and other physical conditions that may be irreversible, according to the Center.

While James has denied responsibility, his critics have charged that he used his access to confidential medical records of detainees to target their “physical and mental vulnerabilities.”

At the recent August American Psychological Association (APA) conference in Toronto, the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) handed out fliers with the headline: “Department of Defense Ensures Psychologists’ Collusion in Torture.” Larry James was singled out as one of the psychologists in question.

Both the CCIJ and the CCR called upon the Minister of Public Safety in Canada, Peter Van Loan, to investigate James’ for possible war crimes. They included an 8-page Appendix extensively foot-noted including numerous references to admissions from James’ book, “Fixing Hell.”

The Appendix points out that while James frequently claimed he was reforming things, his actual accounts show he either turned a blind eye to torture, or may have facilitated it.

On page 50-51 of “Fixing Hell,” James writes the following:

“I saw Luther and three MPs wrestling with a detainee on the floor. It was an awful sight. I wanted to run back to my room and wash my eyes with bleach. The detainee was naked except for the pink panties I had seen hanging on the door earlier. He also had lipstick and a wig on. The four men were holding the prisoner down and trying to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown, but he was fighting hard. My first instinct was to rush in and start barking orders at the men, demanding they stop this ridiculous and abusive wrestling match. But I managed to quell that urge and wait.”

James admitted he went to have a cup of coffee and then intervened to urge the interrogators to build better relations with the man being tortured. James writes: “I never once said anything about the lingerie or interrogation. My purpose was to build a relationship with Luther, rather than to attack him as being wrong or as a human being.”

Hell hath been fixed.

When another prisoner was being abused by large MPs screaming in his face for three hours straight, James once again “fixed” hell by suggesting they might want to offer him a drink or a bathroom break.

While James was at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, court records and affidavits indicate that prisoners were not only isolated, but their sleep cycles were deliberately disturbed, they were exposed to extremely hot and cold temperatures, forced to smell unpleasant odors and subject to “dietary manipulations.”

But what does that mean in practical terms? Allegations by one detainee claim that he went for 3-4 weeks without any solid food, living on Ensure and water. Reports by six other high-value detainees allege they were subject to the same liquid diets.

According to the Red Cross report, there was also the use of “prolonged diapering” to force the detainees to urinate and defecate on themselves. They were deprived of using a toilet. Six high-value detainees reported being repeatedly slammed against walls 20-30 times consecutively as an interrogation technique.

If James had the urge to go in and “bark orders” when confronting torture, he most likely had command authority over the torturers at Gitmo. Remember that the standard definition for torture is the deliberate infliction of physical or mental distress on detainees.

Under Canadian law, it is a war crime if any military personnel are found to be “committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Dr. Trudy Bond, a Toledo psychologist, filed an extensive complaint against James with the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists (LSBEP). Bond’s complaint specifically charged that James violated his ethical duties as a licensed psychologist to keep his patients from harm, to protect confidential information, and to obtain their informed consent.

Bond filed her complaint on February 29, 2008. Within a month, the LSBEP chose not to investigate the matter. On June 19, 2008, Bond asked the Board to reconsider. In less than a week, the LSBEP reaffirmed their decision not to investigate.

Bond next turned to the courts, asking the 19th Judicial District Court for the Parish of East Baton Rouge to review the LSBEP’s decision on June 13, 2009. The Court ruled in favor of the Board. On August 6 of this year, Bond filed an appeal with the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeals.

Bond has taken similar action in Ohio as well as with the American Psychological Association. On July 8, 2008, she filed a formal complaint against James with the Ohio State Board of Psychology for, among other things, that James’ conduct is an ethical violation because it “…substantially harmed or is likely to substantially harm a person.”

In her complaint to the American Psychological Association (APA), Bond cited the Report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) published after their visit to Guantanamo. The Report documented behavior commonly regarded as torture prior to Bush and Cheney. The rest of the world still defines torture in the traditional sense.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has demanded that medical professionals including James be a “specific focus” of an investigation assessing whether the interrogations violated legal or medical ethics. Steven Reisner of PHR said, “The conclusions that these interrogation techniques cause no lasting harm is the equivalent of psychological practice.”

In a report issued by PHR in 2009, they categorically concluded, that “Health professionals played central roles in developing, implementing, and providing justification for torture.”

While the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have come out unequivocally against the interrogation techniques used at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the APA has waffled on the issue.

In 2005, the APA’s Board endorsed the role of psychologists involved in interrogations as consistent with APA ethics, if it was done for the purpose of making the interrogations “safe, legal and effective.” In 2008, the APA passed another resolution against its members being present in any facility where U.S. and international law was being violated unless they were working for the benefit of the detainees.

James is at the center of this ongoing debate, and now so is Wright State University.

Whether James is qualified to be licensed in Ohio or to be a Dean at Wright State is probably best decided after a careful reading of “Fixing Hell.” One of the most telling passages from the book reads as follows: “Sex was a complicated factor in much of our work at Abu Ghraib. I came to know several single women at Abu Ghraib who got pregnant, received adverse legal action, and were sent home. Private Jenni Nelson was a short, fat, seriously ugly young lady. She looked as though she was crying all the time. Nevertheless, she got a boyfriend, got pregnant, and was promptly sent home by her company commander. Did she do it on purpose to get out of Abu Ghraib? Probably. And I’m sure she wasn’t the first.”

One wonders why Wright State University would hire a man as their Professional Psychology Department Dean who has so little sensitivity to Private Nelson, as well as the prinsoners he was charged to protect. The reality is Private Nelson took action to get out of Abu Ghrai, and not be charged with war crimes. James stayed and wrote a book insulting Nelson and covering-up crimes against humanity.

Was he fixing hell? Human rights advocates say he helped create it for his patients and they are doing everything to hold him accountable for his admitted actions. Bond is currently re-filing an ethics complaint against James in Ohio. There’s an ongoing campaign by the Center for Constitutional Rights called “When Healers Harm” demanding that we “hold health professionals accountable for torture.”

Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the freepress.org and is the author of the forthcoming book, Cops, Coverups, and Corruption.

There’s a peculiar lawsuit pending in Franklin County: Fox Investigation, Inc. vs. Linda Leisure.
Linda Leisure first met death row inmates during her volunteer work as a prison minister in Ohio. Inspired by President Bush’s call for “volunteerism” she worked up the nerve to visit men she feared, yet wanted to help. Not unlike the Susan Sarandon character in Dead Man Walking, she listened to their stories and ministered to their needs.

One of those man’s needs, it turned out, involved helping the wife of death-row inmate John Spirko prove that her husband was not guilty. The Spirko case peaked Leisure’s interest in investigating murder cases. She felt her talents might be better used in ensuring that justice was being done in individual cases rather than preaching to the condemned. Leisure took a job with Fox Investigation, Inc., a private investigating firm headed by Richard H. Smith, an ex-Columbus police officer and an ex-investigator at the Ohio Public Defender’s Office (OPDO). Fox Investigation often did contract work for the OPDO investigating the cases of death row inmates.

Little did Leisure know the reasons why Smith was no longer a cop or state investigator. But she quickly found out why. Soon after going to work at Fox, Leisure claims that Smith “wanted me to falsify time records and interviews on these murder cases.” Appalled, she left Fox Investigation, convinced that certain death row inmates were being denied basic “due process” guaranteed them under the Constitution. And even more frightening, that as a result, some innocent American citizen might be executed. This spurred her into action.

On October 25, 1994 Leisure sent a letter to Common Pleas Judge James O’Grady outlining the above allegations against Smith. On November 14, Leisure voluntarily took and passed a polygraph exam substantiating her charges. But it was politics as usual in the Franklin County Courts and nobody took her accusations seriously, as Smith continued to do business.

Fortuitously, Leisure shared the same attorney as Chester “Briss” Craig, former deputy investigator at the OPDO. Craig informed her that he had been Smith’s boss at the OPDO and had complained to the Ohio Inspector General with similar concerns. In January 1992, Craig charged “…that some of the investigators were turning in false reports and were not providing the support services to the attorneys as required.” Leisure tracked down the state investigative report that essentially verified Craig’s allegations.

The report was none too kind to her old boss, Mr. Smith. During his tenure from April 1983 to November 1988 at the OPDO, Smith was fond of referring to black defendants as “niggers” and white ones as “scumbags.” These “niggers” and “scumbags” were the very clients Smith was hired to work for and investigate their claims of innocence.

Smith told several of his fellow investigators that he didn’t like “working for a nigger,” referring to Craig. Smith admitted in the report that he had arranged for police friends to arrest Deputy Director Craig on a drunk driving charge. “I don’t consider it a conspiracy at all. I was just going to let the man expose himself,” Smith said of Craig.

Speaking of exposing oneself, it turns out that Smith had been forced off the Columbus Police force for doing just that with his most private parts to seven different women, including five minors on October 9, 1981. He had previously been reprimanded many times for various acts of misconduct, including engaging in sex while on duty, and showing up drunk and threatening his ex-wife at her house.

Who was exposing who?

Leisure tried desperately to take the story to the press, with no luck. Depressed and nearly defeated, she picked up a copy of the now-defunct Columbus Free Press, which I edited at the time. She claims God spoke to her and told her that I would publish the story. Who was I to argue with God, particularly when he sends me such a hot story?

Anyway, Leisure’s story appeared on the cover of the January 1995 Free Press. Happy ending? Alas, hardly.

Leisure began to receive harassing and threatening phone calls; someone mailed drugs to her house; and Fox Investigation and Richard Smith sued Linda Leisure for $150,000 in damages due to his loss of reputation. Leisure’s been unable to hold a steady job and had to re-mortgage her home in order to pay an attorney.

After perusing Mr. Smith’s Columbus police files, Leisure’s attorney recently wrote to Smith’s attorney: “Quite frankly, after review of such file, I believe Mr. Smith would have great difficulty proving to a jury that any action by Miss Leisure caused damage to his reputation.” Standard legal principle: one must first have a reputation before it can be damaged.

Leisure was moved by the spirit, driven by her fund.

      

” VERY POWERFUL…. the footage is staggering!  Passionate, exciting and frightening. “  -Roger Ebert

                      “RIVETING ….. a classic espionage tale!”   – Peter Knegt, Indiewire

 THE COVE  starts Friday, October 9 at the Drexel Theatre, 2254 E. Main St.  For more information, Showtimes and
Special Group Discount Ticket Information – contact Drexel Theatres at (614) 231-1050, (showtimes -614 231-9512) or
visit www.drexel.net. 

Special Discount Offer:  Save up to $8 on tickets to see THE COVE  – See the attached
coupon or use coupon below….
——————————————————————
 $2 OFF Any General Admission Ticket or $1 OFF any Matinee(before 6p.m.)
or Student/Senior Ticket.  Coupon valid for up to 4 Discounted Tickets.   Not valid Mondays
or any performance before 12 noon.   Expires 10/22/09.
     PRESENT THIS COUPON FOR ” THE COVE”  TO THE DREXEL THEATRE , 2254 E. Main St.
     SHOWTIMES – (614) 231-9512 or visit www.drexel.net 

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Saturday, October 10
6:30pm-midnight
Free Press Second Saturday Salon
Join progressive friends for food, drink, music, art, and a presentation by CURE-OHIO on:
– the insane over-incarceration in the U.S.
- some of the horrors of the Ohio prisons
- the Parole Board and old-law inmates
- the incredible racial and ethnic disproportion in incarceration
- and what you can do to help!
1021 E. Broad St., side door, parking in rear
253-2571, truth@freepress.org

ACORN, more than any other political organization, was responsible for Obama’s victory. ACORN in Ohio, and in key swing states, did what the Democratic Party used to do, but now seems incapable of doing – registering large numbers of low income and working class voters.

Instead of going after the real whores at Chase, CitiBank, and assorted other financial institutions that pimped our system and our people, undercover right wing videographers went for a target that fit their pre-fabricated agenda – a fake Daddy Mac and whore trying to open up a brothel with an ACORN member’s advice. Of course any ACORN people involved in illegal practices should be investigated, as should anyone in the elite financial community and anyone out there misusing federal Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) money.

For that matter, the war criminals in the United States – beginning with Cheney and Bush who committed war crimes, violated the 4th and 8th Amendments by spying on U.S. citizens and torturing people – should be stalked and videotaped whenever possible.

The major reason ACORN has been a target of the Republican Party’s political operatives because it disrupts the strategy put in place by Karl Rove to simply purge as many Democratic voters as possible.

Here in Ohio, the Republican Party led a charge to purge an estimated 1.25 million voters. The GOP attacked black students at Wilberforce, a traditionally black college. They attacked inner city voters in the heavily Democratic wards of Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati. They attacked students at liberal colleges like Kenyon and students who had gone to major public universities like the Ohio State University and Ohio University.

ACORN was one of the few organizations that was consistently active in the inner city of Ohio’s largest urban areas. Not that there weren’t other voter registration organizations, including the Obama campaign, but the one that asked me to register to vote over and over again in the inner city neighborhood I live in was ACORN.

Recall that Arkansas U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins and Western Missouri U.S. Attorney Todd Graves were fired for failing to go after ACORN during its 2006 voter registration drive. Those responsible for the firing reached all the way to Rove in Bush’s White House.

The National Journal reported that former Bush-Cheney re-election campaign attorney Mark “Thor” Hearne targeted ACORN: “[Hearne]…believed that the U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was not taking seriously allegations that ACORN workers were registering people who did not qualify to vote.”

The Republican sting operation is little more than an extension of the attacks on ACORN in Nevada, Missouri and Ohio in the 2006 election. In 2006, estimates were that ACORN had registered some 1.3 million new voters. The attacks on ACORN, and their contrived nature were revealed at a 2005 hearing before then-Congressman Bob Ney in Ohio, who was later convicted of a felony.

At the federal hearing held in the Ohio Statehouse, Hearne emerged from nowhere claiming to be a voting rights advocate with a front organization called the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). In a classic Rovian scam, Hearne unleashed an unsubstantiated litany of “voter fraud” charges against ACORN and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Among other things, Hearne, who had no history of ever working as a voting rights advocate, told Congressman Ney that voter registration campaigns were used crack cocaine as an incentive for registering new voters. Using the age-old canard of linking a black civil rights and a welfare rights organization with drugs serves the racist stereotypes consistently pitched by right-wingers.

In Hearne’s testimony in Ohio, he also went after the AFL-CIO and Americans Coming Together (ACT-Ohio) as evil-doers involved in “fraudulent” voter registration.

In a March 2005 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, Hearne claimed there was “substantial evidence to suggest potential criminal wrongdoing by organizations such as Americans Coming Together, ACORN, and the NAACP-Project Vote.”

In Wood County, Ohio, the Free Enterprise Coalition (FEC) associated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agreed to back a racketeering charge against the NAACP. After Hearne’s showy press conferences, the suit was withdrawn following the revelation that the plaintiffs were being indemnified by the FEC.

The real issue is the emergence of long-standing southern Jim Crow tactics in key swing states like Ohio. In 2004, more than 300,000 voters were purged in the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. In fact, 24.93% of all voters in the Cleveland area were purges between the 2000 and 2004 presidential election.

If the United States had universal guaranteed constitutional voting rights, ACORN would not be under attack by upper-class white political operatives posing as whores and pimps on their way up the Republican operative ladder.

The small amount of federal money received by ACORN pales in comparison to the tens of billions of dollars in unbid contracts given by Mac Daddys Bush and Cheney to Halliburton.
ACORN is under attack because it is effective and a threat to those forces who wish to disenfranchise millions of U.S. voters. For the most part, Democratic Party officials and their corporate Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) mentors have long ago given up door-to-door inner city voter registration campaigns. ACORN remains as one of the last hold-outs in ensuring the voting rights of millions of forgotten and discarded urban voters.

Bob Fitrakis is the editor of freepress.org. While he’s never worked or been a member of ACORN, in the early 1980s he lived in a house in the city of Detroit that included ACORN organizers.

The ES&S purchase of Diebold’s voting machine operation is merely the tip of a toxic iceberg…

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 24, 2009

Unless U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder intervenes, your electronic vote in 2010 will probably be owned by the Republican-connected ES&S Corporation. With 80% ownership of America’s electronic voting machines, ES&S could have the power to shape America’s future with a few proprietary keystrokes.

ES&S has just purchased the voting machine division of the Ohio-based Diebold, whose role in fixing the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush is infamous.

Critics of the merger hope Holder will rescind the purchase on anti-trust grounds.

But only a transparent system totally based on hand-counted paper ballots, with universal automatic voter registration, can get us even remotely close to a reliable vote count in the future.

For even if Holder does void this purchase, ES&S and Diebold in tandem will still control four of every five votes cast on touchscreen machines. As the U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to open the floodgates on corporate campaign spending, the only difference could be that those who would buy our elections will have to write two checks instead of one.

And in fact, it’s even worse than that. ES&S, Diebold and a tiny handful of sibling Republican voting equipment and computing companies control not only the touchscreen machines, but also the electronic tabulators that count millions of scantron ballots, AND the electronic polling books that decide who gets to vote and who doesn’t.

Let’s do a quick review:

1. ES&S, Diebold and other companies tied to election hardware and software are owned and operated by a handful of very wealthy conservatives, or right-to-life ideologues, with long-standing direct ties to the Republican Party;
2. As votes will be increasingly cast on optiscans, touchscreens or computer voting machines in the United States in 2010, the scant few so-called paper trail mechanisms that are in place will offer little security against electronic vote theft;
3. The source code on all U.S. touchscreen machines now used for the casting and counting of ballots is proprietary, meaning the companies that own and operate the machines — including ES&S — are not required to share with the public the details of how those machines actually work;
4. Although there are official mechanisms for monitoring and recounts, none carry any real weight in the face of the public’s inability to gain control or even access to this electronic source code, whose proprietary standing has been upheld by the courts;
5. With the newly merged ES&S/Diebold now apparently controlling 80% of the national vote through hardware and software, this GOP-connected corporation will have the power to alter virtually every election in the U.S. with a few keystrokes. Unless there is a massive, successful grassroots campaign between now and 2012, the same will hold true for the next US presidential election;
6. Aside from its control of touchscreen machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S also controls a significant percent of the electronic optiscan tabulators to count cards on which voters use pencils to fill in circles, indicating their vote. Accounts of fraud, rigging, theft and abuse of these optiscan systems are well-documented and innumerable. Any corporation that prints these ballots and runs the machines designated to count them can control yet another major piece of the US vote count;
7. The merged ES&S/Diebold now also controls the electronic voter registration systems in many counties and states. With that control comes the ability to remove registered voters without significant public accountability. In the 2004 election, nearly 25% of all the registered voters in the Democratic-rich city of Cleveland were purged, including 10,000 voters erased “accidentally” by a Diebold electronic pollbook system. So in addition to controlling the vote counts on touchscreen and optiscan voting machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S and sympathetic hardware and software companies that service computerized voting equipment will control who actually gets to cast a vote in the first place.

Lest we forget: in 2000, long before this ES&S/Diebold purchase was proposed, Choicepoint, a GOP-controlled data management firm, hired by Florida’s Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, removed up to 150,000 Florida citizens from voter rolls on the pretense that they were ex-felons. The vast majority of them were not.

Computer software “disappeared” 16,000 votes from Al Gore’s column at a critical moment on election night, allowing George W. Bush’s first cousin John Ellis, a Fox News analyst, to proclaim him the winner. The election was officially decided by less than 700 votes and a 5-4 Supreme Court vote preventing a full recount. An independent audit later showed Gore was the rightful winner.

In 2004, more than 300,000 Ohio citizens were removed from voter rolls by GOP-controlled county election boards (more than one million have been removed since).

Various dirty tricks prevented still tens of thousands more Ohioans from voting. The vote count was marred by a wide range of official manipulations coordinated by then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

Diebold was a major player in the 2004 Ohio elections, but was joined by numerous other computer voting firms and their technicians in “recounting the vote” which confirmed the Bush “victory,” despite exit poll results and other evidence to the contrary. In defiance of a federal court order, 56 of 88 Ohio counties destroyed some or all of their ballots or election records. No one has been prosecuted.

In short, the ES&S purchase of Diebold’s voting machine operation is merely the tip of a toxic iceberg. Voiding the merger will do nothing to solve the REAL problem, which is an electronic-based system of voter registration and ballot counting that is potentially controlled by private corporations and contractors whose agenda is to make large profits and protect the system that guarantees them.

Although elections based on universal automatic registration and hand-counted paper ballots are not foolproof, they constitute a start. Stealing an election by stuffing paper ballot boxes at the “retail” level is far more difficult than stealing votes at the “wholesale” level with an electronic flip of a switch.

As it’s done in numerous other countries throughout the world, the only realistic means by which the U.S. can establish a democratic system of ballot casting and counting is to do it the old-fashioned way. With human-scale checks and balances we might even be secure in the knowledge that our elections and vote counts will truly reflect the will of the people. What a concept!

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, available at freepress.org at, where this article also appears, and where Bob's Fitrakis Files are also available. Harvey Wasserman's History of the U.S. is at harveywasserman.com.]

The Rag Blog

Matt went on from there to be known as “the chauffer” – the guy who drove around and literally wheeled around former Franklin County Republican Party Chair Michael F. Colley. He went from being Colley’s wheel-man to replacing Colley as the Franklin County Republican Party Chair.

From there it was a short hop to the lucrative and politically powerful position as Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections. In that post Damschroder came to national prominence during the infamous 2004 election. Readers of freepress.org will recall that Damschroder distinguished himself by purging “felons” that weren’t convicted of felonies from the voting rolls, particularly in Democratic strongholds, as well as shorting voting machines from the inner city black wards.

His partisan actions as Franklin County BOE Director cost John Kerry tens of thousands of votes in Ohio’s capital city. And when the bidding was opened for new voting machines in Franklin County, Damschroder accepted a $10,000 check in his BOE office made out to the Franklin County Republican Party from a key Diebold salesperson, Patsy Gallina. Damschroder was censured and suspended without pay for a month for this breach of ethics. His job was only saved thanks to the intervention of the Democratic Party’s ethically-challenged Chair, Bill Anthony. The philosophy at the Franklin County BOE is that an injury to one election official is an injury to all. Covering each other’s asses, and donkeys, is their code of honor.

Prior to the 2008 election, Damschroder purged more than 300,000 voters from Franklin County’s voting rolls – far exceeding any election official in the state of Ohio. And purging more voters in his county that were eliminated in 2004. Matt Damschroder was forced out by Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner two days before the 2008 presidential primary. Damschroder had openly defied Brunner’s directives, particularly one mandating that voters be allowed to vote on paper. Damschroder hung on, as party hacks often do, as Deputy Director.

In a just society Damschroder would be busy repenting in prison. But in the United States, he gets promoted for his incompetence and corruption. Now Matt will be serving alongside former United Nations Ambassador and Senator John Danforth, former Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former U.S. Reps Harold Ford, Jr. and Susan Molinari.

The goal of CMVR is to update the voting systems, particularly registration. A key charge to the Committee is to “…register voters automatically while also maintaining safeguards against fraud,” according to the Columbus Dispatch. I guess this is in the long tradition of hiring computer hackers for security and bank robbers as advisors to banks to prevent future thefts.

Ironically, the Columbus Dispatch seems to have missed the articles that contained Damschroder’s scandalous behavior. Mark Niquette, as is tradition, reports the Damschroder appointment as straight news as local boy makes good. Without a hint of sarcasm he writes “Matthew Damschroder is one of two local election officials on the bipartisan committee….”

I figure a few unethical debacles on this committee and Damschroder’s ready to lead the National Republican Party. After all, Rove’s retired, isn’t he?

1021 E. Broad St.
(side door, parking in rear)

Come for the progressive social networking
Have a bit to eat and drink

truth@freepress.org

Swanson holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson is Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of ConvictBushCheney.org and Washington Director of Democrats.com, a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, and Voters for Peace, a member of the legislative working group of United for Peace and Justice, and convener of the accountability and prosecution working group of United for Peace and Justice.

This event is free and open to the public. Swanson’s new book will be available for purchase and signing by the author. This event is sponsored by the Columbus Free Press and the Progressive Peace Coalition. For more information, contact chammon@columbus.rr.com or http://www.davidswanson.org/book

The struggle and victory to re-open Antioch College as an independent institution separate from Antioch University is a major victory for peace and progressive forces in the United States. On Friday, September 4, Antioch University officials signed a 750-page closing document after 14 months of negotiations to turn Antioch College assets over to the Antioch College Continuation Corp. (read: the alumni).

A group of Greene County citizens recently dropped a complaint filed with the Ohio Attorney General’s office to strip the University of its tax exempt status. The complaint alleged that the University had neglected and wasted the assets of the former College, including severe damage to the historical main building at the Yellow Springs campus.

The Attorney General’s office acknowledged that the withdrawal of the complaint helped pave the way for the final settlement.

The Dayton Daily News reports that the resurrected Antioch plans: “…for a small, first-year class in fall 2010.” The Chronicle of Higher Education asserted that: “Admitting applicants and educating students are at least two years away.” And, Antioch University itself said when it closed the College that it would attempt to re-open it in 2012.

When the increasingly corporatist Antioch University Board of Trustees announced that the College would cease operations in July 2008, it was a stake through the heart of advocates of socially-conscious liberal arts education.

The sooner Antiochian-educated students are injected into America’s body politic the better. In many ways, the little liberal arts college in Yellow Springs has functioned as the conscience of American higher education. Also, it has served as an incubator for virtually every progressive struggle that has improved human rights in this nation.

Mussolini understood in his bid for fascism, that alternative and selfless ideas must be eradicated. He once gave a definition of fascism as “illiberalism” and “corporatism.”

Bruce P. Bedford served on the Board of Antioch University as well on the Board of the Arlington, Virginia company GlobeSecNine. The company was described as possessing a “unique set of experiences in special forces, classified operations, transportation security, and military operations” according to Bear Stearns. Michael Alexander, a former Trustee, founded AverStar whose clients were primarily the U.S. Defense Department and NASA. AverStar merged with the controversial Titan Corporation in the year 2000. Titan, with close ties to the Bush administration, pleaded guilty and paid, at the time, the largest penalty under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for bribery and filing false tax returns in March 2005. Questions have lingered over the role of Bedford and Alexander with their close ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex and the U.S. intelligence community.

At the time of the closing, the Dayton Daily News reported that a $5 million accounting error caused the College to close. Bedford, University records show, served as Treasurer just before the decision was made to close Antioch College.

Recalling Antioch’s history is key to celebrating this victory. The Christian Connection founded Antioch in 1852 and famed educator Horace Mann helmed as president in when it opened its doors in 1853. Mann’s quote: “Be ashamed to die until you win some victory for humanity” inspired the progressive spirit of the school. Antioch College was one of the first mostly white colleges to aggressively recruit African American students in the 1940s and refused to expel students accused of “Communist” leanings in the 1950s. Antioch provided a setting for growing activist movements such as the civil rights movement, New Left, Black Power, and feminism. Antioch students were encouraged to participate in practical work along with their classroom learning.

Former Antioch College faculty, staff, and others continued holding classes while the College was closed in what they called “Nonstop” Antioch during part of 2008 and 2009. Students attended classes at Yellow Springs bookstores, coffee shops, churches, homes, art galleries and even at the Glen Helen Nature Preserve.

An alumni reunion is scheduled for October 2 at the re-born Antioch College. Let us hope that the spirit of the event is that which caused the college to be targeted as a “vanguard of the New Left” under the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO operation. Those who fought to save Antioch have clearly won another significant victory for humanity.

See: Shock, awe and Antioch at freepress.org

–
Bob Fitrakis represented the Greene County citizens group seeking to strip tax exempt status from Antioch University. He is also the author of “The Fitrakis Files” Spooks, Nukes, and Nazis” on the role of the CIA in Ohio politics and the author of the forthcoming volume Cops, Coverups and Corruption.”

But, I was there for his last battle in 1980, supporting him and his United Automobile union allies in Detroit. In many ways, it was the last shoot-out in the Democratic Party between the liberal/progressive forces longing for a return of the New Deal/Great Society and the emerging new pro-corporate Democrats.

Not that the corporatism of Carter and his economic moderation was not offset by his championing of human rights and a rational energy policy, rather those of us who pushed Kennedy in 1980 realized that the “stagflation” – simultaneously high unemployment and high inflation – associated with Carter and the Democrats would likely pave the way for the rise of Ronald Reagan and his politics of deregulation and casino capitalism.

Ted Kennedy would later, during a tribute to the intellectual architect of the [John] Kennedy/Johnson War on Poverty Michael Harrington, call himself a European style “social democrat.” This idea of an America that took care of the least of its brethren and joined the rest of the advanced industrial nations with universal health care was what we were fighting for in 1980.

Harrington, the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, had gone on an early tour to test the waters as a progressive presidential candidate himself. But most of us understood that he was a “stalking horse” for Teddy. Harrington’s frequent trips to Detroit showed that there was tremendous support within the progressive wing of the labor unions for a run by the last remaining Kennedy brother. I had the privilege of chauffeuring Harrington around from meeting to meeting on a few occasions and talking strategy with the likes of the legendary Millie Jeffries and Saul Wellman. The two were once old Left adversaries, but both agreed that Carter had to be challenged within the Democratic Party.

The Michigan caucuses that year came down to who could turn out the most forces. Then-Mayor of Detroit Coleman Young stood strongly with President Carter. The Mayor’s real fear of Reagan, mitigated by Carter’s largesse to the Motor City that at one point reached a 70% match of the entire Detroit budget through various federal grants during 1980 election year, caused him to pull out all stops to deliver the caucuses to the sitting President. The UAW threw the massive political resources of the international union into the caucus fray. Ultimately, it came down to the role of the Associated of Communities Organizing for Reform Now (ACORN), that ended siding with Carter in exchange for delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Sadly, the ACORN forces were some of my closest allies and the political commune I lived in and partially owned at 12749 Kilbourne on Detroit’s east side often was referred to as “ACORN East.” That summer ACORN’s interns and students sent from Minnesota by a little-known college professor, Paul Wellstone, worked out of my house.They continued to do so through 1984.

I remember what appeared to be a scuffle in the New York delegation during the 1980 Democratic primary where Harrington was accused of blocking Carter delegates from speaking. We fell a few delegates short at the convention, and from putting forth our dream of a resurrected Camelot. I stayed away from the Democratic convention, instead organizing demonstrations in Detroit at the Republican convention where not only Ronald Reagan was nominated, for the former CIA director George Herbert Walker Bush emerged as his Vice President.

It was the last gathering of the New Left tribes and the 60s countercultures. I worked very closely with the San Francisco Mime Troupe who were organizing the “:Reagan for Shah” committee. I played the role of a young Republican pleading with Reaganites to have Reagan declare himself Shah and get rid of the liberals who were ruining the country. I few were quite drunk and sympathetic saying, “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

I regretfully sat out the Carter campaign in 1980 and instead worked for Barry Commoner and the People’s Party. I recall the slogan, “The 5% Solution.” If we could just get 5% of the vote, we would have a real environmental worker’s party on the ballot. Like the dream of a re-born Camelot, the structure of American politics has long worked against a viable left-wing third party.

Still, I can’t help but wonder these days as I ponder the life of Ted Kennedy and his tremendous perseverance in the U.S. Senate during the dark days of Reagan and Bush who were both elected in 1966 to public office for the first time. Voted in as enemies of the Great Society, the New Left, and the 60s counterculture, they represented a violent reaction against the idealism of the 1960s.

Kennedy remained the last and greatest idealist of the 60s. Even during the hell-black night of Bush the Second. Let us pray that his death inspires Barack Obama and others to rekindle the dream that endured with Kennedy physically and hangs heavily in the air as we mourn his passing.

Another politically bleak week: trade gap widens by 43 percent; credit card delinquencies hit a record high; but violent crime goes down 9 percent. Yet Bill Clinton and Bob Dole continue to run for district attorney instead of president. It’s just the real national problems like trade policy and stagnant household income that they’re clueless about.

Ask them about drugs and crime, boy, do they have answers. Desperate for political hot-button issues, they bellow: “lock ‘em up, beat ‘em up, kill ‘em quicker, more cops, fewer civil liberties….”

Dole wants to double prison spending-must have been talking to the Brothers Voinovich. I wonder if Paul Mifsud is still working for his campaign? Dole also called for more “drug news.” Here’s some: 85 percent of drug addiction is legally prescribed.

Ask Chief Justice Rehnquist, Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan, Kitty Dukakis, Elvis, etc. In the early ’80s, high school kids used to work themselves into such a frenzy at the “Just Say No” clubs that they had to go chug a beer just to cool down afterwards. Clinton wants to spend $700 million for “the largest anti-drug effort in history, “but he won’t give the Congressional Black Caucus an answer on whether he backs an investigation into the CIA’s (aka Cocaine Importing Agency) involvement with crack trafficking in the inner-cities of the U.S.

An American institution
Speaking of crime, the Pentagon finally released documents showing that U.S. Army training manuals used at the notorious School of the Americas advocated executions, torture, coercion, blackmail, and other God-fearing American tactics against Third World insurgents. Yes, indeed, our U.S. tax dollars at work abroad.

We, as a people, are responsible for our drug-running, murdering, and torturing government. Sorry, that’s the way democracy works. We are paid to train and “educate” most of the Western Hemisphere’s most heinous butchers. Like “Blow Torch” Bob D’Aubuisson who was the leader of El Salvador’s right-wing death squads, the Salvadoran soldiers who assassinated six Jesuit priests in 1989, and “our man in Panama” General Manuel Noriega.

Recently, the largest-ever protest occurred at Fort Benning, Georgia, home of the School of the Americas. Four hundred and fifty people-including 300 Catholic nuns-converged on the main gate and called for its closing. Believing “The Truth Cannot Be Silenced,” 13 U.S. citizens remain in prison for willfully and openly trespassing at the School in the finest tradition of civil disobedience.

As for President Clinton, the White House recently called the School “a force for good and not evil.” Hey, did I tell ya how they pioneered that really thin highly conductive wire that could be inserted in the penile shaft like a catheter and hooked to any portable military field telephone? Just a few cranks of the field telephone and your average Third World non-white Native American-type starts telling you everything you want to know. You usually don’t even have to torture him all that long to get information. Must be what the President means by a “force” for good.

Cliff and Jim
Enough bleakness, there’s still some heroic Americans fighting the good fight. Cliff Arnebeck, probably the most decent and thoughtful candidate in central Ohio this year, is once again calling for real Congressional campaign finance reform. Arnebeck is Deborah Pryce’s Democratic opponent in the 15th district.

Arnebeck, Tom Erney and I are all part of a lawsuit against the state of Ohio with our lead plaintiff, former Republican Congressman Clarence Miller. Our suit argues that it’s unfair for the Democratic and Republican parties to draw up the Congressional districts to favor their party’s incumbent Congressperson. Take for example, Franklin County: the state legislature created two relatively safe Republican districts by dividing the Columbus voters into two separate districts and attaching overwhelmingly Republican rural counties like Delaware, Licking and Union. If the city of Columbus had been left intact as a Congressional district, we’d actually have a competitive Congressional race this year. In Cleveland, they created a black minority district that votes 84 percent Democratic. And they call it “democracy.” We’re arguing that a non-partisan body should draw up Congressional districts in a fair and impartial manner. Whoa, is that radical or what?

Worthington School Board member Jim Timko continues his fight against the lock-step majority on the board. Timko refused to bow to community pressure and instead acted on his own conscience. He believes that former Worthington Kilbourne student Max Seeman “didn’t do anything wrong” in sitting during a senior pride rally. At least nothing so evil as to require a police paddy wagon to remove Max from the school and his suspension.

“The message it sends is we’re going to do everything we can to control your behavior,” Timko stated. “You don’t understand the Worthington mentality. ‘We don’t make mistakes.’ That’s what the school board is saying, and that’s wrong.”

Timko is consulting with one of the state’s leading civil rights attorneys to discuss his options following his September 9th censure by his fellow board members. He admits to being “flabbergasted” after the “junta” voted four to one for censure. And well he should.

The Worthington school board is going to have a hell of a time explaining to a judge how they offered a completed resolution of censure and disapproval, and issued a prepared statement on the resolution behind Timko’s back. Can you say violation of open meetings law? Can you say violation of Sunshine Laws? Obviously, the paddy wagon came for the wrong people. The board is acting criminally, not Max Seeman.

What the hell is Cynthia Ruccia thinking? Ruccia, running for Congress in the 12th district against John Kasich, held a press conference last week questioning the Congressman’s living arrangement with a male aide in Washington. The Dispatch justly portrayed her desperate attempt to “out” Kasich as a descent into the “gutter.” What the Dispatch failed to note is that they pioneered such “gutter” politics against Kasich a few years back when they essentially used the same tactics.

If you remember, Johnny-boy was meeting with Hillary Clinton over the health-care issue in the pre-Newtonian days. The Dispatch ran a front page story describing the townhouse that John and his aide lived in and the lovely grilled fish prepared for the First Lady. Hugh DeMoss and I shared a laugh at the time over the Dispatch’s all-too-obvious displeasure with Congressman Kasich.

Although I disagree with Congressman Kasich on virtually every public policy issue, I believe his personal relationship with his aide or any other consenting adult is none of our business. Unsubstantiated gossip has nothing to do with political issues. And even if there was an ounce of evidence, what’s her point? One would expect more from Ruccia, a Democrat who decries the same tactics and moralizing from the far right.

Last time I wrote about Ruccia in a feature story suggesting the obvious-that the presence of longtime Democrat and former school board member Bill Moss was hurting her campaign-her attorney contacted Columbus Alive.

Her contempt for the First Amendment and her unprincipled attacks on Congressman Kasich should be rejected by the voters. Someone should have steered her away from the Mike Stinziano School of Campaigning.

Betty’s boop
Dog ate my homework, computer crashed, copy machine broke down. Just when you thought you’d heard all the lame excuses, Ohio’s Attorney General Betty Montgomery manages to take incompetence to the highest level. The Plain Dealer reported that Ms. Montgomery missed her deadline in a key court case because her copier broke. The good news is that the case involved Betty and the Guv’s attempt to foil Ohio’s Open Records Law by having state bureaucrats claim attorney-client privilege. Basically, they were creating a way to keep important or embarrassing information from the public. The Open Records Law is the state equivalent of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). These post-Watergate, so-called “Sunshine Laws” are indispensable checks on government corruption. We use the FOIA and the Open Records Law a lot at Columbus Alive.

The bad news is that she’s our state’s attorney. ” …and the line was too long at Kinko’s, honest!”

Out of the mouths of babes
It’s getting really weird in Worthington. The case of Worthington-Kilbourne student Max Seeman, who was hauled off in a police paddy wagon at the request of Principal Dianna Lindsay, continues to cause consternation. Much to its credit, This Week in Worthington reprinted the transcript of Seeman’s disciplinary hearing. The transcript clearly shows that Max was removed for not standing-even though he wasn’t required to stand-during a mini-version of a Nuremburg-style senior pride rally.

Well, seems at least one Worthington School Board member understands the difference between a police state and an educational environment. School board member Jim Timko called for an investigation of the incident in a letter to This Week. His authoritarian-worshipping colleagues on the school board immediately passed a resolution of censure and disapproval. They demanded that he not release confidential information, that he not speak on behalf of the board, and that he abide by the first two points or resign.

“They wanted to intimidate me and create the impression that I did something wrong,” Timko said. He said that his colleagues get elected and do “whatever the administrators want.” Their attitude is “we don’t make mistakes in Worthington,” he continued.

They accused him of violating confidentiality by responding publicly about the incident. Supposedly, his utterances as an elected official about a hearing purposely opened to the public by the parents of Max Seeman, with Channel 4 in attendance, somehow violated confidentiality.

Key point, Timko did not violate the confidence of the board by responding to a newspaper story. No one told the other educational jackboots on the Worthington board that something has to be a secret first to be considered confidential. Perhaps it was a breach of idiocy. He wasn’t dense enough to be on the Worthington school board.

On the plus side, students in Worthington Kilbourne’s American Radicalism class requested a discussion on the issue between Dr. Lindsay and Joan Seeman, Max’s mother. They must be reading too much Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Abe Lincoln.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 25, 2009
7:30PM
Drexel Theater
2254 E. Main St., Bexley

A POWERFUL NOISE
Hanh is an HIV-positive widow in Vietnam. Nada, a survivor of the Bosnian war. And Jacqueline works the slums of Bamako, Mali. Three very different lives. Three vastly different worlds. But they share something in common: Power. These women are each overcoming gender barriers to rise up and claim a voice in their societies. Through their empowerment and ability to empower others, Hanh, Nada and Jacqueline are sparking remarkable changes. Fighting AIDS. Rebuilding communities. Educating girls.

Sponsored by the Free Press, Drexel Theater, Film Council of Greater Columbus, and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund
253-2571
truth@freepress.org

Give me a ticket for an aeroplane, ain’t got time to take a fast train
– since the Republicans destroyed mass transit in the U.S. and there
aren’t any fast trains – Ken Blackwell just wrote me a letter. That’s
same Blackwell we all now known as the Katherine Harris of Ohio for his
role in helping steal the 2004 election. Blackwell, billing himself as
“Former Ohio Secretary of State” and “Conservative Republican,” wrote a
letter regarding: “The One Way to Stop the Obama Machine.”

My first thought to stop the Obama “Machine” was – take cell phones
away from 18-24-year-olds. After all, the Obama political machine was
actually a decentralized cyber-force of youngsters. All of this
brilliantly captured in Danny Schechter’s recent documentary: Barack
Obama: People’s President.

Blackwell addressed me as “Dear Fellow Conservative.” This is perfectly
appropriate since I believe in the Bill of Rights, particularly the 8th
Amendment that forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.” Thus, in order
to preserve these traditional conservative values, I’d like to have a
grand jury investigate Bush and Cheney for torture and assorted crimes
against the Constitution and then prosecute them.

Blackwell began the letter by asserting that he was a “clear and
present danger” to the “Democrats.” Why? Because he “threatens
self-appointed black leaders, the Democrat Party machine, and even
Barack Obama’s grip on power.” Blackwell particularly takes offense to
the fact that Al Sharpton “…flew into the state to racially slander me
by calling me Ken Whitewell” during his ill-fated run for the
governorship of Ohio.

I understand Blackwell’s outrage and how out of touch Sharpton is with
the people of Ohio. Blacks here were referring to him as “Ken
Blackhell” and election activists as “Ken Hackwell.” How dare Sharpton
make a reference to Blackwell’s race simply because the black
conservative spent his time kissing Bush buttocks? Also, Sharpton
failed to point out that Blackwell’s favorite past-time paid real well
and was steady work.

Blackwell claims these evil Democrats “…have gone out of their way to
destroy me and other black Republicans like me.” I wondered why the
Dems would waste their time to “destroy” one person, because who else
is like him? And who cares? But Blackwell had gotten my attention.

Blackwell sees himself targeted because he stands “on principle.” Fair
enough. His principles happen to be opportunism, corruption, and
cronyism. But he has displayed a principled commitment to these values.

Blackwell’s always been a man of principle. First, when he was a
left-wing black nationalist in the 70s. And then, when he was a charter
reform progressive Democrat out of Cincinnati. And then when he was an
Independent, and again when he became a Jack Kemp help-the-poor
kind-hearted conservative. And finally when he was a Steve Forbes
help-the-poor-by-giving-money-to-the-rich Republican. Also, he was
perhaps most principle when he appeared before white supremacist groups
in Ohio and elsewhere and campaigned with far-right born-again
Christians like Rod Parsley. I guess it’s not hypocritical or
opportunistic to hang out with people that want to lynch blacks and
believe all Muslims will burn in hell (See “Why is the man who stole
Ohio campaigning with a white supremacist?” by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey
Wasserman, October 9, 2006 at
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/217).

Still, the highlight of Blackwell’s letter was his ranting against
Obama’s “Big Brother government.” It’s fair to concede that Blackwell
knows a lot about Big Brother. He served as the UN Human Rights
Ambassador for former CIA Director, and then President, George Herbert
Walker Bush. So, we gotta give him his props. He associates with people
(for example George Walker Bush and Cheney) who know about torture,
unconstitutional and illegal domestic electronic surveillance, and
overthrowing democratically-elected governments. No wonder they wanted
him to be Ohio’s Secretary of State.

To be fair to Blackwell, he did have major accomplishments as Ohio
Secretary of State. He allowed 24.93% of all voters in Cleveland,
Ohio’s major Democratic stronghold, to be purged prior to the 2004
election. Many voters thrown off the voting rolls had been registered
in majority black precincts.

And he does know a little about money. Blackwell and three friends took
a $500,000 investment, hooked up with Carl Lindner, the Cincinnati
billionaire, and parlayed it into a nearly $200 million investment in
radio. Of course, Blackwell’s role as State Treasurer and the deposit
of large sums of Ohio tax dollars into Lindner’s banks played no role
in Blackwell’s success, according to Blackwell. Essentially, Blackwell,
with no radio experience, got rich off the Clear Channel franchise and
mergers.

Blackwell is thrifty – outsourcing Ohio’s 2004 election count to
private companies like New Media, Triad, and Smartech – so the actual
statewide vote count could take place on Republican servers tied to the
White House in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (See “Behind the firewall: Bush
loyalist Mike Connell controls Congressional secrets as his email sites
serve Karl Rove” by Bob Fitrakis, July 29, 2008 at
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2008/1665).

I was so inspired by Blackwell’s letter and his plea for money, since
his Black Republican PAC is “Our best chance to stop the socialism of
the Obama presidency.” Blackwell clearly prefers the
welfare-for-the-rich socialism of the Bush administration where nearly
a trillion dollars was given to failed corporate investment bankers as
opposed to the Obama, where nearly a trillion dollars was given to
failed corporate investment banks. (See “Democratic Socialists?
Democrats not half that good” by Bob Fitrakis, May 24, 2009 at
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2009/1746).

I took up his challenge to respond within “96 hours.” Whew, I barely
got this in with an hour or so to go. Blackwell’s right – I should send
whatever I can spare, $35, $50, $75…– to a cause I can believe in.
Maybe I’ll send a check to the Single Payer Action Network (SPAN)
because I want health care reform or to All Aboard Ohio working to
bring a fast train, for that matter any train service, to Columbus,
Ohio.

Bob Fitrakis is the editor of freepress.org and also ran for governor
of Ohio in 2006 on the Green Party ticket.

As the axiom states: “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.” Strange and interesting things are happening in the legendary swing state.

First, it was Fox commentator, former Congressman, and originally freshly-scrubbed Nixon youth John Kasich emerging as the likely Republican nominee for governor of the Buckeye State.

Then, former U.S. Senator Mike Dewine announced his candidacy for Ohio Attorney General on July 22. In 2006, the then-incumbent Dewine lost to Democrat U.S. Representative Sherrod Brown by 12 percentage points, although final polls throughout the state showed him losing by twice that amount.

Why would a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives – granted he was most well-known for falling asleep during the Iran-Contra hearings – and U.S. Senator, be seeking the seemingly lesser office of Ohio’s chief law enforcement officer?

The answer is: he would be chief law enforcement officer in one of America’s most politically corrupt states – sort of New Jersey without the reputation. Historically, the Attorney General of Ohio has been the key position for covering up the state’s systemic corruption and two-party pay-to-play system.

Back in 80s, Ohio’s Attorney General was none other than Billy Joe Brown (original name: Barone) whose major political backer was Eddie DeBartolo, Jr. DeBartolo is most well-known as the former owner of the San Francisco 49ers who was forced to sell the franchise after pleading guilty in a alleged scheme to bribe the former governor of Louisiana to secure a gambling license. Columbus police records indicate that DeBartolo has ties to organized crime and was a “person of interest” in a high–profile murder case in Columbus back in the 80s.

What Brown understood is that the Attorney General’s office is a good place to harass political enemies, dispense patronage, and cover up questionable activities by your cronies. The current Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray – most famous in Ohio for being a 5-time Jeopardy winner – has a well-deserved reputation for being squeaky clean and ethical.

Prior to Cordray, Mark Dann of Youngstown held the office briefly before being forced to resign amidst a sex scandal. Dann’s Attorney General’s office became a great place from which he and his appointees could shake women down for booty. Dann won, in part, because of the support of the election integrity movement which was hostile to Republican Attorney General James Petro, who went out of his way to thwart lawful Ohio Supreme Court supervised examination of the conduct of George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and Ken Blackwell in connection with Ohio’s infamous 2004 Presidential election.

What kind of Attorney General would Dewine make? Perhaps the best testament to Dewine’s character is in a piece written by Joe Gilyard, a former state cabinet member as Director of Criminal Justice Services during the Voinovich administration. Gilyard, a well-known Republican political operative recounts how he served as “Dewine’s hired gun” when he ran as Lieutenant Governor on the Voinovich ticket: “I was to protect him [Dewine] from sharks like Chief of Staff Paul Mifsud and even Governor Voinovich himself.” The late Mifsud was a former military intelligence officer and close friend of George Herbert Walker Bush, who ran his Ohio presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1988.

Mifsud would later serve time in jail related to falsification of government records in a contract-steering and bribery scandal. Early on, when Gilyard tried to blow the whistle on the corruption of Paul Mifsud, Dewine pledged his support. “…he thought Mifsud was a crook and we should go after him,” Gilyard wrote.

In order to go after Mifsud and Voinovich, Gilyard and Dewine would have to first clash with another legendary friend of George H. W. Bush, Franklin County Sheriff Earl Smith. Both Smith and the late John Walton Wolfe of Columbus’ politically-formidable Wolfe media conglomerate, used the Columbus Dispatch to go after Gilyard.

Dewine was openly and easily intimidated from the fight. As Gilyard colorfully recalled the story: “He [Smith] hurled invective upon invective on a now squeamish Mike Dewine, going so far as to call him Mike DeWeeny in the press.” The name stuck.

Gilyard wrote an eight-page memo about Smith’s activities that were under investigation by federal authorities. The memo was given to Mike Dewine, according to Gilyard. “He [Dewine] stood up, face whiter than usual, and said, ‘This meeting is over. Please put all your memos on the table.” Gilyard alleged that Dewine demanded all copies of the memo showing corruption by Smith and the Voinovich administration in order to cover up any investigation.

Gilyard admitted that “I went back to my office and destroyed everything except a hard copy and the disk. I took them home and secured them in case I needed them to prove my innocence in what had become a Machiavellian plan to steal $30 million in state bond money, give the Voinovich Company an ‘inside track’ to all county jail-building contracts and allow Earl Smith to escape from justice again.”

All of this is documented in a CICJ Books book I authored called “The Brothers Voinovich and the Ohiogate Scandal.”

Dewine, rather than stand up to the obvious corruption of the Voinovich administration, instead ran for the Senate because the heat was too hot in Columbus.

Now, Mike Dewine wants to return to Ohio’s capital city and be the state’s chief law enforcement officer. He originally denied that Gilyard ever wrote a memo outlining the corruption of the Voinovich administration. Gilyard lost his job after his photo appeared on the front page of the Wolfe-owned Dispatch newspaper portraying him as a criminal based on charges brought by Earl Smith, although Gilyard was later acquitted of all charges. Stress and high blood pressure had wrecked his kidneys.

Under pressure from the state’s inspector general, Dewine later found a copy of the memo in a vacation home desk vindicating Gilyard. But it was too late for Gilyard.

It’s hard to believe how corrupt the Voinovich-Dewine administration was in the early 90s. During those years, the terrorist/Al Qaeda-connected, now discredited Bank of Credit and Commerce International helped finance a toxic waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio as the regulatory wheels were greased by the Voinovich family.

Governor Voinovich’s brother Paul was paid $6000 a month retainer to lobby on behalf of the incinerator. Another money source for the incinerator was the notorious Swiss corporation Von Roll, a company that was busted for trying to sell a “supergun” to Iraq to lob nuclear warheads at Israel.

This massive corruption is what the spineless Mike Dewine escaped from by running for U.S. Senate. Now the man known for looking the other way when corruption runs rampant wants to be Ohio’s chief law enforcement officer, just in time to look the other way for the 2012 Presidential election.

Bob Fitrakis edits freepress.org and was one of the lawyers attempting to conduct the investigation of Bush, Rove and Blackwell in Ohio’s 2004 election.

The death of former Philippine President Corazon Aquino on August 1, 2009 should be remembered for many reasons: not just because she led the People Power revolution in the Philippines that stood for peace and human rights, and not just because she did it after the brutal Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos had her husband assassinated, but most importantly, she stood up to one of the first documented stolen elections.

While the American mainstream media steadfastly refuses to recognize the use of both computer hardware and software in modern election manipulation, President Ronald Reagan’s good buddy Marcos immediately knew the score with the new technology and blatantly used mainframe computers to rig his 1986 election. With the support of the Reagan administration, Marcos simply had the vote count shut down until “new tapes” were brought in that reversed Aquino’s victory.

All of this was captured on the nightly news, and more tellingly, in Hedrick Smith’s book The Power Game and the video he did called “The Power Game: The President.” The video documents the role of Senator Richard Lugar complaining to the world that somebody was cooking the numbers on the election computers. Fortunately for Aquino, most of the election workers walked out rather than accept the rigged election.

Not the case in Ohio in 2004. And coincidentally, August 2 marks the fourth anniversary of the death of the Reverend Bill Moss. He was the lead plaintiff who sued to overturn the 2004 Ohio presidential election. A key difference between the people of the Philippines and most of those in the U.S. is that the Philippine people took to the street in a general strike after the election was stolen.

The corruption of the Marcos regime was well-established, including the bullet to the back of Corazon’s husband Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr. when he returned from exile in the U.S. to ask for a democratic election. Recall Marcos had him assassinated right on the tarmac at the airport.

Yet, were the dealings of the Bush administration any less blatantly corrupt? You had the coup in Florida in the 2000 election, followed by the illegal occupation of Iraq, and the blatant embracing of torture and other violations of human rights before the eyes of the world. So, when Bush crony J. Kenneth Blackwell privatized the 2004 Ohio election bringing in private companies like Triad, Diebold, New Media, and Smartech – and the exit polls all indicated unprecedented vote theft – it was Moss who led the charge.

The election integrity movement remains to evolve into a real people power movement that will wrest control of the computer software and hardware from the private vendors with direct ties to the Republican Party and the CIA-connected Bush family.

This weekend we should honor our election integrity heroes who have passed. The wondrous “ordinary housewife” Corazon Aquino who became the 11th president of the Philippines and beat back Reagan’s version of the U.S. as an evil empire, and Bill Moss, the man behind the Moss V. Bush lawsuit in Ohio that resulted in the first challenge to a state’s entire electoral college slate in U.S. history.

There is much work to be done. But much inspiration in the legacy of Aquino and Moss.

Bob Fitrakis is the freepress.org Editor and was one of the four attorneys in the Moss v. Bush lawsuit.

A Sense of Wonder
Rachel Carson’s love for the natural world and her fight to defend it

When pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, the backlash from her critics thrust her into the center of a political maelstrom. Despite her love of privacy, Carson’s convictions and her foresight regarding the risks posed by chemical pesticides forced her into a very public and controversial role. The film is an intimate and poignant reflection of Carson’s life as she emerges as America’s most successful advocate for the natural world. Sponsored by the Free Press, Sierra Club, Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and Drexel Theater.

Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley
253-2571 – truth@freepress.org

The United States has produced several mythic historical figures – Paul Bunyan, John Henry and the like – but our actual prophetic peace activists are actually far more interesting. People like Eugene Victor Debs, Emma Goldman, and in our present day, Cindy Sheehan.

Myth America: 10 Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Case for Revolution places Sheehan firmly in the pantheon of progressive heroes. Myth America is an online book by Sheehan geared towards destroying the military industrial and security industrial complex that killed her son Casey in the corrupt war in Iraq.

Sheehan is calling for re-localization and the uncoupling of the “robbed class” from the war profiteers and new high-tech robber barons that are flourishing under globalization. The beauty of Sheehan’s work, directly echoing the speeches and writings of Debs, is its sheer bluntness.

I interviewed her for freepress.org, and she began by pointing out that “the last month or so in Iraq does not show that the war is winding down, and that part of Obama’s plan to withdraw from the cities in Iraq simply involved redefining the border of the city.” She termed the so-called withdrawal “painfully slow.”

“The peace movement has been co-opted by the Democratic Party,” Sheehan said, while on her way to a national gathering of peace activists in Pittsburgh on July 10. She ran a Congressional campaign in the Democratic primary last year against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and raised the issue of Pelosi being aware of the practices of torture and waterboarding.

Sheehan favors the appointment of an independent special prosecutor to look into the issues of torture and war crimes in Iraq. She is well aware that if you begin digging up facts concerning the practices of the Bush administration following 911, you’re going to “pull up some Democratic skeletons as well.”

Sheehan argues that it’s necessary to dig up all the bodies and bones or there’ll be “no healing.”

In one sense, Sheehan is both old-fashioned and cutting edge – she uses the appropriate term in discussing U.S. foreign policy – “imperial.” When asked she believes current U.S. policy is imperialist, she replied “Of course.”

But her focus is more on re-invigorating the peace movement at the local level, which she says is doing a “bad job” under the Obama administration. Make no mistake, Sheehan sees the current imperial policy of the U.S. reflected in a domestic “class war” as well. The book poses a key question: “What can the vast majority of Americans do as the “robbed class?” She recently wrote: “The so-called Ship of State that ‘turns slowly’ cannot turn at all if the rudder keeps pointing in the direction of economic piracy for the Robbers and economic pillage for We the Robbed.” This populism from below sentiment has usually been a harbinger for large-scale social economic movements, from the original Populists to the Socialists, Wobblies, progressives and New Leftists.

Her new book analyzes the relationship between the U.S. government and the six or so transnational media corporations that control 80% of the world’s for-profit content. Sheehan’s strategy is to avoid the Robber Class corporations as much as possible, whether its through publishing e-books and articles on the internet, or re-allocating one’s capital in a different direction.

Sheehan’s pitch is to free ourselves from our co-dependency with the Robber Class. “…Only buy used, only use cash or bank debit cards, or only buy from local merchants,” she recently wrote. They can only steal from us if we enable them.” And when the Robber Class steals from us they generally get away with it. Sheehan argues that Bernie Madoff was punished so severely because he stole from the rich.

Sheehan’s book is a plea for the robbed class to take back their independence and the wealth that they produce, not only for their own good, but for the good of all the people on the planet.

Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of freepress.org and the author of The Idea of Democratic Socialism in America and the Decline of the Socialist Party.

NOTE: Cindy Sheehan is speaking in Columbus on Monday, July 13 from 7-9 pm at the Ohio at the Central Ohioans for Peace meeting at the Columbus Mennonite Church, 35 Oakland Park Avenue, Columbus, Ohio.

For four years the Free Press and other community groups like
the Central Ohio Green Education Fund and Ohio Honest Elections
have brought together progressive activists on the second Saturday
for socializing, music, progressive films, activist presentations, art,
refreshments and organizing.

Saturday, July 11, 2009
6:30-11pm
1021 E. Broad St. (side door, parking in rear)
253-2571
truth@freepress.org

A Parlor with Clint Curtis
Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 7:30 PM
at the Hanna House
1021 E. Broad Street Columbus, OH 43205
Free to the public

A personal, one on one, opportunity to speak with Clint Curtis: brought to you by
the Central Ohio Green Education Fund and the Columbus Institute of Contemporary Journalism and the FREE PRESS

Clint Curtis was an everyday computer programmer in Florida until he was asked by a powerful Republican legislator to create vote-rigging software for electronic voting machines.

Comfest events:
Free Press Workshop
Saturday at the Shelterhouse
June 27, 2009 from 2:00 to 3:00
“Perspectives on Indicting Bush and Cheney”
Bob Fitrakis – Columbus Free Press, Anita Rios – Ohio Green Party, John Quigley – International Law Professor OSU, Clint Curtis

ComFest Free Press Saturday Salon
Saturday at the Solar Stage
June 27, 2009 from 3:20-4:10
“Peoples Tribunal on the Indictment of Bush and Cheney”
Moderated by Bob Fitrakis
Special Guest Anita Rios, john Quigley and Clint Curtis

If you want to help volunteer at the Free Press wine booth during Comfest, please email: truth@freepress.org

Iran’s Ayatollahs have just admitted that in some 50 cities there were as many as 3 million more votes cast than there were voters in the recent presidential election.

But, they say, that’s not enough to change the outcome. So, like Florida in 2000 and Ohio 2004, there will be no total recount and no new election. Election theft should be opposed, whether it’s sanctioned by a supreme Ayatollah or the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s as if the Iranian government is being advised by Ohio’s former Iman J. Kenneth Blackwell, who, as Ohio’s 2004 Secretary of State, purged hundreds of thousands of voters, and stole, switched and disappeared enough votes to put George W. Bush in the White House for a second term. The dubious Iranian tallies look very similar to the inflated Bush outcomes in 12 Republican southwest Ohio counties, most notably Warren, Clermont and Butler. They are reminiscent of the vote counts in two precincts in Perry County that reported turnouts of 121% and 118% of registered voters.

The chief difference between Iran 2009 and Ohio 2004—and Florida 2000—-is in the opposition. Iran’s Mir Hussein Moussavi has vowed martyrdom.

John Kerry, trailing in Ohio by just 130,000 votes with more than 250,000 yet to be counted, walked away less than 12 hours after exit polls showed him a clear victor.

Gore fought a little, but instead of embracing martyrdom, opted for boredom, and for making sure there was no challenge in the US Senate to the votes stolen.

Nationwide, Bush’s alleged 3 million-vote nationwide margin in 2004, and 600 votes in Florida 2000, were as fictional as those ballots the Ayatollahs now admit should not exist.

Moussavi believes he has a date with destiny. But Kerry apparently had one on the golf course. Gore’s failure failure to effectively respond in Florida 2000 remains an inconvenient truth.

Blackwell, Florida’s Jeb Bush and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard used registration tampering, disinformation, intimidation and fraud to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters before the balloting.

Blackwell and Bush then used a lethal mix of black box machines, faulty scantrons and hijacked ballots to finish the job. Blackwell worked with Diebold, ES&S, Triad, and other electronic magicians that let him disappear or switch all the votes he needed with a few keystrokes at around 2am election night. His high-tech IT henchman, Michael Connell, has since died in a mysterious plane crash.

The Times seems to finally understand the problem. In their July 22 editorial, “How to Trust Electronic Voting,” they argued the following: “In paperless electronic voting, voters mark their choices, and when the votes have all been cast, the machine spits out the results. There is no way to be sure that a glitch or intentional vote theft – by malicious software or computer hacking – did not change the outcome. If there’s a close election, there’s also no way of conducting a meaningful recount.”

Saddled with paper ballots that may or may not still exist, the Iranian authorities have simply trashed the whole election. “I don’t think they actually counted the votes,” one observer told the New York Times.

Because the American people did not take to the streets in the Iranian model, our democracy was subverted.

Thanks to Kerry and Gore, the public follow-up in Ohio and Florida was ineffective. As in Iran, the primary reporting has been largely limited to the Internet. The results—8 years of George W. Bush—speak for themselves.

But in the US, a nationwide election protection movement has arisen that protected the results in 2008, and that could make all the difference for the future of American democracy.

The Iranian people are speaking for themselves, and for the finest principles of democracy. For confirmation and inspiration, they need only look at America 2000-8 to see the consequences of an unelected government.

–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection. Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES are at FreePress.org, where this article first appeared. HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE U.S. is at www.harveywasserman.com.

The parallels between the stolen Iranian election of 2009 and the American of 2000 and 2004 are tempting. The histories—and futures—of the two nations are inseparable. Bound up in their tortured half-century of crime and manipulation are the few glimmers of hope for lasting peace in the Middle East.

In both countries, a right-wing fundamentalist authoritarian with open contempt for human rights and the Geneva Convention has come up a winner, with catastrophic consequences. In both countries, the blowback of two George Bushes loom large.

In the US, two “defeated” candidates—Al Gore and John Kerry—said and did nothing in the face of two stolen elections. But an unprecedented election protection movement arose from the ashes of those defeats to assure the 2008 victory of America’s first African-American president.

In Iran, the “defeated” candidate—Mir Hussein Moussavi—is fighting back, along with massive grassroots resistance. How far they get will define the Iranian future—as well as that of the Middle East.

In a fluid and unpredictable situation, here are some indisputables:

1) A half-century ago, the people of Iran attempted a democratic revolution led by a moderate progressive, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, whose social-democratic inclinations have been revived by Moussavi.

2) Prime Minister Mossadegh was overthrown by the Eisenhower Administration and its Central Intelligence Agency, which wanted to wall in the Soviet Union and protect western oil interests.

3) Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. (father of the Gulf War general of the same name) used a suitcase full of US taxpayer dollars to bribe Iran’s anti-democratic sympathizers and help overthrow Mossadegh.

4) They installed the pro-U.S. general Fazlollah Zahedi, who handed control of Iran to the brutal and vicious Shah. The Shah ruled through the infamous secret terror/torture police force Savak, which Schwartzkopf helped train.

4) A prototypical CIA asset, the Shah used his iron torturer’s hand to “westernize” the country and make it more user-friendly to US oil interests.

5) Among other things, the U.S., France and other western powers were moving to provide the Shah with up to 36 atomic power plants designed to provide electricity and, ultimately, radioactive materials with which to build his own atomic bombs.

6) Despite his ostensible commitment to human rights, President Jimmy Carter made a point of spending a high-profile New Year’s with the Shah, evoking the bitter hatred of millions of Iranians.

7) The Shah’s overthrow by fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini led to the 1979-80 hostage crisis that finally sank Carter’s presidency. Amidst indications of a secret deal involving past and future CIA Directors George H.W. Bush and William Casey, the release of the hostages was delayed long enough to guarantee Carter’s defeat, thus inaugurating the Age of Ronald Reagan, with 12 of its 28 years under the two Bushes.

8 ) Secret dealings between Reagan/Bush and the Iranians led to the Iran-Contra Affair, when covert operatives like Oliver North funneled arms to the Iranians and laundered cash and drugs through the reactionary Contra forces fighting revolution in Nicaragua.

9) The Contras in turn flooded the US with cocaine, feeding a horrific crack epidemic that has crippled the black and Hispanic communities here for two decades.

10) Those US-financed arms were used to fight the Iraqis and Saddam Hussein, whom the US also supported, and whom Donald Rumsfeld publicly embraced in the early 1980s. The American goal seems to have been to weaken both Iran and Iraq through a horrifying war that claimed at least a million casualties, ultimately infuriating both citizenries.

After a half-century of dictatorship under the Shah and the CIA, followed by the Ayatollah and the fundamentalists, the Iranian public appears desperate to return to the social-democratic vision of Mossadegh, denied so long ago.

In the US in 2000 and 2004, the corporate/religious right put George W. Bush in the White House—and then kept him there—with a sophisticated election theft machine built around elimination of voter registrations, manipulation of the vote count, and a wide array of supporting tactics. The US Supreme Court set it all in stone with its infamous Bush v. Gore decision, which prevented a true vote count in Florida 2000. History repeated itself in Ohio 2004.

In Iran 2009, the ruling fundamentalist elite has barely pretended to count the votes at all, merely rushing to announce a prê-determined outcome. The reigning Ayatollah has played the role of the US Supreme Court by certifying the outcome before a real ballot tally could possibly occur. Holes in the texts of Iranian newspapers and an electronic blackout created by official censors reflect the on-going vacuum in the US corporate media, which has yet to seriously face up to what happened to the American elections of 2000 and 2004.

What will happen next in Iran is anyone’s guess. George W. Bush fueled its fundamentalist right by calling it a “terror state” whose nuclear weapons ambitions are fueled with materials produced by the “Peaceful Atom” Eisenhower inaugurated in 1953, around the time he was disposing of Mossadegh.

Bush’s counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is now turning the state terror apparatus—reminiscent of the Shah’s—against those who would mention the illegitimacy of his rule.

Thus tragedy looms at the brink of opportunity. That democracy in Iran so clearly won at the polls is a sign of great courage and hope on the part of the Iranian people. They are fighting terrible odds, not of their making. Should they break free, the storm would re-shape the Middle East—and much more.

In the meantime, perhaps their American counterparts, instructed by the ghost of Mossadegh, might finally face up to the true price of sowing such cynical, lethal whirlwinds.

–
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection. Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES are available via www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.harveywasserman.com.

Former Chair of the House Budget Committee John Kasich of Ohio formally declared his candidacy for governor of Ohio June 1, 2009. His timing could not have been worse. As a Congressman, Kasich championed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and worldwide free trade. Now he announces for governor of Ohio, as General Motors files for bankruptcy. It will be interesting to see how Kasich, who focused recently on eliminating Ohio’s income tax, plans to explain how his free trade policies that sent tens of thousands of Ohio jobs to Mexico and China will help the state weather what looks more and more like a Depression.

With over 10% of the state’s labor force officially unemployed, Kasich will also have to explain his ties to the bankrupt and defunct investment banking firm Lehman Brothers. After leaving Congress in 2000, Kasich took a job as managing director of the Columbus, Ohio investment banking division of the company. Kasich, like the assets of Lehman Brothers, ended up with the British banking firm Barclays.

So, while Kasich’s candidacy has that 1936 Alf Landon for President disaster feel, he should not be counted out first and foremost, because of the Fox Factor. As the former host of the neo-hokum “Heartland with John Kasich” show and a frequent guest host filling in for Bill O’Reilly on the “O’Reilly Factor,” Kasich is a political celeb with his own propaganda machine.

Moreover, in his early political campaigns, Kasich was aided by followers of the self-proclaimed Messiah, Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Moon’s ties to the Washington Times, the UPI, and other publications, could serve as an asset to Kasich as well. Moon’s past history of passing money to Republican Party candidates may also prove beneficial.

With his Wall Street and Moon connections and celebrity status, Kasich could claim the Statehouse in a floundering economy where Governor Ted Strickland often appears as a paralyzed moderate with little vision to initiate a green revolution in the state. If President Obama’s stimulus fails to stimulate the Buckeye State economy, Kasich’s “maverick” image as a budget cutter may appear as a fresh and wholesome alternative to economic stagnation.

Kasich, a 1974 graduate of The Ohio State University, frequently stresses his blue-collar background and his father who worked as a postman. Both of his parents were tragically in a 1987 automobile accident which Kasich has spoken and written about. He’s authored two books Courage is Contagious and Stand for Something: The Battle for America’s Soul. The genre they best represent is re-worked Horatio Alger rags to riches myths.

Kasich is running for governor in 2010 during Congressional off-year elections. A victory in Ohio, our nation’s great barometer state, would indicate future problems for President Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.

Republican State Senator Kevin Coughlin of Cuyahoga County is also seeking the Republican nomination for governor.

The Democratic Party pre-empted Kasich’s announcement by leading an onslaught against him as the “candidate of Wall Street.” The Ohio Dems can also take solace in the fact that Kasich’s 2000 run for president was a certified debacle. He withdrew early after achieving status as perhaps the Republican’s leading non-entity in the field.

Kasich will no doubt stress the fact that the budget was balanced in the years he chaired the House Budget Committee. Here Kasich can claim he worked with Bill Clinton to stimulate the economy and restore fiscal responsibility.

While the Dems blast Kasich’s Wall Street connections, Ohio’s Republican Party Chair Kevin Dewine is busy attacking Gov. Strickland for the loss of 300,000 in Ohio. Their theme is that the Democrats committed to fix economy, but it’s just getting worse. “The only Ohioan who deserves to lose a job in this economy is the guy who promised to turn it around and failed miserably,” Dewine said in a statement.

Still, Governor Strickland’s popularity remains high and President Obama’s even higher. Yet, those numbers may begin to fall if the hope of real reform and change is seen as empty campaign rhetoric rather than the reality of a new high-tech sustainable Buckeye economy.

–
Bob Fitrakis is Editor of freepress.org, is a political theorist, ran against against Kasich for the 12th District of Congress in 1992 and ran as a Green candidate for Governor in 2006. This article was originally published by http://freepress.org.

The Republican National Committee recently dropped its resolution to brand the moderate pro-corporate Democratic Party “Socialists.” As the late, great Democratic Socialist leader Michael Harrington liked to tell it when he testified before a dying Senator Hubert Humphrey on the Humphrey-Hawkins Work Bill, that would theoretically guarantee every American a right to a job, Humphrey bluntly asked him “Is my bill socialism?” Harrington replied, “Senator, your bill’s not half that good.”

Here’s why the Democratic Party is also not half that good. Obama’s “Me too” bailout policy to the largest and most irresponsible banks and investment houses has nothing to do with socializing capital. Democratic Socialists believe in democratizing and socializing money matters. They favor credit unions and co-ops with democratically elected boards over large welfare checks to transnational corporations. In fact, there’s little difference between Obama’s approach to the big bankers and George W. Bush’s.

If the Democrats were European Democratic Socialists or Social Democrats, they would have never allowed 20% of all U.S. workers and 47 million people in the U.S. to live without health care. They would have at least called for a general strike to shut down the system until the injustice was stopped.

If you want to look at the history of democratic socialism as a barometer for that esteemed label in American history, let’s start with the legendary Eugene Victor Debs. Unlike the cowardly Democratic Party and its then-leaders – John Kerry and Hillary Clinton who both supported Bush’s illegal imperialist occupation of Iraq to remain politically viable as presidential candidates – Debs went to jail to oppose World War I.

Not only that, he ran as a Socialist Party presidential candidate from jail and received a million votes defending the First Amendment. What was Debs’ great crime? Claiming the rich have always declared war and the poor and working class have always fought and died.

Historically, U.S. Socialist leaders like Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington were not cowards hiding behind pragmatism and popularity polls. When virtually no U.S. politicians spoke on behalf of accepting Jewish immigrants from Nazi Germany during the Great Depression, Thomas fought for their admittance.

Martin Luther King, Jr. called Norman Thomas “the bravest man” he ever met. When Thomas gave his nominal blessing for the last remains of the Socialist Party to merge into the Democratic Party in 1960, he did not surrender his conscience. For example, he called John F. Kennedy “all profile and no courage,” particularly in regards to the President’s civil rights actions. In 1965, Thomas spoke at the first major anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington D.C. and announced he had come to “cleanse” the American flag, not to burn it.

Thomas spoke out and wrote a book against the torture of pacifists during World War I, asking the key question, “Is conscience a crime?” He understood that when you strung pacifists up by their thumbs, it was torture. I’m sure if he had ever been briefed on it, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi allegedly was, he would have denounced it immediately.

Michael Harrington was the architect of the Great Society and the War on Poverty. His book, “The Other America,” stands as a lasting monument to the principles of Democratic Socialism. When both the Democrat and Republican Parties were ignoring the 22% of U.S. population living in poverty during the Eisenhower years, it was Harrington who documented their desperate plight.

Harrington later went on to champion the rights of the wretched of the Earth in his book “The Vast Majority.” He helped write the policy perspectives that tilted the European Social Democrats toward massive aid to Africa, Asia and South America.

Debs, Thomas and Harrington came to realize that democracy was more important than socialism and that decision-making from the bottom up was the key. To label the timid, triangulating Obama Democratic Party as Democratic Socialists is absurd. Not only is Obama not half as good as Debs, Thomas and Harrington, he’s not yet a pale imitation of FDR. And we can only dream that he would adopt the infrastructure programs and progressive tax policies of President Dwight Eisenhower from the 50s.

Perhaps the best we can do is raise the slogan demanding that Obama “Be like Ike.” America needs a Marshall Plan, that’s something an FDR or Ike would understand. Debs, on the other hand, would be calling for an army of a million men to arrest Bush and Cheney for crimes against humanity. And Debs would be talking about his desire to resurrect from the dead the more than a million dead Iraqis killed in a corporate capitalist war for oil.

That’s the legacy of American Democratic Socialism.

Bob Fitrakis, Ph.D., J.D., is the editor of the freepress.org and author of The Idea of Democratic Socialism in America and the Decline of the Socialist Party which is for sale at the freepress.org online store.

As hundreds of our hard-earned billions are being poured into corrupt, greed-driven, lethally inefficient banks, the Administration, Congress and corporate media have studiously avoided the one sector of the banking industry that actually works—the credit unions.

Throughout the United States there are hundreds of these people-powered banks that have succeeded and prospered while all around them the traditional banking has collapsed into ruin, taking our general economy with them.

Why?

Because unlike those private banks, the America’s 10,000 not-for-profit credit unions are controlled by the people who deposit their money there. Loans are made only to members. The deposits are federally insured, and investments are monitored by the depositors and, allegedly, by federal regulators.

For the most part, their decisions are made democratically. Their boards of directors are elected. Increasingly those decisions have been oriented funneling resources into new green industries whose future is bright, and that actually serve that public rather than raping it.

To be sure, there are those credit unions that are plagued with problems. Like all institutions, they all have their flaws. As creatures of the democratic process, they are capable of making wrong decisions while driving those involved stark raving mad.

But by basic mandate, credit unions are ACCOUNTABLE, a concept almost completely lacking from those mega-banks “too big to let fail.”

In fact, Obama’s fiscal 2010 budget contains $234.6 billion in Community Development Financial Institution funds. Some $113 billions is earmarked for “financial issues in underserved communities,” according to the Treasury Department, along with another $80 million for the new Capital Magnet Fund aimed at “enhancing investments in affordable housing opportunities for the very poorest Americans.” This money, says a May 7 Treasury Department release, “should be a boon to Credit Unions.”

The numbers are a great improvement over the Bush era. But they pale alongside the torrent of cash slushing into failed private banks.

Since the founding of the first true credit unions in Germany beginning in 1852, the institutions have spread throughout Europe, India and North America. The first came to the US in New Hampshire in 1909.

Edward A. Filene, the Boston merchant whose famous basement offered bargain clothing to working people, Basic principles include the idea that only members can borrow money from a credit union, and that the loans must be “prudent and productive.” Because loans involve the money of a close-knit group, and must be approved by members whose money is at risk, the credit unions are a model of how the banking system might be remade.

On average about 10 of the nation’s 10,000 credit unions fail each year. Because depositors’ money is federally guaranteed, they may lose their bank, but not their deposits.

Ohio election officials purged more than a million voters between the 2004 and 2008 elections. The number is three times that of voters purged between the 2000 and 2004 elections in that key swing state.

The Free Press Election Protection Project requested data from Boards of Elections in all of Ohio’s 88 counties. A detailed analysis of the records reveals shocking and unprecedented purges. The total number of people whose names were removed from the voting rolls is a stunning 1.25 million.

The Ohio data shows enormous disparities in the number of people purged in different categories from county to county. These results suggest obvious violations of equal protection and due process. The documents demonstrate that the voting rights of a million Ohioans were destroyed based on the arbitrary whims of local election officials. Purging appears to be subject to widely diverse interpretations of state and federal laws by different Ohio Board of Elections officials.

Despite being the only organization in Ohio to conduct a statewide study of voter purges, Free Press staffers were not invited to present the results at the second statewide Ohio Election Conference convened by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner in March 2009.

One of the study’s most troubling findings was that Hamilton County knocked 37,465 reported felons off the voting list. The next largest number came from Franklin County, which is larger than Hamilton County, with 2,174. Hamilton County became infamous in the 2004 election for wrongly telling former felons that they weren’t eligible to vote unless a judge signed off. Ohio uses the “in/out” rule in regards to felons: those in prison cannot vote; those out of prison can vote, even if on probation or in a halfway house.

Hamilton County’s felon purge constituted 80% of all Ohio’s total. In the past, some counties mistakenly purged people only indicted, but not convicted of felonies. After a Free Press investigation, Franklin County admitted to this practice prior to the 2004 election.

Those suffering a “mental incident” can be purged as well, especially in Fayette County. Out of 307 voters stripped of their voting rights because of psychological problems, 283 were from Fayette County – more than 92% of the state’s reported total.

Altogether, 220,000 voters were purged due to death or moving. There were 137,550 voters who moved from one county to another and were justifiably eliminated as they were merged into their new county’s voting roll. Another 93,178 voters deleted due to death, leaving more than a million eliminated for other or unknown reasons.

The largest single purge category, with 228,799 voters, was “failure to vote.” In Franklin County, home of Columbus, led the way with 116,000 purged voters – 51% of the total eliminated for not voting.

“Failure to vote” may have a different definition depending on which Ohio county you ask. Some counties purge if a voter fails to vote in federal elections for eight years straight. Other counties purge after failure to vote in federal elections every four years.

Only 47 Ohio counties offered specifics on the reasons for purging. Other counties simply reported a non-categorized total number of purges in response to the Free Press records request. The Republican stronghold of Warren County purged more than 52,000 people without explanation and Democratic Lucas County, home of Toledo, purged more than 24,000 for unknown causes. Many of Ohio’s counties refused to comply with the Free Press’ records request until after the election, and some complied only after legal pressure from the Secretary of State’s office.

Ohio does not have a uniform system for keeping track of purged voters. Shelby County and the historically corrupt Mahoning County refused to comply with Ohio’s public records law and provided no records. Sandusky County, despite assurances from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office that there is a statewide computer database linked to all counties, informed the Free Press that they only had paper records available for inspection on site and were incapable of transmitting electronic data.

One of the difficulties discussed at the March Election Conference is that there’s no statewide system for coding purges, making it unclear which counties remove people for death, felony conviction, failing to vote, or failing to respond to a notice from the Board of Elections.

Statewide Free Press Election Protection Project coordinator Connie Gadell-Newton noted in her preliminary assessment, “…even though a whopping 1.25 million records were removed, this doesn’t mean that 1.25 million people were disenfranchised or that 1.25 million individual people were removed from the voting rolls, since some voters may have been removed more than once if they moved from county to county multiple times.”

Initial studies indicate that 80% of purged voters who moved had moved within the county. Historically, Ohio voters who moved within the same county could cast their ballot at the county Board of Elections. In the run up to the 2008 election, 66,115 voters who moved within county were purged. Franklin County boasts 38% of the total. Fulton and Henry counties had only one each.

In 2008, the Republican Party and the Obama campaign waged a battle wherein voters were purged at the request of the Republican Party and later re-registered by the Obama campaign.

The records indicate that many voters were removed for failure to respond to a mailed notice, even though they continued to reside in the same county and some at the same voter registration address.

Verification of voter address has emerged as the key issue, not only in purge issues, but in uncounted provisional ballots. Ohio had 181,000 provisional voters, a staggeringly high number compared to only 7,000 provisional voters in Missouri and 5,000 in Virginia. These statistics come from Brunner’s first Election Summit in December 2008. In Ohio, 10% of all people voting on Election Day were forced to vote provisionally.

At the March Election Conference, Franklin County Board of Elections Deputy Director Matt Damschroder, a Republican, advocated using state and federal records to establish new addresses for Ohio voters.

Senior Counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice Lawrence Norden noted another problem with voters’ addresses. He pointed out that 36% of Ohio’s uncounted provisional ballots were the result of voters being in the wrong precinct, but often at the right polling place.

Tom McCabe, Director of the Mahoning County Board of Elections, reported that 81% of provisional votes were counted in Mahoning County. He pointed out that the number would have been 90% had the pre-Ken Blackwell rules been in effect in Ohio. Prior to Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell’s supervision of Ohio’s 2004 presidential election, Ohio voters in the wrong precinct still had their votes counted from the county level to the presidential level.

McCabe also decried the fact that there is no consistent statewide standard for counting provisional ballots in Ohio. In his county, a voter who was able to produce a library card with a current address was allowed to vote, although that type of ID is not officially accepted in Ohio guidelines.

In a promising development, a handful of Ohio counties noted that they did not purge voter records from their computer systems, but merely moved questionable voter names into an “inactive” status. Some “flagged” certain voters if there were concerns about their eligibility. On another positive note, Coshocton County notified the Free Press that it is a “no purge” county.

Prior to the 2004 election, most purges were concentrated in the Democratic havens of Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. Public records show that in Cleveland, 24.93% of all voters were dumped from the voting rolls.

The pattern continued prior to the 2008 election, with an additional 211,000 Franklin County voters removed. Most were concentrated in the Democratically-controlled capital city of Columbus.

Just prior to the 2008 presidential election, the Free Press called attention to the Ohio Republican Party’s attempt to purge 600,000 long-time registered voters, and 200,000 newly-registered voters. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s intervention prevented the 800,000 purges by directing that Ohio voters had both the right to notification and hearing before being stripped of their voting rights. If the GOP had succeeded in eliminating the 800,000 overwhelmingly Democratic voters, John McCain may have carried Ohio by 50,000 votes, instead of losing by more than 200,000 votes.

A Jim Crow system of county-by-county partisan purges remains in effect in Ohio. The Buckeye State does not recognize voting as a fundamental human right. Voting is considered a universal and unalienable right in most other democracies. In Ohio, there’s no statewide system mandating all voters be treated equally before they lose their most basic and sacred right. In Ohio, often called the most Southern of Northern states, there is also no system in place that even requires giving a reason for disenfranchising a voter. No wonder the number of purged voters tripled last year.

–
Bob Fitrakis has a Ph.D. in political science and was an election observer in the Ohio 2004 general election, Ohio’s 2008 primary and 2008 general elections. He was the director of the Free Press Election Protection Project. This article was originally published by http://freepress.org.

6:30pm – midnight

Join progressives for a night of food, drink, music and art.
Socialize or network for your causes.
Women’s Beauty Deception display.

1021 E. Broad St., side door, parking in rear

Co-sponsored by the
Central Ohio Green Education Fund Board

9:30am-5pm

Please RSVP
Doug Todd, 614-308-5681, dougsftc@yahoo.com
www.cgcongress.org

Proposed Agenda

Morning Session

9:30am Presentation of Resolutions – revisit, revise and add new resolutions
10:30 am – Prioritize resolutions

Lunch – pizza and bring your own side dish

Afternoon Session

Discussion of implementation of resolutions and activities
Possibilities include:

• City Council Watch, or Franklin County Commission Watch group—to monitor, rate, and report on their activities
• Parallel City Council or other governing organization
• Ballot initiative to enlarge City Council with district representation

Room 100 of the Northwood Building – 2231 North High Street in Columbus
two blocks north of Lane Ave.

Hope to see you there!
The Central Ohio Green Education Fund Board

McCleary spearheaded a Free Press outreach toward African American writers like Jeff Winbush and Jerolyn Barbee. McCleary got the Free Press involved in a long-running investigative series to “out” white supremacists in Ohio. The Free Press began to print the names and addresses of known Klan and neo-Nazi members, and also began to publish “Wanted” posters with their photos and vitals attached. All of this culminated with buses of anti-racist activists demonstrating outside the homes of the white supremacists. McCleary used his extensive ties with black private investigators and police officers to gather intelligence. Five white supremacists left the state rather be “outed.”

In 1995, McCleary brought together a slate of reformers to run for Columbus School Board. I had the pleasure of being one of them. While we didn’t win, much of our agenda advocating multicultural diversity and more transparency by the School Board succeeded. Just last year, I participated with Cornell in a project to screen local political candidates for office and publish our ratings and the interviews on the internet.

Cornell and I occasionally disagreed over the issue of police brutality and the approach of the Columbus Police officers in dealing with black youth. His position was far more sympathetic to the police than mine, probably due to his military background and his business Pro-Private Police Training Academy that trained private security guards. Still, Cornell and I remained friends. I remember our last joint appearance on the WOSU TV show “On the Record” where we engaged in a heated debate, then went outside and laughed about it.

Cornell embodied the style of the “new jack activism” – one that was both highly intellectual and simultaneously street-wise. His commitment to the inner-city and to equality for all people: blacks, Hispanics, gays, and whites – set him apart from most of the more traditional leaders in the community. His voice, his vision, and his laugh will be greatly missed.

Why should you attend?

Our public officials guide central Ohio’s policies & progress, but who are they?
• A Democratic Columbus City Council who never disagrees on any topic? How many are beholden to the developers — consequently moving Columbus in the sprawl direction?
• A Franklin County Commission, who oversees the Board of Elections, and allowed the long lines during the 2004 election?
• And, when was the last time you remember being excited about something our state legislature made happen?

At the Citizen’s Grassroots Congress, we will discuss:
• Resolutions from local activist groups to better our lives
• City Council Watch, or Franklin County Commission Watch group—to monitor, rate, and report on their activities
• Parallel City Council or other governing organization
• Ballot initiative to enlarge City Council with district representation

We are all responsible for moving central Ohio in the direction of supporting peace, ecologically sound practices, better services, and legislation leaning toward equity and social justice.
If you want to get involved, please join us!

The 2009 Citizens Grassroots Congress
Saturday, February 28 from 9:30am-5pm
Room 100 of the Northwood Building – 2231 North High Street in Columbus
two blocks north of Lane Ave.

Please RSVP to Doug Todd, 614-308-5681, dougsftc@yahoo.com
www.cgcongress.org

Hope to see you there!
The Central Ohio Green Education Fund Board

THE 2009 CITIZENS GRASSROOTS CONGRESS

WANTS YOU!

On February 28, 2009 from 9:30 to 5:00

At Room 100 of the Northwood Building.

(2231 N. High Street in Columbus).

Bring a potluck item for snack / salad. Pizza will be provided for lunch.

To help advance an enlightened, reform agenda for Central Ohio in the areas of Social and Economic Justice, Sustainability and the Environment, Grassroots Democracy and Peace.

In October 2007 the Citizens Grassroots Congress convened an all day session and formed an agenda of enlightenment and reform for Central Ohio. Many efforts have ensued to promote and draw attention to these issues and resolutions. Some of these efforts were effective and some were not. But many lessons were learned. Do you want a voice in vital local reform following the dark years of the last administration? Do you want to share the opportunities for your most important local issues and concerns during the Obama administration? Then you do not want to miss this meeting!

The purpose of this congress is to plan and think ahead as well as prioritize issues. To develop strategies, tactics and means to effectively let our local officials know what is important to our community. From past experience we know that if we do not influence local priorities others with more self serving goals certainly will. Join us and help make a difference.

For more information contact Doug Todd at Dougsftc@yahoo.com or Joe Keehner at 614/337-9478.

The welcome news that President Obama is taking steps to shut Guantanamo and right other Bush-era human rights abuses must quickly be joined by a proclamation of freedom for Leonard Peltier.

Peltier is the nation’s best-known native activist and has become a global symbol of abject injustice and prison abuse. Imprisoned in the late 1970s for allegedly murdering two FBI agents, Peltier has never been given a fair trial. Federal authorities have quashed or destroyed thousands of pages of evidence that might have freed Peltier decades ago.

The Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee points out that “Amnesty International considers Leonard Peltier to be a political prisoner whose avenues of redress have long been exhausted….Amnesty International recognizes that a retrial is no longer a feasible option and believes that Leonard Peltier should be immediately and unconditionally released.”

The committee adds that” Documents show that although the prosecution and government pointed the finger at Peltier for shooting FBI agents at close range during the trial in 1976, for three years the prosecution withheld critical ballistic test results proving that the fatal bullets could not have come from the gun tied to Leonard Peltier. This trial also denied evidence of self defense.”

The committee further states that: “the U.S. Prosecutor, during subsequent oral arguments, stated: “we can’t prove who shot those agents.” And that the Eighth Circuit found that “There is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been available to him in order to better exploit and reinforce the inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government’s case.”

The committee also says that “Judge Heaney, who authored the denial now supports Mr. Peltier’s release, stating that the FBI used improper tactics to gain Mr. Peltier’s conviction.”

Now 64 years old, Peltier is suffering from diabetes and a series of other serious ailments brought on by his decades in prison. He has great grandchildren he has never seen. His case is the centerpiece of the book IN THE SPIRIT OF CRAZY HORSE by Peter Matthiessen.

Reports from Betty Peltier-Solano, Leonard’s sister, now assert that Peltier was severely beaten during a recent transfer to the Canaan Federal Penitentiary. According to Peltier-Solano, he has been held in solitary confinement and limited to a single meal a day, a serious threat to his health due to his diabetes.

Over the decades Peltier has been a model prisoner, concentrating on his art and writing. His commitment to native American rights has been consistent throughout the years, though he’s been repeatedly denied media access.

Peltier is eligible for parole in the near future. His supporters fear this latest round of abuse may be designed to discredit him. The FBI recently sent a letter accusing Peltier of prompting this latest attack. Given Peltier’s age, poor health, immanent parole status and long-standing political commitments canont be viewed as a calculated absurdity. His sister writes that “currently, the FBI is actively seeking support for his continued imprisonment.”

The political involvement of the FBI is itself an issue the President must address. At very least Peltier should be freed on bail pending a new trial, with a concerted effort on the part of the new Department of Justice to unearth all suppressed evidence in this case.

Leonard Peltier has languished unjustly in prison far longer than those held in Guantanamo. It is time to set him free!

To find out more, contact the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee at http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info.

–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, which appear at http://freepress.org, along with Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES. Harvey’s HISTORY OF THE U.S. is at http://harveywasserman.com. This article was originally published by http://freepress.org.

For more info:
253-2571
truth@freepress.org

The parallels between the 1933 coming of Franklin Roosevelt and the upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama must include the issue of Prohibition: alcohol in 1933, and marijuana today. As FDR did back then, Obama must now help end an utterly failed, socially destructive, reactionary crusade.

Marijuana prohibition is a core cause of many of the nation’s economic problems. It now costs the U.S. tens of billions per year to track, arrest, try, defend and imprison marijuana consumers who pose little, if any, harm to society. The social toll soars even higher when we account for social violence, lost work, ruined careers and damaged families. In 2007, 775,137 people were arrested in the U.S. for mere possession of this ancient crop, according to the FBI’s uniform crime report.

Like the Prohibition on alcohol that plagued the nation from 1920 to 1933, marijuana prohibition (which essentially began in 1937) feeds organized crime and a socially useless prison-industrial complex that includes judges, lawyers, police, guards, prison contractors, and more.

A dozen states have now passed public referenda confirming medical uses for marijuana based on voluminous research dating back 5,000 years. Confirmed medicinal uses for marijuana include treatment for glaucoma, hypertension, arthritis, pain relief, nausea relief, reducing muscle spasticity from spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis, and diminishing tremors in multiple sclerosis patients. Medical reports also prove smoked marijuana provides relief from migraine headaches, depression, seizures, and insomnia, according to NORML. In recent years its use has become critical to thousands of cancer and AIDS sufferers who need to it to maintain their appetite while undergoing chemotherapy.

The U.S. ban on marijuana extends to include hemp, one of the most widely used agricultural products in human history. Unlike many other industrial crops, hemp is powerful and prolific in a natural state, requiring no pesticides, herbicides, extraordinary fertilizing or inappropriate irrigation. Its core products include paper, cloth, sails, rope, cosmetics, fuel, supplements and food. Its seeds are a potentially significant source of bio-diesel fuel, and its leaves and stems an obvious choice for cellulosic ethanol, both critically important for a conversion to a Solartopian renewable energy supply.

Hemp was grown in large quantities by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and many more of the nation’s founders, most of whom would likely be dumbfounded to hear it is illegal (based on entries in Washington’s agricultural diaries, referring to the separation of male and female plants, it’s likely he and his cohorts also raised an earlier form of “medicinal” marijuana).

Hemp growing was mandatory in some circumstances in early America, and again during World War II, when virtually the entire state of Kansas was planted in it. The current ban on industrial hemp costs the U.S. billiions of dollars in lost production and revenue from a plant that can produce superior paper, clothing, fuel and other critical materials at a fraction the financial cost and environmental damage imposed by less worthy sources.

On January 16, 1919, fundamentalist crusaders help pass the 18th Amendment, making the sale of alcohol illegal. The ensuing Prohibition was by all accounts a ludicrous failure epitomized by gang violence and lethal “amateur” product that added to the death toll. Its only real winner was organized crime and the prison-industrial complex.

In 1933, FDR helped pass the 21st Amendment repealing Prohibition, which ended a costly era of gratuitous social repression and gave the American economy—and psyche—a tangible boost.

Marijuana prohibition was escalated with Richard Nixon’s 1970 declaration of the War on Drugs. There was a brief reprieve when Steve Ford, the son of President Gerald Ford appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone barefoot and claiming that the best place to smoke pot was in the White House. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter’s last year in office, 338,664 were arrested for marijuana possession.

Ronald Reagan renewed the War on Drugs and declared his “Zero Tolerance” policy, despite his daughter Patti Davis’ claim the Gipper smoked weed with a major donor. Following Reagan, President George Herbert Walker Bush recorded a low of 260,390 marijuana possession arrests, but the numbers climbed again under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both of whom are reported to have smoked it themselves (though Clinton claims not to have inhaled).

On a percentage basis, at least as many American high school students smoke pot than students in Holland, where it is legal. In the midst of the drug war, U.S. students report virtually unlimited access to a wide range of allegedly controlled substances, including pot. Because so many Americans use it, and it is so readily available, the war on marijuana can only be seen as a virtually universal assault on the basic liberties of our citizenry.

In a 2005 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services survey, more than 97 million Americans admitted to having tried marijuana at least once. President-elect Obama makes it clear in his book Dreams From My Father that he has smoked—and inhaled—marijuana (he is also apparently addicted to a far more dangerous drug, tobacco). His administration should tax marijuana rather than trying to repress it. Like alcohol and tobacco, a minimum age for legal access should be set at 21.

As a whole, the violent, repressive War on Drugs has been forty years of legal, cultural and economic catastrophe. Like FDR, Obama must end our modern-day Prohibition, and with it the health-killing crusade against this ancient, powerful medicinal herb.

–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, available at http://freepress.org, along with Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES. Harvey’s SOLARTOPIA! is at http://harveywasserman.com. This article was first published by http://freepress.org.

The tragic and suspicious death of Karl Rove’s election thief in chief should send a clear message to Al Franken and other key liberals: don’t be riding in any small private planes.

Death by air crash now seems to be the favored means of ridding the Rovian right of troublesome characters.

The most recent is Michael Connell, who died Friday night when his private plane crashed near his northern Ohio home. Connell was the information techology whiz kid who helped Rove steal the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, along with a few in between—possibly including the 2002 senatorial campaign in Minnesota that followed the death of Paul Wellstone.

Connell was an expert pilot whose plane crashed in clear weather. He held virtually all the secrets to how George W. Bush was illegally foisted on the American people—and the world—for eight horrifying years. By manipulating computerized results in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 Connell made history. By some accounts, he was about to tell the attorneys in the on-going King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit how he did it. He also approached expressed a willingness to appear under oath before Congress. But now he is dead.

Current cover stories include the possibility that his plane ran out of fuel. But its crash was accompanied by a very large fireball explosion that burned for more than ten minutes. A trooper on the scene immediately identified Connell, but newspaper accounts say his body was charred beyond recognition.

Connell told various sources that he was being threatened by Rove. He canceled at least two previous flights due to mechanical failure. A father of four, his decision to fly from a highly restricted airport in Maryland remains a mystery. Connell reportedly did contract work for security-industrial agencies, like the CIA. Connell also openly acknowledged that he was the first IT contractor to move his servers behind the firewall of the US House of Representatves where he oversaw the websites of the House Judiciary Committee, Intelligence Committee, Ways and Means Committee, and Administrative Committee, arguably the four most powerful committees in the House.

He now joins such critical players as Paul Wellstone, Mel Carnahan, Ron Brown, Mickey Leland, John Tower, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and many more critical public figures who have died in small plane crashes at questionable moments.

In all cases there are non-nefarious potential explanations for their deaths. Conspiracy theories can, indeed, be frivolous.

But so can their out-of-hand dismissal by coincidence theorists. Both Wellstone and Carnahan died two weeks before critical Senatorial elections they were favored to win in a divided Senate. In 2000, Carnahan’s Missouri seat was taken by his wife, who subsequently lost it.

Wellstone, the leading liberal light in the US Senate, had been personally threatened by Dick Cheney for opposing the Iraq war. Wellstone’s plane crashed under dubious circumstances, carrying himself, his wife and daughter. In an extremely questionable outcome, Norm Coleman got his seat.

Coleman was hand-picked by Karl Rove to run against Wellstone. His ensuing victory over stand-in candidate Walter Mondale was the highly unlikely outcome of a messy, manipulated election that coincided with equally dubious senatorial vote counts in Georgia and Colorado.

Al Franken may now be poised to take back the Wellstone seat for the Democratic Party. As an Air America talk host, he repeatedly mocked those who were investigating the theft of the 2004 election.

But he now owes the possibility of being elected to the diligent work of election protection activists who have fought all these years for fair, open and reliable vote counts. Had former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell been in charge of this year’s Minnesota election, Franken would not even be in the running.

Ironically, a brutal right-wing hate campaign is now being waged against Franken, charging him with election theft. Among other things, it claims he “went to Hollywood” for money to steal his way into the Senate.

Were it not for the deaths of so many others before him, such talk could be dismissed out of hand.

But under the circumstances, we would strongly urge Al Franken not to be flying in any small planes.

–
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION…, and AS GOES OHIO, available at www.freepress.org, where this article was first published. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln civil rights lawsuit pursuing Michael Connell. This article originally appeared at http://freepress.org.

Michael Connell, the crucial techno- lynch pin in the theft of the 2004 election, and much more, is dead at the age of 45. His unnatural, suspicious death raises serious questions about the corruption of the American electoral process that now may never be answered.

Connell died Friday, December 19 when his Piper Saratoga plane crashed near his northern Ohio home. He was flying himself home from the College Park, Maryland airport. An accomplished pilot, flying in unremarkable weather, his death cuts off a critical path to much of what may never be known about how the 2004 election was shifted from John Kerry to George W. Bush in the wee hours of November 2. His plane crashed between two houses in an upscale neighborhood, one vacant, just 2.5 miles from the Akron-Canton airport.

A long-time, outspokenly loyal associate of the Bush family, Connell created the Bush-Cheney website for their 2000 presidential campaign. Connell may have played a role in various computer malfunctions that helped the GOP claim the presidency in 2000. As a chief IT consultant and operative for Karl Rove, Connell was a devout Catholic and the father of four children. In various interviews and a deposition Connell cited his belief that abortion is murder as a primary motivating factor in his work for the Republican Party.

Connell recently wrote the following in his New Media Communications newsletter, regarding Barack Obama’s election: “In our 230 year history, our democracy has suffered worse fates. It’s just that none come to mind right now.” Connell wrote: “This is just a moment in time and this too shall pass. Enduring is the fact that 2000 years ago, a babe was born in Bethlehem. When our Lord God sent his only Son for our salvation,…In spite of the current economic and political conditions, salvation is eternal.”

Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hired Connell in 2004 to create a real-time computer data compilation for counting Ohio’s votes. Under Connell’s supervision, Ohio’s presidential vote count was transmitted to private, partisan computer servers owned by SmartTech housed in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Connell’s company, New Media Communications worked closely with SmartTech in building Republican and right-wing websites that were hosted on SmartTech servers. Among Connell’s clients were the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gwb43.com. The SmartTech servers at one point housed Karl Rove’s emails. Some of Rove’s email files have since mysteriously disappeared despite repeated court-sanctioned attempts to review them.

In 2001, Michael Connell’s GovTech Solutions, LLC was selected to reorganize the Capitol Hill IT network, the only private-sector company to gain permission from HIR [House Information Resources] to place its server behind the firewall, he bragged.

At 12:20 am on the night of the 2004 election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner of Ohio’s presidential campaign. The Buckeye State’s 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.

But from then until around 2am, the flow of information mysteriously ceased. After that, the vote count shifted dramatically to George W. Bush, ultimately giving him a second term. In the end there was a 6.7 percent diversion—in Bush’s favor—between highly professional, nationally funded exit polls and the final official vote count as tabulated by Blackwell and Connell.

Until his death Connell remained the IT supervisor for six Congressional committees. But on the day before the 2008 election, Connell was deposed by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count, and his continued involvement in IT operations for the GOP, including his access to Rove’s e-mail files and the circumstances behind their disappearance.

Various threats have been repeatedly reported involving Connell and other IT experts close to the GOP. On July 24, 2008, Arnebeck emailed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, stating: “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King-Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio,….”

Connell’s death comes at a moment where election protection attorneys and others appeared to be closing in on critical irregularities and illegalities. In his pre-election deposition, Connell was generally evasive, but did disclose key pieces of information that could prove damaging to Karl Rove and the GOP. Examining attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit, stemming from the 2004 election theft, were confident Connell had far more to tell.

There is widespread concern that this may be the reason he is now dead.

Revised December 21, 2008

———-
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including AS GOES OHIO and HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICAS 2004 ELECTION…, available at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King- Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit which subpoenaed and was deposing Michael Connell.

by Bob Fitrakis

We all know that the Wolfe Family Newsletter, aka The Columbus Dispatch, has other relatives in the industry. There’s the staid uncle who secretly reads Hustler, who publishes The Ohio Magazine, the bastard stepchildren who put out This Week, and the flashy niece who flaunts herself over at Today’s Columbus Woman.

So, when you see Farah Majidzadeh’s splashy cover photo on July’s Today’s Columbus Woman, you can bet that she’s a Wolfe Family fave and politically connected. Her air-brushed, spin-doctored puff piece sent more than one investigative reporter running to their “deep throat” sources and their “top-secret” data banks. The Wolfe spin portrays Ms. Majidzadeh as one of Columbus’ leading female entrepreneurs, the head of Resource International, Inc., a Columbus-based engineering and construction-testing firm. Lest we suspect that Farah could be a female Tommy Banks-you know, one of those ersatz affirmative action front owners-Today’s Columbus Woman points out that Farah owns 67 percent of the business, while her husband Kamran owns the remaining 33 percent.

What the article doesn’t mention is that Resource International is a leading pay-to-play firm in Ohio politics. Between 1990 and 1994, the Majidzadeh family and in-laws gave at least $8,250 to Governor George V. Voinovich’s campaign coffers. Like Banks, the Majidzadeh bunch have gotten more than their share of state contracts, and not just in the construction field.

Recall that the Dispatch’s best investigative reporter, Bob Ruth, was hot on the trail of Farah’s daughter, Marcia, two years ago, when the Big D powers that be muzzled him. Marcia Majidzadeh and her husband owned Nationwide Equipment Enterprises. Ring a bell? The company that allegedly bilked a program to aid the blind out of some $253,900. In March 1993, Nationwide Equipment received a six-month contract from the Ohio Rehabilitation Services Commission to operate vending machines at rest stops. Thirty-seven-and-a-half percent of the gross receipts were to go to the state of Ohio to be used to help blind people establish their own food and beverage businesses at state rest stops. Ruth broke the story on July 24, 1994 that state records showed that Nationwide Equipment owed $120,395 in underreported receipts, had bounced $104,588 worth of checks, and had failed to pay the state $28,917 for cleaning bills at the 13 rest stops. On July 30, Ruth reported that the company had failed to “post a performance bond” even though their state contract called for it. And at the same time the state canceled her contract, in her zeal to serve the disabled, Marcia changed the name of her company to Consult-Systems, Inc. and signed a false name on another state Rehabilitation Services Commission contract bid application. Now she was the more waspy-sounding “Marsha May.”

But, Marcia had a pretty good explanation. You see, “people often had trouble pronouncing and spelling her real name,” particularly when they’ve been reading it in the paper in relationship to someone allegedly stealing from the blind. Marsha, Marsha, Marsha! Things got so bad that the Department of Aging canceled a contract that she and her husband were scheduled to sign to cater meals to senior citizens at the Ohio State Fair. Let’s see, the blind…the elderly…no doubt handicapped children breathed a sigh of relief after that.

Here’s the story of a lovely lady, who was building up a business of her own. And then one day when that lady met the governor, she knew that it was much more than a hunch. That if she gave him a lot of money, he could probably help her business out a bunch. Damage control time. Farah and Kamran pulled a George Voinovich and wept openly about their bum son-in-law, Ali Sharifrazi (aka Ali S. Razi), who deceived their daughter and allegedly forged her name. Actual quote: “Majidzadeh’s parents fought back tears as they described their surprise…” They were “shocked,” shocked, I say! The distraught parents failed to explain how their poor, duped, 30-year-old daughter who had nothing to do with any wrongdoing, not only submitted a bid in the name of Marsha May, but showed up for a “coin-toss ceremony” at the Ohio Division of Purchasing. The coin toss broke a tie between “Marsha May” and another bidder over the state contract.

Poor Marcia; she emerged a double loser. Not only did she lose the toss, but state officials realized that Marsha May was a fraud. Now, we know who Marsha May really is and we know her game. The question remains, who is Farah Majidzadeh and what is her financial relationship, if any, with the disgraced former Chief of Staff Paul Mifsud? Let’s toss a coin: heads-it’s contract steering, tails-it’s just another one of those funny Voinovich coincidences.

All evidence suggests that since the onset of the George Voinovich administration in January 1991, the governor’s recently resigned chief of staff, Paul Mifsud, systematically engineered the steering of contracts and public funds to political backers and Voinovich family members.

The firing of Joseph Gilyard on July 22, 1991 by the Voinovich administration was a clear harbinger of the governor’s current problems. Gilyard, who had been director of the Office of Criminal Justice Services and a long-time loyal supporter of the state’s Republican machine, was canned shortly after he alleged that he was under political pressure to give the governor’s brother’s company valuable state prison construction contracts.

The firing paved the way for Mifsud, formerly vice president of the Voinovich Cos., to operate with virtually no restraints within the governor’s administration. As chief of staff, Mifsud was put in charge of the Ohio Department of Transportation, the Commerce Department and the Development Department, and used that position of power to serve the interests of political backers and personal favorites.

Recent allegations that contracts were steered towards the Banks-Carbone Construction Company may be just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an open secret in the local construction and architecture industry that over the last five years most major design and construction management contracts have been awarded in a blatantly partisan manner. Many contractors believe that the state’s Department of Administrative Services has repeatedly gone through a charade of soliciting proposals and later interviewing qualified architectural construction management companies for state projects prior to steering the contracts to what appeared to be predetermined winners. According to construction industry insiders, projects that seem to fit this pattern include:

· Five prison contracts totaling $150 million awarded to Knowlton Construction Company to build or renovate five state prisons, despite the company having little or no previous experience as a prison construction manager.
· The $80 million Max Fisher Business School, the $85 million Schottenstein Arena at Ohio State, and the $110 million Hilltop Office Complex to the Gilbane Building Company. In all three cases, the Banks-Carbone Construction Company was selected as the minority partner.
· The $65 million new COSI building to the Ruscilli Construction Company.
· The $20 million reconstruction of the riot-damaged Lucasville prison to the Sherman R. Smoot Company.
· Various contracts to the Voinovich Cos. and Voinovich-Sgro to build and renovate jails, including the Franklin County jail.

Following George Voinovich’s electoral victory in November 1990, Lieutenant Governor Michael DeWine appointed Gilyard director of the Governor’s Office of Criminal Justice Services in January 1991. Gilyard’s previous experience included being executive assistant to George Forbes, Cleveland City Council president; chief of staff for Cuyahoga County Commissioner Virgil Brown; court administrator for Chief Justice Thomas Moyer; and director of the Ohio Court of Claims. As director of the Office of Criminal Justice Services, Gilyard’s tasks were to coordinate planning and funding for all of Ohio’s criminal justice agencies and dispense state funds for area jail construction projects. Over the eight-year period from 1983 to 1991, the Office of Criminal Justice Services awarded some $200 million in jail construction monies.

Within six months of his hiring, Gilyard was disgraced and hounded by several charges-theft in office, lying to the Voinovich administration about his past, and allegations of sexual harassment-that were later all summarily dismissed. Gilyard’s termination and public humiliation served as a head on a spike to all who dared cross Mifsud.

Gilyard’s tenure turned tenuous immediately after an early “get acquainted” meeting with lobbyist Phil Hamilton, head of the Voinovich transition team and former executive vice president of Voinovich Cos.; and Bennett J. Cooper, Gilyard’s predecessor in the administration of Governor James A. Rhodes.

“[Hamilton] had been bugging me and bugging me to come over,” Gilyard said in an interview with Columbus Alive. When he walked up to the office at 8 E. Long Street, Gilyard said he noticed a plaque over the door. “In gold leaf it says ‘Hamilton and Associates, The Voinovich Cos.’ I about passed out.”

In fact, Candace Peters, a criminal justice administrator, had warned Hamilton during the 1990 campaign that the Voinovich Cos. was facing a potential conflict-of-interest situation over the building of local jails in Ohio.

Despite the warning, the pressure from Hamilton and his associates was “never-ending,” Gilyard insists. For example, he says, at “a reception for all the Voinovich criminal justice people, Hamilton is bothering me again. Cooper’s coming over [to his office] every other two, three days. He’s calling me. He’s going on trips with me,” Gilyard recalls.

Both Cooper and Hamilton are on record denying having pressured Gilyard to receive jail construction grants and contracts.

In a memo to DeWine dated February 1, 1991, Gilyard outlined his problems with the initial meeting with Cooper, Hamilton, and his wife, Patricia Hamilton. According to Gilyard, the talk immediately turned to jail construction contracts and Gilyard said he felt he had to excuse himself. Gilyard said he believed the meeting “raised a significant question as to its propriety” since there was a 1987 Attorney General’s opinion that jail construction grants were state contracts and candidate George Voinovich had pledged that his brother Paul’s company would receive no state contracts.

Patricia Hamilton was soon thereafter appointed the chairperson of State Board of Personnel Review, the board that would later approve Gilyard’s ouster as director.

While others mulled the memo, Gilyard’s attention was drawn to Sheriff Earl Smith. In late March, early April, Gilyard began investigating allegations of impropriety surrounding Sheriff Smith’s Franklin County Drug Enforcement Network (DEN). Gilyard’s now-famous April 12, 1991 memo to DeWine basically summarized various allegations of illegal activity by DEN agents. DeWine froze the funding for the program and, Gilyard later claimed, ordered him to “destroy the memo.” The DEN missive-together with the February 1 memo-unwittingly set the stage for Gilyard’s later dismissal.

At about this time, Sharon Downs, an assistant deputy director of Administrative Services-and wife of John Downs, then-personnel director for Earl Smith and a protege of Voinovich transition director Hamilton-accessed a computer file on Gilyard’s personnel history. Prior to accepting his position, Gilyard had interviewed with Secretary of State Bob Taft’s office where he talked openly about a 1975 incident at Indian River School, a juvenile detention facility where he was fired from the staff and convicted for hitting a youth. The misdemeanor conviction was later overturned. Despite the fact that Gilyard made no secret of the incident, DeWine claimed that Gilyard had failed to disclose the incident during his background check and subsequently he fired Gilyard in July of 1991, even though he later conceded that he was aware of the 1975 incident when Gilyard was hired.

As Gilyard recalls, he was originally offered the job to protect DeWine because, like Mifsud, he was raised in the hardball political scene in Cleveland. Gilyard said he was told: “You were in Cleveland politics, and Mike’s afraid that those guys are going to eat him alive.” Gilyard claims that early on, Mifsud surrounded himself with ambitious “young Republicans….We used to call them ‘brown shirts’ like in Germany.” Politically, you couldn’t make any mistakes in dealing with Mifsud, according to Gilyard: “Mifsud would cut your throat off.”

In June, Smith, angered at Gilyard for freezing his drug task force funds, met with Mifsud about instituting a thaw. Smith gave Mifsud an investigation file on Gilyard. In a two-pronged strategy, Hamilton-who was on Smith’s payroll as a $1,000 a month management contractor-met with DeWine and offered to mediate the dispute between Smith and DeWine over task force funding.

In the meantime, pressure from Hamilton and Cooper mounted, Gilyard claims, adding that he felt compelled to approach Mifsud about the Voinovich Cos.’ apparent conflict of interest. He said he went early to a Cabinet meeting. “I said ‘Paul, you have to do something about this jail stuff….I’m telling him this story and literally…he put his hands over his ears like a little kid. ‘I don’t want to know, get away from me, stay away from me,’ and he ran around the Cabinet table to the other side and turned his back on me.”

Around the first of July, Paul Voinovich sent his brother 14 pages of material-including copies of Gilyard’s personnel history-with handwritten comments to the effect that there were problems with Gilyard. It was virtually the same package Smith had given Mifsud in June.

Gilyard had confronted Sheriff Smith about the allegations against the DEN agents. While Smith denied them and insisted that he get his funding back, both he and Gilyard have confirmed that, during the conversation, Smith made Gilyard aware of illegal campaign contributions that the trash haulers had made to the 1990 Voinovich campaign.

Gilyard claims Smith “sent a direct threat to the governor” to back off his drug task force, and immediately Smith began to crack down on overloaded garbage trucks in Franklin County. “Now, what actually happened was, when Earl had told me about the illegal campaign contributions, he actually was making trash trucks dump their trash in the city streets of Columbus. There’s pictures in the Dispatch. Nobody could understand why. I, of course, knew why, and I’m telling the governor and I’m telling these people why and Mifsud’s pooh-poohing me, although he knew better,” Gilyard explained.

In what even he describes as an end run to get to the governor the information about the activities of his brother Paul, Hamilton and Mifsud, Gilyard said he arranged a meeting with David B. Bailey, a Cleveland Republican Ward Committeeman and Voinovich confidante for over 30 years; and former Cuyahoga County Republican Party Chair, Robert Hughes.

Hughes, one of the state’s most powerful Republicans, had recently formed his own political consulting company. “We met with Hughes in Hughes’ basement. It was Hughes, Hughes’ wife, Bailey, my wife and myself. Bob took prodigious notes. Five pages of notes on a yellow pad. He agreed to see the governor, and I believe he made a phone call to Columbus that night,” recalled Gilyard.

Whether or not the governor got the information is unknown. Hughes died in November of 1991 under mysterious circumstances, the victim of carbon monoxide poisoning.

On July 15, 1991, Gilyard sent another troubling memo to DeWine questioning the propriety of the Voinovich Cos.’ lobbying efforts. Within a week, he was suspended and then fired by DeWine, who accused him of withholding information about the 1975 Indian River incident. DeWine also claimed that he hadn’t received any memo from Gilyard regarding the Voinovich Cos.’ intense lobbying efforts. Earl Smith had in the meantime filed theft-in-office charges against Gilyard.

On August 7, Curt Steiner, chief spokesman for Voinovich, stated that DeWine was aware of the 1975 Indian River incident when he first interviewed Gilyard in December. Late in August, a nearly 1,000-page Ohio Highway Patrol report substantially supported Gilyard’s claim that he had sought to repeatedly warn Mifsud of ethical problems.

A little more than a week after Gilyard’s departure, the Columbus Dispatch reported that, “Two well-connected Statehouse lobbyists- one with ties with Governor George V. Voinovich’s brother and another appointed by Voinovich to a state commission-helped clients land unbid contracts as part of a $350 million state bond issue.” Hamilton was the lobbyist for Goldman Sachs & Co., which, along with Lehman Brothers, received the unbid contracts to handle about $175 million in bond issues on behalf of the Ohio Housing Finance Agency.

On October 3, Franklin County Judge Richard Ferrell dismissed Smith’s charges against Gilyard, citing “no probably cause.” On October 18, after months denying its existence, DeWine turned over a copy of Gilyard’s July 15 memo, claiming that he had recently discovered it in a desk at his second home. DeWine dismissed Gilyard’s thoughtful memo as “a goofy, long narrative.” The memo remains a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the current contract-steering allegations against Mifsud.

After Hughes’ death in November 1991, the Ohio Ethics Commission-with new Voinovich appointees-ruled that it wasn’t a conflict of interest for the governor’s brother to take state jail construction funds.

One monument to the political machine that steamrolled over Gilyard stands in Franklin County: the renovated Franklin County jail, built in 1970 by Pringle and Pratt. According to former Sheriff Smith, now running again for his old job, the Voinovich Cos. originally did the architectural assessment for the renovation at the Franklin County jail. They were paid $75,000, and received another $18,000 for their estimate that the jail could be renovated for $2 million. The $2 million renovation has turned into an $11 million-plus project.

Smith said that the Voinovich Cos. recently renovated a kitchen at the jail that had already been renovated “down to leveling the floors” in 1990.

“There was no bid from the Voinovich Cos. They said that since the Voinovich Cos. had done the original architectural assessment, that constituted a bid,” Smith said.

The Ohio Republican Party has escalated its attacks on democracy on two key fronts.

It’s trying to steal a hotly contested Congressional seat. And it’s moving to restrict voting rights for coming elections.

In the bitterly embattled House race in central Ohio’s 15th Congressional District, Republican State Senator Steve Stivers has a slight lead over Franklin County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy.

Two years ago, Kilroy essentially defeated the previous incumbent, fourth-ranked House Republican Deborah Pryce. In an extremely tight race, a wide range of dubious voter eliminations and manipulated vote counts stole what appears to have been a clear victory from Kilroy. The GOP’s infamous J. Kenneth Blackwell was still Ohio’s Secretary of State. The Democrats declined to take him on, and the seat remained in Republican hands.

This year Ohio’s Secretary of State is Democrat Jennifer Brunner. It would appear Kilroy has won again.

But the Republicans are on their usual anti-voter attack. With the help of Matt Damshroeder, Deputy Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, the GOP has used a r