MARCH 22
This Land is Our Land: The Fight to Reclaim the Commons
“You’ll never be the same after watching the mind-opening film This Land is Your Land because you will see the diverse wealth — the commonwealth — that you own with other Americans, how it has been seized, despoiled and corporatized. But you all still own these immense public assets and you can regain control of them for now and for posterity. David Bollier has outdone himself once again!” ~ Ralph Nader
For more than three decades, transnational corporations have been busy buying up what used to be known as the commons — everything from our forests and our oceans to our broadcast airwaves and our most important intellectual and cultural works. In This Land is Our Land, acclaimed author David Bollier, a leading figure in the global movement to reclaim the commons, bucks the rising tide of anti-government extremism and free market ideology to show how commercial interests are undermining our collective interests. Placing the commons squarely within the American tradition of community engagement and the free exchange of ideas and information, Bollier shows how a bold new international movement steeped in democratic principles is trying to reclaim our common wealth by modeling practical alternatives to the restrictive monopoly powers of corporate elites. / co-sponsored by DSCO.
Each movie begins at 7:30PM, followed by discussion
Drexel Theater 2254 E. Main Street, Bexley
Co-sponsored by the Drexel Theater, Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and the Film Council of Columbus
253-2571, truth@freepress.org

Crypto-Facism, mediocrity and the mindset of Ohio Governor Kasich

Every huge media business requires contracts to operate but to deny unions this privilege is hypocritical and furthering oppression of the poor and middle class.

1st Free Press Express Publication

Second Saturday Salon
with the Free Press
Special Musical Guest Angela Perley!

Saturday, March 12, 2011
6:30-11pm
1021 E. Broad St., Columbus
East side door, parking in rear parking lot

Join local progressive community activists for food, drink, music, art, and networking. Discussion of SB 5.

truth@freepress.org
253-2571

Bob Fitrakis
March 6, 2011

Senator Sherrod Brown apologized after giving a speech on the Senate floor March 4 where he stated the obvious, that Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Egyptian President Mubarak all crushed independent labor unions. No need to apologize, Senator Brown. The Republicans never do, as they endorse the policies of union busters. The only thing, Senator, you should be mildly chagrined about, is failing to point out Ohio Governor John Kasich and Wisconsin Governor Walker’s similarities to Mussolini’s fascism.

As Kasich takes money from the new corporate robber barons – the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch – let’s quote Mussolini directly: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Kasich has just won his battle to privatize economic development in Ohio. Again the more accurate word would be “corporatize.”

The tyrants of the Left and Right like Stalin and Hitler had to destroy trade unionism in order to create totalitarian governments. Independent labor unions are an essential countervailing power in a democratic society. Unions allow people – be they police officers, firefighters, teachers, janitors, or auto workers – to organize and bargain collectively around their own economic interests.

Senator, you are absolutely correct that Hitler destroyed the trade unions in order to destroy democracy. When the general elections for the Reichstag of March 5, 1933 gave Hitler’s Nazi Party only 33% of the vote and his rightwing coalition government a slim majority, Hitler went after his political opponents. His brownshirt Nazi thugs destroyed the trade union association ADGB (Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) on May 2, 1933. They simply stormed union facilities, arrested and imprisoned union leaders. Other key trade unions were forced to merge into the Hitler-controlled German Labor Front.

So, first they come for the trade unionists because the labor notion of solidarity includes all people, regardless of race, creed, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, and age. Before Hitler could lock up the Jews, gypsies, gays and others, he had to shatter the one organization that sings and believes in the song “Solidarity Forever.” The unions must be destroyed because they know that “an injury to one is an injury to all” and they demand the same rights of contract protected in the U.S. Constitution and essential to corporate business. They know that united, they bargain for wages, salaries and working conditions, and that disunited they beg.

Kasich, Walker and the Koch brothers idolize a world wherein unnatural persons (corporations) control the state. This is the dream of Mussolini. It should not escape us that Kasich, Walker and the Koch brothers hate liberalism and the ideas of tolerance and reason that it has historically promoted. Let us again quote Mussolini directly: “Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposite to the doctrines of liberalism.”

If we look realistically upon what is happening in our nation – the attacks on liberalism, intolerance, imperialist occupation of Iraq, the endless war over oil in Afghanistan, a military greater in firepower than Hitler’s in 1939 according to the New York Times – why not call it what it is. Fascism.

Sure we can quibble, Senator Brown, and use Bertram Gross’s term “friendly fascism.” Writing in 1980, Gross, who had worked for the U.S. government, noted that “in the United States, it points towards more concentrated, unscrupulous, repressive, and militaristic control by a big business-big government partnership….” It exists, and “…squelches the rights and liberties of other people both at home and abroad. That is friendly fascism.”

The parallels between Kasich, who received less than a majority of the vote, and Mussolini and Hitler are all too clear. Take your meager mandate and smash the only countervailing power that middle class people have – their trade union organizations. Kasich has spent a lifetime serving wealthy and secretive interests. Earlier in his career Richard Nixon and Rev. Moon, two shadowy, paranoid figures – one willing to do anything to be president and one claiming to be the Messiah. Later in his career, Kasich served Rupert Murdoch at News Corp and the firm of Lehman Brothers which sold junk assets and made billions and helped destroy the U.S. economy before going out of business.

I think I have a reasonable compromise for Sen. Brown: agree to apologize for your references to Hitler and Stalin when Kasich agrees to quit acting like them or stop thinking he’s the reincarnation of Mussolini. Kasich’s actions are those of a fascist movement.


Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press and ran against Kasich for Congress in 1992. Originally published by https://freepress.org.

Join Bob and Suzanne this Saturday for a
Native American Indian Center fund-raising dinner
Saturday March 5 from 5-8pm

Taco dinner $6, Drinks $1

67 E. Innis
South of German Village, just east of High Street
443-6120

Dr. Bob, Connie discuss some and host Steve Dodge, local musician/comedian, The Devil.
http://www.wcrsfm.org/audio/download/1328/fight_back_steve3.mp3

Thank You www.WCRSfm.org!
Power to Low Power FM! Right On!

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
March 3, 2011

The national corporate campaign to destroy America’s public sector unions has drawn first blood in Ohio.

But a counter-attack centered on one or more statewide initiatives or constitutional amendments has become highly likely.

While thousands of protestors chanted, spoke and sang inside and outside the statehouse for the past two weeks (SB 5 Rally), the Ohio Senate voted 17-16 on Senate Bill 5, a bill that will slash collective bargaining for state workers by banning strikes and giving local officials the right to settle disputes. The bill, among other things, also eliminates all paid sick days from teachers.

The vote came amid shouts of “shame on you” and widespread booing from the diverse crowd of teachers, police, firefighters, construction workers, state employees and more.

The bill decimates a legal framework in place since 1983. The vote was surprisingly close as six Republicans joined ten Democrats in opposition. The seventeen yes voters were all Republicans.

In order to vote the bill out of committee, Republican Senate President Tom Niehaus had to remove two key Republican senators who opposed the bill from crucial committees. Both Senators Scott Oelslager of Canton and Bill Seitz of Cincinnati were yanked from their posts. The removal of Seitz broke a committee stalemate and allowed the bill to come to the floor with a 7-5 vote.

Ultra-conservative Senator Timothy Grendell of rural Chesterland, Ohio demounced the bill as “unconstitutional” pointing out that it prohibits union members from talking with elected public officials during negotiations and labels such activity as an unfair labor practice. Seitz echoed this theme: “It’s an unfair labor practice if they exercise their First Amendment right to call up their Councilman.”

The bill now goes to the Ohio House, where it is fast-tracked and anticipated to pass by mid-March. In the House, the passage is being orchestrated by House Speaker Bill Batchelder. The

Free Press has reported in the past of Batchelder’s ties to the secretive Council for National Policy.


Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates describes CNP members as not only traditional conservatives, but also nativists, xenophobes, white racial supremacists, homophobes, sexists, militarists, authoritarians, reactionaries and “in some cases outright neo-fascists.”

The Democrats do not hold enough seats in either house to deny the GOP a quorum, as is being done in Wisconsin and Indiana.

Ohio’s multi-millonaire Governor John Kasich, who got rich selling junk assets as a managing partner for Lehman Brothers to public pensions in Ohio, will sign the bill as soon as he gets it. Kasich was selected last November with a large last-minute contribution from Rupert Murdoch. Kasich is also a former Fox news commentator, who emerged in Ohio politics as one of Richard Nixon’s freshly-scrubbed youth and was initially supported by followers of Reverend Moon.

Kasich has blamed budget problems on state workers. But a rich person’s repeal of Ohio’s estate tax has cost the state a long-standing multi-million-dollar revenue stream. Like Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Kasich also has rejected a big federal grant ($400 million) to upgrade the state’s passenger rail system, which would have created at least a thousand direct jobs and thousands more indirectly, along with a jump in state tax revenue.

Kasich meanwhile has given his chief of staff a substantial pay hike over that his predecessor. He has hired at least four commissioners to sit on a “job creation” panel with annual salaries of roughly $150,000 each. The commission has been structured to operate without formal accountability to the legislature or taxpayers of the state. Kasich has already succeeded in privatizing the state’s department of development.

Kasich tried to ban the media and the public from his inauguration. He has warned opponents that they had better “get on the bus or get run over by the bus.”

Unlike Wisconsin, Ohio has no recall law. The only apparent route to overturning this union-busting legislation may be with a statewide initiative or a constitutional amendment. As the statehouse filled with union protestors, talk spread of how and when that might be done.

Polls are showing overwhelming support for public workers, in part due to the blatant attack on Ohio’s police and firefighters who are now barred from negotiating on safety issues. The bill bans binding arbitration used in the past to settle negotiations, and instead allows management to pick the settlement it wants.

Ohioans may also consider a constitutional amendment to guarantee hand-counted paper ballots. Electronic voting is dominated here by the successor to the Ohio-based Diebold corporation and the ES&S corporation, and other Republican-controlled voting machine companies. The privatization of Ohio’s voting and voter registration rolls corresponded with a 5.4% shift to the Republican Party not predicted by the exit polls in the 2010 election. Exit polls showed Kasich losing the election.

Overall the architectural map of the Ohio election system appears to give private voting companies contracted to the Secretary of State’s office—currently headed by John Husted, a Republican—the ability to electronically select state office winners in a matter of a few minutes on election night. Husted has already introduced legislation to restrict voting rights through demands for photo ID and other measures aimed at students, the elderly, poor and other Democrat-leaning citizens. Without universal voter registration and hand-counted paper ballots, the Ohio Democratic party has little chance of winning statewide office for the foreseeable future, or of turning back legislative union busting.

Key to the national corporate strategy now playing itself out in Ohio is the destruction of the Democratic Party’s traditional base. It is also about trashing teachers, firefighters, police and other citizens who choose to work for the general good rather than individual profit. As Nina Turner, a Senate Democrat told the New York Times, “This bill seeks to vilify our public employees and turn what used to be the virtue of public service into a crime.”

It’s widely believed Kasich will next assault Ohio’s pubic school system, whose funding mechanisms have been repeatedly ruled unconstitutional by state courts. Kasich is a cheerleader for private charter schools. The GOP is expected to push a voucher program that would use taxpayer money to subsidize private schools for the rich.

David Brennan, owner of White Hat Management, a chain of private charter schools, has consisting been the leading donor to the Ohio Republican candidates. Former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray filed a legal complaint against Brennan alleging that “White Hat’s management agreements with the schools are invalid because the public charter schools handed over nearly all funding – 96 percent – to White Hat and were given essentially no accountability or transparency as to how the funds were spent.”

Kasich and the GOP have already moved to gut environmental regulations and turn the state’s park system over to corporate extractors. He is also expected to attack legislation mandating advances in renewable energy while pushing for a new nuclear plant to be built in southern Ohio by corporations poised to cash in on massive federal subsidies being proposed by President Obama (Nuke giveaway).

While the mood of demonstrators yesterday at the statehouse was angry and defiant, there are no illusions about the stakes in this battle. Governor Kasich and his wholly owned Republican legislature are born of unlimited Citizens United corporate cash and rigged electronic voting machines.

It’s thus no surprise that the first serious blood drawn in this latest corporate campaigns to finally wipe labor unions off the American map has come in the Buckeye State.

The question now: can the unions effectively fight back, in Ohio and nationwide?


Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection at https://freepress.org/store.php, where Bob’s Fitrakis Files books appear. Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States is at https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/harvey-wasserman’s-history-of-the-united-states/. Originally published by http://www.freepress.org

Bob Fitrakis and Connie Gadell-Newton – Interview with Sean Plaskett, Poet
Talking to OSU graduate Sean Plaskett about his poetry.

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
February 21, 2011

The escalating confrontations in Wisconsin and Ohio are ultimately about preventing the United States from becoming a full-on fascist state.

The stakes could not be higher—or more clear.

As defined by its inventor, Benito Mussolini, fascism is “corporate control of the state.” There are ways to beat around the Bush—Paul Krugman has recently written about “oligarchy”—but it’s time to end all illusions and call what we now confront by its true name.

The fights in Wisconsin, Ohio, and in numerous other states are about saving the last shreds of American democracy. They burn down to five basic realities:

1) The bulwark of modern democracy is the trade union. This has been true since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. All social programs can trace their roots to union activism, as can the protection of our civil liberties.

The first Germans Hitler put in concentration camps were neither Jews nor gypsies—they were trade unionists.

The attacks on state workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere have nothing to do with balancing budgets. That could easily be done without destroying collective bargaining.

For the hard-right, this is about busting unions, the last organized force standing in the way of total corporate control of the United States by the rich and richer.

2) The material essence of fascism is the extreme separation of rich and poor, a massive transfer of wealth from those on the bottom to those on the top.

The unbalanced budgets in Ohio and Wisconsin are rooted in huge tax cuts given to the rich at the expense of the middle and lower classes. Widespread poverty among those who might otherwise rebel is essential to fascist control of a government.

A largely ignored aspect of this fight is the hundreds of billions of dollars currently locked up in union, government and Social Security pension funds. With unions destroyed, this huge cache of dollars will fall quickly into corporate hands. The additional “benefit” for the financial elite will be tens of millions of impoverished elders desperate for low-wage jobs in virtual slave labor situations.

3) The crisis crippling states everywhere is directly related to the massive destruction of social resources by war. Since the end of the New Deal and World War II, the American elite have engineered the biggest dump of material wealth by military means in human history.

The trillions of dollars of pure martial waste poured into the Cold War and those in Southeast Asia, central America, the Middle East, Southwest Asia and elsewhere could easily have clothed, housed, fed, educated, and provided otherwise decent lives for all human beings the world over.

Instead, poverty, desperation and stratification have been guaranteed.

The entire economic crisis now gripping the United States can be directly traced to the military budget, which exceeds the sum of what’s being spent by all other nations combined. In a brilliant recent column, Robert Greenwald points out that the entire alleged shortfall in Wisconsin could be covered by bringing just 180 troops home from Afghanistan.

But the purpose of that deployment is to undermine national security, not to protect it. A frightened, impoverished, insecure nation is one dependent on its fascist elite.

Democracy demands and protects true material security among the people as a whole. That’s what’s really at stake in the battle to cut the military budget. The fights in Ohio and Wisconsin are surface manifestations of that bigger battle.

4) Mussolini also made it clear that corporate control of the media is essential to fascist rule. Whoever would seize power first took the radio stations, then the television stations. Now the internet is under attack. The free flow of information is fascism’s ultimate enemy.

So the relentless Foxist portrayal of the battles in Wisconsin and Ohio as pitting “responsible, austerity-minded” governors versus “lazy, irresponsible state workers” is utterly predictable.

So is the appearance of the media-created Tea Party “movement” on the side of the corporations. It’s standard corporate procedure to invent a faux “grassroots” to fight unions and working people. So finding phony corporate “populists” like Sarah Palin and New Jersey’s Chris Christie in the right-wing media limelight is utterly predictable.

5) It is no accident that the “job loving” union-hating governors of Wisconsin and Ohio (along with Florida) have rejected billions in federal funds for re-building passenger rail service that would create thousands of jobs.

A corporate state relies on central of energy. Rail service threatens the power of the oil and auto lobbies. Renewable energy would replace centralized fossil/nuclear sources with decentralized solar panels, bio-fuels, windmills, increased efficiency and the like. The push for federal nuclear loan guarantees is central to the corporate state.

The anti-union governor of Ohio is strongly focused on killing not only train service but all incentives for renewable energy. His energy plan is for extreme right-wing nuke-based monopolies like FirstEnergy to run the show. Atomic power is the ultimate weapon against community control.

For decades the term “fascist” has been dismissed from use in this country, and perhaps rightly so. Corporations have been dominant in the US since the 1880s, but we have managed to maintain a modicum of democracy.

It’s hard to see that happening if the remnants of the organized labor movement are crushed in Wisconsin and Ohio. Both states have long, important traditions of union activism.

In the wake of Citizens United, with the courts, media, Congress and presidency firmly in corporate control, we see no easy road to victory for working people.

“Vote the bastards out” has become a pipedream in the age of electronic voting machines. Especially in Ohio, a reliable electoral vote count is a thing of the past.

We also have a president who was elected with strong labor support and who is now genuflecting toward the unions. But US history is filled with Democrats who have betrayed their working-class backers, and this one may prove no exception.

So in the long run, we have only ourselves to rely on. The way to survival is not clear.

Ultimately, as Martin Luther King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

But from time to time, it does break. If these uprisings in Wisconsin and Ohio fail, there will—literally—be hell to pay.

Somehow, we must find a way to make sure they don’t.


Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, which are at www.freepress.org, where Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES also appear. HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE US is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH. Originally published by https://freepress.org.

Ohio Rally Against Senate Bill 5

Tuesday, February 22, 2011, starting at 1:00 p.m. and continuing into the evening there will be a massive rally at the Statehouse to oppose Senate Bill 5. Members and supporters are requested to stop by the OEA Building at 225 E. Broad St., Columbus, Ohio 43215 on Tuesday starting at 12:00 noon to pick up signs, updated talking points and instructions before heading over to the Statehouse. The rally is expected to gear up at 1pm. Click here to RSVP for this event!

The Senate Insurance, Commerce and Labor Committee considering SB 5 just published the hearing schedule, which will start at 4pm. In order to most fully organize and mobilize in opposition to this bill, we have decided, along with our community and labor coalition partners, to stage this rally starting at 1pm and running into Tuesday night. If you are unable to come during the day Tuesday, please plan to come to Columbus after school on Tuesday, stopping by the OEA first and then on to the Statehouse. This is an all-hands-on-deck week coming up, so please talk with your colleagues, neighbors and friends and bring them with you on Tuesday!

Please begin sharing this information and helping our members organize a tremendous turnout on Tuesday. While we do not know when the hearing will end, we do expect significant media attention all day Tuesday and into the evening. We need to demonstrate that all of Ohio is opposed to this bill. RSVP’s are helpful, but not required. We encourage you to continue to make your voice heard and contact your legislators about your opposition to Senate Bill 5.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2011
7:30PM

Free Press Free Film Night

THE POLITICAL PROSECUTIONS OF KARL ROVE
by Project Save Justice

In the hands of renowned filmmaker John McTiernan, director of the Hollywood blockbusters, Predator, The Hunt for Red October, and the Die Hard trilogy, The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove offers a documented record of the pervasive misuse of the Justice Department. Sadly, as the film documents, Democrats were targeted at all levels of the system and in many states across the country. The film reveals startling evidence supporting the use of the U.S. Department of Justice to create a permanent Republican majority. In fact, statistics show that in the 15 months leading up to the 2008 general election, indictments of elected Democrats increased by nearly 50%. The soul-stirring documentary offers convincing evidence to indicate that a vigorous and comprehensive strategy was pursued toattack lower levels of the Democratic Party designed to completely uproot and undermine any challenges to Republican political power.

Brought to you by the Free Press, the Drexel Theater, and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund.
Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St. Bexley
truth@freepress.org
253-2571