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Green Party To Columbus Dispatch (Uh Hello?) Media Lockout

Since that very important corporate newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, has decided that only Strickland and Blackwell’s opinions matter, I’m now forced as a duly certified candidate to ask myself the same questions in a spontaneous interview on the fraudbusterbob blog.

How important is religion in your life?
I try to live my faith…which is democracy, human rights and the Sermon on the Mount. I believe it will be difficult for J. Kenneth Blackwell to get into heaven, much like it was difficult for the camel to pass through the eye of a needle. I’m also quite fond of the socialism of the early Catholic Church in the Book of Acts. And, I also fight every day to save the poor baby Jesus from the warmongering greedhead clutches of Bush and Blackwell.

Do you apply your faith in office or in campaigning?
Sure. Democracy means trusting the people. I apply that faith every day and I hold true to my belief in a final judgment and just pray I’m present when God asks J. Kenneth why he oppressed “the least of our brothers and sisters” by canceling their votes because they hadn’t registered on 80 bond unwaxed white paper.

Can you cite any policies or votes that may have stemmed from your faith?
Well, I’m not in office, but most of my positions are based on faith. For example, I believe Jesus is the Prince of Peace, and hence would find Bush and Blackwell’s illegal war in Iraq reprehensible. I believe Jesus and I would be against torturing human beings as are the vast majority of people on the planet. Bush and his lackey Blackwell, see otherwise. The only marriage I would outlaw is the marriage of Church and State. And I believe the First Amendment protects Freedom of Religion and the Freedom From Religion – the rights of agnostics, atheists, humanists, and pagans.

Do you think America was founded as a Christian nation, is it now, and should it be?
Since the original founders of our country were the indigenous, pantheistic Native Americans, I would have to say no. As I recall, in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution says “We the people” not “We the Christian people.” Now, I know that some far-right evangelicals will tell you that the holy spirit of Christ descended on the founding fathers in Philadelphia in 1787, but I think anyone who reads the Constitution will come to the conclusion that it was founded by a group of wealthy, well-educated men – some who were slave holders – and that it wasn’t the Holy Spirit or God who told them to count slaves as 3/5ths of a person and not to outlaw the importing of slaves for at least 20 years. That sounds like the work of the devil, or at worst, politicians.

Are non-Christians religions true?
Is the Pope Catholic?
Which of the following statements comes closest to your view about the Bible?
#3 – that the Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man. I would disagree with this statement in that there were obviously women, like Ruth and others, who recorded things. Also, that the King James version is an incredible work of literature as well. All great radicals from Marx to Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas quoted the Bible. It has a prophetic quality and should inspire us to speak truth to power, and that’s a basic Old Testament concept of righteousness.

What is your position on evolution, intelligent design and science, and what should be taught in science classes?
Let me go out on a limb here – science should be taught in science classes. By that I mean that the scientific method that people can never have truth, but the best possible explanation given the existing data. Why would we teach intelligent design in our science classes? I believe in the separation of church and state. But, if they do allow intelligent design, I think you have to include them all, including the one about the Earth being on the back of a giant turtle and the ancient astronauts breeding with primates. I think any non-scientific faith-based explanation must be treated equally in a secular classroom.

Is homosexuality a sin and can gays be cured?
No and I’m laughing too hard to answer the second half of this question. I believe that people like Blackwell who see sexuality as a “choice” must have had a very strange pattern of sexual development as a youth. I don’t remember somewhere around puberty there being a “choice” day. Scientific studies show that the vast majority of people’s sexual orientation is set early in life and it’s not a choice or lifestyle. I do however, believe that eating pork, as in the Book of Leviticus, is a sin. And, I say this as a biased former owner of two noble tropical boars, including the legendary Iggy. So, if I’m going to spend my time, focusing on sin, look for me protesting at Bob Evans against the pig holocaust.

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IMMEDIATE UPCOMING COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP FORUM

Wednesday, July 19th, 7PM, Robert Fitrakis, Editor and Publisher of the Freepress and a practicing local attorney, Candidate for Governor, State of Ohio, will speak to the Community Leaders Forum on the topic,

“Will the Green Party Simply Be A Spoiler Factor in Ohio Politics?”

Many people are afraid that the Green Party in Ohio, as the Green Party nationally in the years 2000 and 2004, will this year, ruin the chances of the Democratic Party in Ohio to rebound from its many setbacks in state government elections in recent years.

Candidate Fitrakis will address this sensitive issue directly and head-on in a candid discussion of what is likely to happen in Ohio and nationally within the fall November state and national general elections. This forum is free and open to the broad Columbus community.

Well, this should be fun. But there’s really nothing like democracy, and democracy means trusting the people and being accountable, as a candidate for public office, for one’s actions. Since the Green Party and other independents have placed my name on the ballot as their candidate, I intend to explain the philosophy behind my candidacy as directly as possible. While I’ll go into much greater detail a week from today at the Unitarian Church, let me state the obvious.

Had the Democratic Party in Ohio and John Kerry campaign actually made good on their pledge to “count every vote” in 2004, I would not be running for governor in 2006. But that’s only one area where the Democratic Party has failed to provide a clear alternative. Remember, when an independent progressive candidate has done well, so have liberal Democrats like Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt.

But, more next Wednesday. Hope to see you there!

The Unitarian Church in Columbus is at

93 W. Weisheimer Rd.

Wednesday, July 19th, 7PM

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Blackwell Chooses A Flake

What do we make of the aptly named Rev. Floyd Flake, president of Wilberforce University, signing on as Ken Blackwell’s Co-Chair? First, the press release is one of the weirdest in gubernatorial history. Blackwell, a former Democrat, calls the former Democratic Congressman Flake an educator, a statesman and a national leader – ironically, all the things that Blackwell is not. Flake says that “Ken Blackwell’s the leader Ohio needs right now.” Well, I suppose with George Wallace and Mussolini dead, there’s a dearth of theocratic neo-fascist ultra-nationalists who repress minority votes, so why not elect Blackwell?

Flake goes on the say that Blackwell understands the challenges faced by institutions of higher education. Indeed, Blackwell’s higher education plan and his economic policies would make it even more challenging as he cuts aid to higher education. It’s not often you’ll see a reverend flat-out lying, but what else can you make out of the bizarre statement that “Ken Blackwell’s solid, proven leadership will get Ohio cities back on track”? I guess, if the track is hunger, homelessness, and catering to rich white suburbanites, Blackwell’s capable of that track. Kind of a retro-white-is-right track.

Blackwell and Flake are both members of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), a group of black self-proclaimed leaders who are funded primarily by white charities. This is an old tactic. W’s daddy, former CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush, hated the civil rights movement and was elected as an anti-civil rights Congressman in 1966. But, after white supremacy and racism were no longer in vogue in the 70s, Bush the Elder embraced the United Negro College Fund and pushed wealthy white donors in that direction.

Already Black activists have called for a boycott of Wilberforce and the resignation of Flake. Students at Wilberforce waited for hours to vote in the 2004 election at the historically black college. Blacks waited 4-7 hours to vote in Franklin County during the 2004 due to the directives of Blackwell.

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Another Sign Of Smiley-Faced Fascism

I marched in the Doo Dah Parade today in Columbus, Ohio; democracy requires dissent. And here’s where I dissent from W. Bush and his junta. Our founders held that people are born with certain “unalienable Rights” – among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have a Constitution with a Bill of Rights that protects us from “unreasonable search and seizure.” The Bush administration violates this daily with its warrantless searches of U.S. citizens. This is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime, not a constitutional republic with guaranteed rights.

  Our Bill of Rights guarantees that people won’t suffer “cruel and unusual punishment.” The Bush regime and its Attorney General embrace torture by redefining it. Remember when Alberto Gonzales wrote the memo saying that torture isn’t torture unless a major body organ fails. This is another sign of smiley-faced fascism. We rip your toenails out with pliers and claim it’s not torture. We shock your genitals with electricity and say it’s not torture. Finally, we have a regime that is every bit as imperialist and ruthless as the British empire early Americans rebelled against. The Bush junta adopts the same tactics as King George. His is a belief in an empire based on lies and full-scale occupation of whole countries.

We must resist the tyranny of the Bush regime and drive them from power, just as we drove the original King George from these shores.

The Green Party in the Doo Dah Parade marched for clean elections, peace, the environment and prosperity. Thanks to everyone who joined us!

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How We Got On The Ballot

Here’s a breakdown from the Secretary of State regarding the filing of the Fitrakis/Rios gubernatorial slate. We filed 1,199 petitions representing 81 of Ohio’s 88 counties. In Franklin County alone, my home, we filed 7,124 signatures. We also filed 1,283 in the Cleveland area (Cuyahoga County) and 757 signatures in the Cincinnati area (Hamilton County). We filed 322 in the Toledo area (Lucas County), Anita Rios’ home, and 163 in the Akron area (Summit County). We also filed 102 in Lorain County and 1071 in the Dayton area (Montgomery County). We did well in the college towns of Athens (Ohio U) with 111 and 244 in Greene County where Antioch College is in Yellow Springs. Major party candidates only have to file 1,000 signatures, but the bipartisan bluster of two effete corporate lapdog parties are in agreement that independents and third party candidates should have to file 5,000 valid signatures.

Overall, we filed 12,295 signatures and the Secretary of State approved 7,853. What these numbers show is that the Green Party has a massive and active grassroots network throughout the state of Ohio, due in no small part to the fact that they stood up for the rights of the voters when the Democratic Party faded away following the 2004 election. The Greens funded and initiated the recount, and my running mate for Lieutenant Governor, Anita Rios, was a plaintiff in many voting rights actions before the court.

Tim Kettler, Green Party candidate for Secretary of State also gained ballot status this week. Kettler was instrumental in forcing Coshocton County to recount all its ballots by hand in 2004, the only county in the state of Ohio to do so.

Once again I want to thank all my signature gatherers and those who signed. We look forward to building a real party of the people. I know some of you are concerned about the Greens playing a spoiler role, so I intend to ask Ted Strickland to drop out of the race, as suggested by blogger Andrew Warner, so a real progressive can run against Blackwell. But here’s another idea: why don’t all the candidates – Democratic, Republican, Green and Libertarian – debate openly in the series of public town hall meetings and let the people decide. Isn’t that what democracy is all about?

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Ohio: Between 44th and 46th in Education, A Schoolhouse Divided

When I first came to Ohio, the state’s higher education was ranked 37th among the 50 states, and that was under the Democratic administration of Dick Celeste. Under Voinovich, and now Taft, state aid to higher education has fallen – depending on who’s counting – between 44th and 46th. This makes Ohio the Mississippi of the Midwest. Even more dangerous in the new plan by J. Kenneth Blackwell to impose his “bumper sticker” solution to K-12 education in Ohio.

Instead of calling for the end of the war in Iraq or raising the taxes on the top 1% of the population in Ohio – don’t worry, this doesn’t include you – thus bringing more money into the Ohio school systems, Blackwell simply wants to reshuffle the deck with his so-called “65% solution.” This would end control by local school board who understand their districts, and instead require the boards to spend 65 cents on every dollar on classroom instruction.

This allows Blackwell to continue cutting taxes on Ohio’s wealthiest citizens while pretending to put more money into education. I have a book of writings on education in Ohio, particularly Columbus, entitled “A Schoolhouse Divided.” The problem with Ohio schools is that most of the central city schools are victims of race and class apartheid, where lily white suburban schools co-exist next to majority minority school districts like the Columbus Public Schools. In Columbus, with few exceptions, there’s been an agreement from both political parties to pretty much loot the system and steer contracts to political donors.

What’s needed more than ever is real school choice run by professional unionized teachers without crushing bureaucratic oversight. Every public school should be a school of choice. Every public school should have its own democratically and locally elected school board. A marketplace of economic techniques should flourish in the central cities. Large school buildings could easily be divided up by floor into two, three or four schools. Publish the results and let the parents choose.

Blackwell’s 65% solution is no solution. It’s a bumper sticker for children who can’t calculate 65%.

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Renew, Re-energize And Revive

Representatives of the Blue-Green Alliance were in Columbus Wednesday preaching the gospel of good jobs, a clean environment and a safer world. The Alliance is a partnership between the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club. As they say, “Historic times demand historic responses.” The Alliance offers “visionary solutions” understanding that the new jobs must come, not from the race to the bottom to be the filthiest society, but from embracing new clean technology that creates jobs for the 21st century.

The reality is that creating a green environment and curbing greenhouse gases will create a generation of new high-tech domestic manufacturing jobs. Synergetically, these jobs will make our planet more sustainable and healthy by reducing global warming and cleaning our air. There’s at least a generation of work for steelworkers and other laborers by rebuilding our public transportation system and creating new solar and wind powered energy systems. The Alliance estimates that a commitment to green technology would create more than 1.4 million new well-paying jobs.

Currently, Bush, Blackwell and the Republican Party aided by their junior partners the New Democrats, embrace reactionary free trade policy that promotes environmental destruction and worker degradation. The trade policy not only produces toxics, but is poison to the vast majority of people on this planet.

The debate in this year’s Ohio gubernatorial election should be how we can both create a greener Ohio and produce new high-tech jobs. The Blue-Green Alliance understands that and they understand the need to create renewable energies, re-energized “cool cities,” and revive the American Dream.

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Ted Strickland In Gay Pride Parade?

I didn’t get a chance to blog over the weekend. I was busy volunteering at the Community Festival in Columbus, Ohio at Goodale Park. I also did a little campaigning. On Saturday, Tim Kettler, Green Party candidate for Secretary of State, and I, marched in the gay pride parade between the Peace Pride contingent and the Stolen Election float. Our banner read: Fitrakis-Rios-Kettler for Clean Elections – fraudbusterbob.com.

The Gay Pride Parade is clearly the largest march in Columbus each year. It looked like 100,000 or so marchers and spectators. It’s hard to call them spectators because they are so active in their participation as they line the route.

Back when the Franklin County Democratic Party had a progressive wing, I managed the campaign of then-very young Tom Erney for Congress in the 22nd district. He, by the way, got 41% of the vote and only spent $17,000. I later wrote a paper for the American Political Science Association entitled “Waging Guerrilla War in the Heartland.”

One of the things that Erney did was become the first politician to accept the endorsement of Stonewall Union – the gay activist organization. I remember some labor voters thinking we got the endorsement of the bricklayers union. In 1991, I was working high up in the campaigns of two Democratic women, and they became the first candidates to march in the gay pride parade. They were Ann Taylor for Municipal Judge and Mary Jo Kilroy for School Board. We were warned that it was the kiss of death to march in the gay pride parade. When both of them won in upsets over incumbents, suddenly many of the local Dems wanted to march in the gay pride parade.

In fact, one of my fondest memories is from 1992 was watching sheriff candidate Big Jim Karnes schmooze in the gay bars with other Democratic candidates. What I noticed this year, sadly, in the aftermath of the Issue One debacle (making gay marriage illegal in Ohio) and the emboldened Ken Hackwell homophobes, few political candidates marched in the parade this year. When I was marching, I didn’t see ANY. While Lee Fisher addressed the march before it began, I didn’t see him on the route. Hopefully, I’m wrong here. I was hoping Ted Strickland was there, but I didn’t see him either. There’s nothing I’d rather do than debate Strickland and Hackwell at Stonewall Union.

As for me, I believe that the state should sanction gay marriage under equal protection, just as I believe that it’s up to each individual church to decide who marries in their church, under the First Amendment.

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Inconvenient Truths

Ohio lags behind the states of the northeast in our commitment to clean energy. By November 15, 2004, nine Northeastern US states – Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania – committed to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) RGGI. These states established emission capping and trading programs to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions.

As governor, I will make sure that Ohio joins these states, as well as California and Oregon, in embracing the Kyoto Protocol in reducing greenhouse gases. Already, four cities in Ohio support the Kyoto Protocol: Brooklyn, Dayton, Garfield Heights, and Toledo. It’s a shame that none of Ohio’s three major cities, Columbus-Cincinnati-Cleveland, have adopted this position. 

Democrat Ted Strickland has made apolitical decision to support what he calls “clean coal technologies.” This makes political sense given that he currently represents coal-mining regions of Ohio as a U.S. representative. Environmentally, his plan is unsound. First, the gasification of coal, of course, involves coal mining which is and remains an environmental nightmare – rubblizing hills, destroying forests, and polluting watersheds, rivers and streams. Also, coal gasification is a largely untested and unproven technology and the cost will be astronomical. It’s actually more expensive than dirty coal and far more expensive than wind and solar energy. Coal gasification will be a major pork-barrel project by the government. Sure, contractors and contributors to Strickland will get rich off these contracts, but it will do nothing to improve the environment of Ohio in the long run. Capturing huge amounts of CO2 gas and pumping it back into the earth on a long-term basis is what makes “clean coal” clean. The capturing of CO2 gas, which is both technically feasible and plausible, still raises the question of the viability of underground storage systems.

So, what Strickland is offering is an incredibly expensive, political solution that will cost more than solar and wind energy and one that will destroy our hills and valleys. Instead, every public building that is built in the state of Ohio should be a green building. We should be integrating green landscaping into every construction project as well as solar panels and fuel efficient power systems that can sell energy to surrounding communities. As a Green, I seek real environmental solutions, not politically expedient solutions that are designed to please special interests.

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Grassroots Green Activism

In “An Inconvenient Truth,” former Vice President Al Gore tells us that we only have a decade to turn around the destruction by global warming to our planet. What we would be entering into has been called “the birth of death” if we continue in our non-sustainable ways. The only way to clean up Ohio, one of the most polluted states in the country – with Columbus recently voted the least sustainable major city – is to elect a governor who is a real Green. Not one who has his photo taken in a canoe or who claims to be Green. I’ve been deeply involved in the environmental movement since the 1970s when I was an undergraduate. Let me briefly recap my actual grassroots Green activist experience.

As an undergraduate, I followed nuclear waste trucks from a plant in Traverse City, Michigan as part of a report on safety and security for PIRG and I also collected signatures to put a bottle bill on the ballot. In the last 20 years, I’ve engaged in a lot of grassroots campaigns and investigative reporting that directly challenged the corporate polluters:

  • I exposed Battelle’s hidden radioactive and toxic waste site at the King Avenue location and fought it from being located on the Olentangy River with the help of local activist Tim Wagner
  • I investigated and worked against the so-called “Mobile Chernobyl” with environmentalist Joanne Phillips when Governor Voinovich attempted to make Ohio the Midwest radioactive waste site
  • I investigated and exposed criminal activity in Hilliard, where elementary school children were having their lungs scarred by illegal toxic fumes
  • With Harvey Wasserman, I investigated Columbus’ notorious trash burning power plant and worked with area citizens such as Theresa Mills, Stan and Sherri Loscko and Ohio Environmental Council Directory Rick Sahli. We fought against it for a year until we prevailed and it was shut down
  • I exposed radioactive material from old nuclear missiles in a junkyard in Mansfield, Ohio
  • I also reported on the coal company’s plans to mine under Dysart Woods and destroy Ohio’s last strand of old growth trees, working with tireless activist Chad Kister
  • I investigated and exposed the radioactivity in Marion, Ohio that was being covered up by government officials. As a result of that reporting for Columbus Alive, in 2001, the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists voted me the best environmental writer in the state. The article is included in “The Fitrakis Files: Spooks, Nukes and Nazis” that exposes the underbelly of corruption in the state

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