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Fight Back: Health Care Reform Kurt Bateman, Solartopia Podcasts

Bob’s topic this week: Health Care Reform with Kurt Bateman, SPAN Ohio
Listen and call in this Wednesday July 13 from 7 – 8 PM
Call 877-932-9766

Kurt Bateman, a native of Ohio, has worked for the Ohio Healthy Families Act, an initiative petition campaign to enable workers to earn paid sick days and is currently the state director of SPAN (Single Payer Action Network) as director of the Ohio effort to gain passage of The Health Care For All Ohioans Act.

We need to hear from you — if you have a story about a health care dilemma and comments/questions on health care.

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Also, join Harvey “No Nukes” Wasserman
for THE NUCLEAR DELUSION!
LIVE with Rex Weyler of Greenpeace & Roy Morrison of the Clamshell Alliance
Wednesday, 8pm EST at www.talktainmentradio.com

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Here’s how to call in to the LIVE INTERNET radio show:
(on your computer – not on your broadcast radio dial)
On Wednesday nights at 7:00 pm
Go to: http://talktainmentradio.com
Click on “Listen Live”
Call 877-932-9766

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Fight Back Call In: Kasich Budget With Brian Rothenberg

Listen to Fight Back! Talktainmentradio.com radio show this Wednesday
July 6 – 7pm
Bob discusses the Kasich budget and the future of Ohio
with
Brian Rothenberg of ProgressOhio, an organization that has sued Governonr Kasich

Here’s how to call in to the LIVE INTERNET radio show:
(on your computer – not on your broadcast radio dial)
On Wednesday nights at 7:00 pm
Go to: http://talktainmentradio.com
Click on “Listen Live”
Bob’s program “Fight Back!” will be on
Call 877-932-9766

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John Kasich: The New York Times Smooth Operator

by Bob Fitrakis
July 4, 2011

You would never know it after reading the July 2, 2011 puff piece “In Ohio, a new Governor is off to a smooth start,” but Governor John Kasich is already on the ropes. In the Times’ analysis, the passage of Kasich’s controversial budget “…has been about as smooth as a knife through butter.”

In reality, Kasich is a founding member of the “gaffe of the week” club. His budget is based on busting all the public employee unions in the state of Ohio and began with the supposed savings Kasich cited in the union-busting Senate Bill 5. The bill not only went after state employees, public school teachers, and professors, but also attacked police and firemen. In a gaffe that went around the Buckeye state, Kasich justified union-busting by calling a police officer who gave him a traffic ticket “an idiot.”

Soon after that, during a speech in Cleveland, Ohio, Kasich pronounced himself a fan of the Cleveland Browns’ arch-rival, the Pittsburgh Steelers. After trying to get himself sworn-in secretly and refusing to live in the governor’s mansion, Kasich recently announced he will not honor the long-held tradition of the Ohio governor sleeping overnight in a barn at the Ohio State Fair.

When workers and their supporters gathered $1.3 million signatures to repeal Senate Bill 5, half a million more signatures than ever submitted for an Ohio initiative, Kasich stuck to the analysis that his budget will save the state.

Kasich emerged as a freshly-scrubbed Nixon supporter in the 1972 election after moving from Pennsylvania to attend Ohio State University. He parlayed his connections to Nixon and to Nixon supporter and cult-figure Reverend Moon into an internship at the Ohio legislature. His next step was from intern to hired staff, where he earned a reputation for being both volatile and lazy.

He had the good fortune, however, to run for state senator in a suburban district during the Reagan landslide of 1980. The ever-ambitious Kasich next ran for U.S. Congress against incumbent one-term representative Bob Shamansky. Good fortune again smiled on Kasich when legendary Ohio House Speaker Vern Riffe had the district re-drawn to favor Republican candidates because Shamansky failed to endorse Gov. Dick Celeste in the Democratic primary.

Kasich lorded over the gerrymandered 12th district in Ohio for nearly two decades. The district included the Republican stronghold Delaware County as well as the heavily Republican Licking County, thrown in with the east side of Columbus and the eastern suburbs, including Westerville, where he still lives.

After a disastrous bid for president, Kasich took a turn bloviating on Fox News and took another turn ripping off stockholders with Lehman Brothers. He sold $400 million in junk assets into the State Teachers pension fund just prior to Lehman Brothers going belly up. This has not stopped him as governor from attacking the teacher’s union for making bad investments and not being solvent. Despite the fact that teachers gave back $11 billion to make their fund solvent, Kasich has demanded 2% morec of their salaries in his budget.

Kasich ran for Ohio governor backed by the Republican Governors’ Association and Rupert Murdoch. Exit polls in his gubernatorial election showed that he actually lost by 2.7%.

Kasich’s most recent approval numbers show 33% approval and 56% disapproval, tying him with Florida governor Rick Scott as the worst in the nation.

An analysis of Kasich’s budget shows the standard Republican tax cuts to the wealthy followed by cuts to public schools and local governments. It also includes huge handouts to Republican-connected corporations.

In April, Kasich gave Diebold a $56 million package of grants, tax credits and loans to keep its headquarters in Ohio. Diebold made national news in the 2004 Ohio presidential election when its then-CEO Wally O’Dell pledged to deliver Ohio’s electoral vote to George W. Bush. This was no idle promise since much of Ohio’s vote was tallied and counted on Diebold computers and their GEMS software. The software is proprietary and secret.

Kasich also gave the Bob Evans restaurant company a $7.8 million incentive package to move its headquarters out of Columbus into the wealthy suburb of New Albany, well-known as being created by Ohio’s only billionaire Les Wexner. In the Bob Evans case, he cited population losses in cities like Columbus as the reason for the incentive package.

Lost on Kasich was the fact that Columbus had added nearly 155,000 residencies in the last 20 years, according to the U.S. Census. Kasich has always taken the Reagan approach on facts: “Facts are stupid things,” as Reagan said.

At the same time he was giving the wealthy Bob Evans owners nearly a $8 million welfare check, he was attacking public workers for having decent benefits when a waitress at Bob Evans had “shabby at best” health care benefits and no pension.

Here’s an analysis of Kasich’s budget:

• In order to fill an $8 billion budget deficit, Kasich extended a 4.2% income tax cut.
• Kasich’s budget cut $640 million from local government and $700 million from Ohio schools.
• Despite massive problems with Correction Corporations of America, a private prison company in Ohio, Kasich is putting 6 state prisons up for sale.
• The Kasich administration also plans to lease the Ohio turnpike, a 241-mile toll road in northern Ohio. Kasich began his term by refusing $400 million of federal money for passenger rail service from Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati. Columbus, Ohio, the nation’s 15th largest city has not had passenger rail service since 1979.
• Kasich cut state Medicaid payments to nursing homes by 6% and initiated new rules that lift the requirement that each nursing home room has access to a bathtub or shower (hey – it works in the Ohio State University dorms).
• Kasich will lease Ohio’s wholesale liquor operations to the so-called JobsOhio. Thus, he will be able to take credit for creating jobs when the state workers go from being public workers to private workers without any real net job gain.
• Kasich, of course, slashed funding to the Ohio Consumer Council and banned it from operating a call center to take consumer complaints and inform people of their rights against utility companies.
• Kasich’s budget also provides heavy subsidies to charter schools increasing the number of vouchers paid by the state from 14,000 to 60,000 by the 2012-13 school year.
• Kasich’s budget eliminates the seniority system for teachers in determining layoffs. Any new and cheaper teacher with a better evaluation will be kept over a higher-priced senior teacher.
• Senate Bill 5, which was passed in conjunction with the budget, eliminated all unions for public college and university professors.
• His budget also prohibits municipalities from regulating fast food restaurants ingredients or requiring restaurant nutritional data be displayed.
• Kasich’s budget does, in fact, move away from privatization and toward heavy government regulation in one key area – it mandates that those who obtain Freemason license plates to document membership in good standing in the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Ohio.

So there’s Kasich’s “smooth as butter” start. We can only hope his departure will be even smoother.

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Bob Fitrakis ran against Kasich for Congress in 1992 and is currently the co-chair of the Ohio Green Party.

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Fight Back With Wayne Madsen

Dr. Bob Talks to Wayne Madsen, investigative journalist who traveled to Libya with Bob at the invitation of former congress person Cynthia McKinney.

Wayne has also been published in the Columbus Dispatch.

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Free Press Fourth Tuesday Free Film Night: Plunder

Free Press Fourth Tuesday Free Film Night
Drexel Theater 2254 E. Main Street, Bexley
7:30PM, followed by discussion

TUESDAY – JUNE 28
“PLUNDER: The Crime of Our Time”
Plunder: The Crime of Our Time is a hard-hitting investigative film by Danny Schechter. The “News Dissector” explores how the financial crisis was built on a foundation of criminal activity uncovering the connection between the collapse of the housing market and the economic catastrophe that followed.

“I used to think of Wall Street as a financial center. I now think of it as a crime scene.” – Filmmaker Danny Schecter, Plunder (2009)
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“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.” – Political economist Frederic Bastiat, The Law [1850]

Co-sponsored by the Drexel Theater, Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and the Film Council of Columbus
253-2571, truth@freepress.org

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Fight Back, War On Drugs

Bob discusses the “War on Drugs” with former Border Patrol Guard Terry Nelson

This week’s show – Wednesday, May 4

Terry Nelson ,former US Border Patrol and Homeland Security Officer says“Al Capone brought appalling violence to American streets during our first prohibition. But, it was nothing in comparison to what the Mexican drug cartels have in store for us if we do not stop this senseless war on drugs.”

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Free Press Free Movie, Ain’t I a Person

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APRIL 26 – Free Press free movie
“Ain’t I a Person: A film about being poor in America”
by Keith Kilty, Free Press Board member
During the past quarter century, a myth has developed that poor people are lazy and that providing them with government assistance leads to dependency and a lack of personal responsibility. The reality is very different. The poverty rate dropped sharply in response to the War on Poverty programs, only to level off in the late 1970s when those programs started getting cut back, and increasing through the Reagan-Bush era attacks on social welfare. The slight drop in the late-1990s has already disappeared, and the poverty rate has skyrocketed during the so-called Great Recession. The plight of the poor has just gotten worse. While the accepted wisdom now is that public interventions do not work, that is a myth: the reality is that they have and still could.
Drexel Theater 2254 E. Main Street, Bexley
7:30PM, followed by discussion
Co-sponsored by the Drexel Theater, Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and the Film Council of Columbus
253-2571, truth@freepress.org

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Fight Back Wed. Apr. 6, 2011, Rev. Joel King, Cousin MLK Jr.

Dr. Bob And Rev. Joel King, Cousin of MLK Jr. discuss the assasinations of the 60’s, Counsel on National Policy (CNP), racism. Ohio SB 5, jobs, job discrimination, budget cuts, corporate tax breaks, 25% lose there vote for photo ID rider attached to SB 5.

http://www.talktainmentradio.com/Fight-Back/9504490?date=2011_04

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Unions And The Ballot Under Attack In Ohio

March 31, 2011

by Bob Fitrakis
Photos by Bob Studzinski

Jim Gilbert, President of the Fraternal Order of Police, Capital City Lodge 9, claims that the Republican Party’s passing of Senate Bill 5 “has woken a sleeping giant.” By a vote of 53-44, the Republican-dominated Ohio Assembly passed Senate Bill 5 on Wednesday, March 30 –- to drastically limit collective bargaining for 360,000 public union workers. The new law requires that no salary increases can be based on seniority, only on performance.

The Senate approved the final version by one vote – 17 to 16. Republican representative Louis Blessing told workers “Be glad you have a job.”

Governor John Kasich signed the bill into law Thursday March 31. His press release stated “There is a reason that the union bosses opposed these changes; because it strips power from the union leaders and returns it to the taxpayers and workers.”

A better case can be made that Kasich has long plotted with wealthy corporate backers to destroy the base of the modern Democratic Party – the unions.

The legislation rammed through in Ohio amidst demonstrations unheard of since the Great Depression caused the normally staid Republican-owned Columbus Dispatch to write “Both the House and Senate worked through an almost unheard-of amount of applause, boos, and shouts of ‘Shame on You!’ from pro-union crowds that packed the chambers and made sure lawmakers understood the magnitude of their vote.”


The legislation was prefabricated by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which has a long affiliation with John Kasich. More then three decades ago, this corporate front masquerading as advocates of “limited government” and “free markets” began plotting to destroy the programs common in all modern industrial democracies.

ALEC’s own history points to a meeting in September 1973 that included then-Illinois State Representative Henry Hyde, conservative activist Paul Weyrich, and Lou Barnett, an operative for then-Governor Ronald Reagan’s presidential ambitions, these three created the Council. Reactionary and racist Senator Jesse Helms is also listed as one of the key founders of ALEC. ALEC’s website states that “Among those who were involved with ALEC in the formative years were…John Kasich of Ohio.”

ALEC exists to provide “model legislation” with one theme: How to transfer wealth to corporations while shrinking the size of government.

Kasich’s press release announced that “The General Assembly passed Senate Bill 5 and local governments will now have more tools to control their budgets and provide better services to you at a lower cost.”

ALEC is funded and works directly through a so-called Private Enterprise Board. Its members represent many of the largest multi-national corporations including Koch Industries, Coca-cola, Wal-Mart, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Exxon-Mobil, and State Farm insurance among others.

The focus on the Council legislative agenda and its “model legislations” read like manuals on how to destroy worker’s rights under the guise of “saving taxpayers money.”
Coincidentally, ALEC’s spring Task Force Summit, where it will plot its next round of union-busting through legislative action will be held in Cincinnati April 28-29 at the Netherland Plaza Hotel.

The point man for passage of SB5 in the House of Representatives is the House Speaker, Ohio’s William Batchelder who has been identified as a member of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP). The New York Times described the CNP as a “little-known group of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.” Weyrich is also a CNP member.

The Nation magazine wrote that the organization “networks wealthy right-wing donors together with top conservative operatives to plan long-term movement strategy.”

The CNP website reads “Limited government, traditional values, strong national defense.” ALEC also leads with “Limited government” and follows with “free markets, and federalism.”

In order to ensure that their union-busting and their public power grab through legislative fiat sticks, the Ohio Republican House earlier pushed through House Bill 159 that will disenfranchise nearly 900,000 voters. House Bill 159 requires all voters to produce an Ohio driver’s license with photo or state photo ID to vote. This is the most restrictive standard in the nation.

This legislation will overwhelming affect Democratic voters such as African Americans, the elderly, college students, the homeless and working poor – who are most likely to be without cars and driver’s licenses. Critics of the legislation, including the ACLU point out that this constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax and have gone so far to accuse the Republicans of stealing the next statewide Ohio election.

Even this drastic action by Ohio Republicans might not save them from the wrath of Ohio public unions and their private sector union allies in the next election. Police officers and firefighters have emerged as the most militant unions in defense of collective bargaining in Ohio and their leaders are pledging to work day and night to get the required 231,000 valid signatures of registered voters in order to freeze the bill pending a November referendum.

Unionists are also asking members and supporters to cancel their subscription to newspapers like the Columbus Dispatch that editorialized on behalf of Senate Bill 5. Boycotts are also being contemplated against the industries listed on the private enterprise board of ALEC.

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Bob Fitrakis is a Professor of Political Science at Columbus State Community College and member CSEA, the Columbus State Education Association. Originally published by The Free Press, https://freepress.org.

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Ohio GOP Sends A Stealth Death Notice To Public College Teachers Unions

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
April 2, 2011
An obscure clause that was slipped into Ohio’s infamous anti-union Senate Bill 5 may spell the end of collective bargaining for the state’s public college teachers.

SB-5 was passed in the face of bitter controversy and mass public demonstrations at the state capitol in Columbus. It was signed into law Thursday, March 31, by Ohio’s new extreme right-wing Governor John Kasich.

But little attention has been paid to the following clause on page 272, which reads:

“With respect to members of a faculty of a state institution of higher education, any faculty who, individually or through a faculty senate or like organization, participate in the governance of the institution, are involved in personnel decisions, selection or review of administrators, planning and use of physical resources, budget preparation, and determination of educational policies related to admissions, curriculum, subject matter, and methods of instruction and research are management level employees.”


Photograph by Bob Studzinski

The obvious intent of this language is to bar public college faculty members from belonging to a union or participating in collective bargaining. By definition, “management level employees” are not allowed to unionize or strike.

But all faculty members participate in drawing up curricula. They also, as a matter of course, help choose fellow teachers and administrators, help govern their schools and the like.

So the practical intent of this language is to bar Ohio’s public college teachers from unionizing at all by renaming their role.

As Darrell Minor puts it: “We are now management as soon as this law takes effect and we have no right to collect bargaining.” Minor is a mathematics professor at Columbus State Community College. He heads the Columbus State Educational Association, the faculty union, at a school whose enrollment now numbers around 31,000.

The faculty’s new status as “management” may also call into question the legal standing of tenure.

SB-5 is slated to become official law within 90 days. Legal challenges are already in the works. The nullification process by referendum has also begun.

But along the way, the state’s college teachers may find themselves without tenure or a union.

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection via Freepress.org, where the FITRAKIS FILES are stored. HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at HarveyWasserman.com. Bob is a Professor of Political Science at Columbus State Community College, where Harvey is an adjunct instructor of history.

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