AMERICAN DRUG WAR Free Press Free Film Night, Tuesday, June 22
By Nation Of Gandhis – Jun 16, 2010 10:40:07 AM ET
AMERICAN DRUG WAR
Free Press Free Film Night
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.
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
January 27, 2010
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.
Bob Fitrakis
January 18, 2010
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:
https://freepress.org/columns/display/3/2010/1801
10/09/1996
by Bob Fitrakis
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?
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.
Written and Produced by Kevin Stocklin, directed by Gary Gasgarth
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.
Thinking about the death of Senator Edward Kennedy causes me to reflect on my own life and political activism. First, I was struck by the fact that “Teddy” was only one year younger than my father. The Senator always seemed eternally youthful, optimistic, and idealistic. I harbored in the back of my mind, up until the time his brain cancer was announced, that somehow – someway – he would still end up as President someday.
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.
August 7, 2009
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.
By Dr. Robert Fitrakis
June 1, 2009
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 https://freepress.org.
By Bob Fitrakis
May 25, 2009
Article below.
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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.
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