Live audience chat with music from Andrew Davis and Rob Jones.
6/26/1996
FEATURED ARTICLE
by Bob Fitrakis and Sally MacPhail
Last week, the University Area Commission, Campus Partners for Community Urban Redevelopment, the Columbus Development Commission and the Columbus Historic Resources Commission all adopted resolutions endorsing the University Neighborhoods Revitalization Plan, a 250-page document drafted by Campus Partners that addresses just about every aspect of off-campus life from trash collection to land use, from drinking and drug abuse to community schools. Intended to encourage reinvestment-financial and philosophical-by present and prospective businesses, residents, students, and the university itself, the plan has been a source of public debate for the last few months. Critics charge that the proposed clean-up will eradicate a unique multi-ethnic urban community.
Around the Ivory Tower It is the sweeping-some might say, overwhelming-way in which Campus Partners is approaching OSU’s role off-campus that has had some observers worried. One of the most vocal critics of the former Final Draft was Columbus Alive columnist, Bob Fitrakis, who called it former Campus Partners President Barry Humphries’ “mission to make the campus area safe for Max and Erma’s….In fact, in the original draft of the master plan revealed in November, yuppification north of campus and ghettoization south of campus were the twin pillars holding up the new campus fortress.”
Asked to react to Fitrakis’ comments that the plan might result in gentrification that would eradicate the campus counter-culture, Campus Partners’ Marc Conte said: “I think he’s pretty right. Those are pretty much my sentiments. When [other board members] ask for my opinion on retail, I say we can look at the record stores and see that the independent record stores survive, not the chain stores. People like the independent businesses, they like the uniqueness of the area; that’s one of the reason we’re shopping here, ’cause there’s no other reason. And the other thing is that there’s an incredible amount of retail diversity; now just because Target isn’t up as the main sign for the area doesn’t mean you can’t find everything that you find at Target.”
Among the major long-term projects for revitalization of the commercial strip along High Street are three theme areas-one at Lane, one at 15th, and one at 10th-that will be the “rooms” through which one progresses. At the north end, a widened and realigned Lane Avenue will mark an “expanded international village,” drawing upon the mixed uses and multi-ethnic restaurants in the area. There will be an Arts Gateway at 15th across from the Wexner Center. The last and most controversial component is an entertainment/retail/office/commercial development at High Street where E. 11th and W. 10th would be realigned to meet. Among the chain ventures suggested as possible occupants of the site are Max and Erma’s, The Limited, The Gap, and Urban Outfitters.
“All this talk about Max and Erma’s by Campus Partners, they really don’t understand the market or how to deal with the residents. What’s their college-trained manager going to do the first time a member of the rugby team comes in to their upscale restaurant and pisses in a corner? How are they going to handle that? What they don’t want to admit is that the bar owners know this area, we know this market and we’re professionals,” commented Brad Miller, owner of Maxwell’s.
Conte, too, is unwilling to give in yet to the notion of High Street as a mall with major retailers anchoring it. “The problem I know we’re going to run into when they want to build new structures or new businesses, to build those structures they’re going to have to have a national caliber retailer in order to convince the banks that they should get more money for it. …Wherever that happens, I’ve really been encouraging that that be our last resort.”
“High Street has enormous potential,” Campus Partners’ community liaison Steve Sterrett said. He maintained, though, that “It’s not working well now. Students are spending their discretionary funds elsewhere.”
A self-created war zone
Miller, for one, thinks the fault for that lies with the police. “This is the hardest place in the nation to own a bar… It’s a war zone. They’ve dehumanized the students. The police have to realize that the students are not the armies of darkness,” he said. Miller argued that the original Campus Partners rhetoric about “a dangerous neighborhood in decline,” has added to the south campus woes.
He pointed out that because of the conflict with the police, students are now “paying to get out of this area” and drink at places like Mekka. “It shouldn’t have to be that way,” Miller said.
The Columbus police take a drubbing in the Campus Partners plan, both for their lack of sensitivity toward students and their failure to follow through with the Park, Walk and Talk program designed to get officers out of their cruisers and onto the sidewalks. Mark Hatch, director of Community Crime Patrol and a member of the Campus Partners board, has already begun meeting with law enforcement and student representatives, according to Sterrett.
Campus Partners is seen by both south campus bar owners and residents as sort of a new temperance movement. At a December meeting of the Undergraduate Student Government Assembly, Humphries lectured students on partying “responsibly.” President E. Gordon Gee is quoted in the April issue of the Ohio State Alumni Magazine as saying: “I have no intention to make [student life] boring. . . [but] there will be no plebiscite on the fundamental issue of change.” Most of Gee’s envisioned “change” has focused from the beginning on downsizing the south campus bar strip.
Gee recently told students lobbying for domestic partnership benefits that change takes time and he used Campus Partners as his analogy. “When I first came here six years ago I knew something had to be done, so every year, six years ago, five years ago, four years ago, I asked for money to do something. I finally got the money….” Gee conceded that critics may correctly view his attack on the south campus bar strip as a return to the principle of in loco parentis, the notion that the university should act as a surrogate parent to students under the age of 21.
Citizenship 101
Certainly, even under the modified Final Final Draft, the university is expected to take a much greater responsibility for its students. It calls for students to be trained for community service, for the university to assess that service, for incentives to be provided to encourage service, and for students to follow the code of conduct anytime they are engaged in a university-related activity, a modified in loco parentis.
Campus Partners’ Conte agrees that the university “should definitely be taking a more active role; then how that’s done is the question.”
One way that the university could begin addressing the problem would start right on campus, with increased expenditures for student activities and health and counseling services. Mindbogglingly, the university spends about 10% of what similar institutions spend on alternative activities for students, according to the Campus Partners plan. As the instructional fee for students has risen, tuition costs have been controlled by keeping the general activity fee-that which pays for non-instructional programming-low. As a result, there is not much that the university provides students to divert them from haunting the High Street bars.
In the meantime, there is not one full-time person working on alcohol abuse on campus, according to Conte. “There’s nobody on campus that’s trying to coordinate activities to reduce alcohol usage and prevent alcohol abuse, and I think that’s why we have all the problems on 12th Avenue because there hasn’t been any planning…. This alcohol position was recommended to be funded as part of OSU’s budget process, but the last I heard from OSU vice president on Student Affairs [David Williams] was it wasn’t going to be funded.”
Williams was in Africa last week and could not be reached for comment.
Despite the university’s disinvestment, Conte thinks the students need to realize their responsibilities. He is encouraged by planning among off-campus student and year-round residents to meet and orient students new to the neighborhoods. The idea is to be pro-active with students moving off-campus “so you immediately make them partners in that neighborhood….. And the students need to realize that they might be here temporarily, but they’re stewards of the university and the university area.”
Extending its boundaries
Work by Campus Partners has not been limited to the East Campus neighborhoods. Language in the Final Final Draft is deliberately more inclusive than in earlier drafts in an attempt to extend the university’s responsibility to the north and south as well.
“There’s still a lot of things missing,” UAC’s Skubovius cautioned, “particularly in the northern third of the district. A little money could go a long way.” But he called the extensively revised document “more acceptable.”
In the north campus area, Campus Partners initially worked closely with the Glen Echo South Civic Association. That collaboration spawned an oppositional organization, The Common Ground Forum. The Common Ground folks objected to the original Campus Partners proposal to close and redirect area streets. Joe Demshar, the owner of Top Priority Pizza, emerged as the most vocal critic of the Campus Partners plan.
“It’s been mostly quiet up here since Barry Humphries’ departure,” he stated, although, at a May 22 meeting of the Civic Association, Demshar claimed that Campus Partners’ spokesperson Julie Boyland “discredited herself.” Boyland presented the Campus Partners perspective on the need for “traffic calming” and the closing of Fourth Street. “It was quite a fiasco,” Demshar declared. “Julie attempted to shout down the Common Ground attorney Laura Sharp. She kept yelling: ‘Where do you live? What are you doing here?'” while Sharp was presenting the less-intrusive Common Ground proposals calling for stop signs and speed bumps.
Demshar believes that the election of Jim Hubbard, of the Common Ground group, as vice president of the Glen Echo South Civic Association at a June 3 meeting signals the ability of the neighborhood to solve their traffic problems without Campus Partners’ intervention. “They have nothing to do with anything up here anymore. We can solve our own problems without their involvement,” he said.
The university in drag
Unlike the University Area Commission, Demshar is unwilling to endorse Campus Partners’ Final Final Draft. “Who is Campus Partners? It’s the university in drag. Why do they deserve the other side of High Street? It’s a land grab by the university using a not-for-profit entity as a diversionary tactic to get involved in commercial enterprises,” in Demshar’s analysis. He asked, “How well managed are they? They bury nuclear waste and cadavers under the Fawcett Center and forgot about it.”
Echoing the sentiments of the UAC, Demshar dashed off a list of what he sees as the real needs of north campus: “If Campus Partners, and I mean the university, wants to do something for us, let them fix our streets, improve the lighting, help us get new sidewalks and curbs, bury the utility lines, build green space, clean our streets, improve the landscape-that’s what this area needs. Not the Limited!”
” As a student, I’m concerned about the displacement of people and the problems. If the rents go up, everything gets nice, and people can’t afford to live here, where are they going to go?” Conte asked, raising the same concerns. “And again, [there’s] this feeling that there’s this assumption that there is no community here. But it is there and we threaten to destroy what communities we do have.”
“I’m torn because I understand the economics of it,” he continued, adding, though, “I know I don’t agree with everything that’s in [the plan], but I know something needs to be done,” Conte concluded.
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Speaking on the potential theft of the 2008 election.
Dear Movie Lover,
On Sunday, February 24th Drexel Theatres will be having its 11th
straight Academy Award Party and this year’s Red Carpet Bash will
benefit the restoration of the historic 1937 neighborhood movie theatre.
We hope you will join us for Hollywood’s biggest night, from the red
carpet arrival of the stars to the presentations of the golden statues.
We’ll be giving out our own Awards to those in attendance for creativity
in Oscar attire and knowledge of Academy Awards trivia.
In addition to the live telecast, there will be gourmet
hors d’oeuvres and libations from some of the cities finest restaurants,
unique Prizes donated by all the major film studios and your chance to
dress-up and walk the theatre’s red carpet where “paparazzi” and
fashion commentators will greet you on the way to the star-studded
event. If you’ve never attended our Oscar Bash, it’s the closest you
can come to actually being at the awards. You’ll feel the excitement and
glamour along with Hollywood’s actors, directors, producers and filmmakers.
This year we’re inviting (don’t worry, it’s optional)
everyone to dress-up as your favorite Academy Award nominee or
nominated film or if you’re really adventurous, put on a short
skit from a nominated movie with some of your close friends.
Prizes will be awarded for the best nominee or movie impersonations
and for the best dressed at the show. Everyone will have a chance
to enter the annual You-Pick-The-Winners contest, with a year’s
worth of Drexel movie passes, and a special Studio Grand Prize
awarded to the person who predicts the most winners. Everyone
attending receives a special Red Carpet Goodie Bag.
Because of the uncertainty that the 80th Academy Awards would actually
happen due to the just settled Writers Guild of America strike, our
event got off to a late start. We need your help getting the word
out to movie fans and Drexel Theatres supporters. This year we are
offering a Special Discount to our loyal Drexel Fans and their friends.
We hope you can join us for this gala evening.
Jeff and Kathy Frank
Drexel Friends & Family – Red Carpet Bash – Discount Voucher
Save $5.00 off any amount of Drexel Red Carpet Bash Tickets
To enjoy this special discount, your price only $15.00, order tickets by
phone(614)222-0947 ext. 6 M-F 9-5
(and mention Code Drexel Friends) or
present this letter to any Drexel Theatre Box-Office.
Offer valid thru Friday, Feb. 22nd only. Not valid at the door.
For more information on the event visit http://www.drexel.net/
Saturday Feb. 9, 6:30-9 P.M.
Food – fun – relaxation – political discourse Bring your friends!
Free Press office – 1000 E. Main St., parking in rear or next door at Salvation Army parking lot
253-2571
truth@freepress.org
Every Second Saturday!
5/22/1996
by Bob Fitrakis
The action was in the streets, and parks, last weekend. In Westerville, 50 or so activists from the Westerville Social Action group and Amnesty International exercised their First Amendment rights by demonstrating in front of Rep. John Kasich’s house and then marching down Main Street. They want Mr. Budget-Cutter to wield his ax and topple the notorious School of the Americas (SOA)–School of the Assassins. In Franklin Park, the African-American community and guests celebrated the heritage of Malcolm X, and up on campus at 16th and Waldeck–the original site of Community Festival–Anti-Racist Action (ARA) staged a very successful second annual Anti-Fest.
A common theme ran through these three events: the streets and the parks belong to the people, all the people.
Kasich’s house looks like it was built for a Hollywood movie about a wholesome and earnest young politician. That’s probably why the Congressman purchased it. So, imagine his surprise–no, he wasn’t there as usual–when he hears about an actual group of earnest and wholesome young neighbors of his calling his ethics and morality into question.
One notes Johnny has made a career out of trying to balance the U.S. budget, yet he conveniently continues to ignore the School of the Americas located in Ft. Bening, Georgia. The School recently underwent a $30 million renovation at taxpayers’ expense to better house the legions of murderers and assassins it trains. The official purpose of the School is to train Latin American soldiers in combat skills such as counter-insurgency operations, sniper fire, commando tactics and psychological warfare. But, wherever the graduates of the School go, atrocities and torture follow.
General Manuel Noriega is a graduate and so were over 60 Salvadoran officers cited by the 1993 United Nations Truth Commission Report for butchering civilians; two out of three officers cited in the assassination of Archbishop Romero were graduates; three out of five officers cited in the rape and murder of four U.S. churchwomen were alumni; 10 out of 12 officers cited in the El Mozote massacre of over 800 civilians held diplomas from SOA; and 19 of the 26 officers responsible for the slaughter of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were educated there.
Alas, U.S. tax dollars at work, training between 700-2000 Latin American assassins a year. Most recently, Julio Roberto Alperez, who ordered the killing of U.S. citizen Michael Devine in Guatemala and Efrim Bamaca, husband of U.S. citizen Jennifer Harbury, calls SOA his alma mater. Harbury reported the last time she saw her husband, he was being blown up with various gases, his body four times its normal size, as he raved unintelligibly. In a recent Dispatch editorial, the paper rightly criticized Clinton for his failure to bring Alperez and other Guatemalan “allies” to justice. Now, if only they would hold their boy John equally responsible for funding the criminals, or at least cover the event like a normal paper. Westerville Social Action is asking citizens to write or call Rep. Kasich and tell him to support House Resolution 2652, a bill proposed by Rep. Joe Kennedy to close the School of the Americas and demand that we spend “Not a Dime for Death Squads.”
Many of the activists went from death squad protests to dancing in the streets and parks on Saturday. Talk about a “pro-life” celebration; that’s what you got at the Anti-Fest. It was a racist’s nightmare with interracial mingling, cavorting and boogeying in front of various people’s gods. The event started off with a certain amount of apprehension and fears that the Columbus police riot unit might show up uninvited. OSU President Gordon Gee’s office, in his attempt to re-establish in loco parentis (“I’m your daddy”) policy, demanded a meeting with ARA organizers. Jim McNamara, ARA leader and local attorney, declined the invitation. “I told him I’m 46 years old, I’ve got kids who’ve graduated from OSU. Why do I need to meet with the president’s office? This is my neighborhood in the city of Columbus. I’m not a college student,” said McNamara.
At the street fest, inevitably, talk turned to the topic of Campus Partners. Seems my penpals in the Glen Echo South Civic Association are sitting down in a neighborly fashion with the dissident Common Grounds Forum group and appear to be working out their traffic problems. Also, University Area Commissioners report that finally, after a year and a half, Campus Partners staffers are seeking real input from the neighborhood. Some small businesspeople originally opposed to the plan appear willing to compromise in exchange for Pearl Alley becoming a real street and some assistance in redeveloping their businesses there.
On the other hand, the Stache’s/Monkey’s Retreat complex is reportedly scheduled for demolition next year. Yet, if the streets still belong to all the people and the campus community organizes, who knows, pardner?
Bob Fitrakis ran for Congress against John Kasich in 1992.
5/08/1996
by Bob Fitrakis
Last Wednesday at Columbus City Hall, local community and labor organizations sent a graphic and powerful message to our city and nation: America Needs a Raise! The AFL-CIO is sponsoring a series of town meetings across the country where workers can speak out publicly about their increasing insecurity and reduced standard of living. And so they came: the tired working poor, haggard working single mothers, laid-off and anxious middle-level managers, and downtrodden temps.
Those reading the Wolfe Family Newsletter (aka Dispatch), may have missed the event since they tucked the small article on an inside page of an additional Metro section. That’s not surprising, the highly paid and tightly leashed Wolfe family lapdogs regularly sprinkle the editorial pages with shocking tales of wealthy woes. Usually it’s about some poor millionaire denied a tax abatement by greedy inner-city Columbus schoolchildren or CEOs unable to purchase their third mansion because of heartless workers demanding the minimum wage be raised. Read more
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
December 14, 2007
Ohio’s Secretary of State announced this morning that a $1.9 million official study shows that “critical security failures” are embedded throughout the voting systems in the state that decided the 2004 election. Those failures, she says, “could impact the integrity of elections in the Buckeye State.” They have rendered Ohio’s vote counts “vulnerable” to manipulation and theft by “fairly simple techniques.”
Indeed, she says, “the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as tampering with the paper audit trail connector or using a magnet and a personal digital assistant.”
In other words, Ohio’s top election official has finally confirmed that the 2004 election could have been easily stolen.
Brunner’s stunning findings apply to electronic voting machines used in 58 of Ohio’s 88 counties, in addition to scanning devices and central tabulators used on paper ballots in much of the rest of the state.
Brunner is calling for widespread changes to the way Ohio casts and counts its ballots. Her announcement follows moves by California Secretary of State Deborah Bowen to disqualify electronic voting machines in the nation’s biggest state.
In tandem, these two reports add a critical state-based dimension to the growing mountain of evidence that the US electoral system is rife with insecurities. Reports from the Brennan Center, the Carter-Baker Commission, the Government Accountability Office, the Conyers Committee Task Force Report, Princeton University and others have offered differing perspectives that add up to the same conclusion.
Coming in the state that decided the 2004 election for George W. Bush, Brunner’s confirmation of the electoral system’s vulnerabilities adds huge new weight to the charge that the Buckeye State’s vote count was stolen.
In a series of investigative reports dating to well before the 2004 election, the Columbus Free Press and Freepress.org have documented several dozen different means used by the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign to steal the official 2004 vote count.
The final official tally for Bush—less than 119,000 votes out of 5.4 million cast—varied by 6.7% from exit poll results, which showed a Kerry victory. Exit polls in 2004 were designed to have a margin of error of about 1%.
In various polling stations in Democrat-rich inner city precincts in Youngstown and Columbus, voters who pushed touch screens for Kerry saw Bush’s name light up. A wide range of discrepancies on both electronic and paper balloting systems leaned almost uniformly toward the Bush camp. Voting procedures regularly broke down in inner city and campus areas known to be heavily Democratic.
In direct violation of standing federal election law, 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties have since destroyed all or part of their 2004 election data. The materials were additionally protected by a federal court injunction in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit (in which we are attorney and plaintiff). To date, no state or federal prosecutions have resulted from this wholesale destruction of presidential election records, including 1.6 million ballots, cast and uncast, needed for definitive auditing procedures.
However, two Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) election officials have been convicted of felony manipulation of an official recount. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the state’s largest newspaper, recently editorialized that there is “no evidence” the 2004 election was stolen, but omitted mention of the destruction of the electoral records by more than half the counties in the state. The Plain-Dealer and other mainstream media have consistently ignored findings by the Free Press and others indicating widespread manipulation and theft of the kind Brunner has now confirmed was eminently do-able within the Ohio system.
Brunner says “the results underscore the need for a fundamental change in the structure of Ohio’s election system to ensure ballot and voting system security while still making voting convenient and accessible to all Ohio voters.” Among other things, she advocates replacing touch-screen machines with optical-scan units that include a paper balloting system.
The study was managed by the Battelle Corporation, and conducted by Columbus-based MicroSolved Inc., SysTest Labs of Denver along with a consortium of academic subcontractors. It was reviewed by a dozen county officials, and included scrutiny of voting systems produced by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Hart Intercivic and Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold).
Brunner is the Democratic successor to Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell, who administered the 2004 election as Secretary of State while also serving as state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. The report comes as part of her pledge to guarantee a fair and reliable vote count in the upcoming 2008 presidential election.
Under Blackwell, Ohio spent some $100 million installing electronic voting machines as part of the Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in the wake of the scandals surrounding the 2000 election. Former Ohio Congressman Bob Ney, HAVA’s principle author, now resides in a federal prison, in part for illegalities surrounding his dealings with voting machine companies.
Blackwell, who was defeated in a 2006 race for the Ohio governorship, outsourced web hosting responsibilities for the 2004 vote count to a programming firm that also programmed the web site for the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign. Blackwell’s chosen host site for the state’s vote count was in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the servers for the Republican National Committee, and the Bush White House, were also located.
Brunner has now recommended that all Ohio’s voting be done on optical scan ballots, with reliance on central tabulation. Voters with disabilities could use AutoMark machines with bar coding devices that allow the marking of ballots with little or no additional assistance.
“It’s a testament to our state’s boards of elections officials that elections on the new (federally) mandated voting systems have gone as smoothly as they have in light of these findings,” Brunner said.
Conversely, it is also a testament to the ease with which the 2004 election was stolen by election officials who had clear conflicts of interest aimed at keeping George W. Bush in the White House.
—
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (www.freepress.org) and of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO? (The New Press) with Steve Rosenfeld. THE FITRAKIS FILES are available at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org.
5/01/2002
by Bob Fitrakis
It’s the end of the campus as we know it, and I feel slimed.
If you really want to know what Campus Partners is all about, don’t buy their hype or PR spin. Instead, read Graydon Hambrick’s article, “A New Campus Partnership” in the April 1996 Ohio State Alumni Magazine (OSAM). It reveals the real agenda; it’s the smoking gun.
Campus Partners portrays itself as just another non-profit organization seeking to promote community cooperation. In reality, it’s a “redevelopment corporation”–they prefer the term “revitalization”–similar to the one that wired the City Center mall deal. As Hambrick puts it, “As such, it is allowed special legal privileges.” Indeed.
Recall the City Center development. In 1977 the city of Columbus purchased $26 million in land and leased it to the Capitol South Community Urban Development Corporation, which in turn subleased the land to billionaire mall developer Al Taubman. Before Taubman built the City Center mall, city and state government officials combined to legally declare the downtown area “blighted” and a “slum.” Columbus Monthly reported that approximately $80 million more in non-repayable public tax expenditures flowed into the mall’s development. When subleasee Taubman began to rake in the dough courtesy of the public’s largess, Capitol South owed the city some $67 million. This is an old game. As Robert Goodman illustrates in his book, The Last Entrepreneurs, billionaire developers like Taubman and Max Fisher–yes, they just named the business school after Fisher at OSU–know how to get taxpayers to provide the “risk capital” for major for-profit private development projects.
Both Taubman and Fisher are good friends of fellow billionaire and OSU Trustee Les Wexner. A senior OSU administrator admits that Les Wexner is stirring the pot on the Campus Partners redevelopment. Despite the fact that there was neither a “needs assessment” done nor any need for a performing arts center at 15th and High, Wexner, according to sources, doesn’t like the view from the Wexner Center east across High Street.
Hambrick writes that OSU President Gordon Gee “….has ‘other commitments’ from businesses that he is ‘not ready’ to speak about, and that Ohio State Trustee Leslie Wexner, head of the Limited clothing empire, has shown an interest in the High Street development.” (p. 27, OSAM) No doubt.
In the late ’70s in Detroit, Taubman and Fisher managed to talk the bankrupt city into giving them $100 million in prime riverfront land for the development of the Riverfront West luxury condominiums. Next, they had the state legislature pass the infamous “Max Fisher law” that created a 24-year 50 percent tax abatement for the property–twice as long an abatement as any in Michigan history. Then, they used their political connections with the Reagan administration to use the city’s federal mass transit money to build a people-mover that runs from the Riverfront West complex, where the wealthy live, to the Renaissance Center, where they work, and the Greektown restaurant strip, where they eat. So, it’s now possible to live in luxury and work in Detroit without ever setting foot on a city street. I’m sure that Les’ buddies have relayed this “success” story to him.
I have no doubt they’re planning a similar carnage in the OSU area. As Hambrick notes, “A special improvement district along the High Street strip will be created under Ohio law.” This is the same tactic Wexner used in New Albany. Say goodbye to Stache’s, Monkey’s Retreat, Used Kids and the like, because the alumni are being promised: “spiffy and modern businesses and galleries, a variety of restaurants, decent housing full of enlightened people….” (p. 27, OSAM)
Hambrick goes so far as to call Gee’s and Wexner’s New Campus Order a “Garden of Eden.” And who are we to argue, since they’re planning “. ..art movie houses, a bowling alley, clothing stores run by national merchandisers [read: Leslie Wexner], maybe even sports bars such as they have in the ‘burbs.” (p. 26, OSAM) Be still my heart!
And Gee just keeps on giving and giving–of course, maybe it’s because he recently got that huge raise engineered by Les. Gee admits it’ll even be better than the ‘burbs because OSU’s planning on returning to “a modified in loco parentis.” Thus, Papa Gee and Uncle Les will protect students from the harsh realities of campus life. Gee assured the alumni in finest democratic fashion that: “I have no intention to make [student life] boring…. [But] there will be no plebiscite on the fundamental issue of change.” That means, to the unenlightened, there won’t be a student community vote, we’re jamming it down your throat.
In an area bounded on the north by the Glen Echo ravine and Fifth Avenue on the south, stretching from the Olentangy River on the west and the Conrail tracks on the east, they’re planning to build their Brave New Campus World.
Now through December2, 2007 at Studio 35
3055 Indianola Avenue (614) 261-1581
Each night at 6:30pm
The Free Press highly recommends the independent documentary “King Corn,” that makes the connection between government farm subsidy policy, massive obesity, and a junk food culture. Part Farming for Dummies, part animal rights advocacy, and mostly revelation about the overgrowth of corn and our overweight population. Two young college graduates from the east coast follow the trail of corn syrup from the American heartland as it clogs the arteries of major urban centers throughout the country. It’s witty but poignant, and more than ever proves the axiom, we are what we eat.
Bob Fitrakis
King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat-and how we farm.
Aaron Woolf (dir.)
Ian Cheney
Curt Ellis