ALSO SEE : Robert Fitrakis (born 1955) / Fitrakis.org archived articles (1996 -1999) 

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06/2000

Bad timing?

The mysterious indictment of Fred Yates

by Bob Fitrakis

In politics, like comedy, timing is everything.

This adage leads us to the curious indictment of Fred Yates, Mayor Michael Coleman's highly regarded campaign spokesperson. On the Sunday before last November's election day, as I was preparing for my public affairs radio show on WSMZ, two sources offered me strangely premature information. They said one of the candidates suggested as a likely replacement for Coleman on Columbus City Council--Fred Yates--had legal problems. The sources, who were politically linked to City Attorney Janet Jackson, told me that Yates had "theft charges" against him.

After Coleman's landslide victory that Tuesday, November 2, I kept turning up Yates rumors. Democratic Party regulars had various versions, from Yates allegedly being involved with stolen property to embezzlement. Throughout November, I made calls and searched databanks with the aid of a private investigator. I found that Yates had no arrest record, although a much younger man with a similar name had been evicted in the campus area by Triangle Real Estate, according to court records and attorney Charles T. Williams.

No arrests, no love nest in the campus area--why was the growing and obvious smear campaign against Yates continuing? There had to be something going on.

At the end of November, with Yates steadfastly insisting he wanted to be on City Council despite tremendous pressure to get him to serve on Coleman's staff, suddenly a new candidate emerged universally thought to be promoted by Jackson. It was my old neighbor and one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, Fred Ransier.

On December 5, I told listeners of my radio show that conventional wisdom from the Democratic Party had it that Yates would not be selected to serve on council because of alleged criminal problems. Party insiders all seemed to know about this--but how?

Three days later, up in Cuyahoga County, someone resurrected an old investigatory file and managed to get Yates indicted on December 8. How did people close to Janet Jackson, in the middle of the state, know that Yates was supposedly having problems in Cleveland? According to the Columbus Dispatch, the court didn't process the indictment until December 10.

Yates began making calls to Columbus Alive and The Other Paper that week, begging to know if the publications were working on a story about him. I talked to Yates and told him there was a possible smear campaign claiming he was charged with or convicted of theft. He sounded genuinely confused about the nature of the rumors of criminal activity.

The Other Paper chronicled Ransier's meteoric rise in its December 9 issue: "Ten days ago, Fred Ransier's name wasn't even in circulation as a candidate for appointment to Mayor-elect Mike Coleman's City Council seat. Now Ransier, chairman of the Columbus Civil Service Commission, has become the prohibitive favorite to land the job."

City Councilmembers, the Columbus Dispatch, and my reliable sources all say that Yates first heard of his possible indictment on December 14, the day council was screening candidates to replace Coleman. Some claim the information was leaked by the governor's office, but most insiders agree that this is nonsense. These sources claim the "Yates smear" was an intra-Democratic Party dispute leaked by people close to City Attorney Jackson, who appeared to be privy to information from Cleveland--information that Yates didn't possess because he'd never been called before a grand jury, a constitutional requirement before answering to a crime. The next day I learned of the indictment from two local attorneys who both insisted that Yates' Cleveland indictment was initiated in Columbus to keep him off City Council.

In many big cities like Detroit and Cleveland, it's not uncommon for candidates to be indicted just prior to an election. It's considered just another political ploy. By now I was convinced that, in the Yates case, these party machine tactics may have spread to Columbus.

Particularly interesting was the fact that both attorneys told me Fred's wife, Kathleen Ransier, had been Yates' business attorney. This was acknowledged by Yates when he declined comment to the Alive on December 17.

Repeated calls to the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's office weren't returned. In messages I left with the office, I asked how this two-year-old investigation--involving events between 1991 and 1994--suddenly coincided precisely with the date Yates was screening for Columbus City Council.

On December 16, The Other Paper ran a strangely naive political story lacking mention of the indictment in Cleveland, claiming there had been no smear campaign against Yates, and quoting Janet Jackson denying she had anything to do with such gutter politics.

Jackson, through a spokesperson, declined to comment for Alive's article this week.

Yates received a certified letter on Thursday, December 23, informing him of his indictment for aggravated theft involving the overbilling of the Ohio State Lottery Commission for advertising. In a front-page story on December 29, the Dispatch quoted Yates' attorney, the politically powerful George Forbes, as follows: "This thing has happened a couple of years ago...Why did it all of a sudden come back when this political thing was taking place?"

That remains a mystery. Add to it the equally important question of how people associated with the Columbus city attorney knew about the Cleveland indictment before it happened. Clairvoyance? I doubt it. While she'll never publicly acknowledge it, word has it that Janet Jackson is, in fact, quietly battling to keep Michael Coleman from being the dominant force in the Franklin County Democratic Party. Whether this has anything to do with the sudden demise of Yates' political career is a question worth pondering.

1/13/2000

The Ohio primary in black and white

by Bob Fitrakis

Last week, the Ohio Democratic Party and the Franklin County Democrats both held caucuses on the primary campaign issues and endorsements that will determine the future course of the tepid centrist political organizations.

On Monday, January 3, 12th and 15th Congressional District Dems met to elect delegates for the Bill Bradley and Al Gore campaigns. I ran as a Bradley delegate without illusions about Bradley's politics or my chances of winning. My preferred presidential candidate, Senator Paul Wellstone, the last unabashed progressive in the U.S. Senate, dropped out last year before he ever formally declared his candidacy. Such is the state of the Party of Roosevelt. A mere eight years ago, you could count on a progressive candidate like Jerry Brown going to the convention and raising hell. Not anymore.

It's doubtful that Ohio's 12th District delegates are going to cause much commotion at the convention in Los Angeles this summer. Gore's camp is dominated by the AFL-CIO--must've been the Veep's support for NAFTA and moving U.S. union jobs overseas that swung the labor bureaucrats--and the Bradley contingent is controlled by the likes of Jerry Hammond, Cindy Lazarus and Matt Habash.

The battle between Bradley and Gore more than anything else signals the death of the last splintered remnant of the McGovern wing of the party in Ohio. Hell, Bradley was a centrist New Democrat before being a New Democrat was cool. Still, there is a key difference that distinguishes the virtually indistinguishable candidates. Bradley's record on race issues is principled and impeccable. In 1996, he was one of only 21 Democratic Senators who broke rank with the Clinton-Gore administration to vote against the reactionary welfare reform plan which ended a 60-year federal commitment to poor kids. "State's rights" activists and reactionaries of every stripe accused Clinton and Gore of being opportunists and stealing their ideas. Bradley exposed the thinly veiled false racist stereotypes behind so-called "welfare reform."

Bradley's speech on the Senate floor after the L.A. riots is a testament to his belief in racial equality. He's called racial discrimination the "ultimate evil" and he still crusades for affirmative action programs. Locally, he's got Ben Espy in his corner, and Dick Austin, the architect behind Jesse Jackson's upset 1988 victory over Michael Dukakis in Franklin County. Still, Bradley can't beat Gore's regulars in Franklin County without a direct appeal to people of color, gays and lesbians, environmentalists and liberals who remain politically active but are nowhere to be found within the local Democratic Party.

Last Thursday, January 6, the Franklin County Democrats unanimously endorsed our local strain of Gore, Richard Cordray for U.S. Senate. The bland and benign Cordray received 38 percent of the vote for Ohio Attorney General in 1998. He got about the same percentage when he ran against Deborah Pryce in 1992 for U.S. Congress.

The day before the Cordray endorsement, the far more interesting Reverend Marvin McMickle of Shaker Heights submitted his petitions for U.S. Senate. You've heard all the gushing over the start of a new century and a new millennium. Consider this: In the entire 20th century, the two major parties nominated only nine African-American candidates for U.S. Senate. Two were elected.

The McMickle campaign is a rare opportunity to nominate an African-American senator. It's an even rarer opportunity to nominate an Ohio progressive and advocate of the nearly defunct "social gospel" doctrine. Rabbi Daniel Roberts of Temple Emanu Ell in University Heights described McMickle's "style of preaching" as one that "disturbed the comfortable and comforted the disturbed."

The 50-year-old McMickle, who earned a Ph.D. in American studies from Case Western Reserve and is the Ohio School Board president, is a long shot in central Ohio. Still, he could win here if people were aware of his platform. McMickle recently told the Gay People's Chronicle that he would vote for a lesbian and gay civil rights law.

The Cincinnati Post covered a campaign stop McMickle made in Hamilton County where he "attack[ed] the Republican Congress' `Contract with America' while promoting his own liberal agenda of helping the less fortunate and improving education, protecting the environment, aiding the causes of women and minorities."

McMickle's press conference last Wednesday drew scant coverage from Columbus' mainstream media. This did little to overcome his biggest hurdle--other than being in a state that never nominates blacks to the U.S. Senate--which is his lack of name recognition outside of northeast Ohio.

Bradley and McMickle's primary victories would serve as the best way to usher out the racist destruction so prevalent in the last century and millennium and signal a new beginning. Pass the word.

NOTE: Bob Fitrakis was not elected as a Bradley delegate and is not seeking re-election as the Democratic Central Committee 55th Ward representative.

1/20/2000

Nazis in the heartland

by Bob Fitrakis

Will Ohio be the nation's heartland for neo-Nazi terror? Last Sunday's NBC-4 news report on the National Alliance's leafleting in the Dublin and Grove City areas will come as no surprise to regular readers of this column. Erich Gliebe, of Cleveland, told Channel 4 that the organization targeted the two Columbus suburbs because the areas were "most receptive to their messages," according to producer Karen Baker.

The alliance is a West Virginia-based neo-Nazi organization headed for two decades by William Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries. Tim McVeigh, convicted in the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, was a zealous fan of Pierce's primer on race war. In the past few years, National Alliance membership has grown dramatically, operating in more than a dozen states.

Pierce calls Gliebe, a former amateur boxer, a "tireless recruiter and organizer, a man who has spent nearly every available minute working for the alliance." Gliebe's Cleveland organization is the single largest in the alliance, boasting some 60 open neo-Nazis and hosting an annual "Euro-American Cultural Fest." A recent intelligence report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization that monitors white supremacist groups, named Gliebe one of the elite "dirty dozen" of white supremacist leaders in the U.S.

Gliebe serves as the National Alliance's Midwest spokesperson and regional coordinator. His cultural fest has drawn the likes of Pierce, Tom Metzger, head of the neo-Nazi White Aryan Resistance, and Steve Barry, editor of the white supremacist magazine The Resister. Not far behind in the alliance hierarchy is Hilliard's Matt Ball, also seen on Channel 4's January 16 report.

The influence of the Idaho-based Aryan Nations is beginning to fade as the health of its founder, the ailing and aged Richard Butler, 81, declines. Meanwhile, Pierce and the National Alliance appear to be growing stronger by the day. The alliance is busy building bridges to other fascist and white supremacist groups. Just last summer, the SPLC reported that Pierce and two "gussied-up skinheads" dined at the exclusive Washington, D.C., University Club with former Reagan Whitehouse staffer and GOP strategist Todd Blodgett.

Blodgett, a prot™g™ of the late Lee Atwater, a key GOP campaign strategist for both Presidents Reagan and Bush, is the son of wealthy Republican State Representative Gary Blodgett of Iowa. On April 26, 1999, Pierce and Blodgett incorporated Resistance Records LLC in the District of Columbia, according to the SPLC. The deal gave the National Alliance control over a defunct racist record company.

In October last year, Pierce went public with the fact that he now owned Resistance Records, the largest catalog and inventory of "white power" music in the U.S. A few years ago, prior to its demise, the record company was selling an estimated 50,000 white supremacist CDs every year.

The alliance's strategy is to reach out to both young neo-Nazi shock troops and older, more mainstream racist organizations with Republican ties, like the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). Two recent reports from the SPLC--Money, Music and the Doctor and Sharks in the Mainstream--document Pierce's activities. The CCC is little more than the reincarnation of the racist White Citizen's Councils of the '50s and '60s. Last year, during the Clinton impeachment trials, news reports documented that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Republican from Mississippi, and Representative Bob Barr, a Republican from Georgia, both wrote for the CCC's racist newsletter.

The CCC and the National Alliance have many things in common, including attacking the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Black History Month and affirmative action. The CCC refuses to disclose the names of its members, but the SPLC collected the names of 175 CCC members and "found a significant number of members have been linked to unabashedly racist groups including the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, the America First Party and the neo-Nazi National Alliance."

The CCC's leader, Gordon Lee Baum, attempted to recruit Vince Reed, the head of security for the Aryan Nations, to the CCC's national board in 1995, according to Reed. The council has also been endorsed by Senator Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, and various Republican politicians, particularly in the South. Council leaders have claimed responsibility for the defeat of former South Carolina Governor David Beasley, who angered the group by opposing the continued flying of the Confederate battle flag over the state's capital building.

It makes perfect sense that the National Alliance would pass out information attacking the Martin Luther King holiday the day before the event, and less than two months before the Ohio primary. The emergence of a highly emotional and polarizing political "wedge" issue, as Atwater liked to call them, comes at an opportune time for George W. Bush's presidential campaign in Ohio. Recall his father was elected as an anti-civil rights "states' rights" representative from Texas in 1966, and his son is now busy defending the states' rights of South Carolina to fly the Confederate flag. Pierce and his Central Ohio and Cleveland lackeys may simply be priming the pump for Bush.

1/27/2000

Oh Lord, don't let Pauly be misunderstood

by Bob Fitrakis

What a way to start the new year. Not only did we dodge the Y2K bullet, but Senator George Voinovich's brother Paul Voinovich announced on January 7 that he's re-organizing the V Companies and VS Architects Inc. under Chapter 11. Following the $13.3 million jury verdict against the V Group in mid-December for shoddy construction and cost overruns in building the Jefferson County Jail, Pauly pledged, "We'll work harder to do better than we've ever done."

Fortunately for the taxpayers of Ohio, that won't be difficult for Paul Voinovich. A quick perusal of my mammoth and ever-expanding Brothers Voinovich file proves that there's lots of room for improvement.

Pauly probably learned a lot from the $5.7 million Highland Heights municipal complex he worked on in the early 1980s. Sure, the city's law director, Dale Feneli, blamed the Voinovich-Sgro Architects Inc. "for design flaws and poor oversight of the project" when the roof began to leak "shortly after the first employees moved in," according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. There were a few other problems: bathrooms built with residential rather than commercial plumbing; a floor drain not connected to the sanitary sewer system; and a burst pipe on the fire sprinkler system. But hey, that was the '80s.

OK, I'll be the first to concede that the '90s were also a little rough on Pauly and his alphabet soup of V Group/Voinovich Companies. Take Darrel Rowland's July 1992 article in the Columbus Dispatch. I mean, did he really have to write that "lawsuits against Paul Voinovich range literally from sea to sea"? It should have read "ocean to ocean." I prefer Paul's PR Newswire spin that his "Cleveland-based firm has earned a national reputation for its work."

For example, when Rowland noted that a California company "50 percent owned by Paul Voinovich was cited for not paying $386,000 in federal income taxes and forced into an involuntary bankruptcy by its creditors," he didn't even mention how much that bankruptcy might help Paul "reorganize" in the future. Rowland did point out that "$700,000 in delinquent real estate taxes in the Cleveland suburb of Euclid, plus almost $30,000 on his company's headquarters in Cleveland, were, according to a company spokesperson, a `misunderstanding.'"

It's awfully easy for a guy like Pauly, with a high profile political brother like Senator George, to be taken the wrong way. Anyone can accidentally get hooked up with the wrong people. Just look at the controversial Waste Distillation company, in which Pauly was a partner in a Willoughby, Ohio, waste project in the early '90s. You try to put together a nice waste management deal with flamboyant rubbish hauler Daniel A. Dzina and what do you get? An environmental group called the "Concerned Citizens Research Group" writes that Anthony Hughes, "a convicted felon" who served time in prison for racketeering and embezzlement, was also a partner with Dzina in the Waste Distillation company.

Granted, in August 1999 the Plain Dealer called Dzina "a felon with an extensive history of controversy involving publicly funded contracts" and tried to blow his acquiring of the Golden Gloves gym facility in Cleveland all out of proportion. Even the Plain Dealer couldn't find anything criminal. Why else would the paper write about the gym: "If crimes haven't been committed, laws need to be changed"? A three-judge panel acquitted Dzina of charges of aggravated murder, aggravated burglary and felonious assault in 1977. No way one of Pauly's partners would beat a man to death with a baseball bat.

Nor would Pauly know that Hughes was "a former business partner of John `Curly' Montana, currently in prison for murder," as the Concerned Citizens Research Group stated in a 1991 report. In the early '80s, the Cleveland Press reported that Dzina dumped Cleveland rubbish on farm property in Orange Village. How was Dzina to know that the unlicensed, makeshift landfill was linked to two reputed ne'er-do-wells, Montana and Allen "Connie" Nakon?

I mean, who're they gonna try to link to Pauly next? Just because the Lake County News Herald wrote that Clark Miller, a Voinovich Company vice president, gave Willoughby officials "a 1984 study of a New Jersey prototype plant that closed in 1986 as an explanation" of Pauly's nifty waste-to-energy plant, people get the wrong ideas.

So Dzina and Pauly try to do a little business with Miller and, of course, they hire the most reputable accountant, Vincent Panichi, who's so good he's George Voinovich's campaign treasurer--and all people want to do is point out the negatives. The Plain Dealer had to bring up the issue of how Pauly got ahold of the Ohio rights to the "flameless technology" that the waste plant uses. Just because Clark Miller was on the selection committee that picked the Ohio EPA director under Governor George Voinovich, people read too much into it--like that state Senator Eric Fingerhut who called attention to it.

If you think Pauly didn't learn a lot from that Waste Distillation controversy, then think again. When convicted criminals like WTI waste incinerator lobbyist Michael Anthony Fabiano or convicted felons Vincent Zumpano and Ronald and Pasquale Deluca all started testifying about Clark and Pauly in the late 1990s, linking them to pay-offs and kickbacks and bribes in the Ohio River Valley, hardy anyone believed it. Well, maybe a few guys in the FBI, but what do the feds know?

Let me just leave you with the recent courageous words of the misunderstood Pauly V: "Rather than run away and shirk our responsibilities, we're staying put." And Ohio will be a better place for it in the new millennium.

2/03/2000

Ohio: Home of Hate

by Bob Fitrakis

Will the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations organization relocate its headquarters to Ohio? Floyd Cochran, former director of propaganda for the hate group, now a leading anti-racist activist, concedes that there's been "a lot of speculation" on a move by the group from their Hayden Lake, Idaho, compound to Southwest Ohio.

Why the Buckeye State? There's the failing health of 80-year-old Richard Butler, the founder and leader of both the Aryan Nations and the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Butler is the United States' most infamous Christian Identity preacher--a neo-Nazi ideology masquerading as religion that preaches Anglo-Saxons and Aryans are God's "only" chosen people. News reports say Butler has willed his 20-acre Idaho home and complex to his daughters, who've distanced themselves from his beliefs.

A year ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center sued Butler personally, his church, Aryan Nations and Saphire, Inc., an Idaho corporation, in hopes of seizing the neo-Nazi organization's assets in a civil suit. The suit claims, "Members of the [Aryan Nations] security force chased them [Victoria and Jason Keenan] for over two miles, shot at them with assault rifles, detained them, battered them, and threatened to kill them." The center, successful in the past in suing white supremacist groups and seizing their assets, could force the Aryans to search for a new home.

Cochran describes the Hayden Lake compound as the "crown jewel" of the Aryan movement. "Take it away and there is no Aryan Nations," he told Columbus Alive. He says a likely place for the homeless neo-Nazis to head is New Vienna, Ohio. Harold Ray "Butch" Redfeairn, Butler's personal aide and most likely successor, set up a regional Midwest Aryan Nations center there in 1997.

Cochran points out that the Midwest is potentially much more fertile recruiting ground for white supremacist hate organizations than Butler's Northwest network. White supremacist David Duke, a former Nazi and Klan leader, understood this when he made Southern Ohio part of an all-white homeland (to be founded after the United States is shattered). "Most of the white supremacists seek out mountains and hills in their belief that this is where God's chosen people should flee in preparation for the final days," Cochran explained. "Draw a line from the Alleghenies in Pennsylvania down through Appalachia in its foothills and you're going to pick up a lot of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and white supremacist organizations."

A brief comparison of hate groups available to an Ohio-centered Aryan Nations versus an Idaho-based neo-Nazi movement yields disturbing numbers. Idaho has nine hate groups compared to Ohio's 22--the seventh largest total in the U.S. The state of Wyoming, Idaho's neighbor, has one hate group; the Columbus suburb of Hilliard alone has two hate groups.

This concentration of hate is seen throughout the Midwest, but not the West, according to the latest Southern Poverty Law Center data. Pennsylvania has 27 hate groups. Montana has five; Michigan 24. Oregon 10 versus Indiana's 17. Washington and Illinois are a wash at 17 each. Heading south, 10 hate groups call Kentucky home, compared to Nevada's two. Let's see, that makes it 117 hate groups in the Midwest to 44 in the West--a rout in favor of Ohio being the country's heart of it all for hatred.

Of course, it may be difficult to continue the Idaho Aryan Nations' hate legacy in Ohio. Butler's organization spawned our country's foremost domestic terrorist group, The Order, in the 1980s and just last August one of Butler's former security men, Buford O. Furrow Jr., was charged with attacking a Jewish community center in Los Angeles and killing a non-white mailman. Three months later, Butler's Denver organizer, Nathan Thill, confessed on television that he murdered a black man because he was "wearing the enemy's uniform"--his black skin.

Still, Redfeairn managed in a short period of time to sow violence from his base in western Clinton County, Ohio. Last July, Kale T. Kelly, Redfeairn's New Vienna lieutenant, was convicted on weapons charges stemming from an alleged plot to gather an arsenal to attack the government. In February 1997, the Kehoe brothers with ties to the Aryan Nations shot it out with Clinton County sheriff's deputies and Ohio State troopers before fleeing the state. Most analysts suggest the brothers were heading up to Columbus for the Aryan Nations' Statehouse rally, which drew scores of other white supremacist groups. Remember that the leader of the Aryan Republican Army, a.k.a. the Midwest Bank Bandits, was captured in Columbus after the neo-Nazi group carried out 22 bank robberies in the mid-1990s in order to fund a white supremacist revolution.

Two weeks ago, I pointed out one drawback to Ohio as the next Aryan Nations national headquarters site. The nation's fastest growing neo-Nazi group, the National Alliance, is already well-entrenched here with the organization's strongest chapter in Cleveland and a burgeoning central Ohio organization.

But hey, what about those Buckeyes? Most people know there's more important stuff to talk about in this city. If you're not one of them, you might want to consider attending the March 11-12 Building Democracy Conference in Chicago, "Continuing the Journey Against Hate," sponsored by the faith-based Center for New Community. There's no workshops on sports, but Floyd Cochran will be there. Check it out at www.newcomm.org.

2/10/2000

Does the Octopussy have Gore in its tentacles?

by Bob Fitrakis

The Octopussy lurks in the murky polluted waters of the Ohio River Valley. Scarier than the fabled Loch Ness Monster is the shadowy, mostly clandestine network involving organized crime, powerful politicians, mysterious Arkansas billionaire Jackson T. Stephens, the notorious and defunct Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and the infamous Waste Technologies Industries (WTI) waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio.

While campaigning at Ohio State University last Wednesday, February 2, Democratic presidential hopeful Al Gore encountered Citizen Action activists shouting "What about WTI?" and "Keep your promises!" Gore's broken promise to halt the start-up of the WTI incinerator is as famous in environmental circles as President George Bush's "Read my lips, no new taxes" pledge in 1988.

Hell, I was duped by Gore's promise myself in 1992. That year, I'd served as Jerry Brown's Midwest coordinator at the Democratic Party convention. When Greg Haas, the Clinton-Gore campaign coordinator, asked me to sign a letter to former Brown delegates and environmentalists urging them to support the "Dubba Bubba" ticket, I did.

My support for Clinton and Gore stemmed primarily from Gore's statements at a Weirton, West Virginia, campaign stop in July 1992 that: "The very idea of putting WTI in a flood plain, you know it's just unbelievable to me... We don't need these incinerators... I'll tell you this, a Clinton-Gore administration is going to give you an environmental presidency to deal with these problems. We'll be on your side for a change instead of the side of the garbage generators."

The letter I signed on behalf of the Clinton-Gore campaign touted the ticket's dedication to the environment. Unlike the numerous campaign pledges that Clinton dismissed as "pillow talk" between his first election and inauguration, Gore seemed sincere in his pledge to keep the WTI incinerator from firing up. On December 7, 1992, Gore issued a press release stating, "Serious questions concerning the safety of an East Liverpool, Ohio, hazardous waste incinerator must be answered before the plant may begin operation." Gore called for a "full investigation" by the U.S. General Accounting Office and pledged that the Clinton-Gore administration would not issue the plant a test burn permit until these questions were answered.

Within a few weeks, Clinton and Gore had reversed their opposition to the giant waste incinerator. Ohio Citizen Action recounts the history of WTI in its current newsletter: "According to unconfirmed reports from well-placed sources, Clinton's EPA administrator-designate, Carol Browner, called Valdus Adamkus, director of U.S. EPA's Great Lakes office. She asked Adamkus to approve WTI's initial `test burn' before January 20 [1992], so the incoming Clinton administration would not have to take responsibility for the decision."

By early January 1992 WTI had the OK from Adamkus for a test burn, even though 400 children attended East Elementary School only 1,100 feet away from the incinerator's stack, spewing lead, mercury and dioxin into the valley's air, and houses were as close as 320 feet away.

Why did Clinton and Gore renege on their promise? Ask billionaire Stephens, if you can find him. Stephens was the single largest financial backer of the '92 Clinton-Gore campaign. He raised a reported $100,000 in contributions that year and is widely credited as having saved the Clinton campaign by extending a $3.5 million line of credit through his bank during the dark days of the Gennifer Flowers sex scandal.

Stephens is the man responsible for introducing both the Pakistani bank BCCI to the United States and WTI to the Ohio River Valley. His family firm is the largest privately owned investment bank outside Wall Street. And he's been linked to several political scandals. In September 1977, President Jimmy Carter's Budget Director Burt Lance resigned amid allegations that he was involved in shady dealings with Stephens. Coincidentally, Stephens and Carter were classmates at the Naval Academy.

In 1978, Stephens, Lance and BCCI were charged with violating U.S. security laws. The charges were dropped in exchange for the defendants' promise not to violate security laws in the future, but they admitted no guilt. The New York Post reported in 1992 that it was Stephens who orchestrated BCCI's foothold in the U.S. and helped the fraud-plagued bank covertly acquire U.S. banks. Investigative reporters Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin documented the flow of opium revenue from Afghanistan's Mujahedin anti-Soviet guerrillas into the accounts of BCCI. The Post also reported that Stephens allegedly introduced BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi to Burt Lance shortly after Lance resigned.

CIA Deputy Director Richard Kerr admitted to Congress at the time that BCCI "was involved in illegal activities such as money-laundering, narcotics and terrorism."

In 1975, Stephens originally chartered WTI as an Arkansas subsidiary. A July 1981 press release identified four firms involved in the plans to build the incinerator, including WTI, a subsidiary of Stephens Inc. of Little Rock, and Von Roll of America Inc., an affiliate of the Swiss firm Von Roll Limited. Recall that four Von Roll officials were later convicted in Switzerland for attempting to illegally sell "supergun parts" to the Iraqi government during the Persian Gulf War. It also owned New Jersey Steel, a company with reputed mob ties.

Von Roll lobbyist Tony Fabiano was recently fined by the Ohio Elections Commission for money-laundering violations in the 1994 Governor Voinovich re-election campaign and also pleaded guilty to tax charges related to his role in securing environmental permits from the defunct North Ohio Valley Air Authority for WTI.

That WTI should play such a prominent role in both national Democratic and Ohio Republican scandals should come as no surprise. The Wall Street Journal reported in 1991 that Stephens arranged a bailout for a small Texas oil company on the verge of bankruptcy. One of the company's directors and stockholders is also running for president--George W. Bush.

Beware the murky waters of the Ohio River Valley, where the secrets of BCCI, WTI and other monsters dwell. Be afraid of the Octopussy, be very afraid.

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2/17/2000  by Bob Fitrakis

Green-free farms :  Strip malls and plutonium plants are OK in Madison County--but no damn parks!

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2/24/2000

Dark side of the Moon

by Bob Fitrakis

After Texas Governor George W. Bush faltered in New Hampshire, a spooky and shadowy right-wing network came to his rescue in South Carolina, turning a certain primary defeat into a double-digit victory. As the Washington Post noted, "An array of conservative groups have come in to reinforce Bush's message with phone banks, radio ads and mailings of their own."

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen asserted that "Bush embraces the far-right fringe." From the racists who prohibit interracial dating at Bob Jones University to the moronic Confederate flag wavers, from Rush Limbaugh to Pat Robertson, and from the most extreme elements of the right-to-life movement to the Moonies, the Bush family network prevailed. NBC's Tim Russert pointed out that George W. was now "indebted to Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell" and the Christian right.

Dutifully, the Washington Times--a paper owned by self-proclaimed messiah and cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon--ran a headline stating, "Bush scoffs at assertion he moved too far right." The bizarre and almost unbelievable relationship between the Bush family and the 80-year-old Moon is the dirty little secret of George W.'s campaign for President.

To understand the role the Moonies play in U.S. politics, one must start with Ryoichi Sasakawa, identified in a 1992 PBS Frontline investigative report as a key money source for Reverend Moon's far-flung world empire. In the 1930s, Sasakawa was one of Japan's leading fascists. He organized a private army of 1,500 men equipped with 20 warplanes. His men dressed in black shirts to emulate Mussolini. Sasakawa was an "uncondemned Class A war criminal" suddenly freed with another accused war criminal--Yoshio Kodama, a leading figure in Japan's organized crime syndicate Yakuza--in 1948.

In January 1995, Japan' s KYODO news service uncovered documents establishing that the one-time fascist war criminal suspect was earmarked as an informer by U.S. military intelligence two months prior to his unexplained release. Declassified documents link Kodama's release to the CIA. During World War II, the Kodama Agency, according to U.S. Army counterintelligence records, consisted of "systematically looting China of its raw materials" and dealing in heroin, guns, tungsten, gold, industrial diamonds and radium.

Both Sasakawa and Kodama's CIA ties are a reoccurring theme in their relationship with the Moonies. In 1977, Congressman Donald Fraser launched an investigation into Moon's background. The 444-page Congressional report alleged Moonie involvement with bribery, bank fraud, illegal kickbacks and arms sales. The report revealed that Moon's 20,000-member Unification Church was a creation of Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) Director Kim Chong Phil as a political tool to influence U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. CIA was the agency primarily responsible for the founding of the KCIA.

The Moon organizations have denied any links with the Korean government or intelligence community.

Moon, who is Korean, and his two Japanese buddies, Sasakawa and Kodama, first joined together in the 1960s to form the Asian People's Anti-Communist League with the aid of KCIA agents, alleged Japanese organized crime money and financial support from Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. The League concentrated on uniting fascists, right-wing and anti-Communist forces throughout Asia.

In 1964, League funds set up Moon's Freedom Center in the United States. Kodama served as Chief Advisor to the Moon subsidiary Win Over Communism, an organization that served to protect Moon's South Korean investments. Sasakawa acted as Win Over Communism's chair.

In 1966, the League merged with the anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, another group with strong fascist ties, to form the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Later, in the 1980s, the retired U.S. Major General John Singlaub emerged as a key player in the Iran-Contra scandal through his chairmanship of the WACL. Singlaub enlisted paramilitary groups, foreign governments and right-wing Americans to support the Contra cause in Nicaragua.

Moon's Freedom Center served as the headquarters for the League in the United States. During the Iran-Contra hearings, the League was described as "a multi-national network of Nazi war criminals, Latin American death squad leaders, North American racists and anti-Semites and fascist politicians from every continent."

Working with the KCIA, Moon made his first trip to the U.S. in 1965 and obtained an audience with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike, along with former President Harry S Truman, lent their names to the letterhead of the Moon-created Korean Cultural Freedom Foundation. In 1969, Moon and Sasakawa jointly formed the Freedom Leadership Foundation (FLF), a pro-Vietnam War organization that lobbied the U.S. government.

In the 1970s, Moon earned notoriety in the Koreagate scandal after female followers of the Unification Church were accused of entertaining and keeping confidential files on several U.S. congressmen who they "lobbied" at a Washington Hilton Hotel suite rented by the Moonies. The U.S. Senate held hearings concerning Moon's "programmatic bribery of U.S. officials, journalists and others as part of an operation by the Korean CIA to influence the course of U.S. foreign policy."

The Fraser report noted that Moon was paid by the KCIA to stage demonstrations at the United Nations and run pro-South Korean propaganda campaigns. The Congressional investigator for the Fraser report said, "We determine that their [Moonies'] primary interest, at least in the U.S. at that time, was not religious at all but was political, it was attempt to gain power, influence and authority."

After Ronald Reagan's presidential victory in 1980, Moon's political influence increased dramatically. Vice President George Bush, a former CIA director, invited Moon as his guest to the Reagan inauguration. Bush and Moon shared unsavory links to South American underworld figures. In 1980, according to the investigatory magazine IF, the Moon organization collaborated with a right-wing military coup in Bolivia that established the region's first narco-state.

Moon's credentials soared in conservative circles in 1982 with the inception of the Washington Times. Vice President Bush immediately saw the value of building an alliance with the politically powerful Moon organization, an alliance that Moon claims made Bush president. One ex-Moonie's website claims that during the 1988 Bush-Dukakis battle, Reverend Moon threatened his followers that he'd move all of them out of the U.S. if the evil Dukakis won.

Also in 1982, Moon was convicted of income tax evasion and spent more than a year in jail.

During the Gulf War, the Moonie-sponsored American Freedom Coalition organized "support the troop" rallies. The Frontline documentary identified the Washington Times as the most costly piece in Moon's propaganda arsenal, with losses estimated as high as $800 million. Still, Sasakawa's virtual monopoly over the Japanese speedboat gambling industry allowed the money to continue flowing to Moon's U.S. coffers.

The Bush-Moonie connection caused considerable controversy in September 1995, when the former president announced he would be spending nearly a week in Japan on behalf of a Moonie front organization, the Women's Federation for World Peace, founded and led by Moon's wife. Then-President Bush downplayed accusations of brain-washing and coercion against the Moonies. The New York Times noted that Bush's presence "is seen by some as lending the group [Moonies] legitimacy."

Longtime Moonie member S.P. Simonds wrote an editorial for the Portland Press Herald noting the Bushes "didn't need the reported million dollars paid by Moon and were well aware of the Church's history."

Bush shared the podium with Moon's wife and addressed a crowd of 50,000 in the Tokyo dome. Bush told the true believers, "Reverend and Mrs. Moon are engaged in the most important activities going on the world today."

The following year Moon bankrolled a series of "family values" conferences from Oakland to Washington, D.C. The San Francisco Chronicle reported, "In Washington, Moon opened his checkbook to such Republican Party mainstays as former Presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush, GOP presidential candidate Jack Kemp and Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed."

Purdue University Professor of Sociology Anson Shupe, a longtime Moon watcher, said, "The man accused of being the biggest brainwasher in America has moved into mainstream Republican Americana."

Moon claimed at these family values conferences that he was the "only one who knows all the secrets of God." One of them, according to the Chronicle, is that "the husband is the owner of his wife's sexual organs and vice versa."

"President Ford, President Bush, who attended the Inaugural World Convention of the Family Federation for World Peace and all you distinguished guests are famous, but there's something that you do not know," the Chronicle quoted Moon as saying. "Is there anyone here who dislikes sexual organs?... Until now you may not have thought it virtuous to value the sexual organs, but from now, you must value them."

In November 1996, President Bush arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, amid controversy over a newly created Spanish-language Moon weekly newspaper called Tiempos del Mundo. Bush smoothed things over as the principal speaker at the paper's opening dinner on November 23.

The former president then traveled with Moon to neighboring Uruguay to help him open a Montevideo seminary to train 4,200 young Japanese women to spread the word of the Unification Church across Latin America. The young Japanese seminarians were later accused of laundering $80 million through an Uruguayan bank, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

The Times also reported that when Reverend Jerry Falwell's university faced bankruptcy, Moon's group bailed it out with millions of dollars in loans and grants.

The New York Times noted in 1997 that Moon "has been reaching out to conservative Christians in this country in the last few years by emphasizing shared goals like support for sexual abstinence outside of marriage and opposition to homosexuality." Moon also appeals to the Second Amendment crowd. In March 1999, the Washington Post reported that the messiah owned the lucrative Kahr Arms Company through Saeilo, Inc.

It's the shadowy network around the Moonies that the elder Bush could have called in to bail out his son's campaign in South Carolina. Make no mistake, George W. of Texas is little more than a frontman for the restoration of his father's unsavory connections, who hide behind the veil of national security to avoid accountability.

3/02/2000

Police history in black and white

by Bob Fitrakis

More than 200 youth and student activists blocked the intersection of High and 15th Sunday afternoon demanding a new trial--this time a fair one--for death-row inmate and political activist Mumia Abu-Jamal. Local protesters held the street for over 18 minutes at the February 27 rally.

Recent events, from the demonstrations at OSU's 1998 CNN Town Hall meeting on Iraq, to last November's protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, to Sunday's rally that took it to the streets of Columbus, are more and more reminiscent of pre-Reagan/Bush-era social protest. The activists are reclaiming traditions and slogans that insist the streets belong to the people.

I don't know whether Mumia is guilty or innocent, but I believe he sits on death row as a result of a rigged and unconstitutional prosecution and trial. Let's go over some of the facts of the case. Mumia's Philadelphia public radio show gave voice to the poor and oppressed prior to his arrest in December 1981. Mumia, a licensed taxi driver, was shot and nearly died at the scene where a Philadelphia police officer was slain. The officer was beating Mumia's brother at the time. Instead of acting as the professionals they claim to be, the Philly police allegedly proceeded to beat Mumia before taking him to the hospital.

Despite exculpatory evidence from eyewitnesses who saw two other men fleeing the scene, Mumia was charged with the murder and the police and prosecution proclaimed his licensed .38 revolver was the murder weapon. Medical examiners, however, report that the slain officer was shot with a .44-caliber bullet as he clutched the driver's license of a man other than Mumia.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Mumia's conviction is the testimony of the slain officer's partner. Two months after the incident, the partner claimed that Mumia had confessed to the crime in the hospital's emergency room and the officer had simply forgotten to note it in his reports or mention it to anybody. An emergency room doctor says the confession never happened.

But big-city cops wouldn't perjure themselves, would they? Except maybe in Los Angeles, where the police officers branded their bodies with a grinning skull in a cowboy hat and pledged an oath of silence as they delivered unprovoked beatings to suspected gang members and framed innocent people for crimes. Eleven officers have already been relieved of duty, and USA Today reports that at least a dozen others will be implicated "in serious misconduct," including murder, in the growing Los Angeles scandal. The preliminary estimates are that some 300 convictions are tainted by L.A. police corruption.

Or what about New York City? Police lie after brutally sodomizing an immigrant with a wooden toilet plunger. Last week, an all-white jury acquitted four New York policemen after they fired 41 shots at an unarmed immigrant, striking him 19 times, including his feet. The police claimed, in direct contradiction of eyewitnesses, that they thought his wallet was a gun and shot him so many times because he didn't fall right away.

Or what about the Columbus police? Back in the mid-'90s they allowed 29 people who had admitted to committing felonies to serve on the police force. With well over 300 citizen complaints filed against the police department with the U.S. Justice Department's Division of Civil Rights, what's the city's response? City Attorney Janet Jackson--incredibly--claims that the federal government has no jurisdiction over civil rights matters involving police brutality and misconduct.

Jackson's clearly been reading the 1963 and '64 speeches of the racist Alabama Governor George Wallace, or watching old video clips of Montgomery's fascist Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, who argued the same thing before unleashing the Billy clubs, dogs and fire hoses on civil rights activists.

Speaking of fire hoses, remember Mumia, a founding member of Philadelphia's Black Panther Party and its former minister of information, had exposed police attacks on the MOVE organization. On May 13, 1985, police fired water cannons, tear gas and bullets into the MOVE house in an eviction action. When their attempts to drive MOVE members from the house failed, Philly police in a state police helicopter dropped a bomb--reportedly a full five-gallon gas can with nearly 10 pounds of military C-4 plastic explosives duct taped to it--and destroyed the MOVE house and 61 other homes on Osage Avenue and the adjoining Pine Street. Eleven occupants in the MOVE house died, including five children. Only Ramona Africa and 13-year-old Michael Moses Ward survived.

Instead of a righteous outcry demanding to know why in the hell the Philly cops dropped 10 pounds of military explosives in the middle of a residential neighborhood, the focus switched to the crimes of the victim, Ramona Africa. That was in spite of a March 1986 MOVE Commission investigatory report that deemed Philly's mayor Wilson Goode and his top administrators "grossly negligent" and said the death of the five children "appeared to be unjustified homicide."

In April 1986, a jury convicted Africa of riot and conspiracy charges stemming from the bombing of her house. She served a full seven-year sentence in prison. A civil court jury awarded her and relatives of two dead MOVE members $1.5 million in June 1996.

Africa was in Columbus to lead the February 27 rally on High Street. It was good to see her in fine spirits and strong voice. It's equally important to support a new generation of human rights activists who correctly understand, as they stated in their flier, that: "The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal concentrates the criminalization of black men, the suppression of dissent, the expanded death penalty, the gutting of defendant's rights, and a whole political atmosphere based on blame and punishment of the most oppressed."

3/09/2000

Red, white and green

Will Ralph Nader rain on Al Gore's parade?

by Bob Fitrakis

On Monday night, a dozen veteran central Ohio activists met in an upstairs room at the Clintonville Community Market. Their brief agenda posed a potential danger for likely Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore--to put Ralph Nader on Ohio's ballot this November.

Unlike Nader's token Green Party campaign in 1996, when he was an official write-in candidate in the Buckeye state and spent a mere $5,000 nationally, Ralph's new raiders claim that Mr. Citizen Action will spend $5 million this election. The well-established Green Parties in California and New Mexico are looking to Ohio as a bellwether state, to judge the seriousness of Nader enthusiasts across the country.

One sign of Nader's aspirations in Ohio is his supporters' goal of collecting the 5,000 signatures needed to place his name as an independent on the ballot. They hope to do so prior to the Green's national convention in late June. The core group in central Ohio includes petitioners seasoned in the Pickerington Ponds initiative, which garnered 12,000 signatures in just one month last year. A similar group of Naderites is already active in the Cleveland area.

While many of the Nader supporters at the March 6 meeting admitted that they had copies of Gore's Earth in the Balance in their home libraries, they were quick to point out the mountain of broken Clinton-Gore environmental promises. None perhaps more infamous than Gore's hollow vow to aid the people of East Liverpool, Ohio, in shutting down the toxic-spewing WTI incinerator.

In an age of dirty foreign money--take your pick, Japanese Nippon Group for Bush or the Indonesia Lippon Group for Gore--cynicism and spinmeisters, Citizen Nader represents to many grassroots activists the last best hope for modern democracy. Nader was first recognized as a consumer advocate with his 1965 bestseller Unsafe at Any Speed, which revealed both the engineering flaws of GM's Corvair and the corrupt practices of an auto industry that knowingly marketed unsafe vehicles. GM's attempt to discredit Nader backfired, leading to a large invasion of privacy settlement and the start of his career as America's foremost corporate watchdog.

In 1971, Nader helped found Public Citizen. I joined his PIRGIM (Public Interest Research Group in Michigan) as a college freshman in 1973. We followed nuclear waste trucks and found them traveling at unsafe speeds. We watched their drivers go into McDonald's while they left their engines running and their truck cabs unlocked, opening the door for would-be nuclear hijackers. We duly reported all of this to Washington, D.C. PIRGIM also brought Michigan its so-called Bottle Bill. By placing deposits on cans and bottles, recycling flourished in the state up north.

Nader's 1996 book, No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America, eloquently argues that both the Democratic and Republican Parties are captives of well-heeled special interest groups, that our courts are corrupted and justice is distorted by corporate PACs. All of this in the name of "tort reform."

Nader's progressive opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) should sell well in Ohio, a state that's lost thousands of well-paying manufacturing jobs while the average real wage in our boomtown known as Cowtown has declined by $1.50 in the past 20 years. If Nader runs in Ohio, at least someone other than the East Side's BREAD organization will mention "livable wages" for working families. Nader authored much of Jerry Brown's insurgent progressive campaign at the Democratic Party's 1992 platform hearings. Recently, he took on the World Trade Organization and their politics of reactionary globalization in Seattle.

Both Gore and Bradley, despite their posturing in the Democratic primary, are fundamentally pro-Big Business New Democrats. Come the fall, Gore will be busy taking progressives and environmentalists for granted while he reaches just to the Right of Center to snatch votes from Bush or McCain. At the same time, the Republican nominee will be busy touting his compassion and Gore's broken environmental promises and he reaches very slightly to the Left of Center.

In Ohio, as in California and other key swing states, Nader's presence on the ballot may help break the "greedlock" that the large multinational corporations have on both candidates and major parties. As one activist explained Monday night, "The Democrats on City Council are friendly and easier to talk to about environmental issues, but they still vote the same way as the Republicans."

The well-entrenched pattern of having to vote for the lesser of two evils may give way when disgruntled progressive Democrats and independent voters see Nader's name on the ballot. While the Bushes and Gores of the political world have searched the planet to find Buddhist monks and Moonies with bags of cash to launder into their campaign coffers, Nader spent his time taking on the most powerful corporations in the world and demanding they make our automobiles safer, our water and air cleaner.

Nader would be the only true "reformer with results" on the ballot. Granted, Bush would be the reformed drinker with enough money (through his Poppa's connections) to commandeer national TV airwaves. And Gore will run on the age-old Clinton strategy, "I'm not as bad as Bush, or Dole, or McCain."

Ask not what Citizen Nader has done for you--and it's plenty--ask what you can do for him. The Nader petitioners will meet again on Sunday, March 26, at 4 p.m. at the Clintonville Community Market. For more info call 766-4511.

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3/16/2000  by Bob Fitrakis

Average white band :  White supremacists use rock music to recruit racist kids

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3/23/2000

Council clash

Cops face off over civil rights

by Bob Fitrakis

Reversing the dictum of the Good Book, newly enthroned Columbus City Council President Matt Habash decreed at Monday's council meeting that "the last shall be last." Hardly the wisdom of Solomon.

By forcing Police Officers for Equal Rights (POER) members and supporters, some who'd flown in from other states, to speak at the end of an unusually mundane and boring council agenda--and then limiting them to six speakers--Habash was begging for a confrontation at the March 20 meeting.

Habash's shabby treatment of citizens and police officers who support the consent decree proposed by the U.S. Justice Department to protect the Fourth and 14th Amendments in Columbus is perplexing. The POER believes that all citizens should be treated equally regardless of their race or bank account balance when they encounter the police. The organization holds that citizens should not be victimized by racial profiling or pretext traffic stops and coerced into illegal searches and seizures.

Why have our elected officials on City Council been so eerily silent on the issue of civil rights? There is, of course, the Holy Grail of Columbus political endorsements: "FOP endorsed."

But there's more to it than that. A group of 50 or so primarily black men show up at council chambers and Habash, the life-long social liberal, acts just like the Columbus police. First, he disrespects them, then he attempts to ignore them and the problem, and then he arbitrarily exerts his authority as if to say, "Hey, white guy in charge here." And when they question his arbitrary use of authority, Habash's cop buddies come rushing in to make matters worse. What happened at council this week is a microcosm of Columbus' police problem and the nation's race problems.

To understand what Fox 28's News Center called "Council Chaos," a look at events leading up to the council clash is essential. Just recently, the first African-American City Attorney, Janet Jackson, argued the all-too-familiar and discredited Dixiecrat line of state's rights. On behalf of the City of Columbus and its co-defendant Capital City Lodge No. 9 of the Fraternal Order of Police, our city attorney claims that the U.S. Justice Department has no business in enforcing civil rights in our city.

The 1994 federal law which gave the U.S. Justice Department the authority to bring civil suit against local police for violating the constitutional rights of citizens was passed in the aftermath of the vicious beating of Rodney King and the consequent riot in L.A. If local elected officials routinely kiss the ring and rump of the Fraternal Order of Police in order to get endorsements and campaign contributions, where are minorities and the poor to turn for a redress of grievances?

The riots that rocked the '60s--Watts 1965, Newark and Detroit 1967 and scores of others--were all caused by an institutional pattern of police violence and misconduct against black communities, according to the government's Kerner Commission. There was an attempt in the '70s to educate police about the U.S. Constitution and basic sociology through law enforcement educational grants. The Reagan reaction quickly thwarted these small efforts to turn the police into the foot soldiers of the Constitution.

On Monday, the official police line in response to their demonstration of force at council chambers was "We were just doing our job." But what about Saturday? At 4 p.m. on March 18, approximately 70 marchers, many of them children, assembled at POER attorney John Waddy's law office on Hamilton Park for a short march across Broad Street to the First A.M.E. Zion church.

The clearly constitutional march in support of the consent decree was met with police-state tactics. When POER President James Moss told me to expect a police helicopter overhead because his group is deemed "subversive," I dismissed it out of hand. My mistake, as a police helicopter soon roared overhead.

As we marched, police cruisers began to appear. And then there was the too-easy-to-spot undercover guy in a car with tinted windows in a church parking lot on Broad Street. As we marched down 18th Street to the church, six cruisers were visible.

After people began to enter the church to engage in subversive activities including prayer and free speech, a young white man pulled up and informed Waddy and I that "I just wanted to let you guys know that there's an undercover cop with a video camera taping you in that alley." I suppose the police were just doing their job.

And Janet Jackson was just doing her job when she opened up her mouth and Dixiecrat states' rights sentiments came out. And I suppose Matt Habash was just doing his job when he disrespected POER supporters while rolling out the red carpet to well-heeled zoning attorneys on the payroll of wealthy developers.

And if they don't like my column? Hey, I'm just doing my job.

Bob Fitrakis spoke in favor of the Justice Department consent decree at the Saturday POER "Stand Up for Justice" rally and at the City Council meeting on Monday.

3/30/2000

The science of racism

by Bob Fitrakis

A new generation of ideologues and academicians are openly working to resurrect the most destructive and discredited ideas of Nazi science. This "new eugenics" movement must be challenged.

Eugenics is the science of improving a race stock through selective breeding and, as Nazi Germany demonstrated, has horribly frightening consequences. The search for a "master race" usually leads to genocide.

Such ideas are now slyly creeping back on college campuses. Internationally, the Euro-American Student Unions promote campus activism on issues related to race and science. Articles posted on the group's web site range from rants about "Jewish influences" to a "Call to white Americans." Most of its so-called science seems to worship the Bell Curve and the belief that blacks have significantly lower IQs than whites.

Ohio State University and central Ohio have a curious history relating to eugenics and Nazi scientists. As the Wall Street Journal wrote last year, "Long before cloned sheep, egg donors and sperm banks, a group of wealthy Northeastern conservatives embarked on an experiment with the help of the U.S. Army Air Corps to find a way to improve the human race...The Pioneer Fund, alarmed by the declining U.S. birthrate and rising immigration, was at the forefront of the eugenics movement."

In 1940, the Pioneer Fund agreed to pay the all-white Air Corps members for breeding children. Two of the 12 children were Ward and Darby Warburton, twin brothers born on August 18, 1940, "at a hospital near Dayton, Ohio." Their father was stationed at a nearby airfield.

William Pierce, a former physics professor and the leader of the National Alliance, frequently refers to scientists sponsored by the Pioneer Fund in his calls for race war in the United States.

Founded in 1937, the Pioneer Fund is a nonprofit foundation with the stated purpose of studying "the problems of heredity and eugenics in the human race." Pierce's National Vanguard publication, citing race scientists, claimed, "It is the Negro's deficiency...which kept him in a state of savagery in his African environment and is now undermining the civilization of a racially mixed America."

Still earlier in Ohio history, the state has the distinction of hiring away H.H. Goddard from the Vineland Training School for the Feeble Minded in New Jersey in 1918. Steven J. Gould, in his Mismeasure of Man, called Goddard "The most unsubtle hereditarian of all...[who] used his unilinear scale of mental deficiency to identify intelligence as a single entity, and [who] assumed that everything important about it was inborn and inherited in family lines."

So impressed were Ohio public officials with Goddard's work that they hired him to head the Ohio Bureau of Juvenile Research. Sharing Ohio officials' views, according to Stefan Kuhl in his The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism, were Nazi Party members. Kuhl points out that Goddard's pseudo-scientific writings were central to the Nazi propaganda campaign to exterminate Jews and create a master race.

Madge Thurlow Macklin, an avid supporter in the 1930s of the controversial eugenics movement, spread the gospel of improving the human race through controlled breeding throughout North America. She co-founded the Canadian Eugenics Society in 1930, served on its executive committee between 1932-34 and acted as its director in 1935.

Macklin claimed that doctors ought to "determine who are physically and mentally qualified to be parents of the next generation." She advocated compulsory sterilization for the "unfit," like schizophrenics. In 1945, as World War II ended, she was terminated from her appointment in "medical genetics" at Ontario University.

What university would hire such a professor tied to Nazi science? In 1946, Macklin moved to Columbus and began lecturing in medical genetics at Ohio State University, where she remained until her retirement in 1959.

At the same time Macklin moved to Columbus, U.S. intelligence teams were busy rounding up Nazi scientists to bring to the U.S. to work at places like Wright Patterson Air Force base in Dayton. This is the infamous Operation Paperclip. These Nazi scientists were most visibly linked to the U.S. space program and secretly worked on a variety of CIA projects, including mind-control experiments like the MK-Ultra project at OSU.

In 1993, a mural at the Ohio State University Medical School made international news for portraying Nazi Colonel Hubertus Strughold as one of the mural's medical heroes. In the 1960s, Strughold was painted in the mural along with other medical giants like Marie Curie and Hippocrates.

I suppose OSU officials were unaware that Strughold headed the Luftwaffe Institute for Aviation Medicine, which conducted notorious experiments on inmates at Dachau, including immersing inmates in ice water to see how long it would take them to die, forcing them to drink sea water and placing them in air pressure chambers and slowly removing the air.

Nuremberg documents place Strughold at an October 1942 conference on the Dachau experiments. One scientist, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, told the War Crimes Tribunal that Strughold could have stopped the experiments at any time because he headed the institute that conducted them. The U.S. Army intelligence Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects listed Strughold as "wanted."

OSU can paint over celebratory images of Nazis like Strughold, but the ideas behind eugenics can (and do) survive. As groups like the Euro-American Student Unions and Pierce's National Alliance step up recruiting efforts on college campuses and attempt to veil their hatred in academic legitimacy, we need to recognize this "science" for the racism it is.

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4/06/2000  by Bob Fitrakis

Jumping bail

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4/13/2000  by Bob Fitrakis

Minimum wages :  OSU union workers are left out of the economic boom

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4/20/2000

Make love, not debt

Behind the lines with World Bank protesters in Washington

by Bob Fitrakis

Dubbed "Seattle Two: The Sequel," the clash between critics of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and D.C. police last weekend proved irresistible to an activist and political junkie like me. As websites starting to percolate with stories from Washington detailing young protesters' heroics and attacks by the police, I knew, despite my planned traveling partners' canceling on me, that I had to go witness history in the making. So I embarked on my own road trip to the April 14-16 protests.

In Washington, police initially claimed they'd arrested only "several dozen people" at protests on Saturday. Under scrutiny from international reporters--who are much more aggressive and accurate in their news coverage than U.S. mainstream reporters--the police upped arrest figures to "approximately 600."

Earlier Saturday, the police raided and closed down demonstration central, or "the convergence center" for the Mobilization for Global Justice, the umbrella group organizing Sunday's rally. The center, in an old warehouse, served as the headquarters for a festive, creative and dedicated movement of new activists. Offering everything from Demonstration Techniques 101 to Intermediate First Aid, Advanced Tear Gas Coping Strategies and the ever-popular Giant Puppet Construction, it's no wonder the police illegally raided the joint.

The London Independent, being run by Brits and all, failed to parrot the standard police lie bantered around D.C. Instead, the Independent stated the obvious: "In preemptive strikes, the police closed the demonstrators' headquarters as a `fire risk' on Saturday, and arrested 600 people, more than were arrested in five days in Seattle."

District of Columbia Police Chief Charles Ramsey had a different take, preferred by the U.S. press: "We probably saved their lives...We're simply concerned about their safety and we want to make sure that there are no fire hazards."

In the official police version, a couple of fire marshals just happened to be walking by and noticed somebody using a propane camping stove. Thus, the ever-vigilant fire marshals raced in to close down the fire trap. International reporters noted that, luckily, the D.C. police were in the neighborhood in full riot gear to immediately begin evacuating and arresting those who wouldn't leave.

I'm just thankful that we live in a country where the police care so much. I remember a few years back, while covering an anti-police brutality march in the Ohio State University campus area, the police were so concerned about our Constitutional rights, or at least they later swore under oath to this fact, that they dispatched three squad cars of police who inadvertently Maced the marchers.

After the D.C. police "evacuated" 200 activists against their will, demonstrators filled the street and sang: "We want our puppets, oh yes we do, the cops have taken them, and we are blue. We want our stuff back, and our food too, we want our puppets, and so should you." Police eventually turned over the confiscated puppets, art supplies and foodstuff to the protesters, who stored them in rented trucks.

London's Daily Telegraph pointed out that the saintly D.C. police had spent $1 million on "new helmets, shin guards and gloves and is splashing out another $1.6 million on police overtime." Not a bad funding priority for a city with the second highest rate of infant mortality in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti, and where a pregnant working poor mother with no health insurance waits on average four months for free prenatal care.

The next day I witnessed the D.C. police rhythmically slapping their riot batons against their shiny new riot shin guards like a drill team. This wasn't the old school bang-your-nightstick-on-the-ground and then charge routine, this was worthy of ESPN 2's cheerleader competition coverage.

By Sunday morning, as I entered D.C. for the rally at the Ellipse, police had closed more than 60 blocks around the IMF building to vehicles and barred pedestrians from walking within a two block radius. As the Independent put it, the "central bankers and finance ministers... met behind a vast, multi-layered security screen, with roadblocks, wired fences, armored cars, phalanxes of police motorcyclists of helmeted officers." It took the French finance minister four hours to get from the Watergate Hotel to the IMF, no doubt infuriating the German minister expecting his usual greased-palm pay off.

The Columbus Dispatch dutifully towed the official line, reporting on Monday's front page, beside its AP report on the demonstrations, that the IMF "provides short-term credit to 182 member nations. The loans are used to stabilize nations' economies in times of crisis."

Contrast that to the Irish Times coverage the same day: "The loans, however, come at a price; the IMF insists that in order to be eligible for loans, the poor countries must open up their markets to foreign trade and adopt the free market principles that have prevailed in the U.S. for the last 20 years."

Like the Irish Times, dozens of speakers at Sunday's rally noted the obvious: sub-Sahara Africa owes more than $200 billion--three times the value of the region's annual exports--to the IMF. Vietnam owes $22 billion, roughly 87 percent of its gross national product. The IMF/World Bank's real scam is offering easy money to desperate, debt-ridden countries in return for accessing or owning their natural resources and using their people for sweatshop labor.

Ralph Nader eloquently explained it in his rally speech. As working people formed unions and passed environmental laws to protect their nation from the ravages of large undemocratic corporations, the corporations searched the Earth and found weak and vulnerable people to exploit, thus skirting labor and environmental laws.

Nader noted the fallacy of seeing this as a battle between "free traders" and "nationalistic protectionists." It's really a battle between a rapacious corporate capitalism and the democratic rights of people trying to protect their families and communities from merciless economic exploitation. Nader recently polled six percent in a national poll for president, passing Pat Buchanan. Nader, unlike the Ivy League lightweights George W. Bush and Al Gore, understands basic stats--that there's something fundamentally wrong in a world where "300 U.S. billionaires own more wealth than 3 billion people worldwide."

Michael Moore, of Roger and Me, The Big One and The Awful Truth fame, served as master of ceremonies at the April 16 rally--not to be confused with Michael Moore, Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO Moore tried to put a happy and benevolent face on world bank policy from his fortified bunker.

Meanwhile, the other Moore, the people's filmmaker, unveiled his plan to run a potted plant for Congress against unchallenged and well-entrenched incumbents. His thinking, "The potted plant would do much less harm." Moore asked the 20,000 demonstrators to write in "Ficus" in November. They chanted back "Ficus! Ficus!"

Ohio's own Dennis Kucinich, the courageous congressman from Cleveland, officially welcomed the revelers to Washington. He also blew out the speaker system as he praised the demonstrators' commitment to human rights and social justice. At first I suspected that it was most likely another Ohio congressmen and former banker, Senator George Voinovich, tampering with cables backstage.

But powerful enough to cut through the sound system static was the chant of the young demonstrators: "Ain't no power like the power of the people 'cause the power of the people don't stop." And, later, their polite instructions: "Anybody who's not arrestable please leave the street."

Before 5 p.m. Monday, the UPI reported that 600 more arrests were made, "including 400 `voluntary arrests.'" These new young volunteers for global justice didn't stop the summit, but their message, summed up on one sign, came through loud and clear: "Make Love, Not Debt."

4/27/2000

Death rate detectives

Why is Columbus so unhealthy? The answer is right under our dioxin-filled noses

by Bob Fitrakis

Local health officials and elected leaders are dumbfounded. Why is Columbus such an unhealthy place to live? Unfortunately, though these experts refuse to acknowledge it, the answer is obvious: it's been creating a carcinogenic stink right under their noses for more than 15 years.

"Using death certificates, the health department found that the city's death rates have increased significantly between 1990 and 1998. This has happened while the U.S. rate has decreased," the Columbus Dispatch reported after the Columbus Health Department held a death rate summit on April 13. Columbus residents are dying at high rates of heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes.

Health department spokesperson Liane Egle told the Dispatch, "The mystery is what is keeping us as a city from reducing these death rates."

Dr. David Frid, an OSU cardiologist pondered, "All these diseases are related to lifestyle...Are we different from other areas?"

This is shocking--whatever could have caused this? How about the largest point source of dioxin pollution in the United States, and possibly the world--the city-owned trash-burning power plant that operated for well over a decade until environmental "extremists" shut it down.

Before it was closed four years ago, Columbus' trash-burning power plant was the primo polluter in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency inventory, spewing more deadly dioxin than all sources in Germany combined, twice as much as Holland and 592 times the amount of dioxin mandated as "safe" by the EPA.

Inadvertently, our elected officials turned a trash-burner into a souped-up dioxin generator by designing it to burn dirty Ohio coal instead of less volatile natural gas. They also built it on the cheap, without stack scrubbers and virtually no pollution control devices. This would be unheard of in private industry, but perfectly acceptable by then-mayor Buck Rinehart and his political cohorts when it went online in 1983.

Add to this that Columbus essentially had no recycling program in the 1980s and early '90s and mixed all its trash together, conjuring up a toxic brew. A famous EPA document, leaked by whistleblower William Sanjour in 1994, reported that our trash-burner emitted 17,982 nanograms of dioxin (part per billion) when the suggested EPA level was 30 nanograms.

Dioxin is one of the most toxic and carcinogenic chemicals known. The Guinness Book of World Records calls dioxin 2-3-7-8-TCDD the most deadly manmade substance, more lethal than plutonium. Dioxin, as the EPA notes, "bioaccumulates up the food chain." It's stored in our fat. There's no real way for men to get rid of it, other than allowing the chemical to slowly break down in their bodies. Women, of course, can pass it to their infants through the placenta or through fatty breast milk.

The journal of the National Cancer Institute uses a "15-year lag time" to document cancer caused by dioxin exposure. Let's see--1983-84, plus 15 years, equals 1998-99. Current Columbus death rates indicate that the trash-burner's toxins are coming home to roost, right on schedule.

When reached for comment this week, St. Lawrence University biochemist and world-renowned dioxin expert Dr. Paul Connett told Columbus Alive he wasn't surprised at all that Columbus was seeing an unexplained rise in the illnesses and deaths generally associated with dioxin exposure.

"As I warned in 1994, your trash-burner was producing the toxic equivalent of nearly a thousand grams--984 grams to be precise--of dioxin a year. That's more than five times the level that led to the evacuation at Seveso, Italy, and more than was spilled at Times Beach, Missouri," Connett said. "Granted, yours was spewed into the air and spread out over a longer period of time, but it's clearly going to have massive health implications."

Connett said it's absurd for Columbus officials "to blame it on lifestyle and to call on supposed `experts' to avoid getting to the cause of the problem, which is the heavy dioxin exposure." To scapegoat "lifestyle" is "intellectually dishonest."

Dioxin was the key ingredient in the defoliate Agent Orange used in Vietnam. A month ago, on March 29, the Air Force released a study showing a 47-percent increase in diabetes and elevated heart disease levels in Air Force veterans with high levels of chemical dioxin in their bloodstreams, according to the Los Angeles Times. The study was widely reported in the New York Times, Washington Post and Chicago Sun-Times, but was conveniently left out of the Dispatch "mystery" articles.

Experts estimate that 95 percent of dioxin exposure comes from dioxin-contaminated food consumption. In 1994, the Columbus Free Press published photos of dairy cows grazing near the trash-burning power plant, eggs for sale and a cultivated farm just across the I-71 expressway from the plant.

That summer, the Free Press exposed attempts by the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio (SWACO) to cover up the dioxin problems at the plant. Sanjour said that SWACO's actions "might constitute a criminal conspiracy to violate federal environmental laws." In the October 1994 Free Press, I reported extensively on the U.S. EPA's three-year study of dioxin and its devastating impact on children's health.

Then-mayor Greg Lashutka "discounted" Sanjour's EPA document, claiming it lacked "statistical or scientific evidence."

Columbus city officials instead brought in a hired gun, Dr. Greg Ringo, who proceeded to use outdated data to explain to a befuddled and acquiescent mainstream media "that if we averaged all the known and unknown sources of dioxin in the U.S. from areas with and without trash incinerators, then on average, Columbus has no real dioxin problem."

The real problem is that our elected officials didn't listen when cancer experts warned that the trash-burner's dioxin output would catch up with Columbus within 15 years. Now, as current health statistics show, those predictions were deadly accurate.

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5/04/2000 :  by Bob Fitrakis and Jamie Pietras

NEWS BRIEF :  Dark side of the boom ;  Striking OSU workers demand fair wages and economic justice

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5/04/2000

Tin soldiers

On the 30th anniversary of the Kent State killings, questions still linger

by Bob Fitrakis

Like the assassination of JFK, conspiracy questions linger over the four dead corpses of the students murdered at Kent State University 30 years ago. And well it should. The U.S. government's infiltration and suppression of anti-war organizations during the Vietnam era inevitably led to massive cover-ups. Much of what we know about the government's large-scale counter-intelligence operations against its citizens crosses the line into blatant criminality.

To understand what happened at Kent State we need to remember Operations MHCHAOS and Cointelpro, run respectively by the CIA and the FBI with the assistance of the National Security Agency. William A. Gordon's Four Dead in Ohio: Was there a conspiracy at Kent State?, written for the event's 25th anniversary, and August MacKenzie's 1997 The CIA's War at Home, are required reading for anyone trying to comprehend the government's complicity in the Kent State tragedy.

The lead story in Sunday's Akron Beacon Journal, "KSU: Who fired first?," resurrects questions surrounding the mysterious activities of Terry Norman and the bizarre behavior of the FBI following the May 4, 1970, shootings. As the Beacon Journal noted, "While five years of FBI files do not reveal a `smoking gun,' they at least point to missing guns and missing answers."

Norman, a 21-year-old part-time Kent State student, was the only person at the university other than the guardsmen known to have been armed when the incident took place. Armed with a .38-caliber pistol, a surveillance camera and a gas mask, Norman's role at Kent State is suspicious. In the days immediately after the shooting, Ohio National Guard General Sylvester Del Corso suggested that the guard fired in response to sniper bullets and tried to tie Norman to the shots.

For three years the FBI denied any connection to Norman, before finally admitting that they had paid him $125 in expenses in 1970 for infiltrating the National Socialists White People's Party, a neo-Nazi organization. Gordon documented that Norman served as an informant for both the campus police and the Akron office of the FBI. Since Norman was a paid FBI informant and many past FBI informants have functioned as agent provocateurs, there's a possibility that he served this role at Kent State.

Not only did the FBI lie about its relationship with Norman, the bureau also gave false testimony to Congress regarding ballistic tests on Norman's gun. The FBI told Congressional investigators that Norman's .38 had not been fired on May 4, when in fact its own lab test indicated that it had been fired at some undetermined point since its last cleaning.

In 1973, as evidence was being gathered for a civil trial, the Beacon Journal points out that Norman's gun "and an undetermined amount of M-1 rifles used by guardsmen were discovered missing."

The Beacon Journal reports the strange scenario when, "while trying to locate Norman's gun before 1973-74 civil trial, FBI officials found it had been sent by Kent State officials back to a Smith and Wesson factory in Springfield, Massachusetts. There, it had been renickeled--giving it a new exterior, presumably for resale--but not tested or repaired."

Both Guardsman Dennis Breckenridge and Guard Captain John Martin reported to their superior officers that Norman positioned himself between the guardsmen and the students and threw rocks at the students just prior to the shooting. Tom Masterson, a student, reported that Norman may have tossed as many as a dozen rocks. Norman admitted to throwing "two or three."

Norman's activities and the FBI cover-up fit the pattern of Cointelpro provocations. The question isn't "Who fired first?" but how far our government went to suppress legitimate dissent 30 years ago, and how far they'll go in the future.

5/11/2000

The ghost of Billy Joe Barone

by Bob Fitrakis

I see dead people. It's a political sixth sense. The ghost of former Ohio Attorney General William J. Brown (nee Barone) continues to haunt the Buckeye state's pay-to-play carousel. Former Ohio Inspector General David Sturtz used to comment, "Watch it go around long enough and you realize it's always the same riders"--even if they're no longer living.

Which brings us to the legend of Billy Joe, whom I last wrote about in Columbus Alive more than a year ago ("The Ballad of Billy Joe Brown"), 10 months before his death in November 1999 at age 59.

In 1970, Brown became Ohio's Attorney General at the tender age of 29--partly due to the fat bankroll of reputed organized crime associate "Fast" Eddie DeBartolo Jr. of Youngstown, one of his biggest campaign contributors. Elected three times as a Democrat, Brown suddenly turned his Emens, Kegler, Brown Law firm PAC into a Republican money machine in 1996.

Simply a case of Billy Joe growing conservative with age? Recently uncovered civil suits filed in the Franklin County Common Pleas Court against Brown, his firm, and business associate Michael E. Scoliere, suggest otherwise. The suits also offers interesting revelations on how the game is really played in Ohio, among the living and the dead.

In June 1996, Janice Spalla, then the sole shareholder and CEO of J. Chase and Bradley, Inc., (JC&B), a debt-collection firm doing half its business through the state attorney general's office, sued Brown and his firm. The suit alleged that Brown breached his duty as an attorney to Spalla and her firm by recommending Scoliere as his replacement at JC&B.

Spalla claimed her ordeal began in 1991, when her husband John Spalla, a "special counsel" to the Ohio Attorney General, "died suddenly and accidentally during a family vacation in Florida," according to her affidavit. The widow Spalla, with three young sons, looked to her husband's "long-time friend," old reliable Billy Joe Brown.

Seems Billy Joe was no heroic Billy Jack type. After a few years of aiding the Spalla family, and receiving $82,000 in legal fees from JC&B, Brown recommended Scoliere take his place as the company's lawyer. Scoliere, like Billy Joe and John Spalla before him, became "special counsel" to the attorney general's office, a title that let him go after state of Ohio debtors. Critics have long charged that the privatization of debt collection by Ohio is unnecessary and could be easily done by state employees.

"In or around October 1994, defendant Scoliere hired Hugh DeMoss to work for plaintiff JC&B.... Mr. DeMoss, who is not a `key employee,' received vacation, health and dental benefits immediately upon starting his employment.... Mr. DeMoss was then a candidate for local political office, and defendant Scoliere was his campaign treasurer," the suit states. Spalla called DeMoss a "ghost employee" who contributed "little or no work" in exchange for $14,378; he ran for Columbus City Council in 1995.

Scoliere, just prior to leaving JC&B, also hired former City Council president and renowned political player Jerry Hammond and his company Hammond & Associates for $14,000, according to court papers. Hammond consulted and lobbied on "special counsel work" that apparently aided Scoliere more than JC&B.

The suit also alleges that when Scoliere left JC&B in August 1995, he took the special counsel work files with him, half of the firm's business. That same year, the Scoliere clan became big fans of Attorney General Betty Montgomery and the Ohio Republican Party. Mike Scoliere gave Montgomery $1,000 that year. Not to be outdone, his retired and obviously civic-minded mom Mary doubled her son's donation from Library, Pennsylvania. Mark Scoliere of Venetia, Pennsylvania, caught Buckeye fever and gave another $500. And Joe Scoliere of New Jersey matched that.

That same year, Brown and his firm began making massive political donations, many to the Republican Party (see "The Ballad"). The Associated Press reported that between 1996 and 1998, Brown received $1.9 million in special counsel fees from Mont-gomery's office after he and his firm became heavy donors.

The infant firm Scoliere and Associates, flush with special counsel debt-collection work, thanks in part to Billy Joe, also emerged as a major political donor. In the 1997-98 election cycle, the firm became a "top contributor" to the Ohio Republican Party, giving $33,500 to the state's GOP, according to Ohio Citizen Action. Let's see, that's $2,500 more than National City Bank and only $3,125 less than Bank One.

So enthused were the Scoliere clan that Mike's mother sent another $2,500 from Pennsylvania in March 1996. Perhaps strapped by a fixed income, his mom could only cough up half that amount in January 1997.

In Billy Joe's obit, the mainstream press credited him with expanding the attorney general's office during his three-term tenure by eight-fold. Reportedly, this was to fight consumer fraud. But perhaps there's another explanation. That the Ohio Attorney General's office expands its business not primarily to aid the public good but to create and pass out work to private special counsels in exchange for political donations. Maybe these merry-go-round riders, living or dead, are taking the public on a never-ending ride.

5/18/2000

Throw away the key!

The U.S.--and Ohio--leads the world in the prison industry

by Bob Fitrakis

This Saturday, the fledgling Prisoner Advocacy Network (PAN) will join with the campus-based Copwatch crowd to demonstrate against the prison industrial complex. The rally couldn't come at a better time. The cover story for the May/June issue of the investigative magazine Mother Jones shouts: "Prison, Inc.: How one corporation is turning a rusting steel town into the private-prison capital of the world."

Last year, the top national story recognized by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies dealt with the same subject--Correction Corporation of America's (CCA) attempt to turn Youngstown into the nation's for-profit prison capital. Who says the Buckeye State isn't world-class?

Tragically, the city that once led the nation in steel production now leads in prison cell "profit unit production." Much like the highly questionable and smelly policy during Governor George Voinovich's regime to allow the importation of garbage and toxic waste into Ohio, CCA "imported 1,700 of the most violent inmates from Washington, D.C." into its Youngstown prisons beginning in 1997, according to Mother Jones.

PAN correctly points out in its literature that the prison industrial complex is race- and class-based, with more than 60 percent of the state prison population so-called minorities, and virtually all coming from lower economic classes. PAN also makes key links between the prison labor industry, which pays 40 cents an hour--look out low-wage Mexican and Haitian workers, Ohio's coming at you--and the weakening of labor unions across the country. If the Communist Chinese can masquerade as just another corporate capitalist entity to use prison labor, why can't we?

This may help explain why nearly 12,000 Ohio prisoners are serving sentences well beyond their eligible parole release dates. Five to 10 will get you 10 years in the brave new world of perpetual incarceration.

Back in September 1977, Youngstown Sheet & Tube announced without warning that it would close its Campbell Works, triggering the rapid de-industrialization of the steel town. Now workers can start at CCA's prison for $24,600 a year--much less than the steelworkers made 23 years ago.

The zero-tolerance drug policies launched in the Reagan years, coupled with the "privatization of government services" mantra, led to a tripling of prisoners since the 1970s. The New York Times last year noted that many of those now incarcerated are in for low-level drug possession and sales. The rates of drug use in the U.S. and in Western European democracies are virtually identical, while the incarceration rate in Europe for such offenses is almost non-existent.

CCA rushed into the privatization gap, staffing its Youngstown facilities "with guards who had little or no experience in corrections," Mother Jones documents. Between 1995 and 1998, 79 inmates escaped from CCA's private prisons, while only nine escaped from the entire California state system, which contains more than twice as many inmates.

Still, you've got to admire CCA's entrepreneurship. It takes a certain amount of business savvy to negotiate a $182 million contract with the District of Columbia to house the area's most violent felons in a state halfway across the country.

Of course, the deal tells us far more about Ohio's elected officials, such as the infamous Representative James Traficant Jr. who, when he's not being investigated by the FBI for alleged organized crime connections, found the time to sign a "memorandum of understanding" in May 1999 to add two more CCA facilities in his district.

Quick, somebody better warn Germany's Deutsche Bank and the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry--Ohio is jumping into re-industrialization in a big, big way! The United States ranks number two in the world in incarceration rates, according to the think tank The Sentencing Project. For every 100,000 people, the U.S. locks up 600 of its citizens. Compare that to Japan, which locks up 37 of every 100,000 citizens, and Germany, which locks up 85 per 100,000. Even by imprisoning political dissents, the Chinese can only manage 103 incarcerations per 100,000. Only the former Soviet state of Russia tops the U.S. in incarceration rates.

Legendary New Left activist Staughton Lynd's Prison Forum recently launched a campaign called "Schools, not jails." There's a novel idea for a state where the Republican-dominated Supreme Court has repeatedly declared the public K-12 educational system unconstitutional because of its blatant disparities and inadequacies.

The many ex-prisoners I've talked with about the rehabilitative power of the prison system, to a man, point out that drug use is rampant inside prison walls. Concentrated, dehumanizing brutalization--with little to no education or job training--is hardly a model for reforming nonviolent drug-related behavior. But try to explain that to a Prozac nation that worships its drug emporiums. And knows that it's illegal for the lower class to be addicted without a prescription.

I'm getting so nervous and anxious just thinking about the prison industrial complex, I've got to go now and call that 1-800 number for the drugs they advertise on TV. No doubt some 40-cents-an-hour prisoner in Ohio will take my credit card number as soon as I'm diagnosed over the Internet. God bless free enterprise. If the pills come in time, maybe I can make it out to 15th and High Streets on May 20 for the 4 p.m. demonstration.

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05/25/2000  /  by Bob Fitrakis

Wanna go for a ride?  Private busing for public schools is paying off big--for private bus companies

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06/01/2000

Ransom notes

Rosa Smith's personal security funding should be spent on a district in dire academic straights

by Bob Fitrakis

Columbus needs to put the death threats against public schools Superintendent Rosa Smith in context. While certainly cause for concern, the increased security sideshow shouldn't distract from the more pressing academic problems the school system faces--or the taxpayer-funded pricetag of that increased security.

Smith's death threats reportedly came on March 1, just two days after the Columbus Public Schools were placed in a state of "academic emergency" by the Ohio Department of Education. The district Smith leads failed to meet 22 of the state's 27 educational standards, destroying the academic futures of many of its students. Threats aside, Smith must spell out to the public how, with her inflated raises, she intends to solve this crisis. In the month prior to the threats, Smith came under heavy fire from supporters of Charmaine Ware, director of Northwest Career Center, and Carletta Griffis-Anderson, principal at Deshler Elementary, two administrators she suspended without pay and attempted to terminate for allegedly falsifying a retirement party reimbursement. Over 100 parents and community activists protested at the Columbus school board meeting on February 1, attacking Smith's decision, and more parents and teachers rallied at Deshler Elementary in support of the administrators on February 24, one week prior to the death threats.

Smith recommended the harshest possible penalty for the two administrators, but the death threats sideshow has since shifted the focus away from Smith's decision-making as superintendent. On February 15, the school board voted to refer Smith's decision to a Ohio Department of Education referee.

How real and frightening were the threats against Smith? On March 1, amidst mounting turmoil in the district, a call was allegedly made to the business office of School Board President David Dobos, who was out of town. Perhaps an odd way to threaten the superintendent. Still stranger, the less-than-politically knowledgeable suspect supposedly called Mary Jo Kilroy with a threat, even though she's no longer a member of the school board.

Even more bizarre, the person in Dobos' office who received the threatening call did not initially alert law enforcement, but instead notified the Columbus Public Schools' communications department which handles media and public relations for the school system. Bad choice. These are the bureaucrats paid to spin such a story in a direction that deflects criticism away from the schools' academic emergency.

Within the last year, various school superintendents and administrators nationwide have been threatened. Their districts responded differently than the Columbus school board. In January 1999 in Paris, Maine, a female vice principal responsible for checking students' lockers, cars and bookbags for drugs received death threats from four students. When she wore a bullet-proof jacket after the threats, she was criticized and forced to resign by the school superintendent. In May 1999, the Oakland, California, superintendent received a death threat telling her to "bow out, bitch, or lose your life." The police quickly arrested a suspect and the crisis was resolved. Last December in Stow-Munroe Falls, Ohio, someone mailed the superintendent a dead fish, a traditional death threat.

Certain hazards come with public service and a high public profile. Simply writing this column makes me prone to a wide range of threats. I prefer to classify them by suspects: neo-Nazis, Klan members, friends of discredited state officials and a drunk guy who vaguely sounds like Greg Lashutka. But my threats aren't costing the taxpayers money.

So far, the Columbus school board has voted $109,000 for round-the-clock bodyguards for Rosa Smith until June 30. (Of course the security contract with Hall & Associates was unbid.) A May survey of the largest urban school districts conducted by the Great City Schools organization found that 26 out of 29 districts offered no personal-protection agent or guard for their superintendent. Of the three that did, none offered the 24-hour, seven-days-a-week protection that Smith is reportedly receiving.

Columbus Public School records indicate that hiring extra special duty police for board meetings cost taxpayers $22,748 between March 7 and April 24 of this year, figuring to be around $180,000 a year.

Smith also asked the board to hire a personal driver for her, and maybe buy or lease a car, in exchange for giving up her $500 car allowance. Twenty-four of the 29 districts in the Great City Schools survey refused private or personal drivers for their superintendents.

District spokeswoman Sharon Kornegay conceded to the Columbus Dispatch that she didn't "think there had been any threats" against Smith since March 1. The projected $600,000 in additional annual costs associated with the threats against Smith are coming out of the coffers of a school district in a state of academic emergency. This money desperately needs to be put to better use.

06/08/2000

Barely passing

Comrade Bob Taft bravely leads Ohio away from the evil clutches of democracy

by Bob Fitrakis

Thank God that Premier Bob Taft, of the Taft dynasty, had the good sense to bully the Ohio AFL-CIO into renouncing its "package of populist ballot initiatives," as the Columbus Dispatch described them.

Long live Comrade Taft and the People's Republic of Ohio! The three ballot initiatives in question would have moved our state dangerously close to democracy. Particularly pernicious was "Running Dog" labor leader William Burga's idea to take politics out of the political re-districting process which, in the words of the Dispatch, "was viewed as such a threat to the GOP's control of the General Assembly that it would spark retribution against labor."

The people are rejoicing at the actions of our Great Helmsman Taft who, acting on our behalf, summoned the renegade Burga to a private meeting in the governor's Statehouse office--which Taft holds in trust for the rejoicing masses--and directed Burga along the proper path.

Every 10 years the geographical boundaries of congressional districts are re-drawn by the incumbents to protect themselves from competitive elections in the coming decade. For instance, the late Chalmers Wylie's 15th district was re-drawn in 1992 to include many of the suburbs of the Columbus metro area and rural Union County, to encompass Republican voters and thus diminish harmful dissent and debate. It's gerrymandering--drawing a district to match the politician, not electing a politician that represents the district.

So successful was the wondrous Wylie and his amoeba-shaped district that his successor, Representative Deborah Pryce, can confidently call herself "The People's Representative for Life." Pryce is so snugly secure in her district that in April, she announced that she is running for the GOP vice chair post. When asked by the very rude and revisionist Roll Call newspaper in April to cite "her most noteworthy accomplishments," she responded, "I have been in leadership for some time now. It's just time to move up a notch."

Just like in China, democracy--people's rule--can be a destructive and disruptive force. No doubt Comrade Taft called Burga's attention to the disturbing recent observation by the Washington Post: "More than three-fourths of the House seats are regarded as effectively immune from challenge. While as many as 60 districts are theoretically targeted by one side or the other, realistically, fewer than half that number are in play."

Think about it. This means 30 Congressional seats will actually be contested between the Two Noble Parties That Act As One. Careful--15 more contested Congressional seats and democracy, albeit two-party democracy, will prevail in 10 percent of our nation.

These decadent liberal ideas have been beaten back in the past. A bitter and mean-spirited group of defeated candidates, led by the misguided former Republican Representative Clarence Miller, sued the state of Ohio following the 1992 Congressional elections. Miller and his motley crew, much like the hated Gang of Four, sought to mislead the people by overturning a law and forcing free and unfettered competitive elections in Ohio.

Miller's lawsuit went so far as to demand that political districts be drawn up in a politically neutral way, to maximize democratic competition. Ha! In December 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court wisely dismissed the case known as Miller et al vs. Ohio et al, letting the venerated old way, which has blessed us with the Taft dynasty, stand.

There are many signs that our directed democracy from above is working fine. The people don't really need a vote anyway--choices only offer confusion. Earlier this year, the highly respected scholarly journal Governing Magazine gave Columbus city officials a "C" grade for city management. That is most definitely passing--it's better than a D!--and the people are pleased. We can only plead that Comrade Charleta Tavares will quit varying from the wishes of our remarkable leaders, elected and unelected, and once again bring total unity in every City Council vote.

Perhaps Premier Taft could give her guidance. During his regime, nine other states were found to have worse conflicts-of-interest than Ohio in Statehouse committee assignments. Only 36 percent of our state legislators, according to the Center for Public Integrity, sit on legislative committees that regulate their personal business interests. Being number 10 on the conflicts-of-interest list is better than being nine! Of course, being nine is not always bad, as in the case of our state's percentage of lawmakers who have financial ties to organizations that lobby Ohio state government. Nine is better than eight!

By having such ties, public servants like Senator Roy L. Ray, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, can easily converse with the 200 registered lobbyists that spent at least $3 million to help stimulate Columbus' economy and guide electric deregulation through the state legislature in 1999. Ray, wishing to take no credit for his wisdom and virtue, kindly accepted $161,000 from Ohio Edison for his thoughtful "consultation."

Through Ray's efforts, the large utility companies, including Ohio Edison, were able to recoup $8.5 billion in costs from the grateful masses in so-called "stranded costs." Each month when the people pay their bills, they offer a token to the large utility companies who built nuclear power plants and dirty coal burners, risking their health, to keep us warm. Why should they be stuck with the bad investments they made to keep us warm? Things are going so well in Ohio without democracy, that the final stage of Communism is nearly at hand. The people rejoiced when the Center for Public Integrity conceded that our state score of 66 in overall integrity--a solid D in anyone's book--was indeed a "barely passing" grade.

Bob Fitrakis was a plaintiff along with the renegades in the Miller et al lawsuit. He confesses his error and his eyes now look only to the Magical Mystery Taft for guidance.

6/15/2000

Pomp, circumstance and bigotry

OSU picks an ultra-right-wing hypocrite to lead graduates into the future

by Bob Fitrakis

Ohio State University President Brit Kirwan should ask himself: Who're the real criminals? The university administrators who invited the vacuous political jock J.C. Watts Jr. to speak at commencement this year, or the relatives and friends of graduating student Oona Besman who were handcuffed and arrested for peacefully demonstrating against the totally inappropriate presence of Watts at the graduation ceremony?

Watts, an Oklahoma Representative, the only black Republican in the U.S. Congress and the leader of his party's Congressional Conference, has spent the entire year shilling for the Christian Coalition wing of the GOP and trying to resurrect the Reaganomic fiscal policies that devastated U.S. inner cities.

Earlier this month, Watts the politician was in Columbus for a party rally. Columbus Dispatch political editor Joe Hallett pointed out the hypocrisy in his message: "Watts, who proudly associates himself with Christian conservative organizations, became a flawed messenger by delivering a sermon about personal responsibility to the faithful gathered at Ohio GOP headquarters. Unmentioned were the two children Watts fathered out of wedlock, one of whom he relied on an aunt and uncle to raise; liens filed against him by the state of Oklahoma for income taxes three times during the 1980s; and lawsuits and garnishment actions against him for nonpayment of debts."

Sounds like a perfect commencement speaker, Dr. Kirwan.

Of course, Watts Jr. believes in "family values." Too bad he didn't listen to his daddy, J.C. "Buddy" Watts Sr., who told the Topeka Capital Journal, "I couldn't be no Republican because the Republican Party is against the poor man."

Watts Sr. added this homespun wisdom: "A black man voting for the Republicans makes about as much sense as a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders." On June 3, Representative Watts denounced President Clinton's $128 million federal initiative to give computer training to the nation's teachers, instead suggesting "a new approach"--get the federal government out of education and have state governments give students vouchers for private and religious schools. In the 104th Congress, Watts distinguished himself by having a zero-percent voting score from the American Civil Liberties Union, including voting for the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools. Nothing like hanging ancient Jewish laws on the wall to teach a kid how to Yahoo, hey J.C.?

Maybe it's Watts' contempt for diversity that made him so appealing to OSU. After all, Watts was part of the notorious right-wing Republican Class of 1994. He stood out in that class for zealously preaching against affirmative action, even as the GOP went from having 107 black delegates in its 1992 convention to having "just over 50" out of 1,950 delegates in 1996, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In 1996, there were approximately 8,000 elected black office holders in the U.S. Sixty or so called themselves Republicans.

Watts is also being touted as a possible VP candidate for George W. Bush, undoubtedly because, by contrast, Bush is a downright "compassionate" conservative compared to Watts' Social Darwinism. Hyperbole? Hardly. When Clinton urged Congress to quickly pass a Patients' Bill of Rights and a bill guaranteeing prescription drug coverage for seniors on Medicare last April, Watts opposed it and said the President was "scaring seniors." That same month, he rushed to Florida to demonstrate support for the crazed Miami Cubans holding Elian Gonzalez hostage. Watts also threw in a call for increased military spending.

Speaking of spending, a March 20 Wall Street Journal story pointed out that Watts was using a loophole in federal campaign laws to quietly raise $1.5 million "below radar."

There are so many reasons why Kirwan must have wanted Watts to lead OSU's students across the commencement podium. When President Clinton asked Congress to give the Food and Drug Administration increased power to regulate Big Tobacco, it was the "moral" stand of Watts to argue that it was none of Congress' business to intercede. In February, when Clinton proposed spending $20 million to help states offer workers paid family leave to spend time with their newborn children, it was Watts who opposed it. No doubt this signaled his commitment to "traditional" values, since the U.S. is the only industrialized democracy that lacks paid family leave.

Al Gore's campaign manager Donna Brazile, the first African-American female to run a major party's presidential campaign, said at the start of the year that "the Republicans bring out Colin Powell and J.C. Watts because they have no program, no policy... They'd rather take pictures with black children than feed them." It's true of the Republican Party--recall that Peggy Noonan, speechwriter to Presidents Reagan and Bush, admitted as much in her book What I Saw at the Revolution. But Powell is no Watts. He represents a more moderate and modest Republicanism compared to the screaming banshee Shiite Republicanism of J.C.

Perhaps Kirwan wanted Watts as a commencement speaker because of his courage in standing fast in support of white supremacy. In March 1999, when Democrats attempted to pass a resolution condemning the racist Council of Conservative Citizens--a remake of the old white power councils that tells us there are "nine bottles of chocolate milk" in the world and only one bottle of white left--it was Watts who raced to the CCC's defense. To deflect attacks on his white Congressional mentors, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott from Mississippi and Representative Bob Barr from Georgia, who wrote for and addressed the CCC bigots, Watts substituted a lame resolution condemning all bigotry, as opposed to that practiced by Lott and Barr. So, President Kirwan, if you need a far-right bigot who hypocritically defends "families" while he dismantles the social programs families need most, who can do it? Watts can. Just make sure you quash any peaceful protests, and send graduates' families to jail if they dare to stand in opposition to your commencement speaker. A university like OSU is the last place we want to foster dissent against a brave visionary like J.C. Watts.

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6/22/2000

Hunted

by Bob Fitrakis

Glenda Fravel and Jeremy Murray are accused of no crimes, and have no warrants out for their arrest. So why did they find themselves staring down the barrels of guns, pointed at their heads by two bounty hunters?

It's a bungled comedy of errors that's left no one laughing

It was a lazy Saturday afternoon as Glenda Fravel and Jeremy Murray leisurely napped, exhausted from their recent move into a house on the 1100 block of Minnesota Avenue in the North Linden neighborhood. The rest the young couple enjoyed that May 20, while Fravel's mother baby-sat their two-year-old son Brian, proved short-lived--shattered by shouting outside the front door.

Fravel, startled from her sleep, peered out the window and saw two men with guns drawn approaching her porch, shouting demands that "Jeremy" step outside. Quickly rousing Murray, Fravel frantically apprised him of the situation.

As Murray headed to the door, one of the men kicked it partly open and claimed he had a warrant for Murray's arrest. Confused, Murray opened the door and asked to see the warrant. The two men could not produce one and, uninvited, pushed past him into the house.

Fravel and Murray, both 19, found themselves facing guns, aimed at their heads--one a large semi-automatic pistol and the other a rifle that looked like "a machine gun attached to a bulletproof vest," Murray later recalled.

The armed intruders demanded to know the whereabouts of Mike Miller, the long-time boyfriend of Jeremy's mother, Dirrenda Murray. "We told them he didn't live here and we hadn't seen him for awhile," Fravel said.

The men ordered the couple out of the house and onto the porch. While one trained his gun on Murray and Fravel, the other searched the premises. Spying the couple's photo album in the search, one intruder insisted they produce a photo of Miller. The men took a photo of Miller and Dirrenda and left.

"The whole time they were here they had guns to our heads, watching each move we made. They made me write down their names and pager numbers and told us to page them before 7 p.m. and let them know where Mike was," Fravel told Columbus Alive.

"George" and "Jerry" were the names the armed intruders gave. The phone numbers they provided connected to Columbus Bail Bonds. Murray remembered that he'd co-signed an $1,100 traffic violations bond for Mike Miller in March.

The men who threatened the young couple with guns were bounty hunters, looking for a man with traffic violations.

Murray said that Jerry demanded he produce $2,000 before 7 p.m. or they'd be back to kick in his door again and take him to jail. The panicked couple began a desperate search for Miller.

For George and Jerry, the armed threatening of Miller's acquaintances was just beginning. They next beat on the door of Jeremy's grandmother, Jacqueline Murray, and her boyfriend Keith Lefton.

"They came here twice the same night and pointed a gun at me that looked like a machine gun," Lefton told Alive.

Jacqueline Murray said she was upstairs when she heard pounding on the door. When the bounty hunters talked to her, she realized they had her confused with her daughter, Dirrenda.

Meanwhile, Fravel and Murray said they dutifully paged Jerry and told him that they couldn't find Miller, and asked to be left alone or they'd call the police. "Jerry said, `Call 'em, you pussy. I'll just tell 'em you fell down the stairs,'" Murray said. "He kept saying he was going to come back and `bounce' on my head."

The couple said Jerry gave them a new deadline of 10 p.m. to find Miller. "I tried to cooperate by calling around, looking for Mike. We still didn't find him," Fravel recalled. "So I paged them and told them nothing new and to quit harassing me, I have a baby and I'm tired of worrying if my door was getting kicked in again. The guy told me to count on it. And ever since then, they've done nothing but harass me."

Fravel called the Columbus police at about 10 p.m. that night, May 20, and a cruiser was dispatched two hours later, around midnight. "But they [the police] told me there was nothing they could do," she complained.

Last Friday, June 16--nearly a month after armed bounty hunters broke in Fravel and Murray's door, and only after Columbus Alive made inquiries into the case--a Columbus police cruiser was sent back to the North Linden house to take an investigative report. Alive has learned that a police investigation has now been opened into the incident.

Fravel and Murray claimed that Jerry and George staked out their house off and on for a week after first threatening them. On Friday, May 26, the bounty hunters followed the couple's friend Chad Swimm as he left the Minnesota Avenue house with his girlfriend, Courtney Milburn.

"This mean-looking guy with a .45 pulled a gun on me and yelled, `Get the hell outta your car!' I didn't know what I did," Swimm recalled. "I thought of all the possibilities, but it didn't make sense. He grabbed my wallet out of my back pocket and looked at my ID. But I don't look anything like Mike Miller." The 19-year-old Swimm, who describes himself as 5 feet 5 inches tall, 120 pounds, wonders how the bounty hunters could confuse him with the 6-foot-tall, 50-year-old Miller.

Milburn said she witnessed the bounty hunters point a gun at Swimm and force him up against the car. "When I saw it, they shoved me back and I started crying," Milburn said.

"He's not a very good detective," Swimm added. "The first place I would've looked is Mike's house."

Don Rookstool, Mike Miller's employer at Rookstool's Custom Painting, said that the bounty hunters unnerved him in their quest to find the traffic violator. "One was out here with a big gun on his hip beating on the door and calling me up and harassing me," said Rookstool. "They were threatening to kick in my door. I told them you do what you gotta do and I'll try and bring charges. They were making my whole family and me nervous."

Rookstool also said the bounty hunters went to Marysville to search for Miller, at a painting site, and they "knocked on neighbors' doors, terrorizing them."

So where was Mike Miller this whole time, the man wanted for traffic violations deemed so serious that bounty hunters had to shove guns in the faces of his friends and family? Was Miller on the lam? Was he hiding out?

No, Mike Miller was home. On Hiawatha Street in Columbus.

And he'd been at Scioto Downs on May 20, a suggestion Murray had offered the bounty hunters.

So why didn't the bounty hunters just visit Miller at home? It appears that a simple clerical mistake was at least partly to blame for this entire, sad comedy of errors.

When Miller was arrested on March 16--for a driving-without-a-license violation from 1995 and two 1996 traffic offenses--someone at the Franklin County Jail entered his address as Hiawatha Avenue (not Street) with no ZIP code. Apparently, someone in the Court Assignment Office then entered a Westerville ZIP code for Miller, since that's where Hiawatha Avenue is located, speculated Paul Herbert, the Franklin County municipal clerk of courts.

Miller posted two separate bail bonds on March 16: $1,100 for the 1995 driving offense and $2,000 on the 1996 tickets, both with Columbus Bail Bonds.

On April 14, Miller went to court for the 1995 ticket and received a continuance from Judge Dwayne W. Maynard. Miller told Columbus Alive that he thought the continuance was for all of the offenses, since they had him in court and didn't mention the warrants for his arrest on the 1996 violations. Meanwhile, mail from the court to Miller was being returned from the nonexistent Westerville address, which, had it existed, would have located him in the middle of Hoover Reservoir.

Herbert's office contacted Columbus Bail Bonds on May 9, giving the company 30 days to produce Miller, who hadn't shown for his court date on the 1996 violations because he never received the court's notice in the mail. The bounty hunters who looked for Miller for at least a week--and harassed his friends, family and boss--would have received a $200 finder's fee for bringing him in.

When asked if he was hiding from the bounty hunters, Miller said, "Hell no! I was at my house all the time waiting for my court date to come in the mail. And then I heard that guys with guns was harassing my mother-in-law, her son and my niece's little boyfriend. They choke-slammed him on a car. He only weighs about 110 pounds."

Miller described his arrest on June 7, a day before his bond was to be forfeited, as uneventful: "A very professional, very nice man came to my house and picked me up. He told me those other two bounty hunters were `assholes.'"

Herbert stressed that it was Miller's responsibility to keep track of his court date. But, after being informed of the address error on the jail slate and from the judge's assignment office, outside Herbert's jurisdiction, the clerk expedited a new court date for Miller, who was sitting in jail.

Judge Maynard sentenced Miller to "time served" plus four more days, and he was released on Saturday, June 18.

And just exactly who are "Jerry" and "George," the hapless bounty hunters who spent a week trying to find a guy who was sitting at home? That remains somewhat of a mystery.

Randy Treneff, attorney for Columbus Bail Bonds, said he had "no idea who they are." This, despite the fact that the armed men were passing out Columbus Bail Bonds' phone number. Treneff added, "All the bounty hunters here are independent contractors."

Treneff's reluctance to acknowledge that out-of-control bounty hunters work for the firm is understandable. Earlier this year, Columbus Alive reported on the indictment of bounty-hunting brothers Troy and Barry Thoman, their sidekick James A. Coleman and Marvin Napier, their bond-writing boss. The men were charged with abducting Amy Cox and, in a more widely publicized case, abducting, kidnapping and menacing Ladasha Denny and abducting her then-five-month-old son.

Napier owns Columbus Bail Bonds, and Robert Craven, an agent licensed to his company, was also indicted on kidnapping and menacing charges in the Denny case. All of the defendants are facing trials this summer.

Detective Carl Covey, of the Columbus Division of Police's Burglary Squad, headed the investigation that led to the indictment of the bondsmen and bounty hunters. Covey pointed out the obvious problems with bounty hunters, who operate virtually unregulated in Ohio: "They've got far more rights than a police officer. They can break into the house if they think a bail jumper's in there. But what they can't do once they ascertain that the person that they're looking for isn't there, is abduct people, hold them against their will and take things from them."

On June 5, State Representative David Goodman, a Republican from Bexley, introduced a bill to protect citizens from bounty hunters. One of Goodman's concerns is that many of the bounty hunters have criminal records themselves, in many cases felonies.

In calling for "criminal background checks" of bounty hunters, Goodman commented, "It is amazing to think that this is not already a requirement. I was amazed at how many incidents existed where the very person charged with apprehending a fugitive was one himself."

"We have regulations for hairdressers but there are no provisions addressing bail bondsmen or their hired hands, the bounty hunters," the legislator added.

One provision in Goodman's bill requires that, "in order to apprehend, detain, or arrest a principal, the individual must enter into a written contract" with the insurance company or a licensed bail bond agent appointed by the company. It also requires that "the contract must state the name of the principal who is to be pursued."

In other words, if Goodman's legislation passes, it would be much easier to find the full names of the mysterious "Jerry" and "George" and to establish who authorized them to point their guns, kick in doors and "bounce" on people's heads. Perhaps this would end the absurdity of bounty hunters operating virtually unregulated, often with criminal records or under indictment themselves, terrorizing innocent bystanders in their search for clerical-error-created bond skips who aren't really hiding.

06/29/2000

Infrequent fliers

African-Americans in Columbus come out on the short end of the racial profiling numbers game at the airport

by Bob Fitrakis

If you believe the mainstream media, there's no problem with racial profiling in Columbus. And the U.S. Department of Justice's attempt to add profiling to the civil suit against the city of Columbus and the Columbus Division of Police lacks a basis in fact.

Dutifully, the journalism majors who apparently skipped statistics and basic social science methodology reported the official police line supplied by Deputy Chief John Rockwell in the last few weeks. By now I'm sure you've heard it. Since nearly 25 percent of the city population is black and only 28 percent of the traffic tickets go to blacks, obviously there's no racial profiling going on here.

Rule 1: Always define the statistical "universe." Do blacks drive at the same rate as whites? Most studies indicate that blacks have fewer driver licenses, drive less, are demographically younger and disproportionately use public transportation. This is a mistake repeated often in political polls when candidates sometimes release data for all eligible voters instead of "likely" voters.

As pointed out by James Moss--the president of Police Officers for Equal Rights (POER) and a retired officer and outspoken critic of the Columbus police department--what matters is the number of black drivers, not blacks in the population. A majority of people in the African-American workforce do not own an automobile or have a driver license. Approximately eight percent or less of the licensed drivers in Columbus are African American. So, if the statistical data from the Columbus police department is correct, 28 percent of tickets going to eight percent of the drivers--probable cause that some Columbus police officers are involved in racial profiling, Moss argues.

Racial profiling is not only measured in traffic tickets. It's measured in statistics of police stops and arrests for such things as disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstructing official police business. This is the key data that needs to be collected.

That's why Mayor Michael Coleman's May 31 memo to new Public Safety Director Mitchell Brown is so important. The mayor wisely proposes that Columbus police cruisers be equipped with real time video cameras "to protect both our officers and our citizens." If Rockwell is right and the police aren't profiling and they're acting professionally, they have nothing to worry about.

Also, the mayor rightly wants "to create an internal `officer leadership institute' to provide officers with continuing education, particularly in the areas of personal protection, changes in the law, cultural sensitivity, civil rights and anti-discrimination laws and community policing."

The most damning evidence offered by Moss and the POER regarding racial profiling isn't the traditional "Driving While Black" or DWB problem of frequent traffic stops, but his allegations against the narcotics squads at Port Columbus International Airport. Moss claims that former Columbus police Detective James Hagan contacted POER in 1997 to report racial profiling at the airport. Moss asserts that Hagan, then a 25-year veteran of the force, told him that K-9 dogs were being used to sniff for traces of illegal drugs on paper currency carried by African Americans.

Moss said Hagan "told us that ticket agents were rewarded monetarily by the drug task force at the airport who helped in this illegal profiling." In a POER press release issued June 23, Moss said the latest statistical data "from the Columbus police showed out of 205 stops [at the airport], 148 stops were African Americans, 38 were white, and 19 were Hispanic. The number of African American stops represented 72 percent of the total stops." Keep in mind, there's undeniable data that blacks are infrequent fliers, so there are far fewer African-Americans at the airport to begin with.

These numbers, if correct--and I've not known Moss to be wrong yet on these public records requests--represents far more than racial profiling. It represents a racial war against black fliers. Even more shocking is Moss' finding that 63 African-American women were stopped, compared to six white women. This means African-American women represented 95 percent of all the stops of females at Port Columbus.

Police usually focus on the racist retail level of drug sales, busting small-time users in downtrodden neighborhoods instead of breaking up the overwhelmingly white import and trafficking operations. If the narcotics squads really wanted to make a dent in drug traffic at the airport, they'd focus on the cargo planes and semi trucks at Port Columbus and Rickenbacker International Airport (usually owned by white businessmen) instead of stopping the few black fliers waiting at gates as passengers. Moss said the police's narcotics division got their ideas about the drug trade from the Pam Grier flick Jackie Brown.

The Columbus police are already backpedaling on the airport profiling, blaming it now on the federal Drug Enforcement Agency. Citizens in Columbus deserve full disclosure of all documents regarding profiling at Port Columbus. The numbers that the police have provided so far just don't add up to justice.

07/06/2000

Passing gas

Why is Ohio really being squeezed by soaring gas prices?

by Bob Fitrakis

Why are gasoline prices so high in Ohio lately? While the silly debate about pennies-per-gallon gas taxes rages on front pages, a much more interesting tidbit was buried on page B5 in the Columbus Dispatch on July 1.

In a brief article titled "Fuel pipeline battle turning into marathon," Marathon Ashland Petroleum spokesperson Chuck Rice said: "With the recent gasoline price spikes, there should be little doubt that recent supply constraints in the Midwest have been due in part to infrastructure constraints and inflexibility."

Chuckie's obviously engaging in doublespeak. No, I'm not referring his repeated use of the words "recent" and "constraints" in a single sentence. The problem is his babble about "infrastructure"--a thinly veiled pitch for the 130-mile pipeline that Marathon's planning to carry liquid fuels from the Ohio River to our fair Capital City.

A permit application filed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers documents Marathon's proposal to climb every hill and forge every stream, or at least many of them, to get oil across Ohio. The pipeline Rice is shilling for will cross 319 streams and 40 wetlands.

Some may recall that on February 25, Marathon withdrew its federal application for the pipeline after coming under heavy criticism because its permit excluded any public notification and comment. At the time Rice said he didn't know how long the project would be delayed. Apparently, it will be on hold through a summer of high gas prices, in order to soften up public opinion that is more and more sensitive to environmental concerns.

Jacked-up Ohio gas prices may make Buckeyes forget about Marathon's early February pipeline spill that allowed more than 573,000 gallons of crude oil to flow into Kentucky streams and farms. Joe Smith of the Kentucky Department for Environmental Protection said the oil spill amounted to the equivalent of 64 separate 18-wheel tankers.

Squeezed by gas prices and often trapped in oversized SUVs that they never take off-road, suburban Ohioans are likely to tune out the real horror stories of crude oil flowing into Two Mile Creek, the Kentucky River tributary, or the stench of sulfurous odor opponents of the pipeline will certainly point out. Hell, if gas prices go high enough, that little old 286,000 gallon spill of fuel oil at Marathon's Calettsburg refinery last November won't be enough to merit a lifted eyebrow.

Remember as gas prices soared to $2 a gallon in the Midwest, 40 and 50 cents above prices in Tennessee, oil companies' flacks usually claimed it was due to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency demanding cleaner gas. But as the Dayton Daily News pointed out back in June, "Ohio does not require reformulated gas."

Rice also mentioned to the Dispatch that other factors, including "a major Midwest pipeline rupture in March," may be a cause.

Over and over again, Rice beats the drum for a new pipeline. Exactly why do we need a new oil pipeline? A Dispatch editorial, attempting to paint Marathon as a safe company, noted: "Ohio, despite having three times more pipeline miles than highway miles, has had relatively few spills." Why exactly would Marathon need a new pipeline if there's already so much capacity in the state?

South Bloomingville farmer Thomas Amerine suggested a plausible explanation in his letter to the Dispatch: "The only motivation to build the Marathon-Ashland pipeline is money." Amerine and critics charge that Marathon's plan will save the company four cents a gallon on 100,000 or more gallons a day of fuel by building a new 14-inch high pressure line. Amerine claims that Marathon already has "pipelines in place to serve central Ohio for the next 20-plus years."

If Marathon and the oil industry keep prices artificially high in Ohio, the public is less likely to express concern as trees are clear-cut in the Hocking Hills region to make way for more fuel. As naturalist Paul Knopp Jr. stressed in a letter to the Dispatch, the planned pipeline will be coming through "the most visited scenic spot in Ohio," and one with "a healthy, biologically rich landscape." Wonder what it'll look like after one of those Kentucky-type oil spills?

In a joint letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency expressed concern over "numerous aquatic habitat crossings," and the impact on wildlife along the proposed pipeline route. Marathon plans to build the pipeline along an abandoned 1916 pipeline route. The original pipeline had an easement of 25 feet or less. The company claims it's entitled to a 75 foot easement for construction "and a permanent 50-foot easement that would allow for aerial inspection of the corridor," according to the Dispatch.

Rising gas prices should have Ohioans thinking about alternative and cleaner fuels, about decent mass transportation, and about how we're being ripped-off by oil companies who blame environmental standards when Ohio doesn't even require reformulated gas. I've lived in Ohio nearly 14 years and there's always been enough gas--until now. Conveniently, the gas squeeze comes as Marathon fights for its ecologically devastating and economically unnecessary new pipeline.

07/13/2000

The hunter

Mysterious bounty hunter George steps forward with his version of the "Hunted" escapades

by Bob Fitrakis

Three weeks ago, in the June 22 cover story "Hunted," Columbus Alive reported on the escapades of two bounty hunters going by the names of "Jerry" and "George" who allegedly kicked in doors, terrorized innocent people with guns and, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, promised to come back and do it again. We couldn't track down the bounty hunters at the time; as was reported, they never fully identified themselves to the people they were pursuing.

But one of the elusive bounty hunters finally tracked me down at the Alive offices last week to tell his side of the story.

George Pardos, a six-foot one-inch, 295-pound ex-Marine and former OSU wrestler, told Alive in an interview that he's the mysterious "George" in question.

Pardos was described by both Glenda Fravel and Jeremy Murray as the "nice one" in the good bounty hunter-bad bounty hunter routine that occurred at their home on May 20. The couple claimed that two uninvited bounty hunters kicked their door ajar and pushed past them into their house, one of them with a pistol and the other with a rifle that looked like a "machine gun attached to a bulletproof vest."

Pardos said he can't speak to the two apparent shoe prints on the couple's door because he was the security, or "sweeper," who had gone behind the house to make sure the man they were looking for didn't escape out the back door. George contends he was invited into the couple's house and said that he neither pointed his SP89--a $5,000 9mm assault rifle banned for importation by the Clinton administration--nor his Glock backup at the couple. He admitted that, during the incident, he was wearing a bulletproof vest to which the SWAT-style rifle attaches.

As to Murray and Fravel's contention that the bounty hunters coerced them into giving a photo from their photo album of Miller, Pardos said he asked them twice and they gave it to him.

"Jerry" had a contract with Columbus Bail Bonds, according to Pardos, to find Mike Miller, who'd failed to show for trial on two traffic tickets. When asked why he needed to be so heavily armed to pick up a bond-skip with no history of violence, Pardos stressed as the "sweeper" that it's best to be over-prepared.

Pardos identified himself as the owner of Mid-Atlantic, a recovery service for commercial loan and banking firms seeking to repossess capital equipment. He said he was trained in the military to chase deserters and produced certificates showing four military seminars related to the security field. He also produced a transcript documenting a degree in criminal justice from Ohio State University.

He readily admitted that many bounty hunters lack training and that there's definitely a need to regulate the industry.

Pardos refused to disclose the last name of "Jerry," but promised to tell him that Columbus Alive wants to speak with him. Pardos admitted that, since the May 20 incident, Columbus Bail Bonds is no longer using his and Jerry's services.

As for Fravel's frantic call to 911 at 11:58 p.m. that evening, and her report of phone harassment from "Jerry" and his threat that he was headed back over to kick in their door, Pardos said he can't speak to the specifics, but he thinks that was unlikely.

The paperwork that Pardos produced from Columbus Bail Bonds appeared incomplete, which may explain why the bounty hunters went to the address on Minnesota Avenue where Fravel and Murray reside. Pardos asserted that Columbus Bail Bonds only gave the bounty hunters Miller's skip on a 1995 traffic ticket, which contained an old address. Miller had also skipped on a 1996 traffic bond, which listed a Hiawatha Avenue in Columbus as his address, but listed an incorrect Westerville ZIP code, a mistake easily identified by a former Columbus Bail Bonds employee, Bill Neill.

Neill said that this may have been a paperwork foul-up but suggests it's also possible that the bounty hunters were given incomplete paperwork so they wouldn't have to be paid their 10 percent finder's fees on both bond skips. "When I worked there, the owner of the firm would do it to beat the bounty hunters out of skip fees," Neill explained.

Pardos insisted that he had the legal right to go to the Minnesota Avenue residence because Murray, although only 18 years old, had been the second co-signer on the bond for Miller, his mother's boyfriend. The beefy bounty hunter contended he is well within his rights under an 1872 Supreme Court decision and existing Ohio law.

Currently, Ohio law allows bail bondsmen to arrest those who skip their court dates. The law reads: "For the purpose of surrendering the defendant, the bail [bondsman] may arrest him at any time or place before he is finally charged, or, by a written authority endorsed on a certified copy of the bond, may empower any person of suitable age and discretion to do so."

Pardos portrayed himself as a man of "suitable age and discretion." What's open for debate is whether the tactics used by him or, more specifically, the as-yet-unheard-from "Jerry," were appropriate to use against someone accused of traffic offenses. I know if Pardos shows up at my house that well-armed because I was the second signer on a bond for someone who missed a court date on a traffic ticket, I'm liable to defend myself and property out of my basic right of self-defense. What happens when the bounty hunters encounter somebody as well-armed as they are, without "discretion"?

07/20/2000

Like dust in the Tradewinds

by Bob Fitrakis

It's the last Saturday, ever, in Columbus' original "liberated zone" known as Tradewinds. Business is brisk inside the campus area's former countercultural headquarters. It's a fire sale--not a prairie fire as the Revolutionary Youth Movement envisioned sparking in the late '60s--and one customer is panicking and hording his favorite incense.

The store's owner, 59-year-old Yvette Garayalde Wyman, calms the frantic buyer by offering him a phone number to put him in touch with her supplier. A young man quickly grabs a T-shirt inscribed "Tree Hugger." I buy a sterling silver ring engraved with, Wyman informs me, a Native American fertility symbol.

The store's motif and merchandise seems like the product of a business merger of Garcia, Hoffman and Guevera. That's Jerry, Abbie and Che, for identification purposes. On July 15, Tradewinds' last Saturday, unrepentant yippies mingled easily amongst the tie-dye with a new generation of retro, neo and nouveau hippies and freaks.

Scott Solomon, Wyman's landlord, recently gave her a three-day eviction notice.

Tradewinds' pro-bono lawyer, Joe Reed, got a seven-day extension from the court--so on Wednesday, July 19, the business founded by the late and legendary community activist Libby Gregory was scheduled to vanish from the Columbus counterculture scene for good.

But not without one last fight.

Former Columbus Guardian editor Mimi Morris e-mailed her community of friends and political allies last week: "For over 30 years, this store has been the place where OSU first encountered alternatives, where exiled Columbusites went to check in when visiting their old hometown, and (very importantly) where the Columbus Free Press found sanctuary when the FBI tried to stifle dissent in Columbus."

Morris, a Free Press staffer and activist in the '70s, raised the question of whether Campus Partners' ambitious redevelopment plan killed the store. My, my. How the times are a changing--back.

Wyman said she became part owner with Gregory in 1975. "You had to do political work to be part of Tradewinds. We wanted to run a business the way we wanted work to be rather than the way it was," she explained.

Local artist Paul Volker, who worked both at the store and on the Free Press, sheltered in the upstairs offices, echoed this theme: "I think that one of the great things about Tradewinds was that it was a business, a capitalist endeavor, but it did not belong to `capitalists' per se. So it's like saying, `Capitalists don't have a monopoly on capitalism.' Having a store that functions as a hub for the community is a great thing."

Volker, along with Jill Hurley, painted the comfortably familiar mural on the Tradewinds storefront, 1651 N. High St. on the corner of Chittenden Avenue. There was "the dragon over the door," "the moon and the stars" over the window and at the end "the great wave."

Symbolically, the great wave known as the "corporate chaining and malling" of America blew away the entrepreneurial spirit of Tradewinds. When asked what would take its place, Wyman offered, "The word `Starbucks' comes to mind."

Wyman called it the "sterilization of High Street" and suggested that Campus Partners made the already run-down south campus area even worse by forcing out businesses. "There's simply no foot traffic or businesses left to attract customers," she explained.

Already in Chapter 13 reorganization, Wyman refused to pay a $2,000 water bill she claimed resulted from a burst pipe. "I've never paid water in all the time I've leased here and suddenly I'm responsible when a pipe burst?" Wyman believes the landlords who own the deteriorating property in the south campus area intentionally ran it into the ground, because it made more economic sense; once the area becomes blighted and a slum, they'll be eligible for public money, she observed.

Tradewinds' lawyer Reed admitted that the store didn't pay its rent on the first of this month, but has always paid its rent by the end of each month, and had never had a problem with this arrangement before. More than a year remained on Tradewinds' lease, which Reed says is "below market value." The $2,000 water bill was the first water bill the store received in 19 years, he said.

Reed said he is filing a counterclaim, for "intentional interference with business," and sees as Solomon's motivation the "gentrification" of High Street, which has unleashed corporations with deep pockets looking to lease in the campus area.

When contacted by Columbus Alive, Campus Partners spokesperson Steve Sterrett said he was unaware of Tradewinds' demise. "Campus Partners gets unfairly blamed for a lot of things," he said. "I was sorry to see the Souvlaki Palace go also. We favor locally owned small businesses."

Sterrett noted that Tradewinds was not part of agency's "Gateway Development Project," since the store was north of Chittenden and 12th avenues. He said that Tradewinds fit into Campus Partners vision of a lively and vibrant High Street.

He also denied a rumor that the Tradewinds landlord was on the board of Campus Partners.

Landlord Solomon also told Alive that neither he nor his father serves on the Campus Partners board, despite rumors circulating in the pro-Tradewinds camp. On the advice of his attorney, Solomon declined to comment on the Tradewinds situation, citing pending litigation.

As the Alive goes to print, Morris and Volker are orchestrating a symbolic "de-commissioning" of the Tradewinds murals. Volker said, while communities have often come together to paint murals, "This is the first one I know of where people have gathered to paint one out."

He explained, "It is important that we in the community `bury our own dead,' as it were. The store is closed, the mural is dead. Rather than letting the landlord have the privilege of destroying the work, I felt it was better to paint it over ourselves. In this way, the community...the family...still retains full rights to the corpse."

Volker sees the white paint covering his mural as "a death shroud."

Tom McGuire offers a positive perspective on Volker's website, columbusart.com, seeing the "diaspora" from the community gathering spot in a different light: "Good things sprang from such seed as was scattered around," from the strong activist winds that blew from Tradewinds.

The community activism nurtured at Tradewinds lives on in numerous organizations, from the Community Festival to the Free Press quarterly journal and website to this very column. Still, I'm reminded that we don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing up High Street.

07/22/2000

Holy roller

by Bob Fitrakis

After weeks of political punditing, Texas Guv George W. Bush finally picked his veep candidate, his dad's friend Dick Cheney. Left out in the cold are the prominent Republican Ohioans mentioned as Vice Presidential material: U.S. Representative John Kasich, Senator George Voinovich, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and U.S. Representative Deborah Pryce.

Not that I didn't wish and hope and pray for Johnny Boy Kasich or former Governor V to be the "spare tire on the auto of government," just for the fodder they'd provide for this column.

Bush and Kasich would have been too much like an Eddie Haskell-Opie Taylor ticket. What would Kasich bring to the campaign? From his failed presidential run we know he has less voter appeal than Alan Keyes and he's fairly obscure even elsewhere in Ohio. Of course, it would be interesting to see the national press dig into his early and bizarre connections to the Moonie cult, which was all over his 1982 campaign and played a key role in his election to Congress.

I suspect Kasich's real motive for seeking the VP spot is so he could leverage his position to get backstage passes for all the hot rock groups. As a mere Congressman, he once threatened the Grateful Dead that they would "never play Washington again" when they wouldn't let him backstage.

Voinovich as veep is even more deliciously inviting. Instead of the sycophantic PR and steady drumbeat of propaganda from the editorial pages of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Columbus Dispatch, you'd get the national press crawling up his corrupt butt with a proctoscope. Not a pleasant sight, but politically far more interesting than President Reagan's colon polyps.

Voinovich, a proven statewide vote-getter, has more secrets than Tony Soprano, and more connections. Voinovich told the Dispatch that he "credits the Holy Spirit for guiding his long political career." What, was he watching reruns of the Godfather again? I'm thinking of Michael Corleone at a baptism scene.

Now George, was it really the Holy Spirit that guided you to write a letter getting the alleged mob-connected Don King out of jail after his second murder? You sure it wasn't Casper the Friendly Ghost you were listening to, who told you to do a favor for a friend? You sure it was the apparition of God who told you to go to the mobster Teamster boss Jackie Presser's funeral in 1988 and give the eulogy? C'mon, who was it whispering in your ear when you appointed Umberto Fideli to the Ohio Turnpike Commission after you tried to appoint reputed organized crime associate Carmen Paresi but were rejected?

You still never explained why you brought the formerly CIA-owned and drug-linked Southern Air Transport freight company to Rickenbacker International Airport with state tax dollars. Was the Holy Spirit simply trying to reform the now-defunct airline that had a dozen of its pilots linked to drug-running in a CIA Inspector General's report? Maybe you could elaborate on how this Holy Spirit thing works its connections to the Iran-Contra scandal.

I suppose you could make a case for the Holy Spirit telling you to "honor thy brother" by passing state tax dollars to him to go on a prison- and jail-building spree. The front page of the June 26 Cleveland Plain Dealer offers us profound insight into your reality, Senator. Did the voice of God speak to you in 1996, directing you to the exact spot in a 259-page budget bill so you could veto an obscure provision that everybody but you and your brother supported, allowing his employer, the Corrections Corporation of America, to retain its seven-year tax abatement? Sure, the Dispatch buried the AP report about your veto inside its pages. But the national press wouldn't have been so kind if you were Bush's running mate.

It's not God at work in your political career, it's mammon. A top member of your 1996 team that sought to secure your VP nomination told me that your brother Paul Voinovich worked openly to scuttle your nomination because he didn't want the scrutiny.

I can only hope that your claims of righteousness, which are like filthy rags, will one day undergo a final judgment. I'm still praying for a New York Times interview and investigation of your leading minority contractor when you were governor, the infamous and always entertaining T.G. Banks. There's still a lot of explaining to do.

Still, Bush-Voinovich would have been the most publicly pious team, with the Texas governor already proclaiming Jesus as his favorite philosopher and George guided by the third entity of the Holy Trinity. They could have mastered Machiavelli's old maxim: Don't take religion seriously, but always be the first one out on high holy days for public professions of faith if you want to manipulate the people.

INVESTIGATION

08/03/2000

The Politics of Punishment

part two of a Columbus Alive investigation

by Bob Fitrakis

"The atmosphere of the death house was smothering, suffocating, as if there was a shortage of oxygen. Everybody moved as if in slow motion. Their every move seeming to have been thoroughly rehearsed, learned, robot-like professionalism, as now, for the first time in over 30 years, they, the elite death squad, had been called upon to commit murder in the state of Ohio. In some of these eyes I saw fear, concern, and revulsion--in others, sadistic glee."

These were almost the last thoughts of John Byrd Jr., as he prepared to die in Ohio's electric chair on March 14, 1994. But, after narrowly escaping death that night, Byrd lived another day--another six years and counting--and was able to recall in the written statement above what it was like to come face-to-face with his executioners.

Byrd came within 30 minutes of being the first man executed in Ohio since 1963. He lost that historic distinction last year when a well-documented mentally ill and brain-damaged prisoner, Wilford Berry, refused to legally defend himself and entered infamy as the "Volunteer."

Although Byrd was granted a last-minute reprieve by the U.S. Supreme Court, when it upheld his "stay of execution" the evening he was to die, Byrd is likely to be put to death within the next few months. He's run out of appeals.

Columbus Alive's extensive review of court documents indicates that Byrd may die because of the possibly perjured testimony of a jailhouse snitch, condoned by overzealous Hamilton County prosecutors. Arrested with two co-defendants on robbery and murder charges, Byrd was the only one of the three accomplices to receive the death penalty, despite the state's failure to provide any forensic evidence linking Byrd to the murder victim.

Justice is supposed to be meted out evenly and equitably. But as Byrd's case illustrates, justice is too often a game of chance, with steep odds favoring the dealers.

The losers pay with their lives.

The confession

On the evening of April 17, 1983, Cincinnati King Kwik convenience store clerk Monte Tewksbury was stabbed once in the side during a robbery. He called his wife and described the robbers as two masked men; he later died in a local emergency room.

In the early morning hours of April 18, 19-year-old John Byrd was arrested along with John Brewer and William Woodall, two ex-felons, in a construction van that contained Tewksbury's possessions.

The evidence seized from the van placed Brewer at the murder scene. Under Brewer's passenger seat was Tewksbury's wife's gasoline credit card. Brewer had in his possession a $20 bill, two $10 bills, four $5 bills, 29 $1 bills and a large quantity of change matching the suspected contents of the King Kwik cash register. Detectives would later find Brewer's shoeprint on the countertop of a store robbed that night.

Sitting in the van next to Brewer was Byrd, with $1.47 in his pocket and no credit cards.

A short time after the King Kwik robbery, two masked men robbed a nearby U-Totem store. A customer, Dennis Nitz, told the police that one of the robbers had a knife and was wearing tan pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Since Byrd was wearing blue pants and a shirt with cut-off sleeves, prosecutors would later argue that the witness was mistaken about the pants' color and that Byrd had cut off his sleeves to hide the blood evidence they couldn't find on him.

The arresting officer noted that while there was no blood on Byrd, there appeared to be fresh blood on the driver's seat where Woodall sat. The Bowie knife purportedly used to stab Tewksbury never materialized; however, a work knife with no blood evidence on it was found in the van.

Byrd has steadfastly maintained that he didn't kill Tewksbury. He's claimed all along that when he woke up in the Cincinnati Correctional Institute the next day, he thought he was there for alcohol-related charges after a night of drinking, smoking pot and doing Quaaludes, according to Richard J. Vickers, his post-conviction attorney supplied by the Ohio Public Defender's office. Even after repeated questioning, neither Byrd nor his co-defendants made any statements to the police admitting the slaying of the store clerk.

Police and prosecutors knew it would be difficult to convict Byrd on a capital murder indictment without any direct evidence linking him to the killing. Not all murderers are equal under the law. Only the most heinous--cold-blooded, pre-meditated--receive capital indictments, with the possibility of receiving a death sentence. But amidst mounting public pressure and sympathetic media portrayals of the victim, who left a widow and three children, it was almost certain that one of the three accomplices would have to die.

Brewer and Woodall, each tried separately, never received a capital murder indictment. Both were eventually convicted by a jury of aggravated murder, but escaped the death chamber and remain in prison.

Events that transpired in the jailhouse and at Byrd's grand jury indictment would transform Byrd into the prosecution's version of the remorseless killer, despite the lack of an eyewitness tying him to the murder, fingerprints or other forensic evidence at the scene, or blood on an alleged murder weapon.

The grand jury that convened to issue indictments in the Tewksbury slaying initially heard testimony that Byrd was the killer from a highly suspect source, according to Vickers. Brewer's sister claimed that her brother told her that Byrd did it.

The state later turned to an even more suspect source in order to convict Byrd at trial on capital murder charges--well-known jailhouse informant Ronald Armstead.

Armstead wrote the prosecutors claiming that Brewer, Woodall and Byrd were openly bragging about killing Tewksbury. He claimed that approximately three weeks after the robbery, Byrd supposedly confessed the cold-blooded nature of the murder to Armstead while the two of them watched a PM Magazine segment featuring footage of the singing Tewksbury family.

Conveniently, the confession during the show allowed prosecutors to later show the emotionally wrenching footage of the happily singing family at trial.

It's Armstead's key testimony--portraying Byrd as a calculated, cold-blooded killer--that allowed prosecutors to win a death-penalty conviction. In dramatic testimony, a weeping Armstead told the jury that Byrd confided in him that he killed Tewksbury. "Fuck him [Tewksbury], he deserved to die," Armstead swore Byrd said.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reported at the time that Armstead's testimony was the most dramatic of Byrd's trial. The paper wrote, "Observers in the packed courtroom appeared captivated by Armstead and a stunned silence fell over the courtroom."

Daniel "Woody" Breyer, a Hamilton County prosecutor who, with Carl Vollman, tried the Byrd case, concurred. "I've seen it all and I've never seen a courthouse so intent, so rapt, so quiet, so involved," Breyer told Columbus Alive. "Tears were coming down [Armstead's] cheeks. He pointed at Byrd, and you could hear a pin drop."

The snitch

But to believe Armstead's testimony, one has to accept that three white guys suspected of murder and described by defense attorney Richard J. Vickers as "rednecks," refused to talk to the police but suddenly confessed to Armstead and his fellow black inmates Virgil Jordan and Marvin Randolph in jail. Ronald Armstead, who wept during his testimony, claimed John Byrd confessed to him because he "knew a lot about the law" and that "the white boys bared their souls" to him.

Vickers doesn't buy the story that the white guys confided to three black guys in jail, two of them known snitches. He sees that as an absurd scenario. "It's 1983 in Hamilton County. My client's a redneck in jail. Is he going to seek out three black cons and confess a murder to them that he steadfastly denied to everybody else?" Vickers said. "As Virgil Jordan, the self-described `King of the Snitches' put it, you shouldn't put frogs with snakes. They were schooled. They knew just enough facts to make themselves snitches."

As Vickers explained it to Columbus Alive, the Hamilton County prosecutors did not have a capital murder case against Byrd until Armstead stepped forward: "Armstead's confession is the only direct evidence they had linking Byrd to the murder. It's the only part the jury asked to re-hear in their deliberations. Forty-five minutes later, they found Byrd guilty on all charges including specifications for the death penalty."

According to Vickers, Armstead had also offered virtually the same dramatic testimony at supposed accomplice John Brewer's earlier trial. In that case, Brewer was the killer instead of Byrd.

Byrd's final appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit was handed down on April 6. Both the two-judge majority and the blistering dissent focused on Armstead's testimony.

The majority opinion reads: "The main evidence introduced at trial to prove that Petitioner [Byrd] was the principal offender, i.e., the individual who actually stabbed and murdered Monte [Tewksbury], came from Ronald Armstead." The court also conceded, "All agree that Armstead's testimony was vitally important to the jury's determination."

After a 10-day trial that ended on August 12, 1983, the jury had one request for the court: could they have the Armstead testimony read back to them. Over an objection from Byrd's attorney, the court reporter read the entirety of Armstead's dramatic and flamboyant testimony to the jury in open court. Part of what the jury heard was, "And he said, `Yeah, I killed him, I killed him, you know, because he was in my motherfucking way, fuck him.' You know, that's the whole attitude they took the whole time they were there, they don't care, you know. He [Byrd] don't care. [Pointing at Byrd.]"

The jury was never informed of the state's star witness' dubious past. While Byrd's trial attorneys managed to get into the record that Armstead had been convicted of a felony within the last 10 years, the jury was not aware that Armstead was in jail on a parole violation and was facing a return to state prison for a three- to 15-year stay.

Hamilton County prosecutors failed to disclose Armstead's parole violation and pending return to prison as well as his extensive criminal past. Nor did prosecutors disclose Armstead's prison intake screening from 1981, which showed he "possesses below average intelligence and has achieved academically around the third grade."

In Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors must turn over exculpatory evidence or evidence that could have been used to impeach the state's star witness. But the prosecution had in its possession a three-page parole report that it never turned over in which Armstead admitted to the prison psychologist that "he has been addicted to heroin and Talwin for some 10 years."

By withholding this information from the defendant, the prosecutors prohibited Byrd's attorneys from casting doubt on Armstead's vital testimony. Even worse, when asked if "any charges" were pending against him, Armstead testified, "I don't have no time pending or nothing else pending.... I don't have no more cases pending and I come to testify against [Byrd] because he was wrong."

In the April 2000 Sixth Circuit Court ruling, one judge vigorously dissented against the two-judge majority, arguing that Byrd should have a new hearing. Judge Nathaniel R. Jones wrote in his dissent, "At best, these [Armstead's] statements were misleading and left the jury with a material mis-impression of fact. At worst, these statements were patently false, which the prosecution knew, or should have known." Jones pointedly noted that "`Any' [charges] means `any.'"

The evidence

Since John Byrd's original trial, other records withheld from his attorneys have surfaced. These documents demonstrate that the Hamilton County Prosecutor's office was adamantly opposed to Ronald Armstead's parole, and sought to have him returned to prison prior to his testimony against Byrd.

An April 29, 1981, letter from Simon L. Leis Jr., Hamilton County prosecuting attorney to the Ohio Parole Board, stated, "Please be advised that this office strongly opposes any type of furlough, parole or release of defendant Ronald Armstead, aka Ronald Scott, who was committed to your institution a little less than five months ago under a sentence of not less than three years no more 15 years for the crime of felonious assault and trafficking in drugs." Leis pointed out that while incarcerated, Armstead had attempted to escape and attacked both a guard and a nurse "with a metal bed crank."

Leis continued, "We have in the person of the defendant a person who has gone out and committed two prior escapes for which he was convicted and the third time he was convicted of felonious assault and the escape charge was dropped." Leis wrote the Adult Parole Board again in 1982 reiterating the county's position that Armstead should not be paroled.

Vickers suggests that, instead of attacking prison personnel with metal bed cranks, Armstead found an easier way out of prison--as a star witness for the prosecutor's office.

After Armstead's testimony, the Hamilton County prosecutors had a sudden and decisive change of heart and no longer opposed his parole. Daniel Breyer, one of the prosecutors who tried the Byrd case, wrote a letter to the parole board recommending Armstead's release, citing his cooperation in Byrd's conviction.

Breyer told Alive that his letter was motivated simply out of concern for Armstead's safety. Armstead contacted the prosecutor and said he was being roughed up in prison because he was a known snitch. "I was worried about Armstead being attacked," Breyer said in an interview this week.

Breyer emphatically denies that Armstead's testimony in the Byrd case was in exchange for early release from prison. "There was no deal," Breyer said. "They'll never prove it. It never happened...It's a fabrication to save Byrd."

"Armstead was returned to prison [after his testimony]," Breyer continued. "If there was a deal, Armstead wouldn't have been returned to prison and I wouldn't have had to write the letter."

Appeals court Judge Jones' dissent argues that Byrd should be allowed to investigate why Armstead, with his pending return to prison, was chosen to testify instead of two other inmates who contacted the prosecutor's office. The other two inmates have subsequently recanted their stories and denied that Byrd ever confessed to them. They admitted to concocting the story with Armstead in hopes of getting special treatment in jail.

Vickers said that Armstead's friends, Virgil Jordan and Marvin Randolph, both independently supplied affidavits stating that the whole story about the confession was fabricated. "They felt by snitching it would help them get released from jail. In Armstead's case, it worked, since the parole board reversed itself and refused to send him back to prison, which they initially had planned. Both Randolph and Jordan separately claimed that they knew how to play the snitch game--to write the prosecutor and say that they had `personal knowledge' of a crime," Vickers explained.

Byrd is in a classic Catch-22, according to Vickers, with the prosecution vouching for the snitch Armstead while telling the court not to believe the two other inmates who originally backed Armstead but now have signed affidavits saying the witness perjured himself. The prosecutor's felon is always the honest felon, according to Vickers.

The majority in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals concurred. The two judges pointed out that there are actually statements and affidavits as of April from four inmates alleging that Armstead lied, but they are to be disregarded. "Elwood Jones, Marvin Randolph, Robert Jones and Thomas Sargent are all convicted felons, whose credibility is thereby diminished," the court wrote. The court dismissed their affidavits as "merely impeaching in nature"--of use only to call into question the testimony of Armstead, the state's star witness and also a felon.

"There's a body of case law that says if we can't prove the prosecutor knew or should have known that Armstead perjured himself, then we have no right to a hearing or to depose the prosecutor on the matter," Vickers explained. "This is skewed logic. What prosecutor is going to sign an affidavit swearing that they suborned perjury so we can depose them and discover their documents? It's never going to happen. We'll never have a chance to prove our claims. There's enough in the records to suggest that Armstead was a lying prevaricator simply trying to save his own skin."

Vickers argues that one of Byrd's prosecutors, Daniel Breyer, was in the enviable position of having his brother, William Breyer, as the chief appellate counsel in Hamilton County. "The court findings that all the subsequent appeals courts have relied on were written and signed by Bill Breyer, who had a stake in protecting his office and his brother's reputation," Vickers offered. "It's the same finding that's been relied on by every appeals court to deny Byrd judicial relief, to deny him a hearing, to deny him the prosecutor's files, to deny him the ability to impeach the testimony of a known criminal and snitch."

So dependent were the prosecutors upon Armstead's evidence linking Byrd to the murder that they "vouched" for his credibility, Vickers contends.

According to court records, during closing arguments one of the prosecutors stated, "[Armstead] looked Byrd right in the face. He looked me in the face. He looked you in the face, Armstead did, he looked the defense attorney in the face and he said, `What the man did was wrong. He killed that man for no reason.' I'm not sure there's honor among thieves, but I believe Armstead when he took that stand, and I believe you did, too."

The prosecutor's closing argument continued, "Armstead said that he was told by Byrd that Byrd stabbed Monte Tewksbury. I haven't heard any evidence to contradict that. I have seen a lot of circumstantial evidence to support that. I've heard no evidence, direct or circumstantial, to contradict what Armstead said. I believe him, and I submit that you should believe him."

Vickers insisted, "Any time you have the representative of the state telling the jury a witness is telling the truth, it makes for dramatic testimony. It's not evidence, it's the prosecutor's personal opinion. But he's giving the sanction of the state of Ohio to his opinion."

Late last year, Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court Thomas J. Moyer publicly scolded Hamilton County prosecutors in another death-penalty case. "Time and time again we see counsel misconduct which...would appear to be grounds for reversal and the vacating of convictions and/or sentences," Moyer asserted.

"Hamilton County isn't overzealous, it's serious about the death penalty," countered Daniel Breyer, who's now the Clermont County Prosecutor. "We didn't charge people and use it as a bargaining tool [by reducing charges]. We followed through on our obligation and didn't take the easy way out."

In his dissent in the Byrd case, Judge Jones contends, "There's no other way to describe the prosecutor's statement in this case than to use the words `egregious,' `astonishing' and `inexcusable.'" The appeals court judge concluded with, "The prosecutory vouching in this case represents flagrant constitutional error."

The majority disagreed, claiming that the federal court "lacks supervisory power over state courts and could only consider `the fairness of the trial not the culpability of the prosecutor.'" The judges found that there was no legal relief for the prosecutor's "improper vouching" for the state's star witness who they knew was misleading the jury.

Jones' dissent holds that Byrd should be entitled to at least some "limited discovery" in order to find out the facts about the prosecutor's office's relationship with Armstead. "Anything less is a gross and irrevocable miscarriage of justice, as the stark and chilly choice here is between due process or death."

"They're going to kill this guy on this evidence. This raises legal, moral, philosophical and ethical concerns. They're going to kill him although he never received a fair trial," Vickers reflected. "Byrd is going to be executed on that basis. There's no fingerprints, no video, no DNA, no eyewitness linking him to the murder--just his supposed confession supplied by a jailhouse informant."

Meanwhile, Byrd's supposed partners in crime, John Brewer and William Woodall, are sitting safely in prison without any danger of coming near the death chamber. If nothing else, the use of death penalty against only one of the three accomplices is arbitrary at best.

Breyer, needless to say, disagrees. "Just because Brewer, who may have deserved the death penalty, didn't get it, it's no argument that Byrd shouldn't receive the death penalty," the prosecutor said. "Should we do away with putting people in prison because sometimes innocent people are sentenced? The same thing's true of the death penalty."

"No one can argue that Byrd's innocent. It's simply a question of whether the death penalty's applicable or not," Breyer continued. "There's no question he did it."

Vickers has been working on the case for 12 years and can't believe it's gone this far towards execution.

Sure, the defense attorney admits, Byrd previously had trouble with the law. He'd run away, stolen a truck, taken it to Kentucky and gone to prison for joy-riding. But the 19-year-old had never committed a violent crime. His mother gave birth to him at 16 and divorced his father soon after because of a jail stint. Her two subsequent marriages failed. One ex-husband was fond of blackening Johnny's eyes, his mother testified. A learning disability made Byrd a subject of frequent ridicule at school, but at the age of 11 he was briefly a local hero when he saved a young child from falling into a frozen creek.

"When the nightmare first began, I was a young, strong, good-looking kid," Byrd wrote from the Mansfield Correctional Institution's death row, in a letter received by Columbus Alive this week. "The years that have been wasted, spent by enduring...the 23-hour-a-day lockdowns, the mental and physical abuses placed upon me by both the failure of the justice system and the prison administration. The toll of these years upon my physical well-being is expressionless. The parasites that are sucking the life out of my body and plotting my murder can and never will be able to break me! All I want is to be heard and for the truth to be exposed."

"I did not kill this man," Byrd continued. "Taking of life shouldn't rest on the testimony of jailhouse snitches who will and do say anything to gain favor from the prosecutor's office."

John Byrd's impending execution--and a conviction based on the uncorroborated testimony of a single jailhouse informant, felon and possible perjurer--points toward a capricious and farcical system of administering justice. A system where the difference between life and death is just a snitch away.

"The Politics of Punishment" continues on August 10: Jamie Pietras calculates the luck-of-the-draw odds defendants face in Ohio's death row lottery.

The snitch's rap sheet

Jailhouse informant Ronald Armstead's testimony against John Byrd Jr.--that Byrd confessed to the murder of Monte Tewksbury--was described as the most "dramatic" of the trial, that it "captivated" courtroom observers. Even the appeals court that upheld Byrd's conviction agreed that Armstead's testimony was "vitally important to the jury's determination."

But what the jury didn't know, because of Armstead's misleading statement on the witness stand, was that Armstead was behind bars hoping for an early release when he turned snitch. Nor did the jury know that the Hamilton County Prosecutor's office had previously petitioned to keep Armstead in jail, only to reverse that position and support his parole after his testimony secured Byrd's conviction.

Here's something else the jury didn't know: Career criminal Armstead's rap sheet was pages long. This is the arrest and conviction record of Ronald Armstead, before he became Ohio's star witness.

August 3, 1963: Disorderly conduct, convicted

March 24, 1964: Receiving stolen property, convicted

March 25, 1964: Assault and battery, convicted

June 4, 1964: Public intoxication, convicted

August 23, 1964: Assault and battery, convicted

August 6, 1965: Assault and battery, dismissed by prosecutor

October 31, 1966: Assault and battery, convicted; vandalism charge, dismissed

February 4, 1967: Assault and battery, dismissed by prosecutor

December 14, 1967: Resisting arrest, passing bad checks, dismissed by prosecutor

February 5, 1968: Disorderly conduct, convicted; resisting arrest, dismissed by prosecutor

March 26, 1968: Assault and battery, convicted

March 28, 1968: Sodomy, convicted

October 16, 1968: Escape from workhouse, convicted

February 17, 1972: Disorderly conduct, convicted

May 21, 1978: Assault, acquitted by court

September 15, 1979: Obstructing official business, acquitted by court; public gaming, acquitted by court

May 30, 1980: Felonious assault, dismissed; trafficking and transporting narcotics, convicted

June 3, 1980: Felonious assault, convicted; escape from workhouse, convicted

8/10/2000

NEWS BRIEF

Sweat socks and sweat shops

The Nike Truth Tour made a pit stop in Columbus on Sunday, August 6. Ten students representing United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) led a demonstration at the nation's second largest institution of higher learning.

USAS is a national network of campus-based organizations at more than 175 universities throughout the United States. Founded in the summer of 1998, the organization's "Sweat-Free" campus campaign has created quite a stir in the $2.5 billion collegiate apparel market.

Columbus USAS members stressed that the core of their struggle is not about punishing Nike, but about supporting human rights. Carrie Brunk--a USAS student making the 4,381 mile, 13-day, 12-city pilgrimage with the Nike tour--wrote on the group's "On The Road" diary webpage that "all we are trying to do is tell the truth about Nike."

The group's flier stated, "You shell out $50 for a Nike shirt or $150 for Nike shoes. But Nike doesn't tell you that the young woman who made that shirt or shoes did not earn enough to support herself or her children." Roselio Reyes, a 22-year-old student and labor organizer from the Dominican Republic, worked in a sweatshop in his native country. He told local anti-sweatshop activists that in the "free trade zone" where he worked, he was not allowed to leave the factory until 9 p.m., which caused him to miss his classes. When he refused to work the mandatory overtime, he was fired.

A Yale student on the pilgrimage summed it up by saying, "We want students to understand that private acts of buying clothing have very real public consequences around the world."

Tour members stressed that they're not urging a boycott of Nike at this point, but want people concerned to call Nike and demand that the company adopt and enforce a "code of conduct" that provides dignity, decent living wages and the right to organize for workers. USAS members want Ohio State University officials to negotiate a strict and enforceable contract with Nike for the apparel they produce with the OSU logo.

The tour is being recorded and webcast at www.behindthelabel.org.

--Bob Fitrakis

8/10/2000

NEWS BRIEF

Saying more about less

The absurdity of Governor Bob Taft emphasizing Ohio's commitment to education Wednesday night, August 2, at the Republican National Convention, as Senator George Voinovich grinned beside him, was beyond Orwellian.

During the convention's roll call vote, Taft turned the floor over to an elementary school student from Dublin, who dutifully recited, "Just as more and more of my fellow students pass our reading and writing tests, the great state of Ohio tonight also passes."

Merciful convention commentators gave Taft and Voinovich a pass on their flight from reality.

Under then-Governor Voinovich's watch in the 1990s, the Buckeye State dropped from 37th in public expenditures for higher education to its current 42nd in the nation among the 50 states. During the Voinovich administration, the Republican-dominated Ohio Supreme Court declared the state's K-12 school system unconstitutional and the General Accounting Office cited Ohio as the state with the worst disparity between rich and poor schools. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court again found Ohio's public schools' funding unconstitutional during the Taft regime.

Of course, Taft wasn't under oath when he bragged about Ohio's commitment to education: no crime, no foul. Still, if the governor and senator wanted to be honest about the recent Republican legacy in Ohio, they probably should have bragged about importing garbage and toxic waste or the prison and jail building spree so cherished by Voinovich.

Perhaps during the presidential debates they could have non-partisan fact-checkers and, just like a prizefight, they could flash a statement-by-statement account of how often the candidates connect with reality. Although he threw a lot of punches in a short and flamboyant flurry, Taft earned a five-percent truth-connection rating.

--Bob Fitrakis

08/10/2000

The sausage factory

The hot-button capital-punishment debate has become even more contentious in the last year. The rise in use of DNA evidence is garnering the most headlines--freeing wrongly convicted people from death rows nationwide--led by a high-profile execution moratorium in Illinois.

How are innocent people landing on death row? A June study by Columbia University law professor James Liebman provides a peek at the answer. In the 28 states Liebman studied, 68 percent of death-penalty convictions were reversed at the federal level because of errors in the judicial process.Polls indicate that people are increasingly questioning the fairness of the death-penalty process. A June Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Americans support the death penalty, down from 80 percent just six years ago. That support may continue to decline drastically, under further scrutiny of state executions. Much like a trip to the sausage factory, Americans may lose their appetite for lethal injection when they learn what really goes on in courtrooms and on death row.

A jury sentenced John Byrd Jr. to death without knowing that Ronald Armstead, the trial's key witness, avoided a return to prison after his testimony against Byrd. The jury was misled about the witness' long criminal history, and left with the impression that Armstead's testimony was an unselfish act of civic virtue.

Attempts to cross-examine Armstead about his criminal past were thwarted by prosecutors' objections sustained by the trial court. Thus, jurors could not consider pertinent facts, such as that Armstead had recently committed a crime, had violated his parole, and was facing an impending return to the penitentiary.

He was hardly a selfless citizen doing a good deed.

Such suspect prosecutory behavior caused U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, then the oldest and longest-serving member of the Supreme Court, to announce in February 1994 that he would vote to oppose all future death sentences. He claimed that the system for imposing capital punishment was simply too arbitrary and biased against poor and black defendants to pass Constitutional muster.

"From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death," Blackmun proclaimed, "I believe that the death penalty, as currently administered, is unconstitutional."

Blackmun's words are those of a judge appointed by President Richard Nixon because of his dedication to "law and order." Blackmun played a key role in restoring capital punishment in 1976, yet he concluded that "the problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution."

Three weeks after Justice Blackmun's condemnation of the death penalty, Ohio officials worked fervishly to carry out Byrd's execution, despite his remaining appeals. Then-Attorney General Lee Fisher filed an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on March 14, 1994, after conferring with then-Governor George Voinovich, asking the court to allow Ohio's first execution in 31 years.

Byrd waited in his death house cell 13 steps from "Old Thunderbolt," as the Cleveland Plain Dealer called it, or "Old Sparky," as the competing Columbus Dispatch referred to the electric chair. None of the mainstream news coverage at the time raised the Armstead issues exposed by Columbus Alive last week.

Byrd condemned "the apparent unprecedented and mean-spirited tactics being employed by the `Honorable' Carl Rubin, the judge assigned to my case. It seems that although he had my writ of habeas corpus and motion for a stay of execution before him since March 7, he decided to wait until the `11th hour' before making a ruling, knowing full well that the situation was critical and time was of the essence." The Sixth Circuit Court removed Judge Rubin from handling Byrd's case.

In 1994, after Ohio failed to kill Byrd, then-State Senator Betty Montgomery chaired a panel seeking ways to speed up appeals in death penalty cases. A news account in the Plain Dealer documents her utter contempt for an academic witness suggesting that the system was fundamentally flawed. Montgomery invited the family of slain convenience store clerk Monte Tewksbury to testify, and ended up endorsing a constitutional change that outlawed a death penalty appeal to the state appeals court.

Why was the state of Ohio in such a hurry to kill Byrd? Maybe so nosy reporters couldn't dig up Armstead's dubious past and shed light on the suspicious behavior of the Hamilton County prosecutors. Late last year, Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer specifically singled out the Hamilton County Prosecutor's office for its overzealous conduct in pursuing death-penalty cases.

In February, Illinois Governor George Ryan halted executions in his state for a year pending a full investigation of the capital punishment system, one which has admittedly put 13 innocent people on death row. Remember, it wasn't the mainstream media that brought the wrongful convictions to light, but a college professor and his students doing research on death penalty cases.

The New Hampshire legislature voted in May to repeal the state's seldom-used death penalty, although Governor Jeanne Shaheen quickly vetoed the proposal. The next month found both the states of Maryland and Virginia commuting or postponing a death sentence because of questions of basic trial fairness.

This, of course, did not stop Texas governor and presidential candidate George W. Bush from carrying out the execution of Gary Graham on June 22, even after three jurors filed affidavits expressing doubts about the lone eyewitness' identification of Graham. Bush's actions drew the condemnation of the ultra-conservative Reverend Pat Robertson.

At the July meeting of the American Bar Association, the group's President-elect Martha Barnett, citing "gross injustice" in the application of the death penalty, called upon the nation's lawyers to support a moratorium on capital punishment. As the lawyers met, President Bill Clinton put the execution of any federal prisoners on hold while the U.S. Justice Department reviews new clemency rules for death-row inmates and completes a federal death-penalty study.

Concern over the death penalty spread to the Ohio Statehouse as Representative Shirley A. Smith introduced legislation calling for a moratorium on capital punishment in Ohio. Governor Bob Taft immediately dismissed Smith's bill and issued a statement that he has no plans to suspend death-penalty sentences. The governor's spokesperson, former Plain Dealer writer Mary Ann Sharkey, informed the media that "He [Taft] believes we have sufficient safeguards with the appeals process and the parole board, and the governor reviews each case."

At the same time that Taft was preaching the superiority of Ohio's capital punishment system, Florida's St. Petersburg Times released a study indicating that "the state's registry of death-penalty defense lawyers appears to have been designed to keep death-row inmates from getting the full defense they are entitled to." Florida Governor Jed Bush supports the system where death-row attorneys cap their hours at 840, despite a study saying on average they need 3,300 hours to thoroughly defend their clients.

Former Florida Supreme Court Justice Gerald Kogan said, "If you make a mistake in a non-capital case and the defendant is innocent, you can open the prison door. But if you make a mistake in a capital case, you can't dig up" the defendant.

Lacking the Ohio's governor's confidence, a judge in Georgia ordered the body of a man executed four years ago to be dug up for DNA testing a little over a week after Taft's pronouncements. A Virginia judge turned down a similar request earlier in the year.

08/17/2000

Impending collapse

The savings and loan scandal haunts City Council hopeful Warren Tyler

by Bob Fitrakis

The ghost of the Home State Savings and Loan scandal, described by the Washington Post as "Ohio's biggest banking crisis since the Great Depression," haunts Columbus City Council hopeful Warren Tyler.

Currently residing in Upper Arlington, Tyler may move to Columbus to do for our fair city what he did for the state under Governor Richard Celeste. Tyler headed Ohio's Commerce Department from January 1983 to February 1985. Celeste moved him to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency just prior to the eruption of the Home State Savings scandal.

Before City Council votes to appoint Tyler--who's on the shortlist of possible replacements for Councilmember Fred Ransier--they might want to read his August 1985 testimony before the Ohio General Assembly's Joint Select Committee on Savings and Loans. Tyler, as the commerce director, supervised the Ohio Division of Savings and Loans. In his testimony, he acknowledged that he failed to inform Governor Celeste of the problems plaguing Marvin Warner's Home State Savings and Loan.

Tyler told state investigators that he never mentioned it to the governor because he was "convinced" the situation was "under control." What he supposedly never told the governor was that Warner's savings and loan had invested more than $140 million of its customers' cash in an obscure Florida-based company with questionable business practices. When that company, E.S.M. Government Securities Inc., collapsed in March 1985, 90,000 Home State depositors were left in the lurch.

Celeste closed 71 Ohio savings and loans to prevent a run on the banks and had to virtually liquidate the state's private insurance fund to cover the losses. Warner later served 28 months of a three-and-a-half year prison sentence for nine fraud-related charges in connection with the savings and loan collapse.

Better yet, skip Tyler's testimony and read the statements from former Chief Examiner of Savings and Loans Kurt A. Kreinbring, who, according to the Columbus Dispatch, resigned his state job "because of his frustration of the [Celeste] administration's unwillingness or inability to force Home State to divest itself of the E.S.M. investment."

Kreinbring told the joint select committee that "he had at least three conversations with Tyler between mid-1983 and November 1984 about Examiner's [Kreinbring's] concerns in connection with Home State's ballooning investments and repurchase agreements with E.S.M."

Facts suggest that Tyler was the governor's "go to" guy in protecting Warner, a fat cat money-raiser for Celeste and other powerful state and national Democrats. Warner emerged on the national political scene in 1975 as a major fund-raiser for then-obscure one-term governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Despite the protests of the American Foreign Service Association, President Carter appointed Warner Ambassador to Switzerland, where press accounts say he was not well-received.

In the spring of '82, Warner became the Daddy Warbucks for the underdog Celeste in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Warner contributed $36,000 to the Celeste campaign, hosted a fund-raiser that netted $200,000, and co-signed a $75,000 loan at a critical financial time, according to the Washington Post. The governor's campaign manager, Dick Austin, became a registered lobbyist for Home State Savings. Warner had open access to Governor Celeste, and when the savings and loan scandal broke, more than one Ohio newspaper compared him to the notorious Burt Lance, who was forced out of the Carter administration.

On February 27, 1981, IRS, DEA and U.S. Customs Service agents busted Great American Bank of Dade County as part of Operation Greenback, a Reagan administration attempt to crack down on drug money laundering. The bank and three middle-level employees were later indicted for allegedly laundering $94 million in drug money. According to press accounts, Warner had large holdings in Great American Bank, which he quietly sold after the raid.

The untimely deaths of three Warner associates hampered the federal government's investigation into the E.S.M./Home State collapse and allegations of money laundering. Alan Novick, president of E.S.M. and a Celeste contributor, died of a heart attack November 23, 1984, just prior to the scandal. Novick was later portrayed as the "domineering mastermind of [the] huge financial fraud," according to the New York Times.

Warner's son-in-law and prominent Miami attorney Steve Arky died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on July 22, 1985. E.S.M.'s court-appointed receiver, Thomas Tew, accused Arky of closing his E.S.M. account and withdrawing $2 million just before the collapse.

On November 13, 1986, under pressure from federal investigators and facing a three-year prison term, E.S.M.'s comptroller Henry Earl Riddel "suffocated himself with a plastic bag," according to the Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal reported that the court-appointed trustee for E.S.M. was investigating more than $6 billion in questionable E.S.M. transactions.

The New York Times reported that Ohio officials were warned of the problem in a 1982 audit: "Home State faced the possible loss of $125 million in investments with E.S.M.," Sylvester Hentschell, chief examiner for the Division of Savings and Loans, advised the division's Superintendent Clark Wideman in October 1982. Wideman resigned in January 1983.

Enter Warren Tyler as commerce director. In July 1984 the new superintendent of the Savings and Loan Division, C. Lawrence Huddleston, wrote Tyler and warned him, "I'm not willing to take the hit when this thing blows up." Still, Tyler claimed that it wasn't worth bothering the governor over the impending Home State collapse.

Now Tyler wants to bring his political skills to City Council. Perhaps it would be best if the council suggested he go live with Marvin Warner on his horse-breeding Warnerton Farm in Ocala, Florida. The farm was worth an estimated $5 million in 1993 when the moneyman left prison.

NEWS BRIEF

08/24/2000

Toxic child's play

Ohio Citizen Action organized scores of local activists to join with parents and children from Marion's contaminated River Valley Middle and High School in a vigil Monday night at the Governor's Mansion. The candlelight vigil was a desperate plea to Governor Bob Taft to halt the opening of the River Valley Schools and to reassign the students before the beginning of classes, slated for Tuesday, August 22.

Demonstrators carried signs asking "What if they were your kids?" and insisting that "Kids shouldn't play on toxic waste."

The two River Valley schools were built on the site of the former U.S. Army Marion Engineering Depot, the largest facility of its kind in the nation until its closing and subsequent sale to the school district in 1961. The U.S. Army acknowledges dumping, burning and burying solvents, fuel oil, chemical agents and paint on the property for nearly two decades.

Some 70 different chemicals have been documented on or near the school property, including arsenic, vinyl chlorine, tricholoroethyline, benzo (a) pyrene, chromium, lead, PCBs and a host of toxic solvents.

In 1997, the River Valley school nurse reported to the Ohio Department of Health that a disproportionate number of leukemia cases had struck River Valley students and graduates. Between 1966 and 1995, leukemia death rates rose by 122 percent in the city of Marion, and brain cancer death rates increased by 40 percent in the county. The rate of esophageal cancer is 10 times higher than expected, according to Ohio Citizen Action. In 1999, the U.S. Army found "an eminent threat to human health" on Army Reserve property near the schools.

Citizen Action spokesperson Noreen Warnock told those gathered at the vigil that a "state of emergency" exists in Marion, and produced an executive order her organization drafted for the governor's signature. The order calls for "the reassignment of all students to other schools."

Marion resident Mike Griffith shares that sentiment. He told Columbus Alive, "All the state and federal pronouncements are always qualified. They'll say there's no eminent or immediate danger but they don't want to assess the combined risk of a hundred chemicals and 20 metals in the soil and air in and around the school."

Kent Krumanaker of Marion suggests that it would be easy to reassign the schoolkids to four other schools in the county. "We wanted it closed three years ago. We need to take these kids out of harm's way," he said.

Last year, River Valley School Superintendent Thomas G. Shade filed an application with the Ohio Schools Facilities Commission Extreme Environmental Contamination Program in order to get funds to build a new school. The application noted that "extensive ongoing investigations by the [Army] Corps have revealed that the entire site is contaminated and it includes a six-acre chemical waste disposal pit."

"Arial photos suggest that former disposal areas may extend below the current middle school building," the application continues. "Surface soil contamination contains unacceptable levels of carcinogenics" which the students are being exposed to through "inhalation, ingestion and dermal contact."

The superintendent's application to the facilities commission pointed out that environmental studies "show extensive and severe surface and subsurface soil contamination in many areas utilized by the students, including the athletic fields, practice areas and the agricultural activities area."

The school district is currently gathering evidence for a possible lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers.

The governor was not in during the course of the candlelight vigil, but state troopers guarding the residence promised to deliver the newly drafted executive order to him. Many of the demonstrators vowed to stay all night in order to make their plea to the governor in person before the schools opened Tuesday morning.

08/31/2000

Super Populist

Gore's quick change leaves him looking like a pale imitation of Nader

by Bob Fitrakis

Much like Clark Kent, the mild-mannered preppy New Democrat Vice President Al Gore did a quick change at the Democratic National Convention and emerged as Super Populist. Gore now pledges to fight for "the people, not the powerful." His new slogan and denouncements of "Big Tobacco, Big Oil, big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs" is reminiscent of President Bill Clinton's 1992 rhetoric fashioned by leftist pollster Stanley Greenberg.

Al From, the head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, recently told the Washington Post that he doesn't see a problem with Gore using populist rhetoric "so long as it's used to sell centrist policies." Clinton used similar tactics to twice carry the five critical swing states of Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania--states where GOP governors have won 12 out of the last 13 elections.

But Gore faces obstacles in Ohio that Clinton did not: The presence of Ralph Nader on the statewide ballot and a reinvigorated Ohio Green Party supporting his independent candidacy. Nader, who's raised $2 million and is running a serious campaign this year, unlike 1996, should appear on 45 state ballots by election day. In 1996, Green petitioners in Ohio failed to get the 5,000 signatures necessary to place Nader on the ballot.

Ohio's key role as the nation's foremost bellwether state--having picked the winning president in all but two elections in the 20th century--will elevate the debate over Nader's candidacy, especially since last week's Survey/USA poll of likely Ohio voters showed Gore and Governor George W. Bush in a virtual dead heat in the Buckeye State.

While Gore loyalists predict that the Nader campaign will wither in Ohio, Nader forces in central Ohio are riding a wave of optimism. In January, 11 people showed up for the first statewide campaign meeting. There was a slight improvement in March when a dozen people attended a central Ohio Nader meeting at the Clintonville Community Market. Last week, some 65 Nader campaigners met at the Northwood Community building. As a former Franklin County Democratic Party wardperson, I don't remember the local Democrats turning out 65 volunteers for any campaign, even when there was free beer.

Nader's explosive potential to attract voters was demonstrated on July 21 when more than 1,000 enthusiastic supporters packed OSU's Independence Hall to cheer the nation's foremost consumer advocate. An OSU campus Green Party emerged almost spontaneously from the Nader appearance.

In contrast to the pseudo-populism of Gore, it's easier to believe Nader when he tells you the problem is "excessive concentration of power and wealth in a few hands," or when he says, "instead of government of, by, and for the people, we have a government of the Exxons, by the General Motors and for the DuPonts." Nader's dedicated his whole life to holding these behemoth corporate entities accountable--as opposed to Gore and Bush, who've dedicated themselves to shaking down corporate PACs for campaign contributions.

"I've had many, many folks say that when they listen to Nader talk, they couldn't believe it. Somebody was actually saying the truth. Some describe it as `a religious experience,' I kid you not," local Nader campaign spokesperson Paul Dumouchelle told Columbus Alive. "There is a hunger out there for a political movement that truly speaks to the situation of Americans suffering from an economy where real wages have declined in the past couple of decades, where people are so time-starved from working low wage jobs to make ends meet that their children's upbringing is suffering, where everyone suffers from real and painful health care insecurity or increasing health care expenses that leave them paying more for less care than before. Ralph Nader is offering real solutions to these problems."

Without Nader's presence in the campaign, you can bet that Al Gore would be pandering to the right of center with conservative rhetoric, instead of doing his impersonation of William Jennings Bryan. Expect to hear increasingly shrill attacks on Nader from Gore loyalists invoking the supposed specter of the "Greater Evil," the Republicans' Bush.

But what about the evil known as the WTI waste incinerator? Remember, candidate Gore promised the people of East Liverpool, Ohio, that he would close that toxic generator back in '92. He didn't.

And what about the Veep's role in championing the privatization of the Piketon Gaseous Diffusion Plant--a scam that will enrich the investment bankers who brokered the deal but threw hundreds of well-paid union workers out of their jobs?

Gore can talk all he wants about "earth in the balance," but it was he and Clinton who pushed NAFTA through Congress without any continental environmental standards, minimum wage or occupational health and safety requirements.

Ultimately, the Nader campaign is not about winning the White House; rather, it's about building a progressive grassroots alternative movement in Ohio. This is more important than ever, since the Ohio Democratic Party has turned its attention to large and questionable "soft money" donations and its base is more Astroturf than natural grassroots.

Nader's message is clear and he needs to be heard: "The corporations are becoming more arrogant, more powerful, more abusive and more shameless. They're taking over the two parties in full vision of the mass media that is reporting every detail, every day, and they don't care. The two parties don't care.... And they can't reform themselves."

09/07/2000

NEWS BRIEF

Police critics say they're being harassed

Last week's decision by U.S. District Judge William Rea allowing the Los Angeles Police Department to be sued under the federal Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) might not be a bad idea for Columbus, suggests James Moss, president of Police Officers for Equal Rights.

"In Columbus, it's hard to prosecute police officers for criminal activity. The way they've designed the internal affairs system, where it covers up rather than exposes wrongdoing, needs to be changed," Moss told Columbus Alive.

Former Public Safety Director Thomas Rice recommended that the city separate the Internal Affairs Bureau from Columbus Division of Police oversight and move it out of police headquarters, so the bureau would serve as a more effective watchdog. Moss agrees with the intent of that suggestion and goes even further, suggesting that we may need "a new unit or new [oversight] system in Columbus." Moss argues that there's a standard pattern for dealing with police critics in Columbus, and virtually every complaint made to the Internal Affairs Bureau comes back classified as "unfounded," with the implication that those complaining are always "lying about the incident."

Moss, a retired 24-year veteran police sergeant with the Columbus Division of Police, has continued to raise allegations of police misconduct and harassment even after the U.S. Department of Justice finding that the division has engaged in a "pattern and practice" of abuse against minorities, women, poor and young people. Moss contends that he's paying the price for blowing the whistle on city police.

Last March, Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery's office sent a letter to Police Officers for Equal Rights, Inc. requesting the "submission of registration material and annual financial reports with applicable fees for years ending December 31, 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998." So far, POER has turned over financial reports for the last three years and has requested reports from the older years from the group's accountant.

Moss claims this is just another form of state and local "harassment" of a group complaining to the federal government about the Columbus police. Of course, it may be natural for the Attorney General's office, which for decades kept lists of "subversive" groups, to investigate Police Officers for Equal Rights (POER).

Moss has provided tapes of phone calls he received that he categorizes as "threatening and harassing" to the Columbus Division of Police Organized Crime Bureau, and he says he's filed "several reports with the local FBI."

In a recent letter to Columbus Dispatch writer Bruce Cadwallader, Moss wrote, "All Columbus police members who served on our [POER] executive board have been charged by Chief [James] Jackson with some petty and fabricated charges. This tactic is a way to intimidate our members to quit."

For a recent article, the Dispatch attempted to contact 14 POER members. The paper reported that "three declined comment, saying they feared retribution from white officers."

Last month, the battle between the civil rights group and the police division heated up after POER called upon the local U.S. attorney to seek indictments against police officers who allegedly assaulted two black youths in separate incidents on the Near East Side. At an August 7 press conference about the alleged assaults, Moss went so far as to charge that the first elected African-American city attorney, Janet Jackson, was not doing her job. "You can't go to the city attorney with these things, so where do you go?" Moss asked.

The city attorney responded, "Don't accuse me of not doing my job until you give me the opportunity to do my job," the Dispatch reported.

POER is now advocating tactics similar to the campus-based Copwatch organization: The organization wants "citizens to arm themselves with cameras, video cameras and tape recorders to protect themselves when police officers engage in criminal activity." Moss sees this as an obviously "more proactive role" in monitoring officer conduct.

Moss asserts, "It is so easy for our members to align with the status quo. Our members must be willing to challenge unjust incidents, stand for unpopular causes, and have strength to fight the status quo." He says the main reason that POER has been so successful in its struggle against police misconduct within the police division is because "many honest Columbus police officers" are giving the POER information.

He readily concedes that the group's activities have taken a toll on his private life and causes him concern over his family's safety. He points out that his daughter, Shondrika L. Moss, was stopped and searched by the Columbus police at Columbus International Airport, an act he terms "a blatant form of racial profiling."

On August 16, the police division sent Moss its usual findings in four complaints he had pending against police with the Internal Affairs Bureau. Last September, he filed charges against Officer Joseph Plancon for allegedly assaulting him at a KKK rally; the next day he alleges that Officer Phillip S. Grounds "conducted a biased vehicle accident investigation" against him; he filed the same charge against Officer Donald Hoar three months later; and he also alleged that last April 18, Officer Roy B. Constable "used excessive force," illegally detained him, and pointed a firearm at his forehead. The Columbus Division of Police found all charges "unfounded."

To make matters worse, Moss insists that the Columbus police have been making duplicate copies of his records requests, thus inflating POER's copying bill. In an August 10 letter, the city claimed that POER owes $6,084.05 for a 1996 records request and is planning to refer the matter to the city attorney's office for collection.

09/07/2000

MEDIA WATCH

Journalists victims of the drug war

Drug policy reformers last week were talking about Newsweek's September 4 story on Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey's chronic habit of secretly taping interviews with reporters.

The fact that McCaffrey--whose Office of National Drug Control cut secret deals with major TV networks to slip anti-drug messages into prime time TV and secretly tracked visitors to drug-policy related web sites--would secretly tape interviews with journalists is no big shocker.

What is surprising is that then-New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal reportedly was one of those taped by McCaffrey in 1996. They were talking off-the-record about ways to attack millionaire philanthropist George Soros. Soros, whose wealth was used to foster drug reform think-tank the Lindesmith Center, is frequently beaten up in the press by die-hard drug warriors like Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse head and infrequent Washington Post columnist Joe Califano.

As a columnist, Rosenthal's certainly entitled to spew his own anti-drug opinions (Rosenthal, who was editor of the Times from 1977 to 1986 and is now a columnist for the New York Daily News, is a notorious drug war hawk). But strategy sessions with government sources? Gee, maybe those crazy drug law reformers at NORML and High Times are onto something when they say the mainstream press is conspiring with the government against pot-smokers.

When McCaffrey visited Columbus last March, he met with the Columbus Dispatch for an hour, though what they talked about never appeared in print. Incidentally, McCaffrey backed out of a scheduled interview with Columbus Alive after the paper submitted some proposed questions to him, as requested. We wanted to ask about contradictions in the country's drug policies. McCaffrey suddenly had to cancel the interview.

Arena secrets exposed!

A secret comparable to the final episode of Survivor?

That's what WBNS is saying about the yet-to-be-opened Nationwide Arena. With promises of suspense and intrigue rivaled only by Geraldo Rivera's 1985 exclusive look at Al Capone's tomb, Channel 10 has been running commercials all week boasting about its exclusive "first look" at the Columbus Blue Jackets' home on September 8. The arena officially opens the next night with a sold-out Tim McGraw and Faith Hill concert.

The station's team of crack reporters must have fought tooth and nail to get access to a place shrouded in such mystery. Or, more likely, they just got the keys from John F. Wolfe, whose Dispatch Printing Company owns Channel 10 and is a 10 percent minority partner in the yet-to-be-opened arena.

It must have been a tough decision for Wolfe, deciding which of his babies--the Dispatch or Channel 10--would get the exclusive scoop. (What, no Wolfe-owned WBNS 1460 AM radio? Oh yeah, they're broadcasting the hockey games.) In the Sunday, September 3, edition of the Dispatch, the paper ran a special, 16-page pull-out section on the arena. Can't help but wonder what nooks and crannies are left for Channel 10 to explore. Let's just hope they fare a little better than Geraldo.

But let's give credit where credit is due here. At least the Dispatch disclosed that it has a financial stake in the arena. Granted, the disclosure was a little hard to find--and believe us, Media Watch was looking. On page six of the 16-page fluff job, buried in the middle of a story about how much money the city is spending on the arena ($33.3 million), the Dispatch admitted that the city is spending money on its arena.

Maybe the small disclosure was the Dispatch's way of avoiding a Staples Center-style fiasco. A year ago, in a parable that's become legendary among journalists, the Los Angeles Times published a special Sunday magazine devoted to the Staples Center, the new L.A. arena in which the Times is an investor. (The Times' Staples Center magazine pull-out was 164 pages, a little heftier than the Dispatch's 16-pager.) The problem was, the Times agreed to share ad revenue from the Staples Center magazine with the Staples Center--without telling the Times writers working on the magazine or disclosing the financial interest to readers. It was a textbook breach of journalistic credibility: You don't give money (lots of it, it turns out) to the subjects of your stories. The Staples Center fiasco was so embarrassing to the Times, the esteemed Chandler family, who owned the paper for nearly a century, quickly sold the Times to the Chicago Tribune, and the Times publisher and CEO behind the Staples magazine were both shown the door.

But the Dispatch had no qualms about letting readers know who owns what, at least those readers who made it through the page-six story about sewers and road construction. Presumably, the Dispatch scribes writing for Sunday's arena pull-out already knew they were covering a company investment.

(In the interest of further disclosure, you should know that Columbus Alive publisher Sally Crane's family is a minority investor in the Blue Jackets, not that it's done us any good yet. Media Watch is still waiting for an invitation to the Pizzuti Club Lounge.)

We don't blame the Dispatch for the fawning coverage. The arena is a big deal--we're excited about it--and the daily paper in any city would be expected to provide a laudatory special section like Sunday's "A big-league building." We're just looking forward to the day--one month from today--when Columbus will become a big-league city and we can stop defensively calling everything "big league."

Revelation of the week

"Abusing trust key trait of con artists"

--Columbus Dispatch headline

September 5, page A1

FEATURED ARTICLE

09/14/2000

Meltdown

How did nuclear missile parts land in a Mansfield junkyard? The U.S. military doesn't deny the mix-up, but doesn't want to give Allen Hogan his day in court

by Bob Fitrakis and Jamie Pietras

Allen Hogan's 27-acre scrap yard, the Autojumble, and his adjacent house stand on Mansfield's Fifth Avenue as a radioactive testament to the Cold War. Just exactly how Hogan and his young daughter Erin became some of the last casualties of the nuclear arms race is a reminder that the U.S. military-industrial complex's fear of the former Soviet Union may still be responsible, to borrow a military term, for collateral damages.

On a cold, March day in 1994, Allen Hogan drove to a Columbus auction and bid on Lot 178 offered by the U.S. Defense Revitalization and Marketing Office (DRMO). In an apparent bargain, Hogan bought 2,180 pounds of scrap magnesium for $75, to resell.

"I looked at the math," he said. Hogan figured the magnesium was worth $400 to $500. "It looked like a no-brainer."

What the government failed to disclose at the sale, but now readily admits, is that Hogan unknowingly took possession of hot waste from a former Minuteman nuclear missile, made up of a radioactive magnesium-thorium alloy. Hogan had his ton of "scrap magnesium" trucked to his Mansfield salvage yard. For nearly three years, Allen worked and Erin played, and the little girl helped her dad sort through the scrap metal, surrounded by high levels of radiation.

"The stuff got drug around and kicked and stomped and spread and shoved around and stuck in various corners," Hogan said. He didn't have a clue the material might be contaminated.

Hogan recalls that he and Erin would gather trash on their property and burn it in a barrel during those three years. Government records indicate that in a later cleanup, a radiation-contaminated burn barrel was removed from the Autojumble. Eventually, the nuclear waste contaminated virtually the entire property.

Hogan's medical records indicate that in January and April of 1995, he was examined for nasal inflammation, tender sinuses and a nasal septum defect, all likely symptoms from breathing radioactive material. He couldn't go to Christmas dinners at the in-laws the year of his nasal problems. "I laid home on Christmas day because I couldn't breathe," he recalled.

In October 1996, amidst growing health problems, Hogan contracted with Northern Ohio Scrap Service of Cleveland to crush and remove various car bodies. The scrap service took the junk cars to the Luntz Corporation in Canton for shredding and recycling.

On November 22, 1996, Lake County Auto Recyclers of Perry, a subcontractor, returned four crushed cars to the Autojumble after the cars had set off a "radioactive antenna" at the Luntz Corporation. Hogan determined that what the four cars had in common was the scrap magnesium he had stored in their trunks. In a later affidavit, he said, "It occurred to me that there might be a connection."

Within days, Hogan contacted DRMO in hopes of confirming his suspicion. Ben Wilmouth soon called from the Radiation Safety Office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and set up a mid-December meeting. Wilmouth came out, photographed and surveyed the property, and told Hogan that it was probably "mag-thor" radioactive waste.

Hogan contends in a lawsuit filed last December in U.S. District Court in Columbus that Wilmouth assured him "that the government would take whatever steps necessary to take care of the situation, and that they would remove the mag-thor from my property." Naively, Hogan took the government at its word and assumed "that would be the end of the problem."

Several U.S. Air Force personnel descended on the Autojumble in January 1997. Their mission was to remove the mag-thor scrap. Hogan claims that they told him the mag-thor "was nothing to worry about." At the end of January, Wilmouth returned with still more personnel to haul out the four radioactive cars and a flatbed truck full of mag-thor. It appeared all was going well. In April 1997, Wilmouth returned again, to arrange the "big, final cleanup" that would solve the problem. Hogan says that Wilmouth and other government officials repeatedly reassured him that there was nothing to worry about and everything would be as good as new.

Hogan swears that he "told the officials that we had handled, sleep near, worked and played in these radioactive materials, and even burned pieces of it for years. They advised me there was no problem."

On June 10, 1997, the government installed a project office trailer on Hogan's property to coordinate the crew of up to 16 workers who toiled for three-and-a-half weeks on site. Air Force representatives promised complete removal of soil if necessary and issued a press release to that effect.

The Mansfield News Journal ran an article on the day the cleanup started under the headline "Radioactive material found: Air Force mistakenly sold scrap material, assisting with cleanup." The story quoted Larry Glidewell, an environmental public affairs specialist with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, assuring everyone that "most of the 87 pounds of metal was cleared away in January."

"[I]f any soil is shown to contain thorium, it will be removed," Glidewell told the News Journal.

The amount of metal Glidewell cited apparently referred to the thorium the government removed. Hogan repeatedly tried to find out how much of the total metal was removed--he bought one ton of "magnesium," not 87 pounds--but received no answers, he said. Glidewell declined to comment for this story, citing government policy on pending litigation, as did other military personnel contacted by Columbus Alive.

Air Force officials attempted to clean the property using bulldozers and other heavy equipment in June 1997, but Hogan says that "I continued to find pieces of the mag-thor alloy routinely." After the "big cleanup," Wilmouth came back and took away the additional radioactive material collected by Hogan.

Columbus Alive has viewed a videotape of Wilmouth and Hogan wandering around the Autojumble with Wilmouth's Geiger counter repeatedly registering "hot" for high radiation. Despite these readings, the U.S. Air Force informed Hogan on July 15, 1997, that the U.S. Air Force Office of the Command Surgeon had determined that potential adverse health effects due to the radioactive contamination was "infinitely small to insignificant."

The government paid a third-party contractor to perform a radiological survey of the site and collect soil samples in July 1997. The contractor concluded that no soil excavation was needed. A September 5 letter from the Air Force informed Hogan that both the third party contractor and the government now believed that future health risks to the Hogans were "negligible."

Later in 1997, Hogan bought an old ambulance and stored it for resale. Ironically, he found a booklet in the ambulance giving instructions for the handling of radioactive materials. The book indicated that burning thorium was hazardous to anyone within 1,000 feet.

"My daughter and I had burned pieces of mag-thor alloy as we cleaned parts of the yard. This was the first time I ever had an inkling that there were health risks associated with our exposure to this mag-thor," Hogan recalled. "You're not supposed to be smoking this, ingesting this, putting it on your food. Well, when you're a six-year-old child, where do you put your hands? That's my fear, this is my only child."

Government documents show that another 18 pounds of radioactive waste was removed from the site in October 1998. In February 1999, another 30 pounds of radioactive material was carted away.

Under the Federal Torts Claim Act, Hogan had to file an administrative claim with the Air Force before he could sue for damages. On January 28, 1999, he filed his initial administrative claim alleging permanent injury to his business, property and himself due to the radioactive contamination of his land. He listed himself as the "claimant" but discussed in detail his daughter Erin's exposure to the radioactive waste. Hogan filed a second administrative claim with the Air Force on April 9 alleging that the radioactive contamination of his property constituted an "on-going tort, a continuing nuisance."

The government's response in a June 21, 1999, letter shocked Hogan. Judith M. Regan, chief of the Air Force's Environmental Torts Branch, wrote Hogan that: "We regret that you were sold the magnesium-thorium alloy. However, you have failed to file a timely and substantiated claim. Therefore, we cannot make any payment to you."

Regan reasoned, "Clearly, you suspected the material you had was radioactive in October 1996 when the vehicles you tried to sell were returned to you. You were certainly aware of the radioactive material in December 1996 when an Air Force representative visited your salvage yard. Consequently, any claim you had as a result of the purchase of the magnesium-thorium alloy had to be filed prior to January 1999. However, your first claim was not filed until January 28, 1999, therefore the statute of limitations bars certain aspects of your claim."

Also, since Hogan had not officially listed Erin as a claimant, but merely discussed her, she was also barred from receiving money for her exposure to radiation. By Regan's reasoning, "If you burned the alloy prior to January 1997, then any claim for injuries is barred by the statute of limitations. If, on the other hand, you burned the alloy in or after January 1997 then your claim is barred by your own negligence, since you knew or should have known you were burning radioactive material. A reasonable person would restrain from burning such material as it might be harmful to do so. Additionally, we believe that any open burning of material you knew to be radioactive would have violated Ohio law."

Hogan is worried the government might actually come after him for violating state law against burning material he didn't know was radioactive. Frustrated with a situation that's escalated to a "slow-moving version of 60 Minutes," Hogan took a sample of his radioactive junk and left it in an envelope outside the office of a claims lawyer at Wright-Patterson. "I was returning lost property--Is that crime?" Hogan asked.

Apparently so, said Hogan. He's been banned from Wright-Patterson and said U.S. attorneys have been waving the incident "like a carrot" in front of his legal counsel.

Eight government attorneys submitted a motion to dismiss Hogan's claims on April 28, 2000. The United States of America, the official plaintiff in the suit, will be arguing its motion before U.S. District Judge James Graham in Columbus on September 25. The government will argue that Hogan's claim should be dismissed not because it is invalid, but because he should have filed it sooner. For example, since Hogan "remembered suffering from a deviated septum and rectal bleeding in 1994 or 1995," court documents note, he apparently should have surmised then that the government had accidentally contaminated him with radioactive material.

Hogan's attorney James McNamara calls the government's position "absurd." As McNamara sees it, "The government made a huge mistake. They admit they erroneously sold radioactive waste to my client, contaminated his property, assured him that everything would be OK and now they're saying that because he trusted their assurances, he's barred because of a statute of limitation claim."

The 48-year-old father said he's merely seeking retribution for the government's radioactive screw-up. "This is my only hope," Hogan said of the lawsuit. "I thought the Air Force was supposed to protect us from nuclear attacks."

"The bottom line is [the radioactive mag-thor] is not mine. It's theirs," Hogan continued. "They have failed to clean up. They have lied about the health issues. What else is there? I could run away and hide. I could walk away from this, but this is my life's work."

9/14/2000

Stone cold steel

AK Steel wages an old-fashioned class war against its workers

by Bob Fitrakis

It's been a hard year for the 620 locked-out members of the United Steelworkers of America Local 169--as hard as the steel they used to forge in Mansfield's AK Steel plant. The workers and thousands of their supporters rallied, marched and broke bread together in a "One-Year of Solidarity" rally in the downtown square last Saturday, September 9.

On September 1, 1999, AK (then Armco) Steel brought back the good old days of class warfare by locking out its workforce. It happened after the workers' contract expired on August 31 that year and the union members voted to continue working while bargaining for a new agreement.

But when the night shift showed up, the steelworkers were greeted by a newly installed chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and patrolled, literally, by an army of 200 jack-booted private security guards. As the workers tell it, within a matter of hours the century-old Bowman Steel Mill turned into a twin of the even older, heavily fortified federal penitentiary that Mansfield's famous for.

AK Steel is demanding that workers accept unlimited mandatory overtime, after 120 jobs were eliminated. Refusal to work the overtime would be cause for termination. Prior to the growth of the United Steelworkers union in the 1930s, workers routinely worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, with a mandatory 24-hour day once every two weeks when the day shift switched to night shift and vice versa. Many Mansfield workers contend they are once again being asked to choose between their jobs and their families, and they shouldn't be forced to work under threat of fire because the company threw 120 hard-working co-workers and neighbors into the street.

The steel company is also demanding the usual anti-labor provisions that have become typical in the new corporate economy: Destruction of long-standing seniority practices protected by the union contract; cuts in contributions to the workers' pension plan; and the right to contract out work to cheap non-union labor.

Neither Main Street in Mansfield nor Wall Street have responded to the reactionary tactics of the company. In the year since the lock-out started, AK Steel shareholders have lost more than $1.3 billion in value in their stock holdings. Alan H. McCoy, an AK spokesperson, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the company "needs a market-competitive contract and the ability to schedule workers to meet customer demand."

Local, state and federal politicians have overwhelmingly sided with the workers. On March 22, 10 Ohio Congressional representatives, a majority of the state's delegation, signed a letter to AK Steel's Chairman and CEO Richard Wardrop asking: "What provocation could possibly justify this heavy-handed response from AK Steel?" The letter said, in part--and Columbus residents are likely to have seen this quote on billboards here in the capital--that the conduct of AK Steel would seem to be an embarrassment to the state of Ohio. The representatives are urging AK Steel to open its heavily fortified gates and allow the workers to return to work and continue bargaining.

The presence of the private Darth Vader-clad security force stirs heated emotions in Mansfield. Workers on Saturday were quick to point out that a former guard told the Mansfield News Journal that he and his cohorts were trained to provoke the locked-out workers. Workers claim that the guards in full regalia have followed various union members and their families around town in an attempt to intimidate them. Speaker after speaker at Saturday's rally denounced AK's tactics as "economic terrorism."

The most amazing thing about the rally was the old-fashioned spirit of community solidarity it evoked. The attitudes of the workers and their supporters stand in stark contrast to the vicious anti-social market-driven thuggery of AK Steel. An honor system prevailed where you donated whatever you wanted in exchange for food and drinks. One of the locked-out workers was an extraordinary chili chef, and he cooked up a big vat of molten chili to share with supporters. Plenty of big names showed up to taste the chili and speak out against the lock-out: Bill Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO; Noreen Warnock of Ohio Citizen Action; Marcia Webb of the NAACP; Alice Chen of United Students Against Sweatshops; and my personal favorite, U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich.

How will it end in Johnny Appleseed's hometown? I'm betting that the seeds of solidarity sowed by a tight-knit community of workers, neighbors and friends will emerge triumphant over the cold black jack-boots of corporate power. Solidarity forever.

NEWS BRIEF

09/21/2000

Embarrassing lawsuit targets developer Andrew B. Wolfe

In a strange tangent to the corruption allegations against Fairfield County Sheriff Gary DeMastry, a strongly worded and potentially embarrassing lawsuit was filed last week against a high-profile Buckeye Lake developer and member of the powerful Wolfe family. The complaint involves allegations of possible criminal wrongdoing against Andrew B. Wolfe, the son of Edgar T. Wolfe Jr., the late publisher of the Columbus Dispatch who died in a plane crash in 1975.

Andrew Wolfe is a Buckeye Lake-area developer and the president, CEO and sole shareholder of LOBOCO, Inc., according to court records. Wolfe's property holdings include the upscale Heron Bay development at Buckeye Lake. Marty Finta, LOBOCO's former vice president and chief financial officer prior to his February 10 termination, is suing Wolfe for "an amount in excess of $10 million."

Finta's complaint alleges that he was wrongfully terminated after confronting Wolfe about a LOBOCO employee's allegations that "Wolfe had pressured him [the employee] to lie in his testimony as a favor to one of the potential targets of the [Fairfield County] grand jury proceeding."

"The employee stated he had been pressured to testify falsely about being a paid drug informant for the Fairfield County Sheriff's office," Finta's complaint states.

On February 10, Fairfield County Sheriff DeMastry was indicted on 323 charges of public corruption. State auditors claim that DeMastry and his employees misspent $349,500 between 1994 and 1998. A state audit released August 8 questioned eight checks totaling $11,700 written to DeMastry from two of the sheriff's office's funds. DeMastry insists that the money was for undercover drug buys and informants. State auditors claim there's very little documentation or verification to support the sheriff's claim.

Shortly after meeting with the LOBOCO employee who testified in the DeMastry investigation, Finta claims he met with Wolfe in his office and told the CEO that "a LOBOCO employee may have lied in the grand jury proceeding at Wolfe's direction." The complaint says that, "Wolfe threw his arms in the air and responded, `Fuck it. I had nothing to do with it.'"

After meeting again with the employee, who repeated his allegations, Finta advised the employee to seek legal counsel. He gave Wolfe the same advice at a February 9 meeting. Finta claims he had a duty to bring the issue to Wolfe's attention, and that Wolfe's response to his advice to consult a lawyer was to become "enraged" and yell, "Fuck it, I quit."

The next day at LOBOCO headquarters, according to the complaint, "Wolfe screamed, `Fucking everyone is fired.' Wolfe then came into the hallway and screamed again, `Everyone is fucking fired.'"

In the court document, Finta swears that Wolfe's behavior was not out of character since "Wolfe has a history in engaging in a pattern and practice of violence, profane and physically threatening outbursts towards the employees who work for him." The complaint states, "During Finta's employment, Wolfe also often would come to work or would be at work while under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. Wolfe often also exhibited wild mood swings, violent outbursts and emotional episodes."

Wolfe ordered all LOBOCO employees to leave corporate headquarters and "turn in their keys" on February 10, according to Finta. Eventually, all the LOBOCO employees were allowed to return to work, "except Finta."

The complaint argues that "Finta, as an officer of LOBOCO, had a fiduciary obligation and duties of loyalty and care under Ohio law to report to Wolfe that a LOBOCO employee may have provided false testimony in grand jury proceedings at the request of the company's president." It notes that Finta "also had an obligation under Ohio's perjury and crime reporting statutes to investigate whether the LOBOCO employee had in fact committed perjury and whether he had done so at the direction and request of Wolfe."

Finta asserts that at the time of his termination, Coastal and Custom Homes, a separate company Finta owned and one that worked with LOBOCO, "was projected to build approximately 50 homes for LOBOCO lot purchasers at Heron Bay." Additionally, Coastal and Custom Homes projected building "at least 29 condo units at Heron Bay, and 194 condo units at another Wolfe property development project in Fairfield County." The potential revenue from these deals amounted to more than $5 million.

By "arbitrarily and capriciously" severing the ties between Coastal and Custom Homes and LOBOCO "and publishing a letter that CCH [Coastal] is no longer affiliated with Heron Bay," the complaint says, "Wolfe has caused damages to CCH and loss of income to Finta in the amount in excess of $5 million."

Finta's complaint states, "Through an inherited trust fund, Wolfe has a personal net worth in the millions of dollars." In 1987, the Columbus Dispatch reported that an out-of-court settlement was reached in the division of Edgar T. Wolfe Jr.'s estate. Knowledgeable sources placed Andrew Wolfe's cut at around $30 million.

Columbus Alive's telephone calls seeking comment from Wolfe were not returned by press time.

9/21/2000

MEDIA WATCH

Freedom of speech vs. freedom to exploit?

Here's a moral dilemma: Say your six-year-old boy is taken away by children's services. And say he was taken away because, among other things, you allowed him to dress like a girl and planned to enroll him in school as a girl and legally change his name.

You allowed the boy to live as a girl because a licensed pediatrician diagnosed him with gender identity disorder. You thought his behavior as a female was in the child's best interests, and have gained the support of the transgendered community. Now you're in the middle of an ugly custody battle with children's services.

Do you want publicity, or do you want to keep the boy out of the spotlight?

These are the issues being raised in Franklin County Juvenile Courtrooms as Paul and Sherry Lipscomb fight to regain custody of their son. Rather than try to keep the child's plight out of the spotlight, the parents have enlisted the media as their ally.

When the couple was forced to turn the boy over to Franklin County Children's Services on August 23, they chose to do so at the offices of WCMH 4 TV. On later visits with the child, the parents were accompanied by a camera crew from CBS's 48 Hours, which is planning a segment on the case.

At a September 12 hearing in front of Judge Kay Lias, CBS attorneys grappled with children's services over whether cameras should be allowed in the courtroom. The county agency argued that it was in the young boy's best interest to keep him out of the spotlight. But after a little legal finagling, CBS won, and was able to record proceedings in Magistrate Lorenzo Sanchez's chambers.

After the hearing, children's services retained custody of the boy pending a November trial, but Sanchez said the parents could visit the boy as often as they'd like. Public Defender Rebecca Steele, who was appointed by the court to represent the child, asked that the media not be allowed on visits. Sanchez wouldn't go there. "We're not in Cuba just yet," he told the court, but later admitted he hoped that visits by the parents would be meaningful ones between the parents and child--not lawyers or camera crews. Children's services had the liberty to set their own restrictions, Sanchez said.

Before the hearing wrapped up, the Lipscombs asked if the court could promise they'd be allowed to take still photos of the child. Sanchez said they could, after the parents assured children's services they would be for sentimental value, not for lawyers or reporters.

The case has attracted the interest of Time magazine, German and British news crews as well as NBC. In fact, the national media has been running circles around local coverage of the case. The biggest scoop came from Time: Paul Lipscomb told the magazine that he has had a gender identity disorder since he was a child.

On Monday, September 18, media attorneys gathered in Lias' courtroom to contest children's services' request that further legal proceedings be closed to the public. Child psychologist Jolie Brams testified that media coverage could harm the child's mental state and development, the Columbus Dispatch reported on Tuesday.

Dispatch attorney Marion Little told Media Watch, "From the Columbus Dispatch view, we believe the potential for harm to the juvenile does not outweigh the benefit for public access." CBS attorneys were not present for the hearing, Little said. Lias was expected to rule on the issue on Wednesday.

The Lipscombs' attorneys, Mark Narens and Randi Barnabee, have removed themselves from the case, because the Lipscombs have expressed conflicting interests to both their attorneys and the media, Barnabee said. Barnabee had planned to file a federal suit against children's services on behalf of the family.

Governor's flak job still open

The search for a replacement for a lead spokesperson for Governor Bob Taft continues. Scott Milburn, who headed up the Republican governor's communications team, spent his last day at the governor's office September 8. He left to take a communications job with Ohio Senator George Voinovich. Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections spokesperson Joe Andrews is filling in as the governor's office looks to fill Milburn's shoes.

"Alive laments sensationalism"

Sensational crime coverage leads to an irrational fear of crime. This leads to tough-on-crime political candidates--stick with us here--which ultimately means more people end up in the slammer. Anyway, that's a big criticism of the media from those who like to decry saturation coverage of crimes like the Littleton tragedy or the O.J. Simpson case.

So when the Columbus Dispatch deems it necessary to run five stories--all on either page A1 or the Metro section front--on a murder-suicide in Ava, Media Watch couldn't help but get a little annoyed. Granted, a tragedy where a married couple and five kids wind up dead is going to be front-page news, even if it was almost 100 miles away.

But do we really need the newspaper to tell us "Deaths of Family Cast Pall at School" or "Relatives Left Numb By Seven Deaths"? How about "Mourners Lament Deaths of Neighbors"? These were three separate headlines from the paper's wall-to-wall coverage of the September 4 tragedy. Let's just hope the Ramseys never embark for the greener pastures of Ohio.

Get out the vote

Readers of the gay weekly Outlook received a surprise in the September 14 edition of the newspaper. Tucked into each paper was an Ohio voter registration form. The goal of the insert was to try to get as many gay or gay-friendly people registered to vote as possible.

According to Lisa Zellner, editor of Outlook, the paper went through the Ohio Secretary of State's office to obtain the forms; since the paper is now distributed throughout the state, not just in Columbus, Outlook didn't want to use Franklin County forms. A total of 12,000 forms were needed for that edition of the paper. Let's hope most of those are returned--the good guys could use the help in November.

Freudian slips

Looks like Columbus Alive's Jamie Pietras allowed a Freudian slip into his September 7 cover story on newly appointed Columbus City Councilmember Kevin Boyce. In the article, Pietras mistakenly referred to a book Boyce had recently read as All Politics is Evil. Anyone who's read Tip O'Neill's book knows the correct title is All Politics is Local. So what's been on your mind lately, Jamie?

And one more slip-up: On September 14, Alive theater critic Doug Hoehn raved about the work of Matt Slaybaugh, who directed the Central Park West one-act as part of Red Herring's Death Defying Acts. The problem is, Doug called Matt "Mark." While mistakes like this will happen, though not very often--sorry, Matt--the really embarrassing thing is that Matt's brother Stephen Slaybaugh is Alive's music columnist. You'd think we never talk to each other around here.

Drop us a line. You can e-mail your media news and observations to mediawatch@alivewired.com or fax (614) 221-2456. All correspondence will remain confidential, naturally.

9/28/2000

The new left

Ralph Nader's campaign is getting out the vote--for progressive activism

by Bob Fitrakis

One of the stated goals of Ralph Nader's candidacy for president is the resurrection of progressive activism. On Monday night, September 25, at Ohio State University's student union, 50 or so Nader supporters met under the banner of the Campus Greens, a great turnout for a brand-new student organization closely affiliated with the burgeoning Central Ohio Green Party. The student group's first meeting had seven people, the next had 30, now 50--and all but one signed up to work in the Nader campaign.

The best thing about the Campus Green Party is that it's not a party in the tired, status quo-ish way of the Campus Dems and Republicans. It's a movement inspired by last fall's heroic resistance to corporate globalization and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, and the massive demonstrations against the World Bank/International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., last spring.

The Campus Greens' literature shows the organization is not buying the argument that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush in Ohio. They quote from Nader's recent Rolling Stone interview where he rightly dismisses the suggestion as "a snare and a delusion." In Nader's analysis, "You've got military weapons proliferation, massive world hunger and starvation, global infectious diseases coming this way in drug-resistant form. You've got the majority of workers in this country making less money in real terms than they did in 1979, notwithstanding a booming economy. You've got 20 percent child poverty in this country, massive homelessness and inadequate housing. You've got $6.2 trillion in consumer debt, an epidemic of corporate crime, a labor movement that's weaker than it's ever been...[and] hundreds of billions of dollars going to corporate welfare every year, meaning that citizens are gouged not just as consumers but as taxpayers."

This is a powerful message, and may explain why 100 million eligible U.S. voters stay home on Election Day. As local Greens argue, a vote for Nader is a vote for democracy. It's a vote for change and it's a vote for activism and idealism rather than cynicism and apathy. Ten thousand people paid $7 apiece to see Nader speak in Portland, Oregon, last week and 12,000 did the same in Minneapolis. On October 27, Nader will be coming to the OSU campus. He should rock the joint.

Of course, much of this enthusiasm and grassroots activism goes unnoticed as the very serious corporate media types dutifully report how well the ne'er-do-well smirking frat-boy son of a former president is staying "on message." I like to think of it as "Simple-Simon Says." The media has long tried to convince us that the rhetorically afflicted Bush family are damn near geniuses when they string a noun and a verb together.

The mainstream media is also going out of its way to tell us the differences between Bush and Gore--despite the fact that there's no real difference on the burning issues of globalization, NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, the World Bank and the small group of global plutocrats who search the world for workers they can pay a buck a day. No wonder the Greens chanted at the Nader rally last Friday at the Statehouse, "Bush and Gore, what a bore!"

Nader is being excluded from the presidential debates on national television because he is not a "serious" candidate, when the truth is exactly the opposite. He poses a very serious challenge to the Siamese twins George W. and Al. The two major-party "C" students from the Ivy League we're told are the "serious" guys who need to debate. The magna cum laude graduate from Princeton with a Harvard Law degree, Nader, is excluded for not being serious despite polling four to seven percent in national polls.

While Bush is busy raising $100 million from wealthy donors, forcing Gore to shake down Buddhist monks fronting for Asian interests, the Campus Greens will be sending out "chalk brigades" to bring Nader's message to the community. They'll be canvassing door-to-door in the campus area and registering new voters amidst the largest pool of eligible non-voters in Columbus. They're also petitioning to have Nader included in the TV debates.

Currently, the Commission on Presidential Debates, a wholly owned subsidiary of the major-party duopoly, excludes any candidate who's not running 15 percent in the polls. Using this criteria, Jesse Ventura would have been barred from the debates that propelled him to victory as governor of Minnesota. But, of course, this is exactly what the major parties are afraid of, and exactly why they don't want to give Nader access to millions of voters on a debate podium.

Every other advanced democracy in the world has a mass democratic right party, a mass democratic center party and a mass democratic left party. We in the U.S. have the right--that's the Republicans with Bush--and a center--with the Democrats and Gore. What we don't have is a progressive left option. Why? Because anyone who directly challenges corporate domination of U.S. politics is excluded as not being "serious."

The Campus Greens are fed up with corporate-controlled politics, cheesy focus group soundbites and hollow promises. These new Greens are tired of the relentless unending commercialization of society and a culture where everything's for sale and nothing is sacred. They know that a vote for Nader is not a wasted vote, but one that affirms the very foundation of their morality, and the oneness of all people seeking justice.

NEWS BRIEF

10/05/2000

Gore burned WTI promise, Nader says

Green Party presidential nominee Ralph Nader visited the controversial WTI waste incinerator in East Liverpool last Wednesday morning, September 27, and called on Vice President Al Gore to honor a promise he made in the 1992 campaign to shut the facility down.

"Mr. Gore, after seven years of double talk and delays, the time has come to shut down this incinerator. Workers should be given two years full severance pay by their negligent employer, WTI," Nader said.

WTI burns 60,000 tons of hazardous material every year, making it one of the largest incinerators in the world. WTI is owned by Von Roll of Switzerland, a company best known for attempting to sell "Supergun" parts to Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

The waste incinerator sits on a floodplain less than 400 yards from an elementary school, releasing dioxins and metals such as mercury, arsenic, lead and chromium into the air. "Any incinerator that emits almost a pound of mercury into the air every day can't be good for our children's ability to learn," Nader noted.

WTI has been operating without a permit since 1995. Numerous allegations of irregularities emerged during Governor George Voinovich's administration regarding his brother Paul's role in securing the initial permits for the plant to operate. The continued operation of the incinerator enjoys bipartisan support from both Senator Voinovich, a Republican, and the Democratic Clinton-Gore administration. In 1992, the Columbus Free Press reported that one of the financiers of WTI was also one of Clinton's most important campaign contributors, the mysterious Arkansas billionaire Jackson T. Stephens.

Following the 1992 election, Gore initially called upon the General Accounting Office (GAO) to investigate WTI, claiming, "A thorough investigation is urgently needed [because] too many questions remain unanswered about the impact of the incinerator and the process in which it was approved."

But on January 8, 1993, amidst promises from out-going President George Bush's EPA administrator William Reilly to cooperate with Clinton and Gore on environmental issues, a permit for a trial burn at WTI was issued after a meeting between Reilly and top Gore aide Katie McGinty. At his East Liverpool appearance last week, Nader challenged Gore to disclose whether he or McGinty had asked the Bush EPA to postpone the approval of the test burn in 1993 as promised.

A September 1994 GAO report documents that Gore requested that the toxic emission standards be altered in order to allow the WTI incinerator to keep operating despite dangerously high levels of mercury and dioxin. The report reads, "In each case [where toxic emissions exceeded allowable levels], EPA responded to the trial burn results by changing the operating conditions under which the incinerator could continue to operate." Three former officials of the North Ohio Valley Air Authority, which was responsible for monitoring the air emission at WTI, have since been convicted on various corruption charges.

Nader charged that Gore's well-known promise to close WTI "is just the sort of phony populist rhetoric that Mr. Gore's tried to sell the American public in this election year... If Gore can't stand up for the people against this outrageously dangerous polluter, should anyone believe that he will ever fight for the people, and not the powerful?"

Later Wednesday afternoon in Youngstown, Nader blasted the corporate prison industry and President Bill Clinton and Governor George W. Bush for encouraging its growth. Youngstown is the home of a 1,700-inmate facility owned by the private Correction Corporations of America (CCA). The company currently has plans to build two more facilities in the area to accommodate an additional 5,500 prisoners. In the past, CCA has imported violent felons from the Washington, D.C., to fill its cells, which it refers to as "profit units."

Nader called the for-profit prison industry "one of the most ill-conceived ventures corporations have ever entered into." He challenged Vice President Gore and Governor Bush to return the more than $100,000 in "soft money" that private prisons have contributed to both the Democratic and the Republican National Committees.

"By treating inmates as profitable commodities, corporate prisons obscure a public policy that should be aimed at reducing the incarceration rate through treatment and rehabilitation," Nader said.

Earlier this year, news reports uncovered that then-Governor Voinovich's brother Paul Voinovich played a vital role in securing the tax abatement that made CCA's Youngstown facility possible along with a key veto by the governor to save a $900,000 abatement for the company.

Sunday's Columbus Dispatch poll of Ohio's likely voters showed Nader at two percent. Ohio Green Party members claim that this, in part, stems from the fact that the Dispatch failed to cover both the East Liverpool and Youngstown events and the poll fails to reflect newly registered voters on Ohio's college campuses.

10/05/2000

MEDIA WATCH

Why Channel 10's Shumway cashed out

Anyone who wondered why Chris Shumway really left Channel 10 in July might want to pick up a copy of this month's Free Press.

In a stinging column, the former WBNS meteorologist explains how he was forced to resign from the company for violating a clause in his contract that forbade employees from making "statements or remarks" about the station or its sponsors that "tend to discredit or reflect unfavorably" on them.

The station's management was angry that Shumway had exposed how editorial content of a certain "news" segment on the station wasn't directed by journalists working at the station, but rather by a local bank that also sponsored the segment.

The bank, Shumway said, provided a list of questions for news anchors to ask the "expert" bank official during the "Your Money" portion of the local news. Shumway pointed out that the reports often referred directly to products and services offered by the bank, and were always portrayed in a context most favorable to the banking industry.

When Shumway exposed the sham on his personal web site, he was shown the door for breach of contract.

The disgruntled newsman sums it up best: "If news anchors and reporters often admit privately that the news they're broadcasting is distorted for financial reasons, and if news outlets are willing to fire those who say it publicly, can citizens even remotely expect the corporate news media to be the fierce watchdogs of the public interest they claim they are?"

Journalism students learn a PR lesson

Students who read the September 22 Lantern were probably dismayed at the Ohio State University Board of Regents' recommendation to lift the state-sanctioned six-percent annual cap on tuition increases. The school hoped to raise tuition 20 to 25 percent over a two-year period, according to a Lantern editorial railing against the proposal.

The article pointed out that the regents agreed to ask the state legislature for the tuition cap waiver at the board's meeting the day before.

But as the paper's student staff realized when they read the September 22 Columbus Dispatch, their editorial was based on a faulty presumption. As it turned out, the proposal never even came up at the board's meeting.

Was sloppy reporting to blame? Not necessarily.

As the Lantern explained in an article and editorial the following Monday, University Communications was the source of the bad information. The school's PR department sent out a press release detailing OSU's plan to raise tuition on Wednesday. They followed up with a Thursday e-mail, quoting President Brit Kirwan's "praise" for the recommendation. Of course the recommendation hadn't yet happened--nor did it. Apparently there was some miscommunication between the university PR staff and the regents.

An OSU spokesperson told the Lantern, "This type of thing happens all the time with press releases."

That wasn't enough to keep the student paper from lashing out against the PR professionals in their Monday editorial. "It's not that we're trying to blame anyone for trying to mislead us," the editorial stated. "We're simply concerned when our administration fails to follow the basic lessons we're taught in our first days of an introductory media class."

Dispatch endorsement flip-flop

The Dispatch has spoken. For Judges of the Common Pleas Court, they've endorsed white guy, white guy and white guy over white woman, white woman and black woman. No inconsistency here, except perhaps that problem with Carole Squire. In the Domestic Relations Division race between Squire and Harland H. Hale, the Dispatch endorsed Hale, who's quite literally a good ol' boy fond of telling that joke about the Hillary Clinton chicken special (you know, the one that gives you "two fat thighs and a dozen left wings").

But wait--didn't the Dispatch endorse Squire in 1994? Why the change of heart?

In 1994, the Dispatch was upset with Squire's opponent, Republican incumbent Judge Kay Lias. Both Susan Brown and Squire got the nod from the daily monopoly then because they were "the best hope to eliminate some inconsistencies that exist in the court."

OK, we'll bite--what inconsistencies?

Bob Ruth provided the answer in an October 25, 1994, article. In a major investigative revelation, Ruth revealed that Judge Ronald L. Solove and Judge Kay Lias "have been the only juvenile court jurists to deny requests to try juveniles as adults when the cases involve homicides, records show."

No doubt Hale will charge the young-uns as adults and maybe put a few of those femi-Nazis on trial for something too.

So who pays for campaign stops?

When the Dispatch tackled the issue of local authorities paying to protect visiting presidential candidates, it left readers with more questions than answers. It's another example of how the words omitted from an article are as important as the words that comprise it.

On October 2, the Dispatch reported that the Columbus police and fire departments have anted up more than $146,000 so far to protect candidates, with a few campaign visits remaining before November 7.

After detailing the costs associated with visits by President Clinton and the major party candidates, the article goes on to state that, according to Barb Seckler, assistant safety director for Columbus, city officials have not discussed billing the political parties for the visits. Some law enforcement agencies, we are told, try to recoup their costs.

Since the headline screamed "Taxpayers foot bill for candidates' visits," the reader may have expected an analysis of exactly how much of these costs are recovered and how much are incurred by taxpayers. But the supposed crux of the article, according to its attention-grabbing headline, is barely touched. How successful are agencies that attempt to recoup their costs? What percentage of the bill do taxpayer's actually foot? The answer could be 100, or it could be zero. The story gives no indication.

The hapless reader is also never told which agencies try to recoup their costs, which do not, and why any agency is permitted to spend taxpayer money when a viable alternative exits. The fact that Columbus apparently has no policy governing the recovery of such costs is exposed but not examined, leaving all of these questions unanswered.

An analysis of Cincinnati's billing practices is equally vague. The Dispatch reports that Hamilton County Sheriff Simon Leis billed the Bush campaign for one visit and received full payment. But the story fails to mention Leis' overall success in receiving payment for providing security to the candidates. If the Hamilton County sheriff generally collects on such bills, why doesn't Columbus do the same?

We are told that, in pointed contrast to the Bush campaign paying its bill in full, the Democratic National Committee never paid for Clinton's fundraising visit to Cincinnati. The Dispatch, however, does not report the most important fact: Local law enforcement agencies are never reimbursed for presidential visits, a fact recognized by Hamilton County Prosecutor Mike Allen when he defied Leis and refused to file a suit to collect payment from Clinton.

News to them

Let's hope for John Ruch's sake that his recent move to Boston hasn't pushed him off The Other Paper's payroll. The departed film and arts writer is still the paper's only font of good story ideas, hence their timely coverage of the city's cinema closings last week.

Late last Tuesday, September 26, Studio 35 proprietor John Conti sent to his weekly e-mail list information about the closing of General Cinemas Northland 8 and AMC Westerville 6. A subscriber to the list since before the move, Ruch received the e-mail in Boston and tipped off TOP staffers, according to Conti. When writer Rob Harvila called the theater owner for a comment, he credited Ruch as the story's long-distance source.

10/12/2000

The white doughnut

Numbers don't lie: Race is a problem at Columbus schools

by Bob Fitrakis

The best history text I've read recently is the amended complaint charging racial discrimination against the Columbus Public Schools, titled Moss, et al, v. Columbus Board of Education, et al. Before dismissing the allegations raised by long-time Columbus School Board member Bill Moss, representing himself, and attorney Ambrose Moses III, representing more than two dozen plaintiffs, the tax assessment numbers need to be crunched to see if there's a factual basis for the charges.

Moss has both the weight of historical evidence on his side and statistics so persuasive not even a Klan member could distort them. Recall that in September 1999, after an extensive curriculum audit, Phi Delta Kappa informed the Columbus board that, "There is a giant monster in this district that is being ignored and enabled, and it is `race.'" Moss and his merry band of warriors, mostly parents of Columbus Public School children, with Moses on their side--always a good sign--are determined to slay the monster in its lair.

Who fed and enabled the white monster is outlined accurately in Moss' complaint: "Through 1955, the boundaries of the city of Columbus and the Columbus City School District were the same and covered 55 square miles. That year the Ohio General Assembly changed Ohio law to provide that school territory transfers no longer automatically followed land annexation agreements." So, in the aftermath of the historic Brown v. the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, case striking down educational apartheid in the U.S., Ohio legislatures were no longer willing to force the annexation of overwhelmingly white, previously rural districts into urban districts with significant black student populations.

"The purpose and effect of the State of Ohio's statutory changes in 1955 was to, at least in part, circumvent the letter and intent of the United States' Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown... by establishing a statutory and administrative scheme that appeared racially neutral on its face but which had the expected and/or intended effect of allowing cities, townships, boards of education, and other political subdivisions to facilitate continued racism and racial discrimination," the complaint reads.

Since the 1955 law, the Columbus school district added 55 additional square miles of city territory, doubling in size, while suburban school districts posted a much greater gain by acquiring 77 square miles of city territory. Prior to the Brown decision, kids who lived in Columbus went to Columbus schools. Now, more than 40 percent of Columbus students go to suburban schools, and last time I looked, 92 percent of those "commuters" were white. The Columbus school district is approximately 60 percent black. In 1986, the Columbus board entered into the Initial 1986 Land Transfer Agreement, otherwise known as the absurdly misnamed "Win/Win Agreement." This haphazard system promoting racial and economic apartheid became Ohio Revised Code in Senate Bill 298 that same year.

Readily available county auditor tax assessment documents reveal the problem of the big white doughnut with the dark hole in the middle. All of the dough is on the outskirts of the city and the surrounding suburbs.

Going back to 1984, just prior to the first Win/Win Agreement, we find that the Columbus Public Schools had a nearly $4.1 billion total tax base for levies. The suburban schools with Columbus city territory had a little less than $1.1 billion. Columbus Public Schools had almost 80 percent of the city's tax base in its district.

Over the last 15 years, the suburban schools have added some $3.4 billion in city property to their tax base, leaving the Columbus school district with less than 64 percent of Columbus' tax base in its area. The long-term trends suggest that the mostly minority district with disproportionately lower-income students will only grow poorer and add more minorities, in comparison to the suburban districts who are adding the city's most affluent upscale neighborhoods.

Contrast the Columbus Public Schools' average annual rate of growth of its tax base over the last 15 years, at 4.6 percent, to the suburban districts in the Win/Win Agreement and you get a disturbing trend: Upper Arlington, 16.3 percent growth; Canal Winchester, 45.4 percent; Dublin, 12.4 percent; Hilliard, 12.5 percent; and Olentangy, 47.7 percent.

The Moss complaint charges the obvious, that "In 1986, the State of Ohio knew or should have known that given the history of racism and discrimination in the State of Ohio, County of Franklin, City of Columbus, and the Columbus City School District, the terms of the `Win/Win Agreement' would likely promote and facilitate `White Flight' from the Columbus City School District."

Despite the Columbus Dispatch editorial board's best efforts to paint Moss as crazy in last year's school board election, the reality of racism weighs heavily in his favor on the scales of justice, as do the demographics that define race and class apartheid in Columbus education.

10/19/2000

NEWS BRIEF?

Moon over Korea

A new report links a controversial cult leader to George W. Bush's family

by Bob Fitrakis

A controversial religious cult leader and conservative publisher may have directly violated the U.S. trade embargo aimed at containing North Korea's military build up, an independent news website reported last week. The disclosure of U.S. intelligence documents could prove embarrassing to Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush.

Consortiumnews.com published U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents disclosing that Unification Church leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon's business empire funneled millions of dollars in secret payments to North Korean Communist leaders during the early 1990s. At the time, North Korea was in desperate need of hard currency to advance its nuclear weapons program.

The DIA documents reveal that Moon surreptitiously traveled to North Korea "between 30NOV91 and 07DEC91" and "made donations to KN [North Korea] of 450 billion yen [$3.5 billion] in 1991 and $3 million in 1993." The $3 million, according to the documents, was a birthday present to the country's Communist dictator Kim Jong II.

Moon, a native South Korean, is a resident alien of the U.S. and subject to U.S. law.

"In January '94, a Japanese trading company `Touen Shoji' in Suginami-Ku, Tokyo, purchased 12 F- and G-class submarines from the Russian Pacific Fleet headquarters. These submarines were then sold to a KN trading company. Although this transaction garnered a great deal of coverage in the Japanese press, it was not disclosed at the time that Touen Shoji is an affiliate of the Unification Church," a DIA document reads.

The Bush family, particularly former President George Bush, has had long-standing political and financial ties to Reverend Moon, the self-proclaimed second coming of Christ.

In a Consortiumnews.com four-part series, one of the United States' foremost investigative reporters, Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, outlines the connections between the Bush family and Moon. After he left office in January 1993, the former president received hefty payments from Moon, reported in the seven-figure range, for speeches and other personal services. Parry reports a former "well-placed" Unification Church leader as saying that "$10 million" was earmarked for former President Bush.

The Bush-Moon connection caused considerable controversy in September 1995 when Bush, the former CIA director and president, announced he would be spending nearly a week in Japan on behalf of the Women's Federation for World Peace, an organization founded and led by Moon's wife. In November 1996, Bush emerged as the principal speaker at the opening of a Spanish-language Moon weekly newspaper, Tiempos del Mundo, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

During the 2000 presidential election, the Moon-owned Washington Times has championed the Republican candidacy of George W. Bush and mounted harsh attacks against Democratic candidate Al Gore. On December 7, 1999, the Washington Times accused Gore of being "delusional" and called the vice president "a politician who not only manufactures gross, obvious lies about himself and his achievements but appears to actually believe these confabulations."

Gore's supposed "delusions" have emerged as a key, and successful, attack theme, taking on a life of their own. Many voters now believe that Gore claimed to have "invented" the Internet. What Gore actually said was, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Two actual Internet "inventors," Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, have vigorously defended Gore as the key politician in Washington who took the "initiative" to support the Internet in its infancy.

In 1988, when Republican presidential nominee George Bush was trailing significantly in the polls, the Washington Times printed an unconfirmed rumor that Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis had undergone psychiatric treatment.

Moon was convicted of income tax evasion in 1982 and spent more than a year in jail. That same year, he founded the Washington Times. Moon also owns the World and I journal, Insight magazine and earlier this year he purchased the UPI wire service. When the Washington Times appointed Wesley Pruden editor-in-chief in 1991, President Bush invited the new editor to a private White House lunch "just to tell you how valuable the Times has become in Washington, where we read it every day," the Washington Times reported.

The Times proved to be one of President Bush's staunchest defenders, launching several attacks against Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh during his investigation of Bush and high-ranking officials in his administration. During the '92 campaign, the Washington Times raised questions about Clinton's alleged ties to Communism, even going as far to suggest that the Rhodes scholar may have been recruited by the KGB during a college trip to Moscow.

The Times is the paper most responsible for breaking news on the so-called Whitewater scandal and the Lewinsky affair.

In the 1970s, Moon earned notoriety during the Koreagate scandal when female followers of the Unification Church were accused of entertaining and keeping confidential files on various U.S. Congressmen, whom they reportedly horizontally "lobbied" at the Washington Hilton hotel. The U.S. Senate investigated Moon's "programmatic bribery of U.S. officials, journalists and others as part of an operation by the Korean CIA to influence the course of U.S. foreign policy."

Ironically, Moon's newspaper has repeatedly attacked the Clinton-Gore administration for being soft on North Korea. As Parry puts it: "Moon helped deliver the means for the Communist state to advance exactly the strategic threat that Moon's newspaper now says will require billions of U.S. tax dollars to thwart."

10/19/2000

MEDIA WATCH

A Columbus radio revolution?

In most big cities, the best place to hear really alternative music is the local college radio station. With decidedly non-commercial formats and mind-bogglingly eclectic playlists, they spin music you'll never hear on commercial stations. Even for listeners with mainstream tastes, college radio is a good place to hear what's next. Bands like R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers and Smashing Pumpkins, just to name a few, were "discovered" by college radio years before their commercial success.

But not in Columbus. Ohio State University is the biggest college in the country without a student radio station, leaving local listeners with an awful lot of AC/DC and Blink 182 but not much Mos Def or Legendary Pink Dots.

That could change within a month if the Underground, the five-year-old OSU station that's not heard off-campus, finally nabs the broadcast frequency it's long been hoping for.

The Federal Communications Commission will accept bids from Ohio applicants for a new class of low-power FM licenses in November. If the Underground can claim the rights to the available signal at 94.1 FM, the student station could begin broadcasting as soon as 30 days later.

"We're pretty much ready to go," said Underground Music Director Mike Finch.

The low-power broadcast signal would allow the Underground--the only radio station in Columbus that plays a steady dose of independent and local rock, hip-hop, punk, electronica and everything in-between--to be heard virtually anywhere within the outerbelt.

The student station currently broadcasts 24 hours a day through a campus cable system and over the Internet, in addition to the midnight to 2 a.m. nightly broadcasts it pre-records for WOSU-AM. Finch said the station plans to erect an antenna on the campus bio-sciences building.

Finch has heard rumors of other groups interested in the frequency, but nothing will be made public until the window opens in November. In the first two rounds of applications this year, the FCC received bids from more than 1,200 non-profit, community and education groups, vying for low-power signals in 22 states. If there are multiple applicants for the local signal, the FCC will decide who gets the license based on criteria like content and ability to broadcast.

Finch thinks the Underground's track record gives the station a pretty solid edge. The station currently has about 100 volunteer staffers, in addition to a handful of paid student managers.

Ballot watchers

The United States is quick to point out flaws in democratic elections in places like Yugoslavia and Peru. But what would happen if international observers were allowed to take a look at the way the U.S. handles its own electoral process? Mother Jones writer Garry Leech finds "little doubt" they'd deem the process undemocratic.

"One U.S. criticism of the recent Peruvian election was the ruling party's denial of media access to opposition parties. Meanwhile, however, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader and the Reform Party's Pat Buchanan have been barred from the media event that has proven to be the single most effective way to reach American voters: the debates," Leech writes in an article posted on Mother Jones' website this week.

Leech also points out that 14 states prohibit convicted felons from voting. As a result, 13 percent of the male black population has lost voting rights.

Indeed, the U.S. just might benefit from a little watchdogging from "international observers." Maybe then the mainstream media would pay attention to the real drama surrounding this year's election.

Judicial silence

An article-cum-editorial decrying the vow of silence taken by Ohio's Supreme Court justices filled the cover of The Other Paper on October 5. There, beside pictures of Justice Alice Resnick and Chief Justice Thomas Moyer with black tape over their mouths, reporter Dan Williamson did a fine job of examining the code of conduct that prohibits Ohio judges from engaging in politics.

Briefly, because the printing of such rules almost guarantees page-turning, judges are not allowed to publicly discuss their political views or to campaign for politicians or for other judges.

The article centered around Resnick and Moyer, both of whom are accused of violating these rules in recent months. The Columbus Dispatch has slammed Resnick on several occasions, including throwing their support to Terrence O'Donnell, her challenger in next month's election, for appearing with William Phillis at a school opening in Vinton County. The appearance, says the Dispatch, creates an aura of partiality, since Phillis led the coalition of school districts that won a controversial school funding decision from the high court earlier this year. Moyer sinned by conveying his support for O'Donnell at a Republican Party function.

In addition to laying the judicial code out in an interesting manner, not an easy task, Williamson includes quotes from heavy hitters on both sides of the issue--those who believe in the judicial code as written and those who wish to abolish it and let judges act as politicians.

It's Williamson's own ranting for this latter point of view that transforms his otherwise insightful article into a not-so-insightful editorial. The piece is littered with jeering, antagonistic phrases pointed directly at those who believe in judicial impartiality--"Oh come onêwhat's wrong with the Republican chief justice stating the obvious" and "OK, but let's be realisticêHuman beings come equipped with opinions."

Williamson, however, never discusses the dangers of allowing judges to campaign like politicians. Judges certainly have opinions, political and otherwise, but those opinions are not supposed to weigh in when they make decisions. The sole task of any judge is to take the law and apply it to the situation at hand. Period. The judge's personal and political opinions are, theoretically, irrelevant.

This is not to say that all judges shed their political beliefs as they put on black robes. Several years ago, a pro-life judge even prohibited a female inmate from having an abortion. But encouraging judges to sell themselves to voters based on their political ideologies will only encourage more such politicized judgments. The judicial code attempts to prevent judges from acting like political animals outside the courtroom so that such behavior will not bleed into the courtroom.

While Williamson briefly presented the idea of impartiality in his article, he portrayed it only as a vague and irrelevant concept, not a real-world issue with real-world implications. Unlike a judge and much like a politician, Williamson presented only those arguments that strengthened his own viewpoint, and to hell with the rest.

10/26/2000

Agit-prop

The truth behind the Dispatch's Bush endorsement

by Bob Fitrakis

As a supporter of Ralph Nader for president, longing for the five percent solution (if Nader gets five percent of the vote nationally, the Green Party gets millions in matching funds in the 2004 election), I couldn't help but marvel at the Soviet-style propaganda of the Columbus Dispatch endorsement of George W. Bush.

The Dispatch is fond of referring to Democrat Al Gore's supposed "embellishment and exaggeration," but the paper's delusional endorsement of Bush suffers from this same affliction.

We're told that "Bush is better-equipped to smooth over the bitter partisanship and frequent gridlock that characterized the eight years of the Clinton administration." What the Big D means is that when rabid right-wingers like Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott shut down the government in order to blackmail the president into cutting Social Security or Medicare, Bush will go along. Thus, no gridlock.

The most obvious Dr. Dispatch and Mr. Hyde portion of the endorsement occurs in the fifth and sixth paragraphs, when the Dispatch urges a vote for Bush because, "With the economy booming and government awash in cash, now is the time to act." In the next sentence we're told we should vote against Gore because he "cannot change this unproductive status quo."

Logically, the Dispatch is probably right. Bush will end the booming economy, much like his father who presided over the 1991-92 recession, the worst since the Great Depression. Instead of leaving the country "awash in cash," Daddy Bush left it with a record $330 billion fiscal deficit.

Its fangs dripping with venom, the Dispatch next tells us that Gore's "natural bent is to attack those who disagree with him." Gee, the Dispatch would never do that. Ask Bill Moss or Palmer McNeal. At least the Daily Monopoly is bipartisan.

Gore's election would mean "another four years of confrontation, demagoguery and impasse," and we'd miss out on the "golden moment of peace, [and] prosperity." Admittedly, there are a few people nostalgic for the good old days of the last Bush presidency, which brought us the Gulf War, recession and record debt. And I suppose it's not demagoguery when you show up in South Carolina and tell a roaring crowd of Confederate flag-waving crackers that it's their "state right" to wave the flag that stood for the destruction of the United States of America, as Bush did. It sure seems like Bush pandered to people's worst instincts when he showed up at Bob Jones University, which was known for its born-again apartheid, racism and anti-Catholic bigotry.

Bush, we're told, "favors across-the-board tax cuts that leave people free to keep and spend more of their own money as they wish." Particularly the multi-millionaire Bush and Wolfe families, who combined will get more tax relief under George W.'s plan than the entire inner-city of Columbus.

The Dispatch chides Gore for seeing "Americans [as]...the helpless victims of powerful political and economic interests," without a simple acknowledgment that the Wolfe family's Dispatch Publishing Company is precisely one of those politically and economically powerful interests that dominates the lives of citizens in central Ohio. Did I mention they love George W. Bush?

"Gore believes only the federal government can protect citizens from these shadowy forces and from themselves," the paper pontificates. I'm not worried about myself, but I am worried about the Ohio EPA's inability to stop mega-farm and mega-industrial polluters in the Buckeye State. Whatever the shortcomings of the federal government, it's Dispatch-endorsed state and local Republican politicians who allowed Anton Pohlmann to turn Licking County into a large chicken manure lagoon.

Gore is attacked for his educational policies as the Dispatch insists that "the nuts and bolts of education should be controlled by parents, school districts and state officials." Of course, the paper endorsed George Voinovich for governor twice and U.S. senator as he presided over a state school system that was declared "unconstitutional" by a Republican-dominated Supreme Court, due to the inequalities of state school funding and its lack of thoroughness and effectiveness in educating Ohio schoolchildren.

The weirdest portion of the editorial has to be the discussion of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Dispatch claims that "Bush's appointments would be likely to maintain or strengthen the five-four majority that has gone some way towards adjusting the power between the states and the federal government." I guess that's a clever way to say Bush-appointed justices would be pro-corporation, anti-choice, opposed to affirmative action and similar to the low-caliber choice his father made in Clarence Thomas.

It's also a ringing endorsement of state's rights. Texas workers under the Bush administration employed in agriculture or domestic service are excluded from the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour and instead receive the Texas state minimum wage of $3.35 an hour. Governor Bush opposes a national minimum wage and believes that states ought to be able to opt out, according to the Dallas Morning News.

After reading the delusional Dispatch fawnings over George W., the best way to put it in perspective is to read Dispatch political editor Joe Hallett's thoughtful analysis titled "Either candidate is a good bet" on the next page: "Prosperity breeds contentedness breeds apathy breeds mediocrity. Hence, our next president will be Bush, the vacuous frat boy boosted by family name and money, or Gore, the beltway bully inbred with Washington's know-it-all demeanor." Amen.

ELECTION NEWS

11/02/2000

Barbarians at the gate

The most important race in Ohio this year is the re-election campaign of Justice Alice Robie Resnick. Corporate vampires smell blood and want to suck the last drop of fairness and decency out of Ohio's Supreme Court politics.

The Ohio Chamber of Commerce front group "Citizens for a Strong Ohio" (CSO) is leading the assault on Resnick with a series of attack ads under the guise of "educational information." The CSO ad features the traditional blindfolded Lady Justice who's peeking at a pile of money on her scales, delivered by the trial lawyers, and asks, "Is justice for sale in Ohio?"

The ads are so vicious and mean-spirited that even Republican Governor Bob Taft, who admits to raising money for them, has called the ads into question. Last Thursday, another chamber affiliate, the Institute for Legal Reform, weighed in with another 30-second spot depicting a black-robed Resnick switching her vote after someone dumps bags of money on her desk.

Resnick is being targeted by the wealthiest corporations and their spokespeople at the chamber primarily because she opposes the absurdly named "tort reform" movement. The goal of these so-called "tort reformers" is reactionary: They want to go back to the good old days when it was virtually impossible to sue a corporation after the corporation killed, harmed or maimed you. It's easy to see why, say, a company like Firestone Tires might want to bankroll such "reform."

Resnick authored the opinion in the 4-3 Ohio Supreme Court decision that overturned the 1996 Republican tort reform legislation, which limited Ohioans' ability to collect damages from businesses in civil lawsuits. She also wrote the DeRolph decision, another 4-3 vote, that declared the Ohio school funding system unconstitutional because of its heavy reliance on property tax.

An emboldened movement of plutocrats wants Resnick's head on a pike as a reminder to present and future Supreme Court candidates and justices as to who really rules in the Buckeye domain. Earlier this month in Cleveland, another corporate "astroturf" organization, Ohio Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, began airing radio ads depicting the Ohio court system as a feeding trough for pigs. As the Cleveland Scene put it, the message is simple: "Them crooked lawyers are gouging businesses, consumers, and taxpayers. Enough is enough." The American Tort Reform Association--a coalition of more than 300 well-heeled corporate and trade associations--have designed campaigns in 27 states to make corporations safe from lawsuits.

The era of tort reform was initiated in part by a $5.5 million contribution from Big Tobacco in 1995, according to Center for Justice and Democracy. Now they're in Ohio, bashing at the doors of the Supreme Court. All they want is the head of Resnick and the citizens will be subjugated.

ELECTION NEWS

11/02/2000

Nothing to judge

When Franklin County voters hit the ballots on Tuesday, they may wonder why all but one of the seven common pleas court judges--those are the ones who try felonies--are running unopposed. Why aren't voters given a choice when it comes to the most powerful local judicial positions?

The best answer is that virtually all the attorneys in the county, and they'll admit this "off the record," are scared to death of the elected judges. Words like "retaliation" come quickly to the lips of intimidated attorneys who wouldn't dare run a campaign against a sitting judge. Also, the most powerful families in this town seem to love the way the courts are presently being run and justice is being dispensed. As the adage goes, we've got one of the best justice systems that money can buy, and they don't want it changed.

Usually if a candidate musters the courage to run against a sitting judge, they need to be politically protected. Hence, when Democrat Lee Fisher ran the Ohio Attorney General's office, he could usually round up some staffers or supporters to run for judge.

Many local Democrats complain privately and bitterly that Columbus City Attorney Janet Jackson is not doing her duty by encouraging attorneys on her staff to run for judge. This is not a problem faced by the Republicans, since County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien does not prohibit his attorneys, nor should he, from seeking judgeships. So, Franklin County voters won't be burdened by Democratic choice for common pleas courts judges, and we'll all have a half-dozen fewer decisions to make in the voting booths.

11/02/2000

MEDIA WATCH

Electric lies

No one is shocked when politicians are caught dancing around the truth, shaping and molding their stories or even leaving out significant facts in order to shine a brighter light on themselves. "Lying politician" is an oxymoron in America, a part of our natural culture, a favorite punch line for our jokes.

Our only line of defense against such lies is the media. From Watergate to the Iran-Contra fiasco to Monica Lewinsky and George W.'s frat-boy indiscretions, curious and cynical reporters have reveled in exposing politicians' lies to the public.

But the Columbus Dispatch has repeatedly failed to expose the half-truths told by Ohio's legislators with regard to electric deregulation. In article after article, numerous Dispatch reporters have happily repeated Senator Bruce Johnson's claim that Ohio households will save five percent on their electric bills when the state's electric utility industry is deregulated this January.

In an October 25 article on the front of the Business section, Dispatch Statehouse reporter Alan Johnson writes, "Ohioans will be able to choose their electricity provider, saving at least five percent on their monthly bill, for the first time." To further emphasize these wonderful savings, a bar graph titled "Electricity Savings" appears just to the left of the article, with little dollar signs symbolizing the money that the customers of each of Ohio's electric companies can expect to save.

In truth, electric bills will not drop one penny for most residential electric consumers in Ohio and will probably increase for many.

The claim of a five-percent savings is based on a provision put into Senator Johnson's legislation specifically for that purpose, to allow lawmakers to claim that this business-friendly bill will save consumers money. The provision guarantees that one of the many components of the electric bills we receive, the electric generation component, will decrease when deregulation begins, giving consumers a five-percent savings on that one item.

Contrary to Alan Johnson's superficial analysis of the law, this five-percent savings will not be seen on the most important line of the bill--the bottom line. Since the legislation does not similarly curtail the other components of our electric bills, this five-percent reduction on one item will, in all likelihood, be offset by increases in other items.

Which leads to several questions. Does a five-percent savings on one part of a bill really matter if another part of that same bill can eat the savings up? No, but what can you expect from a politician?

More important, shouldn't a seasoned political reporter critically evaluate legislation instead of serving as a legislator's public relations arm? Undoubtedly, yes.

Furthermore, the "guaranteed" reduction that both Senator Johnson and reporter Johnson highlight with such glee may be waved by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio after two-and-a-half years if it discourages new electric companies from entering the market.

If reporter Alan Johnson had delved into the legislation a little, he would have noticed that it does little for consumers. The deregulated portion of our electric bills will be capped at pre-deregulation levels for five years. But electric bills will contain still-regulated items that could increase, resulting in consumers paying more for electricity than before deregulation, even during the five-year transition period.

Secondly, even the overall cap on deregulated components of electric bills could disappear. If tax changes, designed to compensate for the loss of revenue to schools due to electric deregulation, adversely affect electric utilities, a surcharge could be added to consumers' bills "to avoid placing the financial responsibility for the difference upon the electric utility or its shareholders."

And one of the other items you'll be seeing on your electric bill is a new "transition charge" to recover bad investments made by electric companies in now-defunct nuclear reactors. Consumers may be hit with this fee for 10 years. Of course, when all the caps are removed in five years, customers could end up paying much more because of this additional transition charge.

With several reporters covering state politics, the Dispatch should have been able to uncover the truth about electric deregulation instead of lamely parroting a senator's half-truths.

Dispatch buries V report

You may have missed it in the October 26 Dispatch--buried on page C3 beneath the generic and innocuous headline "Businessman admits kickback scheme"--but the federal investigation is tightening around the V Group, the company owned by our senator's brother Paul Voinovich.

The bizarre headline and the structure of the Dispatch article suggest that Columbus' self-proclaimed "greatest home newspaper" is still running a flak campaign for George Voinovich. Contrast the headline in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "FBI links V Cos. to secret deal."

Better yet, look at the lead in the Dispatch story: "An eastern Ohio businessman told a federal judge yesterday that an executive of the V Group participated four years ago in an illegal kickback scheme to obtain dumping permits for a landfill." Note the absence of the V-word--Voinovich--which doesn't appear until the third paragraph.

The Plain Dealer led with the following: "The company owned by Paul Voinovich received secret payments from a Steubenville landfill owner seeking to win favors from state regulators who served under then-Governor George Voinovich, the FBI said in federal court yesterday."

The Plain Dealer worked the names of both Paul Voinovich and George Voinovich into the first sentence. The lead promises an exciting story about an FBI investigation and secret payments.

The Dispatch story reads like some boring business report about permits or something. Paul Voinovich's name doesn't appear until the end of the third paragraph. Talk about burying the lead. What's the Dispatch trying to hide here?

If you want the full V Group story, check out the Columbus Alive archives on the web. The FBI even referred to articles in this newspaper during the initial probe of the wide-ranging political corruption scandal. You might want to start with the September 17, 1997, Alive article "Arlene, Pauly and Frank," which linked former V Group Vice President Clark Miller's campaign contributions to County Commissioner Arlene Shoemaker and the Franklin County Jail debacle.

Or read the November 5, 1997, Alive article questioning Miller's role in possible payoffs in Franklin County titled "Dewey's decimals."

The November 12, 1998, Alive article "Money Machine: Inside the V Group's pattern of alleged laundering and contract steering" was given to the FBI by Jefferson County Prosecutor Stephen Stern.

Finally, you might want to re-read the comprehensive "The V Report," from April 8, 1999. The Ohio Society of Professional Journalists named that story the best governmental reporting last year for all Ohio newspapers with circulations under 100,000.

TV gay baiting

Viewers of WBNS-TV were treated recently to a perfect example of how TV stations sensationalize "news" to attract eyeballs. Throughout the evening of October 24, anchor Dave Kaylor's promos for the 11 p.m. newscast, spoken with such ominous warnings one would think that perhaps Communists had invaded Grandview, warned viewers that "gay marriages!" were on their way to central Ohio.

Sure enough, the lead story--the story Channel 10 picked as the most important of the day--was about one church in Upper Arlington that was holding discussions for its members concerning same-sex "commitment ceremonies." Unfortunately for Channel 10, the nearly five minutes devoted to the story negated everything the menacing promos had promised. As the reporter of the story pointed out, "gay marriage!" is illegal in the United States; the church in question wasn't making a decision, merely holding discussions (and much to the congregation's credit, all of the participants refused to speak to the TV reporter); and that there are several churches in the Columbus area that already perform "commitment ceremonies."

In other words, there was no story. Channel 10 merely tried to sensationalize a gay topic to attract viewers.

It should also be noted that the next six stories on WBNS' news that evening (a serial rapist in Akron, update on a syringe attack, a missing woman, a state worker who misused state dollars, a bank robbery and a deadly accident) took just over five minutes to report. Besides making viewers question the station's priority of stories, it certainly proved that two of the letters in Channel 10's name are correct: B and S.

11/09/2000

Behind closed doors

The world's most powerful plutocrats are bringing their anti-democratic agenda to Cincinnati

by Bob Fitrakis

Their name is innocuous enough. The Transatlantic Business Dialogue's goal is almost Socialist-sounding: "[TABD] offers an effective framework for enhanced cooperation between the transatlantic business community and the governments of the European Union and the United States."

We're told "It is an informal process whereby European and American companies and business associations develop joint E.U.-U.S. trade policy recommendations, working together with the European Commission and U.S. Administration."

Despite the disarming rhetoric, the undemocratic practices of TABD will meet with major protests next weekend, November 16-18, in Cincinnati. The ongoing struggle between human rights advocates, environmental and labor activists and the world's Western corporate elite--the struggle that brought us last fall's protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and this spring's demonstrations against the World Bank in Washington, D.C.--will continue in the Queen City.

Round three will be a showdown between TABD and CHE (The Coalition for a Humane Economy)--essentially a battle of guerrilla theater forces against 150 of the world's most prominent corporate executives. As usual, I'll be rooting for the guerrillas, and I'm willing to buy war bonds.

Founded in November 1995, TABD is a byproduct of the Clinton administration's fascination with "neo-liberal" (read "undemocratic, corporate capitalist") globalization. The late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown brought 100 corporate executives from the U.S. and Europe to Seville, Spain, that year to discuss "trade liberalization."

TABD defines "liberalization" differently than you and I: Liberalization is defined as the freedom of corporations from those pesky environmental and worker safety regulations that get in the way of clear-cutting tropical rainforests and hiring nine-year-old kids for 12 cents an hour to work in sweatshops in developing countries.

This exclusive, private club of plutocrats grew out of corporate frustration over opposition to the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Now these rich white guys are out to "deliver the positive messages of globalization." Contrary to its obvious role of setting the agenda for the World Trade Organization (WTO), TABD has no official structure and no formal legal existence. This serves the organization well, by allowing it to exclude the public and press from its "informal" meetings with top elected officials and bureaucrats from the wealthiest countries in the world.

England's Observer noted last May that "when presidents, prime ministers and other transitory heads of state meet at the WTO, this more permanent group [the TABD] provides the agenda." A key part of TABD's agenda is making sure middle-class union manufacturing jobs are shipped to desperate, indebted Third World nations where brutal dictators understand the need for massive and unconscionable corporate profits.

TABD's E.U. chair, Bertrand Cullomb, CEO of Lafarge, concedes that "more work needs to be done by both business and government to demonstrate the direct benefit of trade liberalization to consumers and employees." Of course it's hard to see the benefit of a system where a few hundred Western billionaires own more wealth than nearly half the people on the planet, but I'm sure Cullomb will be explaining it informally to a bunch of very important guys who do understand. And then, they can use the growing world media monopolies to explain the non-obvious benefits of a blatantly immoral and undemocratic New World Order to the rest of us.

TABD's extreme secrecy allows it to plot--sorry, I mean advise about--the world's economic future unencumbered by the participation of people affected by its decisions. Anyone who believes in that messy process we call democracy should question why TABD closes its door to the press when it meets with "invited business and government officials." Perhaps citizens would feel better about globalization if they were actually included in the process.

When you're making the world safe for plutocracy and fostering government of the CEOs, by the CEOs and for the CEOs, I guess it's OK to keep it all a secret.

If you don't share that sentiment, you might want to check out groups like N16--Cincinnati Direct Action Collective. "Our convergence upon Cincinnati will be a symbol that we want to totally eradicate and abolish the injustice of global economic control by a few," reads the group's website. They're calling for the creation of "affinity groups" to greet TABD delegates in the streets of Cincinnati. Demonstrators are planning a noon kickoff on Thursday, November 16, at Fountain Square. The following day, they'll assemble at Sawyer Point on Race Street to march to the Omni Netherlands Plaza Hotel where TABD's meeting.

A note of caution: the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in October that an extensive undercover police operation reminiscent of the FBI's CoIntelPro is targeting protesters. One undercover police officer drove a vanload of 18 activists heading for the Republican National Convention in August directly to jail.

Remember, none of you are planning to do anything illegal--that would be criminal conspiracy. You may, however, be moved by the spirit once there, with absolutely no forethought, to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. Democracy is in the streets, but so are informants and undercover cops. Make a ruckus, rock on, and keep the faith.

11/16/2000

MEDIA WATCH

What liberal media?

Especially during the weeks leading up to an election, conservative circles complain of the liberal media bias--that army of left-wing editors and reporters who slant the news to fit their own political ideology, and the newspaper publishers who apparently think just-this-side-of-Communism viewpoints will help increase profits.

Those liberals must be locked in the basement at the Columbus Dispatch, because they certainly had no say in the paper's endorsements.

On the contrary, the Dispatch's selections, with few exceptions, could have been made by Robert Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. The Sunday before the election, November 5, just in case we missed any of the picks, the Dispatch laid them out in a spiffy capsule format--a Republican reference card, a Cliff's Notes of conservatism.

At the top of the list, of course, was George W. Bush, who the Dispatch claimed will "smooth over the bitter partisanship and frequent gridlock that have characterized the eight years of the Clinton administration." Nevermind that it takes two to gridlock and that a beaten Newt Gingrich, when tendering his resignation, admitted his role in creating the contentious relationship with the White House by saying that everything would run more smoothly once he was gone. Much of the partisan atmosphere in Congress was created by Gingrich and other bitter Republicans who could not stomach Bill Clinton's popularity.

Does Bush have some special magic that will bring the two parties together? Of course not. We didn't even have to wait for him to take office--much less get elected--to see the Dispatch's laughable claim of a bipartisan Bush proved wrong. His behavior this week--filing a lawsuit to prevent Florida from counting its votes, of all things--is evidence enough that the two-party system is alive and well in America.

If Al Gore is elected and the rival parties face off again (the Republicans held a slim majority in Congress), we will see, once again, the confrontational nature of politics. It seems--stop the presses!--that the Democrats and Republicans don't always agree with each other. Then again, maybe the Dispatch was simply advocating a gridlock-free one-party system.

The Dispatch threw its Supreme Court endorsements to Deborah Cook and Terrence O'Donnell. The paper praised both for their belief that judges should not make policy from the bench, somehow ignoring the fact that Cook did just that by excising the "thorough and efficient" education clause from Ohio's constitution. In her decision on school funding, Cook wrote that requiring Ohio's legislatures to adhere to this clause and actually provide a thorough and efficient education for Ohio's school children would be an "absurdity."

The daily monopoly also praised Cook and O'Donnell for their independence from special interest groups, despite the millions of dollars that each received from businesses and insurance companies and despite strong judicial histories of siding with those donors. Apparently, the Dispatch does not consider the business community to be a special interest group.

The rest of the Dispatch dance card was also filled with elephants. Republican Mike DeWine for U.S. senator, four Republicans for five U.S. representative slots, Republican Priscilla Mead for state senator, and Republican Bill Schuck for Franklin County commissioner. Democrats were able to nab three endorsements for state representative offices, but Republicans got six of the nine. At the county level, the Dispatch graciously approved Democrats for three of 11 offices.

Although they provided reasons for their selections, it is quite apparent that Dispatch editors voted the same way many citizens do--along party lines. Their puffy platitudes--Pat Tiberi's "professionalism" and DeWine's thoughtful consideration of the issues--carry little real weight and could easily be applied to any choice, Democrat or Republican.

The Dispatch's endorsees posted a respectable election-day record of 23-6-1. Staunch Republicans certainly nodded their heads and agreed wholeheartedly when reading the endorsements, but the paper's lack of objectivity and reason probably prevented them from making many converts.

Unanswered exit poll questions

The mainstream media's self-flagellation for calling the Florida election early--first for Gore, then for Bush--may be misplaced. Projections based on exit polls using advanced sampling methods have almost never failed before. Maybe the media's initial exit polls were correct this time too.

Suppose in the recent Yugoslavian election we learned that the exit polls predicted Slobodan Milosevich's opponent as the victor; there were massive voting irregularities in the one area of the country controlled by Milosevich's brother; it turns out that Milosevich's father was the former director of the secret police, who previously manipulated elections throughout the world; and Milosevich is suddenly winning by a few hundred votes.

What would we think?

We'd immediately suspect a coup d'™tat and a stolen election. We'd call for a United Nations-supervised recount and dispatch the U.S. secretary of state to oversee it.

Here in the U.S. election, we have a presidential candidate with the most votes--a clear plurality of 200,000 votes over his opponent--who's losing because of a few hundred votes in one state. The mainstream media drumbeat is trying to force, as we go to press, popular vote winner Al Gore to concede the race "for the good of the country" while spinning stories on how the early projections of a Gore victory were wrong. But it's entirely plausible that the exit polls in Florida were correct--people came out of the voting booths saying that they voted for Gore, not knowing that their votes would be counted otherwise.

Gore was leading in the exit polls in Florida, a state controlled by his opponent's brother, Governor Jeb Bush. It turns out their father is the former U.S. CIA director who had manipulated scores of elections throughout the Third World in the mid-'70s. George W. Bush appears to be ahead by a few hundred votes in Florida.

And two former U.S. secretary of states were dispatched to oversee the recount.

But it's the United States, not Yugoslavia. There couldn't be a coup d'™tat here. Could there?

Maybe there's a reason why it's so important to the Bush family that one of their own holds the power of the presidency next year. Long-awaited CIA files tying former CIA Director George Bush to human rights abuses and other potential crimes are to be released to the public next year--particularly the elder Bush's alleged role in the double homicide of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and U.S. ally Ronnie Moffitt in a 1976 Washington, D.C., car bombing. The next President of the United States will be the one to decide if these files are released in a timely manner.

Senator Frank Church's 1975 congressional investigation of the CIA's covert activities found that the organization had run between 10,000 and 20,000 covert operations in its four decades. The most common of these operations was rigging elections, not surprisingly often by directing votes to obscure third-party candidates.

The question the American media doesn't want to ask is the most obvious: Did the Bushes bring their unique covert election-rigging skills to the Banana Republic of Florida?

It's an issue that the world press is not afraid to tackle, as seen in some excerpts collected by Newsweek this week. "U.S. Humiliated in Presidential Shambles," screamed the page-one headline on Britain's The Mirror. "The health certificate of the greatest democracy in the world includes, unquestionably, some serious black marks," wrote France's Le Monde. Italy's La Repubblica commented that the atmosphere in the U.S. is "not so much of a superpower but of a super banana republic."

Doesn't it make you proud to be an American?

11/23/2000

Mental capacity

If Governor Bush executes a retarded man as planned, it will put Texas in a despicable league all its own

by Bob Fitrakis

At least one positive thing has come from the closely contested presidential recount in Florida: the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the execution of Texas killer Johnny Paul Penry just hours before his state-sanctioned murder was to take place.

Penry is the poster person for the mentally retarded on death row. Educated at a home for the mentally retarded, his I.Q. test scores range between 50 and 63. His attorneys point out that this is the functional level of a six-year-old, that he still believes in Santa Claus, and that he was severely abused as a child.

In 1979, Penry raped and murdered a 22-year-old woman. Initially, a Texas court refused to let the jury even consider evidence of Penry's well-documented retardation in deciding his fate.

Not only have the usual death penalty opponents pleaded to stay the execution, so have the European Union, the American Bar Association and both the American Association on Mental Retardation and the Association for Retarded Citizens. Only a handful of "rogue" nations in the world openly execute the mentally retarded--putting the state of Texas in a league with Mauritius, Tonga and Tunisia. Ohio's Attorney General Betty Montgomery has carved out her own little niche with the execution of Wilford Berry last year, the "volunteer" with a long history of mental illness and brain damage from his beating during the Lucasville riot.

Locally, Ohio State University Law Professor Douglas Berman prepared a letter for the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles claiming, among other things, that "society's `evolving standards of decency' precludes his [Penry's] execution."

"A `dynamic' interpretation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article 1, Section 13 of the Texas Constitution, focusing upon `objective' factors evidencing an evolution of contemporary values over the last decade, leads to the conclusion that the execution of the mentally retarded is no longer tolerated by society's current `standard of decency,'" wrote Berman.

In the last decade, 13 state legislatures and the U.S. Congress have passed statutes against executing the mentally retarded. In the vast majority of U.S. jurisdictions, Penry would not be killed, according to Berman. Just within the last year, six additional states are considering bills to prohibit the execution of the mentally retarded.

While substantial majorities have continued to support capital punishment, even greater numbers are opposed to the death penalty for retarded people. Berman's letter points to a recent public opinion poll showing that 80 percent opposed the execution of the mentally retarded. Over a decade ago, before it became a hot-button issue, 73 percent of Texans polled opposed the execution of retarded inmates, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

Berman suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court likely stayed the Penry execution to allow Texas Governor George W. Bush more time to reflect on the matter. A Texas newspaper reported last week that the governor is busy "playing gentleman rancher at his Crawford spread" and "`enjoying the tranquillity of Central Texas,' according to a PR flak." The American-Statesman noted that Bush was "under...unprecedented pressure" from the presidential election recount.

Texas papers seem more than willing to forgive the preoccupied governor for overlooking the obvious moral dilemma posed by executing Penry. Thankfully the Supreme Court proved a little more thoughtful. Arguably, in the U.S., "pregnant chads" should take clear precedence over killing certified retarded people.

The executive director of the Texas Civil Liberties Union said that his state would "shame" itself by killing Penry. The "shame" of killing Penry neither stopped the governor from meeting with architects and builders working on his ranch home nor from grilling hamburgers and reading the new biography of baseball great Joe DiMaggio, according to Bush spokesperson Ray Sullivan.

Ironically, in 1991, Governor Bush's father's President's Committee on Mental Retardation issued a report which concluded that the death penalty was inappropriate for the mentally retarded. Then-President George H.W. Bush authorized the report advocating that "capital punishment be prohibited for persons with mental retardation." Berman cites the report in his letter to the board of pardons.

Perhaps Berman's most telling argument is that last August on Good Morning, America, Governor Bush had the following exchange with Jack Ford.

Ford: "Do you personally feel that it's morally repugnant to execute someone who is mentally retarded, regardless of what the legislature would do?"

Governor Bush: "I do--I do feel that way. Yes, I do feel that way."

State's rights aside, it's a good thing the federal Supreme Court justices were paying enough attention to justice at hand to save our possible future president from taking office as the killer of a man with the mental capacity of a six-year-old.

11/30/2000

MEDIA WATCH

You gotta have faith (values optional)

The front page of the Columbus Dispatch's November 17 "Faith and Values" section contained a curious account of Sir John Reiner, a 51-year-old Dublin City Councilmember and president of Oakland Nursery, being admitted into the Knights of Malta.

The Dispatch told us that "few Catholics win the distinction Reiner has and even fewer will talk about it." After all, "Modesty is a virtue valued by the order."

Or maybe that virtue is secrecy.

Dating back to the first Crusade in 1099, the order originally known as the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem were granted independence from Catholic Church control by Pope Pascal II in 1113. The order became military participants in later Crusades along with the Knights Templar and Teutonic Knights.

Driven from Jerusalem in 1187, the order of St. John fled first to Acre, then Cyprus and finally Rhodes, where they were known as the Knights of Rhodes. There they established a military dictatorship and sovereign state status. In 1530, they were forced from Rhodes and re-established their headquarters in Malta, hence the Knights of Malta.

The Knights of Malta recruited primarily among the European aristocracy and soon amassed extensive estates throughout the continent. Their fortunes picked up dramatically during the first two decades of the 14th century when they helped crush the Knights Templar--Templar leaders were burned alive as heretics--and assimilated the Templars' holdings. The Knights of Malta were defeated by Napoleon in 1789 and given protection by the Russian emperor before moving their headquarters to Rome.

A better source than the Dispatch on the Knights of Malta is the Winter 1986 Covert Action Information Bulletin article by Francoise Hervet. He pointed out that the American Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (Knights of Malta SMOM) was founded in 1927. Entering World War II in 1941, Cardinal Francis Spellman was the American order's "Grand Protector" and "Spiritual Advisor." The Knight's treasurer was one John J. Raskob. Raskob, an admirer of the French fascist Croix de Feu, worked with Morgan banker John Davis as the principal financier in the infamous aborted fascist coup that failed because Major General Smedley Butler, the chosen military dictator, denounced it.

When the U.S. Army entered Rome in June 1944, General Mark Clark was made a Knight of Malta. Legendary CIA official James Angleton was awarded honors by the Knights of Malta in 1946. And in November 1948 the American Knights awarded the Grand Cross of Merit to Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's chief of intelligence on the Soviet front. The CIA later installed Gehlen as the first chief of West Germany's CIA equivalent, the BND.

In 1998, the Jerusalem Post reported that Pope John Paul II met with Vienna diplomat Dr. Robert Prantner, "envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of the Knights of Malta." Prantner argued that the Catholic Church shouldn't apologize to Jews for centuries of anti-semitism, rather Jews should apologize for "their deplorable crimes...against Catholic children...and for the blood of murdered Christians," according to the Austrian Zurziet.

According to Covert Action, recent members of the Knights of Malta included Franz von Pape, who persuaded German President Paul von Hindenburg to resign and make Hitler chancellor of Germany; Alexander Haig, President Reagan's secretary of state; and William Casey, Reagan's CIA director during the Iran-Contra scandal. Other news sources list as Knights Prescott Bush Jr., the former President's brother; William F. Buckley Jr.; former CIA Director John McCone; and former Treasury Secretary William Simon. (The Knights choose their own members and elect their own grand master.)

A 1998 Chronicle of Philanthropy article reported on Simon's membership in the Knights and also pointed out that Simon "was on the board of Covenant House in New York when its founder was accused of sexual and financial misconduct." Covenant House founder Father Bruce Ritter was involved in covert operations with the Knights of Malta and AmeriCares, a supposed charity run by a life-long acquaintance of ex-President George Bush, according to award-winning investigative reporter Charles M. Sennott.

Reiner did tell the Dispatch that when he was knighted in Washington, "It was an opportunity to see a lot of people who are sort of secretly doing good things. It's so uplifting." As Reiner put it, being a Knight means "a life of dedication to helping others."

Another of the Columbus-area Knights is Robert Morosky, whose name emerged in the controversial Shapiro murder file. Police Chief James Jackson was investigated and disciplined for attempting to destroy all copies of the document titled "Shapiro Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis." The report, written for the Columbus Police Organized Crime Bureau, noted, "Arthur Shapiro was reportedly in direct contact with Vice Chairman Robert Morosky (`Number Two') at the Limited." Prominent Columbus attorney Arthur Shapiro, who worked for Les Wexner and the Limited, was slain in an unsolved mob-style murder in 1985.

Alive honored by planning office

While Columbus Alive receives its share of local, state and national journalism awards each year, we aren't accustomed to being recognized by government agencies. The press is supposed to be the unblinking watchdog of government, and we don't expect a pat on the back in return.

So we have to give a lot of credit to the City of Columbus' Planning Office for its PlanIt Columbus 2000 awards, a celebration of planning and design excellence. Apparently, they aren't afraid to pat the watchdog on the back, even when its teeth are bared.

At a ceremony on November 9, Columbus Alive received the PlanIt Columbus 2000 Award for Excellence in Journalism for our "Sprawlburbia" series, the summer 1999 series that turned a critical eye to the state of urban planning in central Ohio. The award was accepted by Melinda M. White, the primary reporter of the series; editor Brian Lindamood and arts editor Melissa Starker also contributed to "Sprawlburbia."

The three-part series explored the causes and effects--both positive and negative--of central Ohio's phenomenal growth: the impact this has on employers, neighborhoods, roadways and public transportation; the problems faced by suburbs and outlying communities as Columbus creeps outside the outerbelt; and the cultural impact of migrating entertainment centers, as developments like Easton Town Center increasingly draw nightlife away from the city.

Ultimately, "Sprawlburbia" was hopeful, exploring possible solutions to the community's sprawl challenge. The best thing about Columbus' growth is it's still not too late to make changes for the better. We're grateful that the city's planning office and PlanIt Awards committee recognized the importance of this issue.

Other PlanIt Award recipients, in more traditional planning and design categories, included the Southern Theatre for historic preservation; the Italian Village Community Garden for public spaces-neighborhood focus; the Scioto Peninsula Riverfront Amphitheatre for public spaces-community focus; the Columbus Arts District Master Plan for excellence in planning; and the Nationwide Arena District deservedly won the M.D. Portman Award for overall excellence in contribution to the city.

FEATURED ARTICLE

12/07/2000

Uncovering River Valley Schools' atomic secrets

The Ohio EPA knew at least 22 years ago that the Marion public schools were built next to a toxic waste dump

Documents obtained by Columbus Alive show radioactive materials were also stored at the site, including Manhattan Project materials used to test the first atomic bomb

by Bob Fitrakis and Jamie Pietras

There's an untold story behind the almost $24 million Marion's River Valley School District will receive in the next three years. The U.S. government, through an act of Congress, promised $15 million to build a new high school and middle school, while the state enacted legislation kicking in an additional $8.9 million to the district, which also plans to build two elementary schools.

The $15 million from the armed services budget is explained easily enough, as one concerned Marion resident told Columbus Alive: at least 12 River Valley alumni with leukemia multiplied by an average settlement of $1.25 million equals $15 million. The state's $8.9 million payment might be better explained as hush money for the questionable handling of the polluted site the River Valley Schools were built upon.

Despite the site's toxic legacy--which dates as far back as the dawn of the atomic age in the 1940s, when the land was an Army engineers' depot--public officials are hesitant to jump to any conclusions about the leukemia cases and unusual cancer rates suffered by River Valley alumni. The Ohio Department of Health is examining case studies to see if there is a link between the contamination and disease. In the meantime, middle and high school students literally sit in the middle of the uncertainty--their parents knowing all too well of studies which have indicated abnormally high cancer rates among graduates.

To put it mildly, the recent years have been tense ones for Governor Bob Taft, Ohio EPA officials and state and federal legislators, as they scrambled to find a solution to the problems in the small city just an hour's drive north of Columbus. When federal and state officials cut a deal earlier this year that allowed the U.S. and Ohio governments to kick in money for relocation of the schools--provided Marion residents kick in almost $20 million with a property tax levy of their own--they breathed a sigh of relief.

"For months the state has been working with the [Army] Corps [of Engineers] and Senators [George] Voinovich and [Mike] DeWine to craft a solution to the very complex situation in Marion," Taft said in a May 19 Ohio Department of Health press release. "With this agreement, River Valley students and families will receive a new school facility and the community will have a significant tract of land available for industrial development."

But according to an extensive review of documents obtained by Columbus Alive, the schools' toxic problem isn't as new as the politicians would probably like to believe. The Ohio EPA knew of contamination on the site for more than two decades, and information on the site's role in the Manhattan Project was discovered by an environmental audit team in the late 1980s.

In three years the kids will be moved to new schools and the dump will be cleaned up by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers so that it can be re-used for industrial purposes. Cleaning its former depot site to industrial standards will cost the Army Corps $5 million to $10 million. To move the children temporarily, clean the dump to residential standards, and move the students back into the schools would have cost substantially more--$44.5 million.

Clearly the armed services are smiling at the price tag. They're the ones responsible for the mess in the first place.

"The company was given permission to use the dump"

Despite claims to the contrary, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency knew at least 22 years ago that the River Valley Junior High and High School property was formerly an Army engineers' depot, with a contaminated dump directly next to the school property. Correspondence dating to 1978 between Plant City Steel, the Marion County Health Department and the Ohio EPA's district office in Bowling Green specifically addressed a toxic dump just south of the schools' fence line. At the time, Plant City Steel was dumping toxic waste on a site adjacent to the River Valley Schools property.

Earlier this year, Howard L. Jones, a 1978 River Valley graduate, wrote the Marion County Health Department requesting information related to the dumping of toxic waste near the River Valley Schools. Marion County Director of Environmental Health Lowell Lufkin responded in a May 1 letter: "Mr. Phil Case was the director of environmental health for the Marion County Health Department for many years. Shortly after Mr. Case left the department all the files for nuisance violations and solid waste violations were lost."

So Lufkin turned to the Ohio EPA's Northwest District Office for the requested information--material on toxic dumping at the school site that the Ohio EPA had long denied knowledge of--and the EPA office sent it.

Within the information Lufkin received and forwarded to Jones was a clear and disturbing photograph of an open waste dump dated July 26, 1978, with a handwritten note on the back: "Marion County Plant City Steel dump located on the old Marion Ordinance Depot."

Also included in the EPA material was a letter dated July 7, 1978, that Case sent William Walters, the Plant City Steel plant manager, demanding that the steel company "cease operation of your disposal site immediately." Case wrote, "You must either dig a trench and bury all waste or haul enough dirt in to cover the area with two (2) feet of dirt cover."

Ten days later, the steel company's attorney, Walter D. Moore, wrote promising that Plant City Steel would "henceforth refrain" from using the dump near the schools, but the company refused to "bury or cover the waste present" at the site since "the land on which the dump is located is owned by some segment of the government." Moreover, Moore insisted, "The company was given permission to use the dump...[and] that Plant City was only one of a number of users of the dump."

That same month, Moore again wrote Case, informing him that the Ohio EPA had made "demands of Plant City that it cannot fulfill." Moore claimed that the dump site land was owned by the U.S. General Service Administration (GSA), and was "immediately supervised by 83rd [U.S. Army] ARCOM, Ft. Hayes, Columbus, Ohio."

Case informed the Ohio EPA that he had "contacted Mr. James F. Lyons, GSA, and explained the Plant City dump problems." Case's letter also notes that "He [Lyons] is contacting his legal adviser and is getting some up-to-date maps from Chicago, then he will come up and look over the problem."

Ohio EPA District Chief R.J. Manson wrote Walters on August 4 that year informing him that the agency's investigation had found two violations: "Operating a solid waste facility without plan approval and an operating license" and "Operating an open dump and open burning."

By November 22, 1978, the Ohio EPA had apparently solved the problem of the toxic waste site. "The road leading into this area has been barricaded. The Ohio National Guard plans to cover the area with dirt," revealed an internal EPA letter. The letter did not explain how the dirt would keep the toxins from migrating onto the adjacent school property.

"Part of the depot was used for development of the first atomic bomb"

Environmental concerns with the Marion schools site emerged again a decade later, with even more ominous implications. On March 21, 1988, Benatec Associates Inc. issued an environmental audit report commissioned by the HARSCO Corporation regarding the sale of the company's Plant City Steel (PCS) operation in Marion. The steel company had purchased the audited property in 1966 from the U.S. government, and ceased operations in 1986.

In order to determine how the government had used the site prior to 1966, Benatec researchers contacted, among others, James F. Lyons, then the facility's manager for the U.S. GSA in Columbus. The Benatec report noted, "Mr. Lyons stated that to the best of his knowledge, part of the depot was used for storage, bomb production, and experiments regarding the development of the first atomic bomb."

Lyons suggested that Benatec researchers contact Charles Mosher, the author of a recent book titled The Scioto Ordnance Plant and the Marion Engineer Depot of Marion, Ohio: A Profile After Forty Years. Mosher claimed "that portions of `The Manhattan Project' for the development of the first atomic bomb were conducted exclusively in a building on the depot and off the now PCS property."

"Mr. Mosher stated that he was personally involved in `The Manhattan Project.' He suggested that Mr. Robert Ferguson of Marion, Ohio, former safety director of the Marion depot, be contacted," the Benatec report added. In a telephone interview with a Benatec investigator, Ferguson verified that he worked in the depot's fire department between 1948 and 1954, and served as the facility's safety director between 1954 and 1960. "According to Mr. Ferguson, a concrete building west of the water tower and south of Route 309 contained radioactive material utilized for `The Manhattan Project' during World War II. He felt that the building known as Building 517 may have been used for the storage of radioactive material. Building 517 is presently on the western end of the PCS property. He further stated that a storm sewer ran from Warehouse No. 4 south of Route 309 to Building 510 and then in open ditches towards the river."

When contacted by Columbus Alive this week, Ferguson said he had no knowledge of the Manhattan Project, and the 1988 report must have misquoted him. Ferguson did confirm to Alive that radioactive materials were stored at the depot.

A deed from World War II substantiates the government's lease of the drainage ditch in question. "Allegedly, cattle and sheep in the area drinking from the open ditches were impacted and lawsuits against the government with out-of-court settlements resulted," the Benatec report read.

Ferguson also claimed "that there was a dump for `nonsalvageable excess waste' which, prior to his personally stopping it, contained used solvent, paint, waste oil, etc."

The Benatec environmental audit found "five major areas of concern": three underground storage tanks near Building 510; "43 55-gallon drums stored on wooden pallets...full or partially filled" with what "may be lead and chromate enamel"; the storm drainage systems on the eastern and western ends of the property; the radioactive material storage areas, particularly Buildings 517 and 510; and "a general dump for waste material for the National Guard and the PCS operation."

In August 1988, Benatec issued a second report noting that "although the PCS operation and environmental records were destroyed, indications are that spray painting and storage of electric transformers containing PCBs may have occurred on the site."

"Forty-three barrels containing an oily substance had visibly spilled on the ground," the second report stated. In sampling the property for toxic and radioactive contamination, the Benatec investigators found "some level of volatile gases." As a result, "all involved personnel went to level C protection. This consists of oil resistant Tyvek suits, gloves, boots, and respirators." The meter reading for volatile organic compounds for environment sampling hole "D-4" was six times the limit that triggered level C protection.

The Benatec samples showed that "a great deal of oil remains in the soil due to a past oil spill on the property."

The Ohio EPA began another investigation of the depot site in July 1989, which resulted in the agency filing a 33-count civil action on February 28, 1994, against Plant City Steel parent HARSCO for violation of Ohio environmental laws. The counts included the illegal operation of a hazardous waste facility, unlawful burning of hazardous waste, failure to mark hazardous waste containers, failure to analyze hazardous waste and failure to keep written operating records, among other charges. The Ohio EPA asked for $10,000 a day in fines. Within a week, HARSCO had settled for $100,000 and an agreement to close the waste dump.

The initial closure plan submitted to the EPA by HARSCO subsidiary Getman Brothers Manufacturing Company included 11 of 12 hazardous waste storage units. Jeff Steers of the Ohio EPA's Northwest District Office signed off as the group leader on the closure plan, but the EPA refused to accept the closure plan for one unit, Area L. The closure plan submitted to the Ohio EPA during Governor George Voinovich's administration for Area L was not finally approved until five years later, during Governor Bob Taft's administration--two years into the current River Valley Schools controversy.

Beginning in 1996, the state fire marshal ordered the Ohio Army National Guard to take benzene samples from the ground water at the Marion Army Guard site located on the old depot property, abutting River Valley Junior High School. The River Valley Schools' contamination crisis began the next year, the same year that HARSCO paid the Ohio EPA more than half a million dollars in a settlement for violation of air pollution control laws at a Marysville manufacturing facility.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers commissioned an Environmental Baseline Survey in 1996 of the Marion Outdoor Training Area, on the same former depot site near the school. The corps' study found "no definite hazardous waste or material...at the time of the site visit." The corps did find three empty drums "in the vicinity of a potential wetland area."

The brief report concluded, "After reviewing historical use documents of the site it is not known exactly what types of materials, if any, were stored at this location. According to existing data, facility records, and current conditions there is no documented or physical evidence indicating hazardous materials were ever used or stored at this site."

Of course the Army's investigators could have simply walked over to the Marion Historical Society and purchased a copy of Mosher's book to find out that material for the Manhattan Project was stored there along with radioactive infrared sniper scopes and radium disks through the 1950s. Nazi prisoners of war resided there as well.

"Hundreds of gallons of trichloroethylene were disposed of out there"

While state and federal officials tend to ignore, dismiss or downplay the Benatec report and Army Corps of Engineers findings in their ongoing investigation of the high rates of leukemia and cancers at River Valley's High School and Junior High, information continues to filter out suggesting a cover-up of the depot's past contamination.

A confidential letter arrived at the headquarters of the Ohio EPA, dated April 24, 1993. The author, Mary Prior, had worked at the depot from 1945 until it closed in 1961. She had a simple question: "Was there ever any effort made to determine what was buried at the site of the old Marion Engineer Depot?"

"It was part of my duty to order not only office supplies, but also items needed in the shop area, such as paint, paint thinner, paint remover, carbon tetrachloride (now a known carcinogen) and trichloroethylene (also now a known carcinogen)," Prior confessed. "Back then stuff was just buried somewhere on the post...It was poured on the ground near the building. The area must have been saturated...I know absolutely that it was disposed of because the drums always went back empty. Hundreds of gallons of trichloroethylene were disposed of out there because I used to order a drum several times a year."

"Several years ago I saw a 60 Minutes broadcast about a company...which had not properly disposed of some trichloroethylene and it resulted in a number of illnesses in the area... A businessman who used to work out there said I should let sleeping dogs lie," Prior's letter ended, "But there is already a school on that old depot property and the warehouses are being used."

The River Valley High School opened in 1962 and the adjacent Junior High in 1968. In 1997, a River Valley School nurse reported to the Ohio Department of Health that a disproportionate number of leukemia cases had struck students and graduates. Between 1966 and 1995, leukemia death rates rose by 122 percent in the city of Marion, and brain cancer death rates increased by 40 percent in the county.

Cases of esophageal cancer is 10 times the normal rate in Marion, according to a Ohio Department of Health survey. USA Today reported this year that a government study found a 40-percent increase in esophageal cancer among workers involved in early nuclear weapons production.

When the Ohio EPA checked the River Valley High School grounds in September 1997, the agency discovered a dime-sized radium disk in front of the school. The radioactive disks, stored at the former depot, were used as reflectors to highlight bridges and roadways during World War II. Between 50,000 and 80,000 of these disks were stored at the depot at one time, according to Charles Mosher's book and U.S. military documents. The military claimed the disks were moved, but can't provide the paperwork showing when or where the disks went. A few Marion parents suspect the radium disks were dumped and buried on the old depot site.

In the last week of June 1998, Army contractor Montgomery Watson conducted tests at various locations at the River Valley School property. The on-site laboratory picked up such a significant level of the carcinogenic chemical vinyl chloride that the testers dismissed it as "an apparent false detection." The report states, "The initial blank run and associated sample analytical results which displayed false positive vinyl chloride detections were rejected."

To eliminate these assumed "false" readings of a potent carcinogen, the Montgomery Watson testers adjusted the temperature and then detected carbon disulfide, a lesser toxin. However, in the investigative results from one of the two field samples of "water from hole," the vinyl chloride numbers tested in the range of 700,000 times the allowable risk standard.

The Ohio EPA now tests air inside the schools every three months. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tests air quality outside the site monthly. Those tests, along with the Ohio EPA's and Army's groundwater and soil tests, have shown toxin levels not to be dangerous to human health, according to the EPA.

"This is new information"

The Ohio EPA also attempted a more thorough historical evaluation after data from the Ohio Department of Health set off the current crisis. In October 1997, the EPA submitted a "Historical Aerial Photograph Analysis" between 1939 and 1966. The first photo submitted--dated August 31, 1961, just prior to the depot's closing by the Army--shows a strangely plowed triangle of land precisely where the junior high school now sits. Concerned parents fear this unexplained disturbed land may be a waste dump. The revealing photo was not made public by the EPA until January 1999.

That same month, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers handed out status memos to the recently established citizens' Restoration Advisory Board for the Depot (RAB) recommending that no further action was necessary on the old Army dump site. RAB would later hire its own expert, Bruce Molholt, a Ph.D. in microbiology who recommended, with the "demonstrated high disease frequency," that the school be relocated and that a "prolonged excavation of the dump" was "required." Molholt pointed to the 1997 leukemia mortality study showing that deaths had increased by 122 percent in Marion in the past 30 years.

The Ohio EPA discredited Molholt's and co-researcher J.R. Kolmer's findings in a September 29, 2000, press release. "The consultants' epidemiology data inappropriately associated past cancer incidences of River Valley grads with current environmental conditions at the site," it said. The Ohio EPA also accused the researchers of having a limited understanding of the trichloroethylene breakdown process.

But when questioned about the 1961 photo, the Ohio EPA's Jeff Steers told the Columbus Dispatch, "This is new information... In earlier photos taken in the 1950s, it [the area under the school] wasn't disturbed at all."

Steers told the Marion Star in 1999 that the Ohio EPA came across the photo while digging through its Marion depot archives. He said, "I can't tell you when we actually got it [the 1961 aerial photo]."

The actual date the EPA received the photo, according to EPA's own files, is October 27, 1997. Steers explained to Columbus Alive that Lawhon and Associates, the company with which the Ohio EPA contracted, had found the photo during a records search, but Steers did not see it until 1999.

In 1998, Paul Jayko, of the Ohio EPA's Division of Emergency and Remedial Response, prepared a two-page analysis of an electromagnetic survey and seized upon two "anomalies." What Jayko saw were "buried metallic objects and possible waste materials having high electrical conductivity such as sludge of some type. The size and shape of the anomaly strongly suggests disposal of a waste material."

Jayko suggested the EPA move its testing directly to the other side of the River Valley School's chain-link fence, since "due to the limited mapping imposed by property boundaries, it is impossible to determine whether the mapped anomaly is shown in its entirety or is only the tip of the iceberg."

Jayko's January 8, 1998, internal memo was addressed to Steers. Whoever received the memo wrote the word "No" in felt pen and Xed out Jayko's recommendation to test the Army property next to the middle school.

Steers told Columbus Alive he was "not aware" of the memo.

Jayko's concerns were obvious. With students at the middle school and high school, he "suspected that any contaminant existing in this area has a direct pathway to the surface [due to the disruption of the clay soil by landfill activity] and there may be a dermal, ingestion, and inhalation pathway." Jayko's map showed what he thought was an obvious toxic waste site approximately 300-feet-by-200-feet in size just in back of the school's fence.

During the summer of 1998, Jayko lost his position as Marion Site Director because of alleged poor performance. Recently, Judge Thomas F. Phalen Jr. ruled that the Ohio EPA "wanted to do something graduated and far less effective" than a full investigation at the Marion site. Phalen ruled that the Ohio EPA had broken federal whistle blower laws by disciplining and reassigning Jayko.

"Keep the noise down"

A little over a month after the Paul Jayko memo to Jeff Steers, Steers wrote a curious memo to Ohio EPA Director Donald Schregardus regarding the "Marion investigation." Steers indicated that the decision to do ambient air monitoring at the site would be left up to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the Department of Defense (DOD), which was responsible for the original pollution. Another goal would be to work with the Department of Energy (DOE), which was responsible for the radioactive contamination on the site. Steers added, "No Superfund money will be used since DOE and DOD are clearly the responsible parties and must pay for all associated costs of cleanup."

Montgomery Watson prepared a draft report for the Army Corps of Engineers in November 1998. In the brief four-page report, the contractor wrote: "The principal contaminant found was vinyl chloride, which is a breakdown product of trichloroethylene."

In February 1999, after concerned Marion residents charged the depot contamination was being covered up, a much larger Army Corps of Engineers report with the same November 1998 date mysteriously appeared in the public repository of the Marion Public Library. The Corps was clearly retreating from its earlier "three empty barrels" analysis.

Montgomery Watson's assessment in the expanded report was straightforward. The "Overall Relative Risk: High" and the status of the Army's dump in back of the school property posed "imminent threats." Soldiers would no longer train in the area, and the report noted "ecological receptors [living organisms like mammals] have not been evidenced at this phase, however, there's a nature preserve on this parcel of land alleged to have been a waste disposal area."

The report fails to mention the ecological receptors--that is, students--standing directly on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Steers told the Columbus Dispatch that the Montgomery Watson report "was an internal document to justify funding requests. It was not to be circulated publicly."

The Toledo Blade reported in October this year that "Two-thirds of that 1953 dump [shown in the aerial photo] is River Valley School property. The other third is on the Army reserve training site which has been closed since 1999 because of health risks."

River Valley School Superintendent Thomas G. Shade rode to the Ohio EPA's rescue with a 1999 "The Voice of the Valley Environmental Bulletin." Shade told Marion parents that newly discovered toxic waste barrels were 500 to 800 yards beyond the fence that separates the school from the reserve ground. A Columbus Alive analysis of Army Corps of Engineers maps and other public documents indicates that the superintendent mistook yards for feet in his apparent effort to calm parents. In fact, the dump was as close as 500 feet to school property.

When later asked about the mix-up, Shade told Alive, "I can't tell you if it was yards or feet."

Shade also told parents, "The school and local government officials found out about the barrels on the reserve grounds when the public did--two months after the U.S. Army Reserve learned about them."

Apparently the Ohio EPA or the federal government failed to tell Shade about the Benatec study or Prior's 1993 letter or even the 1978 dump investigation. Indeed, Shade told Alive that he hadn't read the Benatec report and that Prior's name simply "rings a bell."

Governor Bob Taft's new EPA director, Chris Jones, tried a different approach. In a memo to the governor, he wrote, "The contaminated area has been there for years, and the public knew it existed." Thankfully Jones knew the difference between yards and feet, noting that the area was "500-800 feet from the school fence line."

While Shade was publicly calming parents, albeit with shaky information, he was also submitting an application from the River Valley Local School District to Ohio's Extreme Environmental Contamination Program for funds to build new schools. In the 1999 application he wrote, "Surface soil contamination contains unacceptable levels of carcinogenic polyaromatic hydrocarbons including benzo a pyrene. The paths of exposure include inhalation, ingestion and dermal contact."

Publicly, the superintendent followed the government's line, telling the Marion Star in February 1999 "that the trenching in front of the middle school did not indicate the school was built on top of a dump site."

Shade's efforts did not go unnoticed. In a February 2000 "Privileged/Confidential" memo obtained by Alive, EPA Director Jones wrote to Superintendent Shade, "I appreciate the effort you are making to `keep the noise down.' I really believe that it will be to everyone's benefit in the long run."

Shade had written Jones a February 9, 2000, "heads up" on a possible story by Columbus Dispatch reporter Jill Ripenhoff. Shade told Jones: "Again, to the degree possible we are trying to be sensitive to the whole issue, keep the noise down and proceed accordingly."

Shade told Columbus Alive that these memos shouldn't be taken out of context. A time of sensitive negotiations is not the time to start venting in local newspapers, he said.

"You don't go into negotiations that had just started with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Ohio EPA," Shade said. "You don't go into negotiations in good faith and out the back door go out blasting people."

The superintendent added, "Those memos were in that vein...not trying to cover up anything or hide anything."

"Why are the students still attending this school?"

While politicians and school leaders are busy defending their actions, grassroots groups like Ohio Citizen Action and Concerned River Valley Families continue to pressure Governor Bob Taft to remove children to another location. Citizens and activists have presented the governor with thousands of letters and documentation of the problems in Marion. "His complete inaction speaks for itself," Citizen Action's Simona Vaclavikova said of the governor. The group is not satisfied with the promise of a better tomorrow--when new schools are built in three years--while kids sit in the schools today.

Taft spokesperson Troy Kirkpatrick said of those letters, only 14 actually came from residents of the River Valley. Many letters didn't supply a return address.

Just prior to the November election, Stephen Lester, the science director at the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, analyzed the data from the River Valley School property and concluded with a simple question: "I have to raise a common sense question that I cannot answer. Why are the students still attending this school? The RI [U.S. Army's Remedial Investigation] report, even with its limitations, still shows serious hot spots on the school site." The River Valley School officials had earlier taken action by not allowing students to use the back exits of the school.

Vaclavikova said the fact that the bond issue to raise money for new schools passed this November is evidence Marion residents fear for the safety of their children.

"Obviously there's chemicals on the property and that's well-publicized," the Ohio EPA's Jeff Steers said. But, he points out that all EPA tests have indicated that the levels are not dangerous to human health.

River Valley Superintendent Shade told Alive that until case studies are completed by the Ohio Department of Health, no one should jump to conclusions. "The concern is, is it safe now?" Shade asked. He said it's "irresponsible" to make linkages between the rate of leukemia among people who went to the schools 10 years ago and possible dangers today. "We've relied on safety and the scientific method from the inception of this problem."Shade pointed out that all but one of River Valley's school board members has children or grandchildren at the junior high school or high school--not to mention the fact that Shade roams the halls regularly.

"What ulterior motive could there be for me to work on a campus that I thought was unsafe?" Shade asked. "We absolutely, firmly, confidently maintain that this campus is safe."

Taft and others maintain that the unusual Marion bond issue with matching state and federal money was an all-encompassing package intended to deal with ailing elementary schools as well as environmental problems at the high school and junior high school. Taft spokesperson Kirkpatrick mentioned Taft's visit to Caledonia Elementary School: "Their computer center where they kept all their servers was in the bathroom."

But at the junior high and high schools, an unseen, more unsightly problem lurks deep underneath the soil.

With their funding locked up, officially all is well in Marion, despite the fact that River Valley Junior High School children will go to school on a toxic waste site for the next three years, while a new school is being built, and their nearby high school neighbors will continue to play on contaminated ground.

NO 12/07/2000

12/14/2000

MEDIA WATCH

You can show that on television

The station barred the sex- and drug-laden visual collages of the foul-mouthed Angsto the Clown last year--a decision OK'd by a jury in a federal obscenity lawsuit last year. But when it comes to white supremacist propaganda, Community 21 loosens its reins.

Critics of the public access station's policy of prior review--which gives the station the power to pull videos it deems inappropriate--point to the irony that the station chose to allow the White Revolution video to air on December 7. Station listings show that the video, which is a half-hour white supremacist tirade from World Church of the Creator's Matt Hale, also aired on November 30.

The fight over prior review reared its head again at Columbus City Council's December 11 meeting. During the public speaking portion of council's meeting, video producer Praza O. Edwards took the podium and criticized station Executive Director Pat Williamsen for choosing to air his Hebrew Israelite Ministries Worldwide show at 10:30 p.m. He said the station didn't like his message, particularly that Jesus was black.

A source at Community 21 told Media Watch that Edwards' show depicted acts of graphic violence, and that a parent had called the station to complain.

Community 21 supporter Darlene Cheek took the podium next at the council meeting. First she wanted to clear the confusion. Jesus was a Jew, she said. "Jesus was a black Jew," a voice cried from the back of the room. The debate over public access television is always animated.

Cheek voiced concerns about the station's funding being cut. In the city's recently released budget, Community 21's funding was dropped from $400,000 to $219,000.

Each of Columbus' government and education stations--including government Channel 3 and education Channel 25--experienced budget cuts this year. The city chose to manage Channel 25 in-house, rather than contract with another company, to take advantage of digital production capabilities and staff availability in the city's technology department.

In March, Community 21's contract with the city will be up for renewal. The city has taken bids from at least five parties interested in the public access contract, but sources could not say if anyone has the inside track.

Council honors Williamson?

The usual suspects at Columbus City Council got a hearty laugh, and The Other Paper reporter Dan Williamson played it off like a sport. But if any of the other City Hall beat reporters ever considered quitting their jobs, this was bound to make them think twice.

Ever the yuckster, Mayor Michael Coleman announced during the December 11 council meeting that he was providing Williamson with a "citation of recognition" for all that he's done for the city. Asking Williamson to take the podium, Coleman proceeded to roast the reporter who, for five years, has found countless punchlines at the expense of City Hall.

Williamson's tenure at The Other Paper and Columbus Monthly is over. He's leaving Max Brown's mini media empire to take a job with Capitalgate.com, an electronic start-up covering Statehouse politics.

After a little ribbing from the mayor (Coleman said he asked everyone at City Hall for comment on Williamson's departure and all they could say was "Thank you"), Williamson was given his certificate.

With the threat of falling victim to Billy Crystal-style standup at the hands of the mayor, reporters are left wondering whether they'll be next if they dare to leave the City Hall beat. "Possibly, but not necessarily," said Coleman's press secretary Mike Brown. "Dan especially had been there for some time."

Suburban News Publications reporter Gary Seman played it safe. He waited until the end of the meeting to tell the mayor and council insiders he was moving on to a food review beat. "If he would have told us ahead of time, we could have given him a citation cookie," Brown said.

Reading, 'riting and radioactivity

One way to look at last week's Columbus Alive cover story on Marion's River Valley Schools' atomic secrets is that the kids and educators were simply collateral damage of the Cold War. For years, bits and pieces of Ohio's major role in the Manhattan Project and the thermonuclear arms race have been dribbling out in the media. Here's a quick refresher course.

The uranium processing plant in Fernald--18 miles northwest of Cincinnati--was so contaminated by radiation that state and federal agencies barred their inspectors from visiting the plant in 1989. The Fernald plant was opened in 1952 by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to produce nuclear bomb-grade uranium. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote in 1989, "Ohio officials say that in the 37 years it has been in operation, the plant has released 298,000 pounds of uranium waste into the air and 167,000 pounds of waste into the Greater Miami River. Another 12.7 million pounds of waste were put into pits, which may be leaking. And the plant's concrete storage tanks are cracked and leaking. Leaking radioactivity has contaminated the Greater Miami Aquifer, which supplies drinking water to about 2 million people in the Cincinnati area. The plant sits on the aquifer."

Of course, things could have been worse. In 1993, at the unrelated Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts, the Boston Globe reported that scientists from Harvard University and MIT fed radioactive forms of iron and calcium to 19 mentally retarded boys in their breakfast milk to monitor the health effects. Their parents were told they were in a "science club."

In the January 1994 Columbus Free Press cover story "Battelle and the Banality of Evil," the then-monthly muckraking paper pointed out that the institute had played a key role in the U.S. atomic and nuclear programs and that the Department of Defense estimated it would take more than $100 million in radioactive clean-up costs alone at Battelle's facilities.

The next month, the Free Press interviewed a moon-suited environmental decontamination worker leaving Battelle's West Jefferson site and published that there was radioactive contamination from an experimental laboratory and reactor. Battelle refused to comment but soon categorically denied the charge to the defunct Columbus Guardian.

The Columbus Dispatch's Scott Powers, perhaps the state's best environmental reporter, managed to confirm the radioactive contamination in a June 26, 1994, story bizarrely headlined "Battelle to clean up soil; Lab dust may be responsible for contamination." Battelle's Vice President, Kenneth Brog, reassured central Ohio residents by noting, "We certainly don't want to give anyone the impression that this plutonium, which is trapped in soils, migrates readily."

Essential reading is Powers' October 1, 1995, Dispatch article reporting that Ohio has "around 50 documented radioactive sites," more than any other state. Along with Fernald, the Mound Laboratory in Miamisburg and the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon were part of the "Big Three" nasties. The estimated cost of cleaning up these sites is well over $20 billion.

Earlier this year, Dispatch reporter Randall Edwards wrote, "For nearly 40 years, Battelle scientists using the same mechanical arms unlocked the secrets of atomic energy, first for use in powerful bombs, then for more peaceful causes." The article also pointed out that "Fuel rods and equipment from these plants [nuclear power plants] were shipped to West Jefferson for three decades, and as a result, many of the buildings there became contaminated with radioactivity."

It's not uncommon to find Manhattan Project contamination in urban areas, even outside research facilities like Battelle. The Dispatch's Powers revealed, "For eight months in 1943, B&T Metals at 425 W. Town St. was one of numerous small machine shops secretly pressed into service to manufacture uranium pellets for the Manhattan Project." In 1996, the U.S. government undertook an estimated $2.3 million clean-up of radioactive dust at the plant site.

The discovery of radioactive contamination directly linked to the Manhattan Project at two Dayton Board of Education buildings, including the Green Jr. ROTC Academy, stirred controversy in Dayton in 1998.

During the Fernald cleanup, medical experts suggested that the radium, linked specifically to leukemia, be cleaned up first as a health threat. Ohio Environmental Protection Agency officials found a dime-sized radium-coated disk in front of Marion's River Valley Schools in September 1997.

Soon after, the Dispatch's Frank Hinchey raised the radium and radiation issue at the schools, pointing to the radioactive contamination in Building 517 at the Marion Engineering Depot and the "about 58,000 radium markers stored at the depot." Reportedly, the radium disks were shipped to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland after World War II, claimed the Army Corps of Engineers.

One of the reasons that military-related toxic and radioactive waste keeps showing up at schools results from the Federal Property and Administrative Service Act of 1949, enacted to sell off surplus government property, particularly for public use such as schools. A decade ago, parents of high school students in St. Charles County, Missouri, were shocked when the government attempted to open up an old uranium and thorium plant half a mile from the Francis Howell High School. So, whenever you find a school on an old military base or installation, public officials would be wise to check for toxic or radioactive contamination.

12/21/2000

Idiot bastard son

The Bush family staged the biggest demonstration election in the world

by Bob Fitrakis

Repeat the mantra: "George W. Bush is the legitimate President of the United States, the legitimate President of the United States, the legitimate President of the United States..."

Never has the mainstream media been more naked and desperate in its attempts to "manufacture consent," a term coined by brilliant linguist Noam Chomsky. Not since three separate lone gunmen just happened to shoot the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. have we witnessed such brazen Orwellian coersion. But as the mega-corporate pundits of America attempt to pressure every dissenting voice to repeat the legitimacy refrain, facts keep filtering out that suggest the exact opposite.

Let's take the word legitimacy. In Medieval times, it meant what it implies: the king or heir apparent was not literally a bastard, as in the movie Braveheart, but his royal parents were his actual biological parents. Under modern democracy, the term implies that you won the election legitimately, at a minimum: the adult population could vote, those votes were fairly counted, and you got the most votes.

We know legitimate voters were prevented from voting in Florida. Republican Secretary of State and Bush loyalist Katherine Harris hired the Republican company ChoicePoint, and their subsidiary Database Technologies, to ethnically and racially "cleanse" (their word) Florida's voter registration rolls. According to Bob Herbert of the New York Times, the companies now admit that they accidentally purged 8,000 voters from the rolls who weren't felons, overwhelmingly from poor and minority districts, who were eligible to vote.

Take the case of Dave Crawford of Broward County who showed up at the polls with his five-year-old daughter and was reportedly told by the kindly Southern election official, "Son, we've got a problem. You're not allowed to vote. Son, says here you're a convict. Convicts can't vote." Despite the fact Crawford had never been arrested in his life, the election official refused to show Crawford the felon list and turned him away from the poll, with his daughter crying.

We know all votes were not fairly counted. A one-vote majority of the Supreme Court stopped the counting of ballots at the state and local level for the first time in U.S. history. The absurdity of a 14th Amendment "equal protection" argument should not be lost. In a state where there are a variety of voting devices in different counties--and the minority and poor precincts get the worst machines, which fail to count four percent of the vote, while the rich precincts get optical scanners which count over 99 percent of all the vote--how can there be a single state standard?

The Florida Supreme Court has always interpreted Florida statute to mean a "reasonable" standard for each county. Bush's own expert witness, John Ahmann, conceded that the Votomatic machines used in the poorest county are prone to failure and can only be corrected through hand counting. For the five Bush-wackers on the Supreme Court to be concerned about the impossibility of setting a statewide standard of recounting--instead of being concerned about actually counting votes--is both surreal and hypocritical. That's why Justice John Paul Stevens' comments in his dissent are so important. "Counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm," he said. What created irreparable harm was not counting every vote.

It's estimated that 187,000 votes went uncounted in Florida with more than half of them in black precincts. Even the pathetic Republican counter-argument that votes also weren't counted in Republican counties are blatant distortions. What they won't tell you about the 25,000 votes thrown out by the Duval County canvassing board is that 17,000 came from the black precincts. This would be akin to saying the Republican stronghold of Franklin County threw out 25,000 votes without telling you that 17,000 came from the Democratic black precincts on the Near East Side.

Also, in order to keep the votes from being counted, Bush essentially rented a riot of 150 Republican operatives who stormed the Miami Dade canvassing board to stop the recount. The Wall Street Journal reported that the plane tickets and hotel rooms for the demonstrators were paid for by Republican funders and that the president-select called and joked with the "Rent-A-Riot" crowd at an after-protest party where Las Vegas lounge lizard Wayne Newton serenaded them with Danke Schoen.

We know Gore won the popular vote. The exit polls on election night were right, regardless of Bush's cousin reversing the call on Fox TV. Most projections have Gore winning Florida if all the ballots were counted--by between 23,000 to 57,000 votes. That's why Bush loyalists are busy trying to seal those uncounted ballots "for the good of the country." Remember, they also sealed the JFK, MLK and RFK files to help the country. Thanks. Reality's a tough thing to deal with in a democracy.

The president-select, George W. Bush, has a huge "legitimacy gap." The words to the mid-'60s Zappa song keep coming to mind, "The idiot bastard son, his daddy's a Nazi in Congress today." The son grew up, and despite double-legacy Ivy League-style affirmative action--and even though his daddy is the former CIA director and President--the bastard appears to be as idiotic as ever.

It should strike people as odd that after apparently stealing an election through the state apparatus controlled by Bush's governor brother, his loyalists would immediately demand that everybody kiss the ring of legitimacy. I'll be first to admit that the Bush family stole it fair and square, and they might have been owed one after the Kennedy boys' handiwork in 1960. But to pretend that the Bushes didn't steal it through the systematic disenfranchisement of blacks, Jews, Hispanics and poor people in Florida--please, my brothers and sisters.

If Bush wants legitimacy, he's going to have to earn it the old-fashioned way, through real policy initiatives that are inclusive--and that doesn't mean wrapping himself in the Confederate flag as he did in the South Carolina primary.

During the Reagan-Bush era (1981-93), the CIA regularly rigged elections throughout the Third World, as in Nicaragua and El Salvador. There's a name political scientists use for these staged elections to create legitimacy: "demonstration elections." In Florida, the Bushes just showed us how to stage a demonstration election in the oldest democracy in the world.

FEATURED ARTICLE

12/28/2000

Clean air villain

The U.S. Senate's new environmental chair has green groups smelling brown

by Bob Fitrakis

Last week's swap between U.S. Senate subcommittee chairs calls into question Ohio's junior senator and former governor George Voinovich's environmental record. Senator Voinovich assumes the chairmanship of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's Subcommittee on Clean Air, Wetlands, Private Property and Nuclear Safety. He exchanged gavels with Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who now chairs the Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

While governor of Ohio from 1991-1999, Voinovich frequently clashed with New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman, President-elect George W. Bush's choice to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Whitman lobbied the U.S. EPA to crack down on air pollution blowing from Ohio into the northeastern states. The U.S. EPA cited Ohio as the single "largest source" of air pollution affecting the northeast.

Currently, the V Group of Cleveland, the company owned by the senator's brother Paul Voinovich, is under investigation by the U.S. EPA, the IRS and the FBI for allegations that a former company vice president participated in an illegal kickback scheme to obtain dumping permits from the Ohio EPA for a landfill when Voinovich was governor. The Ohio EPA originally investigated the V Group and cleared the company, while the federal probe has led to a half dozen felony convictions. The most recent conviction was Robert Vukelic, a Steubenville landfill owner who pleaded guilty to making more than $170,000 in secret payments to then-V Group Vice President Clark V. Miller. The V Group has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.

Voinovich has earned a reputation among environmental groups as an ardent opponent of the Clean Air Act and the U.S. EPA. Commenting on the chairmanship swap, Frank O'Donnell of the Clean Air Trust called Voinovich "much smarter," "more effective" and "more dangerous than Inhofe." Earlier this year, the trust named Voinovich its "Clean Air Villain of the Month." Voinovich's attempts to force the U.S. EPA to factor in cost to polluters along with cost to human health drew criticism from Paul G. Billings, vice president of governmental relations for the American Lung Association: "With that bill, he wanted to rip the lungs out of the Clean Air Act."

In defense of the gavel swap, Voinovich's press secretary Scott Milburn stressed the senator's work on landmark legislation protecting Florida's Everglades. "I think that experience with him is going to cause a lot of people to re-evaluate," Milburn told the Associated Press.

Two days after switching chairmanships last week, Voinovich was once again echoing a familiar refrain from his gubernatorial days. According to the Columbus Dispatch, "U.S. Senator George Voinovich wants them [the U.S. EPA] to back off if they aren't willing to provide money to fix the problems [of sewage spills into rivers and streams]." Voinovich told the Dispatch, "We need to improve the qualities of our streams, but that shouldn't result in astronomical costs in sewer rates for homeowners and industry."

During his successful 1990 campaign for governor, Voinovich ran an ad of himself posing in a canoe, and touted himself as the "environmental governor." His eight-year tenure suggests this was the triumph of image over substance.

By May 1992, the Ohio Environmental Council (OEC) openly attacked the governor for his failure to live up to his campaign promises. The OEC suggested a "toxic tour" of Ohio. The governor blamed most of the pollution on his predecessor, Richard Celeste. A little over a month later, Governor Voinovich ordered a $2.9 million cut in the Ohio EPA budget, the Dispatch reported. Democratic Representative Patrick Sweeney claimed, "For nearly two-and-one-half years, Governor George Voinovich has paid lip service to the environment. Now, all of a sudden he has drawn a line in the dust over the pending budget for the Ohio EPA...The governor showed his priorities by hitting the EPA with a 19.5-percent cut."

In June 1992, opponents of the Waste Technologies Industries incinerator in East Liverpool attacked Governor Voinovich for failing to stop the operation of the toxic waste burner. Despite these early criticisms of Voinovich's environmental policies, the governor staunchly defended himself as an environmentalist. On August 27, 1993, Voinovich told the Dispatch, "We're doing the right thing," as he allowed Southern Ohio Coal to pump 600 million gallons of toxic waste from a flooded mine into the Leading and Raccoon Creeks and tributaries. The U.S. EPA challenged the governor's action in court, while the Dispatch reported that "all aquatic life in Leading Creek has been killed."

Following his defense of this environmental catastrophe, the governor quickly leaped into action. Within a week he spent two hours canoeing the Cuyahoga River with a 20-boat entourage of his administrators. The OEC called it a "hypocritical public relations stunt."

Environmental groups point to numerous other anti-environmental positions that mar the record of the U.S. Senate's new clean air and wetlands chair:

February 1994: OEC Director Richard Sahli called Voinovich's "brownfields" redevelopment plan for abandoned and contaminated industrial sites "the biggest environmental swindle in Ohio history." The plan, according to the Dispatch, "establishes a voluntary, privatized program" that allowed the polluters to determine if the cleanup was successful without public input.