5 DEAD in OHIO. (and much more!)

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  • Senate Bill 5 is dead, that is – Ohio Governor Kasich’s draconian overreach of a union-busting bill was utterly slaughtered today by 61% of the state’s voters.  Sayonara to the Koch Brothers / Republican Party anti-worker agenda, at least in that vital swing state!
  • Also today in Maine, where the Republican-dominated legislature and Governor had overturned the 40-year-old law allowing Maine voters to register on the same day that they vote – check it out – Maine voters by a similar huge margin brought it back!  Desperate Republicans, at the last minute, even tried calling same-day registration GAY.  Didn’t work.

  • Meanwhile, ‘way down south in Mississippi, Republican anti-choice extremists put up a ballot initiative declaring personhood to begin at fertilization – outlawing not only abortion but many forms of birth control and fertility treatments, and even making miscarriages subject to criminal investigation.  Mississippians flocked to the polls today… and JUST SAID NO to that rightwing government invasion of their lives and bodies. (Again, by an overwhelming margin.)
  • Simultaneously in Kentucky, red Kentucky, the popular Democratic Governor and Attorney General were both resoundingly re-elected.  Also tonight, the second-most powerful politician in Arizona, Republican Senate leader Russell Pearce, the author of the notorious anti-immigrant SB 1070 is well on his way to being recalled as I write, and has all but conceded defeat.
  • And so far, due to Operation Bank Transfer Day – last Saturday – and since the few weeks leading up to it, “more than $4.5 billion has shifted from big banks into the nation’s roughly 7,000 credit unions alone,” according to the Credit Union National Association.  “Our branches had a flurry of activity, and we treated it as a celebration of community and a liberation from big-bank neglect,” said one community bank CEO.  Meanwhile, the terrified big banks have reversed course on their planned massive fee hikes, hoping for mercy from our movement, which will not soon be forthcoming.  Too big to fail?  A problem we can fix.
  • Further victories of the Occupy Movement?  Let’s see, as the stodgy Calbuzz grudgingly admitted:

Rather astonishingly, the OWS movement has succeeded in less than two months in raising the nation’s consciousness, and moving onto its agenda, the ugly issue of what to do with a dysfunctional political system, fueled and sustained by big corporate and Wall Street money, that aids and abets a Third World-rank inequality gap among its citizens. In truth, it’s hard to imagine, six or even three months ago, the New York Times playing on Page 1 a CBO study about wealth inequality, or a top rank Washpost pundit opining thusly:

“In particular, growing inequalities of wealth and income – which should have been a central issue in American politics for at least a decade – are finally at the heart of our discourse. We are, at last, discussing the social and economic costs of concentrating more resources in the hands of the top sliver of our society.”

What’s the world coming to?  Discuss!


About Vern Nelson

Greatest pianist/composer in Orange County, and official political troubadour of Anaheim and most other OC towns. Regularly makes solo performances, sometimes with his savage-jazz band The Vern Nelson Problem. Reach at vernpnelson@gmail.com, or 714-235-VERN.