Butler County Progressive Political Political Action Committee held a reception for former Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner at the home of Prue and Steve Dana on the evening of October 25, 2011. Jennifer is the creator of Courage PAC. Courage PAC is an Ohio state political action committee focused on citizen involvement on issues such as financial reform, fair elections and redistricting and accountable and transparent government.

Jennifer addressing attendees of the reception.

Host Steve Dana with Jennifer.

Jennifer with members of the Miami University College Democrats

All the pictures of Jennifer Brunner’s Oxford Reception can be seen Here.

Thanks to Daniel Fairbanks for the pictures

President Don Daiker opened the PAC meeting and welcomed both members and guests alike. The meeting included endorsement recommendations and guest speakers.

President of Miami University College Democrats, Jimmy Jordan, reported about activities of the group.

The following candidates were recommended by the BCPPAC Executive committee for endorsement, introduced by Mark Hardig (Executive Board Member), and were approved by the general membership.

Kate Rousmaniere – Oxford City Council

Charlie Ford – Oxford City Council

John Kinne – Oxford Township Trustee

Tony Klimer – West Chester Township Trustee

Kyle Peavley – Trenton City Council

Kate Jacob, WE ARE OHIO Field Organizer, Butler County talked about the work being done to repeal Senate Bill 5.  We need to remember “In Ohio, No means No.  No on State Issue 2 means No on Senate Bill 5.”

Sarah Benzing, Senator Sherrod Brown Campaign Manager talked to the group.

Guest of Honor and Featured Speaker was Ohio State Representative Michael Stinziano.  Representative Stinziano talked about House Bill 194 and why this voter suppression bill must be repealed.

Alex Youn, Executive Director, Ohio House Democratic Caucus talked to the group about some of the legislation in the Ohio House.

Greg Schultz, State Director, OBAMA FOR AMERICA  elaborated on some of the state strategy for 2012.

On July 3rd the City of Oxford held their Independence Day Parade.  Butler County Progressives had a large presence.  BCP-PAC members (left to right: Bill Gracie, Bill Houk, Kate Rousmaniere, Don Daiker, Clyde Brown, Gayle Brown, and Mary Sue Houk) are seen lining up for the parade with our new banner. You can see pictures of the Independence Day Parade HERE.

Several members can be seen proudly caring our new banner down High Street.  Pictured left to right are Rick Bailey holding the banner, Bill Gracie, Bill Houk, Roland Duerksen and Kate Rousmaniere behind Gayle Brown with flag, Mary Duerksen, Mary Sue Houk with back turned, Lillian Corti with sign, Dave Christman on the bike, and Don Daiker.  Following the marchers is a 1929 Ford Model A driven by Mark Sawyer representing local AFSCME workers.

Here’s a closer view of the vintage Ford.

Members of BCP-PAC traveled to Columbus to march in the June 29th parade that delivered signed petitions to the Ohio Secretary of State to repeal SB 5. You can see pictures of the Columbus Rally HERE.

Don Daiker and Bob Ratterman are shown carrying our new banner in a parade of  6,500 participants.

The picture that says it all.  This sign shows the number of signatures turned into the Secretary of State.

I’m sure there will be dozens of Butler County Republicans willing to support the governor and his new budget, so let me present the Democratic view.  There are two sides to every coin, and this one is far from perfect.  Here are three big problems with the Republican budget that passed the Ohio Senate last week: First, it’s true that Kasich balanced his budget and did not raise taxes, but he did steal tax revenues from public schools and local governments and reassign them to the state.  This blatant political tactic of seizing CAT taxes and other revenues that were previously allocated to fund local townships will devastate local governments; but it will have one major benefit.  It will let the governor argue in 2012 that he “lowered” taxes, while those awful school boards and local leaders tried to raise them!  Isn’t that tricky?  Well played sir!  Ohio law mandates that schools and local governments provide basic services.  That alone will force local school boards and local governments to raise taxes next year.  In fact, schools and local governments will cut jobs, lower wages, and raise taxes, but the total effect will fail to make up for the losses in state funding.  West Chester Township alone will lose roughly $5million per year over the next two or three years, and the Lakota School District will lose more than that!

Secondly, how do you sell a budget in a bad economy when its primary feature is job cuts?  Apparently, you call it the “Jobs Budget!”  Let’s be clear about one thing – this budget cuts jobs. The public schools alone will lose roughly 50,000 jobs in the next two years.  When the governor claims that he is creating jobs, he means that he is reducing taxes for corporations and wealthy estates.  He may even believe that works.  The facts say they don’t.  The Bush tax cuts proved beyond a reasonable doubt that tax cuts don’t create jobs.  Our national unemployment rate increased from 5% and peaked over 10% after the Bush tax cuts were passed.  By the way, they passed by just one vote, exactly ten years ago.  Our economy has been in trouble ever since.

Third, Kasich is selling major state assets, including prisons, the liquor monopoly, the lottery, and drilling rights in state parks.  He’s selling them at fire sale prices to his friends and allies.  He campaigned against one time sources of revenues like the federal stimulus package passed in 2009, but these asset sales are one time sources of revenue that will help balance his budget but make it harder to balance future budgets in the State of Ohio.  With the state coffers nearly empty, and our economy still sputtering, why is Kasich cutting taxes for his friends and increasing the tax burden on the middle class?  When these taxes are shifted to the local level, you know we will be the ones paying!  Meanwhile, the local members of the right wing like to worship the idea of “No new taxes!”  Well no one likes to pay taxes, do they?    No elected official wants to increase them either, so we hope you didn’t want your child to have a first class school.  We can’t afford that.  We hope that you can afford a new set of shock absorbers because your local road maintenance is about to be deferred.  Got burglar alarms?  Your police department is about to be cut back.   And we’re really sorry if you needed that “911” service for an ambulance… because we just can’t spend money we don’t have!  Voters will be talking about Kasich’s budget for years to come, and they may say to one another, “You know, we could have done better.”

Jeff Perdew
Butler County Democrats
Liberty Township
June 12, 2011

Saturday April 16, 2011 there was a rally against SB 5 at the Courthouse in Hamilton. You can see pictures of the Hamilton rally here.

One picture I don’t want anybody to miss is that of our two t-shirt sellers Kathy Ellison and PAC president Don Daiker. The PAC still have some t-shirts left. We will be selling them at our general meeting May 10th. Don is holding up and showing what the back of the t-shirt looks like. The young man in the background is displaying the front of the t-shirt.

This article was posted in the Huffington Post on March 13, 2011. If you read this, and you should, make sure you read the last paragraph. Maybe we could use this theme.

For a long time, I tried to fight it.

Whenever someone had the temerity to criticize public schools and schoolteachers, I stood staunchly in the corner of those who practice my profession. I noted that in my 12 years as a teacher, I have had the privilege of serving with hard-working, skilled professionals.

Prior to becoming a teacher, I spent the previous 22 years as a newspaper reporter and had the opportunity to observe dozens of schools doing outstanding jobs of serving their communities.

Sadly, I have finally had my blinders removed and I no longer have the same glowing view of public education.

It has nothing to do with test scores, considering most of the schools are taking poorly-worded tests from companies that are making a mint off selling tests and practice tests. After all, if the tests are any good, there would be no need for these practice tests, which have turned out to be a lucrative sideline for the companies.

It has nothing to do with lazy, incompetent teachers who received tenure and cannot be fired. On the contrary, that is a phenomenon of some large, suburban schools whose failures are then exploited by those who wish to see public education destroyed. From what I have seen over the years, many young teachers who are not cut out for teaching quickly discover that and move to other work. Others are encouraged by administrators to leave education, while others are removed before they can do more damage. Few incompetents receive tenure in Missouri and most of those are as a result of administrators not doing their jobs.

It has nothing to do with the stories about teachers misusing their positions of trust to take advantage of students. Some critics have targeted teachers because of these few who have brought shame on all of us. The reason those instances are so well publicized is because they are still thankfully rare.

It has nothing to do with out of control unions who care about teachers more than children. It has not been my experience that union members put anyone ahead of children.

It has nothing to do with teachers working 8 to 3 and getting three months off in the summer and Christmas breaks. I don’t know many teachers who don’t take their work home with them and most arrive well before first bell and work long after children have gone home. Summers are spent either teaching summer school or taking classes and attending seminars to keep up with the latest developments or to earn higher degrees. Of course, those higher degrees and the debt the teachers have run up earning them will be wasted once laws are passed, including one scheduled to be voted on this week in Missouri that will eliminate years of valuable experience and advanced degrees in favor of a system that relies on the same poorly written tests I mentioned before. Poverty, parents who don’t care, children with no interest in learning (or allowing others to learn) — none of those things mean anything. After all, if you believe the rhetoric from our politicians, the sole problem in American public education is horrible, inept teachers.

And that brings me to the sole reason I have changed my mind about the competence of American public schoolteachers — if we were doing our job, somewhere along the line we would have taught the politicians who are systematically destroying public education, the greatest of all American experiments, something about decency, respect, and developing the mortal fortitude to resist the siren song of the special interests who are well on their way to making the U. S. into a world of haves and have-nots, where public education will serve to provide low paid feeder stock for non-union companies and taxpayer-financed private schools will continue to cater to the elite, with the middle class existing only in history books.

Public schoolteachers have failed miserably by producing the most incompetent, mean-spirited legislators in U.S. history.

This Guest Column appeared in The Hamilton Journal March 18,2011:

During the first half of the last century, long before public employee unions, my grandfather was a small-town cop, back East. After 30 years of walking the beat and putting his life on the line, he retired, gray in hair and tired in body. Having raised two sons on a modest patrolman’s salary, he left the force without so much as an engraved pen, let alone a pension or benefits to support him and my grandmother. That’s the way it was in those days.

So he began a second career as the custodian at the town bank, mopping floors and emptying trash cans at night. Honorable and necessary work to be sure, but hardly justice for one who had already devoted a lifetime to public service. After working as a janitor for 15 years for a regular paycheck and the health benefits he couldn’t get as a cop, my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer at 67 and died shortly thereafter, never to see a much-deserved retirement, or live to know his grandchildren.

During that same era, my other grandfather served for decades as a big city firefighter, where responding to life-threatening fires was a weekly reality. But back then, a fireman’s pay wasn’t enough to support a growing family so, after fighting fires by day, he drove a cab at night to make ends meet (along with third and fourth jobs). His life, too, was cut short by cancer.

Thank goodness our public servants have a fairer shake today. Thank goodness they can expect reasonable work conditions, a living wage and access to deserved benefits and earned retirements. Of course, these gains were not granted one day by suddenly enlightened governments. They are the hard-fought advances, made in inches, over a half-century by public-employee unions on behalf of our public servants.

But the merits and accomplishments of organized labor seem lost on many Americans today. Thanks to a decades-long effort by anti-union Republicans to distort our very perception of unions, many non-union workers are now convinced that union workers simply get a better (and undeserved) deal — excessive pensions, higher pay, cushy benefits — a disparity that can apparently only be cured by dragging all workers down to the lowest common denominator, rather than striving to lift them all up to a higher standard.

But even if we accept the assertion that unions do get a “better deal” — a highly debatable claim — when did a living wage, affordable health care and a secure retirement for the working middle class become bad things? Why would we ever think it’s in our best interest to strip those gains from other American workers just because some of us don’t get them?

And why is it that many of the very same Republicans who opposed limiting obscene salaries and bonuses for (taxpayer-bailed-out) Wall Street bankers and corporate executives — on the grounds that it would keep corporate America’s best and the brightest from corner offices — don’t feel the same way about the middle class?

In response, union-haters often invoke the corporate mantra that replacing competitive wages and pensions with market-based mechanisms, like profit sharing and 401(k)s (the tax code product of intense corporate lobbying), gives workers a vested interest in the success of their employer and a stake in the health of our overall economy.

In the real world of credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, sub-prime mortgages and Ponzi schemes, where Wall Street bankers and corporate executives manipulate the system to enrich themselves (and stick taxpayers with the losses), the odds will always be stacked against the worker-investor. In the name of capitalism, employers have succeeded in shifting nearly all the workplace risks — job security, health-care costs, retirement savings — off their books and onto the backs of the employee. And all too often, unions stand as a last bastion of defense of a fair deal for the American worker.

Sadly, substantive discussions about the merits of unions, collective bargaining, and the like, couldn’t be more uninteresting to the crop of Republicans now in power in state capitals and Washington. Using an anemic economy and looming fiscal crises as pretexts, Republican motivations are as painfully obvious as they are purely political: Payback for the past, insurance for the future. If Republicans can finally kill unions, so goes the last significant obstacle to enactment of their anti-middle class, pro-corporate agenda.

Maybe the lesson of the last few months is this: When next we head to the polls, along with God, guns and government spending, we might be wise to remember a few other “g’s” before casting our ballots — like good-paying jobs and governments that believe in the inherent dignity of the American worker. Of course, that’s just my take. But I’d like to think that my grandfathers would agree.

Justin Coussoule of Liberty Twp. was the Democratic candidate in Ohio’s 8th Congressional District race in 2010. House Speaker John Boehner, R-West Chester Twp., won the contest.

Here is some “fair and balanced”.

Donna Mollaun posted this on her Facebook. I laughed so much I realized I needed to share it with anyone who didn’t see it.