Voting Trump and Ohio Republicans Out of Office

In letters last month supporting the re-election of President Donald Trump, state and local Republicans have outlined reasons that Ohio voters should consider voting for him in the upcoming election.  But it seems they have left out several important factors that Ohio residents need to consider and they fail to address many issues critical to Stark County voters.

The astounding corruption scandal that engulfed top elected Republican leaders in the Ohio legislature last month is the elephant in the room weighing heavily on the minds of many voters in Ohio. The $60 million bribery and racketeering enterprise led by Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was breathtaking in scope and eye-popping in its size and arrogance.   If we are still interested in “draining the swamp” then a good place to start is within the top echelons of the state’s Republican elected representatives.  This alleged criminal conspiracy involving secret corporate donations, pay-to-play scheming, laundered campaign funds, and dark money seems to have found a home in Columbus. There are strong hints of financial irregularities among top Trump campaign officials as well, some of whom have been or are still in prison.

Claims that President Trump has provided leadership in protecting our country from the Covid-19 pandemic is way beyond anyone’s honest evaluation. The Trump administration’s response to the Corona virus is nothing short of catastrophic. From his initial denial of the looming crisis in February to the lackadaisical approach to preparation and education in March and April, Trump’s management of ongoing disastrous developments has been marked by ongoing denial, delay, and chaotic decision-making. To this day, half a year into the maelstrom, there is still no cohesive national strategy or effective planning.  Even as the USA is still the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth, we have the worst track record in dealing with the disease, leading the world in infections, disease and death.  As nervous parents try to figure out how to send their children back to school, Trump tweets out bizarre conspiracy theories from questionable doctors espousing useless medicine, evil spirits and demons. The ongoing calamity continues to disrupt lives, exhaust health care workers, bankrupt small businesses and scare seniors and their families.

Any discussion of re-electing the President must consider the years of blatant bigoted and prejudiced statements spoken and tweeted out by Trump against various American minorities.  Voters understand that tacitly supporting radical fringe groups like white supremacists and nationalist or even neo-Nazi far right marchers led to the violence against people of color, immigrants, and Jews. This kind of evil, that many of our parents and grandparents fought against in World War II, is what has led to the Black Lives Matter movement.  Young people, Black, Hispanic and Native communities, suburban moms, sports organizations, corporations, and many others are striving to put an end once and for all to the 400-year stain of racism in our country.  Rather than help, Trump and his followers seem to want to fan the flames.

Finally, and this issue will be paramount to Ohio voters and in particular Stark County residents, the rolling disaster that is the current American economy will determine how people vote this Fall. Once again, a Republican president is presiding over yet another Great Recession. The American economic engine has sputtered and stalled; its pistons misfiring.  Unemployment has spiked to over 11% and the gross domestic product has sunk the fastest and furthest in the history of record-keeping.  Renters are panicked4 as evictions begin. Foreclosures are forecast to jump. Funding for school districts, cities and townships and states will shrink next year. Small businesses are shuttering their doors and bankruptcies are rising. While Republican leaders tout the stock market, the national debt balloons to astronomical heights.

It is ironic that Trump supporters are trying to scare Americans with visions of socialism and communism coming to America. A hallmark of 1970’s communism was long lines of unhappy consumers waiting in lines to purchase bread and other common goods.  As we observe our country in 2020, we have seen long lines at food banks, shortages of toilet paper and cleaning supplies, cars snaked for miles to get covid testing and voters waiting for hours just to cast ballots.

President Reagan asked voters in 1980 if they were better off or worse off than four years before. With no end in sight to the epidemic and economic turmoil, worsening climate change and still no health care fix,Is it any wonder that working class and middle income Americans are abandoning trumpism in droves, and that even Ohio, a traditional swing state, may well join a blue wave.

Craig Covey is a resident of Jackson Township and the Democratic candidate for Stark County Treasurer.

              

Press Release Covey Campaign for Stark County Treasurer

July 4, 2020         For Immediate Release

Re:  Craig Covey for Stark County Treasurer Campaign

Candidate Not Seeking Campaign Contributions For Election

Any contributions to be distributed to local charities

(Canton) Craig Covey, Democratic candidate for Stark County Treasurer, is announcing that he will not be seeking or using any monetary donations or contributions from PACS, political organizations, or individuals in his efforts to become the next Stark County Treasurer. He is paying for campaign costs with his own resources. Any funds received by the campaign committee – Friends of Craig Covey, will be donated to Stark County based charities, with an emphasis on groups helping residents during the current economic and pandemic crisis. 

He has also decided that the campaign will be as green as possible, with printing only done with recycled materials.

Covey is also announcing that should the voters of Stark County decide to elect him to this office, he will be donating ten percent of the treasurer salary to local charities as well.

“I’m declaring this campaign and my efforts independent of any and all influences based on donations or funding from any sources or special interests,” says Covey.  “I want to make Stark County a better place to live and work.  For too long our region has suffered from a stasis that is reluctant to try new ideas and use creativity and best practices to solve problems and bring us to a brighter, modern and enlightened future,” he added.  

The campaign is seeking endorsements and will accept in-kind support such as get out the vote efforts and voter outreach. Most of the election efforts will focus on traditional media, newspapers and radio, electronic communication and social platforms.

Covey was born and raised in Stark County and attended Plain Local Schools, then received his degree from The Ohio State University in Columbus.  During the 80’s he founded and directed civil rights and advocacy organizations in Ohio and Michigan. In the 90’s he founded and ran organizations developing health education and disease prevention programs statewide in Michigan around the HIV/AIDS pandemic. He was also a city councilman and mayor in Ferndale Michigan from 2000 to 2010 and then was elected to the Oakland County Michigan Board of Commissioners until 2013. He was appointed community liaison and communications director for the Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner. He retired in 2017 and returned home to Canton where much of his family still reside. 

    

            www.coveys-corner.blogspot.com   FB Craig Covey    Twitter craigcovey               

Not the first time: Here is how to deal with the Covid Pandemic

As the covid-19 pandemic continues to sweep across the globe bringing fear, illness and death to every country, it is important to understand that, notwithstanding mankind’s desire to control the environment and continue population growth, progress, and prosperity, pandemics and new infectious diseases have been a constant in human history. It is nice to believe that we can use modern medicine and technology to prevent such disasters, but the natural order reminds us that we are not always in control. The current situation enveloping the world is just the latest reminder that humans are one part of a much larger web of life on Earth. If we want to continue the march of our civilization, we will have to marshal our resources and use the intelligence that has brought us this far.

Plagues and epidemics predate human history, and periodically swept through early civilizations in antiquity. Plague swept through the Roman Empire in the centuries before Christ, and in the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed between one third and one half of the populations of Europe and Asia. The arrival of the Spanish, English, and French to the New World in the middle of the last millennium brought smallpox and other diseases that wiped out tens of millions of Native Americans. And in modern times, students of history know that the Spanish Flu killed tens of millions, including young adults, in a pandemic just one hundred years ago.  In spite of its name, that flu began first in western Kansas.

While most people show a respectful amount of fear for this new disease and want to protect the health and lives of themselves and their loved ones, and want to help their neighbors and communities, it is also human nature for some to go into denial and pretend the scourge will simply go away.  Some turn fear into anger, railing against the disruption and change that has arrived; witness the political protests that erupted in state capitals recently.  A far better response would be to learn the facts, understand the new reality, follow the advice of experts, and prepare for change.  Things will not totally be going back to the way they were.    

The HIV/AIDS pandemic was a much slower moving disaster that began to unfold in 1981.  It was marked by fear, anger and denial.  It too is believed to have been a virus that jumped from animal to human.  Because it initially infected disparate and marginal groups, societies ignored it for the first several years.  President Reagan famously never uttered its name until 1985 when his friend Rock Hudson was stricken.  Stigma and prejudice surrounded those at risk. The HIV pandemic changed lives, including my own. After losing dozens of friends in Ohio and Michigan, I switched careers in 1987 to focus solely on AIDS prevention education. Starting from scratch, we helped develop behavior-based programs to reduce risk and educate society. It took four years to develop an antibody test and another decade to find interventions and drugs to reduce the death rate.  Since 1981 AIDS has taken a toll of 32 million souls, and counting. Interestingly, Dr. Anthony Fauci was a leader and hero in the fight against AIDS. Today he is the most respected expert on Covid-19 in America. 

Profound change in society resulted from the HIV pandemic including changes in sex education, viral and behavioral medicine, drug treatment, marriage laws, health privacy, and lifestyle choices.   Coronavirus will be making long-term changes too.

As with HIV/AIDS, in Covid we lost valuable time at the beginning, with politics and denial slowing the response. Now that the initial shock to society is wearing off, the real work will continue.   If we’re smart, we will listen to the experts in medicine, virology, epidemiology, and public health.  We fill follow their guidelines, increase research on treatments and vaccines, finally ramp up testing, and hopefully learn from our mistakes.  We will care for the sick, protect our seniors, and rebuild our economies.  Leaders will emerge and ideally, we will embrace new found appreciation for the essential workers who kept things going during the turmoil. But this crisis won’t be over by Memorial Day, or the Fourth Of July, or Labor Day. There is a chance the pestilence will take many more lives this coming fall and winter. What we will have is a new normal that may not include packing thousands of people like sardines on cruise ships or squeezing hundreds of travelers onto each other’s laps on airplanes.  

If we learn from history and follow the science, maybe we will also finally understand that humanity is interconnected worldwide, and part of a finite ecosystem that is more fragile than we once thought.  As mankind’s world population nears eight billion people, maybe we will learn to live in a way that is more sustainable and in harmony with nature. The alternative will not be pretty.    

          

    

Why I am running for Stark County Treasurer

     In 1970, the population of Stark County was 370,000.  Today, fifty years later, Stark County's population is still the same at 370,000 residents.  We need new leadership. We need people with forward thinking and progressive ideas. As young people continue to leave our community, and the population according to experts keeps getting older, and less prosperous, the stasis that seems to have a lock on our county must end.

     As critical 2020 elections approached,there were many local offices up for election with only one candidate.   I offered to step up to once again serve my community, and the county's Democratic Party chair asked me to consider running for treasurer.  I said yes.

     In a functioning democracy, voters need to have choices when they are picking their local, state and national leaders.  Especially in these current times of cynicism and division, with our institutions under attack from within and outside our country,  citizens need to have the opportunity to make a selection of their choice from among candidates for all offices.

     I am a born and raised Stark County resident.  After growing up and attending Perry and Plain Local schools, I moved to Columbus to attain my degree from Ohio State University. In my 20's in Columbus, I founded and ran the Stonewall Union, Ohio's first and largest LGBT rights organization.
We founded then also the state's Gay Pride Parade, now the largest such annual march between New York and Chicago.

     In Michigan, I founded or managed additional state-wide civil rights and health education organizations. I was elected twice as a city councilman in Ferndale, Michigan, and then after eight years there was elected mayor of that city twice.  In 2010 voters elected me to the Oakland County Commission.  Oakland County as a population of 1.3 million and is among the top 5% wealthiest counties in America.

     I returned  home to Canton to support my family here three years ago and I have already begun volunteering and working to make the region stronger and better.

    My core values have always included the need to give back to the community.  Honesty, hard work, inclusiveness, and a love of our country's diversity are bedrock principles that have guided my life.  I believe in science, knowledge, and data-driven progress. Every organization and office that I have been a part of have always attained balanced budgets, honest accounting, open management, and sustainable programs.  I worked on women's equality in the 70's, gay rights in the 80's, community health in the 90's, and environmental protections for the past forty years.

     Every elected leader's top goal should be to serve their residents, and if Stark County voters elect me in November, I will always strive to make them proud.

Keep Women's Choices in Ohio Strong, Safe, and Legal

Recent attempts by the Ohio legislature to change laws and restrict women’s reproductive rights are excellent demonstrations of how gerrymandering skews the will of the people in our state.  While Ohio is generally considered a “swing state” or a “purple state” when it comes to elections, Republicans in power drew the districts to give themselves a nearly two to one advantage in the state house and senate. The result is an extreme legislature that is enacting policies nowhere near what Ohioans support.

A recent bill introduced in Ohio would try to classify zygotes and unborn fetuses as people, and would call for doctors who help a woman terminate a pregnancy to be guilty of pre-mediated murder, subject to criminal prosecution. That same bill could force doctors to operate on a woman with an ectopic pregnancy (when a fertilized egg is growing in the fallopian tubes) to try to re-implant the zygote into her womb.  This procedure does not actually exist, and is very dangerous to the mother.   The Republican legislator from southwest Ohio who sponsored this bill admitted he didn’t research the issue or consult with medical experts.  This bizarre situation made international news and put our state in a bad light.

 Last spring the Ohio legislature passed, and the Governor signed, a law known as a “heartbeat” bill. This halts all abortions after a heartbeat can be detected in the fetus - about six weeks after fertilization.  Even if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, physicians who terminate a pregnancy after that point would be subject to criminal prosecution and prison.  With this action, Ohio joined Alabama, Arkansas and Utah in trying to roll back women’s reproductive choices that have been available for nearly 50 years.

A recent guest columnist in the Repository praised President Trump for halting all family planning funds going to Planned Parenthood, an organization that mainly provides education and birth control services to lower income women along with cancer screenings and other health programs. This is nothing to be proud of at all.

  

Americans, including Ohioans, by a substantial majority do not support these kinds of extreme changes to the rights and privacy that women and families should continue to enjoy.  Let’s let women, parents, families, and medical personnel make these very personal and private decisions, and let’s keep politicians in Columbus and Washington out of the bedroom and out of women's wombs.

         

Canton Repository Guest Editorial June 2019

                                                                               

Recurring themes in stories about Canton and Stark County concern the loss of population, flat incomes, and the advancing age of our residents. Stark County’s population is the same today as it was in 1970.  We are losing our young people. Common to many cities of the “rust belt”, the population is getting older and less prosperous. Young people leave for bigger cities and better jobs. What is mentioned less is that this process has been going on for forty years. I know this because I was one of those who left.

I grew up in Canton and graduated from GlenOak. I had a great childhood but couldn’t wait to leave. In 1975 I moved to Columbus for school and found a vibrant, exciting, growing city.  I had always felt somehow stifled in Canton.  I wanted more choices, more diversity, and more excitement.    

It isn’t rocket science to figure out why young folks leave the area, and why other young families don’t come here.  All you need do is ask them.  Social scientists, urban planners, and researchers have conducted innumerable studies and focus groups over the years, and they’ve learned that millennials and those younger, want to live in cities that have diversity, character, cultural and entertainment choices, and public transit.  They want walkability, downtown living, and cultural variety. Those under 40 are less interested in monochromatic neighborhoods, car ownership, and suburbia.  They want to feel connected; they want transportation options, green spaces, and public gathering places.

Most of all they want diversity. These new generations are the most diverse in American history, and the cities in America that are successful, like Seattle, Boston, Chicago and Washington DC, are bustling with Americans of Asian, Latin, and Middle eastern backgrounds.  Americans under 40 have largely rejected the old racial divisions of black vs. white, and now prefer to live and work with a kaleidoscope of people of different ethnic backgrounds and lifestyles. 

Certainly jobs are critically important, but it isn’t only that people follow jobs. Businesses and employers also follow people and look at demographics.  The fast growing and high paying tech and information companies are choosing to locate in areas with strong education programs and younger, diverse populations.  They locate where their potential employees and customers live.  It is why smart cities invest in education, downtown development, and public transit. It’s why cities like Denver, Portland and Salt Lake City thrive.

There isn’t a single successful city in America that does not have a visible vibrant LGBT community. Look no further than Columbus to see how a town that recognized and embraced its gay community became the most successful and fastest growing city in Ohio.  Whole neighborhoods were rejuvenated and reborn, and its glittering downtown is full of life.  Festivals bring people to the city core all summer long. The annual Gay Pride Parade and festival, which began in 1982, now brings hundreds of thousands of people to its downtown each June, along with millions of dollars in economic activity. 

 I later lived in Detroit, an area that epitomized urban decay and the hollowing out of our cities.  Friends suggested I was “rowing back to the Titanic”.  In 1990 I settled in a small blue-collar city on the border of Detroit.  Ferndale was getting older, less prosperous, and losing population. The downtown was an empty beige canyon.  But we began to promote the city as a place that welcomed everyone, including artists, musicians, gay people, and others in the “creative class”.  We started music festivals and pride marches. We empowered our Downtown Development Authority to bring in new restaurants and nightclubs and placed greenery and baskets of flowers downtown. We changed ordinances to allow patio dining, and soon the city began to revive.  We made the city walkable with new streetlights and sidewalks. Above all we made sure that the welcome mat was out for everyone.  There was initial resistance to the growing LGBT community, but when neighborhoods blossomed and property values skyrocketed, that resistance melted away. Today there is a building boom going on, the downtown is full of color and life, and the largest demographic is people aged 25 to 34.  Even Detroit is coming back. It is rebuilding its downtown and building public transportation options even while embracing its past.  It has become cool and young urban pioneers of every stripe are moving to the city.

Canton is making strides in the right direction, with a budding arts district and a growing music scene.  Farsighted developers are trying to build apartments and living spaces downtown. We have amazing restaurants and taverns. Events like the annual Blues Festival, Saturday concerts and First Fridays are bringing people into the city.  Groups like ArtsinStark do amazing work but we must redouble our efforts.

 We cannot hang our hats solely on football and trying to bring back 1950’s era jobs. The dominant colors as one travels downtown are too often the dusty grays of concrete and tans faded brick. Regional leaders must temper sclerotic policies that push suburban sprawl.  The fate of the region is inextricably tied to the success of our cities.

Business, religious, and political leaders must begin to aggressively welcome young people, ethnic and racial minorities, and LGBT people to the community.  Such diversity is not just to be tolerated or even recognized, but should be promoted, embraced and celebrated. Such actions will help bring tech, information, and environmental companies that now fuel the new economy of the 21st century.

It’s ironic that as Stark County gets older and less populated, there are thousands of young families and children from Central America stuck in holding pens on our southern border seeking to legally immigrate to our country.  Immigrants built Canton in the last two centuries, and they can be the customers, workers and residents for the next one. 

I moved back to Canton last year because I have family here, and because it has great parks, a low cost of living, and the friendliest people in the Midwest.  Folks are working hard to make it better, and the potential is limitless if we think smart and work together.    

Craig Covey was a human rights activist in Columbus, Ohio and a health educator for the Michigan Department of Public Health.  He was a City Councilman and Mayor of Ferndale, Michigan, and an Oakland County Commissioner.          

Retire Coal to the Dustbin of History

It was confounding to read in the Canton Repository that the Ohio Coal Association has joined other lobbyists to oppose the American Electric Power plan to build large new solar power generating facilities in southern Ohio.  The proposed new project would bring high paying jobs to our state, reduce costs for electricity, and bring clean energy at a time when people are desperately seeking ways to stop massive carbon pollution worldwide.  That "Big Coal" would oppose solar power may not be surprising, it is nevertheless cynical and selfish.

Coal was an important energy source in the previous two centuries, but its use now is the most dangerous type of fuel used in power plants. Its black smoke releases millions of tons of carbon and other poisons into the air and its coal tar residue in lakes and streams kills fish and other life. Natural gas, solar, and wind power is cheaper and much cleaner.    

In measuring costs to create electricity, you have to include coal's contribution to rising costs for insurance, food, and infrastructure as a result of climate change.  If we want a decent future for our kids and grand-kids, we must support cleaner forms of energy and retire the use of coal to the dustbin of history. In Ohio and worldwide, time is running out to make smarter decisions and invest in 21st century technology to save the planet.

Craig Covey

Jackson Township