Activist Deb Steele on building alliances, voter suppression, privatizing OSU, and expelling Sodexo from Columbus Public Schools

Steele has worked w/ Greenpeace and served as Outreach Director at Jennifer Brunner For Senate. She is currently an organizer w/ Columbus Jobs With Justice. She spoke w/ us at the Stand Up For Ohio festival on Aug. 20.

A ‘disorientation guide’ for incoming OSU freshmen (and freshwomen)

She is helping Ohio State University students form a chapter of the Progressive Student Coalition.

“We just sort of need more progressive groups coming together. The Progressive Student Coalition is the feminists, the environmentalists, the worker rights student groups coming together to get more bang for our activism energy.”

Those students did an event at OSU on May 5 of this year called Live Against Five, at which they gathered about 300 signatures to add to the petition drive that put the repeal of Ohio House Bill 5 up to a vote this fall.

The OSU Progressive Student Alliance currently is working on the ‘Disorientation Guide’ to give to incoming freshman.

“It’s about the realities of the politics of the city we live in and the reality of Gordon Gee acting pretty cushy w/ corporations.”

Privatizing our land grant university ?

“There are murmurs of him wanting to privatize Ohio State University in the near future,” said Steele.

She said there is currently money going to charter universities that should be going to public universities.

“ I wouldn’t be surprised-- if we did nothing--in a year and a half you would see some kind of OSU wing that’s a charter school. I’ve heard the chief medical center lobbyist say ‘we’re revisiting our mission statement; maybe we won’t always be a land grant university.’ So, we have a whole lot of fires to put out, here and now. But the greed doesn’t end. Privatize everything!”

Making the expansion of OSU’s medical center more accountable to the community

Steele is also involved w/ efforts to get a Community Benefit Agreement w/ the university, as it expands its medical center. Project One

“ It’s the largest construction project Columbus has ever seen. It’s gong to impact the Near Eastside a lot.”

Steele said OSU is probably going to buy half of Poindexter Village. It’s a 22 acre site and one of the first public housing units ever opened in the country.

“So, this is prime real estate in an important neighborhood that has a lot of history. If we can get a community Benefit Agreement the community can grow w/ OSU.”

Steele said a CBA makes sense given that developers have received a combination of tax breaks and grants at the federal, state, and city levels, amounting to at least $300 million.

“What we want are things like a local hiring provision, a career ladder, and more assurances that people are going to be receiving family-sustaining wages and benefits.”

Expelling Sodexo from school ?
Steele is also involved w/ efforts to kick Sodexo out of Columbus Public Schools as a near-term goal, though getting them out of OSU is a longer term project. Sodexo is a food vender at the Ohio Stadium and at the Schottenstein Center/Value City Arena.

“They have a contract w/ OSU and they have a bigger contract w/ Columbus Public Schools. This summer, the Columbus Public School Board at some point--- I think they can drag it out to the fall---could renew their contract w/ Sodexo. We don’t want them to do that."

Steele said Sodexo is a known human rights violator across the world. She said both the university and the city’s public school system could dump Sodexo for US-based, if not Ohio-based companies that treat their employees better.

Voter suppression

Steele is involved w/ the petition drive that, if successful, will put the repeal of Ohio House Bill 194 on the ballot for Nov 2012, as well as prevent the bill from applying to voting this fall.

“It (HB 194) restricts the early voting window. They didn’t keep the photo ID thing in there. That’s not on the table right now, thank goodness. But if House Bill 194 stays in place, it makes voting harder. 2004 should have shown us early voting is a great thing. Even in 2008 (which had a 35 day early voting period) we had a line out the door (at the Veterans Memorial Center.) And they want to restrict voting ? The people who want to restrict voting seem to have a problem w/ democracy.”

Steele said efforts to restrict voting are taking place across the country. She said requiring all 9 digits of a person’s social security number is one way of discouraging people from voting.

“It’s identity theft. The last four digits of my social security and my autograph don’t work? It scares people out of voting…Our country runs better when people vote.”

She said voter fraud is rare and whatever cases do exist are grossly exaggerated.

Building alliances

“People across the country are connecting the dots. (They realize there is) a well-orchestrated attack on the working class. This is an attack on people voting. (It’s based on) driving the environment for profit, rather than the environment for people, in the long run. We can have jobs and a strong, healthy environment but they want to pretend it’s one or the other.”

Steele said some politicians have been presenting divisive and false choices to us on many issues.

“As far as building our coalitions and trying to fight more than one of these fires at once, I think it’s fairly natural and easy.”

It remains to be seen whether this movement will be strong enough to defeat right-wing extremism which might rule over us if the middle-class, the working class, and the poor turn on each other, focusing on issues of race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and other things that can divide us, instead of the things that unite us.