Mike Ferner is a former

Toledo, Ohio Toledo ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Lucas County, Ohio, United States. A major Midwestern United States port city, Toledo is the fourth-most populous city in the state of Ohio, after Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, and according ...

city council A municipal council is the legislative body of a municipality or local government area. Depending on the location and classification of the municipality it may be known as a city council, town council, town board, community council, rural counc ...

member, Vietnam era veteran, author, and peace activist. He is a member of the

POCLAD The Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD) is an activist collective of 11 members(with three leaving, making 14.), who research the history of corporations in the United States. They are some of the main circulators of the notion th ...

collective. Toledo had the most active campaign in the country for municipal public power in the late 1980s and early '90s. In 1989 Ferner was elected as an independent to the city council and proposed the creation of a small municipal utility to compete with

Toledo Edison FirstEnergy Corp is an electric utility headquartered in Akron, Ohio. It was established when Ohio Edison acquired Centerior Energy in 1997. Its subsidiaries and affiliates are involved in the distribution, transmission, and generation of electri ...

. He ran for mayor in 1993 with this as a major campaign plank, but lost by 672 out of 92,740 votes cast. In March 2006 Ferner, along with fellow activists Pete Perry, Malachy Kilbride, and David Barrows, interrupted the US House Appropriations Committee that was in the process of voting on $67,000,000,000 in military funding for the US war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ferner was arrested on June 30, 2006 at the Jesse Brown Veterans' Administration Medical Center. (Ferner was at the center because he was participating in

Voices For Creative Nonviolence Kathy Kelly (born 1952) is an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of ''Voices in the Wilderness'', and, until the campaign closed in 2020, a co-coordinator of ''Voices for Creative Nonviolence''. As part of pe ...

's 320-mile "Walk for Justice" from Springfield, Illinois to North Chicago, Illinois.) According to Ferner's recounting of the incident, the arresting officer stated that wearing a "Veterans for Peace" T-shirt while drinking coffee at the center comprised protesting, and Ferner was required to leave the premises. Ferner refused, and was subsequently arrested. Ferner was charged with criminal trespass and with weapons possession (a Swiss Army pocketknife). In 2006 he published "Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq," recounting his trips to Iraq, just prior to the U.S. invasion and a year later. Ferner ran for Toledo mayor in the special election held November 3, 2015 to fill the last two years of D. Michael Collins' term after Collins died in office.

References

Works

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External links

Official Site

''Inside the Red Zone''
Living people Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-activist-stub