Who sez we need a massive land bridge from the Mall to the lakefront?

Steve Litt?

There is one of the biggest corrupt schemes in the works to provide an easy access to lakefront land. This rivals the Chagrin Highlands dealing in dirty politics.

Mayor Justin Bibb has legislation ready to create another body that escapes the public scrutiny required and allows elected officials to hide off in the dark.

It’s the North Coast Development Authority. We can expect all the openness and honesty we get from the Gateway Economic Development Corp. Total PR only.

Bibb and County Executive Chris Roynane are aboard with the guidance of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the shadow government that propels public investment that propels private interests. Can the Cleveland and Gund Foundations be far behind.

Council President Blaine Griffin is all for it and brings along a mostly pliant city council.

First in line will be Tennessee oligarchs Dee and Jimmy Haslam, owners of the Browns. The relish taking over the entire lakefront for private development.

Downtown councilman Kerry McCormack is already all for it. It never seems to change.

You know how well this has been greased—not only from Litt’s typical glowing words—but the State of Ohio as I’m writing has proposed $62 million toward the “land bridge.” And the PD reported noted that the state pols couldn’t say who proposed this little gift. (Will someone check the Haslam’s political contribution.)

It is so typical of our Cleveland politicians. They bend so easily.

With no seemingly even somewhat reasonable reason, the lakefront dealing quickly—with the help of the PD and Litt—is put on the front burner.

It is something that MUST BE DONE. NOW. QUICKLY. Don’t look!

So no one takes a clear eye view and asks WHY?

I’ve been reading a book—by Matthew Desmond “Poverty by America.”

Not Poverty IN America but BY.

And he makes a very strong case that nationally our government rewards the wealthy and burdens the poor.

He makes the case that we reward the rich at the expense of the poor.

The rush to serve the Haslams is a perfect example of how it works on the local level.

Forget the real needs of the community; serve the desires of the oligarch interlopers.

This has been going on for as long—some 55 years—as I’ve been reporting here.

This will rival the Chagrin-Highlands as corrupting deal-making.

The Haslams also want a renewed Browns football stadium.

The stadium deal shows how generous the city and its politicians are to these homegrown oligarchs.

Cleveland charges the Haslams $250,000 a year rent.

The City of Cleveland must pay the property taxes on the stadium land. We have to remember that our retired officials—Mayor Michael White and County Commissioner Tim Hagan—went to Columbus where with Republican legislators in command, relieved ALL from paying any property tax on the structures. (The County now doesn’t even list the property value for the public to determine how much of a gift-giving it is annually.

However, the City of Cleveland, which charges $250,000 in rent, pays this year $796,202.08 in property taxes on the land.

Now what landlord do you know that charges one-third of what is paid for only property taxes?

Oh yes, the game is rigged.

As of this year the three sports facilities, worth at least $100 million each, have paid NO PROPERTY TAXES for 26 years.

It would be a tidy sum, if the County listed the value of the exempted facilities I’d know.

However, you can bet that the figure is close to or more than a half BILLION dollars in property taxes not paid. For 26 years and growing.

And worse, the taxes to pay for them are regressive sales taxes. And worse still, the promoters—White and Hagan most prominent in promos—pictured happy children who were to enjoy the benefits of the property taxes. The pols in 1990 promised NO TAX ABATEMENT. But they dishonestly went for TAX EXEMPTION.

This is exactly how we get poverty BY—our elected officials.

While writing this morning I’m listening to Alice Cooper’s album From The Inside. When the record was released on 17 November 1978 we had only been back in San Diego for 110 days and I would not buy the album until the following March when by best bud, STG2 Duane Weaver, and I would attend the concert. (I still have the concert t-shirt from that I’ll be cremated in from that show.)

The song that made me stop and write this post was Jackknife Johnny. While I am technically a Vietnam Veteran—Saigon fell while I was still in Gunner’s Mate A School in Great Lakes, Illinois—I was never in country. I came as close as I ever wanted to the hellhole that was Vietnam on that cruise when we rescued a boatload of refugees fleeing that country.

I served with many men who were there and I’ve come to see first hand the damage done by that political cluster fuck in conversations at the Veteran’s Administration facilities here in Cleveland. Since my discharge in 1986 we have endured to more such abominations in Iraq and Afghanistan and seemed poised to repeat the mistakes fueled by American exceptionalism in Ukraine.

Make no mistake. When it comes to war, there are no Democrats or Republicans, there is only the loyal members of our Pro-War, Pro-Business Party and President Joseph Robinette Biden may yet have his war. (Will we never learn?)

So, yesterday Roldo Bartimole emailed me: I watched “137 bullets” on Netflix. It was very good. Have you seen it? I looked back and I did write about [the killing of Timothy Russell and Marissa Williams by Cleveland police]. If you have the energy maybe you could repeat the 2015 piece with an opening blurb. Have a good holiday. Roldo

I haven’t seen the documentary—we don’t subscribe to Netflix—but I’m as familiar with the events of 29 November 2012 as any Clevelander and while I don’t believe that this documentary will alter police culture in Cleveland, I can understand that this is yet another important step in a too-long process.

How long? Longer that I know, but for me the story begins in Cleveland in 1968 with the Glenville Shootout. I was 12 then and pretty much clueless living in rural Southeastern Ohio. I wouldn’t learn about the events of 23-24 July of that year for another 53 years when I began my Readin’ Roldo project and read Volume 1, Number 22 of Roldo’s point Of viəw

.

Perhaps the election of incoming Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb and his appointment of Deputy Chief Wayne Drummond as his interim Chief of Police will mark a new beginning or, more likely, the continuation of just more of the same old bullshit.

No justice, no peace is not a meaningless chant.

This nightmare showed up in my email inbox this morning. I read Jimmy’s political biography last year and for about 30 seconds I thought I had the man wrong. There is a reason the phrase Florida man has become a laugh line.

Do we really to go there?

Bonus No. 1: How anti-abortion advocates are pushing local bans, city by small city.

Bonus No. 2: Seven doctors contract Covid after attending Florida anti-vaccine summit.

Bonus No. 3: I have plenty of common sense! I just choose to ignore it.

From Jamesleo on this morning’s Daily Kos:

Every shelf was stacked and prices didn’t appear much different from last year. As if all this talk about shortages and inflation were “talk” In this isle I had the unexpected encounter with a Trump supporter. She was in her cart , amazed at the selection as I was picking “green chiles” for the dressing.

“Wow, I can’t believe this place” she said. Yes, “I seldom go anyplace else.”. “Everything is available and the prices are reasonable.” I mentioned that things may be improving nationally and even gasoline was starting to go down.”Oh don’t start me” she replied. “This president is ruining this county.” “How so” I asked. “Shutting down the damn pipelines and going to OPEC. “ I told her the pipelines were for Canadian Oil to be refined and going to China and it had little effect on Oil prices . “That s not true” she said . The conversation continued “ She was upset with the truckers situation and the truckers were being taken advantage. She supported the Teamsters and the right to organize. She hated “big Pharma” and believe we should negotiate prices for medicines “ While she supported the pipelines, she believed the Native Americans were being screwed . What was I missing? For years, I thought of her and her believers as “the enemy” Now I was confused. We wished each other a Happy Thanksgiving and a good day. What’s the messaging” What are we missing? Bernie Sanders says we should talk to everybody , especially those who don’t agree wit us. I know I have been a “bubble” in my college town (New Paltz, NY) I most associate and socialize with people who believe what I believe in, with people of the same social economic background, the same education , We, like that person, see her as “the other” I wish there was a way to change . I see clips where Bernie is in West Virginia, in areas where Trump received 70% of the vote , talking about Medicaid for All and the right to be part of a union, and no one disagrees with him. I am totally convinced “we are doing something wrong” in our messaging and engaging I wish I had an answer.

We shouldn’t assume the messaging we get from our chosen news source is what everyone actually believes. As a wise woman once told me: “If you know one person with X, then you know one person with X.”

Generalizations are rarely helpful.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving table.

Bonus NO. 1: Things to be thankful for…

Democrats and Republicans are the front for the Pro-War Pro-Business Party.

Editor’s Note: Maybe 15 years ago at one of our monthly blogger meetups, someone who had lived in Cleveland all his life berated me for talking about Roldo Bartimole. The blogger’s position was that Roldo was a broken record who kept bitching about all the money going to Cleveland’s three sports franchises and my friend was sick and tired of the tirade.

He was right. And he was wrong.

Roldo began writing his Point Of Viəw in 1968 and he kept at it for 50 years. The names and numbers changed, but the central message—the one that infuriated my blogger friend—didn’t. Clevelanders (and by proximity those of us living in Cuyahoga County) were regularly getting fucked in the ass by the wealthy who demanded that we forever repeat: Please sir, may I have another?

Happy holidays Cleveland, the ass-fucking, and the vital need for Roldo’s work, continues.

[This piece originally appeared on 27 April 2017.]

We don’t pay attention to the past. So we repeat it. To our disgrace and heavy cost.

The latest Quicken Arena deal—$282 million in all—repeats the mistake of feeding the beast. Further, it opened a new source of tax revenue, ignoring the voted sin tax receipts. As of the end of March, the sin tax has produced $3,742,748.30 this year.

But finally, in this mayoral election year, there is push-back. Real resentment to this latest money grab.

And a political climate of despair fed by crime, unemployment and the usual array of social problems among so many here.

But there is push-back. Six, then five, Councilmen balked at new taxation after more than 27 years of the same old same of seeking more public revenue for private desires.

Citizen groups—the Greater Cleveland Congregation, the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, AFSCME Ohio Council 8, and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 268—will have to collect more than 6,000 valid signatures to overcome what their representatives in Cleveland City Council and Cuyahoga County Council voted to give billionaire Dan Gilbert, a mortgage lender, a casino czar and a greedy pro sports owner.

This money snatch has been going on since 1990. Cleveland corporate and legal leaders have been pushing for extremely heavy public subsidies for wealthy sports owners. They make matters worse by exempting property taxes 100 percent in the hundreds of millions of dollars. First, they promised schools tens of millions of dollars annually yet it turned out they have been stealing tax revenue mainly from the Cleveland schools. See also below extra public costs since 1992 and going to 2023 for old bonds. The new take begins from the city and county in 2024.

These exploiters have been backed by a subservient, bought news media led by the Plain Dealer, which in the past actually used Gateway symbols on articles pushing these deals and now strongly supports the gifts with misleading editorials, news and weak columnists who deflect blame instead of dispensing shame.

It’s been going on a long, costly time and will continue unless the petition drive succeeds.

We have spent well beyond a billion scarce public dollars on the Gateway sports complex.

And I am not just quoting my figures but those cited by Cleveland Magazine. The Plain Dealer has never tried to assess the costs of the sports sponges. The weak new PD has poor leadership at the top.

Here’s what Cleveland Magazine wrote in April 2014 on the costs at Gateway:

Our calculation of $1.2 billion in public stadium costs if the sin tax passes (it did)—not reported elsewhere in town—will probably give the tax’s opponents a new argument. Enough! They’ll say.

Not their elected officials.

But we knew the heavy subsidies long before.

The past is present. We keep forgetting it.

Here is a piece I wrote in the Cleveland Edition in January, 1990. More than two-and-a-half decades ago! It could be written today. Only the names change:

County Commissioner Tim Hagan came over to City Hall a week or so ago to share the podium with Mayor Michael White as the two announced the opening of a new battle against poverty.

Hagan took the opportunity to point out that in the previous decade—the Voinovich era—he had been called to City Hall for a number of mayoral announcements, but none that dealt with a fight against poverty—probably the city’s most severe problem.

It was a commendation to the new mayor for being quickly on the battle field on this problem and a backhand slap at former Mayor George Voinovich for never getting to the problem in 10 years. Voinovich’s fight against poverty rarely extended beyond urging city employees to bring in cans of food for the city’s hunger centers.

The poverty fight called by Hagan and White evolves from a study backed by the Rockefeller and Cleveland Foundations which now calls for more study and examination.

We all know that there are many demands upon government for the use of its taxes to meet the needs of the larger community.

Both White and Hagan have been fond of talking about the needs of those in the society who have serious problems and few resources to deal with the problems.

But in the next few months politicians—Hagan and White prominently—will be under severe pressure from the Cleveland Establishment to devise new taxes—not for the solutions to the dire problems that these two young politicians speak so eloquently about—but for a new stadium for Dick Jacobs and his Cleveland Indians.

The Establishment, now $24 million in debt for its vacant Central Market “domed” stadium site, wants a bailout of its embarrassment by the city and state government.

So we are hearing sales tax increases or a sin tax levy (the most regressive of taxes, robbing even more from the poor) on the sale of cigarettes and alcoholic beverages—that would be earmarked to help pay for a $160-million stadium. With interest, the cost will be closer to $350 to $500 million.

If there can be increases in sales or sin taxes, why should not the money for such dire needs as alcohol and drug treatment, relief of homelessness, health centers, prenatal and baby care, just to mention a few?

Why is it that the politicians who speak so eloquently about the needs of those in the society so deprived, can so easily be pressured to put ahead of those needs what the business community wants high on the public agenda?

Who needs public help more—those we say are suffering the ills associated with poverty—or sports team owners rated in the one-half billionaire set and their ballplayers who have become million-dollar-a-year .222 hitters?

Hagan and White are either going to have to tone down their rhetoric or face those embarrassing questions.

For an article recently I got statistics from the Council of Churches on the numbers receiving Aid to Dependent Children. The figures were shocking not only for the total numbers but even more for who those numbers represented.

They represented the city’s future, far more than a new stadium.

There are a shocking 90,000 children on ADC (receiving 41 percent of what Ohio under the liberal Gov. Dick Celeste, a big booster of a stadium pays for upkeep). But more devastatingly 30,000 of the 90,000 were babies 4-years old and under. And 90 percent of these babies were cared for by a single parent, female, who was 20 years old or younger.

That’s another entire generation we seem to be writing off to the ravages of poverty.

While many dismiss another poverty study, I won’t be so quick to condemn the move. Partly because in today’s world everyone needs to speak to the public through the news media.

And by generating information about poverty the news media may well pay some attention to those problems.

It’s easy for the sports establishment to command news media attention.

Can you imagine what we might learn if the news media turned its resources, money and power in examining the problems of poverty as it did in it saturation (and disgusting, I might add) treatment of The Game?

The pressure is on for finding taxes to build a massively publicly financed stadium for our sports millionaires.

That’s because of the embarrassing position of the Domed, now the New Stadium Corp, has put itself.
Cleveland banks—led by Ameritrust—have been rolling over debt owed by the Stadium Corp. for the land bought and cleared at the Central Market site.

Likewise the State Ohio, penurious with welfare clients, has been very reasonable with the stadium group, rolling over a $4-million, 5 percent loan, last May and again in December, with an additional $800,000 in interest). The commercial banks that have extended loans to the Stadium Corp. have agreed to a six month extension as a gesture of continuing good faith toward the project.” That means the new stadium group owes $24.1 million at least with interest accruing on both principal and interest. (Note: it ended up costing us $40 million as the site for Gateway).

As in the savings and loan scandal, apparently, the business establishment feels it can simply call upon the appropriate politicians to bail them out.

We won’t have to wait long to learn if White and Hagan talk a better game but are just as easy picking as Voinovich for the business establishment and its needs.

We learned that White and Hagan were even more lenient with the Cleveland corporates.

Below are some of the even more generous subsidy costs forced after Gateway added an arena to lure the Cavs here. The owners forced the politicians into heavier spending, for which will be paying until 2023 when we will pick up the costs in 2024 of this newest deal, or steal. You be the judge. Here are annual costs for bonds on arena overruns:

In 2018 through 2023 the interest costs from this and succeeding years will be paid from the County general fund, the city’s admission taxes and bed taxes.

Cuyahoga County, a billion dollar in debt, facing losses at its new convention center and county-owned hotel next door, is shrinking in population, as is the city, with increasing poverty.

However, it has enough money to provide entertainment for the population of surrounding Ohio counties who don’t have to pay the cost of these facilities unless some directly use the premises.

It’s a good deal for those outsiders with enough discretionary income to enjoy what Cleveland and Cuyahoga County residents have provided.

James Aronson, a New York journalist and a founder of the National Guardian, called Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw, “perhaps the sharpest critique of the media—and the city it serves—being published anywhere,” in his 1972 book, Deadline for the Media. In 1991, Roldo was awarded the Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage by the Shafeek Nader Trust.

In my 40s, friends who never served in the military started to approach me about my own experiences. They felt that they had somehow missed out on some quintessential male rite of passage. Those conversations were the genesis of my current, American Reconstruction novel in progress: Absent Son.

Bonus No. 1: And for all those who don’t remember Vietnam…

Bonus No. 1: Respect the perimeter around the Piggly Wiggly!

This, I hope, will be the last piece I will write in Cleveland.

Why?

You can’t keep telling people the situation is very bad and something has
to be done about it.

But the steamroller keeps rolling.

The words don’t seem to influence anyone’s thought about the city and its predicament.

You may ask, What’s its predicament?

If you have to boil it down I’d say a very (too) successful business/civic community.

It just rolls over the rest of us.

Yet gives us the privilege of paying for their successful desires.

It struck me once again last week when the Regional Transit Authority decided to dump the Waterfront Line.

Does anyone remember why we have a rapid transit line, specially to go to the lakefront?

Well, I tell you why. Dick Pogue and others like him wanted it.

It would make this city hip, or something like that.

But they also wanted a delivery system.

So people should be delivered near its doorstep.

The Cleveland Browns likely had some interest too.

But RTA couldn’t build it quickly enough (I’ll stop asking why) because it take a lot of time and effort to get the federal government convinced all the rules have been followed, so then it could fork over its 80 percent of the cost. Environmental rules would have to be addressed.

Jones-Day’s Dick Pogue, a prime mover and original board member, couldn’t wait until the feds gave a “go” sign. So RTA, and the Cleveland public, had to pay the full freight. Five other Jones-Day lawyers were involved in pushing for the Rock Hall. Many of the early meetings were at the firm’s headquarters, across from City Hall. All cozy.

To this day, Jones-Day, if you Google it, leads its web site with a photo of the Rock Hall dominating the Cleveland skyline.

At the first City Council meeting on Rock Hall legislation there was not a person from the public. But the legal community was there. The Port Authority, which issued some bonds, had two expensive lawyers in attendance. Tony Garofoli of Climaco, Seminatore, Leftkowitz & Garofoli sat there as did Jack Dowd of Squire, Sanders and Dempsey. Three bond firm reps also sat in.

You can bet none represented the paying public. Indeed, Tim Offtermatt, who has been a finance guy in all the sports facilities, the convention center, left the Gateway board of director to shift to vice president of finance. In a recent year he was paid $203,000 plus a $30,000 ‘bonus’ and $13,000 in retirement compensation.

It’s just so hard to do good. But seems easy to do well.

The cost of the Waterfront Line hit $69 million. All local money.

And the line travels to the $93-million Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (RRHF). Also pretty much all cost is paid with local tax money. And most tax money, since it involved property taxes diverted from Terminal Tower, is stolen from the Cleveland schools (just like the three sports fields).

The price tab rose from the original cost. Therefore, the diverted property tax funds are taken for 25 years, or four more than originally planned.

Bed taxes from the County and a cut on city admission taxes filled out the payments.

But who cares that much about Cleveland kids? Not Gates Mill lawyers.

But it was all part of the establishment scheme to make Cleveland a hot visitors spot, along with three new sports facilities. Millions of dollars upon millions of dollars.

Nothing to investigate. Nothing here, move on. The blind Plain Dealer cannot see. Maybe doesn’t want to see.

It was often so easy for me.

Because if you aren’t looking at something critically, you won’t find it.

When you look critically, you sometimes get to peek inside.

But what about the Browns? Aren’t they important?

You could almost see the movers and shakers lining up to take a bite of the dough to be spent.

Cong. Mary Rose Oakar got in early and you had to wonder why. In a telephone call to a leader of the Rock Hall, she showed interest in who was getting architectural business there. She had two in mind.

Here is one of the Rock Hall promoters bemoaning himself the political machinations involving the forming of the Rock Hall here.

William Hulett, the Rock Hall chair and president of Stouffer’s Inns, found the political maneuvering much too much, reacting to Oakar’s questions.

…at no time, to my knowledge, has anyone suggested who the associate architect should be. Mary Rose (Oakar), on the other hand is very insistent and direct in that she feels this whole process is flawed, that someone other than I.M. Pei’s office is making the selection, that people who did early work on this process, such as Richard Fleishman’s firm and Paul Voinovich, who she mentioned in particular, were being pushed aside….She’s unwilling to listen to anything but her own opinions on the subject.

You wonder what the public’s perception would be if this appeared in the Plain Dealer, not Point Of Viəw.

Hulett was beside himself. The poor man.

I have no idea how this unnecessary mess is going to be straightened out, but I would suggest that the Cleveland board look around for another chairman as I do not really need or appreciate this crap.

This quagmire is apparently no place for an honest man.

shocking!

Mayor White, of course, took significant interest in the board make-up.

He took a seat on the construction committee. A strategic move.

In a memo to White, economic development chair Joe Marinucci wrote,

You made some comments and suggestions on the group’s makeup.” Subsequently, he wrote, the list was altered.

“How do you feel about the list of potential additions?” asks Marinucci.

Another Rock Hall official writes to White, “How do you feel about the potential additions… I think we need more minority members…. Please give me suggestions as to who you believe should be added to the group or removed….”

I also noted that politicians also enjoy the ability to rub shoulders with celebrities. Marinucci again with a note to White and an attached Vanity Fair article on Jann Werner, a New York Rock board member: “I thought you’d like to see this article.”

Marinucci and company devoted a good amount of city work time to the project.

“We estimate that over 170 person hours were expended by city staff,” writes Marinucci. It included work from the economic development office, law, finance, and other city hall workers.

That’s the way it works when no one is watching,

It has become the standard procedure here in Cleveland.

And it isn’t working.

Wait until the various grimy hands get into the deal that Jimmy and Dee Haslam have hatched downtown for a costly platform to be built to the lakefront.

With Steve Litt telling Cleveland how wonderful it all is.

I have read hundreds of books, academic articles, magazine accounts, and newspaper exposes on the power structures of cities around this country and I’ve never found anyone who told it any better, and with such punch, than Roldo Bartimole. l think that he has taught all of us more about Cleveland than any of the books on Cleveland and he has done so in a way that is understandable and useful as well….

Time has proven him right in his earlier assessments again and again. The pundits and the mass media have been proven wrong in their constant claims of new evidence of optimism. Let’s us hope they finally wise up and start listening to Roldo for a better sense of the future.

—G. William Domhoff, Professor of Psychology & Sociology, U of California, Santa Cruz and batboy, Cleveland Indians, 1951-1952.

James Aronson, a New York journalist and a founder of the National Guardian, called Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw, “perhaps the sharpest critique of the media—and the city it serves—being published anywhere,” in his 1972 book, Deadline for the Media. In 1991, Roldo was awarded the Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage by the Shafeek Nader Trust.

Derf has better plans for today than, I expect, most Americans…

Bonus No. 1: But the next day…

MEMO TO CHRIS QUINN: This is to inform you that there actually is a contest for mayor of Cleveland this fall.

NOTE TO CHRIS: Seven candidates are pursuing election in Cleveland where the Plain Dealer is located. Primary days away.

MEMO TO QUINN: Each day now the candidates are crisscrossing Cleveland, campaigning for the privilege to succeed Mayor Frank Jackson, one of your favorites.

TO QUINN: The important primary to select two Democratic candidates to face off in the November election takes place September 14. Put this on your calendar, please.

ALERT CHRIS QUINN: Yes, despite what you may still believe, there will be a new mayor in Cleveland in 2022.

NOTE: STAFF TO QUINN: We really ought to give the city election more attention, more than you’d get from a PD columnist living in Atlanta, Ga.

Somebody yell, “Fire” in the newspaper city room! Wake up!

After 16 years of lackluster—really dismal—governance at Cleveland City Hall you would think that the city’s principal—read: only—newspaper would welcome and demand change. Be at the forefront of its delivery.

This is September 8 and for this and the previous three days—including the Labor Day holiday—there had been no real coverage of the city’s long awaited mayoral election.

Not even for the Labor Day Parade’s 50th anniversary of the 11th Congressional District annual parade, an annual political showing in the city’s black community, did the PD wake up.

PD COVERAGE: Nada. None.

One of the candidates said he spoke with a PD reporter and asked about this.

The reporter told him that he questioned the paper whether he should attend the parade and report the event. A number of the candidates campaigned during the event.

He was told “No.” He told the candidate he wasn’t going out on a day off on his own.

Can you imagine: You got plenty of coverage—on TV news.

Now, at this point in the PD history, everyone knows that the decision-maker is Chris Quinn, the paper’s executive editor. HE IS BOSS.

And from my experience of watching PD bosses over a 50-plus year span, he is a very peculiar editor.

He was a very good reporter. Took on Mayor Michael White, and treated him as he should have. Gave him trouble.

But then, as editor, he became a sycophant of Mayor Frank Jackson, supporting him when Jackson simply didn’t—couldn’t—do the job.

He has stayed for 16 years.

That makes this election special. Important.

Quinn writes a Sunday editorial page column almost every week in which he lets us know how well he manages the paper. He uses a lot of “I”s, referring, of course, to himself.

One former political official describes him as “self-important,” then goes a step further, “delusional.”

Quinn in a column proclaimed he wouldn’t cover Dennis Kucinich, a candidate, because he considered a campaign move he makes a “stunt.”

He so labeled a post card mailer Kucinich sent out of a popular downtown “CLEVELAND” sign, meant to publicizes the city. It was the candidate’s message against crime. Kucinich had the sign in red with blood dripping from it to connote the city’s crime problem. A vivid message. Quinn censored it. The non-profit image-owner complained. Kucinich, clever as usual, put out a second version of the sign. This one had a rainbow over it, hardly content that could be questioned.

“We did not cover his stunt, although one television station did,” wrote Quinn in a column.

Well, I along with tens of thousands of other got it in the mail anyway.

Actually, there’s been little in the news that really touches upon Cleveland’s severe problems. We’ve dealt with that before.

So it is difficult to shut news down. That should not be news to Quinn.

But to not push your staff to cover a crucial election in a city that has shown a troublesome lack of desire to vote is extra poor editorship. In the last two city-wide elections the vote was in the low 20s both years. The voting was low in the city portion (mostly black) in the recent 11th Congressional District vote.

A poll mentioned for this election with seven Democrats running showed 21 percent, the highest total, as undecided.

“There’s no journalistic explanation” for the lack of coverage, says a PD person, then adds, “It’s malpractice,” calling Quinn “a narcissist,” not the first to use that term.

And you would think the PD, as in the past, would have a run-of-the-paper columnist, one the public could count on to speak truth to power.

No.

Just recently, a relatively new Forum columnist, after several columns, admitted he had moved to Atlanta, Ga. Eric Foster, a black lawyer, wrote an innocuous but readable column.

Quinn himself wrote his Sunday column explaining why he continues to run Foster’s column – from Atlanta. The most recent column from the now Atlanta writer was from Chicago, a touching piece about the last days of a relative.

Cleveland has so many unattended problems that need news exposure that you would think the first item on Quinn’s list would be replacing someone leaving with someone here and tough.

But Quinn doesn’t seem to be in the hard news business.

Or just what Cleveland, a troubled, bleeding people city, really needs.

James Aronson, a New York journalist and a founder of the National Guardian, called Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw, “perhaps the sharpest critique of the media—and the city it serves—being published anywhere,” in his 1972 book, Deadline for the Media. In 1991, Roldo was awarded the Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage by the Shafeek Nader Trust.

Fifty-eight years ago today, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his August 28th “I Have a Dream” speech called out the “urgency of today.”

So 58 years later in a mayoral campaign that we seem to want to believe is so crucial to the city of Cleveland, there is something very missing.

It is the “urgency of today.” There is none.

What we are hearing from our candidates is hardly urgent, I’d say.

It’s mostly what they believe people might hear and be willing to think it’s important.

But it isn’t.

One jumps on the issue of crime, all seem to do the same.

The West Side Market. Of course. All have their stands.

And the news media make it so much worse.

Because they—like the candidates—ignore the stinking issue right out in front of us all.

Four of the seven candidates are black.

And if anything should be a blaring issue for this town it is INEQUALITY.

How are they missing it?

Do they expect the Plain Dealer to make that a question for them to tee off on?

Come on, let’s get serious.

When billionaires in the city with the most poverty, and child poverty, want $425 billion to make their ballpark more revenue sweet, why has no candidate screamed this issue?

When the Haslams—Dee & Jimmy Boy—push their way into deciding where the next big development will take place—at cost of hundreds of millions of pubic dollars—and no one says, wait, who are they to decide what’s next on the city’s most need?

Not a squeak from our “candidates” to replace Frank Jackson. Jackson could stay and say, “Yes, boss,” to these corporate creeps.

This rush to help the corporate bigwigs has been going on since the business/civic community joined together to get rid of Dennis Kucinich back in 1979 and ushered in more than three decades of civic rule by and for the most wealthy in the community.

It’s got to stop.

Or else Cleveland may end up a minor league city with three heavy major league teams to support.

INEQUALITY BUILT IN TO OUR CITY’S SYSTEM.

THAT’S THE ISSUE. THAT’S THE CRIME THAT NEEDS ATTENTION.

AND YOU DON’T NEED 400 MORE COPS TO SOLVE IT.

Some mayoral elections ago, I wrote some truth that could be a guide for this election if some reporter looked carefully.

George Forbes was hardly my choice to be a mayor.

But at least George didn’t want to be mayor so badly that he changed himself or tried to create a phony image, as so many do when campaigning.

Here is George. He lost. But he didn’t bow.

And another candidate of that time, Benny Bonanno, who thought he could sit back and at least finish second in the primary.

Somebody needs to tell these candidates that post cards and fancy campaign mailings aren’t real campaigning.

James Aronson, a New York journalist and a founder of the National Guardian, called Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw, “perhaps the sharpest critique of the media—and the city it serves—being published anywhere,” in his 1972 book, Deadline for the Media. In 1991, Roldo was awarded the Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage by the Shafeek Nader Trust.

There is a dangerous tendency to set the bar for making political decisions just low enough to ensure that we are included in the process. There is always someone—better educated, possessing of a higher Intelligence Quotient or superior breeding—half a step higher or more on whatever ladder we use, who would exclude us from influencing their society. They would lump us with Louella and Luther and make us irrelevant.

If all don’t matter, then none matter.

Always, always, always, follow the money. On Monday I wrote:

The war in Afghanistan, America’s longest and most costly, ceased to be about defeating Al-Qaeda and capturing Osama bin Laden somewhere around day 100. There was likely a moment there when conversations in the White House centered on the question: can we win in another month, another six months, another year? I believe that those around the table knew the answer was no, but no one wanted to be depicted as a cur running from a fight with their tail between their legs.

Besides, there was billions, tens of billions of dollars to be made by staying.

I was wrong. By a factor of 10. Quite Possibly 100.

In We Failed Afghanistan, Not the Other Way Around, Matt Taibbi writes:

From Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the pattern of American officials showering questionable political allies abroad with armfuls of cash is a long-established practice. However, the idea that this is the reason the “missions” fail in such places is just a continuation of the original propaganda lines that get us into these messes. It’s a way of saying the subject populations are to blame for undermining our noble efforts, when the missions themselves are often preposterous and, moreover, the lion’s share of the looting is usually done by our own marauding contracting community.

It’s bad enough that Maddow/MSNBC played a big part in delaying the withdrawal last year with hype of the bogus Bountygate story, which gave one last (false) dying breath to the war rationale. This latest criticism of theirs ignores the massive amounts of corruption that were endemic to the American side of the mission. Contractors made fortunes monstrously overcharging the taxpayer for everything from private security, to dysfunctional or unnecessary construction projects, to social programs that either had no chance for success, or for which metrics for measuring success didn’t exist.

The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction some years ago identified “$15.5 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse… in our published reports and closed investigations between SIGAR’s inception in 2008 and December 31, 2017,” and added an additional $3.4 billion in a subsequent review. All told, “SIGAR reviewed approximately $63 billion and concluded that a total of approximately $19 billion or 30 percent of the amount reviewed was lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Thirty percent! If the overall cost of the war was, as reported, $2 trillion (about $300 million per day for 20 years), a crude back of the envelope calculation for the amount lost to fraud during the entire period might be $600 billion, an awesome sum. It could even be worse than that. SIGAR for instance also looked at a $7.8 billion sum spent on buildings and vehicles from 2008 on, and reported that of that, only $343.2 million worth “were maintained in good condition.” They added that just $1.2 billion of the original expenditure was used as intended. By that metric, the majority of the monies spent in Afghanistan might simply have gone up in smoke in bogus or ineffectual contracting schemes.

Taibbi continues in painful, devastating detail.

Make no mistake. This is not about Republicans or Democrats, Conservatives or Progressives. This is systemic corruption that is a feature, not a bug, of American power.

This is how the Pro-War Pro-Business party works.

This is how the 1 Percent became, and remains to be, the true government of these United States of America.

This is why they hate us.

Bonus No. 1: Via Ryan—Jim Braude asks and Andrew Bacevich gives a no-bullshit answer.

The war in Afghanistan, America’s longest and most costly, ceased to be about defeating Al-Qaeda and capturing Osama bin Laden somewhere around day 100. There was likely a moment there when conversations in the White House centered on the question: can we win in another month, another six months, another year? I believe that those around the table knew the answer was no, but no one wanted to be depicted as a cur running from a fight with their tail between their legs.

Besides, there was billions, tens of billions of dollars to be made by staying. What President Dwight David Eisenhower described as the Military Industrial Complex 60 sixty years ago was ready, able and willing to sell the bullets and missiles; the trucks and tanks; the planes and helicopters and, most of all the fuels, that would be needed to fight this Everwar.

The American public bought the lie that we stayed there for noble reasons but that was never the case. We stayed because American businesses saw ginormous dollar signs. Our fighting men and women were traumatized, wounded, crippled and killed for the American dollar.

Glenn Greenwald, in The U.S. Government Lied For Two Decades About Afghanistan, ledes:

“The Taliban regime is coming to an end,” announced President George W. Bush at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on December 12, 2001 — almost twenty years ago today. Five months later, Bush vowed: “In the United States of America, the terrorists have chosen a foe unlike they have faced before. … We will stay until the mission is done.” Four years after that, in August of 2006, Bush announced: “Al Qaeda and the Taliban lost a coveted base in Afghanistan and they know they will never reclaim it when democracy succeeds. … The days of the Taliban are over. The future of Afghanistan belongs to the people of Afghanistan.”

For two decades, the message Americans heard from their political and military leaders about the country’s longest war was the same. America is winning. The Taliban is on the verge of permanent obliteration. The U.S. is fortifying the Afghan security forces, which are close to being able to stand on their own and defend the government and the country.

Just five weeks ago, on July 8, President Biden stood in the East Room of the White House and insisted that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was not inevitable because, while their willingness to do so might be in doubt, “the Afghan government and leadership… clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.” Biden then vehemently denied the accuracy of a reporter’s assertion that “your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.” Biden snapped: “That is not true. They did not—they didn’t—did not reach that conclusion.”

Bull shit.

In Afghanistan: We Never Learn: As the Taliban waltzes into Kabul, the look of surprise on the faces of top officials should frighten us most of all Matt Taibbi writes:

The pattern is always the same. We go to places we’re not welcome, tell the public a confounding political problem can be solved militarily, and lie about our motives in occupying the country to boot. Then we pick a local civilian political authority to back that inevitably proves to be corrupt and repressive, increasing local antagonism toward the American presence.

We, the American people—including myself—allowed this to happen. Shame on all of us.