Thank Florence Reece and Joe Hill and Mary Harris Jones and César Estrada Chávez and Crystal Lee Sutton and Eugene Victor Debs and all the other thousands and thousands of men and women who believed that honest pay for honest work was an ideal worth fighting and dying for.

On Eugene Debs, Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

I still quote Eugene Debs (1855–1926), late of Terre Haute, Indiana, five times the Socialist Party’s candidate for President, in every speech:

“While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

In recent years, I’ve found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap.

Which it is not

Vonnegut, a writer I revere, was a Socialist and not ashamed to label himself thus. In accepting the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in 2001, Vonnegut said:

We are America’s Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

I thank you for this honor, although it is a reminder that I am not nearly the passionate and effective artist Carl Sandburg was. And we are surely grateful for his fog, which came in on little cat feet.

But tonight seems an apt occasion as well for celebrating what he and other American socialists did during the first half of the past century, with art, with eloquence, with organizing skills, to elevate the self-respect, the dignity and political acumen of American wage earners, of our working class.

That wage earners, without social position or higher education or wealth, are of inferior intellect is surely belied by the fact that two of the most splendid writers and speakers on the deepest subjects in American history were self-taught workmen. I speak, of course, of Carl Sandburg of Illinois and Abraham Lincoln, of Kentucky, then Indiana, and finally Illinois. Both, may I say, were continental, freshwater people like ourselves.

Hooray for our team!

I know upper-class graduates of Yale University who can’t talk or write worth a nickel.

“Socialism” is no more an evil word than “Christianity.” Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women and children are created equal, and shalt not starve.

Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a two-fer. He named his party the National Socialists, the Nazis. Hitler also had crosses painted on his tanks and airplanes. The swastika wasn’t a pagan symbol, as so many people believe. It was a working person’s Christian cross, made of axes, of tools.

About Stalin’s shuttered churches, and those in China today: Such suppression of religion was supposedly justified by Karl Marx’s statement that that “religion is the opium of the people.” Marx said that back in 1844, when opium and opium derivatives were the only effective painkillers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they had given him. He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic or social distress. It was a casual truism, not a dictum.

When Marx wrote those words, by the way, we hadn’t even freed our slaves yet. Whom do you imagine was more pleasing in the eyes of a merciful God back then: Karl Marx or the United States of America?

Stalin was happy to take Marx’s truism as a decree, and Chinese tyrants as well, since it seemingly empowered them to put preachers out of business who might speak ill of them or their goals.

The statement has also entitled many in this country to say that socialists are anti-religion, are anti-God, and therefore absolutely loathsome.

I never met Carl Sandburg, and wish I had. I would have been tongue-tied in the presence of such a national treasure. I did get to know one socialist of his generation, who was Powers Hapgood of Indianapolis. After graduating from Harvard he went to work as a coal miner, urging his working-class brothers to organize, in order to get better pay and safer working conditions. He also led protesters at the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1927.

We met in Indianapolis after the end of World War Two, and he had become an official in the CIO. There had been some sort of dust-up on a picket line, and he had just testified about it in court. The judge had interrupted the proceedings to ask Powers Hapgood why, with all his social and economic and educational advantages, he had chosen to lead such a life. And Powers Hapgood replied, “Why, because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir.”

Another of our freshwater ancestors was Eugene Victor Debs, of Terre Haute, Indiana. A former locomotive fireman, Eugene Debs ran for president of the United States four times, the fourth time in 1920, when he was in prison. He said, “As long as there is a lower class, I’m in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there’s a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Some platform. A paraphrase of the beatitudes.

And again: Hooray for our team.

And our own beloved Carl Sandburg had this to say about the fire-belching evangelist Bill Sunday:

“You come along–tearing your shirt–yelling about Jesus. I want to know what the hell you know about Jesus? Jesus had a way of talking soft, and everybody except a few bankers and higher ups among the con men of Jerusalem like to have Jesus around because he never made any fake passes, and he helped the sick and gave people hope.

“You come along calling us all damn fools–so fierce the froth of your own spit slobbers over your lips–always blabbering we’re all going to hell straight off, and you know all about it. I’ve read Jesus’ words. I know what he said. You don’t throw any scare into me. I’ve got your number. I know how much you know about Jesus.

“You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it up all right with them by giving them mansions in the skies after they’re dead and the worms have eaten ’em. You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need is Jesus. You take a steel trust wop, dead without having lived, gray and shrunken at 40 years of age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross and he’ll be all right.

“You tell poor people they don’t need any more money on pay day. And even if it’s fierce to be out of a job, Jesus’ll fix that all right, all right. All they gotta do is take Jesus the way you say.

“Jesus played it different. The bankers and corporation lawyers of Jerusalem got their murderers to go after Jesus because Jesus wouldn’t play their game. I don’t want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.”

Hooray for our team.

And I now take advantage of your hospitality by declaring myself a child of the Chicago Renaissance, powerfully humanized not only by Carl Sandburg, but by Edgar Lee Masters and Jane Addams and Louis Sullivan and Lake Michigan, and on and on.

And I propose a toast to an individual who wasn’t an artist or working stiff of any description. She wasn’t even a human being. Ladies and gentlemen of Chicago, I give you Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

And I thank you for your attention.

Yes, hooray for our team!

I have lots of personal peeves—partially destroyed and very unique jump to mind, thank you Dr. Evarts—regarding correct word usages, but I could do much worse than deferring to Harold Evans’ glossary.

Evans, in The 35 words you’re (probably) getting wrong, writes:

I freely acknowledge that, in a list of this sort, “glossary” is a fancy Latin word for a collection of pet peeves (noun, 1919), meaning an annoyance or irritation. One of my peeves is that, as a noun originating in America, it had not been admitted into the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1968) on my desk in London when I edited the Sunday Times. Now, it is recognised (“back-formation from peevish”). I admit I have no evidence for believing that the neglect of peeve is to blame for angering the poltergeist Peeves in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

My favorites on Evans’ list include:

Decimate. Confused with “destroy”. By derivation, decimation means “killing one in 10”. Today, it is often used figuratively to mean “very heavy casualties”, but to say “completely decimated” or “decimated as much as half the town” simply will not do.

Gourmet/Gourmand. The gourmet, one with a refined, discriminating taste for the best food and wine, will be insulted to be called a gourmand, a glutton fond of good things. [I heard this one abused just this week on the radio, JH] and

Less/Fewer. “Less” is right for quantities – less coffee, less sugar. It means “a smaller amount”. “Fewer” is right for comparing numbers – fewer people, fewer houses; less dough results in fewer loaves. Nobody would think of saying fewer coffee, fewer sugar, but every day somebody writes “less houses”. [I’m also a stickler for the misuse of over, a positional description, and more, a quantity description, JH]

I’ve also ordered Evans’ book Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters, from which his glossary is extracted.

Last Fall I wrote quite a bit about Colin Kaepernick, Rodney Axson and a movement in protest of police murders of black men. Kaepernick, and others, continue those protests this season as they should because the murders continue unabated in Northeastern Ohio and around our nation.

We can only expect the extra-judicial execution of people of color to grow worse thanks to the decision by President Donald John Trump’s Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to toss out President Barack Hussein Obama’s post-Ferguson decision to stop equipping police with heavy military equipment. At that time, President Obama said:

We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like [police are] an occupying force, as opposed to a force that’s part of the community that’s protecting them and serving them.

Yesterday, while running errands I listened to Performance Or Politics?, a Scott Simon interview with Colin Fleming, author of the New York Times Op-ed piece Maybe Colin Kaepernick Is Just Not That Good. Fleming examined whether or not Colin Kaepernick was benched for his political actions, for his playing abilities or for some combination of factors. He wrote:

Whether or not Colin Kaepernick plays another down in the NFL, I’m going to say that he can achieve more off a football field than he—or anyone else in the sport—can achieve on one.

Football, in the larger scheme of things, is not that important. Kaepernick, meanwhile, has a message about crucial aspects of our frayed but hopefully repairable nation that will continue to grow. If he has the devotion to work for change, he could outclass Tom Brady, or any player you might name, as someone who did something that truly matters for future generations.

But I thought it might be useful to at least consider something. The conventional wisdom is that Kaepernick, who opted out of his contract with the San Francisco 49ers after last season and has yet to be signed by another team, does not have an N.F.L. job on account of his politics. In protest against racism and police brutality, he won’t stand for the national anthem, and he’s increasingly outspoken on social issues. Earlier this summer in a tweet he likened the police to members of the fugitive slave patrol. N.F.L. owners, the thinking goes, must be racists who don’t like his politics—or cynical pragmatists who don’t like that their racist fans don’t like his politics.

What seems to me more problematic than Kaepernick’s not having a job is the general unwillingness to consider that this situation might be justified on the merits, given Kaepernick’s current attributes, or lack thereof, as a quarterback, rather than assuming, as part of a kneejerk gospel of victimhood, that persecution must be the cause.

Kneejerk or not, the protest resonates in Middle America as evidenced by a tweet from an Ohio Supreme Court Justice and the decision of my local weekly newspaper, The North Royalton Post, to make I don’t care about them anymore after the shameful kneeling stunt they pulled one of five possible reader responses to the question: What kind of season will the Browns have this year? As of this writing, that response is No. 2 by a large margin.

Xenophobia, fear of the other and the prejudice and bigotry they engender are far from gone.

Of course, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III just made the situation much worse.

Via Mano Singham: We all know why this happened: Police rage.

A few years ago, when I moved from walkable Cleveland Heights (No. 6) to the unwalkable North Royalton (No. 108), I faced a challenge in my life. I was doubling the amount of gasoline I purchased each week because, where I previously dealt with drive times of 10-15 minutes to see my students, I suddenly faced a daily commute that, depending upon traffic, could involve 80-120 minutes each day.

That sucks on several levels: I’m not crazy about driving the same route twice a day, my car is subjected to additional stresses with the coinciding increases in maintenance costs, driving in often heavy traffic raises my personal stress levels and, while I do my best to listen to downloaded books or listen to informative radio, that time represents as much as 12.5 percent of my waking day, or in an analogy I like to use, some 120 precious pieces of gold.

Alex Blasdel, writing in ‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene for The Guardian, takes my angst global.

Blasdel, in profiling philosopher Timothy Morton, writes:

“There you are, turning the ignition of your car,” [Morton] writes. “And it creeps up on you.” Every time you fire up your engine you don’t mean to harm the Earth, “let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the four-and-a-half billion-year history of life on this planet”. But “harm to Earth is precisely what is happening”. Part of what’s so uncomfortable about this is that our individual acts may be statistically and morally insignificant, but when you multiply them millions and billions of times—as they are performed by an entire species—they are a collective act of ecological destruction. Coral bleaching isn’t just occurring over yonder, on the Great Barrier Reef; it’s happening wherever you switch on the air conditioning. In short, Morton says, “everything is interconnected”.

All of which has led Morton to champion the term The Anthropocene—a proposed term for the present geological epoch (from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards), during which humanity has begun to have a significant impact on the environment—first coined by the Nobel-winning Dutch Chemist Paul Crutzen.

Blasdel continues:

Planetary changes had increasingly led journalists to set their environmental reporting in the context of geohistory – atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of 400 parts per million? Not seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago – and the Anthropocene became a useful shorthand for placing human activity in the perspective of geological deep time. For Morton, who had recently begun writing about it, it captured his concern with the way beings of different kinds, including humans, depend on each other for their existence—a fact the various calamities of the Anthropocene drove home.

The natural leap is to talk about Global Warming, Climate Change and the myriad of other ecological catastrophes just on the even horizon. Morton, however, takes a different path.

Morton stakes out a more iconoclastic position. Instead of raising the ecological alarm like some Paul Revere of the apocalypse, he advocates what he calls “dark ecology,” which holds that the much-feared catastrophe has, in fact, already occurred.

Morton means not only that irreversible global warming is under way, but also something more wide-reaching. “We Mesopotamians”—as he calls the past 400 or so generations of humans living in agricultural and industrial societies—thought that we were simply manipulating other entities (by farming and engineering, and so on) in a vacuum, as if we were lab technicians and they were in some kind of giant petri dish called “nature” or “the environment”. In the Anthropocene, Morton says, we must wake up to the fact that we never stood apart from or controlled the non-human things on the planet, but have always been thoroughly bound up with them. We can’t even burn, throw or flush things away without them coming back to us in some form, such as harmful pollution. Our most cherished ideas about nature and the environment—that they are separate from us, and relatively stable—have been destroyed.

[No news on how Morton, who holds the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University (just southwest from downtown Houston), has fared during Hurricane Harvey]

Morton isn’t a guru, he’s just a guy with ideas. Some dislike what he suggest, others revel. Writing about a lecture delivered by Morton, Blasdel writes:

Even as someone with an interest in Morton’s work, I soon felt bored and distracted. The man standing next to me, an American scholar with an acerbic sense of humour, rolled his eyes and whispered a comment to the effect of “What is this bullshit?”

Despite Morton’s popularity, this isn’t an uncommon response to his work. The Morton detractors with whom I spoke accused him of misunderstanding contemporary science, like quantum mechanics and set theory, and then claiming his distortions as support for his wild ideas. They shared a broad critique that reminded me of the sceptical adage, “If you open your mind too far, your brains will fall out.” The slurry of interesting ideas in Morton’s work doesn’t hold together under scrutiny, they say. The philosopher Ray Brassier, who was once associated with OOO, has charged Morton and his blogging confrères with generating “an online orgy of stupidity”.

Other critics, especially on the left, complain that Morton’s conception of the Anthropocene glosses over issues of race, class, gender and colonialism by blaming the entire species for the damage inflicted by a privileged minority. The focus on the human enshrined in the term Anthropocene is a particular target for critics. By referring to humans as a unified whole, they argue that Morton effaces distinctions between the affluent west and the other members of humanity, many of whom were living in a state of ecological catastrophe long before the notion of the Anthropocene became trendy on campuses in Europe and North America. Others say that Morton’s notion of politics is too woolly, or that the last thing we need when facing ecological challenges are abstract musings about the nature of objects.

Morton’s defenders, however, see him as something of a Ralph Waldo Emerson for the Anthropocene: his writing has value, even if it doesn’t always stand up to philosophical scrutiny.

Blasdel concludes:

“Don’t hide under a rock, for heaven’s sake,” Morton had said to me at one point. “Go out in the street and start making any and as many kinds of political affiliations with as many kinds of beings, human or otherwise, that you possibly can, with a view to creating a more non-violent and just, for everybody, ecological world.” It was hard to argue with those aims. We can’t debate with other species, but the Anthropocene makes it clear that we need to include their wellbeing among our goals.

Morton’s own political emphasis seemed to change after the election. Wind-powered house parties and interspecies reading groups were out. Now, the whole point, he said, was “to freakin’ crush these fascists over and over and over again”.

Recycling my bottles, cans and paper won’t get me (or any of us) out of this.

Fifty years ago this headline appeared in the Plain Dealer:

“NEGRO PASTORS TO SHUN ORGANIZER ALINSKY”

Things don’t change much in Cleveland, do they? Not in 50 years anyway.

Unless you truly understand—they do change. They get worse.

I wrote that story for the PD in 1967.

I wrote:

The United Pastors, a group formed by Negro pastors … agreed not to meet with Saul Alinsky, a militant consumer advocate when he comes to Cleveland next month.

They didn’t want change. They apparently, like now, enjoy keeping control of those with dire needs.

This Thursday the United Pastor (now with added “Mission” to its name) worked a deal that undercut 20,000 signers for a vote on the Quicken Arena dirty deal to finance an expansion with public funding in the tens of millions. A dirty political deal against their own.

They sabotaged community action as they played a change role that never changes.

Alinsky, who died in 1972, was the great organizer of communities for people who needed help. His organization was called the Industrial Areas Foundation.

Conservative author William F. Buckley Jr. said in 1966 that Alinsky Continue Reading »

So, two weeks ago I went thinking to prepare for the beginning of the school year. My major challenge is that I’ve got an early start this year and I don’t have a lot of time in the mornings—even rising at 0330 which is my routine—to get all the work done that I like. The main victim of this change has to be blogging and I simply need to stay off my blog until after I get home in the afternoon so readers should expect to see posts in the early evening rather than the early morning as has long been my practice.

Such is the way of my world.

While I was away I didn’t stay off the Internet and I did find a few pieces that in my normal routine I would have blogged about. Below are the links to those pieces. Enjoy.

Ohio Supreme Court justice blasts ‘draft dodging’ Browns players for kneeling during anthem

An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right

Man Waving “Blacks for Trump” Sign at President’s Rally has Bizarre Beliefs about Race War (Kenan Thompson plays Michael The Black Man, no, seriously, that is the guys name, in the Saturday Night Live sketch.)

The “Many Sides” of Trump’s Phoenix Rally: The Daily Show

Fire Steve Bannon by Matt Taibbi

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah 8/21/17 Comedy Central

Over a dozen Cleveland Browns kneel in NFL’s largest anthem protest yet

Polls shows majority of Americans think Confederate statues should remain

Donald Trump to expand US military intervention in Afghanistan Francis Marion, known as The Swamp Fox during our own War for Independence, explains why we can’t win in Afghanistan (or any other country we’re not prepared to occupy and own).

(As this was being written the biggest sell-out in Cleveland history and likely the most damaging one for a community activist group in America took place. The Greater Cleveland Congregations, just as Mayor Jackson, Kevin Kelley, Armond Budish, Dan Brady, and especially Congresswoman Marcia Fudge engineered—pulled a sellout by ignoring more than 20,000 signatures to a petition to stop a give-away of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County funds to a billionaire. Cleveland has distinguished itself once again by this backstabbing move. It sounds as though the County will ante up the dough for mental health facilities as part of the deal. What a bargain. —Roldo Bartimole)

It was announced this week that billionaire Dan Gilbert withdrew the plan to expand the Quicken Arena, mostly on the public dole. He’s worth $7.39 billion, according to Bloomberg News. He can’t pay his bills. He needs your help.

What a prince!

They are crying that the Q is now 22 years old as if that’s so old it needs to be replaced. I know that’s how you homeowners look at your house. Twenty-two, hell, how can we live in this dump?

City Hall—Mayor Frank “Failure” Jackson and Council President Kevin “Don’t Know What I’m Doing” Kelley—gave the middle finger to 20,000 Clevelanders who signed a petition distributed by the first activist grouping to hit Cleveland in decades. More than 13,000 were valid signatures.

Even the top corporates can’t depend upon these amateur politicians.

It shows what People Power can do with a little leadership.

The powers-that-be simply didn’t want voters to have an opportunity Continue Reading »

We’ve seen this before, but the idea is just as good today as it was in 2009. One of tactics of individuals or corporations under investigation is to bury their crimes under mountains of irrelevant paper. Online publication and crowd sourcing offers a real response.

Mano Singham, in Become a ‘Citizen Sleuth’ and investigate Trump administration corruption, explains:

The administration of Donald Trump probably has the most wealth of any administration in US history. It is also the administration that has the most open contempt for ethics and thus one can expect that many of them will have no compunction about using their offices to enrich themselves by making decisions that are advantageous to their private interests. This was also likely true for many members of previous administrations but the Trump cohort will be different in that they think they are entitled to do so. After all, the head of this corrupt organization, Trump himself, clearly sees being president as a way to advance his business interests.

The Center for Public Integrity has decided to enlist the general public in monitoring the administration with a new project called Citizen Sleuth. They have put online in an easily searchable, sortable database in the form of a spreadsheet all the financial disclosure forms that government employees are required to file so that anyone can pore over them and add notes if they find any evidence of corruption. This page gives some tips on how to get started, what to look for, and how to report anything interesting that you find.

Now, get sleuthing…

What would be necessary for anyone to learn a lesson? Real fear that the failure to do so would, without any doubt, seriously discomfort a person beyond their reason.

Sadly, while Ralph Nader attempts to make the case otherwise, I’m not optimistic.

Nader, writing in Can the Politicians Heed the Lessons of Hurricane Harvey?, argues:

Hovering Hurricane Harvey, loaded and reloading with trillions of gallons of water raining down on the greater Houston region—ironically the hub of the petroleum refining industry—is an unfolding, off the charts tragedy for millions of people. Many of those most affected are minorities and low-income families with no homes, health care or jobs to look forward to once the waters recede.

Will this tragedy teach us the lessons that so many politicians and impulsive voters have been denying for so long?

The first lesson is that America must come home: we must end the Empire of Militarism and of playing the role of policeman of the planet. Both of these habitual roles are backfiring and depleting trillions of taxpayer dollars that could be better used toward rebuilding our country’s infrastructure, strengthening our catastrophe-response networks and preparing for the coming megastorms like Hurricane Harvey. A projected trillion dollars being spent by Obama, and now Trump, just to upgrade nuclear weapons will only spur another arms race with Russia and China. This money could Continue Reading »

MEMO
TO: Chris Quinn & “A Greater Cleveland.”
FR: Roldo Bartimole
RE: Slowly building empathy in Northeast Ohio

Your program to use reporters as uneducated social workers has some problems, I think.

First, you are dishonoring hundreds—thousand over the years—of social workers who have been working daily with families in need. It’s their job.

You are also diminishing indirectly the work of countless school teachers who work daily through the school year with the children you want to help.

I’m sure they are happy with the self-satisfaction on your promo, checking their years of fighting these problems. Nice strategy, Chris.

Do none of their efforts over the years really mean, by your promotion (and that’s what it is rather than real journalism) of an attempt to make people believe the Plain Dealer REALLY CARES.

I know you believe you mean well. But you are avoiding your real job—to tell this community, the part that rules—what’s wrong with it and how it’s screwing up.

You say that your program is “slowly building empathy in Northeast Ohio.”

You are wrong. Nothing significant will change until maybe you start to do your real job.

Why doesn’t the PD really do something for low income people, like Continue Reading »

A most fruitful week. Look for details tomorrow.

Just how utterly disgusting and duplicitous Plain Dealer editors Chris Quinn, Betsy Sullivan, and George Rodrigue are can be seen by what they fail to see, what they purposely refuse to see or what their prejudices tolerate them to ignore.

What they distort, however, costs us hundreds of millions of dollars.

Their incredible failure in their actions with the 20,000 signatures to insure the public a vote on a give-away of tens of millions of dollars to Dan Gilbert and Quicken Arena was made clear by some 13,000 signatures validated by the County Board of Elections.

They failed miserable at simply backing what we call democracy.

They bargained continually for the TAKERS instead of the CITIZENS.

Mayor Frank Jackson, County Executive Armond Budish and Cleveland Council President Kevin Kelley were emboldened by the newspaper’s look-the-other-way to give the finger to Cleveland voters on the Q issue.

They caved to the corporate rulers of Cleveland.

What goes unreported adds to the tragedy of poor government backed by poor journalism. It has become a Cleveland sickness.

The two charts below from County Records reveal what is being spent now from Cuyahoga County tax payers. One chart reveals that Quicken Arena has sucked Continue Reading »

Perhaps the smallest club of powerful (so far) men living today is that made up of past and present presidents of the United States of America. That group, today, stands at six: James Earl Carter, George Herbert Walker Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, George Walker Bush, Barack Hussein Obama and Donald John Trump.

There is a belief that (rightly, I think) only someone who has sat behind the desk in the oval office can appreciate the gravity of that responsibility. Because of that, perhaps the only people who can speak to a sitting president is one who has served before.

There is also a long-held precedent that former presidents do not speak out against a sitting president. Ralph Nader, writing in Barack Obama: What’s He Waiting For? argues that breaking that precedent is not only right, but vital:

The most popular Democratic leader by far is still former President Barack Obama. Despite this popularity, many of the signature accomplishments of his modest legacy are being brutishly unraveled—being repealed, suspended or slated Continue Reading »

I wrote this in 2006—more than a decade ago—but the story remains appropriate today since we haven’t moved to address those who have and those who have not. The matter is how you address inequality and it is not one family at a time. That’s a defeat from the start:

It’s an old saying, but a relevant cliché: the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Let me be blunt. I think the squeaky wheels in this town have skewed the priority agenda of community needs. The squeaky wheels in recent years have been the sports teams, art, bicycles, towpaths, lakefront parks, convention centers, fancy bridges, downtown housing—all in some way worthy causes, most of them causes of middle and upper class desires. [I guess you could add Public Square and a dirt bike track since. RB].

However, these voices—many good—have championed these needs incessantly. The echo of that chorus overwhelms needs that have no vocal champions. These other voices are seemingly now passé and off the community agenda. These would voice the needs of the powerless, in essence, the poor.

For a short, short time, the time it takes for the sun to peek out of a passing cloud, Poverty’s presence invaded our minds after Hurricane Katrina. The sun of concern disappeared rather quickly. It certainly didn’t translate effectively into concern beyond the impacted New Orleans and its surroundings. It certainly didn’t raise the level of distress in our community. I don’t remember seeing a series on local television didn’t hear heavy chatter on the blogs and failed to see real apprehension in the pages of the Plain Dealer.

Where has the concern about Poverty gone? My guess is that it went off the agenda when riots and the pressure of civil disorder receded. Again, the squeaky wheel analogy.

How do we bring it back into the community’s vision? How do we make it impossible to ignore?

One way is to get people talking about the subject of poverty. Today, the Internet—blogs in particular—can reach people and can ignite conversation, and thus put Poverty back on the civic agenda.

I’ve had some experience in this area. I was once the welfare reporter for the Plain Dealer in the 1960s, when Poverty had to be addressed even by Continue Reading »