When I was executive editor of GIE’s Recycling Media Group I became a member of Cleveland’s City Club and regularly attended the Friday forums. The food was OK and occasionally the speakers were interesting, but I doubt too many people were there for either. Like me, I suspect, there were there to see who else was there and to be seen by those in attendance.

This was a weekly networking luncheon and the membership—I forget how much that was back in the early ’90s—was well worth both my time and money. Not much, if anything, had changed since Roldo Bartimole took a dive into one of the nation’s great free speech forums. In his 6 November issue of Point Of Viəw Roldo Bartimole tackles this very-Cleveland institution in City Club Forum, Freedom of Prattle.

Roldo ledes:

This is a time as never before when institutions are being challenged to live up to rhetoric of their image and traditions. It is a time when the facade of tradition is being peeled away from the most venerable of institutions.

However, sometimes it isn’t the action of protestors that betray the gap between image and reality. Sometimes it’s the members of the institution themselves. When it is, the betrayal is by chance, not choice.

That’s why the questions asked of the two senate candidates—[Republican William Bart] Saxbe and [Democrat John Joyce] Gilligan—at the recent City Club Forum debate reveal more of the City Club forums than members should like.

I can toss a softball as well as any journalist, but those questions out to be the purview of staff and flacks, not journalists tasked with informing a public about the true nature of a topic or person. That has gotten harder as first soundbites and now tweets have allowed politicians and civic leaders to circumvent the tough questions and answer their own softballs; to stage their own awesome fest. Roldo thought people deserved more:

Free speech at the City Club has come to mean a debate between the Democratic and Republican candidates for some political office or other. The local shrine of free speech too often takes on the aura of the local ward club.

This year the City Club has had a parade of politicians from Eugene McCarthy to Adrian Fink. Not only is this a debasement of the idea of free speech, it is a fraud.

For the public can and does get the line of all these public personalities ‘for wholesale’ via radio, television, newspapers and the paid propaganda of each.

It doesn’t take the ‘bastion of free speech,’ as the City Club likes to be called, for the public to hear the views of these individuals. Indeed, the public hears too much of them.

Amen to that. A bastion of free speech ought to air that which people find objectionable, words that make people uncomfortable. I don’t buy all the can’t-we-all-just-get-along/civility crap. I’m part of a tiny minority that thinks the first presidential debate between President Donald John Trump and Candidate Joseph Robinette Biden was the best in a long time. Not because either candidate said much of any substance, but rather that the gloves came off and a few people gained some insights into each candidate. We need more of that. We need to hear that which makes us squirm in our seats, not what makes us feel all warm and fuzzy. Forums like the City Club set standards. How good a standard can be questionable. Roldo continues:

As an institution that is revered in the mass media here, it sets a tone for the city. Free expression becomes measured by it. Thus the tone of expression in Cleveland is dull, pretentious and stifling. At a time when issues of great importance threaten to engulf this and other communities, the City Club Forums deal in personalities, not issue.

And, of course, times when issues of great importance threaten to engulf this and other communities. are always right here, right now. Roldo makes the case that the City Club has exchanged free speech for free propaganda. He writes:

“The best test of truth is the power of the thought itself to get accepted in the competition of the market,” says a City Club official. [That has to be the most bullshit definition of truth I’ve ever read. Truth, with apologies to Philip K. Dick, (like reality) is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. JH] How is that possible when the City Club supposedly offers that market but allows it to be used to present only certain idea? What new truths have the opportunity to birth at the City Club?

Another City Club fund-raiser says that in an affluent society, we ought to be able to afford free speech. It is more crucial that in this Arrogant Society, we seek out the unpopular individual, rather than the conventional propaganda.

As it is now, the City Club forums are a community narcotic, lulling people into thinking that it has a forum for free expression when it does not.

So, how does the City Club of 2020 compare to that of 1968. That is a question worth asking. Roldo continues:

Maybe the tradition of the City Club as a free speech forum is invalid. Tom Campbell wrote in his biography of Daniel Morgan that “Morgan’s image was carefully considered when the City Club of Cleveland was founded in Oct., 1912. The decision to make Morgan the first president of the City Club was based on the fact that he was regarded as a ‘conservative progressive’ whose presence would not alienate the more substantial citizens of the community.”

It appears that the same gauge is used today by the City Club when it chooses its speakers.

The word Prattle in Roldo’s headline raised a few hackles, but instead of a public shaming—Roldo reminded me—the City Club offered him their podium and he accepted addressed the Forum on 20 December. The Cleveland Memory Project has both the recording and the transcript of that presentation.

I have listened to a few forums in the last quarter century—and I thoroughly enjoyed the recent virtual forum with Eric Foner, I have not attended a forum since I let my membership lapse around 1993 or so. But I have listened, and many, many times called in, to what I think as a worthy successor: WCPN’s Sound of Ideas. I think I began listening to the show around 2007—I can’t find an exact date online—and met host Dan Moulthrop at the Lee Road Phoenix Coffee House around the same time. I thought his show was some of the best public radio I’d heard and I told him then that I expected he’d be leaving Cleveland and going national in the not too distant future. Well, I was wrong, he didn’t leave town, but he did shift jobs in 2013 to become Chief Executive Officer of the City Club. The first two (virtual) forums up for 2021 are: The Road to Revitalization: Economic Inclusion and America’s Legacy Cities and More than a Paycheck: Reducing Inequality through Summer Jobs. You can evaluate the City Club’s choices for 2020 here.

The second forum—in light of Roldo’s own examination of the challenge in 1968—could be interesting. If you’re going to watch, as I am, then be sure to read Roldo’s Summer Jobs Fail Again.

Roldo carries on his coverage of United Appeal in $17 Million Split In Back Room. He writes:

Those committees that divvy the United Appeal dollars are now in the their dark holes making decisions. All the interest shown by the mass media during the money milking time has strangely vanished now that the polite heist has been accomplished. The media thinks collecting money is important, but how it’s spent is none of the public’s business.

And therein lies the danger of elites collecting funds from the pubic and then arriving at ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ to benefit who they think is worthy of there decisions. Seldom is what happens in private ever in the public’s best interests. But as Roldo writes: The name of the game is play it safe and be quiet. Roldo was never quiet. We ought not to be either.

In his 4 December issue of Point Of Viəw Roldo Bartimole strikes a seasonal note with: BUY, BABY, BUY SEASON’S HERE featuring the heyday of a mall so sad that even Walmart moved out. He ledes:

The legal looting season is in full swing. It’s called Christmas shopping, America’s number one cultural bask. It’s as American as violence, to borrow a paraphrase.

The Egyptians buried their greats with a collection of worldly wealth to make things pleasant for them in the next world. If the same were done for the average American, one could brick up the entrances to Severance [Mall] and let it go at that. For there is entombed America.

The creation of Severance shopping center took the same mental genius that creates ‘virgin nylon’ and expounds the virtues o ‘genuine imitations.’

Severance is a tomb dedicated to our unique national culture, the cult of consumption.

The tomb is, well, sealed but here in the present we have seen where that cult of consumption has gotten us after very smart geniuses at very good companies figured out how to outsource the actual making of what American are led to believe they must buy and just focus on selling cheap plastic crap from China to each other.

Years from now, I expect that economists and historians will study 2020 as the year consumerism crashed.

Finally, below the fold , Roldo pulls back the curtain on Cleveland’s own Ministerium für Staatsicherheit in SECRET POLICE CLEVELAND STYLE; shines the light on still more Ceremonial Democracy in PUBLIC HEARINGS, PRIVATE REASONS; shows readers how the Plain Dealer made two paragraphs disappear from a New York Times story on the Glenville Shootings; and performs a real act of public service by listing the businessmen who had the final say on Cleveland Now expenditures.

Roldo ended the year with his first Special issue, printing the transcript of his speech before the City Club of Cleveland.

I just want to highlight three bits from the end of his talk First:

The mass media and major institutions in this society are not dedicated to the United States but to the “American Way of Life”. Therefore, it is encumbent upon them not to question very closely the actions of a host of American institutions, and especially not to question the values or motives of those institutions.

Second:

Institutions may be criticized, but the real sin is questioning the value system or motives of the major institutions. Students may protest bad [inaudible] when they begin to question the very nature of the university. Well, then that’s enough.

For example, when was the last time you saw anywhere a critique of such Cleveland institutions as the Businessmen’s Interracial Committee, the Cleveland Development Foundation, the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundations, the PACE Association, the PATH Association, the Cleveland Board of Education, the Citizens League, the United Appeal, University Circle Foundation, Group 66? Yet some of these organizations have immense power over what happens in Cleveland. And they themselves claim to be heavily involved in the life of the city. These institutions have to be demythologized. They are not basically and inherently good. And their motives don’t necessarily have to be good and certainly they must be open to question. Are we afraid to ask those questions publicly?

And third, Roldo concludes:

We talk of the problem of law and order, but our problem is one of excessive order and the encrustening and hardening of institutional bureaucracy and unbecoming values.

Not included in the Special Edition of Point Of Viəw, but available in the City Club transcript—where you can also listen to the full audio—is the question and answer portion so important to the City Club Forum format. I’ll pick just the second exchange because Roldo’s response so perfectly speaks to what his is about. You should go read the rest:

Member: I have a question. It’s a two-part question. I’d like to ask what one think is the government doing that would meet your approval. I’d like also to ask what one thing is the news media doing that would meet your approval.

RB: Well, I’ll tell you, uh. You know you can always find something that’s going on that’s good. And I don’t think we ought to spend our time saying what’s good when there’s so much that’s wrong. I don’t care whether the media does something nice. You know a lot of people get excited because the news media, for example, the Plain Dealer has a something on the miners. Well, you know, so what? So, so they get a thousand dollars per family. So, what, what does that mean? I don’t think there’s any meaning in pointing out what’s good about the media because it’s – if they’re doing their job, their supposed to do it. We should be critical of things when they’re not doing what they want. The government’s doing a lot of good things. But most of them are outweighed by what it isn’t doing.

The fun, and learning never stops in Cleveland and the Point Of Viəw.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Bernie never gets any respect.

Bonus No. 2: How The Political Class Has LIED About Deficits.

The Union Block building on Front Street in Marietta, Ohio, made No. 6 on selected photos in this morning’s photo essay on The Guardian: Small-town US after dark—in pictures.

Criss-crossing the US, covering 25,000 miles and 22 states, the British photographer Daniel Freeman has captured the nocturnal life of small town US. He meanders across states with no planned itinerary, and his photographs capture the timeless quality of the country. Midnight on Main is published by Hatje Cantz.

I’ve been in all three retail spaces over the year—the stores have periodically changed—but I immediately recognized the Union Block building when I scrolled through the photographs.

Bonus No. 1: The true meaning of Christmas.

Bonus No. 2: What he’s saying is kind of ??? crazy.

Bonus No. 3: Glenn Greenwald—Media’s WORST Failures Of 2020.

In his 9 October issue of Point Of Viəw Roldo Bartimole takes a short step away from politics to our own profression—journalism—to examine the lenses that Cleveland’s newspapers (with special attention to his former employer, the Cleveland Plain Dealer)—use to write about the Glenville Shootout and its aftermath. The view is clear, but it ain’t pretty.

Using a style the PD had recently employed in a series under the banner: Cleveland Police, What’s on Their Minds Roldo talks with his former colleagues in: PD Reporters, WHAT’S ON THEIR MINDS. Roldo found this central concern among reporter:

In the bitter words of one of its veteran reporters, words that utter from a deep well of your pride, “They don’t trust us. Tom Vail (publisher and editor, RB) calls us his ‘tigers’ but they don’t trust us. When we come back with the truth but it doesn’t fit certain preconceptions, it doesn’t get into the paper.”

This reporter’s words are not alone. They are backed by a flood of remarks from reporters. They come from a city room filled with restlessness.

Almost to a man, they agreed: We need leadership.

I was in journalism school at Ohio University in the early ’80s and I have to wonder how many of my fellow students might have chosen other majors if they’d had Point Of Viəw on the rack in the lobby of the school. This points to one of the rude awakenings budding journalists quickly learn once they start work: Freedom of the press has nothing to do with reporters, that freedom applies to the people who own actual presses, or in this modern age an electronic—radio, television, internet—platform to broadcast their message on. As long as advertising funds the media, business will have a stranglehold on the news, irregardless of high-minded assertions and a separation of church and state.

Publishers want the cash, but they also want the accolades, and that is a tough wire to walk. Roldo continues:

Like the point of a sharpened pencil, many of them are more direct.

“They won’t let us do our job. Vail covets a Pulitzer prize, but doesn’t want to upset certain people.”

Yes, the allusive Pulitzer. Employees have won two in the newspaper’s 178-year history. The first came in 1953 when editorial cartoonist Edward Daniel Kuekes won for his cartoon Aftermath More than half a century would pass before a second Plain Dealer writer would score a Pulitzer when Connie Schultz would take the honor for her pungent columns that provided a voice for the underdog and underprivileged.

There is a lesson there and more than a little irony in that Schultz would be lauded for the kind of stories reporters wanted to but were blocked because management didn’t want those stories. In late July of this year, Roldo continues:

…A team of PD reporters were assigned to do an in-depth interpretive report on the Glenville shootings.

The stories never appeared. Even the carbon copies and notes were taken from reporters. All the hard work of compiling and writing, gone. The pain and anguish was heightened when reporters were told why the stories would be sacked. They weren’t competent and hadn’t done a good enough job, they were told.

That was, of course, horseshit. While Roldo didn’t say so in so many words, I’m confident that he would have agreed privately in 1968. Such editorial kowtowing to the business side has a chilling effect on reporters and the news they cover. A reporter told Roldo:

That’s the way it goes. Too often when we report something controversial, all it takes is a telephone call from the person who might get hurt. That’s especially true if he has some standing in the community. They’ll believe him before us.

No, they’re just following the Golden Rule as understood by Johnny Hart. Returning to Connie Schultz for a moment, consider, Schultz joined the Plain Dealer in 1993 and married then Ohio congressional representative Sherrod Campbell Brown in 2004. While I won’t take anything away from Schultz for her excellent writing, you have to wonder how editors—and publisher viewed her work after she married a rising star—Brown became one of Ohio’s senators in 2006—in Ohio politics. Schultz resigned from the Plain Dealer in 2011, writing:

[I]n recent weeks, it has become painfully clear that my independence, professionally and personally, is possible only if I’m no longer writing for the newspaper that covers my husband’s senate race on a daily basis.

(Brown won reëlection to a second senate term the following year.)

Roldo closed his lead story with:

Yes, reporters opened up, talked, complained, wondered, worried. The big view: When will we have other than scarred kittens editing copy, relieving it of the truth? When will we be able to give Clevelanders the truth they need?

And at night, when the reporter gets home, switches on his TV and watches the Johnny Carson show in his lonely room, he says, almost to himself, “Will they ever let us tell it the way it is?”

The answer, with rare exception, is no. Media are businesses with a need to attract cash. The solution is far more difficult as Roldo can certainly attest: If any reporter wants to write—without interference—the truth as they understand it to be, they have to go independent. With blogs and platforms such as Substack the leap is far easier than the process Roldo had to go through in 1968, but it can be done.

Roldo continue on his theme of the Plain Dealer in his 23 October issue of Point Of Viəw There Roldo ledes—in Plain Dealing From Bottom—

Point Of Viəw, issue 9 was completed before the latest Plain Dealer absurdity regarding the police was printed: “CORE ‘bodyguards’ Freed by City Hall in Gun Case.” It’s apparent that they Plain Dealer is willing to play Russian roulette with this city. Therefore, this issue attempts to to further analyze the PD’s motives and coverage of the most sensitive issue facing Cleveland.

Roldo carefully lays out the facts of the story, but what I found fascinating was his forensic examination of why the newspaper printed on 16 October: the story… on page one with bold black headlines, accompanied by four page one photograph, as if the story were a new revelation and the most important story of the day the report of events that occurred on 4 April? Did the paper run the story, as Roldo suggests in his subhead: To Get Mayor? The mayor in question, of course, was Carl Burton Stokes. The first Black mayor of a major American city. Roldo writes:

As a former PD reporter I know the methods used by newspapers to keep a story going, especially the methods of “helping” public officials to decide to take further action to keep the story alive. It may mean calling an official daily for a statement. A newspaper can make it embarrassing for a public official who may not think it necessary to bring charges.

If not conspiracy, the evidence points too clearly to a form of collusion among the PD, police and other groups.

Anger in the black community against the PD is at a fever pitch. This was clear last week at an all-day “mass media and race relations conference.” Three militants walked out of one session with a PD official. For hours the debate centered principally upon the PD‘s racist attitudes.

For blacks the issue centers on the premise that the PD is out to get Mayor Stokes. That all the negative stories are the result of a plot by the PD against the mayor is too simple an explanation.

The better explanation is that the PD is warning the mayor to purge himself of black militants. This echoes the Fraternal Order of Police exactly. It is calling upon the mayor not only to the nationalists, but to repress them—or better yet—allow the police to do the job. [Emphasis mine, JH]

Damn! Does that ever sound familiar in light of the police murders—carried out not only here in Cleveland with the shooting death of Tamir Rice, but also the hail of 137 police bullets that butchered Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams as if they had been Bonnie and Clyde but across the country—giving rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and large demonstration in American cities the like of which have not been seen sine the ’60s.

This is why Roldo an Point Of Viəw are vital. Roldo is Cleveland’s elder, serving in the role of storyteller to teach us and remind us that we are part of a history and that we ought to learn from what those before us experienced, else we will just continue in the same wash-and-repeat loop.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: I hope you’re having a Merry Christmas…

Bonus No. 2: History, sooooo much History… and good ol’ Fess…

Bonus No. 1: PREACH! Cornel West DESTROYS Obama Excuses For Democratic Failures.

Bonus No. 2: Tulsi Gabbard—Why I voted AGAINST spending bill.

The big takeaway, for me, from Jeremy Rifkin’s The End Of Work was his warning of the threat to humanity arising from masses of unemployed young men. In the 20th century we watched such masses contributing to revolution in Russia, National Socialism in Germany and global terrorism spreading from countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized the threat and created the Works Project Administration to put millions to work and begin the recovery from The Great Depression. In the ’60s, it can be argued that the Vietnam War siphoned off part of that mass—particularly because the troops fighting in Vietnam were disproportionally Black—but what to do with those too young to draft?

Roldo’s first story in Point Of Viəw dated 11 September 1968 tells us that: Summer Jobs Fail Again. He writes:

Cleveland National Alliance of Businessmen flopped 70 percent short of its announced goal of 4,200 summer jobs from youth from low-income families. The goal was set by NAB itself. Cleveland businessmen pledged 1,600 jobs in answer to the 4,200-goal, but actually hired less than 1,200.

G.J. Tankersley, president of East Ohio Gas Co. and head of the Cleveland NAB in June told a Hollenden House luncheon group that 10,000 needy youth would be involved in meaningful work this summer. “Victory in Job Battle Hailed by Tankersley,” a Cleveland Press headline read.

How difficult would it be for Cleveland industry to come up with 1,200 jobs? As a gauge one can look at the roster of member companies of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association. You’ll find that if each of the companies listed hired only one youth, the 1,200 figure is reached by the time one gets to company names beginning with “H.” That hardly seems a difficult task, or burden upon Cleveland businesses.

…

Federally-financed programs did better. The Neighborhood Youth Corps hired 4,000 youth and the Youth Employment Program, 2,100, both slightly above announced goals. The jobs, however, are primarily menial, pay only $1.25 an hour [the Federal minimum wage that summer was $1.60 an hour. JH] and are limited to 26 and 20 hours a week respectively. The most a youth could earn was $250 to $325 for the summer.

As a personal point of reference, I note that my first on-the-books job was as a movie usher for Dale McCoy at the Colony Theater in Marietta, Ohio. I worked 32 hours a week for 55 cents an hour. Roldo—anticipating Andrew Yang’s guaranteed minimum income scheme—concludes:

With all the bright young men at city hall and the “progressive” thinkers of Cleveland industry, a real jobs program for next years should be planned now.

A suggestion: that a program be put together that would insure every youth of a low-income family, not a job next summer, but an income. The idea of the government as “employer the last resort” could be the basis for a pilot program to test that idea in a unique manner.

If “meaningful” jobs (meaningful this summer meant digging in the cemetery for many youth that are acceptable to youth can be provided, fine. If not, then allow the youth the choice of taking the slight amount these jobs pay—from $250 to $325 a summer—and doing what they like to do.

In other words, stop the crap of stupid jobs that are meaningless to the kids, but help achieve what the society wants, cool summers. Stop the summer arts festivals, imposed upon people, but aimed at the same cool-it psychology, and start thinking and acting for the best interests of the youth.

Uncharacteristically, Roldo’s second piece—Wheel Power!—produced a spit take. I thought Roldo was having a laugh with quotes like:”Whenever it comes to helping the car-commuter in need, it appears the public turns its back;” “We need new highways and we need them now;” and “We would hope that an enlightened citizenry would become aware of the plight of thousands who daily take to treacherous highways to make their way, some as far as 30 and 40 miles, into and out of the city of Cleveland each day.”

Those quotes are from Warren Beaver [Roldo didn’t list a job title or company affiliation, JH] speaking:

…before more than 1,000 cheering road contractors, highway sign makers, billboard advertisers, automobile executives, service station managers, and representatives of Howard HighwayRobs and Holiday Sinns at a rally protesting the low allocation of state funds for highways [in Ohio].

There was no mention of White Flight or Urban Sprawl in the story. Roldo got his headline from the end of the meeting where he tells us:

As the meeting, hundreds joined one militant travelnik who started a chant that probably be heard much in the future. “Wheel Power, Wheel Power.”

Roldo is originally from Bridgeport, Conn., so when a piece appeared in Psychology Today on urban renewal in his home state, it caught his attention. Under the headline A WARNING, he writes:

Allen Talbot… writes of the lessons of New Haven, the nation’s model Model City in renewal and poverty programs.

[Talbot] writes: “Somewhere in America tonight a mayor or city manager is resting comfortably one on of the accomplishments which New Haven found was important, but really irrelevant.”

Cleveland Now is one of them and Mr. Talbot is one paragraph tells why New Haven failed and Cleveland Now won’t succeed:

“One can also see in the prelude to New Haven’s riots the conflict between delivering programs quickly and the imperative to deliver them democratically. At the head of the list of ghetto grievances is, very simply, the total lack of control or influence over what happens. In this context, the problems of joblessness, dreadful schools or poor housing are just symbols of impotence. When relief comes from above as it did in New Haven because it is really quicker and more efficient that way, the problem of impotence remains.”

One can argue about the efficiency of New Haven’s programs, but not with Mr. Talbot’s contention of hand-me-down decisions.

Finally, Roldo offered an election-year remedy in 1968 that would have worked even better in 2020:

Now you can vote for the least of three evils. That is if somebody comes up with a mechanism for figuring out the least evil among Wallace, Nixon and Humphrey. Ugh.

Suggestion: The formation of a Non-Participation Party with an army of workers to man the polls with little white boxes into which everyone who refrains from voting—at least for the presidential spot—can toss a coin or a dollar, the proceeds to go to the formation “government in exile.”

I hear that Mar-a-Logo may be available.

[Program Update (filed under Isn’t Serendipity Great?)—On 15 January, The City Club (virtual) Forum will be: More than a Paycheck: Reducing Inequality through Summer Jobs.]

Which brings us to Point Of Viəw Volume 1, Number 8 where the top headline reads: UNITED APPEAL UNFAIR SHARE. (United Appeal would change its name in the following decade to United Way.) Roldo ledes:

Last year in conjunction with the United Appeal Drive, the Plain Dealer ran a touching page one photo showing a close-up of a small girl’s face staring out appealingly for help. Reaching to her was a hand symbolic of UA agencies—offering all the help she would need, provided the public responded generously with donations.

The photo as a UA public relations man’s dream. The photographer had captured perfectly the sense of what UA wants the community to believe: your ‘fair share’ gift will solve the child’s problem and those of others like her.

Yet, if one studied the photo something highly disturbing emerged. Not only did the photo visualize the public image, but the reality and mythology of UA came through. The extending hand was white and the appealing child, black. At once the paternalism and welfare colonialism became visible. That’s the reality of the private institutions.

Mythology is powerful because it provides a comforting message to those uncomfortable with their choices. Roldo continues:

Last year after falling $565,000 short of its goal, UA commissioned a private study why. The study revealed, as UA suspected, that its fund drive was another ‘backlash’ victim. So well had the public been brainwashed through the years that many white workers felt their donations were going to ‘them’—blacks.

At the same time poor blacks and whites have awakened to the fact that UA funds are relatively meaningless to them.

But every little bit helps, right? No. As we’re seeing in the present day, the crumbs the Federal government is doling out to alleviate COVID-19 economic suffering helps a few buy Ferraris, but doesn’t do nearly enough to help Americans avoid cold and hunger. Bailing out the banks, and the airlines and the cruise lines helps the wealthy. Support ought not to trickle down but swell up.

Roldo looked at where the needy live and where United Appeal spends those Fair Share donations and found that:

Census figures show that Cleveland’s poverty is high concentrated in the inner city and that 76 percent of the 50,000 families in Cuyahoga County are in the city. This is a 1960 Census figure. However, the special census of 1965 reveals that poverty had alarmingly increased in city poverty areas here.

Yet, in 1965, funds expended by private agencies were as follows: $10.3 million, or 51 percent in the suburbs; $4.9 million, or 24 percent in non-poverty city areas and $5.1 million, or 25 percent, in Cleveland poverty areas.

Roldo next gets even more specific. He writes:

…in 1966 while the USO ($14,200 local budget) was “making change for cokes” (one of its stated ‘services’) and distributing “17,850 dozen home baked cookies,” some 40,000 children were living on 73 cents a day. What kind of minds mobilize cookie crusades when children are going without food?

…

No one is charging that UA agencies should become income maintenance agencies, as private charity once was. Nor, is anyone saying that all UA funds should be used in the inner city. However, UA and its affiliates have chosen over the years to give the impression they are ‘where the action,’ and they most certainly have not been or are they.

…

If one takes a look at the total amounts now spent by public and private agencies in health and welfare in the county, UA is almost irrelevant. First, if you take all funds spent, UA donations account for only 2.1 percent of health and welfare spending. Even if you eliminate major welfare programs such as Social Security and Veteran benefits UA only accounts for 4.4 percent of spending. Using either figure the kindest thing one can say of UA is that it is rather irrelevant. What makes the charge more meaningful is a review of the major problem areas of the city and UA spending. For example, on the funds expended for health, UA accounts for 1.5 percent; for welfare services, 5.8 percent; housing, less than 1 percent; job programs less than 1 percent; education, less than 1 percent.

If UA is irrelevant, why attack it? That can best be answered by another question. Why are we so vigorously implored to ‘give a fair share’ by so many civic elites, business leaders and the propaganda machinery of the mass media?

The answer to the second question evolves from industry’s concerns with keeping taxes down. The mythology that private institution, charitably financed, should and can deal with serious social problems has been used to oppose public programs. The United Way is the American Way, goes the theme. Professional fund-raisers coax support with the pitch that ‘business can give it to us, and keep taxes down.’ The Haves are very open to such suggestions.

…

Further, an attack on UA is necessary for many of the reasons that Point Of Viəw rejected Cleveland Now., which is merely a new twist on the UA philosophy. Not only are needed public programs hurt, but Industry earns the image of a progressive, responsible community force, without delivering. A good example of the thinking is displayed by a Cleveland firm which hired a community relations person who wanted the company to know upon employment that he meant to speak out on issues and for programs that would hurt the company financially through taxes. “You do what you have to do for our image. Don’t worry, we have strong enough lobbies so you won’t hurt us,” was the reply.

They are more concerned with, as one political scientist says “Projects… which lend prestige, attract public support and avoid controversy.”

Indeed, at this state of social upheaval, any agency trying to fulfill the above three qualifications has no relationship to the needs of poor people.

Roldo concludes:

A perfect example of paternalism and lack of concern for poor people is evidenced in the [Welfare Federation of Cleveland]’s public welfare committee. Despite the major conflicts of public welfare and the growth of welfare rights organizations, none of the mothers vocal in the fight were on the [allocation] committee.

This isn’t an oversight by any means, but evolves naturally from an agency more concerned with ‘responsible’ public image than getting a job done.

Distasteful confrontation is necessary, not roast beef luncheons with state legislators to plead for better welfare allowances.

The recent compromise by the Welfare Federation in increasing its 36-member board by three representatives of poor people indicates not only the amount of concern for the poor, but for the idea of democratic participation.

It is an insult and should be turned down.

All of this goes to the heart of the economic battle between Capitalism and Democratic Socialism. The capitalists, as the accumulators of wealth, see the money as their and they ought to decide what to do with any surplus they might designate. The Democratic Socialists, as the actual producers, through workers, of wealth, see the money as belonging to the
People, and they ought to decide what to do with any surplus they might designate.

That makes good sense to me.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Trickle-down economics doesn’t work but build-up does…

Bonus No. 2: In a Crisis, a Compromise Solution Is Worse Than No Solution at All.

Bonus No. 3: Dominion worker sues Trump campaign and conservative media.

Bonus No. 4: 2020 electdion map where each data point represent 250,000 voters.

Tuesday night, 23 July 1968, a firefight erupted in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood. When the shooting stopped, seven, three police and three civilians, were dead. A further 14, two civilians and 12 police (one of whom died later) were wounded in what became known as The Glenville Shootout. Roldo Bartimole stopped the presses for the breaking news.

This was the fifth issue of Point Of Viəw, so Roldo’s distinctive staccato, straight talking style was not yet firmly set in reader’s minds, but reading now, 52 years later, he grabbed me on the first page. Roldo opened with a two paragraphs from Wretched of The Earth by Frantz Fanon. Subtitled A negro psychoanalyst’s study of the problems of racism and colonialism in the world today, the book looks at the plight of Blacks in America through the lens of colonialism. Roldo writes:

The importance of the decolonialization-by-violence concept is relevant for an interpretation of last Tuesday’s attack on police by nationalists.

Had a number of policemen been ambushed by a gang of thugs and murderers, in a community outside the ghetto-colony, first, the reason for the attack would have been different, and what followed would have been much different.

But the fact is that the police were attacked in alien territory. They were, indeed, in “another country.”

There is far too much to attempt a reasonable abstraction of the piece, but I do want to highlight four blocks of text from the final two pages of the issue. First:

We hear a great outcry in Ohio against raising welfare grants to 100 percent of the 1958 standard. But when an amendment to this year’s agriculture appropriations bill would have placed a $10,000 ceiling on individual farm subsidies, it was overwhelmingly defeated.

Second:

Akron newspapers last week were filled with the plight of small businessmen, all white, whose shops were looted.

But who speaks on the results or a study taken in the same riot area two years ago that showed poor blacks were over charged nine out of 10 times compared to poor whites, who hardly get a break?

Who speaks to the issue of a black poverty worker in Akron who is quoted a price of $150 for furniture, and her white counterpart who is told, “I wouldn’t sell you that. It’s no good.”

Who calls for the National Guard or the police to stop this legal looting no for days, but years?

Who indeed. Third:

Now who speaks of the violence of uprooting thousands of poor families who have little choice of finding suitable housing?

Finally:

And who speaks for the perfidy of the Cincinnati business community which met with black leaders for two-and-one half years without public knowledge (the city’s newspapers agreed to not publish the fact that the Committee of 28, composed of top business officials and black leaders even existed) and when asked for 2,000 summer jobs last year, came up with 55?

And people were shocked! Shocked, I say, that looters would feel a need to loot.

By the time Roldo published the next Point Of Viəw—Volume 1, Number 6, on 21 August—there had begun to be some perspective on the Glenville Shootout and his headline read: WHO POLICES THE POLICE? A question, of course, that plagues us yet today. Roldo begins:

The police officer asked the picket to show restraint and understanding for the police assigned to the demonstration. He said they had just finished riot duty and could have been with their families, were it not for the demonstration. Then he became more serious. Like a father about to tell his daughter something he felt was of great importance for her future welfare:

“We have tapes of their (black nationalists) meetings. They’re not after white cops, not white businessmen, but they’re after “Whitety,” he said. In desperation, he tried to convey the totality of his conclusion: “You know, we are your last line of defense.”

Early in my journalism career my editor was also a Colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve commanding a unit in New York City. At about the same time that Roldo was reporting on the Glenville Shootout, my editor told me about his command’s emergency plan to literally be the last line of defense for Manhattan south of Harlem (he mentioned a particular cross street, but I don’t recall which one). He was preparing for martial law with Marines creating a mini-DMZ across the island of Manhattan. That’s where we were then. Roldo continues:

The ominous finality of his words at once reflect both the thinking and plea of the police. It indicates that they feel themselves at war with black communities and want full public support to fight that war—in familiar terms—“To win.”

Today, in our time of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, when too few people understand Black Lives Matter, I think that Roldo is precisely correct. And, I think the root of the problem is the very historical organization structure, the concept, of our police. Police are not soldiers. They do not serve in combat. They are not at war with America. Yet, by their very use of military nomenclature—they have sergeants, lieutenants, captains and battalion commanders wearing stripes, bars and stars—and military training and practices: they salute, learn to march and fallen comrades are given military like funerals. With good reason former New York Mayor Michael Rubens Bloomberg told an audience back in 2011:

I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have.

An army doesn’t train to serve and protect, an army trains to destroy a nations enemies and when we continue to see citizens of our nation as our enemies, we lose. Here in North Royalton we recently had an issue on the ballot to place the police and fire services under the control of our Mayor. That issue never had a chance, yet I voted for it because I think civilian control (Even using the term civilian is wrong here creating a false us-or-them dichotomy.) of those we entrust with the power of life and death is important. As did Roldo in 1968:

Without strong civilian control, the police can drag the community into a bloody war. It is the community’s most crucial problem. Yet civic leaders are again playing the ostrich.

Those who have spoken out by supporting Mayor Stokes’ now famous decision, [to withdraw white police from the Glenville neighborhood] don’t carry much weight with public opinion. Silence of other leadership elements may be taken as tacit support by the police.

Who does Roldo blame: our own profession, journalists and the media we work in.

A Major problem is the mass media—newspapers, radio, TV—and their utter failure to inform the public and take a forthright stand on the police-civilian control issue. Indeed, the mass media can create the type of climate necessary for community leaders to speak out. The issue of civilian control, a battle under the surface since Mr. Stokes took control, has been reported, especially by TV, at a gutter level of rumors and precinct propaganda.

Roldo doesn’t explicitly write this here, but I have to wonder to what degree did Stokes’ status as the first Black Mayor of a major American city had to play a significant role in the discussions around civilian/political control of the police. He continues:

Nationalists know the police have evaded civilian control. It’s brought home vividly by by police who harass them and boast, “Compliments of the mayor.”

News executives know how crucial it is to maintain civilian control of military forces. Yet both dailies editorially took weak-kneed positions on a police force admittedly in ‘rebellion.’ The Press mustered bravery with “this newspaper urges them to take it easy.” The PD was equally bold. “Some explanations are in order and some reprimand, if the allegations (of discipline breakdown) prove true.”

They can hardly be accused of courage.

No they can’t. But there is also a fear—in 1968 and 2020—that some police might take a vindictive stance, be a little slow when responding, be extra vigilant concerning nuisance calls or during traffic stops. Police, with a degree of impunity, can be vengeful. And they know where we live. Roldo continues:

One only need compare news editorials scream ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility’ at teachers who walk off the job one day or welfare workers on strike a week to see how completely they have avoided their duty on a crucial issue. TV coverage doesn’t even merit comment. It takes stands only against traffic accidents.

All of this covers only about 80 percent of the front page of Roldo’s piece. Go. Read it all. You’ll be better for having done so. I’ll end with this conclusion from Roldo:

Without suggesting mechanics (which should be easy to work out), I’d say that not only was Mr. Stokes’ decision to for self-policing right for that night, but it should be extended to a permanent form for self-determination.

Maybe this would be embarrassing to many institutions in the community, but embarrassment is a cheap price to pay in the face of the alternative we’ve seen.

However, it must be noted that black people can’t be expected to self-police themselves if they are not given other self-determination powers.

Thus they could not be asked merely to become the same type of instrument as the police force, but with black faces. Self-policing the community would mean new controls over private business, schools and welfare systems, indeed, the entire gamut of private and public agencies in a liberated, decolonized community.

When Black Lives Matter, that makes perfect sense.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…
Bonus No. 1 The YouTube Ban Is Un-American, Wrong, and Will Backfire.

Bonus No. 2: What Public Defenders See: “Authorized” for Release, But Still Jailed.

Bonus No.3: “Amazing” Hypocrisy: Democrats Make Wreck of Covid-19 Relief Negotiations.

I have in the past recalled the words of Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley that: Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.

There is much to unpack there, but for this morning I want to focus on one small portion that, for me (and I believe Roldo Bartimole) that captures the real calling of any journalist worth the name and that is that we should: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Roldo, under the headline “Negative Politics”—Positive Strategy in volume 1, number 3 of his Point Of Viəw that the Cleveland Memory Project tagged with Cleveland and Civic Leaders. In this single-topic issue, Roldo ledes:

A number of people have expressed, expectedly, misgivings about the first two issues of Point of View. Some complain it’s too negative. That it opposes, but doesn’t propose. That it is destructive, not constructive.

These are the cries of the comfortable people.

And what did Mr. Dooley say a journalist is to do with comfortable people? Roldo continues:

[Comfortable people] maintain from their position of comfort a great endurance for the sufferings of others. They support the status quo by saying: “This is not the time for radical action,” or we “agree with the ends, but not the means.”

And they attack smugly with the question that is meant to silence all critics: “What’s your program?” Label something ‘a program’ and it becomes sanctified

This is not the time for radical action. That phrase should set off alarms in the head of anyone who wishes to comfort the afflicted. I think back to a meeting in 2005 when a group of bloggers attended a meeting on the proposal to build the shopping center in the flats that would become Steelyard Commons. The bloggers, who had come together under the banner No Cleveland Walmart—which later became The Writing On The Wal—did their best to oppose support, but a brief conversation after the meeting told the story for me. A blogger was approached by the head of one of the construction unions that stood to get a lot of work for his members said: Let us build it first, then we can stick it to them.

How many times have Progressives been told that now is not the time? Recall the response from firearm manufacturers (through their lobbying arm, the National Rifle Association) every time in the past decade that we have suffered a mass shooting in this country. Recall just a few months ago when Progressives were told to back the presidential candidacy Joseph Robinette Biden because the first priority was to get President Donald John Trump out of the White House and that all our progressive stuff could be addressed later. We all know how well that’s working out, right?

As you would expect, Roldo does get down to the prescriptive. He continues:

What we have then—through the subsidization of industry, the middle class and the rich, and the use of U.S. taxing powers to keep an unemployed labor pool of the poor—is socialism for the affluent and free enterprise for the poor.

The higher up the income ladder one goes,the more subsidized he becomes. And, unfortunately, the more tied he is to what exists but should not be.

The emphasis there is mine and I underlined that phrase because we’ve heard and read those words repeated in the 2020 presidential campaign. I don’t know who first uttered them, but that here we are 52 years later and we’re still decrying this reality tells us a lot.

I am reminded of conversations with my dad who was a railroad and model train enthusiast. He would decry the subsidies given to highways and airports—the competitors that killed the railroads—saying that the railroads never got any money to build their tracks. Except they did. In the 19th century, the federal government gave the railroads free land to lay their tracks and that land was wider that was actually needed. The purpose was to allow the railroads to develop the infrastructure around which communities would rise and enrich the great railroad barons.

So, what are we to do? Roldo continues:

Yet a minority can be a crucial balance at times and though it may not be able to pressure for what it wants, it can thwart the desires of others.

Thus, a strategy of “Negative Politics” could achieve what positive action has been unable to do.

How could it work?

In all likelihood, Gov. James A. Rhodes will ask for a bond issue this November totaling nearly $1 billion. This will require voter approval.

The great chunk of the money, as you will expect, will go for more highways—some $750 million.

While I personally wouldn’t learn about Global Warming until my freshman science class the following year, scientists were already warning about the threat had here was Ohio, wanting to spend $750 million on more highways because, well, you have to build highways. So, why did Gov. Rhodes need the $1 billion to build highways and such? Roldo answers:

An administration which can’t deliver the infusion of capital required by large segments of the society, is in trouble. Big business, bank, construction firms—only to mention a few—are dependent on this indirect subsidization by governments, though their rhetoric denies it.

But even the immediate economic impact may not be as great at the psychological impact. The defeat of such a bond issue by a coalition of the poor and those who see poverty as the priority issue would deliver a more dramatic message to the legislature than all the protests from welfare clients, social welfare agencies and church leaders.

The message would be clear: set your priorities straight or face the denial of your pet projects.

This the vital lesson of political leverage. Such leverage only exists prior to the action. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—and all Progressives—lost any leverage they might have had on the Harris-Biden administration on 3 November. Roldo concludes:

Governor Rhodes isn’t going to spend money on welfare and he isn’t going to invest in mental health, education or anything else that involves people. That’s his philosophy and it fits the concept of Ohio’s industrial leaders perfectly

The bond issue can become a target to build a coalition to break the back of conservatism in Ohio, by denying it the subsidization it requires. It is a movement that could unite civil rights groups, church and social welfare interests, the ghetto and the suburbs.

…

Some people have a hang-up with the term Negative Politics. The politicians and the press will oppose it staunchly.

But it used here with purpose. The term Negative Politics should not repel. What should be repulsive are the “positive” policies that produce gradual improvements that don’t even keep pace with growing problems.

An escalation of commitment has to be made by the middle class whites and blacks. If it isn’t, they will have lost the right to speak out against those taking to the streets to seek redress, as they will if changes are not made quickly and meaningfully.

And that’s how we got The Summer of 2020.

The top headline for volume 1, number 4 of Point Of Viəw is Ceremonial Democracy, It Wears Thin.. Ceremonial Democracy. I like that characterization of how our system of government works for the elites: what Occupy Wall Street and Senator Bernie Sanders would come to call the 1 Percent in 2011. And I think of those moments in our history when Democracy fought back against the pomp and circumstance of elites. Roldo writes:

Ceremonial Democracy is the ritual we go through in an attempt to convince the public it is participating in the affairs of government, while the few who make the decisions can do so in private.

Three local examples of what will take place in Miami and Chicago in August were provided the board of education, the county commissioners and Mayor Carl Stokes.

The first case involved the wondrous reasoning of George Dobrea, president of the Cleveland School Board. Mr. Dobrea feels that neighborhood residents should not dictate who shall be the principal of a school to which they send their children.

It’s remarkable that choosing one’ principal becomes ‘dictatorship,’ when selecting one’s president is considered ‘democracy.’

…

Mr. Dobrea is quoted saying, “If you let one group start telling you what to do, you open the door to all kinds of pressure groups. We can’t let that happen.

Gawd forbid the hoi polloi, actual citizens, tax payers, voters be allowed to interfere with the decision of experts. The second case targets Cuyahoga County’s commissioners—remember them?—and the ceremony of public meetings on how to spend the tax payer county commissioner’s moeny. Roldo continues:As expected, the poor who challenged the budget as not providing adequate welfare allowances were ignored. The commissioners raised the allowance to 93 cents of the 1959 dollar. That means that welfare clients can starve better come January 1969. It also means that welfare clients in Cuyahoga County are only 7 cents and 10 years behind the time.

Actually, the hearings were completely unnecessary. The County Commissioners already had decided on the allowance some time before in private meetings with the Welfare Federation and groups, a tradition of Ceremonial Democracy.

In his third example, Roldo returns to the matter of Cleveland Now. He writes:

Many of those who protested at the County Commissioner’s got another lesson in Ceremonial Democracy from Mayor Stokes later in the week.

…

The poor were told that the programs under Cleveland Now were “already decided.” Mr. Stokes said there can be no change or reapportionment of the funds.”

…

Mr. Stokes did admit that “perhaps we over-subscribed” Cleveland Now. But, he said, “People were so starved for something to hold onto.”

Grasping at images and homage to Ceremonial Democracy may give some comfort. But in reality it’s like a drowning man clutching at a razor blade for survival.

It’s a truism of Ceremonial Democracy that once elected, those who did the electing become a bothersome “pressure group,” as Mr. Dobrea put it.

Until we unmask the ritual and begin to participate in the decisions, we won’t have democracy.

No, we won’t. The first line against Ceremonial Democracy is, and must be, a free and activist, no mad-dog rabid, Press. This is the legacy of Roldo Bartimole and his 50-year campaign against Ceremonial Democracy and all the smoke and mirrors through Point Of Viəw. He’s still writing, of course, but not doing the shoe-leather journalism he once did. That task has fallen to the likes of Sam Allard at Scene, independent journalists like those at NEO SoJo and a handful of bloggers. When Roldo first began writing Point Of Viəw, there were at least three daily print newspapers: the Call & Post, the Cleveland Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Today we have none. That sucks.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Fox, Newsmax Retract Fraud Claims After Maker Threatens Legal Action.

Bonus No. 1: I think Progressives have compromised for far too long to too little effect.

Bonus No. 2: I know, I know. But being Satan is waayyy more fun.

Bonus No. 3: Corbyn launches Peace and Justice project to block fight against Labour…

Bonus No. 4 Understanding the SolarWinds Breach…

When in doubt, begin at the beginning. In the case of Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw that is Thursday, 13 June 1968 and the headline reads: Cleveland Now: another gimmick. The Cleveland Memory archives index for the issue lists: Cleveland Now, Vietnam War, Charles Vanik, Frances Payne Bolton and Ohio Congressional District 22.

Cleveland Now is one of—possibly the first, Roldo?—of many silly and meaningless tags or lost causes from flack catchers tasked with making Cleveland great again. (My personal favorite was Cleveland’s A Plum.) Please note, as is his wont, Roldo sites dollar figures and I have not made any attempt to convert those numbers to 2020 dollars. In addition, Roldo did not have access to the typesetting capabilities of today’s bloggers so, where I can, I maintain his original formatting. Roldo writes:

Just ask yourself: Is the answer to the massive and physical and social problems of American cities to be found in the 55¢ contributions of widows, the 10¢ donations of welfare children or one-hour’s wages from laborers?

Cleveland Now creates the illusion that it is. Therefore, it’s a pornographic answer to the city’s ills. It is a diversion.

For a moment, let’s not talk about program content—which is flimsy—but merely about its rationale—which is deceptive. CN says spirit, positive thinking and boosterism—based in some magic donation concept—will solve city problems.

If this concept had any value, why not finance the $30 billion a year war in Vietnam that way? Why not an America Now campaign to raise the $102 billions the Pentagon wants next fiscal year? Or finance the space program or the billion dollar SST program similarly?

Involvement by donations is a fraud. Its is the gimmick illusion of participation. For involvement means having power to influence and make decisions, not giving 25¢ or $1 million to “experts.”

This last snapped me back to Thomas Frank’s description of the rise of an anti-populist liberal elite in the years following the end of WW II. Frank writes about Roldo’s experts this way:

This group translated anti-populism in the language of theory and built it into a full-blown system of big, intimidating ideas. It continued to serve the same function as always, rationalizing the power of the powerful. But now anti-populism did its work by means of psychology and social theory.

In short, the highly educated learned to deplore working-class movements for their bigotry, their refusal of modernity and their borderline madness. (p. 147-8)

Roldo—quoting the 1966 testimony of Mayor Carl Burton Stokes to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission—continues:

We have, in Cleveland, developed the art of accenting the positive to the exclusion of remedying the negative How difficult it is, but necessary, to advocate as a remedy the accenting of the negative. How else to strike at and endeavor to dispel the deep, almost indigenous false sense of security and accomplishment that pervades this city?

I have highlighted two more sections on Roldo’s examination of Cleveland Now. The first focues on housing and urban renewal. He writes:

Perspective: There are some 60,000 substandard housing units in Cleveland, and more than 25,000 low-income families, most living in bad housing.

Proposals for urban renewal have builtin danger. Cleveland renewal kills poor people. Now new money is being sought for University Circle, Euclid Avenue and downtown. Where will city resources and concern go–to Hough, Glenville and the Near West Side—or to the university complex, institutions and businesses? The past shows that private interests have priority over the poor.

My second highlight concerns a perennial bone that Roldo has picked: Cleveland’s lapdog newspapers. He writes:

The newspapers treat CN as if the Almighty came down personally and gave Cleveland THE ANSWER. The hoopla would put P.T. Barnum to shame. The full-page ads for the Mayor to pressure Council despite its own deplorable condition, were blatantly extortionist.

Roldo closes his premier issue with a short piece under the headline: petty people of district 22. Prior to 1983, Ohio had 22 congressional districts with the 22nd covering eastern Cuyahoga county as well as minor parts of western Geauga, western Lake, and northern Summit counties. Roldo writes:

[Representatives Frances Payne Bingham Bolton (1940-69 and Charles Albert Vanik (1969-81] would agree publicly, I’m sure, to the description of your electorate as well-educated, law-abiding, self-reliant, well-employed, God fearing—in essence—substantial citizens?

Yet a poll by Rep. Bolton—with careful reading—shows them to be prejudiced, selfish, dependent, rather vicious, certainly stupid and somewhat criminal.

Roldo goes on to, of course, back up his reading of Bolton’s poll with the figures.

In Volume 1, Number 2 of Point Of Viəw, Roldo takes on Buying Peace The Private Way. Roldo ledes:

Cleveland business leaders last summer “bought peace” in the ghetto by paying some black activists about $40,000 in a 10-week period to do what they had decided to do already—keep it cool.

He ‘s writing there about a secret Peace in Cleveland program that “displays corporate methods and motives. Roldo continues:

Although protection of property and the community’s national image were of concern, the most significant factor was politics as social control. Business wanted an end to the regime of [50th Cleveland Mayor] Ralph Locher. Corporate interests no longer could tolerate Mr. Locher’s inability to maintain the stability industry demands. Disorder is not good for business.

OK. But why the secrecy?

Peace in Cleveland was never publicized because of an agreement between the newspapers and a business leader, who says publicity would give the troublemakers more power in the ghetto and would be a disservice to the community.

Cleveland’s newspapers might have agreed to keep the story on the down-low, but they hadn’t figured on the power of an independent journalist.

The payments were made through a “neutral source” at the Call & Post. The newspaper’s business manager was its treasurer. Call & Post publisher, W.O. Walker, says Peace in Cleveland was an “outgrowth” of weekly meetings held at the newspaper during last summer by militants and middle class blacks in an effort to maintain calm.

Mr. Walker says he knew little of the workings of Peace in Cleveland but that “Ralph Besse headed it up.”

Mr. Besse, chairman of the defunct Inner City Action Committee is chairman of the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. He has refused to talk about the program.

Shades of Black Lives Matter, Roldo continues:

The activists wanted to keep watch on the actions of police in the ghetto. (Conventional thinking that the activists started ghetto riots is fatuous. Mayor Stokes showed he understood the problem when, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, he quietly withdrew the police from the ghetto and wisely replaced them with black workers from various city departments.

Such action is central to the movement tagged as Defund The Police. Roldo adds:From the activists’ point, they had already passed the word for peace in the ghetto. Says one, “The brothers and sisters were doing the job, so they might as well get paid.

How the money was solicited and who paid is unclear. The president of a well-known retail chain said he was asked and gave. [Clearly, the spirit of Marcus Alonzo Hanna was alive and well in 1967.] “It was worth it, he said. A leading industrialist, who first denied knowledge of the program, then said that he “assumes the money went to quiet rebels” and that “one must view with mixed emotion.” A member of the Inner City Action Committee felt the payments were “a bold, gutsy” approach to the problems.

How bold and gutsy can an approach be when you operate in secret to pay money to people already doing what you want. Craven and clueless seems more appropriate to me. Roldo moves on, asking “who watches elites?”

But who is going to evaluate the private sector? Certainly not the idolizing mass media of Cleveland. And Where are the controls on the well-financed Cleveland foundations to be found?

He then hits the core of problem: “Peace in Cleveland shows quite clearly that the business priority is on social control, not justice.”

Roldo concludes:

By financing ‘safe’ programs—real action is subverted.

So the rush of private interests to aid the ghetto must be viewed with alarm, not applause. It’s obvious that corporate interests are leaning away from the old racism that kept blacks as a labor pool to depress wages.

The threats by blacks to tear down the structure, if not allowed to enter, is viewed expectedly, with alarm by civic elites. It becomes necessary to deflect the anger.

That’s why we get Cleveland civic leaders chastising the the ethnic minorities about their racist attitudes. Racism no longer has enough utility to corporate interests. Thus, civic leaders talk self-righteously about “human relations” from their homogenized, closed suburbs, their Union Club and their Fifty Club. “What can we do about those racist workers?” they ask. But ask them about their covenant communities and exclusive clubs and they’ll tell you “that’s private.” It’s private because the is where the power lives and it’s not shareable.

The end of the issue includes two questions for reader to ponder. The first is a bit glib, but still telling: “Ask yourself,” Roldo writes, “If you wouldn’t buy a used car from Nixon, would you lend your son to Johnson? The second is deeper” To the question “What Kind of Nation?” Roldo replies:

It’s a nation that spends $3 billion—and going up—on pets and $1.7 billion—and going down—on the entire federal anti-poverty program.

It’s a nation that spends $55 million a year on the care and feeding of migrant birds and $40 million on aid to migrant workers.

Has any of this changed?

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

More Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Fox News retracts Smartmatic voting machine fraud claim in staged video.

Bonus No. 2: Why lifelong Democrats are leaving the party.

Bonus No. 3: When real lawyers go to real courts, this is what happens.

Bonus No. 4: The single most important four minutes in The West Wing.

Bonus No. 5: Increased, in-home COVID-19 screening is a must!

Regular readers of Have Coffee Will Write know that every year I chose some writings for deep reading. This year I’ve chosen to spend the next 365 days—tomorrow begins my new year which starts with the Winter Solstice—reading Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw from the beginning. To unify the pieces, I’ve selected the iconic image of his flag’s inverted ə.

I began reading a week ago with Volume 1, Number 1 dated 13 June 1968 and to cover approximately one month’s worth of POVs—Roldo published bi-weekly—with a few specials thrown in here and there. I was 12, closing in on 13 when Roldo published his first issue and more than a year away from beginning my career as a journalist working on and selling a mimeographed newspaper titled POIUYT (the top row of letters on the typewriter backwards) as a Freshman in the halls of Warren High School. I had no idea who Roldo was of course, or that I would begin my professional journalism career in Cleveland—first as a freelancer for Cleveland Magazine and later as an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich—or that more than forty years later I, as a blogger/owner of Have Coffee Will Write and The Writing On The Wal would first meet and then publish (and very lightly edit) Roldo. Doing so, and getting to know him, has been one of my great honors and joys.

I picked the kicker for today’s headline for three reasons: first, I’m a huge Jethro Tull fan and the song, Living In The Past, was originally recorded in 1968. Second, I’m a historian who firmly believes that the aphorism most often attributed to Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás (commonly known in English as George Santayana) is spot on. And, third, I finished reading Thomas Frank’s The People, No yesterday and I think I understand 2020 a lot better in the context of 1896, 1936 and the ’60s. Reading just the first two issues of Point Of Viəw have given me that same feeling about Cleveland. Far too many Clevelanders are condemned to repeat the region’s history because they haven’t read Roldo.

I hope, in my own small way, to correct that: More Readin’ Roldo…

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Bonus No. 1: Will the Media’s Newfound Stridency Continue under Biden? No.

Bonus No. 2: How employee ownership helped Phoenix Coffee survive Covid-19.

Bonus No. 3: An absolute brilliant discussion of Survivorship Bias.

Bonus No. 4: With each new character we’re exploring the possibilities for humanity.

Bonus No. 1: From Mano Singham—The crazies can be dangerous.

In both 2016 and 2020 I was prepared to vote for the Democratic Party’s nominee up until the very second that the elites running the Democratic National Committee kicked Bernie Sanders to the curb. I was OK with Donald John T**** becoming president in both elections for one reason: T**** as president guaranteed the destruction of the Republican Party.

As the 42 days since his loss evidence, T**** will not stop. T*** will continue to burn the mother fucker down and hose the fires with kerosene for months (years?) to come. Maybe one of the cable network should rework the The Biggest Loser.

Bonus No. 1: I think Rat’s goal for 2021 is a pretty good one.

Bonus No. 2 SCOTUS Ruling, AG Barr Makes FOOLS Of Liberal Conspiracy Theorists…

Bonus No. 3: In Leaked Audio, Biden SHOCKINGLY Similar To T****.

The page-one story in my local newspaper this morning is: GOP-Led Ohio Joins Trump Effort to Overturn Election Results. I am not happy that Ohio’s Attorney General David Anthony Yost has thrown the good name of our state—which did vote for Donald John Trump for president, twice—under the bus and made us part of the new Confederate States of America.

Julie Carr Smyth, reporting for The Associated Press, ledes (while burying the actual lede, see below):

Ohio on Thursday joined other Republican-led states that are backing GOP President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden.

In an amicus brief, Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost urged the U.S. Supreme Court to accept the lawsuit led by his GOP counterpart in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton, which seeks to invalidate Electoral College votes in battleground states that Trump lost.

Ohio joins more than a dozen other GOP-led states that have signed on.

“Free and fair elections start with clear rules that don’t change right before the election,” Yost said in the brief. “It is not unreasonable to wonder—and many millions of Americans do—whether those hastily implemented changes exposed the election systems to vulnerabilities.”

The story is not, however, precisely what it appears to be. Smyth buried the lede:

Despite appearing to support the effort, Yost expressed skepticism in his filing about the central court remedy sought by Texas, which wants justices to order Legislatures to appoint a new set of electors in the targeted states.

“Federal courts, just like state courts, lack authority to change the legislatively chosen method for appointing presidential electors,” Yost said. “And so federal courts, just like state courts, lack authority to order legislatures to appoint electors without regard to the results of an already-completed election.”

Still, Yost said it is time for the Supreme Court to definitively rule on how the Electors Clause of the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted. The provision says legislators, not the executive and judicial branches, set rules for selecting electors.

The Guardian treated Yost’s actions in an afterthought tacked to the bottom of its story.

So. Yeah. Complete and utter horseshit, but, to be fair, this is the standard message coming from the Buckeye State. (Ohio joke: What is a Buckeye? A worthless nut.) I would use the word shameless there, but we are a state where four members of the legislature have filed articles of impeachment for Governor Richard Michael DeWine because he has dared to science and stuff to take away the basic rights of the citizens whose lives he seeks to protect.

Also, this morning’s Post includes my letter-to-the-editor: The Long Road To Trump.

Bonus No. 1: Disparities make Blacks less likely to trust COVID-19 care/vaccine.

Bonus No. 2: I miss the old me. We all do big fella.

Bonus No. 3: America Attacked! Pearl Harbor Bombed, America Ready For Sacrifice…

Bonus No. 4: Democrats Versus Republicans.

Bonus No. 5: How This American Life revolutionized radio.

Bonus No. 1: Well, I’ve never been a stripper so…

Bonus No. 2: Marcia Fudge reportedly tapped for housing…

Bonus No. 3: I’m often faster: Milan’s bicycling bookseller takes on the online giants

Bonus No. 4: Bernie co-chair Nina Turner eyes Fudge seat.

While reading Thomas Franks’s most excellent The People, No: A Brief History Of Anti-Populism, I came across an extended section about a Cleveland icon: Marcus Alonzo Hanna. Hanna was chairman of the Republican National Committee (1896-1904) and Ohio’s United States Senator (1897-1904).

One of Cleveland’s equally iconic downtown buildings, a Playhouse Square theater as well as many other buildings bear his family name, but Frank focuses on Hanna’s anti-populist role in the election of 1896. He writes:

Of course, the Democratic Party was not really made up of anarchists, nor had it been captured by the Populists. Still, its shift to the Left was real enough, with huge potential consequences for the country’s financiers and investors. Their fear was a tangible thing.

Republican leaders pulled out all the stops. Their candidate, the famed protectionist William McKinley, waged an avuncular front porch campaign from his home in Ohio. But behind the scenes, McKinley’s friend Marcus Alonzo Hanna, the Cleveland Tycoon, organized a bare-knuckle offensive in the great showdown between the classes. If [Democratic Party Party presidential candidate William Jennings] Bryan represented the producing masses of the country, as the Democrat claimed, Hana would counter his appeal with Trump-like promises of prosperity-through-tariffs. He would enlist American business and the whole vote-for-hire political system of the nineteenth century to suppress the eloquent challenger.

In this war, Hanna was “a political generalissimo of genius,” the historian Matthew Josephson has written., “risen suddenly from the councils of the leading capitalists, to meet and checkmate the drive of the masses by summoning up the berserk fighting power latent in his class.

The dynamic Hanna set about raising and spending enormous sums for the GOP effort, even going door-to-door to the headquarters of the great American corporations soliciting funds to put down the Nebraska upstart. There were few campaign finance rules back then, and what levied was what Josephson calls a political assessment—which is to say, a private Republican tax—“upon corporate wealth.”

Armed with an unprecedented treasury, Hanna proceeded to crush Bryan under a mountain of money. He summoned up a blizzard of alarmist anti-Populist pamphlets—-120 million [Nearly twice the nation’s population at the time, JH] of them, according to Josephson, distributed wherever Bryan’s message seemed to have the most traction. A squad of Republican orators followed Bryan as he moved across the country. There were parades, mind-numbingly long and noisy and expensive. Every shady Election Day practice of the era was deployed; every last possible hireling was provided with generous outlays. Toward the end of the contest, business rolled out its ultimate weapon: coercion, allegedly threatening to shut down factories or cancel deals if Bryan won. Matthew Josephson’s summary is chilly but exact: “Moral enthusiasm was to be beaten at every point by a machinelike domination of the actual polling.” And so it was.

From The People, No: A Brief History Of Anti-Populism by Thomas Frank, p. 60-2

Found in My Electronic Chapbook

If President Donald John Trump had had Marcus Alonzo Hana running his campaign, he’d be president for the next four years.

Regular readers will not be surprised that our own Roldo Bartimole has written numerous times about the descendants of Marcus Hanna and their continuing pro-capitalist and anti-populist roles in Cleveland business and politics.

Bonus No. 1: We forget that William Jennings Bryan whooped Clarence Seward Darrow.

Bonus No. 2: Why Didn’t the Xenophobe-in-Chief Close the Borders?

Bonus No. 3: PFAS Chemical Associated With Severe Covid-19.

Bonus No. 1: People Are Being Offered Pardons Who Don’t Want Pardons.

Bonus No. 2: The Great Reset Conspiracy Smoothie.

Bonus No. 3: How Much Longer Can The President’s Hold On The GOP Last?

I have been waiting for the Plain Dealer editorial pages to show some courage and sharply tell readers what a sickening danger President Donald Trump is and how he is getting worse.

This is a man who has no interest in anyone else but himself. What damage he does is of no concern to him.

But the paper shies away from any kind of moral stance about the dangerous and damaging actions of our lying President.

I put the blame on Executive Editor (the Boss) Chris Quinn.

Quinn, I am told by people who should know, rules over the paper and especially over its editorial pages.

This Sunday he wrote a piece on the editorial pages, headlined—“Tone matters in our opinion pieces.”

So does substance, Mr. Quinn.

One of the references Quinn makes deals with the heavy subject as Melania’s Christmas decorations and a column written about it. Who cares?

It allowed Quinn to talk about the division we face in our nation.

“The last thing we should do is create more reason for division,” he writes.

No. The last thing we should do in the situation as a newspaper, especially the size of the PD, is avoid the truth.

Editorials should speak truth to power.

Yet, the Plain Dealer throughout the vile reign of Trump has avoided telling the truth.

Shamefully avoids the truth.

It is not up to the Plain Dealer, nor is it possible, to avoid the deep divisions we face. It’s not the job to calm the waters when we know who the disturber is. Tell the truth, bluntly. So the message is clear.

Anyone with some experience can see that Quinn’s (and Elizabeth Sullivan- for after all she is the Opinion Director)—tries to “balance” its coverage by offering us a conservative view and a less conservative view.

It’s a hell of a way to tell the truth. By ignoring it.

“We are going to give an extra read to what we publish with an eye sorely on the harshness of the words and their potential to divide,” Quinn wrote.

Please. What is this grade school?

Is Quinn an editor or a censor?

The Plain Dealer has been woefully derelict in its editorial coverage of Trump.

I cannot remember a single sharp editorial about a man who no doubt is the worse president I’ve ever watched, who has a record of lies, who demeans people and who has not done his job.

And on that last point has failed where several hundreds of thousands of people have died of a pandemic he blatantly ignores and lies about. It’s rounding the corner. Total, blatant lie.

How can an editorial page miss it? How can an editor talk about balance?

You have to editorially dodge the truth to not continually condemn him and his administration.

And you are telling us in a column that you will seek to be “less offensive.”

How can you possibly do that?

And you’ll so advise your columnists. What a disgrace for any columnist to have to listen to that nonsense.

How you can be less offensive in your editorial coverage makes me think, why have an editorial page.

Why not more comics?

Bonus No. 1: Student Loan: Borrowed: $79,000. Paid: $190,000. Owes? $236,000.

Bonus No. 2: An Appeal From Michael Moore To MAGA Nation: I Don’t Want You To Die.

Bonus No. 3: Regular readers of Have Coffee Will Write have known this for months.

Thank you for this Mano…

Bonus No. 1: Here’s the Real Reason Foreigners Want to Come to the United States.