*In case you didn’t get the headline, the reference is to Krystal’s Radar…

The 1 percent are different from the 99 percent because they can afford to be. Their wealth allows them to create and live in their own fantasy world, distanced from the realities of life in ways that prevent either group from truly understanding the other. In his 1926 novelette The Rich Boy, F. Scott Fitzgerald penned his most famous misquote on the very rich.

He, in what Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli described as an extension of The Great Gatsby, enlarging the examination of the effects of wealth on character, wrote:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

(The purported exchange between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway didn’t happen either.)

Like Fitzgerald’s protagonist Anson Hunter, Donald John Trump was born to his wealth and has pissed away more of his inheritance than the occupants of a major city will make in a life time. Ted Rall gets that, and in seemingly offering a bit of advice to our tantrum-in-chief, he begins with a caveat:

Some of my commentary about politics is presented in the form of “advice” to the ruling classes. Please understand: I don’t really expect them to take my advice. My advice is not really directed toward them. It is a theoretical exercise.

I am really speaking to you, the people. My goal is to set a standard of behavior and policy to which we ought to expect the ruling class to conform. I set a minimal bar. I know that the ruling classes will not meet the minimum standard to which we are entitled. I want our rulers’ failures to be placed in the sharpest possible relief so we can judge them accordingly and take the next logical step, getting rid of them.

With that disclaimer out of the way, Rall, writing in The Speech Trump Must but Cannot Give continues:

If I were a speechwriter, I would advise President Trump to deliver something like the following from the Oval Office on national television. He will not. He cannot. The system won’t allow it.

But he has to. And he won’t. Which is why the regime is on the way out.

My fellow Americans,

I know you are scared. I’m scared too. Anyone who is paying attention is frightened.

We will lose some of our sons, our daughters, our spouses, our parents and our friends. Even after the coronavirus has been eradicated, it will take years to recover from the economic shock. Pain, suffering and death are inevitable. We will lose many of our best people.

But I want you to know that we will get through this. America survived the Civil War, which killed 2 percent of the population at the time, the Spanish Flu epidemic and the Great Depression. The COVID-19 pandemic will be remembered as a challenge on par with those horrors, but not greater.

Today I want to assure you that no American will come out of this economically ruined. It will be tough. But no one will lose their home to eviction or foreclosure. No one will go hungry. The United States government has ample resources to meet the basic needs and necessities of every American. This assurance goes beyond the end date of the present crisis. No one will be asked in 6 or 12 or 18 months when we come out on the other side of this, to pay back rent or back mortgage or giant medical bills.

To be fair, there is only one politician on the national stage who could deliver Rall’s speech: Bernie Sanders. Not Nancy Patricia Pelosi. Not Charles Ellis Schumer. And certainly not Joseph Robinette Biden. In their wildest imagination no one could conceive of anyone but Bernie standing at a podium and saying:

This and many other decisions I will be making in the coming days, weeks and months may be unpopular. I take full responsibility. If you disapprove of my policies, please vote against me in the coming election. Which I personally guarantee you will take place even if most votes are cast online.

There are no Democrats or Republicans, only the people of the United States. This is not a time to promote conservative, moderate or liberal values—only intelligent, fact-based decision-making. I am open to any and all suggestions of how to address the healthcare and economic challenges that lie ahead of us. For that reason, I am setting up a special White House telephone hotline and website in order to encourage academics, experts and ordinary citizens among our extraordinarily talented people to contact us with any and all ideas that might help.

Were it not for the elites and their pet, the Democratic National Committee, Bernie could have deliverd this speech more than a month ago. We still have a chance. Tell the DNC to got fuck itself. Biden is not the answer. He’s not even an outside hope.

This isn’t over yet.

Bonus No. 1: My Dead French Grandfather Helped Me with COVID-19.

Bonus No. 2: Revised Edition of “Bernie” Graphic Biography Due Out May 5, 2020.

Bonus No. 3: Looking for a distraction? Here are 25 of our favourite long reads.

In these dark days, please remember to…

Bonus No. 4: and Keep on the Sunny Side.

Yesterday I made Robert Reich’s Ignore the bankers—the Trump economy is not worth more coronavirus deaths a bonus on one of my posts. If you didn’t read it then, you should do so before moving on to Lee Fang’s Charles Koch Network Pushed $1 Billion Cut to CDC, Now Attacks Shelter-in-Place Policies for Harming Business.

The actions of Charles Koch—his younger brother David, the other half of the Duo of Darkness, died last August—and his private goon squad couldn’t illustrate better what Reich warned about.

I don’t know what acting chops Koch has, but for my money, he’d make a perfect Vladimir Harkonnen in any Dune movie. Fang, writing at The Intercept, ledes:

Americans for Prosperity, the pro-corporate pressure group founded and funded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, wants employees to return to work despite desperate pleas from public health officials that people should stay home as much as possible to help contain the spread of the coronavirus.

As states began to order nonessential businesses to shut down last week, AFP released a statement calling for all businesses to remain open.

“Rather than blanket shutdowns, the government should allow businesses to continue to adapt and innovate to produce the goods and services Americans need, while continuing to do everything they can to protect the public health,” said Emily Seidel, chief executive of AFP, in a press release.

Some of the group’s state chapters have taken a similar tone. AFP Pennsylvania’s state director, as well as a regional director with the group, have taken to Twitter to lambast shelter-in-place policies. The Michigan chapter of AFP on Monday slammed Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order, which closed down fitness centers, nail salons, amusement parks, casinos, and other businesses deemed nonessential, calling it the “wrong approach for our state.”

Whitmer’s order, variations of which are being implemented by state and local governments nationwide, contains exceptions for critical industries such as grocery stores, pharmacies, health care providers, financial services, transportation, child care, hazardous materials, and energy.

“All businesses are essential — to the people who own them, the people who work in them, and the communities they serve,” said Annie Patnaude, the Michigan state director for AFP, in a statement responding to the order.

AFP’s position, which directly contradicts the advice of medical experts who say that social isolation is essential to curbing the spread of the coronavirus, comes after the group lobbied the Trump administration in 2018 to rescind $1 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Much of AFP’s recommended cuts to government programs, which included CDC money for infectious disease control and global health, became part of the official White House budget request, though most were not adopted by Congress.

The cuts, AFP argued, would “relieve the burden overspending is placing on all taxpayers.” The CDC is now one of the front-line organizations dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, which has impacted nearly 70,000 people in the United States and has claimed over 1,000 lives.

Make no mistake. These are loathsome, money grubbing thugs seeking the blessing of their one true gawd: their stock portfolios. And, surprise, surprise, they’re hypocrites to boot. Fang concludes:

The Koch network, while pushing for businesses to stay open, is taking the opposite approach for its lobbying apparatus. AFP and its affiliates, including LIBRE Initiative and Concerned Veterans for America [a group the American Legion called a, “mouthpiece” vets group who is proactively trying to privatize VA. JH], are now working from home. “Out of an abundance of caution and to ensure the health and safety of our activists, staff, and voters, our staff are working from home and are utilizing digital organizing as one way to continue their grassroots engagement,” a spokesperson from AFP told CNBC.

Koch and his ilk are worse than blood suckers.

And finally, while there is sad news today about John Prine, he was an important part of my teenage years and this is how I like to remember him…

Bonus No. 1: I had to add this classic Derf on the Koch Brothers…

Bonus No. 2: John Oliver has the best line: Shitting on your cake and choking on it too.

Bonus No. 3: The rightwing figures pushing Trump’s ‘back-to-work’ policy despite pandemic.

Bonus No. 4: Obsessively consuming every morsel of information about coronavirus? Or trying to avoid the news completely?

Bonus No. 5: The rest of John Oliver (Will be taken down soon.)

Bonus No. 1: Ignore the bankers—the Trump economy is not worth more coronavirus deaths.

Mary Jo, Gillighan (our dog), Willie (our cat) and I are fine and hunkered down. I’m making one trip a week to the grocery store when the store opens in the morning and buying the fresh food we need for a week—and we have stocks for much longer than that in canned and other packaged/frozen foods. We’re both retired and that helps financially.

We’re among a fortunate population—white, educated, middle-class professionals living in the country and able to self-isolate without a lot of trouble. Up until the current crisis began I mostly felt guilty for not doing enough to hand over a working planet to my nieces and nephews. I knew that I would be long dead before the real shit hit the fan. But Gaia has a way of delivering a really big fuck this bullshit when she wants and make no mistake: our Climate Crisis has played no small role in this pandemic.

Ed Yong, in How the Pandemic Will End for The Atlantic, ledes:

Three months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed. Soon, most everyone in the United States will know someone who has been infected. Like World War II or the 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon the nation’s psyche.

A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. [Emphasis mine, JH]

If we take nothing else from that statement we must learn this: we were told. we knew. we didn’t pay attention. That is how we got here.

And we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Yong continues:

With little room to surge during a crisis, America’s health-care system operates on the assumption that unaffected states can help beleaguered ones in an emergency. That ethic works for localized disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires, but not for a pandemic that is now in all 50 states. Cooperation has given way to competition; some worried hospitals have bought out large quantities of supplies, in the way that panicked consumers have bought out toilet paper.

Partly, that’s because the White House is a ghost town of scientific expertise. A pandemic-preparedness office that was part of the National Security Council was dissolved in 2018. On January 28, Luciana Borio, who was part of that team, urged the government to “act now to prevent an American epidemic,” and specifically to work with the private sector to develop fast, easy diagnostic tests. But with the office shuttered, those warnings were published in The Wall Street Journal, rather than spoken into the president’s ear. Instead of springing into action, America sat idle.

Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared.

So, we all can’t just grab our ankles. What do we do? Not much, actually, but for those at the top, the people we’ve elected to keep the country safe and functioning, this must be all hands on deck. To avert the worst case scenario—2.2. million dead from the virus, Yong writes, four actions must be taken. Immediately.

The first and most important is to rapidly produce masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment. If health-care workers can’t stay healthy, the rest of the response will collapse…

Second, he writes, the Defense Logistics Agency—a 26,000-person group that prepares the U.S. military for overseas operations and that has assisted in past public-health crises, including the 2014 Ebola outbreak—must coordinate:

a massive rollout of COVID-19 tests. Those tests have been slow to arrive because of five separate shortages: of masks to protect people administering the tests; of nasopharyngeal swabs for collecting viral samples; of extraction kits for pulling the virus’s genetic material out of the samples; of chemical reagents that are part of those kits; and of trained people who can give the tests.

Third, convince the nation that social distancing and self-isolation is not a nice thing to do, it is vital.

These measures will take time, during which the pandemic will either accelerate beyond the capacity of the health system or slow to containable levels. Its course—and the nation’s fate—now depends on the third need, which is social distancing. Think of it this way: There are now only two groups of Americans. Group A includes everyone involved in the medical response, whether that’s treating patients, running tests, or manufacturing supplies. Group B includes everyone else, and their job is to buy Group A more time. Group B must now “flatten the curve” by physically isolating themselves from other people to cut off chains of transmission.

The fourth urgent need is clear coordination. Yong writes:

The importance of social distancing must be impressed upon a public who must also be reassured and informed. Instead, [President Donald John] Trump has repeatedly played down the problem, telling America that “we have it very well under control” when we do not, and that cases were “going to be down to close to zero” when they were rising. In some cases, as with his claims about ubiquitous testing, his misleading gaffes have deepened the crisis. He has even touted unproven medications.

Away from the White House press room, Trump has apparently been listening to Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci has advised every president since Ronald Reagan on new epidemics, and now sits on the COVID-19 task force that meets with Trump roughly every other day. “He’s got his own style, let’s leave it at that,” Fauci told me, “but any kind of recommendation that I have made thus far, the substance of it, he has listened to everything.”

But Trump already seems to be wavering. In recent days, he has signaled that he is prepared to backtrack on social-distancing policies in a bid to protect the economy. Pundits and business leaders have used similar rhetoric, arguing that high-risk people, such as the elderly, could be protected while lower-risk people are allowed to go back to work. Such thinking is seductive, but flawed. It overestimates our ability to assess a person’s risk, and to somehow wall off the ‘high-risk’ people from the rest of society. It underestimates how badly the virus can hit ‘low-risk’ groups, and how thoroughly hospitals will be overwhelmed if even just younger demographics are falling sick.

The endgame, Yong writes, comes down to three possible scenarios:

The first is that every nation manages to simultaneously bring the virus to heel, as with the original SARS in 2003. Given how widespread the coronavirus pandemic is, and how badly many countries are faring, the odds of worldwide synchronous control seem vanishingly small.

The second is that the virus does what past flu pandemics have done: It burns through the world and leaves behind enough immune survivors that it eventually struggles to find viable hosts. This “herd immunity” scenario would be quick, and thus tempting. But it would also come at a terrible cost: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible and fatal than the flu, and it would likely leave behind many millions of corpses and a trail of devastated health systems. The United Kingdom initially seemed to consider this herd-immunity strategy, before backtracking when models revealed the dire consequences. The U.S. now seems to be considering it too.

The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.

Because we have never, ever done this before. We are literally in undiscovered country and here there be tygers. But we have to believe that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that we will—like Londoners after the blitz—shoulder through. What then?

The aftermath, writes Yong, won’t be pretty.

Aspects of America’s identity may need rethinking after COVID-19. Many of the country’s values have seemed to work against it during the pandemic. Its individualism, exceptionalism, and tendency to equate doing whatever you want with an act of resistance meant that when it came time to save lives and stay indoors, some people flocked to bars and clubs. Having internalized years of anti-terrorism messaging following 9/11, Americans resolved to not live in fear. But SARS-CoV-2 has no interest in their terror, only their cells.

Years of isolationist rhetoric had consequences too. Citizens who saw China as a distant, different place, where bats are edible and authoritarianism is acceptable, failed to consider that they would be next or that they wouldn’t be ready. (China’s response to this crisis had its own problems, but that’s for another time.) “People believed the rhetoric that containment would work,” says Wendy Parmet, who studies law and public health at Northeastern University. “We keep them out, and we’ll be okay. When you have a body politic that buys into these ideas of isolationism and ethnonationalism, you’re especially vulnerable when a pandemic hits.”

Veterans of past epidemics have long warned that American society is trapped in a cycle of panic and neglect. After every crisis—anthrax, SARS, flu, Ebola—attention is paid and investments are made. But after short periods of peacetime, memories fade and budgets dwindle. This trend transcends red and blue administrations. When a new normal sets in, the abnormal once again becomes unimaginable. But there is reason to think that COVID-19 might be a disaster that leads to more radical and lasting change.

Like Democrats realizing that the road their on to November will only make the crisis worse? Could be. In his penultimate paragraph, Yong muses:

One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic. The election of November 2020 becomes a repudiation of “America first” politics. The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation. Buoyed by steady investments and an influx of the brightest minds, the health-care workforce surges. Gen C kids [the cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19, JH] write school essays about growing up to be epidemiologists. Public health becomes the centerpiece of foreign policy. The U.S. leads a new global partnership focused on solving challenges like pandemics and climate change.

And he finishes with: In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere, and is brought to heel within a month. We are not passive observers here.

Bonus No. 1: So now I can find my way home! Thanks, Jack. Log out.

Bonus No. 2: Grocery Stores Are the Coronavirus Tipping Point.

Bonus No. 3: But what’re you gonna do? Attention-seekers gotta seek!

Bonus No. 4: Ed Yong also does a podcast for The Atlantic: Social Distance.

Bonus No. 5: Sorry, we were arguing and couldn’t do anything.

Bonus No. 6: Five of Donald Trump’s most misleading coronavirus claims.

Bonus No. 1: Why has the media ignored sexual assault allegations against Biden?

First, if you haven’t watched the 30-second attack ad from Priorities USA (a Democratic/Biden Super Pac) you should do so—see Bonus No. 1—right now:. (I’ll wait… Welcome back… Good isn’t it.) Then take a few minutes to read Poppy Noor’s piece: Trump is trying to stop people from seeing this ad on his response to coronavirus.

That’s the 30-second elevator pitch for why Ralph Nader thinks that President Donald John Trump should resign. Sorry, but that isn’t going to happen and no one should think that a President Michael Richard Pence (or even a President Nancy Patricia Pelosi, if events were to go to the No. 3 spot in the line of succession) would make our current national disaster any better. We are in the midst of the pandemic and no change in leadership at the top will change the virus’s course at this point. Americans are dying and we are in what I call our Titanic moment when the 1 Percent are getting theirs and bugger all to the rest of us.

Nader is right, however, in that we have to get Trump out of office, but anyone who thinks Joseph Robinette Biden is our savior is full of shit. We can imagine how we might be coping right now if Bernie Sanders had won both the primary and the election in 2016, but that’s all beggars-and-horses. Nader, in For America’s Urgent Health and Safety, Trump Needs to Resign!, writes:

Leaning on sober-minded experts in infectious diseases at his daily news conferences, Trump is frantically trying to look good. But the old delusionary Trump keeps resurfacing. On Monday, he rated his coronavirus performance at a perfect ten. On Tuesday, he lied to the public about his knowing it was a pandemic “long before it was called a pandemic.” The facts are just the opposite. On February 28th, Trump called COVID-19 a Democratic hoax (See the March 18, 2020 article in the New York Times).

Trump is unable to accept the ferocious reality of this pandemic.

Donald J. Trump is so consumed by his all-defining ego as to be occupationally insane. He is imperiling the public health of the entire country. If Trump endangered his family as he has endangered the country, he would be institutionalized. Again and again, Trump replaces realities with fantasies. He fibs, flails, fails, scapegoats, and never admits he was wrong or mistaken. Trump insists that the media heap undeserved praise on him, and solicits fawning, obsequious compliments from his cabinet members and staff. He just cannot absorb essential information.

Trump’s negligence is even worse than is often recognized. In 2018, his White House’s National Security Council disbanded the pandemic response team after Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, who headed the program, was told to leave his position. Last week, Trump vacuously said he didn’t know that this happened. Even though, the press had repeatedly reported Trump’s decision, Trump refused to take any responsibility. Trump insanely cut USAID’s tiny Predict Program tracking infectious diseases, while bulking up the bloated military weapons budget. Stockpiling redundant nuclear bombs but not precious medical equipment and facilities.

It is clear that Trump’s failed administration is responsible for our staggering unreadiness as the current catastrophe metastasizes, leaving America greatly vulnerable. But Trump doesn’t see it that way. When asked about the role he played in the U.S. government’s gross failure to anticipate and contain coronavirus, Trump responded, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

Trump is crazily still pressing to weaken nursing home regulations designed to reduce deadly infections among millions of elderly residents. He stubbornly persists even after COVID-19 interrupted his golf game. He hates these rules because Obama issued them – his vendetta against Obama is all-consuming.

One of Trump’s biggest goals is to get rid of Obamacare without any replacement plan. When Democrats repeatedly stopped his efforts in Congress, Trump decided to turn to a prolonged court case. Would a rational president mindlessly cut desperately needed healthcare coverage for thirty million Americans during a pandemic? The potential victims even include Trump’s own supporters!

The corporations now want varieties of bailouts because of the virus crisis, and Trump and the Republicans are pouring Niagara’s of red ink into the federal budget. Yet Trump and his congressional cronies continue to starve the IRS that is unable to recover over $400 billion in uncollected taxes every year because of its inadequate budget. The IRS budget is lower than it was in 2011 and lack of funding has forced layoffs of thousands of employees. It is impossible for the IRS to properly audit many global corporations or even respond to inquiring taxpayers without long delays.

Would a sane president be fanatically disabling disease and injury prevention programs at federal agencies and boast about such “deregulation”? Trump continues to favor crooked/for-profit universities that rip off students and leave them impoverished with debt.

It gets worse. Year after year, Trump tried to cut the budgets of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, and the US contribution to the World Health Organization, including their pandemic prevention work. This is criminal negligence. His recent federal budget sent to Congress on February 10, 2020 still advocated these capricious cuts, along with more money for the bloated Pentagon budget than asked for by the Generals.

Last week, Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, called for President Trump to resign.

Lunging between vicious vitriol and manipulative flattery, Trump never did know how to get out of the holes he dug. Here is how to get him out of this one: he should be a patriot for the sake of America and just resign. This is not the time for Captains Queeg or Ahab. The ship of state is sailing toward disaster and the President is incapable of transforming his temperamental dysfunctions.

We are on our own. Neither the president nor the congress is coming to save us. There is no cavalry on the horizon. We have to take care of each other as best we can. That’s what Socialism is all about. And from Eugene Victor Debs to Bernie Sanders to Bhaskar Sunkara the message is clear: the 1 Percent is not going to open the gate; we must grab the bench and batter the gate down.

Bonus No. 1: Out of the Coronavirus Crisis Can Come Efficient Historic Changes for Justice.

As a nation we cannot allow any politician—from Dog Catcher to President—the benefit of the doubt on anything. There are good men and women in public office, but they are not the norm and staying pristine in the barrel full of rotten apples that is politics is all but impossible. We should start with locking all their finances down while they are in office.

I get that that is extreme, but I’m convinced that the remedy is necessary. We should set up the national equivalent of a Special Master to manage in trust all stocks, financial holdings, businesses and accounts of all politicians that they cannot touch, benefit from or influence in any way. Public service must not be a free ticket to wealth.

What set me off? Well, this has been a long-term slow burn, but news this week of congresscritters—a favorite phrase of one of my journalism heroes Molly Ivins—saw the writing on the wall and dumped their stocks before the market had time to react to the Coronavirus pandemic. Matt Taibbi, in After Richard Burr’s Coronavirus Scandal, Will the Government Finally Crack Down on Congressional Insider Trading? for Rolling Stone magazine, ledes:

Late last week, Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina briefly became the most detestable politician in America, at a time when public outrage toward politicians was at an all-time high.

Why? Well, he is a Republican Senator from North Carolina, never a good look, but he’s a particular loathsome example because:

Burr dumped hundreds of thousands (if not millions) worth of stocks after non-public briefings about the extent of the coronavirus crisis in the Senate Intelligence Committee.

At least four other Senators also dumped stock: Republicans Kelly Louffler and David Purdue of Georgia and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, and Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California. Two dozen members of the House also engaged in aggressive stock sales in early February after various briefings.

There’s nothing new here, of course. We’re only paying attention because these three Republican and on Democratic senator got caught at a time when the economy is tanking like its 1929. Taibbi continues:

A key detail is that Burr was one of only four Senators to vote against the 2012 STOCK Act, which was designed to prevent members of congress from trading against non-public information. That nugget was a reminder of how long the fight against congressional insider trading has gone on — and how, despite some successful reforms, a frenetic history of loophole-making has allowed this activity to continue.

Modern efforts to stop the political insider trading problem seem to trace back to 2004, with the publication of a University of Washington School of Business Administration study. Those academics reported that an analysis of Senate portfolios from 1993-1998 showed that “a portfolio that mimics the purchases of U.S. Senators beats the market by 85 basis points a month.”

Eighty-five basis points a month? That’s Bernie Madoff territory. Taibbi goes on doing what he does best: marking the financial trail back to the source with 1000-watt spotlights before he concludes:

However, as the history of the STOCK Act shows, new laws only work if governments decide to enforce them. The history of enforcement involving members of congress is not good, even when the law favors it.

“Even the most stringent laws are going to be impotent in a climate of ethical laxity and weak enforcement.” says Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, an organization which has issued reports on the subject. “It may be that instead of better laws what we really need are better public officials.”

The Burr scandal shows how difficult it is to effect meaningful reform in Washington. If not just one but many members of congress feel sufficiently bulletproof that they’re not scared of trading against a pandemic, how will the government ever deal with less obviously grotesque issues?

Off course, politicians are pikers compared to the big dogs, but I’m with Aftergood. One example I would like to suggest is Aaron Paul Godfrey who is running against my current representative in Congress. He’s good people.

Bonus No. 1: One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.

Bonus No. 2: PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE BACKROOM DEALS…

Bonus No. 3: America Finds Its Many Churchills.

Bonus No. 4: GOV. ANDREW MARK CUOMO IS NO HOSPITAL HERO…

Bonus No. 5: Matt Taibbi on Congressional Insider Trading.

Bonus No. 1: NAOMI KLEIN IS SCREAMING OUT HER WINDOW…!

Bonus No. 2: DON’T BE SHOCKED AND AWED BY THE FAT CATS…

Bonus No. 3: WHAT THE WORLD IN 1917 SHOWS US ABOUT 2020…

Bonus No. 4: TO ASSERT THE MORAL WORTH OF EVERY PERSON…

Persian (Iranian) poet Muslih-ud-Din Mushrif ibn-Abdullah Shirazi is credited with writing: I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet. As horrible as we think the world is for us right now, many many others are living a far worse nightmare. Perspective is always good to have and when we’re on top we benefit from looking down.

Sinduja Rangarajan, in I’ve spent 27 years in solitary confinement. Here are some tips on making the best use of time alone. for Mother Jones, ledes:

For 27 years, Keith LaMar has survived solitary confinement in a supermax prison in Ohio, isolated for 23 hours a day in a space the size of a bathroom. From his bed, if he crooks his neck at just the right angle, he can look out through a slit of a window a few inches wide at a parking lot. But in all these years, he hasn’t touched a blade of grass or a tree; the closest he’s come to the outdoors is in a below-ground concrete “rec cage,” covered by a steel grate ceiling. If he’s lucky, he might catch a glimpse of the sun.

I don’t care what LaMar did to land in prison or to be dropped into the black hole of solitary confinement because those facts aren’t what Rangarajan, or myself, are interested inhere. Now. In the midst of an unprecedented world event when we are joining an ever growing global village of people forced to distance ourselves from each other, we may learn how to better cope with our own self-isolation and perhaps, just perhaps, feel empathy for those for whom isolation is not a choice. Rangarajan continues:

After a hunger strike in 2011, LaMar and a few other death row prisoners at the Ohio supermax won the right to hug their family members during visits, instead of just seeing them through a plexiglass barrier, and to make phone calls from their cells. Lately, his friends outside prison have been telling him about the spread of the coronavirus and the new “shelter in place” orders taking effect in many states. His friends wonder how he stays positive during prolonged periods of physical isolation. The social distancing they describe is nowhere near as extreme as the punishment of solitary confinement—a form of torture. But he has tried to offer what insight he can. He called me last week from his cell.

For the balance of his piece, Rangarajan turns the page of to LaMar.

In solitary, I’m already quarantined somewhat. The only way we would get sick is if a CO [correctional officer] or somebody brings it in. It’s probably inevitable because the guards, even if they don’t have a temperature, can still be carrying the virus. And they are the ones who pass out mail, who give us food. I’m doing what I can in terms of washing my hands frequently, but there’s only so much you can do. You just sitting here waiting to catch it.

I had a strict rule with my family that if anyone is sick please don’t come visit, because once you get the flu [here] it’s just torture. They don’t give you any medications, beyond ibuprofen, so you pretty much have to suffer through. If you catch something as severe as coronavirus, I don’t know how they intend to deal with that. Perhaps they would ship you out to another facility, a hospital. I’m definitely afraid.

As we all are to some extent. LaMar goes on describing how he deals with his forced isolation. He reads, he listens to music, he writes. But unlike those of us self-isolating, he can’t take a walk. He can’t play with his dog. He can’t hold someone he loves.

People are freaking out over being in isolation for a few days. Imagine what would happen to your mind, your spirit after 27 years. LaMar concludes.

Being in solitary confinement, it’s a punishment. But people out in society, it’s an opportunity for your kids to get more in tune with themselves. Because when you’re in school, especially with the internet being what it is, everybody is generally being pulled away from themselves.

The root word of education is “to educe,” to bring forth that which is already there. Education isn’t really about what kind of career you’re gonna get or how you’re gonna make money. That’s not why we were born, to make money for somebody else. To get a big house. To have a nice car. You’re here to bring forth that which is already there. Hopefully young people being forced to stay home outside of the mainstream curriculum are able to get a glimpse of themselves and start pulling on that thread.

Just fucking wow.

Bonus No. 1: Top U.S. & World Headlines—March 27, 2020.

Bonus No. 2: WHAT YOU MIGHT NOT BE HEARING ON FOX NEWS…

Bonus No. 3: The nation has been forced into home solitude by a deadly pandemic.

Bonus No. 4: BIDEN IS THE LYING, DOG-FACED PONY SOLDIER…

Bonus No. 5: Coronavirus Worries and Sabotage.

Inequality isn’t a crime. It just should be.

Public officials, foundation leaders, corporate and legal honchos have become expert at devising mechanisms that generously reward themselves.

They have a protection racket to keep themselves safe. It’s called the news media.

The media give cover to the corrupt by softening coverage.

Never adding up the public cost. The bill you pay.

Those who set the rules have to know that what they take, they take from a significant minority that suffers badly.

These combinations do NOT care if they leave in the wake a destitute population.

They don’t care. Or they care so little that they don’t see the connection between what they TAKE and what’s not available at the other end. I call it government by bribery.

A perfect example of this loathsome thinking revealed itself when four Republic Senators wanted stop the stimulus bill.

The reason: Too generous handout in the $2 trillion bill.

The bill would add $600 to unemployment for four months.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Rich Scott of Florida delayed the bill over the $600. Not the billions going to businesses. The N. Y. Times had a photo of Graham and I wonder if it purposely left visible to his left—a red “exit” sign.

The biggest—but by far not the only—such public thievery going on is Cleveland’s Easter basket of payoffs to Sherwin-Williams paint company.

Sherwin-Williams had revenue of $17.8 billion in 2019.

It’s one of the paint companies that brought children, especially poor ones, lead. It damaged their brains.

Now, the city will reward the company with THIRTY-YEARS OF TAX INCREMENTAL FINANCING.

The Plain Dealer causally mentions this, noting the cost of $60 to $75 million. That’s if there are no tax increases in the next 30 years. And they don’t mention that a good part of the property at Public Square has already been soaked in tax forgiveness. It went into the Dick Jacobs large pockets back starting in the 1980s.

And that’s where the media shell game starts. The PD has two excellent real estate reporters.

But they never go back and add up. What’s the real cost to our community?

Nobody tells us. Newspaper readers don’t have a clip file that follows these hefty deals.

Who should tell us? How about the daily newspaper?

You can look back at pieces I’ve done that tell that kind of story.

In particular I’ll suggest the following that totes up so many of the past deals. Unfortunately, downtown Cleveland is on another development binge, drawing significant money. More will be wanted soon.

Can they at least be truthful and tell you want the cost will be. Even the grocer has to tell you the price of what you’re buying.

But developers and other rascals slip by. As you can see it’s a costly public business. It’s worth saving. From 5 June 2013:

DISGUSTING RECORD OF CLEVELAND DOWNTOWN SCAMS—
TIME TO TOTE THE SCORE IN CITY OF CORPORATE WELFARE

By Roldo Bartimole

In sports we keep records to see who is ahead and who is behind. It’s simple. Get the scores. It tells the story.

I thought it was time to put up a scoreboard that gives us some feel for what the tally is on downtown public subsidies. Where the dough goes. It can’t be a precise record. There’s simply too much public money involved.

It is a tale of two cities. Downtown vs. neighborhoods. It is true some neighborhoods are experiencing resurgence. Others are suffering further decline. Where resources go is crucial to urban life.

This is a journalistic effort. What’s needed is a true academic study to track all this funding. As a reporter, I have followed the bouncing ball and made as thorough an accounting as possible. However, I don’t have a full accounting. No one does.

And just as this is being prepared, County Executive Ed FitzGerald and Mayor

Frank Jackson at the Plain Dealer offices tell us they have a little cash—some $350 million—sloshing around to give—where—downtown. Total pie-in-the-sky nonsense for PD headlines. So predictable.

Even more disturbing the powers that be—the Greater Cleveland Partnership aka Cleveland Tomorrow are pushing a radical 20 year extension of the sin tax.

The tax, first for 15 years, cost taxpayers $240 million. An extension of 10 more years has produced a cost of some $114 million with more than a year to go.

The 20-year extension could produce from $240 million to $320 million, depending on rising alcohol consumption and dwindling cigarette consumption.

A vote is set for May of 2014. The public needs to be alerted.

In other words, the wealth sports owners want more sin tax money now than they got to help build the original Gateway.

When will the people say, “Enough is enough?”

In this piece I try to do my best to calculate the public costs of many private enterprises. The lists below should shock citizens. The ability of private interests to raid public monies puts the excesses of corrupt government to shame.

They have made illegal corruption seem benign.

Cleveland is a city with 32 percent poverty, according to the American Community Survey, U.S. Census Bureau, 5-year estimate 2006-2010. I suspect it is worse now. Certainly for minority communities. But who cares about them?

While the subsidies were being doled out to multi-millionaires and billionaires, much of the city where ordinary Clevelanders lived was being destroyed by other money-making forces. Housing was being destroyed in too many ways to account here.

We have experienced decades of binge subsidizing of our rich while ignoring—and billing—the people who most need help. The shame is written in dollar signs.

Although I haven’t been close to city hall or the county administration for some years I have some indication of what’s been going on. I’m using—as much as I can—public records I’ve compiled. They will not be totally complete. However, I believe they will illustrate the point I’m trying to make.

Our history needs the truth. We rarely get it.

We go back to the 1980s when money literally flowed out of city hall. Directing:

Mayor George Voinovich (his fiscally responsible politician image largely a creation of the PD) and Council President George Forbes (never one to care about image). In the 1990s, Mayor Michael White and Council President Jay Westbrook followed with even more costly subsidies. Now FitzGerald and Jackson. They defer to the city’s corporate leaders, the Greater Cleveland Partnership—50 or so top corporate leaders.

Voinovich and Forbes showed no pretense of real need, giving subsidies mostly at the maximum rate. They didn’t “deal” with developers. Just gave it away.

White & Westbrook were no better. FitzGerald and Jackson continue the policy.
FitzGerald has set aside $100,000,000 for “economic development.” I’m willing to bet most of that cash will go to downtown interests. (PD headlines attest to it already.) He has promised the first flush of Cuyahoga County tax receipts from the Horseshoe Casino downtown entirely for downtown uses until July 2014, expected to be some $8.5 million to $11.5 million annually. The city is expected, as host city, to collect some $13 to $15 million annually. Why the County has restricted its take to downtown should be a mystery. If anything that money should go to the Cleveland School District. Most downtown projects have been tax abated, taking Cleveland school revenue.

A better use would be to improve Cleveland’s child mortality rates. Some Cleveland neighborhoods have worse records than Third World countries.

“Within three miles of University Circle (city’s cultural center) infant mortality
rate exceeds some Third World countries,” according to the division chief of neonatology at Rainbow & Children’s hospital here. Some neighborhoods have worse records than Zimbabwe! Where is the media and public outrage?

The County’s first $7,000,000 in casino money, according to a recent report in the Plain Dealer, will go to the following: Playhouse Square, $4,000,000 for “outdoor improvements,” that include a huge 24-foot-high glass crystal chandelier; $3,000,000 split between Wolstein’s Flats development (see list below) and a conversion of the old East Ohio Gas building on Superior & 9th for new (undoubtedly tax abated) housing.

You may have noticed that the Cleveland Metropolitan School System recently sold its Group Plan-located administration building for $4 million less than appraised to a hotel chain. The school administration must now find new digs to rent.

Already the cry is to use the school’s $4 million—not to re-house the administration—but to build a new downtown school.

Couldn’t they have converted the precious, historic administration building into a downtown school, located in the restricted Group Plan area? NO, instead they sell it to the Drury Hotels for $4.8 million. Its value is much more simply because it is located across from the new convention center.

The era I have observed starts in the 1950s under urban renewal when Cleveland helped destroy much of the East Side of Cleveland. The promised flush of new buildings and progress was never realized.

The Cleveland Development Foundation—funded by the Hanna Fund created by Leonard Hanna with Hanna Mining dough—provided the impetus for renewal and some believed it would help relieve the housing problem in the city.

However, its corporate chairman said, “It would be a mistake to think that the foundation ever had as its main concern housing.” Rather it was to make land available for commercial and industrial use. This, as so many other efforts, had the fingerprints of the Cleveland Foundation and the city’s major law firms.

I have used this quote from Thomas Westropp, a banker and Cleveland Planning Commission member, whose honest assessment of what was in process under urban renewal is shocking in its revelations:

“… Urban renewal has worked very well indeed. Hospitals and educational institutions have been constructed and enlarged. So have commercial and industrial interests and many service organizations, all with the help of urban renewal dollars. With respect to housing, however, the urban renewal program has been a disaster. I wish I could believe that all of this was accidental and brought about by the inefficiency of well-meaning people. But I just can’t. The truth, it seems to me, is it was planned that way.”

Well, of course it was.

Then the subsequent attempt to spur new building arrived in the late 1970s when National City Bank—then the most profitable in the nation—built its headquarters on the northwest corner of E. 9th and Euclid. The $70-million bank building received the first downtown abatement. Unlike Voinovich-abatements, it at least was fashioned on a sliding scale by Mayor Ralph Perk. For the first five years, 100 percent tax free; next five years, 25 percent less, and so on until the end of 20 years when it fully returned to the tax rolls.

In 1990 I checked what abatement meant to the city and schools. SOHIO, when it first decided to build its new home behind Tower City in 1977, was given abatement. However, when it moved its plan to Public Square some years later it did not receive abatement. After five years I checked and SOHIO paid in property taxes $17,750,828, some $10,000,000 of it to Cleveland schools. At the same time National City Bank for property taxes it escaped via abatement: $10,630,245.

This gives us an idea of the cost of tax abatement, especially to schools. School systems depend largely on revenue from property taxes.

Projects downtown became the end all and be all during the 1980s. Voinovich at first held off on tax abatements. Dennis Kucinich in 1979 ran and won the mayor’s seat by opposing abatements. Voinovich in the early 1980s feared the wrath of Kucinich supporters opposed to abatement.

And while he was frightened and abatements were withheld, did downtown development die? Not at all.

Without abatements these major office buildings went up: the $78.5 million Medical Mutual; the $47-million Eaton Center; the $50-million Ohio Bell building and the $200-million plus SOHIO building at Public Square .

Despite this construction, the flow of abatements and free and low interest subsidies gushed out of City Hall and the County. And they haven’t stopped.

Let’s just list some facts by project:

TERMINAL TOWER:

—Tower City (retail UDAG) $10,000,000
—Tower City III (UDAG) $2,700,000
—Tower City IIIA (UDAG) $2,036,000
—Tower City – Old Post Office Bldg. $9,200,000
—RITZ HOTEL (UDAG) $7,900,000
—RITZ HOTEL $34,500,000 (15 year tax abatement estimate)

OTHERS PROJECTS:

—HALLE’S BLDG (UDAG) $7,000,000
—HALLE’S BLDG (OHIO LOAN) $6,000,000
—HALLE’S (OHIO INDUSTRIAL LOAN) $10,000,000
—HALLE’S (HISTORIC DESIGNATION) $5,000,000
—JACOB’S GALLERIA (UDAG) $3,500,000
—JACOB’S KEY CENTER (UDAG) $10,000,000
—JACOB’S MARRIOTT (UDAG) $7,729,398
—MARRIOT/KEY ABATEMENTS $120,000,000
—MALL A PARKING GARAGE (UDAG) $2,500,000

(UDAGs are Urban Development Action Grants, given because of the city’s high urban poverty though the money seems to most often go to wealthy downtown developers. During this Voinovich-Forbes era they were fashioned as mostly zero percent loans for 20 years with neither principal nor interest payable for 20 years – essentially free money. Some were repaid sooner at much reduced paybacks. UDAGs started, as my memory tells me, with a restaurant on West 6th street. It was called George’s. It served good food at inexpensive prices. Lots of downtown office workers filled the place at noontime. It was replaced. It’s now called Johnny’s. It caters to the high rollers of Cleveland. Used to be a favorite of the late Dick Jacobs and those of that ilk. Yes, we needed subsidies to turn a perfectly good, simple restaurant into a place for the elite. The headline in my piece in Point of View in 1983 read: “George’s UDAGed.” Replaced by George Voinovich’s progress.”)

PLAYHOUSE SQUARE:

—PLAYHOUSE SQUARE: $750,000 UDAG for renovation of Ohio Theater
—PLAYHOUSE SQUARE BUILDING: $500,000 TO Prescott, Ball & Turben
—PLAYHOUSE SQUARE GARAGE: $5,500,000 UDAG.
—PLAYHOUSE SQUARE HOTEL (WYNDHAM): $4,000,000 (COMMUNITY BLOCK GRANT)
—WYNDHAM (STATE OF OHIO LOAN): $4,000,000
—WYNDHAM: $3,100,000 TIF ABATEMENT
—WYNDHAM (Tax abatement): $13 million estimated
—WOLSTEIN RENAISSANCE BLDG AT PLAYHOUSE SQUARE: $7,700,000 tax abatement
—ELECTRONIC TICKER SIGN AT PLAYHOUSE SQ.: $2,800,000 PORT AUTHORITY BONDS

ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME:

—$92,000,000, constructed on city land
—$8,500,000 for Inner Harbor by State of Ohio costs
—Cost supported by TIF of properties at Tower City
—Supported by 1.5 percent Cuyahoga County Bed Tax
—Supported by 3 percent surcharge on city admissions tax
—$5,000,000 from Cuyahoga County
—$8,000,000 from State of Ohio

1990s – GATEWAY COSTS:

—JACOBS FIELD $180,000,000
—TAX EXEMPT COST $138,000,000 ($4.6 million annually for 30 years)
—GUND ARENA $157,000,000
—TAX EXEMPT COST $75,000,000 ($3,750,000 annually 20-years)
—SITE PREPARATION $41,000,000
—LAND COST $21,000,000

(Gateway costs from a Gateway document marked “confidential.”)

—GATEWAY GARAGES $42,000,000 (city built). City also had to rebuild city hall parking facility for another $21,000,000. It originally been built at city cost as a match for 1960 urban renewal at Erieview.

—GATEWAY WALKWAY $13,000,000 (RTA built)

(There is no total price but hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on new street work, costly granite curbing and signage for the new projects.)

Gateway’s promoters promised some 16,000 good paying full-time jobs and 28,000 jobs in all. In subsequent years Cleveland lost tens of thousands of jobs. Gateway’s promoters promised no tax abatement but successfully fought and passed state legislation for full tax EXEMPTION for the projects.

GATEWAY POLICE PROTECTION: Mayor White & Council signed agreement that requires 50 city police at any baseball game with 35,000 attendance; 41 officers at arena large crowds. Of course, if these officers served these sports facilities they were unavailable in neighborhoods. The cost at times was at overtime rates. But who cares about them.

PUBLIC TAX FUNDS PAID FOR GATEWAY & OVER-RUNS ONLY AS OF 2013 FROM COUNTY DOCUMENT:

—$240.5 Million (1st 15 years of excise sin tax)
—$125.5 Million (County general fund payments for Gateway bonds as of 2013 with $70 million still owed.)
—$38.2 Million (City admission tax for Gateway Bonds)
—$8.6 Million (County Bed Taxes for Gateway Bonds)
—$8.8 Million (excess from sin taxes for Gateway Bonds)
—$21.3 Million (labeled as “other” for County Gateway Bonds)
—$3.75 Million (County to reimburse State Loan for Gateway)
—$3.75 Million (City to reimburse State Loan for Gateway)
—$5.8 Million (City advance to Browns for Capital Improvements)
—$2.0 Million (Repay loan from Cleveland Foundation for Gateway)
—$11.5 Million (County payment on Gateway overruns)

1990s—CITY VOTED TAXES FOR BROWNS STADIUM & EXPECTED REVENUE:

—DOWNTOWN PARKING 8 percent TAX $213,000,000
—ADMISSION TAX HIKE $36,000,000
—CAR RENTAL TAX $18,000,000
—SIN TAX (10 YEAR EXTEND $116,000,000)
—RTA WATERFRONT LINE $69,000,000
—GATEWAY WALKWAY $13,738,536

If sports facilities were paying property tax (which were exempted when Hagan and White pushed state legislation to free them of any property taxes) Browns stadium would be paying some $8 million a year; Quicken Arena, $3.8 million a year; Progressive Field $4.8 million a year, based on 2010 County figures. That’s more than $16 million per year in lost taxes, about half from the city’s schools.)

—TOTAL SOME $16,000,000 PER YEAR SUBSIDY OF SPORTS FACILITY PROPERTY TAXES.

The RTA waterfront line, a big revenue loser which doesn’t even run regularly, was paid fully from local RTA revenue. Corporate leaders wanted the project done quickly and spurned federal subsidies that could have reduced RTA local costs. It showed clearly the corporate ability to ignore the major needs of poorest transit-dependent riders for the needs of downtown visitors.

1990s—BROWNS STADIUM—Financing

—EXTENDED SIN TAX $110,682,300 (COLLECTED AS OF MARCH 2013)
—STATE OF OHIO $37,050,000
—RTA CONTRIBUTION $3,000,000
—CITY – WATER DIV. $2,000,000
—N.E SEWER DIST. $2,246,760
—TAX EXEMPT COST $240,000,000 (About $8 million annual 30 years.)
—FREE USE OF CITY LAND (2012 VALUE): $19,007,400
—PRESENT YEARLY LAND TAX PAID BY CITY: $646,922.84 ON $19 MILLION VALUE
—ANNUAL TAX LOSS TO CLEVELAND SCHOOLS ON STADIUM: $375,214

(I don’t have current figures for what Clevelanders are paying on bonds for the football stadium. However, by May 2009 the city had paid $102,823,947 and still owed $160,367,109 for bonds, according to city refinancing documents in 2007. Payments extend to November 2027.)

MEDICAL MART/CONVENTION CENTER:

—$218,731,359 sales tax collected from Cuyahoga residents as of March 2013

(Expected revenue of unvoted 40-year, quarter percent sales tax: More than $800,000,000. Collections are running ahead of estimates.)

WESTON HOTEL: Hotel renovation, right across from new convention center.

—CITY LOAN: $1,000,000, 15-YEARS AT 3 percent, $200,000 forgiven with 185 jobs
—TIF ABATEMENT: 30-years worth $6,569,741

GEORGE’S/BURGESS BLDG. site of Johnny’s restaurant:

—$430,000 UDAG at 5 percent interest
—$790,000 in industrial development bonds

PERRY-PAYNE HOUSING REHAB:

—$1,890,000 LOW-INTEREST LOAN
—75 PERCENT TAX ABATEMENT, 17 YEARS
—ANOTHER $550,000 3 percent 20-YEAR LOAN.
—$1,300,000 HISTORIC TAX CREDIT TO POLITICAL-CONNECTED JOHN CARNEY

HOUSE OF BLUES & E 4TH STREET:

—$9,200,000 BOND (WITH INTEREST $12,800,000 PUBLIC COST) FOR DEVELOPER MRN BUILDING RHAB

(I wrote that after Council’s discussion on this legislation one councilman declared, “After 14 hours here, I can’t comprehend this information.” The city backed these bonds with a TIF abatement. In other words, it would be paid by diverting property taxes from that area from public revenues, particularly the Cleveland school system. Further, because the financing was shaky, nearby property of the same developer worth $22.3 million was to be reduced to $5.5 million. The property in question in the old National City Building on Euclid was delinquent

$1.2 million at the time also property of MRN.

RTA – EUCLID CORRIDOR:

—$18,000,000 City of Cleveland
—$10,000,000 Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency
—$56,000,000 STATE OF OHIO
—$36,000,000 RTA (REGIONAL TRANSIT AUTHORITY.)

APPLIED INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGIES (FORMERLY BEARINGS Inc. TO RELOCATE ON SAME STREET – EUCLID AVE.)

—$3,250,000 (20-year, 3 percent LOAN FROM CITY NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT FUND)
—UDAG $1,250,000
—$6,000,000 STATE OF OHIO, 1 percent TO 4 percent INTEREST, PAYABLE 20 YEARS OUT
—$2,000,000 CUYAHOGA COUNTY LOAN
—$16,000,000 PORT AUTHORITY BONDS
—20 YEAR TAX ABATEMENT AT 75 PERCENT FROM CITY, COUNTY, CITY SCHOOLS
—10 YEAR PERSONAL PROPERTY ABATEMENT AT 75 PERCENT

MALL A UNDERGROUND GARAGE

—20-year, 100 percent abatement for underground parking to serve Key Center and Marriott hotel, developed by Dick Jacobs: Cost N/A (Jacobs got 65-year lease with a base rent of $60,000 for 1,650 cars, or about 10 cents a day per car. The garage was to go to another developer but Forbes/Voinovich shifted it to Jacobs. The lawsuit cost $443,000, paid by Jacobs to Voinovich’s old law firm—Calfee & Halter.)

POWERHOUSE AT NAUTICA (JEFF JACOBS): —$4,244,000 UDAG LOAN

GREATER CLEVELAND AQUARIUM (JEFF JACOBS): —$2,000,000 10-YEAR LOW INTEREST CITY LOAN

THE ARCADE-HYATT HOTEL DEAL (The following subsidies were bestowed on the 1880 historic building):

—$1-million in low interest economic development grant from the city of Cleveland
—$2 million low interest loan from Cuyahoga County
—$7 million TIF from city of Cleveland
—$7,152,500 in federal historic tax credits
—$9,686,600 in tax benefits from the donations of the Conservation Easement
—$1.5 million in low interest loans from the Cleveland and Gund Foundations
—$300,000 in grants from the Cleveland Foundation and the 1525 Foundation

Despite the heavy subsidies the project has failed. Soon enough the Arcade developer was before the County Board of Revision for reductions of its property tax value. At one point it asked for lower values for past years for The Arcade, its offices, and Hyatt Regency Hotel for the years 2001 and 2002. The owners want the value dropped from $25 million to $16.2 million for 2001 and to $12.1 for 2002. That would cut taxes in those years and more than half the future tax bill.

WOLSTEIN & FLATS PROJECT:

Although the project remains in its early stages here were the original committed subsidies passed by City Council:

—$11,000,000 CLEVELAND-CUYAHOGA PORT AUTHORITY LOANS
—$6,000,000 CITY OF CLEVELAND CORE CITY LOANS
—$3,400,000 CLEVELAND PUBLIC POWER IN FREE SERVICES
—$740,000 CLEVELAND WATER DIVISION INFRASTRUCTURE WORK
—$1,000,000 CITY OF CLEVELAND GENERAL OBLIGATION BONDS.
—$11,140,000 TIF SHIFT OF PROPERTY TAXES FROM COUNTY, CITY, SCHOOLS FOR PROJECT IMPROVEMENTS
—$1,000,000 CUYAHOGA COUNTY SUBSIDY, UNSPECIFIED
—$3,000,000 STATE OF OHIO GRANT, ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDY
—$1,000,000 CUYAHOGA COUNTY, ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDY
—$8,540,000 CITY OF CLEVELAQND PARKING REVENUE BONDS
—$9,000,000 NORTHEAST OHIO REGIONAL SEWER DISTRICT TAX-EXEMPT BONDS FOR INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS
—$4,550,000 FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION
—$1,400,000 U.S. DEPT.OF COMMERCE VIA CITY OF CLEVELAND
—100 PERCENT TAX ABATEMENT, 15-YEARS ON ALL RENTAL AND CONDO UNITS, INCLUDING ANY IMPROVEMENTS. NO COST ESTIMATE GIVEN
—NEW TRANSIT STATION FOR WATERFRONT LINE TO SERVE PROJECT “AT NO COST OR EXPENSE TO PROJECT.” NO COST FIGURE GIVEN

EAST 9TH STREET DEAL:

—$22,000,000 CUYAHOGA COUNTY PAID FOR HIS WHITE ELEPHANT PROPERTIES ON E. 9TH & EUCLID. ADD MANY MORE COUNTY DOLLARS SPENT ON THE DEAL ESTIMATED AT $37,000,000 IN 2008. NO ONE KNOWS THE TRUE COST. And City Council has already given it a tax gift.

Jacobs had inserted into the deed a plaque to honor himself, where the plaque must be placed and unobstructed and visible:

In recognition of over 50 years of endeavor and achievement the Board of Cuyahoga County Commissioners, on behalf of the citizens, gratefully acknowledges the significant contributions of RICHARD JACOBS (YES, THE DEED HAS THE NAME IN LARGER TYPE) Mr. Jacobs has consistently and selflessly devoted his insight, skills and resources to the development, redevelopment, and preservation of Downtown Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. This complex, which includes the historic old (Cleveland Trust) Rotunda, symbolizes the legacy that Mr. Jacobs has established through his leadership in development and owning many of this County’s major commercial, retail and recreation facilities.

What pure bullshit.

This is by no means the final total of give-aways downtown. All the new and rehabbed downtown housing—praised in the media—are tax abated and some helped by added subsidies.

Downtown floats on public money. Most of the taxes are regressive taxes. In other words, the cost is paid mostly by the 47 percent that get so much abuse from the wealthy.

Most shamefully, we have a news media—Plain Dealer, television and radio stations (private and public)—that pay no attention to the theft of public resources for private profit.

I don’t think the above paints a hopeful picture for the future. I do hope some will pay attention because the city of Cleveland and the County of Cuyahoga will continue to tax the many for the benefit of the few.

The Plain Dealer recently editorialized favorably, of course, for another re-do of Public Square, presumably to give the casino more safety. The cost there is put at $40,000,000. FitzGerald and Jackson responded with a new $350 million plan.

But that’s not all in the works. Expect cries for more.

Surely Jimmy Haslam, Danny Gilbert and Larry Dolan will be look for as the third life for the sin tax that ends in 2014. They will want—and the Pee Dee will certainly second the motion—an extension of the sin (sales) tax for another 10 years or to make it permanent. How they will get it without a vote will be interesting.

The cost to Cuyahoga County taxpayers: Another $100,000,000 or so. If permanent, much, much more.

It’s a spiral to the bottom for the less fortunate.

Finally, why do our public officials go along with these games?

First, they figure it’s a way to re-election or a higher office.

Then, the lawyers make money.

The bondholders get their safe deals.

The bond counsels make easy fees.

The developers win big.

The insurers make their profit.

The architects get their take.

The contractors make loads.

The construction workers get paid.

The newspapers sell papers.

It’s nothing but WIN-WIN for those with power.

And you get stuck with the bill.

What’s not to like?

In recent days governors have stepped up to do what President Donald John Trump can’t or won’t do because of his narcissism, ignorance or inability to think beyond himself. Mary Jo believes the governors have one eye on their state and the other on their presidential aspirations.New York’s governor Andrew Mark Cuomo is leading that pack.

While I’m self-quarantining I’ve been paying more attention to two primary new sources: The Rising and Democracy Now! The former is a new source for me, but I’ve been following Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! for years, but not on a daily basis as I have begun to do in the last week or so.

The people at the head of the line dealing with Americans during the COVDI19 pandemic aren’t politicians or bureaucrats or businesses owners or administrators or researchers or doctors; they’re nurses. If you want to know whats going on you need to talk to the men and women risking their lives in every moment. We need to listen to nurses like emergency room nurses Sean Petty and Kelley Caberra.

The comments tell their own story: Remember at the end of the day. Politicians and their buddies specialize in Handling Money; This won’t get reported at all in the mainstream media; If this hasn’t presented the perfect platform to demand as citizens the implementation of healthcare for all, I don’t know what would; Never forget those that put livelihood above lives; He’s trying to LOOK PRESIDENTIAL; Another “Rudy” fake out…; This is the impact of profit over patient care. Cuomo’s sanctimonious rants are disingenuous and shows his hypocrisy and contempt for New York citizens.

How’s your governor doing?

Bonus No. 1: Top U.S. & World Headlines—March 26, 2020.

Bonus No. 2: Blue Angels Return to Their Roots: F8F Bearcat.

Bonus No. 1: Krystal Ball: Biden seeks Wall Street approved VP pick.

Bonus No. 2: Saagar Enjeti: Obama-Bro’s, Dem elites don’t care about workers, here are their stories.

I wrote earlier this week about reading John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook The World and watching the Warren Beatty movie, Reds, that draws on Reed’s experiences in Russia before and during the revolution. Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality is everything Reed’s tome is not.

This is a book about what could be, not what was, for a brief moment, full of promise. Take this passage for instance:

At its core, to be a socialist is to assert the moral worth of every person, no matter who they are, where they’re from, of what they did. With any luck, future generations will look back at this time when life outcomes were accidents of birth with shock and disgust, the same way we look back on more extreme forms of exploitation and oppression—slavery,feudalism and so on—that have already been done away with. If all human beings have the same inherent worth, then they must be free to fulfill their potential to flourish in all their individuality.

In order to realize this kind of expansive freedom, we need to guarantee at least the basics of a good life to all. And given the opportunity to thrive, people can contribute to society and create the conditions in which other can do the same. Freedom for working people today, however, means limiting the freedom of those who benefit from the inequities inherent in class society. Socialism is not so much about trading in freedom for equality but rather posting the question: Freedom for whom? p. 26-27.

In the midst of a global pandemic that now infects more Americans than citizens of China and all that that means, can there be a better argument for a second socialist revolution—President Frankly Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was the first—here in the United States? Four years ago Bernie Sanders was a radical in the wilderness. Today his outsider views are mainstream and can anyone doubt that if he had won the nomination and the White House in 2016 that we would be in a lot better place with Medicare For all and much, much more, than we are today with Crisis Capitalism chomping away at our people?

Bonus No. 1: Top U.S. & World Headlines—March 25, 2020.

Nearly 40 years after I first watched Warren Beatty’s Reds, I rewatched the movie last evening and it holds up well. I was thinking about the movie after watching Meagan Day on The Rising talk about about Bernie and her new book—written with Micah Uetricht: Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.

I tried to read John Reed’s masterpiece—Ten Days that Shook the World—after watching the movie back in 1981, but in the midst of my usual undergraduate work load, I couldn’t plow through Reed’s 400-pages-plus description of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

I would make the book a dark-winter read years latter, and Reed’s enthusiasm as he was caught up in the glorious October Revolution comes through bright and clear, but I wish customs had not confiscated all his notes when he reëntered the United States forcing him to rely on rosy memory and that he had lived long enough to complete the sequel to Ten Days. He makes seven references (mostly in footnotes) to this sequel—Kornilov to Brest-Litovsk—in Ten Days. There, on page 11, he writes:

In another volume, “Kornilov to Brest-Litovsk,” I trace the course of the Revolution up to and including the German peace. There I explain the origin and functions of the Revolutionary organisations, the evolution of popular sentiment, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the structure of the Soviet state, and the course and outcome of the BrestLitovsk negotiations… [Ellipses in original, JH]

I cannot help but think that Reed knowing what was to come would have written a very different view of the revolution, but others have done so and socialists—like Day—are able to learn from those mistakes.

2020 is not 1917. Maybe we’ll get socialism right this time.

Bonus No. 1: Top U.S. & World Headlines—March 24, 2020.

Bonus No. 2: Fiona the Unemployed Bettong vs Centrelink vs the coronavirus.

Bonus No. 3: What Fox News Actually Needs to Focus On.

Five years before terrorists carried out a coordinated attack on New York City and Washington D.C. that ended 2,977 lives Harlan Ullman, chairman of the Killowen Group and James Wade, chairman of the Military Liaison Committee to the United States Department of Energy unveiled a military doctrine they called Shock and Awe.

Touted by some in President George Walker Bush’s administration—and disparaged by others like General Tommy Ray Franks—the Doctrine of Rapid Dominance (what Adolf Hitler called Blitzkrieg or lightning-war)—was to be the guiding principle of American Empire for the post-cold war world. But the non-military took notice too, and in 2007 Canadian Naomi Klein, inspired, in part, by the events following the 11 September 2001 attack, wrote: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Illustrating how elites opportunistically use shock and awe to further their wealth and consolidate their dominance while shredding the powers of those they see as a threat.

Today, in the midst of the growing CORVID-19 pandemic, those same elites are pouncing on yet another opportunity. Samuel Miller McDonald, in We can’t let the coronavirus lead to a 9/11-style erosion of civil liberties for The Guardian, writes:

Ecological devastation, meanwhile, is the quiet crisis amplifier that has persisted through both of these national emergencies and cast a shadow over the whole of my generation. Its latest iteration is the Covid-19 pandemic, whose origins lay in habitat destruction and biodiversity loss.

Once again, the federal government appears poised to exploit this emergency to expand executive power and move wealth from the public treasury into private bank accounts. As the Nation recently reported, an internal CBP directive empowers the agency to indefinitely monitor and detain anyone suspected of carrying the virus. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has begun a bailout for the oil industry, which could exceed $2.6bn in tax dollars going to oil industry control, and is toying with the idea of an airline industry bailout, which could exceed $50bn.

The authoritarian lockdowns in China and Italy may soon arrive to the anglophone world. Seeing self-avowed leftists and liberals praising such draconian reactions is frightening. Anyone who cares about democracy and civil liberty should not welcome such responses. As we witnessed with the authoritarian reactions to 9/11, emergency violations of civil liberties are not easily rolled back, and often aggregate over time. In the wake of 9/11, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which gave sweeping powers to the executive branch. In 2012, Obama signed an expanded version into law, which gave the president the power to “hold individuals, including US citizens, in military detention indefinitely”, which means for life. We must reject such authoritarian measures wholly, no matter who says they’re “necessary.”

Interestingly, the loudest anti-government voices are coming from Trumpland with runs on gun stores and fears of martial law, but the threat is more subtle and the lack of opposition in Congress should give us all serious pause. McDonald continues:

The fact is, neither expanding executive power nor redistributing wealth upward will save lives or address the root cause of the crisis. In fact, both the oil and airline industries are accelerating the ecological devastation at the heart of this pandemic. As ecological collapse continues to unfold, more and more emergencies like this will occur with greater frequency and intensity. Now is the time to break out of the recurring pattern in which national responses not only fail to solve the problem, but even exacerbate the original cause, while transferring wealth from taxpayers to already-wealthy, well-connected executives. Instead, now is the time to implement a set of standards for what constitutes a response that puts the common good at the center.

In the case of this virus, there are plenty of good ideas already being discussed that would do exactly that. Instead of moving public wealth into private corporations, the government should be doing the opposite.

The first step to containing this virus is handing out cash to every American to fund their ability to self-isolate without having to go to work. A basic income of, at minimum, subsistence rate would achieve this. The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for implementing an emergency universal basic income, while presidential candidate Bernie Sanders suggested delivering a monthly $2,000 check to every household to deal with lost income.

Providing universal healthcare, both during the virus flareup and after, would also go a long way to containing its spread and reducing its seasonal intensity; the for-profit system is probably exacerbating the spread of the virus. Subsidizing or even nationalizing essential goods and services like utilities, pharmaceuticals and distribution of basic necessities could also help contain the virus and reduce its negative long-term impacts, and ensure that those services remain available to all.

As the debate on a bailout package progresses, we are not seeing (yet) any moves on the level of the grossly misnamed Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act but that doesn’t mean that the conversations aren’t already in progress in the backrooms of congress; in fact, I have no doubt that they are.

Bonus No. 1: Top U.S. & World Headlines—March 23, 2020.

Bonus No. 2: The country is being run by a marketing manager who can’t get the message out: DON’T GO OUT!

The Orcas and sharks are tearing at the flesh of the United States in a feeding frenzy unlike any we have never seen and surely Naomi Klein is doing her best Howard Beale imitation as she reminds us that we have nothing but our own willful ignorance to blame for not having seen this coming. We should have read her 2008 book.

In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Klein laid out a dozen years ago how the Orcas and the sharks billionaires and their minions intend to carry away the meat and leave the carcass to the rest of us. Ted Rall, however, remains cautiously hopeful. In Mass Testing for Coronavirus Antibodies Might Save the Economy. he writes:

I’m a cartoonist, not a scientist, but it’s hard to escape the anecdotal evidence (prompted in part responses to my blog a week ago in which I suspected that I had this nasty virus in January) that many Americans have been unknowingly infected by the COVID-19 virus as early as January, perhaps even November or December. The United States intelligence community warned the Trump administration that that would happen early, and appears that they were right.

Somebody hand Nero President Donald John Trump a fiddle. There is hope, however. Rall continues:

A team at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York has developed a SARS-CoV-2 antibody test. This test serves two purposes: it will both tell you whether you actively have a disease or if you have ever had it in the past.

The government should pull out all the stops to make this test available to every American.

If we can start greenlighting infection-free and infection-proof Americans proven to have recovered from COVID-19, they can resume their jobs, go back to work and assist with people who are sick and getting sick.

Every second that President Trump worries about the economy brings us one second closer to not having a population to enjoy that economy.

Bonus No. 1: The coronavirus relief bill could turn into a corporate coup if we aren’t careful.

Bonus No. 2: The Government That Cried Wolf.

As Mary Jo and I watched the 11th—and I expect the final, Joseph Robinette Biden can risk another—debate for the Democratic Party nomination for president nearly two weeks ago, I lost track of the number of times that we looked at each other and shared some form of “How can he lie like that?” or “Why aren’t they calling him out on this?” We were not alone in that.

One of the admirable traits that his supporters so love in Bernie Sanders is that his beliefs don’t change. Not in a campaign, not in a year, not in a decade, not in a lifetime. Bernie is the Horton of American politics: he means what he said and he says what he means. Bernie’s faithful one-hundred percent!

One of the questions friends used to ask me when they learned that I tossed my television onto the tree lawn and canceled my subscription to the Cleveland Plain Dealer back in the 90s was: How do you know what is going on? People don’t ask that any more because they assume, rightly, that I get my news from the intertubes.

Bonus No. 1: Tell it, Huey, tell it!

Bonus No. 2: Coronavirus has made things crazy and scary and they were already crazy and scary before!

Bonus No. 3: House Arrest in the Age of Coronavirus.

Bonus No. 4: A handy guide to better individuwellness with the ABC Interpretive Dance Bandicoot.

If you haven’t already done so, read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, do so as soon as you can.

Bonus No. 1: “It’s Inadequate”: Rep. Ro Khanna Says White House Stimulus Plan Helps Big Business, Not Workers.

Bonus No. 2: Coronavirus Updates, Corporate Bailouts and the Stimulus Package.