In reviewing the Kucinich memoir I said my writing during the late 1970s matched what he wrote.

But as I look back, I see he left a lot out.

How important the blind spots are may become relevant as he campaigns again for mayor against a new crew of young politician. None weren’t around for his first tour.

In April 1979 I wrote in https://havecoffeewillwrite.com/?p=80509, a bi-weekly publication I published for 32 years. Here was the headline:

WILL KUCINICH TRIP ON A PEBBLE?

I wrote that his administration “continues to have trouble with people who should not be enemies and who might even be allies.”

It relates some of the Kucinich dealings with neighborhood groups, strong at that time.

One incident involved the St. Clair-Superior Neighborhood Coalition.

It was important to know that the Gridna sisters—Betty, director of community development, and Tonia, top official in the Safety department—were Kucinich staunch favorites. They had deep family roots in the neighborhood.

The Gridna sisters were young to hold such high positions in the city administration

One meeting in particular stands out. It ended, I wrote, in an “ugly physical struggle.”

I was at the meeting.

It gave visibility to some of the nature of what the administration had been criticized about, even by supporters.

The late Bob Weissman, top advisor to Kucinich, at the meeting “insisted upon delivering a long lecture berating the group after they had reluctantly offered him a two-minute period for greetings.” He spoke because Mayor Kucinich was out of town.

While standing as an urban populist, Kucinich wanted to control neighborhood groups, which at the time were strong and independent.

The full article from early 1979 is here:

Several months later I wrote more and noted, “The pebble gets bigger.”

The issue included behavior contrary to his desire to be seen as a populist leader.

The incidents included a strange refusal to meet with—a “hide and seek” dodge to avoid meeting some 500, mostly elderly people, who came to city hall to protest.

And an incident where he had three young boys (one only 7-years old) arrested as vandals for playing in a restricted, empty pool.

I warned that there was only one way for Kucinich to lose he re-election—by “kicking it away.”

I guess the question could be—is the Dennis Kucinich 50 years after a changed and better man. And will he be different without sway of Bob Weissman, the man who got him elected.

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

Can a movie be far away?

Dennis Kucinich’s memoir—The Division of Light And Power—has everything Hollywood desires for a blockbuster, especially in these times when Americans are looking for heroes.

It’s got vile corrupt corporate bigwigs, shifty crooked politicians, mobsters looking to knock off an uncooperative mayor, bought-and-paid for newspaper editors, and TV and radio personalities.

More skullduggery than a movie could handle.

AND one man against the System.

He may lose. But he doesn’t bow.

However, he’s not finished. He announced today he’s running again.

For mayor, of course.

Dennis Kucinich lived it all. Painfully, as the details tell.

I was around for most of the ride. I wrote about much of it and even parts that Dennis conveniently forgot.

For now, I’m going to give you a shorthand ride through his book by highlighting some old issues of the newsletter I wrote while Dennis was performing.

We touched many of the same bases.

And what I wrote matches the tale he tells, as far as it goes.

Dennis’s major corporate enemy by far was Brock Weir, chairman of the city’s most powerful bank then: Cleveland Trust.

Here’s a take on the rather bullying Brock Weir:

As you can tell with Weir’s confrontation with Jack Schulman, Kucinich’s young, bright law director, the enmity got very personal. And went deep.

This was no ordinary dispute. This was for real.

Weir, Dennis and George Forbes, council president, met, at the behest of a Kucinich business supporter, in a last ditch effort to end the spiral into default.

Dennis plays this meeting up in his book.

Here back when it was happening was my take, which doesn’t differ much, if at all, from his:

I had forgotten I had written the details so reading this issue I was surprised at how both this and Dennis’s version matched up.

Another aspect that I wrote fairly extensively about that matched the book version was his take on the news media, especially three reporters who stake their careers at the time. I had much more detail than he.

Three reporters are singled out for their courageous desire to tell the story of how corporate efforts were being made to take the city’s electric power asset, Muny Light, from the city. It was a demand by one bank in particular and others to relieve Kucinich and the city of financial default, the first since the Great Depression of the 20s.

Reporters lost their jobs. But piece by piece the story got out. At the Plain Dealer there was open revolt the forced the true story of CEI’s desperate acts to create a monopoly by acquiring by hook or crook Muny Light.

Eventually, material I had been reporting broke through at the PD, under reporter revolt. Voters, once they heard the truth, choose to save the system in a vote to sell or not.

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

The splurge of new housing development at west side neighborhoods of Cleveland may have less to do with real estate developers or the economy than with a dead man.

Tremont, Ohio City, Detroit-Shoreway you owe this guy.

He had to stop the steamroller. It was called urban renewal.

Lucky for all of us, it stopped at the Cuyahoga River East. The east side of Cleveland paid the price.

The late Al Grisanti was responsible.

In 1966 Grisanti charged, according to the Plain Dealer, that urban renewal and highway projects could turn the near West Side into “another Hough.”

The early urban renewal pushed people out of the Central and other inner city areas, causing massive movements into Hough. Property owners, knowing the area was designated under renewal, failed to keep up property.

The efforts that promised by renewal promoters to produce replacement housing totally failed.

I have often used the quote from a banker who was also on the City’s Planning Commission—Tom Westropp.

He acknowledge the housing efforts were a disaster and then added:

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 that it was planned that way.

You can’t be more critical of the powers that propelled renewal—corporate and foundations—than Westropp’s assessment. It’s devastating.

Grisanti, a lawyer, died in 2002 at the age of 93. At the time it was claimed that he was the last of the legendary Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame football players to die. However, it was later reported that two other ex-players still lived.

Oddly, although all three were members of Rockne’s fame football team, none of them, including Grisanti, actually played in a Notre Dame game.

The famed Notre Dame team won 105 games, lost 12 and tied five during Rockne’s tenure. It was national champion five time.

Despite his protest efforts Grisanti couldn’t save the one home from demolition that set him on his crusade.

It was where his mother lived. In what became the Erieview downtown urban renewal district. The building was at the corner of E. 12th & St. Clair Ave.

The building Grisanti wanted to save is being demolished as the tall building rose during Erieview’s renewal.

Irony of ironies, that corner remained vacant into the 1990s and beyond.

It was the site that Dick Jacobs held and was supposed to construct a high-rise office building. He never did.

The massive Cleveland urban renewal project Erieview—actually the massive stalled project—took the home and Grisanti never forgave the city.

Indeed, he had been the downtown councilman, one of 33 members. He served from 1943 until January 19, 1954, according to City Archivist Charles Mocsiran. Grisanti did not seek re-election.

He took the city to court in the 60s. But lost.

The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the attempt by Grisanti to declare urban renewal unlawful. The Court ruled Grisanti’s plea was “want of a substantial federal constitutional question …” It was dismissed in November, 1962.

The decision ironically proved to validate urban renewal as legal throughout the nation.

Al took his case to the media. He wasn’t ready to give in. We never know where a protest really goes.

He glowed when the Reader’s Digest—a national publication—printed a piece that he promoted, attacking urban renewal.

It became part of a U. S. Senate hearing with Sen. Edward Muskie referring to the Digest’s article. It was “critical of an urban renewal project called Erieview in Cleveland, Ohio. The gist of its complaint is that the Urban Renewal Administration approved the demolition of a number of sound commercial buildings in this downtown project area.

“The article alleges that the city building inspectors had previously certified as sound most of the building’s which Cleveland officials later reclassified as substandard in order to make the project eligible for an urban renewal grant of $33 million.” It did note that the project was unanimously adopted by the city’s then 33 council members.

Grisanti was fighting a losing battle. And he knew it.

That reflected his slogan: “We got to organize the confusion.” This he did.

It really wasn’t that difficult.

Carl Stokes wrote in his “Promises of Power,” that “Cleveland had the largest urban-renewal program in the nation and had demonstrated the least progress.”

Indeed, Cleveland’s renewal program was being so badly operated that the feds cut all HUD funding in January, 1967.

Not likely to satisfy Grisanti but more likely to show the national Democrats desire to see Stokes elected.

Cleveland has never really recovered from its botched renewal plan that put 6,060 acres of the city under the renewal cloud.

The dreadful record – both downtown and on the east side, along with Grisanti’s haranguing—stalled any attempt to move on projects west of the river.

The West Side survived largely whole.

URBAN RENEWAL MEETING—City officials and others discuss Erieview. Law director and future mayor Ralph Locher is seated front left in photo. Grisanti is seated, looking forward, to right of table.

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

Bonus No. 1: Dennis Kucinich on his new book, The Division of Light and Power.

If only Huey could be as successful as John Blutarsky…

Bonus No. 1: No, they certainly did not die for this…

The Cleveland corporate/legal/philanthropic establishment survived—not well—the terrible urban renewal mistakes it made and forced upon the city.

It survived the urban violence it so feared too.

Others paid the price.

But it still had another problem: Dennis Kucinich.

However, Kucinich made it easy for the Corporates to steamroller him quickly into the 1980s. It elected Republican George Voinovich.

There was nothing in the way now.

Well, maybe one thing that was beginning to grow. It could be a problem.

Neighborhood community activists. Demanding attention to neighborhood problems.

At the close of 1979, “the community organizing movement in Cleveland was an established, flourishing force in the city’s neighborhoods,” wrote Randy Cunningham, a long-time West Side activist. The book—Democratizing Cleveland: The Rise and Fall of Community Organizing in Cleveland, Ohio 1975-1985—is detail rich.

It tells the rise—then fall—of the movement.

A key event that allowed the corporate/foundation complex to choke back the activism of the period came in 1982.

“We hit the CEO’s country club… and funding died immediately. I mean it was the beginning of the end of organizing. The money just dried up,” one activist told CSU student Jordan Yin, now a professor at Alabama A&M, urban affairs.

Cunningham tells the Gates Mills Hunt Club Country Club episode in rich detail. The idea was to confront Alton Whitehouse of Standard Oil and ask for $1 billion. Whitehouse had also been a Squire-Sanders lawyer.

“Located in exclusive Gates Mills, the Hunt Club was one of the most prominent social institutions of Cleveland’s elite,” wrote Cunningham.

He sets the scene:

Those poor people just didn’t know what was going on. There they were sitting having lunch, totally decked out, with tablecloths and crystal. People were saying, ‘Excuse me, I’m thirsty. Do you mind if I drink out of your water glass?

Shouting between the two segments broke out.

“The hunt club had never before seen so many African-Americans… It was so clear who had it and who didn’t, when you went there,” one demonstrator was quoted saying.

The unplanned trip to Gates Mills included local and national neighborhood activist.

Cunningham writes:

What occurred when the 600 demonstrators (not all Clevelanders) landed at the Hunt Club was not just a political event. It was a collision of worlds that barely recognized each other’s existence, and that never came into contact… The veranda was full of well dressed diners while on the grounds, members in English riding outfits were rending their mounts, gathering for the afternoon’s equestrian events.

One activist said, “You do not embarrass the rich among their rich peers.”

One of the buses on the trip had TV cameras.

The result, seemingly all concluded, was the loss of funding from private sources, including Cleveland’s major foundations.

The corporate/legal-complex that took over city government in the late 1970s and destroyed neighborhood organizing soon after set the stage for an assault on local government.

They now owned the future.

They gangbanged public treasury for all kinds of heavy subsidies—tax abatements and the regressive taxes for three sports facilities that now totals over $1 billion easily, a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame via local taxes and diverted property taxes.

It was a long list.

In the late 1970s Squire-Sanders lawyers wrote a tax abatement law that became state legislation.

Then, of course, Squire-Sanders represented National City Bank in its successful quest for a first tax abatement. It was on land at E.9th and Euclid Ave. The bank build a new office structure with 20-year abatement on a declining scale of 25 percent each five years.

It was the first abatement of an avalanche of similar deals, typically increasing to 20-year, 100 percent property tax-free deals.

When I asked the County to provide the total amount of tax abated land of deals more than $1 million each, in 2016, it reported abatements of $722,339,500.

The Squire-Sanders law obviously took off.

It was only the start of an avalanche of sweet corporate deals.

With Voinovich at the helm and the powerful City Council President George Forbes steering legislation through Council, there was little to stop the corporate agenda.

Cleveland became the nation’s most impoverished city. It became the city with the highest child poverty rate and high early birth deaths particularly in the black community. And it was losing population.

In the backrooms, more subsidies were being cooked up.

In the mid-70s a domed stadium was sought but a property tax got kicked aside by the voters. The Corporates had been acquiring land (to be used later as Gateway).It set the stage for the next stadium tax – not until Mayor Michael White was elected mayor.

County moderate income voters successfully choose a sales tax on cigarettes, liquor, beer and wine. City low income voters nixed the vote but by not enough to offset the suburban vote.

It set the stage for the biggest subsidy ever that ended with two sports facilities – a baseball stadium and basketball arena. The Gateway Economic Development Corp. became it’s manager as a quasi-public body.

But it left Browns owner Art Modell very unhappy and resulted in the loss of the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore.

White worked the NFL to promise the return of a team with the Browns name and colors.

But that required a third stadium—First Energy stadium on the lakefront.

In all the cost became enormous.

White and County Commissioner Tim Hagan pushed the deal with promises never kept.

In a full-page ad just before the May the stadium promoters made significant promises.

The ad headlined boldly: WHO WINS WITH ISSUE 2?” It placed a sign, “WE ALL DO” above a photo of many children.

It promised:

• 25,000 good-paying jobs for the jobless
• Neighborhood housing for the homeless
• $15 million a year for school for our children
• Revenues for City And County clinics and hospital for the sick
• Energy assistance programs for the elderly

Despite the italicized ending the promises were obviously lies.

They didn’t end there. This was an all-out sham.

It went on: NO PROPERTY TAX • NO SALES TAX • NO INCOME TAX • NO TAX ABATEMENT.

Of course the only “no property tax” was for the sports facilities and team owners themselves. And the no “tax abatement” became full tax abatement as a state law to give ‘full tax exemption.’

For Cleveland schools, promised $15 million a year, the cost has been in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It would mean more than $300 million for the schools.

They got zilch.

This vote signaled a life-time of massive subsidies to three sports teams, all owned by billionaire families.

The Indians and Cavaliers have been playing since 1994. Between them they have escaped some $10 million a year in property taxes. That’s 27 years or $270 million in free property taxes. The Browns have been back 22 years, at close to $10 million property tax (2017 figure) that’s some $220 million.

The millions a year promised and the tens of million of property taxes not paid total some $790 million in lost revenue, most of it from Cleveland schools.

Soon you were talking money. Promised. But somehow disappeared.

Then there were the costs.

The first 10 years of the sin tax (by the way, a sales tax) cost $240 million.

But as you can see by this older chart there are so many other subsidies that it is difficult to tell how much we taxpayers are giving the billionaires.

And then along came billionaire Al Lerner who took the football team from Modell.

Of course, we had to build another stadium. I wrote that the city “barked” the football stadium, and they did.

I wrote how the Plain Dealer pandered to the desires of the wealthy class of Cleveland. They couldn’t bow lower.

Here are some of the taxes and gifts for the new tax exempt Browns stadium:

• EXTENDED SIN TAX: $110,682,300 (COLLECTED AS OF MARCH 2013)
• STATE OF OHIO: $37,050,000
• RTA CONTRIBUTION: $3,000,000
• CITY – WATER DIVISION: $2,000,000
• Northeast SEWER DISTRICT: $2,246,760
• TAX EXEMPT COST: $240,000,000 (About $8 million annual 30 years)
• FREE USE OF CITY LAND—2017 VALUE: $19,000,000.

The Established Corporates were not done.

And then they wanted the Rock Hall so Cleveland could ROCK.

But it took hard cash, not rocks.

ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME SUBSIDIES:

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

How the admission and bed taxes will contribute during the pandemic shortfalls might mean other sources have been tapped.

And don’t forget the biggest theft of public funding.

Finally, they wanted transport to these activities.

For Gateway, the city built two (money-losing) garages. RTA built a walkway from Terminal Tower at $13 million.

But they also wanted transport to the Browns field and Rock Hall. This one really hurt.

RTA was forced to totally finance the near useless Waterfront Line to connect to the Rock Hall from Tower City. RTA had to pay the full $69-million. Why? Because Dick Pogue (Jones-Day) and the boys couldn’t wait for the necessary federal environmental studies. IT WAS FULL SPEED AHEAD. It was only public transit money. And who uses public transit? Not the Dick Pogues of the world.

NOW COMES THE PLINTH

It truly never stops.

Here come the Browns-owning Haslams offering to play do-gooders, taking the rest of the lakefront property, if their plan works.

Mayor Mike White, desiring as did the NFL, a quick answer to the return of the Browns, simply chose to build—on city land—on the lakefront.

The biggest opponent of that placement: Eddie Rybka, former councilman.

Now Eddie Rybka, chief of regional development, seems to want to give the rest of the downtown waterfront to the Browns. Bad move, Eddie.

BUT here we go again.

Being played by the money men.

They’re talking about a couple of hundred million dollars. NO. NO. NO.

It will be at least a half billion and maybe lots more.

For what?

So Haslam and a few others can profit from a publicly-financed development that will open waterfront property to development—housing, retail, restaurants and whatever can be tax abated.

The money-go-round continues.

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

It really doesn’t matter much who is elected mayor this year.

Man or woman.

The Cleveland political society is so profoundly conservative, straight-laced and staid that anyone truly creative politically wouldn’t be tolerated.

Wouldn’t be elected surely.

Watch who gets well-funded. That’s the corporate stooge.

Four more, eight more, twelve more, maybe sixteen more years.

Of treading on the treadmill.

Hey, we’ll get the ALL-STAR GAME in 2032!

Cleveland people settle for so little. Why give them more?

It seemed some journalists were trying to assess what is Mayor Frank Jackson’s legacy. He has no legacy. Why bother creating one.

“It is what it is.”

That’s Jackson’s dictum.

What does it mean?

No chance of change.

Stuck.

Sixteen years of stuck.

Who ordained this STUCK.

The people for whom the status quo, the way things go, favors.

If they could, they’d have Jackson forever.

Mayor Jackson was a good Cleveland councilman.

Nothing fancy. No real creative ideas.

Never troublesome to those who run things.

Those who can’t tolerate troublesomeness.

If they could mass produce a Mayor Jackson, we’d have him forever.

And quite frankly, I don’t see any possibility of real change.

I hope someone can surprise me.

But I wouldn’t bet on it.

LAKEFRONT FOR SALE—OR GIVE-AWAY

I recently wrote how the Cleveland Development Foundation, a private corporate entity, planned the city’s urban renewal program. In other words, a private group pushed the city of Cleveland into a massive demo program. The city, however, never had the resource or talent to make it work.

Now we are being presented with a football team ownership deciding what should be done with the city’s downtown lakefront.

Steve Litt in the Plain Dealer wrote a piece headlined Cleveland Browns’ vision for the lakefront could benefit from public input.

Good luck with that Steve.

How about a headline that says:

Why is a private individual making decision about what to do with the entire Cleveland lakefront? Who appointed Jimmy Haslam the new Cleveland planning director?

Remember that Haslam’s company was accused of cheating truckers, his customers at the Pilot Flying J.

The Ringer, a sports & culture website, noted at the trial:

Up until this week, Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam had avoided being significantly entangled in a fraud lawsuit against his truck-stop company, Pilot Flying J. Haslam, who bought the Browns in 2012, has denied knowledge in the alleged scheme?—?which plaintiffs/prosecutors say involved defrauding customers out of promised rebates?—?and has not been charged with a crime. But his position might have worsened Tuesday, when a recording played before a jury indicated that he might have been aware of the alleged effort.

Mayor Michael White insisted on the football stadium being placed on the lakefront and built essentially by city mandated taxes.

White also ensured that the Browns owner would not have to pay property taxes on First Energy stadium. Haslam also keeps the naming rights income.

Last time I check (2017) the stadium was worth $276-million. Taxes (on 35 percent of that figure) would be $9.6 million annually. And the land value: $19-million. The land taxes, not exempted, total annual $675,990. Who pays? The city of Cleveland.

Now, the deal already moving along suggests that most of the lakefront would be turned over to the likes of the Haslams. He’s worth $3 billion now!

Nothing in poor Cleveland like helping the filthy rich.

KEEPING TABS ON SPENDING

The Plain Dealer and boss Chris Quinn tell us that they will “be tracking…every…single…dollar of the cash that Cleveland will get from the American Rescue Plan.

I’ll have to see it before I believe it Chris.

Editorially on Sunday the PD warned that “Jackson should not lock in how the $512M windfall will be spent.”

The last line suggests how pathetic this warning is:

Jackson has a significant legacy already. He should continue to be a good steward…” ending by calling Jackson wise. Where did they notice that?

I’ll suggest a warning, not only to Jackson but the City Council.
Here’s how they acted with another city slush fund:

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

Point Of Viəw

This is a peculiar way to begin a column about Cleveland Ohio.

But it’s most appropriate, I believe.

I’m tired of writing this story. However, it is a most important one. One universally neglected.

The entire news media here avoids it as if it were poison. A purposeful avoidance.

Why must truth be smiled upon as if it were not so, someone has written.

Sometimes it seems that if you believe the opposite of what the media are telling you, then you would be more correct. Strange but not far from the truth.

I start by using a blurb from the back of a recent book about how we (some of us)—as a society—created inequality that is destroying America.

It’s a book everyone should read. Every journalist certainly should.

John Heilmann, an American journalist and a sharp political analyst, writes the blurb for the book: Kurt Anderson’s Evil Geniuses—The Unmaking of America. It reads:

Back when the idea of President Reagan still seemed a stretch and President Trump was barely a joke, some serious, smart, committed people with vast appetites and little shame—right-wing intellectuals and billionaires, CEOs and Washington hustlers—launched a long war to create a paradigm shift and rewrite our social contract to their benefit. Anderson’s dazzling, mind-bending, must-read chronicle of that fifty-year crusade explains how it happened, why it succeeded, and, unsettlingly, what that victory means: America is now theirs.

Just as there were Evil Geniuses—really manipulators of economic forces—on the national level, there were such forces or evil geniuses here. They distorted the local economy to benefit certain interests. Interest of wealth and power.

Now can we identify them as Kurt Anderson did in his revealing book?

The locally induced inequalities simply add to the severe national disparities, weighing heavily upon especially lower income people.

The acts producing inequality range from elites successfully pushing events or sometimes blocking measures that might address inequality.

Cleveland post-world war II can be seen in eras.

The disturbing 1960s really started in the 50s with the pursuit of a massive urban renewal program. It was the business and civic elites attempt to restore Cleveland’s past—a wealthy, vibrant city. It was a massive failure. A federal official told me in the 1960s that “Cleveland is our Vietnam. We’d like to get out but we don’t know how.”

The urban program moved masses of people out of inner city black neighborhoods into mainly the Hough area. A banker who served on the city planning commission then, summed up the result:

For some, the urban renewal program worked out 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 that it was planned that way.

Indeed, it was.

As a Plain Dealer reporter in the 1960s, I and Don Sabath, the paper’s urban renewal reporter, interviewed Upshur Evans of the Cleveland Development Foundation. We had to argue to get what he told us into the story in the paper.

As with many created entities during this period the CDF was financed by foundations, including money from the Leonard C. Hanna Fund.

Evans, a retired Standard Oil executive, told us that his CDF had given $50,000 to the city’s Plan Commission to produce a new downtown city plan.

However, he told us that privately plans were being produced for the Erieview urban renewal program under the CDF’s direction.

Its plan would make the city’s planning obsolete and irrelevant.

A testament to who rules—private interests.

Carl Stokes outlined in his Promises of Power book how he tried to force development under the Erieview urban renewal plan by pressuring one of the developers who sat on urban renewal land, undeveloped for years.

James C. Davis, a name you’ll hear about, warned Stokes he should not pressure the developer—John Galbreath of Columbus—to develop the land he held under the Erieview urban renewal project. Stokes writes that Davis “suggested that it wouldn’t be wise to move against Galbreath…”

Here was an unelected elite telling the elected mayor what he cannot do.

Davis played a significant role in Cleveland’s governance, as we shall see.

One of the most significant moves by establishment elites came in the late 1970s, not revealed for some time after. But then actually bragged about by business/civic leaders.

It was outlined in a Fortune magazine article in March 1989.

It reveals the collusion of business leaders to dethrone a mayor. A coup, if you will, by elites.

Corporate leaders “organized the troops and devised a strategy, setting in motion a benign conspiracy of executives and entrepreneurs that still operates.”

The article—story of a coup d’état—clearly had the full cooperation of Cleveland business and legal elites.

“The impressive feat of organizing that cabal and persuading Cleveland’s most senior businessmen to take charge of the grittiest aspects of civic life was the real key to the town’s turnaround,” the article continued. An overthrow of a government!

However, it really wasn’t that unique for Cleveland business/legal leaders. Not to anyone who has paid attention to the civic life of this old industrial town. John Gunther, who wrote sociopolitical “insider” books, wrote, “Cleveland is probably the most civic-minded city in the country.”

Cleveland historically has had a close-knit business community. In the 1960s, Rep. Wright Patman described “the major Cleveland banks extensive use of stockholder links” as more pervasive than any other city examined by the congressional committee, according to The Cleveland Papers. The Papers, an exam of Cleveland’s tightly control business establishment, available now likely only at local libraries.

Patman’s conclusion is reflected in the words of one corporate member’s feeling: “Of course we’re all on the banks. Everyone I’ve mentioned is on a bank. We all know each other. We all belong to the Union Club. We all call each other. We have no hesitation to call each other for help.”

Cleveland companies at a time when mergers and takeovers were prominent were known to rescue possible takeovers by countering others offers from outside Cleveland. “You can beat our Browns and our Indians, but it’s tough to beat our Union Club,” went one business leader.

Corporate/legal forces had good practice in the 1960s as wrenching racial problem, the rise of civil rights protests and corporate-promoted urban renewal demands forced elites to take open roles, rather than behind the scenes operators. The Businessmen’s Interracial Committee on Community Affairs and the Inner City Action Committee were commanded by top legal/corporate leaders. And foundation funded.

Jack Reavis, a Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue managing partner and BICCA head at the time, warned, “Tempers and tensions were very high indeed. I thought it quite possible that Cleveland would be the first of the northern cities where savage violence might break out.” Indeed, it did both in Hough in 1966 and Glenville in 1968. Reavis, though his partner Seth Taft ran as a Republican in the 1967 mayoral election, backed Carl Stokes, the Democrat, who became the first black mayor of a major American city.

The two mechanisms—BICCA and ICAC—were not totally successful; despite Reavis concluding that “The Negroes on this committee have behaved magnificently.” The problem was that Reavis was dealing with Blacks who weren’t suffering the severe problems of the ghetto. (Can you imagine talking like that about their behavior?)

Indeed, as one part of the business establishment was seeking to placate those suffering urban blight, another segment was pushing urban renewal, a major cause of disruption of low income Blacks.

James C. Davis of Squires, Sanders and Dempsey wrote: “I am a third generation Republican… I am reasonably hardheaded.”

His speech to the Cleveland Bar Association blamed “white ethnics” for the city’s problems.

He gave no fault to his class of people. His attack at the meeting was followed by a pamphlet of the speech distributed widely.

Let us rather give our attention to the political soil from which they grow. Let us direct our attention to the solution of Cleveland’s white problem. It will not be easy—it will not be quick, but, unless our efforts be unrelenting, unless they be carried forward with the full force of both our hearts and our minds and unless we succeed—it must necessarily follow that the opportunities for the profitable practice of law in Cleveland will soon be materially foreshortened.The speech was printed in pamphlet form and distributed widely.

In the same bar journal issue carrying his speech, 16 lawyer-members were honored. All were white. All with photographs.

Davis apparently didn’t notice that white problem.

Davis became the head of the Cleveland Development Foundation, the Greater Cleveland Growth Association (later Cleveland Tomorrow, now Greater Cleveland Partnership.) The names change but the policies don’t.

At one point in the 1970s the aim was to relieve Cleveland of its transit system, converting to a regional system via RTA. Davis was intimately involved.

The city gave up its system for nothing except some $10 million for parking lots it owned.

There was, however, a fight over what RTA would charge riders. Some politicians tried to protect in particular elder citizens. Eventually, reduced costs were won, mostly through efforts by then councilman Dennis Kucinich.

Davis scoffed at older riders at one meeting: “They don’t even know what they’re cheering about,” the Squire-Sanders lawyer said at a public hearing.

Davis, of course, knew what he was talking about when he pushed another transportation plan: A jetport in the lake. Estimated cost: $1 BILLION in 1975 dollars.

What he didn’t say was that it would require hefty bond issues. Or that Squire-Sanders, where he was managing partner, was the principal bond counsel in the state of Ohio.

It was the way business was—and is—done.

We’ve had over the last four or five decades unconditional surrender to the desires of the business/civic elite.

Indeed, it is shameful that the transfer of some power from white domination here to blacks political leadership has had little major effect on the outcome of life for low income people.

Indeed, as I have documented time after time, most of the added taxation locally has been via very regressive sale tax type increases. On consumer items.

And there is no city income tax. But there is a payroll tax. And it starts with the first dollar you earn on a weekly paycheck. No deductions.

Since the 1960s we’ve had more than three decades of city hall control by Black mayors.

Black or white mayors—it didn’t matter. Progress was what the top non-elected leadership wanted.

They have been the most productive years for the top establishment rules.

What have they produced? Just about anything the Establishment has desired.

We’ll take a look in a second part to how the Cleveland Establishment, for lack of a better designation, rode the city’s elected leaders where they wanted them to go.

The result: A reign of subsidies, all backed by regressive taxes, that gave us the city of wealth and the city of poverty we have today.

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

Congressional District 11—open for a new congress person from mostly Cuyahoga County—was really the creation of Carl Stokes: the 21st Congressional District.

Stokes, an Ohio State representative in the early 1960s, worked to create a congressional district that would elect Ohio’s first black U.S. representative.

He meant it for himself.

But legal matters delayed the formation of the 21st Congressional District until the late 1960s.

By that time Carl was mayor of Cleveland. So his brother, Louis, ran and won with Carl’s blessing.

There was a story I was told that the day Lou entered his Congressional office, Carl took the seat at his desk. Mother Louise told Carl to “get out” of the chair, “That’s your brother’s seat.”

Carl became the force that made the 21st District seat powerful by forming the 21st District Caucus.

But when he left Cleveland after serving two terms as mayor, the caucus lost its power, other than to keep the district in his brother’s hands for 30 years.

That power has been frittered away.

The height of its power likely was the campaign against the sin tax for the sports facilities in early 1990.

Carl became a municipal judge after he returned to Cleveland. As such he personally couldn’t be the public force of the 21st District Caucus. But I have no doubt that the caucus openly opposed the sin tax, pushed by Mayor Michael White and County Commissioner Tim Hagan. My suspicion was that Carl had a hand in that.

I remember speaking at a 21st District rally against the tax. I presented facts and figures. But following me was one of Carl’s loyal supporters, the irascible Bert Jennings. He gave a rousing, get-them-on-their-feet speech. He moved the crowd, as Carl would have done.

The county-vote was very close. The winning margin county-wide was only 1 percent as 51 percent voted favorably.

The city vote, however, was thumbs down, a testament to the caucus’s power.

Now, the district in its misshapen form, reaching down to Akron from Cleveland, will elect a new rep.

The open seat has drawn a large crowd of mostly known black politicians and, so far, one white candidate. All Democrats for a primary in August.

Here are some of the names: Nina Turner, Jeff Johnson, Shirley Smith, John Barnes Jr., Shontel Brown, all black candidates, and Brian Flannery, white.

It is a test of black political organization.

The possibility that if all black candidates remain in the contest and only one white, Flannery, does, the congressional district Carl Stokes help create more than 50 years ago will be no more.

This should not happen. This would not happen if the Caucus had been kept a meaningful, powerful voice for the black community.

But it has been allowed to wither, become only the home of the occupant, not of the community.

It is time again for strong, progressive leadership in the 11th district (21st District, as created), not the comfy home of office holders as it has become.

I believe, as a voter in the district, I’ll pull for Nina Turner, a progressive and hopefully a uniter.

This town needs a shaking.

What will the economic issues of this mayoral election be?

My bet is that you will never know.

Why?

Because the candidates will follow the traditional bullshit that is meant to capture your vote. They will argue what’s unimportant.

Nothing will really change.

Two major projects—one nearing completion, the other in planning—tell us that nothing new will happen.

The first is the Opportunity Corridor road project.

Opportunity for whom?

We’re being led to believe it will be for a good portion of the neglected black community.

Oh, yeah. From a west side highway to the door of the Cleveland Clinic. That will help the black community. New jobs. For West Siders?

The other just surfaced—the whatever bridge from the city’s historic malls through to the lakefront. To First Energy Stadium, to the Rock Hall, to the Science Center. And whatever can be developed by those with pull. Indeed, could this be the excuse for a new stadium for the misplaced lakefront facility?

You may notice that the football stadium and the rock hall are both publicly financed for private interests.

It’s the Cleveland way. Really, it’s the way of most cities.

Give to your wealthy. Don’t they deserve your tribute?

This is a money town. This is a poverty town.

Yes, it can be both at the same time.

I took a look at the latest value of our professional sports teams. Billions is the operative word.

The Cleveland Browns value these days $2.35 BILLION.

Yet we (citizens) provide, essentially free of charge, their place of business—the non-property tax paying football stadium.

By the way, the owners, DON’T NEED OUR CHARITY. But they don’t leave it.

They are all billionaires!

Browns owner Jimmy Haslam’s net worth is put at $2.8 BILLION.

These stats don’t often make our sports pages. Or TV News.

The Cleveland Cavaliers are now worth $1.74 BILLION.

Its playing facilities at the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse (also used for other profit venues) is essentially free. (Teams took naming rights in a deal when the Gateway Economic Development Corp.—public body—faced bankruptcy and the teams subsidized its operating costs.)

The owner—Dan Gilbert—a billionaire 151.9 times over. A very, very, very wealthy man. Amazingly wealthy.

The Cleveland Indians value is $1.160 BILLION.

Owned by Larry Dolan—net worth $4.7 billion and Paul Dolan, $4.6 billion.

Nice of Clevelanders to help out these guys by giving them First Energy Stadium.

And then we’re told that $15 an hour for a worker would ruin the economy.

Too much for business to carry. Can’t do.

Wow, how they lie for selfish profit.

The blame for this inequity that won’t go away belongs to both political leadership (or lack of it really) and a robust, well-funded private sector that steals from the public treasury. It includes the foundations, the fiscal and bond counsels and the strong law firms here.

They’re a beautiful orchestra and they play an expensive tune.

Public funds that should be going into schools, recreation centers, parks are going in the pockets of sports owners and players

The balance is out of whack and it still goes in the wrong direction.

Who will change it?

Not a candidate for Cleveland mayor.

Norm Edwards, head of a group known as Black Contractors, lifted a finger in the air to test which way the wind was blowing for a FIFTH term for Frank Jackson.

I doubt very much if this was anything more than a testing of the velocity of wind for another Jackson run.

The next day it snowed a surprising amount, if that’s any indication.

It was April Fool’s day after all.

It’s been noted that Jackson hasn’t been raising much of a campaign chest to run for mayor.

But the truth is, he doesn’t need cash.

However, he does need a miracle judging the sour taste in so many mouths over the city’s sour mood. One that says, why bother—it doesn’t matter who’s mayor.

Probably the reason Jackson has been able to stay around so long. Civic depression.

If Jackson really feels he can eke out another term, he should wonder why so many are jumping into the race this time.

It suggests to anyone with a brain: Mayor Frank has overstayed his welcome.

But he’s not like most any politician. I used to visit his council office at City Hall from time to time. I never felt he had higher ambition—to be council president or mayor. Certainly not mayor forever.

I was obviously wrong.

He was unlike most council members. When a council member came into the hearing room as a committee was meeting, invariably the member would take a seat at the table and participate. Not Jackson. He would more likely stand apart and just watch. Always apart. Not a team player. He even denied Mayor White the needed vote to pass the key legislation to start the construction of Browns stadium. He told me that he said he wasn’t voting for it and he wasn’t changing his mind the night of the vote. It fell one vote short.

He didn’t play the game.

The growing slate doesn’t seem that impressive.

Council President Kevin Kelley will run.

But he will have to carry the burden of having given the finger to 20,000 signers of a petition to put the multi-million dollar Cavalier’s arena dress-up on the ballot.

Kelley gave the finger to those petition signers.

Guess who will make that as significant an issue as selling Muny (Public Power) Light to First Energy?

Yes, Dennis.

Having been around for a long time and having watched Dennis Kucinich, there is no politician still active who can play on the same field and not get bloodied.

Justin Bibb seems to be the candidate of those citizens who have been too long making the decisions for the city. And he’s backed by another mayor, or former mayor, Michael White, I’m told.

That and a lot of cash will allow him to be in the race but his lack of political experience is a serious handicap.

White should remind Bibb that when he started to run for mayor back in the 1970s he went to live with a public housing family.

Bibb lives downtown, though he’s running as a neighborhood candidate.

Basheer Jones will make waves but not sail far. Too arrogant.

Ross DeBillo has the desire but also lacks experience.

Zach Reed could be the one candidate with the political experience to surprise the field. I will never forget how he defeated a Stokes—as strong a political name as you could find – in his first run for Council after being given the ward by the retiring member. He’s had problems but not recently. I don’t think he can be outworked either.

The question may be: Who will see this as a weak field and want to jump in.

A strong woman might fit that perfectly.

Bonus No. 1: Eight more Phillip Reed videos by Barney Hayter.

Bonus No. 2: Now’s Not The Time To Fix America’s Gun Problem, Says GOP In Familiar Refrain.

I stopped in at Royal Park Wine for a bit of wisdom yesterday and discovered that Joe Soussou is now sharing his knowledge on his own YouTube channel. Well done you, Joe.

Bonus No. 1: Now do you believe it?

Bonus No. 2: Stephan Pastis slams a triple and my side hurts.

Bonus No. 3: Ze steenking bears have gotten really good at ice sculpture.

Bonus No.4: I was happy with my life until others showed me I wasn’t.

In this morning’s North Royalton Post, I have a letter to the editor—Karen DeLong’s question is spot on—agreeing with a woman holding up Naomi Klein and Robert Francis Kennedy as examples of liberals warning of an American descent into totalitarianism under the Harris-Biden administration. Maybe. But that isn’t why I said she asked a very good question.

What I wanted to illustrate is that Americans like myself and DeLong have far more in common than corporatist elites running the Pro-Business Pro-War party want us to recognize. We need to talk to each other and be able to see that. I wrote:

Karen DeLong, writing about a WND article on Naomi Klein and John F. Kennedy, asked: “How come these two liberals can see what’s going on in our country, when the liberals who read our Trading Post can’t?”

I can’t speak for the liberals you ask your question of, but I can say, writing as a Progressive/Populist, that your question is spot on. I can see a political union of the right and left coming in the near future fueled by many other like-thinkers such as yourself asking this same question of those who pretend to represent them in their legislatures and executive offices.

Conservatives (aka Republicans) and Liberals (aka Democrats) have been for most of my lifetime two branches of the same Corporatist ideology pretending to fight politically to disguise the reality that they are actually the right and left wings of the same Pro-Business Pro-War party. We can all see the truth of this by looking at the two issues they always seem to come together on in a bipartisan manner: legislation that favors big business and legislation that throws our fighting men and women in harm’s way.

Klein and Kennedy are just two of many progressive/populists thinkers—I would also commend to you the writings of Matt Taibbi, Thomas Frank and Glenn Greenwald, among others—who have been sounding the alarm for more than a decade. To learn much more I would suggest beginning with Klein’s 2007 book: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and Frank’s 2020 text: The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.

No responses yet.

Bonus No. 1: Acting is not art.

Bonus No. 2: This isn’t really news, but still…

(If you’re quick, you might still find the full show here.)

Bonus No. 1: You can get so much more done!

Bonus No. 2: In Praise of Bad Weather.

Bonus No. 3: Why Stonehenge was abandoned.

Bonus No. 4: Story Corps—One Small Step…

Bonus No. 4: Ted Rall—Comics that make you go hmmmm…?remacy

So, Oliver Burkeman left The Guardian back in September and launched The Imperfectionist where he has published, so far, nine essays very much in the vein of his Guardian columns. His most recent—Too Many Needles—addresses a common challenge: So many books, so little time. Spoiler Alert: There is no solution, so get over it.

The essay is very good, but I dropped a note to Burkeman wondering if he understood the irony there. You see, there are more than a few books on my own Books-To-Read-Before-I-Die list—the problem is so universal that James Mustich wrote a book on the topic—that he has suggested over the years. Burkeman ledes:

I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that you, like me, have a large pile (or digital equivalent) of books or articles you’ve been meaning to get around to reading, plus maybe a long queue of podcast episodes to which you’d love to listen, if only you had the time. It’s the archetypal “first-world problem”, I know. But one worth reflecting on – because it’s a microcosm of a broader mistake that makes it more stressful than in needs to be to build a fulfilling and productive life: the problem of Too Many Needles.

There was a time, possibly sometime between the burning of the library at Alexandria and the beginning of the 18th century, a person might reasonably be able to actually read the important books. Thomas Jefferson had about 3,000 books in his library and 20th century scholars compiled lists of Great Books ranging from Charles Elliot’s 51 volumes to the 2,400 volumes on Harold Bloom’s list. I could probably read 51, but 2,400? Fuggedaboutit. The Internet only made matters worse. So much so that his attempt to curate the web drove Andrew Sullivan into the woods. Burkeman continues:

It’s amusing to reflect that at an earlier stage in the history of the web, information overload was widely held to be a temporary issue. Yes, true, for the time being we were getting deluged by a zillion irrelevant blog posts, emails and news updates. But that wouldn’t last, because soon we’d have better technology for finding what we wanted, while disregarding the rest. The real trouble, according to the leading techno-optimist Clay Shirky, wasn’t information overload, but “filter failure”. We needed – and we’d eventually get – more sophisticated ways to filter the wheat from the online chaff. And then we’d no longer feel overwhelmed.

Yeah… no. I assume you’d agree that the problem of your to-read pile is very much not one of filter failure. It’s not that you’re deluged with things you don’t care about, and need help figuring out what’s truly of interest. It’s that you’re overwhelmed by things you do want to read. All the books on your bedside table, all those bookmarks in your browser, or articles saved to Instapaper—all of them seem like they might be right up your street, or crucial to your professional success, or might contain some nugget of wisdom you’d benefit from absorbing. The problem, as the critic Nicholas Carr explained, isn’t filter failure. It’s filter success. In a world of effectively infinite information, the better you get at sifting the wheat from the chaff, the more you end up crushed beneath a never-ending avalanche of wheat.

So, what do we do? In the end, suffer. You will die with many, many unfinished lists. That’s life But here’s what Burkeman recommends to ease the suffering a bit:

You have to take a stab at deciding what matters most, among your various creative passions/life goals/responsibilities – and then do that, while acknowledging that you’ll inevitably be neglecting many other things that matter too.

To return to information overload: this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).

Tough, but doable. Yes?

Bonus No. 1: Matt Taibbi: The Sovietization of the American Press.

Bonus No. 2: As Do We All…

Bonus No. 3: Glenn Greenwald: Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor its Writers.

Bonus No. 4: Announcement: New Home For “Useful Idiots.”

Bonus No. 1: With a Second War on Terror Looming, a New Film Explores… the First.

I remember when I once wrote a piece about George Forbes that was considered “too favorable” by an alternative press editor.

He felt that it would confuse people.

Why?

Because I hadn’t really been kind in my coverage of Forbes. He held power over City Council from 1974 through 1989. And to simply say, he held power, is to minimize the grip on how things would go.

He intended to remain in City Council very long.

He told Frank Keegan in the late ’70s:

Not very much longer. I have come to the conclusion that you do what you can. Like Dr. King said, ‘I’ve been to the Mountain top.’ I went to see Ahmed (Evans) at Auburndale and 123rd Street. I was the last guy to see him, along with Walter Beach (former Browns player). I talked to him and told him to cool it and I would be back. When I went back, I was shot at like I was a rabbit.

That was the day of the Glenville shootout, July 23, 1968.

Forbes was then Mayor Carl Stokes’ front man.

Now, George Forbes will be 90 years old on April 4. He has led a long, successful life.

I likely have spent more time writing about him than any other Cleveland figure.

You simply couldn’t avoid it if you were a reporter in his years of power.

The truth is that there were aspects of George Forbes that you couldn’t not like.

To cover City Hall during his time, you couldn’t avoid him.

I once wrote a piece in 1982, “My Monday with George. Better than dinner with Andre.”

“Each Monday George gives life lessons, rare performances,” I continued.

I wrote of two political moves he made.

In the first, he passed a 25 percent water rate hike everyone was against with now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t deftness. He walked away from the meeting looking disappointed. The absence of applause reveals the lack of appreciation…

The rate hike of 25 percent followed one of 15 percent. And it was assumed that all other 20 councilmen were opposed.

Forbes tilted the outcome by feigning outrage that Mayor George Voinovich would lay off water department workers. Somehow many of those workers showed up en masse at the meeting. George “ranted and raged” at possible layoffs as “a political thing.”

Now he set it as a Council vs. administration, not a rate hike vote.

“It’s bullshit and we are not going to be pressured… This business of politics, you can’t beat us at that. You can’t beat me at my game,” as he slams Ed Richard, then Voinovich’s person at the table.

Then to toss some confusion into what the meeting is about, Forbes talks to one of the water department people in the audience, a question seemingly out of nowhere.

“Butch,” says Forbes, “how long you been with the city now?”

He doesn’t wait for a answer. He addresses Richard again: You ain’t going to lay off Butch. I’ll tell you right now…”

Another slight diversion.

Forbes ask an administration person: “Is the mayor there?”

I guess he expected a “no” answer. But it’s “Yes.”

Now in full command, I wrote, Forbes then says, “I don’t want him.”

Call the roll, says the Council President.

“It’s 10 to zip, without a word of protest.”

I wrote: He had stopped on a dime, reversed directions and the dime was standing on end.”

Forbes and Carl Stokes were the principal black politicians as Cleveland changed from an old white ethnic town in the civil rights era. Stokes was still a creature of the rights era.

I remember when Stokes returned to town. I ran into him on the street and he invited to me see the renovation of what would be his new law office. He said to me, “You didn’t think I came back to be a councilman did you?”

I certainly didn’t.

It was also apparent that Stokes still wanted to taste the power he had held. But his time had passed.

He had been eclipsed by George Forbes.

Stokes struck out at Forbes in 1985 with a bitter attack.

“He has turned out to be a foul-mouthed, unregenerated politician of the most despicable sort and I think he ought to be out of office.”

He went on to charge Forbes with helping some with rewards for himself.

It so happened that soon after his attack, Stokes, as chief judge had to appear before Forbes to have the court’s budget approved.

It was a scene made for a TV drama.

I wrote:

Forbes came to the table quietly, looking more stern than usual, a tense frown. There were no words by him to open the meeting.

Forbes then passed over several other budgets to summon Stokes, who had taken a front row seat.

Forbes seemed unusually grave, tense muscles in his forehead revealing his intense unease.

Had this been a year earlier the two might have joked. But to Stokes Forbes was ‘Mr. Chairman.’ To Forbes, Stokes was ‘Sir.’ There were no smiles, no personal words at all.

The evidence of animosity between the two was more in what didn’t happen and what wasn’t said by two old friends.

It was clear that Forbes wanted this man out of his sphere—quickly.

‘Any questions?’ asked Forbes after a reading by (Merce) Cotner of the basic figures of the budget. Then almost immediately, ‘You may leave, sir.’

But there were question from Council members. Then Stokes asked to address the body but it was only to ask for extra bailiffs.

As more questions were asked, Forbes became irritated. “John,” he address a member, “Come on, let’s wind it up.” Gary Kucinich then prolonged it with another question, which Stokes took concise language to answer.

Forbes ended his career by leaving Council to run for mayor. He lost to Michael White. That changed the nature of City Hall politics. White became a different kind of servant to the town’s power people.

Forbes became a part-time professor in addition to his lawyering.

I was surprised when he asked me to address his Baldwin-Wallace political science students. But I went anyway. Twice actually.

At one of the sessions, I brought along a blow-up photo of Forbes grabbing me as he tossed me out of a meeting.

I wasn’t sure what response I’d get from him. But I wasn’t surprised at all at the response.

“Pass it around,” he said and the photo went around the room.

You couldn’t embarrass George. He knows himself.

Back in the dark ages of blogging, I suggested to George Nemeth that ought to be reading an early blogger’s posts and George replied: I don’t have to because you do. That’s how I feel about Matt Taibbi. There is so much I don’t have to read because he does. For instance, before this morning I had no idea who Martin Gurri was. Now I do.

Gurri, Taibbi tells me, is a former CIA analyst and author of the 2014 book: The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Writing in Interview with Martin Gurri, “A Short-Term Pessimist and Long-Term Optimist,” Taibbi ledes:

Gurri’s book, which outlines the inherent contradictions between traditional hierarchies of power and the demystifying power of the Internet, is compellingly predictive on a number of levels, but it’s easy to see why some mainstream thinkers might look askance. He says things that are obviously true, but that no one wants to hear, the worst possible combination.

Ask any mainstream media critic—say, Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post—what needs to be done to rebuild trust in news organizations, and the answer might be a combination of, “We need to do ideological litmus tests before conducting interviews” and “We need to boycott Fox News,” without so much as a nod to, “We maybe have to stop screwing up, too.”

In politics, media, financial services, medicine even, there’s an institutional unwillingness to admit that their trust problem might in any way be self-inflicted. A central premise of Gurri’s book is that the public, around the world, is reacting to real institutional shortcomings. He even has a chapter called, “The Failure of Government.” At the same time, he finds some of that failure in the habit of setting expectations too high, deceiving the public into misunderstanding “the reality of what democratic governments can achieve.”

The non-subscriber version of the interview is, of course, abbreviated, but still these two exchanges caught my attention. First:

TK: You referenced the repeat appearance in protest movements of imagery from “V for Vendetta,” a movie that ends with the destruction of the old regime, and everything else will “take care of itself.” Do you think there’s disinterest in the form of future governance among political activists because they’re pessimistic about actually taking power? Or is it optimism: if they overthrow established authority, problems will vanish? Or is it the quasi-ironic/nihilistic spirit of these times, where even the most capable people don’t like to imagine themselves as power-holders? Where in our society are people trained for actual governance?

Gurri: The posture of negation that edges into nihilism is a function of the structure of the public itself. The public in the digital age is many, not one. It’s fractured into mutually hostile war-bands. The only way to unify and mobilize these groups is to emphasize what they stand against: the system, the elites, the established order. Governance would require organization, leadership, programs—but all those things would once again divide the public into its component parts. So the posture remains eternally against. Even when protesters win concessions—as in France with the Yellow Vests, for example—they will not take yes for an answer.

Your last question is a very interesting and troubling one. In the digital age, people are trained to express themselves, to perform in a way that will grow their following, rather than to govern. (Think Donald Trump.) Yuval Levin has written that our institutions were once formative—they shaped the character and discipline of those who joined them—but are now performative, mere platforms for elite self-expression and personal branding. I completely agree. Outside of the military, which still demands a code of conduct from its members, I don’t see where people are trained to govern today.

And second:

TK: You speak in the book of being worried for the future of representative democracy. How much more or less bleak does the picture look now, after four years of Donald Trump? It looks possible that his legacy will be the delegitimization of electoral politics, as traditional hierarchies have almost rallied to something like an authoritarian counterrevolution in response to him. If people have lost faith in authority, have elites also lost faith in the ability of populations to hold up their end of the bargain in democracies?

Gurri: First, I hold that Trump was a symptom — an effect rather than a cause. He possessed an outlandish personality, and that brought its own effects, but one can easily find Trump-like populists all over the world. Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, for example, makes Trump seem like an etiquette book by comparison. Globally, the public is looking for alternatives to the ruling elites, and these populists, by their very outrageousness, are signaling that they are not them.

Second, the elites, as I said before, are stuck in a sterile nostalgia for the 20th century. They are at war with the world as it actually is today, and I imagine they would love to disband the public and summon a more obedient version. Hence the panic about fake news and the tinkering with control over content.

When Trump won in 2016, the elites refused to accept his legitimacy. He was said to be the tool of Vladimir Putin and an aspiring tyrant. When Trump lost in 2020, he and many of his followers refused to accept the legitimacy of that election. A Trumpist mob sacked the Capitol building to demonstrate its rage. None of this is good for democracy or the legitimacy of our political institutions.

But let’s look at the big picture. Trump won in 2016, and, in his inimitable style, ran the US government for four years. He lost in 2020 and moved out of the White House to make room for Joe Biden, just as he was supposed to do. Now Biden is in charge. He gets to run the government. The drama of democracy has generated lots of turbulence but remarkably little violence. The old institutions are battered and maladapted but they have deep roots. The American people may be undergoing a psychotic episode, but they are fundamentally sensible.

That last sentence, that we, the American people, are in the midst of a psychotic episode is chilling. Yet Gurri remains optimistic in the long run. Like John Astin’s Buddy, Gurri expects that we’ll eventually be able to say that we’re Feeling much better now.

Bonus No. 1: Off-road, off-grid: the modern nomads wandering America’s back country.

Bonus No. 2: I generally don’t like Bill Maher; occasionally, however, he’s spot on.

Bonus No. 3: Dogs Can’t Help Falling in Love.