Roldo Bartimole writes:

In 2009 so far we taxpayers of Cuyahoga County have given $8.8 million to benefit the Billionaire Lucky Lerner family.

Since August 2005 you have generously paid in those sales tax pennies on alcoholic drinks $56.4 million to aid the Lucky Lerners. How lucky some people are. Wonder how that happens.

Actually, you can”t blame anyone but yourselves. You voted for it.

When Cuyahoga taxpayers voted to extend the Gateway sin taxes another 10 years it resulted tens in millions of dollars going for the Lerner family.

Why the family? Because the Lerners, now headed by Randy Lerner, control the Browns Stadium for a paltry $250,000 a year rent. The impoverished City of Cleveland actually pays way more than that for property taxes on just the land. Just the land because former Mayor Michael White and County Commissioner Tim Hagan saw to it that sports stadiums pay no property taxes. Tax exempt. Forever, says the law. Continue Reading »

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Rich people HATE to pay taxes. They pinch pennies. The squeeze real hard.

If you don”t believe me, this information will convince you. Or nothing will.

Here are some of the richest people in Cleveland worried about paying taxes on $17 more of what they consider an unfair tax valuation of their property. Unbelievable. But so believable if you know them.

Now remember, this isn”t $17 more in taxes. It”s the property tax on $17. In other words, it”s pennies. Continue Reading »

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

THE ZEN OF SARCASM:

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Our misuse of the word and concept of creativity has robbed us of a standard of judgment. We can no longer tell when an artist is expressing something human or merely screaming: we do not even try to interpret the noise, we just react to it one way or another, believing that the mere fact of having a reaction is somehow “creative.” p. 39

From Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing edited by Robert Inchausti.

PRAISE…

Avot

The ‘rents: Abe, Sari;
Ike and Beck; Jake and Leah;
Cute Rachel. Anu tov? (We good?)

G”vurot

Our action hero.
You lift-up, heal and free, you
Send dew and rain. Neeflah! (Wow!)

Kedusha.

Manic. Psychotic.
Pathways to draw us closer.
Separating. Kadosh. (Holy.)

PETITION…

Binah.

Led to understand,
Seeking sense, wisdom and wit.
Our intelligence. Shaw. (Gift.)

T”shuvah.

I wander, get lost.
Leave the light on, I turn back.
Espying my way, shuv. (again.)

Slichah.

I fell down yet again.
How can you put up with me?
I get another koshrah? (chance?)

G”ulah.

By my own measure,
Am I worthy of myself?
Of what worth g”ulah? (redemption)

Refu-ah.

Damn it hurts down there.
A small price for membership.
Was it enough, Rufeh? (Healer.)

Birkat H”Shanim.

Plant, worry; reap, worry.
These cyclings of Moon and Sun.
All safe this time. Ein sof. (No end.)

Kibbutz Galluyot.

More numbered than stars.
Called to gather in our place.
Covenant. Mishpatim. (Family.)

Din.

Justice justice is
What we are to chase after.
But tempered with chesed. (loving kindness.)

Birkat H”Minim.

What makes enemies?
Evil? Injustice? Nescience?
One answer for all: chocmah. (Wisdom.)

Tzadikim.

If I am righteous
Is righteousness rewarded?
Or is the life masfeeq? (sufficient.)

Binyan Yerushalyaim.

(5)
(7)
(6)

Malkut Bet David.

(5)
(7)
(6)

Shomei-Ah Tefillah.

(5)
(7)
(6)

 
THANKSGIVING…

Avodah.

Place, People, Presence.
I”ll get there if I keep going
Doing my avodah. (work.)

Modim.

To rise with the Sun.
To see, smell, touch, hear and taste.
I say: toda rabah. (great thanks.)

Birkat shalom.

Life and liberty,
The pursuit of happiness.
These demand shalom rav. (Much peace.)

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

THE ZEN OF SARCASM:

If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

The true solutions are not those which we force upon life in accordance with our theories, but those which life itself provides for those who dispose themselves to receive the truth. Consequently our task is to dissociate ourselves from all who have theories, not in a spirit of negativism and defeat, but rather trusting life itself, and nature… p. 35

From Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing edited by Robert Inchausti.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority is planning to drop “Transit” from its name. You can tell that because it keeps eliminating transportation for people. In fact, it can change its name to the Greater Cleveland Downtown Pleasing Authority.

At least that”s the way it seems to me as Joe Calabrese, general manager, becomes a leading excuse maker and weaker executive than we now need.

How hard is it to NOT provide transportation if you”re a transit operation? Apparently, not hard at all.

RTA will cut all circulators in a few weeks and will cut back on services on 16 bus routes.

AND will raise the price of a ride by 25 cents.

That”s a solution to dropping ridership? That”s a recipe for fewer and fewer riders.

I”ve said this before and I”ll say it again. RTA management didn”t say NO to the downtown gang when it needed some $200 million to beautify Euclid Avenue from Public Square to University Circle. I”d like to know how much money RTA is now losing on that operation.

RTA management didn”t say NO when it paid some $69 million for the useless Waterfront Line. Totally from local RTA funds. The downtown cabal forced it to forgo federal funds for the line because it wanted the line pronto for the city”s Bicentennial and the opening of the Rock Hall.

When it comes to the ordinary riders Calabrese and his RTA board finds it easy to say, “No, we can”t do it.” When it comes to the downtown crowd, “ain”t nothing we can”t do.”

When I asked for figures on ridership on the Waterfront Line, RTA couldn”t come up with figures. Don”t keep those figures, I was told. But you noticed the Pee Dee used detailed figures on the circulators and the supposed decline. (Does the decline come as a result of RTA”s performance and desire to curtail this service? And don”t tell me that the figures are true actual counts either because I don”t believe you.)

The Waterfront Line should be stopped and put out of business before the circulators are, if cost is a problem.

RTA management didn”t say NO to the $13 million or so walkway to Gateway from Sam Miller”s Tower City. If Gateway felt it needed that help, it should have paid for it and it should pay for the use of that property and its maintenance costs now.

I don”t want to hear that sales tax revenue is down. Should have thought of that a long time ago.

Unload some of the heavy executive staff. Cut that downtown free downtown trolley service. That should go first.

It”s time that RTA took its job seriously and started fighting for more money, too.

If we can think about spending $350 million on a so-called Opportunity Corridor, pushed by the downtown Greater Cleveland Partnership, along with PD publisher Terry Egger, its co-chairman, we can think about getting some more money for transit dependent people. Those who don”t have cars to get to their jobs, to their medical appointments, even to get downtown.

All writers must, I believe, experience those moments when they read the words of another and despair of ever matching such beauty. For most of us, such moments are spurs to greater efforts, to come as close to that perfection as we can. Other times we shake our heads and consider more banal occupations.

I’m reading Pat Conroy’s South Of Broad at the moment and while I’ve always considered Conroy to be a fine writer, this book makes all his previous works appear as only brief respites along the road that has brought him to this place.

Reading just the prologue has taken my breath away. This is how Conroy finishes that first offering.

Charleston has its own heartbeat and fingerprint, its own mug shots and photo ops and police lineups. It is a city of contrivance, of blueprints; devotion to pattern that is like a bent knee to the nature of beauty itself. I could feel my destiny forming in the leaves high above the city. Like Charleston I had my alleyways that were dead ends and led to nowhere, but mansions were forming jewels in my bloodstream. Looking down, I studied the layout of my city, the one that had taught me all the lures of attractiveness, yet made me suspicious of the showy or makeshift. I turned to the stars and was about to make a bad throw of the dice and try to predict the future, but stopped myself in time.

A boy stopped in time, in a city of amber-colored life that possessed the glamour forbidden to a lesser angel.

I know my shovel is around here someplace.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

I didn”t really know until today that the Pee Dee endorsed torture.

Then today I read PD Deputy Editorial Page Editor Kevin O”Brien, the paper”s right wing bomb thrower.

“Water flowed,” he said, “up some deserving noses.”

How cavalier.

“Yes, our guys did this. They did it to our enemies. They did it to protect us. And they did it knowing full well that when word of their rough methods got out, they would be demonized.”

“Rough methods,” huh? Afraid to call it what it is, Kevin?

Be a plain spoken right-winger. Be honest at least. Call it “torture.” But to “enemies,” so it”s alright.

Why the Pee Dee has such a rabid right-winger tossing us right-wing propaganda I don”t know because this is not exactly even Southern Ohio, never mind the Deep South where this stuff sells well these days.

Previously. This was written at the Wildacres Writer’s Retreat in late June. JH

How would you fix Walmart? That is the question posed to my co-blogger Jonathan by Someone in the USA, a Walmart employee and a regular reader and commenter to our group blog The Writing On The Wal. Someone placed, however, a restriction on all possible replies that renders any valuable response as likely as rat vomit. He added this caveat, Unless you can offer up a solution that is at least cost neutral, you can”t exactly expect me to go running back to my masters with your side of the story. And thus Someone asks Jonathan, and by extension myself, to violate the first rule of capitalism – there”s no such thing as a free lunch – if we are to formulate an answer acceptable to him.

On its face, the question itself appears reasonable. It is the question a group of us asked ourselves in 2005 as we contemplated how to best stop the legislative end-run engineered by Walmart and then mayor of Cleveland Jane Campbell to build a Walmart in the blackheart of our city. We failed. Walmart built at Steelyard Commons. The developer took his money and ran. Mayor Campbell lost her re-election bid that fall. And we crusading bloggers were left with our sackcloth and ashes. But other windmills demanded tilting and the question remained as frontlet before my eyes.

How would we fix Walmart? To ask the question is to accept that Walmart is broken in some real sense. But is it? And in whose eyes? Certainly the Walton family enthroned at nos. 11, 12,13 and 14 on Forbes magazine”s list of the world”s wealthiest billionaires would see no problem worthy of repair. Nor would past Walmart CEO Lee Scott, who received more than $30 million in his last year with the company, or present CEO Mike Duke, who will bank more than $29 million in his new job, be likely to agree that they worked for a broken company. Walmart, the second largest corporation in the world isn”t broken. It is the acme of Capitalism, the model to be studied, emulated. Walmart is perfection itself in accomplishing the only task for which any corporation is intended: to maximize shareholder”s value. While Walmart, in and of itself, is not broken, its place in our community is. The question is not, then, how do we fix Walmart, but rather how do we fix Walmart”s relationship to our world. so that the corporation becomes at worst benign?

My luncheon conversation today with a number of potters was instructive. Why would artists who want to sell their art not buy the work of other artists? Why would an artist shop at Walmart for cookie-cutter dinner ware when the singular work of fellow artists is available? Why allow money to flow out of your community when it is possible to nurture and grow that community? This last is critical. When we patronize local merchants not affiliated with national organizations such as franchises or corporate-owned businesses, then 51-cents of each dollar we spend flows back into and circulates throughout our community. When we choose to spend our money at merchants who are not a part of our community, then we bleed 86 cents of our economic life”s blood from our own vitality. Why do we continue to do this to ourselves? Why have we allowed consumption to supplant companionship?

Is it simply because we have ceased to be our neighbor”s keeper? How is it that we are blind to the truth that a global village is neither? Globalization, economy of scale and free trade are wedges that corporations drive between us so that we all might hang separately. It is to the benefit of corporations that we drive ourselves to fill every moment of our abundant leisure to their profit by buying more and more of what we need less and less. This is the path that has led us to succumb to the pornography of productivity.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

THE ZEN OF SARCASM:

Never test the depth of the water with both feet.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

The majority of men think they see, and do not. They believe they listen, but they do not hear. They are “absent hen present” because in the act of seeing and hearing they substitute the clichés of familiar prejudice for the new and unexpected truth that is being offered to them. p. 34

From Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing edited by Robert Inchausti.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

How pathetic can you get, Pee Dee?

The Downtown Cleveland Alliance, the Plain Dealer reports with a straight face, has installed about a dozen meter boxes into which you may drop coins to help the homeless. Laugh now.

I wonder how long these containers of coins last on the streets of downtown Cleveland.

DCA director Joe Marinucci – salary $210,000, plus $10,945 benefit package, plus $7,500 in expenses and allowances – wants to keep you from putting those quarters or dimes into the hands of someone begging on downtown streets.

“Those” people upset today”s yuppies.

“Downtown yellow meters raise money for homeless” says the Pee Dee headline for an article by Joe Guillen. As if that”s what it”s this is all about. Helping the homeless. No doubt, huh?

Joe, please tell us weekly how much money is going to the homeless from this pathetic idea. Tell us how many pennies are collected.

That”s an assignment your editors won”t give you.

“I”m not trying to get nothing but something to eat right now,” Guillen quotes one panhandler.

The Pee Dee wastes more than 30 inches with this Metro page one piece of crap journalism.

With the skimpy offerings, bolstered by blaring headlines, photos and graphs that the Pee Dee gives us, this is a waste the newspaper can”t afford.

Shouldn”t the story”s headline be: “Marinucci, DCA want to keep street guy from getting a bite to eat!?”

If we had newspapers that told the truth, newspapers that didn”t speak constantly – always – favorably about the needs of business and its “non-profit” agents. Then we might get some true information. The “non-profit” Downtown Alliance has $4.4 million budget (all figures from 2007 IRS returns.)

Let them buy an ad if they want to propagandize. You need the money, Pee Dee.

“This is not meant to be a financial windfall,” said Marinucci. With a straight face? Really? No kidding, Joe?

Roldo Bartimole writes:

I”ve been stirring memories as I look through memorabilia as I near 50 years of news reporting. I came across two long interviews with Dr. Benjamin Spock from 1967.

Much of it dealt with his anti-war activity. I asked him naturally about the opposition he encountered over his anti-Vietnam positions. But I also asked him, “Did you take much abuse over your Medicare stand?”

I don”t remember the nature of his position but his response reveals even today the bitterness in the fight for health care reform.

His answer: Continue Reading »