PD Endorses Provocateur Law
By Roldo Bartimole
When the Plain Dealer endorsed John Kasich for Governor it said it did so “with trepidation.” We soon found out why. Yet on Sunday, the Cleveland newspaper endorsed Governor John Kasich’s anti-government, anti-worker and “flawed” SB 5 by urging voters to vote “Yes” on Issue 2. What a crock.
One mistaken endorsement earns another from our daily newspaper.
“Does he understand that being a Fox News provocateur is not the same as being the leader of a diverse, complex state,” the PD editorial asked a year ago when they endorsed this train wreck. All evidence says that he doesn’t understand that. However, the PD rewards him with this gift.
What Gov. Kasich did with his legislation to dump all over public workers was exactly that – provocateur nonsense. But that’s his style. He seems to have become Governor to do away with the task. By peddling off the turnpike and so many other state functions. He wants to privatize the public’s business.
And the Pee Dee rewards him with an endorsement from what’s supposed to be the paper that gets its customers from Northeast Ohio, a very Democratic and Labor area.
This travesty the same week I got a message of a price increase for delivery of this newspaper. I have to pay for a paper that doesn’t represent my interests in the most important issues.
So now, to double-down on its original mistake, the Plain Dealer endorses a provocateur law meant to damage labor and working people, a Fox News goal.
Apparently, the Plain Dealer management (because that’s who makes the editorial board decisions in such matters) doesn’t get at all what street protesters all around the nation – and here in Cleveland – are saying with the Occupy Wall Street rallies. Enough is enough.
Time to think of working people. Stop kicking them.
“But here’s what’s scary about Kasich,” the PD wrote in the 2010 editorial, “With his Red Bull style it is sometimes hard to tell what’s his core belief, what’s hot air and whether he knows the difference.”
Kasich knows the difference. He’s a right wing ideologue. He continues to prove it every day. And the Plain Dealer is endorsing his anti-government demagoguery.
The Plain Dealer apparently believes it is immune to reaction when it becomes a mouthpiece for Republican conservatism. The newspaper business is in precarious position and for this newspaper to strike out against working people in this manner suggests that it feels working people will just take it and keep reading (and paying) for the newspaper.
I wonder if the paper has made people angry with this Tea Party type decision.
There is no need for the overly harsh law that supposedly gives government a hand in controlling out of whack public employees. Local governments have power to coax its workers into making equitable deals. It’s called layoffs. And it has been used. And workers have shown they understand tough times mean tough decisions.
But taking all rights and giving them to one side is highly unfair. Thus the reaction this law has gotten.
Even the PD recognizes the imbalance of Kasich’s law.
The Plain Dealer writes that “Unions can be important advocates for their members, and a measure sold as restoring balance ought to do just that – not shift power deceivably to the other side.” This says that the PD editors understand that Senate Bill 5 is out of balance.
But then the Plain Dealer naively, after endorsing Kasich’s nonsense, writes that “Once the votes are tallied (and presumably favors passage), Kasich must take the lead in suggesting these changes.”
Are they kidding? Trust Kasich and his band of Tea Party-infested Republicans to do favors for Labor? Do they really believe the stuff they write? Are they that out of touch with the real world?
Kasich hinted at willingness to compromise in August, says the editorial. It doesn’t say, however, that Kasich’s peace offering was a phony, made to thwart the effort to put the issue on the ballot.
Kasich, according to the PD editorialists, should win this battle then give away the prize?
It just shows how out of touch these people are.
It is time their public let them know we’re not all Kevin O’Brien ideologues. We don’t expect to support a newspaper that has made that philosophy the banner of its editorial policy.
Roldo Bartimole celebrates 50 years of news reporting this year. He published and wrote Point of View, a newsletter about Cleveland, for 32 years. He worked for the Plain Dealer and Wall Street Journal in the 1960s.He was a 2004 Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame recipient and won the national Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 1991. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]