ROLDO: Public Welfare – Shifted From the Poor to Corporations

By Roldo Bartimole

Will somebody please notice that our state, county and local governments are stuffing the craw of big businesses — you know the 1 percent — with tons of free money.

We’re providing holiday gifts to all kinds of private businesses.

It hardly gets noticed. The press never keeps an eye on this sleaze.

Hey, it’s only our tax money.

The new welfare culture demands that the dole is for those who have more than enough already while those who have nothing or less can swim for themselves.

Is this anywhere near fair?

When our local schools are dying from lack of financial support. The word is also out that half our population is now either poor or low income and so many are finding the street their new un-foreclosed homes.

I don’t know what the difference is between poor or low income. Maybe they mean impoverished and people just plain old broke.

Let’s not worry too much. Instead, play the Star Spangled Banner. Let’s have a parade.

(I wonder also when the Plain Dealer editorialists will request billionaire Randy Lerner to pay some property taxes on the stadium as it demands Cleveland teachers provide extra dough in these tough times. Lerner, thanks to Fred Nance’s negotiated lease, pays no property taxes. Nance now works for Lerner’s Browns. What could be more natural in a give-away culture?)

It was amusing to read Brent Larkin’s weepy distress in the Sunday’s Plain Dealer about the city and inner suburbs’ poisonous decline. Where has he been? 60 Minutes has to come to town to wake him up. Oh, that’s right — he was backing every give-away from huge subsidies to Dick Jacobs and the Ratners at Public Square to Gateway to Browns Stadium to every conceivable downtown corporate gift. And really he is still doing that.

He kind of missed the total disintegration of Cleveland. He wasn’t looking in that direction.

Brent, much of this happened while you directed the editorial voice of our major morning daily, which, by the way, has even gotten worse since you left. How, I don’t know. Betsy Sullivan should be ashamed of herself. The critical letters about the PD-backed proposed gasification plant in the same Sunday paper give hints of the paper’s editorial ineptness. Or is it just the usual fraud.

In the meantime, Ohio Gov. John Kasich was ready last week to give a struggling Sears — a company some investors believe won’t even be around very long — some $400 million in subsidies to relocate to Ohio. $400 million! Yes. Not a typo. The result: Illinois, its home, jumped its bribe from $100 million to some $275 million to keep Sears from escaping to Ohio.

Thank you, Gov. Kasich. Sears stockholders thank you, too.

States and communities are bidding up the free money so that no one wins but the corporates. It’s an extortion game.

We have a give-away sickness that has been growing for decades that says we have to enrich corporate interests or they’ll take themselves elsewhere. These businesses, like American Greetings, have the loyalty of Albert Pujols and LeBron James.

Kasich helped Diebold supposedly to stay in Ohio with a bribe — that’s what I called these corporate financial deals from government — of more than $100 million in tax credits and low interest loans. These are not penny ante bribes.

It hardly makes a ripple of discontent from anybody.

American Greetings showed its loyalty to Brooklyn — its home for more than 50 years! — by taking $93.5 million in the dole from government to move to Westlake. Goodbye suckers.

Bob Evans got $8 million to stay pat. Surely, Bob needed it. Cancel my reservation.

In one of the most disgusting deals, the Ohio Dept. of Development gave a $10 million loan (1 percent and structured so maybe none will be paid back) to help in the purchase of Nationwide arena in Columbus, supposedly to keep a National Hockey League club from leaving the city. Much more likely, however, the dole was to take a financial load off private owners — Nationwide Insurance and the crummy Columbus Dispatch. Both needy Ohio institutions, don’t you think?

We know here in Cleveland that generosity begins with our politicians. Come and get it! If a politician can’t give favored business interests free money, what good are they? And it all has come from Democratic politicians.

It has become a corrosive way of doing public business. Even though government can’t do anything, according to the belief of same people taking this graft.

Democratic Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald surely wants to join the parade. How better to ingratiate himself with the powers that be.

FitzGerald wants to use the county sales taxes to help fund a $100 million kitty to better feed corporate appetites in Cuyahoga County. Another hundred million!

Is that really the highest need for scarce public funds? Especially now. I think not. We know not.

What does he tell us is the purpose of these generous gifts? Jobs, of course. It’s always jobs — for our people.

Yet this same FitzGerald is dumping County employees with ease. Cutting jobs wholesale. FitzGerald, we already suspect, wants Kasich’s job and he’s willing to pay for it with County taxes. What a guy!

If there are public jobs to be dumped there must be public jobs that need to be filled. I think that’s what some on the County Council were trying to say during the recent budget discussions.

This kind of civic corruption doesn’t rate the prosecution it deserves. It’s corrupting us, although it is not against the law per se.

It is helping to destroy our civic life.

Maybe FitzGerald should worry more about the County’s needs and not private business. Let our outstanding business brains take care of their businesses. Let’s keep the government out of their way. Isn’t that cry heard often enough from them?

Maybe he should be telling us how the County is going to find the millions of dollars it needs to do something with its deteriorated East 9th properties. An old bailout of Dick Jacobs and company from prior County administrators. Helping needy Dick Jacobs.

Have we all forgotten about THAT County disaster and its ongoing cost to taxpayers? A continuing fiscal disaster.

I can’t possibly tote up how much public money has gone to private corporate interests in Cleveland. It’s been quite a bundle. I have over the last three decades made a good stab at the hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone from city, county and state governments. To private interests.

All in the name of jobs and community improvement. Hurray for Joe Roman and Joe Marinucci.

Meanwhile, those who draw the big salaries — with the help of our dumbed down media — tell us all the POSITIVE stuff that’s happening here — without the balancing news of our continued staggering decline.

Wake up!

Frankly, it may be too late. But let’s wake up anyway.

 

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.]

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