Did everyone get the message of the top Page One Plain Dealer headline a week ago. Just to remind you:
Gilbert Tells State Commission
That Casino’s Goal Is to Boost City
It’s accompanied by a smiling photo 🙂 of Dan Gilbert with the highlighted quote, “We wanted to make sure that jobs created, that other businesses are attracted to downtown.” How nice of him. How generous.
Now if you believe Gilbert has anyone but himself and his pocketbook in mind keep reading the Plain Dealer. It will make you very happy. 🙂
* * *Definition:
Sycophant: All Cleveland television stations when reporting about the Browns and NFL draft. Breaking news! Especially WKYC-TV – the station that wants to make us believe it’s the only professional news station in town. What rot. You would think that this is the most important Cleveland event of the year, maybe the decade. Oh, besides the rock awards that is.
* * *I love the hand-wringing, teeth-gnashing over the lowering of interest on student loans. “Get used to it, honey. You borrow; you repay,” wrote one PD letter writer to the paper. You student ingrates you.
It amuses me because I watched the City of Cleveland in the 1980s give gobs federal money to downtown developers on major buildings in this manner: 20-year loans and not low but ZERO interest rate (Key Center). And they didn’t have to pay a penny of the principal either. For 20 years! You can’t get money anywhere else that cheap. Old Dick Jacobs was a favorite of then Mayor George Voinovich, who is always described as a fiscal conservative. Joke.
Republican Voinovich and Democratic Council President George Forbes were the most generous political team Cleveland has ever seen. (The developers also typically got 20-year tax abatements for these same projects. Nothing too sweet for some people.) The richest welfare clients in Cleveland history.
Ironically, that money – paid back 20 years later and worth less – is still being routed to developers at low interest rates.
But students? They want low interest rates? OUTRAGEOUS. How dare they.
* * *By the way, when is Randy Lerner, Browns owner, going to give a breakdown to Council of the $50,000 he says the team has spent on the stadium? He promised it. He didn’t set a delivery date.
Space is short. There was no newspaper space since the NFL draft coverage required it all. Did you see the special section? Was it eight pages? Ten pages? I don’t know. I tossed it.
When will the Plain Dealer demand the information? Transparency requires it.
We’re waaaiting.
* * *When also will the Plain Dealer tell us what’s going on with the behind-the-scenes dealing for an extension of the 25-year old sin tax? Just a matter of another $130 million dollars or more of sales taxes. Again, transparency – the byword of good government at the PD – remains quite overcast. Tell us what the Greater Cleveland Partnership wants this time. And how they’ll finesse to get it. Tax and spend capitalists.
* * *By the way, could the Pee Dee also tell us how much it contributes annually to the Greater Cleveland Partnership? Its reporters – enduring pay givebacks – might want to know. Also, what Frank Jackson and Ed Fitzgerald give to the gimmie lobbyists at GCP? They pay GCP to lobby them. Inquiring minds want to know. Don’t you? The city and county have made annual contributions in the past. Have you noticed how kind the Plain Dealer is to both Jackson and Fitzgerald? Ass-kissing is all you see.
* * *If you didn’t see it, here’s the best answer to those who believe that the school reform plan called the Jackson Plan but really the Cleveland and Gund foundation and the Greater Cleveland Partnership plan is good. It tells why it is a fraud:
Clever, amusing and right on the money by New York Times columnist Gail Collins: Read it here.
How the hare beats the pineapple. And will every time! Got to read it to understand. C’mon, do a little work.
* * *It was good to read that the new big guy at the United Way of Greater Cleveland will be paid ONLY $225,000 a year. Expensive charity. Bill Kitson came from the Toledo United Way. That amount is less than retiring Mike Benz made as last reported. Benz got $417,029. A mere $125,680 of that went into his retirement pocket. This doesn’t include 2011 or any part of this year when he retires.
Benz, who was recently lauded in the PD for his charity work, took home $284,984 in 2009; $264,323 in 2008; and $252,059 in 2007. Not bad for helping the needy.
When I published my newsletter Point of View I typically ran a piece each year about how much the United Way paid its top executives. It was the one issue each year that people who didn’t even subscribe asked when it would be published.
The reason: They resented having their bosses pressure them for contributions, which was often viewed as a “tax.” Indeed, that’s what it was. Bosses applied pressure.
This annual charity has a long history. It really, I believe, was one of the first examples of privatization. Wealthy people want social issues to be addressed via charities, not taxes. That’s because the government exact taxes from them. They shift the burden to their employees. Of course, the charities never could meet real needs. Never will. But that’s the point.
It was always interesting to me that when I got an opportunity to ask corporate big shots how much THEY gave to United Way, I was met with high indignation. Why, I was delving into their private affairs. Privacy, please!
For example, E. Mandel deWindt, who recently died, was a major United Way cheerleader. Once I got the opportunity at a press conference to ask him just how much he gave to his favorite charity. He headed it at that time. He got visible uptight and refused to say. You would think he’d be happy to let the world know. I wanted to match what he gave against his hefty income and find out if he was as generous as his employees at Eaton Corp. I was sure he wasn’t.
I tried a trick to ask Brock Weir, then the top executive at Cleveland Trust bank, the same question. I called the bank at noon hoping his secretary would be out. Sure enough he answered the phone himself. At that time he was top guy at the bank and at United Way. I asked him to tell me just how much he gave. Ye gad, man, you’re asking for private information! How gross of you. He declined. I knew Cleveland Trust kept records of how much every employee of the bank gave. I said I was only asking of him what he knows about of every one of his employee. You have the records, I said. Of course, he declined.
Now, I’ll admit some good comes from the money United Way distributes.
The problem is that it never, ever comes close to meeting the needs, especially in these tough times. And they know it. That’s why they want it to be private. They also can control who gets the money. The compliant ones, naturally.
It does, however, allow the top corporate people to have their dinners, pictures in the paper and content themselves and most others that charity is the way to go. We’re dealing with it. Clap clap.
That’s what upsets me also with Cuyahoga County chief executive Ed “Good Guy” Fitzgerald, the new darling of the Pee Dee, and his $100 million economic development fund. He plans to use it to subsidize developers and other business interests. Economic development, don’t you know.
Why not use it to help people faced with foreclosures? Why not give them low or no interest loans, if you have tax money to give away? Or could the 18.8 percent in the county considered “food insecure” need a hand?
Oh, no. That would be wasteful. But giving to Wolstein-type interests for five more downtown restaurants in the Flats – that would be so responsible. We need more restaurants for the food secure people. Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?
What crap these people expect us to swallow. And thank them for it.
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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