By Roldo Bartimole
Brent Larkin is taking off and running. He fakes to the left. And then goes right.
Larkin’s column on Sunday appears to be a spanking of Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and Mayor Frank Jackson. It’s not.
The headline says, “City’s stadium deal with the Browns is not good for people of Cleveland.”
If you’re not paying attention it looks as if Larkin, traditionally the voice of corporate Cleveland, has changed his tune. He’s for the people now.
Not so.
The column – ostensibly against the $2 million a year for 15 years the city pledge to the Browns – really is the opening shot for a more than $200 million give-away to the Browns, Indians and Cavaliers. Let’s not go cheap.
Larkin, complaining about the smaller, but wrong, deal is really tilling the soil for the bigger subsidy – passage probably early next year of the extension of the so-called sin tax for a whopping 20 years. We’ve already paid for 25 years!
It will cost Cuyahoga/Cleveland residents mostly more than $200 million in sales taxes on beer, wine, liquor and cigarettes.
Larkin blatantly lies about the first sin tax.
He calls the drive for the first sin tax, back in 1990, “a well-run campaign.”
It was nothing of the kind.
It was a lying, deceptive, manipulative and corrupt.
Its promises were truly deceiving.
Here are some of its promises, broadcast in a full-page ad in the Plain Dealer just before the vote. I’ve added the real result.
The promises:
– 28,000 good-paying jobs for the jobless. (Not even close).
– Neighborhood housing development for the homeless. (A complete joke).
– $15 million a year for schools for our children. (Instead, it took money from the Cleveland schools).
– Revenues for City and County clinics and hospitals for the sick. (Not done, not even thought about).
– Energy assistance programs for the elderly. (See above comment).
They also promised “no tax abatement,” but soon sought and got tax EXEMPTION – never to pay property taxes on any sports facility.
If ever there were a pack of lies, this was it. Larkin calls it well-run.
Most disgusting, our political, civic and corporate leaders went after agencies providing services to the poor and indigent and PRESSURED them to sign on to the tax. These agencies, of course, depend upon the political and philanthropic hierarchy for their annual budgets. So they supported it. Gave the exploiters cover.
In other words, they were extorted to urge passage of a regressive sale tax that would benefit wealthy sports owners – at that time multi-millionaire Dick Jacobs and billionaire George and Gordon Gund.
“The classy thing for the Browns to do would be to tell the city to keep the $30 million, insisting that it will be earmarked for one or more of the city’s many pressing needs,” concludes Larkin. What a PR thought.
Wouldn’t that be the biggest fake run of them all, making Haslam, now considered a thief by some, a hero?
And the start of the big campaign to pass a much heavier tax that hits ordinary people the most. And, of course, rewards the wealthy team owners.
Larkin says that Mayor Jackson’s deal “requires an unprecedented raid on the sacred pot of money used to provide daily services to residents, the pot known as the general fund.”
Hardly unprecedented if Larkin decided to be a reporter instead of a propagandist. Plenty of dough that should go to the general fund goes to subsidize these stadiums, including chunks of parking revenue and admission taxes, and lost property tax revenue.
Larkin is simply lying via self-imposed ignorance.
There is one message hidden in Larkin’s column. It is a message to Frank Jackson. You’ve had your run, Frank. Now it is time to get out of the way.
Larkin writes that Jackson has hurt the little people by taking the $2 million a year from the general fund. He raps Jackson for his spending, which would hurt “the quality of life for an underserved population.” How caring .
It speaks to those who might yearn to be mayor that Jackson is no longer off limits to criticism from the PD. The ride is over.
Larkin is, let’s be clear, THE editorial spokesman of the PD on such issues. That’s why they keep him. He’s personally popular and likeable.
I’ve been watching the news media from inside and out for some 50 years. I know it serves, not the readers or the people, but those considered the civic, philanthropic and corporate leaders. The upper class.
It has certainly lost its way. It is far, far away from its own ideals.
The Cleveland Press used to brag: “Give the people light and they will find their own way.”
Larkin and the PD cast a heavy shadow behind which strings are pulled and how decisions are made. The people are diverted. Go Browns!
Here’s a rule to live by:
“A free press should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy for the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare,” said Joseph Pulitzer.
Unfortunately, the Larkins and the Plain Dealer are with the plunderers. They pave the way.
[Photo via YouTube]
Roldo Bartimole has been reporting since 1959. He came to Cleveland in 1965 to report for the Plain Dealer where he worked twice in the 1960s, left for the Wall Street Journal in 1967. He started publishing his newsletter Point of View in 1968 and ended it in 2000.In 1991 he was awarded the Second Annual Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in Washington, D.C. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Professional Journalists, Cleveland chapter, in 2002, and was named to the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame, 2004. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]
5 Responses to “ROLDO: Brent Larkin’s Fake-Out Move”
Dick Peery
Amazing coincidence. Cleveland council voted to support Jimmy Haslam’s Browns with $30 million on the same day it was announced that a federal judge in Arkansas awarded $84.9 million to customers who had been swindled by Haslam’s Pilot Flying J company. And there are more payouts sure to come since the company faces a separate suit by Western Express, one of its best customers, for damages that could exceed another $70 million. Since Haslam took the money out of the firm as dividends to buy the Browns for $1 billion, how much more will he need from Cleveland taxpayers to make his victims whole?
Roldo Bartimole
Dick: A lot more. Sin tax extend coming.
Allen Freeman
I read Larkin’s editorial last week and came to the exact same conclusion by the end (and even commented as such below the story): Larkin’s outrage is way too late, the PD should have been 60pt headlining this story on the front page for weeks prior to the Council vote, and it’s all a setup for the absurdity of the sin tax ballot initiative.
I’ve said before and I will say it again: if the residents of the city of Cleveland vote to extend the sin tax, they are idiots who get exactly what they deserve.
Eric replies
I was in college when the issue of the sin tax was put before the electorate. I remember the divisive campaign that made strange bedfellows out of the checkered political landscape that was Cleveland at that time. It began just for the Gateway complex and then was used to push the stadium development.
The only way I support this process is if you put a dome on it and there were discussions that the stadium was supposed to be built dome ready.
The only real way we would see a benefit from stadiums is win the teams win ALOT and they are used to host special events like Super Bowl, BCS National Championship or NCAA Final Four. To date we have done none of these activities.
Richard Ellers
IN r&&*&(*()())S name can they put the bite on taxpayers in the face of multi-million dollar salaries to the players and., of course” the owners.
Thankfully, we live in Trumbull County, well out of reach of this ripoff.