ROLDO: The Battle Has Begun to Tax Some $320 Million in Regressive Taxes

 

A Make Poverty Program

By Roldo Bartimole

You can bet that the string-pullers who want to add a 20-year extended sin tax on cigarettes, wine, beer, and alcohol are quietly out preparing for a massive campaign to get poor people to tax themselves.

I’ve heard that they’re already working the black community via the ministers, a powerful grassroots group. It could help sway those least likely and most harmed to vote against their best interests.

Unlike in 1990 when Rep. Louis Stokes (and Rep. Mary Rose Oakar) strongly opposed the sin tax – and won their battle since city folks voted down the tax only to lose to a larger suburban vote. There so far aren’t strong voices in opposition to the tax, higher than the original.

The subterranean campaign has started. It will surface soon in the Pee Dee.

And you can bet the farm that the reason Lou Stokes took a lead in 1990 was that Judge Carl Stokes was courtroom silenced. The 21st District Congress fought the sin tax vigorously and no one can convince me that Carl wasn’t the behind the scenes motivator. He at least fought for little people.

The black community needs a strong voice now. Especially since the lackeys of the Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP) – the corporate evildoers – are working the levers of power in their community already.

Community groups – if they get a smidgen of green from city hall, the foundations or any other private or public dole – will be under severe pressure – as they were in 1990, to sellout those they supposedly work to help. To endorse the tax.

The other servants of power – the now weakly but only major news outlet – will be doing its evil soon enough.

The PD in 1990 went so far as a propaganda tool as to dress up its “news” for Gateway and the sin tax by using the Gateway symbol on its stories. Pure and unadulterated promotion in the grossest of sellouts. The paper labeled its stories “The Stadium: Season of Decision” with a drawing of a stadium. Pure propaganda.

TV was just as bad or worse, as it will be again.

I remember during that campaign a flunky Ch. 5 reporter actually tried to counter a question I asked at a news conference, and a PD reporter found his behavior so distasteful that he included it in his article. It was cut out by his PD editors.

Censorship here rivals totalitarian nations on certain issues. And this is one.

It makes someone who calls themselves a reporter, journalist or columnist simply a salesperson. A clerk for the Interests. A few tried to hold up the standards.

Mostly, the paper orchestrated the GCP (then Called Cleveland Tomorrow) pro-tax music.

The PD even stooped to run a phony poll the Sunday before the vote. Nothing was too low.

Here’s what I wrote:

“The PD sell-out climaxed with a phonied poll the Sunday before the vote. (the headline said partially “… likely voters say they’ll okay sin tax”) The poll lent itself to the bandwagon effect being pursued by a heavily financed campaign by city leaders. The final 2011 headline said that 62.5 percent of voters favored the tax but the poll, instead of using, as it had always in the past, a total of those polled, in this case used a smaller sampling to base its headline. If it weren’t meant to mislead it was an awfully convenient change for Gateway proponents.”

In other words the PD lied on its front page. Why? Because the paper was a puppet of the establishment. Then. And now.

“If the headline were based on the total sample, as it had in the past,” I wrote, “the vote was neck and neck, just as it eventually was in the real vote. The final vote was 51.7 to 48.2 percent with city residents voting strongly against and suburbanites heavily for the tax.” Rich outbid poor.

The PD also ran a front-page editorial that day (such suck-ups to the corporate/political cabal). It was headlined “Gateway to the Future.”

I wrote then “(Mary Ann) Sharkey, a Mike White sycophant, used her position to spank his opponents on this issue and protect the mayor. She might as well be on his payroll.” (Now she is on a city hall payroll but still used as an independent commentator often on Tom Beres’s Ch. 3 Sunday show).

You can bet the editorial board now will host (and I do mean host) the GCP and its gang, listen to their lies, and then Elizabeth Sullivan and her court will do the same as was done in 1990. Bow and kiss the ass of power. A tax even the anti-taxer himself, Kevin O’Brien, will swallow. Take it to the bank. What else are they paid to do?

The “future” Gateway promised apparently hasn’t arrived yet 24 years later because now they want a 20-year sin tax worth $325 million. More than ever. I know that columnist Mark Naymik says it is less. However, he uses as his gauge the last 10 years’ collections. If you remember – at least low income, unemployed people do – there’s been a recession/depression in the last decade. If you use the first 15 year when $240.5 million was taken from the economy in good times, you’ll get a different number than Naymik uses. A much higher one. ($240.5 million divided by 15 years equals $16 million per year. For 20 years ($16 million X 20 years = $320 million and if they sales tax the sin tax it could cost an extra $25 million.) Now we’re talking money.

And no one seems to notice at the grocery store they add the 8 percent sales tax onto the sin tax.

Of course, the PD editorial leaned heavily toward Gateway propaganda.

I wrote: “He (Mayor Mike White, salesman of the corporates) was given a free ride from criticism, not unusual for a strong mayor doing the bidding of corporate interests.” White, by the way, campaigned a year earlier that he “would bring balance to downtown and neighborhood development,” the same song Mayor Frank Jackson sings. Wonder where Frank got it?

Here’s what to watch out for now, especially if you belong to churches and community groups that publicize their love of the downtrodden. I wrote back then:

“The debate over major issues such as Gateway reveals the true nature of the news media as mere propaganda outlets of the corporate community. What was so valuable about the news media dependent upon its masters in the corporate community is that it not only can present its distorted view to the public, it can force, entice or fool other interests into adopting the corporate view.

“Shamefully, church leaders, social service agencies such as the Federation of Community Planning (now the Center for Community Solutions), so-called civic organizations as the Citizens League, all abandoned their constituency and community tasks to join the campaign and give credibility to the give-away of hundreds of millions of public dollars desperately needed in a devastated community.”

The ball is rolling once again. There is no Carl Stokes to make it a contest. We have only Council midgets at City Hall and Cuyahoga County.

As for the editorial department of the Plain Dealer I wouldn’t give you two cents.

The paper itself is a shell of itself and maybe that’s good.

But you can bet it will be page one news (I mean propaganda) every day as vote time approaches.

The Pee Dee doesn’t have a columnist with the strength to fight for the obvious.

So it’s up to you citizens, do you give booty to the wealthy plunderers of our town or do you stand up and say NO to Gilbert, Haslam and Dolan.

 

 

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.]

 

 

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