by Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole
I’d suggest to those who want to keep up with local economic information to put on their “favorite” internet selections Bill Callahan’s blog site - Callahan’s Cleveland Diary. He follows data and from time to time shares his thoughts with anyone who cares to read them. Callahan, in a recent posting, writes about the public subsidizing of big box stores such as Wal-Mart. He provides links to the original study showing a billion dollars of public money given to these big box outlets. That certainly doesn’t include all the other subsidies of government like special interest roads and other infrastructure provided free to these big businesses. The public subsidy is bad enough, but even more destructive socially has been the obliteration of small business and real income to local people and communities. Big Boxes have helped to destroy the social fabric of our communities, and we are poorer in many ways despite the lower prices they afford.
I have thought about this because it has been personal to me. My father owned a small grocery and meat market. He bought the store where he had worked since he was 19 years old just after World War II. He hired his three brothers, all had returned from the military. Right next door to my father’s store was a friendly competitor - my uncle’s grocery/meat market, separated only by a driveway. These two small outlets provided adequate incomes to six families with ten children at the time, and one to three part-time youth workers, including myself, for some time. Soon business wasn’t enough for all and the two brothers moved on. It’s an old story by now, so much so that we don’t even much notice. Supermarkets came to replace many small grocers and butchers. Just as big boxes, franchises and conglomerates have destroyed other small businesses – from restaurant, drug, hardware, clothing, farm and so many other single-purpose retail outlets. These businesses kept wealth within the community. Wealth that now flows to centralized capital centers.
This trend has left many neighborhoods with gaping retail holes and the consequences that rundown street economies bring. It makes low-income employees of more and more of us. Wealth that once flowed to numerous families – and remained generally in the community - now surges to a few owners, usually big stockholders. It isn’t going to change, because we have gone too far for that to happen. There are too many other social advantages (cheap goods at cheap prices) to return to the past. But do we also have to give some behemoths that destroy social structure tax breaks on real property and personal property too? Nothing can improve the cities until a method can be found to share the nation’s wealth. Bill Moyer wrote recently about the inequality that pervades our society, I know. I know: this sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon, who soon was to be Secretary of Treasury. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and New Deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less...It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
Adding to this despairing picture, a task force of the American Political Science Association recently examined the issue of inequality and issued a report on the rising inequality in America. “Generations of Americans have worked to equalize citizen voice(s) across lines of income, race and gender. Today, however, the voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally. The privileged participate more than others and are increasingly well organized to press their demands on government. Public officials, in turn, are much more responsive to the privileged than to average citizens and the least affluent. Citizens with lower or moderate incomes speak with a whisper that is lost on the ears of inattentive government officials, while the advantaged roar with a clarity and consistency that policy-makers readily hear and routinely follow. “The scourge of overt discrimination against African-Americans and women has been replaced by a more subtle but potent threat – the growing concentration of the country’s wealth and income in the hands of a few,” the report said.
We see it locally with the power of our major foundations - the Cleveland and Gund Foundations, among others - which fund elite organizations like Cleveland Tomorrow and the Downtown Cleveland Partnership, groups that are well funded by wealthy interests that work to dominate the public agenda. We saw it clearly in their greedy push for a convention center last year while the $100 million school deficit was growing. They helped keep a school levy from the ballot. So they can talk all they want about regionalism building a new convention center, funding the arts, creating new parks and boulevards – just as they did about building Gateway, the Rock and Roll Museum Hall of Fame and the Browns Stadium as solutions – but you won’t even come near solving Cleveland’s death rattle.
Frankie, Frankie, quite contrary
How does your power grow?
Smoke puffs and cigarette butts
And No and No and No and No!
Cleveland City Council President Frank Jackson’s response to a move to ban smoking in public places, a brusque “nyet,” perfectly reveals the contrary attitude about anything he does not and has no interest in considering. His dismissive attitude is illustrative of his attitude. “I’ve got nothing to do with them,” he told the Plain Dealer when asked about legislation banning smoking in public places, including bars. Jackson told Mike Tobin, “I just don’t have the space in my brain or the energy to deal with it. If I’m going to take that little capacity I have left in my brain, it won’t be for smoking.”
I don’t believe for a minute that Jackson is that limited. Judging from the PD this hasn’t been much of a year for tough legislation before Council. In fact, people seem to be asleep in that respect. Of course, Jackson doesn’t allow smoking in Council meetings, its workplace, or, in fact, any part of City Hall. What’s the difference for restaurants and bars? It’s a peculiar time in city politics. Even from my now distant perch, City Hall seems to be run by two people who have different political aims that conflict.
Mayor Jane Campbell continues to bungle along. She has been hampered from the beginning by her own staffing decisions that ranged – except for the finance department and other minor exceptions – from poor to appalling. Unfortunately, she has stuck with many of those decisions or replaced the unfortunate choices with other ill-fated selections. Her position appears more precarious than Jackson’s. Jackson appears to have little opposition. Campbell faces a tough re-election contest in a year.
Jackson moves slowly and that may not be all bad right now. He’s in a strategic place as Council President with a weak mayor. The push for some kind of regional plan – so much on the mind of the corporate leadership - has to pass muster with Jackson. His contrariness may serve well here. “Any approach of making decisions and creating plans concerning the city of Cleveland without dialogue with us will only create alienation and divisiveness and doom our effort to failure,” he said in his City Club speech last month. He was talking about the issue of public-private partnerships, part of the Greater Cleveland Partnership (new Cleveland Tomorrow) plans.
But I’ve seen Jackson play ball before. He did played ball on the vote for a new convention center even if the plans didn’t materialize. Jackson pushed through a vote in Council. The problem today, however, is similar to Cleveland in the 1970s, even to the Party in the Park to draw people downtown. During Ralph Perk’s tenure 1971-77, the city faced financial ruin. Perk solved the problem for a time by selling off or giving away city assets from the Cleveland port, sewer system and parks. He had hoped to make up for illegally spent bond money by selling off one more Cleveland asset – Muny Light. However, he ran out of time and into a former supporter, Dennis Kucinich and defeat.
It is unlikely a Kucinich-type candidate – a mayor of the little people – could win in today’s political climate. In any case, no one has prepared him or herself to take up that mantle. The problem for Mayor Campbell is that she has no Cleveland assets to sell and must face declining revenues. Not a pretty picture for the mayor or the town.
LEADERSHIP – I read in The Plain Dealer that a neighborhood organization was honoring both former Mayor now Senator George Voinovich and former Council President George Forbes presumably for their service to Cleveland. Does anyone see what’s been happening to Cleveland subsequent to their tour of duty? And particularly, does anyone see what’s happened to Ohio after Voinovich left as its Governor, or what’s happening to the U.S. as Voinovich serves as Senator?
It’s all downhill, folks.
from Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole (:divend:)