line-height:200%">After CTO

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 Part 2: The Egalitarian City: Radical Reform in Cleveland.

A Cleveland Spring? One Year Later

by Randy Cunningham

Part 1: The Year that Was.

The World Turned Upside Down          

by Randy Cunningham

 People’s Summit 2017

by Randy Cunningham

 Cleveland as a Banana Republic

by Randy Cunningham

Humping the Hood

 What it would take (to bring down Frank Jackson)

by Randy Cunningham

 Neo-Liberal Cleveland: The Silence Ends

By Randy Cunningham

            I recently attended a Cuyahoga County Council meeting on the proposed renovation of the Q.  All the usual suspects were there – a bunch of suits salivating for profits, and the building trades, salivating for jobs.  What was unusual was the meeting drew a standing room only crowd, that included activists from the Greater Cleveland Congregations (GCC) who voiced their opposition to the proposal.  The suits talked numbers. The GCC talked about the lives of people in the neighborhoods.

 Post-Democratic America

           January 2017        Author’s Note:     The Neo-Liberal City was an act of dissent that was clandestinely distributed in the early 1990s as what we called Urban Samizdat – after the clandestine critical writings of the old Soviet Union.  It was clandestine because the author and the co-conspirators in the project worked in city government or other venues that would not have received the message of The Neo-Liberal City very kindly.  It was during the administration of Mayor Michael R. White who was notorious for firing people on the whim.  So, discretion was called for. The details described may date it, but the basic bones of what it describes are still the ruling realities of Cleveland. 

Randy Cunningham aka Vincent aka Randino

           This essay is the second of two that were inspired by the recent article in Cleveland magazine, concerning the impact on Cleveland’s neighborhoods of Neighborhood Progress Inc., the non-profit funding institution that has revolutionized the world of non-profit development corporations.  The title of this essay is the Neo Liberal City.  It attempts to move from a focus on NPI, to a broader focus on how Cleveland has and is being reorganized since the end of the Kucinich administration and the resulting consolidation of private power during the Voinovich and White administrations. This essay is not intended to be an academic essay, a policy analysis, or a muckraking exercise.  It is an unabashed polemic.  It seeks to develop broad themes and ideas about where Cleveland is at today, and where it is going.  Since a polemic is a call to action, it attempts to begin the development of an alternative politics of activism to combat what the author feels is an insidious, anti-democratic and unjust new order in our city.