The Plain Dealer gave us a billboard of headlines on the Medical Mart on its front page today but little – if anything – new that would indicate whether a medical mart would mean anything to the Cleveland area economy. Other than a drain, that is.

Headlines – all with question marks – don’t add to the debate at all. They are simply a gimmick that attracts attention.

Why is it that the newspaper cannot inspire a real public debate about the necessity of spending $1 billion dollars for this project?

It seems so obvious that that is the question requiring answers.

This area’s private electric company had a stranglehold on the city’s public electric system. Muny Light, as the city’s system was known, in the 1970s was an island serving some Cleveland neighborhoods, surrounded by CEI, which served in Cleveland and its suburbs.

CEI refused to allow electric power to cross its lines – a common practice called wheeling - to serve the city’s much smaller system. It was tightening its grip. It was hoping its hold would become a death grip.

Prima donna Tim Hagan cries the Plain Dealer is “cynical.” Tim, the PD has been propping you up for 30 years. You an arrogant, lazy excuse for a leader. You’ve been given the best press a big mouth with little record has ever been given. You don’t know how lucky you have been. With Brent Larkin leaving the Plain Dealer editorial boss position some reporter might start telling the truth about a guy who talks and talks but does little. “They’re cynical about everything we are trying to do here,” Hagan moaned about the news media and PD.

“Charities feeling the pinch of crisis,” headlines the Plain Dealer this a.m.

Some, however, aren’t feeling the pinch as we’ll see from taxes collected in January from Cuyahoga County taxpayers.

Steve Litt provides a good look at the mall site as the proper one for a medical mart and convention center in today’s Plain Dealer. http://blog.cleveland.com/architecture/2009/01/chosen_medical_mart_site_... It’s a good argument for where the project should be. However, it doesn’t address really – as no one has - whether we need this project or whether it is worth the price it will cost.

A number of times in my newsletter Point of View I published more extensive reviews of Cleveland politics and the local news media.

I hate to see them simply sit on the shelf. Therefore, I’m offering some copies free. I’d like to send 10 copies of a couple of the issues, one on a 16-page review 25 years of Cleveland mayors – “Who Really Governs” - and another a 16-page review of some 25 years of local media coverage – “Don’t read all about it.”

This is a story of civic sabotage. The desire for the private sector to damage, destroy and take over the Cleveland’s public electric power system reveals an important lesson in how power works in this or any community.

Time to say goodbye. Time to say goodbye to the poisonous politics of greed. Time to say goodbye to our bought-out politics. Time to say goodbye to people as Sam Miller and his type of cynical use of our politics. Forest City Enterprises executives now call for “an open process” when the decision on the Medical Mart and convention center don’t go its way. What a sick laugh. Just the audacity of the behind-the-scenes manipulators asking for the light of public sunshine is shocking. Forest City’s Sam Miller and Al Ratner have run the string out.

We keep paying and paying for projects that enrich multi-millionaires and their private businesses while all levels of our government cry out that they don’t have enough revenue for the essential of government operations and we need more taxes.

As government lays off workers, it pays stiff costs that result from bad decisions by its top leaders - people as County Commissioner Tim Hagan and former Mayor Michael White.

Here’s another 2008 bill for $9.9 million that taxpayers may not realize they are paying. However, they are.

Oh, boy, we’re not going straight, not taking a right turn or a left. Now it’s make a U-turn, Cleveland.

I thought the powers that be here didn’t know what direction they were going on the Medical Mart and Convention Center. Then the decision last week by the County Commissioners was to go the Mall site.

I thought Sam Miller and Al Ratner and Scott Wolstein were out of the game.

I didn’t expect that Mayor Frank Jackson would still take up the Forest City cause.

I was wrong.

Mayor Jackson can now be considered Mayor of Tower City.

Turn left. No, turn right. No, turn diagonally. No go straight.

It’s always good to have crisp, credible directions. Otherwise, how do you know where you are going?

Cuyahoga County Commissioners yesterday gave new directions to where they want to take us. If only we had any idea that they had any real idea where they are taking us.

It’s an untidy and greedy free for all. Grab while you can. If you can. So why shouldn’t Scott Wolstein – whose grandiose Flats development has hit a frigid stall despite huge promised public subsidies – enter the messed up deal on the medical mart and convention center issue. Confusion may be the mark of bad planning, poor communications and lack of leadership and, quite frankly, an economy in a seemingly permanent dump. However, chaos seems to suit our so-called Leadership.

I was going through an overstuffed file that had been resting on a shelf in the cellar. The broken fake leather file held old letters, cards, complaints and even some compliments going back to the 1960s.

A note from 1989 that I can barely read said, “I hope you’re still around 20 years from now… Nobody else will monitor to see if the Jacobs brothers keep their promise to help the neighborhoods.”

Well it’s a surprise to even me that I’m still around.

I’ll have to think of Carl Stokes on a day as this.

The election of Carl Stokes in November, 1967, came as a release in Cleveland much as, I think, Barak Obama’s election, culminating today in his inauguration, does for the nation.

Cleveland had been wracked by racial problems and animosity that kept relations between blacks and whites raw in this town. The 1960s were hell in Cleveland. We see the results of that more vividly today.

The impoverished City of Cleveland – with all its problems – is giving Howard Hanna (Smyth Cramer) $250,000 to renovate the offices downtown that the realtor bought last October, the Plain Dealer recently reported.

“I want to thank the mayor because this was not a done deal. This was a deal where we had to go on the offense,” said downtown Councilman Joe Cimperman to the Plain Dealer.

Well, it sure is offensive to me.

This is how distortion gets mistaken for reality. This is where propaganda outdoes truth.

The Plain Dealer this a.m. in its crusade for the Medical Mart calls the group that selected the Tower City site a “citizen’s committee.”

That’s really reporting very loosely with the truth - to describe a group that is entirely made up of Corporate/Corporate controlled individuals as representing the vast citizenry, thus the public. There isn’t a normal “citizen” on the committee because they are all related to the corporate community and its self-interests.

Don’t you just love the dance the establishment, its puppet politicians and its subservient media are doing with the medical mart.

“This community needs to move ahead on the medical mart, and that means pushing for a decision on where to build it,” headlined a Plain Dealer editorial, “Decision time.”

Well, editorial writers, no one is building a medical mart.

George Voinovich was a very selective conservative. That made him also a very selective “moderate” Republican.

My experience with Voinovich tells me he used his ethnic background to represent wealth in the community and in the nation. He successfully portrayed himself as personally frugal and the image carried him a long way.

I once told an audience that Voinovich would never be Governor because people saw him as a Mayor, nothing more. I was obviously very wrong.

Today’s Plain Dealer is very instructive.

The Metro pages have little news in six pages.
Ironically, the major metro page ad is from bad boy Auditor Frank Russo. It is a listing of delinquent personal property taxes – smaller than usual since the tax is being eliminated. Even so, the Russo ad takes up the entire second page and four inches across Page 6, which is dominated by the weather report, not news.

Then paid obituary notices eat up two full pages and a bit more.
The front Metro page is dominated – not by hard news - but by a sports story out of Avon.

In the 1990s, Cleveland had a rather highly educated City Council. I can’t remember the number but the percentage of lawyers among the 21 members was high. Cleveland also had an intelligent, crafty and feisty Mayor in Michael White. Today, City Council appears – with a few exceptions – to be inept and even farcical. Mayor Frank Jackson may be steady but one wouldn’t call him artful or exciting. Does it make any difference? Here is an example where it definitely didn’t.

Frank Jackson is trying to let people know he’s Cleveland’s mayor. After all, he does have to run for that office, though at least at this time there isn’t much talent around that appears able to challenge him.

However, the Medical Mart & Convention Center issue has shown how little weight he exhibits as the Cleveland mayor on big issues of the day.

They may soon begin selling reporter’s desks at the Plain Dealer.

A message today went to employees announcing the PD will be looking to rent parking and office space in its Superior Ave. and E. 18th building.

Management said that it was working with Grubb & Ellis “to explore the possibility of leasing a portion of the parking garage.”

In addition, the paper will attempt to lease space in its relatively new building working with Cresco, Ltd.

What page are we on? What year is this? And where did Fred Nance go?

The latest muddle on the med mart suggests that the big boys can’t get the ducks in a row again.

Backroom dealing and pressure are being exerted. By someone upon someone. Messages are being sent.

MMPI (Merchandise Merchandise Properties Inc.) maybe wants a smaller convention center and apparently a different site than the Downtown Gang (Greater (or Lesser) Cleveland Partnership & Forest City Enterprise) desires.

That would benefit MMPI.

Just as a reminder that there is plenty of room for meetings without a new convention center. Why doesn’t Cleveland Positively sell out of these venues? Quoting from a Cleveland Crain’s Business listings here are convention and meeting spaces available in Cleveland and its near suburbs. Lest we forget in order to build another structure for the Forest City Gang: - Cleveland Convention Center – 124,067 square feet of meeting space. - I-X Center – 101,045 square feet. - Playhouse Square Center – 90,000 square feet.

What have you done lately for Randy Lerner, Sam Miller, Albert Ratner, Tim Hagan, the Cleveland Orchestra or the Playhouse Square Foundation?

Plenty.

You may not know it but as a resident of Cuyahoga County you have been extremely generous to these richest of our rich.
The figures are in through December for a number of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County taxes.