The secrecy of the dealings between Squire, Sanders & Dempsey lawyer Fred Nance and MMPI suggests we won’t know how bad a deal the County Commissioners have made until it’s much too late.

Never in my memory has there been such a scramble as the mauling going on over the $1 billion in public funds sitting out there for a Medical Mart.

 It’s good that Tom Haley lived a long life. He expressed the fear that he would not.

 Boy, how the profiteers will fight over a $1 billion. Forest City will not go into the night quietly.

 While some people are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and feed and clothe themselves and their children too many are living too high in these desperate economic times.

 It’s pretty discouraging when you have to depend on the greedy to save you.

The Plain Dealer announcement of Dan Gilbert’s casino proposal looked very much as a free front page, glitz-up color ad for gambling: $1.8 billion in annual revenue, 20,000 jobs and $60 million in tax income.

Anyone who watched Jon Stewart’s dissection last night of Jim Cramer, of CNBC - and really all “conventional” journalism - got a lesson in why newspapers and TV news simply cannot – or will not - serve the American public.

I thought it rather amusing that the Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP) listed its priorities for stimulus money from Washington recently as the Plain Dealer quoted Sherwin-Williams CEO Chris Conner, GCP’s chairman. Just the guy who would know what the ordinary Cleveland resident most needs. Laughably, three pages over the PD by happenstance reports Conners’s annual income. A measly annual rate of $6,203,510.

 Just another regular guy telling us what to do with our public money.

 You can imagine why this country – and especially this county – IS (and should be) going down the drain. I return to Cleveland to find our wonderfully generous politicians are giving Eaton Corp. more than $90 million in gifts. Or should I say you and I are giving Eaton, which had sales of $15.4 billion and earnings over $1.1 billion last year, the gift.

The money continues to roll in – into the County – and out of your pockets.

Well, wouldn’t you know it?

U. S. Judge Robert Krupansky knew how to toss a case the way he wanted it to go.

He did it a simple way. The first jury voted against CEI with a single holdout. That was a bad sign for CEI. So Krupansky made a couple of simple changes. He finely tuned things for CEI.

There were two damaging examples of CEI’s legal manipulation that swayed the first jury.

Why would MMPI (Medical Mart Properties Inc.), the firm chosen to build and operate the medical mart and convention center, already be offering to subsidize the first 25 occupants of the Cleveland med mart?

And why is MMPI saying that it will be diverting business from its other spots to Cleveland?

Is business that bad already?

I also don’t like MMPI’s executives saying that these new $1 billion facilities will “live or die on the success of the health care market place.”

This all makes me even more nervous than I was about this debacle of the deal.

Long-time Cleveland writer John Ettorre at a journalism meeting this week asked Susan Goldberg, Plain Dealer Editor, whether the newspaper might be losing some male perspective because several top editors were women. Not the most politically correct of questions but it could have elicited a valuable exchange.

Goldberg instead was sharp in her response before an audience of a meeting sponsored by the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalist, according to Crain’s Cleveland Business:

So you may think that investing in a medical mart is something Cleveland just has to do. That’s what they said about so many things that I’m not going to list here but you know the money that’s been expended on downtown this and that over the last 20 years in Cleveland. Cleveland wasn’t alone. Other cities did the same. Now here’s a study of the same kind of “investments” made in St. Louis and how much it has helped that city. How many jobs, how much economic activity did it produce? Who actually benefited from the public give-away of our money?

During the first anti-trust trial between the city of Cleveland and the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. (CEI), I walked up to the company’s former chairman Elmer Lindseth. He had been attending the trial as a spectator. I asked the 78-year old retired executive if he ever had expected to see the day that the corporate leaders of CEI would ever be brought into a court of law by the city. He hesitated to answer. I asked him if maybe he didn’t want to respond. He smiled and said, “The times are different and things change.” Things do change.

Just what I feared.

If the Cleveland Mall site is chosen for the Medical Mart & Convention Center we could expect a raid on the historic Cleveland School headquarter building on E. 6th, across from the present convention center. It sits on valuable land next to the mall underground parking facility in front of the Marriott Hotel.

With the looting of billions, no trillions of dollars from the U. S. Treasury for incompetent bankers, automakers and others the elite are turning to the only reservoir of more trillions to steal. Who better than William Greider to sound the alarm, as he does so well in The Nation this week.

Some added thoughts this morning about the Medical Mart nonsense.

I go back to original my thoughts about the Medical Mart and Convention Center. The splashy presentations by Christopher Kennedy and his MMPI gang didn’t change a thing.

The deal stinks.

With two hours of hearings on the Medical Mart and Convention Center with its proposed operators – MMPI (Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc.), I know no more of value than when I got up this morning.

For more than an hour, those in attendance got the sales pitch via typical computer screened version of lists (wine tasting, fine craft shows) of possible visitors, plans one, two, three and more of sites with sketches. Never mind the drawings - that’s all they are, just drawings, we’re warned, not architectural renderings. But the Mall is the best, price-wise.

George Voinovich took every dollar the feds sent him when he was Mayor of Cleveland and gave those dollars – tens of millions of them – to the richest people in Cleveland. He fed greed as if it were sacred.

And now he’s crying about the bailout. After eight years under President George Bush. Eight years when Voinovich was part of the team that has taken this nation to ruin.

He’s found something to complain about.

Can Voinovich tell us what federal dollar - as governor, as mayor or as senator - that he turned down and sent back from Ohio to Washington, D. C.? Just one dollar?

As I’m writing these days about the underhanded suppression of Cleveland’s electric system by the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., it appears that some of the same shameful acts are now pursued on the part of the city’s electric system against public reaction to the building of a coal powered facility. Bill Callahan in his blog, Callahan’s Cleveland Diary (http://www.callahansclevelanddiary.com/?p=772)tells us about it. The issue also is detailed here also in the Ohio Citizen Action report (http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/coal/saxbe/saxbe.html).

“The Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. has been caught so red-handed in its predatory anti-competitive activities that a CEI lawyer had to admit guilt in the hope he could bamboozle the jury enough to avoid losing up to $150 million in damages,” I wrote as the city pursued its anti-trust case against CEI in 1980.

Squire, Sanders & Dempsey lead lawyer John Lansdale admitted this deception in his opening address to the jury.

The Healthcare Convention &Exhibitors Association (HCEA) “is the only organization solely dedicated to “improving the effectiveness and quality of all healthcare conventions and congresses, medical meetings and healthcare exhibit marketing throughout the industry.”

Cleveland, of course, is a prime city for health care with the nationally renowned Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and their medical schools.

One would think that Cleveland would be big NOW in the field of attracting conventions and exhibitions dealing with healthcare meetings and showings.