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.

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.

Please Join us for a look at the works of some of Cleveland's finest African American Filmmakers

Works by: Fred Boswell, Georgio Sabino, Marcell Dorsey, Nikki Byrd, Robert Banks Jr. and Preston Pickett.

Location

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.

I was very saddened to learn today we lost a great artist, loved friend and family to many, and inspirational Clevelander with the passing of Clarence E. Van Duzer. I knew Van Duzer as a family friend and always was inspired and energized by talking with him, his work, and his approach to life. At our last meeting, at his Convivium opening, in 2006, he was so strong and clear it seemed he would live on forever.

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.