Roldo, you always have such good content. Have you considered distancing yourself from the din here on RealNEO?

I'm not saying they're wrong--most of them here just have such an odd way of going about things.

Do you have any other feeds now, where you are separate from the rest of the RealNEO content?

Roldo posts at Cleveland Leader, CoolCleveland and other venues...but, of course, you know that...what's your real beef?

  Now--bribery is right out in the open in NEO.  No need to camouflage the deal here.

my opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer, my spouse, my cat, my neighbors, my extended family or anyone I happen to acknowledge on the street, bus, etc.

To use the new favorite catch word of the elite and the school district....Kumbaya...

Keep in mind, that just because someone posts or comments at REALNEO does not mean we agree with each other or have to agree with each other on everything.

There are class, gender and cultural differences that show up here. 

my opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer, my spouse, my cat, my neighbors, my extended family or anyone I happen to acknowledge on the street, bus, etc.

  Tim, I agree that it gets off-the-track with name-calling and the like...if I fall in that category anywhere here--ever, then, I apologize. 

I only try to make sense of what I see and live with here in NEO.  I see and hear many good things, too.  I try to provide some balance.  I took some lovely photos/video of the snowy neighborhood today, but I am having a hard time uploading the video. 

my opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer, my spouse, my cat, my neighbors, my extended family or anyone I happen to acknowledge on the street, bus, etc.

 Tone, yahoos, unpleasant, marginally acceptable. Any suggested solutions to make it different?

 No, Norm, this does not sound like a good solution. Not knowing all the ins and outs of what has happened, and, ok, I am being selfish, but this is not ok. It is not ok for you to leave. 

If you are up to sharing, what are these threats from Ferris? In the year or so that I've been on realneo, I have seen little of Ferris. He comes on, casting about for a fight, but how can Ferris be a threat? How is Ferris any different than any others that come on and rather than give ideas of what he sees as a problem and offer suggestions, actually cause negative vibes?

Part of what you have built here on realneo is a virtual family. How can we help with threats?

need more pictures

Submitted by TimFerris on February 28, 2010 - 6:44pm.

That last batch you did January 4th will hit the public next week. We need to do another batch soon.

You tell me

Citizen Norm

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I haven't any idea what he if referencing here. Is it tied into the other posting he did about no photos in existence of Tim in women's clothing? I did pick up on that reference but hoped that this was in jest.

The view count on this posting by Roldo is way up considering he posted it only about 11 hours ago at this writing. And there are over 30 comments appeneded to it! This is not your usual RealNEO communication. From what I can see, none of the comments address the content of Roldo's posting. Apparently at least one spark point in the comments has brought out emotional writing. Is this drawing all the eyes? How will the future of this posting and attached comments proceed? Will anyone address Roldo's points, other than that he has good material?

 This has been a subject that has been brought up in the recent past: when the comments go off topic. I had not counted, as you did, but was aware at some point that this was getting long and far off topic.

Please feel free to jump in and address Roldo's points, which are always relevant to Cleveland.

This is not the first time that one of Roldo's blog has gone long and off topic, and he still has not complained and keeps posting. Roldo is very appreciated here, and I think that he knows that and is aware and tolerant. 

I grew up considering many Gunds family friends, and I still consider the family friends.

I have never communicated with them about their business or foundation interests - only about art, and NEO, and family. The Gunds I know - and I know many of them - are valuable people.

Their foundation interests are valuable as well - always evolving, I'm sure.

For the past 5 years, I've felt the Cleveland and Gund Foundations have tried something different - Fund For Our Economic Future - and that was bold and deserving of respect.

After 5 years, the Cleveland Foundation has shown they intend to try other things different - and that is good. I imagine the Gund Foundation is now trying some things different. That is good.

I like seeing them mixing things up.

I don;t like seeing any of them directly involved in real estate development, like the opportunity corridor.

Having a powerplant forced down my throat, in my neighbourhood, creates very bad feelings - good people and good names should stay far away from such filth - same goes for free-ways... same goes for stadiums.

My observation is that building the opportunity corridor will hurt many people, and make many people rich, and no foundation should be involved in any of that.

However, even though I don't like sports or stadiums or Gateway, I credit the Gunds with shutting down the Coliseum and making the area around Peninsula - which could have turned into a disaster-area - into a very natural area, for NEO. They bought land and donated it to the National Parks, etc... I don't know the details but all this was happening in my childhood, and seemed right... righter than made sense to me at the time.

They brought the Cavs and all that Coliseum activity back downtown, righting one of the greatest wrongs of my time, both in moving anchors into the hinterland and moving a treasure out of the treasure chest - if we are going to waste public money on professional sports lets do it right.

Every professional team owner is rich and rich people get richer while barely trying - the chips are not stacked against the rich, and the system helps them scale larger and larger... simple math.

The Gunds are some of the few rich people I know who seem to really try and give back to their community, and who still consider this their community - I believe Aggie recently joined the board of the CMA, and I'm sure we will get lots of her great art, and money, in return.

I can't hate them just because they are rich. They are creative, nice people, as well, and without them many of our museum walls would be bare.

I'm looking forward to significant change at both the Cleveland and Gund Foundations, in the years ahead, as change is what is needed in real NEO now.

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Thanks Roldo for continually helping us to recognize how the money flows around here. One need only navigate to cleveland.com to see how sports placate the teeming masses here in Cleveland taking up half of the home page there. I was told years ago that Cleveland is a bean and wiener town. Indeed, it is easy to see. What most sports fans don't see while they're fixated on a game is how fast that money is flowing out their back pockets and to the already very rich. And these very rich folks have power and influence - they shape the politics of NEO. It's a magic show deftly employing sleight of hand.

I tried, in vain, to find here a direct quote from Ronn Richard that I posted a short time after I had an exchange with him at a CSU Forum, so I'll paraphrase as best I can. I said to him that I was aware that, as the head of a private non-profit foundation, he held no particular sway over political decisions, and he immediately countered and corrected me saying that since Cleveland Foundation spent approximately $85 million annually in the region, I could be certain that he can and does influence what happens in government. Gund seems to do it more quietly and does not advise other donors about how to spend their money to influence local projects and initiatives. But for years when I was in the arts, we were asked to meet with both Cleveland and Gund arts program officers in the same meeting - they'd be funding in concert. So I came to understand that they were the powerhouses in the region - go against them and you're SOL. 

So with the school gift, Gund seems to be saying have a nice processed school lunch on us replete with enough HFCS, salt and fat to give you type 2 diabetes, just as they said in the past, "Hey, let us take you to dinner - it's beans and wieners at the ball park for you. Will we be joining you? Oh, no, we'll be dining in our loges on food specially prepared by celebrity chef, Michael Symon." Or as Steve Martin said, "Bring me a roast pig on a spit and bring the little lady something for a dollar." 

On issues such as the medical mart and port move both foundations seem to have stayed quiet. I doubt it though. I haven't combed through their annual reports, but it took a lot of research to discover just how they had funded Hamilton Brown's position with Opportunity Corridor. There are others to watch; the Generation Foundation, for example, just to see how very interconnected are the wealthy in this community. This one sits on that one's board and another's board and gives money through many different channels. A million here, thousands there. It is not unlike campaign contributions where Daddy gives everyone in the family a thousand bucks to contribute in order to legally max out the family's support of a candidate or issue. It's an old boy network and what goes on in the GCP and in smaller foundations is not to be sneezed at either, even if the PD does not report on these gifts and manuevers. Wouldn't it be interesting to map all the nonprofit giving and taking here in NEO to see where and how the money flows in and out of the foundation community? Of course, with so many looking for hand outs and hands up, something like that is not to be expected any time soon.

When will Clevelanders understand that we're like so many wait staff members in the homes of the rich? Only when the flows of cash are explained as deftly as you do routinely. 

Cecil John Rhodes in 1895: "I was walking in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for 'bread', bread!' and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism... The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists."

• the poor are growing in number
• there isn't enough food to feed them all
• if there isn't enough food to feed them, they will go hungry
• if they go hungry, there will be civil war
• other countries have enough food to feed them

From Raj Patel's Stuffed and Starved

So Britain ruled the waves and colonized much of the world bringing tea and sugar to fuel their industrial revolution, further fueling their rise to power. How does this relate to Cleveland's caste system? Now that the world is flat and global trade is de riguer, the rich, those in power have discovered how to take it out of the pockets of the poor right here at home and give it back to them in seemingly huge sums. Are we placated well enough yet? Have we rid the world of imperialists and kings or do we just call them by different names?

As an economist, I know what must be disrupted.

Economics is as precise a science as programming, and works well when written right.

Our economics here are not written right. That is not the responsibility of the rich to correct... that is the responsibilitiy of citizens.

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Disrupt IT