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.

A look at City Council campaign funds

Posted by hgomez February 12, 2009 11:35AM

On Thursday we learned how deep Mayor Frank Jackson's campaign pockets are heading into a re-election cycle.

There's a name missing in the wikipedia's entry "muckraker" and it's Roldo Bartimole. In this 1996 article from his (now discontinued) Point of View (see below), he lays out how our local fishwrap, the Pee Dee, as Roldo dubs it, serves up bread and circuses while the elected and their business cronies fleece the public. It's the basic sleight of hand that our lofty elected pull on us. Not much has changed more than a decade later.

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.

COMMISSIONERS TO HOST PUBLIC BRIEFING ON MEDICAL MART SITE

CLEVELAND - The Cuyahoga County Board of Commissioners will host a public presentation, by Merchandise Mart Properties Inc. (MMPI) of the company's plans for the proposed Medical Mart and Convention Center on the site of the current convention center in downtown Cleveland.

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Last Thursday evening I headed east to State College, Pennsylvania for the PASA Conference - Farming for the Future: The Worldwide Search for Food Sovereignty: Finding Your Foodshed. PASA stands for Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and this was their 18th Annual Conference.

In the Fall of 2008, I proposed to Cuyahoga County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones that the local foods sector offers the people of Northeast Ohio $ billions in economic development opportunities that may be distributed to a huge percentage of our 1,000,000s of residents in very socially equitably ways. I also proposed similar opportunities are available in open source information and social computing. And I pointed out regional organizational, strategic, social and operational barriers to success and proposed specific solutions to maximize workforce and infrastructure development, massive scaling, and social equity.

Below is a heartfelt appeal to those to reach out with their social networks to demand inclusion of key legislation that would curtail regional and state funded programming and could have many negative consequences as a result.  This particular piece of legislation, still up for debate is the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund.  The importance of this particular element is elucidated here for your perusal. 

At 10 A.M. in the Cleveland council chamber on Wed. Feb. 11 there will be a meeting about the innerbelt bridge/access ramp.  Representatives will be there from ODOT, the City and city council as well as many interested citizens from the Tremont neighborhood. I believe that State Senator Shirley Smith will also be in attendance.  If you would like to be brought up to date on this important issue, please attend.  If you need a ride, at least a couple of cars with available seats will be at TWDC on Professor St. leaving at about 9:30 A.M.

Deane M.

As of today we have had 13 Tremont Residents 10 of which were in attendance at the TWDC Annual Meeting that paid into a retainer for the attached letters sent to the offices of TWDC and the local media.

We also have 5 Interested parties that have also contributed to the retainer that are not Tremont Residents but were in attendance also at the TWDC annual meeting.

Statement sent to local media covering the Story.

Please Review the attached letters.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Last night I listened to Dick Feagler and his Friends on WVIZ discuss Governor Strickland's education plan for the state of Ohio, slated to be piloted in the Cleveland Municipal Schools. When Mr Feagler asked his panel's opinion of the proposed 200 day school year, all of his highly educated guests nodded in agreement. "Of course it is a GREAT idea!" "Some other countries have school years even longer than 200 days." "Another month of school makes sense. We need to prepare Ohio's children to compete in a global economy." "It's about time.

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 Center for Community Solutions' Human Services Institute is Ohio's longest-running and largest one-day professional development opportunity for staff and volunteers of health, social service, education, and other human service organizations.

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THE administrators of prime custom papers provider BestEssays.Com took the time and initiative to help protect their employees by installing better fire protection equipments at the company’s premises recently.

BestEssays.Com tapped a fire protection equipment company for a consultation as well as installation of customized protection systems which comprised of pre-engineered and engineered fire systems, fire extinguishers, duct cleaning, fire extinguisher cabinets, brass and fire department connections as well as exit and emergency lighting.

This just in, via Cleveland City Council, via Facebook... "Another step taken toward Breaking the Cycle of Abandonment". This is about how City Council has decided to spend our community's $25 million in Federal taxpayer funds from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) - the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development - intended to help our impoverished inner city. You must ask yourself, who decided how your $25,000,000 should be spent here, how did they really decide this, and is this a step forward or backwards?

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.

Here you go: another example of how the government and its agencies don't seem to want to reward good behavior but will instead lump us all together: From Ted Strickland's budget balancing proposal. Fees instead of taxes.

I originally thought to put this in the discussion of NEORSD and its stowmwater program fee increases, but reconsidered. Still, it's all about a little fee increase here and a little fee increase there.

Summary information regarding current legislative actions and discussions in Cleveland and Akron with regards to outdoor media advertising and in particular digital billboards.

Todays experience was intense with the Cleveland Board of Building and Housing.

Pictures really do tell a thousand words... at least.

Presented before and after pics... the letters, emails, and petition of support...  landed a six month extention.  

Now one tired me is resting with one tired puppy and kitty to gear up to hit the ground running tomorrow... now is where the fun part starts...

Songs and music of the Civil Rights Movement will be presented by Muszikat-Shalom.

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