Introduction
This essay has a long pedigree. The thinking behind it was developed during the 1970s and 80s in two earlier essays, “The Primitive Socialist City” and the “Democratic Socialist City”. These were thought experiments on what a radical democratic city would look like written when I was chair of an urban affairs commission of two left organizations, The New American Movement, and the Democratic Socialists of America.
They were followed in the 1990s by what I called Urban Samizdat and an essay I wrote under the pen name Vincent, called “The Neo-liberal City.” By neo-liberal I meant a city where the market was supreme and that rejected the movements that rose in the 1960s, and the welfare state that came out of the New Deal and Great Society. This was part of an international movement of capitalist retrenchment, and social democratic retreat. In contrast to the two earlier essays, this was focused on Cleveland. It was based not just on theoretics, but my own lived experience working for housing non-profits in Cleveland’s neighborhoods. It was written, produced, and distributed clandestinely because at the time I was working for the City of Cleveland and quite reasonably did not want to lose my job. It was something of a hit, and I never came out of the closet as the author until my public sector career was over with. I am retired now and one of the few benefits of old age is the right to say what you want without the fear or favor of those who run our world. Its nice to get off your knees.
Call this essay The Neo-Liberal City’s grandchild. Enough has changed in Cleveland to warrant an update. I call it a hybrid because it contains both new materials, and some material from its ancestors. There are terms I will use in this essay that need to be explained. I use the terms “progressive” and “left” interchangeably. This drives purists nuts, but I don’t like purists. What I am describing is a broad ecumenical politics that ranges from being anti-corporate to being anti-capitalist. It is egalitarian, democratic, for racial and gender equality, environmental justice and is skeptical about our military interventionism abroad. It does not worship the Market God. This puts it in direct conflict with the American right, which is xenophobic, worships the Market God, and defends the traditional American hierarchies of race, gender, and class. Finally, I use the term “power elite” instead of such terms as “ruling class,” “1 percent” or Bernie’s “billionaire class.” The term was coined by rebel sociologist C. Wright Mills in his 1956 book, The Power Elite. Mills was a hero of my political generation. A generation that was irreverent about everything from the past, including the jargon encrusted language of the old Marxist left. The term “power elite” fits my purpose for this essay. Thank you, C. Wright. You are still in our hearts.
Read this essay as a thought piece. I want it to provoke thought and discussion in our city. I have always considered myself to be a provocateur and hope I still have the right stuff for the job. Feel free to share this and use my email address at randino49@gmail.com if you want to contact me about the thoughts herein. I hope you find at the very least, that it is a good read.
What has changed and what has not
For the past 10 years I have been writing about what I see as the return of grass roots activism in Cleveland. I described an earlier era of activism in my book Democratizing Cleveland: The rise and fall of community organizing in Cleveland, Ohio 1975-1985. The backlash against that era of activism created a generation long civic ice age that is just now starting to melt.
The left in Cleveland is multilayered. It’s made up of many informal networks of activists who have been working together for years. It is also represented by organizations such as the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, OUR revolution, Black Lives Matter, and the Democratic Socialists of America, among others. Then there are task-oriented groups such as the Jail Coalition, Clevelanders for Public Transit, and the Cleveland Housing Organizing Project.
The work we have been doing since Occupy, has begun to produce results. This work has been seen in a series of organizing battles from the Yes on 15 initiative, to the Q fight, to the campaign for public comment in City Council meetings. Some of the battles we have won, and some we have lost. Win or lose, they have been educational. We have been fielding numerous campaigns to elect progressives to office. In the 2021 election campaigns several progressive backed candidates were elected to local offices in Cleveland and the suburbs. The most significant of these candidates was Justin Bibb, who will close the long Jackson era, when he is sworn in as Mayor, in January 2022. But all these accomplishments were overshadowed by probably the greatest victory we have seen for progressives, since the election of Carl Stokes in 1967. The victory was the police reform charter amendment, Issue 24. It was a victory masterminded by the Cleveland chapter of Black Lives Matter.
It was part of a long history of conflict between the police and the African American community. The history of this conflict stretches back to the Hough Riot and Glenville Shoot Out of the 1960s. The victory of the Issue 24 campaign occurred after a series of recent defeats and frustrations that began with the November 29, 2012, Cleveland police chase into East Cleveland, which ended with the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, who were cornered in a parking lot and then killed in a hail of 137 bullets. No weapon was found in their car. Next was the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice on November 22, 2014, who was shot by police while playing with a toy gun in a park. No significant charges were forthcoming from these events, though a few police were fired for violating department protocols. The power and prerogatives of the Division of Police and its unions has been a never-ending nightmare for Cleveland mayors throughout the modern history of the city. The police, who in theory serve under civilian authority, have always operated as if they are answerable only to themselves.
Meanwhile a second consent decree was issued by the Justice Department mandating reforms of the Cleveland Division of Police. If consent decrees were effective in reforming the police, then most of the events cited above would not have occurred. Consent decrees are administered by the courts, and the record of the courts dispensing justice when it comes to police violence against the Black community is spotty at best.
Then came the passage of Issue 24. The bunker of political power of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association (CPPA), was finally breeched. Cleveland will now have a Community Police Commission with the power and the resources to monitor police behavior in Cleveland. Cops will no longer discipline other cops.
New political eras happen when what always worked in the past, no longer works. This was seen in the mayoral campaign leading to the victory of Justin Bibb, over Cleveland City Council President Kevin Kelley. Kelley was an enemy of practically every progressive grass roots initiative attempted in Cleveland, over the past 6 years. Kelley based his whole campaign on demonizing Bibb for his support of Issue 24. Kelley charged that Issue 24 was a “defund the police” measure. It was not. As the Bibb campaign gathered momentum, Kelley desperately ramped up the law-and-order rhetoric that is central to our toxic brand of racial politics. It did not work. Issue 24 won handily. There was some worry that the African American community on the East Side that has been subjected to some of the worst criminal violence, would fall for the law-and-order line as well. “Defund the police” has never been popular in Cleveland’s African American communities. They want to be served by the police. Not bullied and murdered by the police. Instead of being sidelined by Kelley’s rhetoric, African Americans kept their eyes on the prize of ending police abuse and impunity and gave Issue 24 a resounding victory.
Though the Cleveland City Council is still full of council people who were allies of Kevin Kelley, and outgoing Mayor Frank Jackson, enough new members were elected to open some real progressive possibilities in Cleveland. The challenge now is how to take advantage of those possibilities and develop a sturdy network of progressive organizations that can thrive in good times and bad times. We need to look at what has changed and what remains the same in Cleveland, while setting a new agenda for the city.
Challenging Changes – Housing
During the campaign for Mayor, I attended a meet and greet for then candidate Justin Bibb on the West Side of Cleveland. He mentioned that all people were talking about on the West Side was gentrification. I spent almost 30 years working in housing in various roles from development corporations to the Cleveland Housing Court, to tenant rights and homeless work with the Cleveland Tenants Organization. In the old Near West Side (now Ohio City) where I started in the early 1980s, we used to fret about incipient gentrification, but it never amounted to much except on a handful of streets. The Near West Side was a peculiar location with a peculiar history for a future yuppie hangout. It was one of the launching pads for the old National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) of the 1960s, and hosted an organizing campaign called the Education Research and Action Project (ERAP) of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the premier student organization of the 1960s New Left. It was also an old base for the Catholic Worker movement, and liberal Catholic activism in the 1960s.
Now, the old welfare rights people, SDSers and Catholic Workers would not recognize the place. Few people even remember the Near West Side, but everyone knows about Ohio City. The area I knew so well is almost totally gentrified, except for two housing projects of the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority. It seems like on every street corner there is a new luxury high rise that has been built or is under construction. The old West Side Community House, on Bridge Ave, where I used to work, is no longer a settlement house. It is a now a loft development. West 25th Street is now a “destination” for the young, hip and affluent. It used to be that the only luxury brands of cars you would see, belonged to the owners of local factories and other businesses. Now they are common in the traffic congestion that plagues W. 25th. The corner across from the West Side Market where we used to stage rallies and demonstrations has now been gobbled up by a new monster commercial and residential development.
The same thing that happened to Ohio City is happening in what is now called Uptown but has traditionally been called University Circle. Symbolic of these changes is the situation on Hessler Road. Hessler Road was one of the few surviving hold outs of the old Cleveland counterculture sensibility. Hessler won its reputation in a long series of housing struggles with its nemesis, University Circle Incorporated. The result was the formation of a number of housing co-ops on the street during the 1970s. The street was famous for its Hessler Street Fair that drew thousands to its vendors and food stands and morning to night concerts by local bands. But the sheer power of the real estate boom in the area, overwhelmed the street in a conflict over the construction of a new apartment building. Hessler has always been like an ant in a herd of elephants, trying not to be trampled by the heavy dancers of the area such as Case Western Reserve University, medical behemoths such as University Hospital, and development power houses like University Circle. It has been lucky so far, but hard telling how long that luck will hold out.
The changes sweeping University Circle that have radiated out from the center, have been driven by the “med/ed” pattern of development that has been a characteristic of American urban life in the last two decades. Medical complexes and universities have become the 800-pound gorillas of urban development, rivaling the influence of sports arenas and convention halls. Two of the future targets for developers on the East Side are the Glenville neighborhood, and East Cleveland. East Cleveland is a perfect example of the workings of the real estate market. It was abandoned to disinvestment and decay when it integrated during the 1960s. It became infamous for bombed out neighborhoods that resembled post World War II Europe. But that was just an example of the creative destruction that has for so long been a feature of capitalism. The destruction of East Cleveland destroyed property values, and cleared out blocks of housing, but it meant that East Cleveland real estate could now be snatched up by real estate speculators for a song. That is why many observers confidently predict that East Cleveland will redevelop in the next few decades, resegregate, and return to its former self as one of Cleveland’s toniest suburbs.
Housing gentrification and speculation are focused on specific neighborhoods. In Uptown they are close to the Med/Ed sectors. In Ohio City the enclaves are boosted by residential downtown development across the Cuyahoga River and the entertainment and dining venues of the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood. Now redevelopment of the neighborhoods surrounding the main campus of Metro Hospital is on the agenda and will be fueled by the hospital’s massive new building program.
As you drive around neighborhoods such as Ohio City, and see all the luxury apartment and condo buildings going up, you have to wonder just who is going to live in these buildings? Cleveland is the hometown of the humble. It is not a city for high rollers. It hasn’t been a city for high rollers since the Gilded Age plutocrats abandoned their Euclid Ave Mansions, for suburbs such as Bratenahl, or Shaker Heights. Add to this the fact that Cleveland is surrounded by suburbs that offer better schools, along with all the amenities that the affluent want. If you need downtown offices for your business, they are easily accessible to you via all the interstates that divide up Cleveland. So, who is going to live in all the glittering new developments? Is the boom headed for a bust?
All the glitter and the breathless boosterism greeting the building boom in Cleveland not only hits the supply of low-income housing. It also undermines the supply of housing and commercial space for the young, the artists, musicians, writers, performers, innovators, and startup businesses. We have seen the result of this dynamic with artists who have abandoned New York City for cities such as Detroit, because the cost of loft space and residences has run them out of the Big Apple. My niece and her husband have been run out of Seattle because commercial rents for their businesses have gone from the outrageous to the insane. Letting the animal spirits of the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) sector run free, creates communities that may not have gates, but are gated all the same, where few are welcome, and many are turned away. They lock out many of those people who are essential to creating that collective genius that has always made great cities, great. Will this happen in Cleveland? If it does, we will only notice it when it is too late to prevent.
In most of Cleveland neighborhoods, for better or for worse, the status quo remains. Some are stable, there are spot improvements and spot deterioration in others. But all neighborhoods are impacted by the boom times in the real estate market. It is reflected in increasing real estate tax rates, which fluctuate according to the overall housing market. Then there is the fact that much, if not most of the development in areas like Ohio City is heavily tax abated. Major institutions that could easily carry the tax burden of the city and county, such as the ever-expanding Cleveland Clinic, are tax exempt since they are non-profits. The Cleveland Municipal School District does not benefit from the opulence of the Cleveland Clinic, which might as well be in Mumbai for all it contributes to the financial well being of the city schools.
The Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) is still the biggest provider of low-income housing in Northeast Ohio. As difficult as its history has been, it is still the only viable alternative for many to living on the street or having a slum lord take fifty or even eighty percent of your income for rent – rats, mice, lead poisoning, leaky roofs, and bad plumbing thrown in for free. I worked a lot with CMHA when I was with Cleveland Tenants Organization. I found it to be a big, lumbering beast of an institution and such institutions are hard to love, but I came to respect it. I was frequently at their headquarters pleading the case of a client who I wanted to get into or keep in CMHA. I was willing to do some appeals that were bat shit crazy, and that caused the bureaucrats in the back office to shake their heads, but I also won a lot of cases before them. I learned what I had learned in one of my past jobs as a caseworker at a welfare department. You find some crusty, cynical, world-weary soul in the bureaucracy and if you pry open their atrophied hearts, they can make the institution stand on its hind legs and dance for you. I found a battered and unappreciated idealism among many in the central office and estates of CMHA. I found no idealism in the private housing sector. My only regret upon retirement is that I never worked at CMHA. Instead, I worked it.
Despite the best efforts of Cleveland’s housing non-profits to build affordable housing, they are still bound and gagged by the ideological constraints of the current housing consensus. Real progress will be impossible as long as housing policy is limited by the cult of home ownership, and market fundamentalism where housing as a commodity is sacrosanct, and housing as a right is scorned. No notable progress can be made without reconsidering public housing.
Public housing was first developed during the Great Depression and was in many cities looked upon as a godsend for families who could not afford housing in the private market. The Stokes brothers were raised in the early Cedar Central estates. No sooner was public housing begun than it was under attack by the real estate industry. The real estate industry mobilized against a form of housing that competed with them. A motto of capitalist enterprises is “Competition for thee, but not for me.” They did everything they could after World War II to hem public housing in, and to make it fail. They are still hostile to it. The only reason public housing was warped and limited in its development was the hostility and power of the real estate industry. Their greatest victory was not with legislation and public policy. Their greatest victory was ideological, where the only viable form of housing, was private home ownership that would make them rich. Any other alternative was denounced as communism or declared impractical and bound to fail. There are plenty of examples from around the world in rich nations and poor nations of public and quasi-public housing that is affordable and desirable. Their housing systems are not held hostage by the real estate industry. Its power has impoverished our imagination about what is and is not desirable and possible in housing policy.
First, the whole issue of current landlord tenant law must be reopened. I remember the days before the current model of landlord tenant law was passed in the mid-1970s. What existed before then was feudal. What exists since is getting threadbare and does not address the chronic insecurity of tenancy that renters face and the inadequacies of landlords maintaining rental properties, and local government enforcing its housing codes. And then there is the central, unavoidable conflict at the center of landlord/tenant relations. What is a home to tenants, is an investment to the landlord. All the problems of rental housing originate with this conflict.
The one word that explains all you need to know about why home ownership is coveted in our society, is the word landlord. I am a homeowner. I became a homeowner because of my scuzz bag landlord, who I rented from while working at the Cleveland Housing Court. Not only did I have to put up with scuzz bag landlords at work, but I also had to put up with him when I came home. We decided to become the devil in our own hell, and we bought a house. It panned out for us. But the American Dream has fine print that few of its promoters talk about. It is very expensive. In case a tree falls on your house, or the boiler goes out, you pay for it. We can afford it. One size does not fit all, however, and many cannot afford home ownership. That does not mean they should be thrown to the tender mercies of the private rental market. Again, we circle back to the need for alternative forms of housing. Housing that is subject to democratic governance, not the take it or leave it edicts of landlords. Housing as a right.
If you are not blinded by the hype of the gentrifiers, you may be able to notice a new progressive housing movement that is stirring in Cleveland. As one generation of housing advocacy groups such as Cleveland Tenants Organization (CTO) have failed and faded from the scene, new actors have arrived. The Cleveland local of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is accumulating a respectable track record of old fashioned, on the ground organizing in Cleveland on such issues as public transportation, the fight against lead poisoning in rental housing, and securing tenant rights against mass evictions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Cleveland Housing Organizing Project (CHOP) of DSA uses door to door canvassing, and telephone contacts of tenants who appear on the eviction docket in the Cleveland Housing Court. They offer information and assistance so that tenants can access legal help through the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, while organizing tenants to a degree unseen since CTO closed its doors. The Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing (CLASH) campaign was noteworthy as a model of an environmental justice issue combined with a housing justice issue where the DSA supervised petition gathering. The activists of DSA and CHOP have renewed a banished tradition that was lost in the button down, and brick and mortar focus of the past generation of non-profit housing work. It is vital that it does not suffer the same fate of repression or co-optation that its predecessors suffered. Those in need of housing justice in Cleveland, should not suffer another repetition of the past.
An Old Challenge Remains: Life on the Non-Profit Rez
One of the greatest challenges for the future of progressive politics and activism in Cleveland is also one of the oldest. That is the role of foundations and the non-profits they finance in Cleveland. These are institutions that dare not say the word politics and hide behind the veil of philanthropy and doing good. Anand Giriharadas in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World skewers this assumption of international philanthropy, which is just as true for domestic philanthropy. Giriharadas:
Elite networking forums like the Aspen Institute and the Clinton Global Initiative groom the rich to be self-appointed leaders of social change, taking on the problems people like them have been instrumental in creating or sustaining.
The political paralysis of our society has opened an opportunity for the power elite to pose as agents of social change with issues such as climate change and racial justice. Thus, you have the most powerful corporate interests telling you that Black Lives Matter to them and they love the planet too. Any review of the history of these interests, show how complicit they have been in creating the very problems they are wringing their hands over. Looking for solutions to our maladies from them, is like expecting an arsonist to call the fire department.
The foundations are the outer defensive perimeter of the power elite. They determine what is or is not a “serious” issue, and they determine what is and is not an acceptable policy to address that issue. How they see the world is how the non-profits see the world. In short, they determine the parameters of public policy and that is profoundly political.
I call non-profits Indian Reservations for idealists. Non-profits enable them to pursue unimpeachable goals and provide needed services to the community, while staying out of the way of the primary business of American society – making more money for those who own and run America and already have too much money. If the idealists are not herded onto reservations, they – like Crazy Horse before them, might cause trouble for those with the power and the money. Just as the residents of the original reservations were kept dependent, powerless, and out of the way of Manifest Destiny by the U.S. Army, the residents of the non-profit reservations are kept dependent, powerless, and out of the way by philanthropic foundations. No troop of cavalry was ever as effective as the foundations are in patrolling the boundaries of the rez.
We are in a golden era of non-profits and foundations which many people now call the nonprofit/industrial complex. The reason we are in such a golden era is because of 50 years of public sector austerity and private sector opulence. From the New Deal to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, the public sector was the place to go to address the social ills of the day. The priorities of the public sector are set by voters, elections, and the sausage making of legislation, paid for by taxes. The power elite deeply resented the New Deal. They considered it a mortal threat to the powers and rights they enjoyed during their heyday of the Gilded Age. The ink was not dry on New Deal legislation before the counter revolution began, and the first great victory of the counter revolution was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981. The dismantling of the New Deal began. Nonprofits began to replace the old social safety net. They did not challenge the Market God. Non-profits were funded by the foundations. Foundations that were founded and funded by the power elite. The question was who controls and who allocates the wealth of society – democracy or plutocracy. Plutocracy won.
Unfortunately, most progressive minded idealists and activists have no place to go to earn a living other than the non-profit sector and that other system of reservations known as academia. There they live out their working lives beneath a Sword of Damocles, dependent on the whims and wishes of the foundations. Idealists of an earlier era looked for opportunities in the labor movement, or government service. These two areas were trashed by the era of austerity and reaction that crushed labor and defunded and privatized much of the public sector.
And here we are today. Until we see a return of the labor movement to power and influence and have a public sector that can do more than just kill people and lock them up, we will be stuck on the rez. Meanwhile, our most important work is to pull back the veil of noblesse oblige represented by the foundations and make their power the topic of debate and action. The abandonment of an illusion is the first step in changing the conditions that require the illusion.
Waiting for Justin
Probably not since Carl Stokes was elected, have we had a mayor whose administration has been more breathlessly anticipated than Justin Bibb’s. For many in the progressive community just the fact that we will not have to face the horrors of a Kelley administration, was enough to generate glee. As with any new political leader, everyone is projecting their hopes and dreams on a person who cannot possibly live up to all the expectations being heaped upon their back.
Justin is young. He will be one of the youngest mayors in Cleveland’s history. He has a style reminiscent of Obama. I have often wondered how many hours of video from Obama’s presidency, Justin watched and then imitated in front of a mirror. He is relatively new to politics and has spent most of his working life as a corporate and non-profit technocrat. However many hopes progressives have for him, he is solidly connected to the establishment in Cleveland. It is impossible to be supported by former mayor Mike White and not be well connected. But Justin has already shown that he is willing to take risks, and buck tradition with his backing of Issue 24. Standing up to the law enforcement axis is not for the faint of heart.
When it comes to my expectations of Bibb, I am reminded of what was said about a former Bishop of the Archdiocese of Cleveland, James Hickey. He was an enthusiastic backer of the community organizing movement of the era I wrote about. He was one of the great church liberals of the time, but as one person who worked with him said, he was as liberal as an ambitious man could be. Which will probably be true of Bibb, but maybe at least we will not have to listen to pious declarations from Bibb, like we did under Jackson, of his loyalty to the least of us when his administration was all about serving the greatest of us.
The best advice I could give to soon to be Mayor Bibb, is to set aside all your briefing books and give your advisors a weekend off, and read and reread former Mayor Carl Stokes’ memoir, The Promises of Power: A Political Autobiography. All the trials and tribulations Stokes endured, from racist and homicidal police to a hostile City Council, to an arrogant power elite who hung him out to dry after the Glenville Shoot Out, all of this will soon be his. Good luck, Justin. You are going to need it.
However, we should not be asking ourselves what Mayor Bibb will do. We should ask ourselves what are we going to do to take this opportunity and push it as far as we can. What do we need to do in a city managed by Justin? First off, our motto should be close but not too close. This is Justin Bibb’s administration. Not ours. Our second motto should be to keep doing what we are doing while refocusing our efforts for a larger agenda. We need to unify progressives and the left behind a broad but independent agenda for the future of the city, to give focus to the myriad organizing projects and campaigns we are currently working on. An agenda I call a Democracy and Justice Agenda for Cleveland.
A Democracy and Justice Agenda for Cleveland
If there has been a consistent theme to recent activism over the past five years, it is the theme of democracy. Democracy in Cleveland has been nine-tenths rhetoric and bombast, and one-tenth reality. There has been no democracy in the decision making on development projects in Cleveland. Instead, it has been a classic case of hostage taking and black mail by the power elite of the political leaders and people of Cleveland. The non-democratic, or better still the anti-democratic nature of our power elite, can be seen in the reaction that greets any grass roots initiative that challenges its pet projects. The response to any such initiative – as we saw with the Yes for $15, or the rehab of the Q, ranges from pushing through pre-emption legislation in the Ohio State House, to a full court press on the sponsoring organizations to intimidate them into compliance with the agenda of power. The classic example of this application of power, was the tsunami of intimidation that hit the Greater Cleveland Congregations for supporting the referendum on the financing of the Q rehab for billionaire Dan Gilbert. One term I use for the application of power against grass roots organizers and their organizations, is The Treatment. GCC’s heads are still spinning from The Treatment they received over the Q.
The problem is not just The Treatment. It is the fact that democracy has been marginalized in both Cleveland, and in American society in general. The illusion of democracy is much more important than its reality. The illusion is cultivated in formal hearings at all levels of government, where the issues are debated by all, when everyone knows ahead of time who will win and who will lose. The important decisions are made behind closed doors, in the building of a consensus that does not need to be announced or codified. It is viscerally understood by everyone who needs to understand it and who will then enact it. Meanwhile democracy continues to struggle on, like a tenacious weed that has found a crack to grow in, in defiance of the surrounding institutional pavement.
The Democracy and Justice Agenda is based on the belief that democracy either advances and conquers new territory, or it will die. Our agenda wants to take the democratic weed and turn it into a forest. Instead of outlining a meticulous strategy that will be obsolete the moment it is created, it would be better to establish themes for the future for building a just and democratic city. Call these themes markers for future organizing and politics.
Build the Public Sector and Build the Common Good
In President Reagan’s first inaugural address he stated, “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” This statement shaped the past 50 years of American history. The mantra of public sector bad, private sector good ruled from Reagan’s inaugural in 1982, until it started breaking down under the weight of its failures starting with the Great Recession of 2008. One of the failures was the wretched response to the COVID pandemic. Wars, depressions, and pandemics shine a bright light on a society’s fault lines and failures.
The controversy over vaccinations to prevent COVID has seen a lot of indiscriminate criticism of people who refuse or hesitate to get vaccinations. If you can look beyond the antivax con game of the right, and the self-righteousness of the affluent you can see what is really going is the much broader legacy of the glory days of neoliberal supremacy. In the New York Times op-ed of December 3, 2021, “Behind Low Vaccination Rates Lurks a More Profound Social Weakness” by Anita Sreednar and Anand Gopal, they describe how the eclipse of the basic idea of a common good, set us up for the pandemic.
Over the past four decades, governments have slashed budgets and privatized basic services. This has two important consequences for public health. First, people are unlikely to trust institutions that do little for them. And second, public health is no longer viewed as a collective endeavor, based on the principle of social solidarity and mutual obligation. People are conditioned to believe they’re on their own and responsible only for themselves. That means an important source of vaccine hesitancy is the erosion of the idea of a common good.
The return of the common good requires the rehabilitation of the public sector, and its expansion into areas of concern that have heretofore been the sole prerogative of the private sector. The continued hesitancy to fund the public sector has been devastating for the poorer sectors of our population and has even undermined the wellbeing of people in the middle classes. We need health care for all. We need more public housing. We need more parks – especially National Parks. We need fewer prisons, and more adequately financed schools. We need to rehabilitate our decrepit public health care system, and system of rural public hospitals and health facilities. We need fewer cops and more social workers. We need to quit garrisoning the world with our military bases and start garrisoning our communities with public services. We need to quit green washing and start green doing regarding climate change. An example is the effort to build a renewable energy infrastructure in Cuyahoga County, marshaling public sector resources to stop the rhetoric and start the action. All these reforms will require that the private sector step back, and the public sector step up. The common good will return when people see how their lives are improved by an expanded, responsive, and well-funded public sector. A public sector that looks upon people as members of a community, not as isolated atoms of economic self-interest.
We must recognize that however much the government has been hijacked by private interests throughout our history, and however many crimes it has been guilty of, it is the court of last resort for the least of us. Those of us who have had our rights trampled on, do not pen letters, grievances, or court cases to the Greater Cleveland Partnership. We take our petitions to our councilman, representative, senator, mayor, or president and ask them for mercy or justice. Our government has been the entity we expect help from when disaster and misfortune strike. The people in Mayfield, Kentucky are not waiting for the market or the “invisible hand” to rebuild their communities. They are turning to the government.
We must face up to what happens in societies that turn their agendas over to the private sector and look to the market to solve their problems. In country after country around the globe, the turn to the market always ends up being a turn towards greater inequality and increased social polarization. Greed is good for the well positioned and privileged. It is bad for everyone else.
A large public sector helps diminish inequality in the overall society. An illustration of this is with jobs. The public sector has been a source of employment and with it a sane and dignified standard of living for those ethnic and racial groups that have faced rampant discrimination and limited opportunities in the private sector. In the past Irish, Italians, Jews and more recently African Americans and Hispanics have found occupational refuge in the public sector. The drive to privatize is inherently racist and sexist.
Before we move on from this topic, let us deal with that holy of holies called the “public private” partnership. Pundit and politician’s hearts go all aflutter when you say that phrase, but as with so many of the sacred cows of the recent past, it is a fraud. In the “public private partnership” the private colonizes the public sector and uses its tax and bonding powers for corporate welfare. It is the private sector in public sector drag.
Democratize City Hall
Clevelanders for City Council Reform began in 2021 to pass an ordinance to establish a public comment period at all weekly City Council meetings. It assembled a coalition of supporters made up of local Democratic Precinct Central Committee members, activists, politicians, and neighborhood residents to push the reform. The usual drill followed. City Council President Kevin Kelley, channeling the famous quote attributed to Gandhi, ignored us, laughed at us, fought us and after realizing that we were not going to go away or give up, finally hoped to co-opt us with a council rule change that was barely adequate.
Clevelanders for City Council Reform chalked up the public comment rule as a win all the same, but it wants much, much more from City Council. It wants an end to the archaic unit rule that rewards conformity and punishes dissent among City Council persons. It wants an end to the flagrant use of designating legislation as an “emergency”, which was originally designed to quickly pass the routine business of council but is now a way to ram through legislation with little to no public discussion or review. It wants an end to using the City Council political slush fund that puts a finger on the scales of local council elections and is a job protection measure for incumbent council members. It wants an end to the rubber-stamp practice of current council members being able to name their successors with no review or discussion if they leave office before their term is expired. There is still plenty of work to be done.
Rolling Back Private Government
In the recent string of tornadoes that swept through the mid-South, workers at the candle factory in Maysville, Kentucky, were forbidden to leave their jobs at the approach of a devastating EF 5 tornado under penalty of being fired. Nine workers died and a dirty little secret of American capitalism was revealed. Workplace despotism. In the December 14, 2021 New York Times op-ed by Jamelle Bouie, “Tornadoes Shouldn’t Be a Workplace Hazard” this point is driven home. Bouie:
Americans are at the mercy of what the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls “private government,” a workplace despotism in which most workers “cede all of their rights to their employers, except those specifically guaranteed to them by law, for the duration of the employment relationship.” With few exceptions — like union members covered by collective bargaining agreements or academics covered by tenure — an employer’s authority over its workers is, Anderson writes, “sweeping, arbitrary and unaccountable — not subject to notice, process, or appeal.
Your typical Clevelander is well acquainted with the private government. They experience maybe two to three hours of democracy over a lifetime. Otherwise, they live out their lives under the private government of the job, where there are no rights, and there is no democracy. When you check in for a shift, you cease to be the citizen of a democracy. Again Bouie:
Our democracy is and will remain incomplete for as long as most Americans work without power or representation under the authority of private governments. Whatever democratic habits we hope to instill in ourselves and our children cannot be sustained, in the long run, when democracy is banned from the shop floor.
Over the past fifty years, we have seen a ceaseless campaign to roll back all the democratic and social justice accomplishments of the 1930s and 1960s. Democracy has lost ground in its never-ending battle against the forces of plutocracy. The jewel in the crown of this reactionary onslaught has been the savaging of the American labor movement. Its marginalization has been the greatest accomplishment of the conservative movement in the United States. The future of democracy in our country is tied to the future of the labor movement.
The Agenda for Democracy and Justice in Cleveland must be a stalwart of the labor movement. But even that is not enough. That is a minimal demand. We must also be in favor of worker run enterprises in Cleveland because you can be a member of a union, the finest union there is, but the rights of management are still sacrosanct and supreme in American capitalism.
With that realization, we need to agitate for and promote worker control of economic enterprises by establishing an office for employee ownership that will seek out such businesses and be a technical consultant for those interested in owning where they work. There are a handful of such businesses in Cleveland. One of them is the composting company Rust Belt Riders, which has expanded its business while switching over to an employee-owned cooperative business model. An office of employee ownership would meet with such businesses, find out what is needed for their success, and work to pass legislation that would be preferential to them, instead of the old habit of sucking up to the corporate dinosaurs who normally get all the goodies.
Democracy as a Compelling Public Interest
We have agencies and regulatory bodies that protect the environment, combat racial and sexual discrimination and deal with other social problems. What we do not have is an agency with the mission of promoting democracy and democratic values. We need an Office for Democratic Life in the City of Cleveland. We need an agency that will monitor democratic norms and practices, beyond that covered by labor agreements or normal regulatory regimes.
The primary job of this agency will be naming and shaming. The agency will investigate complaints about agencies, non-profits, and private companies that act in a heavy-handed manner that prevents employees from being able to exercise their full democratic rights. The primary focus would be on those organizations that are not represented by labor contracts. Follow up reports on the investigations will become publicly available. Reports will also be made available to government bodies that solicit and decide on contracts, so that decisions can consider the democratic reputation of the corporation or organization applying for a contract. For instance, companies applying for city business that have reputations for union busting, or racial and gender discrimination, will not have their applications considered.
The office will also monitor such public events as demonstrations, marches, and rallies to ensure that the civil liberties of those participating in such events will be respected. Those who wish to use democracy are often faced with a blizzard of bureaucratic ands, ifs, and buts that impede their efforts. An Office of Democratic Life could be a help in smoothing out the bureaucratic road for the sponsors of these events. Finally, it is often difficult for advocacy and organizing groups to find venues for meetings and events. The Office could be a clearing house for available public meeting spaces in public buildings. Those needing such space would apply through the office.
Finally, the Office will examine when and where public bodies hold their board meetings and their openness to public participation. Too many agencies and public bodies have their meetings at times that are not convenient for ordinary working people to be able to attend. They may say they welcome the input of the community, but in fact their practices are a front door mat, which reads “Go Away.”
Cities of Resistance, Cities of Refuge: Protecting democracy in an authoritarian era
Not since the 1930s, has democracy as a set of values and practices, had its back against the wall as much as it does today. In the 1930s democracy was not even a theoretical reality for the millions who were under the yoke of colonialism. The ideologies of fascism and Stalinism, birthed in the carnage of World War I, haunted the bloodied and bankrupt regimes responsible for that slaughter. It was during that decade that Sinclair Lewis wrote a dystopian novel about a fascist America called It Can’t Happen Here. In the America of the 2020s, it not only can happen here, but it is happening here.
The long strategy of the Republican Party to ensure permanent minority rule, is within a decade of success. Step by step they have won control of state legislatures, sabotaged voting rights, and the administration of elections, packed the courts with their judges and whittled down the rights to protest. The Democrats are operating with a manual from the past and are clueless on how to respond to the onslaught.
“City air is free” is the old saying from feudal Europe, to describe the freedoms and opportunities available in cities. Freedoms and opportunities that were foreign to the masses of Europe who were under the boot of feudal lords and the church. It is a theme we must return to as we enter a hostile era. Cleveland exists in a state that has never been the friend of its major cities. The Republican Party has always regarded the cities as the havens of suspicious ideologies, and unruly populations, which threaten their conservative interests and values.
To ensure that city air remains free, Cleveland cannot go it alone. It must construct an alliance of cities to counter the Republican matrix. I call this strategy The Cities of Resistance. Cities of Resistance would be a strategy of defense and offense. Defense as far as zealously guarding urban rights and prerogatives from a State House that respects no rights but its own. It would fight them in committee meetings. Fight them in state meetings. Fight them on the federal level, and when appropriate fight them internationally and most important of all fight them in their own home turfs, which are ill-served by conservative misrule. An excellent example of this is the Red States, where the Republican politicization of the pandemic has filled ICUs. They have turned their base supporters into epidemiological cannon fodder to “own the libs.”
Most past reactionary regimes in the past have not ruled just by guile and clever political maneuvering. They have also ruled with violence. The Southern Democrats used organized terrorism to consolidate their power after the end of Reconstruction. The northern industrialists employed private armies provided by agencies such as the Pinkertons to deter labor organizing and break strikes. Vigilantism was the stock and trade of settlement and white supremacy in the American West. Extra-legal organized violence is as American as apple pie. If you think that it can’t happen here, the existence of a dozen militias in Ohio should sober you up. Add to this the statewide deregulation of almost all laws regulating guns and you have a free for all for gunslingers, leaving the rest of us with the freedom to run, hide, and shelter in place.
There are two certainties that you can bet on, should America go authoritarian. First it will be ferociously resisted, and the architects of this new order may enjoy power, but they will know little peace. Second, is that resistance will be met with violence – both legal and extra-legal. The backers of this new regime will be armed, violent, and eager to use their arsenals. They will be used.
In meeting this challenge, the Cities of Resistance should also be Cities of Refuge. They should make clear their hostility to any form of vigilantism, or militia activity and take as example the Socialist Mayor of Milwaukee, Daniel Hoan, who confronted the Ku Klux Klan in 1924. As an article by Dan Kaufman in the October 19, 2019, issue of the New York Times “The City Sanders and Ocasio Cortez Would Have Loved to Live In,” said, Mayor Hoan read the riot act to the KKK.
In 1924, with the Ku Klux Klan in Milwaukee boasting more than 4,000 members, Hoan declared that he would make the city “the hottest place this side of hell” if a K.K.K. member attacked one of his constituents, “whether he be black or white, red, or yellow, Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant.”
Mayor Hoan had it right. We should also form Cities of Refuge for those fleeing vigilante violence. We did this in the 1980s with refugees from the wars in Central America. We have done this to protect Muslim and other immigrants as well. The African American population of Cleveland did not just come up from the South for industrial jobs. They also joined the Great Migration to escape Jim Crow terrorism. City air was free in the Middle Ages, and it should be free in the future, whatever the challenges we may face in confronting and overcoming a new dark period in our nation’s history.
In Conclusion
The 2020 election was important for a number of reasons. Most important of all, it closed out the post-Kucinich era that was characterized by a pacification of the populace and politics of Cleveland under the banner of neo-liberal market supremacy. This began to decay due to the Great Recession of 2008, and increasing levels of dissent against neo-liberalism, not only in Cleveland, but throughout the world. The purpose of this essay was, as stated in the introduction, to be a thought piece for a new generation of activists. A thought piece from one who has been there. I hope I have succeeded and given you all a few things to think about and use.
Randy Cunningham, Cleveland Ohio, December 29, 2021.
