Strickland Country

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County

Playing the Gender Card

As I begin to write this, it is early Sunday morning, March 2, the weekend before the presidential primary, which is on Tuesday, November 4. I now know where Hillary disappeared to yesterday, Saturday, interrupting her campaign schedule without explanation. She was on her way to Manhattan to make an unannounced guest appearance on Saturday Night Live, a program that was very funny twenty-five to thirty-five years ago but in the decades since is too often embarrassingly unfunny. The John Stewart Show is where political comedy is at. But Hillary had already indicated how much political importance she attached to SNL when she referred to it in her debate with Obama in Cleveland on February 26. In a skit on SNL on February 23, the press had been portrayed as pampering Obama, which was music to Hillary’s ears, because that is just one of many things she has been complaining about for months – that Obama is getting a free ride from the press. That is called playing the gender card.

Unfortunately for her, Hillary had to share the SNL stage last night with Rudy Giuliani, which really screws up the gender lines. Rudy’s failed campaign for the Republican nomination has achieved a well deserved notoriety for ineptness and knuckleheadedness. Sharing the stage with Giuliani was unfortunate because that is what the Clinton campaign has been accused of in the last several weeks – of being a bunch of knuckleheads who in the last year blew millions and millions of dollars and a 20 point lead in the polls. Hillary’s co-appearance with Giuliani was embarrassing for another reason: in an effort to create a macho commander-in-chief image during the campaign, Hillary has worn a dress only reluctantly, while Giuliani, some of whose best friends are gay, was willing to wear not just a dress but a gown, in a previous appearance on SNL. Hillary has a closet full of pants suits and Giuliani has a closet-full of gay acquaintances, two of whom he shared an apartment with when his then wife had kicked him out of the mayor’s mansion in New York.

Hillary was willing to put up with sharing the stage with a laughing-stock Republican presidential failure who once appeared in drag before millions of television viewers because she is desperate, and may be on the verge of losing the Democratic presidential nomination that once seemed hers for the taking. Apparently believing SNL was one of her last opportunities to reach younger voters, Obama’s most loyal constituency, she jumped at the opportunity to appear as a hip candidate to twenty-something and thirty-something viewers. The hip Hillary is just one of a number of Hillarys who have been turning up in the last couple of months, along with the tear-jerking, victim-complaining, race-baiting, fear-mongering, and Obama-honoring Hillary. (She had admitted in the February 21 debate in Texas that she was “honored” to be running against Obama, but less than a week later she was shame-on-you-ing him in the Cleveland debate.) Many Americans were not sure which of the various Hillarys was going to show up at a debate or rally, or whether she was going to show up at all. How many people were disappointed not to see her when she took off for her appearance at SNL?

“Mere Anarchy”

Presidential primary elections are won 7/24 on the ground in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and smaller Texas towns like Port Arthur; and in Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and smaller Ohio towns like Portsmouth, and not on Saturday night in Manhattan. When it began in 1975, the cast of SNL was billed as “the not-ready-for-prime-time-players,” and that’s what Hillary unwittingly appears to be rehearsing for, judging by the way her campaign has been mismanaged. Hillary’s non-appearance in Portsmouth would not have been such a disappointment for her admirers if Bill’s appearance had not been such a disappointment. In his infamous appearance on SNL, Rudy had been in drag. Though he didn't wear a dress in his appearance in Portsmouth, Bill was a drag.

Rudy Giuliani on SNL

I did not mention the apparent Clinton campaign disorganization in my last blog, “Go Bucks!” because I was not sure my experiences were enough to draw conclusions from. But I had tried for weeks without much success to find out who in the Clinton campaign was coming to Portsmouth and when. I assumed Hillary and Ted Strickland would make an appearance, since local Democrats are now calling Scioto County “Strickland Country,” as an older generation – and a traffic sign on Route 23 – has for decades called it “Riffe Country.” How could Hillary not make at least a token appearance in Portsmouth, the capital of Strickland Country. I heard a rumor Hillary would be in Portsmouth February 23, from someone who was rehearsing to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” at Hillary’s appearance, but I saw and read nothing to confirm she was coming on that date. When I inquired of well placed Democrats just who was coming when, I was told that the exact date and time was being withheld for security reasons. I thought at the time this was bs and an excuse for the disorganization in the campaign. (Somebody told me security was in fact very lax at the Athletic Center during Bill’s appearance.) Eleven straight primary defeats had reportedly left the Clinton campaign reeling and feuding, not sure what to do next.

As I wrote in a recent blog, “Hillary, Ted, and Neal,” I thought Hillary and Ted appearing in Portsmouth posed political risks for the Clinton campaign, given the corrupt character of local government and the two-bit behavior of Portsmouth’s Democratic mayor, Jim Kalb, in particular. But I doubt that the Clinton campaign had considered those risks in its political calculations about Portsmouth. Hillary’s non-appearance in Strickland Country was more likely a reflection of the disorganization of the Clinton campaign, the kind of disorganization it has shown in other parts of the country, and especially in caucus states, where, when the Clinton campaign was not insulting the intelligence of African-Americans, it was insulting the intelligence of young voters. I won’t extrapolate and say other Democratic party organizations elsewhere in Ohio might be as dysfunctional as our local organization, but if things are this bad in the heart of Strickland Country, what might they be like in other counties?

No Country for Young Men

A recent editorial in the Portsmouth Daily Times by a young reporter, Ryan Scott Ottney, tends to support the impression that the Clinton campaign is guilty of at least generational insensitivity, and tends to give credence as well to my suspicion that the disorganized Clinton campaign, where Portsmouth was concerned, didn’t know what it was doing until very late in the game, and even then appeared to drop the ball. One Democratic insider claimed to know what time of day Clinton would appear, 11:30 AM, but not which day, and another was sure of the day he would appear, February 25, but not the hour. Everyone seemed confused including the Daily Times reporter, who wrote, “I spent more than a week, along with other reporters in the Daily Times newsroom trying to get official confirmation of his visit. I was looking forward to meeting with him, as a member of the press. But as the day approached, the entire event began to fall apart.” Ottney couldn’t get anyone representing the campaign to tell him who was coming when until very late Thursday night, February 21. “That really gave us only one day before the weekend to contact people and write our stories,” Ottney complained. “I really felt marginalized,” he wrote. “I felt like we [the press] were an afterthought.” When the young reporter went to the rally, he found himself and other reporters were being seated well away from Bill Clinton, presumably to avoid the risk of somebody asking him questions that might elicit answers or cause an incident that the campaign would be trying to explain away for the next couple of news cycles. Frustrated, if not disgusted, Ottney went home and watched the rally on closed circuit TV. I who had to stand for almost three hours outside and inside the SSU Athletic Center wish I had done the same. I was standing, along with about a hundred other people, not because it was a standing room only rally but because somebody had decided not to unfold the bleachers behind us, which could have easily accommodated a hundred people or more. Maybe somebody wanted to make it look like a standing-room-only meeting. Or more likely, somebody was not thinking at all. Oh, and I don’t recall hearing the “Star Spangled Banner,” which a group had been practicing for weeks.

It did not help ease my aches when I was later told that the reason Bill Clinton was late was that he was giving a private audience, like the Pope, to about forty admirers, reportedly at a local American Legion post, though he is not a veteran. The press and the general public were not invited to the private audience; no, the general public were kept cooling their heels for an hour at the Athletic Center while Bill socialized and gave photo ops. Is this any way to run a campaign?

“The Centre Will Not Hold”

The Bill Clinton rally in the Athletic Center might be described by rephrasing lines from a famous poem of William Butler Yeats, “Slouching toward Bethlehem”: “Things fall apart; the Athletic Center will not hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon Portsmouth.” If you multiply such screw ups by the hundreds or thousands, nationally, you can begin to understand why the Clinton campaign, with all its political and financial advantages, blew a humungous lead and bank balance. I attended, as an observer, the initial meeting of the local Obama campaign, on February 19, and was impressed as much by the organizational skills of Jennifer Austin, the young woman in charge, as I was by the diversity of people in attendance, in terms of sex, race, and age. There was no confusion about whether Obama was coming to Portsmouth. He wasn’t. Jennifer was clear about that. His schedule was not a coded message that had to be deciphered. But those in attendance were still eager to contribute to the campaign in a variety of ways. Obama’s success in Ohio rests on shoulders of Ground Troops,” a CNN headline read on Sunday, March 2, and that is apparently even true in the heart of Strickland Country.

The young Daily Times reporter Ottney reflected a regional as well as a generational grievance when he wrote about the February 25 rally that “I really feel like the campaign played us for yokels, trotting out a former big-city U.S. president so ‘us hillfolk’ could take a break from our pig farms to say ‘Golly, I reckon we oughta vote fer that nice lady.’” He concluded his PDT editorial by saying he still had admiration for Bill Clinton, in spite of his performance at the rally. “I’m still a big fan of Bill Clinton. But I’m also saddened to feel the campaign was pandering to small towns, hoping to impress them with a brief and uninspiring visit from a former president.” From the viewpoint of the Clinton campaign, the rally in Portsmouth, as far as Ottney was concerned, was a bust. Ottney made it clear he was not going to vote for Hillary. Leaving behind a disgruntled voter is one thing; leaving behind a disgruntled reporter is another, especially if she wins the nomination. There are enough Hillary Haters in the press corps, Hillary has implied, so why increase their numbers?

Ottney is not the only young man with complaints. An angry Shawnee State student, whom I’ll call Jason, attempted to organize other students for the Clinton campaign but found himself frustrated every step of the way by the local Democratic organization. “They treated us like crap,” was what Jason told me. He said the experience left him disgusted with politics and he vowed he would not get involved again. I don’t know what those Shawnee students who showed up at the Obama organizational meeting might finally feel about their involvement in his campaign, but I would be surprised, based on that organizational meeting, if they became as bitter and disillusioned as Jason.

Playing the Race Card

After the Bill Clinton rally, I ran into a sixtyish male acquaintance, whom I’ll call John, who put the primary campaign in disturbing perspective for me. I asked him if he had been at the rally. He said he had wanted to go but had other commitments. He told me he had been uncertain about whether to vote for Clinton or Obama, but he was positive he would not vote for another Republican. I think he may have voted for George W. Bush at least once. But he had seen the photo of Obama in native African dress that had been circulating on the internet, which had convinced him that Obama was a Muslim. I told him politicians visiting other countries in the world often put on some article of local clothing and nobody thinks anything about it. “Well, what about his name?” John asked, as if that was the clincher. “What about Hussein?” I told him it’s a common name, like Smith and Jones are, and it doesn’t mean Obama is a Muslim. John is not a betting man, from what I know of him, but he wanted to bet me a thousand dollars that Obama was a Muslim. In ten years, I had never seen John so agitated. He mentioned something about his minister agreeing Obama was a Muslim. A Protestant, John is a regular church goer, and I know ministers in Appalachia, like mullahs in Muslim countries, have a great deal of influence over their congregations. In the Ohio gubernatorial campaign, Rev. Scott Rawlings was doing what he could to spread the rumor that Ted Strickland and his wife Frances were homosexuals, so it would not be unusual for at least one local minister to be spreading the rumor that Obama was a Muslim. That does not surprise me, but what does surprise is that John would so readily believe it.

One other thing John said flabbergasted me. He said, “They will never let him become president. They’ll do what they did to Martin Luther King.” That reminded me of something I heard recently on the radio. When Obama volunteers were going from door to door in Iowa, one white man, obviously not an Obama supporter, told the Obama canvassers, “So you are the people who want to put a nigger in the White House.” This was Iowa, not Mississippi. It is widely reported that Clinton’s most reliable base in Ohio includes uneducated, blue-collar whites, a group that has more racist tendencies than other whites want to admit. That’s something, I’m sure, that those in the Clinton campaign would not want to admit. Though Matt Drudge reported that he got the photo of Obama in native garb from someone in the Clinton campaign, I would believe an unequivocal denial from the Clinton campaign’s before I would believe Drudge’s avowal, but has the Clinton campaign made an unequivocal denial? I have no doubt that Hillary is going to benefit at least some from racial prejudice in Ohio, so she is going to have to repudiate racist remarks by others more strongly than she has so far if she wants to avoid a racially tainted victory in the Buckeye state. Let us hope that Ohio does not prove to be “No country for young folk or for black folk either.”

"Go Bucks!"

In his speech at Shawnee State U., in Porstmouth, Ohio, on Monday, February 25, 2008, Bill Clinton (shown above) was at his best – and worst. He showed the intelligence and mastery of detail and the articulateness for which he is admired and envied, but he also showed his tendency to talk too much and to reveal, or imply, more than he intended. Maybe a bunch more.

He has learned something since his gaffes earlier in the campaign, when he talked too much about himself and stooped to playing the race card, in South Carolina. It may be the role of someone else in the Clinton campaign to play the race card, but it can’t be Bill, not as a former president, not as a candidate’s husband, not without turning lots of voters against her. In his speech in Portsmouth, he criticized Obama but only obliquely and usually not by name. Others, reportedly Clinton staffers, were playing the religion card, even as Bill was speaking, sending via the internet photos of Obama in a turban. (I talked to someone after the rally who had been leaning toward Obama but is now convinced, on the basis of that turban photo, that Obama is a Muslim.) But Bill behaved himself in his speech; he repeated over and over again “what Hillary believes” and “what Hillary said,” to show he understood that she not he was the candidate. He put his eloquence and analytical skills, his salesmanship and awshucksness, at her disposal as he talked about the economy and trade, about health care, education, and the war.

But he also brought up, seemingly incidentally, to my surprise, the issue of how much money he and Hillary now have, which is perhaps one of the two Achilles heels of the Clinton campaign, the other being her support of the Iraq war. (Since she was for it before she was against it, let’s call her support of NAFTA a bunion.) Criticizing the Bush administration was the context in which Bill raised the issue of how wealthy he is. What he said, if I heard correctly from the balcony, was that he had made a “bunch” of money. Making a “bunch of money” sounds down home and cracker barrel. How much more culturally jarring it would have sounded, especially in the Appalachian venue in which he was speaking, if Bill had said, “Hillary and I have made a bundle,” or “Hillary and I have made scads of money.” Anyway, he admitted he was now in a much higher income bracket, along with the Republican financial elite. He didn’t explain how he made that “bunch” of money. That would have been very impolitic, but the politically literate know where it came from. It came from his and her big book deals, from his $450,000 a crack speaking fees, and from his financial and business connections with billionaires and potentates. For example, the Wall Street Journal reported Bill is now partners in an investment fund connected to his longtime friend and political supporter, the Los Angeles billionaire Ronald Burkle. For alleged shenanigans, that fund is now under investigation.

The well-heeled have been very generous to Bill who has raised $500 million and counting for the Clinton Foundation, which is funding the Clinton Presidential Library and Bill’s charitable activities. He has refused to reveal who those donors are. Hillary’s mandatory 2006 Senate disclosure forms revealed that she was then worth somewhere between $10 to $25 million. She was not obliged to be any more precise than that. Somewhere between and probably lots in addition to, since she loaned her campagin $5 million recently. No, Bill in his Portsmouth speech wasn’t foolish enough to go into details about how he and Hillary made their bunch, because the devil is in the details.

The point Bill wanted to make was that now that he is in a high income bracket, he is in a good position to know how much the Bush administration and the Republicans spoil the rich with tax breaks and other advantages. How those Republicans must be making life miserable for the poor rich kid from Arkansas. What he was trying to suggest was that though he has become rich, he is not inhaling financially, like all those Republican potheads. This was not Bill at his best and brightest. He did mention that when he and Hillary began their tenure in the White House they were as poor as any new presidential couple had ever been. But if they really were poor, does such virtue apply retroactively? When politicians who spend most of their adult life “serving the people” end up as multi-millionaires, are we to assume it was their business acumen and not their political connections and wealthy friends, not their willingness to cut ethical corners, that helped them make their bundle? Hillary has put her holdings in a blind trust, but anyone who trusts politicians not to prosper in office is blind.

During the campaign Hillary has more than once declined to make her tax returns public, which would reveal her total net worth. She is not legally required to release them, and most candidates don’t until they have secured the nomination of their party. She has promised she would if nominated, but Obama has released his tax returns, putting pressure on her to do the same. If she is not legally required to, she may be politically unwise not to. But if the Clintons’ net worth is so high that it might shock and awe blue-collar voters, especially those in Ohio, then she of course can not afford to, not when she is relying so much on those blue collar voters. “The Clintons are worth what?” is not a question that Bill and Hillary want to hear shocked blue-collar Ohio voters asking.

Making the Sale

So, there was Bill on Febuary 25, in blue-collar Ohio, in down-and-out Portsmouth, speaking for the party of the working man, and, in the process of criticizing Republicans, revealing that he and Hillary are more or less somewhere in between being loaded and filthy rich. “Go Bucks!” might be the Clinton campaign slogan for Ohio. He qualified his admission of wealth by pointing out he and Hillary were poor as church mice when they arrived in Washington. He also threw in that Hillary’s father, Hugh E. Rodham, was the kind of guy who wouldn’t buy a car unless he could pay cash for it. The implication was her father didn’t have much money and would do without a car rather than go into debt to own one, but in fact Hugh E. Rodham was not accustomed to being without a car. Bill was telling this Rodham family story as a way of contrasting Hillary’s father with the Bush administration, which hasn’t hesitated to increase the national debt by gazillions. But what Bill didn’t tell us was that Hillary’s father was a rabid tight-fisted Republican, who didn’t lack money to pay for a car, and, according to Carl Bernstein in his biography of Hillary, always drove a new Cadillac or Lincoln. Like a slick car salesman, Bill Clinton will say almost anything to sell whatever model he is trying to sell, which in this case is his wife. He won’t hesitate to falsify Hillary’s family’s history to do it. If Hugh E. Rodham were alive today, he probably would have voted for Bush twice and for John McCain in November, against Barack Obama.

I would be surprised if Obama, before his career of serving the people is over, hasn’t made a bundle, or should I say a bunch. That’s the American way. The core of the American dream is making money. It’s our national obsession, and national politics is where good, that is to say unscrupulous, salesmen can really clean up. If Clinton now wears five hundred dollar ties, those well tailored suits of Obama don’t look like they come from Macy’s. But why should people of color and women be forever excluded by white males from making a bunch of money through politics?

No Thanks to Kalb

At the beginning of the rally in the Athletic Center, somebody read off the list of names of local Democratic politicians, but, if I heard correctly, that somebody omitted the name of a bottom feeder in the local Democratic food chain, Mayor Jim Kalb (shown here). When President Bush began his speech to a rally in the same Athletic Center in 2005, he thanked acting Mayor Kalb for the city’s hospitality. Governor Strickland swore Kalb into office a few years later, but now Strickland is beginning to slip in the polls, and the Democrats apparently cannot afford to acknowledge Kalb as one of their own, if I am not giving them too much credit. The primary in Ohio is shaping up to be very close, with Hillary slipping in the polls every day, and Democrats cannot afford to have the Clinton name linked with a local crook. Even if he is a political nobody, Kalb has alienated a number of Portsmouth voters. Not only has the incompetent Kalb in his miserable career not made a bunch of money, in the face of a looming recession he has tried to get himself a snazzy new official SUV and has tried to slip a raise for himself in the budget he submitted, in violation of state law that says office holders cannot receive raises during their term of office.

Think of how much worse it would be if we had only Democrats or, worst of all, only Republicans. I would argue that Republicans are bigger hypocrites than Democrats when it comes to making money while “serving the people.” When you consider what social, gender, and racial barriers the Clintons and Obama had to overcome to get where they are, Bush by comparison is a bratty, backslapping, buckpassing, gaspassing “miserable failure,” to use Dick Gephardt’s phrase. When he spoke at the Athletic Center in 2005, Bush was the bubble boy on the campaign trail, facing the only kind of audiences he dared to, the carefully screened or the obediently military. Republicans denounce government night and day, but they clearly depend as much upon public office to get ahead as Idaho’s Republican Senator Larry Craig does public bathrooms.

Miserable Failures

You only have to look at the careers of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to see what a Republican politician will do to get ahead. Bush in the 1960s opted for the National Guard and oil money connections in Texas to avoid fighting for his country. Cheney explained why he had not served in the military by saying he had “other priorities in the 1960s,” which included making his bundle as servant of the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned the country against in his Farewell Address, in 1961. I suppose what it comes down to is a choice between those who have made a bundle from the military industrial complex and those who have made a bunch of money from billionaires. It looks like a Hobson’s choice. Still, though the bunch politicians may be bad and getting worse, they are nowhere as bad as those miserable failures, the incompetent bundle politicians, who are the worst.

Hillary, Ted, and Neal

Not long after Governor Ted Strickland gave the oath of office to Portsmouth mayor James Kalb on January 1, 2006, at the Portsmouth Municipal Building, I posted on River Vices an open letter to Strickland that began, “Ted, I have been a strong supporter of yours from your first run for Congress, but what were you thinking when you swore in James Kalb as mayor of Portsmouth at the Portsmouth Municipal Building on January 1? What a way to begin your Portsmouth campaign for governor!” I asked the rhetorical question, “Are you that out of touch with Portsmouth, now that it has been gerrymandered out of your district, that you didn’t know that Kalb and the corrupt and incompetent Portsmouth city government that he heads is as much an embarrassment and threat to democracy locally as the administration in Washington is nationally?”

Two years later, Strickland is governor of Ohio, Senator Hillary Clinton is campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, and the March 4 primaries, in Texas and Ohio, have become her last-ditch hope of winning the nomination. It is possible, therefore, that when Strickland comes to the Portsmouth area with Senator Clinton and her husband Bill, next Saturday, he may commit the same political blunder he did back on January 1, 2006, when he swore in Kalb, but it is potentially a hundred, no a thousand times worse, considering what’s at stake.

Iowa Caucuses

Strickland made what looked like the worst mistake of his political career, a few days before the January 3 Iowa caucuses, when he told the Columbus Dispatch that the Iowa caucuses made “no sense” and were “hugely undemocratic.” Embarrassed, the Clinton campaign disassociated itself from his remarks. Clinton finished third in the caucuses, and while no one should blame Strickland for her loss – the Clinton team made enough mistakes of their own – his untimely criticism of the caucuses sure didn’t help. That caucuses generally are a poor mechanism for selecting a candidate, and that they are not very democratic is a valid criticism, but for Strickland to have made that criticism when he did was a serious lapse in political correctness.

For him to have accused Iowans of being undemocratic was not only untimely but somewhat hypocritical, because Strickland’s home base is Portsmouth, which happens to be one of the most corrupt and poorest excuses for democracy in Ohio, if not America. If a sociologist wants to see what a couple of crooked lawyers and real estate developers can do to a community, they should come to Portsmouth; if a political scientist wants to see an undemocratic city government in action, wants to see what bipartisan corruption looks like up close, she should come to Portsmouth.

Hugely Undemocratic

If Strickland accompanies Senator Clinton to Portsmouth, he will be providing as a backdrop for her Ohio campaign a city government that is controlled and corrupted by a private agency, the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership; a city government, that does everything possible to discourage citizen participation; a city government that has for years frustrated pleas from citizens to televise council meetings and make city government more transparent and less secretive; a city government that tries to stifle free speech at city council meetings by restricting citizens from speaking to the council; a city government that has anyone who criticizes a city official by name removed under threat of arrest from the council chambers; a city government that has the police chief sitting by the door of the council chamber, acting as a bouncer; a city government that has as police chief a man whose son was dealing drugs in the restaurant right across the street from the police station, a son whose conviction for drugs was later expunged from court records; a city government that allowed that same police chief to denounce concerned citizens as “domestic terrorists” at the same time that a major Oxycontin and chop-shop operation was going full blast a half a mile from the police station; a city government that has a city clerk who, along with her husband, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and who was admonished by the courts for illegally removing names from petitions to recall city officials; a city government that awards pay raises to sitting elected officials, including Mayor Kalb, in violation of state laws; a city government that illegally paid $2 million for a 125-year-old former department store for use as a “new” municipal building while neglecting and trashing the existing municipal building, which is a half-century younger; a city government that continues to ignore a referendum in which voters rejected using the Marting building as a municipal building by a 2 to 1 margin; a city government that in a fishy deal sold eight acres of city land to a developer, Elmer Mullins, for $60,000, which several years later was worth over $4 million; a city government that allowed that same property to be developed in spite of widespread rumors that the site was contaminated; a city government that colluded with trustees of Shawnee State University to allow the developer Neal Hatcher to build tax-abated student dorms in which the public, not Hatcher, bears all the risk; a city government that has shrunk the local tax base by indiscriminately granting 100 percent tax abatements to new businesses; a city government that permitted a councilman, in my ward, Timothy Loper, to sit on the council though he was not a resident of the ward, as the city charter requires; a city government that allowed the city solicitor, David Kuhn, to do everything he could to keep Loper illegally in office; a city government that, after I brought a challenge that led to Loper’s removal from office, appointed as his replacement a local lawyer, Mike Mearan, who is widely rumored to be tied to drugs and prostitution in Portsmouth; a city government that then appointed appointee Mearan to chair the Building Committee, in spite of Mearan having a clear conflict of interest since he was the lawyer for the landlord the city entered into negotiations with for use of his property for city offices; a city government that allowed Mearan as chair of the Building Committee to appoint as the Building Committee stenographer a drug-addicted young woman who was arrested a short time later transporting Oxycontin to Portsmouth in an automobile Mearan had rented for her; a city government that allows the city engineering office to punish Mayor Kalb’s critics by requiring them to make expensive repairs to their sidewalks; a city government that allows the city engineer’s office to decide who must make sidewalk repairs, in spite of the fact the city charter, in an apparent attempt to restrict the mayor’s power to punish opponents, requires that the Auditor’s Office monitor sidewalk repairs; and a city government whose machinations go unreported in the only local newspaper, the Portsmouth Daily Times, which fires reporters who dare to report anything that embarrasses or exposes the over-privileged of Portsmouth.

This is the political backdrop that Strickland will be providing Senator Clinton when he escorts her to Portsmouth next Saturday. If the Iowa caucuses were “hugely undemocratic,” what is the Portsmouth city government all year long but a travesty, a prostitution, a degradation of democratic government?

What democracy there is in Portsmouth is reflected in the resistance of the misgoverned citizens to the corrupt politicians. In response to the violations of democratic governance, the voters of Portsmouth recalled by a 2 to 1 margin Gregory Bauer, the mayor responsible for the $60,000 land scam and the Marting fraud, and recalled two council members who had helped make the scams possible. City Solicitor Kuhn, who contributed so much to the lawlessness of our city, was defeated in last November’s election by a 2 to 1 margin, in spite of outspending his relatively unknown opponent by twenty to one.

Photo Oops!

I see no evidence that Strickland is responsible for the corruption in Portsmouth. On the contrary, he was a shining exception to the golden rule of Portsmouth politics: do unto others before they get a chance to undo you. When I first came to Portsmouth in 1989, Strickland with a kind of religious determination, was working for a pittance teaching part-time at Shawnee State University, whose Republican dominated board of trustees were opposed to raises for part-time faculty. When Strickland was first elected to Congress, as a Democrat, and left for Washington, one of the Republican trustees vowed Strickland would never teach at SSU again.

But Strickland’s last campaign appearance in Portsmouth, as I recall, was on Gay Street, in front of the Democratic Headquarters, a building that the notorious local Republican real estate developer, Neal Hatcher had recently made available to the local Democratic organization. He who lies down with dogs rises with fleas, the Bible says. The Democratic campaign headquarters was just around the corner from the Republican campaign headquarters, in a building that Hatcher (shown above giving the finger) had made available to the local Republican organization. Hatcher was a big backer of the tool Kalb, a Democrat, in the last mayoral election, as he was of the corrupt Republican mayor, Bauer, in previous elections. At least when it comes to influence peddling and political corruption, Portsmouth is bi-partisan.

If she comes to Portsmouth next Saturday, as she is now scheduled to do, Hillary Clinton would be well advised to avoid photo ops with local politicians and bigwigs because there might be someone somewhere in the picture giving proponents of democracy and honest government the finger. The last thing her campaign needs, in its last ditch efforts to defeat Barack Obama in Ohio, is associating itself with any "hugely undemocratic" characters who not only thumb their nose at democracy but also give the people the finger.

Shady Acres

Before there was the Marting scam there was the Route 23 Viaduct scam. The Route 23 Viaduct consists of 7.868 acres located west of the Chillicothe St., which the city owned back in 2000. The property and money involved in the Route 23 Viaduct scam puts Marting’s in the shade; but the Viaduct never got the notoriety it deserved. Speaking as a private citizen before the City Council on 12 July 2004, Bob Mollette urged City Solicitor David Kuhn and County Solicitor Mark Kuhn to investigate the sale of the Viaduct property, but they did not and neither did local media. With the exception of Mollette and his wife Teresa, people who are well informed about Marting’s often know little or nothing about the Route 23 Viaduct property. What follows may be news for some of them. 

In the Beginning

According to a November 13, 2000 statement from the firm of Johnson and Oliver, which was in the thick of the Route 23 Viaduct scam, the city sometime prior to November 2000 advertised that the Viaduct land was for sale but received no bids. No bids on potentially valuable property that was located next to Route 23, the main road through south central highway? Why not? Because, according to Chief of Police Charles Horner, who did an investigation of the sale, Mayor Bauer and the developer Elmer Mullins conspired to keep rival bidders away by spreading rumors that the land was contaminated and that the Ohio EPA had mandated a cleanup. In fact, as Horner pointed out and as the OEPA confirmed to me, the OEPA has never done a soil analysis of the Viaduct property and never mandated a cleanup. Horner’s investigation, incidentally, was done not so much for the sake of justice as to save his own job, since it was known that Bauer was on the verge of firing him. Once Bauer was recalled, the Viaduct became a dead issue for Horner, just as the Marting scam did. 

The city put the Viaduct land up for sale a second time, placing an official notice in the Portsmouth Daily Times, on 18 November, 2000, calling for bids and setting a minimum of $60,000 for the nearly eight acres. The city was offering the land on the condition that within eight months the purchaser would construct a ten-thousand-square-foot building that would hire two hundred full- and part-time employees. Bauer even pronounced publicly there would be four hundred employees. The notice did not specify what the ratio of full-time to part-time employees would be, a glaring loophole, especially since the business that eventually occupied the building hired a lot of part-timers. The notice included boiler plate language that the employees who would work in the new business would not be discriminated against because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. It might also have stipulated that employees with criminal records would not be discriminated against, either, because I have been told the business hired more than its share of shady characters with records. If a felony was not a requirement for working in the new business, it apparently was not a hindrance either.

Cleaning Up

Most importantly, the 18 November 2000 notice in the Daily Times further stipulated that “the buyer of the property shall accept all responsibility for any environmental cleanup of the site or the obtaining of clearance from Federal or Ohio EPA which may be required [italics added], and must indemnify and hold the City of Portsmouth harmless from such liability.” No stipulation in the notice would become more controversial than the one related to the issue of contamination.

Several questions should have been but weren’t asked about the city’s official notice, which incidentally has some glaring mistakes, including a sentence that asserted the city would sell the land to the lowest bidder! Why was the city trying to sell property that might be contaminated? Why didn’t the city test the soil or better still why didn’t it ask the Ohio EPA to do it? Why leave it up to the purchaser to make the determination of whether a cleanup or OK from the OEPA “may be required”? Why leave so vital a question to be answered by a private party? Why let the two hundred, or four hundred, employees in the ten-thousand-square-foot building and hundreds of potential employees in other establishments work on a site that might be contaminated? The answer, Chief Horner said, was that Bauer and Mullins sought to discourage other buyers from bidding on the property by spreading the rumor it was contaminated and that the OEPA had ordered a cleanup. By spreading the rumor, Bauer made a sweetheart deal possible for Mullins, who ended up paying the minimum dirt-cheap price of $60,000 for the potentially valuable land. The Ohio EPA never mandated a clean up of the Viaduct, but Mayor Bauer had mandated that Mullins would clean up financially.

One of the striking similarities between the Marting and the Route 23 Viaduct scam was the way in which Bauer hurried up the sale of the property on the grounds that there was an emergency. In a memo dated 2 March 2001, Bauer asked the City Clerk to call a special meeting of the Portsmouth City Council so that it could grant him the authority to sell the Viaduct land, declaring that sale “to be an emergency.” The memo does not explain what the emergency was, but it was probably Bauer’s need to close the deal before the public learned he was in the process of committing the first of the two real estate frauds for which his administration would become infamous, the second of which, the sale of the Marting’s building to the city, would lead to his being recalled from office by a two to one margin.

Anchor Business

The requirement that whoever bought the nearly eight acres would build a ten-thousand- square-foot building for an anchor business that would provide two hundred jobs was the equivalent of requiring a prospective mall developer to provide an anchor store. Failing to find an anchor store for the proposed 1980 Mall was one of the things that put the kibosh on that project. The city should have required that Mullins bring in a business that provided good jobs, in manufacturing or retail, but it didn’t. In a revealing comment at a Portsmouth City Council meeting on 21 Sept. 2004, councilman Howard Baughman, the mayor-in-waiting, said about the proposed Aluminastics company plan for building a plant near Route 23 that it was “not anything like the viaduct property.” The Aluminastics plan, Baughman explained, unlike the Route 23 Viaduct, was “not a developmental venture for entertainment, restaurants and other things. This is about manufacturing jobs which any city in the Midwest would drool over with jobs that would be quality pay.” In other words, after Route 23 was the done deal that he was partly responsible for foisting on the city, Baughman admitted that it was not best use of the land after all. The jobs at the Route 23 Viaduct establishments would be of the minimum-wage, service-sector variety, filled largely by young low-paid part-time employees, hamburger flippers, ticket takers, and telemarketers, with a high turn-over ratio, not the kind of work force that could be expected to help turn Portsmouth’s economy around. But if the employees at the Viaduct establishments make low wages, Mullins and the owners of the businesses who bought land from him, make good profits, perhaps even profits high enough to drool over.

Low Wages, High Profits

Take note of what price tag the Scioto County Auditor puts on the property that was subsequently built on the Route 23 Viaduct, for which Mullins paid only $60,000. The County Auditor lists the Portsmouth Cinemas at $1,820,630; the Telemarketing operation at $899,710; Salmons State Farm Insurance, $458,530; Buffalo Wild Wings, $334,430, and Dairy Queen, $140,750. The value of the new sub shop Penn Station has not yet been established by the County Auditor. The value put on the businesses in the Route 23 Viaduct by the county auditor is in the neighborhood of $4,000,000, and counting, because not all of the nearly eight acres has been developed. The estimated value the County Auditor puts on property is traditionally below market value, so the property may be worth substantially more than $4,000,000, and Mullins, without much regard to greenery or appearance, has not done selling off every inch of it. How much money has Mullins made on his $60,000 investment? Maybe only his accountant and the IRS know, but if the related Mullins Construction company has also profited from the construction on the site, it could be much more than whatever Elmer Mullins made selling the land.

The scandalous footnote to all this is that every single business in the Route 23 Viaduct is abated. Nobody is paying a dime of taxes and won’t for years. Marty Mohr said at a January 2004 City Council meeting, “We cannot continue to give tax exemptions to companies within our district. A smaller percent of the people are picking up the tab.” He went on to say that the city had given so many tax credits during the past four to five years that he didn’t feel the city could afford another exemption. I am not aware that Mohr or any other council member did anything to stop the abatements for businesses in the Viaduct, even though they are glaring examples of unwarranted abatements. Some abatements make sense, but they have metastasized in Portsmouth’s economy. Whether they deserve an abatement or not, almost every new business gets one, which means the money the city needs for schools and other essential operations is just not there. What incentives do businesses need for building at the Route 23 Viaduct, with its advantageous location? The Viaduct property, to use one of Mayor Kalb’s expressions for another scam-in-the-making, the Municipal building site, is “prime real estate.” Bauer estimated that initially 1600 vehicles would go on and off the Viaduct every day. Five years later, let’s say that number is around 2000, which would mean annually 730,000 automobiles, many of which would have more than one passenger. At a minimum, that’s a million potential customers a year. Did the city need to give tax free status for from ten to fifteen years to attract businesses to the Viaduct? I very much doubt it, but when it comes to money the city of Portsmouth is like a drunk that every business knows it can roll. 

Even the new downtown office building that Clayton Johnson built in 2004 was abated, setting an example for the Dairy Queens and Buffalo Wild Wings of the world to follow. If the man reputed to be the richest lawyer in Portsmouth, and who claims to be always doing what is best for the city, won’t pay his fair share of taxes, why should businesses that have no roots in the community? The big profits alone should have been enough incentive at the Viaduct, but there were other perks. Because of Bauer’s lies, the city had to pick up the $125,000 tab for the traffic light at the entrance to the Viaduct. Bauer claimed that a traffic light in that location had been mandated by the state, and therefore the city and county were obligated to pay for it, which was no truer than his claim that the OEPA had mandated a toxic cleanup of the site. The traffic light was just one more plum in Mullins’s pie.

“A Rotten Organization”

The two-hundred-employee business that Mullins provided turned out to be a franchise of the notorious telemarketing company Civic Development Group (CDG). Public relations firms get paid big money to come up with these euphemistic or fraudulent names: Civic Development Group! How about Con Artists Consolidated or Royal Rip-Offs, Inc. Telemarketing is now what pocket picking was in the past. Owning the ten-thousand-square-foot building that it occupies, Mullins became a partner in the Portsmouth CDG telemarketing business. This was not a new business and these were not new jobs. The CDG had first come to Portsmouth in 1995, occupying the old GTE building, on Albert St. The home offices of the CDG are in in New Jersey, in Tony Soprano territory. A longtime employee of the Civic Development Group operation in Portsmouth told me he had heard from fellow employees that the New Jersey Mafia were possibly in control of the CDG, which at that time had thirty-seven offices in the United States. “It is a shame,” a veteran telemarketer who had worked for the CDG commented on the website RipOffReport.com, (a whistle-blowing website), that through the CDG, “police and fire organizations get in bed with mafia types such as these.”

A former employee of the CDG, who identified himself as “Ted, from Canton, Ohio,” wrote a revealing exposé of the Canton CDG in RipOffReport. He wrote “that telemarketers often skirt the edge of taste, ethics, and manners. However, Civic Development Group, aka Millenium Teleservices, aka CDG Management, is a particularly rotten organization from both an employee as well as the public’s perspective.” Ted pointed out that most of CDG’s profits come from telephone solicitation for charities, especially for donations for state troopers’ associations. Ted said CDG’s employees were encouraged to create the impression that it was actually a state police officer who was making the call. As long ago as 5 June 1998, the Federal Trade Commission charged CDG with fraudulently claiming that money collected for the police would go for bullet proof vests and death benefits for the families of officers killed in the line of duty. In fact, most money collected by CDG for the police never went to the police.

As recently as November 2007, Channel 5 in Cleveland exposed the telemarketing scam of the CDG operation in Canton involving disabled veterans. Of every dollar raised for disabled veterans, the CDG kept eighty-seven cents and gave thirteen to a phony front organization called Disabled Veterans Association. Contributors thought they were giving to the Disabled American Veterans, a legitimate charity. In its reporting on that same story, on 19 November 2007, the Columbus Dispatch published an article headed “Troopers’ Fundraising Company Scrutinized,” which revealed that only a small fraction of the money the Ohio Trooper Coalition raised went to kids. “Most of the rest of the money went into the pockets of Civic Development Group LLC, a New Jersey Company that’s now being sued by the Ohio attorney general’s offices over its fundraising practices for the troopers’ group . . .” A watchdog group on charities put the Ohio Trooper Coalition on its Top Ten Ebenezer Scrooge list when it comes to giving to charity. If OTC skimps on charity, it doesn’t on salary. It paid its executive director $90,000 in 2004 for working a twenty hour week. Do you recall reading about any of this in the Portsmouth Daily Times? Jeff Barron was recently fired and blacklisted in Scioto County for daring to report that a Glockner Motors employee was arrested for dealing drugs. Imagine what they would have done to him if he had dare investigate Portsmouth’s CDG operation? They might have fished him out of the Ohio River.

As someone who has received more than one call from the CDG, I know how their solicitors try to awe, confuse, and intimidate a “mark,” a slang term for a gullible victim of a con artist. I wrote a blog recently about how the marketing firm KaBoom! exploits the love people have for children. The CDG exploits the respect and fear people have for law enforcement. The police associations and unions, unfortunately, have been all too willing to enter into this unsavory relationship with an operation with reputed criminal ties since they get their cut, small as it is, without doing anything except letting their reputation be smirched.

Ted of Canton revealed that the CDG likes to establish franchises “in small, down-on-their-luck communities.” Well, Portsmouth certainly qualifies on that score. The CDG finds depressed communities in Appalachia ripe for picking, or for telemarketing. Such communities are so grateful to have any company offer them any kind of jobs, even low-paying and shady ones, that they don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. CDG franchisers find it easier to hire employees in depressed communities where unemployment is high or where there is a pool of students, who will work for low hourly wages. But since they have some education, students can be a problem. Most of what I learned about the Portsmouth CDG came from students. Ted says the CDG prefers "the desperate, uneducated, and those least likely to question what they do.” They also seem to have a weakness for those with criminal backgrounds, according to my sources at the Portsmouth CDG, which literally went after street people, advertising by pasting notices on telephone poles.

Drive-by Shooting

An experience I had several years ago with CDG revealed to me what a fishy business it is. I was driving through the Route 23 Viaduct on my way to the Adelphia Cable office, which was then located in the wasteland behind the Viaduct, next to the railroad tracks. On my way to the Adelphia office, I stopped, got out of my car, a good distance from the CDG building, and took a photo of it. It couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds. I have taken hundreds of photos of buildings in Portsmouth, so I wasn’t doing anything unusual. As a matter of fact, when I got to the Adelphia building, which looked like a fur trapper’s cabin out in the wilderness, I also took a photo of it before entering to take care of some business.

When I came out ten or fifteen minutes later, I noticed two people near my car. One was behind it, taking down my license plate number, the other was looking through the windows of the car to see what was inside. As I approached my car to ask what was going on, I was told, without any apology or hesitation, that they were employees of CDG and they wanted to know why I had just taken a photo of the CDG building. Evidently, in the short time it had taken me to snap a photo, someone in the CDG building had spotted me, presumably through that big one-way window in front, and two employees were dispatched to follow me. I was to made to feel I had committed a drive-by shooting when the only shot I had taken was with my camera.

I had taught as a U.S. State Dept. Fulbright exchange professor in Communist Poland, in 1971-72. Portsmouth reminds me a little of Communist Poland, only I don’t remember, even though I took photos in Poland, ever being stopped and interrogated. My CDG interrogators were probably speaking with all the authority of officials in a police state. The CDG had close ties to both the Ohio state police and, possibly, to organized crime. I mean, why not demand to know why someone is taking photos if you have the police and the Mafia in your corner? But what do they have to hide, anyway? What are they so guilty about? Why become so paranoid when someone takes a photo?

I got out of that tricky situation by pointing out I was just a harmless old gent who takes a lot of photos in Portsmouth, which happened to be true. Well, maybe not the part about being harmless. I found it hard to believe that I had to explain anything to them, but what was I going to do? Complain to the state police, who were in on the take? Or to the Portsmouth police chief, Charles Horner, who has accused senior citizens like me of being “domestic terrorists” for mounting campaigns to recall elected officials? I was later warned by people who had worked for or knew something about the CDG that I better not get on their shit list, or should I say hit list. I was told by a colleague at Shawnee State of someone who allegedly had fled Portsmouth after being threatened for asking too many questions about the CDG.

No Call List

The telemarketing building now sports the initials OTC, which stands for Ohio Trooper Coalition. The OTC was established in 1984 “to assist in promoting the image of troopers across the state.” It also exists to promote the interests of state troopers, working for better working conditions and wages, the way any union or professional association is expected to. Most of the funds for the OTC, by its own admission, are raised through telemarketing. So the adoption of the Telemarketing Sales Rule, which restricts indiscriminate telephone solicitation, threatened to cut off the financial lifeblood that the OTC raises through telemarketing. In a 2002 letter to the Federal Trade Commission, the e OTC executive director lobbied the Federal Trade Commission for an exemption from the Telemarketing Sales Rule, but not on the basis of being a union, which would not have been a very effective argument, but on the basis of the programs the OTC sponsors for children. Remember the marketing strategy slogan for KaBoom!? It’s for the kids? The OTC is engaging in “social marketing,” emphasizing what it does for kids, not what it does for itself. The $90,000 a year part-time executive director of the Ohio Trooper Coalition wrote to the FTC, “The proposed amendment to the Telemarketing Sales Rule would more than likely diminish the funds that are presently used to provide our drug education program, B.A.D. (Bears Against Drugs), and also our Hug-A-Bear program to children.” The plea “Woodsman, spare that tree” is replaced by “Legislator, spare that child.”

The state of Ohio law restricting telephone solicitation became effective September 2003, but includes an enormous number of exemptions, (ORC 4719.01) one of which the OTC apparently falls under, because the OTC is still doing telephone soliciting, or having a telemarketer do it in on its behalf. The CDG previously did the telemarketing for the OTC. What is the role of CDG now? That is not clear, but what is clear from records in the County Auditor’s office is that Mullins still owns the building, so he may still have something to do with whatever telemarketing company is doing the solicitation for the OTC. Or has the OTC eliminated the telemarketing middle-man, the CDG, and is the OTC running the operation itself? That would mean the police had muscled out the shady New Jersey crowd in handling a lucrative racket.

Hmm, what's the name of that developer?

One thing about the Viaduct scam that needs to be remembered is that Mayor Bauer kept the name of the developer behind it, Elmer Mullins, a secret as long as possible, just as Mayor Kalb (shown here) is keeping secret the name of the developer who allegedly wants to buy the site of the current Municipal Building. Is Elmer Mullins or Neal Hatcher that unnamed developer? Why do public officials keep the public in the dark about the identity of the developer who is behind a major project until the last minute? Probably because it enables corrupt city officials to secretly work out with a disreputable developer the details of a dirty deal, and then at the last minute claim there is an emergency that requires the City Council to suspend the rules and approve it immediately.

In its seemingly permanently arrested state of economic and moral development, Portsmouth has looked for a half century to a mall as its salvation. Our local con artist lawyers and developers have grown rich perpetrating the Myth of the Mall. What we got instead was the Route 23 Viaduct, a “commercial park,” as Bauer originally called it. In view of the shady history of that possibly contaminated commercial park, I think a more appropriate and more easily remembered name for it would be Shady Acres. There have been so many shady developers, shady lawyers, shady politicians, and shady employees connected to it that it deserves that name. I don’t know, it has a certain ring to it, the same ring I associate with a call from a telemarketer. 

ToxiCity

Residents of Portsmouth may be eating chicken wings, drinking milk shakes, and watching movies on a toxic site without realizing it. Rumors began circulating about seven years ago that the ground under the Route 23 Viaduct site was toxic. Even though Portsmouth Mayor Bauer was among those circulating the rumors of contamination, the Ohio EPA (OEPA) did not test the soil or make any study of the Viaduct site. Portsmouth police chief Charles Horner conducted an investigation of the sale of the Viaduct property. In his report, he wrote, “On June 10, 2004, I contacted Chris Osborne, with the Ohio EPA, and she indicated they have no record of any environmental studies completed on the Chillicothe Street Viaduct property and after checking all available databases, determined they have no record of any mandate EPA Cleanup of the property.”

On January 30, 2008, Ken Dewey, who is the Manager of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s Division of Emergency and Remedial Response in the Southeast District Office, confirmed for me that the Ohio EPA had never done an analysis of the soil at what is now called the Route 23 Viaduct area. (It used to be called the Chillicothe St. Viaduct.) What Chris Osborne of the staff of the Southeast District office did do was investigate the rumors that contaminated soil from the Coke Plant had been dumped at the Viaduct. Dewey told me her investigation proved that those rumors of contamination were without foundation.

But Wally Leedom, a Portsmouth resident and an editor of the Shawnee Sentinel, has been saying for years that the Viaduct is possibly toxic because he followed trucks that had been taking soil from the toxic New Boston Coke plant site and dumping it in the Viaduct area. “Can you remember about where the soil was dumped?” I asked him on Jan. 26, 2008. “About where the Dairy Queen and Buffalo Wild Wings are now located,” he told me. I double-checked with him on Jan. 31 about his having seen trucks dumping on the Viaduct site. He repeated what he had told me previously, and added that he thought he knew whose trucks they were. Because he wasn’t positive in identifying the trucks, I won’t mention any names. I asked Chris Osborne on Jan. 31, 2008, if she had ever talked to or heard of someone who claimed to have seen trucks dumping soil from the Coke Plant onto the Viaduct site. I was thinking of Wally Leedom. She said she had not. So her investigation of the rumors, no matter how thorough it might have been, had not included someone who claimed to have witnessed dumping on the Viaduct site.

In view of the controversy over the Viaduct site and the potentially harmful long range consequences of toxic soil on humans, I am surprised that OEPA didn’t do at least a soil analysis of the Viaduct. Before theaters and restaurants were built and before many thousands of customers frequented the Viaduct, hundreds of them employees on a daily basis, OEPA could have put the rumors about contamination to rest by doing a soil analysis.

In my unprofessional opinion, it is not likely the Viaduct is contaminated, but considering the stakes involved, is “not likely” good enough? No one can say positively as of this date that the Viaduct property is not contaminated. Because of the rumors about toxicity that had circulated six or seven years ago and continue to circulate, I have avoided going on the Viaduct property ever since it was developed. I went to the movie theater for the first time last month, but until a soil analysis is done, I will continue to avoid it. Harmful effects of toxic chemicals often take years to reveal themselves in humans. Because of frequent exposure, longtime employees at the Viaduct will, unfortunately, probably be the first to discover if the area is toxic.

I think the Ohio EPA should rethink its previous decision not to test the soil, though now that most of the area is covered with asphalt it will not be easy to get a good sample. On Jan. 31, I emailed a letter to the office of Chris Korleski, the head of the Ohio EPA, requesting the soil at Route 23 Viaduct be tested.

The Portsmouth Daily Times is not doing any investigation of the Viaduct, as far as I know. That could be because Daily Times reporters risk their jobs investigating controversies and scandals that the over-privileged of Portsmouth want suppressed. The two most experienced reporters in Portsmouth, Mike Deaterla and Jeff Barron, were recently fired by the Daily Times. Why? I believe because they know too much. Which leaves it up to part-time bloggers like myself to do the investigating.

Whether or not the Viaduct is toxic chemically, and I repeat that I think it probably is not, it certainly is politically and financially toxic. Chief Horner concluded in his report, which is available on Teresa Mollette’s invaluable website (under "Investigations") the sale of the Viaduct property by the city to the developer Elmer Mullins was fraudulent. Horner thought there was probable cause that Mayor Bauer and Mullins had spread the toxicity rumor to discourage other bidders, making it possible for Mullins to obtain the property dirt cheap, at the minimum mandated price of $60,000. Very little has been done or written about the Viaduct Scam, which got lost in the shadow of the Marting Scam, but I will have more to say in blogs to follow.

Slashings & Rip-Offs

After managing to avoid them all my life, I recently saw my first slasher movie. Like Pinocchio to the circus, I was lured to the Portsmouth Cinema, for the first time, by the critical praise heaped on the Hollywood musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and the New York Times, not given to stars, judged it a masterpiece. It turns out Sweeney Todd is a bubble blood bath of a movie, a slasher of a movie that arrived just in neck of Oscar time. With all those magnificently filmed slit throats, how can it not get an Academy Award? There is a masterpiece lurking somewhere in the bloody mess that is Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The trouble is the potential masterpiece was left on the cutting room floor.

Sweeney Todd himself is a Dickensian hero with a psychotic twist. He is a bloodthirsty Oliver Twitch. “Please, sir, may I have more blood?” With a glint in his eye, Sweeney Todd dispatches dozens and dozens and presumably hundreds and hundreds of victims with a flick of his wrist, and they are promptly turned into meat pies by Mrs. Lovett, who serves them fresh, a rare treat, in her eatery.

What the Dickens!

I had not seen such an over-the-top Dickensian characters since I had been to the Portsmouth City Council meeting the previous Monday evening. Where outside of Oliver Twist will we find a gallery of more unforgettable characters than at the City Council meetings. There is lapdog Mayor Jim Kalb; smarmy council president Howard Baughman; “I Get No Respect” Vice President of Council, Rev. David Malone (to give our adulterous Second Ward Councilman his full and proper title); Police Chief (domestic terrorist expert extraordinaire and City Council bouncer) Chuck Horner; and, most notoriously and salaciously First Ward councilman Mike Mearan, who was appointed to City Council and then appointed Building Committee chair presumably because of his extensive knowledge of the sewers of Portsmouth.

Give credit where credit is due: Mearan is always willing to help out damsels in distress, such as Heather Hren, the drug-addicted, purse-snatching twenty-something blond he ensconced in a public-housing-project love nest and then selected as his left-handed stenographer for the Building Committee. If chairs had knees, Hren might have been dictated to indefinitely if she hadn’t been pulled over by the police and arrested for transporting Oxycontin from Columbus to Portsmouth in a sub-sub-compact that Mearan, (playing Bill Sikes, if not Fagin, to Hren’s Nancy) had rented for her.

Done in like Midred Dunnock

Johnny Depp who plays the barbarous Sweeney Todd, combines the sexual ambiguity of Montgomery Clift with the psychotic intensity of Richard Widmark, who made a name for himself in Kiss of Death (1947) when he killed an old woman in a wheelchair (played by Mildred Dunnock, shown here) by gleefully pushing her down a flight of stairs. How insensitive we Americans are when it comes to violence and how oh-so-sensitive we are, especially the evangelicals among us, on the evils of sexuality. I was struck by this parental advisory for Sweeney Todd that appeared on the Internet Movie Data Base: “The throat slittings are occasionally disturbing.” Throat slittings, mind you, are not always, not usually, but only occasionally disturbing. Could any parental advisory better express the lethal hypocrisy of American culture? “The throat slittings are occasionally disturbing.” These self-appointed guardians of morality have a keener nose for sexual transgressions than a specially trained German shepherd does for explosives. We’ll convert the Third World to “democracy” and consumerism even if we have to carpet-bomb the bastards to do it. If Widmark had done nothing more than given Mildred Dunnock a feel in Kiss of Death, the film would have been banned in all forty-eight states. And if it had been an old guy that he had given a feel, the evangelical Taliban from Idaho, Sen. Larry Craig’s home state, and members of the Catholic Decency League, might have put Widmark in its cross-hairs. Widmark was actually a good student, president of his senior class in high school, and planning to become a lawyer, but then he discovered a more lucrative career: playing a psychotic. When you come down to it, we are all Mildred Dunnocks, since our Dickensian crooks control local government, the police department, the Chamber of Commerce, the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership, and the local newspapers and radio stations.

Cut It Out!

I recently read a complaint in the Boston Globe to the effect that “Tom Brady is a disgrace to all Catholics.” As an ex-Boston Irish Catholic, I have to say that I find Catholics and especially Boston Irish Catholics a disgrace to ex-Catholics, and the Church a refuge for lesbian nuns and pedophile priests. In view of what has happened to the Church in the last twenty-five years, I think Catholics should take a vow of silence for the next thousand years when it comes to the issues of sex and morality. If Brady, the second coming of Christ, in cleats, and a Protestant supermodel become unwed parents, Catholics must not think the worst of him, especially since he is, obviously, still a practicing Catholic. At least he does not practice birth control when he is having sex with Protestant supermodels. As for Brady’s being an unwed father, what would you have him do, you outraged Boston Catholics, marry outside the Faith, begorra? Get over it outraged Boston Catholics and Catholic Legion of Decency. If you will not make a peep about the graphic throat-slashings in Sweeney Todd, not even the occasionally disturbing ones, then stop condemning Scorsese’s Passion of Christ and denigrating Tom Terrific, for Christ’s sake! Brady has had an audience with the Pope. Who have you had an audience with?

Angry Kalb Won't Slash Budget

Mayor Kalb has met with the president of the United States, but he has not yet had an audience with the Pope. The main business of the City Council meeting, on January 14, was the attempt by the City Auditor and others to get Mayor Kalb to cut the budget, however slightly, which he stubbornly refused to do, in spite of an impending recession. He refused to cut the budget by a dime because he has tucked in to it a raise for himself as reward for his incompetence, and he fears that that raise might be the first thing that’s cut. If Kalb will not cut the budget, there is no chance he would agree to slash it, but that may be what he will be forced to do if the looming recession is as bad as economists predict. Kalb did not get the big new SUV he wanted as his mayormobile, but he is determined to get a raise for himself as well as some $10 to $15 million for his new Municipal Building, which may yet turn out to be the 120-year-old Old Maid Marting building. When the current site of the Municipal Building is sold to the mysterious party who has allegedly been waiting for over a decade to get his hands on this “prime piece of property,” to paraphrase Kalb, look for another Marting-like rip-off.

My thesis, which I apologize for taking so long to state, is that the difference between Sweeney Todd’s London and Mayor Kalb’s Portsmouth is that in London the people get slashed and in Portsmouth they get ripped off. The ones who are doing the ripping off in Portsmouth are not a deranged barber and a crooked cook but some developers and lawyers, deranged not by blood but by money. They have managed to bleed the poor Appalachians of Portsmouth of millions and millions because, as Clayton Johnson said at a lunch at Williams Restaurant, according to Portsmouthcitizens.info, they are so ignorant they don’t even know how to set an alarm clock. I have heard of at least two failed Portsmouth eateries blaming their closing on unreliable and dishonest employees, and I was told by the scion of another local business that residents of Portsmouth, as employees, are for the most part, “not worth shit.”

Coming Attraction

In my next blog, I will show how the very ground on which sit the Portsmouth Cinema and other Chillicothe St. viaduct businesses was a rip-off that makes the Marting scam look like a humble meat pie from Mrs. Lovett’s eatery.

Golden Wazoo

On January 8, 2008, Ka-BOOM! announced the winners of the three $25,000 Golden Kazoo and five Silver Kazoo $5,000 grants in the Playful City contest. Portsmouth, one of the contestants, was not one of the winners. If our local news media reported Portsmouth’s failure to win anything in the contest, I missed it. You see, reporting a setback or something that’s wrong with the city, is supposed to be bad for the city. Instead we are told everything is wonderful, things have never been better, it’s progress, progress, progress, all the time. You can read all about it in the special Progress issue that the Portsmouth Daily Times is currently working on. If a reporter strays from that line, the line that everything is wonderful in Portsmouth, if a reporter doesn’t show the crooks who control this town in a favorable light, if a reporter disloyally shows examples of how our river city is not progressing, if a reporter shows how imperfect, how very imperfect Portsmouth is, he won’t be able to work for the Daily Times. He will be fired, like reporter Jeff Barron was. What we get instead from the Daily Times are unctuous editorials from the hypocritical Arthur Kuhn, the latest in a long line of short-lived managing editors. Just what Portsmouth needs, another Kuhn artist.

Somebody at the Daily Times or Community Common or WNXT, should have done a little digging and pointed out that the Ka-BOOM! Playful City contest tends to prove the wisdom of P.T. Barnum’s reminder: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” A city, as well as an individual, you see, can be a sucker. Contestant cities in the Ka-BOOM! contest had to jump through a number of hoops before they could qualify to enter the contest for those Kazoos. One purpose of the qualification trials may be to enable Ka-BOOM! to separate those communities that are likely to be able to follow through on their goals and spend the most money on building play areas for kids. In other words, Ka-BOOM! may be sizing up the potential suckers. The “Playful” grants are seed money, with communities being expected to raise considerably more to complete their play areas. The playground construction companies and building suppliers behind the Ka-BOOM! Playful Cities contest expect winning communities to spend much more than the grants they win, and they not only expect, they require the winners to spend their seed money, in the stores and construction companies behind the contest. Those are the requirements included in the so-called “guidelines” that Ka-BOOM! contestants must agree to. Contestant cities’ building plans must be approved by Ka-BOOM! in order for a city to become a contestant.

No Place like Home Depot

Home Depot contributes $500 to the $5,000 grants, but the $500 is really a gift certificate that must be spent at a Home Depot store. And the other $4500 must be spent at the designated play area construction companies. Home Depot’s $500 and the other $4500 that must be spent in specified construction companies are like “loss leaders” in retail stores. The store advertises an item on which it takes a loss in order to get you into the store where you are expected to buy a lot more other items the store will make a good profit on. If a winner must go to Home Depot to spend the gift certificate, it’s likely the larger amounts the winner will spend on building supplies will be spent at a Home Depot store.

And as an added bonus, Ka-BOOM! ends up not only with the names and email addresses of contest participants, Ka-BOOM! also ends up with the names and email addresses of the many more people who, in an unwise show of civic virtue, supplied their email addresses in voting for their city’s contest video. The fine print says Ka-BOOM! will not sell these names and email addresses to third parties, but it does not say it and the companies connected with the Playful Cities contest cannot use these lists for their own purposes. More spam anybody?

The Ka-BOOM! contest is a marketing scheme posing as philanthropy. Marketing is about making more money by selling more of your product or service. Marketing has been around for a long time and is now part of the curriculum in business schools and colleges. It is like a degree in fleecing. Marketing includes but is not limited to advertising, the purpose of which often is to convince somebody to buy something he or she doesn’t need and can’t afford. Marketing is as pervasive as the oxygen we breathe, so we are hardly aware how much it dominates every facet of life, not just commerce but politics, sports, sex, religion, etc. What are political campaigns but vast marketing exercises? What are candidates promoting if not variations of the two dominant brands, Republican and Democrat? What is religion in America today but a fierce struggle of varieties of the dominant brand, Christianity, for customer loyalty? What are the most successful brands of Christianity? The ones that promise the biggest bang for your buck. Do you remember councilman David Malone’s “Portsmouth: City of Prosperity” campaign, something he borrowed from the Ministry of Truth movement?

Social Marketing

In a new twist, marketing has evolved into something called “social marketing,” which is supposed to employ the methods of marketing but for the sake of the public, not for the sake of profits. Ka-BOOM! is supposed to be engaging in social marketing. A cynic might say – and count me among them – that the line between marketing and social marketing is a narrow one and is easily crossed. Marketing wolves can easily change into social marketing clothing. Count Ka-BOOM! among the wolves offering a bigger bang for your buck. How do you explain that ridiculous name – Ka-BOOM! – if not as a bigger bang for your buck? What an image to use for a kids' campaign, a violent explosion!!!

The name of the company that provided Ka-BOOM! with the idea for the Playful City contest is Shycast, which should be called Slycast. On its website, Shycast “claims to be a community of people and brands, working together to make great new things happen in the world of social marketing.” Notice, it claims to be “a community,” not a company, and its announced goal is not to make money but “to make great things happen” through social marketing. What “great things” are they talking about? “At Shycast,” they boast, “we see the future: brands opening up to their customers, and people becoming more able, interested in, and open to, a real relationship with their favorite brands.” If there is something missing in your life, it may be you do not have “a real relationship” with your favorite brands. Is Home Depot your favorite “brand,” is Home Depot your favorite building supply store, or are you still in a meaningless relationship with poky old Lowe’s? Win a Silver Kazoo and you might see the light, or at least enter into a real relationship with a building supplier. After God, Country, and kids, what is more sacred to us than “Home,” with all its meaningful associations. Social marketing is prepared to exploit our most sacred feelings for the sake of profits. We haven't just been screwed; we've been "shycasted."

Hot Videos

Shycast is a company that provides other companies with a marketing strategy to make money. One of Shycast’s marketing strategies is conduct contests that include videos as part of the competition. “If you have a hot video contest idea for a brand you love,” Shycast says, “tell us about it. Brands tune in; they can make it real. We'll be working in the background, helping them find you. If your idea gets made, you’ve been shycast, and you’ll be involved.” Most of the contests Shycast helps promote are not even remotely beneficial to society. Shycast does not appear to be involved in the campaigns to eliminate AIDS or other Sexually Transmitted Diseases, or smoking. On behalf of IKEA, an international home product company, Shycast came up with a contest for new ways of making a bed. “We’re looking for bed-making maniacs who aren’t worried about what Mom says,” the come-on for the IKEA bed-making video contest says. “If you mix and match sheets, have a special blankie for the Shih-tzu, or the craziest of quilts this contest is for you.” Or if you have kids who, in addition to being bed-making maniacs, are also overweight couch potatoes, get on the ball and join Ka-BOOMS!’ Playful Cities contest.

Embarrassing Video

The Portsmouth video that was entered in the contests is, like our mayor, who is featured in it, an embarrassment to the city. Hot it is not. Instead of featuring kids, the Portsmouth video features city employees taking time off from their jobs to have fun. Try to imagine how hard it must have been to get them to do that. Try to imagine how hard it must have been to persuade our playful mayor to tool around on his motorcycle as the helmeted mystery star of the video.

If Portsmouth was not awarded a Golden of Silver Kazoo, it was awarded a consolation prize for being the best stunt video. What does that mean? One definition of “stunt” is an “unusual or difficult feat requiring great skill or daring.” Another definition of stunt is something “performed or undertaken chiefly to gain publicity.” I watched the video several times. I saw no feats requiring great skill or daring. I did see something done to gain publicity for city employees and Mayor Kalb. Unfortunately, it is bad publicity. The technical skill and the imagination behind the video is also an embarrassment. Portsmouth has a video specialist who claims to be a professional: the owner of Dawgbert Productions. If this Ka-BOOM! video is the best Dawgbert can do technically, go to Columbus or Huntington to have a video made, because Dawgbert is to videos what Snuffy Smith is to grammar. Dawgbert was the official media consultant for David Kuhn’s recent disastrous re-election campaign for city solicitor. ‘Nuf said? Perhaps Dawgbert can enter a social marketing contest on the evils of marijuana. Perhaps he could make a video called “Potsmouth,” showing the harmful effect heavy marijuana use has on the social development of over-the-hill bikers. Perhaps, he could win an Up-the-Golden-Wazoo Award.

Charity Begins at Home

Rather than helping make profits for Ka-BOOM! and company, Portsmouth could have better used the time and energy expended fruitlessly in the Playful Cities campaign. If more and better playground areas is a high priority for Portsmouth, some public or private agency should have organized a campaign for that purpose and not allowed a marketer to make a sucker of the city. Such playground projects have been undertaken in the past in Portsmouth. But with our current crop of public officials, intelligence and imagination, not to mention honesty and competency, are in short supply. Foolishness on the part of adults should not be mistaken for playfulness, nor a clueless biker for a cool dude. We now have two councilmen who will not be rubber stamps for the over-privileged of Portsmouth, and a city solicitor who has taken down the “Out-to-Lunch” sign. The Municipal Building should not be a playground out of which employees come pouring to have fun but the seat of city government, whose responsibility it is to provide safe places for kids to play in every neighborhood.

http://kaboom.shycast.com/contest/1/?page=0