How Everything Went Bad
The men who destroyed Cleveland sports and forced at least a 1 percent additional tax on the county: Tim Hagan, Mike White, and Fred Nance [“The Bad Hands Team,” April 27, 2011].
Commissioner Hagan, along with Mayor White, moved the Indians into their own ballpark, not taking into consideration that Art Modell was losing the only tenant he had at the old Municipal Stadium.
Going back to the 1960s, Modell had an agreement with the City of Cleveland that his Browns Stadium Corp. would take care of all stadium needs. The rent income from the Indians was used to maintain it. Once the Indians moved, Modell went to Hagan and White, and asked for $130 million to do a major fix-up, since there was no more rent money. Hagan and White said no.
The result? Modell moves the Browns. Then … Nance (The Great Dealmaker) ends up agreeing with the NFL to have the county build a $300 million new stadium in order to get a new faux Browns team. That’s $170 million more than Modell was asking for.
I can see why the Browns hired Nance: Payback for a sweet deal.
Kenrmr
Those Voices You Hear
Christine Howey’s review of the play Insomnia [“No Doze,” April 27, 2011] demonstrates a disturbing insensitivity to mentally ill individuals. She wrote: “It’s not just wackos in tin foil hats who hear voices in their heads.”
People who have auditory hallucinations have severe and often disabling mental illnesses. Their diagnoses can include schizophrenia, severe depressive and bipolar disorders, and dissociative disorders. Auditory hallucinations are extremely distressing to the people who experience them, as well as to their family members.
These people deserve compassion and access to treatment, rather than the dismissive label “wacko.” By the way, in nearly 30 years of clinical practice, I have never seen a patient who wore a tin foil hat.
Peter M. Barach, PhD
Clinical Psychologist
Horizons Counseling Services
Parma Heights
This article appears in May 18-24, 2011.
The Jobs Machine is all fine and good, but I think it is another of a long line of rapturous stories on how heroic entrepreneurs are going to save us. The only difference is that this batch of heroic entrepreneurs is imported. Well, since the age of the heroic entrepreneur dawned during the age of Reagan, our nation and our state has continued to go down the tubes economically.
About the same time that the Age of the Entrepreneur dawned, poor and low income communities disappeared from the map. The war on poverty ended, and the war on the poor began. In the place of anti-poverty programs we beefed up the police forces in our urban areas, and began our current era of mass incarceration. Cleveland has become an Indian Reservation for the poor, combined with a penal colony for those either on their way to prison or just coming back from prison. Nobody wants to talk about this, however. They are too busy waiting for enterpreneurs to turn water into wine, and save us from the encroaching squalor. It seems that after 40 years of waiting for salvation, it would occur to us that something is wrong.
Randy Cunningham
Cleveland, OH