“Southern man better keep your head, Don’t forget what your good book said, Southern change gonna come at last, Now your crosses are burning fast… I heard screamin’ and bullwhips cracking, How long? How long?” – from the song “Southern Man” by Neil Young. It feels like the wrong kind of ‘southern change’ has come here to Ohio as Dixie has risen and spread it’s ruinous rebel red menace forcefully northward, no longer confined to the old Confederacy. Who really did win the Civil War? For all the hue and cry of the South being a conquered people, it is the North that increasingly finds itself under the dominion of the Confederacy. The United States doesn’t have to re-fight the Civil War to set matters right. Rather, North and South should simply follow the example of the Czech Republic and Slovakia: Shake hands, says it’s been real, and go their separate ways.

I often think about what America could be without the anchor of the South. Maybe Ohio and the North should think secession. Economically and socially, secession would be painless for the North. The South has always been a gangrenous limb, one that should have been lopped off and discarded decades ago. America is a democracy in spite of the South, who only adopted the tenants of a civil society via force or Federal legislation – never voluntarily.

Per data from the Southern Education Foundation, nearly twice the amount of people live below the poverty line in the old Confederacy than in the Northeast and Midwest combined. More than 2.4 million extremely poor children — 42 percent of the nation’s total — live in the South. You are three times more likely to be murdered in Dixie than anywhere in New England, despite a feverish devotion to law-and-order that has made eight Southern states home to 92 percent of all U.S. executions since 1980 and home to the nation’s highest incarceration rates (Christian Science Monitor). The South has the highest infant-mortality rate, the highest teen pregnancy rate, the highest rate of divorce and the highest incidences of sexually transmitted diseases, while it lags well behind the rest of the country in terms of test scores and opportunities for women. The Confederate states rail against the tyranny of big government, yet they are some of the largest recipients of federal tax dollars with several states (Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana) receiving nearly twice the amount per capita than Ohio (The Tax Foundation). They steal business away from Ohio the same way that developing countries worldwide have always attracted foreign investment and job relocation: through low wages, anti-union laws, privatization of state assets and lax environmental oversight. The tobacco grown by Dixie kills over a half-million Americans each year. The old Confederate states have some of the highest rates of cancers in the country (7 of the top 10 per the National Cancer Institute); in some cancer cases nearly double the national average in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia due to an appalling disregard of the environment and corresponding overexposure to toxins – think “cancer alley”, global nuclear waste depositories (some European countries export its spent uranium waste down south), the proliferation of petrol-chemical industrial agriculture and little environmental regulatory enforcement.

This re-emergence and spreading epidemic of Confederate style politics resurecting itself today under the guise of Tea Party faux populism is merely the symptom of a much deeper problem: The North and South can no longer claim to be one nation. It’s 1860 all over again and Ohio seems to be caught in the middle – pulled up and forward in one direction with the North, then jerked forcefully back down from the South. If you want proof, just look at the electoral map from the last six presidential elections. They nearly mimic the pre-Civil War 1861 U.S. Map that shows the “free states” border above the old Mason-Dixon line and the Ohio River and the “slave states” lying in the gutter below. Or consider that in 2000, George W. Bush lost the U.S. popular vote by 550,000 votes, but he won the old Confederacy by a resounding 3.6 million votes. Since 1992, Democratic presidential candidates have won only four old Confederate states. 

As the electoral center of gravity has shifted in the United States, so too have the orientations of the two major political parties. Both parties now pander to the old Confederacy. For Republicans, the South is their base. For Democrats, it means the near abandonment of their history of progressivism in an often futile effort to swing one or two Confederate states to their side. The Democrats lost their historic claim to the South when the party fractured over the New Deal and the civil rights movement. With Dixie up for grabs, the Republicans went carpetbagging for electoral votes by raging for states rights and opposition to the civil rights bill. Every victorious Republican candidate since then has dished out exactly what Southern voters want to hear.

Imagine then, for just a moment, the North as its own nation. Over 80 percent of Tea-Party congressional representatives would be foreigners. If you were to expel all Southerners from Congress (both parties, mind you) the new liberal majority would be able to correct the most objectionable aspects of Southern culture and the corporate plantation-style dominance of our government would be greatly constrained. Instead of endless culture wars that take attention and focus away from real problems, politics would be broken down to what it really is – a struggle between haves and have-nots – a few Wall Street bankers running for office against 200 million credit card and mortgage customers being nickle and dimed to death. That is the real demographic divide in a country which the top one percent has 40 percent of the wealth. If the North and South were separate nations, we could end the hypocrisy of Red-state welfare. Instead of we could provide them with foreign aid contingent upon sincere efforts to clean up the environment and improve human rights. We could send Peace Corps volunteers down South to teach the necessary skills that would allow Southerners to pull themselves out of poverty and illiteracy while simultaneously promoting a better understanding of American values.

Here in Ohio, the Dixification of the “Party of Lincoln” is near complete. I have been thinking about this threat for years, but the recent redlining of Ohio’s voters through redistricting has heightened my concern for our collective future. Think citizen disenfranchisement – Southern style. In many ways the fate of Ohio has been sealed through redistricting tactics and voter suppression laws hatched in the South, as voters no longer choose their leaders, rather they are in affect chosen beforehand by partisan gerrymandering schemes to eliminate competition to render elections meaningless. Much like the South has done for generations, voting is nothing but a false show of democracy with outcomes already decided and narrow ideology allowed to proceed largely unimpeded. The Ohio Republican legislature has eliminated multi-party competitive elections by pooling voters inclined to back them with bizarrely shaped district lines while isolating voters who might oppose them in electoral wastelands. In a state which is nearly evenly split between the two major parties with 39 percent of registered voters being Democrats and 38 percent registered as Republicans, one would think that Ohio would have districts that reflect the true nature of our voting population. Yet, what we have now for at least the next ten years are 16 Congressional House districts with 12 of them being sure-fire Republican held seats, not remotely representative to the state of Ohio, hostile to Northeast Ohio, aligned with Dixie

Redistricting in Ohio is a behind closed doors process, controlled by Republican Party insiders who are close to major campaign corporate and individual donors who seek to squash the competition and narrow the debate to coincide with their low-wage, privatization, income inequality Southern agenda. In 2010, Ohio Republicans barely won elections for governor and attorney general, each by less than 0.05 percent of the vote, thus gaining complete control to gerrymander the state map to lock in Republican rule at both the state and Federal level for at least a decade, if not longer – imposing their will upon an entire state of 11 million plus people.

By the time you read this, Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur, stalwart members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who were thrown together into the same district, will have faced off in the new 9^th District Democratic primary in which we will have been forced to eliminate one of the House’s two most consistent economic and social justice populists. Both of these exceptional individuals deserve to represent Ohio, the loss of one of them will set us back, send us way down South…to the “Land of Dixie”…look away, please look away.

 Today’s burning legacy of Southern culture is the cult-like worshipping at the Alter of the Rich. It’s plantation politics – if you shackle the poor and unshackle the rich, they’ll rev up the economy. But for whom? Think of this as the super-myth – the one underlying so many other Southern fallacies. For decades, America’s economic policies have been based on the notion that catering to corporations and the wealthy is the way to stimulate the economy. Republicans routinely insist that we need to bail them out, lower their taxes, allow them to repatriate billions in overseas profits, and free them from annoying government meddling. If we don’t, the “job creators” will stay in a funk, and the economy will stay in a rut. But here’s a pesky fact neither corporate America nor the Southern GOP establishment is trumpeting: After-tax corporate profits are currently at an all-time high. Rich people don’t create jobs when we hand them big windfalls.

We still can’t shake the Southern peasant mentality that says we should go easy on the “best and brightest”, whose greed nearly knocked our economy back to the Great Depression and who have rigged the system in part by perpetuating the myth that in creating more wealth for them will save us from ruin. That is the myth at the core of trickle-down economics and the basis for the Southern economy since Reconstruction. The still brutal Southern strategy of racial exclusivity, deep income inequality, evangelical fervor and militaristic nationalism which has now infected the National discourse – is insulting to humanity, to a civil society, to people who do the work.  Author Matt Tiabbi sums it up best when he states:  “In a county where every Joe the Plumber has been brain-washed into thinking he’s one clogged toilet away from being rich himself, we are all invested in rigging the system for the rich. “ This system is rooted down South and manifesting itself on a national scale.

The top one percent can spend their billions on walls and gates and private security guards to insulate themselves from the pitchforks of the angry masses. But today in Ohio, where do the rest of us look in the Yellow Pages to hire private protection from Southern culture? Where do we find protection from insider trading? Against fraudulent bankers? Against unknown chemicals being injected into to our hydro-fractured landscape? Against price-fixing of commodities such as corn and gasoline? Is each individual Ohio family supposed to hire the Pinkertons to keep the local factory from dumping dioxin in the community drinking water source  or the ejection of mercury from the local power plant? Will we have to call in the Federal government to save us…to restore democracy. “How long, How long” did it take to change the Southern man? “How long, How long” will it take to seize back Ohio, take it back from the South?

On January 17th,  the Obama Administration announced that it was pushing to get the 50 state attorneys general to agree to a mortgage fraud settlement with America’s largest banking institutions.  However, a key fraudulent practice will not be part of that proposed settlement - the “robo-signing” scandal.  This ongoing  scandal involves bank employees signing names not their own, under titles they did not have, attesting to the veracity of documents they had not seen or reviewed.  Much evidence exists that it was an industry-wide practice, dating back to at least 1998 and that it has, in fact, clouded the titles of millions of homes.  If the settlement is agreed to, it will let bankers off the hook for crimes that would land you and I behind bars – fraud, forgery, securities violations and tax evasion. 

This is most unfortunate, state-level robo-signing prosecutions are the simplest form of fraud to prove and thereby punish the offenders.  But the Obama Administration has sided withthe banks on this one and handed them a “get out of jail free” card. As part of the proposed mortgage fraud settlement - the banks will not face any more investigations into this crime. To the President’s credit, however, he seems to have felt the wrath of the 99% of us in regard to his position on the settlement, in response to protests before his State of the Union address.  During his speech on January 24th, he did not mention the settlement itself, but announced instead that he would be creating a mortgage crisis unit to investigate wrongdoing related to real estate lending. Only the future will tell if this investigative unit will be given the authority needed when it comes to criminal prosecutions.

But the deeper question is why massive robo-signing occurred - why it was being done.  For the past three years, the bankers justification has been that they were so busy that they had to cut corners to compete in a volatile financial market. But that excuse hardly seems credible given the deep-reaching extent of the criminal practice.   

The robo-signing largely involved assignments of mortgage notes to mortgage servicers or trusts representing the investors who put up the loan money.  Assignment was necessary to give the trusts legal title to the loans.  But in millions of cases the assignment was delayed until it was necessary to foreclose on the homes, when it had to be done through the forgery, fraud and back dating of robo-signing.  Why were these assignments delayed?  Why did the banks not assign the mortgages to the trusts when it is required by law in all 50 states? 

I think it speaks to the evolution of what Noble Prize Economist Paul Krugmanhas aptly monikered ”the shadow banking system.” I witnessed this evolution during my time spent as title insurance underwriter from 1995 to 2005. My fellow co-workers and I once took pride in the title industry as it’s 3rd-party neutrality worked as an effective regulatory mechanism in insuring the legality of documents and offered protection to borrowers against fraud, deceitful mortgage lenders and unscrupulous real estate agents. It was our job to make sure borrowers knew what they were signing and entering into. I took full advantage of the three-day right of rescission law and corresponding legal document that many lenders never submitted to me for the borrower’s signature and protection. I continually had to demand it from banks – I would refuse to allow the borrower to sign any loan documents without it.  I reviewed everything, in particular the terms of the mortgage note. I alerted countless borrowers to what I thought were undesirable terms, made them read any language related to rate increases, excessive closing costs, balloon payments, severe penalties triggered if they were to re-finance or payoff the loan within a certain timeline, etc, etc. In signing the three-day right of rescission form, this allowed me to have a conversation with the borrower about what they may be getting themselves into and allowed the borrower time to think it over for a couple of days with the option of backing out. Some did, many did not.

However, as early as 2000, I would often confide with my wife at the growing level of deception unfolding within the mortgage industry and the erosion of what the title insurance industry once was. Banks became hostile to the title insurance industry – did not care for the checks and balances of people looking out for the borrower’s best interests. Then it came, a wave of corporate acquisitions and forced mergers by banking subsidiaries of thousands of title agencies, thereby severing the web of neutrality and oversight. Thousands of well-intentioned and knowledgeable people lost their jobs as a result.  The title industry now serves at the whim of the banking industry. I could no longer participate in the charade and resigned in disgust at the rampant fraud being perpetrated by banks and by the growing collusion of the title insurance industry (what little is left of it) working in the shadows with the banking industry.

There is a working explanation that cuts through some of the haze in regard to shadow banking industry that has been set forth by Yale economist Gary Gorton as follows: securitized mortgages are the “pawns” used in the pawn shop known as the “repo market.”  The “repos” are overnight sales and repurchases of collateral. Repos are the “deposit insurance” for the shadow banking system, which is now larger than the conventional banking system and is necessary for the conventional system to operate and stay alive.  The problem is that repos require “sales” – lots of them – which means the mortgage notes have to remain free to be bought and sold at a moments notice.  The mortgages are left unendorsed so they can be used again and again in this hyper-active repo market. 

As Gorton observes, there is a massive and growing demand for banking by large institutional investors – pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, etc. – which have millions of dollars to park somewhere between investments.  FDIC insurance is designed to protect individual investors – not institutions. The large institutional investors want an investment that is secure, that provides them with interest, and that is liquid like a traditional checking account, allowing for a quick withdrawal.

The shadow banking system evolved in response to this need, operating largely through the unregulated repo market. “Repos” are sales and repurchases of mortgage-backed securities—the securitized units into which American real estate has been ground up like a sausage. The collateral is bought by a “special purpose vehicle” (SPV), which acts as the shadow bank. The investors put their money in the SPV and keep the securities, which substitute for FDIC insurance in a traditional bank. (If the SPV fails to pay up, the investors can foreclose on the securities.) To satisfy the demand for hyper-liquidity, the repos are one-day or very short-term deals, continually rolled over until the money is withdrawn. This money is used by the banks for other investing and lots of market speculating, including betting against the SPVs sold to a different group of investors.

MERS is the banking industries’ nasty four letter word. This mortgage shell game was made possible because it was all concealed behind an electronic smokescreen called MERS (an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.).  MERS allowed houses to be shuffled around like poker chips among multiple, rapidly changing owners while circumventing local recording laws.  Title would be recorded in the name of MERS as a place holder for the investors, and MERS would foreclose on behalf of the investors.  Payments would be received by the mortgage servicer, which was typically the bank that signed the mortgage with the homeowner.  The homeowner usually thinks the servicer is the lender, but in fact it is an unnamed group of shadow investors.          

Ten years ago, I channeled my inner-Nostradamus, and told my wife that MERS would eventually cause the implosion of the housing market. Starting in 2009, courts across the country began questioning if MERS, which has admitted that it was a mere conduit without title, had legal standing to foreclose. Courts have increasingly held that it does not.  In 2009 and throughout most of 2010, I worked as a foreclosure prevention specialist for a regional non-profit, assisting homeowners to have banks modify their mortgages and avoid foreclosure. MERS and the shadow banking industry presented immense challenges to those of us trying to broker mortgage modifications. For example, in 2009 Fannie Mae sent out a memo telling servicers that in order to be reimbursed under HAMP—a government loan modification program designed to help at-risk homeowners meet their mortgage payments—the servicers would have to produce the paperwork showing the loan had been assigned to the trust. That paperwork did not exist. The banks solution was a rash of assignments signed by an army of “robosigners,” to be filed in the county public records.  But ALL the documents are forgeries, making a shambles of county title records.  There are homes here in Lakewood and throughout the nation in which the legal ownership can’t be determined. These homes just sit and rot – bringing down the value of other homes that surround them.

Not only has the system destroyed county title records, but it is highly vulnerable to bank runs and collapse.  That is what happened in September 2008 following the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers.  The top 1%, highly distrustful of one-another, rushed to pull their money out overnight - lending came to a screeching halt and our Nation’s largest banks did not have their clients money on hand to pay it back.

Yes, the subprime market was the trigger for the crisis, but not the underlying cause. What really happened was that the subprime crisis set off an old-fashioned 1930’s bank run in a newfangled 21st Century market – the shadow banking market, which was, and still remains, vulnerable to similar runs.

Understanding what happened in the shadows is crucial to understanding the last crisis and stopping the next one. The shadow banking market is where big banks, institutional investors, and CEOs who have a lot of money do their banking — particularly their short-term banking. So let’s say I was Mitt Romney back in 2007. I had $10 million that I did not want to pay taxes on and needed to invest pronto. I needed to put it somewhere and being Mitt and a disciple of free-market fundamentalism, I head to the “repo market,” and I ask my good friend John Kasich over at Lehman Brothers to hold my money and pay me interest. John agrees. But how do I know that John and Lehman Brothers won’t just keep my money and not make me more money?

You and I – simple little individual depositors in the normal banking market never have that fear. Through the FDIC, the government insures our deposits up to $250,000. But they don’t insure massive deposits from people like Mitt Romney. So Mitt asks John for “collateral” – something valuable they could hold in order to make sure Lehman Brothers returned Mitt’s money plus interest.  Something like, say, mortgage-backed securities. This manner of banking created a colossal hunger for collateral. See Mitt and John, being high-finance vultures did not really trust one another (would you?). So they, together with some of their friends needed to create something, anything to make a profit. It was this greed-driven hunger that drove the wild demand for mortgage-backed securities.

But think about the difference between the shadow banking market and your bank.  The FDIC’sdeposit insurance exists to prevent bank runs like those that took place in the early 1930s (which happen when creditors become scared that their bank is insolvent and rush to get their money back, which in turn makes their bank insolvent). The shadow banking market doesn’t have deposit insurance. So how does it deal with the problem of bank runs? It doesn’t and John Kasich cut himself a nice fat check as he ran from his bank in 2008 just before the collapse…sorry Mitt – so long Lehman Brothers, hello Ohio. What we had in 2008 was a bank run. No one knew which banks were exposed to the crisis, so everyone froze. Then the CEOs of our largest banks ran to then President George Bush, who cut them a check for 700 billion, interest-free and no strings attached – problem solved as far as the 1% is concerned – we paid their debts.

The longer we continue to ignore the problem leaves the system vulnerable to more future shocks. Fraud induced Bank shocks will continue to come in waves, penetrating ever deeper until the country does something to prevent them. If history teaches us anything, as far as the banking industry is concerned, criminal charges and jail time are the only effective deterrents. The only thing I want to hear is that there will be indictments and lawsuits. Little or no immunity is the only acceptable deal in creating a Federal mortgage fraud investigative unit. It is no longer acceptable to perpetuate the atmosphere where doing deals, paying tiny fines, and admitting no wrongdoing has become the way it’s always been done in the banking industry.

Like almost all other cities, Lakewood is chasing dreams. That is not a negative; I’ll take a chance on the pursuit of the extraordinary over the ordinary any day. There are innumerable “best of” lists for cities, and Lakewood has been glowingly recognized in several recently – but if you drill down to what distinguishes the highest-ranked cities, it’s always related to livability and sustainability. Our dreams need to encompass a wide-angle lens view of sustainability as it applies to community-building. If we desire our dreams to be everlasting and our efforts fruitful, true sustainability can only be achieved if it takes into account economic, social, and environmental aspects. It’s becoming very clear that how our cities are planned, developed and re-developed, how they welcome new residents, how they accommodate all income groups, and how they prioritize human capital and natural resources are becoming more and more crucial to urban sustainability.

We need to look at Lakewood and beyond through the general recognition that we have not always been open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the impossible. This not only applies to Lakewood, but also to the big city next door – Cleveland. We may at times dream big, but act timidly – when these times demand bold and decisive actions. As Lakewood teeters on the edge of exceptional, we must acknowledge that the world is governed not by the predictable and the average, but by the random, the unknown, the unpredictable – big events or discoveries or unusual people that have big consequences. Change, more often than not, comes not uniformly but in unpredictable spurts.

Change is coming to Lakewood, but how much and in what form will often come from outside forces. We need to balance our habit of making predictions in a largely unpredictable world with our perpetual surprise when events not predicted happen. I argue that we can do more to not be caught by surprise, but rather be pleasantly surprised. There is no place else I would rather live in Ohio than Lakewood. As another year draws to a close and a new year beckons, we have much to be grateful for here in the ‘city of homes’. Scattered here and there, in our fine city, the seeds of a new, more local and durable economy are taking root. But sowing the seeds of change is always a delicate process and the proverbial economic storm clouds are an everpresent menace looming on the near horizon. We need to take stronger measures to buttress ourselves from the worst elements of development and re-development. It will be the fierce preservation of what we already have that will best position our city to capture the growing thirst for Lakewood-model livability sweeping the nation – in particular the younger generations.

Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift – a reversal of what took place when the majority of the baby boomer generation chose to drive more and be home less, when far-flung and isolated suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and many inner-ring suburbs withered. Lakewood never withered, in spite of national and state land use policies stacked against us; we have stood the test of time. There is now an ever-growing understanding that for too long, we over-invested in the wrong places. It is time to instead preserve what the market increasingly wants: mixed-income, mixed-use walkable cities and inner-ring suburbs. Another survey shows that baby boomers want yet another redo of their economic misadventures and seek to join with the Gen X and Gen Y generations in a desire by many to live in more pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented, mixed-use environments that de-emphasize auto dependency. Recent surveys show that majority of all age groups are likely to prefer historic inner-ring suburbs as their high density destination – not the isolated subdivisions of the 20th century.

I relocated to Lakewood from Oregon in 2008, and I spent ten years in Portland, Oregon from 1992-2002; during the height of its renaissance in which I witnessed many of the intrepid urban planning decisions take shape  People often look to Portland as the ‘Holy Grail’ of high density urban planning and design. Portland is one of the most-praised cities in contemporary America. Many people ask me – Is the hype real? To some extent, yes it is. The second question I’m always asked is – Why did you leave? At the time, I chose to pursue this life-long romantic notion I had to live in a small town rural setting – which was both an educational experience and a cultural abyss, but that is a story for another day. But the important point I always make is this: Portland didn’t invent bicycles, warehouse districts, fine coffee, good beer, organic and local food, high-density or light rail, but it understood the future implications of them for America’s smaller cities first, and put that knowledge to use before anyone else.

The longest journey begins with a step, but you have to take it. Portland did it at a time when nobody else did. In an era where most American cities went one direction – malls and sprawl, Portland went another, either capturing or even creating the energy of a new age. Portland’s old neighborhoods and city center once teetered on the edge of ruin. The inner-city home and neighborhood where I once lived was considered a slum just thirty years ago. Lakewood compares very favorably to Portland. Having a much smaller population (52,131 versus over 500,000 people), it is like and smaller, more condensed version of Portland’s many older neighborhoods. My wife and I often comment on the parallel universe of our Portland/Lakewood experiences – we often refer to Lakewood as being Portland without the annoying ego.

Just like Lakewood, Portland is real. It’s not about marketing gimmicks pushing false benefits, rather it’s about addressing very real issues regarding how cities change and sustain themselves. Portland’s legacy is largely a positive one. It is undeniable that Portland played a major role in making the nation respect cities again, seeing their potential with fresh eyes. Portland was the right city, in the right place, at the right time. Here in Northeast Ohio, I feel that Lakewood teeters on the edge of being the same if we position ourselves accordingly– the right city, in the right place, at the right time. I have that feeling living here– I have felt it before.

But though Portland can’t be copied, it can be an inspiration. Many of its ideas can and have been adopted elsewhere. Whether most cities will succeed in reclaiming their urban cores is not yet known, but it’s a fight worth fighting. Without Portland, we might not even be trying. Cleveland is trying and may finally be getting it right as well over 10,000 people now call downtown Cleveland home– that can only benefit Lakewood more and more as those numbers continue to increase. However, there is one way Portland today is very unlike Lakewood. Portland now routinely tops “worst of” lists for being one of the most expensive places to live in America; in particular when you compare wages and home prices. Even though real estate values have plunged by over 20% in Portland, housing still remains prohibitively expensive for too many residents as unemployment there has exceeded 11% for nearly four years and underemployment remains a chronic two-decade long problem. Today, Portland’s performance isn’t bad, but given all of its advantages and low degree of difficulty, it should be a lot better. Why is this? I have been thinking that perhaps Portland was a bit too livable. Portland was in the 1990s what San Francisco was in the 1960s: a hip, not too expensive place for young slackers to go. Ohio will never be as hip as Oregon – but Northeast Ohio is hip in a more subtle way – we just don’t go around beating our chests about it. Excessive chest-beating can have its disadvantages. When the promo for the cable television series “Portlandia” makes the claim that, “Portland is where the young go to retire,” it is an attempt at humor but also is an absolutely true statement. People, myself included at the time, move to Portland for values and lifestyle; more for personal than professional reasons– just like so many of us here in Lakewood. However, over the course of the past twenty years, Portland has become the “Mecca” for American trust fund youth. In fact, the term “trustafarian” was coined during my time in Portland to describe the preponderance of non-working, free-spending, ultra-wealthy under forty populations. I don’t foresee that dynamic overtaking Lakewood anytime soon, but I’m sure we all wouldn’t mind a modest level of home value appreciation. It will be forthcoming in random fits and spurts with the cultural shift taking place.

Lakewood, our ‘city of homes’, remains affordable to diverse income groups. That, in my opinion makes us stronger than Portland – more real, more grounded and more welcoming. The working class can actually afford to live and enjoy the Lakewood lifestyle. That is something that we must preserve for our long-term sustainability. Lakewood counters the dirty little secret that Portland tries to suppress – the fact that it has become a revolving door of short-term residents, as nearly one-half of the people who have moved to Portland in the past two decades have been recycled every five years. As the people who’ve had to leave Portland because they couldn’t find affordable housing or real employment there can attest, in order to take advantage of its justly famous high quality, sustainable lifestyle, you first need a roof over your head, a mortgage you can afford and a decent job. It’s not livable if you can’t live there. Thankfully for many of us, Lakewood is and remains livable– like Portland once was when I first moved there nearly twenty years ago.

When I am asked to compare the states of Ohio and Oregon, I don’t think of “the lake” versus “the mountains”; “snow” versus “rain”; “Maple Trees” versus “Douglas Firs” -– no, I think of the year 1979. That was the year that the Portland metro area adopted an Urban Growth Boundary (it became a statewide mandate for all cities and towns by 1990), thereby restricting development in rural and open land while targeting development, preservation and re-development in denser, urban, and older parts of the metropolitan area. This, in effect, was the birth of the Portland story– proof that good policy solutions offer lasting benefits, in particular the prevention of sprawl. If there were to be a policy solution to the Ohio sprawl problem, this would be a great place to start. Sprawl, in my opinion, is the biggest environmental problem for the Northeastern Ohio region. The fact that we have basically flat-lined as a regional population-base the past two decades while at the same time paved over 25% more land is both a tragedy and a blow to our regional sustainability. This dynamic greatly impacts Lakewood and hinders our efforts to enhance, preserve and build upon our cities assets. Sprawl is one thing when the regional population is growing. When population is stagnant, as it is in our region, sprawl simply means more miles of roads to maintain for the same number of commuters, more schools for the same number of students, and more sewer lines for the same amount of…well, you know what I mean.

So where do we go from here? We are already there. People are looking at us and looking for us. We teeter on the edge of everything people desire in a more livable and sustainable future. We also teeter on the edge of economic challenges as the rest of society catches up to places like Lakewood. Public attitudes and desires are dramatically shifting and we need to capture the energy of a new age. Lakewood is the right city, in the right place, at the right time.

I recently went to hear what ‘the smartest guys in the room’ had to say about the future prospects of Lakewood. No, I did not go to a screening of “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” the documentary about the collapse of a mammoth corporation in which the top executives of America’s seventh largest company walked away with over one billion dollars while investors and employees lost everything – a chronicle that plays out like a drama with the emotional power of Greek tragedy. On November 16, I attended the LakewoodAlive forum, “Ensuring a Vibrant Future: A Community Conversation,” in which a panel of some very smart individuals assembled for a conversation on what is impacting Lakewood in the present and what measures Lakewood should take to prevent our future from unfolding like a Greek tragedy.

Mayor Summers summed up the Census Data in a concise statement: “Slightly fewer of us, younger, better educated, poorer, slightly more diverse.”

 The confines of the Masonic Temple provided the right atmosphere for a Lakewood clairvoyance session to gaze upon what secrets the economic crystal ball may hold for our collective future. While economics was the order of the evening, the table was first set by Mayor Mike Summers giving us a quick overview of the Lakewood 2010 Census, and by Gus Frangos, President and General Counsel for the Cuyahoga County Land Bank, who spoke of the impact that the ongoing foreclosure crises has had upon Lakewood, and how we have weathered that storm in comparison to other Cuyahoga County municipalities. Mayor Summers summed up the Census Data in a concise statement: “Slightly fewer of us, younger, better educated, poorer, slightly more diverse.”

Our total Lakewood population fell by 8% from the year 2000 as we now sit at 52,131 people. But there is much more to that number. It has been determined via the volume of research and facts gathered throughout the extensive 2010 Census process, that Lakewood’s population loss is due primarily to the fact that people today are having smaller families. Our racial breakdown is as follows: White – 84%; African American – 6%; Latino – 4%; Multi-race – 3%; Asian – 2%; Other Races – 1%. Our two largest age group populations are the 20-29 and 30-39 year-old-age groups. Not only have we become younger since 2000, but also more educated as 46% of all adults have a two-year degree or more with 25% having obtained a Bachelor’s degree. The most telling tale of the 2010 census is not surprising given our current economic doldrums. The percentage of poverty in Lakewood nearly doubled from the year 2000, as 16% of us fall under the poverty threshold, up from 8.9% ten years earlier. That poverty figure points to the ongoing foreclosure pandemic that has wreaked havoc on a national level and also right here in our backyard.

 ..The number of foreclosures in Lakewood has been trending down since 2009; to below the year 2006 figures – a time before our national economic meltdown.

Gus Frangos from the Cuyahoga County Land Bank, was one of the forum panelists and he presented to us the hyper-local Lakewood statistical analysis of the severity of the foreclosure crises. Lakewood encompasses 93 miles of roadways and all but a couple of streets within that network have suffered multiple foreclosures. Since the year 2006, the number of foreclosures filed within our city has reached 1,586 homes – being 8% of all properties in Lakewood. Yes, Lakewood has been adversely affected and tremendously challenged by the foreclosure crises – virtually no street has gone unscathed as the numbers blanket the entire city. But recently there have been flickers of light at the end of this tunnel of distress as Mr. Frangos pointed out that countywide data shows Lakewood has been less affected by this crises than other inner-ring suburbs and the number of foreclosures has been trending down since 2009; to below the year 2006 figures – a time before our national economic meltdown.

While I am acutely aware that we are not out of the woods yet, we seemed to have weathered the worst of it. It is worth noting here that the city has taken an aggressive stance in combating foreclosures the past two years. They have acquired nearly thirty foreclosed properties and salvaged the ones worth salvaging and demolished the most derelict of properties to remove the blight. I have been inside one of the properties the city recently renovated and sold to a young couple – it was well done and helped stabilize that particular stretch of street. And for those of you who disdain government intervention, the city has to date broken even in this strategic process and this effort will pay significant financial and social dividends in both the short-term and long-term.

After having confirmed my worst fear that I am in fact getting older and that much of Lakewood is younger than me,  and establishing that the next generation may still have solid Lakewood housing stock to choose from, the four esteemed panelists were asked a series of questions by the forum moderator – former Lakewood Director of Planning and Development, Nathan Kelly. The exchange between the panelists was on both micro-economic and macro-economic levels for which there was much cross-panel consensus. In regard to Lakewood commercial development potential – the obvious was pointed out that on a macro level, the nation’s largest retailers dominate the market and that banks, by and large, are refusing to make loans for smaller commercial ventures within already built-out cities like Lakewood. 

Many of us who may have the means and wherewithal to live elsewhere have chosen Lakewood as home because of its unique value – its alternative to suburban sprawl.

This is the curse of bigness – the financial crisis has provided us all with a crash course on how much of our economy is based not on the creation of real value, but on speculation. The way for Lakewood to combat that is to offer unique value. It is our unique value that makes us a community of choice or an alternative community – as the members of the panel phrased in many ways. A significant point was made that the high educational attainment of Lakewood residents bodes well for our future, in that many of us who may have the means and wherewithal to live elsewhere have chosen Lakewood as home because of its unique value – its alternative to suburban sprawl. Our strengths lie in our openness and diversity and that we are not anti-tax zealots, rather pro-responsible spending. Our taxes may be high, but so is the value we receive in return. The panel recognized that it is our social and human capital (and our investment thereto) that form the foundation of many of our strengths.

It has been my observation that in terms of city planning and development and how it affects civic life, all you need to do is spend time watching people in a neighborhood business district like Lakewood. What you see is lots of interaction. Business owners know their customers. People run into friends and neighbors on the sidewalk or while waiting in line at the bakery or coffee shop. This is an environment that slows the pace of life and encourages people to loiter and converse. This is the environment we choose.

Then undertake the same observation in the car-park of a big out-of-town shopping center and watch how differently people behave in this setting. You see very little interaction. This is a landscape built for cars, not people. The stores are sized to serve regions, not neighborhoods, so there’s much less chance that you’ll bump into someone you know. And even if you do, the store itself is designed to facilitate speedy consumption and deter loitering. This is an environment that fosters separation and disengagement. This is the environment we disdain.

Indeed, I have read studies showing that in places with many small, locally-owned businesses, people are much more engaged in community life than those living in towns dominated by national chains and big-box businesses. Residents of communities with a vibrant local business district are more likely to know their neighbors and to join civic and social groups. They attend public meetings more often and even vote in greater numbers than their counterparts in towns overrun by superstores.

A corporate attempt at “being local like Lakewood” is the counterfeit and contrived Faux Local Park – I mean Crocker Park…  Lakewood does not need to make any attempts at imitation, we are already the real ideal that other communities are trying to replicate.

As the evening progressed, someone had to yet again mention Crocker Park as the development ideal we should all hook our unique little first-ring suburb to. Many massive, globe-spanning corporations are now trying to figure out how they can be local like Lakewood. A corporate attempt at that is the counterfeit and contrived Faux Local Park – I mean Crocker Park. Corporations desperately want to turn the local economy movement into nothing more than a cheap marketing trick they can appropriate for their own ends. These attempts at imitation are unnerving. But in the end I think this new variation on corporate green-washing — I call it local-washing — will backfire. Lakewood does not need to make any attempts at imitation, we are already the real ideal that other communities are trying to replicate. In the meantime, I’m heartened by what this attempt at imitation says about the current state of consciousness of developers. After all, these companies spend massive sums on market research and they would not be doing this unless they had detected a sizable shift in public attitudes. It is that shift that Lakewood needs to continue to embrace and promote.

It is not about people creating and exchanging real value. Corporations and chains exist not to create value, but to extract it. Just like colonialism, when mega-retailers, move into a community, their aim is not to enrich the local inhabitants. There presence eradicates local businesses and severs the web of economic relationships that link the people of a community together. Whie chains siphon money out of a community, local businesses spend much of their revenue buying goods and services from other local businesses. They bank at a local bank, hire a local accountant, get their printing done at the local print shop and so on. In place of this robust system of local trade and mutual benefit, national chains erect a single-track economy in which wealth flows in only one direction – out.

…People are rediscovering local food… But I think people are as hungry for the community experience as they are for the fresh broccoli.

This brings me to a theory I have about the growth of farmers markets, community gardens, community-supported agriculture and urban farming. The conventional explanation is that people are rediscovering local food. That’s certainly true and a very good and healthy thing. But I think people are as hungry for the community experience as they are for the fresh broccoli. It’s this social pleasure that I think is driving the regeneration of local businesses in some communities. Many of us in Lakewood get this. A member of the audience asked a question in regard to the burgeoning local food movement not only here in Lakewood, but throughout the greater Cleveland area, and its economic impact. I took exception to a member of the panel scoffing at local food being an economic driver – in total disregard of the positive social and financial elements associated with it. Local food is not about the challenges faced by the economics of scale, it is part and parcel of the right-sizing movement – making our community and its developments designed to benefit its people for generation to come.

Lakewood has unique value because of us–who we are now– and because of what we inherited from the past.

As the forum concluded, I found myself feeling somewhat ambivalent – wanting more, but not more of the same. I prefer my economic fare to be somewhat unconventional. Slowly freezing our economy so it fits into an ever more rigid crystal ball, that every day is more vulnerable to collapse again from some sudden shock, is poor economics. When I got home I was trying to remember a particular quote from Henry David Thoreau. I found it: “Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.” Lakewood faces some serious challenges and pressures in a new age and the key is not to become apathetic in the face of them. Lakewood does have unique value because of us–who we are now– and because of what we inherited from the past. We are the people that choose independent businesses and locally produced goods more often – it is part of our DNA and part of why we choose to live here. We need to continue to make the compelling case that supporting local businesses and locally-produced goods is critical to a sustainable Lakewood, and critical to ensuring that our daily lives are not smothered by corporate uniformity.

Yes, it is true that the McDonald’s proposal to demolish the Detroit Theater has been hyper-focused upon the intersection of Woodward and Detroit Avenues. But what this saga really boils down to is a struggle for our commons. Our commercial corridors are our commons–an asset that belongs to all of us. Its function links us together. As our many residential streets intersect with our commercial corridors, they are much more than intersections of asphalt and curbs, they are intersections that bring us together as a community and work to solidify many of the reasons we call Lakewood our home. For many of us, our common bond is formed by what is not here.

This is a story about the defense of our commons–a struggle for our collective wealth–which is the architecture and function we inherited from the streetcar era. It is that architecture and function that sets the table for the lifestyle and culture we so strongly desire and that we purposefully sought out when we chose to live here.

In essence, the commons means everything that belongs to all of us, and the many ways we work together to use these assets to build a better society. Tragically, our wealth is slowly being stolen from us in the name of economic efficiency, orchestrated by faceless and distant forces, and undermined by regional and global competitiveness.

The McDonald’s scenario is but a symptom of a patient who is sick–a larger underlying condition that needs our help. Is our inheritance slipping away from us? Is our commons becoming too commonplace? Many of us have refused to stand aside and go quietly into the night. Those of us who live on Woodward Avenue, as well as those who reside on other streets impacted by this development, are not going to let McDonald’s write our narrative. We will write our narrative.

We are not victims. We are heroes! In the face of the brute force of McDonald’s, the citizens of Lakewood have done something desperate and audacious–we have put our faith and hope in the last seemingly credible force left in this country: each other. Many of us have immersed ourselves in this entire process to make the best that we can of a dreadful development. We have refused to roll over.

On Nov. 2, a glorious fall night, over fifty of us came together in front of the Detroit Theater and occupied our corner of Lakewood. It was a both a protest against McDonald’s–letting them know “we’re not lovin’ it”–and an example of what a close-knit community can achieve through collectivism. We’re non-hierarchical, self-regulating, self-deliberating and self-organizing. Everyone created their own signs and shouted their own slogans. The positive response we got from so many passing motorists and pedestrians exceeded our most optimistic expectations. Everyone has played his or her own unique individual role during this entire process but always remained connected to the larger hub. Never in my life have I been so proud to be part of a neighborhood.

With that, well over a hundred and twenty of us gathered at the Nov. 3 Planning Commission meeting for the McDonald’s development proposal for the Detroit Theater property. This meeting was a continuation of the same request presented to the Planning Commission two weeks prior at the Oct. 19 special session–that being McDonald’s seeking the merger of two vacant parcels of land (the south 70 feet of the subject parcel) currently zoned as residential use, into one tax lot in order to obtain a conditional-use permit from the city to allow for an accessory parking lot in a residential district.

I realize that at the onset of the Planning Commission review of the McDonald’s development, some residents thought that an opportunity existed to bring to a halt the entire McDonald’s proposal, but it must be stated that the Planning Commission did not have the authority to do so–their authority lies solely on whether or not to approve the request for a conditional-use permit. McDonald’s acquisition of the Detroit Theater could not be stopped, given our current zoning codes.

The Planning Commission members need to be commended for extending this review process to allow more time for certain key questions to be answered and key components to be resolved before they could render a decision on a conditional-use permit. As citizens, our objective has been to seek as many conditions as possible to be attached to this use permit to minimize the many negative impacts associated with this development.

Yes, at the end of the evening, the Planning Commission did approve the merger of the two vacant parcels of land currently zoned for residential use into one tax lot, and granted a conditional-use permit to allow for an accessory parking lot in a residential district. Going into this meeting, it seemed that the Planning Commission’s hands were tied in that they had to choose between the lesser of two evils. In that regard, I can understand their rationale for approving the McDonald’s request and inserting conditions into the use permit that must be met by McDonald’s in order for it not to be revoked by this commission at a future date.

What do I mean about the lesser of two evils? It boils down to local control–and most importantly, ongoing residential concerns. The Detroit Theater became a non-conforming property 40 years ago, when the owner at that time acquired and knocked down two houses for more parking behind the theater. No permit has ever been granted for commercial parking on those two lots located in a residential district–hence it being a non-conforming parcel, as far as the south 70 feet are concerned. McDonald’s could choose to operate in the same manner and use that portion for parking as the theater has and just be done with it all. Any effort by the city to try to stop its use would result in a land use discrimination lawsuit by McDonald’s. With countless millions stockpiled in reserve for its many legal fights, we would be hard pressed to win that case given the nearly 40 years in which the theater was never challenged about its non-conforming status.

Therefore, the Planning Commission acted in our best interests in giving McDonald’s what it was seeking, but attaching certain conditions to the use-permit–thereby giving us some control over how events may unfold. Speaking of us, once again many of us took a turn at the podium to state our concerns and grievances and ask that certain conditions be attached to any approval. Initially, we were asked respectfully to come forward to speak only if we had any new information to share since the prior meeting. That request quickly went by the wayside as, one by one, we spoke from our hearts and minds. One could feel the passion and energy that filled the room. That level of energy does not emanate from victims. It pulsates from heroes–those of us who refuse to accept things as they are.

Many of us now feel a sense of loss. A couple of our neighbors have sold, or plan to try to sell, their homes on Woodward Avenue and leave because of this development. One couple has not only left Woodward, but also left Lakewood entirely–that pains me. We need to be proud of the fact that it was in large part due to our activism that a few key aspects of this development were changed for the better.

What were we able to change? A condition that added “No Right Turn” signs and left-turn-only directional painting at each Woodward Avenue exit in an effort to better orient traffic flow back to Detroit Avenue, ensuring that no right turn be allowed to head south onto Woodward Avenue from the parking lot or drive-thru exits– saving one of Lakewood’s busiest cut-thru residential streets from becoming an intolerable traffic-volume nightmare. Another condition is that after one year, McDonald’s pays for another comprehensive traffic-impact study to see if further measures need to be taken to calm traffic–such as adding concrete curb barriers to physically stop cars from making right turns down Woodward.

In addition, the city has recognized the need to put a traffic light and crosswalks at the Woodward/Detroit intersection (the Hall Avenue light will be removed), not only to address the negative vehicle traffic flow repercussions associated with the new McDonald’s but also to address the even more important pedestrian crossing aspect with so many school kids walking to and from Harding Middle School. The cost of the traffic signal is $120,000. A proposal has been submitted to Ohio Department of Transportation asking that they pay for $100,000 of the cost with the remaining $20,000 to be split by the city and McDonald’s.

We also amplified our voices for the whole of Lakewood. That is something which we should take pride from–we made it more than just about us. After the McDonald’s decision was rendered, I stayed for the Planning Commission work session to hear about the changes being made to the zoning code in regard to future drive-thru regulations. Councilman David Anderson initiated this process in response to many of us coming to him with our concerns, not just with McDonald’s, but also with an eye towards all of Lakewood’s future development. Although these new regulations can’t be applied retroactively to the McDonald’s development, I like what I heard—namely updating the zoning code with an actual ordinance that spells out what we need, and more importantly what we don’t need, which will help limit the McDonald’s-type developments of the future.

I recognize that my neighbors and I will soon be having to contend with a McDonald’s on our corner of Lakewood and that it may seem to many of us that the end is near–the end of Lakewood as we know it. But I am trying my best to look at things under the banner that the beginning is near. By that I mean that this has spurred a renewed sense of becoming better stewards of our inheritance. In the near future, the City of Lakewood will undergo a complete zoning code review. I, for one, will bring all the energy and passion I can muster to that important project. We need to ensure that our city has the best tools to help shape how its major commercial districts should look, feel, function and coexist with surrounding residential streets and neighborhoods.

I call upon all citizens of Lakewood to deepen the notion of “the commons.” We already do that better than many communities, but our resolve will be greatly tested in the years to come. Lakewood is a place where the out-of-control individualism of modern society can be balanced with an even deeper appreciation of what we can accomplish together. This whole McDonald’s development has brought many of us closer together–a welcome shift from “Me” to “We.” We don’t want the history book about Lakewood’s second century to be titled “The Tragedy of The Commons”–we want that narrative to read, “In Defense of The Commons.”

It is the mass movement match of the 21st Century: Occupy Wall Street vs. The Tea Party.

The events of the past three decades have been ominous. The events of recent months even more so, as today’s mainstream media marginalizes meaningful populist movements with endless attempts to paint participants as nothing more than bands of merry pranksters–in effect laughing at us and laughing at human suffering.

I’m somewhat baffled by the notion that the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements are the same. Yes, the enemy is clearly identified. In this respect, Occupy Wall Street does mirror the Tea Party. Any similarity ends there. To the Tea Party, government is the enemy. Occupy Wall Street also sees government as an enemy, but only when democracy has been corrupted by money and has been seized by corporations. However, Occupy Wall Street recognizes that in the end, government remains the only vehicle we have through which the majority can fashion rules that increase personal security and place limits on unbridled greed and corporate dominance. If we choose to give up on government, we will have given up on our ability to collectively influence our future.

Occupy Wall Street wants to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires and make huge corporations actually pay taxes. The Tea Party wants to greatly reduce them. For Occupy Wall Street, unfairness means that billionaires pay taxes at half the rate their secretaries do while the top 1% of the population earn as much collectively as the bottom 65% of the population. To the Tea Party, taxes themselves are unfair and inequality is desirable. They want to give the top 1% an even larger share of the nation’s wealth. Occupy Wall Street wants to rebuild and strengthen the social safety net. The Tea Party wants to eliminate it.

Both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are mass movements, but their attitudes toward the masses could not be further apart. Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy protests lack leaders and a concise platform, but their demands clearly emerge from the thousands of individual grievances expressed in homemade signs and letters. Thousands of people have posted personal statements on the We are the 99% Tumblr website. I find them not to be ideological, but rather very practical. I’m sure that many of us can relate to or have personally experienced what people have shared on this site and I encourage you to take a look.

If you take the time to read some of these stories from people who have shared them there, it becomes obvious what the root causes of the suffering are. There is no universal health care to handle the random nature of poor health. There is no affordable higher education to allow people to develop their skills outside the logic and relations of indentured servitude. There is no realistic living wage guaranteed to each citizen willing to work to keep poverty and poor circumstances at bay.

Wall Street is the pinnacle of corporate greed (thus Occupy Wall Street) that bankrupted our country, and is now further complicit in imposing severe cuts on the middle and working classes. Yet, they have seen no consequences for the financial depression that they caused. It is about time we came together to recognize that corporations have been rewarded for their criminal behavior as they sit upon mountains of cash reserves as after-tax corporate profits are currently at an all-time historical high, while at the same time squeezing the American Dream to the point of near-collapse.

If you want to draw a clear distinction between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, it boils down to one movement based on a fear-driven rage and the other movement galvanized by its pursuit of a more humane and civil society. To the Tea Party, it’s not about saving money or balancing budgets, it’s about punishing those who teeter on the economic margins. It’s about raging that we are not our brothers’ keeper. Occupy Wall Street demonizes powerful banks; the Tea Party demonizes the working class and weakest of us all.

During the earliest days of the Tea Party, their demands were fragmented fits of rage, as people would show up at town halls to shout down their political representatives. One would scream about them taking guns away, another would rage about keeping government out of Medicare, others would fume against the unemployed, the poor, minorities, Obamacare, birth certificates, death panels, socialism, etc. etc. It was not until corporations and their adjunct conservative think tanks and media conglomerates co-opted the Tea Party movement that they centralized and amplified their anti-government manifesto. As one would expect, given its relative longevity and political impact, the Tea Party does have national leaders and a clear program.

By comparison, Occupy Wall Street is a more independent group, still in its embryonic stage. It is not close to finding a central rallying point and I don’t feel one is needed–this is more like big-tent civic engagement revivalism sparked by an evolving energy of people stepping forward in a myriad of ways and actions. I don’t know whether the absence of specific policy proposals is intentional or accidental, but I do know that it’s part of what lends such power to this movement and renders its targets so noticeably uncomfortable. It is made up of individuals that have come together in the name of humanity or better yet, in the defense of humanity.

Franklin Roosevelt once said in the midst of the largest legislative reformation in American History that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The only thing the Tea Party has to offer is fear. The thuggish masses of Americans who not only are venting about insane nonsense, not only are undermining their own interests acting as puppets of laughing corporate predators, and not only are taking down democracy around themselves in order to do so, but are in fact also destroying the entire social safety net fabric of this country. The single most frightening characteristic of this movement is that no amount of evidence or logic could persuade these folks to abandon the corporate manufactured lies they’ve attached themselves too.

Sadly, the crowning achievement of the Tea Party movement is how it created this rage-based atmosphere of disdain and lack of empathy for what Occupy Wall Street calls the 99% of us. This rage against the 99% is demonstrated wherever Tea Party Republicans come to power. Many within the Tea Party movement were happy to take government initiatives when it was helping to bring them into the middle class, but then immediately pulled the ladder up behind themselves afterwards, demanding tax cuts, responding to any line of political propaganda that would harmonize with their embarrassing victimization mantra by promising a feel-good response offering the muscular bludgeoning of people of color and people in poverty.

I prefer the Tea Party alternative of Occupy Wall Street. People are coming together to understand the single most fundamental fact of American politics in our time. The economic elites have walked away from the long-standing grand bargain of the 1930s through the 1970s. They are, simply put, no longer satisfied to be ridiculously wealthy, and now demand to be obscenely so. Instead of looking at the middle class as a source of national pride, it is for them an irritant to see even that small pittance of money in other people’s hands. And, thus, they are succeeding at reversing the basic deal that created the middle class and brought so much prosperity to so many American families in the mid-twentieth century. Today’s Tea Party has become an instrument to fast-forward that process. Perhaps the best example of this imperative is the (so far) unsuccessful play at privatizing Social Security. Wall Street looks at that mountain of cash–within view, but just beyond reach–in utter frustration. It is one of the few government activities (as opposed to health care, military hardware, prisons, utilities, highways, stadiums, ports, natural resources, etc.) that the overclass hasn’t yet been able to profitize. Why should seniors have that money when financial institutions could instead? In short, the whole purpose of the political right has shifted dramatically in the past three decades. Now, it’s entirely about the money. Occupy Wall Street seeks to counter that.

The Tea Party level of deceit has grown exponentially. This should not be taken lightly. There is huge anger out there, being stoked incessantly by those who profit from it, in one way or another. Most frightening of all, it is, as far as I can see, completely impervious to rational discourse. The sophistication of presentation has grown dramatically. This is a full-court press by clever people who know how to market. There are many examples of this, but one of the cleverest has been the defining of corporate center-right political figures like Barack Obama as extreme leftists, and the defining of the mainstream media as biased toward liberalism. “Obama is left of Europe!” they shout. If only. There have always been regressive predators in American politics. But in years past they would have been identified as such and marginalized accordingly. Today, they are more likely to become President, Speaker of the House, Governor, Senator or given a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Until recently, the progressive counter-narrative has all but vanished from the mainstream. Occupy Wall Street seeks to amplify the voice of the people and counter the fact that the Democratic Party has become the sorta not-Republican Party, and stands for little more than a quieter and more slowly-unfolding version of the corporate take-over agenda. Nobody ever votes Democratic anymore. They vote against the Republicans when they rise to their most noxious behavior. We have a president who is supposed to be a radical leftist, and says almost nothing to combat the tide of thuggery now threatening the country. Instead, he continues to seek approval from those who never give it to him, game him at every turn, and repay his conciliatory efforts by asking for investigations into his birth certificate.

Most of the discussion about the Occupy Wall Street protests have focused on the indictment of the economic elite, but Occupy Wall Street makes an equally profound critique of our political system. The protests around the nation are driving home this profound realization that this fight can’t be won today simply by voting. The crisis that most fundamentally shapes our lives cannot be solved through the legislative process because the system is corrupted beyond repair. This slowly emerging realization is both invigorating–an invitation to engage in the kind of bold strategic thinking that those on the left have not entertained for decades–and disturbing, an indication of just how nasty the future may get.

And this is, at the end of the day, the scariest aspect of all concerning the current political climate. America now possesses a massive cohort of people who have simply transcended rational discourse–the Tea Party. Today I see the incoherent rage, the senseless foaming at the mouth that not only doesn’t fit reality, but in fact runs completely contrary to it. Occupy Wall Street seeks to counter that. In reality, what we have here today is a battle for America’s soul, a battle between False Populism (the Tea Party) and True Populism (Occupy Wall Street). Can Occupy Wall Street transform the Democratic Party? Will the truth set us free? If humanity acts as our guide, it will.

On Oct. 19, the Lakewood Planning Commission convened a special session for the pending McDonald’s development proposal for the Detroit Theater property.

On the agenda was McDonald’s request seeking the merger of two vacant parcels of land currently zoned for residential use (being the south 70 feet of the subject parcel) into one tax lo,t as an ingredient for its desire to obtain a conditional-use permit from the city to allow for an accessory parking lot in a residential district.

Without this necessary conditional-use approval for the south 70 feet (which also includes a portion of the proposed drive-thru), the McDonald’s development would already be a done deal and would have proceeded much more unimpeded without this additional piece of oversight from our fellow citizens on the Lakewood Planning Commission.

In a word, the Planning Commission said “Whoa!” As the meeting progressed, they recognized that much still remains unresolved and unanswered in regard to this McDonald’s proposal.

The Planning Commission has not said no to the project as a whole, but wisely chose to defer any decision on the conditional-use permit until the next Planning Commission meeting scheduled for Nov. 3–as they requested additional, more specific traffic studies be done by McDonald’s, and that the city look into traffic signal scenarios at both the Detroit/Woodward and Detroit/Hall intersections.

As the evening’s events unfolded, I could sense a certain amount of unease with the Planning Commission members, as their questions were not always met with clear or concise answers given the gravity of this development proposal. The members of Lakewood’s Planning Commission took this special session very seriously, and for that we should all be appreciative.

Once again, my fellow Woodward Avenue residents turned out in large numbers to express our concerns and apprehensions. At this meeting we were also joined by residents from Hall Avenue and residents from various other locations throughout Lakewood. In all, nearly 30 residents came forward to take a turn at the podium before the Planning Commission, as we presented our own unique perspectives, our own unique range of emotions and our own unique set of concerns. Yes, it was emotional, but that was but a small part of it–this is an emotionally charged development–we are talking about people’s homes and the quality of life we derive from them. People came forward with thoughtful, rational and meaningful concerns, grievances and proposed solutions–they did Lakewood proud.

The meeting began with a brief site plan overview presentation by Mike Lewis, McDonald’s Regional Real Estate Coordinator; it was pretty much the same song and dance that was trotted out at September’s Architectural Board of Review meeting. Speaking of the Lakewood Architectural Board of Review, after they gave conditional approval to the proposed McDonald’s building design and site plan, they went back to McDonald’s with a further condition that they alter the parking lot and drive-thru exits onto Woodward Avenue by adding “No Right Turn” signs and left-turn-only directional painting at each exit in an effort to better orient traffic flow back to Detroit Avenue. I would like to thank the members of the Architectural Board of Review for listening to the voices of Woodward Avenue residents by adding this condition to the proposal.

That being said, I shared with the Planning Commission our request and strong desire to take this significant development one step further by adding a fixed concrete curb as part of the directional painting as an additional assurance measure to better force that left turn back to Detroit Avenue and not have to rely on hope and a prayer that we count on the good will of people to abide by the “No Right Turn” signs and directional painting. It has been my observation, and many others can also attest to this, that the “No Left Turn” sign at the Lakewood Library at the Arthur Street exit is routinely ignored by library patrons as they take a left to head south on Arthur rather than turn right towards Detroit Avenue as the sign directs. We do not want the negative impacts associated with that scenario being played out on a much larger scale.

This may seem a trivial matter to some, but it means the world to us in our corner of Lakewood. I think that the emotions of this development are rooted in the quest to strike a balance between commercial development and residential amenity– that human capital be on equal footing with commercial capital. We desire to achieve that equilibrium needed for Lakewood to grow into the 21st century in terms of meeting the needs of its citizens–such as providing some sense of assurance that measures will be in place to avoid adverse effects on residential property in the face of commercial development.

By adverse effects I mean traffic impact–the main topic of the evening as elements of the McDonald’s traffic study were given much scrutiny by Planning Commission members and residents alike. The traffic impact study was done by GDP Group, an Akron-based engineering firm, and paid for by McDonald’s to measure the current and potential post-construction traffic impact in and around the Woodward Avenue/Detroit Avenue intersection. All the data presented was based on three days of manual traffic counting that occurred on Sept. 20-22 from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. at four different intersections along Detroit between Edwards and Westwood Avenues; and by road tube counts along Woodward Avenue from Sept. 27-29; which verified residential concerns that Woodward Avenue is used daily as a “thru” roadway for vehicles traveling through the area to the tune of 2,000 cars per weekday.

The city has also reviewed the traffic study and finds its methodology typical of other traffic studies done on behalf of the city for prior projects. The McDonald’s traffic impact study also included a review of historical traffic data and found that volume along Detroit Avenue has not changed since 1992, with the average being just over 9,000 vehicles per weekday.

The traffic impact study reached several key conclusions and makes a number of recommendations–the most poignant being the conclusion that the proposed McDonald’s will have no adverse impact on the surrounding roadway network–while at the same time estimating that there will be approximately 400 total additional traffic trips generated to the McDonald’s during the peak morning and evening rush hours. That figure alone warrants an adverse impact in my estimation.

Speaking of warranted, it was determined that the traffic light at the Detroit and Hall intersection is not warranted based on present and projected traffic volume–in its place should be a stop sign. It must be mentioned here that the city is also toying with the idea of removing that traffic signal as part of its ongoing Detroit Avenue Streetscape Plan. It is also recommended that no traffic light be constructed at the Detroit and Woodward intersection, as it too is deemed not warranted–in spite of all the drive-thru traffic exiting onto Woodward at this intersection. The study also recommends the removal of the pedestrian crosswalk on the west side of the Detroit/Hall intersection, as it would impede the proposed driveway entrance on Detroit Avenue.

One conclusion that jumped out at me, and with a member of the Planning Commission as well, is that this study has rated the attempt (post construction) to make a left or right turn at the Detroit/Woodward intersection as sub-standard–degraded to a “Level E” intersection on a scale of A (being no-delay) to F (being a significant delay longer than 45 seconds). Presently the intersection is rated a “Level C.” The McDonald’s traffic study deemed this impact as acceptable and not adverse to the existing traffic pattern wholly on the basis that a traffic signal is not warranted for the intersection based on a single-day traffic count and Ohio Department of Transportation signalization guidelines.

This conclusion alarmed the Planning Commission and is one of the primary aspects of the study which they found to be inadequate, and left too many unresolved questions that need to be answered at the next Planning Commission meeting. Can a signal not be warranted for the good of the community? We are our own city; we have our own autonomy to warrant what is needed within our city limits and not be indebted to statewide statistical data or succumb to the overgeneralization of traffic study software. The human beings who reside here know what is needed, and can better define adverse commercial development.

Another aspect of the traffic impact study is that when the study was undertaken, and all the traffic simulations shown at the meeting, it did not take into account the fact that the current proposal calls for “No Right Turn” signs and left-turn-only directional painting at each exit onto Woodward Avenue in an effort to orient traffic flow back to Detroit Avenue. The Planning Commission asked that the traffic impact study be revised to include this aspect of the proposal and how it may adversely impact the Detroit/Woodward intersection.

The Planning Commission deserves our praise; they recognized that much remains unresolved for this development. They recognize that McDonald’s is not the face of Lakewood and that the pursuit of such development may irreparably harm and alter our city, the people who live in it and the democracy with which we govern ourselves. One of the tenets of future Lakewood development–that it not adversely affect residential property–guided them. The Planning Commission was right to defer this process until key components are resolved to our citizens’ satisfaction.

As Lakewood enters its second century, we find ourselves at a relative political peace at this time–a time that should not be squandered. A time that should foster an environment in which citizens, the mayor and city council, together with the expertise of our Planning Director and his department and our volunteer citizen Planning and Architecture Commissions pursue the preservation of what our city’s founders bequeathed to us–the inheritance of the streetcar era and the economic and lifestyle assets still in place from that era that define the architecture and function that differentiate our streets and neighborhoods from the evils of post-WWII suburban-sprawl development.

I hope to see as many of you as possible at the Nov. 3 Planning Commission meeting at 6:30 p.m. in the City Hall Auditorium. If we truly desire to empower our city with the best defenses and tools necessary to preserve and accentuate the Lakewood we already have, we need to insert ourselves within the process and play a role in the preservation of our Lakewood. “Truth between candid minds can never do harm” -Thomas Jefferson.

My wife and I recently took our two young children down to Cleveland Public Square. It was our intent to join the Occupy Cleveland crowd gathered there to protest Wall Street greed as part of the Occupy Wall Street movements sprouting up across the nation and expose them to one of history’s most important acts–civil disobedience.

They were both fascinated by the stories my wife and I told them of the many protests and acts of civil disobedience (some were very significant) that we have been part of in the past twenty-five years. We explained to them in great detail that the vast majority of gains made in the realm of social justice in this country would never have been achieved if people did not take to the streets in solidarity.

As fate would have it, I nearly bumped shoulders with former Lakewood Mayor and now Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald as I was demonstrating to my children how to hold your protest sign aloft so that it could be read and potentially caught on camera. It was quite the contrast to watch he who could very well be the most powerful man in Cuyahoga County walk through the midst of a group of approximately 75 protesters with not a soul knowing who he was other than myself. To Ed FitzGerald’s credit, he acted like it was nothing out of the ordinary and carried on with his stroll along Public Square–or as I later thought–maybe we all were just invisible to him.

The lords of finance in the looming towers surrounding Public Square, who, like their brethren on Wall Street, toy with money and lives; who make the political class, the press and the judiciary jump at their demands; who destroy the ecosystem for profit and drain the United States Treasury to gamble and speculate, took little notice of my family or any of the other activists on the street below them. The elites consider everyone outside their sphere marginal or invisible.

I have heard the corporate mouthpieces in the press, as they continue to puzzle over what those “Occupy People” want. What are their demands? Why can’t they articulate an agenda? The goal of these so-called “Occupy People” is very simple and very clear. It can be articulated in one word—revolution. These protesters have not come to camp out on sidewalks to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know national electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a voice of their own. They know the economy serves the top one percent, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back. It has to start somewhere…why not with civil disobedience?

This is a goal the power elite cannot understand. They cannot picture a day when they will not be in charge of our lives. The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism is a permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered. What those at the top fail to realize is that the revolution will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children and those being slaughtered in our imperial wars. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students and families no longer have to go into massive debt to pursue an education, and families no longer have to go bankrupt to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the environment stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically changed. And that is why the elites, and the rotted system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They just don’t understand what is happening.

A couple more rants and raves later, I noticed a young woman standing next to us clutching a book tightly with both arms. I was most curious to know what this so obviously important book was that this person held so tightly to her body. And then, I caught a glimpse of the title and it was the most appropriate and relevant book that one could think of to bring to a protest–Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”

I have been thinking incessantly about Howard Zinn ever since. He was one of my personal heroes who died a year ago at the age of 87. With his death, we lost a man who did nothing less than rewrite the narrative of the United States. We lost a historian who also made history. On a more personal level, Howard Zinn altered the course of my history–changed my narrative. Forever altering how I view America and the world.

Of course I’m referring to the way Howard Zinn spoke about history; it was from the perspective of having written “A People’s History of the United States,” a book that changed the lives of countless people like that young woman at Occupy Cleveland.

Count me among them. Back in 1985, when I was 20 and picked up a copy of Zinn’s book, I thought history was about learning that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. I couldn’t tell then what the Magna Carta was, but I knew it was signed in 1215. Howard Zinn took this history of great men in powdered wigs and turned it on its pompous head.

In Zinn’s book, the central actors were the runaway slaves, the labor radicals, the masses and the misfits. Howard Zinn wrote history as if written by Robin Hood, speaking to a desire so many share –to actually make history instead of being history’s victim. His book made me come alive.

Anyone who believes that the United States is now immune to radical politics never attended a lecture by Howard Zinn. I am fortunate to have twice seen and heard him speak. The rooms would be packed to the rafters, as entire families, black, white and brown, would arrive to hear their own history made humorous as well as heroic. I will always remember that famous Zinn quote: “What matters is not who’s sitting in the White House. What matters is who’s sitting in!”

Like the people he wrote about, Howard Zinn was entirely authentic. When he spoke against poverty it was from the perspective of someone whose family became homeless during the Great Depression. When he spoke against war, it was from the perspective of someone who flew as a bombardier during World War II, and was forever changed by the experience. When he spoke against racism it was from the perspective of someone who taught at Spelman College during the civil rights movement and was arrested sitting in with his students.

I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What is so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence within government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet?

In addition to the shouts one can hear at Occupy Cleveland, I want to shout out a thank you to Howard Zinn for having the courage to peel back the rosy veneer of much of American history to reveal sordid realities that had remained hidden for too long until the printing of “A People’s History of the United States.”

Is this too radical? Hardly. I remember the propaganda that filled my old high school textbooks in American History–you will find our Founding Fathers portrayed as rugged frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people–not the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians. Thankfully, I was a receptive audience for his message, and Howard Zinn became my rock star.

It’s easy to feel helpless about the ruthless corporate politics of our day, but the legacy of Howard Zinn will always continue to hold up a mirror to the power that we already possess to make change: the potency of our words, the strength of our convictions, and the long history of activism and resistance that is our birthright.

That he was considered radical says way more about this society than it does about him. We should strive to build on Howard Zinn’s work and go out and make some history.