rude, crude, and nasty: secular nonprofit executive director struts her stuff

There’s a certain tacky, money-grubbing desperation pervasive in the secular nonprofit arena in Ohio, and Marcie Bergman’s conduct representing us as executive director of The Cleveland Arts Prize (CAP) points that up. The Prize has too distinguished a history and is too good a concept to have to endure this sort of hired representation; it’s time for a more gracious face for the organization.

It appears from a cursory examination of the CAP’s forms 990 over at Guidestar (register and sign in for yourself, membership is free) that they certainly could have afforded to provide native son and enfant terrible Harlan Ellison a plane ticket and lodging. It also appears that Marcelle Bergman’s compensation was equal to 1/10th of the endowment amount in 2007; hereafter to be known as Madame Shekelgruber, she had a part-time job of 20 hours a week and received $44,997 for that in 2007. In 2006 and 2005, the compensation for executive-director leadership was significantly less, but that actually misses the point: Paying anything at all for this type of representation is just too, too expensive.

Let’s see if Harlan showcases a new character based on his recent experience with Madame Shekelgruber. Go, Harlan; if anybody can do it, it’s you. And as I’ve been fond of saying lately, “Welcome to Cleveland; now go home.”

Harlan Ellison turns down Cleveland Arts Prize - Cleveland.com

Dan Gilbert of the Cavs and other Ohio casino backers hire troubled California firm Arno Political Consultants

We’ve said “no!” to these clowns on numerous occasions, yet here they come again, using the same dishonest signature-collection firm as before. Anybody who has listened to the signature-gatherers misrepresentations with regard to gambling issues knows that there should be a law requiring them to tell the truth, but in this political climate, there are few standards.

It’s time to view Dan Gilbert in a different light, entirely. This is not a good-neighbor gesture, to attempt to inflict this fraudulent campaign on the community once again. We really don’t need bread and circuses, we really don’t need the underground economies that casinos bring with them, and we really don’t need any more low-paying no-skills-required part-time jobs. We also don’t need any more loans. Think about it.

The Ohio casino plan is being backed by Cleveland Cavaliers majority owner Dan Gilbert and Penn National Gaming, a casino operating company based in Pennsylvania.

The plan would require a rewrite of Ohio's constitution to allow casinos in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, if approved by voters. But to get on the ballot, the casino committee first must collect 402,275 signatures of valid Ohio voters by the end of June.

Ohio casino backers hire troubled California firm Arno Political Consultants - Metro - cleveland.com

telling the story as it should be told, about foreclosures

I wanted to make sure we got the link up to last Sunday's piece by Jim Rokakis in The Washington Post. What's happening right now in Cleveland and in Cuyahoga County is an exceptional and aggravated example of a national plague of parasitism, as lenders, servicers, attorneys, brokers, and investment bankers descend on cities to capture decades of equity to which they are not entitled. Our friend Jim is a strong, clear voice, and he's also a good storyteller. We're going to have lots of similar stories to tell as this foreclosure farce unwinds. Stay tuned.

Jim was talking about this problem a good few months ago when we talked to him in a MeetTheBloggers session. Check it out.

free to be: audio outlaws

I was reading the Cleveland FREETIMES newsprint NEO-wish-fulfillment edition (the one featuring the Mafia plot to kill Dennis Kucinich) and happened to notice an ad on the back for "Audio Outlaws." The advertisement for auto-audio featured cleavage offset by two huge speakers and a subwoofer and mentioned a 600-watt amp. I think that's a lot, but I'm not really expert in that market.

The point I wanted to make is that, obviously, these merchants know that they are selling product to make people "outlaws," that is, people who break the law when they use the product. They flaunt this in their very name. They also know that enforcement of the noise ordinances is weak. They also know that if enforcement picks up, because of the "outlaws"'replacements of the confiscated boomboxes, they'll sell more product, for a while.

Is it possible to levy a nuisance tax on this kind of business, first of all?

This summer has been sort of noisy. It adds to the stress; you get no real peace, even at 3 in the morning. For those of us in town, it creates a siege mentality, or the incipient stages of PTSD. Businesses like Audio Outlaws know they're parasites, and they revel in it.

Second, is it possible to make them a party in some sort of lawsuit? Ill-gotten gain should not stay put; it should be recovered and redistributed. We need to take our neighborhoods back, and that includes recapturing some of the equity stolen in the past. If they rob us of our peace and quiet at our homes, they also reduce the value of those homes across an enforcement area, and we need to take our money back.

bring in the guilds: recognizing excellence and value

Psychobilly Democrat: Why Should I Buy American? -- Good points made by our friend Jason and his commenters about what really constitutes "American-made," where you can find value for your car dollar, and why we need to be critical of blind sloganeering. We need to focus on the many benefits that accrue to the local community from foreign investment and from American-made products sporting foreign names. It's time for enlightened self-interest. It's time to forget the paid propagandists who have been pushing the union agenda, to benefit the unions first at the expense of the community. They've had their run, during the second wave. Now, in the third wave, it's time for guilds, where excellence is the thing that distinguishes the member, not the ability to enter collective bargaining and to strike.

hungry government turns eyes to nonprofits

WebCPA Redesign for Form 990 on the Way -- Lately, for at least the past year, the IRS has been setting up guidance for the nonprofit sector, which is sort of fat and juicy and wild and wooly these days. Guidance precedes audits and fishing expeditions. There are all sorts of things coming up addressing fiduciary issues, conflict-of-interest policies, and whistleblower policies. Now, the 990 form is getting a makeover to control shifting from regular operational expenses to programs to make it look as though the nonprofit is doing more good for the public than it actually is. Keep on an eye on these developments. They will have a huge impact.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the IRS is planning to solicit public comment on the current state of the 15-page, 100-question form for a three-month period beginning in June.

The report said that IRS officials are planning to create a form that is more logically organized, containing a main section with questions about an organization’s revenues, liabilities and programs. Beyond that, additional schedules will provide information on certain charitable activities such as lobbying. Still in its early stages, the information requested as part of the revamped form will still fall short of the kind of details required from public companies.

in case you missed it: rock fest dies because the 501(c)(3) crowd gets no overtime

Plain Dealer Entertainment & Pop Culture: CMJ/Rock Hall Music Fest cancelled after two-year run -- You know, it was ridiculous enough to institutionalize rock and roll in the first place by establishing a nonprofit museum to be the custodian of it. By the time you can identify it, categorize it, and put it into a museum, it's about moribund and a mere curiosity anyway, the shadow of its former self. However, all the woosies who watched rock's evolution safely from the sidelines drew salaries to highjack and display other peoples' life-work product. They got "nice clean jobs." Security. Three squares a day. Healthcare benefits, retirement plans, the chance to move outside the city. All the things, in short, that rock is not about. Now they want overtime.

As we see in this PD article, the woosies can't get overtime to continue to run the music fest, so they're bailing after a scant two years. Usually, it takes three years to ramp up an event anyway, and they're running from it to avoid being committed down the road. They also won't show the numbers. Should we wonder why?

Here's the whole thing from the PD. I think I'm getting nauseous, reading at the end of the article the fact that it wasn't about rock and roll, it wasn't about the collaboration with the clubs and the kids, it wasn't about the good of the city or the inflow of additional revenue to the region, and new NEO visitors, it was about the welfare of the omnipresent "us" of the nonprofit entity, the monster that takes on a life of its own in the nonprofit sector and devours everything, leaving little for the execution of the original mission. Emphasis and reformatting are mine.

What do we pay the rock-acolyte woosies for, anyway? Whatever it is, I think it's high time for a pay cut.

CMJ/Rock Hall Music Fest cancelled after two-year run

Posted by John Soeder April 06, 2007 10:08AM
Categories: Music
John SoederPlain Dealer Pop Music Critic

Organizers have pulled the plug on the CMJ/Rock Hall Music Fest, after a two-year run. "Overall, we felt good about the program, but . . . the resources it took for us to produce it were larger than we could bear," said Todd Mesek, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's vice president of marketing and communications.

Mesek declined to reveal the cost of mounting the festival, which was partly underwritten by sponsors.

The event put a strain on Rock Hall staffers, too.

"On top of their day jobs here, they had to run the festival," Mesek said. "They weren't getting paid extra."

The inaugural Music Fest, held over three days and four nights in June 2005 at the Rock Hall and other Cleveland venues, featured performances by 100 acts, including the Pixies and Grandmaster Flash. The festivities drew 17,800 people. DJ Peretz (aka Perry Ferrell of Jane's Addiction) and Matisyahu were among the 100-plus acts in town for the 2006 festival, which expanded to five days and nights last June. Attendance increased 7 percent, to 19,100.

Music Fest had an annual economic impact of $3 million, with half of the attendees each year coming from outside Northeast Ohio, Mesek said.
The festival was a joint venture between the Rock Hall and the CMJ (College Media Journal) Network, whose long-running CMJ Music Marathon in New York City lures upwards of 100,000 fans every fall to check out 1,000 bands.

"Although we're disappointed that [Music Fest] will not be happening in 2007, we're very proud of its success and accomplishments in '05-'06 and honored to have partnered with the Rock Hall as well as the incredible members of Cleveland's live music community," CMJ founder Bobby Haber said in an e-mail.

Clubs put up their own money to book acts during the festival.

"A small group of people had to struggle to pull it together," said Cindy Barber, co-owner of the Beachland Ballroom and Tavern, one of Music Fest's partner venues.
"We couldn't get big-name bands, because we didn't have the money to pay them," Barber said. "The only extra stuff we got was some improved marketing."
All the same, she is disappointed to see Music Fest go."It was a great idea," Barber said. "There just wasn't enough funding to pull it off."

In the past, Rock Hall and CMJ officials said they hoped to grow the festival over a period of several years.

"At the end of the day, to build it would've required taking more resources from other museum projects," Mesek said.

Instead, the Rock Hall plans to beef up free events at the museum, including community festivals and the Summer in the City concert series, Mesek said.

"We also plan to develop new programs with local clubs, because we feel promoting live music in the city helps all of us, including the Rock Hall," Mesek said.

Music Fest "was an experiment," Mesek said. "We wanted to make it happen for the good of the city. . . . Now we're trying to find a model that works for the city and for us."

"an extra helping of attitude and entitlement..."

Maybe we should call it Cleveland Shopkins -- I loved the letters to the editor in yesterday's Sunday PD, the letters about the Ricky Smith article on Tuesday, in which Ricky inadvertently shows his true stripe: He really doesn't want to serve the public as much as he wants to use the public.

When we had the MTB interview with Fred Krum down at CAK, the message was service, service, service, resulting in a pleasant travel experience that a passenger would willingly replicate or repeat. CAK is prospering and seems to be on an advertising offensive all over the region--their yellow signs are everywhere, at least in the more expensive advertising media. CAK apparently has the financial means to advertise, and now Ricky, saddled with one billion of debt, wants to go still further into debt to counter their blitz:

Smith said he is putting together a strategic plan for Hopkins. He said he
wants to bring in new airlines and launch an aggressive marketing campaign,
partly to compete with the recent advertising blitz by Akron-Canton Airport.
Smith said he also wants to improve the looks of the airport's terminal and
customer services, including taxi service.

"It's crucial that the airport runs well, has strong customer service programs and that it's aesthetically pleasing," he said. "All I've done is put paint on the walls. I haven't done anything yet."

chas wants bob to fight

cleveland.com: Weblogs: Fight Bob, Fight--In case you missed it last week, Chas. Rich has an interesting take on how this BOE situation can play out optimally for the citizenry. I hope he's not counting on the BOE members' being dumber than they actually are.

connecting the dots, doing simple math, just noticing, just wondering

Taxing balance Abatement reviewed: From the SunNEWS on March 15th, with my emphasis added. The SunNEWS quote is italicized:

"Cleveland's existing citywide residential property tax abatement law was renewed in 1999 and is set to expire June 15. A separate abatement law for downtown won't expire until 2010. Cleveland began offering residential tax abatement, at 100 percent for seven years, for new downtown construction in 1987.
In the decade prior, new housing construction in Cleveland was almost non-existent. In some years, fewer than 20 homes were built. After 1987, the pace quickened. It accelerated in 1991 when the use of tax abatement was expanded citywide, offering a 100 percent abatement over 15 years. The abatement applies only to structures, not land.
Since then, 11,259 residential units were built, according to a 2007 study by Cleveland State University's College of Urban Affairs. The study also showed 60 percent of people buying tax-abated housing are coming from outside Cleveland. "

The forecast for 2007 is that Cleveland will have between 10,000 and 12,000 vacant or abandoned properties, which can be accounted for nearly directly by the 11,259 tax-abated new properties. The overall Cleveland population is less now than what it was in 1991. Where is the benefit? Where exactly is the gain? What is the loss?

Nobody's doing the simple math. Nobody's talking straight talk.

lots of statistics, for the record

Mortgage Trouble Clouds Homeownership Dream - New York Times -- Now, nearly two years after we gave testimony for the Cuyahoga County commissioners and five years since Cleveland-Marshall law professor Kathleen Engel began writing her papers warning of the impending debacle, the numbers begin to appear in the popular press, and the evidence of greed is incontrovertible.

In the same edition, the NYT tells in "Buying With Help From Mom and Dad" about how the high price of residential real estate is spawning new specialties among lawyers, third-party administrators, psychiatrists, and counselors, as parents and children cope with the imbalanced behavior of committing more money to the children's housing than the children can afford. I wonder what the upshot of all this will be if ever the prices in the housing markets recede, and they find themselves in the uncomfortable condition called "upside down."

Finally, Gloria tells me that in the PD Friday, someone with insight into the mortgage and real-estate industries talked of "mortgages that are designed to strip wealth rather than allow homeowners to build up equity in their properties." It's good that all this is coming out now, while the huge intergenerational transfer of wealth from the post-WWI crowd to the post-WWII crowd is still under way.

Do you think that, if we paid cash for our housing and our cars, that the prices would moderate and approach true value?

we talked about this with Jim Rokakis

Lender Stops Accepting Mortgage Applications - New York Times--We talked about this subprime mortgage-lender meltdown situation with Jim Rokakis a few weeks ago in a MeetTheBloggers session at Gypsy Beans, and how our county and our state may proceed in the matter. Gloria tells me that our governor has little more sympathy than Rokakis for the people who have created this sloppy subprime mess. Here's an excerpt from the NYT March 9th article about this New Century, "at the center of the subprime storm:"

Like other subprime lenders, New Century’s problems can be traced to a sharp spike in defaults among mortgages written last year, when lending standards eased across the industry and companies sought to increase loan volume. More borrowers with extremely poor credit were given mortgages without being required to make down payments or to prove the income they stated on mortgage applications.

As more recent borrowers began falling behind on payments, New Century’s financial backers on Wall Street demanded the company buy back nonperforming loans under terms of its securitization agreement with the company. It appears that New Century compounded that problem by incorrectly accounting for loans that it had to buy back and by not setting aside adequate reserves to deal with the problem.

The company said yesterday that it had significantly tightened its lending standards in the last few months and was no longer allowing borrowers to take out loans without putting any money down. The new policies, it says, have reduced the number of borrowers who are defaulting on their first mortgage payment to 1.9 percent in February, from 2.5 percent in 2006.

they take care of the money, all right

The Columbus Dispatch - Local/State, KeyBank failed to pay state $170,000: Panel wants interest paid back, questions data-entry contract -- Our friend Anthony Fossaceca over at Blue Ohioan brought this to my attention. It's all coming around fairly quickly. Excerpts:

A Cleveland-based bank shortchanged Ohio taxpayers at least $170,000 last year. The same bank is getting $626,000 a year for work the state can do itself. By fixing both problems, Treasurer Richard Cordray says the state could save more than $1 million. ...Cordray said that when he took a closer look at the state’s "checkbook" — the main depository handled under contract by Cleveland-based Key-Bank — he found at least $170,000 in interest credit that the state should have received last year but didn’t. ...In many cases, the amount to be credited was more than the charges, but the state rarely, if ever, got the full credit, Cordray said. ... The treasurer’s office will look at previous years because KeyBank has had the contract for 14 years. Cordray also said he expects to cancel another Key-Bank deal, a data-entry reporting contract that costs $626,000 annually. ... Cordray said his staff can do the work in-house. The state already has negotiated with KeyBank to avoid $113,000 of that cost this year, he added.

When we go over to BankRate.com and look up KeyBank's financial statement, we notice that the non-interest-bearing deposits are around 21-22% of all deposits in 2005 and 2006. I wonder how they accounted for this state money? The big question, after Cordray gets done: Will the Key financial statement change drastically this year? What was the gist of that book by that treasury guy about Truth?

finally, we're talking about getting our money back

The Daily Bellwether: Ohio's New Bills in the Hopper--It's so great to hear somebody talking about stripping away the protections that allow government and nonprofit swashbucklers to operate like little gangsters, and with impunity. Bob Ney's malfeasance and mendacity are beginning to turn up some positives.

But the reform proposed in SB3 -- a reform long overdue -- could go a long way toward cleaning up government. If the measure passes, a public official would forfeit a state pension upon conviction of a felony if serving in office.Call it the Bob Ney Law. The Republican Congressman from Ohio kept his retirement pay even as he went to prison after being snared in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Ney's misconduct ended with a monthly check from the taxpayers for the rest of his life. SB3 would not impact federal pensions, obviously, but it would pinch the pockets of Ohio's boodlers.

like a tumor

Clinic, city consider new Euclid Ave. traffic plan--Like a tumor, the Cleveland Clinic just continues to spread and to grow, now wanting to take out a chunk of Euclid Avenue itself. It's already been the urban renewal shill to take down a whole neighborhood, and now it wants to become a "campus" and sprawl across and overlay the existing grid of streets. ("A Clinic spokeswoman would not comment on specifics, but said the hospital wants to calm not only traffic but also the patients, employees and other pedestrians who now face an unfriendly swath of cars and concrete. "--how ghastly!)

I view this as the height of arrogance and a clear signal that they just have too much money. It's time for a redistribution. We want our money back.

The Clinic already has its own bus system (RTA's not good enough for its employees) to shuttle Clinic commuters who opt to drive to work from remote parking to their jobsite.

It already has constructed enclosed walkways from building to building (like those things we had for the kids' hamster habitat) so that Clinic commuters need never set foot on a Cleveland city street, yet alone be breathed upon by a native Clevelander, one of those quaint figures down on the sidewalk.

It's figurehead has the hyper-preppie name of Toby.

It just has too much money, and not enough sense not to press it's luck. It's grown fat on us, and now it wants to take yet more. Let's start saying "no" to any more incursions from the Clinic into our public spaces and our public purse, and let's start taking back our money, and our heritage. We've had our pockets picked long enough.

regulatory price creeps piling onto the new technologies

I spent some time today on my Vonage account, waiting online for my SoftPhone to be removed from our business account--no complaints, but we just didn't use it much once Skype caught our attention.

What really caught my eye as I clicked through the invoices of the past year and a half was the steady creep of charges ancillary to the basic bill of $49.99; I assume most of them are caused by government, regulation, and lobbyists. Enlighten me, any of you, if I'm being unfair. But even more to the point, lighten my load. Here are the details of the 482% creep:

Sep 18, 2005:

• FET Tax $1.50
• Regulatory Recovery Fee $1.50
• Total added charges: $3.00

Jan 18, 2007:

• Regulatory Recovery Fee $2.97
• Emergency 911 Cost Recovery $2.97
• Sales Tax $4.95
• Federal Universal Service Fee $3.56
• Total added charges: $14.45

Democreeps already in a feeding frenzy

Democrats Seek Unpaid Taxes, Setting Up Clash - New York Times--Here's an article about the new creeps on the block already looking for more money--from waitresses, hairdressers, babysitters, handymen, web-page designers, and bloggers with ads in sidebars. Don't let them fool you that they're going after "small businesses"--their easiest marks are the sole proprietors, those who can least afford to defend themselves, who can least afford the time off to go through abusive audits. They are shameless parasites feeding on their fellow man. They are trained to harass you until it makes no sense for you to fight any more, to disallow deductions and to quibble to make their quotas, and to blindly promote the best interests of the IRS, the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve Bank as they mindlessly ruin businesses, credit, and lives, not to mention the very communities they themselves try to live in. Do you think our local COSE will take a stand for us small fry against the IRS? Here's an excerpt from the TIMES:

Congressional Democrats, hoping to finance an ambitious agenda without raising taxes, are on a collision course with the Bush administration about pursuing the potentially vast amount of money that people hide from the Internal Revenue Service. House and Senate Democrats say the government could collect as much as $100 billion more a year by whittling the tax gap — the unpaid taxes, mostly on unreported earnings, that the I.R.S. estimated was about $300 billion a year....
Based on an analysis of audited tax returns from 2001, the I.R.S. recently estimated that the government lost $290 billion that year as a result of underreporting and underpayment of taxes. More than 80 percent of that loss stemmed from underreporting by individuals, not corporations. And the biggest problems were with people in business for themselves, who earned income that was not reported to the I.R.S. on W-2 forms or on the Form 1099 that businesses file when they pay independent contractors. The I.R.S. estimated that it lost $109 billion on unreported business income, almost all of that from sole proprietors, like painters, plumbers, dry cleaners, florists, limousine drivers and restaurant owners. Small-business lobbying groups have begun to mobilize against proposals intended to reduce the tax gap. Two of the biggest trade associations in Washington, the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, organized the Coalition for Fairness in Tax Compliance in December to address lawmakers about proposals that might burden law-abiding business owners. “I’m focused on avoiding the wrong solutions,” said Macey Davis, tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents more than 600,000 small companies, half of which have fewer than five employees. “We’re not out to protect noncompliance. We’re out to protect those who are compliant and whose businesses could be hurt.”

Gypsy Beans lives the life, walks the walk, talks the talk

Gypsy Beans & Bakery in the Gordon Square Arts District in the Detroit Shoreway Neighborhood (Cleveland, Ohio)--I just clicked through the MTB ad network to this new website and was heartened to note, on their home page, that they're advocates of what Uncle Norm has tagged as "local production for local consumption."

Please note they also offer free wifi, but you have to ask them for access first. Only after that can you do what the suburban commuters do in Tremont: Go park in the lot, use the free wifi, and not buy anything from the merchant. We first ran into this freeloader, freerider phenomenon over at Scoops last year.

There's no mention of wifi on the Gypsy Beans site right now, but I'm sure that will be forthcoming.