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

sage accounting advice from Janis Joplin - GET IT WHILE YOU CAN

Based on advice from accounting professionals, and backed up by our old friend Janis, I applied today for Social Security retirement benefits. My 62nd birthday is three months from today, and that's the earliest they allow application for the benefit.

I am not retiring, though. I plan on continuing to work in my chosen profession for another 25 years. As the Tofflers have suggested in REVOLUTIONARY WEALTH, we are entering a new age in which all things monetary get re-valued.

book review: MEAN Little deaf Queer, A memoir by Terry Galloway

I saw this title just now over on LibraryThing as one of the review items available for May and was fascinated by the words as juxtaposed.

“You don´t have to be mean, little, deaf, or queer to take heart from this miraculously unsentimental, deliriously funny, refreshingly spite-free, joyously weirdo-embracing memoir. All you have to be is human. Like Augusten Burroughs, Frank McCourt, and Mary Karr, Terry Galloway has written a memoir that transcends its hilarious particularities to achieve the universality of true art.”

—Sarah Bird, author of How Perfect is That and The Mommy Club

More praise

Running with Scissors meets The Liar's Club in this edgy and wickedly hilarious memoir about one irrepressible, mean, little, deaf queer

When Terry Galloway was born on Halloween, no one knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system. After her family moved from Berlin Germany, to Austin, Texas, hers became a deafening, hallucinatory childhood where everything, including her own body, changed for the worse. But those unwelcome changes awoke in this particular child a dark, defiant humor that fueled her lifelong obsessions with language, duplicity, and performance.

As a ten-year-old self-proclaimed “child freak,” she acted out her fury at her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children. Ever since that first real-life performance, Galloway has used theater and performance, whether onstage or off, to defy and transcend her reality. With disarming candor, Terry writes about her mental breakdown, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters. What could have been a bitter litany of complaint is instead an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting take on life.

Contents

Prologue: Nine

Part I: Drowning

Them and Me

Visions

Presto Change-o

Meaner

The Performance of Drowning
        (Listen to it; MP3, 67 MB)

Lost Boy

Part II: Passing

Little-d Deaf

On Being Told No

Passing Strange

Drag Acts

Shhhhhh!

Jobs for the Deaf

The Shallow End

Part III: Emerging

Scare

Who Died and What Killed Them

Why I Should Matter

Epilogue: A Happy Life . . .

Acknowledgments

MEAN Little deaf Queer: A memoir by Terry Galloway

Shift Happens Narrated

My friend and classmate John Francis Moriarty III, an expatriate and educator in Thailand since college, still seems to care about basic disparities and the new, laggard culture of his birth country. The film clip mentions sending laptops to children in disadvantaged countries overseas, and I think, What about our own third-world country, our emerging nation/city-state, our sleepy little banana republic here in the center of Cuyahoga County?

FW: Budget Update from our friend Joe Calabrese over at RTA

We just got this email from Joe Calabrese. I didn’t know he knew where to reach me; will wonders never cease?

Anyway, Joe informs us there is a shortfall in sales tax receipts, just at the same time we’re looking to finance a MedMart on the back of the sales tax. I wonder if this will give any of the MedMart cheerleaders pause?

Here’s an idea: Since the Medical MarijuanaMart will be self-sustaining and a low-cost startup—heck, you can deal out of a suitcase just about anywhere—we can reallocate the sales-tax increase originally earmarked for the old, tired idea of the MedMart to public transit. Given this sudden influx of funds, RTA can be free for all, just like public education, and the economy will flourish, except for the autoworkers and the banks that lend money to buy overpriced gas hogs.

From: e-news [mailto:e-news@gcrta.org]
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 3:22 PM
To: taferris@gmail.com
Subject: Budget Update

A message from Joe Calabrese, RTA CEO & General Manager

I want to update you on the current status of RTA's budget due to the current recession.

In light of a projected $12-15 million shortfall in sales tax receipts, we are aggressively taking steps to help balance our budget to preserve needed transportation services.

The Ohio House of Representatives recently passed House Bill 1, which includes a badly needed increase for public transit.

We urge you to contact your State Senators and the Governor's Office, and urge them to retain this increase and provide whatever other assistance possible in order to minimize any service reductions.

We will keep you informed as the process continues. Thank you for your assistance.

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Arlo Guthrie - Coming Into Los Angeles - Woodstock 1969

I was thinking of the uses of BKL (Cleveland Burke Lakefront Airport) in the conduct of the new commerce at the new Cleveland MedicalMarijuanaMart, and it brought to mind the way trafficking used to be, when Arlo was a kid, flying into LAX.

unions tied to the unthinkable, and I do not lithp: N.Y. Times to File Notice It Will Close Boston Globe

Unthinkable, it is, and the unions are caught right in the middle. What’s valuable here? What’s the price to maintain the value?

The notion that Boston, home to some of the country's top universities, could lose its major daily would have been unthinkable before the recent nationwide plunge in advertising revenue. That dive has triggered a wave of newspaper bankruptcies and the closing of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

A Globe shutdown would leave the city with only one daily newspaper, the tabloid Boston Herald, which has just 10 news reporters and is battling its own financial difficulties.

"From the moment the Times Co. purchased The Globe in 1993, it has treated New England's largest newspaper like a cheap whore," former Globe columnist Eileen McNamara wrote last month in the Herald. "It pimped her out for profit during the booming 1990s and then pillaged her when times got tough. It closed her foreign bureaus and cheapened her coverage of everything from the fine arts to the hard sciences."

McNamara, who now teaches journalism at Brandeis University, ridiculed Sulzberger as "the boy genius whose crack management skills have helped drive the parent company of two of journalism's most respected newspapers to the brink of bankruptcy."

The Globe says the parent company is seeking $10 million in savings from the Newspaper Guild -- the paper's largest union -- as well as $5 million from the mailers, $2.5 million from the drivers and $2.2 million from the pressmen.

N.Y. Times to File Notice It Will Close Boston Globe - washingtonpost.com

$7 billion annual revenue enhancement: MedicalMarijuanaMart

I was telling my friend Jim before church today about the idea of the MedicalMarijuanaMart, and he told me that Vancouver, British Columbia, had realized $7.8 billion from those sorts of sales last year. Checking quickly on line, I found this:

Until recently, I believed tales of drug busts and the legalization debate were news stories, and didn't belong in a business magazine. Then a few experts attached numbers to the illegal business. Forestry added $10 billion to B.C.'s GDP in 2005, the construction industry another $7.9 billion and according to police sources, the marijuana trade claims third spot, boasting annual sales of $7.5 billion. Big business indeed

BC Bud Marijuana from western Canada

And this:

Medical marijuana could ease economic pains

Ian Mulgrew, Vancouver Sun columnist

Published: Friday, November 14, 2008

DUNCAN - Eric Nash can barely contain his excitement waiting to hear from Health Canada whether he can start growing marijuana for 250 patients.

That would be just the start. There are tens of thousands more who are ailing across the country clamouring for his organic B.C. bud.

"There is a great opportunity here for the government to collect significant tax revenue currently being lost to the street market," Nash, one of the best-known legal cannabis producers, enthused.

"With the current global financial crisis, this court ruling is certainly a bright light in dark economic times. We're just waiting for clarification. I figure our production would increase significantly from several pounds to 150 pounds or more immediately."

Now that the Federal Court of Appeal has struck down the government's monopoly on supplying medical marijuana, Nash believes commercial agricultural production of pot is around the corner and the sky's the limit.

His local company, Island Harvest, has cleared the industrial security regulatory hurdles so the company meets the standards set by Ottawa to grow the much-demonized plant.

"Our vision is to have a sustainable commercial agriculture operation," he said. "There's no reason we can't achieve that. Look at the number of compassion clubs, look at the number of people using marijuana to relieve a headache or pre-menstrual cramps!"

More and more research is supporting previous anecdotal evidence that cannabis may have a wide range of therapeutic uses from the treatment of Alzheimer's, depression, glaucoma, epilepsy and cancer to HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and ADD/ADHD. Its most ardent promoters say cannabis may be an addition to the modern pharmacopeia that rivals Aspirin in the breadth of its applications.

It doesn't take a genius to realize the potential profits are staggering….

…Regardless, Nash said, based on the four-per-cent model, that puts sales at more than $400 million annually.

More optimistic projections say the medical market, including ancillary products such as vaporizers and paraphernalia, could be as high as $20 billion.

Add it up: The government sells maybe $1 million a year worth of the pot produced in a Manitoba mine, and compassion clubs across the country sell about $10 million worth of cannabis products.

 

I guess somebody already has thought up the idea of the MedicalMarijuanaMart, but Clevelanders should not give up so soon—they’re always looking for those copycat things, and this is way less tired an idea than casinos.

Since Cleveland has that thing called “home rule,” it would seem a logical next step to set up as a sovereign city-state and begin to deal. They could also work it so they wouldn’t have to share with those greedy devils Lee and Ted at the state, erstwhile brokers of all money flowing back from the Federal level. With home rule, we’d probably be something like an emerging third-world country or a banana republic, but, what the heck, we’ve been practicing being that way for years.

I guess the WeedWalk/PotParade on PublicSquare may have been one of those inflection points.

weed, weed, weed on Public Square in Cleveland, Ohio

Today, around mid-day, I made a quick bus run to public square and happened to see this sad little parade following three police bikes. The people had three banners with all sorts of green colors on them and seemed to be chanting “Weed!”

I went in to the Terminal Tower to get some coffee at the Caribou and when I emerged, the parade had vaporized, almost as though they were swallowed up by the Cleveland Convention & Visitors Bureau at 100 Public Square.

Was there any coverage of this event anywhere? I’ve googled “Weed Walk” and “Pot Parade” and “On the Move with Marijuana” along with “Cleveland OH” and come up empty. Maybe they were here promoting the commissioners’ latest regional revitalization scheme, a MedicalMarijuanaMart. Far out. Outta state. Right arm.

Beats casinos. Probably easier to legalize and tax than prostitution. Go for it. Try something new for a change. Innovate.

the worm has turned: “The Democrats have no more excuses” | Salon

I enjoyed this take on the current state of affairs by David Sirota. Now, do you think they’ll have the moral courage to begin talking about restitution to individuals and restoration of communities before they talk about bailouts of huge entities, and being “too big to fail”?

May 1, 2009 | As counsel for the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination, Arlen Specter described a "magic bullet" that changed America. Four decades later as a U.S. senator, Specter is providing another history-altering magic bullet -- one Democrats will either fire off in a starting gun, or use in their suicide.

By leaving the Republican Party this week, the five-term Pennsylvania lawmaker eliminated the last Democratic rationale for inaction: the Senate filibuster. With Minnesota Democrat Al Franken expected to be seated soon, and now with Specter, Democrats will have the 60 Senate votes needed to overcome all parliamentary obstructions.

This legislative magic bullet will force Democrats to fulfill their policy promises and potentially commence an era of dominance, or they will fail and be annihilated at the polls.

No longer can they blame Republicans for stopping bills to reform healthcare, tax, defense and trade policy. In command of the White House, the autocratic House of Representatives, and soon a filibuster-proof Senate majority, Democrats will have total authority to do whatever they want, and no scapegoat to fault. That means, as ABC News' Rick Klein said, "This is Democrats' turn to govern, no excuses" -- and it means we're about to find out whether their pledges were genuine.

Ever since the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, Democrats have guaranteed "real change" if we give them back control of government. They've made this pledge despite helping Republicans to deregulate the financial system and to plunge the country into the Iraq war. And at every turn, they've blamed the GOP, rather than themselves, for gridlock.

The Democrats have no more excuses | Salon

In another Salon piece, Glenn Greenwald recounts Dick Durbin’s candor a few days ago, about the bankers owning the US Congress. We haven’t heard about it or seen it anywhere else. Wonder why. Great piece, read it all.

Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken:  "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."  The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis "own" the U.S. Congress -- according to one of that institution's most powerful members -- demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.

The ownership of the federal government by banks and other large corporations is effectuated in literally countless ways, none more effective than the endless and increasingly sleazy overlap between government and corporate officials.  Here is just one random item this week announcing a couple of standard personnel moves:

Former Barney Frank staffer now top Goldman Sachs lobbyist