Kucinich Memoir Is a Moving Account of a Battle
Against Corporate Power
When the 'boy mayor' of Cleveland took a stand
against privatization of public power, the
region's elites deployed every weapon in their
arsenal against him, including attempted
assasination.
By Chris Hedges
July 12, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - - "ScheerPost"
-The Division of Light and Power,” by Dennis
Kucinich, like Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker:
Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” is
a gripping, moving and lucidly written account of
the hidden mechanisms of corporate power in the
United States and what happens when these corporate
interests are challenged. It is essential reading,
especially as we face an intensified corporate
assault, done in the name of fiscal necessity
following the financial wounds imposed by the
pandemic, to seize total control of all public
assets.
Kucinich warns that this assault is more than the
seizure of public assets for private gain. These
corporate forces, which function as a shadow
government in Washington and cities across the
country, threaten to achieve a monolithic lock on
all forms of power and extinguish our anemic
democracy. As Kucinich discovered throughout his
career, these corporate forces will deploy every
weapon in their arsenal against those brave or
foolish enough to defy them. “The Division of Light
and Power”is destined to become a classic text for
those who seek to understand the corporate coup
d’etat that took place in the United States in the
late 20th and early 21st centuries.
“People who say, ‘You can’t fight City Hall,’
don’t know where it is,” writes Kucinich, who
battled Cleveland’s big banks and corporations as a
member of the city council and as mayor. “You have
to find it before you can fight it. City Hall was
not only the Doric gray stone temple on East Sixth
and Lakeside Avenue in downtown Cleveland. City Hall
was the boardroom of Cleveland’s banks, its
investor-owned utilities, its real estate combines —
and the mob. In Cleveland, City Hall was in the
shadows, a giant specter invisible to the people of
the city. I brought the invisible City Hall to
light, with great consequences for my city, my
family, my friends and myself. I was the Mayor and I
fought City Hall.”
Kucinich, a diminutive 23-year-old, who was often
mistaken for the paperboy when he campaigned door to
door, had just been elected at the opening of the
book to be the new Councilman from Ward Seven.
Kucinich grew up in Ward Seven in extreme poverty.
His family struggled to pay rent and utility bills.
They endured evictions and at one point were forced
to sleep in their car. Ward Seven was, he recalls,
where “I went to high school, where church spires
and pipe-organ smokestacks reached to a smudged sky.
A neighborhood populated by a steely league of
nations who spoke Polish, Greek, Slovak, Ukrainian,
Russian, Arabic, Spanish, and occasionally English.
A neighborhood of narrow streets lined with old men
wearing white shirts and suspenders, and old ladies
wearing babushkas and carrying shopping bags that
dangled just above their socks, paraded up and down
the small commercial district on Professor Avenue.”
No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is
Independent Media
Because he would not abandon his neighborhood,
his people, he was on a collision course with the
monied elites who ran the city.
The seasoned politicians in city hall assumed
that Kucinich, like themselves, would sell out the
voters for his own political and economic
advancement. No one thought he was serious about
defending those who elected him. They welcomed him
to the cynical club of our bought-and-paid-for
political class and explained the inner workings of
our system of legalized bribery. He was young. He
was talented. He would go far, the political hacks
assured him, if he did the bidding of the real
centers of power.
“These pros knew that every one of the
thirty-three Cleveland City Council seats were won
with campaign contributions from banks who held city
deposits, money from phone, gas, and electric
interests, or downtown real estate developers who
never lost an election because they always bet on
both sides,” Kucinich writes.
One middle-aged Councilman, an attorney from a
neighboring ward, let’s call him Richard, befriended
me, confiding, “Dennis, there are a lot of
legitimate ways you can make money in politics.
Nothing dishonest, mind you. Opportunities come to
people who hold office,” he said.
“Opportunities?”
“You know, you do favors for people. They do favors
for you.”
“Favors?” I didn’t understand.
“Attorneys elected to Council get law business
thrown their way. Insurance salesmen get policies.
Travel agents book trips for people they help. Real
estate guys get commissions from property deals
called to their attention,” he shared. “It’s all
legit.”
A “rotund, cigar-chomping and irascible”
councilman named James H. Bell told Kucinich that
all he wanted was a little ice cream. “He opened his
mouth, lolled his tongue, and with child-like
abandon licked an imaginary cone, his diamond pinky
ring sparkling in the bar lights,” Kucinich writes.
“‘Just a little ice cream. I’m not a pig,’ he
repeated. ‘I want what’s mine. Some ice cream.’”
The rules were clear from the start. Serve the
interests of big business and the city’s rich — by
granting tax abatements, 99-year franchises,
monopolies, and bond financing for big, often
unnecessary multi-million dollar projects — and
thrive. Defy those interests and face political
oblivion.
“City Hall reeked of mendacity, of checking one’s
spiritual beliefs at the door like a beat-up coat
and entering into circumstances where unseen forces
were dictating decisions, demanding consensus, and
meting out punishment to those who denied the
deal-making, was, after all, politics, the dominion
of amorality, where personal advancement relied on
pragmatism operating in shuttered light, without the
imposition of conscience,” Kucinich writes.
Once it was clear the elites
could not buy him off, they set out to destroy his
political career, slander and intimidate him, and,
after he was elected mayor in 1977, wreck the city’s
finances and finally attempt to assassinate him. The
ruling elites play for keeps. And this is why a
politician like Kucinich, with integrity and
undaunted courage, is an anathema in the deeply
corrupted world of American electoral politics where
nearly all who flourish, in city, state and national
politics, do so because they have a price.
The battle royale, which would see the business
elites force the city into default to remove
Kucinich from the mayor’s office, centered around
the schemes by CEI (Cleveland Electric Illuminating
Co.) to crush the public utility, Municipal Light,
or Muny Light, founded in 1907 by then-Cleveland
Mayor Tom L. Johnson. CEI sought a monopoly so it
could jack up rates for the city’s residents. CEI
orchestrated blackouts by blocking Muny’s access to
back-up power and exhausting the patience of Muny
customers to force them into the hands of CEI. The
fight to save Muny was, Kucinich knew, more than a
fight to protect a public utility.
Johnson said when the founded the public utility,
“I believe in public ownership of all public service
monopolies for the same reason that I believe in the
municipal ownership of waterworks, of parks, of
schools. I believe in the municipal ownership of
these monopolies because if you do not own them,
they will in time own you. They will corrupt your
politics, rule your institutions and finally destroy
your liberties.”
Kucinich, like Johnson, realized the danger the
privatization of public assets present and, unlike
most politicians, was willing to sacrifice his
political career to protect those, like his family,
who struggled under the onslaught of predatory
corporations and the rich.
But it was not only Kucinich the business elites
targeted. They destroyed the careers of the handful
of reporters who attempted to investigate and make
public the dirty machinations of CEI and the ruling
elites. Kucinich watched as one honest reporter
after another was silenced by his or her employer,
beholden to the money and power of advertisers.
Kucinich discovered that the press was not only
docile, but complicit. He realized he would have few
allies in the public arena. When the war against him
began in earnest, the press dutifully amplified the
lies spun out by the public relations departments of
the corporations against Kucinich. The city was
saturated with constant news and editorials touting
the benefits of privatizing the private utility,
although customers with Muny Light had one of the
lowest electric rates in the country.
When Steve Clark, the top radio news commentator
in Cleveland on WERE radio, for example, decried
CEI’s spending over $7 million for promotions and
advertising, or about $11 per customer, and
announced that CEI had realized a net profit of $40
million, or more than sixteen cents for each dollar
of operating revenue, at the same time it was
demanding a 20 percent rate increase from the Ohio
Public Utilities Commission, which would generate an
additional $54 million annually for the company, his
career was finished. The radio station received at
least $70,000 a year from CEI in advertising. The
owners did not intend to lose it. Clark was fired.
“News reporters covering the Council meeting were
a sketch of supine immobility, a confession of the
futility of expression without independence,”
Kucinich writes. “If CEI worked to influence
editors, the editors in turn would place limitations
on their reporters. I could not expect any help from
the ‘free press.’”
“I dispensed a long time ago with the idea that
my political advancement depended upon currying the
favor of newspapers, or by agreeing with their
editorial or news policy, which wasn’t really
theirs, but that of interest groups they were
fronting,” he adds.
The Muny Light wars exposed
the lengths corporate power and the mob bosses, who
Kucinich also fought, will go to destroy anyone who
threatens their unchecked pillaging. Cleveland was
known at the time as “America’s Bombing Capital”
because of a war by crime syndicates for control of
Cleveland rackets. The city endured 30 mob-related
bombings and periodic assassinations. There were
also several attempts to kill Kucinich that were
narrowly thwarted by luck or timely police work.
Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk
were shot and killed at San Francisco City Hall
while Kucinich was in office. Chapter 28 in his book
is titled “City Hell.”
The business elites orchestrated a recall
election, which he narrowly survived, threw the city
into default, orchestrated electrical blackouts,
especially during the Christmas holiday, and used a
compliant press to blame Kucinich for the chaos they
spawned. When Kucinich threw out the first pitch at
the Cleveland Indian’s game, forced at that point to
wear a bulletproof vest and travel with police
snipers, the crowd booed and yelled “kill the bum.”
Kucinich was defeated for reelection in 1979, the
celebrated political phenom now treated as a
national punchline.
(Nearly two decades later, after wandering the
political wilderness — and the country — yet still
supported strongly by the working class of
Cleveland, Kucinich made an unexpected political
comeback when he was elected to Congress in 1996.
However, in 2010 the Democratic Party machine in
Ohio drew up a redistricting plan which moved his
Cleveland home address into the Toledo-based
district of another incumbent, all but assuring his
defeat in 2012.)
Through his besieged two years as mayor, Kucinich
was acutely aware that if he capitulated to the sale
of the public utility his political future would be
instantly assured. He writes:
My political future would be guaranteed, with the
swipe of a pen. The endless calls to sell would end.
The media trumpeting the so-called deficiencies of
Muny Light would stop their barrage. The equation of
the sale of Muny Light with the avoidance of default
would end. If I sold the electric system under these
intricately-contrived circumstances, the people of
Cleveland would never know I did not have to sell.
They would be offered a fictional tale of a happy
outcome, agreed upon by the media, the business
community, CEI, the banks, and the political
establishment. It would be the fairy tale of a young
Mayor who finally came to his senses and did the
“right thing.”
But I knew the truth.
The people would end up paying millions of dollars
in higher taxes to the city for street lighting and
other services. Without competition, CEI would
continually raise rates. People in the city would
pay millions more in higher electric bills. Yes, the
city would have credit. It could borrow money and go
deeper in debt. If I agreed to sell, no one in
Cleveland would ever know what happened in this
boardroom. Today the world’s attention was briefly
on the impending default in a major American city.
If I sold, tomorrow the big story would be ‘The
Escape from Default,” the bookends of a complete
political soap opera. Only I would know that Muny
Light was stolen. I would have to conceal that
knowledge, as I rocketed to political stardom with
my newfound friends. I’d wave from a high platform
at “the people.” Unaware, they would think they were
the ones who sent me to higher office.
His enemies did not forgive
him once they removed him from office. He and those
who worked in his mayoral administration were
blacklisted by the city’s elite, often unable to
find work. Kucinich was meant to be an example to
all who thought of defying the system.
“Most of those who worked for me could not find
jobs, blackballed by the Cleveland establishment,”
he writes. “Several members of my team had to travel
many miles out of town to find work. Most found
themselves at a significant financial disadvantage.
One, a brilliant city planner who had courageously
challenged developers’ schemes to extract millions
from the taxpayers, committed suicide. It was my
decision, and I paid a price, but regrettably,
others also paid.”
“After I left office, I had time to absorb what
had happened to me in Cleveland, my ten-year climb
to become Mayor, my collision with corrupt interests
amidst the highest of hopes for the city,” He
writes. “However hard I tried, I could not find a
moral to the story. I was shattered, not so much
from losing an election, as from the pillorying of
the ethical signposts of my life: Right was wrong
and wrong was right. The inversion of reality was
particularly shocking. The banks, the business and
political establishment had now constructed, and the
Cleveland media carried forth, a new fictitious
narrative. The city on its way to recovery … from
me.”
Nevertheless, Kucinich, sacrificing his position
as mayor, had indeed, with the support of a
grassroots army, saved the city’s public utility.
Near the end of his first term in Congress he was
invited to attend a meeting of the Cleveland City
Council on December 14th, 1998, the eve of the
twentieth anniversary of the city’s default. The
council presented him with a resolution of
recognition. It read:
…Today the City of Cleveland has one of the
fastest-growing municipal electric systems in
America. Currently, Cleveland Public Power is
expanding to provide low-cost electricity to
more and more people, providing power for city
facilities and streetlights, thereby helping to
keep taxes low and encouraging economic
development. None of this would have been
possible had Mayor Kucinich not refused to sell
the City’s electric system on December 15, 1978
. . . now, therefore . . . BE IT RESOLVED, that
Cleveland City Council hereby extends its deep
appreciation to Dennis J. Kucinich, for having
the courage and foresight to refuse to sell the
City’s municipal electric system, which has
saved the people of Cleveland over $300 million
since that time.
— Cleveland City Council
Members of the city council stood and applauded.
No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is
Independent Media
Registration is necessary to post comments.
We ask only that you do not use obscene or offensive
language. Please be respectful of others.