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CRAIN’S CLEVELAND BUSINESS
WWW.CRAINSCLEVELAND.COM
OCTOBER 17 - 23, 2011
PUBLISHER/EDITORIAL DIRECTOR:
Brian D. Tucker (btucker@crain.com) EDITOR:
Mark Dodosh (mdodosh@crain.com) MANAGING EDITOR:
Scott Suttell (ssuttell@crain.com)
OPINION
Listen
I
t’s easy to ridicule the Occupy Wall Street protestors. They’re not particularly eloquent, and their demands — crowdsourced, appropriately, for a social media world — aren’t very clear. You probably wouldn’t expect a business newspaper to embrace the anti-corporate specifics of the Occupy Wall Street agenda, to the extent they exist, and we don’t. Not exactly, at least. But as the movement spreads across the country, including to Cleveland, and heads into its second month, it’s worth considering why this protest seems to be finding a voice. Those who dismiss Occupy Wall Street as just a bunch of bitter class warriors who can’t cut it in the working world are missing the deep feelings of anger throughout the country at bailouts, the lousy job market, growing income inequality and the influence of corporate money on the political process. Regardless of how you feel about their point of view, members of the conservative Tea Party have proven to be effective in drawing attention to, and then support for, their vision of smaller government and lower taxes. But remember how they were portrayed at the start? National media focused on the people at rallies who would hold up the most derogatory and offensive signs. Every protest movement has those, but they shouldn’t invalidate the real concerns of citizens, honestly and passionately expressed. At their base, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street share a core concern: This country isn’t working. Literally, for 9.1% (officially; in reality it’s nearly 20%) of Americans, and figuratively, for virtually everyone. In a much-discussed post last week titled “Here’s What the Wall Street Protestors are So Angry About,” the website BusinessInsider.com ran a series of 41 charts that paint a disturbing picture of the American economy. (You can find the post at http://tinyurl.com/69p3ghb.) Trends in employment, wages, bank lending and more all are going in the wrong direction. As Business Insider.com notes, “The problem in a nutshell is this: Inequality in this country has hit a level that has been seen only once in the nation’s history — at the end of the 1920s — and unemployment has reached a level that has been seen only once since the Great Depression. And corporate profits are at a record high.” We certainly don’t begrudge people making money. Corporations should maximize their profits, for the good of shareholders and workers. But everyone, Republican and Democrat, should be concerned that the income gains at the top are not being accompanied by gains in the middle class and among the poor. Indeed, recent federal data showed that working-age households saw their real income decline in the first decade of this century — a clear sign the nation’s economic engine has sputtered. Both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are powerful symbols of discontent. So we say, good for them. Keep raising hell. Maybe this kind of pressure will bring a clarity of vision to policymakers that so far has been lacking, to the country’s detriment.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
It’s time to hang up the BlackBerry
Y
office, so back I went. Because you know ears ago, my wife and I sat in the we can’t go an hour or two without darkness of a Playhouse Square emails, right? theater (I’m pretty sure it was So I was thinking as I walked that I was The Palace) and howled to the beginning to realize why our kids could non-stop jokes of Jerry Seinfeld. One of not imagine us taking so long to respond the best themes centered on him and his to their text messages. There was a time father — more specifically his angst — not that long ago — that I would have about becoming his father. answered with my usual misMany of you probably know sive about how not all people the shtick, about how Jerry had BRIAN are tethered to their phone and begun making “old man noises” TUCKER drop everything they do to when he got up from a chair, and reply to a text message, blah, that he was afraid it was just the blah, blah. start of his becoming his dad. But that was way back then The question is: Can you (maybe a year, maybe less). become your kids? Boy, how things have changed, Of course not, you say. And and my awakening began with you’d be right, mostly. the realization that I went back But let me share an experifor my phone, despite the fact ence from last week, when I was that I would only be away from the office scheduled to speak before the Cleveland for a couple hours, at most. Metropolitan Bar Association’s corpoSo there I am, walking down Saint rate law section. The site was its offices Clair Avenue, juggling my umbrella and in the Galleria, so I looked forward to BlackBerry, trying to check my emails. A the walk from our Warehouse District quick glance showed me that I had none, address. so I slipped it back into my pocket. Of I got to the elevator and realized I had course, that was Wednesday and by now — gasp — left my smart phone in my
we all know that Research in Motion, the maker of what once was the most powerful phone/data device on the planet, was in the midst of a major, worldwide problem. As I write this, my BlackBerry still hasn’t forwarded any emails for two days, RIM’s stock was dropping, and it had all the potential for what one telecom analyst called a “bloodbath.” So at a time when there are actually more American wireless subscribers (327.6 million) than there are Americans (315.5 million), RIM and its heretofore handheld juggernaut were on the ropes. “Dear BlackBerry,” Advertising Age quoted one angry tweet last Thursday, “please give me a refund so I can buy an iPhone.” The AdAge Digital story went on to say that RIM had done little in two days other than hold a short phone conference with reporters and post notifications on its website and Twitter. After several BlackBerries, RIM just lost me. And I’m guessing I’ll be joined by thousands, if not millions, of users like me. Oh well, RIM, it was a great run for a while. ■
PERSONAL VIEW
MMPI deal warrants more consideration By JAY MILLER
I
t may be time to review the meaning of a public-private partnership. While media regularly champion the idea of a public-private partnership, we don’t always accept the notion that in these deals government is going into private business with a company, not the other way around. The company is not going into the government business. In recent articles, The Plain Dealer and the weekly Scene “exposed” that MMPI Inc., the Chicago company that is building the new medical mart and convention center, is not pursuing the kinds of medical technology tenants everyone expected to populate the medical mart. (Or at least, it’s not succeeding in the pursuit of those tenants.) Their stories suggested that, behind
Mr. Miller covers government for Crain’s Cleveland Business. the scenes while no one is looking, the Chicago company is jeopardizing the $465 million in public tax dollars that are building the complex on Cleveland’s mall. They say the medical mart concept might not succeed. The media report that instead of trying to sign med-tech firms to come to the medical mart, that would, in turn, attract doctors and hospital purchasing executives to Cleveland, Med Mart officials are pursuing educational institutions that would bring doctors interested in learning new best practices and brushing up on old skills. The suggestion that this private business is doing something funny, something being hidden from the public, mis-
understands key issues about publicprivate partnerships. I’ve not spoken to anyone from MMPI and so I’ve not heard their side of the story. But my observations are based on what I know about how this deal came together and how the private sector operates. Before getting into specifics, a little history is instructive. This march to a medical mart and convention center was not like con man Harold Hill in the musical “The Music Man,” telling River City elders they needed a marching band. It was not MMPI, the private partner, that said a medical technology showroom would succeed in Cleveland, and please give us millions of dollars to build it. That idea was produced locally. It was first floated in the 1980s and then See VIEW Page 11