Chris Hedges: Kucinich Memoir Is a Moving Account of a Battle Against Corporate Power

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.

Kucinich discovered throughout his career, these corporate forces will deploy every weapon in their arsenal against those brave or foolish enough to defy them.

[consortiumnews.com]

{“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.”}

The battle is breaking free of a false notion that you're being represented by politicians. As I have argued many times here, local, state, and nationally, we are not. The evidence for this fact has been mounting for decades with the help of economist, sociologist, and multiple investigative journalist who have left or been forced out MSCM for speaking out against the corrupt system of the ruling and corporate class. Your state capital and DC are not where you think they are. Our representation is not representing us. What's going on in these places which we look for a genuine ideology of a proper working society is a fallacy within purposeful derelict of duty.

{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.

Both sides! They never lose because they fund and support both sides.

{“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.’ “}

Until it effects a working class family, an entire town/city as a factory or industry is virtually wiped out. Which Ohio knows all to well from each corner and everywhere in the middle of. But they don't see or care about them. They just see their ice cream.

{“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.}

Ironic being today Ohio is still battling corruption within a 62 million dollar racketeering scheme from our former speaker of the house collaborating with the current energy company on a tax payer bailout for nuclear power factories.

{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.}

I'm providing evidence. This isn't just my conjecture. When I apply my conjecture in my post it comes from information like this over the years of an opened mind from extensive following of better new sources for years. Yea I'm talking to you. I've broken free of the managed conditioned fake news that my sources have been exposing and spelling out these lessons for nearly 5 decades. These revelations I bring forth are far from being new! Regular participation in the group and using these sources to compare to yours provide understanding of my conjecture. Use the links in the articles if you don't trust my conjecture!

{Near the end of his first term in Congress he was invited to attend a meeting of the Cleveland City Council on Dec. 14, 1998, the eve of the 20th 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