Posted inUncategorized

Cincinnati, USA

"Cincinnati USA" is the cloying marketing term one sees around the airport. It also recognizes not only that the Cincinnati metro area stretches into northern Kentucky and southeastern Indiana, but that sprawl has taken its toll on the famous city in Ohio. This is a slow-growing metro in slow-growing states, but the city gained 0.3 percent population from 2000 to 2006, while suburban Butler County grew 8.4 percent and northern Kentucky's Boone County added 34 percent (through 2008). In 1900, Cincinnati was the 10th largest city in America and it topped out at 502,000 in 1960, dropping to around 332,000 now. In so many ways it is sui generis, but in other critical areas it is indeed the USA. Unfortunately, those areas are gloomy.

Winston Churchill called Cincinnati America's most beautiful inland city, and it's an observation that's hard to argue with even now. The city sits on wooded hills along gentle, wide bends of the storied Ohio River. The skyline pops up like a jewel box when you come down "death hill" on the freeway from the airport. Cincinnati is an architectural feast, filled with enchanting neighborhoods, lovely parks and deep history. This was the Miami country before the arrival of the whites, the richest hunting ground of the Iroquois Confederacy. Cincinnati was settled by Revolutionary War veterans, many members of the Society of the Cincinnati, and named after the self-denying Roman general who Americans likened to George Washington. Founded in 1788, it was the Queen City of the West, the gateway for generations of migrants and the haven for Germans who fled the crushing of the liberal revolutions of 1848 in Europe.

This city was so good to me when I was business editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer in the 1990s. Armed with one of the best staffs of financial writers I was ever honored to lead, we shook up the old-guard companies that weren't used to the prying eyes of journalists or transparency. Now I am using it as the setting for a new mystery series, The Cincinnati Casebooks, of which The Pain Nurse is the first. Seeing it again this month, after being away for 13 years, I was reminded of Mark Twain's witticism about wanting to be in Cincinnati when the world ends, because it's always behind the times. On the surface, the city seemed little changed. And thank God, for that slow pace has preserved so much good architecture. But beneath that veneer, the story was, as is always the case here, much more complicated.

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Posted inPolitics: National

America becalmed

For all the vigor projected by our appealing president, America sits strangely stuck. Healthcare reform seems all but dead. Even the whateverthehellitmeans "public option" is struggling. Tom Daschle, who proved such a formidable leader for the Democrats during the onset of the Bush calamity, is urging President Obama to drop it. There just aren't the votes in the Senate. Indeed, the Democrats seem in a dead run to lose the next election, which would be a certainty if a credible opposition party existed.

It's easy for the senators to be complacent. They are deep in the pockets of the healthcare and insurance industries. The wife of Sen. Chris Dodd earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and stock grants serving on the boards of Javelin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Cardiome Pharma Corp., Brookdale Senior Living, and Pear Tree Pharmaceuticals. And Dodd is one of the good guys? Daschle has his own conflicts. The for-profit medical and insurance industries, along with the U.S. Chamber and assorted business lobbyists can bring hundreds of millions of dollars to bear to maintain the status quo. The only people who think this is a good idea are the diminishing ranks of Americans who have good insurance. The suffering and fear of everyone else has no political power. Meanwhile, the media hype the costs of single-payer (ignoring that America pays twice as much for its system as any advanced nation) and the alleged horror stories of rationing abroad. Can you believe this trick is working?

The same Democrats who won a historic election are struggling to enact the mildest of measures to limit greenhouse gases, even as the government issues a historic assessment of the consequences we are already seeing and will see from climate change. The Southwest can kiss its ass goodbye. So can the Southeast, including the exurban office "park" where the rat bastards at NCR are moving, stabbing Dayton, Ohio, in the back.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The Big Lie about unions

Somewhere over the past few decades, Americans became something new: followers. They became, as an earlier generation put it with disdain, "easily led." Keeping them that way requires a successful propaganda offensive in the case of the Big Three automakers. You see, it's all the union's fault. It's all the workers' faults. Just keep repeating that, over and over. Who knows what might happen if you failed to believe. Belief in the god "free markets" has been shaken by the incompetence of the Bush administration — and by the inevitable consequence of law-of-the-jungle capitalism: the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Who knows what might happen if working Americans were suddenly not so easily led.

They might follow the example of 240 workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, who staged a sit-in after Bank of America cut off credit to the company — and the company, in the way of today's America, laid off the workers without even a severance. They occupied the factory until the bosses and the bank capitulated. The action was hailed as a new sign of backbone, but there was a critical difference between these workers and most average Americans. A difference between them and the 35,000 employees that BofA itself is cutting. They were members of a union.

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Who mourns for Dayton?
Posted inPolitics: National

Who mourns for Dayton?

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When I moved to Dayton, Ohio, in 1986, it was the first time I lived in a real city. It was far smaller than Phoenix or San Diego, the then sleepy but populous places I'd been, but it seemed bigger. I lived in a leafy city neighborhood of old houses and took the bus to work. The downtown was a compact mass of skyscrapers held in a bend of the Great Miami River. The newspaper was there, in a lovely old building enchanted by history, with a newspaper bar right next door and a bustling historic domed arcade across the street. Two department stores were a block away. Across the square was the old courthouse where Lincoln had spoken. Nearby, a jazz club.

The economy was robust. The "Rust Belt" was reinventing itself as an innovative superpower and Dayton was no exception. While National Cash Register had shut manufacturing of the old machines — a trauma affecting thousands — it had become a successful global computer giant. Mead, the paper company, was headquartered in a downtown tower and starting a data operation that became LexisNexis. Dayton had the second largest concentration of General Motors employees in the world, and its factories were being retooled and reinvented, often with UAW bosses as leading innovators. Hundreds of suppliers provided well-paid, high-skilled jobs that were as productive as any in the world. The airport hosted an airline passenger hub for the best-run carrier in America, Piedmont, as well as a freight hub for Emery Worldwide. For a kid from the West, this introduction to the Midwest was a heartland epiphany.

Those assets are almost all gone now. And when I wonder why Ohio seems so crazy — how it could have voted for Bush in 2004, if indeed it did; why it fell for Hillary's Wellesley girl Norma Jean routine; why it could now be a tossup for McCain (?!). When I wonder all these things, I think about Dayton.

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