That’s what happened here in voting February 27. By a margin of more than two-to-one, voters in this working-class city approved a measure to hike the city’s payroll tax from 1 percent to 1.5 percent.

This regressive measure will soak Cleveland workers for an extra $25 million a year. It doesn’t take a cent from the profits of banks and industry.

By a slightly smaller margin the voters turned down a proposal to sell a city-owned power system that supplies electricity to 20 percent of Cleveland’s residents.

The municipal plant is supposed to hold down the rates of the city’s principal supplier of power, Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. But it doesn’t. The rates keep going up and up.

The debate over whether to sell Muny Light was used by Democratic Mayor Dennis Kucinich as a smokescreen to put over the payroll tax hike demanded by the bankers. Kucinich has cultivated the image of being a “people’s mayor fighting corporate domination.”

Kucinich’s pretense of campaigning against the “greedy corporate special interests” enabled the corporations to ram through the tax hike that voters had rejected four times in the past decade.

By focusing public attention on Muny Light, the mayor diverted attention from the basic question in the city “crisis”: Why should the workers foot the burden of the alleged city deficit, when it could easily be paid from the huge profits of the industrialists and financiers?  
 
March 15, 1954
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Wall Street’s hatchet-man at the Tenth Inter-American Conference at Caracas, Venezuela, has demanded a signed oath from all Latin American countries to support U.S. intervention against any one of them whose form of government U.S. imperialism does not find satisfactory. Washington’s delegation has demanded the enactment of a U.S. resolution which provides a formula for U.S. assault under the guise of taking “necessary measures to protect their political independence against intervention of international communism.”

Central to the loyalty oath that Dulles proposed to exact from the countries south of the Rio Grand is the proposition: “That the domination or control of the political institutions of any American state by the international Communist movement, extending to this hemisphere the political system of an extra-continental power would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and political independence of the American states, endangering the peace of America, and would call for appropriate action in accordance with existing treaties.”

Thus, any government which refused to knuckle under to Wall Street and lay its country open to unlimited exploitation by U.S. capitalism could be accused of maintaining “the political system of an extra continental power,” presumably the Soviet Union, and might be subject to U.S. economic reprisal and military assault.  
 
 
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