A billionaire who owns casinos, facing a pending lawsuit, and has a reputation for launching attacks on journalists. No, we’re not talking about Donald Trump. We’re talking about Dan Gilbert, owner of Quicken Loans. Now, this week’s Republican National Convention has taken place in what’s called the Q. That’s short for the Quicken Loans Arena. As award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi explains, Quicken Loans is one of the country’s largest mortgage companies, was a “symbol” of the subprime mortgage crisis that decimated cities like Cleveland.
Peter Pattakos talking:
he’s obviously a self-made billionaire, who came up in the mortgage bubble. He rode the mortgage bubble, and now he is one of the largest landowners and most powerful citizens, not just in Cleveland, but also in Detroit. So he has a—he has a loop in these two large Great Lakes cities. And even if you gave him the benefit of the doubt on the predatory lending, on Quicken Loans and the allegations of predatory lending and the mortgage fallout, assuming that those were forces beyond anyone’s control and he just happened to be in the right place at the right time, so to speak, there are still plenty of issues beyond that, beyond the predatory lending, that are very concerning about Dan Gilbert.
And the first one, in my mind, is the lack of accountability that he has around town, especially—I can speak for Cleveland, but also in Detroit, the way that there are just so few people, so few politicians that will stand up to him. He seems to get everything he wants, and nobody seems to be able to say anything to him to the contrary, including some very questionable things like a huge $300 million subsidy on cigarettes and alcohol that went right into his and his fellow pro sports—Cleveland pro sports owners’ pockets. And he did that without ever opening his books and explaining just how much profit he took out of this public trust. And no local politician ever even asked him to. So we ended up having to have a citizen-led campaign against that. And it was a ballot issue. And there was not a single prominent politician, not a single councilman, no elected official in Ohio above a few local mayors in the inner ring working-class suburbs.
He changed the Ohio Constitution. There’s another one. There’s another one. And he did it after Ohio voters had rejected it twice before, by narrow margins. But it’s very hard not to think that while the Cleveland Cavaliers, the team that he owns, is successful, he’s bombarding the airwaves with “vote yes on Issue 3.” And as LeBron James played well, people felt good about Dan Gilbert, and they passed the casino referendum by a narrow margin. And it’s very interesting how the good feelings about Dan Gilbert get conflated with or even probably replace an analysis of the words that he actually says.
Dan Gilbert will be making more money than anyone off of this convention. Just from the rental of the arena and his, I understand—someone said the bulk of the profits would be going to Quicken Loans.
These stories have been reported time and time again. When anyone in a local paper writes something critical of Dan Gilbert, he will place an angry phone call, at least one angry phone call. And it has certainly had a chilling effect, in my opinion. And I always go back to the example of the sports subsidy. They bombed the airwaves with $3 million worth of advertising. And their tagline was “Keep Cleveland strong.” And this was at a time when the consensus was that Cleveland schools were the worst in the nation. Our infant mortality rate was the worst in the nation. Inequality is as bad here as it is anywhere. And we’re also one of the most economically segregated cities. And he’s saying, at this same time, that we should keep Cleveland strong by giving him $300—him and his fellow owners $300 million, when they don’t tell us why they need it. It’s quite stunning. And it reminds me of “Make America great again,” in a way. How do we expect him really to do that? And what is he saying about how he’s going to do that? It just makes no sense.
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Peter Pattakos
Ohio attorney and publisher of the sports website Cleveland Frowns.
— source democracynow.org