Displaying items by tag: George Theodore

With the Ohio primary just a week and a half off, what are the voters thinking behind the "horse race" polls we are treated to on a nightly basis? 

 

1590 WAKR, The Akron Beacon Journal and other news organizations in Ohio are part of a collaborative effort to share stories and information leading up to the 2016 primary and general elections. In this report, Akron Beacon Journal reporters Doug Livingston and Jim Mackinnon examine the impact of the economy among Akron-area voters and how it shapes their political views ahead of deciding on candidates seeking their respective nominations.

 

LINKS to the full report "Ohio economy creates stress across all generations and parties" and the Akron Beacon Journal for additional coverage 

 

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(Akron Beacon Journal Doug Livingston and Jim Mackinnon) The Ohio economy, once one of the most robust in the country, has tanked in the last 15 years.

 

With it has gone a sense of security, replaced by a palpable anger.

 

People such as Rick Kepler, a 66-year-old Teamster from suburban Akron, talk of revolution, and 24-year-old Iris Edmondson of Akron works two jobs, worries about student debt and postpones the purchase of a home.

 

Since 2000, the median household income has dropped from 19th in the nation to 35th — the second-biggest drop among the 50 states. Manufacturing jobs, once the lifeblood of the Buckeye State, have disintegrated.

 

Wages in the construction industry have tumbled.

 

Across the country, Gallup, Pew and Associated Press polls have showed Americans concerned about the economy more than anything else this election year, and in Ohio, the concern is no different.

 

People talk about wages, pensions, health care costs and debt, and they also express anger with the privileged class.

 

Today, more than 20 Ohio news organizations partner in the first of several joint efforts to explore issues important to the people of the state. The goal is to reflect Ohioans’ concerns in the presidential campaign — and to hold candidates accountable to those concerns.

 

Today we offer stories of Ohioans. On Monday, Ohio by the numbers, and on Tuesday, how the candidates responded to questions from Ohio media.

 

Time for revolution?

 

Rick Kepler may be retiring, but he certainly isn’t shy.

 

The 66-year-old resident of the small city of Norton, just southwest of Akron, has been a union man for most of his life. His life experiences as a union worker and paid organizer for the Teamsters shaped his world view.

 

His jobs included driving a beer truck in New Orleans and working for a trucking company in Richfield.

 

And the stories Kepler says he hears today from Ohio’s working class also shape his outlook.

 

“I talk to working people. A lot of working people,” Kepler said. “What I’m hearing is, it’s unbelievable what’s going on.”

 

Companies want workers to have unpaid vacations. Workers tell him their health insurance now comes with $7,000 to $8,000 deductibles. Hourly pay often is $10 to $11 an hour, “poverty wages,” said Kepler, who continues as a union organizer.

 

“I sit down and I hear, ‘The boss is pushing us, pushing us, pushing us,’” he said. “So, I sit down with the workers and I hear stories I don’t hear coming out of the corporate media.”

 

Kepler also is among the hundreds of thousands of retired Teamsters facing cuts in monthly pension payments from the financially troubled Central States Pension Fund. A federal law enacted in 2014 made that possible in order to keep plan from collapsing. His check could be reduced 55 percent.

 

So, Kepler doesn’t want a regular presidential election.

 

He says the nation now is a plutocracy — run by wealthy elites — and needs a revolution to return it to its democratic roots.

 

“We’re at an important stage right now,” Kepler said. He hears people telling him that they feel the election system is rigged and that Wall Street is running the show.

 

“If I had to tell someone to vote for someone, it would be Bernie [Sanders],” Kepler said. Sanders has sponsored legislation to overturn the law allowing multi-employer pension fund cuts, and he is speaking out in favor of the middle class, he said.

 

Kepler is certainly not a fan of Republicans. But he also doesn’t like how Barack Obama, (“Mr. Hope and Change”) bailed out Wall Street and said “Nah, I ain’t got time for you” to working people. And he does not want Hillary Clinton elected.

 

“I believe Hillary is a defender of the rich as well,” he said.

 

Husband Bill Clinton was no friend of working class people while president, Kepler said. “She’s no different. ... She is going to be pro corporate. She is going to be a corporatist.”

 

Kepler wants candidates to address the economy and to propose changes to health care that benefit people and not corporations.

 

“You have to protect Social Security,” he said.

 

Candidates also need to talk about how they will reform a two-tier justice system that favors the wealthy, he said.

 

“The plutocrats are calling the shots,” Kepler said. “We need a revolution in America.”

 

 

Iris Edmondson has multiple jobs, friends working 60-hour weeks, student debt and a grandmother whose pension payments were cut in half.

 

The 24-year-old, who turns 25 soon, is a recent graduate of the University of Akron, with a degree in communications that focuses on radio and television — but isn’t working in the field.

 

She has what she calls a fulfilling job at a Canton research facility that helps people with such things as opiate addiction and dementia.

 

“I feel like I’m kind of making a difference,” she said.

 

Edmondson and friends also recently created an event planning business, Event Customs. “We do that mostly on the weekends because everybody has a full-time job,” she said. “We do weddings, we do graduation parties, anything, you name it we will come and do it.”

 

Like others her age who can’t compare the aftermath of the Great Recession with the robust 1990s, she describes the Ohio economy as doing “OK,” but senses the strain.

 

“I still see a lot of people under the poverty line,” she said.

 

“A lot of my friends, they have to work 60 hours, long jobs, maybe a couple different jobs, just to make ends meet and get things together, barely making it,” she said. “I think it’s OK because a lot of people can still hold a job, or a couple of jobs.”

 

Edmondson wants a presidential candidate who speaks to and will address the issues important to her.

 

“A big thing with me is, graduating last year, I have a lot of student loan debt,” she said. “That limits me to do the kind of things I want to do.”

 

Edmondson wonders if she will ever pay off the debt, which is tens of thousands of dollars.

 

“I probably will be stuck paying it forever, pretty much, and I’ll probably have to take a public service job just to get rid of it,” she said. A public service job would let her work a certain number of years and then pay off the debt, she said.

 

“I’m nervous about that. It’s something I think about a lot,” she said. “I’m trying to make moves, I want to buy a home, you know, my next career, a lot of things come into play with that,” she said.

 

Edmondson said she is looking at all of the presidential candidates. She listens and watches news programs regularly, and she and her friends also watch candidate debates.

 

“I’m listening to everybody,” she said. “I’m observing and trying to do research. ... I’m not leaning towards anyone in particular right now.”

 

Politicians need to address issues important to her generation as well as older people, among them minimum wage, child care, student loan debt and health care, she said.

 

While she says she has not chosen a favorite candidate, Edmondson said she is listening more to Bernie Sanders.

 

“As I was looking at what his campaign is all about, he’s trying to raise minimum wage to where people are kind of going above that poverty line,” she said.

 

She noted that her grandmother worked almost 40 years with delivery service company UPS and then had her pension cut in half after she retired.

 

“That’s a big issue,” Edmondson said. “That’s crazy, because she had been used to living off a certain income and now they’re going to cut it in half. ... How can they do that if you already gave them all the years?”

 

 

It was 2003 when George Theodore noticed the economy slipping.

 

He remembers one client, a jet-truck racer who bought customized memorabilia from Theodore’s Akron print shop, Yellow Jacket T-Shirts. The driver, who traveled the country, talked of customers who were buying T-shirts with $10s and $20s instead of the usual $50s and $100s.

 

Theodore saw it too. Reliable clients began asking for pricing before placing orders. By 2005, sales fell by half.

 

It’s his ability to struggle from the brink of ruin and frustration with government that pushes him toward Donald Trump.

 

Theodore, now 70, opened shop in 1981 and built a clientele of churches, schools and community organizations. He controlled costs by finding deals on ink and shirts. During the summer, he worked from 6 a.m. to midnight, mentally docking himself $50 for every hour he lunched.

 

He worked alone. No labor costs, minimal overhead. He took less profitable jobs knowing he could clear the expenses.

 

He could tell something was wrong in the mid-2000s as the area failed to fully recover from the 2001 recession. Then in 2007 — a year before the economy collapsed — he got sick, diagnosed with cancer of the appendix. His insurance covered $55,000 for the surgery. But the chemotherapy, to his surprise, cost $25,000, which he paid out of pocket.

 

A part-time worker hired to help while he was in treatment was laid off. His brother, Ted, kept the mortgage current on his suburban home. The toughest handout, though, came from government.

 

“To be honest with you, I really didn’t want the help,” Theodore said, though he can’t imagine where he would be without the $200,000 in donations and government assistance, much for food.

 

At 70, Theodore doesn’t plan on retiring anytime soon. His dad lived to be 101. His brother, 80, retired after 54 years as an electrician.

 

Theodore runs from an ever-ringing cordless phone to a customer behind a counter. Receipts and profits are slightly above their 2002 peak. But the road to recovery carried tough decisions.

 

That’s all he wants in a leader. He knows his business, from the traffic pattern outside his store to the taxes he pays, may not be directly impacted by the next president.

 

But with trade deficits and illegal immigrants, who he said get treated better than the American unemployed, the choice rests on who can negotiate a stronger deal for the working middle class.

 

“Our economy has never been anything more than a big company,” Theodore said. Cut corners. Look for deals. Take advantage of opportunities. Trade wisely.

 

He doesn’t condone everything Trump says. But on locking up the border and shoring up the national budget, there’s no one he trusts more.

 

“He’s going to run it like a business. And I think he’s going to eliminate a good portion of the national debt,” he said as the phone rang, again.

 

 

Rod Hower lives comfortably in Green, one of the few prospering communities in Summit County. A senior project engineer at Ametek, Hower designs brushless motors for blower fans and city buses at the international company’s branch operation overlooking downtown Kent.

 

Business is good.

 

It’s the rest of the country, starting with his three adult children, that concerns him.

 

His oldest daughter, 28, just bought a house in suburban Wadsworth with her husband. She manages a string of Starbucks coffee shops around the University of Akron, where she received degrees in early childhood development and elementary education.

 

“She actually makes more money doing that than as a teacher. But with two degrees, she racked up a lot of student loans,” Hower said.

 

Then there’s his middle child, a 21-year-old daughter with a speech pathology degree. She’s taking on a Ph.D, has a 4.0 GPA and a near-full ride scholarship. So there’s no need to worry there.

 

But then there’s his youngest. At 18, he entered the University of Toledo as a sophomore studying nuclear engineering and in the first year accumulated $18,000 debt. The bill gave him reason to reconsider his life. He decided, instead, to join the Navy so Uncle Sam, not mom and dad, get the next bill.

 

“The thought of having that student loan debt is one of the things that pushed him into the Navy,” Hower said.

 

“Not just for my kids, but I see other people, middle-class people, who make less money than me, and I think about the problems they have getting their kids through school, especially if they don’t have a scholarship,” he said.

 

Hower, 50, graduated from UA in 1989, when a semester cost about $1,600. He worked throughout college, received a $500 scholarship and had no trouble paying off his debt in a year or two. Jobs were plentiful and pay was good.

 

“It was March of my last year that I was actually offered a job,” he said. “I didn’t graduate until August.”

 

Today’s economy — with inflation and the cost of tuition outpacing wages — is less forgiving.

 

“So I see all these kids without the resources to pay for college racking up this huge amount of debt,” Hower said. “So as soon as they get their degree, if they can get a job then basically all their money is going to pay off that student loan debt. So where’s the money for a mortgage, for a car, for other things that are supposed to be stimulating the economy?”

 

Adjusted for inflation, he made more in his job the year his oldest daughter was born than he does now. Yet, the candidates talk more about immigration, terrorism and Muslims, he said.

 

“It seems like the media focuses on the sound bites, the sensational stories. And they give so much airtime to [Donald] Trump, because he gets the ratings up. That’s basically it. Where’s the substance to the conversation that really affects the middle class?” Hower asked.

 

Hower donated less than $100 to Bernie Sanders’ campaign, the first time he’s ever given to a politician. He likes Sanders laser focus on the middle class, including his push for a single-payer health care system.

 

“Republicans talk about repealing Obamacare but offer no solutions,” he said. “Or at least I’m not hearing it. It’s like you’re strongly opposed to this, but what’s your alternative? And from Hillary Clinton’s standpoint, she pretty much says there’s no way in hell you’re going to get a single-payer system.”

 

 

Janece Schaffer-Burbank is working a couple of part-time jobs as she finishes up her bachelor’s degree at Kent State University.

 

The 23-year-old, who got married in January, expects to graduate this May with a degree that could lead to a career in health administration.

 

Schaffer-Burbank sees first-hand some of the major political and economic issues of the day.

 

One part-time job is in career services at Kent State, helping students and alumni on job-related issues.

 

Another is at the International Institute in Akron, where she has been working since January primarily in refugee resettlement.

 

“I teach a job-skills class on Thursdays,” she said. She brings in speakers from the community, helping the class learn interview and resume skills and such things as how to better present themselves to employers.

 

Ohio is “prospering slightly,” Schaffer-Burbank said. “I think some industries are doing well. Other industries are not doing well at all. I think, based on my experience with students at Kent State and my own, I think there’s a lot of part-time possibilities for students and others.”

 

She said she will graduate with student loan debt.

 

“I don’t have a huge debt,” she said. “But that’s because I’ve worked three jobs most of the time while I’ve been in college to cover my living expenses. But most people don’t do that. It also harms the ability of a student to succeed academically, I think, doing those part-time jobs.”

 

“I worry about loans and I worry about obtaining a full-time job to help me cover those,” she said.

 

She knows people who take multiple part-time jobs to make ends meet.

 

“It’s hard to find full-time work,” she said. “I find a lot of underemployment from people.”

 

All of that affects how she thinks about the election.

 

“But I don’t find it as one of the top issues that is being addressed,” she said. “Maybe John Kasich, because he’s governor here, he’s worried about it.”

 

She said she wished the candidates talked more about the economy, employment and education.

 

National security needs to be more of a campaign issue, she said.

 

“When I say national security, I don’t mean immigration. I work with legal immigrants,” she said. Instead, she means how the nation needs to deal with such things as ISIS, she said.

 

Schaffer-Burbank also said gun control needs to be talked about more because of the daily shootings.

 

“I might have some mixture of political parties in me,” she said. “But I identify more with a lower amount of federal intervention in state government, so that’s why I identify as a Republican.”

 

When it comes to picking a presidential candidate who best speaks best to her issues, “Can I say none?” she said.

 

Schaffer-Burbank has researched candidates, including going to their web sites and reading biographies. She also watches news programs regularly.

 

“If I were to pick one, I would say of the top people who have been competitive, I would say [Marco] Rubio and then I would say [Ben] Carson,” Schaffer-Burbank said.

 

“I don’t believe in Trump at all.”

 

“I’m more on the Kasich and [Ben] Carson side of things, even though they’re losing,” she said. “Might as well be on the losing team that has some moral grounds rather than others that don’t.”

 

 

It was James Kroeger’s last job to retrain the upper echelon of Summit County’s jobless.

 

In the decade before he retired last year, Kroeger coached hundreds of managers — mostly white men — who lost their jobs as corporations lightened their payrolls with younger, lower-paid employees.

 

Most of the displaced hadn’t interviewed for decades. Those in sales or marketing had the charisma to bounce back. Some in manufacturing lacked credentials.

 

Engineering and information technology bosses knew the lingo but lacked the social and networking skills.

 

In the training program he co-founded at the Summit County Department Job and Family Services, Kroeger taught them to value and market themselves after being secure in who they were and what they did for most their lives.

 

“For a lot of them having worked for the same company for decades, that was their identity. And it was a shock then, to be on their own. Not having a place to go each day. I had people about to lose their homes. People who had divorces. I had one suicide in 10 years,” said Kroeger.

 

The training sessions sometimes turned into support groups. Familiar faces relapsed, returning after losing a second job.

 

What Kroeger witnessed as mid-level management downsized in Northeast Ohio, and in his 25 years as head of economic and business development at the Akron and Cleveland chambers of commerce, left a profound impact on his view of corporate America and politics.

 

Kroeger is an Evangelical Christian supporting Hillary Clinton, though he doesn’t like that the former Secretary of State has collected made millions speaking to Wall Street banks or that the Clintons walked out of the White House with more than $100,000 in furniture, cutlery and other trappings, much of it later paid back or returned.

 

Throughout his career, Kroeger has balanced public policy and private enterprise. He considers himself politically left of center but only because the nation has shifted to the right socially.

 

“What confounds me is people don’t vote to their economic self interests. Republicans have been very skilled in using these social-wedge issues to get people to vote contrary to their economic well-being,” said Kroeger.

 

For several reasons, he ranks the economy high on his list of presidential election priorities.

 

“One is just the slow recovery we had from the last recession. There are structural issues in the economy that weren’t there 15 or 20 years ago. You’ve got a middle class that is stressed. We’ve got real wages that haven’t gone up. And you’ve got corporate behavior that has changed quite a bit in my lifetime,” said Kroeger, 66.

 

He’s concerned about widening income inequality, driven by what he sees as a paradigm shift in the way American businesses operate. Managers have devalued employees, which can be eliminated to appease stockholders, he said.

 

The spread between corporation’s lowest and highest paid personnel, maybe a factor of 20 in his father’s day, is now at 200.

 

“So you’ve got this disconnect between the senior people and the people who are doing the daily work. And it’s an attitude that says that everything is driven by the bottom line. The workforce is a fungible asset,” Kroeger said.

 

Seated in his modest one-story brick home in Fairlawn, Kroeger has some sage, albeit it dreary, advice for the future workers. Start saving, know the job you want and don’t expect a promotion when you get it or the right to keep it.

 

“… There is no longer an employment contract.”

 

Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug. Jim Mackinnon can be reached at 330-996-3544 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow him @JimMackinnonABJ on Twitter or  on Facebook www.facebook.com/JimMackinnonABJ. His stories can be found at www.ohio.com/writers/jim-mackinnon.