An Apology to....well, everyone

Dear wise sages of LCO,

I was wrong and you’ve been right all along. I am writing today’s blog to express my sincerest apologies for my behavior over the years in regards to how I’ve conducted my business/newspaper affairs. If I had to write a letter to everyone I owe an apology to, I would be writing a daily letter for the next…well, let’s just say it would be a very long time.

This is to all the people I’ve hurt. I’m sorry you’ve had the misprivilege of meeting me because I’ve been nothing less than a major disappointment.

I’m sorry to my former employees. Many of you I have disrespected, treated unfairly, failed to recognize the awesome work you’ve done, but most importantly, there are some of you that I owe money to and I realize how desperate hard times can be and when shortchanged by your employer, it can make life difficult.

I’m sorry to my former business associates and creditors whom I have defaulted, failed to meet my obligations and failed to honor my end of agreements. This includes the tribal governing board members who signed a contract with me four years ago expecting me to honor a monthly newspaper for the tribe. I let you down and for that, I am ashamed.

I’m sorry to any advertisers over the years who I failed to honor an agreement.

I’m sorry to my relatives for expecting you to be there for me when I wasn’t there for any of you.

I’m sorry to my mother, Florence Ford, for how poor of a son I was. No matter how much love, guidance and direction you tried to show me, I returned nothing but heartache and shame.

I’m sorry to my wife and children for the reckless decisions I made and where those decisions ultimately brought us to, so much so, that I failed to put a roof over your heads and provide for you as a man should. For that, there is no words can describe my shame.

On reflection, I realize that I was wrong to blame others for my mistakes. My behavior was totally inappropriate, inexcusable and disrespectful. I can only imagine the hurt I have caused to many of you and the damage that it has done to your trust in me.  I would appreciate the opportunity to put right my wrongs and prove to you that I have learned from my mistakes. From this day forward, I will work to regain your trust, and though I understand some damages can’t be undone, I hope you’ll accept my apology. I promise I won’t make these mistakes again. I’ve learned from them.

Some will suggest that I’m only writing this letter because I’m running for tribal council. Yes, it’s true that my opponents will soon be throwing everything they can at me so I’m saving them the trouble by sharing it with you today though, it’s not the only reason this letter is being written. It’s a letter that’s been long overdue because these wrongs I’ve committed have been a burden on my soul for far too long. You deserve the truth about me and you deserve an apology.

No matter how much apologizing I do, many of you still have questions about some of the accusations against me so I’d like to address them here. Also, through my new website votejoemorey.wix.com/votejoe, on the Contact Joe page, you can ask me anything through the message form. If you have any further questions after this blog, please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask me about it.

Before I address my faults, I’d like to talk a little about me and my upbringing. I was raised by my grandmother, Florence Ford, who adopted me from her daughter Mary Anne, who was just a teenager when I was born. Florence raised me as her own, so I called her “mom.” I was born in Chicago and we lived in the Zion/Waukegan, IL area until I was 10 years old, at which time we moved to the Rez, living in Whitefish. I went to Stone Lake and Hayward schools graduating in 1990. The first two years out of high school I attended classes at the LCO Ojibwe Community College.

In 1993 I moved to Minneapolis where I met my future wife, Jill. We moved back to LCO in 1995, at which time I began working on writing some news articles for LCO, doing my own thing, but learning the paper business through Mic Isham who was doing the LCO Journal at the time. It was a long grueling process back then of cutting and pasting the printed copies onto grid sheets. Nowadays, it’s all digital, no printing or cutting.

Jill and I married in 1998. We spent the next ten years trying to have a child, and eventually asked Pastor Marvin at the LCO Assembly of God to bless us to have a child. He anointed Jill in the summer of 2008 and several months later, we believe that blessing led us to Cindy Rice at the Second Street Market who recommended Jill drink Dong Qua tea, a woman’s hormonal tea. Sure enough, within a few months, and six months after Marvin’s blessing, Jill was pregnant. I’m sure many of you remember the editorial I wrote in the Ojibwe Times about it when my first child was born.

Well, that first child born in 2009 has led to three more. Yes, that’s right. We now have four children in just six years. I wouldn’t have it any other way. They are all awesome and it’s a blast watching all the changes in kids as they grow.

Through the years I’ve had some successes but I’ve also had failures when it comes to business. The Ojibwe Times I ran from 2008 until 2012 was very successful and I made a great living doing it, but my reckless and risk-taking ways caused me to make a large investment in a nationwide social media site for Indian Country in 2011, and as that business sank, it brought down the Ojibwe Times as well, which led me to the contract with the tribe I did in order to save the Times. That story coming up soon, but it was also during the Ojibwe Times years that I tried to start a new paper in Columbus, Wis that failed too and is another story coming up. If I hadn’t tried to venture out and expand my business during that time, the Ojibwe Times would still be operating today. Those were mistakes I had to learn from, but unfortunately, at the cost of a great newspaper, the Ojibwe Times, that served our Native communities throughout northern Wisconsin.

Over the past 20 years, I’ve poured out my thoughts for you all, sharing with you my ideas on what I thought was wrong with some of our tribal governance, but, also sharing ideas for ways to fix things in regards to tribal structure, finances and economic development. It’s no secret where I stand on most of the issues we face today, and over the next couple of months I’ll be writing many more of these blogs so you’ll have a clear understanding of where I stand on the issues I haven’t already discussed.

One of my biggest disappointments over the 20 years was when I defaulted on the contract that our tribal governing board did with me in 2011. There were many accusations thrown around at the time that I received the contract as a payoff, but that simply wasn’t true. It was an honest deal between me and the tribe that made perfect business sense and I’ll explain that in a bit, but I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let me explain the two bad investments I made prior to this deal that began the downward spiral of the Ojibwe Times.

In 2009 I tried to start up a newspaper in a small community near Madison that fed off the daily papers in the area.  I spent $5,000 on this venture of my own money and also sold $3,000 worth of subscriptions to 72 different people. The original plan called for selling those subscriptions and also selling advertisements to the local business while we were going along. Our weekly budget, which included three employees, office rental and printing, was nearly $2,000 per week. We spent a considerable amount of time trying to sell the local businesses on the idea of their own community paper, and despite huge local support from the residents, businesses failed to respond. In those first couple of months we printed six weekly papers but we just couldn’t get the publication off the ground fast enough to sustain it.

I came back broken, but during that time, the Ojibwe Times was still going strong.  Slowly, I rebounded.  In the meantime, some of those 72 folks who had bought subscriptions had the Consumer Protection Agency start a civil suit against me through the DA of the county.  On the day of my court I showed up with the $3,000 in hand and offered to pay the subscribers back but the DA refused to accept it and said it was too late and they were suing me for $32,000.  This was now for court costs and other things that blew my mind.  That extra $29,000 was now supposed to go to the state, not the victims who I owed money for subscriptions.  I even pleaded this with the judge.  If there should be any fines or extra money paid, it should have gone to them, not the state.  In the end, the judge awarded the amount to the state for $16,000, he cut it in half.  I felt terrible about owing money to the people of the community because it was them that supported the idea in the first place, but upon advice from my attorney, rather than pay $16,000 that I simply didn’t have, I filed bankruptcy. I made a public apology in the community and that was it.

I also had another lawsuit against me at the time, and this played into the decision to file bankruptcy. The second lawsuit came from the Breeze Lounge and Night Club, a bar that I ran for a little over a year.  On May 1, 2007, I gave up running the bar and leased it out to a young couple.  Sometime in May, while the liquor license was still in our name, the couple showed a fight to 25 people on pay-per-view through their home cable and didn’t pay the licensing fee for a public showing.  The lawsuit came two years later asking for $111,000 for showing the fight to 25 people. 

I went down to Madison in federal court, with Judge Barbara Crabb, and I asked for it to be dropped.  I showed her my copy of the lease stating that we weren’t in the bar anymore, but the liquor license didn’t change over till June 30, so she said I couldn’t win for that reason.  She said get a lawyer to help me reduce the fine. I’m sorry but I didn’t agree with this lawsuit at all, a large corporation asking for $111,000 from a small business operation that was our bar for showing a boxing match to 25 people. It didn’t make sense, but such is the way of the world, I guess.

Both lawsuits were ridiculous any way you slice it.  The state should have taken my money and let me pay those people back rather than going for $32,000.  Even the police and district attorney investigated whether I had done anything criminal and they both said no.  I didn’t commit fraud because I did put out newspapers for a two month period and tried to start a business in their community.  It was a business failure and I had every intention of paying the subscribers back, but the DA refused to accept it once they proceeded with the larger lawsuit.

Two years later I invested $12,000 into a social media site for Indian Country called Rezloop. My mistake with this venture was that at the time, I didn’t know diddly about social media. Since then I’ve learned my fair share, even setting up a social media campaign for a company, but back in 2011, nope, not much. For one, I didn’t have to spend so much on marketing when I could have taken advantage of so many free marketing options that were available. Well, anyways, they were my mistakes and I have to own them. The point is, once I lost that money and debt began to build, all of a sudden, I couldn’t pay my employees of the Ojibwe Times. I had four employees at the time. As I began to struggle, the wiser of my household, the wife, told me to lay them off but I kept the employees working and decided to look for a way to save them. At the time I had been doing a successful monthly newspaper for Lac du Flambeau in addition to the Ojibwe Times, so I decided to present a proposal to LCO to do the same thing and they approved to do one issue to see it. This was six months before the election, so after council saw the one print they said come back after the election.

The idea at the time was to wait till after the election and present it again, which is what I did.  So, the council members that were already on council, which included Don Carley, Little Guy, Bill Morrow and Mic, were well aware of the intentions of this new paper.  Contrary to what some would have you believe, that this contract to do the paper was some sort of political award to me, it never was.  The past council and its new members thought this would be a good idea.  Communication with their membership via a monthly newspaper mailed out to all members. 

The proposed paper, the Lac Courte Oreilles Today, was separate from the Ojibwe Times.  The tribe could use this paper, the LCO Today, to communicate directly with the membership.  Such things as reports from council members and tribal council minutes would be printed in it.  Things that the council wanted to get out to membership that otherwise wouldn’t be printed in the Ojibwe Times.  Also, the Today would be mailed out to membership.

Our contract was for $15,000 over six months.  I give the tribe a monthly publication for six months at a cost of $2,500 per month and then an additional $900 a month for the mailing to off-reservation addresses.  Over the course of a year, this cost to the tribe would be $40,800, which includes all expenses from printing to mailing.  You couldn’t hire a Communications Director/Public Relations Director for less than that.  As part of the contract, I would write articles, make regular contacts with council members for their reports, contact program directors for news, take photos, layout the paper, see that it gets printed, delivered and mailed.  Also, I would put updates on the tribal website and keep it fresh seeing that the site was inactive for nearly five years.

Let me explain this $40,800 cost over a year once again, even though our contract was only for six months. If you break this down to the total adult membership who would have received that paper, it’s less than $10 per member over a year.  That’s less than $10 per member for your tribal governing board to communicate with you on a regular basis throughout the year.  Once again, you couldn’t hire a professional marketing or public relations agent to do this for our tribe for less than that, and that’s only the salary of this person and doesn’t include the cost of mailing and printing and other expenses such as mileage that you’d pay a salaried employee.  The tribe didn’t have to pay me for that extra expense. The contract made good business sense for the tribe.

In the end, I received the $15,000 payment from the tribe and $10,000 of that was used immediately to pay off debts to my printer, employees and other expenses incurred over the winter as I attempted to keep the Ojibwe Times going. Once I built up the debt it was a downward spiral and it was too late. Within three months I laid off the workers and closed up the paper. In that time, I did print an issue of the LCO Today, bringing my debt to the tribe down to $12,000. Later in the year, the tribe made another effort to help me by extending me another $3,000 to keep the Ojibwe Times going, but I still failed them, my community and myself.

At this time my debt to the tribe remains $15,000 and there isn’t a day goes by that I don’t wish I could somehow pay that back, but I’ve been unable too. I haven’t worked except to sell tee shirts in the summer time, never getting ahead enough to start paying it back and then suffering through a long cold winter unemployed, blackballed by my own tribe. This is still no excuse not to honor my debts, but as soon as I’m able to, I will. I promise that when elected, I’ll give my salary back to the tribe until that debt is satisfied.

This letter has been a long one, so I’m going to try to wind it down now, but these are things I had to get off my chest. There are a couple of other rumors that are going around that I’d like to address before signing off.

First, there isn’t any member of the tribal council who has ever given me any money for any type of services for the tribe or any individuals. I’ve recently heard that people are attempting to say that I was paid by someone on council to write my book. This is simply not true. I wrote my book early last year and then self-published through an Amazon subsidiary, meaning it cost me nothing to publish and I get paid for every book that sells. Amazon doesn’t print a bunch of books, they only print a book on demand as it is ordered. So, they make a much larger percentage of the book, but I had to put up no investment.

Another sad accusation is about my family and I when we were housed in the hotel last spring. As I said earlier in this blog that ever since my paper, the Ojibwe Times, went downhill, I’ve continued on a downward spiral, dragging my family through hell. I’ve done some work here and there, but never fully recovering. We tried to go to Florida last winter and sell tee shirts, but had no idea the type of market we were facing…in Florida, tee shirts sales at markets are sold at wholesale prices, which we simply couldn’t do. It bankrupted us and we came back home broken…again. For three months we were homeless staying at Jill’s mothers and occasionally, at the hotel. In the beginning, the tribal council, by consensus of five members, Norma, Little Guy, Gordon, Larry and Donny, comp’d our room and this was only on weeknights when the hotel room would have been empty regardless. We never stayed on weekends, and they only comp’d us for two weeks. Then we went back to her mothers. We stayed again for a couple of weeks at the hotel but this time we paid the reduced rate of $35 per night which was the special offered to the community anyways for anyone who stayed two nights. Most of those three months we stayed at Jill’s mothers, but we couldn’t stay there for long either. By the grace of God, we got help from Sawyer County Housing and found a place on May 1.

This was the most difficult and shameful time in my life, to have let my family down. I don’t wish homelessness on anyone and yet there are so many of our people who live with this struggle every day. There are so many of us on the Rez who  do nothing but tear each other down, failing to realize there are real issues we need to address, and this is one of them. We should never leave one of our own out in the cold. We should never turn our backs on our people when they are at their lowest points. You need to always remember that anyone of us could be just one mistake, or one paycheck away from this time of hardship. Just think of all the people who have lost work over this last year. Thankfully, many have found other work, but think about those who haven’t. You never see it coming…I know I didn’t.

At any rate, people have attacked me or council, saying that they housed me at the casino as if it were unfair. Our council does this for people all the time, as they should when a room would be otherwise empty, so what made my family any different that we should have been kicked out into the 20 below temperatures. No matter my disagreements with our tribal council, at least they have compassion, and refused to let us be out in the cold when we had no place to go.

One thing I can say for certain is that through these past few years I’ve learned a lot and I’ve grown up a lot. Being homeless has humbled me. I have children now and I take less risks. I’ve learned to evaluate situations and think things through. Despite how horrible an experience it was, I look at the bright side….I’ve been fortunate enough to see all sides of life…living with a fairly large income and living without one, being homeless as an end result. I never put any consideration into people’s situations in life prior to my own experiences and I strongly believe it’s made me a better person.

Sincerely, Joe Morey