News of the week in Miami by gimleteye

(Group portrait of kitchen staff at the Royal Palm Hotel in Miami, 1941, courtesy of the Florida State Library Archive)

Monday: Nominal chair of the Miami-Dade County Commission, Bruno Barreiro, skirts the rule barring any commissioner from leading the same committee for more than two consecutive terms. Bruno gives the Government Operations and Environment Committee to the woman who made him: de facto chair or the ruling majority, Natacha Seijas. The old and new committees both cover functions key to real estate developers: zoning, land use, water and sewer, solid waste, environmental resources, buildings and code compliance. The new version also oversees elections.

Tuesday

Ice Capades: After spending over $1 million to keep $90,000 worth of ice refrigerated beyond hurricane season, the State of Florida decides to let the 9 million pounds melt.

Wednesday

YMCA: Your Cash Money Assocation. The alternative weekly Miami New Times reports de facto chair of the County Commission, Natacha Seijas, is paid a full-time salary for a no-show job at the YMCA, an organization she votes to award funding.

Mirabilis dictu, the same big production home builders who paid to protect Seijas’ from recall in their political Bethlehem—Hialeah-are also huge contributors to the YMCA.

Charity does begin at home: we hope some of the laundered Christian money gets to the kids.

Thursday

Miami's blue chip crowd supports gutter politics. The fraudulent political action committee supporting the County Commission against the strong mayor proposal finally reports to the Miami-Dade Division of Elections.

The PAC’s ugly mailers that fanned the flames of racial discord with outright lies were funded by wealthy production home builders, unions, lobbyists hiding behind shell corporations, and the Miami law firm Greenberg Traurig, once umbrella for Jack Abramoff and still managed by Cesar Alvarez, who is also board chair of the Knight Foundation.

Friday

Pravda, to the Bush White House: on the day that the latest news of global climate change shocks the world, the communications arm of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) offers $10,000 and expenses to anyone who can disprove it.

Saturday

New York Times today reports in the final quarter of 2006, “final sales to domestic purchasers” rose at an annual rate of only 2.5 percent, before adjusting for inflation, “less than a third of the growth rate early last year” and “the slowest rate of growth since early 2002, when the economy was emerging from the 2001 recession.”

That’s not what the mainstream media reported on the day President Bush appeared on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The market cheered Bush and the press note that the economy grew at an annual 3.5 percent rate in the last quarter of 2006.

Now that we know the latest quarter was the first time since 1991 that home building declined in three consecutive quarters, we can’t wait to see what happens in the fourth quarter.

Sunday morning

Superbowl morning in Miami! Big Coal is shaking off hangovers at the Ritz on Key Biscayne. The planet is warming. Big Everything Else is lined up wing tip-to-wing tip at every airfield within driving distance of Joe’s Stone Crab.

Aviation tankers are lined stem to stern to fuel private jets for the passage homeward bound. An army of caterers will soon be putting on board platters of finger food, safely wrapped in Saran until wheels up. Mission accomplished.