Friendly fire from the Miami Herald by gimleteye

It is a jittery day in the Miami Herald. No mention of President Bush’s appearance in Miami today or the planned protest during his commencement address at Miami-Dade Community College.

On the left column of the OPED page, the Herald printed excerpts from Kevin Tillman’s testimony to the Congressional inquiry into the 2004 death of his brother Pat Tillman.

Herald editors can make a case that no words of their own are more compelling for the public than the family’s, on a day the president appears in Miami.

The Bush White House attributed Tillman's death to enemies for political purposes when it knew the young man had been killed by friendly fire ("Deliberate deceit in Pat Tillman's death").

The case can be made too, that friendly fire is an apt metaphor for what the mainstream media inflicted on the public in the run-up to the war in Iraq. (see “How did the mainstream press get is so wrong?”, Bill Moyers Journal, ).

In Miami we have plenty of local news for which the model of friendly fire fits the response of the mainstream media.

What a newspaper editor chooses NOT to target is also, in this metaphor, a form of friendly fire.

On today’s front page in the Miami Herald, for instance, there is a story about a likely error by county commission chair Bruno Barreiro whose inaction while the Florida legislature fiddled with revenues, may cost the county tens of millions in payments by incorporated municipalities to the county.

When was Barreiro was “selected” to be chair by de facto chair Natacha Seijas, this blog was on the case immediately.

On the other hand, the Miami Herald has chosen NOT to target Barreiro or the dysfunctional majority of the county commission that serves, primarily, the interests of a powerful economic elite representing production homebuilders and their lobbyists and lawyers, like Greenberg Traurig.

We called Barreiro, “Bruno the Dim”. In its feature this week, the New Times called him Bruno the Absent. “He’s not around much and he doesn’t sponsor many bills, but this chairman’s for you.”

That the Herald editorial page has refused to take up the charge against the dysfunctional majority on the county commission; a charge whose purpose would be to educate the public about the mess has been made of local governance, is a form of friendly fire against the public.

The Herald reports Barreiro’s explanation for his inaction is that he is waiting for Natacha Seijas to return from a jaunt to Africa on county business. (What that county business would be, we haven’t heard.) Of that dependency, scarcely a word has appeared in the Herald.

Seijas, of course, represents the dysfunctional majority on the commission. What she stands for, is whatever the builders and developers want—and what the builders and developers want more than anything else these days in Tallahassee is property tax relief.

The builders are out of ideas, with respect to crashing housing markets. They now believe that the best way to revive crashing housing markets is to solve the property tax problem. That assumption should be challenged by the Miami Herald.

If property taxes are the main problem in Florida's home markets, why are markets crashing throughout the United States? Property taxes are not the problem and property tax reform will not cure or revive failing housing markets.

No one likes taxes, especially when our hard-earned income is so badly mis-used. The Tillman family, no doubt, would agree. There is no question, though, that Florida needs tax reform--only not for the stated reasons.

The state economy is paying the price for ill-advised tax cuts during the Bush terms as governor, when property tax revenues from the building boom masked mounting deficits and inequities.

The building boom itself was manufactured by the incestuous relationship between lenders and builders, liar loans, mortgage fraud, and out-of-control land speculation.

The entire controversy over balancing property taxes against sales tax revenue is just fiddling around the edges of a fundamental problem: the absence of a state income tax.

In the Florida legislature and in the Miami Herald, there has been a virtual absence of any discussion about the backlog of infrastructure deficits that have piled up around the state during the building boom—totaling hundreds of billions of dollars.

In Miami-Dade County, those deficits alone total more than $7 billion.

Someone, somewhere, in the state of Florida needs to articulate for people why a state income tax is necessary to redress the massive problems—water infrastructure, affordable housing, wastewater, schools, roadways, environmental harm—that have been allowed to pile up.

(One of the more interesting and related stories in today's paper: a protest demonstration by poor African Americans against the Latin Builders Association luncheon at the failed Parrot Jungle yesterday, where HUD made its case for a take-over of the scandal plagued Miami Dade Housing Agency.)

Simply cutting property taxes and adding to the sales tax is just rearranging deck chairs.

Failing to articule these points, by the mainstream press, it is also a form of friendly fire.