Oh what a parade, by gimleteye

There was Joe Arriola and Dorrin Rolle in the Miami Herald, a nice photo as far as it goes, in a story about the refusal--finally--of the Miami Dade School Board to fund JESCA, an on-going embarrassment to our community (that eyeonmiami has often commented on...) and in particular to African American leaders.

That the story did not also include specific reference to the enormous salary that Dorrin Rolle, a county commissioner, has been drawing from the non-profit with a phantom mission and shambles of a budget-- raises big questions.

What point is the Herald trying to make by omitting in this story, the relevant detail about the JESCA fiasco?

Or, of Arriola, a veritable bull in the china shop-- whose antagonism to the late Arthur Teele was very well-known--, now a messenger of healing? There is something off-kilter.

The much better story is not a story at all: in the letters section Max Rameau, the African American community leader, takes Barbara Jordan, another county commission, to task for wasting time with a proposal to criminalize (without penalties!) the "N" word.

Maybe Arriola can bring fiscal transparency to JESCA. Maybe he is the guy who can find out exactly what is going on, there. But why isn't Rameau and his sound logic on the front page?

We're not just talking about the "N" word. Where is the progressive leadership in the African American community?

African American leaders like Max Rameau, or, those of the Miami Workers Center, or, those emerging from the Dade Human Services Coalition should be supported full-tilt by the Miami Herald.

These voices are struggling to be heard, but they are not supported by a status quo economic elite who counts on their votes for zoning changes in distant farmland.

Behind these omissions has to be some kind of editorial vision: Is the assumption by our only daily newspaper that what we have for leadership in our disadvantaged communities all that we will ever get, and so, don't rock the boat?

I suppose that there are blog readers who wonder why it seems eyeonmiami is so filled with complaint. I get tired, too. I want to just go golfing, or fishing, or to the beach, but then I read stories like this one from the Detroit Free Press...



Let's use Florida as a bad example

May 17, 2007

BY ERIC SHARP

FREE PRESS OUTDOORS WRITER

While we've created some ecological messes in Michigan, we can take comfort that at least we're not in Florida. That state is in far deeper environmental trouble, the result of short-sighted and corrupt political leaders turning blind eyes to impending threats for decades while truckling to developers.

I got to musing about that after reading that fish biologists in Wisconsin were stunned last week to find a lethal new disease not in Lake Michigan, where it was expected to appear next, but in two inland lakes 50 miles up the Fox River.

Like Florida, Michigan has an incredible resource in its waters, and like Florida, Michigan has treated its waters shamefully. The appearance of viral hemorrhagic septicemia in the Great Lakes and now inland lakes should be a warning: To avoid an environmental disaster on the scale that we see in Florida, we need to take steps to protect those liquid assets that in the future could be the most valuable thing we own.

When I first worked in south Florida 40 years ago, among the stories I covered for the Associated Press were fires that swept the Everglades. Fire had been part of the ecology for millennia, eliminating invasive species and making nutrients for future growth. Then the region was laced with canals to drain land for farms and development, removing so much water from the ground that the very earth would burn. The scale and duration of the fires increased dramatically.

Even 40 years ago, Florida politicians knew the dangers those problems posed. Brilliant researchers studied them and warned loudly and often about the need to change course. And what has happened since? The powers that be have made things much worse by encouraging more people to move there and drain even more water from the ground.

Exotic plants in the Glades exacerbated the fire danger. The changing flow of fresh water to the coasts is wrecking estuarine areas that are major fish nurseries as well as the offshore coral reefs that are so important to Florida's tourist economy.

And now CNN is broadcasting video of fires that are compounded by the worst drought in memory. South Florida is so dry that parts of Lake Okeechobee, where I once caught bass in four feet of water, are islands four feet above the surface. Coastal cities will be forced to shut some wells from which they draw their water because the lowered fresh-water table has resulted in salt water intruding into the aquifers.

In the early '70s I wrote about Claude Kirk, a buffoon elected Florida's governor by a fluke, celebrating the fact that the state population had reached 3.5 million. Today, Florida's legal population is over 18 million. No one is sure how many illegal immigrants are there, but it has to be a couple of million, and on any given day there are a quarter-million tourists, as well.

Michigan, by contrast, has about 10 million people who live in roughly the same 57,000 square miles as the people of Florida.

The demands that exploding growth have made on Florida's environment are unsustainable, yet the state continues to encourage people to move in.

Some counties imposed fees on new construction to ameliorate the demands those homeowners make on infrastructure like roads and water. But because south Florida is already far overdeveloped, all that does is ensure that when the real crunch comes, it will be even more catastrophic.

We in Michigan have a chance to learn from Florida's hopelessly bad example. VHS is only a symptom of the real problem -- a continuing threat to the Great Lakes from pollutants and exotic species.

So far, our political leaders have been as clueless and incompetent as those in Florida. The few steps they have taken have been window dressing, giving the appearance of doing something while achieving little.

A solution like demanding ineffective ballast water treatment for ocean-going ships entering the Great Lakes doesn't fix the problem but only postpones the inevitable.

What we need is a crusade to save the lakes, and the impetus for it should come from private interest groups and the business sector. The attention of the governor and legislature is focused on immediate fiscal problems, but if we can get a "Save the Lakes" parade moving, it won't take long for the politicians to run to the front and pretend that they are leading.

Contact ERIC SHARP at 313-222-2511 or esharp@freepress.com.

Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.