On Values, by gimleteye

The Miami Herald is filled with interesting stories today, pointing readers like a Geiger counter to underlying values that define our the economic and political life of our city, county and state.

There’s the chief of the Carniverous Center for the Performing Arts, and a new contract bringing his compensation into the stratosphere, more than $350K.

There’s the fraudulent developer of Poinciana Biotech Park, caught reimbursing his employees for campaign contributions to County Commissioner Dorin Rolle.

There’s the developer of Platinum, the first condominium brought to completion after the market turned sour, who couldn’t auction off units because prospective buyers wouldn’t even meet his preconstruction prices.

What these three stories have in common is the matter of values, or, mis-placed values.

The Herald—on the values that guide our economic and political elite—is either a cheerleader for growth at any cost or largely silent, except for the placement in the editorial page of oppositional points of view.

But when it comes to Miami?

A $500 million performing arts center with no parking, a business plan based on cooked numbers, adjacent to valuable property belonging to the city’s only daily newspaper, never received an analysis on the overarching question: who is the audience and how is it served by the Carniverous Performing Arts Center and its highly compensated executives?

Build it, and they will come—seems to be the prevailing attitude—for everything, including baseball and basketball stadiums. For the fraudulent Biotech Park to serve poor residents of Liberty City, too.

Developer Stackhouse isn’t the first developer to sweet talk his way through somnambulant zoning and permitting councils, including city and county commissions: in fact, local government is serves them because they do, as Stackhouse was caught doing, bundle campaign contributions. Legally, and, illegally.

Most of them are not dumb enough to get caught asking their employees “how many check books” they have.

But, again, The Miami Herald might have noted, in the context of values, how the most enthusiastic supporters of Dorin Rolle, at his 2006 victory party, were County Commissioners Natacha Seijas, Joe Martinez, and Pepe Diaz—who all count on Rolle’s support for zoning changes in farmland, a “gimme” vote that serves their campaign donor base made up of suburban sprawl developers who couldn’t care less about poor people in Liberty City unless, somehow, there's a dollar to be made there.

(It is interesting to watch how the Charter Review process for Miami-Dade seems to revolve around preserving this narrow political allegiance.)

The same values lead to abandoning caution in zoning matters in the city of Miami, giving the store away to one condo developer, like Platinum, after another who shared the crack cocaine of easy credit, manufactured by Wall Street for investors who failed to discern value where next to none existed.

By failing to provide close analyses of fraudulent claims to value, the mainstream media folds itself into the meringue of entertainment that passes for news.

Don’t misunderstand the point: Herald reporters do their jobs—it’s executives and editors who fail to take an editorial stand.

(A good example is how the Tampa Tribune beat out The Miami Herald on drawing political connections surrounding the promotion of the CSX rail expansion—one spur of which is now under consideration by local decision makers in Miami-Dade County, where the political connections are equally apparent.)

This leads me to the top story of the day in The Miami Herald: how Republican leaders refuse to take responsibility for the hit campaign they launched against the mayor of Weston who successfully fought the tax “reform” ballot proposal that a state judge just ruled invalid, for confusing language.

Property tax reform, of course, was the leading goal of the past legislative session: it dominated the news day after day. Now, like the building boom that legislatures were urged to reignite, it is in cinders.

It is no surprise that the attack campaign was micromanaged apparently from Miami, by allies of Hialeah Republican, Ralph Arza. The former legislator may have sought to redeem his furious fall from grace when the hate campaign he launched against African American, Miami Dade school superintendent Rudy Crew was revealed.

The tax reform proposal, thrown out by a state judge, was crafted by Florida’s builders, developers and their lobbyists, to jump start housing markets that are tanking just like Miami’s condominiums.

The mainstream media should explain with careful analyses what political parties that appeal to “values voters” really value.