The Miami performing arts center. By Geniusofdespair

What is missing? An LED billboard, of course!

Now you're talking! So much better isn't it? The architects would be thankful for this addition to their design.

The proliferation of illegal LED billboards is a huge problem. Many cities in the United States have banned illegal LED billboards. Four states ban billboards entirely.

Yet, in Miami-Dade County and the City of Miami, illegal LED billboards are increasing.

Gimleteye: "Who could have predicted that the cool Miami Marlins stadium would look out of place so soon?"

I'd nearly missed Linda Robertson's question in a recent Miami Herald column, "Marlins' high hopes crumbling away." (Sept. 22, 2012) But I will answer it, anyway.

On the Marlins Stadium, the Performing Arsht Center, and other pending monuments to vanity, Eye on Miami feels like the smart kid who regularly raises his hand when the teacher asks, who has the answer? and then pays for it later in the school yard. In our case what that means is that the views we express on this blog, where there are no advertisers calling to complain to the publisher about "negative" stories, rarely make it to the Herald.

"Who could have predicted that the cool landmark (ie. baseball stadium) would look out of place so soon?" (Hand goes up.) We did.

I recall a conversation with Tom Fiedler long ago. Tom was the former managing editor of the Miami Herald. A great guy and, for the record, a much more talented writer on politics than newspaper manager. We bumped into each other in a bus on Key Biscayne, from the general parking lot out to the Lipton tennis tournament in the late 1990's. It was so long ago Roger Federer wasn't even famous yet.

Tom was an unabashed enthusiast for a downtown stadium, along with the rest of the Herald brass. The idea had been percolating and Tom had written in support. I told Tom, my view was that Miami had better things to spend its money on. Like reorganizing Bayside Market and the waterfront to create some kind of durable urban fabric, or, wastewater and water projects that were obvious, glaring black holes.

We know how that turned out. Is anyone surprised that Miami Dade has violated the terms of its 1990's era settlement agreement with EPA to clean our waters? (This would be a good place not to raise your hand.)

Now taxpayers owe Billions and are sitting with a cool billion in debt on various monuments that are poorly sited and scarcely deliver on the promise the harmonious civic life that the cement and steel Growth Machine demanded.

On the other hand, there is Miguel Cabrera, bless his soul: .330, 44 homers and 139 RBIs.

Cabrera has been the AL's best hitter since leaving the Marlins in a trade after the 2007 season. Now he is the first Triple Crown winner since Carl Yaztremski. One of the points of view we regularly express at EOM is that what Florida does best is destroy value. But I'm not going to draw that analogy with the Cabrera trade.

I used to have a baseball card of Yaz and somewhere lost it along the way.

The same will be true of these bone-headed commitments of tax payer dollars. Behind them are a thousand controversies, protests, petition writing, and imploring by civic activists. These stories are largely unwritten and unpublished by the Herald and other mainstream media as they happen. The perpetrators (also called 'winners'), elected or lobbyists, will do their time in the public sector, pay bills and mortgages, perhaps for homes and houses they should not have bought and could not reasonably afford, piling hunger into the void. Robertson writes of the dismal scene unfolding in Little Havana, "The City of Miami made ham-handed attempts to recruit upscale restaurants and retail to its parking garage storefronts in a neighborhood where such businesses made no sense. They remain empty." Duh.

"Hindsight is 20-20", says Robertson, perhaps anticipating or nodding our way. But this where we get to raise our hands again: in the big picture, decision makers use the same excuse.

Having a critical view that draws an analogy between the Miami Marlins and our wider, community issues is not a case of backseat driving or Monday morning quarterbacking. It is also not strictly negativity. To know where you are going, you have to understand the past.

Of inconvenient truths, this one stands out. It may also account for the words left unsaid at the recent presidential debate on the economic crisis: "We could have seen it coming." Some of us, did.

The Miami City Ballet: another performing arts organization ripped by the Performing Center for the Arsht ... by gimleteye

The Miami Herald has a lengthy expose on the controversy of the Miami City Ballet without a single mention of the hidden culprit: the vacuum cleaner effect of the Performing Arsht Center.

I didn't start out as a blogger. I came to Miami in the early 1990's, having produced and participated in the local theater culture and was an early supporter of the Miami Light Project; one of our most innovative and important producing arts organizations.

I was an outspoken critic of the Performing Arts Center well before a dime was spent, not that my voice or objectors influenced the 3/4 billion dollar outcome. For people involved in the performing arts in Miami -- as opposed to socialites and politicians who count names on bricks -- , it was clear Miami could not support a gargantuan edifice while performing arts organizations struggled to find their footing at the same time. It was a foregone conclusion that the Performing Arsht Center would depend on billionaires and/or road shows of Cats!, the musical.

I know the current regime at the PAC is trying its best, but the building was a colossal mistake because the donor base in Miami is so limited. In supporting the building, performing arts organizations have been cheated of opportunities to raise funds themselves.

The recession is blamed for limiting donors, including the Miami Symphony etc. But God sake's, man! Don't you think that the smarter minds in Miami could have reckoned the cost of bricks and mortar against the value of building audiences and lending support to arts organizations who were clearly struggling -- well before the recession even took hold!

Because the Herald and Ibarguen, now of the Knight Foundation, were the biggest cheerleaders of the Performing Arsht Center, I hope that the money they control will rescue the Miami City Ballet. It is a significant cultural institution, like many others who can't catch a breath because so much air has been sucked out by that God awful building.

Adrienne Arsht Center: Lang Lang. By Geniusofdespair

The Concert Begins...

Waiting for the concert to start. Wish you were here...lol...not really. Had a good dinner at Barton G, sat at a table next to Sanford Ziff (sporting a toupee) and his new wife, is it Bernice? Lang Lang is ready to go on, have to go. The flounder was good.

First half was excellent (thinking about the Heat Game - half, get it?). Chopin is coming after intermission. Taping the game so no scores please.

The Concert Ends

Heard the score. Bummer.

Lang Lang did two encores in response to curtain calls. I have no idea what I was listening to as I know nothing about classical music. I assume they were both by a an old-time composer, I would guess it was more Chopin...maybe Bach.

The Miami Herald Performing Arsht Center story: mixed reviews at best ... by gimleteye

Long-time EOM readers know how I feel about the Performing Arsht Center. I am no fan. My gripe goes to the beginning of the controversial project: a building for donors and high society instead of an investment in local arts. How would north of $500 million invested in local art programs, including the schools, improved Miami's economy? We'll never know the answer to that question, because the Herald and the Knight Foundation and Miami's elite got its way. (My gripe is also about transit in the entire area, but the plan is for the whole problem to be buried like the tunnel to the Port of Miami, once the insiders figure out how to shift the needed billions to taxpayers.)

The way the center has performed, financially, is predictable and you can't blame a critic for that. To the extent there is good news, it is based on luck (the Lewis family commitment to the Cleveland Orchestra) but mainly on Broadway road shows. For families that can't make it to NYC, that is good news. But road show monoculture doesn't advance the arts in Miami. This isn't cultural snobbery. It is just a fact. Meanwhile, the diversion of investment and attention by big donors away from local performing arts has compounded the difficulties of a nasty economy.

It is impossible to reconcile the rosy picture of local performing arts painted by the Herald, with the monumental struggles of local performing artists. A more critical and informed view -- that doesn't sound incessantly cheerful or accomplished or desperately forward looking (just wait until Genting "improves" the local arts) would serve Miami better than what passes for Herald journalism on the arts. The Lion King and Shrek the Musical are popular draws that help defray the ongoing losses of the Performing Arsht Center but the fact is that local arts groups are so close to cutting to the budgetary bone, they can scarcely afford to be honest in the press about the disappointments.

The companion story to the Performing Arsht Center in the Herald is "Some arts groups struggle, some succeed in South Florida". Its opening line from a newbie: "Ask anyone with cultural cred and they're tell you: the arts have never been hotter in South Florida."

Correction: ask anyone with cultural cred and budget to meet, and they certainly won't contradict the Herald. But it doesn't mean the Herald should just pander to the local Lion Kings and Queens.

Miami: building community one boondoggle at a time ... by gimleteye

Politicians love concrete. In each little bucket of cement there is a honeycomb to dip the tips of their proboscises in: engineering fees, legal contracts, building supplies, security guards. In today's Miami Herald, "As stadium rises, Little Havana neighborhood caught in waiting game", my favorite quote is from Miami Garden's mayor Shirley Gibson of Joe Robbie Stadium that failed to spur investment; "The stadium has not been a draw to businesses to come to this area."

If you had been around, the exact pledges by an earlier generation of politicians and lobbyists accompanied Joe Robbie stadium. At least in nature, when the honeybees dip and suck from flowers, they are part of a regenerative cycle. This mindless pouring of concrete to build monuments to entertainment does what, exactly, other than encumber our future? The Herald, a big supporter of the new stadium seems to suggest, with this article, that maybe it is time for some planning and financing for related economic activity in the area. Oh well, now that we are in the grips of what Paul Krugman calls "The Third Depression", that is not very likely.

The Herald also reports, "For now, Little Havana's vibrance has nothing to do with the stadium -- it's the monthly Viernes Culturales, or Cultural Fridays, on Southwest Eighth Street that keep stores and art galleries open late and revelers in bars and restaurants." So yes, it is culture and the arts that can energize a city. But Miami and its elected officials only understand progress measured in bricks and mortar. The banks of the Miami River should have been the heart of a new city, but the keys to the city were given away to real estate speculators like Jorge Perez and Greenberg Traurig clients. If you have the patience to connect the dots, read the following from the Sunday New York Times Magazine: "Imagining a Liberal Court".



June 21, 2010
Imagining a Liberal Court
By NOAH FELDMAN
I.THE CRISIS

After decades of stagnation, progressive constitutional thought is reaching a crisis point. Consider that the two great “liberal” justices who retired from the Supreme Court most recently — David Souter in the spring of 2009 and John Paul Stevens a year later — were conservatives. Not only were both appointed by Republican presidents, but both also subscribed loosely to the adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” With a handful of exceptions, neither favored identifying new constitutional rights where none existed before. Their status as liberals came from the fact that, as the court on which they served tilted to the right, they held their ground as moderate Republicans, consistently voting to sustain the constitutional rights that were discovered by the Supreme Court before they were on it. To be sure, without their votes, the liberal constitutional legacy of the period stretching roughly from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to Roe v. Wade in 1973 would have been reversed. But Souter and Stevens were not independent forces for progressive change in American life.

To a great extent, the crisis of liberal thought on the Supreme Court is a result of liberalism’s success. From the time that Franklin Roosevelt’s appointees came to form a majority on the Supreme Court until the appointees of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan came to predominate, liberal constitutional thinking had two major objectives — both of which it largely achieved. First, it sought to give bite to the 14th Amendment’s promise to extend to all persons the equal protection of laws. The Brown decision voiding racial segregation in schools as unconstitutional was the most famous piece of the court’s push for equality. The same ideal was also encompassed in holdings that demanded “one person, one vote” and — more controversially — that upheld affirmative action as consistent with the values of the Constitution.

Second, the liberal Supreme Court interpreted the constitutional promise of liberty as a guarantee of individual autonomy — the freedom to make important life decisions without government interference, especially in the realms of sex and reproduction. Roe v. Wade was the culmination of this movement toward personal liberty. The court took the rubric of a right to privacy that it found in what it called the “penumbras, formed by emanations” of various constitutional amendments and extended the right from marital contraception to abortion. Although the court has never embraced a right to die, it has in recent years, through Justice Anthony Kennedy, spoken of “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.”

Since Roe, the majority of the most-pitched battles in the Supreme Court have concerned whether the liberal visions of equality and liberty should be reined in. Much of the time, as with the court’s compromise rulings on affirmative action and partial-birth abortion, the result has been uneasy deadlock and indecisive squabbling. The most prominent exception is the issue of gay rights, which the court came late to embracing in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 and which — through the same-sex marriage question — remains in the court’s future. It is not too much to say that its resolution (one way or the other) will be the last act of the liberal constitutional revolution.

No new progressive constitutional vision, meanwhile, has emerged from within the court. The only two Democratic appointments in the 42 years between Thurgood Marshall in 1967 and Sonia Sotomayor in 2009, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, reflect this reality. Ginsburg’s distinguished career as a lawyer in the women’s rights movement before she went on the bench embodied the drive for equality; but as a justice, she has striven, mostly successfully, to preserve what she won as a Supreme Court advocate. Breyer’s own pre-judicial reputation was made as part of a bipartisan, technocratic movement for cautious deregulation; on the court, he has been centrist and pragmatic, voting to preserve the liberal legacy while also showing a willingness to compromise on a case-by-case basis. Neither Sotomayor nor the current nominee to the court, Elena Kagan, has articulated a new progressive constitutional vision, either.

Why does the absence of this vision constitute a crisis for liberals? The answer is that new and pressing constitutional issues and problems loom on the horizon — and they cannot be easily solved or resolved using the now-familiar frameworks of liberty and equality. These problems cluster around the current economic situation, which has revealed the extraordinary power of capital markets and business corporations in shaping the structure and actions of our government. The great economic and political challenges of our present decade — salvaging and fixing financial institutions, delivering health care, protecting the environment — have major constitutional dimensions. They require us to determine the limits of government power and the extent to which the state can impinge on collective and individual freedoms. Progressive constitutional thinkers, so skilled in arguing about social and civil rights, are out of practice in addressing such structural economic questions.

More alarming is the fact that, over the past couple of decades, evident gains from deregulation have made many lawyers — progressive and conservative alike — too complacent about deferring to the markets on which our economy depends. That markets work well in so many contexts has strengthened the traditional conservative argument about the constitutional duty to respect private economic transactions — even in the minds of many liberals. Civil libertarian commitments, meanwhile, have become increasingly absolutist, leading some liberals to favor extending basic rights to corporations, not just to individuals. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has long urged the Supreme Court to treat corporations just like individuals when it comes to political speech.

To address these challenges, progressive constitutional thought must discover (or rediscover) a core set of beliefs about the right relationship between government, the individual and the powerful corporate entities that operate under the umbrella of the market. Reregulation, embraced by the Obama administration to address a range of serious economic and environmental dangers, demands its own set of constitutional explorations and explanations. A truly progressive constitutional project needs to go beyond simply upholding regulations challenged in court. It demands that the Supreme Court and other bodies acknowledge the government’s responsibility to protect our democracy from the harmful side effects of all-powerful markets.

II. THE PAST AND FUTURE OF A LIBERAL COURT

To understand today’s jurisprudential crisis, it helps to recognize that liberal constitutional thought is not a single settled body of doctrine but rather a set of ideas that has evolved in response to political, social and economic challenges. Today, for instance, judicial activism is a constitutional approach mostly associated with liberals, while judicial restraint is a constitutional theory most often connected to conservatism. But liberal constitutional thought did not begin with the activist-judicial expansion of equality and liberty as its main goal. It started, rather, with a near-absolute commitment to judicial restraint.

The story begins in the years after the Civil War, as the United States industrialized. By the late 19th century, political progressives had identified a great threat to American democracy in the overwhelming capacity of business to dominate the lives of individuals and the functioning of government. Their answer was to regulate the new industries and labor markets, in the hope of cleaning up business practices, serving consumers and getting workers decent wages for reasonable hours of work. But an activist Supreme Court blocked the way. In a string of cases that, with ebbs and flows, lasted from 1905 into the 1930s, the court overturned progressive laws. Its philosophy was based on a libertarian reading of the Constitution, one that emphasized inalienable rights and treated property as being inseparable from liberty.

The case that gave its name to this constitutional era was Lochner v. New York (1905). Joseph Lochner, a baker in Utica, N.Y., employed a bakery worker formore than the 60 hours a week allowed by a progressive New York law. The Supreme Court vindicated Lochner by striking down the New York law as an unconstitutional violation of the liberty of contract — a right that it found in the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment. Progressive critics of the Supreme Court argued that it was overstepping its bounds, engaging in judicial activism by mandating an economic philosophy that served the interests of business. Dissenting from the Lochner decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that “a Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez-faire.”

With the election of F. D. R. in 1932, the progressive critique of the Supreme Court in the Lochner era merged with what was coming to be called “liberalism” — the rejection of socialism and corporatist fascism in favor of regulatedmarket capitalism. F. D. R. threatened to pack the court with justices who would stand aside, exercise judicial restraint and allow Congress and the president to enact laws reflecting the popular will. After a full four-year term in which no justice retired, F. D. R. got the chance to start appointing justices. Beginning in 1937, he appointed eight associate justices and elevated another to chief justice. In the main, these justices took the bench as staunch supporters of the liberal constitutional ideal of judicial restraint. “Activism” to them was a dirty word — a cover for justices’ imposing their own preferences without constitutional warrant.

Then a funny thing happened. Little by little, the liberal majority began to realize that it had the capacity to protect minority rights and to expand individual freedom. Its members maintained the liberal constitutional orthodoxy that the court should not impose a single economic vision in the name of the Constitution. But when it came to equality and individual liberty, most of the liberal justices slowly moved away from judicial restraint, actively protecting religious and racial minorities and defending civil liberties.

The liberal justices and their academic followers labored mightily to explain why activism in support of equality and individual liberty was consistent with the Constitution while activism in protecting the liberty of contract was not. Their efforts demanded creativity and generated much of modern constitutional thought. Justice Hugo Black, for example, came up with the theory of constitutional originalism to explain the difference: equality and individual liberty, he argued, were consonant with the text of the Constitution and the intention of its framers, but corporations should not be protected under the meaning of the word “person” in the 14th Amendment. (For Black, originalism was a liberal theory, not the conservative one it would become decades later in the hands of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.) Others, including Justice William O. Douglas, were less troubled by the abandonment of judicial restraint. For Douglas, trained as a legal realist to notice power more than principle, the court’s inevitably political character justified the choice to interpret the Constitution in terms of liberty. Justice William Brennan echoed this perspective. He would ask his new law clerks what was the most important rule of constitutional law, then answer by holding up five outstretched fingers to signify the number of votes needed to form a majority of the court.

Among scholars, too, the effort to reconcile the new liberal activism with the liberal tradition of judicial restraint bore fruit. The legal scholar John Hart Ely sought to solve the dilemma by arguing that the underlying purpose of the Constitution was to facilitate political participation; equality and individual liberty served this goal, he maintained, while propertyprotection did not. The lawyer-philosopher Ronald Dworkin offered a theory in which fidelity to constitutional tradition must be joined to moral judgment about the right results. His view, designed to explain how judges should think about the law generally, salved the consciences of liberals who believed that blocking economic regulation was morally mistaken while enhancing equality and individual liberty was morally desirable.

Today, constitutional progressives still say that the courts should defer to economic regulation by the government. But the ideal of judicial restraint has been undercut by the selective and opportunistic way in which liberals and conservatives alike have invoked it. And conservatives have once again mastered the art of depicting corporate interests in terms of individual liberties. What is needed, therefore, is an argument about why regulating markets is, from a constitutional perspective, desirable to enhance the constitutional values of self-government and individual liberty.

III. A RETURN TO PROGRESSIVISM

The liberal constitutional vision in the years before World War II was an inseparable part of the liberal ideal of the right relationship between the government and business, especially the financial markets. Liberals argued that the capitalist system could not survive its internal or external threats unless it was tempered and constrained by government regulation. The point of that regulation was not to subvert the market but to save it. One job of the Constitution, on this view, was to allow the government to protect its citizens and itself from the market’s tendency to dominate everything that came into its path. F. D. R.’s supporters did not see the court as the primary government institution for regulating the market, but they did say that the court must implement the regulatory objectives chosen by the president, Congress and the administrative agencies. In contrast, constitutional conservatives at the time argued that the job of the court was to act as a check on government in its efforts to regulate the markets — to protect private property against its erosion and to preserve capitalism against the threat of socialism.

The fundamental difference, then, between constitutional liberals and constitutional conservatives was on the question of whom they feared most. Liberals feared that, unregulated, business and markets might destroy both themselves and republican government. Conservatives shared the liberals’ fear about the fate of republican government, worrying that, unfettered, regulation might destroy private property, the market and capitalism itself. Both sides contended that the Constitution ought to be interpreted in the light of their substantive views about the dangers to a system of democratic capitalism that both sides equally embraced.

Today, we are moving toward a contemporary version of this debate between liberals and conservatives about what we need to fear most — an overreaching state or unconstrained market forces. The positions in this debate today are not identical to what they were three-quarters of a century ago, but there are important similarities. Progressives today view regulation as the necessary response to the market failures that led to the present economic crisis. Many conservatives fear that taking regulation too far will cripple the possibilities of economic recovery and long-term growth. These differences are not only shaping the leading political debates of our day, but framed in terms of constitutional rights like free speech and due process, will also determine the outcomes of important constitutional challenges to legislative and regulatory reforms. And progressive constitutional thought, in its current form, may not always be adequate to produce the desired progressive outcomes.

IV.FREEDOM OF SPEECH

The recent Supreme Court case that most vividly captures this division between liberals and conservatives has to do with the constitutional rights of corporations — and with their role in influencing the government. The case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, was the subject of President Obama’s in-person criticism of the Supreme Court during his State of the Union speech in January, when his comments elicited the response “That’s not true” from Justice Samuel Alito. The case has received more attention than any First Amendment case in two decades — and with good reason.

At the heart of the case was a provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that prohibited corporations and unions from using general treasury funds to pay for a radio or television broadcast that refers to a candidate in the immediate run-up to an election. Citizens United was a nonprofit corporation that made an unflattering documentary about Hillary Clinton and sought to show it during the 2008 primary season. The Supreme Court, in a highly contentious 5-to-4 decision, held that the First Amendment barred the government from limiting independent corporate expenditures. The decision overruled a 1990 precedent to the contrary. According to a dissent written by Justice Stevens (and echoed by President Obama in his remarks), the opinion also overturned more than a century of precedent treating corporations and individuals differently for purposes of free speech.

On the level of partisan politics, it is easy to see why the decision might have divided Democrats from Republicans. In general, the Republican Party identifies itself as pro-business and thus would most likely benefit from a new constitutional rule that allows corporations to make independent expenditures during political campaigns. Democrats correspondingly might prefer limits on corporate campaign expenditure. Yet the principles involved went well beyond ordinary partisanship — to the core question of how government and business should interact.

Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, has proved to be a powerful advocate of individual liberty (including in cases establishing the right to private homosexual conduct and the rights of Guantánamo detainees). But he remains staunchly conservative in his understanding of the role of corporations as bulwarks againstgovernment. His central argument in the Citizens United case was that the right to speak freely cannot vary based on the identity of the speaker. An individual who speaks is maintaining his independence vis-à-vis the state; and so, by extension, is a corporation, because corporations are nothing more than collections of individuals organized to achieve some greater end. According to this view, civil society is made up not just of civic groups like the N.A.A.C.P. or the N.R.A., but also of for-profit corporations. To deny them the right to speak freely is to allow government to pick and choose which kinds of speech it wants to allow and hence to distort the free marketplace of ideas.

Kennedy has a point: corporate speech often shades into the realm of the expressive, whether the message is creative or political. Thus a progressive approach to corporate speech cannot simply try to demarcate different kinds of expression. The progressive argument must go deeper, to the institutional reality of the effects that corporate money can have on our entire democratic system, elections included. Supreme Court doctrine has historically tried to capture a version of this concern by asserting that the government has a legitimate interest in “anticorruption” — the idea being that money from corporations can produce the appearance of a quid pro quo from elected officials. The court has also sometimes spoken of an “antidistortion” value — the concern that corporations will have a disproportionate effect on elections by providing more money than individuals can. Justice Souter, quoted by Justice Stevens in his Citizens United dissent, referred to these interests collectively as demonstrating a concern for “democratic integrity” — a concern that may in some circumstances outweigh the constitutional value of unfettered speech.

But these polite, high-sounding terms do not go far enough. Couched in abstract language, they reflect the liberals’ discomfort with stating bluntly that money talks. A truly progressive jurisprudence would go further in its legal reasoning, acknowledging that the for-profit corporation, man’s most-advanced technology for making and concentrating wealth, creates unique risks for the structure of democratic government. It is true that corporate political speech is still speech, as Justice Kennedy and the A.C.L.U. alike have insisted. But that speech serves different ends than individual speech. Organized to use all lawful means to generate profit, corporations have the means and opportunity to try to capture the operation of government to serve this objective. Campaign-spending lets them do it directly. That is why Congress must be able to limit the effects of corporate speech during elections. It is a matter of defending democracy against the risk that business interests will come to dominate government decision-making — an interest that derives from the constitutional commitment to republican government.

V.DUE PROCESS

The renewed battle lines between constitutional progressives and conservatives are not restricted to the First Amendment: the constitutional debate about business regulation is also becoming increasingly salient. This term, for example, the Supreme Court took up the constitutionality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to review accounting practices. Similar challenges will certainly be brought to the new financial regulations proposed by the Obama administration. The council of regulators that is supposed to identify risk and deal with emergencies will be challenged as unconstitutional, as will the design of the consumer-credit-protection entity that is expected to be housed somewhere in the Federal Reserve.

Wherever possible, conservatives claim that legislation aimed at regulating business actually infringes on the constitutional rights of individuals. Indeed, the very authority of the government to resolve the affairs of large financial corporations — the heart of the new financial-reform legislation — will very likely be challenged as a violation of the due-process rights of those firms and their shareholders. Thus will the aim to stymie structural change be framed in terms of individual freedom. It will be up to progressives to explain why this view is mistaken — and why limiting corporate rights is justified.

The grave difficulty that must be met by a new progressive constitutional approach can so far be sensed most readily not in court cases but in the government’s actions and justifications connected with the bailout of financial institutions. The now-canonical A.I.G. bailout serves as a useful example. In saving the insurance giant, the government (under the Bush administration) famously paid A.I.G. counterparties, including Goldman Sachs, 100 cents on the dollar for insurance contracts that they had taken out with the firm. Critics wondered loudly why the government didn’t renegotiate the debts and demand that the counterparties settle at a discount. Then, while in control of A.I.G. (this time under the Obama administration), the government’s managers allowed A.I.G. to pay out the bonuses it owed employees under their employment contracts — again inviting the criticism that a private acquirer would have renegotiated and paid out less, or nothing.

The public explanation for these decisions — given after the fact by Lawrence Summers, Obama’s chief economic adviser — was that the rule of law required paying up. “We are a country of law,” Summers told George Stephanopoulos in a television interview. “There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts.” The government, Summers suggested, lacked the authority “under law” to do anything other than pay in full or force A.I.G. into bankruptcy. Summers’s argument implied that some legal source, perhaps the Constitution, barred the government from impairing the obligation of contracts.

But the law is not so definitive. The government could have set conditions on the loans it made to A.I.G., as the recently released Congressional Oversight Report on the A.I.G. bailout explains. And that is not all. Pressed with dire economic necessity, the government has historically had the authority to go further and actually abrogate contracts. When Roosevelt became president in March 1933, he immediately suspended all banking operations in the country for four days. Then, relying on emergency legislation that retroactively validated the banking holiday, he used an executive order to demand that privately held gold be turned in to the government (with the government determining its worth). Finally, after a joint resolution of Congress, Roosevelt ordered the repudiation of private and public contracts denominated in gold — contracts designed specifically to get around the danger of government repudiation. The Supreme Court grumbled but essentially upheld his decision. The markets responded positively.

A progressive constitutional vision would acknowledge what seems relatively obvious in the A.I.G. case: the danger is not that risk-taking financial actors will lose when contracts are repudiated, but that taxpayers will lose if they are not. There was no constitutional obligation on the government to make itself weaker than A.I.G. itself would have been under the circumstances. Even if the government did not have clear statutory authority to reorganize A.I.G. summarily and repudiate some of its obligations overnight, it could have relied on the precedent of the 1930s. Faced with an emergency situation that was arguably less pressing, Roosevelt simply ordered the steps necessary, sought Congressional validation and dared anyone injured to sue after the fact. At a minimum, the government could have threatened A.I.G.’s counterparties and executives with the possibility of such emergency measures. It is not as if President Obama had specific statutory authority on June 16 to compel BP to set aside $20 billion to cover the costs of the Gulf oil disaster — his demand was backed by the weight of his office and the direness of the emergency.

Why did the progressive economists and lawyers of 2008-9 not act as F. D. R. would have acted? Surely neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations intended consciously to act in the interests of bankers rather than those of the public. But under the logic of the bailout, the markets were in charge, and the overarching aim of the government was to propitiate them to avoid disaster. Even under these conditions, a progressive constitutional vision should focus on government’s duty to protect the public — not the bankers who needed to be bailed out in the first place. A bailout had to happen; but the way it was done did not have to be shaped by the strange goal of protecting the “rights” of the corporate actors whose shirts were being saved.

For constitutional conservatives, the most worrisome feature of the Troubled Asset Relief Program was the possibility that government funds would come with strings attached, leading to government control of financial institutions akin to the control the government now has over General Motors. They were concerned that government control in the private sector would compromise the independence of the business community, weakening its capacity to stand against government — a danger that exists in socialist systems. For constitutional progressives, the fear associated with the TARP funds should be almost exactly the opposite: that the bailout reflected and enhanced a system in which the government serves the markets, not the taxpayers. Under today’s economic conditions, the risk of corporations being subordinated to government interests seems faint indeed. The danger of the government’s operating to serve the interests of the corporations in which it has acquired a stake seems remarkably serious. Constitutional decisions made against this backdrop — whether by courts or by other government actors — should recognize that the government may take the steps necessary to achieve the best economic outcomes without being tender about the property rights of market actors who have taken on (and hedged) risk in the hope of high return.

VI.BEYOND RESTRAINT

It is unfortunate that constitutional law is now once again facing the severe challenge of dealing with the astonishing strengths and risks associated with our version of capitalism. We are all better off when economic crisis is averted and wealth increases. Constitutional law, for its part, is purer and more morally uplifting when it is focused on liberty and equality.

But these issues will not go away. The health care reform, President Obama’s biggest legislative accomplishment thus far, has already been challenged by 20 states as an unconstitutional infringement on individual liberties and states’ rights. We can expect constitutional challenges to any Congressional attempt to plug the holes left by the Citizens United decision. More broadly, the Tea Party movement finds its roots in deep skepticism about the legitimacy of government action — an impulse that will issue eventually in legal and constitutional battles.

The Constitution can fulfill its function only if it enables us to adjust to the most basic problems that the world throws at us. Our democracy — including free speech, elections, civic organizations and the rest of its assorted components — has never existed independent of our economy. Absent crisis, it is hard to muster the concentration or the will to make our constitutional system accept this reality and deal with it. So long as the markets continued to deliver the immense gains of recent decades, the chances of regulating the markets’ effect on the democratic system were slim indeed.

Now the moment has arrived for progressive constitutional thought to return to its origins — and to improve on them. Judicial restraint is once again needed. But it must be justified in terms of the underlying goal of preserving our democratic system against the threat of control by market actors. Corporate rights should not be confused with individual rights. Our success or failure will not be felt right away — but it will have consequences for generations to come.

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer, is a professor at Harvard Law School. His new book, “Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of F.D.R.’s Great Supreme Court Justices,” will be published in the fall.

Adrienne Arsht Center, Listen Up! By Geniusofdespair

I do not need a daily email from you telling me about your boring programs. I have gotten 6 emails in 10 days! If I need to know what is at the center I will look in the paper or read one of the dozens of expensive glossy mailings you send me.

Leave me alone! I am not going to another show until the Meningitis and Swine Flu horror show is over. And, you might think about your programming if you have to bother people so much.

Adrienne Arsht can you help? I noticed you were at a Heat game Monday, go to your Performing Arts Center and talk to them for me...please!

Braman’s Lawsuit on the Miami Mega-Deal is Running out of Options. By Geniusofdespair

According to Chuck Rabin of the Miami Herald:

“Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Jeri Beth Cohen ruled Tuesday that building a ballpark for the Florida Marlins serves a public purpose...”

I say: Bummer on that one.

“The decision means six of auto dealer Norman Braman's seven lawsuit counts trying to topple the deal have now been tossed.”

Bummer too.

“The sole issue remaining, however, is significant: A decision on whether the county can use community redevelopment dollars to pay off a construction debt at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. Cohen has yet to decide that question.”

More, on the Performing Arsht Center by gimleteye

One of the values of the archive section of eyeonmiami is both to educate readers who may find subjects of interest and want to look through the trail of blog posts on a particular subject, and another value is to show how our views meet up with reality. I'm perfectly willing to be proven wrong. Now, the Herald reports, "Top concert group asks Arsht Center for help".

"Struggling to pay more than $2 million in debts and stop a dwindling subscriber base, leaders of the Concert Association of Florida--the major local presenter of classical music and dance--have proposed that the performing arts center take over the group's administrative operations.

So: to the budget for a performing arts center we could not afford and that fewer people want, now add the funding request for operating expenses of performing arts organizations whose budgets were unrealistic and not properly vetted by an audit before the county commission committed $500 million to the project. (We're STILL waiting for the Herald story on that. How hard could it be, to dig up the original projections for performance demand on which the decision to invest was based? If there are any PAC insiders who would like to mail us a copy, we would be very pleased to post a condensed version and narrative on our blog.)

If voters who support the unreformable majority of the county commission don't find enough objectionable in this story, in a separate article in the paper today on the county budget crisis--due to crashing housing markets and tax base that the county commissioners' campaign contributors helped unleash here and everywhere--county officials suggest that widespread cuts will be made, including to the numerous small charitable organizations supported by the county.

If there is an answer and way to correct the dwindling subscriber base to the major local presenter of classical music and dance, it is by cultivating local audiences: that has to happen by funding the arts programs of the public schools-- right?-- and supporting local performance groups that have been chronically short of funding for decades. (Just imagine how far $500 million would have gone, to developing new and young audiences for the arts, where they live.)

If I read the Herald correctly, local performing organizations will now be competing for scarce county dollars with an unsustainable platform for performances and the Performing Arsht Center.

To the dunderheads who created and support this fiasco: YOU pay for it. YOU pay for the new Museums and Baseball Stadium. Enough said.

Color change for Performing Arsht Center, by gimleteye

We've had a lot of comments about the new Wyland-inspired concrete median divider on the 18 Mile Stretch. The Miami Herald responded with a story of its own. Wyland seemed slightly defensive. Anyhow, the color is growing on me, like pink in "The Cat in the Hat". Driving past the Performing Arsht Center the other day, I realized what the Center needs is a paint job. It would change my whole attitude to that sore thumb. I nominate the Wyland Median Strip Color. Do you agree?

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Noon brainwashing, by gimleteye

Hey it's Friday. Countless readers are tapping on their keyboards, hooked to the internet, lethargic and waiting for the moment to arrive: it's the weekend!

But I can't let the week pass without commenting on the Coconut Grove Playhouse as reported in today's Miami Herald.

There is a move afoot to change leadership and have the Playhouse (overwhelmed by its previous mismanagement) "taken over" by the Performing Arsht Center managers. Here's what Miami city commissioner Marc Sarnoff had to say:

''The city just wants to get a very class act in the Playhouse to run it,'' Sarnoff said, ``so that for the first time in its history it will run efficiently and for a long, sustainable run. There's probably not a better brand than the Arsht Center to do it.''

Um... say what?

As far as I can tell, the Performing Arsht Center is a mess. Still. Read on...

Is Miami so chronically short of brain cells that it has forgotten that the Arsht Center is still groping "for the first time in its histoy" -- short as it may be, and $500 million in the hole-- to be "run efficiently and for a long, sustainable run"?

And, then, what kind of "brand" does the Performing Arsht Center have? I remember when it was the "Carnival" brand, which I called the "carnivorous center of the performing arts". Now THAT was a brand!

The Performing Arsht Center may yet have a brand, with slick young Turks running around pumping their fists-- YES WE CAN!-- and sage advice from other parts and locations.

You have to ask, does anyone do a background check before conferring wisdom to anyone in Miami? Anyone at all?

Of PAC's and Parks, by gimleteye

How much better off, Miami Dade County would be if the money invested in the Performing Arsht Center had been spent on public parks.

I don't have time, today, to go to the Great Parks Conference slated at Fairchild Tropical Garden to unveil a 50 year plan for county parks, except to say, I'm all for it.

I'd vote for any measure to increase parks funding (including maintenance!), especially for the creation of a network of usable parks in our cities. Small parks, pocket parks, large parks, ball fields: anything to make more civil a landscape, especially in the poorer areas of the county, that was dehumanized through the triumph of zoning attorneys, land use lawyers (eg. Greenberg Traurig) and developers.

Let me be clear: it is not that the Growth Machine stopped parks from being built to serve poor people. But it is the case that every zoning decision to build platted subdivisions in farmland--through which process Bob Traurig made his and his law firm's fortune--stripped the equitable distribution of funding (ie. general revenue through property taxes, etc.) to provide infrastructure, like parks, in areas already served by development. Let me put it another way: it is not that the big downtown lobbyists and lawyers said, "Don't build that park in Overtown", so much as commandeer through zoning and planning that priority would always be given to improving services one platted subdivision after another.

It is sometimes claimed that the public investment in the Performing Arsht Center will help attract business and high paid jobs, for cultured people who expect their city to offer entertainment commensurate with their expectations.

But if anything is driving away jobs and middle class families, surely it is the poverty of the landscape--built for cars--and the absence of a network of parks (especially downtown).

The PAC is struggling for relevancy. I wanted to share a story, told by a friend about a recent experience attempting to buy tickets for a PAC performance this weekend.

My friends wanted to buy some tickets to this weekend's performance of "The Sleeping Beauty" by the American Ballet Theatre.

They were willing to pay the top ticket price, advertised as $145 dollars per seat.

They clicked to the website listed on advertisements in The Miami Herald, filled out the ticket form. and then discovered that there was a $20 processing fee. Per ticket.

Wow, $20 to buy a ticket online!??#@$#

Our friends said, "We're not paying $20 per ticket, to buy tickets on the internet!" So now their odyssey to attend the PAC, began.

So our friend picked up the phone and called the Concert Association phone number listed on the advertisement, intending to save $20 per ticket by buying on the phone.

The first time our friend called the phone number listed on the newspaper ad, she was placed on a queue line. After 20 minutes of muzak, our friend hung up. So, what to do? Our friend called the box office at the Performing Arsht Center. That's reasonable, right?

Our friend asked, "Can you sell us box seats?" "No, we can only sell you tickets in the third balcony for this performance. You have to contact the Concert Association for the good tickets."

OK. My friend said that it cost $20 to buy the tickets on the internet and no one answered the phone. The person at the box office said that Concert Association was short on staff and the phone line closed at 4 pm.

She suggested my friend and her guests just appear at the PAC an hour before the performance because “they always have tickets then.” Just like Lincoln Center (not).

So on the second day, she tried calling again. She had given up hope of buying the tickets and on the verge of deciding to do something else. It was after 4 PM, but what the heck. Someone answered the phone. "I'd like to buy some tickets, in the front section." The ticket person said, "We've just lowered the price for those seats to $20."

I guess the point is, with the Performing Arsht Center, don't buy your tickets until the last minute. The second point is, leave your house early because it will take you twice as long to find a place to park, even if the ticket price is only twenty percent of what you expected to pay."

With a park, at least, you always know what to expect.

Knight Foundation grant to arts, by gimleteye

My complaint about the Performing Arts Center, and it is a long-standing one, is that the $500 million investment in bricks and mortar sucked the oxygen from any investments necessary to cultivate local audiences for the performing arts. Perhaps the investment by the Knight Foundation and by prominent donors will address that concern. Perhaps the Performing Arsht Center and planned arts museum will not stick out like sore thumbs no one can get to.

Twenty years ago, as South Beach was reviving, Miami needed a discussion about what kind of city for arts it wanted to be. That discussion never happened for a variety of reasons; parochialism, narrow-mindedness, and a tendency for the Miami wealthy to fly to New York or Paris for culture.

Then, ten years ago, the city was overwhelmed by the bubble in housing, construction and development. At some level of the city's patriarchy, it was decided to build the Carniverous Performing Arts Center to support all the expectations of a new city branding itself as internationally significant.

In neglecting the need to develop audiences for the arts, organically, from the ground up, Miami's leaders made a bad mistake. Assuming that buildings can also build audiences is wrong.

The best instance of failure is the Coconut Grove Playhouse: an historic theater that was a sham at its heart--serving the purposes of an arrogant producer who managed to bamboozle his entire board of directors. (Who can ever forget--or remember-- that the most cutting edge play of its era, "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett, had its 1956 US premier at the playhouse; audiences grumbled and walked away in droves.)

Building audiences for the arts is a painstaking process that has to start at the level of public education. So the $10 million grant by the Knight Foundation to the Miami Art Museum to bring every fifth-grade student in the county's public school system to the museum each year is the best news in a long time.

It is dismaying, though, that the Knight Foundation commitment of $20 million to fund local arts projects requires matching funds. Perhaps other donors and foundations will jump at the chance to invest in the growth of the arts in Miami, but the thresholds governing such contributions are often too high for small organizations or start-ups.

We need investment in local arts content; no amount of bricks and mortar will achieve that.

Buildings for the arts can be pretty or ugly, and designed for programming that mirrors tradition or Broadway road shows. But local content, the work itself, is the only part of the equation that can energize a whole community.

Idiotic Miami Traffic by gimleteye

I took this photo, today, from my car. I know it will be familiar to many eyeonmiami readers: If you are trying to get the Performing Arsht Center or to the AA Arena from four lanes of 95 north, or four lanes of 95 south, in other words eight lanes of interstate funneling into four lanes of 395 east, this is the ONE lane exit to Biscayne Boulevard that serves BOTH venues.

What part of this picture did elected officials fail to understand, when they permitted BOTH venues?

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Vile Natacha Seijas and Senile-Sounding Javier Souto in the Miami Herald Today by Geniusofdespair

There is an article about Natacha Seijas and her daughter today. Old news. We all know the ever vile Natacha skirts the ethics rules at every chance. She is a big wig at YMCA and they just happened to have received a donation for $110,000 from an airport contractor at a gala the other night. We all know that Natacha votes on airport contracts. And I previously reported on her daughter’s job at the airport. Here is it again from the Herald:

In October, Seijas' daughter, Justina ''Tina'' Millán Clegg, was hired as a cost analyst in the Aviation Department, where she deals daily with project managers, contractors and consultants. She had been chief development officer for the Miami-Dade Empowerment Trust, whose failed projects were the focus of Miami Herald stories last year. Clegg received sterling evaluations.

The airport contractor giving the donation according to the Herald:

Odebrecht is part of a joint venture finishing the $2.9 billion North Terminal and was main contractor on the $1.1 billion South Terminal. It partnered with Parsons Corp.

Barf.

There was another Barf worthy article about the Adrienne Arsht donation of $30,000,000 to get the Performing Arts Center out of its hole. Instead of being happy that their center is being rescued, County Commissioner Souto did his usual swipe at rich people, because he wasn’t notified in advance that the gift was coming. Souto usually targets specifically non-Hispanic rich people with his little slurs. This time, according to the Miami Herald, instead of calling them the rich people that live in waterfront homes east of Biscayne Blvd. (Arsht for instance) and drink wine and eat cheese, Souto said:

'This is a lack of respect, and we are the guys who set this place from day one,'' said Souto, who chairs the committee that oversees the newly renamed Arsht Center. ``A group of wine and cheese and Gucci-shoes people decide they know it all.''

The commission ultimately took an afternoon recess -- which six of the 13 used to attend the announcement -- and Arsht later paid them a courtesy call. She got a standing ovation and praise from almost every commissioner. Only Souto remained silent.”

Here is a tip for you Souto. Stop the racist rants that make no sense and get on the bandwagon. If you are so jealous of the rich, stop making them richer. Or you could line your own pockets by getting a cushy, no-show job from them like your buds Joe Martinez and Pepe Diaz. Then you too could be richer and you can rant about yourself. I would suppose you don't drink wine because it might conflict with your medication but you could get the Gucci shoes you refer to. Both Articles

The skeptics' corner, by gimleteye

No more Carnival Center of the Performing Arts, I called Carniverous. So there you have it. No more front page reports of budget deficits until the $30 million gets drawn down. Nearly half is going to pay back the county. So it's $15 million, provided there are no strings attached.

But the gaping hole in the budget was only the outward manifestation of reality that could not find an audience.

And $15 million isn't going to solve that problem. The Performing Arsht Center was built as though traffic considerations were no concern. Actually it is the other way around: because you can't get there and can't park easily, the Performing Arsht Center is of no consideration.

On this point I'll stop being a skeptic, if someone can explain how to get to the PAC from the north or south on game night for the Heat on that crappy little off ramp from 395 that funnels four lanes north and four lanes south on 95 down to two lanes. Throw a museum in, costing another few hundred million. Maybe most of Miami Dade County will just stay home.

But winning me over is going to require even more than fixing parking and traffic. You have to invest in local artists, arts and arts education in order to cultivate an audience for the arts. In this respect, the Performing Arsht Center is mainly good for donation bricks. Don't get me wrong: it's wonderful that the Cleveland Orchestra is in town for a month but filling those halls so that budget deficits aren't a permanent feature of the PAC meant applying a little creative thinking about building the constituency from the ground up.

To get really angry about the absence of creative thinking in Miami, you have to take a boat ride on the Miami River.

The context is the horrendous mess that Miami and elected leaders like Mayor Diaz, city and county commissioners allowed to be made of zoning for condominiums along the river. Jorge Perez, that civic leader, and the recent column by Rebecca Wakefield on Perez' Related Group, published in the Sunpost come to mind.

I hadn't been up the river in the past eighteen months or so until last weekend. What is most striking about the massive development that has occurred in those condos teetering toward foreclosure is the way in which the public space along the river was surrendered to private corporations.

The immediate point of complaint is how developers like Perez succeeded, through their land use lobbyists and attorneys like Greenberg Traurig, in erasing the setback for a public right of way to a strip about as wide as a piece of dental floss.

There is only one feature that separates Miami from Hampton News, Portsmouth, or Port Elizabeth: Biscayne Bay and the Miami River. The way that condo developers and their money have wrecked public access to the Miami River is the worst legacy of the building boom that no longer exists.

Put another way, the footprint of terrible development and zoning decisions will long outlast the current crop of politicians, insiders, and civic leaders. In this respect, the Performing Arsht Center will be a testament to misguided investment priorities for a very, very long time. Perhaps until sea-level rise.

I listened to donor Adrienne Arsht on WLRN last night, in a message to the people that came out garbled, "The next generation may be standing on my shoulders, but what I hope for is that every citizen of Miami Dade will give of their time and energy to the important causes like the arts, or medical issues." She didn't say anything about the environment.

Future generations may have to stand on this generation's shoulders because we have done nothing, really, to stop sea level rise as a result of man-made impacts of global warming.

It is a curious omission that Miami's civic leaders never mention the environment. Or environmental groups, that have been sinking under waves of public indifference in south Florida for a long time.

The Miami Herald writes a good story on Governor Charlie Crist and the environment, in advance of this weekend's Everglades Coalition conference, "the largest meeting of environmentalists in the state".

The comment that stands out belongs to Eric Draper, of Florida Audubon, who for some unfathomable reason is the go-to quote for the state's newspapers: "He's turned out to be way better than we ever thought", said Draper, the environmental leader who also embraced Governor Jeb Bush who in turn embraced Audubon and froze out every other environmental group in the state.

"Crist has opened doors that were shut to conservationists for several years after relations with Gov. Jeb Bush turned nearly as chilly as a Greenland glacier--largely over an overhaul of Everglades pollution standards." Ultimately, Mr. Draper and Audubon signed off on those standards. Is there any political status quo that Audubon will not embrace?

I'm sore on this point for some very good reasons, having to do with the continued rampant pollution of the Everglades and the failure of environmental groups to take a strong enough stand to penetrate the layers of public indifference thick as a tortoise shell.

Just last week, the octogenarian environmental leader Juanita Greene-- retired journalist for the Miami Herald-- addressed the Governing Board of the South Florida Water Management District, and asked the elite group comprised mostly of Jeb Bush appointees if they had heard of the US EPA report on pollution of the Everglades recording pollution levels up to 2006, that was published last summer.

The Governing Board is the final word on the conduct of the state of Florida with respect to the so-called restoration of the Everglades.

Ms. Greene was shocked, that no one on the Governing Board had heard that EPA had analyzed the District's own data on pollution: "During the November 2005 sampling event approximately 27% of the Everglades marsh had a surface water phosphorus concentration greater than 10 parts per billion. However, during 2005 soil phosphorus exceeded 500 milligrams per kilogram (mg/kg), Florida’s definition of "impacted", in 24% of the Everglades, and it exceeded 400 mg/kg, CERP’s restoration goal, in 49% of the Everglades. These proportions are higher than the 16% and 34%, respectively, observed in 1995-1996."

10 parts per billion is, of course, the long fought-over phosphorous standard that Big Sugar fought and fought and fought, finally dragging along Audubon, the Florida legislature, and everyone else in a terrible compromise embraced by Governor Jeb Bush and the 2003 legislature that allowed for "mixing averages" and numerical hocus-pocus to substitute for hard, fast requirements.

Holiday Magic: The Mega Big Day At the County Commission by Geniusofdespair

They have two agendas today. First is what they are calling “The Special Meeting” (or as I like to call it: the don't let the public stop the freight train agenda) where they will discuss all the City projects forwarded to them for approval: The port tunnel, the baseball stadium, the soccer stadium, Museum Park, bail-out of the Performing Arts Center and changing CRA districts. I expect Nasty Natacha Seijas will send some barbs at the City of Miami staff and put some hoops up for them to jump through, for no other reason then she enjoys pushing her hefty weight around.The notable thing on the second agenda is what the County Commission should do about that pesky Mayoral Veto. It is now in the shadow of the first Special Meeting agenda, but I think even more important. Anyone care to make a wager on what will happen? I think they will override but I hope I am wrong. My reasoning is that I don’t think they will let the applications inside the urban development boundary line go down in flames with the three that are outside the line. Watch it on TV or, if you don’t have a MAC, you can watch a webcast. If you decide to go, bring a barf bag, it will make you sick. If you have a camera you can amuse yourself photographing lobbyists in the lobby.

Add water, uranium and stir... by gimleteye

We have our own confusions at home, never mind the central banks: just read the Miami Herald over the past few days.

Maybe one of our readers who has appropriate software, can send us the following analysis to post as a flow chart.

Here is a short list of needs reported in various Herald stories (feel free to suggest additions to the list, in the comments section):

1) More water.
2) More tourists to generate more tax revenue, to pay for it.
3) The restored Everglades to supply our water.
4) More money to buy out land speculators, obstructing Everglades restoration.
5) Don’t pump sewage into the ocean, re-use it.
6) Don’t wait to find out if re-use water is clean enough to protect wetlands or people.
7) Foreign sand on our beaches to attract foreign tourists.
8) Revenue to buy sand because anything we put on our beaches is washing away.
9) Persuade foreign tourists our water is clean enough to drink.
10) More development to pay for cleaning water.
11) Open new land for development closer to the Everglades.
12) Nuclear power plants to power new development.
13) More water to cool new nuclear power plants.
14) Speculate with tax revenues (ie. State Investment Pool) to foster new development, fueled by nuclear power, to buy out speculators and pay for everything else.
15) No bailouts for speculators.
16) A baseball stadium, a soccer, stadium, a museum, a Carniverous Center for the Performing Arts, a streetcar, parking, and new nuclear power plants.
17) Water lawns once a week, buy hybrid cars.
18) More money from tourists.
19) No new taxes.
20) Pray for rain.

That about sums it up, for Thursday.


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Art Basel, best of show by gimleteye

Criticalmiami.com, props to you. Otherwise I would have missed the photo described as “officially the best thing all week” of Art Basel. I agree. The send-up of the iconic drawing by Richard Serra, called Abu Ghraib, was made by a DASH student (no name associated for attribution, sorry to say!), was found in Wynwood and belongs exploded to gargantuan size in painted, brushed steel and put in the plaza of the Carniverous Center for the Performing Arts.

Every time I read in the Miami Herald (as in today’s lead editorial) that “the city of Miami is on the brink of greatness”, Romero Britto comes to mind—the unofficial iconic artist in celebration of the inconsequential. Happy is good.

A port tunnel, the subject of the Herald editorial, is a good idea but forget about public funding: it should be funded through the port itself and associated fees, just like the baseball stadium should be funded by the Marlins. Period.

As to the breathless Herald depiction of ours as a great city, defined by the contribution of “new residential towers” (mostly empty), “a museum park” (for which there is neither parking or any hope for easy access by cars unless you work at the Miami Herald), and “a plan for a green, livable downtown” (with no public access to the waterfront, the signature feature of Miami), well enough parenthetical comments.

Give it up for DASH and the anonymous artist at large. Kid, you rock.


ps. There was too much to see at Art Basel, but also note with criticalmiami.com the gorgeous “Designer of the Year” Tokujin Yoshioka, at Design Miami. See for yourself, although the web scarcely does the project justice,
here:

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Saturday Speak-up: Are Weekend Posts a Waste of Time? By Geniusofdespair

I am beginning to think that weekend posting is a waste of time. Anyone have anything interesting to say? No one had much to say about our earlier posts on Bank Atlantic and Kittens. We couldn't get you with either money talk or kittens...how demoraizing.

I just saw Habana Abierta in concert at Miami Dade County Auditorium. I think if the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts had them there, they would have sold out. The PAC had instead, the Temptations and the Four Tops. Mind you only one original Temp and Top. I love Motown but I have to say I was disappointed with the replacements. The Habana Abierta group was very good, if I understood the lyrics I would have even liked them better. The PAC has got to book better shows. Habana Abierta (what does that mean?) are coming back November 9th. Worth a trip down to Flagler. And Habana Abierta, a word to you: Learn from Shakira: Do at least one or two song in English...you will increase your fan base.