Don't know if this is the WHOLE class action suit against U.S. Century Bank. By Geniusofdespair

Anyway, this part is dismissed - DIRECT  CLAIMS. Sounds like the whole thing is gone. It is funny to see Juan Herran suing his buddies.

Looks like it is being appealed according to 11/06/13 docket (below).  Jesus Tome is the class action name. There was a change of Counsel since (2/4/2014 and a Stipulation same day).

More on bad transit and the bankrupt model of suburban sprawl and condos on the coastline … by gimleteye

In Politico, critic Jim Kunstler tees off on New Jersey and Mayor Chris Christie: his real target is suburban sprawl and automobile-centric development schemes. In other words, Miami.

Gov. Chris Christie’s problems with the phony “traffic study” on the George Washington Bridge, apparently intended to punish the mayor of Fort Lee for failure to offer an election endorsement, ought to be seen as a symptom of a much greater societal illness: the over-investment in a living arrangement with no future. That is the essence of the suburban matrix. It has no future because it was designed to run on cheap oil. Despite the hype broadcast during these past few years of extraordinary wishful thinking, America is not destined to become “energy independent,” “the next Saudi Arabia” or “the world’s leading oil exporter.” This is all pernicious bullshit. The raptures of shale oil arise out of the inhalations of Ponzi smoke and mirrors. America will soon learn the painful truth: Shale oil is a bubble among many financial bubbles. It will not fulfill America’s master wish: to be able to keep driving to WalMart forever.

We certainly do understand the "suburban matrix" at EOM. We call it the Growth Machine and its operators, the Great Destroyers. We also often highlight the fraud manifest in traffic studies all over the county that always turn up exactly what developers, land use lobbyists, and the unreformable majority of the county commission want to hear: that existing highways are adequate to the purpose of moving citizens and visitors from home to workplace or other destination, and where they are not adequate, simply adding lanes or driving more highways into farmland is the best choice. Their studies universally offer the best choice to those who profit from the bankrupt model of suburban sprawl in Everglades wetlands and more condos on the coast.

At the heart of America’s suburban sprawl predicament is that it has provoked a corrosive psychology of previous investment. Having poured all the treasure of the 20th century into the matrix of housing subdivisions, malls and strip malls, office parks, freeways, highways and numberless paved byways, we can’t imagine reforming it, letting go of it or getting over it. It’s our stuff and we appear to be stuck with it. The future, however, is going to compel us to live differently whether we like it or not, and we are doing absolutely nothing to prepare for that. To me, the danger of a President Christie is that he is about the last politician one might expect to recognize the nation’s tragic predicament and he is exactly the figure who will mount America’s deadly final campaign to sustain the unsustainable. He represents what amounts to a sort of national debt slavery: We will pay any price to stay where history has marooned us. One vivid example of this was Governor Christie’s decision in 2010 to cancel New Jersey’s participation in building a new commuter train tunnel under the Hudson River to relieve the unsustainable pressure on the existing 100-year-old train tunnels. He derided the project as “a tunnel to the basement of Macy’s.” Christie then diverted $4 billion from the tunnel project to New Jersey’s transportation trust fund in a bid to keep the state’s gas tax the second-lowest in the country. (New Jersey’s transit system, meanwhile, ranks among the country’s worst, and Christie has cut its funding.)

Kunstler's "Having poured all the treasure of the 20th century in the matrix of housing subdivisions…" is what we chronicle here in granular detail at EOM, focusing on financing (US Century Bank) and the web of relationships extending to local city government and the Miami-Dade county commission where spreading sprawl across buffer lands to the Everglades was viewed as a highest priority and remains so.

Today the construction mini-boomlet in downtown Miami proceeds at a furious pace. Construction crews are working around the clock to satisfy the nervousness of bankers and builders who want "in" and "out" of projects as quickly as possible. What the building boom lacks, entirely, is what downtown Miami has always lacked: a credible plan for transit to accommodate people instead of a reckless fast-forward ignoring all common sense.

"Museum Row" coupled with the Heat Arena on one side and the Genting slot machine emporium on the other is one simply fantastic example. Now there is a plan to add 750,000 square feet of retail on the other side of the Miami Heat arena. Construction will begin at the end of 2014 and will no doubt be financed by blue chip, experienced banks and builders.

Look where it is. How are people going to get there? Understand that this section of downtown Miami is served by transit that from the west and from the north boils down to one traffic lane at Biscayne Boulevard! So when Kunstler writes, "… we can’t imagine reforming it, letting go of it or getting over it. It’s our stuff and we appear to be stuck with it." he is describing Miami and Miami-Dade County to a "T".

US Century Bank deal goes bust … for the second time … will there be a third or is it time, finally, for the feds to step in? by gimleteye

The insider piggy-bank founded by Latin Builders Association chiefs Ramon Rasco -- also, of the Homestead Air Force Base fiasco -- and Sergio Pino -- of a cratered house building empire and abdicated king of suburban sprawl -- is desperately seeking new capital. Eye On Miami has tracked the fortunes of the bank and its connections to campaign cash and influence that propelled Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio to the forefront of right wing Florida politics. (Go to our archive, under "US Century Bank", for past posts.)

The Miami Herald did its level best to promote the bank. Its editors and publisher, organized through Linkd-In like connections through Greenberg Traurig, the insider land use and zoning black hats for decades, formed a virtual cartel in support of sprawl. It wasn't enough of a cartel, though, for Sergio Pino's tastes.

In the mid-2000's (the date maybe can be provided by a past or present reporter who was there at the time), the Herald entertained an extraordinary event in its newsroom. Pino and Armando Codina were granted, by the publisher, an opportunity to address the journalists along the line of "explaining" how the newspaper's coverage was too hostile to their industry. A pep talk for sprawl, and by extension, the fortunes of a local bank -- US Century -- that was straight-out stoned on the fumes of the housing boom.

Among many low points, it certainly ranked as perhaps the lowest point in the history of the newspaper. (The lowest point was former Miami Dade County Chairman Art Teele blowing his brains out in the lobby of the newspaper. For all the media's focus on the inexplicable and "erratic behavior" of Teele, the bright fact is that Teele's paranoia was built on a political career fighting against the various influences and schemes of the Latin Builders Association, including that privatization of the Homestead Air Force Base that he strongly opposed.)

US Century Bank lent an extraordinary amount of money to bank board directors to purchase land at speculative values at the edge of the Everglades, outside the Urban Development Boundary. The play was always for farmland, where zoning could be converted cheaply in comparison to the zero lot line housing that followed along in its place. To be fair to the Latin Builders, lead by Pino and Rasco, they were slip-streaming behind the profit model of massive sprawl developed by Lennar, Miami's only homegrown, Anglo-owned Fortune 500 homebuilder.)

EOM frequently reported on the bank's ridiculous metrics (Loan ratios to insiders) required by federal banking regulations -- not reported by the Herald, of course. Nor did the Herald ever report that many of the bank's branches were leased on real estate at highly inflated values that was also owned by board directors.

As objectors and leaders of the battle against more suburban sprawl in Miami-Dade, US Century Bank was the juggernaut that erased all possibility of civil exchange and compromise on the future of the county at the Miami-Dade County Commission. What we call "the unreformable majority" were squarely in the US Century Bank court. (The basketball stadium at FIU -- the most important sprawl anchor in West Dade) bears the bank's name.

For the pain and suffering of civic activists, there are no tears shed for the cratered fortunes of the bank. Most of the original founding directors have resigned. In December 2013, Ramon Rasco -- in anticipation of the year-end transaction with a new tranche of insiders heralded by the Herald -- thew in the towel as chairman of the board.

But the transaction did not close by December 31, as required by the prospective deal makers. The Herald is an unreliable source of news on reasons why, as it has been since the beginning. Who got cold feet? Why?

On the debit side of the ledger: a lawsuit by dissenting shareholders that is still in play, over-inflated values on remaining insider loans for that land at the edge of the county that fueled so much nonsense at county commission meetings over many years; with Natacha Seijas, Joe Martinez, and Pepe Diaz fronting for their "friends of family" at US Century. There is also a rumor of federal penalties for money laundering. And then there is the fact that US Century Bank has been kept afloat only thanks to the largesse of the taxpayer: that would be you and me.

US Century Bank, whose founding directors are Republican to the core and presumably in favor of markets free from government regulation, were saved by $50 million that the bank still owes the US Treasury. The amount of capital that the bank's new investors will be required to put up, depends on how successfully they can weasel out paying back you and me. The bank's founders want to make off with the money; that is to say, they want the TARP money to disappear as a debt obligation.

In all its press releases, US Century Bank is unrelenting in its conviction that the bank is an upstanding member of the community. Well, they do have a (declining) deposit base of nearly $1 billion. We guess US Century Bank's depositors read Eye On Miami in inverse proportion to the percentage of bank directors who do.

US Century Bank continues to lose money, and who will put more money into a money-losing bank? Probably a bank that needs the branches to expand its footprint in Miami-Dade; one that is agnostic to our non-financial concerns. That would be all banks. Non-financial, except that not one shareholder associated with the bank should be allowed to walk away with a deal until every last cent of taxpayer money is repaid.

Here is one way of interpreting US Century Bank's record, if you are a Republican banker or supporter like US Senator Marco Rubio (whose mortgage was issued by US Century), you get to pound the table daily about the failure of federal regulations and federal government, but you don't also get to steal taxpayer money via an industry bailout that chose winners and losers like US Century.

We wish the city's daily newspaper had done its job, reporting the real story of the 2000's building boom and bust and the role that insiders played in distorting public policies and government to speed our way to economic and financial wreckage. It puts EOM and our readers in the position as observers of the dust rising from its broken walls and busted foundation.

The 2000-Slot Machine Miami Herald, U.S. Century Bank merger failure to launch, and other sundries … by gimleteye

I want to write about the irony of the proposal by Genting Casinos to default to a slot machine emporium on the site of the former Miami Herald (adjacent to the Genting/Perez Museum of Art) and the failure to launch of the planned take-over of U.S. Century Bank -- the insider piggy-bank of Miami-Dade County -- by another tranche of insiders. First, a family story.

In 1947 my father arrived in Brooklyn on a ship filled with poor immigrants from eastern Europe. His  parents died in the Holocaust only two years earlier. He had survived by dint of a German labor camp -- what he called on his death bed the longest eighteen months of his life -- , digging anti-tank trenches against the Soviet Army at the end of World War II. He was scarcely twenty one years old. He left in Hungary his only surviving family: two brothers whose way he later purchased out of communist Romania. After working his way through an engineering college in Rhode Island, as a waiter, he started his own business. I'm sure it is a similar story of tragedy, sacrifice and the redemption of hard work that built Miami.

My father's business began by scavenging thrown-away textile winders for pennies on the dollar -- the industry had moved away from its historic origins in New England to lower labor costs in the Southeast -- and repurposing them to make gift-wrapping ribbon. Here is how that worked. You bought large spools of dyed thread, combined them at a glue bath, drove the wet tape over a drying creel, and wound them into big rolls that, in a subsequent operation, you put on cardboard rolls that might be purchased at a drug store or gift shop anywhere in the country.

I know this because as a child I loved scampering through the factory and especially into the warehouse where I climbed through dreams on boxes that were nearly light as feathers, filled with gift wrapping tape ready for the shipping dock. I would accompany my father on Saturdays, and while he attended to factory business he would leave unattended in the warehouse to climb (careful!) among the boxes. I remember jumping from near the rafters into a pile of boxes, scattering them like empty egg crates, surrounded by dim light, dust, the smell of cardboard and animal glue with the sound of whirring machines in the background.

The story I want to tell is how my father got out of the gift wrap ribbon business.

I learned this story when I was a teenager. How did my father tell me? In what context? I wish I remembered exactly. It probably occurred during an early crisis lost to time. At any rate it wasn't casual, a story tossed out at the dinner table; dinner being the only time I saw my father during the week in those early years.

By the early 1960's the business was growing. The factory ran three shifts and he had three young children at home. In addition to doing the engineering and product design, he was also the chief salesman. The business had grown to include a few dozen customers, but one customer was his biggest; the largest distributor of gift wrap ribbon in the country.

As any salesman would, he paid special attention to that customer. He would regularly make the sales call, driving from Rhode Island on the interstate and turnpike, stopping along the way to Georgia. On this particular visit; through an ice storm. I imagine him arriving in the late afternoon, nerves jangled, with the light fading outside and the lights burning inside his customer's building; wood paneling, steel desks, and offices for just business.

My father would always bring the purchasing agent a bottle of whiskey or of scotch, but on this day -- with the snow falling outside in the low winter light, piled up in snowbanks in the slippery parking lot -- he asked for more. The customer guessed his orders had grown to as much as half of my father's business. Now he wanted a kick back. A bribe.

There is a common sense reason not to concentrate your business with a single customer: that customer has power over you in excess of the value of a single order. My father had a choice, and he thought about it on the long ride home through the dark with the snow falling in the cone of the headlights. Keep the business, feed your children, pay the bribe. Don't pay the bribe, shrink your business, risk your income and how your are going to feed your children.

My father didn't pay the bribe.

That's all I'm going to write today. Tomorrow I'll write about the 2000 slot machine Miami Herald and the failure to launch of the most corrupt bank in Miami-Dade County: U.S. Century Bank.

On Rogue Banks, Bankers, and "Apparatchiks" … by gimleteye

"(Hillary) Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish. Striking a soothing note on the global financial crisis, she told the audience, in effect: We all got into this mess together, and we’re all going to have to work together to get out of it." (From Politico)

No. We did not "all get into this mess together". Banks, bankers, and speculators pushed every edge of the supply chain for housing and development to the point that sprawl and bad condos swallowed South Florida, whole. Reasonable people who offered both rationale and examples in opposition were brushed to the side like lint from a suit jacket.

I've called it the "Growth Machine" and its top facilitators, "apparatchiks". In the destruction of the civic good, there was no ideology other than the most reckless forms of risk, coupled with "legal" boundaries that would never pass muster if put to a popular vote.

Earlier this summer, former president Jimmy Carter told a small audience in Germany -- that he assumed to be private -- that "The United States is no longer a functioning democracy". It's not hard, to know why.

Ramon Rasco, chairman of US Century Bank, finally resigns … by gimleteye

It's about time … Rasco is one of Miami-Dade's top apparatchiks who mightily profited from the models of growth that sowed sprawl across the county. He was the organizing architect of the failed Homestead Air Force Base redevelopment (along with assistants like lead GOP attorney/lobbyist, Miguel De Grandy) and a banker/ attorney who founded US Century Bank with Sergio Pino. The bank's fortunes were built on the shaky political foundations of the housing boom and barely managed to stay afloat during the bust. US Century Bank was the insider piggy bank of Miami-Dade County. A ProPublica investigative report wrote, "The rise and fall of U.S. Century, while certainly more extreme than most banks, exemplifies the fast-and-loose banking culture that led to the financial crisis, which continues to drag down the global economy. It also epitomizes both the failure to regulate the banking sector during the pre-crisis boom years and the slipshod approach to the bailout that followed the bust. Above all, it's about losers and winners. The losers are taxpayers and local residents grappling with the ill effects of suburban sprawl. The winners appear to be a group of wealthy and politically connected businessmen who created a bank that served as their own corporate ATM, funneling tens of millions of dollars to ventures in which they had a stake."

An Eye On Miami's anonymous commenters once wrote that if you were a middle level manager at Miami-Dade County or anyone with a connection, you could get a "special" expedited loan. That's all gone, now. The bank was the largest recipient of TARP (that's federal) aid in Florida. Complaining about the Perez/ Genting Art Museum recently, collector Rosa de la Cruz said, along the lines, that people in Miami are afraid to speak out.

Federal bank regulators should have shut this bank down, years ago. Why regulators didn't demand Rasco's resignation, long ago, is a mystery.

US Century Bank, Tied To The Hip With The Miami Herald ... by gimleteye

At first I thought the April 1st Miami Herald paean to the resurrection of US Century Bank was an April Fool's joke. But I was wrong.

"Will This Bank Rise Again" is one of the strangest PR pitches I've ever read in the Herald (online edition, thank you).

To get the true story of US Century Bank, readers will have to use our search engine to read the lengthy commentaries and back stories; you won't find it anywhere in the Herald.

Why?

The Herald reports in the second paragraph, "The plan stayed on track for a few years until the recession deepened, bad loans mounted and capital was depleted, putting U.S. Century’s very survival in jeopardy."

There is no mention of the thru-line that Eye On Miami discloses: that US Century was built by a board of directors dedicated to the business model of converting wetlands and farmland to suburban sprawl. The political influence peddling by board directors, lead by Ramon Rasco and Sergio Pino, literally turned Miami-Dade government into a hostage state.

The political origins of the housing boom in South Florida advanced the fortunes of governors, like Jeb! Bush, and presidents, like George W. Bush. This story was uninterrupted by the biggest real estate crash since the Great Depression, built on the fumes of derivative finance and salesmanship that the Miami Herald never, ever attempted to link for readers.

And as we have written in the past, the reason is that Herald revenue and income substantially depended on telling these stories a certain way, so as not to offend advertisers and insiders, like the land use lawyer lobby in tall skyscrapers downtown who rub shoulders with Herald brass.

There is nothing of these relations, naturally, in the Herald report.

At its inception, U.S. Century founders, homebuilder Pino, attorney Ramon Rasco, Sedanos family members Manolo Herran and Armando Guerra and gun manufacturer Carlos Garcia had grand plans to create a successful bank.

After all, they had already succeeded with Ready State Bank, which was started in 1983 with $3 million and was sold in 1999 for $150 million, making fortunes in the process.

“Once we sold the bank, it was always on our minds that we would do it again,” said Pino, during an interview in his office late last year.

So they brought in more well-connected directors: Dade County Bar Association President — and later Florida Bar Association President — Frank Angones, Spanish television executive Jose Cancela and lobbyist and Super Bowl Host Committee Chairman Rodney Barreto, adding Herran’s son Augustin to succeed his father once he retired.

“This was a dream team,” Pino recalled. “We were going to create a great bank.”

What they created was an insider piggy bank of proportions noted by Coral Gables bank analyst, Bauer Financial, with insider loan ratios that may have been among the highest in the nation. The insider transactions extended right to County Hall. One anonymous reader of Eye On Miami commented that during the housing boom, there was a special US Century Bank loan officer delegated to handle loans to county employees. No questions asked.

The Herald glosses over the 2011 FDIC order against US Century Bank. In the ProPublica investigation of the bank by former Miami New Times writer, subsequent Pulitzer Prize winner writer Jake Bernstein noted that one government bank investigator, recently retired, said he had never seen a bank with so many abuses that had not been shut down through enforcement.

In response, Ramon Rasco and other bank investors have expressed nothing but sunny skies for their great community bank. Not a single mention is made of the way that environmental and civic organizations spent decades fighting like David against Goliath the influence peddling that trashed Miami-Dade's quality of life, natural resources, and shifted multi-billion dollar infrastructure costs onto the backs of taxpayers. They called it 'progress'. We call it 'fraud'.

The Herald report white-washes these criticisms.

The suits cite the bank’s large volume of insider loans and other dealings, including that one third of the bank’s 24 branches are leased from current or former directors.

Dávila, who joined the bank in August of last year, said that U.S. Century has modified terms of its loans to past directors Pino and Barreto. Pino, for example, provided more collateral and agreed to a rate increase. Dávila said that all loans to insiders are being paid on schedule.

Readers would like to know if the Herald demanded to see the evidence, to support this claim. What is also relevant is where the land is. We believe much of it is outside the Urban Development Boundary. We would also like to know, what is the record of loan and principle repayment by the "insiders" since the banking crisis in 2008. And we would also like the Herald to issue a disclaimer related to inviting US Century Bank founder Sergio Pino and Armando Codina into the newsroom, to address staff, to pitch what great contributors do for the local economy.

These omissions lead an informed reader to wonder if the Herald editor tasked the reporter to write an up-beat story that would weight against further sanctions by the US government. As in, "Don't miss the criticisms, but don't elaborate on them either."

The new Genting big gambling effort for Miami/Jorge Perez/Jimmy Tate money will be in charge (Perez is a Fortune billionaire, having bluffed his way into the "too big to fail" category of condo developers who would have been shut down by the banks, if the federal government held banks accountable for unstable derivative financing that shattered the US economy. Perez tied his fortunes to his lenders, the way the Miami Herald tied itself to its advertisers ... ), while avoiding -- presumably -- a string of nasty lawsuits that could bring to light more data and facts on the rampant abuse of banking rules and regulations. Eye On Miami has written at length on the Genting/ Perez connection. Use our search engine to read more.

It is a mystery why US Century Bank hasn't been shut down by the federal government. The answer could be in the way US Century Bank directors bound themselves tight, through campaign contributions and fund raising, to a variety of elected officials. The power of South Florida representation in Florida and, by extension, the nation cannot be easily dismissed.

But even if you take exception with our depictions of the Growth Machine, and explanations how the gears mesh from local county permitting officials, to county commissioners standing as land use authorities, to lobbyists and mortgage bankers, Wall Street and presidents, here is what also can't be dismissed: US Century Bank was the largest recipient of TARP (that is, taxpayer) financing in Florida and the largest for a bank its size in the United States. There is $50 million outstanding debt that is owed by the bank, to US taxpayers. The Herald report seems to gloss over the fact as though losing the money was just a sign of support for people who run a great economy. If you are a Republican, Democrat, or Tea Party iconoclast; write to your senators and to the US Treasury Department and INSIST that all the money be repaid to taxpayers as part of any deal. Pay the money back. No discounts, no hair cuts, no white washing theft.

US Century Bank Deal Does Not Pass Smell Test

The Miami Herald published yesterday the latest in a series of puff pieces on the insider piggy bank, US Century Bank. "Miami may be a major metropolis, but in certain circles, all it takes to raise the capital to buy a $1 billion bank is one degree of separation." Well, it takes Eye On Miami to explain exactly how that one degree of separation works in this case, and none of it is explained for readers in the Herald article.

The bottom line, here, is the Herald is promoting a bank sale constructed around walking away from $50 million in US taxpayer money. The $50 million walked away through the bank created by lobbyists and the local representatives of the Growth Machine: Sergio Pino and Ramon Rasco. Pino built a bank to match his ambitions for US Century Homes, dreamt to be the local version of Lennar: the soup to nuts Miami-based homebuilder. Oh, I forgot. According to the Herald, $5 million is to be repaid by the new investors who -- one way or another -- comprise a syndicate of the Great Destroyers.

Irony scarcely covers the issue, on a weekend commemorating the Herald as its 1 Herald Plaza site was demolished, thanks to a bottomless pile of money from Asian gamblers. That's where the one degree of separation lies. You won't read it in the Herald.

Genting was only temporarily deterred from its outsized plan to turn Miami into the Las Vegas of Latin America. It will patiently chip away at resistance to gambling until it achieves its aims.

There is plenty of detail, how Genting spreads its money around. The trio involved in the planned US Century Bank takeover -- Rok, Tate, and Perez -- all washed tens of millions for their short term -- like half a year -- investment in the subordinated debt purchased on the property adjacent to the Herald site.

To achieve its grandiose plans, Genting needed the former Omni property and the company needed agents; politically influential insiders to advance its cause; a large enough footprint for its multi-billion investment in Miami gambling.

The Genting money came at the propitious time that Perez was negotiating his name (and contribution) to the Miami Art Museum. Viewing the whole enterprise, it seems a magician trick worthy of Houdini.

It is astonishing that Jorge Perez materialized whole and was not shut down by the banks during the housing bust or otherwise held to account for the condo mess he created on the banks of the Miami River.

There must be teams of bankers grinding their teeth reading how he now appears on the pages of Forbes and America's richest men. I'd like to know what they think of "one degree of separation".

To continue the theme; it is as though US Century Bank founders, Pino and Rasco, in ginning up the worst excesses of the housing boom -- spreading platted subdivisions into wetlands, environmentally sensitive lands, and spinning public policies into carefully crafted hairballs (like the HABDI fiasco, even earlier) -- simply dissolved from the memory bank of the Miami Herald. (To be fair, the Herald never would print those stories in the first place, giving rise to blogs like ours.)

Because of our $50 TARP investment in US Century, the public deserves to know exactly whose loans cratered on the balance sheet of US Century Bank. My guess is that hundreds of millions sits in undeveloped "agricultural" lands outside the Urban Development Boundary waiting for the miracle to come: the extension of sprawl through the agency of Miami Dade Expressway Authority and the expansion of State Road 836. What are the terms of those loans? Have the borrowers -- who may have been directors of US Century Bank -- repaid their mortgage and principal according to legal obligations?

If the federal government allows the takeover of US Century Bank, by Miami insiders, these facts will vanish the same way likely as US Century debt owed to US taxpayers: the largest unpaid TARP obligation in the state of Florida.

MDX: Justifying the highway to abyss, or, unlocking wealth for a few ... by gimleteye

Eye On Miami hasn't been shy about disclosing the land speculators, the GOP campaign contributors set to benefit, and the mind-boggling fact that the same forces that plunged the economy into the worst housing crash since the Great Depression are, only a few years later, intent on doing exactly the same through the proposed expansion of State Road 836 into Southwest Miami-Dade.

Last week on NBC, Jeb Bush derided journalists probing for a frisson of competition in his relationship with Senator Marco Rubio as "crack cocaine". It was an odd choice of words.

There is an analogy with crack cocaine in Florida politics. It associates the addiction to political money with re-zoning land for suburban sprawl. It's where the dealers and the users interconnect, and the clearest place to view it is where the pressure to build more sprawl rises in distant wetlands, open space, and environmentally sensitive lands near the Everglades. In other words, exactly what the Miami-Dade expressway authority is reviewing.

We wrote about this project a year ago, when it first visibly surfaced ... although it has been on the drawing boards for many years.

Before diving into the details of the political crack cocaine addiction, it is worth a review.

The enormous wealth generated through Wall Street finance based on mortgage derivatives depends on volume: volume of mortgages for commercial and residential real estate development. The volume, in south Florida, depends on local legislatures acting to open farmland to platted subdivisions. There is considerable process involved in "shifting the goal posts" in order to misallocate risk; wetlands need to be downgraded and rezoned, open space needs to be committed to bank branches, gas stations, and car dealerships, malls need to be built to service new subdivisions with residents clamoring for cheap services.

When, at some distant point in the future, taxpayers are left scratching their heads -- how did our quality of life get wrecked? -- the addicts point to "process" and "public hearings" and all the accountrements of re-zoning, downgrading, and destroying that decorate the Growth Machine Christmas Tree like decorations carefully packed and re-used as the years unwind.

The mechanics also depend on the illusion of spreading  wealth and shifting, or ignoring, growth's true costs.

That's the underlying story of the $1 billion wastewater upgrade that is now resting on the backs of county taxpayers, as a result of decades of inaction -- stretching back to the early 1990's when a federal lawsuit forces Miami-Dade County and the EPA into a settlement agreement that the county proceeded to ignore.

Today, anything  that smacks of regulatory authority or environmental enforcement is dismissed as "government over-reaching or overstepping its boundaries". This is commonly attributed to Tea Party enthusiasms, but Jeb! Bush articulate the core principle much earlier than the so-called "revolution" we know, now, to have been orchestrated by billionaire polluters like the Koch Brothers. Jeb!, in his final inaugural address as Florida's governor in 2003, boldly averred: “There will be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers; as silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill."

The crack cocaine dealers need the policemen to vanish from observing their street corner transactions. The Growth Machine needs new markets, free from pesky citizen suits and rancid delay: free for land speculators,  cement manufacturers, roadway contractors, housing developers and real estate shills to pack local county boards and legislatures every time there is an effort to insert new zoning or new infrastructure to speed land development toward the Everglades. Boards like the MDX are in place, with characters culled from the Growth Machine, to dot the i's and cross the t's. 

"Nothing can stop it!" crowed former WCI chairman Al Hoffman, who was Jeb's! hand-picked leader for the Council of 100 -- the state's top business lobby group -- in 2003. A few years later, the company Hoffman founded -- (Hoffman was also Jeb's and Dubya's campaign finance chair) -- would dissolve in bankruptcy. The point: the mechanics of suburban sprawl and land development are not only still in place, they have become even more frictionless with the decapitation of the single state agency charged with growth management by Gov. Rick Scott, Jeb's! successor.

This is what is unfolding in the corner of Miami-Dade at the western boundary with a plan to extend the SR 836  into farmland purchased at the top of the real estate bubble primarily by top GOP campaign contributors allied with US Century Bank (on US Century, check our archive). It is a tried and true formula for wealth generation: use profits from real estate development to secure political patronage, then use political patronage to stack permitting authorities and local boards to speed the way for new taxpayer investments that will double, triple, quadruple the price of real estate, and -- if you are very very connected -- arrange for highway exits and entrances to be put right where you want them.

Last February, we wrote, "Ajamil Bermello: members of the Growth Machine nomenklatura": 

"Nomenklatura: a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in all sphere's of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, engineering and infrastructure development.

In Miami-Dade (and Florida) there is a parallel nomenklatura. Some key members of our own domestic nomenklatura are on parade through the effort to extend the Dolphin Expressway south on the western edge of the county, directly threatening Everglades National Park and benefiting land speculators who purchased property in anticipation of the growth of suburban sprawl: they are also key members of the nomenklatura and include Rodney Barreto, Ramon Rasco, Ed Easton and Sergio Pino.

This week, the board of the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority (MDX) unanimously approved adding the extension of the SR 836. Nearly 200 people voiced opposition to the project. Although it is not a done deal, changes to state law and agencies under Gov. Rick Scott and the anti-environmental GOP Florida legislature are going to make it quite difficult for citizens to stop the expansion that will expose many thousands acres of farmland to development pressure.

The local engineering firm, Ajamil Bermello, has put its shoulder to this wheels of progress.

Ajamil Bermello's Tere Garcia is providing public relations support for the MDX board. In response to opponents, she wrote recently in the professional, neutral tone that masks the frenetic investments of political energy to plow more highway in service of sprawl: "The extension of SR 836 is envisioned as a multimodal facility, used also by express transit buses, that would address the existing transportation needs of a vast community of thousands of existing residents living in the southwestern areas of Miami-Dade County west of the Turnpike. There will be no recommendation on MDX's behalf to move the Urban Development Boundary Line. Any alternative to be identified as part of the study must be evaluated considering all environmental requirements, sound engineering practices, be financially feasible and enjoy the support of those served."

Bermello Ajamil is part of the nomenclature that Occupy Miami and the rest of the Occupy movement ought to study. It takes a village to raise a child and confident engineers to wreck the village.

Willy Bermello, a founding partner of the engineering firm, famously tooted the housing boom in the Miami Herald in May 2005 at just about the same time much of the land in question in the SR 836 expansion was being purchased by nomenklatura friends: "This bubble is not latex," he wrote, "but stainless steel." The Herald provided no opportunity for rebuttal, showing its publisher also knew his place.

The point is that the worst economy since the Great Depression have not thwarted, changed, or modified the goals of the nomenklatura in Miami-Dade in the slightest. Ms. Garcia notes that the initial planning for the extension of SR 836 began in 2007: indeed, all that shows is that the nomenklatura have been intent-- from the start-- to build sprawl to the edge of the Everglades just like Broward."

It is worth tracking back to EOM posts on the land ownership patterns around the SR 836 planned extension. The only news in the Miami Herald report, below, is that commuters, through tolls, have funded a $6.9 million study that will no doubt reach the conclusion that the highway extension is a great public benefit.

The only reason it hasn't rolled out faster is that the real estate downturn turned all the assets in land into big craters on bank balance sheets. Some of these banks, like US Century, have struggled to keep their doors open and to maintain at least the figment of equity. (We still haven't heard all the details of who, exactly, was able to keep mortgages for large land holdings without being required to pay interest or principal while others were shut down and taken over.)

While small, individual homeowners found themselves forced to ruin by the downturn, big and politically connected land owners were protected by the banks that could not afford to "mark-to-market" the loans and so left them alone, once it became clear that federal banking authorities would do nothing to set the record straight.

These are hidden stories that sometimes emerge on 60 Minutes but otherwise stay mostly out of sight.

Take a good look at the owners of the property bordering the proposed MDX Expressway. Interpretation, to come.

New expressway idea for Southwest Miami-Dade draws fire

Yoani Sanchez: "Information War" ... not so different, in Miami

Two Miami Herald OPED's struck my interest this morning. The first, about the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez celebrating her arrival in Brazil and the 'shower of democracy', being able to access the internet free of censors. The second, an OPED by Fred Grimm, "FIU deal benefits connected exec".

The Fred Grimm editorial excoriates the political connections behind a move by FIU to reward a Texas entrepreneur with a contract for its online MBA degree program. As we have documented at Eye on Miami, Florida and Miami Dade's embrace of private charter schools and initiatives like the one exposed by Mr. Grimm is all about keeping intact and rewarding the Jeb! Bush strain of the Republican Party. That includes, of course, hyping Marco Rubio for 2016.

We wrote about this phenomenon, just the other day. FIU's president emeritus Mitch Madique was given space on the Sunday Herald OPED page to pen a gratuitous appeal for civic engagement in Miami that FIU -- through its own behaviors tied to insider dealing (US Century Bank, for example) and an insular board of directors, now including Cesar Alvarez, of Greenberg Traurig -- undermines.

It is rare when the Miami Herald offers readers insight to those undercurrents and political orthodoxies that have transformed Miami into one of the LEAST civically engaged cities in the nation. So what is up with the Herald? One day its OPED page grants Mitch Madique free reign to empty puffery on civic engagement and the next day, to an editorial writer to expose the financial underpinnings of that same puffery.

Is this what the Herald calls, balance? Were she to work in Miami, once she got used to fast internet access, I suspect Yoani Sanchez would be in our corner, on the answers to this question.

"What greater Miami can do to achieve greatness" by Mitch Madique ... OMG ... by gimleteye

 2005 Photo - From left to right: Sergio Pino (former Board Member of U.S. Century Bank), Alan Carsrud, FIU President Mitch Maidique, Eugenio Pino, Governor Jeb Bush, and Carlos Pino

FIU president emeritus Mitch Madique pens a Miami Herald editorial, "What greater Miami can do to achieve greatness." He notes, Miami makes the list "the most likely not to be engaged."

Madique writes, "we share common ground, including the desire to make our community a better place to live, work and raise our families. We don't have to accept this designation."

Well, we may not have to accept this designation but we do have to understand why what mainly passes for "engagement" in Miami is little more than barely legal thievery.

No one should know this better than Madique, whose board of directors and willingness to traffic with the likes of US Century Bank puts it squarely in the column of the abductors of the public interest. (Read about FIU's role, directly, in the 2012 effort to quietly swap out lands purchased for the public interest in the Bird Drive Basin in order to increase its own campus size. Search our archives.)

All the pro-business, Chamber of Commerce led summits in the world can't diminish how two industries in Miami thrive through civic apathy; the tourism-based businesses that over decades failed to protect the attributes of the Everglades and Biscayne Bay and migrated to enterprises that treat Miami mainly as a pass-through. The second industry is construction and development. In terms of benefits to Miami, this Growth Machine depends on slight-of-hand magic tricks, along the lines of "build first, worry about quality of life and infrastructure costs (like those intended to protect the environment) later."

Shareholders Suing U.S. Century Bank. By Geniusofdespair

Interesting to note, the head of Shoma Homes (also a U.S. Century Bank Shareholder), Masoud Shojaee, is suing his fellow home builders/bank officers over at U.S. Century Bank.  I wonder if Juan J. Herran is suing relatives, Augustin and Manuel Herran.

Rodney Barreto, a director of the bank, modified his mortgage with U.S. Century on January 15th but unfortunately I cannot access the document to see what he did.  Sergio Pino, another director, also modified a mortgage held by U.S. Century Bank on January 28th. Why are direcrors/former directors modifying their mortgages?  The mortgage that Sergio Pino is modifying had an initial indebtedness secured by $500,000, maximum principal indebtedness $10,000,000. A third officer, Armando Guerra also modified a mortgage December 12th. His original mortgage was for $3,004,400. I didn't see modifications for the other officers.

The Miami Herald reported today that U.S. Century is close to recapitalizing the Bank. The shareholders have to agree to the deal with Jimmy Tate and Sergio Rok putting $50 million in to wipe out bad loans.  I wonder if Masoud Shojaee likes the deal? Personally, I like any deal that will help pay back the $50.2 million in Tarp funds this bank got.

Phrase of the Year: Sacrifice Zones ... by gimleteye

I googled to see if I could find the first usage of the term "sacrifice zone". The term describes areas (and neighbors) we sacrifice in order to pollute. On such sacrifice zone is Biscayne National Park.

National Parks are supposed to be held in trust, by the federal government, for future generations. They are supposed to be inviolable by polluters. The latest torpedo attack on our national parks is FPL's new plan for Turkey Point.

The desolate, bizarre Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant complex is isolated from the view of people except by boat. From the water, you can see five power plants, including two aged nuclear reactors. The idea of sacrifice implies a surrendering one value or outcome for another.

This morning, as volunteer president of Friends of the Everglades, I will take another day out of my life to go to the county commission to testify against the surrendering a national park in order to permit two new nuclear reactors at Turkey Point by Florida Power and Light.

The county commission is being asked to approve a plan to divert 120 million gallons per day of treated municipal sewage that ultimately will be used to "cool" two new nuclear reactors that FPL plans to build in the lowest relative to sea level rise and most vulnerable section of the county. Of course, the county commission should say, no. The Miami Herald should say, no. Everyone should say, no to more nuclear at sea level, in the most vulnerable section of a state that is more vulnerable than any other in the nation to the severe costs of sea level rise.

Last month, in a planned exercise of imposing frustration on citizens, the county commission heard this issue on the dais, entertaining presentations by FPL lobbyists, then suddenly "lost" its quorum when it came time for citizen opponents of the nuclear project to speak. (Read our analysis -- because you won't be able to read an analysis anywhere else -- of what happened on December 14th, 2012 at the county commission, here.)

In the Florida Keys, the rumbling has grown. A recent newspaper article prompted a reply from Steven D. Scroggs, the senior project manager for the new nuke plan. He wrote:

"The backup (cooling) system uses radial collector wells that are specifically designed, and confirmed by extensive modeling, to have no adverse environmental impact. At the recommendation of South Florida Water Management District, use of the radial collector wells is expected to be restricted to less than 60 days in a 12-month period, assuming they're needed at all. FPL supports the restriction and is confident the county will be able to provide all required wastewater on a daily basis.

FPL is proud of its long-standing commitment and track record of protecting the environment, including our efforts to protect and grow the population of the once-endangered American crocodile at our Turkey Point facility. The Turkey Point Units 6 & 7 Project would continue that commitment and help bring additional safe, clean and reliable energy to South Florida while helping to solve the very costly problem of disposing of the county's wastewater."

Proud? That's like US Century Bank saying it is "proud" of its reputation in the community while it turned out to be, for its size, the most undercapitalized, insider piggy bank in the United States. What Scroggs didn't write is that these "radial collector wells" comprise a vast well field directly under Biscayne National Park. They will be designed to suck out 90 million gallons per day of sea water, through the porous aquifer, creating a massive "sacrifice zone" over a very wide area.

For Scroggs to write there will "no adverse environmental impact" instantly invites comparison with the broken promises of FPL in its formal agreements with the state to halt salt water intrusion to South Florida through its existing cooling canal system.

The sad fact is that the Florida legislature is to blame for the "early cost recovery" awarding FPL nearly two hundred million dollars per year -- from ratepayers like you and me -- to fund Scroggs and the lobbyists and the engineers and the planners to design and attempt to permit two new nuclear reactors that are virtually certain never to be built.

If you watch today's proceedings on live broadcast from the county commission, just keep in mind some people are being paid a lot of money to be there, and some aren't. Level playing field? You tell me.

US Century Bank Collapse: Biggest Business Story of 2012

No surprise that The Miami Herald missed, in its annual review, the biggest business story of 2012: the collapse of the insider piggy bank, US Century Bank.

Eyeonmiami, the blog, documented the hijacking of local government during the early 2000's by insiders who comprised the founders and board of US Century; Sergio Pino and Ramon Rasco. The same forces that planned the transformation of the Homstead Air Force Base into a major commercial airport through a no-bid 99 year lease in the mid 1990's materialized, in the early 2000's to proliferate zero lot line housing and platted subdivisions into Miami suburbs.

Directors like Rodney Barreto, a top Jeb! Bush consigliere, agitated for widening Krome Avenue while amassing large land holdings outside the Urban Development Boundary. It was a near perfect and completely legal scheme: manipulating zoning to arbitrage the value of farmland and open space into its conversion value as sprawl.

The media dared not acknowledge much less criticize the formula because its own revenues and profits, benefiting top executives, were tied to what even then looked like, walked like, and talked like a Ponzi scheme of gargantuan proportions.

US Century Bank provided not just the link between politically connected home builders and the local elected officials who did their bidding from the dais of the county commission, like former county commissioner and ring leader Natacha Seijas, they also provided the financing under the lazy eye of regulatory agencies.

The housing boom and subsequent crash caused the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. On a broad scale, the Great Recession that followed -- if it can be called that -- was not a blameless exercise. The same way at the national level none have been held to account, at the local level the principal actors have gone unmentioned from the scene. The general lassitude of the South Florida economy traces directly to the shattered fortunes of consumers persuaded to invest in mortgages they could not reasonably afford, through the promotion and advocacy of homebuilders and their bankers -- like US Century -- and the politicians who made their developments possible through zoning decisions.

Eventually US Century Bank received the largest TARP federal taxpayer bailout in Florida; even this fact was lightly reported by the mainstream press. Yet, because of its rotten loan portfolio (according to Bauer Financial, a ratings agency, US Century Bank had a ratio of insider loans that dwarfed similarly sized banks in the United States) it also ranked as the most undercapitalized bank in the United States (South Florida Daily Business Journal).

If one were to overlay on a map of Miami-Dade County, those rotten mortgages from US Century Bank, it is our belief the map would provide an outline of the pattern of suburban sprawl that has been so destructive of quality of life and sound decision-making for taxpayer investments by elected officials who voters keep returning to office, mostly because voters are uninformed about the insider forces that shape our communities.

For these reasons, the collapse of US Century Bank -- yet to be shuttered by regulators or, through lawsuits, fully disclosed -- is the biggest business story of 2012 in Miami.

US Century Bank: Is accountability around the corner? ... by gimleteye

Future history books -- presuming the world doesn't end today -- will record the housing bubble and collapse as the trigger for a lost decade of economic growth in the United States. There has been scant analysis, so far, of the political forces and influence peddling that created the bubble in the first place.

At the local level, the insider piggy bank -- US Century Bank -- and its board of directors used the levers of zoning power to proliferate suburban sprawl throughout Miami-Dade farmland and wetlands. We have likely written more than anyone about a bank and directors protected by a code of silence. Here is the archive of our posts, mentioning the bank.

In August 2011, one reader wrote, "When I was within the inner circle of this group, I asked for a loan from a board member. I was told to go to a branch and see a specific person there. I went that day sat down and was given the amount I wanted; no questions asked. Am I thankful? Yes. However, everyone in the inner loop at County Hall did this. Or sold themselves for campaign contributions. You should have seen them--all parties all candidates goveling at the trough. What is sad, is that the bank was started with a semi-private subscription by among others secretaries at US Century, Plumbers, and Rasco et al."

The news of shareholder lawsuits and a collapsed merger with Brazilian investors promises more to come. South Florida Business Daily is revealing the mechanics of insider dealing. US Century Bank is trying to walk away from its $50 million bailout by federal taxpayers through the TARP program. We hope that the bank, its executives and directors are held accountable.

US Century Bank on the rocks: will top insiders wriggle away from the law? ... by gimleteye

This U.S. Century loan was a second Mortgage for Marco Rubio (it was undisclosed on his Financial Disclosure at the time) and the subject of a 2008 Miami Herald probe. The Rubio property is now underwater with a purchase price of  $550,00 and current market value of $384,900. - Miami Dade County Clerk Records

Credit South Florida Business Journal's Brian Bandell with the intrepid journalist of the year award, for taking on the joke of a banking institution: US Century Bank. The Miami Herald fears to tread on the insider lawyer/business elite who swim in lazy circles around Miami and Miami Dade County government. The newspapers publishers and executives have always fostered a cozy relationship with special interests whose business models depend on extracting value from farmland and open space, including Everglades wetlands, in order to proliferate suburban sprawl like a cancer across the South Florida landscape. Who is to argue they weren't successful?

US Century Bank was established by Ramon Rasco and Sergio Pino, two of the top political insiders, to provide mortgages and underlying financing for their business models. US Century Homes fashioned itself as the local Cuban American version of Lennar: vertically integrated to provide the lowest cost, mass market product to buyers ginned up by the housing boom mirage. It turns out the bank's lending practices extraordinarily favored directors, including Rodney Barreto, Jose Cancela and the owners of Sedanos supermarket chain. (US Senator Marco Rubio's home mortgage originated with US Century Bank, at a time Mr. Rubio showed practically no net worth. But that, for insiders who benefited from US Century's piggy bank, is just the tip of the iceberg.)

Eye On Miami has tracked US Century Bank for years. Beginning in the mid-1990's, I dedicated nearly six years to fighting the Homestead Air Force Base fiasco, triggered by Rasco and his cronies at the Latin Builders Association who commandeered county government -- and untold tens of millions of taxpayer resources -- in the brazen attempt to lift ownership of the military base from the Department of Defense into the hands of private investors, eventually including Mas family interests. Today, Rasco is managing partner of a law firm that includes clients like the Fanjul sugar billionaires.

The fight for the air base was won -- if that can be called a victory -- by conservationists, but the subsidiary battle, to prevent suburban sprawl from invading South Dade like a toxic weed, was decidely lost during the housing boom that gobbled up farmland and restored the dreams of Rasco, Pino et al. while shunting environmental protection to the side.

We called US Century Bank, "the insider piggy bank", based both on evidence disclosed through FDIC reporting (see our archive) and quarterly analyses by Bauer Financial. We gave up reporting on the Bauer Financial reports once US Century Bank, bottoming out at a "zero" rating, seemed destined to collapse under the hubris of its founders and directors. Why the FDIC didn't shutter the bank is a mystery probably tied to other forms of influence peddling. It was, after all, according to South Florida Business Journal, the most undercapitalized bank in the United States and, in Florida, the largest recipient of TARP funding.

It is ironic that Republican Tea Party activists, who hated TARP -- the Bush and Obama effort to re-float the US banking system by injecting no-cost money into banks' balance sheets so they might lend out to people and businesses at prime rate and above -- failed to criticize US Century Bank or the Republican insiders who used it as their piggy bank. Both Pino and Barreto -- a Bush consigliere-- were some of the most visible GOP fund raisers in Florida. (Rasco showed up, in the last election cycle, hosting a fund raiser for Democrat, US Senator Bill Nelson.)

In a Nov. 26 report, Bandell writes about a shareholder lawsuit brought against US Century Bank:

The complaint alleges the bank was created to help its directors and their friends and family members finance construction projects under unusually favorable terms under lax underwriting standards. The complaint cited the high level of loans to bank insiders and nine of 24 branches being leased from bank directors Pino, Guerra and Herran in 2011.
Banking regulators allow insider loans and leases as long as the insiders don’t vote on them and the terms are comparable to market conditions. C1 Bank’s merger agreement calls for the rental rates on the insider branches to be reduced. The lawsuit alleges the rents for the insider branches were above market value.
The insider loans had little underwriting scrutiny and U.S. Century Bank’s loan transactions were used to help its directors and business associates gain political leverage, the complaint alleges. Davila previously told the Business Journal that U.S. Century Bank hasn’t taken any losses on its insider loans, but it has taken reserves for potential losses on them and some of those loans were modified in “troubled debt restructuring.”
“The defendant directors wasted corporate assets by, among other things, failing to supervise the unproportional level of insider lending which led to an over-abundance of non-performing loans, employing a liberal loan forgiveness program for insiders and/or their friends and business associates which were more favorable than those available to normal customers of the bank, failing to ensure diversification of the bank’s assets so as to avoid the risk of the bank’s undercapitalization and using the bank branch locations as an avenue to maximize personal profit for those defendant directors who owned the properties which housed said branches," the complaint states.

Late yesterday, US Century shareholders -- a large percentage of the banks's shares are held by insiders including Rasco -- voted to approve a shotgun marriage with Brazilian investors who recently created C1Bank, based in Tampa, that has rolled up a few other similarly distressed community banks. Under the terms of the agreement, US Century shareholders are essentially wiped out, but so are US taxpayers who will only receive $6.27 million of the $50.2 million US Century owed.

Rasco et al. still have to deal with furious shareholders. It is clear that many were left in the complete dark about the internal machinations. But whether the details ever see the light of day is in doubt. The current owners and former US Century insiders like Rasco are counting on business insurance protecting directors to kick in and for some settlement to be reached that hides the sordid details of Miami's insider piggy bank.

Eye On Miami guesses that there are many, many Miami and Miami-Dade County political insiders rooting for the whole rotten mess to be buried far from sight and all the damning paperwork to be thrown into an Everglades canal. Lifting the rocks covering US Century Bank loan details like those mega-tracts outside the Urban Development Boundary (Krome Gold) would provide a close-up view how political influence peddling really works. At the end of the day, Rasco and his fellow insiders can forcefully argue for letting the whole US Century Bank story sink beneath the waves.

There are a thousand reasons (no, closer to 44 million reasons) taxpayers deserve to know those details: those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it. That is, though, how we roll.

US Century Bank already screwed taxpayers, will US Department of Treasury screw taxpayers, again? ... by gimleteye

The worst bank in America, founded by suburban sprawl titans Sergio Pino and Ramon Rasco, may get absorbed by a group of foreign investors through a shareholder vote this evening.

US Century Bank is the insider piggy bank of Miami-Dade County. Its board of directors benefited from insider loans, more than any other comparably sized bank in America. Ramon Rasco, bank chairman and Miami-Dade County insider, calls US Century "a first class community bank." Today, it is the most severely undercapitalized bank in the United States and the largest recipient of TARP (ie. taxpayer) funds in Florida. According to a recent report by South Florida Business Journal, the US Treasury is poised to accept an 87 percent discount to its TARP loan, the largest yet of any bank to receive federal taxpayer-backed support.

Why the bank wasn't shuttered by the FDIC long ago is a mystery, but may have to do with the influence peddling at which its directors excel. Somehow the bank, and its directors' (past and present) land ownership outside the UDB escaped the interest of the mainstream media. Read the Eye on Miami archives, under US Century for details.

Citizens who have struggled for decades to protect quality of life in Miami-Dade, especially in lands edging the Everglades from Homestead and Florida City to West Kendall, often experienced the severe handicap levied by exactly those special interests who chartered US Century Bank in order to facilitate the spread of suburban sprawl westward and into the last remaining open space in South Florida. Now it is clear, they did it by "legally" loaning each other money backed by small depositors and gaming the political system, at which they excelled long before establishing the most corrupt little bank in South Florida.

Who is C1 Bank, that proposed a merger that essentially wipes out US Century shareholders? The Miami Herald cites only "four investors". From South Florida Business Journal, we know that those four investors are "Brazilians", but we really don't know, do we?

All we know for sure is if this transaction proceeds, the sordid details of insider loans connected to the housing boom will be buried forever.

Taxpayers are owed the facts. The US Department of Treasury must block this deal.  US Century shareholders -- also kept in the dark by key Rasco operatives at the bank -- should also vote against the deal. The clock is ticking. It's not too late.

Like the Marlins, the Miami Herald lost the trust of its subscribers ... by gimleteye

A story in the Sunday Miami Herald polls Marlins' fans and notes the deep mistrust and sense of outrage, anger, and abandonment at the Miami Marlins.

This new-found indignation mainly serves to draw attention to the paper's own complicity for the Marlins' stadium deal that will cost billions over the lifetime of the underlying debt. The deal will also deliver an enormous windfall for the Marlins' owner, Jeffrey Loria, when he decides to flip the team to new owners.

During the latest change in the paper's position on the Marlins, we pointed out (along with fellow blogger Bill Cooke at Random Pixels http://randompixels.blogspot.com/2012/11/did-miami-herald-aid-jeffrey-loria-in.html), the tracks of the Herald's past, full-throated support for the stadium deal.

Herald executives are inclined to attribute the paper's dwindling readership to the proliferation of no-cost, internet-based sources of news, but it occurs this Sunday morning that its readers are as turned off by the newspaper as baseball fans are, of the Marlins.

The Herald's best work is tied to investigative reports that bloggers cannot perform (or might, if they were paid). It opens one's eyes, can lead to Pulitzers, and trigger change. But too often, the Herald seems to disdain its readership or paper over readers' complaints, just like the Marlins.

The newspaper's underlying financial difficulty, through which reporters and staff have been both cut to the bone and required to take monthly "furloughs", provide a convenient excuse for the newspaper's owners and executives; as if to say, their memories are as short as their readers'. Take the failed reportage of the US Century Bank fiasco, for example: a story of insider-dealing that cuts to the heart of the Miami power structure including the big downtown law firms that have mightily profited by wrecking our quality of life, plowing subdivisions into cheap farmland and wetlands. Or the front page story trumpeting an outlier public opinion poll by Mason Dixon that had Romney up by five points when a simple Google search would have turned up the real story. (Read the NY Times 538 Blog analysis of public opinion polls during the election, here.)

Selling the consumer short puts the Herald on the same side of the ledger as the Miami Marlins. We can't solve that problem, but we hope the Herald does.

On politics, Miami Herald has some explaining to do ... by gimleteye

Miami Herald reporters are a sharp bunch. Maybe not. Every now and again -- on very important stories -- the Herald shows itself to readers as a paper puppet to larger powers and forces.

Take the insider piggy-bank, US Century Bank for example, where the other day a Herald news report was cribbed from South Florida Business Daily that has had the guts to take on the biggest source of public corruption in Miami-Dade County. Who is protecting US Century Bank, because the bank should have been closed down by the feds long, long ago?

We will never know from the Herald, because Herald executives, past and perhaps present, have strong bonds to the interests and lobbyists who represent and to shareholders of the most corrupt little bank in Florida. (Brian Bandell deserves recognition for excellent reporting on the US Century Bank disaster that the Miami Herald won't. But to get the full scope of that disaster, readers would do better to consult our archives.)

Of the Herald's sins of commission and omission, one startling example was putting on the front page before the recent election a Mason-Dixon poll. It is well known that Mason Dixon is favored by GOP candidates and funders.

The Marc Caputo report of the poll showed Romney up by six points. It certainly raised some eyebrows, given that the Herald had written a strong endorsement of President Obama. Who was at the editorial gate house, allowing a partisan pollster to the head of the line?

In the Nov. 2nd story, Mason-Dixon pollster Brad Coker said, "The debate was the tipping point." On the Herald political blog and in a story last week, Caputo and then the Times tried to dismiss the error: "(Brad Coker) said the shift was not caused by polling error, but because Obama moved the needle with his handling of Hurricane Sandy."

But the needle didn't move. On Nov. 2nd, Caputo wrote as fact: "Obama’s numbers nose-dived with Hispanics, independents and women. Obama was already on unsteady ground in Florida, where unemployment and home foreclosure rates are higher than the national average." Ouch! What moved was The Miami Herald.

Mitt Romney has maintained a solid lead over President Barack Obama in the latest Miami Herald/El Nuevo Herald/Tampa Bay Times poll of likely voters who favor the Republican by six percentage points.

Romney’s strengths: independent voters and more crossover support from Democrats relative to the Republicans who back Obama, according to the survey conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research.

Romney’s crossover appeal is fueled by strong support in rural North Florida, a conservative bastion where a relatively high percentage of Democrats often vote Republican in presidential election years.

“I’m pretty convinced Romney’s going to win Florida,” said Mason-Dixon pollster Brad Coker, who conducted the 800-likely voter survey from Tuesday through Thursday.

“Will it be fivepoints? Maybe. Will it be three points? Possibly,” Coker said, of what he expects Romney’s margin will be. “I don’t think it’s going to be a recount … I don’t think we’re going to have a recount-race here.”

No: we couldn't count in the first place thanks to the GOP.

Credit the New York Times FiveThirtyEight Blog by Nate Silver for doing the work of analyzing the pollsters: "... polls that were Republican-leaning relative to the consensus did especially poorlt." Like Mason-Dixon for example.

In its Nov. 2 report, The Miami Herald editors ought to have pointed out that the Mason-Dixon poll was a statistical outlier. Instead, Caputo's famous ending will stand: "“Romney’s painting the bigger picture, the broader long-term — as Bush used to call it, ‘the vision thing,’"Coker said. “Whereas Obama’s basically down here just preaching to the choir and trying to get them excited." Uh, not exactly.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/11/02/v-print/3080246/poll-mitt-romney-maintains-lead.html#storylink=cpy

Will this election be stolen? ... by gimleteye

Florida voters who experienced the 2000 presidential election have post traumatic stress syndrome. It shaped our lives and fear of the consequences of every presidential election, since.

In 2000, the memories of a botched recount in Palm Beach, or GOP operatives helicoptered into downtown Miami County Hall to stop the recount, the role of then Governor Jeb Bush and teams of lawyers protecting his brother's interests, are searing. The cascade of events in Miami: from the plan to capture the Homestead Air Force Base by political insiders (Fact: Bush loyalists Sergio Pino, Rodney Barreto, and Ramon Rasco's HABDI fiasco was supplanted by the formation of US Century Bank; now the largest recipient of TARP money in Florida, the largest undercapitalized bank in the United States, and about to walk away with $50 million in taxpayer dollars), to the commandeering of county government and the election of Alex Penelas as mayor, to the pressuring of the Clinton administration and avoidance by Gore, to the influence peddling by key lobbyists who controlled contracts at the airport, to the abandonment of the ship of state by Penelas and his buddy Herman Echevarria at the crucial moment of the recount, to the election thrown to the US Supreme Court, the subsequent wars waged on lies costing trillions, the triggering and collapse of the nation's housing markets: this cascade of history triggers panic now at the fact of Republican Gov. Rick Scott shortening voting hours -- to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters -- at the fact of a bomb scare in Orlando that shut down an important voting station over the weekend, and yesterday's near riot at the headquarters of the elections department in Miami-Dade because people promised their vote were denied.

Add to this, news percolating of last minute GOP moves to suppress the vote in Ohio and irregularities at key precincts: this presidential election suddenly in the final days gathers the force of doubt and suspicion that if voting rights are at stake on Tuesday, what other fundamental rights could we lose on Wednesday?