See No Illegal, Speak No Illegal

From the October 2009 edition of Poder

It takes some big cojones, or perhaps the wisdom of a wise monkey, for a police chief to announce that he’s ignoring certain laws. Not those funny ones, like ordinances governing marijuana smoking in nightclubs or sexual abuse of animals, but a vast set of very fearsome federal statutes.

“It takes a lot of hard work on our part, going out there, going on television, going on Spanish radio and Spanish television, going out in the public, going to the communities, letting them know, ‘Trust us, you’ve got to trust us, we are not interested in enforcing these immigration laws,’” Miami police chief John Timoney told Helen Ferre, the host of Issues on WPBT-Channel 2 over the summer. “It makes our life just that much more difficult.” Difficult, because people without proper immigration papers often refrain from reporting crimes, fearing cops will end up reporting them for not having proper immigration papers.

Timoney and 60 other members of the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association are politely telling Congress that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s 287(g) program is dumb. Under the program, approximately 60 police and sheriff departments across the country have joined ICE’s hunts for undocumented immigrants. Nine of the ICE-deputized departments are in Virginia, eight in North Carolina; Florida is tied for third with Arizona, each of which has five. (In the Sunshine State, they include sheriff’s offices in Jacksonville, and in Bay, Brevard, Collier, and Manatee counties.) Read on.

Did Miami-Dade housing funds go into campaign accounts? Looks like it.

We read the news today that state investigators now accuse Raul Masvidal of embezzling nearly $1 million, as opposed to $600,000, worth of Miami-Dade housing funds. As of today, he's still pleading not guilty. He previously cited business woes as one excuse for never building Hometown Station, an office complex that hasn't materialized along the Metrorail line in South Miami. In July 2003, the county commission approved a $5 million loan from the county housing agency to build the project.

We hate to bring it up again, but as we reported in a Poder magazine article more than a year ago, after Masvidal received that loan he proceeded to spend a lot of loot on our representatives in Congress. Here's what we found then:

Somehow, despite the fiscal implosions at work and home, Masvidal managed to find about $70,000 between 2003 and 2007 for some of his preferred politicos. Masvidal donated $3,000 to Penelas’s 2003 senate bid; his wife, Mercedes Masvidal, kicked in another $2,000. The couple also dropped another $1,000 each on Bob Graham’s presidential account. Masvidal was especially generous to the Diaz-Balarts. He had given $1,000 to Mario Diaz-Balart in May 2002; after receiving the county loan Masvidal upped Mario’s gift to $2,000 in December 2003. Between 2003 and 2007 he gave $6,000 to the Diaz-Balarts’ Democracy Believers Political Action Committee, and $15,000 to another group they are involved with, the U.S. Cuba Democracy PAC, which funds members of Congress who vote to maintain or tighten the embargo on trade with, and travel to, Cuba. During that time Masvidal also gave $2,000 to U.S. Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, $1,000 to U.S. Rep. Ander Crenshaw, a Jacksonville-area Republican, and $2,000 to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Miami) via her IRL PAC in 2005. He also spent $500 on Michael Fitzpatrick, who served one term as a congressman for Pennsylvania. That was only the half of it. Masvidal’s munificence has been curiously bipartisan. Besides the $6,000 he and his wife gave to Miami area Democrats Penelas and Graham, in 2004 he sent $2,500 to the Democratic National Committee and $2,000 to the Campaign for Florida’s Future, which promotes fair elections and ethics in government. Then in 2005 and 2006 the uncannily magnanimous developer gave $4,000 to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a South Broward Democrat. During that period he also gave $7,200 to Florida’s Democratic U.S. Senator, Bill Nelson. (Previously, Masvidal had contributed $2,000 to Nelson’s first U.S. senate campaign in 1999).

As we noted in that column, county manager George Burgess, while waiting for Masvidal to repay the $5 million, could ask those public servants to serve the Miami-Dade public and return the $70,000 that Masvidal paid them. That's only the equivalent of a third of a county executive's salary, but it would be a nice gesture, and the recovery of any bit of wasted taxpayer money couldn't hurt Miami-Dade's ransacked budget.

When What Happened in Honduras Didn't Stay in Honduras

By Kirk Nielsen

(First published in Poder, September 2009)

It’s June 2020. President John McCain, who’s grown a big mustache and taken to wearing a white cowboy hat wherever he goes, is nearing the end of his second term. Suddenly, he shocks Americans with an executive order for a nationwide referendum later in the month. Apparently he wants to amend the Constitution. Why? Nobody seems to know. Confusion reigns. Even the nation’s finest newspapers can’t explain McCain’s intentions. Reporters and editors satisfy themselves with the story line proffered by his critics: He wants to stay in office forever, just like Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.

The ballot for the “opinion poll,” as McCain likes to call it, has this single question: “Do you believe that in the 2020 general election the people should decide whether to convoke a national constitutional assembly?”

In other words, the mustachioed maverick is trying to hold a referendum in June on whether to hold a referendum in November. He says it all has to do with helping the poor. But what’s the darn connection between poverty and changing the Constitution? He must be mad.

U.S. Attorney General Charlie Crist and House Speaker Mike Pence, the Christian conservative from eastern Indiana, denounce their fellow Republican’s scheme as a cockamamie socialist plot. The Supreme Court says it’s illegal: The Constitution authorizes Congress, not presidents, to propose constitutional reforms.

But McCain persists. He orders the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, to deploy ballot boxes. (Army troops have done so since the 2012 general election, when Barack Obama’s reelection loss sparked widespread rioting.) Patraeus refuses to comply, though. McCain fires him.

Crist charges McCain with treason and other crimes. Then, for the first time in American history, U.S. military forces arrest a sitting U.S. president. Actually he is lying down when soldiers roust him from his White House bed in the early morning of referendum day. They deport him to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Congress members unanimously approve the expulsion, overlooking minor provisions in the Constitution about due process, impeachment trials, and such.

They do follow the letter of the 25th Amendment, which says the vice president succeeds a president who is unable to fulfill his duties. Sarah Palin had resigned from her v.p. job a year earlier to focus on running for president, and Congress never ratified her replacement, ex-governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty. (Too liberal.) So House Speaker Pence is sworn in, rising from third-ranking Republican in 2009 to the Oval Office in just 11 years.

The United Nations condemns the coup and convinces Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oscar Arias to mediate. McCain accepts a proposal to receive immunity, serve out his term, and drop his amendment scheme. The general election (Palin versus Al Gore) would occur a month earlier, to hasten America’s return to electoral democracy. The generals, justices, and Congress members who conspired to deport McCain would also receive immunity.

But President Pence declines and presents a counteroffer: McCain can return to Washington—to go to jail. Echoing the words of numerous GOP leaders and pundits, Pence declares: “Let me be clear on this point. This was not a military coup as has been widely reported by the international press. Americans saw a growing threat to their democracy and took action to defend it, in order to preserve the rule of law.”(1)

Of course, preserving the rule of law sometimes requires breaking it, as a military lawyer confirms in a shocking interview with The Miami Herald. “In the moment that we took him out of the country, in the way that he was taken out, there is a crime,” the military lawyer admits, then quickly adds: “There is going to be a justification and cause for acquittal that will protect us.”(2)

(1) Pence delivered similar remarks to the Republican-led Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute on 7/20/09 in Washington, D.C. with regard to the June 28 overthrow of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. (2) See “Top Honduran military lawyer: We broke the law,” Miami Herald, 7/3/09.

In Search of Lost Terrorism

So Tom Ridge, George W. Bush's first homeland security secretary, writes in a new book that ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft, et al., pressured him to raise the terrorist attack alert level the weekend before the November 2004 election to help GWB's reelection bid, not because the threat of an attack was actually higher.

To place Ridge's tardy admission in historical context, Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz dug up some discourse by AP writer Ron Fournier from the summer of 2004. Fournier observed that President Bush kept playing on fears of a terrorist attack in the U.S. to shift the campaign debate away from the increasingly nettlesome occupation of Iraq. "The advantages of incumbency were in full display Sunday, when Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned of possible al-Qaida terrorist attacks to financial institutions in New York City, Washington and Newark, N.J.," Fournier reported.

Kurtz's column reminded us of a parallel utterance right here in Miami in the summer of 2004, this time with Ashcroft on the stump at the U.S. Attorney's office, which we chronicled in Miami New Times that year. Back then we wrote:

When U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft visited Miami two weeks ago as part of a nationwide blitz to promote the Bush administration's war on terror, he issued a scary warning. "Multiple available streams of intelligence indicate to us that al Qaeda plans to attack the United States this year and to hit us hard," he declared. "The USA Patriot Act is working to protect American lives and liberties and makes it possible for us to bring charges against individuals who threaten the United States and our security."

Of course our account then devolved into a local scandal -- how a different brand of fear led then-U.S. attorney Marcos Jimenez to bar TV reporter Ike Seamans from the news conference, owing to fallout from a certain unresolved public corruption case involving Miami International Airport. (It concerned allegations against lobbyists who helped a company named Host Marriott win a contract for food and beverage concessions worth an estimated $40 million per year.) We continued:

In anticipation of Ashcroft's Miami appearance, his host, U.S. Attorney Marcos D. Jimenez, issued his own warning. Though this one was directed at a local news organization, not the nation at large; and though it did not concern terrorists, it was chilling in its own way. Jimenez instructed his special counsel for public affairs, Carlos Castillo, to phone in some extraordinary news to WTVJ-TV (Channel 6): Ike Seamans, senior correspondent for the NBC-owned station, would be banned from Ashcroft's June 30 news conference at the federal justice building in downtown Miami. "He said, 'If you send Ike, he will not be allowed in,'" recounts WTVJ's vice president for news, Yvette Miley, who took the call. She says she responded to Castillo: "That's shocking. You really can't dictate to us who we send to cover an event.' I asked him what his issues were and why he would even try to go down that road. And he talked about a past story."

Miami political history buffs can read on via this link.

From Poder Magazine, August 2009
Gimme Foreclosure
Or maybe we'll just take one of those ghetto houses.
By Kirk Nielsen

Thanks to the combination of a historic glut of high-end condominiums with the worst recession since the Great Depression, Greater Miami may one day lay claim to inventing a new real estate hybrid: the affordable luxury condo. But we’re already making minor real estate history, owing to the convergence of two other socioeconomic phenomena—rampant home foreclosures and ever-flourishing homelessness. Take Back the Land, a group of about 15 Miamians, has turned calamity into opportunity, though, by carefully moving homeless families into foreclosed houses in and around Liberty City and Little Haiti.

“For us the big issue is that it’s morally indefensible to have vacant homes,” says TBTL director Max Rameau. “The United States is signatory to at least seven treaties which state that housing is a human right.”

Rameau likes to cite a couple of statistics. There were 4,700 foreclosure-related evictions in Miami-Dade County in the first quarter of 2008 and about 4,500 homeless people at the time. Are you thinking what he’s thinking? Yep, we could have ended homelessness here by now. “The problem with that,” he says, “is that no one gets rich by moving poor people into houses for free.”

And so they squat. Read on.