Nielsen Readings

2011-10-22T17:53:00.000-04:00

From Poder Magazine, Oct-Nov 2011
Turbine or not Turbine
Twenty years since Denmark became the king of wind power, Florida’s clean energy story remains a tale of woe

by Kirk Nielsen

I spent much of August quite literally chilling in Denmark and returned to muggy Miami with a partial solution for ending the Sunshine State’s addiction to oil, coal, and plutonium. Prince Hamlet’s former realm, like much of Florida, is a flat, low-lying land with vast expanses of drained wetlands next to the Atlantic Ocean.

But parallels with Florida pretty much stop there. Among the enormous dissimilarities are the clusters of giant white, sleekly-designed wind turbines on Danish landscapes. One day while feeling a 60-degree breeze on Denmark’s western-most island, Jutland, I looked east over the marshes and pastures and saw a line of six windmills in the distance. Beyond them, through the haze, I detected two more rows probably 20 and 30 miles off. To the south, there were 19 windmills along the horizon. Another day, back in Denmark’s eastern-most island, Sealand, I counted a line of 27 slowly swirling above the sea just off the entrance to Copenhagen’s huge shipping channel.

Meanwhile, my (sweltering) fellow Floridians gazing out from Miami Beach or any other point along Florida’s breezy Atlantic coast saw no wind turbines. Nor would they have seen any to the west, even had they driven all the way to the Gulf.

Why no wind power in Florida, two decades after Denmark pioneered the world’s first wind farms, and one since George W. Bush affirmed our “addiction to oil?” One culprit: an outdated wind-velocity map published by the Department of Energy in 1987, which long held that Florida’s wind speeds were “marginal” for electrical generation purposes. Thanks to better computers and measuring devices, DOE recently released a new, higher resolution map based on measurements that are more nuanced and precise.

The map also reflects the potential of much taller turbine towers. “Generally, the higher you go, the better the wind speeds,” explains Simon Mahan, renewable energy manager for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, an advocacy group. “Wind turbine hub height has grown to over 80 meters, a 40-percent increase over the models installed in the late ‘90s.”

So, now DOE tells us that Florida’s on-shore wind speeds are much higher than previously believed—they average around 14 miles per hour. That isn’t radically lower than Iowa’s average of 19 miles per hour. Had we looked into it ourselves, we might have known sooner and now ranked among the nation’s leaders in wind energy, which provides Iowans one-fifth of their state’s electrical needs, rather than one of the country’s renewable energy laggards.

In addition, we might have realized that for several years now technological advances have made it viable to harness low-velocity winds. “New highly efficient large-scale turbines are commercially available that can begin to generate electricity in wind speeds as low as 6.7 miles per hour,” Mahan says. “Longer and lighter turbine blades help improve the efficiency of these new turbines.” The latter have 145 percent more capacity, he adds, meaning fewer are needed than before to generate the same amount electricity.

Moreover, the  Atlantic Ocean should have given us an advantage over those resourceful midwesterners. “Florida likely has better wind resources offshore,” Mahan tells me. But the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory hasn’t even conducted an offshore wind resource assessment for Florida, in part because of our (and our congressional delegation’s) lack of organization, as meteorologists like to say.

So, is it because turbines kill birds that we lag so? No. Researchers have found our feathered friends tend to avoid the new longer, lighter, more slowly-spinning blades. Recent nationwide surveys indicate bird fatality rates range from zero to 39 birds per turbine per year. When built in sensible locations—as opposed to, say, a golden eagle flyway in California’s Altamont Pass—windmills kill far fewer birds than American coal and nuclear plants, tall glass buildings, cars, or cats, according to various scientific studies.

After returning from Denmark, I learned that some breezes of change have been blowing in Florida. Wind Capital Group, a Missouri-based company, is securing leases and permits for dozens of turbines on sugar cane farms southeast of Lake Okeechobee in Palm Beach County. Florida’s only other major wind venture is one Florida Power & Light is considering off the coast of Port St. Lucie. It’s taken four years for FPL just to get permission to start building a 90-meter tower to measure wind speeds in that area.

Overall we remain in some major doldrums when it comes to developing wind power in Florida. Other states, including Georgia and the Carolinas, have Wind Working Groups, federally-sponsored partnerships in which public officials, entrepreneurs, conservationists, and others collaborate on wind projects. We don’t even have one of those. I’m not sure if something’s still rotten in Denmark, but Florida’s renewable energy efforts certainly have been.

2011-09-14T15:54:00.001-04:00

From Poder Magazine, Aug-Sep 2011
Quality of Vice

Voters may not have known it, but the recent mayoral election was kind of a referendum on illegal gambling

by Kirk Nielsen

I pulled the lever for him, but I’m not sure I’d put money on Carlos Gimenez’s chances for success. To close a quarter of a million dollar deficit, the new Miami-Dade mayor will have to orchestrate radical cuts in county spending. He might have to invent creative new revenue streams, because he’s also pledged to lower property taxes. But I’d double down on this bet: Gimenez will never go for one new cash source that Hialeah and the City of Miami have tapped in recent years: licenses for video slot machines.

“If I were mayor, I’d definitely propose an ordinance to outlaw them throughout Miami-Dade County,” Gimenez said on political reporter Michael Putney’s Sunday morning talk show during the run-off campaign. “Because frankly, Michael, I believe that there’s organized crime behind this.” Which was to suggest that organized crime was behind his opponent, Julio Robaina, since slots purveyors contributed heavily to his campaign.

Robaina denied having ties to mobsters, of course, but he had to admit that slots suppliers had also donated heavily to his winning bid for mayor of Hialeah in 2008. And that he pushed through an ordinance licensing the devices, popularly known as maquinitas tragamonedas (little money-swallowing machines).

Picking up on Robaina’s gambit, Tomas Regalado followed suit in Miami. Video slots suppliers donated thousands of dollars to his successful mayoral campaign in 2009. He, too, sponsored a measure to license the machines.

It was creative municipal financing at its strangest. Police have estimated the average maquinita swallows $1,000 per week, or $52,000 annually. So the estimated 1,500 maquinitas in Miami bring their owners $78 million per year. By issuing a $500 license for each machine, Regalado stood to generate just $750,000 in new revenue. Enough for about two fire department executive salaries plus benefits.

But there was a larger problem: the slots are illegal. Florida law permits video slots only in authorized establishments, like Calder Casino & Race Course, Gulfstream Park, and Magic City Casino (whose owners contributed heavily to Gimenez’s campaign).

So, two weeks after the new law passed, Miami police seized about 400 maquinitas from bars and cafes, and charged about 30 people with illegal gambling. “The confiscations were conducted as a part of Operation Lucky 7, an ongoing operation designed to rid Miami of these devices that are often rigged to rip off customers and generate untaxed earnings for businesses in violation of state law and local ordinances,” an October 2010 MPD press release stated. Miami police chief Miguel Exposito is “committed to the elimination of these devices that do a disservice to the customers, who fall victim to illegal gaming,” and the machines “diminish the quality of life of all Miami’s citizens,” it said.

Of course, even legal casinos rip you off and can even corrupt your quality of life. Any nicotine-saturated, chain-smoking slots addict can attest to that. But Miami’s maquinita industry has an added luster: a connection to The Corporation, the deadly Cuban exile outfit who waged an arson war with Italian mobsters in New York City in the 1980s, killed a few dozen people, and made almost a billion and a half dollars over a four-decade run. The racket included bolita (numbers), bookmaking, and video slot machines.

In March 2004, a task force of Miami-Dade police, FBI agents, and other agencies, arrested 25 people, including The Corporation’s top boss Jose Miguel Battle and his son Jose Miguel, Jr. The former died in 2007, a year after changing his plea to guilty; the latter is a third of the way through a 15-year prison sentence. Two hit men who pled not guilty are serving 20-year and life terms. Most others plea bargained, served short sentences, and are now free. Among the crimes in a 2005 racketeering indictment in the case were four arsons in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx in the mid-1980s that resulted in eight deaths; and five premeditated murders in NYC, as recently as 1992.

In the end, federal prosecutors focused on the bolita side of The Corporation. But information I obtained in 2007 while reporting on the case, and which the U.S. Attorney has now sealed, indicated that Miami-Dade detectives surveilled several maquinita suppliers and monitored their phone calls because they were associates of Corporation members. Some of those same suppliers are now suing Chief Exposito to get their confiscated machines back. I hope they keep their retaliations in the legal system and off the streets.

While campaigning Carlos Gimenez said that as mayor he’d call for a task force to determine “who’s behind” the maquinita enterprise. But such an effort seemed already in full swing. Miami police seized more maquinitas this past March and April, as did Miami-Dade cops in June in the Westchester section of Miami. Odds are the crackdown will continue, which could only make big corporate casino owners flush with appreciation. The House always wins.

Orlando Bosch, in memoriam

2011-04-29T14:13:00.005-04:00

Perhaps it will suffice to say, I did not know Orlando Bosch well, hardly at all, but will remember him well for what he told me at his west Miami-Dade house in the fall of 2001: that a Venezuela court absolved him in the bombing of the Cubana de Aviacion jet in 1976, which killed all 73 people on board, including Cuba's national fencing team; but that all of those who died were "esbirros" -- collaborators -- of the communist regime in Havana that he so despised. From his lack of sorrow with regard to those deaths, I knew that he was not well indeed.

After the interview, we chatted in the doorway, and to my amazement Bosch started to cry, blubberingly lamenting the deaths of all those people who died in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. This capacity to swing from the vile callousness he displayed several minutes earlier to an outburst of authentic bereavement still perplexes and disturbs me when I think about it.

You can read a little more about this encounter with Orlando Bosch here, in this link to an old Miami New Times article "Terrorists, But Our Terrorists."

2011-04-02T13:11:00.001-04:00

From Poder Magazine, April 2011
The Codina Conundrum
What the Spence-Jones bribery case taught us about the real estate business and shamelessness

By Kirk Nielsen

Armando Codina, CEO of Codina Partners and esteemed icon of the local business world, was never a defendant in the bribery case of ex-Miami commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones. But he sure seemed like one. “He doesn’t want to believe he did anything wrong,” state prosecutor Richard Scruggs told the jury when Spence-Jones’s trial began last month, observing that Codina was “not a happy camper” about having to testify. Jurors didn’t want to believe it either. They acquitted Spence-Jones of illegally soliciting a $25,000 “charitable donation” from Codina in 2006.

The unhappiest camper turned out to be State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who blamed Judge Rosa Rodriguez for having a lax sense of the bribery law. “The jury had no choice but to acquit the defendant because the judge instructed the jury that, in effect, soliciting or accepting a bribe through a charity is legal, even if done with corrupt intent,” Fernandez-Rundle says. “Bribery has become very sophisticated in our community. We believe that bribery done to influence a public official, even if done through a charity, is illegal.”

Obscured by the headlines is the story of Codina’s metamorphosis over the past year from repentant prosecution witness to an increasingly defiant asset for the ex-commissioner’s defense. He repeatedly said he was “ashamed” when Scruggs rang him up in March 2010 and grilled him about complying with Spence-Jones’s $25,000 request, while Codina and a high-rise development group had an item before the city commission.

“Ashamed” not only for agreeing to the favor but doing so while something was on his mind: a proposed ordinance to glamorize MDM Development Group’s massive Met 2 hotel and office project in dreary old downtown by changing that stretch of SE Second Avenue to “Brickell.” Codina, MDM’s leasing agent, told Scruggs that a prospective tenant -- global financial powerhouse UBS -- had wanted the change as part of its lease agreement. “They would have preferred the Brickell name,” Codina said, referring to UBS executives.

He was also “ashamed” that, yes, he promptly called his friend and business partner at MDM, Ricardo Glas, to shell out half of the $25,000. “I’m ashamed to tell you that if she wanted to leverage her position to get me to make a contribution to a good cause, I had no problem with that,” he told Scruggs. “But I thought about it, and I wrote the check.... I’m at fault .... Listen, I made a mistake.” Read on at Poder.

2011-01-03T12:34:00.006-05:00

From Poder Magazine, December 2010

Memories of 2010: Scattered Pictures of the Fraud We Left Behind

Some of the ways we were, and probably still are, in Greater Miami

By Kirk Nielsen

With a new Republican-led House of Representatives in Washington, and a voter mandate to cut spending, we’re all supposed to prepare for smaller, more accountable government. Of course, that’s going to prompt all kinds of crises, especially at the municipal level. Good thing we here in Greater Miami actually got a head start on some of them in 2010. The wake-up call came in February at Jackson Health Systems, Miami-Dade County’s tax-supported hospital for the tired and huddled masses. There was an amazing discovery: a $244.6 million deficit for fiscal year 2009. No one is quite sure how that happened. But eleven months later, we can all take heart. The new diagnosis? The estimated loss for fiscal year 2010 is only $88 million. That’s still pretty sick, but knowing is the first step to healing. Prognosis for 2011: longer, more huddled lines at JHS, sicker people on the Greater Miami streets.

With summer came the realization that we’ve had a new industry in our midst for years and didn’t even know it. Apparently it is also one of the area’s most lucrative, behind real estate, tourism, and drug trafficking. Its name: Medicare fraud. Month after month, in the spirit of free market competition, our best Medicare defrauders continued to outdo each other, according to the local U.S. attorney’s office. By year’s end American Therapeutic Corp. emerged as the industry leader, with $84 million in bogus Medicare earnings and $100 million more in the pipeline at the time of their arrests. Overall, allegations of total fraudulent Medicare billings in South Florida approached $2 billion, as far as federal prosecutors know. Prognosis: continued downturn for Medicare fraudsters. Less waste at Medicare.

Anti-tax fever was so high that even the Florida Marlins felt it in 2010. Construction proceeded on the team’s new “$645 million” retractable roof baseball stadium and taxpayers are still paying for most of it ($515 million). But a national press leak of Marlins financial records showed the team ended the 2008-09 season with a $49 million profit. At press time county commissioners were exploring ways to make the team pay for a bigger portion of its stadium. Prognosis: prolonged stadium finance crisis, as redistribution of wealth from county taxpayers to baseball team continues.

The revelation of Marlins earnings was also to cast a long shadow on a new budget proposed by Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez, who backed the stadium deal, would cut hundreds of county jobs, while raising property taxes 12 percent and employee salaries by $132 million. That tax hike sent Republican automobile dealer Norman Braman on a drive to recall not more Toyotas but Alvarez (who’s also a Republican). Prognosis: With anti-tax fever at an all-time high in Miami-Dade and seemingly everywhere in the nation, Braman has a reasonable chance of seeing voters eject Alvarez in 2011.

While Alvarez’s political capital depreciated in 2010, Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado’s rose. As a city commissioner he’d cast the lone vote against the stadium deal in 2008. In August 2010 he avoided laying off city workers by confronting police and firefighters unions—precisely what Alvarez did not do. Moreover, Regalado (another Republican) and city manager Carlos Migoya pushed through a budget with reduced salaries, pensions and benefits for city employees. Prognosis: a continuing budget deficit will force Regalado and the commission to lay off city workers—or raise taxes.

There was even one sign of hope in 2010 for a more fiscally-responsible Miami-Dade commission, as Jean Monastime ousted County Commissioner Dorrin Rolle, who’d held the District 2 seat for 12 years. It was a triple whammy. Besides becoming the first Haitian American on the commission, Monastime knocked out one of the most fiscally-challenged politicians in the county, and did so by spending three times less money as Rolle. Monastime had campaigned to bring “accountability” and “efficiency” to county government. Rolle’s nonprofit, the James E. Scott Community Association, achieved bankruptcy this summer, owing former employees $600,000, Miami-Dade County $1.4 million and Jackson Health Systems $352,000. Prognosis: Those funds, like so many other local taxpayer dollars, are forever wasted.

2010-08-12T16:52:00.006-04:00

From the August 2010 edition of Poder

Open Seat Takeover

Voters in the FL-25 August primary will have seen a lot of stretching before the final stretch this fall

by Kirk Nielsen

Florida’s District 25, which spans from a Miami suburb on the Atlantic to Naples on the Gulf, has always involved a bit of a stretch.

FL-25 originated from an inside political job that stretched the boundaries of public service credibility. Mario Diaz-Balart (who was a Democrat in the 1980s before switching to the GOP) chaired the Republican-controlled redistricting committee that tailored FL-25 to his political needs in 2002. Thanks to a border containing an electorate of 43 percent Republicans, 35 percent Democrats, and 21 percent independents, Diaz-Balart became FL-25’s first representative that November, easily beating Democrat Annie Betancourt. One now-classic District 25 disconnect that year occurred when Betancourt called the U.S. embargo against Cuba an “outdated policy” that Congress should reconsider; just for that, Diaz-Balart called her soft on terrorism. Perhaps it was that kind of fear-mongering, perhaps the hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars that Diaz-Balart garnered for South Florida, that helped him easily win reelection thrice. His margin of victory thinned the last time, though, as Bush Republicanism waned, Obamaism boomed, and Democrat Joe Garcia came within six points of beating him in 2008.

Of course, that slim margin had nothing to do with Diaz-Balart’s decision to jump to District 21 this year, to try to fill the seat his brother Lincoln chose to vacate after 20 years. Rather, it was Mario’s love for Broward County, at least in part. “This is a natural move for me,” he explained in a press release announcing his decision to abandon FL-25 after four terms. “As the only Broward native in the U.S. House of Representatives, I look forward to the opportunity of representing Broward’s residents.” He lamented he would no longer represent people in Collier County and southern Miami-Dade, but noted his brother’s district offered the “privilege” of serving such areas as Hialeah, Miami Lakes, and Westchester (where high percentages of Cuban-American Republican voters reside).

The disconnects are already on display in this year’s District 25 race. The Republican frontrunner, Florida House member David Rivera, casts himself as a small government, fiscal conservative, even though he spent most of the 1990s in the depths of a federal agency, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, as a special assistant to the director. Since then the OCB has overseen expenditures of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on Radio & TV Martí, whose operations congressional and inspector general investigations have repeatedly determined to be ineffective, wasteful, and at times fraudulent.

Another insider issue is causing him greater contortions. One of Rivera’s GOP rivals, Paul Crespo, and Garcia have both accused him of stretching the bounds of a law prohibiting Florida legislators from soliciting campaign donations while the legislature is in session. The ban is supposed to keep lawmakers free of money’s corrupting influence while they deliberate public matters. Rivera, who chairs the House budget committee in Tallahassee, raised an impressive $702,660 for his District 25 bid during this year’s session. He admitted that significant sums came from lobbyists and their clients, then cited an exemption allowing such donations for federal races.

All that’s a deplorable commentary on America’s pay-to-play political system, recently reinforced by the U.S. Supreme Court. Still, given the million-plus dollars needed to win a U.S. House seat nowadays, it’s something of a stretch to believe that Crespo, Garcia, or anyone running would have declined all that corporate cash had it come their way.

More elasticity is certainly in store for the District 25 primary. How will Rivera fit his party’s simplistic anti-tax, anti-government message over, say, the state-funded $50 million Jackson Health System bailout he has touted on his campaign blog to win political points in Miami-Dade County? Can Paul Crespo get more over-inflated than his pledges to “repeal the obscene, budget-busting, government takeover of our health care system” and “ to restore our Constitution as the cornerstone of our political system”? Can Joe Garcia convince voters that he’s a populist anti-tax Democrat, not an Obama Administration political appointee?

The most startling District 25 disconnects so far, however, come from Marili Cancio, another Republican in the race, though she sounds like a sensible liberal. “Taxes and government have important roles in our country -- especially for infrastructure, defense, government, and education,” she states on her website. “Let’s make sure our tax system is not wasteful, but encourages investment, jobs and protection where we can feel a difference and see results.” She also notes that the health care reform bill pushed through by Democrats contains “good benefits,” such as mandatory care for pre-existing conditions and “longer coverage for our children.”

Maybe that’s not such a stretch.

2010-05-23T17:23:00.005-04:00

From the May 2010 edition of Poder
Planet Britto: Has Miami Had Enough?

by Yohir Akerman and Kirk Nielsen

Over the two decades since the makers of Absolut reproduced one of his colorful pop art paintings on a special edition of vodka bottles, the work of Romero Britto has acquired a controversial omnipresence. The 45-year-old native of Recife, Brazil has now colonized at least eight public spaces in Miami-Dade County with nearly 20 of his huge, two-dimensional cartoonish sculptures. His vibrantly colored neo-primitive drawings are now even on parking meters throughout the metro area as part of a fundraising effort for the Homeless Trust, one of Britto’s many philanthropic causes. Manufacturers have put his designs on luggage, teddy bears, ties, dinner plates and other consumer goods. He even has his own Britto perfume brand—for men and women. Across the planet, Britto’s work is synonymous with Miami. So what’s the problem?

“The one thing that keeps it from really connecting with me is the lack of real obvious concept. It’s more about the specific image, so that unfortunately it becomes a little bit more decorative,” says Jeremy Chestler, executive director of ArtCenter/South Florida, a Miami Beach non-profit that helps budding artists with studio space and career development. “I mean, you can’t fault him for being a master marketer. Should that be the objective as an artist? Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder right there.”

Some art world insiders are less diplomatic, as long as they know their names won’t be attached to their true opinions of Britto’s oeuvre. “It sucks,” one contemporary art curator in her 30s said privately while at a prestigious Wynwood gallery during art-walk night this past April. “It’s kind of like Hello Kitty. That’s not art. That’s a brand.”

Still, countless people—“normal people” Britto calls them—adore his work. “I’m a big fan of Romero’s,” says Jeff Berkowitz, a shopping mall developer. So is his business partner, automobile mogul Alan Potamkin. Potamkin and Berkowitz sit on the board of the Miami Children’s Museum on Watson Island, the site of a Britto sculpture depicting a little boy and girl. Berkowitz and his wife own dozens of Britto items, including cufflinks, watches, paintings, hats, plastic sculptures, dresses, a handbag, and several Britto sculptures around his seaside Coral Gables home. In addition, there’s a 45-foot tall Britto statue outside Berkowitz’s Dadeland Station mall, four more at his Kendall Village project, and a 35-foot tall Britto-designed palm tree with beach ball statue at the mall on Fifth Street and Alton Road on South Beach. “What is it about his art that I like? It puts a smile on my face,” Berkowitz explains. “And it puts a smile on a lot of people’s faces. And the art snobs hate him.”

Plans to erect that sculpture in front of Berkowitz’s mall on South Beach blew up into a pop art melodrama in 2005 that had as much to do with quantity as with quality. Some members of the city’s Art in Public Places (AiPP) committee balked at the notion of putting a huge Britto piece in the significant location—one of Miami Beach’s four gateways. But because the installation site was on private property, they could not stop it.

Chestler, who chairs the AiPP committee, says his concern was never the artistic value of Britto’s work per se, but the breadth of the Britto takeover. “It has become so ubiquitous—a store on Lincoln Road, a store at Midtown, a store at the airport, and so many public commissions,” he observes. “My greater issue is it’s not reflective of our overall community, since he’s not the only artist down here. I think it’s unfortunate that he ends up getting the most play, so that people are more familiar with his work but not necessarily getting a full picture of what everybody’s doing down here.”

University of Miami modern art history professor Paula Harper puts the Britto phenomenon down to two simple factors. “He’s a very generous guy, and he’s very prolific,” she says. Harper sat on the AiPP committee for six years in the 90s. “I spent quite a bit of time at Miami Beach City Hall and I began to notice how every member of the city commission had a Britto in their office, which he had given them,” she says. “He makes himself a lot of friends that way.”

Early on Britto painted construction fences on Miami Beach for free, Harper recalls. “He enlivened them by putting his design on it. He does things to attract attention and get his look out into the public,” she says. Britto was also known to drive a yellow Ferrari decorated with red hearts, blue polka dots and his signature in lavender.

[Humility and Hype]

And so the Britto machine rolls on. It’s evident the moment one sets foot inside the anteroom of his unmarked Wynwood warehouse on the south side of NW 25th Street. A television in the corner is abuzz with a fast-paced video recap of some of the artist’s proudest moments. Among them: the showing of a Britto painting at the Louvre Museum in Paris in 2008 during an exhibition of Brazilian art organized by the Brazilian embassy. Another: a temporary pyramid structure Britto painted in London’s Hyde Park to help promote the King Tut Exhibition. In the video, David Caruso, the CSI Miami television star, calls Britto’s work “very, very addictive.”

Leaving the anteroom and entering Britto’s high-ceilinged warehouse, onecan’t miss the wall of photomontages. They show Britto alongside various celebrities at charity fundraising events. Donald Trump. Bill Clinton. George W. Bush and wife Laura. Arnold Schwarzenegger and wife Maria Shriver. (Britto has a special connection to the Shrivers. Maria’s brother Anthony is the founder of Best Buddies, an international charity to which Britto began donating art pieces in 1994. Anthony is married to Alina Mojica Shriver, who runs Magical Thinking Art (MTA), Britto’s exclusive dealer and distributor.)

On the way to the east half of the warehouse, one passes several offices with big glass windows and stylish furniture, a few nicely decorated cubicles, and a series of glass cases displaying all kinds of merchandise bearing his designs. Through a set of swinging double-doors is a large studio space where three women are working at different tables. One applies paint to a stylized drawing of a horse’s head. On a long shelf above eye-level, several large, apparently unfinished portraits of 20th Century Italian pop icons are propped against the wall. On the floor in the center of the room, two oversized white plaster peacocks, destined for a peacock festival, await the Britto touch. In an adjacent smaller studio space known as the Diamond Dust room, an elderly man applies red glitter to a series of poster-size Britto prints. Next to that is another small room with waist-high Britto originals leaning in short stacks against the walls, awaiting documentation on a photography set that takes up half the room.

Britto, sporting a royal blue workout suit, arrives for an interview with PODER at his office carrying a harried expression on his face. After patiently sitting through a photo shoot, he calmly answers questions for nearly an hour, displaying a penchant for responses with juxtapositions of humility and hype.

“In terms about being overexposed,” he says, “I’m not really concerned about that, because I’m showing my work around the world in so many cities. When you go to Paris you don’t see my sculptures all over Paris.” And hardly anyone will get to see his piece for the royal family of United Arab Emirates, he notes. READ ON.

2010-04-15T20:13:00.000-04:00

From the April 2010 edition of Poder magazine
Donation Conflagration
Where is a billboard a wallscape, an ugly street a glamorous boulevard, and a bribe a nonprofit contribution? Sí. Miami!

By Kirk Nielsen

Why does it seem as though nobody in Miami’s political establishment knows where the gifting ends and the bribery begins? If only Miami commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones had laughed off Armando Codina’s crazy street renaming idea a few years ago as cheekily as she did her recent bribery indictment. Then she might only be facing grand theft charges for turning $50,000 in county grant money into a donation to herself in 2004.

Now she has a bribery count because instead of cracking up at Codina, the former District 5 commissioner took the upstanding real estate mogul’s street name conceit quite seriously. After all, it was March 2006, the peak of high-rise hysteria. Codina was working with MDM Development Group on Met 2, a 47-story high-rise project in dreary old downtown, just across the river from glamorous Brickell Avenue. Why not just pretend Brickell Avenue extends north over the bridge into the drabness?

To change street names and signs, however, one needs city commission approval. So Codina, a seasoned writer of four and five-figure checks, made some rounds. Spence-Jones asked him to donate $25,000 to a Liberty City nonprofit, Friends of MLK. Then, she’d vote to pretend that Brickell Avenue runs north past Met 2. Codina sent a $12,500 check to the organization; Ricardo Glas, an MDM executive, was to pay the other half. This is Miami democracy at work.

But Miami democracy is weird and unpredictable. They didn’t get their Brickell extension. In a compromise, the commission opted for “Avenue of the Americas.”

Last month, after police booked Spence-Jones on bribery charges for soliciting the $25,000, she called it a donation. “As an elected official, you ask everyone to donate. I ask everybody,” she apprised The Miami Herald. The main question was whether she received a “direct benefit” from the money, and the answer was “no,” she added.

Is the suspended commissioner really that clueless? To ask Codina for a check in the context of any vote is to corrupt the democratic process. And to comply with the request is just as corrupt. Codina told the Herald he thought his donation was to help pay for a gala honoring ex-county commissioner Barbara Carey-Shuler. Now that’s laughable.

How is buying influence via a party for a shady ex-commissioner any better than buying it with a check to a sleazy nonprofit? Besides, the damage was already done by Codina and Spence-Jones’ quid pro quo. In the archaic language of Florida’s bribery statute, their “evil example” had offended the public’s “peace and dignity” as they sealed the deal.

State prosecutors also made evil example of the previous occupant of the District 5 seat, Arthur Teele. Among other things, they learned that lobbyist Sandy Walker donated $20,000 to Teele’s American Express card account in 2002. At the time of Teele’s suicide in July 2005, investigators were studying whether that gift was the quid for Teele’s pro vote on a bus bench billboard contract for the Sarmiento company. Walker was the firm’s Miami-registered lobbyist.

One can’t know how much bribery and grand theft saturates Miami democracy. But certainly legal donations to politicians are more widespread and, I dare say, cast a greater evil upon the municipality. Indeed, they are the fuel of Miami’s complex political engine. Examples abound. For instance, I’ll never forget when Pennsylvania-based billboard entrepreneur Barry Rush told me of a $10,000 donation he made after meeting with Mayor Manny Diaz in 2004. Rush was seeking a new ordinance to legalize some illegal wallscape billboards he’d already deployed on downtown high-rises. At the mayor’s request, the gift went to the Neighbors Helping Neighbors PAC to promote a bond issue for $7 billion of public works projects. Rush eventually got his law. Coincidentally, he was among Spence-Jones’s most generous campaign donors, along with dozens of other high-minded billboard purveyors, real estate executives, lawyer-lobbyists, and corporate spendthrifts seeking nothing in return, I’m sure.

Grand theft charges aside, Spence-Jones was emulating her political peers when she solicited her “donation” from Codina. The gifting occurs regularly at fundraisers, and lobbyists and executives routinely find ways around the $500 per person limit. (See for yourself in campaign reports on the city clerk’s website.) But unless a donor confesses, the quids pro quos remain secret.

How to re-enfranchise the non-donating masses? A simple ban on bribery won’t do. Miami Beach forbids campaign contributions by vendors and lobbyists with city business. Such a law could help restore real democracy on the other side of the causeway. But Miamians are a hard case, and need a bolder remedy. How about banning all political donations and instituting public campaign financing? For the peace and dignity of non-donors everywhere.

2010-03-24T22:36:00.000-04:00

From the March 2010 issue of Poder Magazine

Cement Over Miami

In the aggregate, the federal stewards of Everglades restoration are moving quickly to preserve wetland destruction for generations to come

by Kirk Nielsen

You wake up one bright South Florida morning, make some coffee, and head for the balcony of your downtown Miami condo, laptop in hand. You feel the cement floor caress the bottoms of your feet. As you step outside, the balmy air hits your face; you gaze westward. You notice the sunlight glimmering off a beautiful multicolored river of cars on I-95, all in one lane because of a construction project. You know that the Miami River is also down there somewhere, fantastically obscured by an awe-inspiring panoply of bridges and roadway overpasses. Oh, there’s a pretty little patch of water, you say to yourself and smile. You scan the panorama, take in the grid of streets, avenues, parking lots, and marvel at this vast pastel-colored tapestry of cement, concrete and asphalt, as far as the eye can see. Where does all this concrete come from, you wonder. It’s miraculous.

You sit at your balcony breakfast table and take a sip of coffee while the computer boots up to the Herald. Headline: ‘Lake Belt’ mining OK’d in Northwest Miami-Dade. Lakes in the Everglades? You thought it was just a huge river, as in the River of Grass. Being an educated sort, you knew that during the Ice Age humongous glaciers descended into the northern United States and carved out holes that filled with water when the glacier receded. But not this far south. You read on and the news is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has approved permits allowing rock mining companies to blast and excavate limestone from 10,000 acres of Everglades wetlands over the next 20 years. The “lakes” are the resulting craters, which fill with water because they’re in the middle of North America’s largest wetland. Ah, American ingenuity.

In fact, each year the Lake Belt produces 60 million tons of limestone aggregate, a main ingredient in cement, concrete, and asphalt. That’s almost half of the aggregate the state of Florida consumes in a year. Wow, you think. You look up, take in your 41st floor view again. How many lakes’ worth of limestone went into this skyline?

Of course, God didn’t create the Everglades only to provide human beings with aggregate. He also made them to create jobs. Approximately 7,000 to 14,000 of them, the Miami-Dade Limestone Products Association estimates. That’s probably a little exaggerated, you chuckle, but still, folks in California should be so lucky. They probably wish the Army Corps would approve some permits to clear-cut a couple dozen square miles of trees in the Redwood and Sequoia National Forests right about now. A single giant sequoia tree could probably create at least a hundred jobs. But the Army Corps doesn’t handle deforestation proposals; it tends to specialize in waterways and wetlands projects involving heavy earth-moving machinery. Sorry Northern California.

You look up again, sip some more coffee, and revel in your solitude, because you’re one of about ten residents who’s ever actually lived in your highrise. It’s like your own little cement mountain top. Reading on, you learn that the Sierra Club and other environmental conservation groups recently won an eight-year-long federal court battle aimed at banning rock mining in the Everglades - jobs and aggregate be damned. The fight was over some permits the Army Corps hastily issued to rock miners in 2002. Federal judge William Hoeveler said the Army Corps didn’t consider whether the rock miners had viable alternatives to the Everglades from which to mine rock. So he rescinded the permits. An appeals panel in Atlanta upheld the judge’s decision.

Moreover, Sierra Club argued that toxic chemicals in the rock quarries could seep into the Biscayne Aquifer—the primary source of drinking water for Miami-Dade—because the aquifer flows right underneath the darn “lakes.” In 2005, as the trial continued, chemists detected benzene in the Lake Belt’s H2o (although none in drinking supplies).

But eight days after the appeals court ruling, the Army Corps approved new permits for mining companies in the Lake Belt!

You’re thirsty, so you head inside and grab the Brita filter water pitcher from the fridge. Do these things filter out benzene, you wonder. (They don’t.) Back on the balcony, you open a related article about an Everglades restoration project to put part of the Tamiami Trail on a bridge. After ten years of talk, it’s finally underway. Of course that can only mean more cement - don’t you just love it!

2010-02-09T01:48:00.000-05:00

First published in Poder, February 2010
Metrorail Martí
These difficult financial and ecological times require creative new sources of federal funding for mass transit

By Kirk Nielsen

Certain Republican lawmakers are always saying we can’t afford this or that government program, like federal health insurance or President Obama’s stimulus plan. Then they’ll turn around and send hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars to companies like Carlyle Group or Hewlett-Packard–or to the transportation contractors who build our roads and railways. For example, U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart notes on his website, www.mariodiazbalart.org, that he has “secured authorization of more than $2.2 billion for all Miami-Dade transit corridors including the new North and East-West Metrorail lines.”

Good for him. Like most public servants, he must know that mass transit is one of those areas in which smart nations and communities pool their tax dollars for the benefit of everyone. There’s just one problem. There won’t be any new North and East-West Metrorail lines.

Of course it’s not entirely the Congressman’s fault. In 2002 Miami-Dade voters approved a half-cent People’s Transportation Plan sales tax specifically to fund about 60 miles of new Metrorail lines and other projects. Erstwhile County Transit Director Danny Alvarez, and the ballot language itself, indicated that a majority of the revenue would be allocated for Metrorail expansion. But county commissioners proceeded to spend most of the PTP revenue on roadways, bus service, and operation of the solitary Metrorail line we already had. Last year County Manager George Burgess confessed that it was bunk to think the PTP tax could have ever funded the expanded rail system voters authorized in 2002—even with federal contributions like the ones Mr. Diaz-Balart secured.

So, we’re left with just 2.4 miles of new Metrorail that is to link the current line to Miami International Airport starting in 2012. The estimated cost is $526 million—$426 million from the PTP tax and $100 million from Florida Department of Transportation. The project will consume none of the $2.2 billion the Congressman secured; Burgess opted to forgo federal money because the federal appropriations process takes too long.

Nor is it entirely Diaz-Balart’s fault that the $2.2 billion he secured would have covered only a fraction of the $14 billion or so that 60 more miles of Metrorail track would cost at today’s prices. Congress just wasn’t willing to authorize anything close to what we need.

But the truth is that Miami-Dade desperately needs an expanded rail system. One trip across the county during rush hour painfully drives home the fact that we have a worsening transit crisis. If Rep. Diaz-Balart wants credit for helping to alleviate it, shouldn’t he need to secure enough money to do so? That is, much, much more than $2.2 billion.

Everyone knows these fiscally-troubled times require Congress to prioritize and shift funds into programs that are vital for our economic and environmental health (like mass transit) and out of federal projects that aren’t. Unfortunately, one of the Congressman’s own expensive pet federal projects, Radio & TV Martí—which cost federal taxpayers about $35 million per year—falls into the latter category. Diaz-Balart, Miami-Dade’s only voice on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has spent a lot of his political capital lately repeatedly denouncing the president’s stimulus plan as “nothing more than a dismal failure” and “a colossal waste of taxpayer money.” Many fiscal conservatives would apply those terms to Radio & TV Martí.

So, here’s an idea I’ve already shared with the local Metropolitan Planning Organization. The MPO recently announced a “call for ideas” on how to reduce traffic congestion and mailed out a form on which to put your idea’s title, objective, and tasks necessary to execute it.

[Title] Metrorail Martí.

[Objective] Closure of Radio & TV Martí, resulting in direction of $350 million into urban rail construction in Miami-Dade County over the next decade.

[Tasks] Develop strategies to 1) persuade Congress and Florida Legislature to match those dollars, for a total of $1 billion in new funding for urban rail expansion in Miami-Dade; 2) press Obama Administration to devote several billion dollars in future stimulus spending to Metrorail Martí.

2010-01-05T21:40:00.001-05:00

In light of the furor and hysteria surrounding the idea of releasing Yemenis from our prison at Guantanamo, we must again raid the Nielsen Readings archive for a fearless antidote. It prescribes sticking to our constitutional guns by trying all GITMO detainees, Yemeni or not, in U.S. criminal courts, as long as prosecutors have met the standard of probable cause. Otherwise, return them to their homelands, surveil them to kingdom come, and beseech the good men and women monitoring them to share pertinent information with proper authorities should any ex-prisoner head back to the United States with a bomb in his pants.

U.S. agents have accomplished this level and degree of surveillance before; it's just not as easy as compromising our constitutional principles and keeping those prisoners at Guantanamo indefinitely, with no due process.

As we wrote back in the summer of 2008: The FBI and CIA have been monitoring people for a long time, even terrorists, and have often excelled at it. The case of Khaled al-Mihdhar, one of the 9/11 hijackers, while ultimately tragic, is a case in point.

In late 1999, the CIA learned that Mihdhar, a Saudi, was staying at a hotel in Dubai before heading to Malaysia for a January 5, 2000 meeting with other Al Qaeda operatives. The CIA had previously linked Mihdhar to the Al Qaeda men who had bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. CIA agents snuck into his room and photocopied his passport. In it they noticed a U.S. visa.

The problem wasn’t that American detectives couldn’t stay on Mihdhar. The problem was that they didn’t. The CIA failed to tell the FBI or the State Department or immigration authorities about Mihdhar’s U.S. visa so that the FBI could get a bead on him once he set foot on U.S. soil, and eventually arrest him on evidence he was involved in a criminal conspiracy. Nor did the CIA inform the FBI that when Mihdhar flew to the U.S. in March 2000 he was traveling with Nawaf al-Hazmi, another Al Qaeda operative and eventual 9/11 hijacker.

Had the FBI known this, agents would have had a good chance of arresting them in late 2000 for links to Al Qaeda operatives who bombed the U.S.S. Cole in October of that year, killing 17 sailors. Kenneth Maxwell, a supervisory agent with the FBI’s National Security Division at the time, told The New Yorker: “Two Al Qaeda guys living in California—are you kidding me? We would have been on them like white on snow: physical surveillance, electronic surveillance, a special unit devoted entirely to them.” Experts say that the fundamental FBI-CIA communication problem that failed to stop Mihdhar and al-Hamzi has been solved.

A stunning example of counter-terrorism within the confines of the U.S. Constitution is the arrest in 1995 of Ramzi Yousef, who was later convicted of plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people. Acting on surveillance and other intelligence, an FBI counter-terrorism unit in Washington, D.C. learned that Yousef was in Pakistan and planning to cross into Afghanistan. Within three days, FBI agents had flown to Islamabad and swooped him up, with the help of Pakistani agents. Yousef was flown to New York City, jailed, received a court hearing, and was returned to his cell. He’s still in federal prison serving a life sentence without parole.

See No Illegal, Speak No Illegal

2009-10-22T15:35:00.001-04:00

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.

2009-10-07T13:45:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-01T20:07:00.000-04:00

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

2009-08-21T14:00:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-08-19T17:26:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-08-04T21:24:00.000-04:00

It's August and that means most news vessels are in the doldrums. Actually, the Guantanamo prisoners and hunt for bin Laden narratives have virtually been in irons -- that's sailing jargon for 'standing still' -- much of the year. So much so that our Poder magazine column from a year ago still stands.

From Poder, August 2008

Gitmo Mojo

How a Miami model for terrorist tracking and the resurrection of habeas corpus could still be a boon for Al Qaeda hunters.

By Kirk Nielsen

Miami’s often vexing contributions to the annals of international terrorism sometimes offer clear insights. In June the United States Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that prisoners held as enemy combatants at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo, Cuba have the right to appear in federal courtrooms to challenge their detentions. That right, known as habeas corpus, is a tenet of the U.S. Constitution. And yet the ruling set off waves of paranoia in some circles of America. “A totally irresponsible and dangerous decision,” radio talk show host Monica Crowley declared on PBS’s “The McLaughlin Group.” “I was at Guantanamo Bay in the fall of 2006. These are the world’s most hardened jihadists who should not have the rights and privileges of American citizens,” she added, totally prejudging the cases of all 270 prisoners held at Gitmo.

Strangely, the ruling even frightened editorial page editors at the Wall Street Journal, who penned a piece raising the specter of a new attack on U.S. soil, perhaps one “enabled” by a terrorist released as a result of the majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush. The editorial noted that even before the ruling, U.S. commanders freed a Gitmo detainee whom they thought was safe but who last month exploded himself in Mosul, killing a group of Iraqi soldiers. America must be afraid to release even the most harmless of prisoners, the Wall Street Journal editors and other critics of the ruling seemed to argue.

Paranoia breeds pessimism, though, and obscures other possibilities. One is that five years in the Gitmo slammer might have radicalized hitherto angry but peaceable young men into murderous criminals. Another possibility is that the experience has actually softened some jihadists. Released on bond one might say, “I have fought the good fight, but enough with the Great Satan already. I will now devote my life to building homes and clean water pipes for the poor, caring for the sick and feeble, stopping child traffickers, or spending more time with my grandmothers.” A third possibility is that Gitmo has further hardened the hardest jihadists. Of course, they’re the ones that scare Crowley, the Wall Street Journal editorial page editors, and many other Americans.

They need not fear habeas corpus, however. If sound evidence of violent intent is what landed these detainees in Gitmo, then Pentagon lawyers should have no problem convincing a judge that they are dangerous flight risks. They go right back to jail.

But what if federal judges are fooled and release a hundred guys like that Mosul bomber, whom U.S. commanders in Gitmo thought was Okay to free? Then we send America’s most professional manhunters to follow them.

That may sound far-fetched, but it isn’t. The FBI and CIA have been monitoring people for a long time, even terrorists, and have often excelled at it. The case of Khaled al-Mihdhar, one of the 9/11 hijackers, while ultimately tragic, is a case in point.

In late 1999, the CIA learned that Mihdhar, a Saudi, was staying at a hotel in Dubai before heading to Malaysia for a January 5, 2000 meeting with other Al Qaeda operatives. The CIA had previously linked Mihdhar to the Al Qaeda men who had bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. CIA agents snuck into his room and photocopied his passport. In it they noticed a U.S. visa.

The problem wasn’t that American detectives couldn’t stay on Mihdhar. The problem was that they didn’t. The CIA failed to tell the FBI or the State Department or immigration authorities about Mihdhar’s U.S. visa so that the FBI could get a bead on him once he set foot on U.S. soil, and eventually arrest him on evidence he was involved in a criminal conspiracy. Nor did the CIA inform the FBI that when Mihdhar flew to the U.S. in March 2000 he was traveling with Nawaf al-Hazmi, another Al Qaeda operative and eventual 9/11 hijacker.

Had the FBI known this, agents would have had a good chance of arresting them in late 2000 for links to Al Qaeda operatives who bombed the U.S.S. Cole in October of that year, killing 17 sailors. Kenneth Maxwell, a supervisory agent with the FBI’s National Security Division at the time, told The New Yorker: “Two Al Qaeda guys living in California—are you kidding me? We would have been on them like white on snow: physical surveillance, electronic surveillance, a special unit devoted entirely to them.” Experts say that the fundamental FBI-CIA communication problem that failed to stop Mihdhar and al-Hamzi has been solved.

A stunning example of counter-terrorism within the confines of the U.S. Constitution is the arrest in 1995 of Ramzi Yousef, who was later convicted of plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people. Acting on surveillance and other intelligence, an FBI counter-terrorism unit in Washington, D.C. learned that Yousef was in Pakistan and planning to cross into Afghanistan. Within three days, FBI agents had flown to Islamabad and swooped him up, with the help of Pakistani agents. Yousef was flown to New York City, jailed, received a court hearing, and was returned to his cell. He’s still in federal prison serving a life sentence without parole.
Miami was ground zero for an even older precedent for constitutional counter-terrorism. The suspects weren’t wild-eyed, anti-American religious fanatics who once received arms and training from the CIA and like to live in caves in Afghanistan. They were wild-eyed anti-Communist Green Beret types, who lost properties and businesses in the Cuban revolution and received munitions, commando, and espionage training from CIA specialists in the 1960s. The FBI called them anti-Castro activists.

It’s worth remembering that after failing to destabilize the Fidel Castro regime with Operation Mongoose and the Bay of Pigs invasion, some of these activists went on to commit some of the most notorious acts of political violence in the United States in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Among their targets: United Nations headquarters in New York, foreign diplomats, the FBI ’s Miami field office, the Miami Federal Building, Miami International Airport, travel agencies, shipping company offices, and people who said publicly that tough diplomacy rather than terrorism might be a superior way to undermine a popular socialist revolution.

All that is so much bloody history now, in part because of a counter-terrorism strategy adopted by the FBI’s Miami field office in the 1980s. That’s when FBI special agents in charge de-emphasized short-term confrontation of anti-Castro activist groups and emphasized long-term surveillance, infiltration, even entrapment. They fostered the perception that the FBI was on the activists’ side and looking the other way as groups of exiles armed, trained, planned missions, even loaded weapons into boats in the Florida Keys.

But detectives were watching, and soon after the activists motored away from the docks officers would pounce. Incriminating weaponry sometimes conveniently went overboard, leaving insufficient evidence for prosecutors. The activists rarely went to jail in this scenario, but they didn’t commit violence either.

It helped to pay some off to work as informants, which remains a key tactic in the war on terrorism today. (A Pakistani man received $2 million for information leading to Yousef’s arrest.) By the early 1990s, the FBI had anti-Castro activist groups so thoroughly penetrated that in some cases their leaders were informants. As a result, violent energies that once found release on the streets of Miami and other American cities dissipated. (Generally, the FBI’s Miami field office also found monitoring covert activities of Cuban government agents in Miami a more valuable strategy than arresting them. In July, Lt. Col. Chris Simmons, a U.S. Army counterintelligence officer, told the Miami Herald that there are about 210 Cuban agents and officers in Florida.)

Overall the strategy worked quite well. Remember Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, the anti-Castro activists who many informed people are convinced planned the 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger jet in 1976, killing 73 people on board? Well, Bosch and Posada are living freely in Miami today and neither of them has blown up anything since 1997. That was the year bombs went off at a variety of hotels and restaurants in Havana, killing Italian tourist Fabio di Celmo and injuring 11 people. (Posada acknowledged responsibility in a famous 1998 interview with the New York Times and in a letter to this reporter from his Panama prison cell three years later).

Of course, there will always be close calls. On November 17, 2000 Panamanian detectives, assisted by informants, surveilled and arrested Posada and three other Miami residents—Gaspar Jimenez, Guillermo Novo, and Pedro Remon—after finding a gym bag full of C-4 explosives in a rental car they were using. Witnesses, including former accomplices, testified that the four had planned to detonate the explosives in a Panama City university auditorium while Fidel Castro delivered a speech. It’s hard to imagine that Panamanian detectives didn’t receive some kind of intelligence from FBI or CIA agents.

It’s also hard to imagine that FBI agents aren’t keeping tabs on the four of them now. Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned them just before she left office in 2004, and all but Posada returned immediately to Miami. Posada, who is not a U.S. citizen, arrived illegally in his friend Santiago Alvarez’s shrimp boat in early 2005, according to an informant who was onboard.

Thanks again to informants, the FBI arrested Alvarez himself and his assistant Osvaldo Mitat a few months later for an illegal weapons cache that included a Heckler & Koch grenade launcher, an M11 A1 machine gun, two Colt AR-15 assault rifles, and a gun silencer. In a successful bid for sentence reductions, Alvarez caused a bunch of his associates to surrender a much larger arms cache, including several dozen assault weapons, 14 pounds of C-4 explosives, 200 pounds of dynamite, and a lot of detonator cord. Mitat is scheduled for release in December, Alvarez next year.

And what FBI field office in its right mind wouldn’t be keeping careful watch on guys like José Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz Romero? They, along with Guillermo Novo, were convicted for the 1976 car bombing in Washington, D.C. that killed former Chilean ambassador to the U.S. Orlando Letelier and his American aide Ronni Moffit. Suarez and Paz eluded the FBI for more than 15 years, but they were finally caught in 1990 and 1991, respectively. Both pled guilty, cut deals, and were paroled before serving their 12-year sentences. It’s doubtful that any Gitmo detainee is more steely and brazen than these guys were in their prime.

But because Suarez and Paz were foreign nationals and felons, they remained in jail awaiting deportation proceedings, as required by U.S. immigration law. Then suddenly U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials released Paz in July 2001 and Suarez a month later. That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that indefinite imprisonment without trial or court hearing was unconstitutional. Sound familiar?

Now that habeas corpus has risen again, supporters of the Boumediene v. Bush ruling believe the United States can return to combating terrorists without compromising tenets of American democracy. It’s been done before. And who knows whether a released Gitmo detainee might prove more useful on the loose? With a special FBI unit on him, like white on snow, even the hardest jihadist could lead agents to the likes of Osama bin Laden, unwittingly or for a fee.

How derailed is the People's Transportation Plan?

2009-06-24T14:18:00.000-04:00

From Poder Magazine, June 2009
The Great Train Wreck
by Kirk Nielsen

In 2002, sensing that all great modern cities have great urban rail systems, the citizens of Miami-Dade County approved a ballot question calling for one. (They also sensed their grand weariness of traffic jams and two-hour public bus excursions to travel 15 miles.) Thus was born the People’s Transportation Plan, or PTP, which involved a new half-cent sales tax to fund, among other things, “rapid transit lines to West Dade, Kendall, Florida City, Miami Beach, and North Dade.” Specifically, the plan proposed to expand Metrorail from a solitary 22-mile line into a nine or ten-line system with 90 miles of track.

Seven years later, the county has spent about $1 billion of PTP sales tax money, virtually none of it directly on Metrorail expansion. About $70 million was used to pay interest on bonds that are to help fund new rail lines. Most of the rest went to operate and maintain the single Metrorail line, buy new buses, and slightly expand bus service, according to a memo county manager George Burgess sent to commissioners in May. Some of it also disappeared into roadways. Read on.

2009-06-09T20:32:00.000-04:00

From the May issue of Poder Magazine:

Stadium Fever
If Miami history repeats itself, the $644 million budget for the Marlins’ new little Havana home won´t even be in the ballpark.

By Kirk Nielsen

In February 2000, when Miami-Dade’s Performing Arts Center was a field of dreams in architect Cesar Pelli’s mind, he told county commissioners it could be built for $186 million. The final tabulation was $446 million. Scholars who study overruns term this kind of low-ball estimating a strategic misrepresentation. In baseball, one form this phenomenon takes is the curveball. In other words, Pelli and the folks who managed the PAC’s construction threw the public a lot of curveballs.

Miami-Dade County Manager George Burgess and his statisticians have calculated that the proposed 37,000-seat, retractable-roof ballpark slated to debut in Little Havana in 2012 will cost approximately $644 million. (That’s $515 million for the stadium, $94 million for parking garages, and about $35 million for infrastructure improvements like new water and sewer lines.) Florida Marlins, L.P., the private corporation that runs the baseball team, has signed on for about $155 million, or 24 percent, of it.

Only the manager’s most delirious fans could believe the project will stay inside that budget. Reasonable people, including him, know it’s just a ballpark figure. A baseline, if you will.

“The County’s exposure to overruns and other unexpected costs—while impossible to eliminate completely—has been dramatically reduced,” Burgess wrote to county commissioners in a March 23 memo that accompanied the stadium plan. They approved it the next day, 9-4. (The Miami City Commission also voted 3-2 in favor.)

Put more bluntly, the stadium project will cost more than $644 million. But how much more? Read on.

Archival reading of the month: "Dialogue: The Final Frontier"

2009-04-13T14:57:00.000-04:00

For some background on the Cuban American National Foundation's new policy pushing rapprochement with the government of Cuba, see Dialogue: The Final Frontier, published in Miami New Times in February 2003.

2009-03-04T15:25:00.000-05:00

From Poder Magazine, February 2009
Havana Daydreamin’
Will there be any Cuba policy change to believe in this year? No Mucho
By Kirk Nielsen
After last November’s presidential election, one of my fellow Cuba policy geeks started fantasizing. Barack Obama would stand at the presidential podium and announce that the United States was planning to return the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay to the Republic of Cuba. He would say he was instructing U.S. officials to commence talks with the Cubans to work out the details. In the meantime, Gitmo would morph from a creepy military prison into a big training camp for young civilian volunteers eager to rebuild areas of Cuba devastated by, say, more than its fair share of hurricanes.

Thus was the reverie that sociologist Max Castro unloosed in a post-election column for the Miami-based website Progreso Weekly. “My thought was that a) closing the detention camp; b) demilitarizing the area c) dedicating it initially for a humanitarian purpose, and d) announcing the intention to return it to Cuba would send an unmistakable message,” he explained in a recent email to me. The message: that the United States was “crafting a new foreign policy transcending the old imperialism (how the base was acquired in the first place) and the new imperial lawlessness (exemplified by the outrages committed in Gitmo as part of the terror war).”

It’s truly a great and wholesome fantasy. But let’s get real for a couple of minutes. Before any meaningful talk about Gitmo devolution could start, the Obama Administration would have to clear out the expensive prison that the U.S. military and private contractors built there post-September 11, 2001 to hold suspected terrorists. Obama has indicated he intends to close the prison down. But the legal and logistical morass of moving its 200 or so inmates to non-military prisons in the U.S. or other countries could easily take all year. Only then could Obama Administration seriously consider closing down the military base altogether, a process that could take several more years.

In 2009, dreamers of a U.S.-Cuba reconciliation will be lucky to see more than a lifting of restrictions on visits and remittances to relatives in Cuba. That’s all Obama promised to do if elected, and he can lift them by executive order, without Congressional involvement. In similar fashion, he could also end Bush’s ban on sending soap and other household goods to Cuba.

To dismantle the trade embargo, however, will require at least one act of Congress. And despite the big new Democratic majority in Washington, D.C., embargo opponents might not have the necessary votes, according to one of the most knowledgeable Cuba policy techies on Capitol Hill (who insists on anonymity).

Over the years, the House of Representatives has passed bills to lift the travel ban and trade sanctions, only to see the legislation die in the hands of the Senate. That’s ironic because opinion polls have long shown that a vast majority of Americans oppose restrictions on trade and travel to Cuba. More recently, polls have shown that even most Cuban-Americans now oppose them.

But on Capitol Hill support for the trade and travel sanctions has, oddly, increased in recent years. Any explanation must include the U.S. Cuba Democracy Political Action Committee, which since 2003 has spent about $3 million to keep members of Congress voting against the wishes of the American public with regard to Cuba. Roughly half of that money has gone to Democrats.

No one knows whether sponsors of new legislation to lift the travel ban will be able to muster enough support even in this more Democratically-controlled Congress. And they won’t even begin to know for many months, while House members are mired in budget, appropriations, stimulus, and bailout bills—to the exclusion of parochial matters like Cuba policy. So, Americans who fancy rum and fun on the island’s breathtaking Varadero Beach—or a brand new Gitmo retrofitted for humanitarian purposes—are going to have to dream on.

2008-10-13T11:15:00.000-04:00

From Poder Magazine, October 2008
John McCain and the Undocumented Express
The Republican nominee recovers his pro-immigrant credentials, but has his visa to the Latino electorate expired?
By Kirk Nielsen

Reporter: “Senator McCain, there’s close to 14 million estimated undocumented workers in this country. I know you’re not for amnesty but what do you plan to do for those undocumented workers?”

John McCain: “First of all we have to secure our borders. Our borders must be secured, that is our first obligation. Americans have lost confidence in our government, and trust. So we have to secure the borders.”

That exchange occurred at a Miami news conference January 21, a week before the Florida primary. McCain also said it was imperative to fully prosecute employers of undocumented immigrants, and to deport the 2 million illegals who’ve committed crimes. “But first we’ve got to secure the borders, and that’s the message.”

It was a far cry from the compassionate, immigrant-friendly chords he struck less than a year earlier. Nonetheless, on the night of McCain’s January 29 Florida primary win, when the senator from Arizona clinched the Republican nomination, Jose Lagos was ebullient. It didn’t bother Lagos, the president of the immigrant advocacy group Honduran Unity, that the Straight Talk Express wasn’t talking about helping undocumented immigrants obtain legal status anymore. “Right now what people want to hear is ‘border security,” Lagos said. “You can’t say everything that everybody wants to hear and get elected.”

Lagos was certain, though, that McCain still supported pro-immigrant reforms, like mass legalization and the opportunity of citizenship for millions of undocumented residents. The candidate just stopped saying so publicly. “Sen. McCain is like the Phoenix bird,” Lagos said excitedly, proclaiming that the Republican Party was now poised to keep immigration reform alive.

It was plausible—as long as McCain returned to his former self. In May 2006, 21 Republicans joined 41 Democrats in the U.S. Senate to pass the comprehensive immigration reform McCain authored with Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy. The bill aimed to bolster border control and enforcement against companies that hire undocumented immigrants. It also would have established a process for the estimated 12 to 14 million undocumented workers already here to become citizens. The legislation died, however, when Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the GOP majority leader at the time, refused to take up the bill in the House.

Democrats gained control of Congress in the 2006 elections but by June 2007, with presidential primary campaigning in motion and xenophobia swirling in some states, legalization proponents could no longer rally a majority of the senate behind the McCain-Kennedy bill. Attempts at compromise failed. In the last vote on the matter only 46 senators (12 Republicans and 34 Democrats) supported comprehensive immigration reform; 53 (40 Republicans and 13 Democrats) opposed it. Mitt Romney and other GOP presidential contenders seized the moment to criticize McCain as being too soft on illegal immigration.

In July of 2007, while the McCain campaign was reeling from financial mismanagement, most of his GOP opponents continued to send out anti-immigrant messages, alienating large numbers prospective Hispanic voters. Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, for example, denounced legislation that allowed immigrants to receive Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Program services without having to provide proof of U.S. citizenship. “Again, the Democrats have proven their loyalty to illegal aliens over American citizens,” Tancredo asserted in a press release. “Rather than help middle class families as they promised, Congressional Democrats are squeezing tax dollars out of Americans in order to benefit those who have violated our laws.... This socialistic plan only encourages more illegal immigration.

When will these out-of-touch Democrats realize that Americans do not want to subsidize illegal aliens?” When McCain re-emerged in the fall of 2007, he, too, had forsaken the more humanitarian reforms of his own bill. Arguably, his new secure-the-border-and-deport criminal-aliens stance helped him win the GOP nomination.

A general election campaign is a different ball game, however, especially when opinion polls indicate that two out of three Latino voters prefer your opponent—and your opponent’s immigrant-friendly positions, which used to be your own. Because record numbers of Latinos voted in this year’s presidential primaries and more have registered since then, they could hold the key to victory in certain battleground states like Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and Florida. So there was plenty of incentive for McCain to rediscover his kinder, gentler side on immigration.

But first, the Republican Party’s 109-member platform committee—which hammers out official GOP policies to be adopted at its convention—had to work through proposals to make life even harsher for illegal immigrants. One called for the party to oppose automatic U.S. citizenship for children born of “illegal aliens.” (Under the Constitution, anyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen.)

“That proposal was voted down and I was encouraged by the debate, by those that recognized that certainly to target or identify children in the immigration debate was inappropriate,” says Marcelo Llorente, a Florida state legislator from the Miami area who was a McCain delegate.

“And on top of that there are 14th Amendment protections to all persons born on this great land.”

The committee also quashed a motion to exclude undocumented immigrants from the U.S. Census count. Opponents argued that because government funding for education, health care, and other social services is apportioned on the basis of population, it would hurt states and municipalities to have inaccurate counts.

In its final form, the Republican platform emphasizes “enforcing the rule of law at the border” and throughout the nation. “We oppose amnesty,” it states. “The rule of law suffers if government policies encourage or reward illegal activity. The American people’s rejection of en masse legalizations is especially appropriate given the federal government’s past failures to enforce the law.” It also states that authorities should also arrest “those who overstay their visas, rather than letting millions flout the generosity that gave them temporary entry.”

The Democratic Party platform is equally vociferous on immigration law enforcement, but more lenient with regard to the undocumented. “For the millions living here illegally but otherwise playing by the rules, we must require them to come out of the shadows and get right with the law,” it says. “We support a system that requires undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, pay taxes, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens. They are our neighbors, and we can help them become full tax paying, law-abiding, productive members of society.”

“He’s got to make a calculation, really, between now and the election about what it’ll take to win,” Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said as he headed to hear McCain’s speech at the Republican National Convention. “His original bill, McCain-Kennedy, had a comprehensive plan, which was very appealing to Hispanics,” Specter continued. “And there is very strong Republican concern about anything beyond border security. So that’s his challenge.”

In his speech, McCain’s only reference to immigration was this: “We believe everyone has something to contribute and deserves the opportunity to reach their God-given potential, from the boy whose descendants arrived on the Mayflower to the Latina daughter of migrant workers. We’re all God’s children and we’re all Americans.” But it was clear his immigration recalculation had begun. It became more discernible when Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos forced the issue in an interview three days later.

“I’ll enact comprehensive immigration reform. We’ll sit down together with Democrats, and we’ll get it done,” McCain told Ramos. “But we’ve got to secure our borders, not only because of illegal immigration, but because of drugs.”

“Would that include massive legalization of millions of undocumented immigrants in this country?” Ramos asked.

“I think it means that we go through a step-by-step process of allowing people to apply and achieve citizenship in this country, of course,” McCain replied. When Ramos pointed out McCain had just contradicted his own party’s platform, the candidate pressed on, saying authorities need to deport or jail 2 million criminal aliens, then joked that there aren’t enough handcuffs in the country for the other 12 million undocumented. “We can, together, Republican and Democrat, work out this issue, provide a path to citizenship.”

For some Latino Republicans, it’s like his primary season regression never happened. “Sen. McCain has always been supportive of a comprehensive immigration policy, which includes a guest worker program,” says George Antuna, a member of McCain’s Hispanic outreach committee for Texas. “He’s been working at it for the past several years, so he’s been extremely vocal.” Antuna, whose mother and father migrated from Mexico in the 1960s, added: “I really do think that we’re going to do extremely well with the Latino vote. Why? Because of the mere fact that Sen. McCain understands immigrants and their issues, because of the fact that he’s from a border state. He understands immigration; he lives it every single day.”

Antuna offers a hint of his approach for convincing Hispanic voters. “Just like we can’t do drilling without doing some kind of conservation, you need to have a good guest worker program, but it has to be tied into a border security program... We should make sure we have a pathway to residency, which leads to a pathway to citizenship. And it’s not going to happen overnight. You’ve got to earn it, man.”

Other McCain backers, however, are still opting for the candidate’s borders-first-deport-criminals message. “The platform that John McCain is running on is that we have an obligation first to secure the borders,” insists Hugh Hallman, the mayor of Tempe, Arizona, a McCain delegate. “Once we do that, we need to calm the political rhetoric down and begin looking at how to address those people who already are in the country and how to create appropriate labor policies so that people can come to this country and work. But those are the second and third steps, not the first step.”

Hallman hastens to warn that Latino voters in Arizona and other states don’t necessarily support pro-legalization and that many are “ardently anti-immigrant.” Despite opinion polls, he says it’s a false premise to assume McCain would gain Latino voter support by becoming more sympathetic to the plight of undocumented immigrants.

Immigration is far from the only concern on the minds of Latinos. “Taxation is a big issue. The more money you can leave in your household the better,” Antuna says, noting that his mother, who runs a small tailoring business, used to be a Democrat. “One day my mom asked her friends, ‘What’s the difference between a Democrat and a Republican?’ And her Hispanic friend says, ‘Well, the Democrats are for the poor, and the Republicans are for the rich.’ And she said, ‘Well you know what? I don’t want to be poor. I want to be rich.’ ”

But with unemployment, the high cost of health care and college, and other economic troubles topping the list of Latino voter concerns, casting himself as the leader of the rich people’s party is a calculation John McCain probably won’t want to make this fall.

In the race for Latino votes, it’s also Peña versus Navarro

The presidential contenders’ lists of Hispanic political advisors expanded to unprecedented proportions this year, along with the Latino electorate’s potential to tip the race in several battleground states. With apologies up front, we have space to recognize only two of the top dogs.

John McCain’s presidential campaign had dozens of chairs and co-chairs on its National Hispanic Advisory Board even before the senator from Arizona won the Republican nomination. But 36-year-old Ana Navarro, McCain’s senior Hispanic policy advisor, is the one involved in virtually every discussion related to winning the hearts and minds of Latino voters.

Navarro was practicing immigration law in Miami when she joined Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s transition team in 1998. Primed with GOP connections, she then launched a Miami-based political consulting firm. Notable clients included the government of El Salvador and Republican congressmen from Miami, brothers Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart, who are among McCain’s core advisors, especially on Cuba issues.

Navarro, a Nicaraguan American whose father was an anti-Sandinista Contra guerrilla in the ‘80s, first met McCain at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, where the senator often stops while on official visits to Southcom, Guantánamo, and other points south.

“When I speak to John about issues important to the Hispanic community, it is much more of a dialogue than it is an advising session. I frankly think he can advise me more than I can [him],” Navarro says, noting that McCain has 25 years of experience with the Latino electorate and has repeatedly won a sizeable majority of it in Arizona.

Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s inner circle of advisors on all things Latino numbers 15. At the center is 61-year-old Federico Peña, who became Denver’s first Hispanic mayor in the 1980s and served as U.S. transportation secretary and energy secretary in the Clinton Administration before joining a Denver-based private equity investment firm.

Peña has served as national co-chair of the Obama campaign since mid-2007, and he advises the senator from Illinois on much besides Latino issues, particularly energy policy, transportation, infrastructure, and political strategy. “I’ve got a multifaceted background with lots of different kinds of experiences, which Barack utilizes fully,” Peña says.

As chair of Obama’s national Hispanic Advisory Council, Peña presides over a weekly conference call connecting the group with campaign manager David Plouffe. “Their role is two-fold,” Peña says of the council. “One, to be briefed on a weekly basis on campaign strategy and how the campaign is going. And secondly, it’s to give them an opportunity to give the campaign manager and the top campaign officials feedback, on things we ought to be doing differently, new strategies, things that are perhaps not working, things that might be working better in certain states. So it’s a two-way conversation."

Gitmo Mojo

2008-08-08T14:15:00.000-04:00

From Poder magazine, August 2008

Gitmo Mojo

How a Miami model for terrorist tracking and the resurrection of habeas corpus could be a boon for Al Qaeda hunters.

By Kirk Nielsen

Strangely, the ruling even frightened editorial page editors at the Wall Street Journal, who penned a piece raising the specter of a new attack on U.S. soil, perhaps one “enabled” by a terrorist released as a result of the majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush. The editorial noted that even before the ruling, U.S. commanders freed a Gitmo detainee whom they thought was safe but who last month exploded himself in Mosul, killing a group of Iraqi soldiers. America must be afraid to release even the most harmless of prisoners, the Wall Street Journal editors and other critics of the ruling seemed to argue.

Paranoia breeds pessimism, though, and obscures other possibilities. One is that five years in the Gitmo slammer might have radicalized hitherto angry but peaceable young men into murderous criminals. Another possibility is that the experience has actually softened some jihadists. Released on bond one might say, “I have fought the good fight, but enough with the Great Satan already. I will now devote my life to building homes and clean water pipes for the poor, caring for the sick and feeble, stopping child traffickers, or spending more time with my grandmothers.”

A third possibility is that Gitmo has further hardened the hardest jihadists. Of course, they’re the ones that scare Crowley, the Wall Street Journal editorial page editors, and many other Americans.

They need not fear habeas corpus, however. If sound evidence of violent intent is what landed these detainees in Gitmo, then Pentagon lawyers should have no problem convincing a judge that they are dangerous flight risks. They go right back to jail.

But what if federal judges are fooled and release a hundred guys like that Mosul bomber, whom U.S. commanders in Gitmo thought was Okay to free? Then we send America’s most professional manhunters to follow them.

That may sound far-fetched, but it isn’t. The FBI and CIA have been monitoring people for a long time, even terrorists, and have often excelled at it. The case of Khaled al-Mihdhar, one of the 9/11 hijackers, while ultimately tragic, is a case in point.

The problem wasn’t that American detectives couldn’t stay on Mihdhar. The problem was that they didn’t. The CIA failed to tell the FBI or the State Department or immigration authorities about Mihdhar’s U.S. visa so that the FBI could get a bead on him once he set foot on U.S. soil, and eventually arrest him on evidence he was involved in a criminal conspiracy. Nor did the CIA inform the FBI that when Mihdhar flew to the U.S. in March 2000 he was traveling with Nawaf al-Hazmi, another Al Qaeda operative and eventual 9/11 hijacker.

Had the FBI known this, agents would have had a good chance of arresting them in late 2000 for links to Al Qaeda operatives who bombed the U.S.S. Cole in October of that year, killing 17 sailors. Kenneth Maxwell, a supervisory agent with the FBI’s National Security Division at the time, told The New Yorker: “Two Al Qaeda guys living in California—are you kidding me? We would have been on them like white on snow: physical surveillance, electronic surveillance, a special unit devoted entirely to them.” Experts say that the fundamental FBI-CIA communication problem that failed to stop Mihdhar and al-Hamzi has been solved.

A stunning example of counter-terrorism within the confines of the U.S. Constitution is the arrest in 1995 of Ramzi Yousef, who was later convicted of plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people. Acting on surveillance and other intelligence, an FBI counter-terrorism unit in Washington, D.C. learned that Yousef was in Pakistan and planning to cross into Afghanistan. Within three days, FBI agents had flown to Islamabad and swooped him up, with the help of Pakistani agents. Yousef was flown to New York City, jailed, received a court hearing, and was returned to his cell. He’s still in federal prison serving a life sentence without parole.

Miami was ground zero for an even older precedent for constitutional counter-terrorism. The suspects weren’t wild-eyed, anti-American religious fanatics who once received arms and training from the CIA and like to live in caves in Afghanistan. They were wild-eyed anti-Communist Green Beret types, who lost properties and businesses in the Cuban revolution and received munitions, commando, and espionage training from CIA specialists in the 1960s. The FBI called them anti-Castro activists.

It’s worth remembering that after failing to destabilize the Fidel Castro regime with Operation Mongoose and the Bay of Pigs invasion, some of these activists went on to commit some of the most notorious acts of political violence in the United States in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Among their targets: United Nations headquarters in New York, foreign diplomats, the FBI ’s Miami field office, the Miami Federal Building, Miami International Airport, travel agencies, shipping company offices, and people who said publicly that tough diplomacy rather than terrorism might be a superior way to undermine a popular socialist revolution.

All that is so much bloody history now, in part because of a counter-terrorism strategy adopted by the FBI’s Miami field office in the 1980s. That’s when FBI special agents in charge de-emphasized short-term confrontation of anti-Castro activist groups and emphasized long-term surveillance, infiltration, even entrapment. They fostered the perception that the FBI was on the activists’ side and looking the other way as groups of exiles armed, trained, planned missions, even loaded weapons into boats in the Florida Keys.

But detectives were watching, and soon after the activists motored away from the docks officers would pounce. Incriminating weaponry sometimes conveniently went overboard, leaving insufficient evidence for prosecutors. The activists rarely went to jail in this scenario, but they didn’t commit violence either.

It helped to pay some off to work as informants, which remains a key tactic in the war on terrorism today. (A Pakistani man received $2 million for information leading to Yousef’s arrest.) By the early 1990s, the FBI had anti-Castro activist groups so thoroughly penetrated that in some cases their leaders were informants. As a result, violent energies that once found release on the streets of Miami and other American cities dissipated. (Generally, the FBI’s Miami field office also found monitoring covert activities of Cuban government agents in Miami a more valuable strategy than arresting them. In July, Lt. Col. Chris Simmons, a U.S. Army counterintelligence officer, told the Miami Herald that there are about 210 Cuban agents and officers in Florida.)

Overall the strategy worked quite well. Remember Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, the anti-Castro activists who many informed people are convinced planned the 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger jet in 1976, killing 73 people on board? Well, Bosch and Posada are living freely in Miami today and neither of them has blown up anything since 1997. That was the year bombs went off at a variety of hotels and restaurants in Havana, killing Italian tourist Fabio di Celmo and injuring 11 people. (Posada acknowledged responsibility in a famous 1998 interview with the New York Times and in a letter to this reporter from his Panama prison cell three years later).

Of course, there will always be close calls. On November 17, 2000 Panamanian detectives, assisted by informants, surveilled and arrested Posada and three other Miami residents—Gaspar Jimenez, Guillermo Novo, and Pedro Remon—after finding a gym bag full of C-4 explosives in a rental car they were using. Witnesses, including former accomplices, testified that the four had planned to detonate the explosives in a Panama City university auditorium while Fidel Castro delivered a speech. It’s hard to imagine that Panamanian detectives didn’t receive some kind of intelligence from FBI or CIA agents.

It’s also hard to imagine that FBI agents aren’t keeping tabs on the four of them now. Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned them just before she left office in 2004, and all but Posada returned immediately to Miami. Posada, who is not a U.S. citizen, arrived illegally in his friend Santiago Alvarez’s shrimp boat in early 2005, according to an informant who was onboard.

Thanks again to informants, the FBI arrested Alvarez himself and his assistant Osvaldo Mitat a few months later for an illegal weapons cache that included a Heckler & Koch grenade launcher, an M11 A1 machine gun, two Colt AR-15 assault rifles, and a gun silencer. In a successful bid for sentence reductions, Alvarez caused a bunch of his associates to surrender a much larger arms cache, including several dozen assault weapons, 14 pounds of C-4 explosives, 200 pounds of dynamite, and a lot of detonator cord. Mitat is scheduled for release in December, Alvarez next year.

And what FBI field office in its right mind wouldn’t be keeping careful watch on guys like José Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz Romero? They, along with Guillermo Novo, were convicted for the 1976 car bombing in Washington, D.C. that killed former Chilean ambassador to the U.S. Orlando Letelier and his American aide Ronni Moffit. Suarez and Paz eluded the FBI for more than 15 years, but they were finally caught in 1990 and 1991, respectively. Both pled guilty, cut deals, and were paroled before serving their 12-year sentences. It’s doubtful that any Gitmo detainee is more steely and brazen than these guys were in their prime.

But because Suarez and Paz were foreign nationals and felons, they remained in jail awaiting deportation proceedings, as required by U.S. immigration law. Then suddenly U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials released Paz in July 2001 and Suarez a month later. That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that indefinite imprisonment without trial or court hearing was unconstitutional. Sound familiar?

Now that habeas corpus has risen again, supporters of the Boumediene v. Bush ruling believe the United States can return to combating terrorists without compromising tenets of American democracy. It’s been done before. And who knows whether a released Gitmo detainee might prove more useful on the loose? With a special FBI unit on him, like white on snow, even the hardest jihadist could lead agents to the likes of Osama bin Laden, unwittingly or for a fee.

2008-04-21T14:25:00.000-04:00

From Poder magazine, April 2008 (Miami edition)

Pretty good pork
While Republican leaders promise to put an end to pork barrel spending, election rhetoric in South Florida tells another story

By Kirk Nielsen

“Here comes Granma,” U.S. Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Miami) says mockingly, referring to Cuba’s Communist Party newspaper and me. He is standing amid a swarm of reporters, TV cameras, and John McCain supporters in the ballroom of the Hilton Miami Airport, the night of the Mac’s January 29 Republican primary win. The Mac had just left the stage after a rousing victory speech, as had Diaz-Balart and his brother Lincoln, also a U.S. representative. The Granma crack related to something I had asked McCain about at the Versailles Restaurant in Little Havana about a week earlier. Something the Diaz-Balarts care deeply about: Radio and TV Martí.

The Miami-based stations, which beam programming at Cuba, have brought about a half-billion American taxpayer dollars to Miami over the past decade. The money continues to flow, despite consistently bad reviews, not from Granma or me, but from U.S. government inspectors. It was the fault of Sen. Joe Lieberman (R-CT) that I even raised the question. On the morning of January 17, while campaigning for McCain across the street from Versailles at La Carreta, Lieberman told a group of mostly Cuban-American political activists that the Mac wanted to increase spending on Radio and TV Martí. The U.S. needs to use them more aggressively, he asserted.

Four days later, McCain was holding forth from a podium in a side dining room at Versailles, and suddenly the irony seemed thicker than the scent of bacon and eggs wafting in from the main dining area. The Diaz-Balart brothers stood proudly behind him. “We’ve got stop the pork barrel spending,” McCain said emphatically. I glanced at the press corps seated around me and thought: A radio and TV operation that costs about $40 million in taxpayer money per year and that hardly anybody in Cuba tunes into—how is that not a huge pork barrel? And so, during the news conference after his speech, I asked the Mac how he could justify increasing spending on Radio and TV Martí, given that investigations had repeatedly found evidence of fiscal misfeasance, malfeasance, and possibly fraud.

“That’s not true!” Mario Diaz-Balart shouted from behind McCain, before I had finished my sentence. The Mac waved him off, without turning around, then replied. “I can justify it that I’ll spend anything that’s necessary in the cause of freedom,” Sen. McCain said sternly. “We know what won the Cold War. Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty. And there were certain skeptics, such as yourself, about Radio Free Europe and those other means of communication that inspired hope in the people who were living under communist oppression, the same way that Radio Martí inspires hope in people that are living in one of the most brutal oppressive governments in history.”

After the news conference, I sought out Mario Diaz-Balart in the front parking lot for comment. “Ah, the spokesman for the Aruca—” he said, without finishing the sentence. The Aruca group, I suspected he wanted to say. He was referring to AM radio talk show host Francisco Aruca, a longtime critic of the U.S. embargo against Cuba and Radio and TV Martí. I told him I was simply going by what I had read in reports written by U.S. government inspectors. “The reports aren’t what you’re saying, though!” Mario retorted. “They’re actually pretty good!”

But, not being Granma, I wasn’t making things up. Perhaps we just have different standards for “pretty good.” A 2003 report by the State Department Office of the Inspector General concluded that Radio Martí’s audience had declined from 9 percent to 5 percent. The OIG’s latest report, issued last year, noted two surveys showed listenership was “significantly higher” than that, while also concluding that the audience research was “inconclusive.”

The 2003 OIG report also concluded that the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB), which operates Radio and TV Martí, “lacked key management personnel and internal controls” and “lacked programming quality control structures.” It also found that “the practices and procedures involving the hiring and use of contractors were inappropriate and inadequate. In some cases, OIG documented violations of government procurement requirements and actions that created an appearance of favoritism.”

Thanks to Mario and his brother’s efforts in the House—and those of key McCain endorser Mel Martinez in the U.S. Senate—the OCB budget swelled from $25.8 million in 2002 to $38.7 million this year. About $10 million goes to pay for the new Aero Martí project, in which pilots fly Gulfstream twin-engine propeller planes for five hours per day, six days per week, beaming TV Martí shows into Cuba. (The budget still also funds four hours of flights per week by a C-130 Hercules turbo-prop transport plane also equipped to transmit TV programming to the island.)

To be fair, maybe Congressman Diaz-Balart was referring to last year’s OIG report when he said “pretty good.” It did cite a variety of managerial improvements. But it also found all these good things:

“Greater emphasis is needed on internal quality control to ensure editorial standards are followed....Guidelines sometimes are breached; for instance, in one case a talk show host monopolized the conversation while editorializing, leaving little airtime for the guest to speak.

“A Radio Martí news manager said that the system was stretched and did not always provide the needed degree of review to ensure the Voice of America Charter, which stipulates that journalists be accurate, objective, and comprehensive.

“The information OCB gleans from dissidents or independent journalists in Cuba is an important part of the views aired on Radio and TV Marti. OCB is well aware of this challenge. Furthermore, some contractors providing talent are unaware of OCB Editorial Guidelines and the Voice of America Charter because they did not receive them when hired or were not instructed about the requirement. To ensure that all workers at OCB are aware of standards, OCB should routinely provide these criteria to its contracted talent and new employees.”

As a remedy, the OIG inspectors recommended giving employees and contractors “refresher courses” in journalism. With taxpayers footing the bill, of course.

The Office of Cuba Broadcasting isn’t the only pork barrel the Diaz-Balarts, Lieberman, Martinez, and McCain have helped sustain. Another is called “democracy assistance for Cuba.” Between 1996 and 2005 USAID and the State Department granted $66 million in such assistance to 22 nonprofits, some of them in Washington, DC and most of them in Miami. Thanks in part to the persuasive powers of the Diaz-Balarts, spending swelled under the Bush Administration to $33 million in 2006 alone. The current annual budget is about $46 million. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2006 and USAID’s inspector general in 2007 found record-keeping and accounting practices so lax throughout the Cuba assistance program that there was no way to know if the nonprofits were spending millions of American taxpayer dollars properly or legally.

The executive director of one nonprofit put federal grant money into his personal bank account, along with private donations. Inspectors uncovered “questionable expenditures” for travel and such items as a chain saw, Nintendo Gameboys and Sony Playstations, a mountain bike, leather coats, cashmere sweaters, crab meat, and Godiva chocolates. USAID Cuba program administrators sent millions of dollars to democracy assistance groups before completing required reviews of the groups’ programs. The list goes on. The USAID inspectors determined that $37 million in expenditures “were not routinely reviewed” by Cuba program administrators.

Perhaps those are the “pretty good” reports that Mario was talking about. Or maybe he, his brother Lincoln, and McCain could use a refresher course of their own this election year. Where can they take Pork Barrel Spending Analysis 101? They only have between now and November to pass it, if any of their Democratic rivals manages to make a stink about all this.