Carl Hiassen, Miami Herald

January 27, 2008

Carl Hiaasen

The Miami Herald

One Herald Plaza

Miami, Florida 33132-1693

Mr. Hiaasen,

One of the books I still haven’t written still has a working title of “Major Premises”. As you can see I am still hung up on the nexus of Logic and Rhetoric.

In your column in today’s Miami Herald you imply – Surprise! – that “men are not Angels”. You mention “CRA” as if it were parallel to “BYOB”, “SNAFU”, or, worse, FUBAR. Others, like SOOL, TT, or KMA leap to mind. If you need help with the last 3 send a SASE.

I give you the benefit of my Hudson County years.

Anytime you see the letters CRA, short for Community Redevelopment Agency, it is always used as a cut out, a “plausible deniability” vehicle, for the “Court House gang”, the “City Hall gang”, or the “juice men”. The goal of any politician is power. One of the ways they use power is to get jobs for their friends. By so doing they punish their enemies. It is “what makes the mule plow”.

You mention Miami – “where anti-poverty money is seldom diverted to the ‘unglamorous’ mission of fighting poverty” - as if it is the only place where concupiscence is the prevailing religion and greed is the greatest of its virtues.

We know that anti-poverty flapdoodle purveyors and their unctuous nostrums about the “poor” poor are grifters, snake oil salesmen, poltroons, scroyles, and con artists who should be flogged and driven from any town that they try to set up shop.

They are not limited to Miami. They are not limited to South Florida. They are like cable TV. They are everywhere.

I prove my point by stressing the opposite.

What county, regardless of what state it is in, has an example of a successful CRA? A lack of scandals and indictments is not an example of success. Just because someone walks past a bank and doesn’t rob it does not make him worthy of a gold medal and the keys to the town.

Miami has earned, rightfully, all of its “slings and arrows”.

Don’t impale them with those that 49 other states should share.

As that noted political sage and keen observer of the human condition, Mr. Hinnisy, the noted publican, always said, “He seen his opportunities and he took’em”.

I did say “major premises”, didn’t I?