Letters, Boy Do We Get Letters

I’ve been getting a lot of mail responses to my articles both on YouTube and E-mail and on my Facebook page. Most of it has to do with recent articles on the Trayvon Martin fiasco. Recently the mail has been very hateful, almost as though there were a movement to discredit the family and the people calling for justice. I’m letting it slide because emotions can’t determine the case and until there is more than speculation, like an indictment and real facts that have a bearing on the case, I’m on to other things.  One of the things I’m not going to let go of is the sham of an election that happened last week in Orlando.  All of a sudden several members of the Orange County Democratic Party have been trying to justify their support for the re-election of Buddy Dyer and the real progressives are hopping mad about it. Doug DeClue is one of the most passionate progressives I know. He’s an aero-space engineer by trade and he checks and rechecks his facts and figures meticulously. Here’s his take and it is a lot to think about.

 April 9, 2012

Dear Jerry,

We need to fight back against the spin being put out by the Buddy machine to re-write him as a good Democrat by people like Carlos Smith and others I have seen who are trying to rehabilitate him for a run for Governor in 2014.

Why real Democrats CANNOT support Buddy:

1) Gave Republican uber-conservative out of state Amway billionaire 500 MILLION DOLLARS in welfare for billionaires to build him a new basketball arena when the existing one wasn’t even 20 years old at the time.

2) He is spending 200 MILLION more to renovate an empty football stadium to please his Chamber of Commerce Citrus Club Buddies.

3) He  is spending several hundred million more on an arts center that none of the arts community will be able to afford to use because it is too large.

Over all he spent 2 BILLION DOLLARS we do not have and cannot afford on venues we do not need and do not want. They don’t add any new facility to the community that didn’t already exist and they won’t be utilized by any significant portion of the community – even the DeVos-dome won’t be utilized by more than about 1% of the community that can afford to regularly buy tickets to sporting events and attend them.

The notion that this will draw more significantly more shows to Orlando is ridiculous too as long as the construction of these facilities has failed to relocate Orlando far enough from Tampa/St. Pete to convince people not to drive there to see a show. As long as Tampa remains 80 miles from Orlando, show producers would be lunatics to pay an extra $30,000 or more to tear down their show, move it 80 miles up the road and put it back up again when they know that Orlandoans will gladly hop in their cars and drive down to Tampa.

4) Out of this 2 BILLION DOLLARS (the price of a Space Shuttle) – 600 MILLION DOLLARS (the price of a Shuttle launch) came out of CRA PROPERTY TAXES that was intended to fix roads and sidewalks and improve NEIGHBORHOODS – NOT provide welfare for billionaires.

5) On top of this Buddy kicked the Central Florida Safety Council out of the building they were in for many years in order to provide a building for a crony of his to start a charter school essentially subsidized by a cheap lease in direct competition with other charter schools in the area that belong to people WITHOUT friends in the mayor’s office.

6) He looked the other way as the welfare for billionaires DeVos-dome had millions of dollars of furniture purchased for private suites with taxpayer money when that furniture was supposed to be supplied by the Orlando Magic.

7) He funneled over 60,000 dollars to the local chamber of Commerce by subisidizing their “entrepreneurial” seminar as “scholarships” to Chamber members.

8) He has harassed the homeless in this town to the point that it brought international bad press on this town and if it has been anywhere around Lake Eola, he has treated homelessness as a crime.

9) He has harassed the Occupy Wall Street movement in this town at the behest of his Chamber of Commerce buddies repeatedly.

10) He built a giant fence around the DeVos-dome to keep ticket holders at the NBA All Star Game spending their money INSIDE the fence line with Chamber of Commerce businesses rather than with local neighborhood businesses in spite of the fact that one of his biggest claims in building the DeVos-Dome was that it was going to bring business to the neighborhood and revitalize it. Of course that was when he needed support for the DeVos dome – once the money was voted the local community was screwed.

11) He refused to let the voters decide for themselves whether to spend $2 BILLION dollars on these venues in referendum despite the fact that the bonds would run for decades after the elected officials that voted for them had left office. Those construction bonds by the way have been downgraded all the way to “B” in spite of Buddy’s weasel wording about the city having a “AAA” bond rating.

12) He endorsed REPUBLICAN Dean Cannon over Democrat Amy Mercado in a PARTISAN house race for State House 35 in 2010 in a district that was registered in favor of DEMOCRATS.

13) He only shows up to the Orange County Democratic Party meetings when he wants volunteers at election time and skips the party altogether except for photo ops with Democratic Presidential candidates when they are in town the rest of the time.

14) Backed the construction of useless condo buildings all over downtown that now sit largely empty and in general has kept Orlando’s economy trapped in tourism and real estate development when he should have been diversifying it into high technology, manufacturing, higher education and renewable energy with the result that Fort Lauderdale has an 8.3% unemployment rate and is 171st in the state with a per capita income of $27,798 as of January while Orlando has a 9.5% unemployment rate and is 352nd in the state with a per capita income of $21,216 or $6,582 less.

15) Buddy wants to spend ANOTHER half a billion dollars we don’t have to bring an NFL team here which will not bring another dollar into this community and is in fact another diversion of resources needed to maintain and improve quality of life in this town to provide welfare for another sports team billionaire and wants to spend even more to bring a MLB team here too. http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_tv_tvblog/2011/10/buddy-dyer-sees-orlando-as-potential-nfl-city.html

Douglas J. De Clue
Democratic Committeman, 311
Progressive Activist
Orlando FL