Fooling all of the people some of the time….
by Gabriel Hillel
Orlando taxpayers should have begun to reap financial benefits by now from the predominantly black Parramore downtown ghetto,and the historically African-American Washington Shores neighborhoods comprising the Southwest Quarter of the City Beautiful, according to promises made by a trio of three white City planners in the 1980s and 1990s.
Owners of private affordable housing should have been paying off mortgages including one, provided to them through the City. They should have been paying annual taxes. In one instance, a balloon payment due in 2008-2009 should have returned nearly $1 million to local coffers.
What the public was promised was Orlando partnership with the private sector to make the City operate better and more efficiently at little or no cost to anyone except to the big, bad federal government.
Instead thanks largely to that same trio, and several other white former City employees,
the money has gone into the private hands of a few whites manipulating two seemingly separate sets of corporations and their spin-offs, to avoid taxes, claim exemptions, and to recycle public contributions endlessly,financially to benefit no one but themselves.
Laundering of the corporations’ identities to hide the flow of public money would have made drug cartels proud. The purpose of the corporate name-playing dumb-founds even journalists who know how to “follow the money” from original sources to the eventual recipients, and to ascertain the purposes for the distribution.
To be continued……………….
