Friday, September 27, 2013

Miami's Back, Thanks to Its Mayor and Pro-Growth Policies (From NewsMax)

Image: Miami's Back, Thanks to Its Mayor and Pro-Growth Policies

Wednesday, 18 Sep 2013 10:11 PM                       By Andrea Billups and John Bachman

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/miami-rebirth-tomas-regalado/2013/09/17/id/526271? ns_mail_uid=1937888&ns_mail_job=1538034_09182013&promo_code=14E9F-1#ixzz2g6NMaeKe

 Less than a decade ago, Miami's inner city was mangy. The tropical city could have become the next Detroit.

When businesses, law firms, and government offices downtown closed, few people remained in its seedy core, fleeing to suburban Miami-Dade and Broward counties for their gated, manicured subdivisions and soccer fields, or to the glamorous nightlife across the causeway in sleek South Beach.

But that's all changed. Miami is booming again. Construction cranes dot the skyline as a new wave of baby boomers, international residents, and businesses converge on the city.

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Call it the tale of two cities: Detroit sought to fix its urban blight with high taxes, heavy regulation, and big salaries and pensions for government employees.

Much of the credit for the transformation of Miami falls to the city's mayor, Tomas Regalado, who decided to take his city on the opposite path, one of lower taxes and economic growth.

Regalado, a Republican born in Havana, Cuba, was elected mayor in 2009 and soon after, set out on an ambitious path of improving city finances, cutting taxes, and welcoming new businesses with a regulation overhaul.

He is running for re-election this November.

"This coming budget, we are proposing to reduce taxes, maintain the level of services, and hire more police officers. Why? Because property values are coming back," Regalado told Newsmax TV.

After forcing concessions from city workers, there is room in the budget for tax cuts, he said. And following a series of lawsuits from public unions that ended in the city's favor, Regalado was also able to trim Miami's budget without eliminating jobs.

City employees making more than $40,000 saw salary cuts, but those earning less did not have to share the pain. The plan kept all city workers employed as the city implemented tough reforms.

"I didn't want to kill a city to save a government," Regalado said, defending his choices, which included slicing his own salary by 36 percent.

"We broke all the contracts with the union, created [new] contracts with salary reductions, and capped the pensions at $100,000, because in the city of Miami, you had [young] people retiring with $150,000, $140,000 per year for life. [In Miami] ... firefighters and police officers retired young," Regalado, a former broadcast journalist, says of the bitter fight and lawsuit he weathered.

He said topping pensions at $100,000 helped to "reduce the deficit and taxes. The reason I proposed to reduce taxes was because the foreclosures were affecting Miami. Miami was ground zero," Regalado said.

"I thought that by reducing taxes, you would bring new investment into the city of Miami and it happened. People are moving back. The message is very clear: You reduce taxes, people will come because it's a good investment."

Regalado also cited tax enterprise zones and Business Improvement Districts — where business people in a geographic area tax themselves and decide which projects to fund — as programs that helped turn the city around.

Today, the city once known for its "vice" in a hit TV show now reflects Regalado's opportunistic message: chic high-rise condos, an emerging crop of world-class restaurants, high-end hotels, a growing expanse of luxury retail stores, and a burgeoning cultural scene.

"I've been in this position for five years now. When I first got here, the condos were 62 percent occupied," says Alyce Robertson, executive director of the Miami Downtown Development Authority. "We are at 95 to 97 percent occupancy now."

The inner city, she adds, has become "its own destination," making it an easier sales pitch for civic leaders seeking jobs for the city beyond those created by a service and tourism industry.

The city vigorously courted financial services companies from New York and Connecticut, tech industry jobs for the city's South American Internet hub, and art groups seeking a friendly home.

"By the year 2025, we envision in our master plan a very vibrant, culturally diverse, walkable, livable downtown," Robertson said.

After being hit hard by a foreclosure crisis that still lingers — about 41 percent of mortgages are still underwater in the Miami-Dade County region — real-estate experts say trendy areas like Miami Beach and Regalado's downtown are flourishing with housing prices reaching levels last seen during the 2000 boom. Miami Beach is a separate municipality from the city of Miami.

The Miami arts scene is also in full tilt. In November, the world-class Perez Art Museum is set to open its doors alongside the premier Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science.

Other chic construction projects in the works for the Downtown-Biscayne corridor include an architecturally spectacular convention center and Marriott hotel with 1,800 rooms on the site of the old Miami Arena, adding to a changing landscape that also includes the elegant Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the state's largest facility of its kind.

Miami still has its share of urban problems such as homelessness, income inequity and, according to National Science Foundation data, the lowest science and engineering workforce for major cities in the nation.

But a coalition of business and education leaders is focused on changing that.

"I think there is a renewed spark of energy and it is palpable in this community," says Robin Reiter, the interim president of Miami's The Beacon Council, a public-private nonprofit organization that helps increase economic development and facilitates job creation.

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"I think you see it in the day life as well as the nightlife. I think you see it in the vibrancy of all our downtown communities," Reiter said. Other Miami-Dade County cities like Aventura, Coral Gables and South Miami have their own booming downtown areas.

"I think the real estate market is recovering," Reiter adds. "The pendulum here swings once again. The price of housing is going up. There is a thrust to build more rental units to accommodate those who don't want home ownership … Yes, we're still seeing a high level of homes in foreclosure, but we're seeing them move off the market very quickly."

Broader international interest in Miami is also heating up the market, Reiter says.

"We have folks from all over the world buying property here," she said, noting that delegations from China and Taiwan have recently visited to examine possibilities in the area.

"We have a huge influx of businesses from across the globe who view Miami as the gateway to the Americas and as such, our business is booming," said Reiter.

Reiter points to the metro area's thriving Miami International Airport and its bustling seaport and cruise ships as crucial economic touchstones that are driving growth.

"There isn't a locale around the world that anyone can travel to and from that, you can't get to and out of Miami with great ease. That has been a tremendous bonus."

Seth Gordon, who runs Seth Gordon Initiatives, which advises global businesses on how to become productive in Miami, praises new inner-city projects as giving the area "a heartbeat."

When he moved to Miami in the 1970s, the city "had no life, no pulse." Now restaurants and businesses are leaving the beaches for the Brickell Avenue corridor, where the new energy is pushing development.

"It's become like a horse race to see how quickly you can buy up empty lots and fill them with very expensive buildings," he said of the growth.

The area's international cache, Gordon adds, is growing. "You see people from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and also Russia, even New York. A lot of them don't live here year-round, but this is one of their homes. They just want to have a place here," and are willing to spend $2 million to $3 million on a pricey vacation spot.

For the wealthy, "it's become one of their checkpoints," Gordon observes.

But the challenge remains on how to create an economy that supports jobs for those who aren't ultra-wealthy.

In terms of space, even as the city center explodes, Gordon said, "we've got another 95 percent of the county not exploited or built out yet: inland. We've got room to do whatever we want to do if people ever want to do it."

Gordon adds, "There's a huge opportunity for expansion, maturity and for growth — and all that comes with that. The last 10 years have been a good peek into the future of just what we can do. We're on the right track now. We just have to keep doing more."

Regalado Makes Case for Second Term

In the interview with Newsmax TV's John Bachman, Mayor Regalado makes a strong case for re-election on Nov. 5, saying he helped bring the city back from a feared fiscal collapse.

"Miami is the poster child of what happens if you reduce taxes, reduce expenses, if you live like any other family in the United States," says Regalado. "In bad times, you don't spend what you don't earn. In good times, you only spend what you have."

"People will understand that this is the model for any city," he says.

Story continues below video.
Regalado has done what many of the nation's other big-city mayors have not had the courage to do: push back against costly union deals to stave off fiscal collapse and create a business climate favorable to private investment.

"I know that politicians always, always are really scared of unions because the unions do have great power, political power. They have the resources to go out and help you or hurt you," Regalado says.

After a market boom from 2004 to 2006, property values were hot in the tropical mecca. But by 2008, the bottom dropped out of the housing market and foreclosures skyrocketed, leaving revenues sagging and city leaders searching for new ways to close the gap.

"The combination of having a lot of unemployed people, property values going down — which is [lost] taxes — and the fact that we overspent by giving unions huge increases in 2007 made us almost bankrupt," said Regalado, describing the situation he says he inherited when he took office in 2009.

Regalado says Miami wasn't fully into a fiscal emergency like Detroit, but the city was headed on a road to "fiscal urgency." Thus, his need to make some difficult choices put him at odds with police and firefighters, whose union pension costs were cutting large slices of city funds.

Regalado said the growing pains of Miami can be an example to cities like Chicago, where mayors must wage similar union fights over pension and healthcare costs after years of fiscal malfeasance and high taxes.

"They only need the courage to do it," Regalado tells Newsmax. "I know it's difficult to fight unions. And in my case, I became persona non grata with the unions."

Obamacare: Massive New Rules Revealed for 2013

Regalado said winning the battle with the unions was the key to the city being able to stave off a tax increase, instead allowing for tax cuts.

"We would have made people leave Miami because of high taxes. And I thought that by reducing taxes, you would bring new investment into the city of Miami and it happened," Regalado said. "The idea that you have to increase taxes to keep services is wrong."

Such successful reforms will likely bolster the political future of Regalado, who until late August faced a serious challenge in his re-election bid from Francis Suarez, who was well-financed but dropped out of the race amid a series of miscues by his staff. He said the campaign was creating too much stress on his pregnant wife.

In his own life, Regalado was married for 37 years to Raquel Ferreiro, who died in 2008. He is the father of three and the grandfather of four, and lives in the city's Little Havana neighborhood.

Regalado said that when he was elected mayor in 2009, "[it] was the worst economic time for the United States and for the city of Miami, especially."

"Unemployment was like 13 percent," Regalado said. "The construction boom had ended but we had 20,520 empty condo units in the downtown corridor, which is five, six miles. All these buildings, they were empty."

Regalado recalled "at the time, you looked at the skyline at downtown at night and it was dark. Today we have 98 percent occupation. People are buying, people are renting, people are moving back, and that has helped the revival of downtown."

With new restaurants in places far from South Beach, many are reconnecting with the new lively downtown area.

Regalado praised the growth in other areas of the city as well. In Overtown, once the site of riots, a new wing of the University of Miami has brought an improved landscape and 500 new jobs.

"They're doing medical research, [with] doctors that specialize in care," Regalado said.

In Wynwood, the center of the city's arts district renewal, technology has been invited as an emerging partner to bolster the growth.

"We have a lot of technology companies in old warehouses that house hundreds of small companies ... Technology, it is the future of Miami," he said.

Soon, search engine powerhouse Google will announce a partnership with the city's parks, he said. "We believe that if we train children after school in programming and in computers, more companies will come to Miami," Regalado says.

Tourism and the potential of new citizens and foreign investors are an important part of the success equation, Regalado added.

"We have more than 20 flights a day from Miami direct to Europe directly feeding tourism, but there are [also] a lot of business people coming to invest here," he said.

He said the city has applied to the Department of Homeland Security to be "certified as an investor visa regional center," where a foreign national who invests $1 million in certain businesses can obtain for themselves and some family members a "permanent green card if they create 10 jobs."

Tax enterprise zones and a healthy Business Improvement District also have played a role in allowing private enterprise drive the economy of the city, Regalado says.

"They decide how to spend that money, either in lighting, more police presence, or in infrastructure, and it's working spectacularly because the fact is, these people know better," Regalado said. "Usually government doesn't know better."

Friday, September 6, 2013

The disconnect between marketing and technology...(Tomado de Aftermarket Business World)

September 4th, 2013

Study results released in late August revealed a startling disconnect between marketing and technology at most U.S. businesses. According to Accenture, the research firm that conducted the survey of chief marketing and technology officers, only 10 percent of CMOs and CIOs believe collaboration between the two disciplines is sufficient at their organizations.
 
ABSTRACTS:

The Accenture study shows that only 10 percent of CMOs and CIOs believe collaboration between the two positions is sufficient at their organizations...

While 77 percent of technology executives in the Accenture study agreed that alignment between marketing and technology is important, only 45 percent said that marketing is near the top of their priorities...

The study shows overwhelming agreement among marketing and technology executives that technology is essential to marketing, and that its primary purpose is to gain insight and intelligence about customers...

The Accenture study responses show the disconnect between marketing and technology professionals most clearly in these responses: 36 percent of marketers said IT deliverables fall short of the desired outcome, and 46 percent of IT executives said marketing does not provide an adequate level of detail to meet business requirements...

The marketing guys are not specifically wired at the detail level – that is why the two departments must be entrenched in the day-to-day operations of the business in order to succeed. The marketing team has to involve the IT team when developing a project or customer request, the IT guys have to understand the business better...

For more details: http://www.searchautoparts.com/aftermarket-business/automotive-aftermarket-technology/disconnect-between-marketing-and-technology?cid=95879 


 

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

If you think the NSA is bad, try the Putin-controlled Chrome toolbar (tomado de ZDNet)

If you think the NSA is bad, try the Putin-controlled Chrome toolbar

Summary: I am not making this up. You can't make this stuff up. This is what the world is coming to.
When I grew up the Russians were the Soviets and they were the bad guys. We were told we were about 20 minutes or so from mutually-assured destruction and that the Russians (er, Soviets) hated us for our freedoms.
 
Eventually, things changed. The Soviet Union fell but many of the old guard remained in power. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a good example. He spent 16 years in the KGB, mustering out with the title of Lieutenant Colonel (the same rank Ollie North had when he was playing games with Iran and the Contras).
 
While Ollie never became leader of a great nation, Vlad-Vlad certainly did. In fact, the Putinator has been either President or Prime Minister of today's Russia since 1998. Suffice it to say, not much goes on in Russia today without the Putin stamp of approval.
 
That's why my attention was so quickly drawn to what seems like a normal little marketing gimmick on the part of RT.com. You might know RT.com as a news site. After all, Alexa shows it has a ranking 553 in terms of American visitors to its Web site. 20 percent of its visitors come from the United States (compared to only 5.8 percent who visit from Russia).
 
What was that marketing gimmick? Nothing big really. Just an extension you can install in Chrome to keep up with RT's news. Or is it something more... devious?
 
RTputin-sept2013
Image courtesy RT.com
Let's explore RT.com for just a minute. RT.com is Russia Today. Yeah, it's a Russian-owned and Russian-operated propaganda vehicle aimed squarely at Americans. It is funded directly by the Russian Government through Rospechat, the former Ministry of Communications and Mass Media, now known as the Federal Agency on Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation.
RT is Putin's house organ. Of course, because most people don't bother to investigate where their news comes from, RT.com is regularly quoted and Liked and tweated all around the blogosphere. I wonder how many people who think they're good Americans don't realize they're furthering Putinganda all across the U.S.?
 
So here's what baffles me. Everyone is all up in arms about this NSA spying thing, where activities being done are being done under carefully defined legal conditions, and where most of it is for Americans' protection. And yet there are constant stories of outrage.
 
But when a foreign frenemy power wants to install a toolbar right in your browser, a toolbar that can do pretty much anything (no, I haven't disassembled it, but that's not the point), no one whines and no one cries.
 
Of course, we're also depending on Eugene Kaspersky for much of our anti-malware protection. Kaspersky was trained by the KGB and his anti-malware software "protects" about a third of America's PCs.
 
Americans and the press are all freaking out because America's premier signals intelligence agency is gathering signals intelligence for the purpose of protecting America, but then they turn around and open up their computers and their privacy completely to a foreign power who most definitely does not have their best interests at heart.
 
Sometimes I just don't understand folks out there.
 
Oh, and if you want to know more about Putin and his antics, read this briefing paper I wrote last year. That one will give you nightmares for a week.

Why Is Vladimir Putin Acting So Crazy? (From Bloomberg BusinessWeek)

By              

Behind this week's cover 

For Russian leaders, sticking it to the Americans has long been a source of both personal satisfaction and political gain. By that standard, President Vladimir Putin is riding high.
 
He’s enraged Washington officialdom by supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—despite his apparent use of chemical weapons against civilians—and obstructing efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
 
Activists in the U.S. and Europe have called for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi over the country’s harsh new antigay law.
 
The Kremlin’s decision to shelter National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, wanted on espionage charges in the U.S., prompted President Obama to nix a one-on-one meeting ahead of the Group of 20 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sept. 5 and 6.
 
Since reclaiming the presidency in May 2012, Putin has become the biggest impediment to the Obama administration’s foreign policy aims. That’s undoubtedly played well with Russians yearning for the days when the country was a superpower. Yet beneath Putin’s swagger lie weaknesses at the core of the economy that threaten Russia’s future—and with it, his power base. And for that, he can blame a familiar nemesis: the U.S.
 
His difficulty has nothing to do with intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles—and everything to do with natural gas that’s cooled to -260F at normal pressure, condensed into liquid form, and transported on special tankers to markets around the world. America’s surprising return as an energy superpower is complicating life for the Russian petro state. The rise of a vibrant, global, and pipeline-free liquefied natural gas (LNG) market is a direct threat to Russia’s interests in Europe, where Gazprom (GAZP:RU), the state-owned energy giant, supplies about 25 percent of the gas. So is the shift in pricing power from suppliers to consumers as a result of the huge supply shock emanating from North America.
 
Russia is still the world’s biggest overall energy exporter: It’s the No. 1 oil producer and No. 2 in gas after the U.S. However, the country’s known oil reserves—primarily between the Ural Mountains and the Central Siberian Plateau—are enough to sustain current production levels for just 20 years, according to a study in December by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), vs. 70 years for Saudi Arabia and 90 years for the United Arab Emirates. Untapped oil and gas reserves in eastern Siberia and the Arctic will take massive investments to explore.
 

Putin’s aware of the problem. “For many years we have had a situation when prices for our main export goods rose fast and almost without interruption, and this made it possible for Russian companies and for the government to cover high expenses,” he told global executives at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 21. “But this situation has changed now. There are no simple solutions and no magic wand we can wave to change things overnight.”
 
That may be true, but the country has little time to waste. Many Russians, and in particular members of the president’s inner circle, have benefited hugely from the country’s energy-export windfall. Now that foundation is slipping away. The question is whether Putin’s power will, too.
 
When he took over at the start of the last decade (he served as president from 2000 to 2008 and premier for four years after that), the global economy was in the early stages of a commodities supercycle. Accelerating global demand, led by a China growing at about 10 percent annually, coincided with rising prices for oil, gas, copper, coal, and other natural resources. Political instability in Venezuela, the start of the Second Gulf War, and Hurricane Katrina all constrained supply and refining capacity, sending energy markets into overdrive.
 
Through 2008, Putin oversaw an average of 7 percent growth in gross domestic product and a huge expansion in Russia’s middle class. At its 2007 annual meeting, Gazprom, the world’s largest gas producer, served red and black caviar. Management Committee Chairman Alexey Miller said the company, whose market value at the time was $360 billion, would someday be worth $1 trillion.
 
Russia’s phenomenal run of prosperity would have been an ideal time to diversify the economy beyond energy, a goal that harks back to the days of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Instead, energy’s share of the economy actually increased; as of late 2012, oil and gas accounted for about 70 percent of exports, compared with less than 50 percent in the mid-1990s, providing half of the government’s revenue and roughly 17 percent of GDP, according to the EBRD. Gazprom alone represents 14 percent of the Russian stock market’s total capitalization. “It has been an issue since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it has gotten worse,” says Alexei Kokin, an energy analyst with UralSib Financial. “I don’t see that changing.”
 

STORY: Kremlin Intrigue Threatens Russia's Silicon Valley