Miami Marlins President Samson Criticizes Elected Officials, Miamians, Press.

[jOOj]

Fritz call me on the 976 line, $4.99 per minute. ( Worth it. )

[Omar]

The opinion here is nothing new, but some of the quotes are (at least to me):

Local sports franchises take the prize

BY GLENN GARVIN
GGARVIN@MIAMIHERALD.COM

It’s looking like a great season for the Miami Marlins. The first game hasn’t even played, but already they’ve won an important and hotly contested championship, wresting the title of Most Swinishly Arrogant Sports Franchise in South Florida away from the Miami Heat.

Heat owner Micky Arison appeared to have a lifetime lock on the award after his mind-bogglingly greedy campaign to drive street vendors away from the American Airlines Arena where his team plays. All pro-sports owners are greedy, of course. Just look at Dolphins boss Stephen Ross and his show-biz team of co-owners, who with straight faces asked for a $250 million taxpayer handout in the middle of a recession.

But Arison, who doesn’t pay a cent in rent for the $213 million arena taxpayers built for him, really put himself in the Greed Hall of Fame when he went after the two dozen or so little guys selling hot dogs on nearby public sidewalks. Their annual net revenue wouldn’t pay for even half a LeBron James dribble. It was just the idea that somebody else might be making a nickel within shouting distance of his empire that set Arison off. (Fairness dictates that I mention the Heat’s side of the story. It was really a safety issue, the team said. I’m sure you remember the wave of hot-dog fatalities near the arena over the past decade.)

In recent months, though, Arison has been distracted by the unfortunate tendency of his cruise ships to ram into coastlines, burst into flames, and otherwise misbehave. Last week, the Marlins saw their chance to shove him aside. And man, did they seize the moment.

Marlins President David Samson, thinking he was safely in the company of his fellow robber-baron plutocrats at the Beacon Council, delivered a smirking speech in which he bragged about how easily he snookered $315 million or so out of our dumb-cluck local politicians. And he doesn’t want to hear any complaints out of you, buddy. The purpose of local government is to extract your money to pump up his bottom line.

“Let’s not sugar-coat, let’s just be very clear,” Samson said, confident that the video camera whirring away in front of him would never expose its contents to the peasantry. “All the services that we want in this community are services to help our companies make more money. Because the easier it is for people to come here, the easier it is for tourists or for people to live here, the more commerce, the more dollars, the more revenue, the more profit.”

Not that Samson is without altruism. He offered his audience some excellent lessons about how to lie to the yokels for fun and profit. Remember back in 2006, when the Marlins suggested they were going broke in South Florida and might move to San Antonio or Las Vegas? Ha, ha. Not a true word in any of it.

“We pretended we wanted to move,” Sansom explained. “We didn’t want to move. We wanted to be in Miami. Why did we want to be in Miami? Because we know for a fact we can make more money in Miami than in San Antonio. We had the same idea in Las Vegas. It was a brilliant plan.”

Some people might think it slightly immodest — among other things — to stand up in a meeting and proclaim your own brilliance as a liar. Not Samson. He positively bubbled with pride in his cunning mendacity.

He looked like he was about to wet himself in self-congratulation as he detailed how he extracted more concessions from the pols in return for renaming the team from the Florida Marlins to the Miami Marlins.

“Is that great negotiation, when you wanna do something and you pretend you don’t, and then you do and then you get it, and you get something else?” he asked the audience.

Some of the early accounts of Samson’s speech, before the Beacon Council coughed up video, suggested he called Miamians stupid. Definitely unfair. He called us “pathetic,” called us “lazy,” and said we don’t vote because we’re busy “watching Oprah.” Depending on what you think of the average intelligence of the Beacon Council, you might infer a suggestion of general South Floridian stupidity from Samson’s claim that its members are “the smartest people in Miami — my guess is. if you’re in this room, we’re immediately in the top 1 percent.” But he didn’t quite say it.

I’m slightly tempted here to observe that it’s unlikely Oprah is distracting too many Miamians from voting because she’s not on television any more. But who am I to argue with a guy who had the sagacity to be born to a woman who later married gazillionaire Jeffrey Loria, the owner of the Marlins? Oh, you didn’t know that Sansom’s stepfather is the boss? Well, then, maybe you are kind of dumb. After reading all this, how else would you think he got the job?

Miami Herald

[TheMendozaLine]

Wow.

[Beef]

I don't know if it was mentioned, but I'm pretty sure the first paper admitted they got some stuff wrong.

[Bobbob1313]

Marlins President David Samson, thinking he was safely in the company of his fellow robber-baron plutocrats at the Beacon Council, delivered a smirking speech in which he bragged about how easily he snookered $315 million or so out of our dumb-cluck local politicians.

I'm a liberal and even I find this sentence to be gross.