A bum steer from a bad neighbor

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board described the Democratic primary for Florida’s Congressional District 10 as "crazy" but that says more about the newspaper's new owner than it does about a crowded field containing mostly serious candidates.

"The contest to fill Val Demings’ spot in the U.S. House is a Category Three mess of a race, crowded with old and new faces and laced with pettiness and lust for lost power," they claimed, ignoring the immense qualifications of former Rep. Alan Grayson—at one time 'the most effective member' of Congress—civil rights lawyer Natalie Jackson; one-time international banker, real estate broker and civic activist Khalid Muneer; and Terence R. Gray, the senior pastor at Saint Mark AME Church since 2004.

Other serious contenders include Jack Achenbach, a registered dietitian with the Osceola County School District who earned a Master of Science degree from Lipscomb University and an MBA from Johnson and Wales University; state Sen. Randolph Bracy; and others who cannot be considered lightweights, Dr. Teresa Tachon and Jeff Boone.

Since the area's leading media outlet was purchased by a hedge fund known for destroying journalism as it drained the life out of once-great newspapers, the Orlando Sentinel has treated this community like one of those third-world countries former President Donald Trump liked to talk about.

But "crazy" is simply a word wealthy investors use to describe people that they do not care about, and the editorial board proved that by endorsing who is likely the least qualified candidate, a 25-year-old minion of cryptocurrency king Samuel Bankster-Fraud (Ed. Note: Samuel Bankman-Fried seems to be a problem for our auto-correct feature).

Local voters have a serious decision to make as inflation has left families struggling; crime in our communities and unfair policies that make working families shell out a greater share of their income on taxes than the richest billionaires pay.

The first line on Defund the Police candidate Maxwell Alejandro Frost's Twitter feed says, "Gun violence is an everyday occurrence," but the youngest contender in the race would have you believe fewer law enforcement officers will fix that. The Orlando Sentinel is okay with that.

With the exception of Corrine Brown, the convicted felon who skimmed money from charities while she was a U.S. Representative for a neighboring congressional district, Frost is the least qualified contender but he has the financial backing of a cryptocurrency billionaire. That money allowed him to disparage his opponents in devious and dishonest ways that earned him the stylized moniker Maxwell Alejandro Fraud.

Are the media executives who told voters in the area that he is Orlando's best hope in the August 23 primary deranged, working an angle, or simply screwing around with democracy?

Almost fresh out of high school, Frost has drawn the interest of a billionaire cryptocurrency investor who is plugging about $1 million into deceptive advertising that will pile up on top of the nearly $2 million the youngster has garnered from contributors all over the country. Not many from Orlando, but if he hopes to buy local support then he has plenty of money.

The Osceola County School for the Arts, located in Kissimmee, is a fine school, but Jackson is an Orlando-based civil rights lawyer and former U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer who earned degrees from Hampton University and the University of Florida College of Law.

Grayson was educated at a little place called Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude in three years before getting a law degree from the prestigious university, an M.P.P. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and completed all coursework and the comprehensive examination for a Ph.D. in government.

Bracy earned a degree in Psychology at the College of William & Mary, followed by double-Masters from the University of Central Florida. Achenbach holds a Master of Science from Lipscomb University and an MBA from Johnson and Wales University.

Tachon, who has been teaching for 35 years, earned a Ph.D. from the University of Florida, along with an M.S. and B.A. from the State University of New York at Potsdam. Boone earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science at Colgate University and attended New York University.

Frost deserves credit for his labor as an organizer for the March for Our Lives anti-gun group, but he is not a parent or college grad, or homeowner. His brain is not fully developed, according to researchers who have studied adolescent behavior. He does not have life experiences or advanced education to help him make decisions about global geopolitics, national security or economic matters that influence our daily lives. The Orlando Sentinel is okay with that.

The people at Alden Capital are newspaper killers.

In 2009, the Great Recession was forcing many major newspaper chains into bankruptcy and Alden Global Capital— a hedge fund based in Manhattan—started buying them.

Randall Smith, a pioneer of vulture capitalism, co-founded Alden Global Capital with 26-year-old Heath Freeman, who once told Washington Post staff writer Sarah Ellison that he hoped his hedge fund “will be remembered as the team that saved the newspaper business.”

The reporters who work for him — and the growing number who no longer do — say that’s not the case.

They rapidly gained control of MediaNews Group, owner of more than 50 papers including the Pulitzer-winning Denver Post, St. Paul Pioneer Press and the San Jose Mercury News. By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly two hundred American newspapers. The company added more newspapers to its portfolio and became the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States in May 2021, when it purchased Tribune Publishing.

The Orlando Sentinal was part of that deal.

“They call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think that’s honestly a misnomer,” said Charlie Johnson, a former Metro reporter. “A vulture doesn’t hold a wounded animal’s head underwater. This is predatory.”

The Alden model is simple: gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring out as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually, enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self. With aggressive cost-cutting, Alden can operate its newspapers at a profit for years while turning out an increasingly worse product, indifferent to the subscribers it’s alienating.

In the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. Today, half of all daily newspapers in America are controlled by financial firms, which have a political agenda aimed at keeping wealth concentrated among the richest one percent of the U.S. population.

For such vulture capitalists, a room full of serious adults with pragmatic ideas about how to fix America's problems might look like a crazy mess.

In fact, these greedy new-money aristocrats might be charmed by a youngster who reminds a guy like Freeman of himself in his twenties: cunning, ambitious, and willing to pursue power and wealth without the constraint of a conscience.

But for voters to accept their recommendation would be truly insane.

To "get a bum steer" means to be given poor, inaccurate, or misleading information or advice. The Orlando Sentinal endorsement of the least-qualified contender certainly fits that definition perfectly.

Capitalist predators that destroy newspapers and the communities they serve or cryptocurrency billionaires who desire weak regulation of their market manipulation schemes may have found exactly what they are looking for in Maxwell Frost, who does not even live in the 10th Congressional District!

In fact, if you Google "predators that destroy newspapers" it will return a slew of stories about Alden Capital, the hedge fund owner of the Orlando Sentinal, which advised readers to cast a vote for a candidate who cannot be trusted. But one may define "sentinel" as a guardian but it can also mean "a thing that acts as an indicator of the presence of disease."

In this case, the medical definition applies, because Maxwell Frost is a blight on America's political system that is directly descended from the disastrous Citizens United decision from the US Supreme Court.

From Watergate to today's pay-to-play political schemes involving government officials and billionaires, public corruption is about dishonest players disregarding their constituencies by abusing their power to achieve personal gain. Frost’s fundraising haul was near twice as much as all the other Democrats were able to collect combined but —like the young candidate—almost all of that money came from outside the district.

Frost’s cryptocurrency benefactor does not even live in the United States, preferring to make his home in the Bahamas and Hong Kong but apparently, he wants to own a congressman or two!

Democratic voters in Orlando, however, share nothing in common with the greedy rich people who are investing to keep Congress corrupt. You should not trust an inexperienced candidate who appears to be for sale to the highest bidder, no matter what nasty lies his campaign buys to convince you otherwise!

On the other hand, the competitor he attacks will be the one his pollsters say is the one most likely to defeat him.