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 How Low Can People Go? Check Out Fairfield Homes And Its Mouthpiece, Pete Zimmerman. By Jeff Smith PROSTITUTION, THE putative oldest profession on the planet, has a history that's obviously long, but less self-evidently honorable.
Unfortunately the Calvinists among us live in dread that someone, somewhere, is having a good time, and they treat this public service as something unclean. So much so that our Puritanical culture has come to attach the term "prostitution" to any enterprise that demonstrates mankind's willingness to do degrading things for money. Public relations, for instance. It's my contention that the habit of saying that PR men are "prostituting themselves" by putting a happy face on the illicit, immoral, sometimes illegal activities of their clients, amounts to a slander against hard-working whores everywhere. Which brings me--albeit belatedly--to the subject of Pete Zimmerman, Fairfield Homes, Canoa Ranch and the Smithsonian Institution. Last week it hit the prints that Fairfield is threatening the Smithsonian with a (put on your best Carl Sagan voice) $900 million lawsuit, unless the Institution shuts up about Fairfield's proposed Canoa Ranch development. When the gasping and snickering died down and folks asked where Fairfield got the brass to make such an outrageous play, Pete Zimmerman, Fairfield's hired gun for press relations, said, straight-faced, that since the Smithsonian is a federal agency, its objections to the Canoa development (in a nutshell, that the projected concentration of residential and commercial development would light up the night sky to an extent that would degrade the view from their Mount Hopkins observatory) amount to a "taking" of Fairfield property. Wow. Give rapacious capitalism a gold star for creative greed. Fairfield bought the Canoa Ranch property in 1995 for $6.4 million. Three years later it was independently appraised at $10 million. You might think even the most avaricious developer would be tickled plumb to death at a better than 50 percent profit in so short a time, but just this side of a billion bucks? Holy shit. Obviously Fairfield believes in the land-raper's creed: I am entitled to profit to the maximum extent of any conceivable rezoning and development scheme; all regulatory and governing bodies are required to accommodate my every whim in pursuing this end; the taxpayers must bear any cost in supporting these horseshit schemes; and anybody who objects had better keep his fat mouth shut or I'll sue his ass, sell his children into bondage and shoot his dog. Obviously, I demur. As an old-fashioned free-enterpriser, I believe in entrepreneurial risk: That no-guts-no-glory approach in which a man sees his chance and takes it. If he's smart and brave, if he has assessed the opportunity wisely and invested his capital where hard work will turn a fair profit, why then he'll prosper and Wall Street will sing his praises. If he's dumb and spendthrift he'll go tits up and someone else will take his place at the table. This is economic Darwinism and it assures a healthy and vigorous business climate. Unfortunately this sort of climate exists only in some sort of Disneyland of the aging capitalist imagination. Here in the real world, business thrives by growing so corpulent that it gets all the tax breaks, hires the most vicious lawyers, kills off its smaller competitors and bleeds the taxpayers white. Can anyone seriously interpret Fairfield's assertion that the Smithsonian objecting to a proposed Canoa Ranch amounts to a $900 million "taking" as anything other than a textbook example of the land-raper's creed? I don't think so. Of course Pete Zimmerman says that it's more a matter of big government interference versus states' rights. Say what? Yup. He argues that the observatory (funded by the Smithsonian, in turn funded by the feds, ergo the U.S. government, is telling the Pima County Board of Supervisors, i.e. the state, what to do with its land. Which is actually Fairfield's property, since 1995, over which the supes have zoning authority.) A bit of a stretch? Oh yeah. Oh, and Zimmerman affects to be shocked--shocked--that people on the government payroll should be offering opinions on a matter before a political body. It's a Hatch Act thing. I remember back in 1976, before Pete Zimmerman had sold his soul, his sorry ass, his first-born son and the rest of the family to Beelzebub, when Pete was shocked--shocked--that the warm, fuzzy folks in the county planning department were restrained by the aforementioned Hatch Act from giving unstintingly of their various resources to re-elect Ron Asta to the Board of Supervisors. Since then we have learned many shocking and unpleasant things about the moral compliance of Messrs. Zimmerman and Asta. Maybe the deal was down, even then, and the rest of us were just too starry-eyed to see it. But mine eye is not clouded today. I see the ploy of Zimmerman and his handlers as a bald-headed play at bullying a responsible public agency into silence, and thus chastening any and all lesser opposition, without the profound depth-of-pocket, into standing mute on the sidelines while Fairfield attempts to trash a pristine natural treasure at significant public expense. Thankfully, the Board of Supervisors had the good sense earlier this week to realize what this threatened $900 million lawsuit portends for the future of actual states' right, local sovereignty, the right of the people to manage their world, and so they told Fairfield Homes to eat shit and die.
Or, put more politely and politickly: You bought it zoned SR;
you can develop it under that zoning.
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In its classic form, prostitution involves a customer--in the
contemporary jargon he would be called the client--and (let's
stay with this idiom) a caregiver. Pre-closing negotiations determine
services required and emolument expected and the deal is consummated.
One hardly ever hears of any failure to deliver the goods. Satisfaction
and performance are other matters, but one gets what one pays
for, in kind, if not in quality.
