The financial carnage that is roiling through the world credit markets is going to give us all something to think about over the weekend.
As you do, don't forget to sign the petition to put the amendment to the Florida constitution proposed by Florida Hometown Democracy.
Re-wind, to understand why the opponents of the FHD amendment do not deserve a "second chance" to get growth "right", in Florida.
Behind the headlines of turmoil in world financial markets is the story how the growth machine and Florida's political elite drove the massive speculative bubble in housing, whose collapse is threatening to unhinge credit markets around the world.
That's quite an achievement for builders and developers who thought they were doing God's work, plowing platted subdivisions into wetlands.
And it didn't happen by accident. Bush tax cuts that benefited primarily the wealthy required massive stimulus of the economy through historic low interest rate policy established by Alan Greenspan, former chairman of The Federal Reserve.
Those low interest rates, cheered by the Florida building and construction lobby--by the big fundraisers for the Bush brothers like Al Hoffman, now Ambassador to Portugal, primed the growth machine and ran rampant over Florida wetlands, our quality of life, and even public health.
Today the growth machine is bankrupt. WCI Communities, the business that Hoffman built, can't even find a buyer. The footprint of hubris is in ten thousand platted subdivisions, strip malls, and a degraded Florida landscape.
Among the ironies piling up faster than "for sale by owner" signs, that the French, who despise the Bush administration, apparently bought heavily, through their banks, into the US mortgage madness that propelled W. to office.
Denial is running rampant, not just through Wall Street penthouse executive suites, but through Congress and the lost legislatures of states like Florida's, the epicenter of the meltdown where not a single hand is raised in acknowledgement, "I accept responsibility."
The growth machine wants things to be exactly as they were-- and the best idea that the growth machine can come up with is massive intervention by the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates again, or, to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--where executives earned millions in compensation while committing financial irregularities--as a dump for toxic mortgage waste.
If there has ever been a good argument for Floridians to support and to sign the petition to put Florida Hometown Democracy on the 2008 state-wide ballot: it unfolds before us.
Florida's builders and developers ran rough-shod over people and communities that objected to the zoning and land use changes, fostering the construction boom, and the massive wealth that fundamentally altered the relationship of government to the people.
What Florida Hometown Democracy proposes is to give people the opportunity to vote on those land use changes before local government does. It's simple: give people a vote.
It's not just that people don't trust their government, which is primarily answerable to the growth machine: we have visible, terrifying evidence of what wreckage it wrought.
Americans are right to suspect that one way or another, that taxpayers will be paying the bill. And Floridians need to think through the complicity of local government in piling up costs related to the boom: unfunded infrastructure deficits in Miami-Dade alone total more than $7 billion.
As the net worth of families across Florida suffer, the one privilege people can hold onto is the right to vote: and right now, the best use of the that privilege is to support Florida Hometown Democracy.
To read more, here is an editorial in the St. Pete Times, by Howard Troxler, that hits the nail on the head.
St. Pete Times
This 'new' dispute is as old as democracy
By HOWARD TROXLER, Times Staff Writer
Published August 9, 2007
The coming fight for the soul of Florida is the oldest political fight there is.
As we duke it out between now and November 2008, we will call it by its current label, "Hometown Democracy."
But it's really an argument that began 2,500 years ago on a hillside in Athens.
Can citizens govern themselves wisely? Or should somebody else make decisions for them?
Florida Hometown Democracy is a group that wants to give voters control of major growth decisions in our state. The group is petitioning to put a constitutional amendment on the 2008 ballot.
Countless times over the past 25 years, I have watched opponents show up at public hearings, angry, energized, saying the same things to fight a proposed development.
Their City Council or County Commission shrugs and says, "Where were you when we were drawing the maps? Our maps tell us that we cannot say no."
(See: Tarpon Springs, Wal-Mart, approval of.)
So here is the genius of Hometown Democracy: It says that voters get to draw the maps in the first place.
To be precise, the group's amendment would require local voter approval for any change in a community's "comprehensive plan."
Plato would hate it. Aristotle would fret. Socrates would ask irritating questions for 15 hours or until somebody made him drink hemlock.
Me, I kinda like it.
I like it because (1) I am flat-out sick of local government saying yes and (2) because the opponents are frothing with ridiculous overstatement.
"This will lead," warns a builder-funded group with the ironic name of Floridians for Smarter Growth, "to far less planning, increased urban sprawl, much more traffic, higher property taxes and anemic municipal services."
Holy cow! All that, just from letting voters control growth in their own community.
Floridians for Smarter Growth has a proposed counter-petition. It, too, claims to give citizens the "right" to control growth but sets up roadblocks to keep them out.
Oh, and this rival amendment also says that if both it and Hometown Democracy pass, then Hometown Democracy won't count. Sneaky!
So if somebody asks you to sign a petition to "control growth," make sure you know which one you're signing.
This isn't black and white. I know lots of smart people who think Hometown Democracy is a bad idea.
After all, in the end the Athenians turned into a fickle mob. They chose demagogues and fools as their leaders. They were whipped by Sparta, which was governed by kings and a kind of gussied-up County Commission.
So by all means, if you think that decisions about growth are best made by "professionals" and local elected officials, then you should oppose Hometown Democracy.
After all, they've done such a good job so far.
- - -
The rival Web sites:
www.floridahometown democracy.com
www.flsmartergrowth.org
HELP SAVE WHAT'S LEFT OF FLORIDA...
LET THE PEOPLE VOTE to control growth!
Help put HOMETOWN DEMOCRACY on the 2008 ballot
Please download and SIGN THE PETITION !
http://www.FloridaHometownDemocracy.com
PO Box 636, New Smyrna Beach, FL 32170-0636.
5 comments:
What amazing is down here in Dade and Broward the epicenter of corruption and miss management where is the media coverage on this issue of FHD?
The media down here felt it did its job by exposing the horror of the affordable housing abuses, and has padded itself on the back quite often, maybe too often which narrowed its view. It seems they don't think that FHD is worth covering or pursuing when it affects every Floridian.
However some thing tells me that suddenly the media will notice when the big money feels FHD must be addressed and these "crazy activists" as many citizens have been branded (and treated) because all they wanted to was defend their neighborhoods in front of the corrupt commissions, must be marginalized along with FHD.
One of the greatest freedoms we enjoy in this country is freedom of the press, but what happens when the press becomes complacent, lazy, or in the worse case, controlled or influenced by big money. Then I say the only weapon left is our votes, then everybody will listen, but that of course is assuming the citizens cannot be brainwashed or confused by our as of late complacent media.
Protect our Homes and our votes get on FHD. We can figure out how to make it work for our own good, without it we can now see what happens in the hands of those who do not care about our way of life.
With a few notable exceptions, Upton Sinclair and the Progressive Movement etc., it was very much the same during the Gilded Age with Randolph Hearst, Boss Tweed, and others who corrupted and controlled government, corporations, and society. For the most part voters have always been irrelevant in the American political system because the deciding factor in American democracy has always been campaign contributors. Something that is not taught in history or civics(i.e. myths) class.
I don't want to side with the building industry. I really don't. It gives me a migraine. But their over-the-top dire predictions are no more accurate than the FHD crowd's claims that it will "return control" to the elected.
People are not rational planners. They regularly spurn good plans because they represent change. They usually don't study the candidates in an election and can be counted on to pay even less attention to something as dry and boring as a "comprehensive land use plan amendment."
The electorate will repeatedly vote against anything in their own back yard, including transit, and then complain about how long it takes to drive to the store (because they voted against commercial nodes along with the transit). But not every application will be in your back yard and it assumes that this will be a fair fight. It will just shift the BS (and the $) from lobbyists to PR firms.
The real answer is to elect people who will do the right thing. Ones who will study land use planning and take it seriously. "The commission is stacked in favor of well funded incumbents" you say? True, but who do you think is going to fund the "yes to jobs and families" campaigns the builders will roll out for their UDB amendments for the next "utopian planned community" in the Everglades?
People voted to make it harder to ratify their own referendum because it sounded good. They voted against Big Sugar paying for Everglades cleanup, even though they said they were largely responsible for the problem. They voted for the bullet train, and then against it. Each time, I could point to a well funded interest group pushing the emotional buttons of the voting public. It won't be any different with FHD.
On the surface your analysis usually makes sense but things have changed so drastically in the currently political environment that we must bring new ideas to the table on how to bring our voices and votes into the process, not just every four years, after the damage is done.
The way things are going will drive every issue to polar extremes instead of consensus in the middle, because when big money spends it expects results, and they don't want to hear about your suggested compromise. so its not about working together its about them winning.
Most people don't bother to be part of the process because the old way of doing things is to make it very difficult, unless you are retired or have a lot of time to throw at it so most people never get started.
Those politicians "the pros" who like it the way it is just sit back and laugh all the way to the bank.
The reason people typically vote in such a negative fashion is the special interests hire experts to systematically create confusion on the issues at hand, just look at the FHD opposition "Floridians for Smarter growth". The name is already being marketed to confuse the position. When regular people don't understand they back off or vote against it and the big boys know this.
There have always been reformers in politics to give us hope, but how many do you see today....not many if any. Our founding fathers were all pretty successful men, but they had extremely ethical backbones, but in fact they were all reformers.
Our political system is broken, money has broken it. We need new ideas on how to make it easier to get the best quality people involved.
As long as we allow things to continue as they are, the right people will not get involved because they wont be heard. All we are allowed to choose from are the so called "pros" who's last thought is true public good if any, not the first. Change is difficult, but its even more difficult when there is no trust.
Campaign finance should be the main goal of electoral reform in Miami as it should be for the USA. In CA there are well funded interest groups on the left to fight some of these battles, unions, some environmetal groups, and long histories of activists, however even there reform politics are difficult as the case of the CAB reversal on zero emmission cars shows. In FL it is even harder to push reforms, but with FHD the developers and environmental "ruin-ists" will be on the defencive and that alone is a victory in itself.
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