Redland, the Wades, and the armies of compassion: Part 5 ... by gimleteye

"It is a joy to be here with members of the armies of compassion. I'm really glad you're here and I appreciate your inspiration to our fellow citizens. I believe you are a constant reminder of the true source of our nation's strength, which is the good hearts and souls of the American people." President Bush discusses Volunteerism, Sept. 8, 2008

For those of you who have followed this series, it is lengthy. You may want to go back, and begin with the first and following parts, before jumping to forward.

For Part 1, click here.
For Part 2, click here.
For Part 3, click here.
For Part 4, click here.

To read the series' conclusion, click on read more. After revisions, early next week, I will re-print the entire piece.

What kinds of lessons can we draw from the example of the Wades? The observation of the Wades represent a starkly different point of view to the legions of economists who claim that no one saw the economic crisis coming. The Wades and their allies did. Though the political and economic structure made no room for their knowledge, still they acted in every way available to them; including elections.

The mainstream media and economists, both, continue to portray the national economic emergency as though it spontaneously generated. What their views fail to incorporate is how the entire gearing mechanism of economic growth depends on the false evaluation of risk to the economy and the environment; while bankers and insurers and developers thrived on unregulated derivative debt, activists like the Wade struggled with the consequences on the ground, pinned down in a seemingly endless succession of battles and skirmishes.

The Wades fought at places like the edges of the Everglades—it is inescapable conclusion that the mainstream media performed most poorly at places where the pressure of growth was most intense. Not once has The Miami Herald or other media in Miami, for instance, featured the volunteerism that has operated at the margins.

In important ways, keeping these stories separate—the struggle to value quality of life and environmental resources and the mispriced risk of financial securitization tied to development—is so institutionalized as to be de facto public policy. The destruction to the environment and quality of life that Floridians treasure could not have happened without a system of financing that compartmentalized and segregated cause and effect, truth from consequence, and socializing risk and privatizing benefits.

The network tying zoning decisions to farmland has limited knowledge, interest, or understanding of Wall Street finance. Why should they? Lobbyists, tax accountants, real estate analysts, transactional lawyers, brokers, tile suppliers, swimming pool installers: their success depends on focus and compartmentalization. Denial of larger consequences is embedded in maxims such as “it’s what the market wants”, or, “anyone should be allowed to do with their property, what they want, at any time.” In Florida’s Optimist Clubs and Chambers of Commerce, if the question were posed about development and its costs, the question might be asked this way: where is the profit and reward in seeing anything beyond the for-sale banners and the flags waving in the breeze, advertising housing subdivisions behind stucco walls fronting highways and turnpikes, and, beyond?

In one light, the results are discouraging: the Wades and the small intrepid band of Miami-Dade civic activists fight with sharply limited funding compared to corporate opposition. Even their allies—locally constituted environmental organizations—are often reluctant to engage in battles they believe cannot be won, or at too great a cost to their budgets, donors, or board members.

At Krome Avenue, the Wades and the environmental groups were able to make a deal with county planners and the state. That agreement was rejected by the county commission. The Agriculture Retention Study and South Dade Watershed Protection Plan were both fiercely opposed by development interests, land speculators and the political status quo, because they would, eventually, restrict the expansion of suburbs. The Wades’ effort to recall Natacha Seijas provoked a fury recalling the excesses of Castro , scarcely 100 miles away in Havana.

It is hard to tease out the meaning of so much hard work, personal sacrifice, and trouble. Yet, there is the undeniable patriotism implicit in the struggle of the Wades and their allies to make democracy work the way it was intended. But for the national financial crisis, brought on by an orgy of rotten finance tied to unsustainable development, stories like the Wades would still seem a kind of far-fetched enthusiasm driven to no realistic purpose. But the results on the ground are shockingly clear: Redland has been largely spared the kind of growth that consumed Homestead and Florida City; staggering under the weight of budget deficits and a real estate market that has turned many platted subdivisions into half-empty, desolate and dangerous places.

But in terms of actual results; the developers got exactly what they wanted in South Dade; a ruinous landscape of strip malls, bereft platted subdivisions, and now foreclosures and public safety hazards.

A decade ago, Wades’ nemesis banker Bill Losner often complained that Homestead needed “growth” because all it had was Section 8 housing. Today, after a wildfire of development he helped to set, the farmland is gone and the trail of misery and foreclosures leads straight to the Chamber of Commerce doorstep that listened to his point of view.

The way a pearl forms around an irritant, the Wades’ story forms a pearl in whose hard, polished surface one can view how our nation’s economic crisis and the willful intent to subvert and evade the purpose of environmental laws and regulations are twin images. The one could not exist without the other, reflected in that pearlescent orb.

Barack Obama, who began his public life as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, persuaded a majority of American voters that his calm and reasoned approach to governance, bringing people together across the spectrum of interests, is what America needs at this time of trouble.

But the Wades’ story belies easy imagery. The entire apparatus of government in Miami-Dade is oriented to enable production homebuilders, lobbyists, and land speculators to organize local government in Miami-Dade county for zoning in farmland. There is a flip side to diverting the purpose of government to sprawl: how the clamor of builders fostered an atmosphere of neglect within the inner city, where the Miami-Dade Housing Agency was looted by insiders as thoroughly as addicts stripping copper pipe from a crack house .

It is tempting to say that the circumstances in Miami are exceptional. They are not.

There are visible concentric rings that spread out from the impact of the Seijas recall instigated by the Wades and their allies as a last recourse against the deformation of democracy: for one, new state laws instigated by the Chamber of Commerce and supported by Governor Bush and then by Governor Crist to sharply limit the circulation of petitions and access to government by citizens.

Throughout the inflation of the housing asset bubble, moreover, special interests succeeded in compartmentalizing cause and effect, finance of mortgages from zoning of housing, rules governing finance from rules filling wetlands.

To bridge the divide, environmental and community groups sought out the mother’s milk of concession politics: private/public partnerships, joint cooperative efforts, independent studies, or blue ribbon panels trying to “resolve” conflicts between economic growth, private property rights, and the imperatives of environmental protection. Such “reasonable” approaches to consensus formed their own insidious exclusions for the Wades and their allies, dismissed so off-handedly by Karl Rove; “… guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . .and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. ''

The record of coordinated attacks on the Wades and their allies for trying to make democracy work is a cautionary tale for wider politics. It is deeply troubling that the de facto chair of a local county commission wielded so much influence with the State Attorney’s Office, the Clerk of the Court, and law enforcement agencies in comparison to citizens trying to petition their government.

In Miami-Dade, the county attorney’s office, itself, acted in ways that defer—not to the civic interest, the law necessarily, or to citizens—but first and foremost to the county commissioners it believes to be clients. What is the cumulative effect on the morale of government employees in agencies like planning and zoning, of singling out and suppressing civic participation?

These are neither trivial questions nor exceptions to the rule, to be easily brushed off. There is a consequence to institutionalized avoidance, of taking the easy way out in deferring to the politically powerful, that adds up to the conclusion in the mind of many people that our democratic institutions are designed to fail. This may be, then, the outermost concentric circle of the Wades’ story: we fail the promise of democracy because we, ourselves, do not pass the test: judge us not by what we say, but what we do.

What happened in Redland, then, is not the case of a few bad apples ruining the barrel, or, of a unique circumstance that stands apart from resolvable tensions when people of good will sit down to hash out solutions. Tens of millions of dollars were wasted in Miami-Dade County on perfectly good and acceptable studies that the Wades engaged in: no one could get a word in edge-wise when there was so much money to be made at the edge of the Everglades. Still is. Or, the hope is, will be once the economic crisis reverses.

The Republican orthodoxy, in particular, emanates through the expression of Grover Norquist, years ago, that government should be shrunk to the size that can fit in a bathtub. If you can’t cut the weed from outside, you can poison its roots: government designed to be dysfunctional is easy to get rid of. Under this premise, the theory took flight that the free market can do better. The Wades’ story tells otherwise: government is not given the chance to do better when its energies are focused on the suppression of civic participation and access of citizens to their democratic institutions.

The Urban Development Boundary, where conflict is concentrated by the arbitrage of property values inside and outside the line of allowable infrastructure and the demands of growth management laws, is exactly the place to view an appalling absence of ethics masquerading as virtuous capitalism and the hovering spirit of Ayn Rand.

Here the prevailing condition of democracy in a simple image that doesn’t need teasing from economic studies, accounts of asset bubbles in Holland in the 17th century, or of data that may have been incompletely provided and led to fatal mistakes by former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan and august members of Federal Reserve regional governing boards, their presidents, and staff.

The image will be familiar to every citizen who has tried to influence a zoning decision at the local level of government to protect a river, a stream, or the rural character of their community: a medieval drawbridge spanning a moat protecting the castle from outsiders.

The castle is government. Behind its walls are legislators. On the far side of the moat are civic activists, community organizers and volunteers. With their backs to the castle, a legion of lobbyists, big engineering firms, and special interests otherwise engaged in converting farmland to suburbia at scale.

The drawbridge is operated by a winch driven by a system of gears that allow small exertion to produce big work. The heavy drawbridge goes up to allow the free transit of commerce and industry that conforms to gigantism; ie. rock mining, electric utilities, water pipe infrastructure, wastewater disposal, highway construction, wetlands “mitigation”. It goes down to block dissenters, critics, and volunteers armed with common sense.

The central feature of this metaphor is the system of gears that hauls the drawbridge up and down; it is the same set of gear ratios—built to appropriate scale—for the White House, Congress, for state legislatures and local county commissions.

The cogs on the big wheel are the motives and hubris of Wall Street; making billions while losing trillions through synthetic, derivative debt spun from the thin air of business school and math departments, embraced by executive suites in America’s largest financial and industrial corporations. The big cogs mesh with cogs on the smaller wheels; from Congress to local zoning councils and the predetermined outcomes hashed out by lobbyists in backrooms at long lunches or dinners before pubic hearings.

Our representative volunteer, standing at the other side of the drawbridge, at the far side of the castle, would have no idea that mortgage backed securities provided energy for that platted subdivision they opposed, that collateral debt obligations prepared one thousand acres of farmland for profit better than any fertilizer, or that credit default swaps helped underwrite political campaigns of county commissioners who turned their backs on people or play the race card to defile volunteers as occurred in the Redland incorporation battle.

The big wheel turns by the energy and confidence in the free market to do better than government in protecting the interests of people. It keeps turning on the principle that private corporations can self-regulate and judge risk better than government—risk, for instance, to the quality of our air and water or equally to the probability of financial default.

This big gear connects down to the little gears at the level where builders and developers push platted subdivisions through zoning councils that conformed—not with what the market wants, as advertised with Hummers and SUVs in colorful full-page ads —but with what Wall Street could finance in bundles.

So far, the misdirection and abrogation of fiduciary responsibility is confined to news reports by economics writers, about players in executive suites who stand for the mighty fallen. But the more revealing story is replicated ten thousand times and in ten thousand places: the base level of government where development rules conflict with common sense and the interest of ordinary people in development at scale to neighborhoods.

The battles engaged by volunteers, the tens of millions of dollars of good studies shelved by elected officials, the use of police and the law to suppress civic activists, and the routine use of a raised drawbridge to keep citizens at bay; these instances all argue for a rigorous audit and control process for any funding that is released by the federal government to the states, and from the states to local municipal authority.

We have learned from TARP, the $700 billion program by Bush Treasury chief Hank Paulson and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke, that there are no audit controls; no way to make sure that taxpayers investment in failing and failed banking institutions are used to ease the credit crisis. Paulson turned to the same Wall Street lieutenants and lawyers whose influence was rewarded handsomely for contriving exactly the playing field and its tilting that ground the public interest to dust, that the Wades and other civic activists represented. What is to stop a tsunami of public money from simply being diverted to the same purposes sought by the instigators of widening Krome Avenue, of converting more farmland to sprawl, and paying lip service to the rest?

In its first weeks, the Obama administration will be proposing another trillion dollar fiscal stimulus comprised of taxpayer obligations. To the question of how well and equitably this money is distributed to the states and counties and municipalities across the nation, the Wades’ story is a blinking red light: if you can’t protect the civic interest now or ensure ethical behavior by public officials, how can you imagine that billions of dollars fed into the local feeding troughs will not further alienate citizens from their government?

The danger for the Obama administration—in consideration of applying nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer obligations to reviving the economy—is that we will make the same mistakes, repeat the same errors, and give the thieves who used infrastructure like transportation budgets, water infrastructure, wastewater and toxics disposal the key to the house, again.

It is imperative to invest in civil service reform and stop the revolving door between government agencies and private corporations that result in the vast mispricing of risk to taxpayers and civic suppression to reward insiders. Over a decade, the demoralization of government agencies has had a ruinous effect on the competence of regulators at exactly a moment in history what we need most in government is professional competence insulated from political pressure.

Measures should include a rapid staffing of law enforcement, from the US Department of Justice to local state attorney’s, to deal with white collar crime and public corruption; a real form of domestic terrorism.

Corporations or their surrogates who receive taxpayer bailout funds should not only face prohibitions against excessive compensation to executives, they should also be prohibited from contributing to political campaigns.

So who should we turn to, then, for leadership? Mainstream environmental organizations have been uncertain allies in the last 20 years. The Service Employees International Union and AFL-CIO supported Seijas. They should examine their motives and rewards: what exactly has the suburban, over-crowded and unsustainable landscape of Florida and the rest of the nation done, to improve the lives of union members? At one UDB zoning hearing a few years ago, Seijas berated a top union official she discovered that union members were supporting the “Hold The Line” campaigners outside County Hall chambers.

Now that the model of suburban sprawl is broken beyond repair, the question arises; what to do next? How to put back to work the millions of Americans displaced and dislodged from security because of blank checks written for growth, against no asset base except what could be conjured from the thin air and ether of financial derivatives, earning billions while losing trillions.

This is the key point of the Wades’ experience as volunteers: that the current system of economic growth allocates no debate or diversity or, even, real standing in how policies shape our communities. That is the pattern of the recent past; a record of diversion, costly fragmentation, and intimidation that turned public agencies silent when they could have been supportive of the laws that activists wanted to uphold.

This leads to leadership that none of the key Obama appointments are able to provide: only the president himself can restore the tradition and honor and scope of the contribution of volunteers to the reconstruction of the American economy along lines that both create economic opportunities and also protect the environment. He will not be able to look to Clinton-era officials for help on this score: they provided none, then, and can’t be expected to provide now.

Where, then, are those “armies of compassion” Why spend one’s years, as the Wades have done, engaged in struggles and battles and conflict, where the outcome is not based on democracy—but of the laws of predetermined outcomes? Why waste one red cent when organizing to defend a civil society has so little currency in downtown law firms, at the Chamber of Commerce, or blue ribbon panels constituted to bestow awards on each other? Why spend one’s years marginalized by well-funded opposition who control the mainstream media through paid advertisements in the real estate section, or, by paying Spanish language radio hosts under the table?

There is another light—a more positive one—through which to view these serious questions: the committment of activists like the Wades seem a mystery, but they prove it is not a passive one. The example of the Wades and others is to show for future generations of leadership that there is, indeed, a path to follow. There is a value in the process, in the engagement and the fight for a better future, and an inspiration to younger generations here and in other places where we like to advertise that democracy has taken hold and root.

It takes a village to raise a child; it takes a Depression to raze a village. Today, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put Humpty back together again: If Congress had acted less on the glad-handing of big campaign donors like Roland Arnall, of Ameriquest Mortgage, or Al Hoffman , of WCI Communities, or corporate farmers from states like Florida and paid attention to volunteers who not only objected to the “fewer rules” but fought to get the rules that existed, enforced; we would have been better off.

The Wades fought for their village as have others before them in South Florida. In the end, they learned something else from their protracted battles to enforce regulations and laws designed to protect communities and the environment from sprawl; that the laws themselves had been subject to weakening, one legislative session at a time, and that the intent of laws governing growth in Florida was left to interpretation by state administrative law judges or state court judges, appointed by the governor.

It is a considerable challenge for the Obama team, to steer the ship of state in a new direction to a future that is sustainable, economically vibrant, protective of the climate and natural resources, and restorative of democracy, itself.

The good news is that it is exactly Obama’s experience as a community organizer, early in his career, that will be most relevant to his actions. It is time for a US president to encourage a broader view of those “armies of compassion”, including the Wades who exemplify what it means to be a citizen at a time when Americans are less confident than ever about what an individual can do. For that, they stand for one thousand points of light.