Today's Miami Herald front page story puts up the good news: housing in Miami-Dade is affordable again. It is hard to see how this is good news for production homebuilders like Lennar whose business model depends on attracting buyers to new growth suburbs like that the company's lobbyists are trying to ram through the zoning process outside the Urban Development Boundary: Parkland 2014.
Here's what the investor site, Motley Fool, wrote about Lennar recently. Maybe some Lennar employees in Miami would be willing to share their views with Eyeonmiami. Read to the bottom of the barrel:
1-Star Stocks Poised to Plunge: Lennar?
http://www.fool.com/investing/small-cap/2009/02/04/1-star-stocks-poised-to-plunge-lennar.aspx
Brian D. Pacampara
February 4, 2009
Based on the aggregated intelligence of 125,000-plus investors participating in Motley Fool CAPS, the Fool's free investing community, homebuilder Lennar (NYSE: LEN) has received the dreaded one-star ranking.
With that in mind, let's take a closer look at Lennar's business, and see what CAPS investors are saying about the stock right now.
....fully 399 of the 466 All-Star members who have rated Lennar -- or 85.6% -- believe the stock will underperform the S&P 500 going forward. These bears include icanpickm and floridabuilder2, both of whom are ranked in the top 3% of our community.
Two weeks ago, icanpickm tapped Lennar as a highly levered, high-risk situation: "Mountains of debt and no way to pay it off until land appreciates. That could be a decade."
In a pitch from earlier in the month, floridabuilder2 replies to inquiring Fools and raises several more red flags:
I don't like [Lennar] because they have 1.1 billion in cash but they have an aggressive debt maturity schedule the next two years ... Additionally, no one is building [spec homes] today and [Lennar's] backlog of sales is SIGNIFICANTLY below its competitors. What does that mean? It means that in order to build backlog they need to slash prices, which brings in sales, but because they have so few specs it means they will have a lot of cash outflow as they ramp up construction.... plus [Lennar] is trying to do [joint ventures] to off balance sheet their land (shell game). They are the only one doing this tactic, which is stupid because no one is landbanking for anyone today. At this point in the game you don't off balance sheet unless there are issues.
...
Report this Comment On February 04, 2009, at 11:05 PM, timfrommn wrote:
As a CURRENT dissatisfied Lennar employee from MN can attest, there is definately something up with this company and it doesn't feel good. They recently slashed our take home pay so low, I'm better off quitting and working part-time at Wal-Mart. All of our competitors haven't resorted to the drastic measures Lennar has sunk to. They keep telling us at the monthly meetings that everything is great but anyone with half a brain can understand that things are going downhill and FAST.
Report this Comment On February 05, 2009, at 3:40 PM, LENNAREX wrote:
Tim, I used to work for Lennar also, upper management are absolute snakes in Miami, I can attest that you cannot or should not trust them. Stuart Miller has a massive ego and is a nasty evil human being who isn't out for anyone but himself. My advice is to get out now...
Saturday, February 07, 2009
A good summation by Dean Baker: Plunder and Blunder ... by gimleteye
Dean Baker writes an excellent summary of the causes and origins of the economic crisis. (Click, 'read more'.) He writes along the lines that I've been exploring on Eyeonmiami for a long time: "The real problem is that the public, including many of the pension fund managers who were taken for a ride, still don't understand what has happened. Perhaps the main reason for this confusion has been the quality of economic reporting. The media relied almost exclusively on the folks who got it wrong. The industry bubble-pushers and the bubble-deniers in policy positions were almost the only sources for economic reporting during the bubble years."
The media relied almost exclusively on the folks who got it wrong. Indeed. And in respects to the trillion dollar fiscal stimulus, still is.
Among the people who got it right were those who objected at public hearings across Florida to platted subdivisions zoned and permitted to ruin natural resources, streams, lakes and bays. (cf. Greenberg Traurig) But economists don't attend those hearings and don't follow how the corruption of local politics ties into finance. There are no "misery" indexes to track, along with disparities that Baker notes.
Newspapers publishers and editors (cf. The Miami Herald) confined such complaints to occasional "environmental" stories buried in the B section of the newspaper and even rarer appearances on the front page. If you had asked the paper's publisher/s and if you had gotten an honest answer, it would have been along the lines of: "people don't care about the environment the way they do about business. These environmental "battles" are examples of a privileged elite complaining about growth that is necessary." They might or might not have added that their own compensation relied on profitability of the newspaper that depends on keeping advertisers happy and content. In other words no adverse stories that could threaten their paychecks.
Now, I suppose, it is clear what a privileged elite did to the entire US economy while the media was sleeping.
Plunder and Blunder; How the 'Financial Experts' Keep Screwing You
By Dean Baker, PoliPoint Press
Posted by Alternet on February 7, 2009, Printed on February 7, 2009
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy by Dean Baker, published by PoliPoint Press, 2009.
The stock market and housing bubbles were the central features of the U.S. economy over the last 15 years. The stock bubble propelled the strongest period of economic growth since the late 1960s. The housing bubble lifted the economy from the wreckage of the stock bubble and sustained a modest recovery, at least through 2007. However, financial bubbles by definition aren't sustainable, and when they collapse, they cause enormous social and economic damage.
The economy had no problem with financial bubbles during its period of strongest and most evenly shared growth, the years from 1945 to 1973. It only became susceptible to bubbles after the pattern of growth had broken down -- when most workers no longer shared in the benefits of productivity growth, and businesses no longer routinely invested to meet increased demand based on growing consumption. We don't have enough evidence to say that bubbles are a direct outgrowth of inequality, but, again, we do know that bubbles weren't a problem when income was more evenly distributed.
The bubbles were allowed to grow only because the people in a position to restrain them failed in their duties. The leading villain in this story is Alan Greenspan. Greenspan mastered the art of currying the favor of the rich and powerful and held top economic positions under five presidents of both political parties. He also managed to gain a near cult-like following among the media. As a result, most of the public is largely unaware of how disastrous the Fed's policies under his tenure were for the economy and the country.
Most of the economics profession went along for the ride, somehow managing to miss a $10 trillion stock bubble in the 1990s and an $8 trillion housing bubble in the current decade. If leading economists had recognized these bubbles and expressed concern about the inherent risks, they could have alerted the public and forced a serious policy debate on the problem. Instead, the leading voices in the profession joined the chorus of Greenspan sycophants, honoring him as potentially the greatest central banker of all time.
The financial industry proved to be more incompetent and corrupt than its worst critics could have imagined. Did people who manage multi-billion dollar portfolios in the late 1990s really believe that price-to-earnings ratios would continue rising, even when they already exceeded 30 to 1? Or did these highly paid fund managers believe that PE ratios no longer mattered -- as though people bought up shares of stock because the stock certificates were pretty?
It's hard to understand how anyone who managed money for a living could have justified keeping a substantial portion of their funds in the ridiculously overvalued markets of 1999 and 2000. You could play the bubble, riding the wave up and dumping stock before the crash. But a buy-and-hold strategy in 1999 and 2000 was a guaranteed loser. In the late 1990s, Warren Buffet famously commented that he didn't understand the Internet economy, and thus he pulled much of his portfolio out of the market. Buffet understood the Internet economy very well. He recognized a hugely overvalued stock market that was certain to crash. Why didn't fund managers?
The financial industry's conduct in the housing bubble was even worse. House prices had sharply diverged from a 100-year trend without any explanation. Furthermore, vacancy rates were at record highs and getting higher. In introductory economics, we teach students about supply and demand. If the excess supply keeps growing, what will happen to the price? Furthermore, inflation-adjusted rents weren't rising through most of the period of the housing bubble. There will always be a rough balance between sales price and rent. When sales prices diverge sharply from rents, some owners become renters, reducing the demand for housing. Similarly, some owners of rental units convert them to ownership units, increasing the supply of housing.
Decreased demand and increased supply lowers the price; what part of that reality did the highly compensated analysts fail to understand? How could the CEOs of the country's two huge mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have been surprised by the housing bubble? The Wall Street wizards at Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, and elsewhere were probably even worse. Did they really have no idea that the bubble would burst and that a large amount of mortgage debt, especially subprime mortgage debt, would become nearly worthless? Did they think that this junk could be made to disappear through complex derivative instruments?
Wall Street sold these instruments to pension funds and other institutional investors. It also persuaded state and local governments to pay them billions of dollars in fees for issuing auction rate securities and for buying credit default swaps and other exotic financial instruments. In addition, many of the same institutional investors lost billions of dollars by holding the stock of companies like Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Bear Stearns, the value of which was driven into the ground by very highly paid executives.
The real problem is that the public, including many of the pension fund managers who were taken for a ride, still don't understand what has happened. Perhaps the main reason for this confusion has been the quality of economic reporting. The media relied almost exclusively on the folks who got it wrong. The industry bubble-pushers and the bubble-deniers in policy positions were almost the only sources for economic reporting during the bubble years. The vast majority of the people who follow the news probably never heard anyone argue that the economy was being driven by a stock bubble in the 1990s or a housing bubble in the current decade. Such views simply were not permitted. (The New York Times deserves special mention as a media outlet that actively sought alternative voices, especially during the housing bubble.)
Knowingly or not, these outlets have covered up the extraordinary incompetence and corruption that allowed these bubbles to grow. For example, in a recent three-part series on the housing bubble, the Washington Post reported a claim from Alan Greenspan that he first became aware of the explosion in subprime mortgage lending as he was about to leave his post as Fed chair in January of 2006. According to the article, Greenspan said he couldn't remember if he had passed this information on to his successor, Ben Bernanke.
This article makes it sound as though the explosion in subprime lending was an obscure piece of data only available to a privileged few. In reality, the explosion in subprime lending was a widely discussed feature of the housing market during the bubble years. If Greenspan was implying that he was unaware of this explosion, he was unbelievably negligent in his job as Fed chair. The notion that Greenspan would have to pass this information on to his successor -- as though an economist of Bernanke's stature could be unaware of such an important development in the economy -- is equally absurd. In other words, the Post article helped Greenspan present a remarkably straightforward development -- namely, the massive issuance of bad loans -- as complex and confusing.
In the same vein, the Wall Street Journal provided cover for Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson by explaining how the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caught him by surprise. These two financial institutions hold almost nothing except mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. What did Mr. Paulson think would happen to them in a housing crash?
The secret of these two bubbles is that there is no secret. Anyone with common sense, a grasp of simple arithmetic, and a willingness to stand up against the consensus could have figured out the basic story. The details of the accounting scandals in the stock bubble and the convoluted financing stories in the housing bubble required some serious investigative work, but the bubbles themselves were there in plain sight for all to see.
The public should demand a real accounting. Why does the Fed grow hysterical over a 2.5 percent inflation rate but think that $10 trillion financial bubbles can be ignored? Where was the Treasury Department during the Clinton and Bush administrations? What about congressional oversight? Did no one in Congress think that massive bubbles might pose a problem? Why do economists worry so much more about small tariffs on steel and shirts than about gigantic financial bubbles? What exactly do the people who get paid millions of dollars by Wall Street financial firms do for their money? And finally, why don't the business and economic reporters ask any of these questions?
The stock and housing bubbles have wreaked havoc on the economy and will cause enormous pain for years to come. We can't undo the damage, but we can try to create a system that will prevent such catastrophes from recurring and that ensures that people responsible for these preventable events are held accountable. That would be a huge step forward.
Copyright PoliPoint Press 2009.
Click here to buy a copy of
Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy
The media relied almost exclusively on the folks who got it wrong. Indeed. And in respects to the trillion dollar fiscal stimulus, still is.
Among the people who got it right were those who objected at public hearings across Florida to platted subdivisions zoned and permitted to ruin natural resources, streams, lakes and bays. (cf. Greenberg Traurig) But economists don't attend those hearings and don't follow how the corruption of local politics ties into finance. There are no "misery" indexes to track, along with disparities that Baker notes.
Newspapers publishers and editors (cf. The Miami Herald) confined such complaints to occasional "environmental" stories buried in the B section of the newspaper and even rarer appearances on the front page. If you had asked the paper's publisher/s and if you had gotten an honest answer, it would have been along the lines of: "people don't care about the environment the way they do about business. These environmental "battles" are examples of a privileged elite complaining about growth that is necessary." They might or might not have added that their own compensation relied on profitability of the newspaper that depends on keeping advertisers happy and content. In other words no adverse stories that could threaten their paychecks.
Now, I suppose, it is clear what a privileged elite did to the entire US economy while the media was sleeping.
Plunder and Blunder; How the 'Financial Experts' Keep Screwing You
By Dean Baker, PoliPoint Press
Posted by Alternet on February 7, 2009, Printed on February 7, 2009
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy by Dean Baker, published by PoliPoint Press, 2009.
The stock market and housing bubbles were the central features of the U.S. economy over the last 15 years. The stock bubble propelled the strongest period of economic growth since the late 1960s. The housing bubble lifted the economy from the wreckage of the stock bubble and sustained a modest recovery, at least through 2007. However, financial bubbles by definition aren't sustainable, and when they collapse, they cause enormous social and economic damage.
The economy had no problem with financial bubbles during its period of strongest and most evenly shared growth, the years from 1945 to 1973. It only became susceptible to bubbles after the pattern of growth had broken down -- when most workers no longer shared in the benefits of productivity growth, and businesses no longer routinely invested to meet increased demand based on growing consumption. We don't have enough evidence to say that bubbles are a direct outgrowth of inequality, but, again, we do know that bubbles weren't a problem when income was more evenly distributed.
The bubbles were allowed to grow only because the people in a position to restrain them failed in their duties. The leading villain in this story is Alan Greenspan. Greenspan mastered the art of currying the favor of the rich and powerful and held top economic positions under five presidents of both political parties. He also managed to gain a near cult-like following among the media. As a result, most of the public is largely unaware of how disastrous the Fed's policies under his tenure were for the economy and the country.
Most of the economics profession went along for the ride, somehow managing to miss a $10 trillion stock bubble in the 1990s and an $8 trillion housing bubble in the current decade. If leading economists had recognized these bubbles and expressed concern about the inherent risks, they could have alerted the public and forced a serious policy debate on the problem. Instead, the leading voices in the profession joined the chorus of Greenspan sycophants, honoring him as potentially the greatest central banker of all time.
The financial industry proved to be more incompetent and corrupt than its worst critics could have imagined. Did people who manage multi-billion dollar portfolios in the late 1990s really believe that price-to-earnings ratios would continue rising, even when they already exceeded 30 to 1? Or did these highly paid fund managers believe that PE ratios no longer mattered -- as though people bought up shares of stock because the stock certificates were pretty?
It's hard to understand how anyone who managed money for a living could have justified keeping a substantial portion of their funds in the ridiculously overvalued markets of 1999 and 2000. You could play the bubble, riding the wave up and dumping stock before the crash. But a buy-and-hold strategy in 1999 and 2000 was a guaranteed loser. In the late 1990s, Warren Buffet famously commented that he didn't understand the Internet economy, and thus he pulled much of his portfolio out of the market. Buffet understood the Internet economy very well. He recognized a hugely overvalued stock market that was certain to crash. Why didn't fund managers?
The financial industry's conduct in the housing bubble was even worse. House prices had sharply diverged from a 100-year trend without any explanation. Furthermore, vacancy rates were at record highs and getting higher. In introductory economics, we teach students about supply and demand. If the excess supply keeps growing, what will happen to the price? Furthermore, inflation-adjusted rents weren't rising through most of the period of the housing bubble. There will always be a rough balance between sales price and rent. When sales prices diverge sharply from rents, some owners become renters, reducing the demand for housing. Similarly, some owners of rental units convert them to ownership units, increasing the supply of housing.
Decreased demand and increased supply lowers the price; what part of that reality did the highly compensated analysts fail to understand? How could the CEOs of the country's two huge mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have been surprised by the housing bubble? The Wall Street wizards at Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, and elsewhere were probably even worse. Did they really have no idea that the bubble would burst and that a large amount of mortgage debt, especially subprime mortgage debt, would become nearly worthless? Did they think that this junk could be made to disappear through complex derivative instruments?
Wall Street sold these instruments to pension funds and other institutional investors. It also persuaded state and local governments to pay them billions of dollars in fees for issuing auction rate securities and for buying credit default swaps and other exotic financial instruments. In addition, many of the same institutional investors lost billions of dollars by holding the stock of companies like Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Bear Stearns, the value of which was driven into the ground by very highly paid executives.
The real problem is that the public, including many of the pension fund managers who were taken for a ride, still don't understand what has happened. Perhaps the main reason for this confusion has been the quality of economic reporting. The media relied almost exclusively on the folks who got it wrong. The industry bubble-pushers and the bubble-deniers in policy positions were almost the only sources for economic reporting during the bubble years. The vast majority of the people who follow the news probably never heard anyone argue that the economy was being driven by a stock bubble in the 1990s or a housing bubble in the current decade. Such views simply were not permitted. (The New York Times deserves special mention as a media outlet that actively sought alternative voices, especially during the housing bubble.)
Knowingly or not, these outlets have covered up the extraordinary incompetence and corruption that allowed these bubbles to grow. For example, in a recent three-part series on the housing bubble, the Washington Post reported a claim from Alan Greenspan that he first became aware of the explosion in subprime mortgage lending as he was about to leave his post as Fed chair in January of 2006. According to the article, Greenspan said he couldn't remember if he had passed this information on to his successor, Ben Bernanke.
This article makes it sound as though the explosion in subprime lending was an obscure piece of data only available to a privileged few. In reality, the explosion in subprime lending was a widely discussed feature of the housing market during the bubble years. If Greenspan was implying that he was unaware of this explosion, he was unbelievably negligent in his job as Fed chair. The notion that Greenspan would have to pass this information on to his successor -- as though an economist of Bernanke's stature could be unaware of such an important development in the economy -- is equally absurd. In other words, the Post article helped Greenspan present a remarkably straightforward development -- namely, the massive issuance of bad loans -- as complex and confusing.
In the same vein, the Wall Street Journal provided cover for Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson by explaining how the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caught him by surprise. These two financial institutions hold almost nothing except mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. What did Mr. Paulson think would happen to them in a housing crash?
The secret of these two bubbles is that there is no secret. Anyone with common sense, a grasp of simple arithmetic, and a willingness to stand up against the consensus could have figured out the basic story. The details of the accounting scandals in the stock bubble and the convoluted financing stories in the housing bubble required some serious investigative work, but the bubbles themselves were there in plain sight for all to see.
The public should demand a real accounting. Why does the Fed grow hysterical over a 2.5 percent inflation rate but think that $10 trillion financial bubbles can be ignored? Where was the Treasury Department during the Clinton and Bush administrations? What about congressional oversight? Did no one in Congress think that massive bubbles might pose a problem? Why do economists worry so much more about small tariffs on steel and shirts than about gigantic financial bubbles? What exactly do the people who get paid millions of dollars by Wall Street financial firms do for their money? And finally, why don't the business and economic reporters ask any of these questions?
The stock and housing bubbles have wreaked havoc on the economy and will cause enormous pain for years to come. We can't undo the damage, but we can try to create a system that will prevent such catastrophes from recurring and that ensures that people responsible for these preventable events are held accountable. That would be a huge step forward.
Copyright PoliPoint Press 2009.
Click here to buy a copy of
Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy
Can you guess what I created here? By geniusofdespair
Hit read more to see what this computer generated "art" represents, but take a guess first:
Yes, it is the Golden Glades Interchange!
Friday, February 06, 2009
Speaking of Lobbyists... and the Marlins' Baseball Bailout. By Geniusofdespair
Biscayne Times has a good article By Frank Rollason called Clean Government in Five Simple and Easy Steps. It is not on line yet so pick up their paper. Two were no brainers, term limits and elect honest representatives. Three of his five I really liked because they were a little different: 1. Elected officials must stop meeting with lobbyists, 2. Remove elected officials from the bid process, and 3. Make the offices of the auditor general and head of the ethics commission elected positions. Back to the Lobbyists, Frank said:
“They (elected official) could simply take the position that lobbyists have nothing to say to them that can’t be said at a public meeting.” Adding: “What kind of secret deal could be negotiated with a whole bunch of public flies on the wall.”
Which brings me to the subject of the Marlins' baseball stadium bailout:
Yes I like you Mayor Carlos Alvarez but heck, no matter how I look at it: It seems stupid to do this deal especially with this bad economy. Our tax dollars need to be used judiciously during a time of crisis.
Look at what is in front of you. How many full-time jobs does the American Airlines Arena generate? This jobs mantra is just crap, we all know it. If you want to fill jobs, I need a proof reader, a researcher and a typist. Just pay me out of the fund you were going to give the baseball people. With $1 Million I would have enough money to pay all three of my future staff for 11 years at $30,000 a year (they would all make more than I do on this blog -- $30,000 more).
Does my idea sound dumb? Well it is not so far from the deal we are being peddled regarding job creation. I bet you don't get too many full time jobs from our investment out of the Marlins. Mayor: Do the job math at the American Airlines Arena before you fork over our tax dollars. That Arena is empty most of the time. And, here is a better idea for the City of Miami: Let's sell the Orange Bowl Land and then we can afford to pay all the people laid off at Macy's, Walgreens, Starbucks and the Miami Herald. I could see Matt Haggman or Chuck Rabin writing ads for buses full-time more than I can picture them selling peanuts or "Beer Here" part-time at an empty (who has money for tickets?) stadium.
Check out Michael Lewis' excellent editorial on the stadium deal.
The financial worth of newspapers, measured by rate of decay ... by gimleteye
Yesterday, McClatchy announced cost-cutting measures that must be very upsetting to Miami Herald employees. Publisher David Landsberg wrote a memo, "This morning, McClatchy announced that it is freezing its pension plans and temporarily suspending the company match to its 401(k) plans, effective March 31." Talk about distress signals.
Landsberg goes on, "Here at the Miami Herald Media Company, we have seen an unprecedented loss in advertising revenue, with quite a few of our retailers and auto dealers going out of business or leaving the area. In addition, employment advertising revenues continue to drop to all-time lows and real estate remains very weak. These challenges are clearly driven by a deepening recession that is hurting our economy. We are still developing our plan to address this extraordinary economic challenge."
I don't believe Landsberg has a plan, any more than his immediate predecessors did-- except to the extent it meant skewing the reporting of the news toward the paper's big advertisers. In its avoidance of reportage that alienated advertisers-- like the explosion of unsustainable development in South Miami Dade--the Herald and other mainstream media blinded themselves to the unfolding economic disaster built on unsustainable credit and the explosion of debt and also lost the trust of readers.
It is clear enough that the costs of newsprint and distribution can't outlast this economic crisis. The moment for private equity investors to step in and rescue small regional and local newspapers has passed; it's an unattractive scenario to measure the worth of a newspaper by its rate of decay.
There's a bigger issue: can democracy survive without print newspapers? I wonder if my fear is a generational bias. Perhaps the Herald needs to go all-electronic and all local with its reporting. Will advertisers trust that format?
Landsberg goes on, "Here at the Miami Herald Media Company, we have seen an unprecedented loss in advertising revenue, with quite a few of our retailers and auto dealers going out of business or leaving the area. In addition, employment advertising revenues continue to drop to all-time lows and real estate remains very weak. These challenges are clearly driven by a deepening recession that is hurting our economy. We are still developing our plan to address this extraordinary economic challenge."
I don't believe Landsberg has a plan, any more than his immediate predecessors did-- except to the extent it meant skewing the reporting of the news toward the paper's big advertisers. In its avoidance of reportage that alienated advertisers-- like the explosion of unsustainable development in South Miami Dade--the Herald and other mainstream media blinded themselves to the unfolding economic disaster built on unsustainable credit and the explosion of debt and also lost the trust of readers.
It is clear enough that the costs of newsprint and distribution can't outlast this economic crisis. The moment for private equity investors to step in and rescue small regional and local newspapers has passed; it's an unattractive scenario to measure the worth of a newspaper by its rate of decay.
There's a bigger issue: can democracy survive without print newspapers? I wonder if my fear is a generational bias. Perhaps the Herald needs to go all-electronic and all local with its reporting. Will advertisers trust that format?
Economic emergency and the fiscal stimulus: Florida's GOP busting through flashing red light ... by gimleteye
The worst possible outcome in the use of trillions of dollars of taxpayer money as fiscal stimulus would be to support the losing formula of economic growth related to suburban sprawl.
But that is exactly the direction the Republican-lead Florida legislature appears to be heading. The Orlando Sentinel reports that the legislature is considering what appear to be, at face-value, the sort of measures one would expect from the injured, hobbled economic elites tied to construction and development: get the nail guns going again and any cost.
My view is that we desperately need a fiscal stimulus, but that there is also a significant chance the cure could be worse than the disease if all the stimulus does is to reward entrenched economic interests who drove the economy onto the rocks in the first place. How can outcome be avoided, if the stimulus and its execution is put in the same hands as those that created the crisis?
The Orlando Sentinel report does not seem hopeful on that score. One of the measures sought by the GOP status quo: to eliminate the state's requirement for transportation concurrency and mandates governing Developments of Regional Impact.
Long before the current economic crisis, Florida's builders had "growth management" in its cross-hairs. The hubris and wealth created during the housing boom, that overran the legislature, sent its political troops to eviscerate what measly measures were in place to temper growth. It is a sad irony that the collapse of its markets-- in fields and wetlands now delineated by failed subdivisions-- is giving even greater energy to public expenditures to revive the sprawl machine.
What the Florida legislature should be doing is carefully listening to what kinds of outcomes it may be able to influence, to get real, sustainable jobs that will fortify the economy and not just feed our tax dollars down a black hole. The lack of foresight, as reported by the Sentinel, is the stamp of failure.
OrlandoSentinel.com
Florida heads for U-turn on road mandates for developers
Aaron Deslatte
Tallahassee Bureau
February 6, 2009
TALLAHASSEE
One idea emerging in the Legislature to kick-start Florida's stalled growth engine: repeal the road-building mandates developers hate.
Four years after lawmakers and then-Gov. Jeb Bush put sharper teeth and more money into the state's 20-year-old development rules, legislation unveiled Thursday proposes to roll back those transportation requirements for most of the state's cities and urban counties.
Although most of the state's once-exploding population centers now have more new homes than the marketplace can absorb, members of the Senate's Select Committee on Florida's Economy described the bill as a growth stimulator and dubbed it the "Community Renewal Act."
The bill would "unclog stalled projects that have been hamstrung by [state] requirements" and "remove government-created barriers to job creation," said the committee's chairman, Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville.
"We want to lift those barriers and get government out of the way."
Changes intended to scale back state regulation include allowing urban areas to completely opt out of what's called transportation concurrency -- the law that requires local governments and builders to add enough road capacity within three years to handle the added traffic their developments create.
Even rural areas could get state permission to dodge the road-building requirement.
In 2005, lawmakers put up more than $1.5 billion to help meet the transportation-concurrency requirements. Senators conceded Thursday that the effort had largely flopped.
Huge projects, school impacts
The new bill also would retire a nearly 30-year-old policy for regulation known as "Developments of Regional Impact," which forces large-scale projects such as airports, shopping malls and factories to go through a lengthy state review.
And it would soften the 2005 mandate forcing developers to take into account the extra students that would pour into nearby schools when they calculate the impact of their subdivisions,
Ironically, the bill has the same sponsor, Sen. Mike Bennett, R-Bradenton, and even the same number (SB 360) as the then-heralded 2005 act.
"Many of the problems we deal with are the solutions we passed before," Bennett said. "We're going to go back and do it one more time."
Lawmakers, local governments, developers, Florida's growth-management czar, and even environmental groups such as 1000 Friends of Florida and The Nature Conservancy were supportive of the bill Thursday at its first airing.
All basically agreed the road-building mandates at the heart of Florida's 23-year-old growth-management act -- once hailed nationally as a model for other fast-growing states -- had actually driven more development to rural areas where traffic congestion isn't as bad and it's cheaper to build.
'Significant step'
"It really is a very, very significant step forward," said longtime growth guru Tom Pelham, secretary of the Department of Community Affairs, which polices Florida's growth laws.
Pelham, though, was less than willing to say the proposal would stimulate growth. Home builders have said the state has about 300,000 homes that have been built but are now sitting vacant.
"The purpose of this is not to speed up residential construction," he said. "You could dismantle DCA and the entire growth-management act and it would not revive the economy, because it didn't cause the problem."
The bill is still a few weeks away from a first vote, but lawmakers appeared ready to steamroll it through the Senate early in the 60-day legislative session that starts March 3.
"With 300,000 empty houses sitting on a parched market in Florida, we probably don't need to build some more houses," Gaetz acknowledged, "but rather, commercial projects and industrial projects that create jobs are the kinds that seem to be held up."
Aaron Deslatte can be reached at 850-222-5564 or adeslatte@orlandosentinel.com.
Copyright © 2009, Orlando Sentinel
But that is exactly the direction the Republican-lead Florida legislature appears to be heading. The Orlando Sentinel reports that the legislature is considering what appear to be, at face-value, the sort of measures one would expect from the injured, hobbled economic elites tied to construction and development: get the nail guns going again and any cost.
My view is that we desperately need a fiscal stimulus, but that there is also a significant chance the cure could be worse than the disease if all the stimulus does is to reward entrenched economic interests who drove the economy onto the rocks in the first place. How can outcome be avoided, if the stimulus and its execution is put in the same hands as those that created the crisis?
The Orlando Sentinel report does not seem hopeful on that score. One of the measures sought by the GOP status quo: to eliminate the state's requirement for transportation concurrency and mandates governing Developments of Regional Impact.
Long before the current economic crisis, Florida's builders had "growth management" in its cross-hairs. The hubris and wealth created during the housing boom, that overran the legislature, sent its political troops to eviscerate what measly measures were in place to temper growth. It is a sad irony that the collapse of its markets-- in fields and wetlands now delineated by failed subdivisions-- is giving even greater energy to public expenditures to revive the sprawl machine.
What the Florida legislature should be doing is carefully listening to what kinds of outcomes it may be able to influence, to get real, sustainable jobs that will fortify the economy and not just feed our tax dollars down a black hole. The lack of foresight, as reported by the Sentinel, is the stamp of failure.
OrlandoSentinel.com
Florida heads for U-turn on road mandates for developers
Aaron Deslatte
Tallahassee Bureau
February 6, 2009
TALLAHASSEE
One idea emerging in the Legislature to kick-start Florida's stalled growth engine: repeal the road-building mandates developers hate.
Four years after lawmakers and then-Gov. Jeb Bush put sharper teeth and more money into the state's 20-year-old development rules, legislation unveiled Thursday proposes to roll back those transportation requirements for most of the state's cities and urban counties.
Although most of the state's once-exploding population centers now have more new homes than the marketplace can absorb, members of the Senate's Select Committee on Florida's Economy described the bill as a growth stimulator and dubbed it the "Community Renewal Act."
The bill would "unclog stalled projects that have been hamstrung by [state] requirements" and "remove government-created barriers to job creation," said the committee's chairman, Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville.
"We want to lift those barriers and get government out of the way."
Changes intended to scale back state regulation include allowing urban areas to completely opt out of what's called transportation concurrency -- the law that requires local governments and builders to add enough road capacity within three years to handle the added traffic their developments create.
Even rural areas could get state permission to dodge the road-building requirement.
In 2005, lawmakers put up more than $1.5 billion to help meet the transportation-concurrency requirements. Senators conceded Thursday that the effort had largely flopped.
Huge projects, school impacts
The new bill also would retire a nearly 30-year-old policy for regulation known as "Developments of Regional Impact," which forces large-scale projects such as airports, shopping malls and factories to go through a lengthy state review.
And it would soften the 2005 mandate forcing developers to take into account the extra students that would pour into nearby schools when they calculate the impact of their subdivisions,
Ironically, the bill has the same sponsor, Sen. Mike Bennett, R-Bradenton, and even the same number (SB 360) as the then-heralded 2005 act.
"Many of the problems we deal with are the solutions we passed before," Bennett said. "We're going to go back and do it one more time."
Lawmakers, local governments, developers, Florida's growth-management czar, and even environmental groups such as 1000 Friends of Florida and The Nature Conservancy were supportive of the bill Thursday at its first airing.
All basically agreed the road-building mandates at the heart of Florida's 23-year-old growth-management act -- once hailed nationally as a model for other fast-growing states -- had actually driven more development to rural areas where traffic congestion isn't as bad and it's cheaper to build.
'Significant step'
"It really is a very, very significant step forward," said longtime growth guru Tom Pelham, secretary of the Department of Community Affairs, which polices Florida's growth laws.
Pelham, though, was less than willing to say the proposal would stimulate growth. Home builders have said the state has about 300,000 homes that have been built but are now sitting vacant.
"The purpose of this is not to speed up residential construction," he said. "You could dismantle DCA and the entire growth-management act and it would not revive the economy, because it didn't cause the problem."
The bill is still a few weeks away from a first vote, but lawmakers appeared ready to steamroll it through the Senate early in the 60-day legislative session that starts March 3.
"With 300,000 empty houses sitting on a parched market in Florida, we probably don't need to build some more houses," Gaetz acknowledged, "but rather, commercial projects and industrial projects that create jobs are the kinds that seem to be held up."
Aaron Deslatte can be reached at 850-222-5564 or adeslatte@orlandosentinel.com.
Copyright © 2009, Orlando Sentinel
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg had Cancer Surgery by Geniusofdespair
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had surgery today for pancreatic cancer.I wish her a speedy recovery, but when you hear things like that about a liberal member of a conservative majority court, it makes you glad that there is a new sheriff in town: Obama. (Ruth, when you get home: start circulating a better photo of yourself. I couldn't stand the photo so I redid it.)
GOP idiocy: cut environmental law to stimulate economy ... by gimleteye
The following just came in from Clean Water Action: does the GOP really think that the answer to the economic crisis is lowering barriers created by environmental regulations? How many years have we had to live with non-stop assaults by the GOP against the nation's premier environmental laws, like NEPA? The GOP has been trying for years to gut the nation's environmental laws: what a good idea, use the worst economic crisis since the Depression to pursue its agenda. I think I know what "shovel ready" means: rape and pillage. Read for yourself:
Please oppose Senator Barrasso (R-WY) amendment to Economic Stimulus legislation that would waive National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). There are plenty of shovel-ready projects that already have their NEPA review completed; there is no need to waive NEPA to justify spending money quickly.
Sen. Bill Nelson (202) 224-5274
Sen. Mel Martinez (202) 224-3041
Title I of NEPA contains a Declaration of National Environmental Policy which requires the federal government to use all practicable means to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony. Section 102 requires federal agencies to incorporate environmental considerations in their planning and decision-making through a systematic interdisciplinary approach.
Specifically, all federal agencies are to prepare detailed statements assessing the environmental impact of and alternatives to major federal actions significantly affecting the environment. These statements are commonly referred to as environmental impact statements (EISs). Section 102 also requires federal agencies to lend appropriate support to initiatives and programs designed to anticipate and prevent a decline in the quality of mankind's world environment
Please oppose Senator Barrasso (R-WY) amendment to Economic Stimulus legislation that would waive National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). There are plenty of shovel-ready projects that already have their NEPA review completed; there is no need to waive NEPA to justify spending money quickly.
Sen. Bill Nelson (202) 224-5274
Sen. Mel Martinez (202) 224-3041
Title I of NEPA contains a Declaration of National Environmental Policy which requires the federal government to use all practicable means to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony. Section 102 requires federal agencies to incorporate environmental considerations in their planning and decision-making through a systematic interdisciplinary approach.
Specifically, all federal agencies are to prepare detailed statements assessing the environmental impact of and alternatives to major federal actions significantly affecting the environment. These statements are commonly referred to as environmental impact statements (EISs). Section 102 also requires federal agencies to lend appropriate support to initiatives and programs designed to anticipate and prevent a decline in the quality of mankind's world environment
The Slide Ruler of the 21st Century: The Newspaper. By Geniusofdespair
Call it what you may, buggy whip or slide ruler, the newspaper just can't get traction in the 21st century. This news from a press release on the McClatchy (owner of the Miami Herald) website really sucks:
"This morning, McClatchy announced that it is freezing its pension plans and temporarily suspending the company match to its 401(k) plans, effective March 31. McClatchy also announced that it will cut an additional $100 to $110 million in expenses over the next 12 months."
They are also going to do staff reduction here in Miami! I would stop blogging if it would help the real newspaper.
"This morning, McClatchy announced that it is freezing its pension plans and temporarily suspending the company match to its 401(k) plans, effective March 31. McClatchy also announced that it will cut an additional $100 to $110 million in expenses over the next 12 months."
They are also going to do staff reduction here in Miami! I would stop blogging if it would help the real newspaper.
(MAYBE) Thanks Dusty Melton. By Geniusofdespar
Call me naive, but Lobbyist Dusty Melton, in the comments on yesterday's post, pointed me in a direction that I am looking forward to exploring with you: The Lobbyist expenditure report (Hit to enlarge the form). It is surely lacking in depth, however, it is something else we can all look at to get information to make us more savvy citizens. I can't wait to look at these documents.I have also included the Clerk's explanation of each category on the form which you should look at (Hit read more to see it). The lobbyist needs to fill one of these out for each client so they should be pretty interesting. Will keep you posted. I have already made some inquiries into getting completed forms from certain lobbyists.
WAIT A MINUTE DUSTY...I am finding out that these reports are coming in blank from Lobbyists....see 2 comments. Now I am not so happy.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Of churches that look like muffler shops ... from Jim Kunstler
Jim Kunstler is one of the more trenchant observers of the economic crisis. Kunstler believes, as I do, that the engines of sprawl are broken and in disarray. Moreover, the financial chain that formed an unbreakable feedback loop between Wall Street bankerz, local real estate speculators, and elected officials is finished. Here's his latest blog entry from the prickly named Clusterfuck Nation. Although Kunstler writes about suburbia outside Montgomery, Alabama, he could equally have been reporting from Kendall Drive. Click on 'read more' for the full text.
"We will not apologize for our way of life...." This unfortunate phrase from President Obama's otherwise sturdy inaugural address, echoed through my mind last week as I cruised the suburban outlands of Montgomery, Alabama.
All the usual commercial furnishings of consumerist America hugged the flattish ochre and dusty-green landscape of played-out cotton fields where thirty feet of topsoil has washed away in the two hundred years since the mainly English settlers shoved out the native Alabamu, Coosa, and Tallapoosa. Along the low horizon, mall followed strip mall followed "lifestyle center," book-ending the "one house" failed subdivisions of otherwise empty unsold lots in a cavalcade of floundering enterprise. It seemed at times as if the terrain was a kind of sea-like expanse, and all the retail boxes ghost ships drifting to oblivion.
They say that the banks have stopped calling in their loans on the commercial real estate, even though the owners of the malls and strip malls have arrived firmly in default. Calling in the loans would only pin another horrifying liability on the banks' balance sheets. So all parties join in a game of "pretend," that nothing has really happened to the fundamental equations of business life. Something similar goes on at the next level down, where the tenants of the malls and strip malls sink deeper into rent arrears every month, and the eviction process is simply postponed, while the stores themselves put off paying their vendors and suppliers – as the whole system, the whole way of life, enters upon a circle-jerk of mutual denial in a last desperate effort to forestall the mandates of reality .
How long will these games go on? This is the primary question that haunts the republic as we wait for new TARPS, and "bad banks," economic stimulus packages, infrastructure renewal roll-outs, and other policy life-lines thrown out in guarded hopefulness to haul America out of a ditch.
The center of Montgomery was instructive, too. Not unlike any other city in the USA (pop. about 200,000), the former main artery of downtown commerce – Dexter Avenue, rolling out like a red carpet below the state capitol hill, where Martin Luther King's early career kicked off in a modest red brick church, and where Rosa Parks famously refused to move to the back of her bus – this "main street" presented a sad sequence of empty shopfronts interrupted here and there by rather creepy amateur murals depicting the cruelties of slavery, as if a remonstrance to the politicos up the hill. Most of the buildings lining the avenue still stood burdened by the clownish facade re-doos and ghastly claddings of the 1950s, which had replaced the ordered classical-vernacular decorum of the original 19th century frontages. Once the malls had landed in the old cotton fields, and MLK moved on to Atlanta, Dexter Avenue was just left to rot in the memory trunk.
Here and there around the rest of the downtown, other weird experiments in American post-war anti-urbanism presented themselves, most notably a "building" designed to look like a small-scaled Death Star, all black reflective glass, canted concrete and steel walls – which turned out to belong to Morris Dees' renowned Southern Poverty Law Center -- deployed directly across the street from the modest white clapboard-with-green-shutters house once occupied by Jefferson Davis after Richmond fell and the Confederate leadership skeedaddled further south. There were a few recently-built government towers that looked like Nascar trophies. But the rest of the downtown – the parts not dedicated to surface parking – was the ubiquitous array of muffler shops, or restaurants and churches that looked like muffler shops.
With the city center thus nearly dead, and the asteroid belt of malls and strips on their knees financially, this emblematic sunbelt metro area finds itself in a pickle. Cotton being well-past decline, and having wrecked the soil, the "new" economy of recent decades dedicated itself to building car-dependent air-conditioned suburban sprawl – the perceived perfect antidote to a previous economic order based on serfdom, hook-worm, and inescapable heat. That now-not-so-new economy of sprawl, in turn, has come to a screeching halt, as a cruel destiny threw sand in the mechanisms of reliably cheap oil and revolving credit, and the gears seized up. A mood of ominous watching and waiting pervaded the city, but many of the movers-and-shakers had pinned their hopes on the chance that Mr. Obama's stimulus bill would allow them to commence building a new freeway to the ocean on the Florida panhandle.
My journey continued on the Jesus-haunted blue highways, to that selfsame place, Walton County, Florida, where some of the most famous experiments in the New Urbanism were conducted beginning in the 1980s with the new town of Seaside. I had been there many times over the years, and I was called down to get a prize in the service of the movement, but it was a little disconcerting to see how the build-out had progressed.
The Seaside experiment began very modestly as the idea for a bohemian village of architects and artists in what was then an almost empty quarter of piney woods owned by the St Joe timber company. Seaside was designed so beautifully that it attracted the attention of every thoracic surgeon and corporate lawyer between Nashville and New Orleans, and pretty soon Seaside became the Riviera of the sunbelt's economic elite – and came in for gales of criticism for becoming that. The newer houses and commercial structures grew ever grander, as a Boomer generation status competition ramped up into the new millennium. Several more, ever-grander New Urbanist towns sprouted along the adjacent beaches, some of the most recent composed of immense mansions embarrassing in their opulence. The outcome was a little scary, especially now that the fortunes behind many of these mansions may be threatened by the multiplying fiascos of finance and economy overspreading the nation like a vicious plague.
The New Urbanists had not set out to build monuments to Yuppie-Boomer consumerism, but a peculiar destiny shoved them into that role for a while – even while they toiled elsewhere around the nation to reform town planning laws and generally provide an antidote to the fatal cultural cancer of sprawl, that is, of a settlement pattern guaranteed to comprehensively bankrupt our society. Anyway, the collapse of the housing bubble has affected the New Urbanists' business, too, and this may turn out to be a very good thing because they can put aside the distractions of building very grand places to sop up ill-gotten wealth and focus on the issues that Mr. Obama's people should have been paying attention to all along, namely, how are we going to reform the way we live in this country and what will be the physical manifestation of how we live in the decades to come.
The New Urbanists have preached for years that conventional suburbia would fail America in the long run, and that we'd have to prepare for this failure by restoring traditional modes of occupying the landscape. So far, the Obama team has not been willing to identify the suburban system as the heart of our economic problem. They can't recognize it for what it truly is: a living arrangement with no future – and an economic, ecological, and spiritual disaster. It is, of course, the primary reason why we find ourselves in the deadly predicament of importing over two-thirds of the oil we use every day.
But then, more than half the population lives the suburban way of life, with its deadly mortgage traps, its mandatory motoring, and its civic disengagements. Nobody in power dares tell the truth: that we can't live this way anymore.
But there are scores of places like Montgomery, Alabama, and thousands of traditional main street small towns that are sitting out there waiting to be re-activated. We need to do this much more than we need to build new freeways to the beach. Suburbia is not going to be abandoned overnight (even if it fails logistically and economically !) but we have got to arrive at a consensus about rehabilitating our forsaken small cities and small towns. The New Urbanists have gathered, organized, and codified all the principle and methodology needed to carry out this campaign. This should be their moment. Mr. Obama and his team should get with the program.
"We will not apologize for our way of life...." This unfortunate phrase from President Obama's otherwise sturdy inaugural address, echoed through my mind last week as I cruised the suburban outlands of Montgomery, Alabama.
All the usual commercial furnishings of consumerist America hugged the flattish ochre and dusty-green landscape of played-out cotton fields where thirty feet of topsoil has washed away in the two hundred years since the mainly English settlers shoved out the native Alabamu, Coosa, and Tallapoosa. Along the low horizon, mall followed strip mall followed "lifestyle center," book-ending the "one house" failed subdivisions of otherwise empty unsold lots in a cavalcade of floundering enterprise. It seemed at times as if the terrain was a kind of sea-like expanse, and all the retail boxes ghost ships drifting to oblivion.
They say that the banks have stopped calling in their loans on the commercial real estate, even though the owners of the malls and strip malls have arrived firmly in default. Calling in the loans would only pin another horrifying liability on the banks' balance sheets. So all parties join in a game of "pretend," that nothing has really happened to the fundamental equations of business life. Something similar goes on at the next level down, where the tenants of the malls and strip malls sink deeper into rent arrears every month, and the eviction process is simply postponed, while the stores themselves put off paying their vendors and suppliers – as the whole system, the whole way of life, enters upon a circle-jerk of mutual denial in a last desperate effort to forestall the mandates of reality .
How long will these games go on? This is the primary question that haunts the republic as we wait for new TARPS, and "bad banks," economic stimulus packages, infrastructure renewal roll-outs, and other policy life-lines thrown out in guarded hopefulness to haul America out of a ditch.
The center of Montgomery was instructive, too. Not unlike any other city in the USA (pop. about 200,000), the former main artery of downtown commerce – Dexter Avenue, rolling out like a red carpet below the state capitol hill, where Martin Luther King's early career kicked off in a modest red brick church, and where Rosa Parks famously refused to move to the back of her bus – this "main street" presented a sad sequence of empty shopfronts interrupted here and there by rather creepy amateur murals depicting the cruelties of slavery, as if a remonstrance to the politicos up the hill. Most of the buildings lining the avenue still stood burdened by the clownish facade re-doos and ghastly claddings of the 1950s, which had replaced the ordered classical-vernacular decorum of the original 19th century frontages. Once the malls had landed in the old cotton fields, and MLK moved on to Atlanta, Dexter Avenue was just left to rot in the memory trunk.
Here and there around the rest of the downtown, other weird experiments in American post-war anti-urbanism presented themselves, most notably a "building" designed to look like a small-scaled Death Star, all black reflective glass, canted concrete and steel walls – which turned out to belong to Morris Dees' renowned Southern Poverty Law Center -- deployed directly across the street from the modest white clapboard-with-green-shutters house once occupied by Jefferson Davis after Richmond fell and the Confederate leadership skeedaddled further south. There were a few recently-built government towers that looked like Nascar trophies. But the rest of the downtown – the parts not dedicated to surface parking – was the ubiquitous array of muffler shops, or restaurants and churches that looked like muffler shops.
With the city center thus nearly dead, and the asteroid belt of malls and strips on their knees financially, this emblematic sunbelt metro area finds itself in a pickle. Cotton being well-past decline, and having wrecked the soil, the "new" economy of recent decades dedicated itself to building car-dependent air-conditioned suburban sprawl – the perceived perfect antidote to a previous economic order based on serfdom, hook-worm, and inescapable heat. That now-not-so-new economy of sprawl, in turn, has come to a screeching halt, as a cruel destiny threw sand in the mechanisms of reliably cheap oil and revolving credit, and the gears seized up. A mood of ominous watching and waiting pervaded the city, but many of the movers-and-shakers had pinned their hopes on the chance that Mr. Obama's stimulus bill would allow them to commence building a new freeway to the ocean on the Florida panhandle.
My journey continued on the Jesus-haunted blue highways, to that selfsame place, Walton County, Florida, where some of the most famous experiments in the New Urbanism were conducted beginning in the 1980s with the new town of Seaside. I had been there many times over the years, and I was called down to get a prize in the service of the movement, but it was a little disconcerting to see how the build-out had progressed.
The Seaside experiment began very modestly as the idea for a bohemian village of architects and artists in what was then an almost empty quarter of piney woods owned by the St Joe timber company. Seaside was designed so beautifully that it attracted the attention of every thoracic surgeon and corporate lawyer between Nashville and New Orleans, and pretty soon Seaside became the Riviera of the sunbelt's economic elite – and came in for gales of criticism for becoming that. The newer houses and commercial structures grew ever grander, as a Boomer generation status competition ramped up into the new millennium. Several more, ever-grander New Urbanist towns sprouted along the adjacent beaches, some of the most recent composed of immense mansions embarrassing in their opulence. The outcome was a little scary, especially now that the fortunes behind many of these mansions may be threatened by the multiplying fiascos of finance and economy overspreading the nation like a vicious plague.
The New Urbanists had not set out to build monuments to Yuppie-Boomer consumerism, but a peculiar destiny shoved them into that role for a while – even while they toiled elsewhere around the nation to reform town planning laws and generally provide an antidote to the fatal cultural cancer of sprawl, that is, of a settlement pattern guaranteed to comprehensively bankrupt our society. Anyway, the collapse of the housing bubble has affected the New Urbanists' business, too, and this may turn out to be a very good thing because they can put aside the distractions of building very grand places to sop up ill-gotten wealth and focus on the issues that Mr. Obama's people should have been paying attention to all along, namely, how are we going to reform the way we live in this country and what will be the physical manifestation of how we live in the decades to come.
The New Urbanists have preached for years that conventional suburbia would fail America in the long run, and that we'd have to prepare for this failure by restoring traditional modes of occupying the landscape. So far, the Obama team has not been willing to identify the suburban system as the heart of our economic problem. They can't recognize it for what it truly is: a living arrangement with no future – and an economic, ecological, and spiritual disaster. It is, of course, the primary reason why we find ourselves in the deadly predicament of importing over two-thirds of the oil we use every day.
But then, more than half the population lives the suburban way of life, with its deadly mortgage traps, its mandatory motoring, and its civic disengagements. Nobody in power dares tell the truth: that we can't live this way anymore.
But there are scores of places like Montgomery, Alabama, and thousands of traditional main street small towns that are sitting out there waiting to be re-activated. We need to do this much more than we need to build new freeways to the beach. Suburbia is not going to be abandoned overnight (even if it fails logistically and economically !) but we have got to arrive at a consensus about rehabilitating our forsaken small cities and small towns. The New Urbanists have gathered, organized, and codified all the principle and methodology needed to carry out this campaign. This should be their moment. Mr. Obama and his team should get with the program.
Your government: not telling the truth... CSX and Parkland ... by gimleteye
SPRAWL: WHAT A COOKED ECONOMIC MODEL LOOKS LIKE
If you watch big infrastructure projects unfold in the United States, it becomes clear that the public hearing process is a game played by developers, bankers, engineering firms and insider-driven government agencies to vet decisions that were already been made; how to plow more people into more suburbs.
This model, broke and cooked in the economic crisis, still has energy. It is all they know how to do. Take Florida Power and Light, for example. The electric utility is already charging customers for the $100 million planning effort to put new nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, despite the fact of significant uncertainties: where the cooling water will come from (60-90 million gallons per day) has not been disclosed or permitted nor the pesky matter of providing lime rock fill to raise the height of the reactors' base 20 feet above sea level.
In a fair public process, these details would have been fully disclosed by multi-billion dollar FPL before putting the project on rail tracks to permitting. Instead, and in the particular case of the rock mining issue, the utility prevailed on Miami Dade County Commissioners to allow the project to move forward with a special use permit. The public hearing process was a complete charade. And if you really want to dig deeper, you will find FPL in the process of changing more codes to allow it to rock mine in places the county already decided was a bad idea.
From FPL's point of view, despite the worst economy since the Depression, the corporate growth model is planned on decadal time lines. People come and go, but ultimately the corporate interest is the only enduring fact of life. Besides, a whole set of engineers and planners and lobbyists have very little to do if they can't be employed priming the pump for future profits. And since there is no business model other than jacking up units of consumption-- and since there is no plan to impose real limits through regulations or rules to mandate profit based on conservation-- the legions are not only at work, they are working through the process of using the trillion dollar fiscal stimulus, the centerpiece of the Obama economic rescue effort, to their advantage.
An even better place to view this phenomenon is the fast growing suburb of West Kendall near Tamiami Airport and SW 137th Avenue. The Miami Herald featured this area. (The Herald could have but didn't link the growth of this area in the past few years to the same political/ business interests we describe at length on this blog (see our archive, "production homebuilders", "Parkland", "UDB"). Despite the fact this area is littered with foreclosures, the decadal leap to the next ring suburb is well underway: it is called Parkland and its edge is Krome Avenue and the Urban Development Boundary.
One of the key obstacles to further suburban expansion is overwhelming traffic, a phenomenon that the Herald continues to portray as an inevitable consequence of needed growth. County Commissioner Joe Martinez, whose relationships on behalf of homebuilders is well documented, has made a virtual jihad to use the CSX rail right-of-way to make the traffic concerns "go away". The Parkland developers are prominent campaign contributors to GOP causes and campaigns. One of Jeb Bush's final acts as governor was to initiate a deal with CSX for public access to its rail lines, and although most of its property under scrutiny is in the Orlando area, there is the pesky matter of CSX access benefiting his political base in western Miami-Dade.
If this is how the world continues to work, there is every reason to believe the trillion dollar fiscal stimulus plan will be abused and that the taxpayer will be used to benefit the same interests who fomented the housing bubble and its catastrophic decline. In the first place, they manipulated risk analyses and printed financial derivatives to mint billions in private profit. Today, all they need are government printing presses.
January 25, 2009
KENDALL
Miami-Dade to host traffic project meetings
BY YUDY PINEIRO
YPINEIRO@MIAMIHERALD.COM
The Metropolitan Planning Organization, Miami-Dade County's transportation planning arm, will host a series of meetings this week where road planners will discuss upcoming projects intended to ease road congestion.
On Tuesday, the public is invited to a meeting that revisits the controversial portion of a 2007 study where planners analyzed rapid transit options for the Kendall area. It examines the transportation options along the existing CSX rail corridor from Miami International Airport through Kendall and other parts of Southwest Miami-Dade.
The meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Kendall Branch Library, 9101 SW 97th Ave.
If you can't make it, the MPO plans to host more meetings as the study gets underway.
The estimated completion date for the study is sometime in June.
Also this week, Southwest Miami-Dade residents are invited to a meeting that will discuss a draft of the long-range transportation plan, which considers necessary improvements to the county's transportation system through the year 2035.
The goals of the long-term plan are to incorporate highway, transit, bicycle and pedestrian improvements in an effort to increase mobility. The final draft of the plan is due before the governing board of the MPO by the end of the year.
The meeting is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the West Kendall Regional Library, 10201 Hammocks Blvd.
There are other meetings scheduled across the county.
For more information on the meetings or a copy of the long-range transportation plan, call 305-375-4507 or go to the MPO website at www.miamidade.gov/mpo.
PALM BEACH POST
Home > Q: The Florida Politics Blog > Archives > 2009 > February > 03 > Entry
DOCKERY PLEADS WITH CRIST TO REDO CSX DEAL
By Dara Kam | Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 10:43 PM
Sen. Paula Dockery is (again) calling on Gov. Charlie Crist to put the brakes on a Central Florida commuter rail deal the day before he is scheduled to hold a press conference touting the project, recently dubbed "Sunrail."
Dockery, a Lakeland Republican, sent Crist a letter this evening critiquing the deal in which the state would pay transportation giant CSX Transportation $640 million for 61.5 miles of track while continuing to allow the railroad giant to operate freight trains on the line. The agreement also gives CSX $400 million for improvements on its other rail lines.
Dockery opposes the deal, in part, because the agreement hatched between CSX and state transportation officials could more than triple the number of freight trains that run each day through downtown Lakeland from 16 to 54.
"Did you know that at $10.5 million per mile, Florida would pay the highest rail-sale price in U.S. history? And that taxpayers would pay for CSX's mistakes on our tracks, even if the freight railroad is grossly negligent? And that the CSX route would only take 3,600 cars off Interstate 4?" Dockery wrote, likening the deal to "the giveaways and corporate welfare that government readily hands out."
Lawmakers failed to approve a bill including the commuter rail project last session but supporters - including House Speaker Designate Dean Cannon of Orlando - are hoping to pass it before this legislative session ends in May.
Crist will be joined by Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, a former state senator, a major proponent of the commuter rail project.
If you watch big infrastructure projects unfold in the United States, it becomes clear that the public hearing process is a game played by developers, bankers, engineering firms and insider-driven government agencies to vet decisions that were already been made; how to plow more people into more suburbs.This model, broke and cooked in the economic crisis, still has energy. It is all they know how to do. Take Florida Power and Light, for example. The electric utility is already charging customers for the $100 million planning effort to put new nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, despite the fact of significant uncertainties: where the cooling water will come from (60-90 million gallons per day) has not been disclosed or permitted nor the pesky matter of providing lime rock fill to raise the height of the reactors' base 20 feet above sea level.
In a fair public process, these details would have been fully disclosed by multi-billion dollar FPL before putting the project on rail tracks to permitting. Instead, and in the particular case of the rock mining issue, the utility prevailed on Miami Dade County Commissioners to allow the project to move forward with a special use permit. The public hearing process was a complete charade. And if you really want to dig deeper, you will find FPL in the process of changing more codes to allow it to rock mine in places the county already decided was a bad idea.
From FPL's point of view, despite the worst economy since the Depression, the corporate growth model is planned on decadal time lines. People come and go, but ultimately the corporate interest is the only enduring fact of life. Besides, a whole set of engineers and planners and lobbyists have very little to do if they can't be employed priming the pump for future profits. And since there is no business model other than jacking up units of consumption-- and since there is no plan to impose real limits through regulations or rules to mandate profit based on conservation-- the legions are not only at work, they are working through the process of using the trillion dollar fiscal stimulus, the centerpiece of the Obama economic rescue effort, to their advantage.
An even better place to view this phenomenon is the fast growing suburb of West Kendall near Tamiami Airport and SW 137th Avenue. The Miami Herald featured this area. (The Herald could have but didn't link the growth of this area in the past few years to the same political/ business interests we describe at length on this blog (see our archive, "production homebuilders", "Parkland", "UDB"). Despite the fact this area is littered with foreclosures, the decadal leap to the next ring suburb is well underway: it is called Parkland and its edge is Krome Avenue and the Urban Development Boundary.
One of the key obstacles to further suburban expansion is overwhelming traffic, a phenomenon that the Herald continues to portray as an inevitable consequence of needed growth. County Commissioner Joe Martinez, whose relationships on behalf of homebuilders is well documented, has made a virtual jihad to use the CSX rail right-of-way to make the traffic concerns "go away". The Parkland developers are prominent campaign contributors to GOP causes and campaigns. One of Jeb Bush's final acts as governor was to initiate a deal with CSX for public access to its rail lines, and although most of its property under scrutiny is in the Orlando area, there is the pesky matter of CSX access benefiting his political base in western Miami-Dade.
If this is how the world continues to work, there is every reason to believe the trillion dollar fiscal stimulus plan will be abused and that the taxpayer will be used to benefit the same interests who fomented the housing bubble and its catastrophic decline. In the first place, they manipulated risk analyses and printed financial derivatives to mint billions in private profit. Today, all they need are government printing presses.
January 25, 2009
KENDALL
Miami-Dade to host traffic project meetings
BY YUDY PINEIRO
YPINEIRO@MIAMIHERALD.COM
The Metropolitan Planning Organization, Miami-Dade County's transportation planning arm, will host a series of meetings this week where road planners will discuss upcoming projects intended to ease road congestion.
On Tuesday, the public is invited to a meeting that revisits the controversial portion of a 2007 study where planners analyzed rapid transit options for the Kendall area. It examines the transportation options along the existing CSX rail corridor from Miami International Airport through Kendall and other parts of Southwest Miami-Dade.
The meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Kendall Branch Library, 9101 SW 97th Ave.
If you can't make it, the MPO plans to host more meetings as the study gets underway.
The estimated completion date for the study is sometime in June.
Also this week, Southwest Miami-Dade residents are invited to a meeting that will discuss a draft of the long-range transportation plan, which considers necessary improvements to the county's transportation system through the year 2035.
The goals of the long-term plan are to incorporate highway, transit, bicycle and pedestrian improvements in an effort to increase mobility. The final draft of the plan is due before the governing board of the MPO by the end of the year.
The meeting is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the West Kendall Regional Library, 10201 Hammocks Blvd.
There are other meetings scheduled across the county.
For more information on the meetings or a copy of the long-range transportation plan, call 305-375-4507 or go to the MPO website at www.miamidade.gov/mpo.
PALM BEACH POST
Home > Q: The Florida Politics Blog > Archives > 2009 > February > 03 > Entry
DOCKERY PLEADS WITH CRIST TO REDO CSX DEAL
By Dara Kam | Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 10:43 PM
Sen. Paula Dockery is (again) calling on Gov. Charlie Crist to put the brakes on a Central Florida commuter rail deal the day before he is scheduled to hold a press conference touting the project, recently dubbed "Sunrail."
Dockery, a Lakeland Republican, sent Crist a letter this evening critiquing the deal in which the state would pay transportation giant CSX Transportation $640 million for 61.5 miles of track while continuing to allow the railroad giant to operate freight trains on the line. The agreement also gives CSX $400 million for improvements on its other rail lines.
Dockery opposes the deal, in part, because the agreement hatched between CSX and state transportation officials could more than triple the number of freight trains that run each day through downtown Lakeland from 16 to 54.
"Did you know that at $10.5 million per mile, Florida would pay the highest rail-sale price in U.S. history? And that taxpayers would pay for CSX's mistakes on our tracks, even if the freight railroad is grossly negligent? And that the CSX route would only take 3,600 cars off Interstate 4?" Dockery wrote, likening the deal to "the giveaways and corporate welfare that government readily hands out."
Lawmakers failed to approve a bill including the commuter rail project last session but supporters - including House Speaker Designate Dean Cannon of Orlando - are hoping to pass it before this legislative session ends in May.
Crist will be joined by Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, a former state senator, a major proponent of the commuter rail project.
Lobbyists: Who are the hotshots, here is a whirlwind tour. By Geniusofdespair
I searched from 11/01/08 to present on the Miami Dade County Lobbyist list to get the skinny on who of note is signing up clients. Ron Book recently signed up with Lennar and WRS Infrastructure & Environmental. Old timer, Miguel DeGrandy (Natacha’s favorite son) has American Earth Movers, Inc., Lanzo Construction Co., and RM/LLC Joint Venture. Miguel Diaz De La Portilla (is he really running against State Senator Julio Robaina?) is representing, Gurri Matute, PA, MCM Corporation and Solutions Construction, Inc. Apparently State Rep. Erik Fresen is a new golden boy lobbyist representing Zoning applications for such clients as:
I & D Associates, Armando Garcia, B & F Marine, MD Holdings II and Gold River Corporation. Mario Garcia-Serra is representing Greenberg Traurig (why do they need a lobbyist?). Niesen Kasdin is representing McCormack Baron Salazar Inc. and Robert Krawcheck is representing Krome Gold Ranches II, LLP. Dusty Melton has Corporate Park of Doral and WRS infrastructure & Environmental. My most un-favorite lobbyist, Sergio Pereira also has WRS Infrastructure & Environmental and Spillis Candela DMJM.
Who are American Earth Movers and McCormack Baron Salazar? They each have a lot of lobbyists. Ramon Rasco has that old favorite, Secure Wrap of Miami, Inc. Greenberg Traurig’s Clifford Schulman has Leistel Tsi-A-Fatt. Rawn N. Williams has the hardest job of all, he signed up to represent Merrill Lynch 1/14/2009.
A Feast of Vultures: on corruption
Arno J Mayer is emeritus professor of history at Princeton University. He is the author of The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. The following is reprinted from the website, Counterpunch.
February 4, 2009
A Feast of Vultures
On Corruption
By ARNO J. MAYER
At irregular intervals the U.S. is shaken by high-profile cases of political and financial corruption. Every time the media indignantly denounces the miscreants as if to reaffirm that except for them America remains unspotted and innocent. There is barely a mention of the corrupt practices and conventions inherent in contemporary finance capitalism.
Rod Blagojevich, governor of Illinois and would-be grifter, and Bernard Madoff, worldly moneyman, momentarily capture the headlines. With his alleged offer to auction off a U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder, Blagojevich followed in the steps of Plunkett of Tamany Hall and is a piker compared to Madoff, whose alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is apparently history’s largest private financial fraud. Ex-chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market and one of its major players, for decades Madoff lubricated his venture by making strategic political contributions and mixed business with philanthropy, in the process raising his social status and soothing his conscience. The explosion of Wall Street’s government-condoned financial bubble exposed Madoff’s pyramid scheme, which can only be understood in the context of the larger praxis and culture of corruption that makes it so difficult for President Barack Obama to separate the wheat from the chaff as he forms his cabinet, White House staff, and inner circle of advisers.
Corruption is a highly polemical word-concept, its rhetorical use adapted to political warfare. Its charges—including bribery, extortion, nepotism—are leveled to mobilize popular and partisan support against incumbents or rivals. A phenomenon of group psychology and action, the meanings attached to the word corruption have changed from one civilization to another, from one century to another, and from one country to another. To think critically about corruption is to think about venality not only in politics but also in economics, finance, religion, sports, the arts, education, and social intercourse. Even so, private individuals who tender bribes are judged and penalized much less severely than politicians, government officials, and bureaucrats who solicit and pocket them, presumably because they betray a public trust. The imbalance is greater in societies where the richest of the rich, both individual and corporate, are in a position to corrupt public servants of modest means.
If man is innately venal it is hardly surprising that elected politicians and state functionaries are corruptible. Political society is not ruled by angels mindful of prayer books. By the nature and logic of things, and in the words of Lord Acton, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Since corruption is chronic in political and civil society (and at certain moments, as Bertolt Brecht observed, “to find an official who accepts a bribe is to find humanity”), the issue is not corruption as such, but its scale and virulence and pervasiveness. So-called primitive societies may well have been the least open to corruption, since there was little if any separation between the private and public sphere, which is a precondition for bribery to subvert non-venal gift-giving. But there was bribery, especially of judges, among the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hebrews. In Greece, by the fourth century B.C.E., bribery developed along with the growth of city, economy, and government, as well as with the need to pack public assemblies. Ancient Rome was never free of venality, though it only began to suffuse civil and political society during the late republic and with imperial expansion: sale of public offices, contracts, and concessions, capped by clientage and the buying off of the plebs with “bread and circuses.” Even the office of Emperor occasionally went to the highest bidder.
Whereas ecclesiastic simony was probably the most common graft of the Middle Ages, the purchase or sale of public places, especially judicial and tax offices, became not uncommon in France and England in early modern Europe, as a complement to hereditary offices. Europe’s overseas colonization provided new avenues for corruption in the metropole as well as in distant imperial provinces. Corruption has always been part of and necessary to imperialism, involving the purchase and sale of fat charters, concessions, and contracts for the economic and fiscal exploitation of colonies, particularly for the extraction of nonrenewable resources and commodities.
Corruption, then, is not equally prevalent always and everywhere. In moments of radical economic transition and social change, when governmental and legal structures are inchoate and social conventions are in flux—in the United States from 1865 to 1890; in the new states of post-colonial Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia; in the lands of the ex-Soviet Union and its former satellites since 1989—corruption becomes rampant and glaring by virtue of unhoped-for opportunities for tempter and tempted alike. Grand corruption overtakes petty graft.
With its moving frontier, particularly from the time of the Civil War to beyond the fin-de-siècle, America excelled in corruption. The legendary robber barons and captains of industry, retrospectively celebrated as the founders of modern American capitalism, built their business empires with calculated recourse to the massive corruption of government—local, state, federal—for private gain. In a climate of relative and widely condoned moral laxity, fraud and graft ran wild, particularly in the frenetic race for rights of way for railroads; for land grants from the public domain for the exploitation of timber, minerals, and oil; and for favorable tariffs, taxes, and business regulations. To achieve their ends, Cooke and Gould, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, Huntington and Stanford, Frick and Carnegie spent vast sums to “fix” things. They competed in bribing senators and representatives of both parties, in suborning elections, in buying newspapers, and in seducing public intellectuals.
A few magnates, hoping to cut the cost of fixing things, themselves stood for public office, using their wealth to secure political power. The giants of certain industries, rather than fight each other in the face of relatively toothless government controls, colluded to form lobbies and, eventually, to merge their firms. As of the late 1870s, because of his fraudulent and illegal practices in building up Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller became a notorious fugitive from justice. To elude process servers he kept crossing state borders until, fearful of being arrested and extradited, he holed up in his estate in Pocantico, New York, surrounded by security guards, to fend off servers of subpoenas. With time, eager to improve his image and status, the oil mogul began to funnel some of his tainted wealth into philanthropic works, prompting Mark Twain’s assessment that through “all the ages three fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience-money.”
In the twentieth century, America’s emergence as an imperial power could not help but bring about an efflorescence of corruption. Compared to the directly ruled Roman and overseas European empires, the indirectly linked U.S. empire gave rise to a military-industrial complex which became cause and effect of constantly rising public expenditures for enormous military contracts which, historically, have been exceptionally conducive to jobbing. The growth of this mighty “defense” establishment, with military bases and subaltern allies the world over, goes hand in hand with imperial America’s global reach for critical and invaluable commodities entailing enormously lucrative but also highly corruptible contracts. This grab is facilitated by the American lead in aeronautics, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and computer technology, all of which call for licensing, fraught with influence-peddling.
In this era of universal finance capitalism, yesterday’s pork-barrel and log-rolling politics has been overtaken by hyper-corruption, both straightforward and circuitous, legal and unlawful. With the sweeping deindustrialization of America, there is no longer a senator to represent the state of Boeing nor a corporate CEO—and future defense secretary (GM chief Charles Wilson)—to proclaim that “what is good for General Motors is good for America.” The objectives have become altogether less insular: bribes, in the form of campaign contributions and gifts, are designed to influence, if not buy, legislative and administrative decisions to benefit giant interests, many of them transnational. Indeed, with the globalization of economy and finance, corruption has become global as well. Suitors and supplicants resort to it in the quest for business contracts and political leverage.
With corruption systemic in the U. S., not just mega-corporations and financial companies practice it but so do rating agencies and accounting firms. And it festers in the Old World where the Vivendi, Parmalat, and Afinsa/Escala scandals are analogous to the Enron and WorldCom scandals in the New World.
Obviously not all the culprits are big-time corporate executives. There remain super-wealthy individuals who fix things as a matter of course. Bill Gates and Sergey Brin, Warren Buffet and George Soros do so aboveboard; the likes of Marc Rich and Boris Berezovsky act surreptitiously. The latter know no national loyalty: Rich renounced his American citizenship to acquire Spanish, Swiss, and Israeli passports to facilitate staying ahead of the law; Berezovsky fled to the United Kingdom to escape Russian courts. Confirming Mark Twain’s maxim, all make large bequests to philanthropic causes.
Overall, however, most of the great tempters are faceless CEOs who seek to advance corporate fortunes along with their own. Together with well-funded lobbies and pressure groups it is they who do most of the giving to both political parties, leaving organized labor and civic groups far behind. Increasingly, business-friendly Republicans and Democrats, their elections and advancements heavily financed—hence swayed—by big corporations and trade associations, are hegemonic in the legislative, executive, and administrative branches of government at the federal, state, and local levels. The symbiosis between corporate business and corporate government is made possible by the revolving door between the private and public sector. Without severing their links to the Beltway the insiders become outsiders promoting interests pending an eventual return to power. To bolster their pedigrees many seek and secure affiliations with elite universities or think tanks.
While out of power the highest-level and most visible politicos and functionaries monetize their experience and connections in government, corporate business, and high society at home and abroad. Jimmy Carter apart, ex-presidents today seek and command huge fees for oily corporate speeches. Former cabinet members and top advisors set up, join, or counsel high-powered consulting firms that engage in transnational influence-peddling and lobbying on behalf of domestic and foreign corporate clients, charging fees in keeping with their vaunted access to the inner corridors of political and corporate power: on the Republican side, James Baker III, Henry Kissinger, Thomas McLarty, Peter Peterson, and John W. Snow; Democrats include Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, William Cohen, Carla Hills, and Richard Holbrook.
James Baker’s Carlyle Group, with ex-President George H. W. Bush as its senior advisor, is prototypical of these corruption tanks, which, in collaboration with major law, investment, accounting, and public relations firms, constitute a formidable nexus of influence and power. Retired senior officers of the armed forces similarly cash in on their credentials and access by advising defense contractors and performing as military analysts in the media.
The 21st century is witnessing the birth of a new concert of nations to be dominated by several great powers, not just one. Although their political systems differ radically, they are all anchored in and driven by a new form of state capitalism. The rivalries among the major state actors will be intensified by sharpened competition for access to or control of increasingly scarce resources—energy, food, and water. In addition population growth will continue to be centered in chronically unstable countries racked by poverty and malnutrition. Not a few of these wretched states are endowed with valuable natural resources controlled by narrow and venal inveterate elites.
The reversion to a multinational world system dominated by several great powers practicing a new kind of mercantilism is a boon to corruption. The corruption-mongers of state finance capitalism are working hand-in-glove with the creatively destructive robber barons and fixers of emerging and failing states. The former decry the latter for their crude and blatant corruption and nepotism all the while they wheel and deal with them. As for the likes of Blagojevich and Madoff, they will continue to figure as colorful supernumeraries while serving to deflect attention from the feast of vultures.
February 4, 2009
A Feast of Vultures
On Corruption
By ARNO J. MAYER
At irregular intervals the U.S. is shaken by high-profile cases of political and financial corruption. Every time the media indignantly denounces the miscreants as if to reaffirm that except for them America remains unspotted and innocent. There is barely a mention of the corrupt practices and conventions inherent in contemporary finance capitalism.
Rod Blagojevich, governor of Illinois and would-be grifter, and Bernard Madoff, worldly moneyman, momentarily capture the headlines. With his alleged offer to auction off a U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder, Blagojevich followed in the steps of Plunkett of Tamany Hall and is a piker compared to Madoff, whose alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is apparently history’s largest private financial fraud. Ex-chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market and one of its major players, for decades Madoff lubricated his venture by making strategic political contributions and mixed business with philanthropy, in the process raising his social status and soothing his conscience. The explosion of Wall Street’s government-condoned financial bubble exposed Madoff’s pyramid scheme, which can only be understood in the context of the larger praxis and culture of corruption that makes it so difficult for President Barack Obama to separate the wheat from the chaff as he forms his cabinet, White House staff, and inner circle of advisers.
Corruption is a highly polemical word-concept, its rhetorical use adapted to political warfare. Its charges—including bribery, extortion, nepotism—are leveled to mobilize popular and partisan support against incumbents or rivals. A phenomenon of group psychology and action, the meanings attached to the word corruption have changed from one civilization to another, from one century to another, and from one country to another. To think critically about corruption is to think about venality not only in politics but also in economics, finance, religion, sports, the arts, education, and social intercourse. Even so, private individuals who tender bribes are judged and penalized much less severely than politicians, government officials, and bureaucrats who solicit and pocket them, presumably because they betray a public trust. The imbalance is greater in societies where the richest of the rich, both individual and corporate, are in a position to corrupt public servants of modest means.
If man is innately venal it is hardly surprising that elected politicians and state functionaries are corruptible. Political society is not ruled by angels mindful of prayer books. By the nature and logic of things, and in the words of Lord Acton, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Since corruption is chronic in political and civil society (and at certain moments, as Bertolt Brecht observed, “to find an official who accepts a bribe is to find humanity”), the issue is not corruption as such, but its scale and virulence and pervasiveness. So-called primitive societies may well have been the least open to corruption, since there was little if any separation between the private and public sphere, which is a precondition for bribery to subvert non-venal gift-giving. But there was bribery, especially of judges, among the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hebrews. In Greece, by the fourth century B.C.E., bribery developed along with the growth of city, economy, and government, as well as with the need to pack public assemblies. Ancient Rome was never free of venality, though it only began to suffuse civil and political society during the late republic and with imperial expansion: sale of public offices, contracts, and concessions, capped by clientage and the buying off of the plebs with “bread and circuses.” Even the office of Emperor occasionally went to the highest bidder.
Whereas ecclesiastic simony was probably the most common graft of the Middle Ages, the purchase or sale of public places, especially judicial and tax offices, became not uncommon in France and England in early modern Europe, as a complement to hereditary offices. Europe’s overseas colonization provided new avenues for corruption in the metropole as well as in distant imperial provinces. Corruption has always been part of and necessary to imperialism, involving the purchase and sale of fat charters, concessions, and contracts for the economic and fiscal exploitation of colonies, particularly for the extraction of nonrenewable resources and commodities.
Corruption, then, is not equally prevalent always and everywhere. In moments of radical economic transition and social change, when governmental and legal structures are inchoate and social conventions are in flux—in the United States from 1865 to 1890; in the new states of post-colonial Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia; in the lands of the ex-Soviet Union and its former satellites since 1989—corruption becomes rampant and glaring by virtue of unhoped-for opportunities for tempter and tempted alike. Grand corruption overtakes petty graft.
With its moving frontier, particularly from the time of the Civil War to beyond the fin-de-siècle, America excelled in corruption. The legendary robber barons and captains of industry, retrospectively celebrated as the founders of modern American capitalism, built their business empires with calculated recourse to the massive corruption of government—local, state, federal—for private gain. In a climate of relative and widely condoned moral laxity, fraud and graft ran wild, particularly in the frenetic race for rights of way for railroads; for land grants from the public domain for the exploitation of timber, minerals, and oil; and for favorable tariffs, taxes, and business regulations. To achieve their ends, Cooke and Gould, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, Huntington and Stanford, Frick and Carnegie spent vast sums to “fix” things. They competed in bribing senators and representatives of both parties, in suborning elections, in buying newspapers, and in seducing public intellectuals.
A few magnates, hoping to cut the cost of fixing things, themselves stood for public office, using their wealth to secure political power. The giants of certain industries, rather than fight each other in the face of relatively toothless government controls, colluded to form lobbies and, eventually, to merge their firms. As of the late 1870s, because of his fraudulent and illegal practices in building up Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller became a notorious fugitive from justice. To elude process servers he kept crossing state borders until, fearful of being arrested and extradited, he holed up in his estate in Pocantico, New York, surrounded by security guards, to fend off servers of subpoenas. With time, eager to improve his image and status, the oil mogul began to funnel some of his tainted wealth into philanthropic works, prompting Mark Twain’s assessment that through “all the ages three fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience-money.”
In the twentieth century, America’s emergence as an imperial power could not help but bring about an efflorescence of corruption. Compared to the directly ruled Roman and overseas European empires, the indirectly linked U.S. empire gave rise to a military-industrial complex which became cause and effect of constantly rising public expenditures for enormous military contracts which, historically, have been exceptionally conducive to jobbing. The growth of this mighty “defense” establishment, with military bases and subaltern allies the world over, goes hand in hand with imperial America’s global reach for critical and invaluable commodities entailing enormously lucrative but also highly corruptible contracts. This grab is facilitated by the American lead in aeronautics, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and computer technology, all of which call for licensing, fraught with influence-peddling.
In this era of universal finance capitalism, yesterday’s pork-barrel and log-rolling politics has been overtaken by hyper-corruption, both straightforward and circuitous, legal and unlawful. With the sweeping deindustrialization of America, there is no longer a senator to represent the state of Boeing nor a corporate CEO—and future defense secretary (GM chief Charles Wilson)—to proclaim that “what is good for General Motors is good for America.” The objectives have become altogether less insular: bribes, in the form of campaign contributions and gifts, are designed to influence, if not buy, legislative and administrative decisions to benefit giant interests, many of them transnational. Indeed, with the globalization of economy and finance, corruption has become global as well. Suitors and supplicants resort to it in the quest for business contracts and political leverage.
With corruption systemic in the U. S., not just mega-corporations and financial companies practice it but so do rating agencies and accounting firms. And it festers in the Old World where the Vivendi, Parmalat, and Afinsa/Escala scandals are analogous to the Enron and WorldCom scandals in the New World.
Obviously not all the culprits are big-time corporate executives. There remain super-wealthy individuals who fix things as a matter of course. Bill Gates and Sergey Brin, Warren Buffet and George Soros do so aboveboard; the likes of Marc Rich and Boris Berezovsky act surreptitiously. The latter know no national loyalty: Rich renounced his American citizenship to acquire Spanish, Swiss, and Israeli passports to facilitate staying ahead of the law; Berezovsky fled to the United Kingdom to escape Russian courts. Confirming Mark Twain’s maxim, all make large bequests to philanthropic causes.
Overall, however, most of the great tempters are faceless CEOs who seek to advance corporate fortunes along with their own. Together with well-funded lobbies and pressure groups it is they who do most of the giving to both political parties, leaving organized labor and civic groups far behind. Increasingly, business-friendly Republicans and Democrats, their elections and advancements heavily financed—hence swayed—by big corporations and trade associations, are hegemonic in the legislative, executive, and administrative branches of government at the federal, state, and local levels. The symbiosis between corporate business and corporate government is made possible by the revolving door between the private and public sector. Without severing their links to the Beltway the insiders become outsiders promoting interests pending an eventual return to power. To bolster their pedigrees many seek and secure affiliations with elite universities or think tanks.
While out of power the highest-level and most visible politicos and functionaries monetize their experience and connections in government, corporate business, and high society at home and abroad. Jimmy Carter apart, ex-presidents today seek and command huge fees for oily corporate speeches. Former cabinet members and top advisors set up, join, or counsel high-powered consulting firms that engage in transnational influence-peddling and lobbying on behalf of domestic and foreign corporate clients, charging fees in keeping with their vaunted access to the inner corridors of political and corporate power: on the Republican side, James Baker III, Henry Kissinger, Thomas McLarty, Peter Peterson, and John W. Snow; Democrats include Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, William Cohen, Carla Hills, and Richard Holbrook.
James Baker’s Carlyle Group, with ex-President George H. W. Bush as its senior advisor, is prototypical of these corruption tanks, which, in collaboration with major law, investment, accounting, and public relations firms, constitute a formidable nexus of influence and power. Retired senior officers of the armed forces similarly cash in on their credentials and access by advising defense contractors and performing as military analysts in the media.
The 21st century is witnessing the birth of a new concert of nations to be dominated by several great powers, not just one. Although their political systems differ radically, they are all anchored in and driven by a new form of state capitalism. The rivalries among the major state actors will be intensified by sharpened competition for access to or control of increasingly scarce resources—energy, food, and water. In addition population growth will continue to be centered in chronically unstable countries racked by poverty and malnutrition. Not a few of these wretched states are endowed with valuable natural resources controlled by narrow and venal inveterate elites.
The reversion to a multinational world system dominated by several great powers practicing a new kind of mercantilism is a boon to corruption. The corruption-mongers of state finance capitalism are working hand-in-glove with the creatively destructive robber barons and fixers of emerging and failing states. The former decry the latter for their crude and blatant corruption and nepotism all the while they wheel and deal with them. As for the likes of Blagojevich and Madoff, they will continue to figure as colorful supernumeraries while serving to deflect attention from the feast of vultures.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
This Lobbyist List for Florida Power & Light is Obscene. By Geniusofdespair
If what Florida Power & Light was doing at Turkey Point was so righteous, why do they need 42 separate lobbyist entries to lobby the County Commission? Here is their lobbyist list on each issue they are lobbying for ("open" means still working on it):
Open
ALBERT DOTSON, JR.
TURKEY POINT ZONING ISSUES 3/13/2007
Open
STANLEY PRICE
TURKEY POINT ZONING ISSUES 3/13/2007
Open
JEFFREY BERCOW
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/14/2007
Open
MANUEL J ECHEZARRETA
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/14/2007
Open
MICHAEL A GIL
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/14/2007
Open
MICHAEL RADELL
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/14/2007
Open
MELISSA TAPANES LLAHUES
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/14/2007
Open
ROB CURTIS
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/15/2007
Open
STEPHEN W CARNEY
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/16/2007
Open
JEFFREY BERCOW
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
STEPHEN W CARNEY
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
ROB CURTIS
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
MANUEL J ECHEZARRETA
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
RAMON FERRER
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
MICHAEL A GIL
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
MICHAEL RADELL
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
MANNY RODRIGUEZ, JR.
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
MELISSA TAPANES LLAHUES
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
JOAQUIN E VARGAS
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/23/2007
Open
PAMELA RAUCH
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/31/2007
Open
STEVEN SCROGGS
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/31/2007
Open
JEFFREY BERCOW
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
RAMON FERRER
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL A GIL
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
BARBARA P LINKIEWICZ
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL RADELL
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
PAMELA RAUCH
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
MANNY RODRIGUEZ, JR.
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
STEVEN SCROGGS
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL TAMMARO
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
JEFFREY BERCOW
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
RAMON FERRER
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL A GIL
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
BARBARA P LINKIEWICZ
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL RADELL
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
PAMELA RAUCH
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
MANNY RODRIGUEZ, JR.
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
STEVEN SCROGGS
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL TAMMARO
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
MELISSA TAPANES LLAHUES
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
open
JORGE L. LOPEZ
GENERAL REPRESENTATION 3/23/1998
Open
GUILLERMO OLMEDILLO
NONE 10/10/2006
Open
ALBERT DOTSON, JR.
TURKEY POINT ZONING ISSUES 3/13/2007
Open
STANLEY PRICE
TURKEY POINT ZONING ISSUES 3/13/2007
Open
JEFFREY BERCOW
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/14/2007
Open
MANUEL J ECHEZARRETA
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/14/2007
Open
MICHAEL A GIL
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/14/2007
Open
MICHAEL RADELL
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/14/2007
Open
MELISSA TAPANES LLAHUES
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/14/2007
Open
ROB CURTIS
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/15/2007
Open
STEPHEN W CARNEY
ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATOR 3/16/2007
Open
JEFFREY BERCOW
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
STEPHEN W CARNEY
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
ROB CURTIS
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
MANUEL J ECHEZARRETA
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
RAMON FERRER
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
MICHAEL A GIL
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
MICHAEL RADELL
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
MANNY RODRIGUEZ, JR.
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
MELISSA TAPANES LLAHUES
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/17/2007
Open
JOAQUIN E VARGAS
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/23/2007
Open
PAMELA RAUCH
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/31/2007
Open
STEVEN SCROGGS
TURKEY POINT UNUSUAL USE APPLICATION 5/31/2007
Open
JEFFREY BERCOW
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
RAMON FERRER
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL A GIL
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
BARBARA P LINKIEWICZ
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL RADELL
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
PAMELA RAUCH
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
MANNY RODRIGUEZ, JR.
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
STEVEN SCROGGS
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL TAMMARO
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 3 & 4 6/9/2008
Open
JEFFREY BERCOW
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
RAMON FERRER
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL A GIL
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
BARBARA P LINKIEWICZ
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL RADELL
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
PAMELA RAUCH
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
MANNY RODRIGUEZ, JR.
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
STEVEN SCROGGS
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
MICHAEL TAMMARO
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
Open
MELISSA TAPANES LLAHUES
MISCELLANEOUS PERMITTING AND ZONING MATTERS TURKEY POINT UNITS 6 & 7 6/9/2008
open
JORGE L. LOPEZ
GENERAL REPRESENTATION 3/23/1998
Open
GUILLERMO OLMEDILLO
NONE 10/10/2006
GOP chaos: will Mel Martinez step down early? How sweet it was ... by gimleteye
The GOP is in trouble in Florida. It's one thing to stand up against Barack Obama, but Florida isn't Washington, DC. State Republicans have had an uninterrupted lock on the executive and legislative branches. Voters can't blame the Democrats in Florida for so much that has gone wrong in the state economy. How sweet it was.
The excesses of the housing bubble not only track back to the GOP agenda; it through shilling for the housing asset bubble that a GOP majority prevailed.
It is a marvel to behold: in fact, if you are an observer of politics we have never seen anything close to it. Who thought the Growth Machine would collapse; particularly the model of suburban sprawl that is fully and completely cooked? The broken Growth Machine gives state legislators very little to do except to cut a budget already cut to the bone. They can't beat up citizens, except Florida Hometown Democracy. With construction and development at a standstill, all the Republican leadership can do is get in trouble: former House Speaker Ray Sansom case in point. What is happening to the GOP sort of has the feeling of an industrious ant colony scattered by a sudden interruption.
Which is one reason it makes sense for Senator Martinez to step down early, giving Governor Charlie Crist the chance to appoint a successor. In 2009 and next year it will be very difficult to raise campaign cash from the usual suspects-- the sprawl lobby-- and where intense national focus will be on the future of Martinez' Senate seat, whoever Governor Crist chooses to fill the vacant US Senate seat would have an instant advantage over a Democratic challenger.
The excesses of the housing bubble not only track back to the GOP agenda; it through shilling for the housing asset bubble that a GOP majority prevailed.
It is a marvel to behold: in fact, if you are an observer of politics we have never seen anything close to it. Who thought the Growth Machine would collapse; particularly the model of suburban sprawl that is fully and completely cooked? The broken Growth Machine gives state legislators very little to do except to cut a budget already cut to the bone. They can't beat up citizens, except Florida Hometown Democracy. With construction and development at a standstill, all the Republican leadership can do is get in trouble: former House Speaker Ray Sansom case in point. What is happening to the GOP sort of has the feeling of an industrious ant colony scattered by a sudden interruption.
Which is one reason it makes sense for Senator Martinez to step down early, giving Governor Charlie Crist the chance to appoint a successor. In 2009 and next year it will be very difficult to raise campaign cash from the usual suspects-- the sprawl lobby-- and where intense national focus will be on the future of Martinez' Senate seat, whoever Governor Crist chooses to fill the vacant US Senate seat would have an instant advantage over a Democratic challenger.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Chris Korge: Fromer Mayor Alex Daoud, Outs His Cousin Korge's Bribes. By Geniusofdespair
Hillary Clinton’s money man, fundraiser for oodles of State and Federal candidates, was highlighted in Former Miami Beach Mayor's tell all book. What Alex Daoud said about Korge in his book is pretty toxic and Daoud stands firmly behind his words. Daoud, a city of Miami Beach Commissioner at the time, said he got pressured by Korge to get him his first job, as an Assistant Attorney in Miami Beach. Daoud said he felt guilty using his influence to get Korge the job, but Korge begged him to do it.
In His book “Sins of South Beach” Daoud recounts two instances when Korge delivered bribes to him. One bribe he accepted. The other he did not.
The second bribe was when Daoud was facing federal criminal charges about to be indicted. He described the meeting with Korge over the bribe:
“During this crucial time, Chris Korge, my cousin and the man who had given me my first bribe as mayor, tried to bribe me again. My cousin had catapulted from his early job in the city attorney’s office to become a wealthy national political lobbyist. He was making big money — the Marriot Hotel chain had hired him as a lobbyist. They wanted to build a hotel on the only oceanfront city-owned park in South Beach. Chris offered me twenty five thousand in cash for my support and vote on the project. I refused, telling him that the FBI was about to indict me. Unbelievably, he raised the ante to fifty thousand.”
This is why reading this book is making me nauseous. The assertions made about Korge are enough to make me want to puke. Politicians treat Korge like a God. he is respected and put on Boards. But if what Daoud said in his book is true, he is nothing but low-life scum, a bottom-feeder and should be treated as such.
The circumstances of the first bribe, as Daoud describes it:
"After the swearing in (new term), my cousin, the former Chief Assistant Miami Beach Attorney Chris Korge congratulated me and handed over a large brown envelope with ten thousand dollars in cash. My cousin hadn't helped me during my election for mayor, but now he was acting as a lobbyist trying to bribe me. In one of the ironic twists that characterizes local politics, it was a campaign contribution from Jim Dougherty, now the husband of former (Miami Beach) city attorney Lucia Allen (Lucia Dougherty), who had been my close confident and lover...My cousin's candor on the matter surprised me; he was acting as a bagman for some attorney I hardly knew.
Superbowl Wrap-Up ... by gimleteye
FOOTBALL HELMET
The American version of football proceeds by fits and starts. There is very little foot in it, except after the fourth play by a team on the offense that has “possession” of the ball or when the team that has scored a touchdown gains an additional point for a set play where a kicker propels the bar through crossbars. Compared to “the beautiful game”, a game of two halves and nearly continuous movement of a round ball propelled by anything but arms or hands of the field players, American football is quartered with teams rotating sides of the field like dueling combatants using anything but feet except during the aforementioned prescribed occasions.
The game proceeds by one set piece after another performed by enormous athletes prized for power, nimbleness, speed and coordination. Each series of four plays, called downs, is calibrated by 10 yard increments measured by referees in pin striped uniforms. For the twenty two men in opposing teams of eleven, American football is a dance of pain and sacrifice to move the ball that rested on the field before the play commenced and ends when the ball again touches ground. A play may last a second, or, a few seconds. A college friend who later played professional football and the Superbowl, too, once told me the difference between the college version of the game was violence.
And money. Forbes calls the NFL (the National Football League) “the richest sports league in the world, with the average value of a team worth $987 million.” The thirty two teams contesting in two divisions to compete for the final championship, the Superbowl, represent a value of $32.5 billion.
On Superbowl Eve, NBC Nightly News featured the security planning for this year’s football championship held in Tampa, Florida. Tampa is also home to MacDill Air Force Base, headquarters of USCENTCOM, where remote control missions by weaponized drones are spun out half-way around the world as smoothly as motorized cameras strung on wires above the field of glory controlled by production trucks outside the stadium.
The reporter noted that the security plans took two years to complete. The two-minute news segment began with a rehearsal; mounted police herding people. On Game Day the US Customs and other government agencies will close the airspace in a thirty mile circle around the Raymond James Stadium. The Tampa chief of police says, “The Secret Service come in and support us on high ground assessment for counter sniper teams.” So do teams of spotters in high booths communicating movements of the opposition to their respective field generals; their methods, according to plans calibrated carefully to expectations of the adversaries’ behavior, culled through HUMANINT. “We’re taking no chances.”
SWAT TEAM
No one is. Chances are for the unprepared, the unprotected, and the reckless. Just in case, SWAT teams are positioned in vans around the stadium watching from within on hand held portable TV’s. The Los Angeles Police Department is generally credited with developing the concept of SWAT in a stand-off with the Black Panthers in 1969, when the Los Angeles Rams finished first in the NFL Coastal Division, and in 1974 with the Symbionese Liberation Army, the year the Rams won the NFC West Division.
The players’ equipment is specially designed clothing, gear, apparatus, for use in urban or suburban stadiums where teams are organized to a rapid, overwhelming response to an immediate threat in gaining field possession and the accumulation of points, or, hits. The gear is designed to protect tactical advantage, allowing players freedom of movement, and gain the advantage in critical situations whether in hot pursuit, or parry and strike.
The players on the field will be protected by helmets that meet the standards of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment. These helmets resemble the same used by riot control deployed around public events celebrating America, or, soldiers in battle dress. Wearing body armor is a balancing act between protection, heat and freedom of movement on the field as it is in battle. The torso and head are usually protected using Kevlar panels and a Kevlar helmet.
SWAT HELMET
Made of Kevlar® ballistic fabric, the SWAT helmet is designed with a low center of gravity. It has a cradle type suspension system and is offset from the head to provide space for deformation caused by projectiles and to allow for increased ventilation. It meets or exceeds military specification MIL-H-44099A and also exceeds the ballistic penetration requirements of NIJ Standard 0106.01. It exceeds the Probable Ballistic Limit (V50) of 2000 fps and withstands an impact force of 40 foot pounds without fracture. The shell is configured so that there are at least 19 layers of Kevlar® throughout any cross-sectional area of the helmet. It includes an adjustable leather headband and a comfortable chin strap assembly to remain on the head to meet the challenge of Rocks, Sticks, Bottles, Acid, Bullets, Fragmentation, Etc. (Neck protectors may or not be included.)
The face mask, which is usually made of plastic or metal bars, attaches to the front of the helmet. There are two types of face masks, the open cage and the closed cage. The open cage usually is preferred by quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers and defensive backfield men because the open cage—with two or three horizontal bars and no vertical bar above the nose—enables better visibility. The closed cage usually is the choice of linesmen because the closed cage—vertical bar running the length of the mask over the nose with two, three, or four horizontal bars—helps to keep other players' fingers and hands out of their eyes. In the 1970s, vinyl coating was layered onto the bars to protect against chipping and abrasions. Soon, colors were added to the face masks as another way to distinguish players and teams. The logo of a player's team usually adorns both sides of the helmet. The NOCSAE warning label states that the helmet should not be used to strike an opponent. Such an action is against football rules and may cause severe brain or neck injury.
The football helmet is manufactured to standards devised to protect against MTBI-Mild Traumatic Brain Injury. For purposes of this standard MTBI is the near threshold brain injury level that typically produces post concussion signs and symptoms without anatomical change.
NOCSAE publishes standards but does not conduct surveillance to assure compliance to standards. It is the sole responsibility of firms that manufacture or recertify protective products to certify that all requirements of these standards are met, including on going statistically relevant QC protocols. Firms utilizing the NOCSAE logo to originally (prior to the first time such product/model is offered for sale) certify products, must submit documentation in the form of a test report from an independent A2LA accredited ISO 17025 certified laboratory, with the appropriate scope.
GRAPHIC OF HELMET TEST
To test the helmet, a headgear is positioned on a headform that is mounted onto a hybrid III neck assembly which is rigidly mounted to a linear bearing table to achieve a somewhat realistic post impact situation. The linear impactor head is propelled at the headgear such that the impact energy (Joules) is within 3% of the specified level. At impact, the instantaneous resultant acceleration is measured by a triaxial accelerometer and the Severity Index calculated.
NOESC recommends a device that is capable of delivering an impact to the target by moving along a straight line towards the target. Like a battering ram, the impactor head (moving section that after acceleration is allowed to free travel to the target in a guided fashion) shall have a mass of 13.3 kg ±3%, and have a convex face conforming to the radius in fig x. The face shall be padded with a polyurethane foam having a density of 13 lbs. pcf and mechanical properties. The impactor shall be capable of delivering impacts at velocities from 6m/s to 12m/s.
The seventy thousand audience wraps the field like polycarbonate. Protecting the stadium from terrorists is the highest purpose of law enforcement surrounding the stadium and continuously monitoring the situation. AP reports, “At least 20 different federal agencies will be involved.”
Vehicles entering the stadium have all been X-ray’d. The NBC News segment shows large X-ray machines scanning the length of tractor trailers, an advanced technique that will someday be in daily use at every American port. Ticket takers and workers will be screened and watched closely by police and Transportation Security Administration officials, employing the same techniques as used at airports to detect suspicious behavior. According to CNN, “TSA spokesman Christopher White said that the officers are being sent at the request of the local police and the FBI, and that it's the first time such officers are assisting with a major sports event.”
Washington Business Journal reports, “Reston-based Kore Telematics and Oklahoma City-based U.S. Fleet Tracking, a vehicle tracking system, teamed up for the third year to secure more than 100 cars carrying football players and entertainment personalities. Each driver will get a Kore-powered vehicle tracking device from U.S. Fleet Tracking. This year, the small device is the size of a cell phone and clips on clothing. The location is transmitted via the Kore network to U.S. Fleet Tracking servers. The installation-free device is allowing nearly five times as many vehicles to be tracked this year over last. Security officials remotely monitor each car’s location through five-second updates and can zoom in to see what lane or parking space a car is in.”
SWAT TEAM DEFENSE
The coordination of the assault with the other components of the tactical elements is executed by the Tactical Commander after the command has been given by the Incident Commander. The Tactical Commander provides instructions to the Tactical Element Leaders for offense, defense, quarterback and special teams. One element is the Emergency Response Team that is immediately given contingency plans and sent to downfield to the crisis site. A team of scouts is then sent to create an assessment of the situation, provide options for entry, methods of safe approach, descriptions, and other salient features like wide out patterns, blocking and tackling, and no-snap huddles. The Team draws maps on paper and practice the movements and timing that will be used in the assault.
To keep track, police have gone high tech with a sophisticated table monitor provided by Microsoft. The Police Chief shows NBC, “I can track location in real time, picture is moveable, pointable, adjustable, I can change elevation. If I have a tactical operation I can bring it in and get as big as I need to.”
On the field, thermal printers are in place to print out for the tactical squad commander observations relayed by non-combatant assistants using computers and databases to record every adversarial trend occurring in real time on the battlefield. Another design feature has been the use of radio receivers in the helmets so that coaches can relay plays to their signal callers. In order to bring the game closer to the fans, a "helmet-cam" also has been used so that fans get to see exactly what the players see on the field. The referees on contested plays can consult with cameras showing the position of the ball from multiple angles in assessing whether the initial decisions was fair or foul to the roar of the crowd, happy that no judgment will be made without the hidden hand of technology.
MARIA BARTIROMO
Four miles from the stadium, the waterways of Tampa are closed off to boat traffic and heavily patrolled by marine police in speedboats with quadruple outboard engines. Then there was Pepsi singing Bob Dylan, “Forever Young”. A twelve minute concert by Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band: It's Boss Time.
According to Maria Bartiromo, MSNBC, the value to GE of commercial advertisements for the Superbowl was $206 million. That is twenty million shy of the recent contract to provide command, control, communications and computer information support for Tampa-based USCENTCOM. General Davd H. Petraeus, commander CENTCOM, conducted the coin toss. Hours earlier, NBC TV host Matt Lauer interviewed President Barack Obama in front of a White House fireplace before his invited guests, Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders, arrived to watch the game. His first question lobbed at the President like an alley-oop pass: what is it like living with your mother-in-law?
Sources:
http://www.madehow.com/Volume-3/Football-Helmet.html
http://tampabay.bizjournals.com/tampabay/stories/2008/10/27/daily33.html
http://www.nocsae.org/
The American version of football proceeds by fits and starts. There is very little foot in it, except after the fourth play by a team on the offense that has “possession” of the ball or when the team that has scored a touchdown gains an additional point for a set play where a kicker propels the bar through crossbars. Compared to “the beautiful game”, a game of two halves and nearly continuous movement of a round ball propelled by anything but arms or hands of the field players, American football is quartered with teams rotating sides of the field like dueling combatants using anything but feet except during the aforementioned prescribed occasions. The game proceeds by one set piece after another performed by enormous athletes prized for power, nimbleness, speed and coordination. Each series of four plays, called downs, is calibrated by 10 yard increments measured by referees in pin striped uniforms. For the twenty two men in opposing teams of eleven, American football is a dance of pain and sacrifice to move the ball that rested on the field before the play commenced and ends when the ball again touches ground. A play may last a second, or, a few seconds. A college friend who later played professional football and the Superbowl, too, once told me the difference between the college version of the game was violence.
And money. Forbes calls the NFL (the National Football League) “the richest sports league in the world, with the average value of a team worth $987 million.” The thirty two teams contesting in two divisions to compete for the final championship, the Superbowl, represent a value of $32.5 billion.
On Superbowl Eve, NBC Nightly News featured the security planning for this year’s football championship held in Tampa, Florida. Tampa is also home to MacDill Air Force Base, headquarters of USCENTCOM, where remote control missions by weaponized drones are spun out half-way around the world as smoothly as motorized cameras strung on wires above the field of glory controlled by production trucks outside the stadium.
The reporter noted that the security plans took two years to complete. The two-minute news segment began with a rehearsal; mounted police herding people. On Game Day the US Customs and other government agencies will close the airspace in a thirty mile circle around the Raymond James Stadium. The Tampa chief of police says, “The Secret Service come in and support us on high ground assessment for counter sniper teams.” So do teams of spotters in high booths communicating movements of the opposition to their respective field generals; their methods, according to plans calibrated carefully to expectations of the adversaries’ behavior, culled through HUMANINT. “We’re taking no chances.”
SWAT TEAM
No one is. Chances are for the unprepared, the unprotected, and the reckless. Just in case, SWAT teams are positioned in vans around the stadium watching from within on hand held portable TV’s. The Los Angeles Police Department is generally credited with developing the concept of SWAT in a stand-off with the Black Panthers in 1969, when the Los Angeles Rams finished first in the NFL Coastal Division, and in 1974 with the Symbionese Liberation Army, the year the Rams won the NFC West Division.
The players’ equipment is specially designed clothing, gear, apparatus, for use in urban or suburban stadiums where teams are organized to a rapid, overwhelming response to an immediate threat in gaining field possession and the accumulation of points, or, hits. The gear is designed to protect tactical advantage, allowing players freedom of movement, and gain the advantage in critical situations whether in hot pursuit, or parry and strike.
The players on the field will be protected by helmets that meet the standards of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment. These helmets resemble the same used by riot control deployed around public events celebrating America, or, soldiers in battle dress. Wearing body armor is a balancing act between protection, heat and freedom of movement on the field as it is in battle. The torso and head are usually protected using Kevlar panels and a Kevlar helmet.
SWAT HELMET
Made of Kevlar® ballistic fabric, the SWAT helmet is designed with a low center of gravity. It has a cradle type suspension system and is offset from the head to provide space for deformation caused by projectiles and to allow for increased ventilation. It meets or exceeds military specification MIL-H-44099A and also exceeds the ballistic penetration requirements of NIJ Standard 0106.01. It exceeds the Probable Ballistic Limit (V50) of 2000 fps and withstands an impact force of 40 foot pounds without fracture. The shell is configured so that there are at least 19 layers of Kevlar® throughout any cross-sectional area of the helmet. It includes an adjustable leather headband and a comfortable chin strap assembly to remain on the head to meet the challenge of Rocks, Sticks, Bottles, Acid, Bullets, Fragmentation, Etc. (Neck protectors may or not be included.)
The face mask, which is usually made of plastic or metal bars, attaches to the front of the helmet. There are two types of face masks, the open cage and the closed cage. The open cage usually is preferred by quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers and defensive backfield men because the open cage—with two or three horizontal bars and no vertical bar above the nose—enables better visibility. The closed cage usually is the choice of linesmen because the closed cage—vertical bar running the length of the mask over the nose with two, three, or four horizontal bars—helps to keep other players' fingers and hands out of their eyes. In the 1970s, vinyl coating was layered onto the bars to protect against chipping and abrasions. Soon, colors were added to the face masks as another way to distinguish players and teams. The logo of a player's team usually adorns both sides of the helmet. The NOCSAE warning label states that the helmet should not be used to strike an opponent. Such an action is against football rules and may cause severe brain or neck injury.
The football helmet is manufactured to standards devised to protect against MTBI-Mild Traumatic Brain Injury. For purposes of this standard MTBI is the near threshold brain injury level that typically produces post concussion signs and symptoms without anatomical change.
NOCSAE publishes standards but does not conduct surveillance to assure compliance to standards. It is the sole responsibility of firms that manufacture or recertify protective products to certify that all requirements of these standards are met, including on going statistically relevant QC protocols. Firms utilizing the NOCSAE logo to originally (prior to the first time such product/model is offered for sale) certify products, must submit documentation in the form of a test report from an independent A2LA accredited ISO 17025 certified laboratory, with the appropriate scope.
GRAPHIC OF HELMET TEST
To test the helmet, a headgear is positioned on a headform that is mounted onto a hybrid III neck assembly which is rigidly mounted to a linear bearing table to achieve a somewhat realistic post impact situation. The linear impactor head is propelled at the headgear such that the impact energy (Joules) is within 3% of the specified level. At impact, the instantaneous resultant acceleration is measured by a triaxial accelerometer and the Severity Index calculated.
NOESC recommends a device that is capable of delivering an impact to the target by moving along a straight line towards the target. Like a battering ram, the impactor head (moving section that after acceleration is allowed to free travel to the target in a guided fashion) shall have a mass of 13.3 kg ±3%, and have a convex face conforming to the radius in fig x. The face shall be padded with a polyurethane foam having a density of 13 lbs. pcf and mechanical properties. The impactor shall be capable of delivering impacts at velocities from 6m/s to 12m/s.
The seventy thousand audience wraps the field like polycarbonate. Protecting the stadium from terrorists is the highest purpose of law enforcement surrounding the stadium and continuously monitoring the situation. AP reports, “At least 20 different federal agencies will be involved.”
Vehicles entering the stadium have all been X-ray’d. The NBC News segment shows large X-ray machines scanning the length of tractor trailers, an advanced technique that will someday be in daily use at every American port. Ticket takers and workers will be screened and watched closely by police and Transportation Security Administration officials, employing the same techniques as used at airports to detect suspicious behavior. According to CNN, “TSA spokesman Christopher White said that the officers are being sent at the request of the local police and the FBI, and that it's the first time such officers are assisting with a major sports event.”
Washington Business Journal reports, “Reston-based Kore Telematics and Oklahoma City-based U.S. Fleet Tracking, a vehicle tracking system, teamed up for the third year to secure more than 100 cars carrying football players and entertainment personalities. Each driver will get a Kore-powered vehicle tracking device from U.S. Fleet Tracking. This year, the small device is the size of a cell phone and clips on clothing. The location is transmitted via the Kore network to U.S. Fleet Tracking servers. The installation-free device is allowing nearly five times as many vehicles to be tracked this year over last. Security officials remotely monitor each car’s location through five-second updates and can zoom in to see what lane or parking space a car is in.”
SWAT TEAM DEFENSE
The coordination of the assault with the other components of the tactical elements is executed by the Tactical Commander after the command has been given by the Incident Commander. The Tactical Commander provides instructions to the Tactical Element Leaders for offense, defense, quarterback and special teams. One element is the Emergency Response Team that is immediately given contingency plans and sent to downfield to the crisis site. A team of scouts is then sent to create an assessment of the situation, provide options for entry, methods of safe approach, descriptions, and other salient features like wide out patterns, blocking and tackling, and no-snap huddles. The Team draws maps on paper and practice the movements and timing that will be used in the assault.
To keep track, police have gone high tech with a sophisticated table monitor provided by Microsoft. The Police Chief shows NBC, “I can track location in real time, picture is moveable, pointable, adjustable, I can change elevation. If I have a tactical operation I can bring it in and get as big as I need to.”
On the field, thermal printers are in place to print out for the tactical squad commander observations relayed by non-combatant assistants using computers and databases to record every adversarial trend occurring in real time on the battlefield. Another design feature has been the use of radio receivers in the helmets so that coaches can relay plays to their signal callers. In order to bring the game closer to the fans, a "helmet-cam" also has been used so that fans get to see exactly what the players see on the field. The referees on contested plays can consult with cameras showing the position of the ball from multiple angles in assessing whether the initial decisions was fair or foul to the roar of the crowd, happy that no judgment will be made without the hidden hand of technology.
MARIA BARTIROMO
Four miles from the stadium, the waterways of Tampa are closed off to boat traffic and heavily patrolled by marine police in speedboats with quadruple outboard engines. Then there was Pepsi singing Bob Dylan, “Forever Young”. A twelve minute concert by Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band: It's Boss Time. According to Maria Bartiromo, MSNBC, the value to GE of commercial advertisements for the Superbowl was $206 million. That is twenty million shy of the recent contract to provide command, control, communications and computer information support for Tampa-based USCENTCOM. General Davd H. Petraeus, commander CENTCOM, conducted the coin toss. Hours earlier, NBC TV host Matt Lauer interviewed President Barack Obama in front of a White House fireplace before his invited guests, Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders, arrived to watch the game. His first question lobbed at the President like an alley-oop pass: what is it like living with your mother-in-law?
Sources:
http://www.madehow.com/Volume-3/Football-Helmet.html
http://tampabay.bizjournals.com/tampabay/stories/2008/10/27/daily33.html
http://www.nocsae.org/
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Great Game! By Geniusofdespair
Best Super Bowl I can remember, although my money was not on Pittsburgh.
Fannie Mae: here comes our tax dollars to bail out the speculators. By Geniusofdespair
The Miami Herald showed a recent sale in Miami Beach to Fannie Mae. I took a look at the deal. Fannie Mae bought the Condo, pictured left, for $336,000 and it has a market value of $334,700. The Condo is 1,330 square feet. The previous owner, Franck from California, bought the Condo for $420,000 on July 26, 2005. When I took a closer look at the deal, I saw that Fannie Mae took possession with what they are calling A Warranty Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure. Actually, the amount Fannie bought it for was the amount of the first mortgage. There was a second mortgage (2005) in the amount of $42,000. Franck put $42,000 down. Both mortgages were with Countrywide.According to Miami Dade County records Franck bought yet another Condo, less than a month later, for $525,000. I am assuming it is the same Franck as the signatures on the mortgages matched. On this one he had $472,500 in mortgages. Again with Countrywide. So this guy from California, obviously a speculator, was holding $850,500 in Florida mortgages all from the same mortgage company. Curiously, there wasn’t a trace of foreclosure activity on his County Records.
Franck got bailed out, the mortgage company got bailed out... but with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Florida, how is Fannie Mae deciding which properties it will bailout? Why Franck, and not Joe or Jose, with or without the correct middle name? What rules are Fannie Mae following, to prioritize purchases: is it like the Lotto with balls spinning in the plastic bubble or, does it depend on who you know or whose campaign you gave to? Oh, one last question: if these were Countrywide loans, and Countrywide disappeared letting Angelo Mozillo walk away with a few hundred million, why wasn't this bailout-- with tax dollars-- of this condo funded by the bank that absorbed Countrywide: Bank of America? We own BAC, too. That's the company that owns Merrill Lynch that paid its bankers millions after it had taken bailout money.Here are portions of the records for this Fannie Mae deal:
Thank you Gimleteye for your help with this column!
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