The Miami Herald picks up the theme I wrote, last week: Marco Rubio's bid to be the next US Senator from Florida is washing up on Gulf Coast beaches. The Herald puts its own reverse spin on the same story: "The oil spill in the Gulf tains whatever it touches -- except Gov. Charlie Crist's political fortunes."
Like G.O.D., I read radar scatter of anti-Crist bias in the Miami Herald. I don't imagine these things. For many years I read the Herald bias toward Big Sugar in its news reports. Sugar's litigation through the 1980's and 1990's fueled many downtown law firms and partners' vacations and college educations and braces. Sugar hired as public relations consultant, Joanna Wragg, the associate editor of the paper. (How many stories have you read in the Herald about the reversal and its consequences by a federal judge of the 2003 Jeb Bush initiative, widely reported in the Herald at the time, of his new law amending the Everglades Forever Act?) The pro-Rubio slant I attribute to the Greenberg Traurig wing of the Herald, whose lobbyists and affiliated clients obtained special access to the Herald during the building boom and afterwards, ties back to enormous mistakes supporting massive overdevelopment that none can acknowledge until the players have all faded from the scene, and institutional memory supplanted with new speculators.
Along this line, there is a detectible sense of sour grapes in the way the Gulf oil catastrophe has damaged the "drill here, drill now" fortunes of Rubio. Herald brass have always shown a strong deference to former governor Jeb Bush, along lines of the conservative right: that Jeb was good for Florida business when he was governor and he, not W., should have been president. They are now thinking: is Charlie Crist going to be Marco Rubio's Lawton Chiles. (Chiles spoiled Bush's first bid to be governor, in 1994.)
The broad brush strokes of Herald-world view Crist as shallow, vain, and changeable as the weather. Bush/Rubio is sober, business-like, and committed to conservative principles. I don't believe either characterization is true, but in any case I would take Charlie Crist as US Senate over a Bush proxy any day of the week. The conservative principles that Jeb! represented were at the center of a grand experiment for the nation where Florida was the guinea pig-- along the lines of the Karl Rove/Grover Norquist formula-- that failed spectacularly.
In this bill of particulars, the housing boom, bubble and implosion were manufactured by production homebuilders, lobbyists, and land speculators who needed and funded anti-regulatory zealots in high political office. The speculators were constituted from the lobbying corps of the builders trade associations. They supported Bush. Their miscalculations of risk manifest as gears in the machine powering the greatest shift of wealth in US economic history. You don't reward the team that drove the economy off the rails by awarding it a US Senate seat.
Charlie Crist may be many things, but he does not bear the stamp of responsibility for these grievous errors of judgment; scarcely reported, by the Miami Herald. (How far, for example, did the Allen Stanford ponzi scheme reach into the Jeb Bush governor's office?)
5 comments:
good graphic
I also noted anti-Crist writing in the Herald. Finally they are turning on Rubio but pretty mum on the drill baby drill campaign he led in Florida.
Rubio was never going to sniff the US Senate. The body hosts a lot of dimwits but no mental midgets on the scale of Jeb Bush's valet.
On much more important matters, Chris Hedges wrote this recently and I wanted to share it.
"Nature always extracts justice. Defy nature and it obliterates the human species. The more we divorce ourselves from nature, the more we permit the natural world to be exploited and polluted by corporations for profit, the more estranged we become from the essence of life. Corporate systems, which grow our food and ship it across country in trucks, which drill deep into the ocean to extract diminishing fossil fuels and send container ships to bring us piles of electronics and cloths from China, have created fragile, unsustainable man-made infrastructures that will collapse. Corporations have, at the same time, destroyed sustainable local communities. We do not know how to grow our own food. We do not know how to make our own clothes. We are helpless appendages of the corporate state. We are fooled by virtual mirages into mistaking the busy, corporate hives of human activity and the salacious images and gossip that clog our minds as real. The natural world, the real world, on which our life depends, is walled off from view as it is systematically slaughtered. The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is one assault. There are thousands more, including the coal-burning power plants dumping gases into our atmosphere that are largely unseen. Left unchecked, this arrogant defiance of nature will kill us."
I just realized it. Marco Rubio is the Anti-Crist. Wow.
Love the Rubiol balls...he's a disaster too.
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