Rick Scott, pack your bags: DCA isn't killing jobs, the Growth Machine is ... by gimleteye

Florida has three industries: tourism, agriculture, and construction/development. These industries are bound together by land speculation, avoidance of environmental regulations, and gaming buyers. The hucksterism has expanded radically in the past decade, to include the idea that the environment is protected by existing regulations and a (bloated, inefficient) bureaucracy. What is undeniably true is that environmental agencies are so brow-beaten by the Growth Machine ideologues, that a significant percentage of agency time and energy is spent either fending off attacks or strategizing how to avoid them. Florida is the manifest example of government designed to fail, by pressuring from outside and when then doesn't work, from within: using ideologues in high positions to undercut mission and legislators to cut budgets and staffing where agencies interfere with campaign contributors' business lines.

Florida is floating in a sea of man-made pollution; our waters are toxic precisely because we can't get the toxics out of our politics. Poisoning regulations meant to protect our air and water and weakening environmental laws has been an essential part of promoting Florida's economy for so long that most people are simply incapable of separating out the charlatans and cynics who say either "it's all good" or "jobs come first".

One example: most Floridians believe the Everglades have been "saved". A chief culprit-- but not the only one-- is excess phosphorous that is mainly the result of runoff from sugar fields and cities built in low-lying flood plains. In 2005, the US E.P.A. published data indicating that 49 percent of 2063 square miles of Everglades were contaminated by phosphorous, measured at 1270 locations. This compares to 34 percent measured in 1995-1996. Today, efforts by the EPA to impose enforceable limits on phosphorous pollution in the Everglades are opposed by the state, which has taxing authority through the legislature but is afraid to use it to clean the environment. And that is just the Everglades. Movement by the EPA to impose enforceable limits on phosphorous pollution in all Florida waters has triggered a political backlash wrapping up Democrats and Republicans, despite the evidence of human health threats, threats to tourism, and the economy from poisoned waters.

No politician wants to run on a platform, how bad things are. But this election cycle, what the public has been treated to is a non-stop, in-your-face, how bad the unemployment is with no-- and I mean, NO-- further development of the theme that state policies and the Florida legislature substantially contributed to the economic calamity. This idea that our economic woes are a form of immaculate conception fits neatly with creationism and its boosters. Some days I wonder if there is so much mercury in Florida's environment that it has made its voters plain stupider than the rest of the nation.

Now here comes Rick Scott claiming that the Florida Department of Community Affairs, nicknamed DCA, is "killing jobs". In doing so Scott is picking up the code and secret handshake between Florida builders, the Florida Chamber of Commerce, and Associated Industries: all development is good. All development in farmland is better than good because at the end of the day, it is more profitable building tract housing and condos than raising vegetables or sugarcane.

There is a further bit of idiocy that goes along with Rick Scott's uninformed view of DCA: that is, that local government can do a better job of managing growth than the state. What a crock of horse manure. The entire reason for Amendment 4, Florida Hometown Democracy, is on account of the deformation of government by big contributors to political campaigns from construction and development sectors of the economy, to local elected officials. Just how bad it is, exhibit A: Miami-Dade's own unreformable majority including Joe Martinez, Pepe Diaz, Dorrin Rolle, Bruno Barreiro, Barbara Jordan, Audrey Edmonson, and last but scarcely least, the Queen of Mean, Natacha Seijas (VNS). This is the level of government Rick Scott wants to further empower? If you like our county commission, by all means vote for Rick Scott. He's your man.

Rick Scott is either lying or he knows so little how Florida really works that he should pack his bags and emigrate to the Cayman Islands or Bahamas or some other tax haven to clip coupons of junk debt issued by corporations he knows better than Florida's environmental and growth management laws. The GOP Legislature had the Florida Department of Community Affairs in its cross-hatch long before the building boom. They have sought to bust up the do-good'ers and get government off the backs of their developer cronies so they can build in more wetlands, on more estuaries, and in more sugar fields-- driving up the price of speculatively purchased property.

The victims don't just include the environment. The victims of this nonsense are ordinary people and clueless voters. I fault Democrats running for high office who simply lacked the courage, the initiative or the conviction to say that the party made mistakes and that those mistakes in Florida have been tied, substantially, to the growth at any cost programs of government that turned Florida into a pinata for influential campaign donors who depended on zoning for the next mega-mall, for the next insta-grow suburb, and for the next square mile turned into a taxpayer funded anonymous place to fill the needs of Wall Street mortgage pools. Of course, if the Democrats in Florida did that; they would have no campaign contributor base either. But as usual here, Democrats are mostly GOP-lite.

Still, what the Florida GOP is serving up this election cycle is the worst hash of candidates and "programs" that I have seen in Florida in more than two decades of observations. Rick Scott made hundreds of millions of dollars exploiting government health care programs. His business model and lobbying first advocated for the very government reimbursement limits that he, then, found ways to undercut and thereby profit. The corporation he founded paid the largest civil fine for Medicare fraud in US history. Does that tell you, anything? Hello? Rick Scott wants to "save the Everglades", too. Anyone, home?

There is approximately one week for the clucking chickens among the electorate to get their heads screwed on straight. Whether that can happen or not, is very much undecided at this unhappy point in time.