If the news reports are to be believed, Florida House Speaker Dean Cannon was elated in Tallahassee, yesterday, as he lead the Florida Legislature to override Gov. Charlie Crist vetoes, targeting measures to eliminate environmental regulations. When business was good, the GOP majority didn't have the muscle to eviscerate protections for Florida's environment. It took a Depression to do that.
Cannon also said, according to the Miami Herald, that this would be the most conservative legislature in 100 years. It was a boast even more bold that Jeb Bush's 2002 inaugural speech where he pledged to empty Tallahassee government buildings of workers. Jeb's target, then, to the delight of his selected audience of builders and developers who fund political campaigns, was the network of environmental laws that were intended to protect the state's air and waters.
Of course, most Floridian voters don't think that they voted on Nov. 2 against clean air and clean water. They voted for jobs! and against bailouts and wasteful corporate subsidies. What they are getting-- and the Legislature lost not a single day to act-- is more subsidies, more bailouts and no jobs.
Government can't create jobs (in the private sector). Unless it does so by outsourcing the proper functions of government. But the limitations of privatization are all around us; encapsulated in the chaotic military spending that has empowered private contractors to usurp so many aspects of our foreign interventions. Privatization is nothing more than another limb in the tree of wealth transfer from the middle class to an insulated, protected economic elite.
What government can do is to create a set of economic and fiscal policies to stimulate job creation. Nearly forty years ago, both the federal government and the State of Florida enacted laws protecting the environment as a matter of public health and, also, economic principle. Clean water and clean air make sense for business. But ever since that time, businesses and their ramrods-- like the US Chamber of Commerce and in Florida, Associated Industries and the Florida Realtors and assorted builders associations-- have taken aim at undermining and chipping away at those laws. These efforts bred phalanxes of lawyers, engineers, and lobbyists I call the Growth Machine. They gave rise to some of Florida's most powerful law firms, based on "environmental land use practices" like Greenberg Traurig. Their mission, on behalf of clients, has been devastating to Florida.
The Reagan Revolution-- held in such high esteem by today's conservatives-- incorporated these principles through the Sagebrush Rebellion and its manifesto, The Wise Use Movement. Today's Tea Party follows the same path, but its acolytes are apparently too unaware of history to understand why it is so. I came to Florida's environmental movement during these years and helped with the lifting of the message that "the environment is the economy". Living in the Florida Keys at the time, it was a message that was resonant given the dependence of the Keys' economy on tourism, fishing, and natural resources. It was also a time where property rights zealots -- true radical extremists-- came out in full force against environmental regulations. Unsurprisingly, their efforts were backed (and financially supported) by the state's wealthiest polluters, Big Sugar.
Democrats never fully embraced the argument, that clean water and business are inter-related in Florida, because they feared its implications in raising money for political campaigns from donors of the Engineering Cartel. Even Al Gore, in Florida, decided to sublimate the message in his 2000 presidential campaign that was stolen, here, by those who inherited the energy of the Sagebrush Rebellion.
So enough of history. Here, we have just gone through the most spectacular housing bust and economic crash in modern Florida history, and we have placed the reins of government back in the hands of politicians who believe the best and fastest way to conjure jobs and growth is to eliminate the protections of Florida's environment. It is as if people had been persuaded the best way to escape from fire is to run back into a burning building.
Florida's economic model has been entirely dependent on importing demand through migration of population. Thinking that having dirty water and pollution is a good way to stimulate demand is sheer insanity, but in the general dismal state of education in Florida, why not? It apparently is not enough that trillions of dollars of wealth have disappeared in the form of mortgages deeper in water than Atlantis, or home equity lines of credit that will never again fund lifestyles, there has to be a reason for all this and now we know what it is: environmental protection.
Let's do away with the laws and make our water dirtier than it already is: people will eventually come for the sun and warmth in winter-time, risking staph infections and happy to see scavenger species when they pull them up at the end of a fishing line baited with frozen fish from Costa Rica. I would feel better about all this, if I sensed a younger generation of activists as inflamed against inequity as those that arose from the last Depression and the 1960's. But I don't. President Obama failed the first principle of grass roots activism: keep the team on the field and find new leaders from the bench. Move on, dot org. It is going to be a long four years in Florida.
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1 comment:
This "jobs vs. environment" argument is the same nonsense those that rallied to defeat Prop 4 used. What they are really saying is unsustainable bullshit jobs vs. the environment. The only hope for Florida is developing a real economy, not an economy sustained by the cycle of real estate development.
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