GOP funders: a "generational opportunity" to rape and pillage Florida ... by gimleteye

This time of year, with the Florida legislature set to wind up and splatter bad legislation across the state, I am usually in a dyspeptic mood. This year I can scarcely summon the words. The Orlando Sentinel recently reported on the massive revolution underway in Florida, fueled by a tsunami of campaign contributions to the GOP by business interests. In Florida, those interests mostly have to do with land speculation. What this session predicts is a horrendous election cycle in 2012 in Florida and nationally.

Locally watch for the new mayor and the county commission to put more and more pressure on regulatory agencies like DERM, the Department of Environmental Resource Management. You see, it used to be the Republican plan to first fight federal laws protecting the environment by asserting states rights. The preponderance of responsibility would then default to local jurisdictions, like the county commission, where land speculators had long ago established control. What the GOP in Florida has discovered is; why wait? There is no resistance by Democrats in the state legislature who are badly outnumbered in any case. At County Hall one can already hear the wheels spinning to dismantle environmental protections. Lynda Bell, who replaced the most environmentally sensitive of county commissioners-- Katy Sorenson-- is leading the charge.

You would think that the GOP would understand neither tourists nor businesses will relocate to a state that has such little regard for its natural attributes; beaches, rivers, streams, bays and wildlife. (click 'read more')

Corporate millions have paid off in 'pro-business' legislative agenda
By AARON DESLATTE AND SCOTT POWERS
Orlando Sentinel

With a former corporate executive in Gov. Rick Scott and growing Republican supermajorities controlling the legislature, Florida is poised to enact sweeping "pro-business" and deregulatory changes in the next three weeks.

And Florida's major corporations, regulated industries and business-backed interest groups have played an outsized role in making that happen.

Of the 30 largest political contributors in Florida this year, all but two are corporations or business-backed interest groups such as the Florida Chamber of Commerce, governed and funded by corporate executives with financial stakes in the outcome of the legislative session.

An Orlando Sentinel analysis of campaign-finance data released last week shows the top two dozen companies and interest groups gave a combined $4.2 million during the first three months of 2011 - a bit more than $500,000 to Democrats and the rest to the Republican Party of Florida, individual GOP lawmakers or the political funds they control.

Those same 30 largest Florida contributors combined to pour more than $45 million into the 2010 elections, the vast majority of the money put to use for Republicans.

It has paid off.

Business interest groups in Tallahassee are already describing this year as a "generational opportunity" to pass sweeping "free-market" changes that have sat on their shelves for years.

From new restrictions on personal-injury lawsuits against automakers, limits on unemployment pay and benefit cuts for public workers to a wave of tax breaks for individual companies, the legislature is advancing virtually the entire business-lobby playbook this session - measures that in previous years would have been too polarizing to pass.

Florida's 25-year-old growth-management act is headed toward repeal, and the state's varied economic-development agencies promoting space, sports, tourism and minority entrepreneurs are about to be folded into one new bureaucracy that would give Scott broader power to lure companies to the state with taxpayer incentives.

And many of the companies and interests poised to win big - along with labor unions staring at humbling losses this session - are shifting the vast majority of their political giving to Republicans.

The list of big givers includes Walt Disney Co., which gave $188,010 and has successfully lobbied to maintain tax advantages for online travel companies, eliminate some restrictions on sales contracts and preserve existing time-share regulations.

And the Orlando-based Florida Association of Realtors - which wants to put a property-tax-cutting amendment on the ballot next year - coughed up $275,500, including $25,000 for a political account that House Speaker Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, created in February.

Health care and health insurance groups trying to help mold a mammoth overhaul of the $21 billion Medicaid program are contributing the heaviest to Tallahassee politicians this year - with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Florida topping the list, with $449,500.

Florida Power & Light is second at $325,611 - all but $5,600 of it to the state Republican Party, GOP lawmakers and the war chests of legislative leaders such as House Speaker-designate Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel. TECO and Progress Energy gave an additional $423,000 .

FPL and other investor-owned utilities have been pushing for control of the solar market in Florida by seeking legislative permission to charge customers to pay for new solar plants.

The GEO Group, a Boca Raton-based private-prison company, has given $106,000 - all but $8,000 of it to the GOP - while Scott and lawmakers have pushed plans to privatize South Florida prisons housing 16,000 inmates. The House and Senate have privatization plans in their competing budgets.