Weird: Something about Charlie ... by gimleteye

In "Charlie Crist's charm offensive brings big bucks", The Miami Herald gives a bright nod to the fundraising ability of a governor who would be US Senator. "Charlie doesn't have any shame," says Ron Book, who knows a thing or two about shamelessness.

Another top lobbyist calls his victory in the 2010 race "unquestionable". I'm not so sure. The Herald notes, "As Florida led the nation this summer in foreclosures and jobs lost, Crist raised an average of $86,000 a day." Today, the response of Crist's primary challenger, former House speaker Marco Rubio just seems plaintive, "You've got the highest unemployment rate in Florida since 1975. It's fair to ask, 'Who is in charge? Who is working on these things?" Rubio-- who seems mainly different from Crist on the issue of partisanship-- may gain traction before the primary is over.

I have a different take: what did Charlie give away, to raise all this money? What irks the most is his abject performance in the recent session of the legislature, signing into law gross mistakes that will allow developers to gain an even stronger chokehold on zoning and permitting for large, unneeded projects like the mass of crappy housing developments that are now ghost towns. But that's what you do, I guess, to get all that campaign cash. Beholden to everyone, and, to no one: I don't think so. Charlie Crist comes across as frugal, happy and obsessed with raising campaign cash. He's as attentive to personal contact as old Poppy Bush was, back in the day. I suppose, by that standard, the popular governor is successful. But isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that Florida's economy is in a ditch and in Charlie's world, the partying just goes on? Weird.


PS. On this blog, I haven't given Mel Martinez, former US Senator from Florida, much credit. His resignation was mostly a mystery to me. I've assumed-- since he was recruited by the Bush team-- that he was pretty much cut from the same cloth. Certainly, I'm no fan of what happened to housing markets under his watch both as chair of the Orange County Commission and later as top housing official under Bush, championing the "ownership society" that was really one of the greatest Ponzi Schemes in US economic history. But word arrives that Martinez was truly dispirited by ugly and nasty personal politics of destruction that boiled up under the white bread management of Republican affairs by Karl Rove and that, in particular, the party lynch mob assembled for the Sotomayor hearings for the US Supreme Court really, really got under his skin. Martinez is probably too much of a party loyalist to admit it publicly, but if this is true-- and this comes from an informed source-- he has my respect for resigning from one of the best jobs in US politics.

US Senator Mel Martinez, out in the nick of time ... by gimleteye

The wing nuts and wackos streaming out by the clarion call of big corporations opposed to President Obama's health care initiative remind me of every public meeting on environmental protection measures I attended in Florida, over 20 years.

When the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary was proposed, treasure salvors teamed up with property rights / big landowners and the jet ski industry to mobilize anti-government fanatics. When the 8.5 Square Mile Area in western Miami-Dade County was under consideration by state government for flooding and land acquisition, the Wise Use Movement--including Big Sugar and land speculators-- stepped on the gas: turning out bilious crowds to oppose government.

Fast forward: Democrats finally mobilized broad public outrage but it took an incurious and ineffective Republican president, George W. Bush, to do it. There is a certain 'what's good for the goose is good for the gander' in the monied Republican response; mobilizing bloviators and tea baggers and birthers to prove the point.

I don't know what was on Senator Martinez' mind when he decided to retire early from political life. The economic shambles have created a forest full of dry kindling. The fire being lit by Republican strategists, whipped to a frenzy by well-paid communication consultants, threatens every American. I imagine Martinez felt-- at last-- it was time to put his family's security ahead of being burned by mobs organized by his own party.

Charlie Crist is a very ambitious politician. He has already shown his willingness to sell the state of Florida down the river by accommodating developers and special interests in order to choke off an insurgent campaign by Jeb Bush acolyte, former State House Majority leader Marco Rubio. He has extended his own velvet glove to President Obama, whose Florida victory confirmed the incipient movement of the state from Republican red to Democratic blue. Crist believes he will do a better job as fireman. He will select a successor to Mel Martinez: someone who to reinforce and speed his own campaign in 2010. Maybe it will be a master stroke of confusion: Jeb Bush who no longer consults for Lehman Brothers. In the meantime, Democrats have their own problem to solve: how to move forward through the flames despite the best efforts of President Barack Obama to be collegial, inclusive, reasonable and calm. Perhaps Democrats should consult with the few environmentalists who survived the scorching when their own party failed its tests of courage standing up to corporate America.

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.

Jeb a No Go. By Geniusofdespair

Jeb Bush Just Announced He Will Not Run For Mel Martinez's Senate Seat.

Shock and Awe: earning billions by losing trillions ... by gimleteye

It was inevitable that the shock and awe we glimpsed for the past twenty years in the fast growing regions of the United States through an unsustainable boom in housing and construction would come to grief. It was born of hubris, and it continues through this day.

In The Miami Herald, Stuart Miller, CEO of Lennar Homes, the Miami-based homebuilder expresses hope that a fiscal stimulus package by the Obama administration will lift the fortunes of his company and homeowners. Lennar has suffered consecutive year losses totaling $3 billion; it has $1.1 billion in cash and also received "a $230 million tax refund" as part of an earlier intervention by the homebuilding industry, crediting to homebuilders some of the taxes paid during the fat years. (Lennar fights back in housing freefall, December 19, 2008) And it wants more.

CEO Miller told the Herald, “… home prices are in a ‘freefall’, and the only way to break the downward spiral is a federal government stimulus package.”

But largesse from the federal government—the same government that Lennar and fellow homebuilders bullied when it came to fighting growth curbs through environmental regulation and by throttling regulations governing the issuance of debt, insurance and mortgages-- has a hollow, devalued ring to it as eight years of George W. Bush unwinds to a dismal end, removing bubble gum from under the White House desks on the way out and keys to Barack Obama and a Democratic majority in Congress in an envelope by the door.

Yesterday President-elect Obama sought to dampen the flames of anxiety with a cool, calm and collected wartime demeanor. Responding to the deepening revelations of Wall Street fraud earning billions while losing trillions, he called on all Americans to return to the ethical behavior we expect of adults; not just through regulation but by moral values.

That is all well and good, as fear of deflation see-saws with fear of inflation; the confidence of ordinary investors has been badly shaken to navigate the kind of long, protracted recession/depression/crisis that Lennar and its $1.2 billion will ride out; its corporate values intact.

The Financial Times writes that Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke "has not merely slashed the federal funds rate to below 0.25 percent. He has lent freely to the banks against undisclosed but probably toxic collateral. Now he is buying securities in the open market. The result has been an explosion of the Fed's balance sheet and of the monetary base. With assets approaching $2.263 trillion and capital of less than $40 billion, the Fed increasingly resembles a public hedge fund, leveraged at more than 50:1." (The Age of Obligation, December 19, 2008)

So, what, then are the lessons since the Reagan Revolution? If we had truly organized ourselves by Reagan "values", filling mega-churches and supporting elected officials devoted to "free market" corporate fundamentalism, how is this a rational outcome unless the preachers of virtue were thieves?

"The stranger, a Western businessman, slipped into the chair next to me at an Asia Society lunch here in Hong Kong and asked me a question that I can honestly say I've never been asked before: 'So, just how corrupt is America?'" This is how Tom Friedman's latest column in The New York Times begins. (The Great Unraveling, December 16, 2008)

I wonder if Americans are ready to understand the full scope of the dilemma. I'm not sure Friedman gets it right, either: "Far from being built on best practices," he describes the Wall Street fraud, "... this legal Ponzi scheme was built on the mortgage brokers, bond bundlers, rating agencies, bond sellers and homeowners all working on the I.B.G. principle: “I’ll be gone” when the payments come due or the mortgage has to be renegotiated." But that's not all.

Wall Street greed was the big gear driving a whole system of smaller gears, all the way down to property rights activists in bankers' wing tips; turning farmland into suburban sprawl one hundred acres at a time and becoming wealthier by load of limerock fill in wetlands.

If you have ever spent time trying to influence a zoning hearing to protect your community -- to persuade community councils or planning advisory boards or county commissioners-- you know full well that what drives Lennar and fellow inflaters of asset bubbles is fealty to the law of predetermined outcomes that tilts the playing field toward behavior that, in its best light, is unethical.

The housing boom in fast growing states like Florida was a feast for special interests connected to Wall Street. Anyone else, from any other class of interests, for instance non-profit environmental groups, were given a seat at the table if they "played ball" and acted nice but otherwise played jester, relegated by the politically powerful to kicking and clawing, often at each other, for scraps fallen from the table.

It is important to hold this picture in mind, when reading The New York Times, "Wall Street Profits Were a Mirage, but the Huge Bonuses Were Real." (December 18, 2008)

"Back in New York, Mr. Kim’s team was eagerly bundling risky home mortgages into bonds. One of the last deals they put together that year was called “Costa Bella,” or beautiful coast — a name that recalls Pebble Beach. The $500 million bundle of loans, a type of investment known as a collateralized debt obligation, was managed by Mr. Gross’s Pimco. Merrill Lynch collected about $5 million in fees for concocting Costa Bella, which included mortgages originated by First Franklin."

I don't know the specific platted subdivisions whose grid lines delimit mortgages packaged into "Costa Bella", and the Times doesn't say: but I can take a good guess: the same subdivisions that comprise Costa Bella's can be found behind high stucco walls off any turnpike exit in Florida. From the air, they look like fields of Mediterranean tiled roofs fixed by the square mile. And from the air, too, you can see the lifeless water features that pass for amenities or "flood control structures", depending on the audience; fooled consumers, regulators, elected officials or all of the above.

What fattened Wall Street was called "what the market wants". It was what the market wants, the same way as what tobacco and sugar said the market wanted-- products to make Americans passive consumers of danger and risk; toxic to public health, to the environment, and last but not least-- the premise that an economy can exist on debt-driven consumption without generating of real growth in the economy.

Wall Street paydays weren't made by "what the market wants": they were made by what they could finance under the lightest touch of supervision and regulation their campaign contributions could buy. They built structured financial instruments around any forms of debt they could lay their hands on: home mortgages, car loans, student loans, credit card loans, loans based on loans based on insurance, swaps involving phantom products to offset real liabilities chopped, sliced and diced in a thousand directions and enriching their originators every step and every trade along the way.

The housing boom ground the public interest into the dust in Florida and other fast growing parts of the nation; wetlands plowed under with no compunction but avoidance of regulation, beaches cleared for sandy ribbons printed with condominiums like those built by WCI Communities—whose former chair, Al Hoffman, ran both George W. and Jeb Bush’s finance committees, Army Corps projects filled and done to protect sand here, losing sand there, coral reefs despoiled by clouds of sand and nutrients, metering and science dodged, streams polluted, estuaries over-taxed by fresh water demands or inputs: an entire system of living out of balance, out of scale, out of reach of citizens, and built on sand.

“It’s an unstoppable force!”, Hoffman crowed of suburban sprawl to the Washington Post in 2002.

One of the most false moments of the Bush presidency was the appeal by the president to volunteerism as the housing boom and asset bubbles pushed the ship of state onto the shallow reef of greed and great expectations. If you tried to "volunteer" by offering your time to go to public zoning meetings, to charitable organizations that scrounged for exhausted wage earners to participate in a civil society, in particular to protect a neighborhood stream or the Everglades, you know exactly what it meant to stand up to the shock and awe campaign that unfolds here:

"... Costa Bella, like so many other C.D.O.’s, was filled with loans that borrowers could not repay. Initially part of it was rated AAA, but Costa Bella is now deeply troubled. The losses on the investment far exceed the money Merrill collected for putting the deal together."

Here's what happened in Florida, the state where US Senator Mel Martinez found his way to the top of the political ladder through careful cultivation of developers who originated the housing asset bubble. At the time, he was Secretary of HUD and explained to a January 2003 audience of the National Association of Home Builders in Las Vegas; "We also must work in close partnership to dispel the myth that our nation is experiencing a "housing bubble." ... Bubbles of course do burst, but the housing market is not in the same category of other weaker and less competitive sectors of the economy… this Administration is making it easier for people to purchase their own homes - a change that will help drive home development and sales. And, it will help more minorities become homeowners.”

The New York Times goes on: "By the time Costa Bella ran into trouble, the Merrill bankers who had devised it had collected their bonuses for 2006. Mr. Kim’s fixed-income unit generated more than half of Merrill’s revenue that year, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. As a reward, Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Kim paid nearly a third of Merrill’s $5 billion to $6 billion bonus pool to the 2,000 professionals in the division.

Mr. O’Neal himself was paid $46 million, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm and data provider in California. Mr. Kim received $35 million. About 57 percent of their pay was in stock, which would lose much of its value over the next two years, but even the cash portions of their bonus were generous: $18.5 million for Mr. O’Neal, and $14.5 million for Mr. Kim, according to Equilar. Mr. Kim and his deputies were given wide discretion about how to dole out their pot of money. Mr. Semerci was among the highest earners in 2006, at more than $20 million. Below him, Mr. Mallach and Mr. Lattanzio each earned more than $10 million. They were among just over 100 people who accounted for some $500 million of the pool, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter."

The truism goes: "It takes a village to raise a child." These days we learn, "It takes a Depression to raze a village." At companies like Lennar, still trying to plant a small city of 18,000 called Parkland outside the Urban Development Boundary and within shouting distance of the Everglades, the values take back seat to clamor for bailouts and aid. If the American village emerges from the brink of insolvency, it will be through resourcefulness, not just fiscal stimulus.

What is so worrisome is that we are not yet there, by half.

The Bad Ju-Ju of Jeb Bush... by gimleteye

A Miami Herald news report highlights the possible bid by former Governor Jeb Bush to fill the US Senate seat being vacated by Mel Martinez. In The Hill, Al Cardenas, "a two-term chairman of the Republican Party of Florida and one of Bush’s closest friends (says,) “He’s been really disappointed with the party’s performance, and he sees this as a chance to reinvigorate it and help it follow a new path. This is a call to arms for him.”

This notion of a Terri Schiavo-esque intervention is in line with Jeb's personal drama that all along it was he, not Newt Gingrich or his incurious brother, who was originally meant to lead the Party from the Clinton-era wilderness.

But this is not a view widely shared. The succession of Bush by current Governor Charlie Crist was greeted with a palpable sense of relief. Huffington Post writer Bob Fertik is mistaken to write as he did yesterday; "Will Jeb Bush lead a Southern Republican Rebellion Against Obama"? "A Martinez resignation would allow Gov. Charlie Crist -- another close ally of Jeb -- to appoint Jeb as the replacement Senator."

Governor Charlie Crist is not a close ally of Bush. From the beginning, Crist has been fighting off the remnant soldiers of the failed Bush terms.

"All of us will lay down for Jeb," says former House Speaker Allen Bense. But the Florida economy, now buckling under the weight of the worst housing market crash since the Depression-- is the fruit, to a large extent, of laying down before the anti-regulatory 'wolf in sheep's clothing' of the Bush era.

For most Floridians, the Bush "my way or the highway" tenure in Florida was a disaster. Crist is at the unlucky end of the housing market inflation propelled by the radical pro-growth agenda of Jeb and his campaign supporters from the construction and building industries. And it is on the record of that radical agenda--and its devastating results in Florida, to the people, the environment, and the economy-- that a Jeb Bush senatorial bid would be judged by voters.

Bush loyalist Al Cardenas told The Hill that Jeb "wants the Republican Party to re-examine its philosophical roots, cleanse itself of ethical improprieties and redouble its outreach efforts to Hispanic and younger voters." The Hill doesn't mention that the very ethical improprieties the Republican leadership has been marked for are represented by another former House Speaker, John Thrasher, who is given the last word: “I think he (Jeb) thinks that the Senate may be the place to be to do those things... For someone to stick a flag in the ground and say ‘This is what we stand for.’”

Here is one example of what Thrasher and Jeb Bush stood for: the permission of a major polluter to build a cement plant on one of Florida's most treasured places, the Ichetucknee River. "Four years after Gov. Jeb Bush canoed the aqua-blue Ichetucknee River and vowed to protect it, his administration is (permitting) a nearby limestone mine to grow by eight times despite ongoing environmental violation. Among those who tried to stop the plant, there's bitterness about allowing heavy industry in one of Florida's finest places." ("Mine to grow near pristine river", St. Pete Times, May 25, 2002) "The Florida Department of Environmental Protection issued the cement plant permit in secret negotiations with the company, prompting charges of back-room dealing. The company's chief negotiator was Steve MacNamara, a top aide to then-Florida House Speaker John Thrasher. DEP staffers later complained that they thought MacNamara was representing Thrasher, and didn't know he was also on Anderson Columbia's payroll. The state Ethics Commission found probable cause that MacNamara violated ethics laws."

The Ichetucknee is only one example how an anti-regulatory fervor that Jeb Bush embraced stoked the flames of the housing boom and asset bubble whose wreckage is now scattered across the Florida landscape. Another is the background of staunch Bush ally Al Hoffman, a former chairman of both Jeb and George W. Bush campaigns, whose former company-- WCI Communities, Inc.-- is bankrupt.

In The Miami Herald today, Hoffman says, "There isn't a person in Florida that doesn't know Jeb Bush and know that he is own man, his own thinker, is own innovator..." said Hoffman. "I'd be the first to line up with his supporters." In 2002, Hoffman bubbled to The Washington Post about suburban sprawl, "You can't stop it," said Al Hoffman, the most influential developer in a state crowded with influential developers. "There's no power on earth that can stop it!" Strange, how reality works.

The Post went on: "The market is so hot that some builders start moving dirt without permits because fines cost less than brief delays. WCI had seven pages of ads in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal, promoting $5 million estates and $11 million penthouses. ... Last year, even Jeb Bush's developer-dominated Growth Management Commission -- led by an Orlando politician named Mel Martinez, who is now President Bush's housing secretary -- agreed that traffic, crowded classrooms, water shortages, pollution and other sprawl-driven ills are "growing problems in the state."

In Homestead, Florida-- where one of Hoffman's early developments, Keysgate, is located in former farmland edging the Everglades now dotted with thousands of foreclosures-- an anonymous resident recently posted to reddit.com in the aftermath of the Jeb Bush era: "CiXeL 21 points 1 day ago* [-] when i first moved down to homestead/florida city (down at the tip of florida) in 2005. i went to the walmart and was shocked to see an entire line of people in the checkout line holding welfare cards, rolls of 20 dollar bills and a credit card. it seemed like the most massive fraud ever. i wouldve killed to have had a camera handy to take a picture of it. i remember talking to our neighbors who told us that they had deals worked out with their employers to get half their pay in cash and half as a check so that they could qualify for section 8 housing and thats how they could afford to live there. we moved a little further north but the fraud down here is still rampant. my girlfriend's boss tells her coworkers how to commit car insurance fraud by getting full coverage and then having your friends dump you car in a canal and then you report it stolen. nice. fraud is like pervasive in the society here its insane. its gotten a little better. you see alot less cars now without license plates since the police are doing a better job I imagine."

This is how the "ownership society" is panning out, in Florida where ten thousand suburbs bloomed under Jeb, helping to propel the nation into an economic crisis. Today, production homebuilders, Jeb Bush's strongest supporters, are begging Congress and the US Department of Treasury for bailouts, tax relief, and incentives to get the nail guns going again. A Bush campaign for Senate in Florida will be a reactionary backlash by "free market" freeloaders who believe in restoring a failed ideology: anti-regulatory, pro-growth at any cost and meant to be the foundation for Florida's future.

This is what a Florida Senate campaign by Jeb Bush would represent: a state-based experiment for the nation that George W. Bush failed and his younger brother imagines he can redeem.

The Waiting Game, Economic Turmoil and the failed Republican Reformation, by gimleteye

The following is a work-in-process. Over the weekend I will be posting serial parts.

In 2001, Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan began a historic series of cuts in the benchmark interest rate, hoping to stave off a recession by stimulating the housing sector. This much has been repeated a thousand times. Assessing the origin of a world wide credit crisis, a crisis that does not have a name yet or an outcome, requires a more careful investigation of the housing sector itself, its advocates and instigators from Wall Street financiers to local home builders, their associations and lobbyists, from the lowliest county commissioners to zoning and permitting agencies greasing the skids.

This is not an area of inquiry to be found either in analyses by industry or reported by the mainstream media. The full picture the threats to the US economy and national security is not in statistics or charts poured over by economists. What it reveals is this: the Greenspan interest rate cuts meant to secure the US economy helped along the plan for a Republican Reformation that has utterly failed.

It began, not with terrorism in 2001 or its responses including a $3 trillion war, but with housing.

Long before 2001, the top echelon of Bush loyalists had beaten a well-worn path between Miami, Tallahassee and Washington, DC. These were not economists, although they were closely tied to conservative economic think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Institute. They were builders, bankers and mortgage lenders whose campaign contributions propelled Jeb Bush to the Governor’s Mansion in Florida 1998.

They were reflected through the career of the current US Senator from Florida, Republican Mel Martinez, an Orlando land use attorney who had served on the board of directors of a community bank, as chairman of the Orange County Commission, as Chairman of the Orlando Housing Authority, on the state growth management commission, and who had run in 1994 with Family Council President Ken Conner on a Republican gubernatorial slate. Martinez was an elector in Florida and co-chair of the 2000 George W. Bush campaign.

In January, 2001 Martinez was confirmed as Secretary of HUD, the key federal agency overseeing housing and issues related to housing financing.

It is interesting to imagine that Greenspan could not take in one picture the Wall Street inventions in financial derivatives that had proven so lucrative since the 1980’s, their role in the housing market bubble, or the implications for compensation packages with the removal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, that eliminated barriers between investment and commercial banking, and—more to the point—that forces from the housing sector that pushed Florida’s Jeb Bush forward in 1998 were one and the same with those that delivered the White House to George W. Bush in early 2001.

They were not Clinton-era technology entrepreneurs. By the time the dot.com bubble burst, they believed with all their faith that the answer to the US economy was a Republican Reformation grounded in housing. Its ebullient frame, that is of course now mentioned no where; “the ownership society”.

Only two years later, in a 2003 speech to the National Association of Homebuilders, then HUD Secretary Mel Martinez put it clearly enough for anyone to understand, “When the President gathered us together at the White House Conference last fall, he had a simple message: "We want everybody in America to own his or her own home." Our Blueprint for the American Dream Partnership is the right response at the right time. It is unprecedented in scope and sets out to close the minority homeownership gap by harnessing the resources of the federal government to those of the housing industry.”

What the Bush team shared was not so much a concern for minorities as an unshakeable faith in the network of industries that thrived from building platted subdivisions and condos and strip malls in farmland and wetlands and on fragile coastlines. Many of these special interests were from blue (Democrat) states, but the insiders were red to the core.

There was one state where all the pieces lined up, from local legislatures charged with zoning to the state legislature, secure in its members’ incumbency: Florida.

If US Senator Mel Martinez represents the political aspirations of the Republican Reformation, Al Hoffman represents the economic ones. Hoffman, now Ambassador to Portugal and far from the economic devastation he helped to unleash, was then-chairman of Florida based WCI Communities, Inc., a company of soaring fortunes during the Jeb Bush years that struggled to find a vulture to purchase its depressed assets in 2007.

Back in the day, Hoffman bridged Tallahassee and Washington: he had been campaign finance chief for both Jeb and also for George W. Bush. In Florida, Jeb placed Hoffman into the top slot of the premier business organization, The Council of 100 to assess and evaluate infrastructure and future growth.

Jeb talked about diversifying the state’s economy, but when it came to landing new industry, like the Scripps Institute initially planned at Mecca Farms, or higher education, like the 5000 acre Ave Maria College and town, opened in 2003 and funded by right-wing pizza magnate, Tom Monaghan, it was less about technology than placing growth in vast tracts of open space—more likely than not to be fragile environmental lands like those impacting Florida’s Everglades, springs, rivers and bays.

In early 2001, the homebuilders, farmers and land speculators understood the way out. All they needed was a little help from their friends. All that stood in their way was regulation.

Grover Norquist articulated the dominant strain of Republican conservatism as “shrinking the size of government so that it could be drowned in a bathtub”. But neither Norquist nor the Republicans really meant to shrink the size of government. Those were words to win elections, deceptions shaped to short attention spans.

In his 2003 inaugural address, Governor Jeb said, “There will be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers; as silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill.”

These were just words, too, echoing Norquist and aimed at the economic stakeholders in the front rows who got the point. And what was the central point?

It wasn’t about making government smaller: it was about removing those workers. And who exactly were they? Who threatened those bankers, farmers, and developers laying claim in 2003 to having rescued not just Florida but the US economy?

They were regulators. There are, of course, many areas of regulation to stand as examples of the failed Republican Transformation—health and safety, to name two—but the “free market” in housing and development had two specific areas of regulation that were a clear and present danger: finance and the environment.

(tomorrow, I'll post Part II)