Right Wing Extremists mix with Conspiracy Wackjobs in Miami-Dade ... by gimleteye

A quick google search shows the current attacks on environmental protection in Miami Dade, the Everglades, global warming and county clerk Harvey Ruvin coincide with the March recall of former county commissioner Natacha Seijas; the district commissioner from Hialeah who received the boot from 88 percent of voters in a special election on March 15.

Seijas' antipathy toward environmentalists was legendary. For more than 15 years on the county commission, her role was to organize reliable majority votes for zoning changes in distant farmland bordering the Everglades far from her district. Seijas' former district, Hialeah, is one of Miami's older suburbs. It is the second largest city in Florida's most populous county and once an Anglo enclave that gave way during the 1960's to the exodus from Cuban refugees. Since that time, the Cuban American vote reliably delivered leadership at the county and state level. No candidate for national office overlooks the impressive majorities that radiate from Hialeah. Although the city itself is a hothouse of insider wheeling and dealing, the district including Hialeah also represents a core constituency that has nothing to do with issues of aging infrastructure: developers and land speculators who have made billions converting farmland and open space bordering the Everglades into suburbs.

Like so many other cities in the Sunbelt, for decades economic growth materialized through the fast, scalable imposition of suburban sprawl on the landscape. What distinguishes Miami, however, is the extent to which development took place at the expense of the environment. Virtually the entire South Florida region, embracing more than 7 million residents, is premised on claiming developable area from former wetlands, widely valued as a national treasure: the Everglades. With each ring suburb benefiting an economic elite based on construction and development-- increasingly but not exclusively Hispanic-- pressure at the edge of the Everglades increased.

In the weeks before the March 15 recall election, extremist right-wing blogs began to light up with news of a conspiracy in Miami-Dade; tying climate change, property rights in the east Everglades, environmental protection, and the county clerk, Harvey Ruvin, who Seijas singled out for having the temerity to certify the signatures that triggered her recall.

Deploying against environmental protection to build right wing political agendas was a political axe sharpened in the Reagan era, when mineral, mining and forestry interests in the American West invented the Wise Use Movement. But even then, the Wise Use Movement gained traction in Florida. Restoration of the Everglades ecosystem had become the a cherished goal of environmentalists and policy makers who recognized that patterns of economic growth, including the predatory land use of Big Sugar scarcely sixty miles upstream from Miami, were threatening both natural resources and fresh water supplies for cities.

Building on campaign contributions from conservatives and the momentum of the religious right, the movement didn't actually need a name in Florida. It found a fertile political landscape in the state capitol, Tallahassee, that is so far removed from urban South Florida it might as well represent another state entirely. There, lobbyists embarked on a 30 Year War Against The Environment with great success, including the election of Jeb Bush -- a Miami developer-- in 1998 who brought a determined focus to efforts to promote the "free" market as the most effective way to protect the environment. Under various guises, including "The Ownership Society" that duped millions of Americans and triggered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the war continues. In important respects, the Wise Use Movement is now the Tea Party.

One of Seijas' last political efforts was to provide quiet support for Linda Bell, a former Homestead official and commissioner elected when Seijas' political nemisis-- Katy Sorenson-- decided to retire. Sorenson had been the most reliable pro-environmental vote on the county commission and on the losing side of majorities organized by Seijas on behalf of land speculators in her district. Sorenson, then, and Bell, now represent landowners of the last farmland and open space in Florida's most populous and politically influential county. Then and now, their goal has been to eliminate zoning restrictions that either keep their land designated as open space or agriculture: classifications they abhor because their highest value is as future green fields for suburban sprawl.

Various schemes and fiascos, including an outrageous plan in the 1990's to build a major commercial airport at the former Homestead Air Force Base-- on the edge of two national parks-- were hatched in the district by land speculators who are still strongly represented through the effort to eviscerate land use planning at the state level. (Homestead played a dismal role in the 2000 contested election for the next president of the United States, and the most controversial presidential election in US history.)

On March 3, scarcely two weeks before the Seijas recall, Bell organized a Town Hall meeting against environmental protection that turned into a low-tech lynching of a longtime department director and tapped into the long history of antagonism to government with a small group of property owners in the 8.5 Square Mile Area who had successfully commandeered public policies on Everglades restoration for decades.

It is likely that someone in the former county commissioner's camp began to feed conservative right-wing blogs with a conspiracy theory tying global warming, Everglades restoration, the destruction of property rights, the United Nations, and the county clerk, Harvey Ruvin, who Seijas reviled for certifying ballot petitions that triggered her recall. The plan would have been to use the issue to mobilize poll workers and coalesce voters around Spanish language media that, in the past, has proven a reliable bullhorn against predatory government policies, like those against Castro that organized Hialeah voters so many times before.

There are multiple stupidities masked as ironies now unfolding in Miami Dade. Firstly, Seijas had supported Ruvin-- a longtime leader in international efforts to raise awareness of local government to the costs and perils of sea level rise and climate change. Seijas, who had beaten back a recall election from determined environmentalists in 2006, attempted to tack toward a record of environmental achievement by supporting Ruvin's climate change panel but kept a tight control over any policy recommendations that emerged from the local planning initiative that the Ruvin-led group surfaced. For example, when it came time for the panel to incorporate advanced scientific imagery mapping out ground level elevations, to show where sea level rise will first infiltrate, Seijas snuffed out inclusion of the data. Her supporters feared the data would harm the speculative value of their real estate holdings. When the second recall was certified by Ruvin, she reverted to mean.

The extremist world of Fox News instantly claimed credit for the Seijas recall, and so does the Tea Party despite the fact that the political forces Seijas sought to unleash to defend against her recall were the same anti-government, conspiracy wackjobs who unleashed the Tea Party in Florida.

What is left after the slash and burn tactics that the Seijas camp ignited? For one, a new county commissioner -- Linda Bell-- is finding traction wherever she can, tapping into the religious right and taking advantage of a decades-old controversy in the 8.5 Square Mile Area. In doing so, Bell-- and the Seijas camp-- is showing how the state's claim that it is better able than federal authority to protect the Everglades is a sham designed to do what Florida does best: open up wetlands for development. The Seijas recall shows, too, that the Tea Party and conspiracy theorists from the radical right are just the same old agenda of the Wise Use Movement dressed in a different disguise.

If Americans and the media are discerning, they will see the antagonism to Obama, health care, and taxes serve the economic interests of very wealthy polluters and speculators. There is nothing much different to the current state of affairs from the Reagan era except that the American economy is in much reduced circumstances. Our shrunken economic opportunities have only emboldened an economic elite that wraps itself in "values". Gullible foot soldiers who will do just about anything for their 15 minutes of fame have always been and are today a dime a dozen.