Rick Scott, Adam Putnam, and Matt Caldwell: Part 2, Turbulent Waters For Florida's Toxic Trio ... by Alan Farago

Everglades Agricultural Area, algae filled drainage ditch

Before Florida's midterm election, the media filled with news reports and visual imagery, spanning network news to the Daily Show, of rampant red tides and toxic algae coating all of Florida's coasts.

After the election? A few pundits noted the impacts on political careers well-grounded in defending polluters.

Big Sugar's best laid plans for the Republican hierarchy came a cropper.

For the first time in Florida political history, Sugar's campaign contributions to state-wide candidates became a threshold issue for candidates and for voters who get it: Florida's water crises is the direct result of dark political money from billionaires turning our waters and Everglades into sacrifice zones for their profits. 

Credit is due to Bullsugar.org whose voter guides highlighted polluted campaign contributions from billionaires who have commandeered the state legislature.

Adam Putnam, whose political career benefited from family wealth derived from a water district funded farm acquisition -- and who has been a strong defender of Big Sugar -- was defeated by Ron DeSantis who made opposition to Big Sugar's cost shifting to taxpayers a central plank in his platform. 

Florida Democrats, again, proved susceptible to Big Sugar money and influence. Where and when they could have planted a flag on the outrageous exchange of Florida waters for corporate welfare, they largely declined or tip-toed through a perceived mine field. cf. Bill Nelson.

Big Sugar, you see, has a different way of forcing its echo chamber into Democratic party ranks. Chris King, Andrew Gillum's running mate, is a notable exception.

Matt Caldwell, who rose to prominence by orchestrating the upset 2012 defeat of Ray Judah -- a Republican commissioner in Lee County who eloquently supported more storage and treatment acreage in the EAA -- failed in his quest to step up the ladder to Agriculture Commissioner. He called Bullsugar, a "hate group", and attacked the group in ads but voters knew better. Look for Caldwell to find a sweet place, like former Democratic senator Jeff Clemens, on the Big Sugar payroll.

"Red Tide" Rick Scott slipped into the US Senate on a razor thin margin, bolstered by a personal investment of tens of millions. A sharper and focused Bill Nelson could have preserved his Senate seat if he had allied himself clearly and strongly against Big Sugar and for Florida's waterways, threatened tourism industries, and the Everglades.

While the punditry has dragged its feet on linking Florida's election outcomes to the toxic influence of Big Sugar, a few raised eyebrows indicate the industry is endlessly resourceful in preserving its prerogatives. It moved with lightning speed after the election, a show of political, legislative, and legal force.

A day after the election on November 7th, the very same day Jeff Sessions resigned as US Attorney General, Sessions signed an extraordinary memorandum providing new guidance to DOJ on federal consent decrees. Its key point: avoid them. Leave the messy business of fixing what is wrong to the states. A day later, the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District -- all appointees of Gov. Rick Scott -- voted to vacate the consent decree that governed relations between the state, the federal government and Big Sugar polluters for a quarter century. If you think the timing was coincidental, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

The District timing on its intent to rip up the consent decree was a show of Big Sugar force. It had been supported by very expensive lobbying and lawyering for at least a couple of years. The votes from the 2018 midterm elections hadn't been counted, but Big Sugar really didn't care. 

Do you?

(originally published August 2, 2018)

In the winter of 2016, polluted water from Lake Okeechobee turned from brown to guacamole green, thick with toxic algae carrying cyanobacteria to downstream communities, putting people and businesses in harm's way. In the summer of 2018, it is happening again. Right before midterm elections.

Gov. Rick Scott. Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam. State Representative Matt Caldwell. All are seeking to move up the political ladder in November on the Republican side of the slate. Rick Scott is aiming to unseat Bill Nelson, the Democrat incumbent, in the US Senate. Adam Putnam is running to be Florida's next governor. Matt Caldwell, to take Putnam's chair in the state agriculture hierarchy. The ladder is real, and it is constructed carefully by the state's shadow government: Big Sugar.

There are a handful of Big Sugar players, and a much larger circle of influence peddlers, but there are two billionaire families who are the mainstay of the Big Sugar cartel; the descendants of Charles Stuart Mott who own US Sugar Corporation and the Fanjul family, owners of Florida Crystals and a vertically integrated, transnational sugar empire.

Both the Mott descendants and the Fanjuls spend heavily to make rules and regulations work their way while claiming a public benefit: "farming for families to put the food on your table". They never say that sugar is not a food but a substance more addictive than cocaine when consumed in excess. But that is another story.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott's Recklessness Is Putting Your Health, Your Property, And Your Jobs At Risk. Don't Give Him Your Vote ... by gimleteye

The viral video shows angry Floridians shouting at "Red Tide Rick" as he scurries out the back door of a restaurant into his armored SUV, hoping to deny an unscripted media moment when his rapidly declining popularity is revealed.

For eight years as governor, Scott was obsessed with preventing such unscripted moments. Every photo op with Scott seemed airbrushed as a Clairol commercial.

At the same time, Scott helped erode protections for Florida's waters, cutting hundreds of millions from agencies and stifling law enforcement against polluters. With Florida's waters filling with toxins that can lead to severe neurological disease -- as in Alzheimer's -- , Rick Scott can't hide.

Scott can't hide the fact that he caused state environmental protection to dissolve at the same time his lawyers argued in federal court that the state can do whatever it wants, even if it means condemning natural resources like the Everglades to a long and tortured death.

The pro-Tea Party, anti-regulatory agendas were cynically organized to mesh with the needs of his big campaign contributors -- from the state's agricultural polluters, like Big Sugar, to the political action committees where big business mingled millions in contributions to funnel to its mostly Republican stars.

Florida environmentalists have been crying for the “precautionary principle” — first, do no harm — for decades. No one in political office listened, not Democrats or Republicans, because that's not how polluters make money. Wherever in state law the precautionary principle pops up, the polluters do their best to lop its head off.

The toxic waters in Palm Beach and Martin Counties, and Lee and Collier, are killing pets and threatening people. In the Scott early years, public health officials downplayed or ignored the threats because it cost money and angered polluters when public attention was shifted to the sorry state of Florida waters. Kind of like the clusters of rare pediatric cancer the Scott administration has ignored.

Telling these stories around a dinner table recently, a friend told me about a wedding he attended last year in Naples where the entire party had to move to the hotel indoors. Outside by the water and the sunset, people began coughing and wheezing because of the air drifting over the fouled waters.

There are going to be a lot fewer weddings in Naples because of Rick Scott.

There is evidence that breathing around some of Florida's toxic waters can expose people to brain disease. With warming temperatures, (note Scott’s ultimatum to state agencies to eliminate “global warming” from state communications), and no changes to the way Florida manages growth and industrial agriculture, this year's red tides could turn from chronic to permanent in certain waters.

And Rick Scott wants your vote to be next US Senator from Florida? Read this scathing OPED from the Palm Beach Post:


Editorial: Scott must answer for environmental malpractice
OPINION By The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board
Posted: 7:28 a.m. Sunday, September 16, 2018


With a horrific red tide killing marine life and tourism on Florida’s southwest coast, and with toxic green algae bringing misery to the Treasure Coast and Fort Myers area on a now-annual basis, it’s understandable that Gov. Rick Scott would want to run away from his environmental record.
Voters shouldn’t let him.

From the moment the health-care multimillionaire swept into office on 2010’s Tea Party anti-tax, anti-regulation wave, he began slashing the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), cutting budgets, skilled staff and inspections.

The SFWMD, which had a $1.4 billion budget in 2007, is now an $814 millionagency. Scott’s administration cut $700 million out of all the state’s water management districts after his first year and crippled their ability to levy taxes. His justification — giving average property owners tax relief — is a sick joke; the state’s 15 biggest industries, like Florida Power & Light and the Walt Disney Co., got to pocket a combined $1.2 million annually, but homeowners save less than $3 per $100,000.

What got slashed? The state’s network for water monitoring shrank from 350 monitoring sites to 115, according to Florida International University’s Southeast Environmental Research Center. Enforcement of anti-pollution regulations slowed to a crawl. The DEP pursued almost 1,600 enforcement cases in 2010, but a mere 220 in 2017, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

In 2012, Scott repealed a law requiring septic-tank inspections. Now, only 1 percent of Florida’s 2.6 million septic tanks get inspected, and scientists say that pollution from leaking septic tanks adds fuel to toxic algae blooms.

The result: nitrogen and phosphorus loads are on the rise in Lake Okeechobee. Combined with agricultural run-off, this is the root of the toxic blue-green algae — and almost certainly a contributor to the unusual endurance of the red tide, the worst of which is occurring near Fort Myers at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River, one of the exit points of Lake O’s waters.

Yet Scott is trying to fool voters into thinking that Sen. Bill Nelson, the Democrat whom Scott is trying to unseat on Nov. 6, is to blame for the algae blooms. A Scott ad released Friday contends Nelson has done “nothing” for “Lake O.” It’s supposedly Nelson’s fault that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hasn’t limited water discharges or fixed the Herbert Hoover Dike.

This is nonsensical double-talk. The dike’s condition and the rate of discharges have nothing to do with the pollutants in the water in Lake Okeechobee. Letting all that phosphorus and nitrogen into the water to begin with — that’s the problem. And that’s on Scott.

The same Scott, by the way, who didn’t buy an available 153,200 acres of U.S. Sugar land, which would have given that water someplace else to go. Backing off that deal, in 2015, was a blow to Everglades restoration.

Sign up for The Palm Beach Post weekly Opinion newsletter: Text Opinion to 444999

The list goes on. In 2011, Scott abolished the Department of Community Affairs, which protected the state from bad development and gave the environment a vote in land-use decisions. He slashed funding for land conservation under the Forever Florida program, and later joined enthusiastically in the Florida Legislature’s nickel-and-diming of Amendment 1, the wildly popular ballot measure that is supposed to be generating hundreds of millions of dollars each year for environmental protection.

Most egregiously, the governor of the state most endangered by sea-level rise allegedly barred the very mention of climate change (although the climate denier denies that, too).

In sum, Scott “has regularly put the wishes of corporate polluters above the needs of Florida’s environment and families,” states Kevin Curtis, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Coalition Action Fund.

“He’s sided with a fringe group of climate change deniers, defunded popular and bipartisan conservation programs, and undermined the enforcement of air, water and climate protections.”

This governor should not escape judgment for these past eight years. And any Floridian who cares about the environment — or simply gags from the stench of the algae blooms — should demand answers for such a putrid environmental record.

Any Floridian who cares about the environment — or simply gags from the stench of the algae blooms — should remember who has been in charge.

Blunders by the Toxic Trio: Rick Scott, Adam Putnam, and Matt Caldwell created this Florida water crisis ... by gimleteye

Inconveniently for Florida's Toxic Trio: Rick Scott -- running for the US Senate against incumbent Bill Nelson, for Adam Putnam -- the Ag Secretary running to succeed Scott as governor, and for Caldwell -- a state representative aiming for Putnam's job as Ag Secretary -- Florida's weather is conspiring against claims they deserve your vote. They don't.

The immediate crisis -- far from the first -- is the reappearance of highly toxic cyanobacteria in algae blooming in the diseased heart of Florida: Lake Okeechobee. Both Florida's rivers -- the St. Lucie and the Caloosahatchee -- carry water out of the lake towards a million residents and tourism businesses on the east and west coast of the southern half of the state. It happened in 2013 then again in 2016 and now.

The water has to go somewhere, when rain levels cause the lake to rise, and the US Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District release those billions of gallons of toxic water downstream. The water could be treated and cleansed if it was allowed to filter through wetlands sufficient in space and volume, south of the Lake. Those lands belong to some of the wealthiest welfare recipients in the US Farm program: Big Sugar. And every year Big Sugar takes its winnings from the electeds and spends millions to ensure that the state legislature, executive mansion, Congress and even the presidency is locked and loaded to shoot down any serious effort to share the adversity caused by Florida's manufactured water crisis.

Florida Gov. Scott, Ag. Secretary Putnam and legislators like Matt Caldwell had the answer in the palm of their hands, and they let it slip away. Now they want your vote.

Taxpayers could be on the road to salvation, but the toxic trio closed the road and built an exit ramp to more wastefulness and more environmental harm and more threats to public health and safety. They did this is three ways.

First, Scott and his co-conspirators killed the deal to buy US Sugar lands because it was opposed by its sometimes competitor, the Florida Crystals/Fanjul family empire. Second, Caldwell, Putnam and Scott created a new law that extended lease terms without competitive bidding on at least 23,000 acres of public lands to sugar farmers. Those lands could have been deployed to cleansing the cyanobacteria-laced waters, but the toxic trio bent to Big Sugar's will. Third, the toxic trio endorsed a new law that prohibits the state from eminent domain in the Everglades Agricultural Area while, at the same time, funds a multi-billion dollar reservoir that even the US Army Corps of Engineers doubts will work or be cost effective.

The bottom line is that billions of taxpayer dollars and years of civic efforts have been squandered while governmental processes slowly grind toward common sense: more water storage lands in the Everglades Agricultural Area. From the Now Or Neverglades Movement to the nation's premier science review agency, the National Academies of Sciences, the eventual solution to taxpayer and property owners woes is clear: buy the land that is necessary to fix Florida's water crisis.

Anyone paying attention knows that Big Sugar is at the heart of Florida's water crisis. The industry excels at muddying the waters, pointing fingers in every direction, but cyanobacteria doesn't lie. It is lifted into air we breathe and is linked to severe and incurable neurological diseases like Alzheimer's.

Remember the Toxic Trio when you go to the polls in November: Scott, Putnam and Caldwell do not deserve your votes.


The next step is simple: Fund Everglades restoration
BY DON JODREY
donjodrey2@gmail.com
July 23, 2018 06:30 PM
Finally, on July 25, after 18 months of silence, the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force is scheduled to convene in Washington, D.C., to discuss next steps for Everglades restoration. As Floridians know, the intergovernmental restoration effort is the world’s largest infrastructure project that will, when complete, bring economic and environmental benefits for a vast region that ranks 13th in the nation in population and economic output.

The congressionally chartered Task Force, co-chaired by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and the state of Florida, fosters the necessary collaboration needed to line up funding, engineering capability and science to get restoration done. The Task Force meeting could not come at a more important time. Several issues require immediate attention.

Bullsugar calls out Big Sugar's rigged political system ... by gimleteye

Toxic algae bloom on the St. Lucie River, Florida

Big Sugar farms on over 400,000 acres -- roughly 800 square miles -- south of Lake Okeechobee, the liquid heart of Florida. The big players in the industry are billionaires; Florida Crystals owned by the Fanjul family and US Sugar Corporation, owned by the descendants of Charles Stuart Mott. Through its campaign contributions, Big Sugar controls the levers of government in Florida.

It needs levers. Big Sugar needs control because profits depend on micromanaging rules and regulations of water pollution (think, Lake Okeechobee and toxic algae) and the operation of the nation's most complex flood control system whose primary purpose is keeping sugar farms dry in wet season and wet in dry season. Regulatory and political capture is Big Sugar's game, pure and simple.

Oh. There is one more season that matters to Big Sugar: election season.

This cycle is exceptional because a massive toxic algae outbreak in Lake Okeechobee is focusing voters' attention on Sugar's role in ways that could upset its best laid political plans.

So Big Sugar is lashing out at the group taking a stand against a rigged system at the root of the toxic algae outbreak. That group is Bullsugar, whose purpose is to call out the fakery and to direct public attention toward real solutions to protect Florida's environment and jobs.

By its very name, Bullsugar elicits anxiety from the polluters it shadows.

In 2016, Big Sugar suffered a stinging defeat in the Republican presidential primary. It bet the farm on US Senator Marco Rubio to be the Republican nominee for president. That investment came a cropper. (By the time John C. Hotten published his A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words in 1859, the phrase has come to refer to any failure rather than the specific failure to stay on a horse: "Cropper, 'to go a cropper', or 'to come a cropper', that is, to fail badly." In the word of our president, Sad!)

Pepe Fanjul, of the billionaire Florida Crystals empire, was first to hug Rubio when he left the Miami stage after his campaign debut. From there, it was all downhill. Rubio's shellacking by Trump shocked political operatives who calibrate Big Sugar's risk. The reason Rubio did so poorly among Republicans, garnering scarcely 25% of the primary vote, was his pathetic response to a massive toxic algae outbreak on both coasts -- the same kind that is occurring today.

If the toxic algae outbreak was the wild card in a normally predictable game, what surprised Big Sugar even more was Bullsugar's role. The grass roots start-up organized in Martin County on Florida's east coast. Its staff quickly mobilized hundreds of thousands of supporters through social media.

The role of toxics in Rubio's thrashing by Trump in the GOP primary generated practically no attention in the mainstream media. Nor did Democrats wake up to the phenomenon in the subsequent US Senate race; an election that Rubio handily won.

Big Sugar did not immediately adapt to this unwelcome development in its careful communication strategy. But it has.

State Representative Matt Caldwell, campaigning to be the next Agriculture Secretary, recently attacked Bullsugar in Sunshine State News: "From the base vulgarity of your name to the harassment and abuse hurled toward fellow Floridians to the constant stream of twisted misinformation spread to the public, your organization has all the hallmarks of a hate group." (Read more about Sunshine State News, here.) Caldwell's claim is a laughable, sad commentary of our current politics.

Big Sugar picked Caldwell from the GOP bench as an up-and-com'er through his role unseating the only Republican county commissioner in Florida with the guts to call out the rigged system that permits Big Sugar to pollute Florida waterways at the expense of taxpayers. In 2012 Ray Judah, a long-serving and popular official in Collier County was blind-sided by a television ad campaign later revealed to be organized by a political committee headed by Caldwell, resident of an adjacent county. US Sugar Corporation was the sole benefactor and spent a million dollars in the dark money blitz. It worked, and Caldwell was on his way to calling Bullsugar a "hate group".

In this election cycle, Big Sugar's political plans are clear. It is spending hundreds of thousands -- if not, millions -- to push term-limited Gov. Rick Scott into the US Senate seat held by the Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Although Nelson has always been respectful of Big Sugar, Scott is an energetic ally who proved his chops by bending state authority even more closely to Big Sugar's will. Scott, of course, is a friend of Trump. To succeed Scott, Big Sugar is pushing Adam Putnam -- now Agriculture Secretary -- to be governor. Big Sugar never had a better friend than Putnam, whose family wealth derived from a land sale to the state at an inflated value compared to its appraisal. To succeed Putnam, Big Sugar has thrown its weight behind Caldwell to be the next Agriculture Secretary.

Whether Big Sugar's election plans are a golden ticket or a trap door depends on Florida voters in November. Informed voters should take a close look at the results of the Bullsugar candidate questionnaire, the one that is getting Matt Caldwell and Sunshine State News all hopped up, because the only way out of this rigged system is to loosen the grip of the polluters who refuse to clean up their pollution at the source and instead force taxpayers to pay and pay and pay.

Patriots For Pollution ... by gimleteye

Evidence of a massive fish kill in 2016 as a result of toxic algae vomiting from Florida's Lake Okeechobee

You never heard "Patriots For Pollution" because the phrase is an oxymoron. A patriot is someone who loves and defends his nation. A polluter is someone or a corporation who erodes it.

In Florida we have plenty of polluters who wear the American flag pin on their lapels. They are well educated and well paid by profits from polluting. Take the sugar industry for example. Big Sugar enjoys massive corporate welfare embedded in the Farm Bill and other hidden subsidies. Two billionaire families -- the Fanjuls/ Flo Sun empire and the descents of Charles Stuart Mott through the Mott Foundation --  control the state's water management infrastructure through political campaign contributions. They routinely use fake arguments to advance the idea that they bear the fair share of cleaning up their pollution.

US Senator Marco Rubio, in his last campaign, asserted that protecting Florida sugar was a matter of national security. That, despite the fact that sugar poisons people, poisons democracy (through its influence in political campaign financing), and poisons our rivers, bays and Everglades.

Patriots defend our shared values as a democracy. By default -- because we share air we breathe and water we drink -- that includes the environment. In other words, it is patriotic to want to protect and to defend our parks, our natural heritage, our Everglades.

For that reason, environmentalists bear the brunt of attacks by polluting corporations. They are branded as "unreasonable" or "Radical" or "against jobs". Sometimes the attacks work. Judged by the Florida legislature and Gov. Rick Scott -- a fierce protector of Big Sugar's prerogatives -- they work very well.

These attacks are crafted and replayed in the right wing echo chamber where voters are often persuaded to vote against their best interests. Like air and water quality. If this were untrue, we wouldn't have an anti-environmental grifter like Scott Pruitt as chief of the federal agency charged with protecting the environment. Or a governor who ditched the one practical start to solve Florida's water emergency -- the acquisition of US Sugar lands in the Everglades Agricultural Area.

You cannot have patriots for pollution. You can have patriots against pollution. That would be Bullsugar.

Bullsugar is a relatively young conservation group in Stuart, Florida. It was established to call out the hypocrisy of Big Sugar mouthpieces. Bullsugar advocates for faster, real progress cleaning up the toxic waste caused by Florida's mismanagement of water resources in favor of nearly half a million acres of sugarcane on the southern rim of Lake Okeechobee. For example, Bullsugar supports the purchase at fair market value of sufficient marsh treatment areas to cleanse Big Sugar's pollution and stop pollution Lake Okeechobee and drainage into the connected rivers. Bullsugar wants public lands leased by Big Sugar to be turned back storage treatment areas.

The lake is Florida's diseased heart. It is used as a sump pump for big agriculture and has been spewing huge volumes of harmful algae into arterial waterways that are used to flush the lake when water levels rise too high.

Big Sugar is expert at pitting communities and constituencies against each other while wrapping its supporters in the American flag. It hires or otherwise supports local community "advocates" to claim that massive burning on sugarcane fields doesn't harm anyone's clean air. One way it does that: brand groups like Bullsugar as "radical". It is no surprise. In Miami, lobbyists for the sugar industry have long used local community institutions to push back against environmentalists. The Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce. The universities. The hospitals. Even the newspaper.

Big Sugar and its allies also conduct whisper campaigns that suppress what should be outright public anger at the the polluters and flip it back onto the patriots. The polluters minimize the damage to the rivers. They point to peoples' septic tanks not their own massive fertilizer run-off. They use arcane legislative port-holes for fake remedies the push solutions further and further into the distance and deeper into the wallets of taxpayers.

All people should have the right to clean air and clean water. You shouldn't be forced to pay for it, because corporations have commandeered government and force you to pay for their pollution.

Remember that and trust your instincts: if it sounds like bullsugar, it is bullsugar.


(Disclosure: I am a volunteer board member of the Bullsugar Alliance.)

Laudato Si and all that ... by gimleteye

Next week, Pope Francis will meet with world environmental leaders in the Vatican, to discuss advancing the agenda of protecting the planet from climate change impacts. The Pope issued his encyclical, "Laudato Si: On Care For Our Common Home", in 2015. A small, powerful constituency -- primarily in the United States and tied to fossil fuel extraction industries -- pushed back, but Pope Francis is determined. The evidence on the ground of climate change is everywhere, notwithstanding the hostility of American conservatives and media machinery like the Murdoch Fox News empire. The Pope is paying attention to sea level rise; from the world's poorest regions, like Bangladesh, to developed nations like the United States and cities like Miami, which -- in addition to being the lowest lying region in a politically influential state -- is also one with the greatest income disparity.

Pope Francis may have read about the recent Republican gubernatorial debate in Florida, a slugfest in which the two top contenders -- Adam Putnam and Ron DeSantis -- focused on how they are respectively more like Trump than their adversary. Trump defines the environment and threats to it as unauthorized access to a golf course he owns. Putnam, as Florida Secretary of Agriculture, has been thoroughly compromised by Big Sugar -- represented by two billionaire families, the Fanjuls and the descendants of Charles Stuart Mott. DeSantis, a Congressman whose campaign Trump endorsed, is a fierce defender of the anti-environmental regulatory jihad.

Then, there is Republican Rick Scott. Florida's term limited governor is challenging Democrat Bill Nelson for US Senate; a race considered critical to Democrats' hope to regain majority control of the Senate. As governor, Scott twiddled his fingers while serial outbreaks of toxic algae spewed from the state's largest fresh water body; outbreaks attributable to a warming climate and the sugar industry -- his big campaign supporters -- and its dominance of water management infrastructure in the state. Some of that algae is being linked through air-borne convection to serious brain disease, like Alzheimer's.

The thread tying together the Republican agenda in Florida and elsewhere is a willingness to dismantle environmental regulations that "drag" on business profits. Scott, for example, drove the final nail of the coffin in the state's growth planning agency. His willingness to abandon environmental enforcement, like wetlands destruction, has unleashed another wave of growth, sprawl, and highways into the Everglades. On another front, Gov. Scott has withheld information on cancer clusters including rare pediatric ones. This dismal course is mirrored by President Trump (eliminating protections for whales and sea turtles) and the empowerment of a radical anti-environmental agenda that masks severe risks to the public. Just one example:

Fearing a “public relations nightmare,” the White House and top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency worked together earlier this year to suppress a federal health study that revealed new evidence about hazardous levels of toxic chemicals in U.S. drinking water.

The study, set to be released by the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS)’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), found that a certain class of chemicals can pose a serious risk to human health at much lower levels than previously thought.

These chemicals, which have been linked to cancer, thyroid diseases, pregnancy complications, and other serious health problems, are present at dangerously high levels in water supplies near chemical plants, military bases, and other sites in multiple states, the study revealed.

Jeb Bush, who did his part as Florida governor to wreck decades of bipartisan consensus on the environment, dismissed Pope Francis' Laudato Si; saying that, in effect, the pope should stick to psalms while good business people took care of the economy. An observer of the Church wrote: "What strikes the Pope as self-evident is that the nature we have attempted to dominate, for the past several centuries, has now turned on us, like Frankenstein’s monster. As he put it in a recent press conference, "God always forgives; human beings sometimes forgive; but when nature is mistreated, she never forgives."

Although these thoughts have yet to register with Florida voters -- who seem to perversely detach their vote for Republicans from the terrible outcomes that Republican officials happily support -- the ones most severely impacted, like in Martin County where Lake Okeechobee is spewing toxic algae onto personal property and treasured waterways, are mobilized. A little further up the Florida Atlantic coast, another group is mobilized too. These are a group of young women who have contracted cancer. They shared neighborhoods, homes and schools near Patrick Air Force Base.

Dr. Julie Greenwalt is a cancer survivor and an oncologist with MD Anderson. She is organizing her community of friends and trying to piece together a toxic puzzle that the government, won't. ""I just feel grateful to be alive, and I know that God has a plan for my life," Greenwalt said. "(Perhaps) this is part of it -- to try and help figure this out."

Maybe God's plan also includes waking up voters, by putting in front of us such insensitive, manipulative and power-hungry politicians who wrap themselves in the velvet robes of religiosity. They should be banished from our legislatures, but only voters have that choice and, so far -- at least as Florida is concerned -- , they have exercised it very poorly.

These Aberrant Politics: Nothing is Normal in the Age of Rick Scott and Donald Trump ... by gimleteye

"For a time, we created exceptional value for shareholders."

Trump just appointed a new head of NASA, the space agency, that has a primary role in science disclosing global warming. The head of NASA is a climate change denier.

The drool starts from the top.

In Florida, the South Florida Water Management District has turned into a paranoid place where science is being forced to the shape of political outcomes.

This didn't happen overnight. For decades, conservatives who spouted anti-regulatory nonsense -- in order to fatten their profits -- tilled the fields of misdirection so that, eventually, something entirely awful and exotic could grow there: Rick Scott, as Governor, and Donald Trump.

Of the two, Scott is a smoother operator. He answers only the questions from the public that he wants to, and always has a frame for his response that reinforces his talking points. Incredibly, Scott and his spokespersons claim that no one has done more for the environment than he has. What Scott did, in fact, was to make science subservient to the demands of big agricultural industries, like Big Sugar.

As extreme as Scott is, it would never have happened without the continuous push and momentum created by his predecessor, Jeb Bush. Jeb had no use for environmental regulation and held the core belief that anything government could do, private industry could do better. That's exactly how "self-regulation" first became a mantra and then provided the fuel to gut government agencies and missions that had already been weakened from within, by allocating budgets and priorities away from science and away from fact.

Florida is an outlier state. That is one reason Trump feels such affinity with Scott. They are both wealthy as a result of skating the edges of the law. They both occupy center seats of power. They both understand their jobs to undermine "the administrative state" that suppresses private profits. Both deride the concept of a "public good".

Science and fact-based regulations to protect public health and the environment instead serve political  ends: to accumulate more power and wealth. That's why, for Trump and his backers like the Koch Brothers and fossil fuel supply chain, it is important to have a head of NASA who doesn't believe in global warming and isn't a scientist. That's why citizens protesting the South Florida Water Management District and its hired-gun governing board are facing the full wrath of the state.

There is nothing normal with what is happening in Florida and the nation. There will be a very steep price to pay, eventually, for those who scavenged rewards from these aberrant politics.

Trump is breaking the environment beyond repair
By Linda J. Bilmes FEBRUARY 20, 2018
Boston Globe

HUMPTY DUMPTY famously cannot be “put back together” again. For those who care about the environment, every day since Donald Trump took office is a Humpty Dumpty day —with something being broken beyond repair.

The federal government has started selling off parcels of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments to anyone who hammers four poles into the ground and pays a $212 fee. The Trump administration has also slapped a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels — making it more expensive for Americans to go solar and crippling the domestic solar panel installation industry. Additionally, the administration suspended the “Waters of the United States” rule, a key Obama-era regulation designed to reduce pollution in 60 percent of the nation’s lakes, rivers, and streams. The president’s 2019 spending plan would gut the Department of Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and especially NOAA — where his budget would force the agency to stop protecting coastal estuaries, Pacific salmon, and marine mammals.

Florida's Environmental Failure: could voters put a state agency into "receivership"? ... by gimleteye

Today, claims of "FAKE NEWS" envelop us, but here is one undeniable truth in Florida: our waters -- which belong to the people -- are dissolving in a toxic soup of pollution. This, despite decades of environmental rules and regulations and billions invested.

Florida's Everglades, held in the public trust for future generations, is on life support after huge taxpayer investments and billions more promised to come. And people are suffering. Highly toxic algae blooms coated both Florida coasts in 2016 and persist in ecological treasures like Florida Bay; more billions lost in a state economy that depends on tourism. Some of that algae can trigger incurable brain disease.

Everything we have tried, in terms of protecting Florida's water quality, is on the order of half-measures or worse. Take North Florida's springs: once as clear as plain air and now clogged and coated with algae. Or Apalachicola Bay, where the historic shellfish industry has disappeared.

Elected officials and decision-makers tell us: there are no silver bullets. It is always someone else's fault. Georgia. Municipal waste. The shrugging platitudes are excuses. The solutions are always the same: bury the pollution in deep wells. Shift it somewhere else.

The regulatory structure within which the public frames its hopes for clean water and a safe environment for people, for the economy, and for habitats is bankrupt, overwhelmed by external costs and internal conflicts.

This set of interlocking phenomena did not happen all at once, although there are manifest examples of contributing factors like Gov. Rick Scott's decision to eliminate the powers of the Florida Department of Community Affairs -- the single state agency with a mission to balance the needs of economic development with the environment. To conservationists, DCA was never a panacea. The agency and its mission grew out of a bi-partisan consensus in the early 1980's that the state needed to take a strong role in balancing economic development with environmental protection.

DCA was hacked to death, piece by piece, by politics steered by unregulated campaign contributions and dark money pools from industry associations, Big Agriculture, and the development supply chain that minted billions from construction at the shoreline and through the conversion of low-cost farmland and wetlands into suburban sprawl.

With DCA, though, at least civic activists had a platform; a legal framework to challenge political decisions. They could petition in state court when they believed local government permitting violated the intent and spirit of state growth management laws.

Now, there is no platform and growth management is a hollow shell.

The hollowing out of government agency and missions is a successful tactic of the anti-government AltR. Its apotheosis at the federal level is President Trump, blithely ignorant of facts and dismissive of science. Trump and his agents like EPA chief Scott Pruitt are torching federal authority to protect the nation's air and water. For instance, Trump has said that he can't wait to dismantle the Clean Water Act.

The states can do a better job, he says, without apparently understanding that Florida can't. Hasn't. Won't. In Florida, the life rafts are designed to sink.

A lawsuit filed yesterday against the State of Florida by a group of children, alleging that the state has failed its responsibilities under the public trust doctrine and constitution to proactively address climate change and its impacts points in the same direction. In that case, Delaney et al. v. Florida, we know that the solution is based in sound science; we must stop and reverse the combustion of global-warming emissions as soon as possible.

Isn't that the same case in Everglades restoration, and isn't the injury by state government in the case of climate change denial the same as the denial of science embedded in the state legislation that emerged, after two years of controversy, to place a huge man-made reservoir south of sugar plantations and Lake Okeechobee? Carl Hiaasen described it this way in a recent OPED:

At 10,500 acres, the reservoir will be relatively small and so deep (23 feet) that some scientists don’t think it can do the job. The design was chosen over better options by the board of the South Florida Water Management District, which under Gov. Rick Scott functions as a policy arm of Big Sugar.
As one example, TCPalm reporters exposed how the water district in 2015 allowed a U.S. Sugar lobbyist named Irene Quincey to “edit” and weaken planned regulations on harmful phosphorous pouring out of Lake O.

Among her contributions to the final draft was deleting the word “enforceable” from three key passages.

So it’s no shock that the water district bowed to the corporate cane growers this year, too. The original reservoir proposal by Sen. Joe Negron, a Stuart Republican whose tourism-dependent district gets slimed hard by the green algae blooms, called for a 60,000-acre project.

That would have been big and shallow enough to deal with much of the fouled lake discharges. However, sugar producers didn’t want a larger reservoir because they opposed taking any cane acreage out of production, even if the state paid them for it.

Just like a corporation, a state agency should be held to be bankrupt when it fails to uphold its mission to protect individual liberties and rights. In the case of the Everglades reservoir, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection claims it is following law and the balance of taxpayer interest and property rights, but it has manifestly ignored the parts of the law that inconveniently conflict with the aims of the state's powerful campaign contributors: Big Sugar. FDEP does the bare minimum. But the bare minimum has the further effect of allowing mission creep and the goal posts to shift further and further away from protecting people and the environment. Surely, the Florida constitution is being violated.

When a corporation goes bankrupt, its business is put into receivership. Why shouldn't receivership apply to state agencies like FDEP, as well? Who would "receive" a failed state agency? It could be a special master of the court, supervising the work and recommendations of a science panel comprised of experts who are independent of Florida's regulated communities. They wouldn't be able to legislate of course, but if the state legislature refused its recommendations at least the destruction would be more highly visible. A special master, moreover, could be a brake on further agency backsliding.

The status quo cannot hold, because if it does, the verge we are on will reveal even more nasty surprises.

In Miami-Dade, Republican Politics Continue To Damage Taxpayers ... and it's worse than you think ... by gimleteye

Today, the Miami-Dade County Commission may rubber stamp an agreement with Florida Power and Light, the monopolistic supplier of electricity to South Florida. The plan -- to re-use wastewater -- is touted as a "win-win". That's spin.

The plan, they claim, is a public good that will stop the outflow of the county's polluted waste water to the ocean and solve the Turkey Point cooling canal disaster at the same time. The cooling canals have been failing for many years, ladling hundreds of tons of super salty water per day into Florida's fragile drinking water aquifer and the waters of a national park.

Here is where the joint agreement falls flat on its face. FPL has neatly camouflaged its claim the waste water will be "clean" by writing the agreement in such a way that water quality standards cannot be enforceable.

It has done so, with broad recognition -- if not by the broader public -- that FPL has run circles for decades around regulators for the state who regularly show up in the revolving door between the company and government. (Mike Sole, former chief Florida environmental regulator, is now the public face of FPL -- and an influential member of the board of the Everglades Foundation.)

At the county level, FPL's arm twisting has been blatant.

If you haven't already noticed (cf. Trump White House and US EPA), the only intact principle of the GOP is protecting the right of polluters to profit at the public expense. It is, for example, the reason that Trump brightly defends Scott Pruitt, an EPA administrator who understands his responsibility to be the dismantling of federal authority to protect the nation's air and water. Gov. Rick Scott? He is right in line with the polluters.

Here is what this acidic observation has to do with today's county commission decision. It is a point of view that the Miami Herald ought to consider amplifying: how the insidious creep of deregulation is leaving taxpayers naked.

The county commissioners, the mayor, and big polluters like FPL understand the new playing field created by the GOP: when you stop environmental regulation at the federal level, and when you cripple rules and regulations at the state level, what you are left with is major decision-making involving difficult science and complexity at the local level: Miami Dade county, where environmental staffers are handed bows and arrows to fight lightning bolts. Mayor Carlos Gimenez and the politically ambitious chairman, Esteban Bovo, are apparently fine with that.

The premise of federal authority is that it is the place where the playing field can be level. Now, with the knee-capping of state regulatory authority -- Gov. Rick Scott and GOP'ers like Adam Putnam fired that metaphorical gun -- taxpayers can only watch the outcomes. That's how state road 836 is going to be extended, along with the rights of developers, further towards the Everglades and over critical farmland and wetlands we know are needed for a safe, secure future for taxpayers. It's also how FPL can get away scott-free, to claim it is delivering "clean" re-use water to badly damaged Biscayne Bay and a national park.

These events don't happen by coincidence. Very smart lawyers and lobbyists are paid handsomely to deliver results for their clients, and they require the acquiescence of elected officials to cross the "t's" and to dot the "i's". The rationales are cooked to perfection like a dulce de leche millefoile birthday cake where everyone wants second helpings. Doubters, ask this question: why is Florida swimming in a sea of pollution today? It is no coincidence. This is what you voted for. The polluters call this "intelligent design" and barring a miracle of sound judgment descending over County Hall -- another example is going to be delivered today.

Rick Scott: ready, steady, go ... by gimleteye

Florida Rick Scott got there, first. Before there was a Donald Trump, Scott decided to deploy a portion of his considerable fortune to buy the office of the governor. It didn't matter than he had zero experience in public policy (like Trump). Didn't matter that his business accomplishment were deeply stained (like Trump). Or that he had nothing in common, at all, with the Tea Party and rabid right-wing that propelled him to office (Trump).

The Republican Party looked down its nose at Scott (like it did, to Trump). When he arrived in Tallahassee in 2010, he barely had competent staff (Trump).

What Scott discovered, to the great satisfaction of his mentee -- Trump -- , was that winning high elected office was a rigged game and that the winners best understood how to navigate the margins for best forward speed.

Scott's favorability numbers are very low. He is a disaster in unscripted moments before the cameras, and so his approach has been to tightly limit the opportunities for the press to catch him off guard. Within his own party, Scott's relations are frosty. But big donors from industries regulated by the state are happy to support Scott, as they are to support Trump in Washington.

Now that Scott has formally announced his intention to take on Senator Bill Nelson, the race is on. Neither party can control the US Senate without winning Florida. The race will be about Trump, Scott's best friend. That is why Scott wants to declare victory in the Everglades and why a Republican Congress will quickly move to provide the federal cost share to a new multi-billion dollar reservoir that will not work, because Big Sugar has already turned the reservoir, legislatively, to its purposes.

The Democrat's best argument is that Florida is swimming in a sea of pollution, and that sea includes toxic water and toxic politics in equal mix.

Republican Party In Palm Beach Lauds GOP Anti-Environmental Crusader ... by gimleteye

Alfie Fanjul (l) and Pepe Fanjul (r), top Palm Beach County Republican donor. The brothers head a billionaire dollar empire carved out of federal subsidies and corporate welfare programs protecting Big Sugar, the primary polluter of Everglades wetlands

The Republican Party of Palm Beach County has invited James O'Keefe to be its keynote speaker at its mid-summer event.

A press release describes O'Keefe as "an award winning journalist". In fact, he is better known as a right-wing activist who infiltrated ACORN and an office of Planned Parenthood and also invites legal action against himself.

In 2010, O'Keefe was convicted of breaking into the offices of Sen. Marie Landrieu:

Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine after he pleaded guilty on Wednesday to misdemeanor charges stemming from his involvement in a break-in at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-La.) office. In January, O’Keefe and three others were arrested by federal authorities at Landrieu’s office on allegations of phone-tampering. Prosecutors initially said they caught four individuals in the process of committing a felony, but the charges were later reduced to misdemeanors."

O'Keefe and the Florida GOP meant to time his visit to Palm Beach County -- where virulent anti-environmentalism is coordinated through the Fanjul & US Sugar Corporation cartel -- with revelations of his incursion into the League Of Conservation Voters; an attack rebuffed yesterday by LCV with the California Attorney General.

The local GOP press release crows, "O’Keefe was ultimately credited with having a significant impact on the 2016 presidential elections for his October Surprise video series."

In "Has James O’Keefe Accidentally Stung Himself Again?", New Yorker writer Jane Mayer -- who chronicled influence peddling of the nation's largest polluters in "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right" -- writes:

In the latest chapter of his strange career, the League of Conservation Voters, a national environmental-advocacy group, has filed a complaint against three individuals who infiltrated its operations, at least two of whom, the group alleges, “could be associated with” O’Keefe and have past ties to him. The group’s leaders recently began to suspect that they were being scammed, and decided to go to the authorities before O’Keefe or his alleged associates released any material on their own.

The timing of the Florida GOP conspiracy with O'Keefe occurs within context of a massive erosion of environmental rules and regulations by the Trump White House.

It is the identical strategy Florida polluters are planning to blend into the important 2018 political races where Big Sugar's main apologist, Agriculture Secretary Adam Putnam, is poised to be the GOP candidate to replace Gov. Rick Scott.

Scott, who counts on campaign financial support from Big Sugar, will likely aim for the senate seat held by incumbent Democratic Bill Nelson.

Overshadowing Florida's nasty, anti-people and anti-environmental politics is a recent report by federal scientists to the Trump administration calling climate change a greater, current threat to economic and national security than earlier estimates. According to the New York Times:

The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration. The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.

The Trump White House has not released or commented on the report and was hoping, perhaps, that a titillating "explosive" revelation against LCV would help its cause in climate change denial.

Governor Rick Scott has prohibited state agencies and staff from using the words, "climate change", although Florida's economy, real estate and tax base is most vulnerable to its impacts in the nation. Recently, the US Department of Agriculture ordered "climate change" to be similarly deleted from its communications.

In the New Yorker report, Mayer contacted O'Keefe for comment. He responded:

“I don’t comment on investigations real or imagined, or work with mainstream reporters who operate in bad faith,” he told me. In 2016, I wrote an article for this magazine about O’Keefe’s bungled attempt to sting George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, a liberal nonprofit group that O’Keefe had targeted.

O'Keefe, in his role feeding the beast of disinformation through channels like Fox News, Breitbart, Infowars and Rush Limbauch, will dine on lobster tails at the Palm Beach GOP anti-environmental love-fest at the Polo Club of Boca Raton, 5400 Champion Boulevard, Boca Raton at 6:30PM on August 17.

Independent science under attack by the State of Florida ... by gimleteye

Miami, March For Science, April 22, 2017

When it comes to using independent science to affirm what is happening in the real world, the State of Florida is abdicating its responsibility.

The direction comes from the top. One of Rick Scott's first acts as governor was to slash the science budget of the state agency charged with Everglades restoration; the South Florida Water Management District.

Environmentalists had good reason to be alarmed. Restoring the Everglades ecosystem requires attention to biodiversity on the microscopic scale. It had been determined, after decades of litigation in federal court, that more than ten parts per billion of phosphorous, laid out by the ton by Big Sugar in its fertilizer run-off, and the Everglades dies. Firing the scientists is not a route to success.

The New York Times Sunday Magazine, From "Arks of the Apocalypse", published a dismal essay on the state of the planet that resonates in the Everglades.

“There is,” he said, “a very intense feeling that we’re losing biodiversity quicker than we can understand it.”

That's happening very intensely too in the Everglades. Decades ago a very public decision by Congress and the State of Florida lead to a massive investment using science to guide the restoration of Everglades biodiversity. It was called, at the time, the most comprehensive environmental restoration project on the planet. It also resonated with the emerging concern about global warming. One Glades activist, Joe Podgor, famously quipped, "Saving the Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet."

A growing consensus among scientists holds that we now live in the Anthropocene, an epoch defined by humanity’s impact on planetary ecosystems. We are responsible for the current die-off of species, not some asteroid or volcanic eruption.

In Florida we are responsible for massive damage to the Everglades. The main culprit: pollution by Big Sugar streaming out of 400,000 acres south of Lake Okeechobee.

Future generations will examine what happened. According to a Sunday Tampa Bay Times report,

The head of the state agency overseeing the multi-billion-dollar Everglades restoration project said this week he will no longer let his employees cooperate with the top scientists who are supposed to be advising the project.

South Florida Water Management District executive director Pete Antonacci declared at a public meeting Thursday that his agency will no longer work with the National Academies of Science — one of the nation's premier scientific organizations — because science advisers there won't "tend to their knitting."

The report by Craig Pittman, "Everglades restoration project leader tells top scientists: Stay in your lane", is a sharp reminder that the disintegration of federal authority for protecting the environment is providing cover for throttling independent science in the states by big polluters who control the levers of government.

Despite the fact that Floridians do want the environment protected, the current fad of lies and misdirection casts a pall on prospects ahead. The Times notes the phenomenon:

Academics have even taken to studying the psychology of this human response — one such book, for example, is titled “The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death.”

Back in 2000, when the road map for the state federal partnership -- costing billions -- was established, the involvement of the National Academy of Sciences was the only point where environmentalists held hope for the massive plan to restore the Everglades. (I was chair of Sierra Club's Florida Chapter Everglades Committee at the time.)

In other words, we knew -- and decision makers agreed -- that the complexity of Everglades restoration needed independent, fact-based assessments of progress; not just to ensure that results were being properly organized but also to be a truth-teller in the case that special interests railroaded billions of taxpayer dollars to line their own pockets while calling the theft something else. Like "progress".

State politicians are reinforced by quid pro quo's from Big Sugar. Their impulses, with respect to Everglades restoration, were intended to be balanced by federal interests: the US Department of Interior -- with responsibility for America's national parks -- and the US Army Corps of Engineers, the earth-moving, canal building, river-channeling agency and cooperative partner of the South Florida Water Management District.

Since environmentalists were left on the sidelines in 2000 with Everglades restoration, leaving protection of the public interests to insiders, the question arose: who would vet, or ensure, that Everglades restoration was moving in the right direction, with the right sequence of projects and public investments?

The Everglades panel of the National Academies of Science was a sturdy and extraordinarily important part of the plan to reassure the public that billions would not be wasted or diverted to paper-over the profit motive of wetlands destroyers.

The NAS panels take their responsibilities with extraordinary care, substance and skill. Unlike Florida-centric science programs, where careers can be blown up if agency funders decide they don't like one's shoe size, the independence of the National Academies is foundational to the national interest in fact.

The National Academies of Science is America's top collection of scientific minds. Congress created it in 1863 to provide "independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology." Election to its ranks is considered one of the highest honors in science.

Antonacci's complaints drew no comments from his bosses at the water district, but Cara Capp of the National Parks and Recreation Association said he's making a mistake.
"It's disappointing to see the state of Florida turn its back on the scientific body that has contributed so much to our knowledge about the Everglades," Capp said. She said her advocacy group "feels strongly that independent science must be the driving factor for restoring the Everglades. 

So did Congress when it approved the Everglades restoration program in 2000. One requirement that it put on the project was that the people building it frequently consult with scientists to make sure they were doing it right."

Antonacci, Gov. Rick Scott's former general counsel, has turned the South Florida Water Management District into an office extension of Big Sugar. He is taking aim at fact; a mini-version of the tragedy playing out in the nation's capitol, where another ideologue -- Scott Pruitt, head of US EPA -- putting a chainsaw to the budgets of federal scientists studying climate change.

Antonacci's suggestion that the University of Florida's Water Institute could replace the National Academies is an insult to the voters and taxpayers.

Science matters, and in the face of unfathomable transformations we triggered in nature, we need to change course. Sadly, when changing course affects the profit margins of the state's biggest campaign contributors, the State of Florida doesn't have the guts to stand up for what ultimately sustains us all.  Only enlightened voters can rectify that injustice.

Water Disaster (Again): The only interest that never suffers when it rains too much? BIG SUGAR ... by gimleteye

Florida Bay had another bad week. This video of the latest fish kill was taken on Monday at the marina in Flamingo. Lake O had a bad week, too. As one expert reported: “When I see over 200 ppm [phosphorus] going out of STAs--five times the Lake O limit and 20 times the Everglades limit--I have to wonder what the hell is going on? Nothing clean about the June 2017 EAA stormwater, regardless of how it was treated. Someone is lying.” (SFWMD’s Randy Smith told reporters the water was clean). Sugar had a good week, though. More than 400,000 acres of sugarcane in the EAA stayed perfectly drained despite getting more than a foot of rain. Just as they stayed perfectly watered in May, while the rest of South Florida faced water restrictions. And that’s the problem: everyone else suffers the consequences of extreme weather while water managers protect the sugarcane crop first, foremost, and (more often then not) only. It works. Sugar has never had a bad year. In one of the world’s most erratic, unpredictable climates sugarcane has delivered steady, predictable yields for decades, generating fantastic wealth for two billionaire families at a horrific price for millions of Floridians. Quietly. Whatever emergency-of-the-week state officials blame for pumping sugar runoff into Lake Okeechobee, or blocking water from reaching Florida Bay and Everglades National Park, or discharging toxic algae into the estuaries, they never say a word about the reliably perfect conditions on US Sugar’s and Florida Crystals’ properties. In fact they routinely lie to the public about water management to avoid mentioning sugar, as they did this week. The truth is sugar’s needs are now prioritized above public health and safety, drinking water supplies, the tourist economy, wildlife and land and water conservation, and everything else that depends on water and drainage. That’s wrong. When we do get our priorities right--and we will--every stakeholder in South Florida will finally have a good week. A great week. -Peter Girard Bullsugar.org http://www.bullsugar.org/ P.S. Bullsugar.org supporters are changing the game, helping Florida win its biggest victory for clean water in years. If you can, please click here to make a donation to continue building momentum and shedding light on how our water is managed.

Make Political Candidates Choose Between Your Vote and Polluters ... by gimleteye

I wrote the following for Bullsugar.org

Make your choice at the ballot box a referendum FOR candidates who will support disclosure and fixing the extent and cause of neurotoxins in our waterways, rare pediatric cancer clusters in our communities, and the spread of methyl mercury through the application of sulfur on more than half a million acres of sugarcane.

Thursday, June 22, 2017     Remember how Big Sugar said the problem in Florida’s estuaries was septic tanks adjacent to the Indian River? They say the same about the mercury problem in the Everglades and Florida waterways: it’s someone else’s fault. Not of course that Big Sugar fails to clean up its pollution. The same sort of wizardry applies to how Big Sugar talks about mercury. Let’s break it down: For mercury contamination to pollute aquatic ecosystems, the mercury must first be transformed to the powerful neurotoxicant methylmercury. Once methylmercury is formed, it can readily enter the base of aquatic food chains and accumulate at increasingly higher concentrations up the food chain from algae to predatory fish and ultimately to terrestrial wildlife such as wading birds and mammal species, including the endangered Florida panther. This process is known as bioaccumulation and can easily result in concentration increases of methylmercury in fish by factors of over one million relative to methylmercury concentrations in the water column of the Everglades. How does it happen? The bacteria largely responsible for producing methylmercury require sulfate to support their metabolism.   Sulfate concentrations are elevated across much of the Everglades. The magnitude of this contamination can reach factors up to and greater than 50 compared to background levels, depending on location. Those excess concentrations of sulfate are largely due to one source: farming practices involving the drainage of flooded soils and the use of elemental sulfur as a soil amendment in the Everglades Agricultural Area. In short, sulfate is a primary driver of the production of methylmercury. The pervasive and high levels of sulfate contamination–largely due to EAA farming practices–are believed by most scientists to have greatly exacerbated the methylmercury problem. Just like water policies protecting Big Sugar first are wrecking our estuaries, rivers and bays, farming practices tolerated by the state of Florida are spreading pollution into Florida’s most treasured wetland. Because the muck soils in the EAA are both low in essential micronutrients, and because limestone present in the soils binds phosphorus, the farmers need to apply sulfur to acidify the soils and release these nutrients. The problem with sulfur is that it doesn’t stay on sugar fields; it flows into the Everglades. So, how have the State of Florida and the South Florida Water Management District reacted to the scientific realities of methylmercury? Sugar’s position, as usual: "Don’t tell us how much water we need or when we can have it, don't tell us we can't drain our fields dry even if it endangers local communities and causes toxic discharges, and don’t tell us how to use sulfur or any other soil additive.” The simple truth is that, either through benign ignorance or willful indifference, the state of Florida and the district do not even require sugar farmers to report how much sulfur they are using. Big Sugar represents a secret sulfur source: "The amount of total sulfur used in various soil amendments, fertilizers, and fungicides in the EAA is unknown.” ('Sulfur in the South Florida Ecosystem,' Orem et al., Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, 3 March 2011, page 262.) A more recent estimate of the amount of sulfur applied to the EAA is nearly 19,000 tons per year (Landing, 2014). When you consider that the practice of applying sulfur as a soil amendment has been occurring over a period of many decades in the EAA, you get the idea.  "Overall, it appears that much or most of the sulfate present in EAA canals originates from the EAA lands. The broad use of sulfur in agriculture (present and legacy sulfur in soil), and the elimination of other sulfur sources (groundwater, wet/dry deposition) as inputs to canals suggests that soil oxidation and present sulfur use in the EAA accounts for the major proportion of the sulfate load to the Everglades." (Orem et al, page 263) Methylmercury is one of the most potent toxicants known to man. It is so powerful that “do not eat” fish warnings are posted throughout the South Florida landscape. Methylmercury is particularly damaging to fetuses and young children. But it not just infants who are at risk.  Indigenous peoples living in the Everglades and relying on fish for food, people in glades communities who depend on fish to supplement their diets, and recreational anglers also are at risk. So why aren’t the facts of methylmercury more widely broadcast to the public? For the same reason that the state ignored the science of water quality and allowed Big Sugar to dictate a deep reservoir in the Everglades in the recent session of the legislature, and not the addition of significant lands for water treatment and cleansing purposes. Big Sugar makes money at your expense, literally, from your wallet and in threats to your health. Not idle threats. Methylmercury is deadly serious business, and Big Sugar routinely buries its cost in your waterways. -Alan Farago Bullsugar.org http://www.bullsugar.org/ P.S. Bullsugar.org supporters have already made a difference in Florida's fight for a clean water future. If you can, please click here to make a donation to help us hold our government accountable for the promises they made this year.         Bullsugar.org http://www.bullsugar. org/     Template by Mosaic • Created with NationBuilder

Conclusion: The Agony of Florida, Its Rivers, Bays, Estuaries and Politics ... by gimleteye

Donald Trump won the White House with talking points that stirred a devoted base. One of them: "The system is rigged." In so far as Big Sugar and the state of Florida are concerned, Trump is right. The system is rigged. But what does one do with that information?

First and foremost, understand: Big Sugar has an Achilles Heel. Big Sugar's singular vulnerability is that its reliable voters don't extend beyond a few communities huddled around the Everglades Agricultural Area. That's why Big Sugar is laser-focused on the internal clock spring of politics, but not so helping anyone understand how to connect the dots. If fact, Big Sugar is vigilant in this respect.

Florida's sugar producers are astute in doling out political money -- to both Democrats and Republicans -- through affiliations for example; allying with and funding hand-in-hand with other cartel enterprises in Florida, like the state's electric utilities, and unrelated business councils like Associated Industries of Florida. In a perfect democracy Big Sugar would only be a special interest vying on a level playing field with the public good.

Remember the public good? The ideal that a representational democracy enlightened by and for the people could arbitrate the fair and equitable relation of the branches of government to special interests? The public good was up-ended by Republicans in the late 1908's, calling for the end to the welfare state, calling on voters to embrace personal responsibility, moral values, and derided the cultural relativism of liberals.

Thirty years later, Republicans claim that government shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers. That's the entire theme of President Trump's determination to erase subsidies for alternative energy like solar.

Yet the sugar program in the Farm Bill remains untouchable and inviolate, conferring the vast profits that amass great wealth for the shareholders -- a form of corporate welfare that Republicans nevertheless embrace.

The appropriate response would be for voters -- both Republican and Democrat -- to make Big Sugar and water policy reform a litmus test at the ballot box: do you support termination of the sugar program in the Farm Bill, or not? Yes or no. Do you support a new law to provide for land acquisition in the EAA, or not? Yes or no.

Although it is hard to see the way through, because the right of corporations to give unlimited campaign contribution is hardened in a missile silo, there is always hope that Floridians will awake, someday, rubbing the sleep from their eyes like Rip Van Winkle.

When they do, they will see that there are civic groups like Bullsugar.org, like the Everglades Trust, the Southwest Florida Clean Water activists and Captains for Clean Water willing to make the arguments and draw the connection between the state's water policy and the economy and the environment; in snapshots that put Big Sugar in its appropriate context: a polluting industry that is harming democracy, harming people and harming the natural resources that Floridians love. No one visits Florida for the sugar cane.

On the signing of the new Everglades law by Gov. Rick Scott, Senator Negron said, "After 20 years of talking, southern storage is finally becoming a reality. We are well on our way to putting the harmful discharges from Lake Okeechobee into the pages of history, instead of the front pages of daily newspapers."

Environmentalists and citizens had a different idea about southern storage than the one that emerged as a result of Senator Negron's hard work in the recent legislative session. Their dream was to create enough shallow water storage to absorb the impact of flooding from Lake Okeechobee. Not a deep reservoir that shifts all the risk to taxpayers.

Instead, the new law frames a dictate from Big Sugar: you will do things our way or not at all.

You will not use eminent domain to pursue a shallow water flow-way, you will only have conversations with Big Sugar if Big Sugar willingly wants to, you will fork over public dollars to do the engineering and science so we can sell rainwater on our private property to the public, and you will require waiting a decade before revisiting this issue.

But Big Sugar does not dictate how you vote.

In 2008, then Gov. Charlie Crist had done the unthinkable: negotiated an option to buy U.S. Sugar Corporation lands in the Everglades Agricultural Area. To be sure, not all the lands were optimally located for a southern flow-way, but if 187,000 acres had been purchased with Amendment 1 dollars -- secured by a committed electorate in 2014 -- Florida would have been well on its way to increasing leverage on the big landowners inside the prospective flow-way: namely, Florida Crystals and the King Ranch, -- the largest landowner in Texas that knows a thing or two about ownership of water as a private right.

But Florida Crystals and the King Ranch had other ideas, and by the time the dust had settled on the 2010 election -- with Gov. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio securing the governor's mansion and U.S. Senate seat respectively -- even U.S. Sugar had reason to pull out of the deal.

Gov. Rick Scott was 100 percent committed to deny the opportunity to create additional storage out of sugar lands. Whether or not he understood the intricacies of Big Sugar's strategic plays to control Florida's water future, Scott was all for letting private industry have the run of the field. Navigating the arbitrage at the edge of federal and state health care reimbursement laws made him rich.

The die-off of the U.S. Sugar option was encouraged by Gov. Scott's political appointees of the South Florida Water Management District. Despite pleas from the public and environmentalists, they allowed the provision for a partial purchase to expire in 2015. Too bad. Then the rains began to fall.

As polluted water from Lake Okeechobee cascaded across incoming state senate president Joe Negron's district, the idea of purchasing an additional 60,000 acres of Big Sugar lands gained traction, but only long enough for the November presidential election to come and go -- helping to deliver to the White House a part-time Floridian well-known to the Palm Beach sugar barons as an arriviste. Big Sugar invested heavily in both Jeb Bush -- who had already proven his facility as governor ink dividing and conquering Florida's environmental and Everglades communities -- , but really supported Marco Rubio.

During the presidential primary campaign, Rubio -- who faced angry Republicans in flooded Republican districts -- defended Big Sugar's prerogatives through the Farm Bill as "a matter of national security". This -- for a commodity, sugar -- that imposes trillion dollar a year costs on the American health care system as a consequence of over-consumption. Primarily in poor communities that can least afford the cover massive treatment costs.

Conservatives who ardently believe that government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers might start asking the question in 2018 of candidates: why is government picking winners like Big Sugar?

Big Sugar supports the following front-runners. For GOP candidate for governor of Florida, the current Agriculture Secretary, Adam Putnam. For Agriculture Secretary, state representative Matt Caldwell, Big Sugar’s chief ally in people's house. For U.S. Senate, Rick Scott who will take on the senior Senator from Florida, Bill Nelson.

What about the Democrats? As Joe Negron pointed out during the legislative session, the Democrats in the state legislature -- like Senate minority leader Oscar Braynon -- proved to be some of the most intractable obstacles to delivering a clean bill including a 60,000 acre reservoir. Big Sugar knows how to ring the Democrats' bell. So long as the state’s top Democrats refuse to delineate the case against Big Sugar, the only place that environmentalists will can take solace in, according to Carl Hiaasen — "a 14,460-acre reservoir is better than no reservoir.” If a 14,460 acre reservoir can work, cooking in the hot Florida sun.

Voters should understand, too, how science is the collateral victim of Big Sugar. In a press report after Gov. Scott signed the new Everglades reservoir bill into law, Gaston Cantens, vice president of Florida Crystals, said "the initial proposal could have threatened existing Everglades restoration plans, but this most recent version uses science-based research to continue the construction of CERP projects." Cantens, a former state legislator from Miami-Dade County, is twisting the conclusion of the nation's top scientists -- in the National Academy of Science. More land to store and cleanse stormwater runoff from sugar farms and other sources of pollution.

The acquisition of additional lands is critical to solving Florida’s water crisis. In 2017 progress towards that end was diverted just like an irrigation in a ditch dug in the middle of the Everglades Agricultural Area.

In December (2016), I wrote that I didn't know "... how the Negron initiative is going to work out, except to cite from history; that initiatives to protect Florida's natural resources are of story-teller / elected officials, one after another, making promises then claiming victory with half-measures costing billions. Their dual purpose: placate restless voters and taxpayers while keeping the status quo intact. That, in a nutshell, is the history of Everglades restoration.”

Floridians need to vote with their hearts and, also, with their contributions. Make Big Sugar a litmus test. Insist that “kicking the can down the road” does not constitute progress no matter how many billions are spent.

We can move on, but -- eventually -- we are going to have to move back. Big Sugar controls Florida but it does not control the rain. Whether by drought or by flood, the day will come when a majority of voters call on Big Sugar to throw down its spears. And Big Sugar will have to do it because too many voters will have arisen from their slumber.

Also Read: part 2

Read: "Part One: The Agony of Florida, Its Rivers, Bays, Estuaries, And Politics"

Selected references:
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2017/10/BillText/er/PDF
http://floridapolitics.com/archives/237789-scott-okeechobee-2
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/stateroundup/compromise-yields-gift-for-the-everglades-78-billion-gallons-of-cleaner/2322476
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/carl-hiaasen/article148964414.html#storylink=cpy
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/florida-passes-everglades-reservoir-restoration-bill-after-20-years-fighting-big-sugar-9321807
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/everglades-activists-worry-okeechobee-reservoir-deal-doesnt-go-far-enough-9333478
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2017/10/BillText/er/PDF
https://gladesdeclaration.org
Help for the Everglades is on the way — maybe, CARL HIAASEN, May 5, 2017
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/carl-hiaasen/article148964414.html#storylink=cpy
https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/florida-president-clinton-trump