For Immediate Release                                           Contact:  Frank Jackalone

October 30, 2018                                                                       frank.jackalone@sierraclub.org

Sierra Club Blasts Rick Scott for Everglades Election Stunt

Opening of Tamiami Trail Bridge Excludes Everglades Groups

St. Petersburg, FL – Rick Scott held a news conference today to announce the completion of the second phase of the Tamiami Trail bridging project.

In response, Sierra Club Florida Chapter Director Frank Jackalone issued the following statement:

“Governor Rick Scott held a self-serving, restricted attendance media event just one week before Election Day that was disguised as a major Everglades announcement.  It’s political pandering at its worst designed to benefit his election campaign against US Senator Bill Nelson.  

“What was the rush?  Scott’s advisory was released less than three hours before the Miami press conference.  

“Instead of using the media event to celebrate a shared federal-state success on the Tamiami Trail bridging, Scott used it to attack Congress for not spending more money on Everglades projects.  Could he get more political?  

“And the map that was linked in his ‘announcement’ is obvious electioneering.  Rick Scott is not the champion of 42 projects, many of which were begun way before he was first elected Governor.  

“Environmental organizations including the Sierra Club, the National Parks Conservation Association, Audubon Florida, Center for Biological Diversity, Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation, the Conservancy of SW Florida, Florida Oceanographic Society, and other members of the Everglades Coalition that advocated for the project and provided input on the Tamiami Trail bridging project to the US Army Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service for more than a decade weren’t invited to attend.  We learned about it from photos of the event posted this morning by Lieutenant Governor Carlos-Lopez Cantera.

“A great many people worked on building those bridges from the time the Sierra Club placed it on the public agenda as the “Everglades Skyway.” For the Governor to slight the very groups that brought us to this day is an insult and a rewriting of history to serve his political ends.  Did he fear that Everglades supporters would show up holding Red Tide Rick protest signs?

  

“Scott is desperately trying to whitewash his environmental record as he tries to unseat Senator Bill Nelson in the current election.  As Florida’s Governor, Scott gutted enforcement of clean water rules in Florida instead of stopping the pollution that fueled Florida’s toxic algae and red tide crisis.  He spent eight years blocking efforts to clean the very water that would go under the Tamiami Trail bridges and installing water managers to do Big Sugar’s bidding.

“Scott scuttled growth management in Florida and replaced it with plans for new sprawling cities that would eliminate much of Florida’s rural farmland, bulldoze over wildlife habitat, and threaten the State’s depleted water supply.  For eight years as governor, he stood idly by, denying climate change and abrogating his responsibility to work with state, national, and world leaders to stop the carbon pollution that is bringing rising seas and ever-stronger hurricanes to Florida and is threatening the very existence of the Everglades.  

“Scott sabotaged our best chance of restoring the Everglades and protecting the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee river estuaries when he publicly rejected Governor Charlie Crist’s historic contract to acquire 187,000 acres of sugar land that would allow us to move excess Lake Okeechobee water south to the Everglades.   In its place, he and his water managers have designed a risky, 23 foot deep reservoir on a tiny footprint that is missing the wetlands needed to clean the contaminated water from Lake Okeechobee that the reservoir will hold.

“Rick Scott is no champion of the Everglades – far from it.”  

###

VOTERS: Boycott the GOP ... by Alan Farago

As the most important election in our lifetimes approach, it is worth another look: the March issue of
Atlantic Magazine, in which Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes published, “Boycott the Republican Party: If conservatives want to save the GOP from itself, they need to vote mindlessly and mechanically against its nominees.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/boycott-the-gop/550907/

(1) The GOP has become the party of Trumpism.
(2) Trumpism is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.
(3) The Republican Party is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.

I agree with this assessment, not out of loyalty to the Democratic Party, but out of loyalty to our democracy which is not under threat “by both sides.” It is under threat by one side: the GOP that has abandoned all conservative principles and thrown its lot in, with a president who stands for nothing but his own vanities and power.

Like Rauch and Wittes, who writes the invaluable Lawfare blog, I am repulsed by the willingness of the Republican leadership to tolerate the most divisive and dangerous administration in US history.

If you are a conservative voter, you will mechanically and mindlessly vote Democrat in this election because it is time to tear up the weeds and replant the garden. When so much is at stake — namely, the drift to authoritarianism — there is no their principled choice.

"Red Tide" Rick Scott needs a demotion not a promotion ... by Alan Farago

Photo courtesy of John Moran

In a world blasted by twitter storms, one fears it is difficult to hold any voter's attention for longer than 140 characters. But the Nov 6th election is critical and so attention is deserved especially in Florida, where "Red Tide Rick" Scott is trying to unseat incumbent Bill Nelson.

For eight years Rick Scott has served as a governor of Florida. During this time, we have gotten to know virtually nothing about the man.

The public record is clear enough: he is very wealthy. His public disclosures do not accurately capture his assets. He lives in a mansion in a secluded Port Royal section of Naples. He thought well enough of this isolation to support a new law restricting the rights of Floridians to public beach access.

Still, from the low tide line if you peer closely enough, it is relatively easy to see that Rick Scott's embrace of crony capitalism not only enriched him personally while in office, it is having massive impacts on the balance between federal and state interests where the outcome is defined by what major campaign contributors want. I'll get to these in a minute.

Scott's fortune derived from skirting the edges of federal health reimbursement regulations. He narrowly escaped the indictment that encumbered his business with the largest civil fine ever levied at the time; about $1.7 billion. Scott claims his assets are in a "blind trust". While governor, his net worth has skyrocketed, including from lucrative private investments that may have been made through contacts he established while governor. In July the Miami Herald reported that a single deal netted Scott more than $500 million.

It is all a little gauzy. A little hazy. But that's exactly how Rick Scott likes to keep it. The Sun Sentinel reported in September, "Gov. Rick Scott's mockery of a "blind trust":

Since he raised the subject, it’s fair game. The giant hole in his rags-to-riches story is the $1.7 billion that his hospital company, Columbia/HCA, was fined for defrauding Medicare and Medicaid. Scott left the company with a golden parachute four months before the federal inquiry became public. He has claimed he had not known about its systematic overbilling and other frauds.

Throughout his two terms, Scott has frustrated the intent of the Florida Constitution’s “full and public disclosure” requirement. On occasion, he has briefly disclosed the trust’s assets long enough to appear to comply with disclosure and to persuade the courts to dismiss litigation over the issue. He has always chosen the alternative disclosure that allows him to withhold his income tax forms and submit a statement of assets instead. In one of those cases, though, Judge Brad Thomas of the First District Court of Appeal warned that the law “may likely be incompatible” with the Constitution.

You see, Rick Scott has excelled at a version of political life that has crystallized during the Donald Trump era: it doesn't matter what you do as a leader. What matters is what you seem.

Rick Scott has seemed the role of governor without serving the public interest very much at all. His appearances are carefully staged and scripted. He abhors being captured on camera where critics somehow pierce the veil his team has created. He does not answer reporters' questions but sticks to talking points. He tightened down on public disclosure law in part to reduce his exposure to public scrutiny.

The most common time to see Rick Scott is during weather-related emergencies. Then, he is all over cable television news, always wearing a Navy baseball cap, and seeming to be an expert on big storms. But in the aftermath, Scott is carefully hustled from place to place without giving journalists much of a chance to squeeze through the scrum. It's all gloss. It is all appearance.

As an environmental leader I've had substantial exposure to the way Scott's top appointees -- his capos -- act in relation to Florida's significant environmental crises: ones that are imposing immense costs on citizens today like the blanket of toxic red tides threatening the state's tourism and real estate based business sectors.

It turns out, contrary to his staff's assertions, Rick Scott is a micromanager when it comes to the environment. Here are few examples of his fingerprints.

First, his appointees to the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District -- beginning with his decision to appoint Peter Antonucci, his personal counsel, as chairman -- were meant to strictly follow his guidance on the balance of interests between private industry (ie. campaign funders) and environmental resources. His guidance? To throttle civic and conservation voices plain and simple.

Shortly after his first election in 2010 (he had never served in any elected capacity, before that time) Scott killed the deal to buy US Sugar and its 130,000 acres of land in the Everglades Agricultural Area. He not only killed the deal, he personally reached down into the staffing of the South Florida Water Management District and imposed massive cuts on the agency's science capacity. If you don't ask good questions of science, you will never get answer you don't want to hear.

It was a key point of support of Big Sugar for his 2010 campaign, at a time when he had very few supporters beyond his investment advisors and the accountants who cut checks from his personal account to his campaign. Seven years later, the public got a "deal" for an Everglades reservoir that will cost at least twice as much as the US Sugar land acquisition would have. Its main benefits will not accrue to the environment. Will not relieve the damaged rivers and estuaries and Florida Bay. Its main benefits will be to provide guarantees of drought-protection for Big Sugar.

Getting to this point, where taxpayer interests have been so baldly and badly damaged took a lot of work. Part of that load was carried by the political appointees of the water management district who routinely criticized, derided, and otherwise insulted members of the public and environmental groups trying to inject fact and science into the public arena. That's not what Rick Scott wanted. His order to ban agency staff from using the words, "climate change", is along that same line. So was his tolerance for governing board members' support of crisis actors, paid by the sugar industry through Roger Stone, to oppose environmental protesters at governing board meetings.

One of Rick Scott's claims to environmental stewardship was his 2012 announcement of a state investment of $890 million in Everglades related protection and infrastructure. He never said, and mainstream media reports largely failed to report at the time, that the state was forced to invest at the point of a major loss in federal court. Even today, Rick Scott is appealing that decision alongside the Fanjul billionaires. And it is worthwhile understanding why his staff are appealing.

Scott believes, with Big Sugar, that the federal court "overreached" in its decision supporting environmentalists and the Miccosukee Tribe, whose Everglades have been gutted by polluted runoff from sugar fields. The right to externalize the costs of pollution are considered, by Scott, to be allowable under states' rights. Period. When Scott and the GOP state legislature, including electeds like Adam Putnam and Matt Caldwell (now running for Agriculture Secretary), condemned the effort by the US EPA to regulate nutrient pollution of Florida waters, they did so with the identical argument: leave us alone, let us pollute or regulate the way we want to.

So there you have it: this is not a matter of "seeming" after all. As governor, Rick Scott actively and deliberately pushed for measures that imposed huge, even unlimited liabilities, on taxpayers. "Red Tide Rick" really is "Red Tide Rick". And he wants to be Florida's next US Senator. Floridians will see, on Nov. 6th, how that goes.

@brianklaas on the state of the nation and upcoming elections

Please read the following twitter thread by @brianklaas. He affirms reasons I will vote against Trump Republicans. For the first time in our nation's history, a cult leader occupies the White House. As all cults do, the Trump cult exploits nativist fears and demonization of minorities. Including Jews.

In just a few days , you will have the single opportunity to make America, America again. If Congress does not revert to a Democratic  majority, expect the trend to authoritarianism to accelerate. In 1932 Berlin, good citizens said “it can’t happen here”. It did, and the same viruses can be spread here. But only if voters allow it to happen.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

1. There have always been violent extremists. But when attacks happened under Reagan or Clinton or Bush or Obama, you couldn’t point to insane anti-Semitic conspiracy theories they had recently spread. They didn’t praise neo-Nazis. They didn’t call reporters “enemy of the people”

2. They didn’t explicitly praise political violence by saying a man who committed violent assault was “their kind of guy.” They didn’t tell their supporters that they would pay for legal fees if they “knocked the crap” out of peaceful protesters.

3. They didn’t promote doctored videos of them violently knocking down their opponents by hitting them with a golf ball. They didn’t share video of them punching and tackling a news network that criticized them. They didn’t call political opponents “a stain on America.”

4. Their closing ads didn’t feature three prominent Jews (with ominous music) claiming they controlled the global levers of power. They didn’t share memes of their opponents with a Star of David and a pile of cash. They didn’t lead chants to “lock up” their opponents.

5. They didn’t explicitly demonize people because of the color of their skin or their religion. They didn’t say “2nd Amendment people” would need to take things into their own hands if their opponent won. They didn’t downplay attacks and amplify lunatics who called them hoaxes.

6. They didn’t absurdly suggest that their opponents had “founded” terrorist groups. They didn’t legitimize outlets like InfoWars, which stoke hate while spreading lunatic lies. They didn’t wake up every morning and target a new scapegoat who later received bombs in the mail.

7. When attacks happened, they didn’t lament that it was politically inconvenient. They didn’t “joke” that they were the real victim because the subsequent press conference gave them “a bad hair day.” They didn’t attack the victims of attacks the same day they were attacked.

8. This shouldn’t be a Democrat vs. Republican issue. It’s democracy vs. authoritarian populism; decency vs. bigotry; and empathy vs. cruelty. Presidents didn’t used to behave like this. They didn’t praise political violence. Vote—to bring the US back to decent leadership.

Why, as a Jew, I'm voting against Donald Trump Republicans ... by Alan Farago

Auschwitz-Birkenau: the shoes of murdered Jews

I am just returning from a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland where my paternal grandparents were murdered by Nazis in 1944. It was my first trip and overdue. The debts I owe my grandparents and father, who survived slave labor and immigrated to the United States in 1948, are personal. Here I want to write about the explicitly political as a form of redemption: Jews and the upcoming election in the United States.

The deal Donald Trump made to Jews to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem was intended to appease Jewish voters in the United States; particularly Sheldon Adelson whose casino fortune supplied over $100 million to Republican candidates and causes.

I am not appeased. I do not agree. I believe Trump is an illegitimate president who would not have been elected but for collusion with a foreign enemy, Russia, whose anti-semitism is less carefully concealed than among today's AltR message machinery. But rather than focus on the symbolism of the embassy move or Trump collusion, I would like Jews to focus on this reality: the extreme rightward drift -- the "nationalism" -- endorsed by Trump and his Republican party.

This is like touching an electrified fence. It is in my genetic makeup: I view any political effort to isolate minorities -- whether immigrants from Central America, or from the Mideast, whether they are African Americans or Native Americans, whether they are homosexuals in the United States or transgendered -- as a threat from the same strain of virus that infected Germans in the pre-war era that led, inexorably, to the Holocaust that claimed six million Jews including my two grandparents and members of my extended family.

I write these words from Berlin, a peaceful, cosmopolitan, first-world capitol filled with young people determinedly pursuing better, more prosperous lives. Aside from museums and monuments, there is no hint of the mass psychosis that gripped Berlin seventy-five years ago when ending Jews -- the "final solution" -- motivated an entire nation to pursue the extermination practices of the nationalists, the Nazis's death camps, with ruthless efficiency even as the war was a lost cause to the German people. Don't say it could never happen here.

I will vote against Republicans and against Trump because they have done the inexcusable both in domestic and international foreign policies: they are unleashing the furies that we experienced, as Jews, for centuries. The American Republic and liberal democracies around the world were designed by wise men and women to bar hatred to the maximum extent possible from infecting the normal conduct of human relations. We express those as the pursuit of liberty and freedom.

It is reprehensible to use poor impoverished people in a "caravan" to the United States for political purposes. That is what Trump and his Republican allies are doing. They are using the caravan to attack Democrats and freely lying to the public about Democrats' support for illegal immigration. In my life as a voter, although I am registered Democrat, I have voted for the candidate not the party. This election I am voting straight line Democrat.

I can't stand what Trump Republicans have done to conservative causes and principles. Moreover, I believe that any Jew who believes that the tables are not set to be turned with vengeance against minorities is living a dream. The caravan I join is a stream of voters to the polls in November to reject the GOP: a party willingly stoking fear, anxiety and hatreds for political gain.

In the most consequential election in our lifetimes, voting against Trump Republicans is the only path ... by gimleteye

The Miami-Dade Republican Party’s County Chairman led an angry mob of partisans, alongside the local leader of national hate group the Proud Boys, in an attack on a Democratic campaign office this week. Miami GOP Chairman Nelson Diaz planned the event (image below) and local Congressman Carlos Curbelo publicized the protest heavily, before and after. (From The Stern Facts)

I'm in Poland, at the end of a pilgrimage in family geography I'd never done in my 64 fortunate years. I'm a first generation American and owe a deep allegiance to the values of democracy and a nation, that allowed my immigrant parents to work hard and to prosper, to educate their children and finally to provide the life that billions around the world dream of. Such are the privileges of the United States.

My family's beginnings were not promising. My father was born in 1922 in a poor, minor city on the edge of Hungary and Romania. The region was deep into decades of hatred and persecution of "the other" -- Jews -- despite the fact that Hungarian Jews in the first Great War had been loyal supporters of the ruling elite. They could never imagine their allegiance would be betrayed by their own.

In 1944, when the Axis cause of the Second World War was already lost, Hitler launched his full fury against the Hungarian Jews. In two short months, nearly three quarters of a million were exported from ghettos where Jews had been herded into concentration camps. What followed, the mass exterminations of the Holocaust, never happened in the history of human civilization.

In May 1994, my paternal grandmother and grandfather were loaded into a train of freight cars. They arrived in Auschwitz a month later. (I know these facts because the Nazis kept detailed records including dates.)

The trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau should have taken a few days, but by the summer of 1944, the rails were jammed with human freight. Birkenau was the bright spot in the Nazi imagination. It was bursting with over 100,000 prisoners warehoused in stables designed for horses. The main limitation was water. The Nazis left the sanitary clean up to the administration of prisoners, saving for themselves the process of decontamination in order to prevent the contraction of typhus and other communicable diseases among themselves, the superior race.

At the train station, children were forcibly separated from mothers. Nazi doctors separated out older women with the children, and they were herded straight to the death chambers. They were stripped naked, shaved and showered in freezing or scalding hot water. They were then sent to death chambers. From slots in the roof above, Nazi soldiers dropped insecticide canisters into the sealed chambers. Today the evidence is stacked in displays of a small fraction of possessions left behind with the concentration camp was liberated by the Soviets in 1945.

Shoes collected from the murdered, a small fraction, at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Nazis were efficient. They wanted to economize on the cost of killing. The less they spent on the toxin Zyklon-B, the better. So instead of poisoning their prisoners quickly, they determined that 15-20 minutes was an appropriate duration for murder.

The death chamber in Auschwitz was built early in the war, above ground. The screams of the dying were unpleasant. When the Nazis built Birkenau a few years later, they redesigned the death system and constructed underground chambers to muffle the screams of the dying. More than 1.1 million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Nazis built an ingenious elevator system to move the bodies above ground to be burned. It was easier to kill than to dispose of the victims. The bottleneck was not the killing. It was the burning. And so the rail lines filled with cars of Jews, denied toilets and ventilation, offered only enough water and food to stay alive, stretched far back into the former lands of the Austro Hungarian empire. All to ensure the evidence would be efficiently removed.

So here is what the Holocaust has to do with the upcoming election in the United States.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party have given full throat to fear of "the other". This inchoate anger is never far from the imagination -- especially among the uneducated. In the United States, it is a constant low-gurgle of racists who resent African Americans, homosexuals, and minorities. In my lifetime, this was always a fringe element occasionally sparking. Until now.

Donald Trump has a single talent: an instinct for the passion of the lowest common denominator. He embraced white nationalism, or more accurately, transactional nationalism. He has given legitimacy to the fury of the mob, the grievances of those left behind by globalism, in order to hold off the shock and outrage of the majority who denied him their vote in 2016. Hitler similarly concentrated the energy of Jew-haters in early 20th century Germany; furious at the outcome of the First World War and a shattered economy.

Trump and the Republicans are using internment camps in the Southwest deserts to separate children from families, to warehouse illegal immigrants, and to reinforce their claims with American voters against the lawless and dangerous "other". They meanwhile use the idea of "originalism" to endorse and fortify authoritarianism under the banner of the US Constitution. They have adopted, virtually intact, the most extreme views of the AltR message machinery. If Hitler's speech writers and advisors were alive, they would praise in Fox News message manipulation and the stirring of nativist hatreds.

In Miami, last week, the leader of the Republican Party appeared at a protest staged by a right wing mob against Democrats and the appearance of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. The event recalled the shut-down of the Miami-Dade recount in the 2000 presidential Bush v. Gore, an outcome determined by the US Supreme Court, and staged by Republican operatives who parachuted into Miami from Washington, DC.

In November, American voters have a chance to put a check and to return balance to a deformed system of government led by a president unafraid of stirring the same nativist extremism that buoyed a fascist dictator in Germany. At the time, the good people of Germany said it was preposterous to believe that a demagogue could usurp the age of reason and impose a mass psychosis leading to the unimaginable persecution and murder of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and Christian dissenters.

"Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it."

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Michael E. Mann: "I think we can say that the storm is stronger, wetter and more impactful from a coastal flooding standpoint than it would have been BECAUSE of human-caused warming,” Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann wrote in an email. “And we don’t need an attribution study to tell us that in my view. We just need the laws of thermodynamics."

What can you do?

VOTE like your lives depend on the outcome, because they do.

When it comes to Florida politics, Big Sugar is an equal opportunity polluter ... by gimleteye

In politics, Big Sugar is an equal opportunity polluter: it casts its net wide irrespective of party affiliation.

In this election cycle, Big Sugar put up its "Toxic Trio" on the Republican side. Gov. Rick Scott, slated to advance from the governor's mansion where he proved his worth, to the US Senate. Scott was the friendliest of governors to Big Sugar. He axed the Florida Department of Community Affairs, the state agency formed out of bipartisan consensus in a kinder 1980's moment when balancing economic growth with protection of the environment was a priority. No more. Scott also slashed the budgets of the science staff of the South Florida Water Management District and set his governing board members to harassing citizens objecting to the trashing of Florida waters. For that good work, Scott gets Sugar's support to be in the US Senate.

Big Sugar's chosen successor to be the next Florida governor was Adam Putnam until he was upended by Congressman Ron DeSantis. Putnam is from a family whose farmland was purchased by the state for FIVE TIMES its appraised value. Putnam was Big Sugar's best friend as state agriculture commissioner and went to Washington to oppose Congress' involvement is approving tough anti-pollution rules for farmland runoff into public waters. For that, Big Sugar put him on the ladder to be the state's next governor.

The third in the "Toxic Trio": Matt Caldwell. As state legislator, Caldwell headed a political committee that made sure Lee County Commissioner Ray Judah's political career would end. Judah had the guts to call out Big Sugar's pollution of waters in Lee County. In the last weeks of his 2012 campaign, Big Sugar dumped a million dollars into a PAC controlled by Caldwell. Gone. For proving his mettle on this and other anti-environmental initiatives, Caldwell is on tap to succeed Putnam as the state's next agriculture commissioner.

In the 2017 session of the state legislature, the "Toxic Trio", Scott, Putnam, and Caldwell, lined up against the initiative by then Senate President Joe Negron to fix "once and for all" the terrible trashing of Florida's waterways as a result of billions of gallons of filthy Lake Okeechobee water released to lower lake levels. Caldwell held the Big Sugar line in the State House of Representatives.

At the time, Miami state senator Jose Javier Rodriguez, a Democrat, emerged to partner with Negron's call for at least 40,000 acres of additional storage treatment marshes in the Everglades Agricultural Area. Big Sugar is farmed on about 500,000 acres. More than 200 scientists signed the Now or Neverglades Declaration endorsing the plan to add marshland to soak up polluted Lake O water. Over many years and science based work, the nation's premier science agency -- the National Academies of Science -- called for the same. Florida voters in 2014 had overwhelmingly approved a major ballot referendum to raise money for this purpose.

Negron asked Rodriguez to help build Democratic support for his bill. Big Sugar blocked that, too. State Senator Jeff Clemens, from Palm Beach County, set the Democratic roadblock in the Senate. Later Clemens would complain that environmentalists failed to lobby him. Still later that year his political career would self-destruct as the result of a sex scandal. But Clemens landed on his feet: he now works for Big Sugar.

If Governor Scott had agreed to exercise the 2010 option to purchase US Sugar lands, there would be today more than 130,000 acres in public ownership. Taxpayers and voters would be 8 years ahead of solving the terrible algae bloom problem that starts with Big Sugar's legacy pollution in Lake Okeechobee, from the decades the industry used the lake as its open sewer.

If Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam had supported tough federal pollution standards, instead of the wishy washy "voluntary compliance" measures -- promoted by Rick Scott -- that allow certain Big Sugar farms to dump huge volumes of pollution into taxpayers' laps, we would far along the path to hold the polluters accountable for the costs of their pollution.

If State Rep Matt Caldwell had supported Senator Negron's original plan, Florida taxpayers wouldn't be on a fool's errand of supporting deep well injection to "solve" the pollution problem by burying all that toxic waste below our drinking water supply. We wouldn't have to twiddle our thumbs, watching our rivers turn to shit, and wait more than a decade for proof a massive $2 billion EAA reservoir, 23 feet deep, will be anything more than a breeding lake for the same red tides, algae, life-threatening bacteria and phantom viruses we suffer today.

Guess who won't get a chance for a soft landing on Big Sugar's payroll like Jeff Clemens did or Gaston Cantens, the former Miami legislator who runs the Fanjul billionaire's political operations?

Florida taxpayers. No soft landing, either, for Florida voters.

There is a lesson here. Know where your candidates stand in relation to Big Sugar BEFORE you cast your vote. Pay attention to where their money comes from. Follow the PAC money that supports their campaigns. Vote Clean Water.

(Click here for a link to the Bullsugar Candidate Questionnaire.

Click here for a link to the Bullsugar Voter Guide.)

There is a very good reason to be outraged at the shadow cast by Putin over the Trump White House ... by gimleteye

Because the Cold War. Because the long history of persecution of minorities in Russia. Because Stalin.

It may be the case that the baby boom generation is defined by the influence of the Cold War. For me, a child of a Holocaust survivor, the Cold War and World War II reverberated through my childhood. That is not the case for today's youth, for whom Vietnam is comparably more distant.

The point is: we know about Russia. After the close of the World War, the United States waged a hugely expensive, very dangerous, and defining war against the Soviet Union.

Finally, a Republican president solemnly asked the president of the Soviet Union, Michael Gorbachev, to "tear down that wall". That was the moment that the Putin faction took root and began to grow, morphing into global gangsters who excel at manipulating the Internet and social media as weapons of war.

For these reasons -- for this history -- it is simply unacceptable that a GOP president and a GOP Congress are actively hiding evidence that Russia influenced the outcome of the 2016 election.

Principled conservatives must not turn away from the mess of the Republican Party. The only way back to normalcy? Vote DEM straight down the line.



BOSTON GLOBE OPINION | RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON
Vladimir Putin’s shadow darkens White House

By Richard North Patterson OCTOBER 09, 2018

In June 2016, an intermediary contacted Donald Trump Jr., suggesting a meeting at which Russians would offer the Trump campaign information damaging to Hillary Clinton “as part of their government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Instead of reporting this approach to the FBI, Trump Junior replied “I love it.” Thus originated the notorious meeting in Trump Tower between Kremlin-connected Russians and Trump Jr.; Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

The meeting surfaced in July 2017. Two weeks ago The New York Times detailed the web of contacts that followed ; last week, the New Yorker catalogued the evidence that Russia’s cyber warfare had changed the outcome of the presidential election. Russia is likely to attack our midterm elections as well.

NY Review of Books: "The Suffocation of Democracy" ...

In a week, I'm going to retrace family geography in East Europe for the first time, including Auschwitz where my paternal grandparents were murdered. This article in the NY Review of Books by Christopher R. Browning is deeply resonant in the context of our current politics:

"As a historian specializing in the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and Europe in the era of the world wars, I have been repeatedly asked about the degree to which the current situation in the United States resembles the interwar period and the rise of fascism in Europe. I would note several troubling similarities and one important but equally troubling difference."

The sugar industry only pretends to be a good neighbor: it's political candidates like "Red Tide Rick Scott" have laid waste to the state of Florida ... by gimleteye

Algae choked drainage canal in EAA sugar fields

Ray Judah, former Lee County Commissioners, delivers a knock-out to the disinformation campaign by Big Sugar to fool voters that politicians it supports, like Rick Scott and Matt Caldwell and Jimmy Patronis, are just good guys.

We've published a lot on Judah and deservedly so. Read our archive, here.

If the sugar industry wants to be a good neighbor...
October 4, 2018
Cape Coral Daily Breeze
Save | Post a comment |
To the editor:

The recent full page ad written by Robert Buker, Jr, CEO and President of U.S. Sugar, concerning the Lake Okeechobee watershed suggests that in Florida nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and the Sugar Industry continuing to deny any culpability or responsibility for the devastating impacts of harmful algae blooms on our environment and businesses.

To begin with, Buker's statement and accompanied map depicts Lake Okeechobee flow to the Caloosahatchee at 30 percent and inflow to the lake from the sugar cane fields in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) at 1 percent. In fact, excessive polluted water flow from Lake Okeechobee to the Caloosahatchee is 44 percent on average and as high as 70 percent during the summer months of exceedingly heavy rainfall. Buker's comment about the volume of water back pumped from the EAA into Lake Okeechobee does not even pass the straight face test.

For decades, the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) would back pump water from the EAA into Lake Okeechobee for "water supply" and "flood control." Gov. Crist appointees on the SFWMD finally stopped the back pumping for water supply. Back pumping for flood control continues to be allowed to this day. Unfortunately, the decades of back pumping has built up residual or legacy nutrients that are continually mixed in the water column in the Lake during severe summer storm events, including hurricane season, resulting in harmful algae blooms in the Lake and release of toxic discharge to the Caloosahatchee and Saint Lucie.

Back pumping for water supply meant that the water was pack pumped from the EAA into Lake Okeechobee during the wet season to ensure that the Lake had sufficient water to irrigate the sugar cane fields during the dry season. The Sugar industry, to this day, use the back pumping into Lake Okeechobee for flood control as their convenient justification for excess polluted water from the EAA discharged into the Lake.

Buker suggests that water is only back pumped from the EAA to Lake Okeechobee to provide flood protection for the communities adjacent southern Lake Okeechobee. Those comments are disingenuous as the massive volume of water redirected to the lake is predominantly from the EAA, which is in excess of 700,000 acres in size and covers a far greater area than the communities around the lake that have a much smaller foot print and exhibit higher ground elevations.

The SFWMD manages the water level in the EAA at 18 inches to 24 inches below ground to provide optimum growing conditions for sugar cane regardless of the seasonal fluctuations resulting in destruction to our rivers, coastal estuaries and Everglades. The Sugar industry has not been able to comply with the Federal Consent Decree that phosphorous released to the Everglades must not exceed 10 ppb and in fact, must rely on water back pumped into the Lake to protect their sugar cane fields from flooding. To make matters worse, there are no numeric nutrient standards that back pumping must comply with to prevent contaminated water from being back pumped into the Lake from the EAA.

If Buker and U.S. Sugar truly want to be a good neighbor and support water management policies based on science than he should embrace the findings of the University of Florida Water Institute 2015 study that concluded reducing discharges (to coastal estuaries) and meeting the Everglades' need for more water will require additional land for storage and treatment between Lake Okeechobee and Everglades National Park and the National Academy of Sciences recent independent scientific review of Everglades restoration progress reporting on the need for increase storage and treatment of water south of Lake Okeechobee.

Ray Judah,
former Lee County commissioner
Fort Myers