Banker Boyz Blues: Jeb Bush’s Advice to the Mortgage Bankers

In Miami it is not considered polite or politic to criticize resident and former governor Jeb Bush, whose political career was fueled by the mad housing boom and its campaign money that is now crashed to cinders. Bush spoke in Chicago last week  to the Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention.

These days, the speechifying of Jeb! can be interpreted for the direction of the Republican message machine. What was reported was that Bush urged the audience to climb out of their fetal position and go on the offensive. “Who better to advocate a policy to get us out of this mess?” Bush implored the same businesses that shipwrecked the economy on the reefs from which scavengers now ply their trades.

The GOP and Occupy Wall Street: The Cantor Code

The GOP response to Occupy Wall Street recalls the way the 1960′s protests against the Vietnam War energized American conservatives. Until the demonstrations by assorted students and labor and political activists (socialists, communists, etc.), the right wing had been defined by racism (southern and Democratic) and the stigma of the John Birch Society.

The counter-response came from the US Chamber of Commerce and wealthy American industrialists. They invented a political machine that now, nearly half a century later, is the most successful in US history. It is a GOP dynamo incorporating the imperatives of the Christian right and the “free market”. The juggernaut owes its success to a message machine book-ended by Fox News and the Murdoch empire.

Surrealism in Orlando: The Republican Primary Debate

I admit, when Newt Gingrich last night took credit for creating a couple of million American jobs when he was Speaker of the House and looked down to see if his nose had grown six inches, I was in the minority who remember that Newt spent most of his time as the top dog in Congress tearing down President Bill Clinton’s economic agenda. The man still has a way with words, verbally keel-hauling President Obama for “class warfare and bureaucratic socialism”. He stakes his ground with the certainty of a labrador retriever. One almost wants to reach out affectionately while steering him away from the young ones.

The Dismal Future of America: Hostage to Fraudulent Elections

Reviewing for the New York Times the new book by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, David Frum asks, “Does America Have a Future”? The backdrop for the question is a combustible mixture of news: more Americans are living in poverty than at any time in the past 50 years and another shocker– the moment during the Tea Party debate among Republican presidential candidates when the audience cheered the idea of letting uninsured patients die. America has a future, but we are heading in an unrecognizable direction without navigation aids.

I recall an American president, Bill Clinton, speaking at the Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami in the spring of 1995. Clinton was a fabulous campaigner. Even his adversaries– especially his adversaries — would agree. He looked over the crowd assembled and sang the virtues of place. He said along these lines, “In the future America is going to look more and more like Miami. Diverse and vibrant and filled with hope.” I marveled from the audience of adoring supporters.

At the time, I was a year into the struggle to stop the Homestead Air Force Base fiasco– triggered by the Miami-Dade county commission and powerful campaign contributors reconstituted as HABDI from the board of directors of the Latin Builders Association. (Their goal: to convert the destroyed military base into a privatized commercial airport with the aim of using their control of access, to control the re-supply of Cuba, after Castro. HABDI needed the quick blessing of the Clinton White House.) Some were big Clinton givers, too.

Courtney Nash’s Last Swim: Florida’s Lethal Waters

Courtney Nash from undated photo

(Counterpunch) Better than a torrent of words, an unnecessary death can spark new legislation protecting children. Such was the case in Florida of the Ryan White Act, approved by Congress to protect children with HIV/AIDS and Megan’s Law, a Florida law meant to protect children from sex predators. In a perfect world, this would also apply to the tragic death of Courtney Nash, who died as a result of swimming in the polluted St. John’s River. The St. John’s is polluted because Florida legislators– and now the Florida GOP congressional delegation– refuse to allow the federal government to establish rules to fix severe water pollution where the Florida has utterly failed.

Marco Rubio Faces the Nation: Not Ready for Prime Time

Marco Rubio has been in the US Senate nearly nine months. After a nine month gestation, last Sunday the junior senator from Florida emerged as tidy proof on “Face the Nation’.

Face The Nation host Bob Schaeffer led off with a question about the GOP stance on raising the debt ceiling. Rubio returned with spin: it is a problem of spending, not the debt ceiling. Spending cuts, spending cuts, spending cuts. Even rating agencies like Standard & Poors say so. Schaeffer asked the senator’s view of a compromise deal to allow the president to increase the debt ceiling without action by either party. Rubio stuck to his point: “it’s not about the debt ceiling, it’s about debt.”

Rubio used the phrase “credible solution” to the debt problem several times, including the rating agency’s emphasis on a credible solution in its recent report. When Schaeffer tried, twice– including a Rubio clip from a Fox News interview– to get the junior senator to acknowledge that not everything in the economy is President Obama’s fault, Rubio pushed back.

“People want to know when they will have a job. Until America has a credible solution to its debt problem, people will be afraid to invest in America.” Here, Schaeffer could have asked: name one investor who wouldn’t create a job in the US because of the national debt.

The Wrecking Crew: Making Florida a Haven for Polluters

We have reached the nadir of the dumbing down of American politics. The path was cleared by ideologues: and why should the devastation not be delivered by the conservative right holding the Book of to their American flag lapels? I am half-tempted to go along with the Ron Paul wing of the Republican Party and let August 2nd come and go: just like Y2K right? (On Jan 1, 2000 apocalypse was predicted when computers would all shut down or short circuit because they had not been programmed to accept the millenium date. If you don’t know what happens on August 2nd, stop reading now.)

Republican brainiacs believe they can pin “this budget thing” on President Obama and the Democrats, but if there is no resolution to the budget and debt ceiling crisis, expect a stock market crash of at least 20 percent off the bat. No one thought home values could be worth only half of what they were, five years ago. Let the GOP masterminds like Karl Rove explain how it is the Democrats’ fault our savings turn out to be worth only half of what they were.

That the Republican Party turned into a party of unrecognizable extremists didn’t happen overnight. For those who thought Grover Norquist was just trying to shrink the size of government, look at the consequences of the decapitations that are working themselves out in slow motion. Turn, for example, to Florida’s GOP wrecking crew in the House of Representatives.

If you were too focused on Texas’ GOP initiative to save the incandescent light bulb, or the electric utilities’ decision to abandon investment to reduce man-made chemicals that cause global warming (because of regulatory uncertainty as a result of Republicans effort to kill environmental regulations), then you might have missed the Florida GOP delegations’ most recent tactic in the Holy War against the US EPA: to gut the Clean Water Act as revenge for the federal agency’s efforts (after decades of lawsuits and inaction) to clean up Florida’s filthy waters where the state refuses (thank you, Governor Barely Legal Rick Scott).

Of Fetuses and the Everglades: Mercury Flows Downstream

The conservative right deploys right-to-life as its battle cry, but when it comes to rallying against environmental pollution that is arguably a greater threat to fetuses than abortion, the right is silent. With a few exceptions, there is hardly a whisper from the pulpits about organizing to protect the unborn by rallying congregations to support tougher anti-pollution laws and candidates for public office who support them. Mercury exposure, for example, is known to cause deformities and developmental disorders. In Florida, mercury is as ubiquitous as sulfur thrown on sugar fields by billionaire farmers, flowing downstream to God knows where.

Southern Christians (I’m singling out Southern Christians, because this writer is from Florida) ought to recognize that the rights of fetuses are harmed by pollution. So why isn’t the conservative right deploying their message machinery to educate Southern Christians about the threats of environmental pollution to the unborn, especially since it is clear thatpollution is arguably a bigger threat to fetuses than abortion?

The Salting of Florida: And Not a Drop to Drink

Drought, wildfires, floods. The first three minutes of network news is like a TV primer from the Book of Revelations. Al Gore, in Rolling Stone, was inventor of that line, but at some point in the not-so-distant future, destroyed drinking water wells in South Florida could be on Nightly News. And if Al Gore is still with us, the shot wells scattering chaos in the nation’s presidential bellweather state will not go unremarked. Florida’s threatened drinking water supply is a stark reminder of Gore’s 2000 loss in Florida. Fearing dissent in his own ranks on policies governing growth and the environment, Gore retreated. Today there is no doubt, none at all, that water management has put South Florida property owners into the path of fresh water at the price of gold or a modern Exodus. This is the dirtiest little secret in Florida and why the dying Everglades are a potent symbol of politics in America today.

For decades in Florida, elected officials supported more growth and development and agriculture than our aquifers could reasonably sustain. It is not conjecture. It is not smarmy, feel-good ethos. Within government agencies, scientists, policy makers and attorneys treaded on the subject like walking on egg shells. Early on, it was established that standing up to the destroyers on water supply or water quality issues was the fastest way to lose one’s job. Sugar billionaires, their lobbyists, builders and developers and trade associations like Miami’s Latin Builders Association had the inside track in the inside hallways of government: from the White House to the lowliest office of the county commission. It is still going on. Last week, Florida’s Jack-Ass-In-Chief Barney Bishop– the Associated Industries leader, a self-described “life-long Democrat” (who led the successful effort to dismantle Florida’s growth management agency), appeared on Fox News, calling out the U.S. EPA for “killing jobs faster than President Obama can create them”. Bishop, a carpetbagger if there ever was one, has prevailed on Florida Governor Rick Scott to push back against federal authority to regulate nutrient pollution where the state won’t: overwhelming Florida’s valuable rivers, estuaries and coastal real estate values. To round up the disaster, after so many decades, in a pithy “killing the goose that lays the golden egg” puts an unforgivable smiley face on abject corruption.

The Real Rubio: He’s No Outsider

In a June 19th column, “Rand and Rubio”, NY Times columnist Ross Douthatwrites, “As The American Spectator’s Jim Antle pointed out last month, Rubio and Paul have followed similar paths to prominence. Both were discouraged from running for the Senate by party leaders.” While Doughat’s editorial doesn’t amplify the assertion — that now US Senator Rubio was an “outsider”–, quoting the Spectator in this case shows how the media can echo a deliberate evasion until it carries the imprimatur of truth. Since Rubio is being cultivated by insiders to run on a future presidential ticket, as carefully as a hothouse rose, the point must not be lost.

There is no evidence — none– that Marco Rubio was “discouraged from running for the Senate by party leaders.” The opposite is the case. In 2010, then Florida Governor Charlie Crist ran as the outsider, carrying a moderate Republican wing grafted onto the state GOP with baling wire and chewing gum. Rubio represented the core of the Florida GOP that bided its time until the dagger could be firmly inserted in the Crist Senate campaign and twisted on the way out. Crist, the anti-Bush, got what was coming to him and the US Senate got a Manchurian candidate.

There are reasons right wing strategists prefer to paint Rubio as an outsider. For one, it positions him “to the rescue” of the party. To suggest Rubio is a populist coming in from the cold is rubbish. One thing the Republicans do well is get their message frames straight: Rubio plays well to TV cameras, he delivers sound bites flawlessly (without question by the mainstream press) and can garner the short attention span of the Tea Party that is, itself, moved by the GOP like a herd of cattle to the sound of a cannon.

The best way to understand the GOP in the United States is by comparison to Russian nesting dolls. In Rubio’s case, he fits in neatly somewhere in the middle sizes where the doll he nests within would be a figurine of Jeb Bush. Outsider? Not by a long shot.