Seeds of Destruction: How the economy was wrecked by the politics of deregulation in Florida

(Counterpunch) In a series of reports, The Miami Herald discloses the astounding facts behind the $7 billion fraud of Stanford Financial. An absence of regulators. Shredded documents. Bags of cash airlifted from Miami International. It all sounds so Miami Vice. But it is more. Back in the late 1990s, when the Stanford scheme gathered the support of Florida regulators, I toiled as a late career financial advisor at Smith Barney. What it means to be “late career” is that I knew enough by that time that honestly toiling within the lines and hash marks of regulatory authority could not possibly account for the wealth that defined the Miami skyline. Its provenance had far more to do with flight capital from Latin and South America, drugs, and the snatch-and-grab growth schemes that turned Florida’s Everglades into Mercedes, private jets, and educational family vacations in Europe by an entire supply chain that prospered by turning a blind eye to the true costs of development. Their Grand Tour of Europe excluded every aspect of the strip mall culture that paid the freight.

Learning How to Survive in a Depression From “Weeds”: Television, the American Landscape and the New Economy

(Counterpunch) Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Sunday said he engineered the central bank’s controversial actions over the past year because “I was not going to be the Federal Reserve chairman who presided over the second Great Depression.” Bernanke either doesn’t acknowledge or hasn’t tapped into the new zeiteist on pay cable television– where a raft of characters and plots are better leading indicators than those preoccupying Federal Reserve economists. If Washington doesn’t know how to describe a Depression, Americans attracted to cable TV do.

Waiting for That One, Perfect Cast: Ted Williams and the Florida Keys

(Counterpunch) As a grade school kid in Providence RI I was a baseball fanatic. I dreamt the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees and practiced my home run swing in my sleep. I memorized statistics and slept with my baseball glove under my pillow with neats foot oil so it would be pliable for tomorrow’s pickup game. I could have been anyone of those kids caught in the camera during the excellent HBO documentary on Ted Williams, the Boston Red Sox legend, broadcast this week. Although Williams had already retired from baseball when I became a grade school expert of the game, he still cast a long shadow over Fenway Park– if only for his impossible hitting average. Fast forward a few decades for my Ted Williams story.

Incident at Buzzard’s Bay: The life and times of Robert McNamara

(Counterpunch) In the end Robert McNamara said his mea culpas for the Vietnam War. He had been Secretary of Defense; his demeanor and bearing not unlike Donald Rumsfeld’s — utterly convinced he was right even when overwhelming evidence had proven him wrong.

Principle over Principal, An Unblinking View From the Rabbit Hole

In a sign of how perilous the national economy is, The New York Times favors broadly reducing principal on underwater residential mortgages (“Not much relief”, July 5, 2009). “Everybody wins” according to the Times by resolving the collateral damage of a speculator-driven economy. Taxpayers win because they will not be required to dole out additional billions when the economy is dragged down further the rabbit hole.

But here is who doesn’t win: responsible homeowners who did not buy a bigger mortgage than they could reasonably afford, or, citizens who could have bought but rented or who otherwise remained on the sidelines during the speculative frenzy that turned home mortgages into gambling chips to enhance their standard of living. Why should these heroes be forced to pay?

The Tears of Mark Sanford: Tripped Up by 35,000 Year Old Flute

In the 1960’s, conservatives were fixated by the threat of the Red Menace and a youthful culture supine with drugs and rock ‘n roll. They set out the foundations of a new Moral Majority to combat these threats. The precepts of the Moral Majority were Christian, mainly, Republican, mainly, and meshed with Chamber of Commerce values, mainly. SC Governor Mark Sanford, who exemplified these conservative values, is only the latest politician who knocked down the limbo stick.

Bailing out the Land Speculators: The transformation of Charlie Crist

(Counterpunch) As Democrats approach a filibuster proof US Senate, every race will be a heated battle. In 2010 one of the key contests will be in Florida where a governor perceived to be moderate, Charlie Crist, is locked in a primary against the former House Speaker in the Florida legislature, Marco Rubio.

No Place Like Home: federal stress test for land use, not just banks

(Counterpunch) Eonomists agree that the collapse in housing markets in the United States plunged world economies into the worst crisis since the 1930’s. A revival of housing markets and new construction is one of the anticipated signs of recovery. In the meantime, the US taxpayer is on the hook for trillions of dollars of debt constituted from the detritus of the housing boom. If value is to be created in service of a new economic order, it is imperative that stimulus money be directed in ways that prevent reigniting a model of growth through construction and development that has demonstrably failed: namely, through the fraudulent wealth creator called suburban sprawl.

The Quicksand Economy: Feeding the status quo

(Counterpunch) When Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner spoke to the Economic Club in Washington yesterday and said the United States bears a substantial share of responsibility for a global economic crisis and its multi-trillion dollar costs, he might have pointedly singled out the epicenter of the housing market crash– the state of Florida– where the absence of regulations governing financial derivatives matched laws designed to fail: in particular, regulations protecting the public from the excesses of suburban sprawl.

The National Ponzi Scheme: trolling the wreckage

It is now clear how the “ownership society” was part of a Ponzi scheme that skimmed the cream from financial derivatives tied to mortgages and used earlier profits to pay off later adopters; spreading wealth through a well organized supply chain to create, through the housing asset bubble, frictionless growth.