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.

The Face of Philanthropy in Florida The Story of Leonard Abess

(Counterpunch) In his first speech to Congress, President Obama briefly bonded with popular outrage at Wall Street’s excess and greed. He picked a counter-note from South Florida: “hope is found in unlikely places,” the president said, “I think Leonard Abess, the bank president from Miami who reportedly cashed out of his company, took a $60 million bonus and gave it out to all 399 people who worked for him, plus another 72 who used to work for him.”

After the Fall: markets without regulation

(Counterpunch) We have only a little knowledge how the federal government intervenes in financial markets. What we do know is that since the fall, US Treasury and Federal Reserve policy makers have been flying blind, sailing in uncharted waters: pick whatever metaphor you choose to dissolve the fabrication of markets based on supply and demand, and, free.

The Audacity of Parkland: Florida’s squandered promise

(Counterpunch) 50 million barrels of oil are being parked in tankers sitting offshore, lacking buyers. Let’s call it: Parkland. But in Miami, Parkland is a name with another meaning. Parkland is a zoning application to move Miami-Dade’s abused Urban Development Boundary closer to the Everglades.

Why Florida Can’t Let Go of Sprawl: The Suburbs March On

(Counterpunch) Some people are burying their cash in backyards. The wealthiest developers in Miami are burying their cash in a plan to build a small city in 2014 at the far western frontier of Miami-Dade County edging toward the Everglades called Parkland.

Into the headwind of the biggest crash in housing values since the Depression, the owners of Parkland are winding their way through Florida’s planning approval process. To understand how poorly the public interest is served by Florida’s growth rules, you need patience and a willingness to follow the worst forms of development through its initial stages to conclusion.

The Politics of Growth, the division of Florida

(Counterpunch) The US presidential campaign has only addressed in generic terms the wreckage caused by Wall Street, the absence of financial regulation and the wages of greed, and not at all how that feeding tube connects locally: too many platted subdivisions in farmland and wetlands and condos barricading Florida’s coasts. It is hard times for builders and their supply chain. But make no mistake: this potent source of political money from developers that matches up with big agriculture is all intent on business as usual, even in the face of the worst collapse in real estate markets since the Great Depression.

Will Miami’s Cubans vote blue?

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  Every presidential cycle, the mainstream media turns to the question of Cuba and the vote of Miami Cuban Americans, respected for the constituency’s influence on the State of Florida and national politics.and national politics. And every presidential cycle the mainstream media dutifully reports US foreign policies toward Castro as the determinant factor.

The crash of the King of Liquidity: Hello from Aspen, wish you were here

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  Key Biscayne’s high-flying hedge fund operator, John Devaney, once called “The King of Liquidity,” has crashed and burned.

I’ve been gawking at the Devaney hedge fund wreck for a long time. The festive charitable giving to needy causes (inoculation from scrutiny by the mainstream press). The entertaining of then Senate majority leader Bill Frist and other luminaries. The mysteries of making a few hundred million trading asset backed securities formed from junk aka “the ownership society.”

John McCain and the company he keeps

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  Yesterday, the US EPA—the nation’s top environmental agency– decided that regulating the movement of polluted water from one water body to another: from a river or stream, by pump, to canal or to Florida’s Everglades is not a federal responsibility.

Hialeah or Havana? Miami, Cuba and the Presidential campaign

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  Already the shape of the presidential campaign over Cuba is forming around the tired rhetoric of the past. It reminds me of a story.

As a child, one of my contemporaries lived in a large house with his grandparents. They seemed impossibly old to me at the time. Their entire downstairs–the only part of the house where I was allowed as a visitor from the outside– was like a museum in homage to a lost world. The heavy velvet drapes closed to the outside world. The cut Victorian glasses and decanter. The photographs in silver frames of somber men, goatees and beards, tails and tophats.

The grandfather had been personal physician to a dictator in his homeland, had emigrated to the United States, yet by the time our paths crossed, theirs still clung to the order that defined the grandfather’s life until concerns of personal and family survival forced him to exile.