Blown Away: Big Wind’s Inconvenient Truth

(Counterpunch, Feb 10, 2012) The installation of wind turbines too close to houses and personal property is a major headache for the wind power industry, but headache scarcely begins to describe their impact to nearby property owners and neighbors. My property and home are scarcely three quarters of a mile from a three 1.5 megawatt turbine wind farm that went online in November 2009 with blades stretching nearly 400 feet into the air.

Taking Over BP

(Counterpunch) As a routine strategy, “managing expectations” is the best way to deal with disaster. It is easy to understand why BP’s first instinct was to keep the video feed of the oil spill 5,000 feet underground from flowing to the public. BP is continuing to harass and to limit access of reporters from viewing and reporting damaged wildlife. Those oiled birds and sea turtles are toxic to corporate power. The images also contribute substantially to the pressures rising on the Obama administration, as the Gulf of Mexico turns into a horror over a long, hot summer.

The Police Got There First: Where Money for Environmental Crimes, Goes

(Counterpunch) It is little more and a little less than a footnote to an investigation by theMiami Herald of Miami-Dade police who used funds collected from environmental fines to buy SUV’s, Direct TV receivers, high powered rifles, and Costa del Mar sunglasses among other purchases irrelevant to the fund’s intended purpose.

Fat Tires in the Everglades: A New Place to Ride

(Counterpunch) It was a gamble what time to leave Coral Gables. I would either make the meeting on the other side of the state or waste the day missing it.

A hundred miles away in Naples, Collier County commissioners scheduled a 9:00 AM public hearing on its growth management plan. Included, an item brought forward by Miami-Dade County commissioners: whether or not to amend their comprehensive growth map to create a recreational area for off road vehicles in the middle of the Everglades in land owned mostly by Miami-Dade County but on the border with Collier County and designated within the federal boundaries of the Big Cypress National Preserve.

Destroying the Everglades at 25 Cents Per Ton: Turning Wetlands Into Rock Mines

In early December, on an unseasonably hot and humid Florida day, I sat under a large tent in a crowd of hundreds at the edge of a man-made canal draining the Everglades. On stage, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, deputy assistant secretary of the Army ‘Rock’ Salt who oversees the Corps of Engineers, Gary Guzy, deputy director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and assorted dignitaries to celebrate the decision by the Obama White House and Congress to invest in the elevation of the roadway—one mile of Tamiami Trail—allowing fresh water to flow and hopefully nourish parts of the Everglades that remain as a pale reminder of spectacular biodiversity. Make no mistake: among serial claims of historic accomplishments for restoring the Everglades, this was a big deal. The first hard dollars for a project to restore water flow into the Everglades.

The social engineers: spending billions to prop up a bankrupt growth model

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  is a popular confusion that what is good for corporations is also good for the public.

They are called social engineers: that small group of corporate executives whose compensation has no correlation to the public interest, much less common shareholders or owners of mutual funds in pension plans.

The politics of zoning in Florida: Hacking the development code

“Yale University economist Robert Shiller, pioneer of the widely watched Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index, said there’s a good chance housing prices will fall further than the 30 percent drop in the historic depression of the 1930s.”

Business Week, April 22, 2008

“Some experts are saying that home prices and interest rates have indeed reached their lowest, bottoming out!” Lennar spokesperson in The Miami Herald special advertising section, April 25, 2008, “Homes selling at record pace”

“Seeing rates like 1.95 percent when purchasing a home is something truly extraordinary nowadays!” Century Homebuilders in The Miami Herald special advertising section, April 25, 2008, “Local builder makes history by lowering interest rates to 1948 levels”

“Between the incredible fixed-rate financing starting at 2.88 percent and our prices at historic lows, it’s little wonder why our homes are selling virtually as fast as we can write the contracts!” Lennar spokesperson 

“Initial construction of U.S. homes fell to a 17-year low in March, a much steeper-than-expected drop, according to a government report released Wednesday.”

CNN “Money,” April 16, 2008

The Miami Herald questioned the value of the civics lesson, yesterday, at County Hall where hundreds of young students, residents, taxpayers and the lobbying class spent hours waiting to voice the support they were encouraged to evince, for breaking through the line on a map separating; open space in Miami from suburbia, the Everglades from infrastructure service areas, and the edge of common sense from its antithesis.

Counterpunch: Sprawl, Mortgage Fraud and Political Corruption

Snagged on the Precipice

In the Friday pullout real estate section of The Miami Herald, local Latin Builder Association member Caribe Homes announces it is throwing in a swimming pool and 3 percent off closing costs and “no builder’s fee”, for its stale inventory: Antilles Isles.

But throwing in the kitchen sink or swimming pool won’t be enough to stimulate buyers because there are none-or only a few. The last dregs of the housing boom sucked up the final tranche of possible buyers-culled from frauds, deadbeats, the weak and gullible. For the foreseeable future, it is a waiting game and an unstable one at that.

Circle of strife: Predators, protectors… Danger in declawing, defanging the Endangered Species Act

It’s always front-page news when an alligator kills a human. The same would be true for a bear mauling or an attack by a mountain lion or shark.We are hard-wired for horror when a top predator kills one of us. It happens rarely, but when it does, television cameras spark with an impulse older than lights on a Christmas tree.

At the same time, the panthers or gators we may have hunted down after dragging a person into a canal are also on a thousand bronze statues, representing the highest order of strength, endurance and accomplishment.

Protect or eradicate? Honor or revile?

Smiling upside down

I am glad that the new nickel will feature a smiling Thomas Jefferson.

In Florida, it has been hard to swallow the continuous evasion by state bureaucrats and elected officials concerning massive outbreaks of toxic red tides and polluted rivers.

Smiling nickels would make me happy.