Sergio Pino’s Bad Year: The Fall of a South Florida Banker

On the same day that Sergio Pino announced his resignation from the board of the bank he founded, US Century Bank in Miami had more bad news: the ratings agency, Fitch, withdrew its rating. In a public statement to South Florida Business Journal, Pino said his withdrawal had nothing to do with the severely deteriorating condition of the bank.

Pino, along with other bank directors, have been major Republican campaign contributors and lobbyists for suburban sprawl in Florida wetlands and farmland. They have strongly supported and pushed for the expansion of the Urban Development Boundary in Miami-Dade to include lands purchased as speculative investments for future platted subdivisions and sprawl. The bank they founded has been the recipient of the largest infusion of federal taxpayer moneys, through TARP, among all Florida banks.

Victims of the Free Market: Predatory Speculation

Civil War in Libya. Oil speculators crowding into the market. For nearly a week running, network TV news has led with the story of rising gas prices and the “threat to the economy”. Really? The Federal Reserve core inflation excludes food and energy, on the basis that price spikes moderate and in any event (barring revolutionaries gaining foothold in Saudi Arabia) speculators come and go, exchanging futures for paintings by Michaelangelo. The price of gas goes from $3.14 to $3.55, and suddenly we are atwitter about tapping the national oil reserve?

In the week before TV news began to focus on gas prices, the Administration announced the jobless rate fell to 8.9 percent. The emerging story line is that rising fuel prices are threatening the economic “recovery”. That’s not why the seams are coming apart.

A Year of Foolishness in High Places: When Progress Didn’t Come and the People Didn’t Awake

(Counterpunch) It is hard to face the close of 2010 with an admission. I was wrong. For more than twenty years as an environmentalist and writer, I harbored the expectation that progress would come. But I did not believe it would come because we had somehow persuaded decision-makers it was time, finally, to abandon the Chamber of Commerce values that crashed the economy into a ditch. I believed that once in the ditch—an inevitability, from witnessing so much bad policy and bad results the past two decades—that people would awake. Rise and Sing!

I was wrong. I had been right about the threats. I started looking in the early 1970s in Florida, through a watery lens of water only a few feet deep covering hundreds of square miles in Florida Bay, the tail end of the Everglades ecosystem. By the late 1980′s, the magnificent efflorescence of nature had been severely injured by repetitive algae blooms. Even then, scientists were chasing changes happening faster than baselines could be anchored with facts. My small layman’s window on marine life in two feet of water, hosting crustaceans and shrimp and sea grass billowing out in glorious creatures from rays to sharks and tarpon and the whole coral reef, encapsulate the whole realm: oceans and a warming planet.

The Real Problem is Fox News Itself: The Juan Williams Affair

(Counterpunch) The problem with the Juan Williams affair is not his comment to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly; that Muslims in full dress on airplanes make him nervous– but Fox News itself. Over the course of many years, as the nation became more and more deeply immersed in its cloud, NPR bent over backwards to ensure its reports were free from taint of opinion irrespective of ideological origin. NPR performs a crucial service to the public despite a constant barrage of attacks from the right.

NIMBY: The Next Idiot Might Be You

(Counterpunch) This election cycle in the United States, televised debates only seem worse than in recent decades. What changed is the urgency of the economic meltdown and the unwillingness of Americans to confront how globalization imposed structural changes on a society ill-prepared for sacrifice and adaptation. No one wants to be wrong. No one wants to be a loser. But explaining why representative democracy has failed to protect the national economy simply exceeds the capacity of a political culture that is oriented to sound bites on television the way the planets rotate around the sun.

Watching Avatar in Miami: Where Natures Saves the World … from Us

(Counterpunch) In a Miami IMAX theater, I recently watched James Cameron’s “Avatar”. Judging from the cheers at the end, even teenagers yearn for a time when rites of passage meant embracing our connectedness with the web of life. Last week, the worldwide box office total for the movie approached a boffo $2 billion. So what conclusions to draw from what could be the highest grossing movie in history?

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.

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 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.

The Stimulus and the Meltdown: from sound to slush

(Published at Counterpunch.com) It is astounding: if you only read the mainstream media (with a few notable exceptions like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal) you would wake up to this morning’s headline in The Miami Herald, “How would an economic stimulus package help South Florida”, and wonder: since when did we need an economic stimulus package?