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.

The radical extremists of the building industry

(Published at Counterpunch.com) “No better time to buy a new home, no better place” reads the faux headline in The Miami Herald paid advertisement section for real estate; describing a platted subdivision in Homestead, Florida. It is a line for suckers.

And another line, comes out as a whine:  “If families who want to buy a new home wait for the media to tell them things are better, it will be too late and the deals won’t be there.” It’s pure nonsense.

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.

Nuclear Florida, Beachfront reactors in an age of sea level rise

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  There is a reason Miami-Dade County in Southern Florida is the first place where America’s utility industry is moving forward with new nuclear capacity in three decades.

In Miami, Florida Power & Light found public officials malleable as silly putty, willing to allow a local agreement with a wink to substitute for solid facts that the public had the right to know: where the cooling water will come from at a time of chronic drought, where the water–more than 50 million gallons per day– will go when it is evaporated, and what will its effects be on public health and the environment.

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.

The toxic economy: Show me the size of your bailout and I’ll show you mine

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill recently described the freeze up of world credit markets as ten unmarked bottles of water and one is poisoned.

I disagree with the number of poisoned bottles.

The Money Launderers: A picnic for Wall Street

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  A week ago, on the day President Bush disavowed government intervention in financial markets, the Federal Reserve announced the fruit of its weekend labor: essentially guaranteeing hundreds of billions in toxic financial derivatives owned by banks. Money laundering has become the de facto standard of Federal Reserve policy.

Back to Florida, where Bushtime began

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  Jake Gittes is in every scene in the 1974 movie, “Chinatown”, leading audiences back to where he started. So it seems with Florida and the national elections.

The politics of the Growth Machine: eating South Florida

(Published at Counterpunch.com) It is no surprise that appointments to Florida’s state agencies charged with protecting the environment are the truest indicator of the governor’s mind set. With two new appointees announced to the governing board of the water management district, Governor Charlie Crist continues to put greater distance between his politics and those of his predecessor, Jeb Bush.