Florida: Old and coming disasters

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

From the 1920s to the 1980s, Florida was notorious for unplanned, environmentally destructive, socially pernicious, and even fraudulent land use schemes. During the real estate boom of the 1920s, hucksters sold thousands of lots sight unseen to out-of-town customers who were misled into thinking that one day they would be able to escape the harsh northern winters by building a house in balmy South Florida. What these con men failed to tell their clients is that most of these tracts were actually wetlands, under water for a good portion of the year. It was a time when land in Florida was sold not by the acre but by the gallon.

Crooked real estate practices never really ended, but the bursting of the Florida real estate bubble before the 1929 Wall Street crash, the Great Depression (1929-1941), and World War II put a damper on things – for a while. But by the 1960s a great proportion of the state’s most fragile ecosystems – including the Everglades and the Florida Keys – had been severely damaged by breakneck urban development and the polluting practices of Big Agriculture.

Among the biggest culprits was the sugar industry, controlled by big companies, including one owned by the last of the great Cuban latifundistas, the Fanjul brothers, who not only own a vast amount of land and sugar mills in the Sunshine State but also in the Dominican Republic.

The runoff from fertilizer used in sugar cane sugar cultivation seeps slowly into streams flowing to the south, fouling the water in wetlands that cover a vast area stretching from lands north of the Everglades to Florida Bay.

The environmentally, socially, and economically pernicious sugar industry has been allowed to operate not merely in a laissez-faire manner but to reap benefits way beyond what a free market would provide. Because of the immense lobbying power of Big Sugar, the sugar barons have enjoyed a sweet deal for decades – at the expense of the environment, the taxpayers, workers, and American consumers.

For the sugar industry, the damage its operations cause is what economists call an “externality,” a cost paid by somebody else, specifically the taxpayers of Florida and the United States that have been forced to devote huge sums of money to try to fix the damage Big Sugar has inflicted on the environment.

Not content with this gift extracted from the public – or the benefit of exploiting the cheap labor of temporary immigrant workers in Florida and even cheaper and powerless Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic whose condition has been compared to that of slaves – the sugar interests have finagled one more huge goodie, courtesy of Uncle Sam and its representatives in the federal executive and legislative branches and in both political parties, always ready to do favors to those with the wealth necessary to make big campaign contributions and to gather their well-heeled friends and associates together with a politician to ensure a much larger contribution than any single individual could contribute under U.S. electoral laws.

While Big Sugar is prone to crow that, unlike other agricultural commodities like corn, it receives no federal subsidies, that claim is totally misleading, amounting to a “pants on fire” lie. The enormous federal subsidy for sugar is all the more difficult to kill because it is disguised. The United States government – the world’s principal advocate of a global free market – severely restricts the supply of sugar in the United States through a system of yearly quotas it assigns to selective countries, which vary to ensure that total sugar imports are far less than what the U.S. market consumes.

This artificial restriction of supply enables U.S. sugar interests to sell their product to American consumers at prices significantly above the world price. As a result, U.S. citizens are ripped off every time they buy anything that contains sugar, which is in an immense number of foods and drinks. Meanwhile, the sugar daddies become enormously rich – acquiring the great power that comes with money in the U.S. political system. The truth is that producing sugar in the United States under free market conditions is not economically viable. The subsidy not only takes a bite out of U.S. consumers and companies that use sugar, it hurts the economies of poor tropical countries, where the production of sugar is economically feasible.

The sugar business in the United States thus is a racket in which both the industry and the U.S. government have colluded for many years. No one has mastered the art of the sugar swindle like the Fanjul brothers. Not only are their holdings diversified, which allows them to benefit from the subsidy for of U.S.-produced sugar and the quota assigned to the Dominican Republic, which after 1959 received a good chunk of Cuba’s quota as a result of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. The Fanjul brothers are uniquely able to personally influence both sides of the aisle in Congress and whichever party controls the White House because – one brother is a Republican and the other is a Democrat! Whichever party is in power one of the two brothers can host a fundraiser for the president – and they have – as well as other powerful politicos.

Perhaps no other incident speaks of the bipartisan clout of the Fanjul brothers than one that surfaced as a result of the investigation surrounding the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. To discuss an issue presumably affecting the sugar industry, one of the Fanjul brothers, probably the Democrat, personally phoned the president. It happened on one of those occasions when Clinton was cavorting with Monica Lewinsky. In the middle of his dalliance, the most powerful man in the world took Fanjul’s call. No wonder the big sugar interests get to run roughshod over the environment, unorganized workers in two countries, unwitting American consumers, U.S. and Florida taxpayers, and poor countries, especially those that do not toe Washington’s line.

But Big Sugar was not the only player implicated in the savaging of Florida’s environment. By the 1970s and 1980s, the disastrous effects of the wanton abuse of the state’s environment by private interests had reached such a level of depravity that Florida lawmakers were forced to react, if for no other reason than to prevent the destruction of the state’s lucrative tourist industry. The sugar companies were forced to curtail some of their most damaging practices and agree to pay a modest portion – much less than their fair share given the devastation wrought by the industry – of the funds needed to partially restore the Everglades. Some control on suburban development and pollution of the rivers and ocean also were put in place.

The key legislation is the landmark 1985 Comprehensive Planning and Land Development Regulation Act. The act was intended, among other things, to prevent such egregious frauds as those perpetrated by the Rosen brothers, detailed in a May 1, 2011 Miami Herald column by Fred Grimm: [The Rosen brothers] “…bought 100 square miles of scrub land outside Fort Myers for $678,000 in 1957, bulldozed roads, dug 400 miles of canals and sold 17,000 lots for $801 million with a nationwide sales campaign that made the term “Florida swamp land” synonymous with “fraud…At least, Cape Coral survived, albeit as the ill-planned, soulless sprawling epicenter of the Florida foreclosure crisis…Three quarters of the lots in their next project, the 85-square mile Golden Gate Estates…were never occupied…The brothers peddled the lots without mentioning that the Golden Gates sites lacked…any…infrastructure for the 400,000 residents…envisioned.”

Now, with Rick Scott, formerly a rapacious health industry magnate who could put the 19th century robber barons to shame, as Governor and an overwhelmingly Republican pro-business legislature, what little progress Florida has made in the last 25 years is set to go down the drain.

Friday of last week, both houses of the legislature approved anti-growth management measures, which Gov. Scott will eagerly sign into law. That will eviscerate the 1985 land management act. The headline to a guest column by Nova Southeastern University professor Richard Grosso, published on April 27, 2011 in The Miami Herald, reads: “Proposed land-use law huge mistake.” Grosso rightly calls the legislation “tragically flawed.” Among the many dire consequences outlined by the professor is this one: “Weakening the act’s urban sprawl provisions will devastate farms and forests, rivers and lakes.”

True, but what is false is that this proposed law is a “mistake.” Rather, it is the deliberate and logical consequence of the extreme, reactionary ideology common to the Governor and the legislature that Floridians elected to govern them. Using the excuse of a fiscal crisis, gutting land use management is part of a broader, vicious right-wing assault against anything that might stand in the way of unfettered business, including unions, regulation of corporations, and environmental protection.

The budget pretext is belied by, among much other evidence, the proposed elimination of the Miami office of the Florida Department of Environmental protection, which has been successful in helping clean up and protect Biscayne Bay – with a staff of two and an annual budget of $70,000!

No, none of what is happening in Tallahassee is a mistake. The only mistake was made by the majority of Florida voters when they elected this gang of extremists to run our state. Now they – and the rest of us who would never pull the lever for any of these ruffians in expensive suits – will have to endure the consequences.