Money Jungle: Demolition Men

Election 2010: Is this Where Florida Ends?

Folio is published every Tuesday, but it’s unclear how many of you actually read it that day. If the office has ever done any research into the subject, I have no idea; it’s possible, since they’re pretty good at understanding their audience (other than the whole “Steven Humphrey is worth more than Money Jungle” calculation, which really does nothing to dispel the stereotype of Floridians as being terrible at math). Certainly, many readers are not able to pick one up on Tuesday; some hold off until the weekend.

I only mention this because this Tuesday, August 24, is the day for primaries in the statewide elections that will ultimately be settled on November 2. No need to preview the race, since most of you will have already voted by now. Obviously, this is the most important cycle for local elections in many, many years, and the results are all but guaranteed to be catastrophic for Northeast Florida, and the state in general. We are about to take major steps backwards in terms of the competence of our elected officials, and in the overall desirability of life in Florida.

While the election of Barack Obama was awesome for the country, it seems now clear that his administration kinda sucks, and that our hopes of dramatic positive changes were naïve pipe-dreams, invested in someone who basically represents the interests of the most corrupt and dangerous elements of Wall Street and Washington. Chicago Flash and his loyal team of Clinton-betrayers have been such a disaster that an unspeakable outside possibility has now been raised: that the likely loss of his congressional majority may be followed by the loss of his job in two years.

The problem, in my opinion, is that many Americans, who sometimes coalesce under the Tea Party banner, still believe that it’s possible to kill our way out of this. If we can just start another war, the theory goes, or cut even deeper into services for children, old people and the poor, the old America will come right back, like the shining silver that emerges after a good polishing. By this analogy, the polish is spewing from the mouth of Glenn Beck, and being rubbed in by Sarah Palin on the campaign trail.

The right loves their “free market”—the idea that, if corporations are given godlike authority its workers and consumers, altruism and civic responsibility will trump the profit motive. Well, ask a Gulf fisherman about that, if you can find one. Having had the central theme of their ideology repudiated by those very markets, the right has found itself a new baby: Austerity. The Republicans of 2010 are running on one promise: to lower taxes for the rich, which is fair enough, but also to put the screws to the underclass like nothing this country has ever seen. Deregulated banks have pissed away the life’s savings of millions, and the only thing that appears to have been manifested by health care “reform” is the Manchurian Candidacy of Rick Scott.

It’s really depressing to think about—a truly hopeless situation. If Jeff Greene beats Kendrick Meek, thereby making Charlie Crist the hold-your-nose choice for US Senate, and Rick Scott beats Bill McCollum for the right to stomp Alex Sink for Governor, you can basically close the door on Florida for the next decade. Being a political junkie myself, I’ve been looking at the 2010 elections across the board, and unfortunately I can report that Florida is leading the nation in collective myopia, willful self-destruction and craven capitulation to the wave of Trojan Horse candidates that is flooding this country like a busted sewer line. But at least you can grow plants with sewage; the only things these guys can grow are gravestones.

Here in Jacksonville, which has already paid a terrible price for not taking this state over when we had the chance, the elections that follow in 2011 will basically mark the end of 30 years of our leaders making good faith efforts (however blatantly shady) to build up this city. It saddens me to think of all those dead (and dying) political giants that once walked among us, putting personal interest aside to do what’s right—or, at least, what they thought was right—for the people, and to know that in 20 years all of their names will have been effectively erased from history, as history itself is eclipsed by the exigencies of present-time or, as Obama puts it, “the fierce urgency of now”.

Today’s Florida kids will have to endure the kind of hardships that most of us have only read about on the “Internets” (Ted Stevens, RIP), and they will probably never know that none of it had to happen. But, like any generation facing existential crises, they will need scapegoats, and that dishonor belongs to those of us casting ballots in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Our terrible decision-making will have “forced” them into whatever fake choices they decide are necessary. I’d hate to be their parents!

sdh666@hotmail.com; August 16, 2010

Charlie Crist and the Great Triangulation of 2010

The old cliché that people get the leaders they deserve is usually true—in America, anyway—and rarely as much so as in the curious case of Charlie Crist. Just three months ago, it seemed likely that he would be shuffled off to the private sector, a high-profile casualty of an economic meltdown he helped set in motion. Whether Rubio beat him in the Senate primary or not, logic almost dictated that Kendrick Meek would beat the GOP nominee with a brutal decisiveness worthy of Randy Orton.

That would have been both fair, and fitting. But instead, the embattled Governor of Florida stands at the mid-way point of the most audacious act of political triangulation since Obama’s “Black Caesar” act in 2008. Like Obama, Crist has challenged his party’s establishment and all conventional wisdom, hoping to assert himself amidst utter chaos on all levels of the electoral system. He’s like a surfer, riding waves of boiling-hot water, on a surfboard made of ice—but oh, such balance!

The text of Crist’s announcement, in St. Petersburg on April 29, was amazingly not leaked beforehand, although the essence of speculation proved correct. He is running as an Independent, turning the Senate race into a three-way dance that could be the most entertaining spectacle of what should be a hilarious year.

Crist’s speech was scheduled for 6pm, then pushed back half an hour; the headliner didn’t start talking until 5:51. Insert your own joke here. He might as well start wearing robes with sequins and feathers, and calling himself the New Nature Boy. Some might say he’s been doing that for a long time, more power to him. He’s already got the hair and the rep; all he needs is better enforcers.

Crist’s theme—“Straight To November”—will surely elicit witty responses from the blogosphere, which has been flogging rumors of Crist’s sexual complexity ever since he was a candidate for Governor in 2006. It’s anyone’s guess to as which elements of this broken system will choose to play that card first, or why, but it seems a certainty at this point. The politics of personal destruction, typified by the ongoing campaigns against Sarah Palin, fills a vacuum created by an absence of real debate, just as it did in the late ‘90s, in the years just before 9/11 briefly realigned America’s focus on policy concerns. Crist may be lucky to have hit the national stage just as Americans are getting tired of the Beltway’s parlor tricks.

Whenever the media is openly talking about a politician’s sex life, people should take it as a clue that something else is going on. In this case, Florida is in serious trouble. Both Meek and Rubio erred severely in not linking Crist inextricably to the recession in Florida, even though it would have happened anyway. Rubio is too beholden to the fake conservatives holding down the right to ever question the wisdom of tax cuts, and Meek might be understandably reluctant to point out that, by inducing an economic crisis here, which quickly went national, Crist helped Obama get elected.

The property tax cuts that Crist forced through, to benefit downstate development interests that anchored his 2006 campaign, cut into the operating budgets of most cities in Florida. The I-4 corridor that has dominated Florida politics for three decades draws enough revenue from other sources that their budget issues were neither as dramatic nor traumatic; there was some cushion for the impact of the tax cuts. Things were worse up north, but ultimately bad everywhere: Almost every municipality has had to deal with budget issues during Crist’s term. Services have been slashed, workers fired, taxes and fees raised; longstanding political alliances were torn apart faster than, well, anything that gets between Justin Bieber and his fans. For the smallest counties, the results have been catastrophic—whole departments closed, lifestyles permanently altered.

And it’s only just begun. The budget-wrangling will continue for years to come; rebuilding the state’s revenue base is a generational matter. As for pensions, we’ve been having the relevant discussions in Jacksonville for some years now—John Peyton knows the subject back-and-forth—but the entire country is facing multi-billion-dollar shortfalls that cannot be rectified during a recession that has proven persistent, to say the least. While I question Crist’s decision to go to Washington, for many reasons, here’s one argument in its favor: He won’t be in Tallahassee when the hammer drops.

Crist has shown a real gift for political calculations—witness the way he used his veto of merit pay for teachers to burnish his centrist cred ahead of the party switch. The bill was devised as a fairly-transparent union-busting move, one which undermined the efficacy of merit pay a supplement to fair, competitive compensation for teachers. As Governor, and nominal leader of his state party, he could have pulled just enough strings to keep such weak, ill-conceived and unpopular legislation from ever passing at all, if he felt that strongly about it. He could have intimated to key pols in Tallahassee that he would veto the bill if it did pass, and encourage them to put their energy into any of a number of things that he would happily sign into law.

Instead, he allowed the bill to develop, along with several weeks of accompanying public discord, including protests by thousands of students, teachers and parents up and down the state, who took the time to lobby Crist in a direction he was already leaning. He wasted their time, so he could score political points by sweeping in with his veto pen, like he didn’t initiate the budget crisis that has led to so many teachers having to worry about their jobs. Crist correctly calculated that his move would be seen as an act of heroism, rather than cold, cynical manipulation of women and children.

There is a glut of bland, boring blubber-butts in Florida politics, a bunch of lightweights that are barely shadows of the folks who held their spots a decade ago. Charlie Crist is one of them, of course, but he has found a way to be slightly better than his peers, and that’s pretty much all you can ask of Florida. As for Meek, his chances were low-balled from the get-go by a Democratic Party that began projecting its vulnerabilities before the Obamas had finished one load of White House Laundry.

As Crist and Rubio dove headlong into a caterwauling catfight that leaves the impression that the smoldering hatred for one another is rooted somewhere beyond policy beefs, the odds should have solidified in Meek’s favor. But they haven’t, which left room for Crist to move. Instead of being pressed between Rubio’s hotshot push and Meek’s liberal legacy, Crist made the election about him and not the issues. It became a game of personalities, which is unfair because his opponents have none.

Instead of taking 2008 as a real mandate for change, and then consolidating control of state and local governments, they’re working a rope with no dope. And that is just not how power works. Clearly, Democrats in Washington are reluctant to challenge their friends across the aisle, even if the feeling is not reciprocated or is, in fact, exploited to install a brand new batch of sorry-ass Republicans, already greasy with gluttony, graft and malicious intent. It’s all a replay of 1994. How Obama (and, critically, Rahm Emanuel) have played right into it is a complete mystery to the entire world, and probably themselves. Instead of Crist kissing up to Obama, maybe Obama should be kissing up to Charlie Crist!

sdh666@hotmail.com; April 29, 2010

Money Jungle extra: “Battle of the Mediocrities”

[Melissa Ross, host of the stellar "First Coast Connect" show on WJCT-89.9 FM, issued a standing invite to deliver some pithy guest commentaries on the issues of the day. I've not taken her up on that offer yet, being perhaps too-careful to find just the right topics. I'd like to be entertaining, but without courting any extra controversy, as I have concluded that the status-quo (for better or mostly for worse) is basically acceptable to the majority of the population in my city, and it's simply self-defeating to attempt any further challenges to that dynamic. Below is a revised-and-extended version of the commentary I'd planned to deliver about the Ahmed/Yarborough dust-up; it would have aired today. However, it doesn't make much sense to criticize city government, so close to budget-time; after all, we all know that such budgets are used primarily as political tools. So, instead, I post it here, where only that narrow fraction of fresh thinkers would ever think to look. Self-censorship, done right!]

On Tuesday, the City Council votes whether to accept the nomination of Parvez Ahmed for a spot on the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission, a nomination being challenged by councilman Clay Yarborough. Like many of you, my first thought was “Who Cares?” Here in Florida, we’ve developed a special gift for meaningless political scandal, and this is a case in point.

Instead of talking about how Jaguar management stomped on the hearts of their fans by not only throwing away Tim Tebow, but leaving him to be drafted by a conference rival, we’re stuck watching a schoolyard spat between cultural stereotypes. And it’s not like our council isn’t bush enough, between threatening to fire loyal civil servants and ducking corruption charges related to widespread misappropriations of public funds. This JHRC gig is the kind of no-work job mobsters get.

Is Ahmad qualified for the position? Absolutely. After all, he holds a degree from Harvard; Bush and Obama have shown us how useful they can be. A cynic might use the bin Laden scholarship fund endowed at Harvard Law to make a blanket condemnation of its entire student body, and do real damage to many people’s careers. That is how these politics work; guilt-by-association works like a double-edged sword, yielded by a lunatic.

The savage violence—the cold-blooded, indiscriminate brutality—associated with Radical Islam represents a threat to all of humanity. Hundreds of Jews, thousands of Christians and millions of Muslims are dead now, and those numbers are growing by the minute. Extremists have been empowered, as moderates are cowed into silence. The only winners are demons and demagogues, many of whom live right here in America.

Organized religion has earned the widespread skepticism and overt hostility that seems its destiny in this century. The Vatican has only recently begun to face the real, dollars-and-cents consequences of their ritualized system of child-rape, which goes back farther than the living memory of any priest. Of course, many saints and martyrs of the faith were killed by the church itself—an irony lost on our current Pope, who couldn’t even be bothered to burn the pictures of himself in a Nazi uniform. (Maybe he should have married Sandra Bullock!)

Anytime one finds oneself ceding the moral high ground to Madonna, a serious inventory is in order, but the Catholics have had this process forced on them by their enemies. The Baptists are moving in the same direction, but faster. The so-called “evangelical right” has shown remarkable clumsiness in its many failed attempts to engage Islam on its own terms. It’s not just that their arguments were ill-conceived and poorly argued; in many cases Christians have worked aggressively against their own interests.

The most notorious example may be in 2002, when Dr. Jerry Vines, the then-leader of the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville (which has been a leading force in the city for most of its century-plus in business), disastrously dissed the Prophet Muhammad as a “demon-possessed pedophile with nine wives, the last of whom was 12 years old”. Coming just months after the most brutal terror attack to ever occur in the western world, Vines knew exactly what dark forces he was invoking with such loose talk. Ultimately, the entire city was endangered by Vines’ loose lips, much as the “South Park” crew deliberately risked their lives, and the lives of their families and colleagues, just to pop a rating for their nasty little show. Why the reckless provocations?

A few months earlier, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, members of the editorial board of the once-great National Review magazine openly floated the idea of bombing Mecca, as part of a larger-scale nuclear assault on the major cities of the Islamic world. NR has since scrubbed the references from its website, and would have you believe their own  idea was first proffered by Tom Tancredo, years later. Good job, losers!

Unfortunately, when the finally time came for a serious reckoning of the issues lingering between Islam and Christianity, all the best talent from both sides was already dead. We should be so lucky to boil these conflicts down to debates between Billy Graham and Ayatollah Khomeini, or even Fulton Sheen and Freddie Mercury. If the dais included Christ, Moses, Muhammad and Buddha, there might be no disputes at all. We might be having these discussions on the moon, or Mars, or maybe at the center of the Earth. Instead, we’ve got Parvez Ahmed and Clay Yarborough at City Hall. Kitty Kelley was right: The blood really does get thinner as you go down the line!

Yarborough is holding down Council District 1, for now, but he has done himself no favors. No one’s filed to challenge him yet, but that will change. No Muslim is going to seek elected office in Northeast Florida, but Yarborough’s done a great job reminding liberal voters that Barack Obama’s election has little or no effect on their own political fortunes. That the White House is clearly unsure whether to back Kendrick Meek, who helped Obama win Florida, or Charlie Crist, whose tax cuts helped tank Florida’s economy, making Obama’s victory possible, speaks against the best hopes of local progressives. But Clay Yarborough is no Charlie Crist.

It’s one thing to make needless hay of Ahmad’s past and present associations, but it’s another to go too far in making inferences. Surely in the struggle waged by Muslim groups to control the PR damage wrought by 9/11, etc., a few bad apples may have gotten into the bunch. The question at hand is: Has Parvez Ahmad ever knowingly dealt with people he knew were either directly or indirectly engaged in terrorism?

Short of some smoking guns (literally), there’s no way to know for sure, but to job the guy out of such an cozy gig on what is currently hearsay and speculation creates a precedent that will undermine the political relevance of the Muslim community in this country. It’s would be like banning anyone who ever attended a Black Panther rally, or the inevitable crackdown on the inevitable shady right-wing domestic terror provocation. Or saying Klansmen can’t serve in the Senate. If you start running such people out of politics, we’ll have nothing left but Dennis Kucinich.

Here’s a bold idea: Dissolve the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission, and then dissolve the City Council. If you took all the taxpayer dollars being wasted on these groups, piled it all up and set it on fire, you could at least make ‘smores!

sdh666@hotmail.com; April 22, 2010

Money Jungle: “Starship Pain”

President Obama’s visit to Cape Canaveral is conveniently set for Tax Day, April 15, and it occurs in a context of general discomfort for all involved. The ostensible purpose is to stop a slow trickle of support flowing away from Obama in a crucial battleground state, which is itself living a political nightmare. The White House won’t admit it, but Florida bears directly on the future of the Obama Agenda, whatever that is.

Obama’s doing damage control after unveiling a package of brutal cuts to NASA and affiliated contractors. Floridians have every reason for concern. With Discovery in orbit right now, there are only three flights remaining in the shuttle schedule. After that, it may be decades before Americans return to space under their own power. With foreign programs also vulnerable to economic or political shifts, and still years behind what we’re set to scrap, mankind has seemingly awakened from a dream that obsessed our ancestors from the days of DaVinci, Icarus and Elijah. And once again, the inspirational legacy of JFK gets pissed away.

Like so many of the catastrophic maneuvers to occur under Obama’s watch, the collapse of America’s space program is hardly his fault. The cuts being pushed right now were all but inevitable before he was even elected, a result of long-term budgetary trends and the slow-motion disintegration of the country’s overall mechanical capacity. Neither factor was controllable by 2009. The reality is that our commitment to space exploration, in the terms defined by JFK in 1961, effectively died alongside the heroes we lost aboard the Challenger when it blew up in the sky over Florida in 1986.

And let’s be clear, here: The Challenger crew died because of neglect and hubris on the bureaucratic level—defects enshrined, by default, as official policy for the quarter-century that followed. The tragedy that followed, 17 years later, was a logical, inevitable extension of that policy. No serious efforts were ever made to replenish the Shuttle Fleet or modernize the design to reflect changing strategic priorities. The next generation(s) of manned spaceflight will be organized around private industry, with foreign governments (Russia, China, India) performing functions typically associated with NASA. Good luck with that. Obama, at least, has positioned himself as unwilling to put more lives at risk on behalf of goals abandoned before he got there.

From agriculture and industrial production to engineering and information technology, our educational system has become incrementally worse, and production of the most vital goods for life has fallen apace. As in so many other cases, so exhaustively documented here and elsewhere, the recession is being used as an excuse to accelerate trends that began while the economy was still at or near its fake, fraudulent peak. Mass-firing as a profit-padding technique has been in effect since the ‘80s: the family farms, the mom-and-pop stores, factory towns all over the country.

I just happened to be polishing this column in the minutes just before the shuttle Discovery took off April 5, and a recurring theme in the coverage was that there won’t be much more of this stuff—not for Americans, anyway. And that’s a shame. This is another sign of Florida’s changing fortunes under Obama. He’s made no enthusiastic display for Kendrick Meek’s Senate bid, and the White House has done nothing to defend the House seats at risk in November. The timing of the NASA cuts implies ambivalence, at best, to the fates of many Obama loyalists; at worst, it suggests frightful ignorance of the reality on the ground. Where have we heard that before?

This is the worst year for incumbents in living memory, but the GOP has done a much better job of training candidates. Besides yielding the open seats and not defending their incumbents, Beltway Dems show no inclination to seriously challenge the other side. President Obama is increasingly defined by his enemies, and he does not control his message. Meek should be positioned to inherit all the scorched-earth of this ridiculously shady Crist-Rubio primary debacle, but instead he’s looking lucky to keep the margin in single digits against either of them. That means real disaster for Florida: a stuffed-shirt GOP sandbagger doing the bidding of whomever has the photos of them together.

All the plans were made years ago, and most of the science has been in place. But corporate greed, political incompetence and collective myopia leaves the US trading on glories from 40 years ago, as the world snickers. Spaceflight is just a recent example. Funding issues aside, the courage and intelligence of our astronauts far outpaces that of our elected leaders, to the point where it now presents an obvious danger to their lives. The biggest question, frankly, is will America even be able to safely cease manned spaceflight without a third major disaster? 

sdh666@hotmail.com; April 5, 2010