Rick Scott, Adam Putnam, and Matt Caldwell: Turbulent Waters For Florida's Toxic Trio ... by gimleteye

In the winter of 2016, polluted water from Lake Okeechobee turned from brown to guacamole green, thick with toxic algae carrying cyanobacteria to downstream communities, putting people and businesses in harm's way. In the summer of 2018, it is happening again. Right before midterm elections.

Gov. Rick Scott. Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam. State Representative Matt Caldwell. All are seeking to move up the political ladder in November on the Republican side of the slate. Rick Scott is aiming to unseat Bill Nelson, the Democrat incumbent, in the US Senate. Adam Putnam is running to be Florida's next governor. Matt Caldwell, to take Putnam's chair in the state agriculture hierarchy. The ladder is real, and it is constructed carefully by the state's shadow government: Big Sugar.

There are a handful of Big Sugar players, and a much larger circle of influence peddlers, but there are two billionaire families who are the mainstay of the Big Sugar cartel; the descendants of Charles Stuart Mott who own US Sugar Corporation and the Fanjul family, owners of Florida Crystals and a vertically integrated, transnational sugar empire.

Both the Mott descendants and the Fanjuls spend heavily to make rules and regulations work their way while claiming a public benefit: "farming for families to put the food on your table". They never say that sugar is not a food but a substance more addictive than cocaine when consumed in excess. But that is another story.

Big Sugar deeply cares about the political ladder because laws and regulations are a key variable in its profit. Florida's sugar industry uses politics to minimize risk that laws and regulations can lower profits below expectations.

Big Sugar calibrates campaign money, including dark pools allowed after the 2010 Citizens United decision by the US Supreme Court, as carefully as it laser-measures its fields, from seeding to harvest, from back bench to committee leadership. It carefully externalizes its costs on the environment, from sulfur magnifying into methyl mercury to phosphorous and nitrogen runoff to cyanobacteria, from ditches into public waterways, from post crop burning to ash plumes to respiratory illnesses in farming communities where frightened residents are too intimidated to complain.

In 2012 Big Sugar picked Matt Caldwell from the legislative crowd. Caldwell, a state representative from Lehigh Acres -- one of the areas in southwest Florida hit hardest by rampant speculative construction and the mortgage excesses triggering the great recession of 2007/ 2008 -- successfully executed a US Sugar Corporation strategy to unseat a popular county commissioner in Lee County, Ray Judah. Big Sugar t-boned Judah with dark money. Judah was a lone Republican calling for Big Sugar to fairly shoulder the costs of its pollution caused through fertilizer and additives designed to extract the absolute last penny from crop yields. Caldwell was head of a political committee that launched $1 million of dirty ads in the last weeks of the campaign against Judah.

For his success, Caldwell was elevated to Big Sugar's de facto majority whip in the Florida House where, in 2013, he pushed a new law extending to thirty years, Big Sugar's leases on public lands in the Everglades Agricultural Area. That was the same year as a major toxic algae outbreak in the Caloosahatchee River, a key connector between Lake Okeechobee and Florida's tourism-dependent west coast.

At a moment the public clamored to buy more sugar lands for surface water treatment and storage to avoid the mess of downstream toxics waste puking on rivers and private property and small businesses owned by ordinary taxpayers, Caldwell went with Big Sugar. Now he's aiming to replace Adam Putnam who Big Sugar is promoting to Florida governor.

Adam Putnam's family farm was purchased by a state agency - the South Florida Water Management District - at five times the appraised value conducted only a year earlier. The Palm Beach Post reported in 2012: "Adam Putnam — former congressman, current commissioner of    agriculture and widely viewed as the future of Florida politics — became a very rich man in 2005 when taxpayers spent $25.5 million on 2,042 acres of his family’s ranch that had been valued at $5.5 million a year earlier..."

Putnam ferociously opposed the intervention by the federal US Environmental Protection Agency in establishing state-wide nutrient limits. Nutrients being the primary cause of the toxic puke, including vast amounts of legacy pollution when Big Sugar used Lake Okeechobee as its septic tank. Big Sugar has waged a decadal war to boot federal laws from overseeing its pollution. "States rights!"

In the Palm Beach Post, Rick Cerabino noted yesterday, "“Eight years ago, the federal Environmental Protection Agency called for specific numeric limits on pollutants from farmers, municipal wastewater and stormwater utilities operations, and other polluters of state waters. In a letter responding to the EPA, Gov. Scott, Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam and the state’s legislative leaders wrote that Florida couldn’t afford the “onerous regulation” of reducing man-made pollution in its waterways. “We each ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility and hear from numerous constituents about concerns of an overbearing federal government that’s placing burdensome regulations on Florida’s families and employers,” the letter said.“

And Rick Scott. Scott came to Tallahassee in 2010 without any prior experience in government.

Scott became extraordinarily wealthy through expertise navigating the edges Medicare reimbursement practices. The company he founded, Columbia/ HCA, was hit with the largest Medicare fraud fine ever in 1997. Scott left the company four months after the federal investigation began, but paid no political price for whistling past the HCA graveyard. Which is why, he believes, he can do it again with the toxic mess he substantially helped create.

Once in Tallahassee Scott immediately sought to build a political infrastructure. Among those offering a helping hand; the special interest with institutional experience and memory longer than most who served in the legislature: Big Sugar.

One of Scott's commitments, straight out of the box: terminate a deal consummated by his predecessor, Charlie Crist, to purchase ALL the lands of US Sugar Corporation in the Everglades Agricultural Area. Originally, about 187,000 acres. Because the EAA is highly compartmentalized by ownership (and by design), the US Sugar lands would not of themselves have solved the problem of wetlands treatment marshes on the scale necessary to fix the toxic algae problems. But in aggregate, the lands if they had been purchased by taxpayers even at the enormous costs -- would have been a massive lever to rearrange the Everglades Agricultural Area for the purpose of encouraging a sustainable economic future based on public health instead of sugar cane production.

Conservation groups, enormously frustrated by the failure of the state to complete the US Sugar purchase -- its critics said, "we don't have the money" -- proceeded to mount a statewide ballot referendum to secure that money and more, around $1 billion per year. In 2014 Amendment 1 passed the threshold of more than 60% voter approval. "The 2014 amendment... was approved by 75 percent of voters, sends 33 percent of revenues from a tax on real-estate documentary stamps to the Land Acquisition Trust Fund." Then Gov. Rick Scott proceeded, with the Republican leadership, to thwart the will of the people by refusing to allocate the money for its stated purposes. (Environmental groups sued in state court and won, four years after the referendum was passed.)

The net effect: rather than pursuing a course that more than 200 qualified scientists believe is necessary -- addition of significant acres of land for water treatment and cleansing marshes -- Scott paved the way towards a 2017 fix that is really a Big Sugar Trojan Horse; a $2 billion "Everglades" reservoir that won't be complete for at least a decade and will likely trigger violations of existing water quality law, imposed on the state by a federal consent agreement after more than a decade of litigation in the 1990's.

In other words, Scott killed the real chance to protect Florida's waters, rivers, bays and Everglades and substituted with one that serves Big Sugar's interests. In another early act as governor, Scott gutted the science budget of the South Florida Water Management District. In doing so, he neutered the state capacity to investigate, explain and show the science of pollution of state waters and the linkages between toxics in farming and cities and the Everglades. In effect, Scott made it so that the public couldn't get good information from qualified scientists because he fired them -- most of them. Then he stacked the governing board of the water districts -- his right under state law -- with Sugar-friendly advocates, some of whom delighted in denigrating critics.

According to a recent report, "During the seven years under Governor Rick Scott, environmental enforcement has hit a modern nadir, with 2017 registering some of the most anemic results on record, according to a new analysis released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The upshot is that not only is Florida’s environment bearing a greater pollution load, but also its Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is losing revenue as well as its capacity to monitor--let alone deter--eco-offenses. Apart from the 2017 results in isolation, the Scott record shows a deep, across-the-board nosedive in Number of Cases in virtually every enforcement category."

Big Sugar wants to elevate Rick Scott to the US Senate. There is only one risk to its plans for the Toxic Trio -- Scott, Putnam and Caldwell -- that Big Sugar can't control: the weather.

And it is the weather, once again, that threatens to force Big Sugar to rebuild its political ladder. Not yet. But maybe. The summer of 2018 is shaping up to be a complete disaster for coastal communities bearing the brunt of highly toxic algae out of Lake Okeechobee.

The US Army Corps of Engineers held a public hearing on the toxic algae outbreak while scarcely a hundred feet away a dying manatee clung to one already dead. July 30, 2018 

Yesterday, the US Army Corps of Engineers -- the federal partner in charge of the canal infrastructure investment that is built around relieving Lake O water levels when there is too much rain -- held a meeting in Cape Coral, Florida. Only a few hundred feet away, a dying manatee clung to the corpse of another; killed by cyanobacteria in the red tide.

The Toxic Trio have nothing to say, because everything they have done as elected officials has set in concrete the measures needed to keep science and disclosure of fact at bay. They have closed off options that could save public health, Florida's waters, and a tourism-based economy in favor of sugar industry profits. They don't want the public to know any more than Big Sugar thinks the public needs to know.

Go anywhere near cyanobacteria mixed in with red tide, you are at risk of serious neurological disease including links to later-development of Alzheimer's. But Florida won't do the science and won't disclose the data and won't clearly outline the steps necessary to protect public health, because Big Sugar doesn't make money that way. Big Sugar deploys phalanxes of lobbyists, downtown lawyers, and for-hire media professionals so it can continue to extract the last penny from its crop, grown on nearly 400,000 acres, never mind the MILLIONS of Floridians, their families, guests and visitors who put tens of billions into the state economy. Oh, they say, "We are doing MORE than our fair share. We reducing phosphorous hugely!"

Rick Scott talks about "jobs". Adam Putnam talks about "jobs". Matt Caldwell talks about "jobs". But they didn't see the weather coming.

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Blunders by the Toxic Trio: Rick Scott, Adam Putnam, and Matt Caldwell created this Florida water crisis ... by gimleteye

Inconveniently for Florida's Toxic Trio: Rick Scott -- running for the US Senate against incumbent Bill Nelson, for Adam Putnam -- the Ag Secretary running to succeed Scott as governor, and for Caldwell -- a state representative aiming for Putnam's job as Ag Secretary -- Florida's weather is conspiring against claims they deserve your vote. They don't.

The immediate crisis -- far from the first -- is the reappearance of highly toxic cyanobacteria in algae blooming in the diseased heart of Florida: Lake Okeechobee. Both Florida's rivers -- the St. Lucie and the Caloosahatchee -- carry water out of the lake towards a million residents and tourism businesses on the east and west coast of the southern half of the state. It happened in 2013 then again in 2016 and now.

The water has to go somewhere, when rain levels cause the lake to rise, and the US Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District release those billions of gallons of toxic water downstream. The water could be treated and cleansed if it was allowed to filter through wetlands sufficient in space and volume, south of the Lake. Those lands belong to some of the wealthiest welfare recipients in the US Farm program: Big Sugar. And every year Big Sugar takes its winnings from the electeds and spends millions to ensure that the state legislature, executive mansion, Congress and even the presidency is locked and loaded to shoot down any serious effort to share the adversity caused by Florida's manufactured water crisis.

Florida Gov. Scott, Ag. Secretary Putnam and legislators like Matt Caldwell had the answer in the palm of their hands, and they let it slip away. Now they want your vote.

Taxpayers could be on the road to salvation, but the toxic trio closed the road and built an exit ramp to more wastefulness and more environmental harm and more threats to public health and safety. They did this is three ways.

First, Scott and his co-conspirators killed the deal to buy US Sugar lands because it was opposed by its sometimes competitor, the Florida Crystals/Fanjul family empire. Second, Caldwell, Putnam and Scott created a new law that extended lease terms without competitive bidding on at least 23,000 acres of public lands to sugar farmers. Those lands could have been deployed to cleansing the cyanobacteria-laced waters, but the toxic trio bent to Big Sugar's will. Third, the toxic trio endorsed a new law that prohibits the state from eminent domain in the Everglades Agricultural Area while, at the same time, funds a multi-billion dollar reservoir that even the US Army Corps of Engineers doubts will work or be cost effective.

The bottom line is that billions of taxpayer dollars and years of civic efforts have been squandered while governmental processes slowly grind toward common sense: more water storage lands in the Everglades Agricultural Area. From the Now Or Neverglades Movement to the nation's premier science review agency, the National Academies of Sciences, the eventual solution to taxpayer and property owners woes is clear: buy the land that is necessary to fix Florida's water crisis.

Anyone paying attention knows that Big Sugar is at the heart of Florida's water crisis. The industry excels at muddying the waters, pointing fingers in every direction, but cyanobacteria doesn't lie. It is lifted into air we breathe and is linked to severe and incurable neurological diseases like Alzheimer's.

Remember the Toxic Trio when you go to the polls in November: Scott, Putnam and Caldwell do not deserve your votes.


The next step is simple: Fund Everglades restoration
BY DON JODREY
donjodrey2@gmail.com
July 23, 2018 06:30 PM
Finally, on July 25, after 18 months of silence, the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force is scheduled to convene in Washington, D.C., to discuss next steps for Everglades restoration. As Floridians know, the intergovernmental restoration effort is the world’s largest infrastructure project that will, when complete, bring economic and environmental benefits for a vast region that ranks 13th in the nation in population and economic output.

The congressionally chartered Task Force, co-chaired by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and the state of Florida, fosters the necessary collaboration needed to line up funding, engineering capability and science to get restoration done. The Task Force meeting could not come at a more important time. Several issues require immediate attention.

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Bullsugar calls out Big Sugar's rigged political system ... by gimleteye

Toxic algae bloom on the St. Lucie River, Florida

Big Sugar farms on over 400,000 acres -- roughly 800 square miles -- south of Lake Okeechobee, the liquid heart of Florida. The big players in the industry are billionaires; Florida Crystals owned by the Fanjul family and US Sugar Corporation, owned by the descendants of Charles Stuart Mott. Through its campaign contributions, Big Sugar controls the levers of government in Florida.

It needs levers. Big Sugar needs control because profits depend on micromanaging rules and regulations of water pollution (think, Lake Okeechobee and toxic algae) and the operation of the nation's most complex flood control system whose primary purpose is keeping sugar farms dry in wet season and wet in dry season. Regulatory and political capture is Big Sugar's game, pure and simple.

Oh. There is one more season that matters to Big Sugar: election season.

This cycle is exceptional because a massive toxic algae outbreak in Lake Okeechobee is focusing voters' attention on Sugar's role in ways that could upset its best laid political plans.

So Big Sugar is lashing out at the group taking a stand against a rigged system at the root of the toxic algae outbreak. That group is Bullsugar, whose purpose is to call out the fakery and to direct public attention toward real solutions to protect Florida's environment and jobs.

By its very name, Bullsugar elicits anxiety from the polluters it shadows.

In 2016, Big Sugar suffered a stinging defeat in the Republican presidential primary. It bet the farm on US Senator Marco Rubio to be the Republican nominee for president. That investment came a cropper. (By the time John C. Hotten published his A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words in 1859, the phrase has come to refer to any failure rather than the specific failure to stay on a horse: "Cropper, 'to go a cropper', or 'to come a cropper', that is, to fail badly." In the word of our president, Sad!)

Pepe Fanjul, of the billionaire Florida Crystals empire, was first to hug Rubio when he left the Miami stage after his campaign debut. From there, it was all downhill. Rubio's shellacking by Trump shocked political operatives who calibrate Big Sugar's risk. The reason Rubio did so poorly among Republicans, garnering scarcely 25% of the primary vote, was his pathetic response to a massive toxic algae outbreak on both coasts -- the same kind that is occurring today.

If the toxic algae outbreak was the wild card in a normally predictable game, what surprised Big Sugar even more was Bullsugar's role. The grass roots start-up organized in Martin County on Florida's east coast. Its staff quickly mobilized hundreds of thousands of supporters through social media.

The role of toxics in Rubio's thrashing by Trump in the GOP primary generated practically no attention in the mainstream media. Nor did Democrats wake up to the phenomenon in the subsequent US Senate race; an election that Rubio handily won.

Big Sugar did not immediately adapt to this unwelcome development in its careful communication strategy. But it has.

State Representative Matt Caldwell, campaigning to be the next Agriculture Secretary, recently attacked Bullsugar in Sunshine State News: "From the base vulgarity of your name to the harassment and abuse hurled toward fellow Floridians to the constant stream of twisted misinformation spread to the public, your organization has all the hallmarks of a hate group." (Read more about Sunshine State News, here.) Caldwell's claim is a laughable, sad commentary of our current politics.

Big Sugar picked Caldwell from the GOP bench as an up-and-com'er through his role unseating the only Republican county commissioner in Florida with the guts to call out the rigged system that permits Big Sugar to pollute Florida waterways at the expense of taxpayers. In 2012 Ray Judah, a long-serving and popular official in Collier County was blind-sided by a television ad campaign later revealed to be organized by a political committee headed by Caldwell, resident of an adjacent county. US Sugar Corporation was the sole benefactor and spent a million dollars in the dark money blitz. It worked, and Caldwell was on his way to calling Bullsugar a "hate group".

In this election cycle, Big Sugar's political plans are clear. It is spending hundreds of thousands -- if not, millions -- to push term-limited Gov. Rick Scott into the US Senate seat held by the Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Although Nelson has always been respectful of Big Sugar, Scott is an energetic ally who proved his chops by bending state authority even more closely to Big Sugar's will. Scott, of course, is a friend of Trump. To succeed Scott, Big Sugar is pushing Adam Putnam -- now Agriculture Secretary -- to be governor. Big Sugar never had a better friend than Putnam, whose family wealth derived from a land sale to the state at an inflated value compared to its appraisal. To succeed Putnam, Big Sugar has thrown its weight behind Caldwell to be the next Agriculture Secretary.

Whether Big Sugar's election plans are a golden ticket or a trap door depends on Florida voters in November. Informed voters should take a close look at the results of the Bullsugar candidate questionnaire, the one that is getting Matt Caldwell and Sunshine State News all hopped up, because the only way out of this rigged system is to loosen the grip of the polluters who refuse to clean up their pollution at the source and instead force taxpayers to pay and pay and pay.

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Patriots For Pollution ... by gimleteye

Evidence of a massive fish kill in 2016 as a result of toxic algae vomiting from Florida's Lake Okeechobee

You never heard "Patriots For Pollution" because the phrase is an oxymoron. A patriot is someone who loves and defends his nation. A polluter is someone or a corporation who erodes it.

In Florida we have plenty of polluters who wear the American flag pin on their lapels. They are well educated and well paid by profits from polluting. Take the sugar industry for example. Big Sugar enjoys massive corporate welfare embedded in the Farm Bill and other hidden subsidies. Two billionaire families -- the Fanjuls/ Flo Sun empire and the descents of Charles Stuart Mott through the Mott Foundation --  control the state's water management infrastructure through political campaign contributions. They routinely use fake arguments to advance the idea that they bear the fair share of cleaning up their pollution.

US Senator Marco Rubio, in his last campaign, asserted that protecting Florida sugar was a matter of national security. That, despite the fact that sugar poisons people, poisons democracy (through its influence in political campaign financing), and poisons our rivers, bays and Everglades.

Patriots defend our shared values as a democracy. By default -- because we share air we breathe and water we drink -- that includes the environment. In other words, it is patriotic to want to protect and to defend our parks, our natural heritage, our Everglades.

For that reason, environmentalists bear the brunt of attacks by polluting corporations. They are branded as "unreasonable" or "Radical" or "against jobs". Sometimes the attacks work. Judged by the Florida legislature and Gov. Rick Scott -- a fierce protector of Big Sugar's prerogatives -- they work very well.

These attacks are crafted and replayed in the right wing echo chamber where voters are often persuaded to vote against their best interests. Like air and water quality. If this were untrue, we wouldn't have an anti-environmental grifter like Scott Pruitt as chief of the federal agency charged with protecting the environment. Or a governor who ditched the one practical start to solve Florida's water emergency -- the acquisition of US Sugar lands in the Everglades Agricultural Area.

You cannot have patriots for pollution. You can have patriots against pollution. That would be Bullsugar.

Bullsugar is a relatively young conservation group in Stuart, Florida. It was established to call out the hypocrisy of Big Sugar mouthpieces. Bullsugar advocates for faster, real progress cleaning up the toxic waste caused by Florida's mismanagement of water resources in favor of nearly half a million acres of sugarcane on the southern rim of Lake Okeechobee. For example, Bullsugar supports the purchase at fair market value of sufficient marsh treatment areas to cleanse Big Sugar's pollution and stop pollution Lake Okeechobee and drainage into the connected rivers. Bullsugar wants public lands leased by Big Sugar to be turned back storage treatment areas.

The lake is Florida's diseased heart. It is used as a sump pump for big agriculture and has been spewing huge volumes of harmful algae into arterial waterways that are used to flush the lake when water levels rise too high.

Big Sugar is expert at pitting communities and constituencies against each other while wrapping its supporters in the American flag. It hires or otherwise supports local community "advocates" to claim that massive burning on sugarcane fields doesn't harm anyone's clean air. One way it does that: brand groups like Bullsugar as "radical". It is no surprise. In Miami, lobbyists for the sugar industry have long used local community institutions to push back against environmentalists. The Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce. The universities. The hospitals. Even the newspaper.

Big Sugar and its allies also conduct whisper campaigns that suppress what should be outright public anger at the the polluters and flip it back onto the patriots. The polluters minimize the damage to the rivers. They point to peoples' septic tanks not their own massive fertilizer run-off. They use arcane legislative port-holes for fake remedies the push solutions further and further into the distance and deeper into the wallets of taxpayers.

All people should have the right to clean air and clean water. You shouldn't be forced to pay for it, because corporations have commandeered government and force you to pay for their pollution.

Remember that and trust your instincts: if it sounds like bullsugar, it is bullsugar.


(Disclosure: I am a volunteer board member of the Bullsugar Alliance.)

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Laudato Si and all that ... by gimleteye

Next week, Pope Francis will meet with world environmental leaders in the Vatican, to discuss advancing the agenda of protecting the planet from climate change impacts. The Pope issued his encyclical, "Laudato Si: On Care For Our Common Home", in 2015. A small, powerful constituency -- primarily in the United States and tied to fossil fuel extraction industries -- pushed back, but Pope Francis is determined. The evidence on the ground of climate change is everywhere, notwithstanding the hostility of American conservatives and media machinery like the Murdoch Fox News empire. The Pope is paying attention to sea level rise; from the world's poorest regions, like Bangladesh, to developed nations like the United States and cities like Miami, which -- in addition to being the lowest lying region in a politically influential state -- is also one with the greatest income disparity.

Pope Francis may have read about the recent Republican gubernatorial debate in Florida, a slugfest in which the two top contenders -- Adam Putnam and Ron DeSantis -- focused on how they are respectively more like Trump than their adversary. Trump defines the environment and threats to it as unauthorized access to a golf course he owns. Putnam, as Florida Secretary of Agriculture, has been thoroughly compromised by Big Sugar -- represented by two billionaire families, the Fanjuls and the descendants of Charles Stuart Mott. DeSantis, a Congressman whose campaign Trump endorsed, is a fierce defender of the anti-environmental regulatory jihad.

Then, there is Republican Rick Scott. Florida's term limited governor is challenging Democrat Bill Nelson for US Senate; a race considered critical to Democrats' hope to regain majority control of the Senate. As governor, Scott twiddled his fingers while serial outbreaks of toxic algae spewed from the state's largest fresh water body; outbreaks attributable to a warming climate and the sugar industry -- his big campaign supporters -- and its dominance of water management infrastructure in the state. Some of that algae is being linked through air-borne convection to serious brain disease, like Alzheimer's.

The thread tying together the Republican agenda in Florida and elsewhere is a willingness to dismantle environmental regulations that "drag" on business profits. Scott, for example, drove the final nail of the coffin in the state's growth planning agency. His willingness to abandon environmental enforcement, like wetlands destruction, has unleashed another wave of growth, sprawl, and highways into the Everglades. On another front, Gov. Scott has withheld information on cancer clusters including rare pediatric ones. This dismal course is mirrored by President Trump (eliminating protections for whales and sea turtles) and the empowerment of a radical anti-environmental agenda that masks severe risks to the public. Just one example:

Fearing a “public relations nightmare,” the White House and top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency worked together earlier this year to suppress a federal health study that revealed new evidence about hazardous levels of toxic chemicals in U.S. drinking water.

The study, set to be released by the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS)’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), found that a certain class of chemicals can pose a serious risk to human health at much lower levels than previously thought.

These chemicals, which have been linked to cancer, thyroid diseases, pregnancy complications, and other serious health problems, are present at dangerously high levels in water supplies near chemical plants, military bases, and other sites in multiple states, the study revealed.

Jeb Bush, who did his part as Florida governor to wreck decades of bipartisan consensus on the environment, dismissed Pope Francis' Laudato Si; saying that, in effect, the pope should stick to psalms while good business people took care of the economy. An observer of the Church wrote: "What strikes the Pope as self-evident is that the nature we have attempted to dominate, for the past several centuries, has now turned on us, like Frankenstein’s monster. As he put it in a recent press conference, "God always forgives; human beings sometimes forgive; but when nature is mistreated, she never forgives."

Although these thoughts have yet to register with Florida voters -- who seem to perversely detach their vote for Republicans from the terrible outcomes that Republican officials happily support -- the ones most severely impacted, like in Martin County where Lake Okeechobee is spewing toxic algae onto personal property and treasured waterways, are mobilized. A little further up the Florida Atlantic coast, another group is mobilized too. These are a group of young women who have contracted cancer. They shared neighborhoods, homes and schools near Patrick Air Force Base.

Dr. Julie Greenwalt is a cancer survivor and an oncologist with MD Anderson. She is organizing her community of friends and trying to piece together a toxic puzzle that the government, won't. ""I just feel grateful to be alive, and I know that God has a plan for my life," Greenwalt said. "(Perhaps) this is part of it -- to try and help figure this out."

Maybe God's plan also includes waking up voters, by putting in front of us such insensitive, manipulative and power-hungry politicians who wrap themselves in the velvet robes of religiosity. They should be banished from our legislatures, but only voters have that choice and, so far -- at least as Florida is concerned -- , they have exercised it very poorly.

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These Aberrant Politics: Nothing is Normal in the Age of Rick Scott and Donald Trump ... by gimleteye

"For a time, we created exceptional value for shareholders."

Trump just appointed a new head of NASA, the space agency, that has a primary role in science disclosing global warming. The head of NASA is a climate change denier.

The drool starts from the top.

In Florida, the South Florida Water Management District has turned into a paranoid place where science is being forced to the shape of political outcomes.

This didn't happen overnight. For decades, conservatives who spouted anti-regulatory nonsense -- in order to fatten their profits -- tilled the fields of misdirection so that, eventually, something entirely awful and exotic could grow there: Rick Scott, as Governor, and Donald Trump.

Of the two, Scott is a smoother operator. He answers only the questions from the public that he wants to, and always has a frame for his response that reinforces his talking points. Incredibly, Scott and his spokespersons claim that no one has done more for the environment than he has. What Scott did, in fact, was to make science subservient to the demands of big agricultural industries, like Big Sugar.

As extreme as Scott is, it would never have happened without the continuous push and momentum created by his predecessor, Jeb Bush. Jeb had no use for environmental regulation and held the core belief that anything government could do, private industry could do better. That's exactly how "self-regulation" first became a mantra and then provided the fuel to gut government agencies and missions that had already been weakened from within, by allocating budgets and priorities away from science and away from fact.

Florida is an outlier state. That is one reason Trump feels such affinity with Scott. They are both wealthy as a result of skating the edges of the law. They both occupy center seats of power. They both understand their jobs to undermine "the administrative state" that suppresses private profits. Both deride the concept of a "public good".

Science and fact-based regulations to protect public health and the environment instead serve political  ends: to accumulate more power and wealth. That's why, for Trump and his backers like the Koch Brothers and fossil fuel supply chain, it is important to have a head of NASA who doesn't believe in global warming and isn't a scientist. That's why citizens protesting the South Florida Water Management District and its hired-gun governing board are facing the full wrath of the state.

There is nothing normal with what is happening in Florida and the nation. There will be a very steep price to pay, eventually, for those who scavenged rewards from these aberrant politics.

Trump is breaking the environment beyond repair
By Linda J. Bilmes FEBRUARY 20, 2018
Boston Globe

HUMPTY DUMPTY famously cannot be “put back together” again. For those who care about the environment, every day since Donald Trump took office is a Humpty Dumpty day —with something being broken beyond repair.

The federal government has started selling off parcels of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments to anyone who hammers four poles into the ground and pays a $212 fee. The Trump administration has also slapped a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels — making it more expensive for Americans to go solar and crippling the domestic solar panel installation industry. Additionally, the administration suspended the “Waters of the United States” rule, a key Obama-era regulation designed to reduce pollution in 60 percent of the nation’s lakes, rivers, and streams. The president’s 2019 spending plan would gut the Department of Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and especially NOAA — where his budget would force the agency to stop protecting coastal estuaries, Pacific salmon, and marine mammals.

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Florida's Environmental Failure: could voters put a state agency into "receivership"? ... by gimleteye

Today, claims of "FAKE NEWS" envelop us, but here is one undeniable truth in Florida: our waters -- which belong to the people -- are dissolving in a toxic soup of pollution. This, despite decades of environmental rules and regulations and billions invested.

Florida's Everglades, held in the public trust for future generations, is on life support after huge taxpayer investments and billions more promised to come. And people are suffering. Highly toxic algae blooms coated both Florida coasts in 2016 and persist in ecological treasures like Florida Bay; more billions lost in a state economy that depends on tourism. Some of that algae can trigger incurable brain disease.

Everything we have tried, in terms of protecting Florida's water quality, is on the order of half-measures or worse. Take North Florida's springs: once as clear as plain air and now clogged and coated with algae. Or Apalachicola Bay, where the historic shellfish industry has disappeared.

Elected officials and decision-makers tell us: there are no silver bullets. It is always someone else's fault. Georgia. Municipal waste. The shrugging platitudes are excuses. The solutions are always the same: bury the pollution in deep wells. Shift it somewhere else.

The regulatory structure within which the public frames its hopes for clean water and a safe environment for people, for the economy, and for habitats is bankrupt, overwhelmed by external costs and internal conflicts.

This set of interlocking phenomena did not happen all at once, although there are manifest examples of contributing factors like Gov. Rick Scott's decision to eliminate the powers of the Florida Department of Community Affairs -- the single state agency with a mission to balance the needs of economic development with the environment. To conservationists, DCA was never a panacea. The agency and its mission grew out of a bi-partisan consensus in the early 1980's that the state needed to take a strong role in balancing economic development with environmental protection.

DCA was hacked to death, piece by piece, by politics steered by unregulated campaign contributions and dark money pools from industry associations, Big Agriculture, and the development supply chain that minted billions from construction at the shoreline and through the conversion of low-cost farmland and wetlands into suburban sprawl.

With DCA, though, at least civic activists had a platform; a legal framework to challenge political decisions. They could petition in state court when they believed local government permitting violated the intent and spirit of state growth management laws.

Now, there is no platform and growth management is a hollow shell.

The hollowing out of government agency and missions is a successful tactic of the anti-government AltR. Its apotheosis at the federal level is President Trump, blithely ignorant of facts and dismissive of science. Trump and his agents like EPA chief Scott Pruitt are torching federal authority to protect the nation's air and water. For instance, Trump has said that he can't wait to dismantle the Clean Water Act.

The states can do a better job, he says, without apparently understanding that Florida can't. Hasn't. Won't. In Florida, the life rafts are designed to sink.

A lawsuit filed yesterday against the State of Florida by a group of children, alleging that the state has failed its responsibilities under the public trust doctrine and constitution to proactively address climate change and its impacts points in the same direction. In that case, Delaney et al. v. Florida, we know that the solution is based in sound science; we must stop and reverse the combustion of global-warming emissions as soon as possible.

Isn't that the same case in Everglades restoration, and isn't the injury by state government in the case of climate change denial the same as the denial of science embedded in the state legislation that emerged, after two years of controversy, to place a huge man-made reservoir south of sugar plantations and Lake Okeechobee? Carl Hiaasen described it this way in a recent OPED:

At 10,500 acres, the reservoir will be relatively small and so deep (23 feet) that some scientists don’t think it can do the job. The design was chosen over better options by the board of the South Florida Water Management District, which under Gov. Rick Scott functions as a policy arm of Big Sugar.
As one example, TCPalm reporters exposed how the water district in 2015 allowed a U.S. Sugar lobbyist named Irene Quincey to “edit” and weaken planned regulations on harmful phosphorous pouring out of Lake O.

Among her contributions to the final draft was deleting the word “enforceable” from three key passages.

So it’s no shock that the water district bowed to the corporate cane growers this year, too. The original reservoir proposal by Sen. Joe Negron, a Stuart Republican whose tourism-dependent district gets slimed hard by the green algae blooms, called for a 60,000-acre project.

That would have been big and shallow enough to deal with much of the fouled lake discharges. However, sugar producers didn’t want a larger reservoir because they opposed taking any cane acreage out of production, even if the state paid them for it.

Just like a corporation, a state agency should be held to be bankrupt when it fails to uphold its mission to protect individual liberties and rights. In the case of the Everglades reservoir, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection claims it is following law and the balance of taxpayer interest and property rights, but it has manifestly ignored the parts of the law that inconveniently conflict with the aims of the state's powerful campaign contributors: Big Sugar. FDEP does the bare minimum. But the bare minimum has the further effect of allowing mission creep and the goal posts to shift further and further away from protecting people and the environment. Surely, the Florida constitution is being violated.

When a corporation goes bankrupt, its business is put into receivership. Why shouldn't receivership apply to state agencies like FDEP, as well? Who would "receive" a failed state agency? It could be a special master of the court, supervising the work and recommendations of a science panel comprised of experts who are independent of Florida's regulated communities. They wouldn't be able to legislate of course, but if the state legislature refused its recommendations at least the destruction would be more highly visible. A special master, moreover, could be a brake on further agency backsliding.

The status quo cannot hold, because if it does, the verge we are on will reveal even more nasty surprises.

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In Miami-Dade, Republican Politics Continue To Damage Taxpayers ... and it's worse than you think ... by gimleteye

Today, the Miami-Dade County Commission may rubber stamp an agreement with Florida Power and Light, the monopolistic supplier of electricity to South Florida. The plan -- to re-use wastewater -- is touted as a "win-win". That's spin.

The plan, they claim, is a public good that will stop the outflow of the county's polluted waste water to the ocean and solve the Turkey Point cooling canal disaster at the same time. The cooling canals have been failing for many years, ladling hundreds of tons of super salty water per day into Florida's fragile drinking water aquifer and the waters of a national park.

Here is where the joint agreement falls flat on its face. FPL has neatly camouflaged its claim the waste water will be "clean" by writing the agreement in such a way that water quality standards cannot be enforceable.

It has done so, with broad recognition -- if not by the broader public -- that FPL has run circles for decades around regulators for the state who regularly show up in the revolving door between the company and government. (Mike Sole, former chief Florida environmental regulator, is now the public face of FPL -- and an influential member of the board of the Everglades Foundation.)

At the county level, FPL's arm twisting has been blatant.

If you haven't already noticed (cf. Trump White House and US EPA), the only intact principle of the GOP is protecting the right of polluters to profit at the public expense. It is, for example, the reason that Trump brightly defends Scott Pruitt, an EPA administrator who understands his responsibility to be the dismantling of federal authority to protect the nation's air and water. Gov. Rick Scott? He is right in line with the polluters.

Here is what this acidic observation has to do with today's county commission decision. It is a point of view that the Miami Herald ought to consider amplifying: how the insidious creep of deregulation is leaving taxpayers naked.

The county commissioners, the mayor, and big polluters like FPL understand the new playing field created by the GOP: when you stop environmental regulation at the federal level, and when you cripple rules and regulations at the state level, what you are left with is major decision-making involving difficult science and complexity at the local level: Miami Dade county, where environmental staffers are handed bows and arrows to fight lightning bolts. Mayor Carlos Gimenez and the politically ambitious chairman, Esteban Bovo, are apparently fine with that.

The premise of federal authority is that it is the place where the playing field can be level. Now, with the knee-capping of state regulatory authority -- Gov. Rick Scott and GOP'ers like Adam Putnam fired that metaphorical gun -- taxpayers can only watch the outcomes. That's how state road 836 is going to be extended, along with the rights of developers, further towards the Everglades and over critical farmland and wetlands we know are needed for a safe, secure future for taxpayers. It's also how FPL can get away scott-free, to claim it is delivering "clean" re-use water to badly damaged Biscayne Bay and a national park.

These events don't happen by coincidence. Very smart lawyers and lobbyists are paid handsomely to deliver results for their clients, and they require the acquiescence of elected officials to cross the "t's" and to dot the "i's". The rationales are cooked to perfection like a dulce de leche millefoile birthday cake where everyone wants second helpings. Doubters, ask this question: why is Florida swimming in a sea of pollution today? It is no coincidence. This is what you voted for. The polluters call this "intelligent design" and barring a miracle of sound judgment descending over County Hall -- another example is going to be delivered today.

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Rick Scott: ready, steady, go ... by gimleteye

Florida Rick Scott got there, first. Before there was a Donald Trump, Scott decided to deploy a portion of his considerable fortune to buy the office of the governor. It didn't matter than he had zero experience in public policy (like Trump). Didn't matter that his business accomplishment were deeply stained (like Trump). Or that he had nothing in common, at all, with the Tea Party and rabid right-wing that propelled him to office (Trump).

The Republican Party looked down its nose at Scott (like it did, to Trump). When he arrived in Tallahassee in 2010, he barely had competent staff (Trump).

What Scott discovered, to the great satisfaction of his mentee -- Trump -- , was that winning high elected office was a rigged game and that the winners best understood how to navigate the margins for best forward speed.

Scott's favorability numbers are very low. He is a disaster in unscripted moments before the cameras, and so his approach has been to tightly limit the opportunities for the press to catch him off guard. Within his own party, Scott's relations are frosty. But big donors from industries regulated by the state are happy to support Scott, as they are to support Trump in Washington.

Now that Scott has formally announced his intention to take on Senator Bill Nelson, the race is on. Neither party can control the US Senate without winning Florida. The race will be about Trump, Scott's best friend. That is why Scott wants to declare victory in the Everglades and why a Republican Congress will quickly move to provide the federal cost share to a new multi-billion dollar reservoir that will not work, because Big Sugar has already turned the reservoir, legislatively, to its purposes.

The Democrat's best argument is that Florida is swimming in a sea of pollution, and that sea includes toxic water and toxic politics in equal mix.

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