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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Short-Sighted Manipulation of People of Kendall. Guest Blog by Richard Grosso

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s desire to alleviate traffic congestion in West Kendall is understandable. His attack on those raising concerns is not. The opposition to the extension of the 836 highway outside of the county’s urban boundary is based, not on “misinformation,” but serious concern, based on history and the realities of development practices and economics, that the county would be making a huge mistake.

Addressing traffic problems in the 21st century with a 1970s solution of building more highways is a bad investment given what we now know about how quickly new roads fill up with new traffic and open areas to new development, and about the critical need to shift away from infrastructure for cars and toward real mass transit. Miami-Dade County’s land use plan specifically reflects these understandings and, for these reasons and others, contains explicit prohibitions against building new public infrastructure — like this highway extension — beyond the Urban Development Boundary.

The looming decision of whether to invest $650 million into another highway expansion or modern mass transit comes at a pivotal point in this county’s history, as it is coming to terms with the necessity of re-working its water supply and flood-protection system, reducing its vulnerability to climate change and sea level rise, and restoring the Everglades upon which it relies for so many economic, recreational and other purposes. It is concerning that some in county leadership may not understand that building a highway through the Bird Drive Basin wetlands would compromise the restoration project water managers are still designing for those lands to prevent flooding and restore previously impacted wetlands in western Miami-Dade County.

The PR campaign to promote this highway may be selling fool’s gold to West Kendall residents, and the county would soon be looking for yet another new road in a few years when this one fills up with new traffic — whether or not it leads to new development in the area.

Miami Herald

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Angry with the world and....Read on, it might be you too! By Geniusofdespair

From the New Yorker Magazine

I will never be the same. NEVER

My life with therapy taught me two lessons: don’t minimize and don’t deny: in other words be truthful with yourself. As a child I had become adept at lying to me to cope. Can’t do it anymore.

The way my country is going and the blinders on many of the people in the country is having a devastating effect on me. The truth hurts.

For example, one tiny example: the Everglades-Trust pushing hard in support of Trump’s pick for Governor — it is just too disgusting, too vile. If DeSantis gets in he will do everything Trump wants. I think Putnam will be equally as bad but at least he won't be in bed with the loony bin.

Am I destined to leave this world to your GRANDCHILDREN, with polluted water, reduced animal species, a toxic Supreme Court, crushing debt and xenophobia run wild? Will my generation be the Nazis of the 21st Century?

Nice to wake up and find this rushing to mind. They say “stay in the present” as a means to heal... and I laugh.

How did the Everglades Trust get pulled into this? Read on...
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