Miami Climate Change March, 1 PM Saturday @ Jose Marti Park ... by gimleteye

This is important. Around the nation, this Saturday, marchers will take to the streets to express their support for policies to address climate change now.

We just have to be better organized than climate change deniers, including the state legislators and the Republicans who control levers of power in Washington and Tallahassee.



Here's how important Saturday's marches are: the earth just passed a carbon dioxide threshold that has no precedent in human history. Climate change is gathering force as the Trump administration and GOP Congress puts sound climate change policy in reverse. We are the lucky ones, in the developed first world, but already in the most desperate parts of the world, climate change is wrecking millions of lives.

The stakes for the young today, for our children and grandchildren, couldn't be higher. They will face the brutal impacts of climate change, head on.

So help. Marching on Saturday is not an end. It is a means to organize for better politics to cope with what lies ahead.

From the Robert Scribbler blog:

This past week, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels passed a new ominous milestone.

Clocking in at 410.7 parts per million at the Mauna Loa Observatory, this key heat trapping gas hit a range not seen on Earth for many millions of years.

(The world crossed the 410 part per million milestone in the daily measure this week. Image source: The Keeling Curve.)

These levels now correspond with the Miocene Climate Epoch when seas were 120 to 190 feet higher than today and when global temperatures ranged from 3 to 5 degrees Celsius hotter than preindustrial averages.

Here is a message from the organizers of the Peoples Climate Change March:

The routes are set. The buses are filling up. The banners are painted.

In less than 100 hours, hundreds of thousands of people will descend on Washington, D.C. to march for climate, jobs and justice. And all across the country, from Fairbanks to Fort Lauderdale and Miami, people will gather to rally and march, fighting to save our communities and the planet.

Here are the details for the Peoples Climate March:

What: Miami People's Climate March
Where: Jose Marti Park
When: Start: April 29, 2017 - 1:00 PM
End: April 29, 2017 - 4:00 PM

Don’t miss this moment — and don't let your friends miss it, either.

It’s important to make sure you have a plan for how you’re planning on getting yourself to the event - are you going to take public transit, bike, drive or walk to the event? But it’s even more important to bring your friends and family to the event with you.

With a little help from our friends, we can make April 29 truly historic.

Use the links below to share the People’s Climate March with your friends, neighbors and family, and invite them to join you!

The Peoples Climate March is going to be a massive show of power 100 days into this destructive administration. Together, we can help turn the tide - but only if we show up.

See you in the streets!

The People’s Climate March Team

Big Sugar, The Big Squeeze, Estuaries and the Everglades … by gimleteye

A picture is worth a thousand words. Here is a picture of the Big Squeeze: wealthy farmers -- mostly through growing sugarcane -- in the Everglades Agricultural Area between Lake Okeechobee in the center of Florida holding hostage the fate of public lands including water conservation areas, (not in the picture), the remnant Everglades, and the value of bordering real estate and quality of life of residents. 

Bear in mind, looking at this map, that sugar is one of the most highly subsidized industrial crops in America. Taxpayer dollars not only support a commodity that harms public health -- sugar poisons people -- but is wrecking public lands and billions of dollars in real estate values.

The groups that supported then Gov. Charlie Crist's 2008 deal to buyout US Sugar lands (see the graphic below) then believed and still do, that the acquisition of a significant part of the EAA was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and worth the cost -- $1.2 billion at the time. As one can see from the map, the US Sugar lands may not be centrally located to the purpose of re-establishing cost-effective pollution control, but they are central to the political gridlock that is driving taxpayers to distraction.

Water from Lake Okeechobee is highly polluted by storm water runoff and agriculture. Since the polluted water doesn't adversely affect farming south of the lake, it flows unimpeded to sugar and other agricultural crops whenever and wherever it is needed. The Lake provides a storage basin during rainy season and a reservoir for irrigation during dry season. When the Lake levels rise too high, threatening the integrity of levy, massive volumes are pumped out to rivers of waste; the Caloosahatchee and Indian River.

What sugarcane production also does is vastly increase the levels of polluted water, flowing off farms through canals and feeding into the Everglades.

To fix the pollution of the rivers and  the Everglades to the south requires massive cleansing marshes and water management infrastructure. The question is where to put the infrastructure to effectively protect taxpayer investments in property and in the Everglades.

Advocates for the purchase of US Sugar lands -- a drastically scaled down option-to-buy by Gov. Rick Scott --  were hardly wild-eyed radicals. They understood other EAA sugar barons -- in particular, the billionaire Fanjuls of Coral Gables and Palm Beach -- have property rights that must be dealt with; either through eminent domain powers of government or trading parcels. Without US Sugar lands, there is no trading. Without trading or otherwise compelling the strategic accumulation of lands, there is no solving Florida's water crisis and taxpayer woes.

This is not just a map detailing property ownership in the EAA, it is the map of political and environmental gridlock in Florida.

SFWMD: Buy US Sugar lands … by gimleteye

On Thursday, Everglades activists attempted to persuade the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District to complete the deal made by district managers for the option to purchase US sugar lands below the Everglades Agricultural Area. The video was taken by Cyndi Lenz and the activists for the Indian River lagoon, who are desperate to stop the outrageous pollution flowing from Lake Okeechobee because there are not enough cleansing marshes to store excess water south of the lake: a lake called "the diseased heart" of Florida.

The reason water managers and Governor Rick Scott will not step to the plate and deal with removal of land from sugar production south of the lake is that Big Sugar will only yield its acreage when it is boxed in, with no option other than to sell. From the governing board? Appeals to legacy, history, moral right? "Stop the bullshit, grow some balls, buy the land"? Response: Excuses, excuses, excuses.

Big Sugar poisons people, poisons the Everglades, and poisons democracy

Why do they do it? Because they can ... and growing sugar cane in Florida is immensely profitable. They can do it, because your elected representatives -- today, the focus is on the Florida legislature, your state representatives and state senators -- see no consequence other than positive in doing whatever the teams of lobbyists are drilling through the session. Word is that Big Sugar has more than fifty, and perhaps as many as seventy, lobbyists pushing its bills through this session in Tallahassee. They can do it, because the sugar subsidy, memorialized in the federal Farm Bill, confers millions in profits to the polluters. They can do it, because all it takes is a fraction of those profits spread through big law firms to make sure the last cent is wrung from growing sugar cane before government policy intervenes to protect the public interest; for example, land to "save the Everglades". In fact, every time it seems like the sugar industry's privileges might weaken -- they harden. Their advisors get rich in the process. It has never been different, and it has never been worse than this session of the legislature and Gov. Rick Scott.

Anti-FPL activists arrested in Martin County; bail contributions sought ... by gimleteye

The following is a press statement from EvergladesEarthFirst:

"On Saturday, January 10 of this year, seventeen Earth First! activists were arrested for entering the Barley Barber Swamp to demand the protection of Florida old growth ecosystems. The Barley Barber Swamp is one of the few remaining old growth cypress swamps in the Southeast. Several of the bald cypress trees in Barley Barber are over a thousand years old. They are the oldest in Florida and the entire Southeast region.
Barley Barber Swamp is being killed by the massive 3750 megaWatt Martin County power plant that hovers over it and the seventeen mile cooling pond that surrounds it.

Following a five day standoff, six activists entered the swamp through a public waterway and chained themselves to trees. Eleven other activists were swept up by the police in a frivolous attempt to quell the protest. Currently, Everglades Earth First! is confronted with the immediate need to raise $18,000 to bail these courageous activists out of Martin County jail.

Direct action is a community effort that goes well beyond the risk of arrest. It requires broad support from those who wish to see grassroots efforts succeed. We hope to go to the jail on Monday with the funds to bail all seventeen activists out. We know times are tough but if everyone pitches in we can ensure that these folks don't sit in jail for the next thirty days. Can you contribute to this effort? Just go to our website at and click on the "Donate" paypal link on the left hand side of the page or make out a check to Everglades Earth First and send it to 822 N C Street, Lake Worth, FL 33460.

Another form of support that we would like to ask for is that those concerned call FPL and demand that they drop all charges against the Barley Barber 17 and that they reopen the Barley Barber Swamp to scientific and public scrutiny. One number to call for FPL is 305-552-3888. If you have a local FPL office, please call them as well...

Any funding raised beyond bail will go towards the legal battle that we will carry out to fundamentally change the status of Barley Barber and to ensure its protection and public access much like the battles over Fisheating Creek in the 1990's (http://www.earthjustice.org/about_us/our_stories/a-snake-in-the-kitchen.html)

Redland, the Wades, and the armies of compassion: Part 5 ... by gimleteye

"It is a joy to be here with members of the armies of compassion. I'm really glad you're here and I appreciate your inspiration to our fellow citizens. I believe you are a constant reminder of the true source of our nation's strength, which is the good hearts and souls of the American people." President Bush discusses Volunteerism, Sept. 8, 2008

For those of you who have followed this series, it is lengthy. You may want to go back, and begin with the first and following parts, before jumping to forward.

For Part 1, click here.
For Part 2, click here.
For Part 3, click here.
For Part 4, click here.

To read the series' conclusion, click on read more. After revisions, early next week, I will re-print the entire piece.

What kinds of lessons can we draw from the example of the Wades? The observation of the Wades represent a starkly different point of view to the legions of economists who claim that no one saw the economic crisis coming. The Wades and their allies did. Though the political and economic structure made no room for their knowledge, still they acted in every way available to them; including elections.

The mainstream media and economists, both, continue to portray the national economic emergency as though it spontaneously generated. What their views fail to incorporate is how the entire gearing mechanism of economic growth depends on the false evaluation of risk to the economy and the environment; while bankers and insurers and developers thrived on unregulated derivative debt, activists like the Wade struggled with the consequences on the ground, pinned down in a seemingly endless succession of battles and skirmishes.

The Wades fought at places like the edges of the Everglades—it is inescapable conclusion that the mainstream media performed most poorly at places where the pressure of growth was most intense. Not once has The Miami Herald or other media in Miami, for instance, featured the volunteerism that has operated at the margins.

In important ways, keeping these stories separate—the struggle to value quality of life and environmental resources and the mispriced risk of financial securitization tied to development—is so institutionalized as to be de facto public policy. The destruction to the environment and quality of life that Floridians treasure could not have happened without a system of financing that compartmentalized and segregated cause and effect, truth from consequence, and socializing risk and privatizing benefits.

The network tying zoning decisions to farmland has limited knowledge, interest, or understanding of Wall Street finance. Why should they? Lobbyists, tax accountants, real estate analysts, transactional lawyers, brokers, tile suppliers, swimming pool installers: their success depends on focus and compartmentalization. Denial of larger consequences is embedded in maxims such as “it’s what the market wants”, or, “anyone should be allowed to do with their property, what they want, at any time.” In Florida’s Optimist Clubs and Chambers of Commerce, if the question were posed about development and its costs, the question might be asked this way: where is the profit and reward in seeing anything beyond the for-sale banners and the flags waving in the breeze, advertising housing subdivisions behind stucco walls fronting highways and turnpikes, and, beyond?

In one light, the results are discouraging: the Wades and the small intrepid band of Miami-Dade civic activists fight with sharply limited funding compared to corporate opposition. Even their allies—locally constituted environmental organizations—are often reluctant to engage in battles they believe cannot be won, or at too great a cost to their budgets, donors, or board members.

At Krome Avenue, the Wades and the environmental groups were able to make a deal with county planners and the state. That agreement was rejected by the county commission. The Agriculture Retention Study and South Dade Watershed Protection Plan were both fiercely opposed by development interests, land speculators and the political status quo, because they would, eventually, restrict the expansion of suburbs. The Wades’ effort to recall Natacha Seijas provoked a fury recalling the excesses of Castro , scarcely 100 miles away in Havana.

It is hard to tease out the meaning of so much hard work, personal sacrifice, and trouble. Yet, there is the undeniable patriotism implicit in the struggle of the Wades and their allies to make democracy work the way it was intended. But for the national financial crisis, brought on by an orgy of rotten finance tied to unsustainable development, stories like the Wades would still seem a kind of far-fetched enthusiasm driven to no realistic purpose. But the results on the ground are shockingly clear: Redland has been largely spared the kind of growth that consumed Homestead and Florida City; staggering under the weight of budget deficits and a real estate market that has turned many platted subdivisions into half-empty, desolate and dangerous places.

But in terms of actual results; the developers got exactly what they wanted in South Dade; a ruinous landscape of strip malls, bereft platted subdivisions, and now foreclosures and public safety hazards.

A decade ago, Wades’ nemesis banker Bill Losner often complained that Homestead needed “growth” because all it had was Section 8 housing. Today, after a wildfire of development he helped to set, the farmland is gone and the trail of misery and foreclosures leads straight to the Chamber of Commerce doorstep that listened to his point of view.

The way a pearl forms around an irritant, the Wades’ story forms a pearl in whose hard, polished surface one can view how our nation’s economic crisis and the willful intent to subvert and evade the purpose of environmental laws and regulations are twin images. The one could not exist without the other, reflected in that pearlescent orb.

Barack Obama, who began his public life as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, persuaded a majority of American voters that his calm and reasoned approach to governance, bringing people together across the spectrum of interests, is what America needs at this time of trouble.

But the Wades’ story belies easy imagery. The entire apparatus of government in Miami-Dade is oriented to enable production homebuilders, lobbyists, and land speculators to organize local government in Miami-Dade county for zoning in farmland. There is a flip side to diverting the purpose of government to sprawl: how the clamor of builders fostered an atmosphere of neglect within the inner city, where the Miami-Dade Housing Agency was looted by insiders as thoroughly as addicts stripping copper pipe from a crack house .

It is tempting to say that the circumstances in Miami are exceptional. They are not.

There are visible concentric rings that spread out from the impact of the Seijas recall instigated by the Wades and their allies as a last recourse against the deformation of democracy: for one, new state laws instigated by the Chamber of Commerce and supported by Governor Bush and then by Governor Crist to sharply limit the circulation of petitions and access to government by citizens.

Throughout the inflation of the housing asset bubble, moreover, special interests succeeded in compartmentalizing cause and effect, finance of mortgages from zoning of housing, rules governing finance from rules filling wetlands.

To bridge the divide, environmental and community groups sought out the mother’s milk of concession politics: private/public partnerships, joint cooperative efforts, independent studies, or blue ribbon panels trying to “resolve” conflicts between economic growth, private property rights, and the imperatives of environmental protection. Such “reasonable” approaches to consensus formed their own insidious exclusions for the Wades and their allies, dismissed so off-handedly by Karl Rove; “… guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . .and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. ''

The record of coordinated attacks on the Wades and their allies for trying to make democracy work is a cautionary tale for wider politics. It is deeply troubling that the de facto chair of a local county commission wielded so much influence with the State Attorney’s Office, the Clerk of the Court, and law enforcement agencies in comparison to citizens trying to petition their government.

In Miami-Dade, the county attorney’s office, itself, acted in ways that defer—not to the civic interest, the law necessarily, or to citizens—but first and foremost to the county commissioners it believes to be clients. What is the cumulative effect on the morale of government employees in agencies like planning and zoning, of singling out and suppressing civic participation?

These are neither trivial questions nor exceptions to the rule, to be easily brushed off. There is a consequence to institutionalized avoidance, of taking the easy way out in deferring to the politically powerful, that adds up to the conclusion in the mind of many people that our democratic institutions are designed to fail. This may be, then, the outermost concentric circle of the Wades’ story: we fail the promise of democracy because we, ourselves, do not pass the test: judge us not by what we say, but what we do.

What happened in Redland, then, is not the case of a few bad apples ruining the barrel, or, of a unique circumstance that stands apart from resolvable tensions when people of good will sit down to hash out solutions. Tens of millions of dollars were wasted in Miami-Dade County on perfectly good and acceptable studies that the Wades engaged in: no one could get a word in edge-wise when there was so much money to be made at the edge of the Everglades. Still is. Or, the hope is, will be once the economic crisis reverses.

The Republican orthodoxy, in particular, emanates through the expression of Grover Norquist, years ago, that government should be shrunk to the size that can fit in a bathtub. If you can’t cut the weed from outside, you can poison its roots: government designed to be dysfunctional is easy to get rid of. Under this premise, the theory took flight that the free market can do better. The Wades’ story tells otherwise: government is not given the chance to do better when its energies are focused on the suppression of civic participation and access of citizens to their democratic institutions.

The Urban Development Boundary, where conflict is concentrated by the arbitrage of property values inside and outside the line of allowable infrastructure and the demands of growth management laws, is exactly the place to view an appalling absence of ethics masquerading as virtuous capitalism and the hovering spirit of Ayn Rand.

Here the prevailing condition of democracy in a simple image that doesn’t need teasing from economic studies, accounts of asset bubbles in Holland in the 17th century, or of data that may have been incompletely provided and led to fatal mistakes by former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan and august members of Federal Reserve regional governing boards, their presidents, and staff.

The image will be familiar to every citizen who has tried to influence a zoning decision at the local level of government to protect a river, a stream, or the rural character of their community: a medieval drawbridge spanning a moat protecting the castle from outsiders.

The castle is government. Behind its walls are legislators. On the far side of the moat are civic activists, community organizers and volunteers. With their backs to the castle, a legion of lobbyists, big engineering firms, and special interests otherwise engaged in converting farmland to suburbia at scale.

The drawbridge is operated by a winch driven by a system of gears that allow small exertion to produce big work. The heavy drawbridge goes up to allow the free transit of commerce and industry that conforms to gigantism; ie. rock mining, electric utilities, water pipe infrastructure, wastewater disposal, highway construction, wetlands “mitigation”. It goes down to block dissenters, critics, and volunteers armed with common sense.

The central feature of this metaphor is the system of gears that hauls the drawbridge up and down; it is the same set of gear ratios—built to appropriate scale—for the White House, Congress, for state legislatures and local county commissions.

The cogs on the big wheel are the motives and hubris of Wall Street; making billions while losing trillions through synthetic, derivative debt spun from the thin air of business school and math departments, embraced by executive suites in America’s largest financial and industrial corporations. The big cogs mesh with cogs on the smaller wheels; from Congress to local zoning councils and the predetermined outcomes hashed out by lobbyists in backrooms at long lunches or dinners before pubic hearings.

Our representative volunteer, standing at the other side of the drawbridge, at the far side of the castle, would have no idea that mortgage backed securities provided energy for that platted subdivision they opposed, that collateral debt obligations prepared one thousand acres of farmland for profit better than any fertilizer, or that credit default swaps helped underwrite political campaigns of county commissioners who turned their backs on people or play the race card to defile volunteers as occurred in the Redland incorporation battle.

The big wheel turns by the energy and confidence in the free market to do better than government in protecting the interests of people. It keeps turning on the principle that private corporations can self-regulate and judge risk better than government—risk, for instance, to the quality of our air and water or equally to the probability of financial default.

This big gear connects down to the little gears at the level where builders and developers push platted subdivisions through zoning councils that conformed—not with what the market wants, as advertised with Hummers and SUVs in colorful full-page ads —but with what Wall Street could finance in bundles.

So far, the misdirection and abrogation of fiduciary responsibility is confined to news reports by economics writers, about players in executive suites who stand for the mighty fallen. But the more revealing story is replicated ten thousand times and in ten thousand places: the base level of government where development rules conflict with common sense and the interest of ordinary people in development at scale to neighborhoods.

The battles engaged by volunteers, the tens of millions of dollars of good studies shelved by elected officials, the use of police and the law to suppress civic activists, and the routine use of a raised drawbridge to keep citizens at bay; these instances all argue for a rigorous audit and control process for any funding that is released by the federal government to the states, and from the states to local municipal authority.

We have learned from TARP, the $700 billion program by Bush Treasury chief Hank Paulson and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke, that there are no audit controls; no way to make sure that taxpayers investment in failing and failed banking institutions are used to ease the credit crisis. Paulson turned to the same Wall Street lieutenants and lawyers whose influence was rewarded handsomely for contriving exactly the playing field and its tilting that ground the public interest to dust, that the Wades and other civic activists represented. What is to stop a tsunami of public money from simply being diverted to the same purposes sought by the instigators of widening Krome Avenue, of converting more farmland to sprawl, and paying lip service to the rest?

In its first weeks, the Obama administration will be proposing another trillion dollar fiscal stimulus comprised of taxpayer obligations. To the question of how well and equitably this money is distributed to the states and counties and municipalities across the nation, the Wades’ story is a blinking red light: if you can’t protect the civic interest now or ensure ethical behavior by public officials, how can you imagine that billions of dollars fed into the local feeding troughs will not further alienate citizens from their government?

The danger for the Obama administration—in consideration of applying nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer obligations to reviving the economy—is that we will make the same mistakes, repeat the same errors, and give the thieves who used infrastructure like transportation budgets, water infrastructure, wastewater and toxics disposal the key to the house, again.

It is imperative to invest in civil service reform and stop the revolving door between government agencies and private corporations that result in the vast mispricing of risk to taxpayers and civic suppression to reward insiders. Over a decade, the demoralization of government agencies has had a ruinous effect on the competence of regulators at exactly a moment in history what we need most in government is professional competence insulated from political pressure.

Measures should include a rapid staffing of law enforcement, from the US Department of Justice to local state attorney’s, to deal with white collar crime and public corruption; a real form of domestic terrorism.

Corporations or their surrogates who receive taxpayer bailout funds should not only face prohibitions against excessive compensation to executives, they should also be prohibited from contributing to political campaigns.

So who should we turn to, then, for leadership? Mainstream environmental organizations have been uncertain allies in the last 20 years. The Service Employees International Union and AFL-CIO supported Seijas. They should examine their motives and rewards: what exactly has the suburban, over-crowded and unsustainable landscape of Florida and the rest of the nation done, to improve the lives of union members? At one UDB zoning hearing a few years ago, Seijas berated a top union official she discovered that union members were supporting the “Hold The Line” campaigners outside County Hall chambers.

Now that the model of suburban sprawl is broken beyond repair, the question arises; what to do next? How to put back to work the millions of Americans displaced and dislodged from security because of blank checks written for growth, against no asset base except what could be conjured from the thin air and ether of financial derivatives, earning billions while losing trillions.

This is the key point of the Wades’ experience as volunteers: that the current system of economic growth allocates no debate or diversity or, even, real standing in how policies shape our communities. That is the pattern of the recent past; a record of diversion, costly fragmentation, and intimidation that turned public agencies silent when they could have been supportive of the laws that activists wanted to uphold.

This leads to leadership that none of the key Obama appointments are able to provide: only the president himself can restore the tradition and honor and scope of the contribution of volunteers to the reconstruction of the American economy along lines that both create economic opportunities and also protect the environment. He will not be able to look to Clinton-era officials for help on this score: they provided none, then, and can’t be expected to provide now.

Where, then, are those “armies of compassion” Why spend one’s years, as the Wades have done, engaged in struggles and battles and conflict, where the outcome is not based on democracy—but of the laws of predetermined outcomes? Why waste one red cent when organizing to defend a civil society has so little currency in downtown law firms, at the Chamber of Commerce, or blue ribbon panels constituted to bestow awards on each other? Why spend one’s years marginalized by well-funded opposition who control the mainstream media through paid advertisements in the real estate section, or, by paying Spanish language radio hosts under the table?

There is another light—a more positive one—through which to view these serious questions: the committment of activists like the Wades seem a mystery, but they prove it is not a passive one. The example of the Wades and others is to show for future generations of leadership that there is, indeed, a path to follow. There is a value in the process, in the engagement and the fight for a better future, and an inspiration to younger generations here and in other places where we like to advertise that democracy has taken hold and root.

It takes a village to raise a child; it takes a Depression to raze a village. Today, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put Humpty back together again: If Congress had acted less on the glad-handing of big campaign donors like Roland Arnall, of Ameriquest Mortgage, or Al Hoffman , of WCI Communities, or corporate farmers from states like Florida and paid attention to volunteers who not only objected to the “fewer rules” but fought to get the rules that existed, enforced; we would have been better off.

The Wades fought for their village as have others before them in South Florida. In the end, they learned something else from their protracted battles to enforce regulations and laws designed to protect communities and the environment from sprawl; that the laws themselves had been subject to weakening, one legislative session at a time, and that the intent of laws governing growth in Florida was left to interpretation by state administrative law judges or state court judges, appointed by the governor.

It is a considerable challenge for the Obama team, to steer the ship of state in a new direction to a future that is sustainable, economically vibrant, protective of the climate and natural resources, and restorative of democracy, itself.

The good news is that it is exactly Obama’s experience as a community organizer, early in his career, that will be most relevant to his actions. It is time for a US president to encourage a broader view of those “armies of compassion”, including the Wades who exemplify what it means to be a citizen at a time when Americans are less confident than ever about what an individual can do. For that, they stand for one thousand points of light.

Redland, the Wades, and the armies of compassion: Part 4 ... by gimleteye

"It is a joy to be here with members of the armies of compassion. I'm really glad you're here and I appreciate your inspiration to our fellow citizens. I believe you are a constant reminder of the true source of our nation's strength, which is the good hearts and souls of the American people." President Bush discusses Volunteerism, Sept. 8, 2008

For those of you who have followed this series, it is lengthy. You may want to go back, and begin with the first and following parts, before jumping to forward.

For Part 1, click here. For Part 2, click here. For Part 3, click here. Please click on "read more" for Part 4 of this series.

On New Year's Day, I will print the conclusion, Part 5. After revisions, I will post the entire piece. There have been some good comments on the earlier posts. Thank you for the input.


In the end, all the recall attempt against Natacha Seijas accomplished was to penalize a lazy notary and scar the life of a 26 year old petition gatherer whose first involvement in American politics involved a mistake that brought law enforcement down on him like a ton of bricks.

But from here, to there, is a drama that wraps up the ideals of democracy in the heavy folds of suppression; it is a feeling of steely determination clanging on iron bars of the castle door, inviting the institutional abuse of power by organs of government charged with protecting individual liberty, freedom, and the right of citizens to petition their government.

A bill of complaint against County Commissioner Natacha Seijas was appended to a November 2006 fundraiser solicitation by The Committee for Recall of Miami-Dade Commissioners: voted in favor of moving the Urban Development Boundary to further enrich big developers, instead of protecting the wellbeing of taxpayers and our limited water supply, voted in favor and defended preventing Miami-Dade County citizen’s right to vote on the Strong Mayor amendment, spending tax dollars to hire expensive attorneys to prevent the people from voting, voted in favor and defended the powerful rock mining owners so they can obtain permits to blast and dig without going to public hearings, voted in favor and defended mitigation fees imposed on new cities and voted against letting the people of the Falls and Redland vote on incorporation, verbally attacks and is disrespectful to citizens and County staff who differ from her opinion and speak in public hearings before the Miami-Dade County Commission, under her watch, the Miami Dade Water and Sewer department allowed developers to not pay millions in water usage, the scandal with the cell phone abuses, the loss of millions of dollars meant for affordable housing, and our County was sanctioned by the state for not complying with the 2005 Growth Management law, Seijas gave $10,000 of her District 13 funds to the lobbying arm of an insurance company, Seijas has spoken against protection of wildlife and preservation of our 2 National Parks, and last but not least: Seijas demanded removal of a banner in the lobby of County hall designed to bring attention to the genocide and starvation in Darfur, Africa.

What the campaign didn’t say is that Seijas has been the de facto chairman of the Miami Dade County Commission for many years, inducing fear and loathing from within county agencies and wielding authority for the $7 billion budget of the county like a cudgel.

There is something glorious about what the Wades did: from the ranch-style house in Redland, where they have lived for 28 years—volunteering most of that time in one battle after another to protect farmland and the quality of life from suburban sprawl—for weeks on end Pat Wade would drive an hour on the Palmetto Expressway to the edge of Seijas district, to a Winn Dixie in Miami Lakes. At rush hour, the drive would take two hours, not one.

Late in the afternoon, and all day on weekends, she would ask strangers to sign the petition for recall of Natacha Seijas. The Wades had defended Redland for 28 years; now they were spending hours and days in what would be their last gift to Miami-Dade County.

The recall effort against Seijas would be the first since 1972 in Miami-Dade County. From their small rural enclave, Redland, in meetings held at night in the quiet of rural Florida with nothing but millions of acres of Everglades on one side and a building boom of historic proportions on the other, the Wades and their team of volunteers wondered where to hide the first petitions that had been collected to force a recall vote of their nemisis, Natacha Seijas.

Pat Wade says today, “People were too scared to take them. No one wanted them in their house or office. They told me, you have more hiding places. So we put the petitions in a plastic container and hid them in an outbuilding on our property.”

The feeling of estrangement is a shared emotion on the highway in Miami; the lines to separate lanes of traffic really have no meaning when the only constancy getting from place A to place B is the uncertainty; how bad will the traffic be? Put yourself in the shoes of the Wades and the other volunteers; you have certified your petition recall and now you have to collect the signatures. What do people know about Natacha Seijas, that she should be recalled?

At the time, Seijas was a four-term county commissioner, born and raised in Havana. Within her district, almost entirely Hispanic, she has been exceedingly attentive to constituents, mostly middle and lower-income families, just like a good pot-hole politician should. But it is clear enough from polling and election results that very few voters—especially the elderly voters whose graces Seijas cultivates carefully—know about or even care what happens through Seijas’ office in respect to the county edges, like Redland.

But put yourself in the Wades’ shoes, stuck on the Palmetto, understanding how estrangement is the essential feature that has allowed so many thousands of acres to be destroyed for unsustainable growth; in the ceaseless stream of cars around them on their daily voyage into Seijas’ political stronghold, how many people cared enough about a wetland, or stream, to make anything more than the smallest contribution? How many would do, what the Wades and their allies did at the other end of the drive, in the parking lot of Winn Dixie?

It is tempting to imagine the frame of this story is two women of equally strong will and equal determination to uphold what they believe in. But it is the wrong frame. It is the story of two powerful women, but only one of them commanded the full weight of government, a privilege she may believe she is entitled to, in deference to her election by constituents. That is not, however, her privilege and she paid no price for wielding it like a cudgel.

In the Winn Dixie parking lot, Pat Wade would approach strangers to sign the recall petition. “Most people would stop and listen. Some people said, ‘I’m not political and don’t know much about it.’ ‘Well this is just to get it on the ballot, and you will have time to do research,’ I would say. Some union people who came by, said, ‘I really shouldn’t be signing this, but she has to go.”

Looking back, Pat Wad says, “She was every bit as vicious as we thought. That woman (Seijas) or Terry Murphy (her chief of staff) went over those petitions, and I’m sure she was vindictive.”

From start to finish, the story of the Seijas recall is about the abuse of power in Florida’s most politically important county. The final result is incidental. What happened between the beginning and end can be encapsulated in a single word: intimidation.

To this day Seijas continues as the de facto chair of the county commission: no business of the county passes without her stamp of approval. Over time, that stamp has been wielded with a heavier and heavier hand. An account by Miami New Times suggests that Seijas lives a secluded life beyond her appearances at County Hall. She enjoyed a no-show job at the YMCA of Greater Miami paying her a salary of $52,499.

To Miami’s lobbyists and power brokers, she had proven her worth as a reliable enforcer of the status quo; in particular, with respect to zoning issues. In the early 1990’s, she proved a quick study of Miami power politics. She had not only proven her mettle by ram-rodding the no-bid lease for the Homestead Air Base on behalf of campaign contributors, she mastered the micro-management of contract awards at Miami International Airport, the largest economic engine in the county, forming a symbiotic relationship with lobbyists like Rodney Barreto and Sergio Pino.

It was a massive affront to Seijas’ sense of order that Anglos from the Redland would organize to upset the balance of power that delivered Hialeah over and over again; her sinecure, a fortress built from political contributions from Cuban American developers who lived in gated communities in Coral Gables, South Miami and Pinecrest and whose influence carried to the Florida legislature and beyond.

The recall effort began in January 2006. The Wades and a core group of like-minded citizens formed a political action committee, raised a small amount of money, and drafted a petition for Seijas’ recall.

In order to qualify for a district recall election, the Wades and their allies needed more than 6,000 qualified signed petitions. Individually, and with limited assistance from paid petition gatherers, the Wades ventured into the Hialeah political fortress. With limited funding and only a few Spanish-language speaking volunteers, the campaign enlisted individual paid petition gatherers who did speak Spanish; they were paid $10 per hour. Pat Wade says they didn’t compensate by the number of petitions generated—the normal way that petition gathering companies organize—“we didn’t want them to be tempted by corruption.”

It is an important point because the campaign knew from the first their every action would be highly scrutinized. Every petition had to be signed and addressed, and petition gatherers were required to sign each page and each page was required to be notarized.

In May 2006, the Clerk of the Court Harvey Ruvin disallowed 3978 signatures out of 6177 submitted because the petition circulators did not print their names in block letters as required by county ordinance. The county ordinance governing petitions only provides that the circulator’s name must be “printed”. The Clerk of Court determined that “print” meant block letters and not cursive, despite the fact that any search of the county database finds thousands of legal documents signed in cursive script. Ruvin’s action was a setback. The campaign responded by filing a lawsuit in circuit court.

Pat Wade was a witness at the trial. She made the following discovery. The evidence submitted by the county against the campaign, based on the use of cursive signatures, glided over the fact that she, herself, had signed her name with some of the letters running into each other, cursive-style. Not a single petition collected by a member of the political action committee was challenged. “The ones they zeroed in, on,” says Wade, “were the poor ladies from Nicaragua helping us. Why? Our opponents believed they were the ones who could be intimidated.”

In the hallway during the trial, Wade began a conversation with an election official, Ivy Corman, that would have resonance later. “She was haranguing me about the folding over the tops of the petitions. I didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘Well you should have seen ones that came in through the elections department, all folded over.’” The intimation was that the campaign was hiding information from the people who were signing the petition.

Based on the selective application of the signature rule by the county, the state court ruled that the Clerk of the Court had erred and allowed the election to proceed, setting a December 2006 date.

Seijas’ legal team was led by Stephen Cody, an attorney who shared office space with Miguel De Grandy, a lynchpin of the Seijas support structure. De Grandy, recognized by the Latin Builders Association as attorney of the year in 1995, developed his practice with Greenberg Traurig. He was the principal Miami attorney advocating for HABDI, the prospective developer of the Homestead Air Force Base. A former state legislator and advisor to Republican causes, De Grandy was one of the Florida legal team representing Bush in the contested 2000 election, and chief counsel for Jeb Bush’s transition team in 2002. It would be a check from Miguel De Grandy to Ken Forbes, later, that would focus the ire of the Florida Division of Elections.

Forbes was a long-time political operative in South Dade who was well-known for serial political action committees wherever he sensed opportunity. He mounted a counter-attack; a PAC formed around a recall petition aimed at Pat Wade, as a member of the local Community Council 14. Forbes, a resident of Princeton—a small, predominantly African American community to the east of Redland—wrote to the Clerk of Court notifying his campaign against Wade. The statement of reason for recall against Wade included that her “statements and votes reflect an anti-growth, anti-business agenda that has significantly impaired the economic health of the area.” Forbes’ PAC did not target any of the other community council members who frequently sided with Wade.

Although the Clerk of Court challenged the recall petitions, irregularities that allowed the Ken Forbes effort to quickly move forward were ignored . Later, the Florida Division of Elections—at the instigation of the Wades—would examine the Forbes’ records for campaign violations and, ultimately, successfully bring charges against him.

The Wades spent hours collecting signatures in Seijas’ district. But the atmosphere of intimidation was never far from the challengers’ minds. Seijas called her opponents, “people I despise.”

One Sunday in March, petition circulators outside of the Miami Lakes Publix supermarket were accosted by Seijas in a rage. “''She started shaking her finger at me like a schoolteacher,'' said Elisa Toruño, who lives in South Miami-Dade. She and other volunteers were collecting signatures outside the Publix on Miami Lakes Drive when Seijas approached them. Toruño said Seijas accused them of getting paid to collect signatures, then grew angry when told the women were in fact volunteering their time. ''She got really upset, and got in my face,'' said Toruño, a diminutive 68-year-old who used a Spanish word for ''brave'' to describe herself. “But I wasn't intimidated. Probably I am more guapa than she is.” Toruño said Seijas then marched into the Publix and complained to managers, who came out and asked the women to leave.”

The harassment of petition gatherers did not stop there. After Seijas became aware of their presence, store managers at Publix, Sedanos and Wal-Mart began calling the police to stop the petition circulators, particularly the Hispanic ones the campaign was able to hire. Seijas was so infuriated with the Wades, that she prodded the state attorney to conduct an investigation .

For those seeking to change government by petition, it is not a trivial matter how and where you are able to collect signatures. In a state whose landscape is largely defined by suburbia, malls and shopping centers are virtually the only place where people congregate or stop their cars long enough to share a public space.

Some petition circulators were harassed by Hialeah city police. Seijas counted among her strong supporters the mayor of Hialeah, Julio Robaina ,and John Rivera, president of the Police Benevolent Association of Miami-Dade. Rivera “sent letters to Hialeah residents warning of petitioners disguised as Miami-Dade Election Department employees.” On more than one occasion, during the 60 period in which the campaign was required to submit the required number of petitions, police pulled over petition circulators as they went from neighborhood to neighborhood by car. After a routine ID check and check of petitions, the circulators were allowed to proceed, but in at least one case, the same car that had been stopped was stopped by another squad car only a few minutes later.

At the same time, according to Wade, investigators from Miami-Dade law enforcement were going from house to house in Hialeah with blown-up photos of the drivers licenses of petition circulators, asking residents if they actually signed a petition ‘handed to you by this person’. Was the right answer, for the respondents, yes or no? As might be expected from an area populated by Hispanic immigrants from countries bearing the history of dictatorships and police repression, many answered, no.

During this time, Wade says she had received a call from a friend who was a private investigator. The friend had done a job for a political operative who was very close to Seijas. “He told me, Seijas is looking for your home address.” Wade’s address and phone number are unlisted.

Members of the political action committee who allowed their names to be used in the campaign against Seijas were further harassed. One individual, a bailiff in the county court system, was threatened with his job. The Hispanic circulators –from 12 to 15 in total-- were also subject to criminal investigation; an alarming development that put people making $10 per hour in view of costly legal bills. The chilling effect was palpable.

Seijas called on all the developers she had helped with zoning decisions for years in the month leading up to the election. On November 17th, ‘South Dade Growers for Natacha’ held a fundraiser for her at a restaurant on Krome Avenue, with a solicitation by organizers from the Dade County Farm Bureau board of directors on behalf of a political action committee called Citizens/Peoples’ Choice.

Seijas called in all her chits: the Service Employees International Union in Broward contributed $50,000, Greenberg Traurig, $5000, the Police Benevolent Association, $5000, and an assorted list of Miami’s top development and lobbying interests. The Citizens to Protect the People's Choice PAC raised $433,930, while the People Improving Our Neighborhoods PAC added an additional $12,060. The groups brought in 10 times the $44,018 raised by the Wades and their allies on the Committee for Recall of Miami-Dade Commissioners.

With limited funds and harassed at every turn, the campaign against Seijas had difficulty gaining traction, especially among an Hispanic population in a municipality who needed to persuaded to vote in special election related to the bad conduct and performance of a county commissioner that required voters to think beyond local issues.

Take the environment, for instance. Although polling shows that Hispanics are extraordinarily receptive to the notion that bad politics are responsible for environmental destruction, mainstream environmental organizations in Miami have had difficulty in turning local Hispanics to activism. In the case of Natacha Seijas, environmental groups had ample reason to become involved: for more than a decade, individuals and organizations had endured her insults and attacks—delivered with depressing regularity—from the dais at County Hall. For Seijas, it had become a form of blood sport that delighted her supporters in the audience and watching the proceedings from television or webcast.

But in their calculation, the environmental groups –also strapped for funding and with virtually no organization in Hialeah—had little to gain by a campaign that seemed, at worst, to be simply poking the beehive that had tormented them (on the Everglades, water supply, lime rock mining in wetlands, manatee protection, on and on) with a stick. Within county government, Seijas’ penchant for meddling in the operation of environmental-related agencies was well-known: what was there to be gained by environmentalists for putting the few regulators who were sympathetic to their aims under further and rougher scrutiny? With little scope for direct political activity, groups like Audubon focused on working with and trying to influence processes.

Other Miami environmental groups who are most inclined to grass-roots activism, like Clean Water Action, had made significant inroads in communicating political aims with Hispanic audiences. In 2003, for instance, the environmentalists had mounted a considerable public outreach campaign in Hispanic districts, generating tens of thousands of contacts to county commissioners—to then chairman of the county commission, Joe Martinez, in particular—to stop a development outside the Urban Development Boundary sought by Lennar Homes in Florida City. The movement, called “Hold The Line”, grew to absorb repeated applications to move the Urban Development Boundary, including Hialeah and an application sought by Armando Codina, a prominent Republican and former business partner of Jeb Bush.

Martinez was deeply irritated by the phone calls and petitions that flooded his office at the time, and the possible emergence of an opponent who could harness the building energy. For environmental groups and civic organizations, overcoming the inertia and suppression of their core issues—in the public realm and mainstream media, too—is difficult at any time but never more so than it was during the building boom when production homebuilders, fueled by a tsunami of easy money, were frantic in a growing orgy of platted subdivisions in farmland; otherwise known as Natacha Seijas’ bread and butter.

According to Mike Pizzi, one of the organizers of the recall campaign and recently elected the mayor of nearby Miami Lakes, “Part of the problem is that we (had) been banned from (Hispanic) radio. In other words, Seijas and her people are on the radio every five minutes, but the (Hispanic) media refuses all requests to present the other side. I am assuming that some big money is paying for these programs.”

As if to affirm their support for Seijas, in early December 2006—only two weeks before the recall vote against Seijas—the majority of Miami-Dade County Commissioners approved two measures aimed directly at petition circulators and recall efforts. The Miami Herald opinion page called them “revenge driven ordinances to intimidate petition signature gatherers and, potentially, the people who sign them.” The commissioners didn’t care: they were approved. It was time to show the colors and for the regiment to stand in line behind their leader. Both measures were subsequently overturned in state court.

In total, Seijas handily raised $500,000, far outmatching the recall forces whose ammunition had been largely spent in the campaign and legal defense. The Miami Herald wrote, “Many developers, builder and landowners that stand to benefit financially from movement of the line contributed to political action committees (PACs) that supported Seijas during a recall election last year, according to records.”

It doesn’t take much imagination to reflect on the pressure that was building on the Wades and their campaign allies, or, what their emotions when an unmarked squad car with two Miami-Dade investigators appeared at their home, on an early December evening in 2006. The Wades had done nothing wrong: they invited the investigators into their house without qualm but asked and were allowed to tape record the conversation that ensued.

They asked questions like, what do you have against Seijas? Who started this? Who trained you to collect petition signatures? Who did you train? Did you fold the petition at the top to hide what it was all about?

The folded petitions recalled the earlier conversation Pat Wade had, in March, with the elections official who intimated that petition circulators were lying to the pubic; among the charges that was leveled at the Wades directly from the dais by county commissioners in their fusillade on December 1st. Today, Wade recalls that she had gotten an answer from one of the PAC members, Millie Herrera; the petitions were legal size and the folder that Ms. Herrera had used to keep them was only letter size, and so she folded them to fit.

Seijas survived the December 20th special election, in a lopsided 5,423-to-2,940 vote.” 11 percent of eligible voters turned out for the special election. Reflecting an intense effort to drive elderly voters to the polls, “almost 5,000” of the votes were cast early.

The consequences of the Seijas recall effort had both near and far-reaching ramifications.

In respect to the failed effort against Pat Wade’s community council seat, John Wade charged the state attorney of a double-standard: “(Centorino) is not investigating Forbes because Wade and his wife were members of the anti-Natacha Seijas political action committee…’There seems to be a double-standard here… as if the state attorney’s office is picking and choosing who they want to prosecute.”

In April 2007, the Florida Elections Commission finally ruled against Ken Forbes, who had mounted the recall attempt against Pat Wade. “Chief among the alleged violations: a $2,200 check from the committee’s campaign account that Forbes made out to himself and told investigators was used to pay campaign workers, a commission report said.” Also at issue, a $500 check reported as a cash contribution from Seijas’ Svengali, Miami attorney Miguel De Grandy. The check was made out to Forbes’ wife.

In February 2006, the Florida legislature passed a bill to tightly regulate signature-gatherers; S 1244 was called the Petition Fraud and Voting Protection Act. The Florida League of Women Voters filed suit in federal court against the measure on May 18, 2006. The state LWV had no inkling of where the energy for this bill originated. “I’m not sure what our representatives in Tallahassee were thinking when they voted for this law,” said Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida. What they were thinking of, was Natacha Seijas’ recall in Miami-Dade County. In August 2006, a federal district court in Miami blocked enforcement of the law.

In 2007, the Florida legislature passed another bill aimed squarely at the collection of petitions on private property. SB 1920 was proposed by Publix, the supermarket chain that had felt the lash of Seijas’ fury in Hialeah. The measure was directed at the kind of petition circulation that the anti-Seijas petitioners had worked out, at supermarkets. Signed into law by Governor Crist on June 27, 2007, the bill allows private businesses to prohibit citizen petition drives on their property. The bill provides that a private person exercising lawful control over any privately-owned property, including commercial property open to the public, may prohibit all activities on the property that support or oppose constitutional amendment initiatives. It was supported by the Florida Chamber of Commerce and opposed by public interest groups like Sierra Club.”

On February 28, 2008—more than two years after the recall election—two people were arrested and charged with breaking the law governing signature collection. One was a notary who had notarized the signature of a circulator when the circulator was not present. For Anibal Roberto Orellana-Ramirez, as a 26 year old, it was his first exposure to US politics. His crime: a half sheet of signatures he had forged. Indeed, of all the thousands of people who had been involved in the Seijas recall attempt, the pressure on the State Attorney’s Office, the Clerk of the Court, on the Miami-Dade and Hialeah police, of all the pressure of developers to come to the rescue of their enabler, it came down to a lazy notary and a kid who was paid $10 an hour and was thrilled to make a difference and, instead, learned that the cost of a mistake can be high or low, depending on who is weighing it.

Redland, the Wades, and the armies of compassion: Part 2 ... by gimleteye

To read the first part, click here. To read part 2, click 'read more'. Part 3, tomorrow.

Pat and John Wade began, two decades ago, as volunteers determined to defend their community from suburban sprawl like so many others around the nation: collecting signatures, signing speaker cards and rising to testify at public forums, and writing letters to the editor.

These volunteers never traveled by corporate jet or wrote off every expense for gas, copies, papers and pens. They are far below the mainstream media radar because, in challenging the economic order, they threaten advertisers and challenge in its key respects the money that fuels political fortunes from county commissioners to Congressmen, Senators and American presidents.

They were determined to keep Redland from becoming another seamless suburb of Miami. Like so many civic activists, they proceeded from the belief that public input—in the form of hearings and meetings--was as integral to the decision-making process as influential lobbyists and campaign contributors. This is the point of departure from most citizens who look at the high moats built around legislatures and throw up their hands in the futility of trying to ‘fight the system’.

It would have been so much easier if they had just been the occasional speaker at a public hearing, or holder of signs at a street corner rally: what sets their contribution apart goes beyond the commitment of neighbors who were also vocal, engaged, and thoughtful; but their entry finally into the political process involving a recall attempt of an incumbent county commissioner, Natacha Seijas whose career is imbedded in the machinery of suburban sprawl.

Kendall is Miami’s largest unincorporated suburb. It has no City Hall of its own, and its services are provided by county government that presides over more than 2 million residents in similarly unincorporated areas.

Kendall and its sprawl a dozen miles away are the abject example that the Wades fought to prevent spreading; a warren of strip malls, retail and commerce organized around successive rings of platted subdivisions, separated by high walls, cul de sacs, and transportation designed only to move the first increment of population growth by car.

Redland and Kendall’s western border is also within a few miles of Everglades National Park, the focal point of what is said to be the most costly and intensive effort to restore a damaged ecosystem in the world, entailing the expenditure of billions of state and federal tax dollars to re-plumb a system that served the needs of flood control for cities and agriculture perfectly well, but caused severe damage to the environment.

(My first experience of Kendall, two decades ago, was trying to find a Kendall soccer field for my then 12 year old son where a game was scheduled; I had an address and we were within a mile of the field, but none of the residents in the series of subdivisions we drove into, knew where it was or how to get there.)

Over time, the Wade’s learned that all the efforts of persuasion were useless in processes governing land use that were tilted toward land speculators; their evolution as activists crystallized around specific provisions of land use and environmental laws to protect Redland from the same over-development that ruined Kendall to the north.

I met the Wades in the backwash from Hurricane Andrew in 1992, after Redland and nearby municipalities, Homestead and Florida City, had started to revive. The Wades and their neighbors objected to high density developments planned outside the Urban Development Boundary; the conversion of a nursery to sprawl and the establishment of a grocery chain outpost on an avocado grove.

In 1993 the Wades and other community activists throughout the county supported a proposal by then county commissioner Miguel Diaz de la Portilla to establish community councils, comprising locally elected officers into a board, as a first line of approval to change the underlying zoning of property for building and development. The principle of community councils, a sublayer of county government with individual representatives running within districts but for seats in specific neighborhoods, was an example of “devolution” of government authority. And the developers hated it.

For developers, there were two advantages to the centralized, downtown location and concentration of zoning decisions with the county commission. First, they knew that their opponents could scarcely afford to take the time off from work to venture from distant neighborhoods to downtown. In other words, the then-existing system with endless hours—billable to attorneys—of debate, shifting agenda items, and unpredictability served special interests perfectly well.

By having all zoning decisions centralized in downtown Miami, an extremely lucrative culture had developed alongside poorly paid county commissioners: the same lobbyists and engineers and law firms profited handsomely by having a single locale as a funnel, the way that herons profit by feeding in a small, shallow pond.

The Diaz de la Portilla propopsal would have created more than a dozen separately constituted community councils. At County Hall, the builders had downtown zoning decisions “wired” through a network of lobbyists; Chris Korge, a big contributor to Democratic campaigns, Rodney Barreto and Sergio Pino, Bush loyalists, and an entire pecking order dedicated to lubricating zoning changes.

Community councils threatened to subject zoning decisions to the unknown: newly elected zoning council members from within community council districts; especially lightly populated rural areas like Redland where motivated activists might actually be elected by majority vote.

Miami’s developers had Homestead and Florida City in their cross-hairs for decades. For local businessmen who harbored jealousy to the way growth had spread northward from Miami toward Fort Lauderdale, they were frustrated and determined to lay the tracks to Homestead. The Homestead Air Force Base, destroyed in the 1992 hurricane, was intended to be the driver of billions of dollars of economic growth. Board members of the Latin Builders Association had constituted a private company, HABDI, to secure a 99 year, no-bid lease for the wrecked air base—even before the military had decided whether or not to allow its use as a commercial airport as the prospective developers planned; using county agencies to set up FAA approvals and transportation routes while other political processes ground on.

The tidal wave of “help” for hurricane relief included banks anxious to lend to underwrite and generate fees from large-scale projects, and Wall Street financiers anxious to take advantage of advances in securitizing debt that included “diversifying risk” through mortgage pools comprised of platted subdivisions and shared, common, and easily quantifiable and ratable demographics.

Some local Homestead activists and Redland neighbors who opposed the air base redevelopment as a private airport, like Chris Spaulding, endured harassment and, finally, were driven out of their jobs. Others were threatened by employers and left the area.

In response, the Wades helped to organize a county-funded study to evaluate, analyze and to protect agriculture. The Miami Dade County Agriculture & Rural Area Study was initiated in 1996. It took a full four years to award a contract to a consultant led by Duany Plater-Zyberk, lead by Elizabeth Plater Zyber, the dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture. A 16-member committee was constituted as “a two-way conduit of information between the consultants and community interests”. The study was immediately opposed by the Dade County Farm Bureau . Despite the best attempts at inclusivity and to give appropriate deference to agricultural interests including the Farm Bureau, protecting agriculture was entirely antithetical to the goals of land speculators and developers who controlled the county commission, and by extension the fate of the agricultural review. In November 2003, the study was rejected by the committee on a 7-5 vote; seven years after the process began and in the midst of the housing boom now in crashed in cinders.

The report was not delivered to the county commission until March, 2006, fully ten years after the process began. County Manager George Burgess wrote to the commissioners, “We will continue to investigate strategies to address the economic viability of agriculture and to achieve the Preliminary Performance/Key Perfomance Indicator in Miami-Dade County’s Strategic Plan of “No net loss of agricultural or environmentally sensitive lands.”

Large landowners and land speculators, in South Dade, had long experience with blocking government initiatives to protect public lands; they viewed the Agriculture Retention Study as another plot to take their property; between hurricanes and free trade agreements like NAFTA, they were determined to preserve their opportunity to cash out of land at the moment that best suited their interest: in the early 1990’s, the prospect of $10 billion of tax base created by a new commercial airport made them salivate.

The proposal to create community councils was intended to replace the full county commission sitting as the zoning appeals board. Commission meetings in downtown Miami, when convened as the zoning board, tended to be interminable, often lasting into the early hours of the morning.

Putting initial decisions for zoning closer to neighborhoods where people lived seemed, at the time, to be a pro-civic, pro-citizen initiative that would empower people, supported by the Wades and other civic activists.

The political arm of the builders, the Latin Builders Association, worried about the demographics: Redland was not Hispanic as other parts of Miami-Dade and could be susceptible to a different kind of politics than those they had been able to control in the newer suburbs, where their surrogates controlled board positions in local homeowner associations. Controlling zoning decisions was easier as the number of subdivisions grew, bringing waves of immigrants to the area, but not necessarily in farmland and the rural areas where votes were harder to count and where the historic, cultural value of agriculture still mattered.

To the builders’ lobby, community councils seemed at the time a costly and harmful evolution of democracy away from patterns that had served them profitably and well.

County commissioner Javier Souto was the tie-breaking vote that approved the community councils against the wishes of his builder/developer constituents in 1993. In a trademark tirade, that meandered from invectives against Castro against, he began mumbling aloud about a long morning walk he had taken on the beach and then described nearly every grain of sand on the way: the Latin Builders’ lobbyists rose and stormed out of the chamber, steaming with anger. They knew that their friend was going to vote against them and for the community councils.

It took a few years for county agencies to organize the community councils. By 1996, the Homestead Air Force Base battle was well underway. When the Redland community council was constituted and its members voted in, for the first time, among its first representatives was a banker owner in South Dade, Bill Losner. For decades, as owner of the local community bank, Losner had been a powerful and threatening figure. He was pro-development to the core; the growth of his bank depended on lending—to homeowners and to builders, from retailers to commercial.

There was not a single aspect of growth that Losner didn’t champion or a complaint against the environment and its advocates that he didn’t embrace. He represented—over a very long period of time—the animus against nearby national parks that, in that estimation, contributed nothing but a drain on growth and impediment to flood control, to make development closer to the Everglades even more safe and secure.

Pat Wade was the most visible and constant opponent of the economic order that Losner represented. In small towns, where power can be wielded outside the view of the media in particularly vindictive and mean-spirit ways, “becoming involved” in one’s community requires a high pain threshold. This snap shot necessarily passes over the zoning meetings in the middle of night in rural Florida, the enmity and long drives home over deserted roads used mostly, still, for farm equipment and transporting produce.

In 2000, Wade ran against Losner and won. She served on the community council for eight years. By 2000, the agricultural and rural lands study had cost millions, enslisted teams of experts, agronomists and other experts: all its recommendations were strongly pro-agriculture, and yet then county manager Steve Shiver requested the formation of another committee to “review” the study recommendations by experts. He selected a group heavily weighted to farmers and land speculators. “There is no way in hell the Dade County Farm Bureau would let that go, so they killed it,” Pat Wade says today. Along with those volunteers who had contributed countless hours to public meetings, the Wades watched developers and large farmers remand the study to a bookshelf in the county planning department.

Environmentalists had successfully prevailed on the military to deny the use of the air base as a commercial airport, partly on the argument against suburban sprawl and its impacts as a secondary consequence of the ill-advised disposal of the former military base.

It was a time that roughly coincided with cuts in the Federal Reserve benchmark interest rate by Alan Greenspan igniting a period of the fastest period of building and construction—far in excess of what the market could absorb—in Florida history. In response to the potential threats to the region from development and to nearby national parks, Miami Dade County agreed in 1996 to form another study group, ostensibly to protect Biscayne Bay Land Trust.

A further outgrowth of the Biscayne Bay Land Trust Committee was a plan to evaluate how to grow and also protect critical watersheds in the area; the Miami Dade County Watershed Study. But like the earlier Agriculture Retention Study, the Wades and other community and environmental advocates found themselves in the same situation: vastly outnumbered by the appointment of committee members, by then county manager and former mayor of Homestead Steve Shiver, in favor of economic interests like Losner and the political hierarchy that had developed in response to the profits from suburban sprawl.

The period of the South Dade Watershed Plan spanned from 2000 to 2007, when its final recommendations were similarly axed by interests allied with land speculators, including the Dade County Farm Bureau, and shelved by county commissioners. The Wades attended countless meetings of the advisory committee to the plan, rising in a familiar plaintive opposition to the development representatives who were blocking and tackling for the massive expansion of platted subdivisions in farmland all the while. The worst foreclosure and housing collapse today is exactly in these areas of the county.

Pat Wade says, “Scientists again came out in favor of agriculture, not moving UDB, density along transportation corridors; and again the Dade County Farm Bureau killed it…they will wait until there is a study that agriculture is dead, then they will approve (it). As long as you have a committee of the farm bureau; this has going on since 1982 it will be the same damn thing; as long as Bill Losner and his big farmer/developer buddies control the committees. Half a dozen studies all said farming is viable and important to the county and they all got killed because they recommended preserving agriculture.” By independent acclaim, the South Miami-Dade Watershed Study was the most comprehensive, thorough, and science-based study of a regional watershed and its economic impacts and prospective uses and planning that had ever been conducted, anywhere in the United States.

In addition to the community council, the Wades became interested in the other ways of influencing growth in South Dade; transportation policies around concurrency, required by the State of Florida through the Growth Management Act—related primarily to the expansion of Krome Avenue in far West Dade—the Urban Development Boundary, whose edge ran inside Redland, stopping the designation of rural roads to urban roads, and lastly, incorporation.

So the Wades took their commitment one step further: frustrated and angry by the failure of the political system to take into account the public interest, they decided to follow the maxim: if you don’t do politics, they do you.

It is largely the ineffectiveness of a county commission, with 13 single member districts, paid $6,000 a year to supervise a $7 billion budget that has led to the ceaseless demand of neighborhoods to separately incorporate; leading to a kind of Balkanization and severing of shared, regional interests.

In 1998 the Wades began hosting informal, open meetings at their house on incorporating Redland. Pat Wade says, “Sometimes there were 20 people, other times only 4 or 5. We conducted a massive survey to ask people their vision of Redland. We produced our own feasibility study, the Risa Report, which was submitted to the county in 2000.”

Two county commissioners shared interest in the boundaries of Redland: Katy Sorenson and Dennis Moss. In mid-2000, Commissioner Sorenson sponsored a municipal advisory committee; a step along the way to independence from county government. Pat Wade was the chairwoman of the incorporation committee for the first year. The Wades ushered the study, gaining approval from every department.

The developers had their own plan of attack. Their staunchest ally was then-mayor of Miami Dade County Alex Penelas; who had just incurred the wrath of his own party by refusing to support the recount of the contested 2000 presidential to proceed in Miami-Dade. At the time, Penelas was angry that neither Clinton nor candidate Gore had explicitly endorsed the plan by powerful and politically connected developers to redevelop the Homestead Air Force Base, adjacent to Redland, into a major commercial airport.

Penelas appointed the mayor of Homestead—the local driving force for the developers—Steve Shiver, to be county manager. As county manager, Shiver made certain that the incorporation process started by the Wades would wither on the vine. According to Pat Wade, “Shiver slashed the boundaries, planning and zoning suddenly added poison pills for incorporation outside the UDB.” African Americans in the district, mainly represented on the county commission by Dennis Moss, from historic neighborhoods of Goulds and Naranja suddenly emerged to contest the incorporation drive, claimed their communities extended to Redland and the western boundary transit route; Krome Avenue.

In Miami, ethnic rivalries often act as surrogates for development and for lobbyists of the development industry who trade influence on campaigns for political support of urban commissioners for zoning votes far from their own neighborhoods. From the public hearings and surveys about incorporation, the land speculators, developers and big farmers who Shiver and Penelas represented know that Redland incorporation would pass, if it came to a vote. But it never did, snuffed out the same was as all the studies had been that community activists supported, that concluded agriculture should be protected.

Citizen activists representing Doral, Palmetto Bay, Miami Gardens and Cutler Bay were all able to persuade the county commission to authorize incorporation. But Redland was delayed for consideration by the county commission repeatedly and finally “put on permanent deferral in 2003.”

Of course by 2003, the housing boom was in full swing; platted subdivisions were spring up in south Dade farmland like weeds. The Wades then decided to take another route: a petition drive that would allow the incorporation of Redland to be put to a district vote. “We collected the signatures in record time and went before the county commission. Commissioner Moss deferred the hearing, called us ‘disrespectful’ and ended the meeting. We never had a hearing. We took the issue to court, lost, appealed and lost again. The state court said that incorporation was the sole discretion of the Board of County Commissioners. By 2004, we were dead. Commissioner Moss changed the incorporation ordinance and eliminated the provision that allowed citizens to petition for incorporation.”

Redland, the Wades and the armies of compassion, Part 1 ... by gimleteye

After more than two decades as activists and volunteers for Redland, Pat and John Wade are moving away. The following is a summation of their story; and a meditation on the nature of volunteerism in defense of one's community at a time when suburban sprawl triumphed throughout Florida. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!


On the subject of volunteerism, American presidents are always front and center. But to what effect, what purpose and what end?

Within the universe of volunteerism, there is a segment that does not fit the frame of helpfulness spurring presidents’ speechwriters to fire up tired canards: this form of democracy has to do with defending democracy from predators.

These are not volunteers blessed by a thousand points of light or featured on newsmaker programs or clips that offer dollops of hopefulness about the capacity of Americans to contribute. Recognizing volunteers who defend democracy from predators gets complicated, when those predators are powerful, wealthy campaign contributors; in some cases the same entrusted with fiduciary responsibility for the nation’s financial institutions.

Former President Bill Clinton, in his final month in office, saluted volunteers; “In America, we are fortunate to have a long and distinguished history of giving and volunteering. Last year in our country, more than half of all adults volunteered their time on behalf of a nonprofit organization. Millions of Americans lend their hearts and hands to faith-based efforts and local, national, and international charitable organizations; hundreds of thousands have served as catalysts for change in the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. Their efforts build on our nation's enduring traditions of meeting our challenges not through big government or as isolated individuals, but as members of a true community, with all of us working together.”

George W. Bush recently put his own touch on volunteerism in the Rose Garden, highlighting citizens who aided the victims of hurricanes and war. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/09/20080908-6.html
“I appreciate the fact that those here represent the hundreds of thousands of our citizens who answered the call to love a neighbor like we'd like to be loved ourselves. I appreciate the fact that you and others lift up souls, one person at a time. You strengthen the foundation of our democracy, which is the engagement of our people.”

However muddled the last part of it, the president’s notion of ‘one love’ or “true community” is Norman Rockwell volunteerism; the hail-fellow-well-met of Shriner’s events, of men in funny hats driving in circles on miniature scooters, of corporations encouraging employees to run for cancer, or diabetes, or AIDS, nailing planks for habitats, or helping The United Way by the mile or raising money for the soccer team.

These are all good, but volunteerism has other shapes. When volunteerism conflicts with corporations that insulate the powerful, it is shunned and, worse, persecuted.

Here is a case and point from Page 1 of The New York Times: “The Reckoning: White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire” (December 21, 2008). According to The New York Times, in the waning days of his administration, President Bush is confounded that he leaves the nation in the worst economic crisis since the Depression.

“This administration made decisions that allowed the free market to operate as a barroom brawl instead of a prize fight,” said L. William Seidman, who advised Republican presidents and led the savings and loan bailout in the 1990s. “To make the market work well, you have to have a lot of rules.” But Mr. Bush populated the financial system’s alphabet soup of oversight agencies with people who, like him, wanted fewer rules, not more.”

If President Bush and President Clinton had listened more closely to the criticism from volunteers fighting to protect their quality of life and environment, the nation might have been spared the deep loss and misery that prevails today. These volunteers have been unrecognized at the base layer of democracy, where fighting forms of unsustainable economic growth—primarily connected to suburban sprawl—are mostly ignored.

For presidents and skeptics, let me put the prevailing condition of democracy in a simple, stark context; an image that doesn’t need teasing from economic studies, or accounts of asset bubbles in Holland in the 17th century, or of data that may have been incompletely provided to former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan and august members of its regional governing boards, their presidents, and staff.

The image will be familiar to every citizen who has tried to influence a zoning decision at the local level of government to protect a river, a stream, or the rural character of their community: a medieval drawbridge spanning a moat protecting the castle from outsiders.

The castle is government. Behind its walls are legislators. On the far side of the moat are civic activists, community organizers and volunteers. With their backs to the castle, a legion of lobbyists, big engineering firms, and special interests otherwise engaged in converting farmland to suburbia at scale.

The drawbridge is operated by a winch driven by a system of gears that allow small exertion to produce big work. The heavy drawbridge goes up to allow the free transit of commerce and industry that conforms to gigantism; ie. rock mining, electric utilities, water pipe infrastructure, wastewater disposal, highway construction, wetlands “mitigation”. It goes down to block dissenters, critics, and volunteers armed with common sense.

But the central feature of this metaphor is the system of gears that hauls the drawbridge up and down; it is the same set of gear ratios—built to appropriate scale—for the White House, Congress, for state legislatures and local county commissions.

The cogs on the big wheel are the greed and hubris of Wall Street; making billions while losing trillions through synthetic, derivative debt spun from the thin air of business school and math departments and embraced by executive suites in America’s largest financial and industrial corporations.

The big cogs mesh with cogs on the smaller wheels; from Congress to local zoning councils and the predetermined outcomes hashed out by lobbyists in backrooms at long lunches or dinners before pubic hearings.

Our representative volunteer, standing at the other side of the drawbridge, at the far side of the castle, would have no idea that mortgage backed securities provided energy for that platted subdivision they opposed, that collateral debt obligations prepared one thousand acres of farmland for profit better than any fertilizer, or that credit default swaps helped underwrite political campaigns of county commissioners who turned their backs on people or, as in Miami, play the race card to defile the reputation of volunteers.

They would understand the network of enablers of an economic status quo who have limited knowledge, interest, or understanding of Wall Street finance. To the contrary, their presence depends on not seeing anything beyond the banner and the flags waving in the breeze, advertising housing subdivisions behind stucco walls fronting highways and turnpikes.

The big wheel turns by the energy and confidence in the free market to do better than government in protecting the interests of people. It keeps turning on the principle that private corporations can self-regulate and judge risk better than government—risk, for instance, to the quality of our air and water or equally to the probability of financial default.

This big gear connects down to the little gears at the level where builders and developers push platted subdivisions through zoning councils that conformed—not with what the market wants, as advertised with Hummers and SUVs in colorful full-page ads —but with what Wall Street could finance in bundles.

So far, the misdirection and abrogation of fiduciary responsibility for the nation’s economy is confined to stories by economics writers, about players in executive suites who stand for the mighty fallen. But the more revealing story is replicated ten thousand times and in ten thousand places: the base level of government where development rules conflict with common sense and the interest of ordinary people in development at scale to neighborhoods.

If you had been curious about volunteers who illuminate that story in Florida, where the housing boom originated as a political whirlwind, in Homestead or Florida City or Redland where it manifested as the subprime crisis, if you had drawn a circle around the southeast quadrant of Florida’s most populous county and inquired at any point in the last twenty years of volunteerism in protection of farmland lost to suburban sprawl, if you had done any of these things, you would have met the Wades.

Pat and John Wade are a former university professor and former utility engineer who, after retirement, dedicated time and energy tending a small shaded nursery—15,000 plants in six inch containers rotated among ornamentals—and to civic engagement; in particular, to protect Redland from suburban sprawl.

The place they spent twenty years defending is called Redland: the final farmland in Miami-Dade County. Redland comprises approximately 63 square miles and is named for its potholes of red clay in porous oolite limerock. Its primary feature is its flatness, virtually at sea level, stretching from the Everglades to the west straight across the Florida peninsula.

These two features: flat and at sea level, make farming possible only through the extensive flood control system of South Florida. Think of a pan and water poured at one edge; the gradual tilt of the Florida peninsula, downward to Florida Bay only a few miles from Redland, spills water and accounts for the single most important demand of large-scale farmers: flood control.

Redland is bordered on the west by Everglades National Park, whose natural feature is millions of acres of wetlands, to the north by the sprawling suburbs of Kendall, to the south, by municipalities hungry for development, Homestead and Florida City, and to the east, by the final stretch of US Route 1, its strip malls, auto dealerships, restaurants and bars as it heads to the Florida Keys.

What makes Redland special is the pressure of nearby population. More than 2 million people live in the county that includes Redland. Redland is also in the increasingly fragmented area of unincorporated Miami-Dade County. These areas are not served by municipal governments like the city of Miami or a few dozen smaller, other cities; but by a county commission that represents unincorporated areas and the needs of their population.

The main difference between Kendall to the north and Redland is the Urban Development Boundary: Kendall is inside the UDB, most of the Redland is outside. Within the UDB, suburban sprawl proliferates like a weed.

Outside the UDB, sprawl is prohibited by rules and regulations, enacted by prior county commissions and incorporated in state law. So long as sprawl generated fat millions for land speculators, farmland outside the UDB—in Redland, for example—was ground zero for the battle that manifested to convert farmland to platted subdivisions as quickly, efficiently, and brutally as Wall Street financing would allow.

As the last rural enclave, its empty acres were gold to land speculators during the housing boom who only had to influence a local zoning council and county commission. The single acre the Wades own hardly compares to the thousands of acres in row crops that supply industrial quality produce to the nation’s supermarket chains whose owners had rather gambled with production homebuilders than bet on farming to sustain their generations.

Redland is an outpost at the corner of the state’s most populous county, at the edge where Florida’s east coast meets the Everglades, in the southeast corner of the United States. In other words, a corner of the envelope, an eddy in a current, the kind of place unlikely to make front page news barring an exceptional event—a two headed cow, a python swallowing an alligator.

The Wades sat right in the middle of the deep divide in the farming community of Redland; between large-scale farmers whose interests were represented by the Dade County Farm Bureau and smaller tropical fruit and nursery growers like the Wades.

For the last two decades much of the Wades civic engagement has been focused on stopping the advancement of infrastructure that otherwise provides the legal basis and rationale for moving more developments into farmland now outside the county’s urban service boundary. Although they were long-time members of the local civic association, called the Redland Citizen Association, for the most part their work as been as individual volunteers; finding the neighborhood nursery whose owners had made a deal to convert to a Publix Supermarket and jumping in to object.

This is an important point: in key respects, environmental organizations – formally incorporated as charitable organizations—cannot contain the ambitions of civic activists like the Wades. There are many reasons, and Florida is instructive on a key point: as a conservative, red state with a weak minority (Democratic) party, for twenty years the leadership of the environmental movement has been torn by rivalries, in part the result of a divide and conquer strategy that confers status and rank to compromise and to the benefits of cozying to corporate donors. To get along, go along.

The second reason has to do with the IRS code governing charitable organizations through which political activity is sharply conscribed. Corporations can pursue their goals and objectives, often as marketing expenses in the legislature—for example—but charitable environmental organizations funded through tax-deductible contributions from individual donors or foundations,rarely support their work in legislative halls with political action on the ground, where rewards and penalties might otherwise be administered through elections.

As a result, environmental organizations the gain access to the inner sanctums of political authority, smile in the photo-ops while their ankles are bound. As a result, environmental organizations are not always reliable partners or able to influence public opinion or politics, except in one way: litigation. Due process and the law is the one place where environmental groups, constituted as charitable organizations, can wage war on polluters and dodgers and schemers. The court of law is the one place where the influence of lobbyists dissolves. But even here there is an important qualification that is central to the Wades’ story; where judges are appointed by the governor, as in the case of state courts, or through political processes, activists learn that the playing field is still tilted away from the public interest.

The result is telling: for twenty years, the Wades left a record of deep involvement in their community, to defend their community from unsustainable development. They could not be easily pushed off their interest in protecting Redland, where the last remaining agriculture would need re-zoning for houses, industrial and commercial, in order to fulfill the dreams of land speculators to become new feeder suburbs between Kendall and the Florida Keys.

During this time, the Wades were individually named plaintiffs in nearly a dozen court actions, sometimes alone but often with co-plaintiffs or intervenors; against the siting of sprawl, against the widening of an important road, and in support of state growth management laws. Sometimes environmental organizations joined them, but often they spent out of their own pockets; relying not on associations or groups, but on their own determination.

To prove out the tenets of democracy that government in American is of the people and for the people, the Wades learned zoning codes, regulations and dove into voluminous government files available to the public, to prove their points: spending hours that their opponents charged clients hundreds of dollars per hour to do; to buttress their arguments with data and fact. They understood how the system was gamed to protect corporations and they were willing to engage it.

At first, Pat and John Wade occupied themselves and their causes with arguing for the value of agriculture, the weakness of growth management rules and enforcement, the necessity of protecting the agricultural component of a tourism-based, pass through economy, of watersheds and wetlands to the one metric that counts at County Hall: politics.

Their story as volunteers is instructive for anyone who wants to get at the heart of America’s economic emergency. Our newspapers are filled with stories and statistics, demographics and econometric models outlining the crisis.

Far better, if the mainstream press had reported the struggle of volunteers like the Wades. If politicians and economists had paid attention to the grievances piling up from people trying to stop suburban sprawl from turning their neighborhoods, regions, and environment toxic well before—decades before—and followed those grievances to the source, it might have been possible to forestall and prevent the worst economic crisis since the Depression.

(This ends the first part ... your comments and corrections are welcome. Stayed tuned for the second part, tomorrow.)