The Fanjul family of Palm Beach County, Florida are some of the most powerful, influential and wealthy people on the planet. Their power and their endless wealth is so strong that they have been able to cause politicians of both parties to sell their very souls to them, and along with it, our public resources and tax dollars.
Their power and influence has created an image to their liking as job creators, and philanthropists, and they have been able to do so with the cooperation and fawning media attention, similar to what the Koch Brothers have achieved with corporate owned media. But that faux image is not to be believed. The Fanjul family has a well deserved reputation for viciousness whose riches were made on the backs of migrant laborers and even accusations of slavery in their Dominican Republic operations. Their Florida empire alone includes a 700,000-acre region between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades known as the Everglades Agricultural Area. (Actual farming acreage, which includes other crops, is 470,000 because of conservation areas and other projects.) The sugar cane agricultural runoff from their plantations is funneled via canal into Lake Okeechobee where depending on lake levels is released into the Everglades, as well as both the Indian River Lagoon on the Atlantic coast, and the Caloosahatchee river on Florida’s Gulf coast. At times of heavy rainfall the release has become not only massive but commonplace due to seasonal and non-seasonal heavy rainfall which is enhanced by the effects of Global Warming. The water should be recycled in holding ponds in the Everglades to be purified and sent south to restore part of the original flow of the river of grass. In fact, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 1 in 2014 which to do just that. But the funds have been spent on other priorities of Rick Scott and the GOP legislature which controls the levers of power in the state. With a wink and a nod the Fanjul billionaires continue to dump their deadly poison into Florida’s estuaries.
José "Pepe" Fanjul, part owner of Fanjul Corporation which owns Florida Crystals. (Getty)
The Fanjul empire is dependent on artificial federal price supports of sugar, because without it their industrial advantage and wealth would collapse. Before the birth of the Tea Party, Florida was making progress in cleaning up Lake Okeechobee. In 2008, then-governor Charlie Crist so enraged the Fanjul family when he offered to buy US Sugar lands -- more than 125,000 acres at a projected cost to the state of about $1.2 billion -- without consulting them. The outrage was due to the fact that if government built wetland marshes using US Sugar lands to store and filter the deadly agricultural waters, then the state would be a step closer to key parcels owned by the Fanjuls in the Everglades Agricultural Area. In 2010, the greedy and peeved Fanjul family summoned the Florida House Majority Leader, Marco Rubio, to their compound where they showered him with multiple, six-figure campaign contributions for his successful primary challenge against Charlie Crist for US Senate. Like House Lanister, Senator Rubio always pays his debts. He has voted nay on such laws as S954 - Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2013, SAMNDT2985- Repeals the Limit on the Use of Funds to Procure Alternative Fuel and other environmental protection legislation in order to protect his corporate overlord’s interests.
Klan Couple. Pepe Fanjul’s executive assistant, Chloe Black, used to be married to Klansman David Duke. Chloe was listed in corporate documents as the secretary of Duke’s Klan group.
Billionaire sugar baron Pepe Fanjul’s executive assistant, Chloe Black, is a fundraiser for Republican candidates such as Rubio and Donald Trump. She has worked for the Fanjul’s for over 35 years and is a powerful player in the secretive big sugar empire of the Fanjul family. She is the ex-wife of former KKK leader David Duke, and the current wife of Don Black, a former KKK grand wizard and member of the American Nazi Party. He now runs white-supremacist website StormFront.org.
Clearer image can be seen here.
In a piece from the Southern Poverty Law Center, it has been learned that José "Pepe" Fanjul’s office confirms his “Klan-connected long-time executive assistant, Chloe Black, is away on vacation this week.” Along with her husband, Storm Front founder Don Black, the two will be attending the Stormfront Summit.
Per the must read post from SPLC:
Among the guest speakers this year will be Chloe Black’s ex-husband, former Klansman David Duke, and Rachel Perdergraft, national spokeswoman for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In a Stormfront post last year, Pendergraft praised Chloe for her attendance at last year’s summit, where racists are not known to mince their words. The 2014 keynote speech at the gathering was titled “Death to America.”
Chloe Black’s boss, Florida sugar baron José “Pepe” Fanjul, is an influential Republican billionaire who helped raise money for Donald Trump at an exclusive $100,000 per couple event in the Hamptons this summer. Fanjul, an owner of Florida Crystals, has long been aware of Chloe’s racist activities, which have been a matter of public record for years. In federal court documents from 1978, Chloe was listed as the corporate secretary of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Despite knowing about her long history in the Klan, his office told the New York Post in 2010 he had no intention of firing Black after a Southern Poverty Law Center report revealed her racist activities.
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It seems oddly ironic for Donald Trump to complain that the United States is becoming a “Third World nation” considering the business practices of his fellow billionaire and campaign fundraiser, Pepe Fanjul.
An article in the New Yorker in January stated: “Over the years, the Fanjuls’ operations in the United States have been fined numerous times for endangering their workers, most of whom, until the mid-nineties, were brought in from Jamaica and often housed in Third World conditions. In 1992, a Florida judge awarded a group of guest workers fifty-one million dollars, ruling that companies owned by the Fanjuls and others had dramatically underpaid them.”
Along with attending at least the last three Stormfront Summit conferences, last April, Don and Chloe Black attended a Knights of The Ku Klux Klan annual gathering, known as the Faith and Freedom Conference. In a photo on a Facebook post promoting this major Klan event, Chloe is seen standing behind her husband (who is featured in the middle of the photograph above).
In a post titled A Big Reason To Vote For Hillary Clinton and Patrick Murphy for US Senate in Florida: It is possible to be too late on climate change ... by gimleteye, the case is made for Patrick Murphy who is challenging Marco Rubio in his reelection bid and for Hillary Clinton who currently has a lead in the presidential race against Donald Trump.
To call the stakes in the climate change battle, as Betsy Kolbert does in a recent edition of her outstanding coverage of global warming, "a legal thriller" is to know that there are real, hard consequences to the posture -- amongst leading Republicans like Marco Rubio -- that climate change is a hoax. The stakes for Florida in the upcoming senate and presidential election are that clear. Republicans and independents who fear a Hillary Clinton presidency should pause and consider just how much there is to lose if Donald Trump were to win. Also, consider how Marco Rubio is a barrier to policies that could protect taxpayers and voters. A Trump presidency is a virtual surrender to a world in which it will be every man and women for themselves. That is, in fact, precisely how Trump sells his "success" in the world of business. He is not about lifting people up, he is about lifting himself and his family up at the expense of those who made legal agreements that he broke. Rubio is just a weathervane pointed in the direction of his biggest campaign contributors. The window on protecting us from accelerating impacts of climate change is closing fast. President Obama is right: it is possible to be too late.