A dark and sleazy history has led to the destruction of large areas of coastal Florida and the Everglades. James Bovard in a post in USA Today provides a short history of the environmental and social impacts of the sugar industry:
In 1816, Congress imposed high tariffs on sugar imports in part to prop up the value of slaves in Louisiana. In the 1890s, Congress abolished and then re-imposed the sugar tariff, spurring a boom-bust in Cuba that helped drag the U.S. into the Spanish-American War.
The article notes that Florida does not have a natural climate for sugar production, farmers have to compensate by saturating the land with fertilizer. As nearly 500,000 acres of the Everglades were converted from slow-moving crystal-clear water teeming with life to a dead zone of poisoned water, sugar fields, phosphorous and fertilizer that has ravaged the fragile ecosystem of central and south Florida.
In 2014, the citizens of Florida passed Amendment 1 that designated billions of dollars to conservation efforts. The Water and Land Conservation Amendment required that, for the next 20 years, 33 percent of the proceeds from real estate documentary-stamp taxes go for land acquisition. For 2016, the share of the real-estate tax is projected to bring in more than $740 million. The measure was overwhelmingly approved by 75 percent of voters. In a stunning rebuke to the will of the Florida citizen, Republican Governor Rick Scott and his GOP teabagging legislature have used the proceeds for such things as salaries, benefits, insurance costs and vehicle purchases.
Earth Justice reports:
The scuzzy water that’s wrecking this year’s tourist season comes courtesy of Big Sugar and other agricultural operators around Lake Okeechobee, which sits in the state’s sparsely populated center roughly between Palm Beach on the east coast and Fort Myers on the west coast. It’s America’s second biggest freshwater lake in the lower 48, and thanks to ridiculously permissive policies, it’s become a private dumping ground for mega-agricultural operations. These corporations pump the public’s water from the lake to irrigate their fields, then send the water; polluted with fertilizer and other farm chemicals, back into Lake Okeechobee.
In January of 2016, Florida experienced record rainfall during what is usually the dry season. American News reports:
Waste from numerous cattle farms as well as the State’s booming sugar cane industry plus all the fertilizers and other chemicals already polluting the body of stagnant water and the result is disastrous. After the State experienced it’s wettest January since 1932, State Officials began to worry that the Lake’s aging dike system wouldn’t be able to handle the ever increasing amount of polluted water headed it’s way this year. So State officials devised a cartoon-esque plan to divert this “toilet water”, which is estimated flow at the ungodly rate of some 70,000 gallons per second, through two major Floridian rivers; the St. Lucie river and the Caloosahatchee River – each waterway flowing to a different coastline. The result of this hair brained scheme will inevitably cost Floridians Millions of dollars in tourism money, which is unfortunately the State’s bread and butter.
The dark, polluted water is not only killing off marine life, it is turning away tourists, fisherman and even everyday beach goers. To think that simply diverting the polluted water to Florida’s marshland also known as the Florida Everglades, where it would be cleansed of toxins along the way is fitting of a State whose economy is primarily based on tourism money generated from the fans of an animated rodent.
Earth Justice continues about the discharge in the Everglades:
Feeling the pressure, Gov. Rick Scott asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to break from its usual practices and drain Lake Okeechobee south into the Everglades instead of out to the coasts, and the Corps complied. As you can imagine, that approach is certainly raising serious questions. Remember, American taxpayers are paying billions to clean up the Everglades, and the federal government sued Florida decades ago for failing to keep agriculture’s polluted runoff out of Everglades National Park.
In a February post, the AP reported that Governor Rick Scott says that President Obama is to blame for the Lake Okeechobee discharge. He stated that the federal government failed to pay for repairs to the dyke around the lake. The always classy Rick Scott blames the black president for his own egregious environmental policies.
Eye on Miami shines the spotlight on how Marco Rubio was bought and paid for by US Sugar and the Fanjul billionaires:
Multiple, six-figure campaign contributions have been shunted Rubio's way by the Fanjul billionaires and by US Sugar, the other branch of the Big Sugar cartel, owned primarily by the 'environmentally sensitive' Mott Foundation. The Fanjuls summoned Rubio to run against then-governor Charlie Crist in 2010. They were outraged when Crist in 2008 had 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 reason for the fury: if government built wetland marshes using US Sugar lands to store and cleanse filthy agricultural waters, then the state would be a step closer to key parcels owned by the Fanjuls in the Everglades Agricultural Area. For the public, the end game is to provide connectivity between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, building a solution toward cleansing Big Ag's toxic mess of Lake Okeechobee. Halting toxic releases to tide -- measured in trillions of gallons -- would eventually provide clean, fresh water to the remaining three million acres of Everglades, owned in perpetuity by the public thanks to the national park and other public entities.
In August of 2015, the right-wing Washington Examiner reported on Marco Rubio’ s pilgrimage to the Koch conclave “where he defended his home state boondoggle in front of the most powerful enemies of corporate welfare.” The fossil fuel industry is heavily subsidized by the US taxpayer and it benefits the Koch brothers.
Battling crony capitalism and corporate welfare has been a central theme of this weekend's gathering.* In that vein, Mike Allen of Politico asked Marco Rubio at Sunday's lunch, commented on Rubio's votes against a federal backstop for terrorism risk insurance and the Export-Import Bank, and then noted that Rubio made one exception to his opposition to crony capitalism. Rubio instantly knew what Allen was talking about: the federal sugar program.
Rubio has consistently voted for and defended the federal sugar program, which drives U.S. sugar prices higher by keeping out foreign sugar and provides federal loans to guarantee those high prices.
Rubio said, "I'm ready to get rid of the loan program for sugar, as long as the countries that export sugar into the U.S. get rid of theirs as well, and here's why: Otherwise, Brazil will wipe out our agriculture and it's not just sugar."
He explained:
"I'm prepared to say, absolutely, we should change the law so that as soon as countries get rid of theirs, we get rid of ours, and then there will be a free market for being able to sell food. Otherwise these other countries will capture the market share, our agricultural capacity will be developed into real estate, you know, housing and so forth, and then we lose the capacity to produce our own food, at which point we're at the mercy of a foreign country for food security."
The pollution ravaging both coasts of Florida has so outraged citizens that former US GOP Congressman, and current Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, was confronted with furious protestors when he arrived at a local Economic Development Council. The plan, according to Putnam, is to divert the poison from the coasts and empty it into Shark Valley in the Everglades. This is what Republicans do. They kill the water.
ACTION
SEIU, AFL-CIO, New Florida Majority, Miami Worker Center, iAmerica, Dream Defenders, NextGen Climate Action. docs.google.com/... Must register for this event. Click Link.
(Time is early evening NOT noon)