Today's Stories

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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Stop Them Before They Subdivide Again!

The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

By ALAN FARAGO

"No better time to buy a new home, no better place" reads the faux headline in The Miami Herald paid advertisement section for real estate; describing a platted subdivision in Homestead, Florida. It is a line for suckers.

And another line, comes out as a whine:  "If families who want to buy a new home wait for the media to tell them things are better, it will be too late and the deals won't be there." It's pure nonsense.

At Miamicondoinvestments.com, real estate consultant Jack McCabe notes: "There were 272 single family homes sold last month in Miami Dade County. ... Puny Tallahassee and Pensacola sold nearly as many even though the areas population and housing stock are but a fraction of Dade."

The reason there are few buyers in Miami is a massive oversupply of housing, fomented by zoning decisions at the level of the county commission, influenced by builders like Caribe Homes and their compatriots at the Latin Builders Association. To be sure, the builders couldn't have pressed their case without cooperating mortgage brokers, a fair share of liar loans and fraud, bankers supplying easy credit like drug dealers to crack addicts, and freshly minted MBA math whizzes doing their seniors proud by taking a dollar of equity and turning it into twenty of debt, well outside the purview of regulators who- for their part--were cajoled and wheedled to let the "free" market do its magic.

In Miami, county commissioners whose campaigns were funded by wringing the supply chain of the builders, from suppliers of cement to paper products, never saw an application for housing that it wouldn't turn down; fine tuning the run-up to the biggest asset bubble in housing since the 1920's. (AP reports today that Lowe's Home Improvement suffered an 18 percent drop in first quarter earnings: said one investment analyst, "We have yet to see trends get less worse.")

In the past year, home prices in Miami have fallen nearly 22% (Case/Shiller S&P Housing Index), one of the most rapid declines in the nation. Loads of homeowners in Miami hinterlands, who thought they were buying cheap land undervalued near the Everglades, now find themselves with unaffordable commutes to distant places of work, stewing impotently in unrelenting traffic.

Today in Miami there is no bottom to the housing market in sight. Hundreds of acres of Mediterranean tiles coat subdivisions on former farmland in South and West Dade like ash from Everglades' fires; those tiles are the pride of the Chamber of Commerce and the hoi polloi of Miami who blasted critics, at the time, as "elitist" and worse.

"If you don't buy now, you'll never be able to afford to" was how the early tranche of buyers were suckered in. There are other tranches of suckers, and their voices are going to be heard loud and clear in the Fall elections.

Those would be hard-working Americans, retirees, and people who balance their checkbook every month, only spend what they can afford on housing, and are now--because they are also US taxpayers--are on the hook for toxic mortgage debt sold by Wall Street and local bankers who already pocketed their billions in commissions and fees for engineered financial products that leveraged down deposits into confection.

Here is the lesson: if you are good and honest and set a good example for your children through fiscal prudence, the housing fiasco shows that as a taxpayer, you are complete sucker. Let's total the cost, that may ultimately fall on your shoulders.

To the $300 billion in realized losses by investment banks, add $300 billion in private toxic debt accepted as collateral by the Federal Reserve-- an unprecedented action by the "independent" lender of last resort-- to keep JP Morgan and others afloat, add $300 billion now under consideration by Congress in the bailout of mortgage holders who are at risk of foreclosure.

The trillion dollar financial crisis may not ruin the US economy on which your job may or may not depend, but add to that the wars in the Middle East that the Bush administration claims cost only $600 million but that Nobel economist Joseph Steiglitz estimates at $3 trillion, and suddenly the calamity is a significant chunk of GDP, combined with the loss of investor confidence in the US dollar, and now the trillion dollar financial crisis has to be ratched up two or three times just to factor in malfeasance and other less worse inefficiencies of regulators trying to cover their asses.

And now you get a sense why Caribe Homes' Leeward Isles II is leeward of nowhere and represents for all its false promise, the failure of the growth model for Florida.

If you want to know what voters think of the mess, just wait until the Fall  election because it is apparent-- notwithstanding the tired advertising gimmicks that abound-- that while ordinary Floridians were practicing conservative economics at home, in Tallahassee and Washington the party of fiscal conservatism, that would be the Republican Party, was doing the governmental equivalent of "Girls Gone Wild" with the nation's economy.

The State of Florida, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is tapping a $3 billion reserve to cover this year's budget deficits. No, it's not the media's fault.

It's the builders' fault for pushing an anti-citizen, pro-growth at any cost agenda, so hard-- so massively, that the only way out of the crisis was to turn the Federal Reserve into a political arm of the federal government. And in Florida, the builders' response to throttle Florida Hometown Democracy: the signature referendum to qualify a measure that would take growth plan amendments out of the hands of elected officials and put it in the hands of voters: who could possibly think it is a penalty to the economy when the Growth Machine has done such a fine and thorough job of running the economy straight onto the rocks?

Citizens in South Florida have every reason to be angry that land speculators, under water, are rushing to turn plans for subdivisions into mines for lime rock; gutting the Everglades to save their hides; and still, in the case of Jeb Bush's Miami ally Ed Easton and Lennar, trying to get zoning rammed through for thousands additional homes edging westward.

Americans are angry, without fully knowing why. This is a teaching moment, and it is the responsibility of the free and independent press to show exactly how the political forces behind the housing boom caused the entire economy to veer crazily--straight to the point of systemic failure.

And it is important for Florida's media to show how the influence of our state's builders and Growth Machine in Washington nurtured this national economic calamity, predicated as it was on the abandonment of regulation or, at the very least, the gutting of regulatory agencies to smooth the way for creative destruction.

Today, the US economy is not leeward of any safe shore. If you think now is the best time to buy into US housing: think again. After foreclosures set new pegs for the housing markets and inflation is supported by the Federal Reserve to be de facto monetary policy, you will see a different set of values-- and new values in American politics.

Note: If you would like to learn more about how the radical extremists from the building industry, like Miami's Latin Builders Association, got away with it: click here.

Alan Farago lives in south Florida. He can be reached at: afarago@bellsouth.net

 

 

 

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