Today's Stories

October 27, 2008

Michael Hudson
Scenes From the Global Class War

October 24 / 26, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Waiting for the Curtain to Rise

Ishmael Reed
Boogiemen: How Lee Atwater Perfected the G.O.P.'s Appeal to Racism

Mike Whitney
Down for the Count

Don Santina
How Maria Fell: Death in the Central Valley

Scott Boehm
Manufacturing Sympathy: Palin, Special Needs and Identity Politics

Saul Landau
Faith-Based Surge: Whining About Winning in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
Iraq and the Arrogance of Washington

Binoy Kampmark
Afghanistan the Un-Winnable

Linn Washington Jr.
The Great Vote Fraud Hoax

Nicole Colson
Mocking Our Rights: McCain's Disdain for Women's Health

Bernard Chazelle
The Humorology of Power

Brian Jones
Campaign by Codeword

Christopher Brauchli
Down the Drain with McCain's Vetters

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Rejects Neoliberalism

Val Strange
The Fraternity of John McCain: Scenes from North Carolina

Joe Mowrey
Name That Candidate: He Supports Petraeus, the Death Penalty, the Bailout, Nuclear Power, the Occupation...

Steve Early
SEIU Learns the Meaning of "No"

David Macaray
Patriotism and the Labor Movement

Allison Kilkenny
You Have the Right to Airport Harassment

Richard Rhames
Open Season

Jim Bell
Nuclear Power's Big Con

Kris De Welde
Domestic Violence and Financial Stress

Barry Clemson
John Wayne Syndrome

Adam Engel
Last Exit to Disneyland

Mark Scaramella
The World's Weirdest Pipe Organ?

Tuli Kupferberg
Nobody for President: the Original Version (Annotated)

Lorenzo Wolff
A Frustrated, Broken-Hearted Joy from Kidnapkin

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Swartzfager and Payne

Website of the Weekend
Patrick Cockburn Dismantles the Surge

October 23, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
What Voter Fraud?

Todd Chretien
Why I'm Not Voting for Obama

John Ross
No Child Left Behind, Mexican-Style

Peter Morici
Strategies to End the Crisis

Mats Svensson
Short Film Clips at a Checkpoint

Marlene Martin
Don't Let Them Execute an Innocent Man

Robert Jensen /
Pat Youngblood
Looking Beyond the Election and Beyond Elections

Margaret Kimberley
Rightwing Obama Love

Deepak Tripathi
Post-Bush Scenarios

David Morris
Why Joe the Plumber is a Socialist (And You Are, Too)

Website of the Day
Voting While Black in North Carolina

October 22, 2008

Brian Cloughley
Kid Killers are Barbarians

Heather Gray
Raising Hell in the South: the Legacy of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.

Jeff Birkenstein
McCain's Disdain for Spain

Ralph Nader
The Song Remains the Same: Convergence and Avoidance in the Presidential Election

DC Larson
The Growing of a Heartland Nader Raider

David Swanson
Colin Powell, Not Qualified for Government Service

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth

Larry Everest
9/11 and the Imperial Adventure in Afghanistan

Robert Fantina
Anything to Win

Martha Rosenberg
The Financier's Playbook

Stephen Martin
Giving It Up to the Combine

Website of the Day
Brokers with Hands on Their Faces

October 21, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Wealth's Apostles

Paul Craig Roberts
How Inflation Works: Why I Can't Buy an Old Ferrari

Corey D. B. Walker
Empire and White Supremacy

Steve Breyman
How to "Win" in Afghanistan

Eric Toussaint
The Economic Crisis and Latin America: Time to Delink

Wajahat Ali
Boo Radley Comes Out to Play: the Emerging Muslim-American Electorate

Robert Weitzel
Wasting a Vote for Lincoln's Radical Ideal (Or Why I'm Voting for Nader)

Brendan Cooney
Palinoscopy: an Exploration of Why Liberals are So Obsessed with Sarah Palin

Dave Lindorff
Cuba's Oil Reserves: a Game-Changer?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing
When You're a Black Candidate There's No Such Thing as a Safe Lead

Patrick B. Barr
Socialist, Socialist, SOCIALIST!

Omar Barghouti
The Boycott and Palestinian Groups: Countering the Critics

Website of the Day
How to Dismantle a US War Plane (and Get Away With It)

October 20, 2008

Michael Hudson
The ABCs of Paulson's Bailout

Anthony DiMaggio
The Scandal That Never Was: ACORN, Rightwing Media and Election "Fraud"

Tariq Ali
Zardari Bans My Books

Uri Avnery
Is Akko Burning?

Bill Quigley
Hammered by the Swedes

Ben Rosenfeld
The Politics of St. Joe, Martyr to a Lie

David Michael Green
Payback's a Bitch: McCain on the Ash Heap

William S. Lind
The Afghanistan Advantage

Chris Genovali
Drill, Baby, Drill (Wink, Wink)

Stephen Martin
The Last Man in America

Howard Lisnoff
Bad News for War Resisters

David Yearsley
Organ Meat

Website of the Day
Our Brother is Sick: the Steve Ferguson Cancer Fund

October 17 / 19, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Blow Ups and Bombers

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Hanford: a Trip to America's Most Toxic Place

Pam Martens
How the Banksters are Making a Killing Off the Bailout

Paul Craig Roberts
Government of Thieves

Mike Whtney
No More Investment Banks

Michael D. Yates
Bowling Alley Blues: Racism Dies Hard in Johnstown, PA

Suzanne Smith
The Energy-War Connection: McCain Said It, Why Don't We?

Carl Boggs
Prosecuting Bush

Ralph Nader
Closing the Courthouse Doors

Fidel Castro
The Global Crash

Dave Marsh
The Great Levi Stubbs

Saul Landau
Denial, the Election Musical Comedy

Jo Guldi
The Floods of Heaven

Kevin Zeese
Now the Cost of War Really Matters

Larry Everest
Afghanistan, Not a Good War Gone Bad

Steve Early
Stop, in the Name of Joe!

David Macaray
Hey, Joe

Ben Terrall
When Ike Hit Haiti

Missy Beattie
Palin and God's Children

Don Monkerud
American Exceptionalism

Helen Redmond
Health Care Now's Big Con

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Delta Vision: Canals and Dams to Bail Out Big Ag

Wajahat Ali
Bush Gets Stoned

Farzana Versey
The White Tiger's Stripes and Gripes

Vladimir Frolov
Medvedev to Obama: We Come Not to Bury America, But to Buy It

Kim Nicolini
Frozen River: At Last, a Great Movie That's Neither Hip Nor Cool

Poets Basement
Gibbons, Corsale, Davis and Fleming

Website of the Day
The Real Sarah Palin?

October 16, 2008

Mike Whitney
The End of Friedmanite Economics: an Interview with Robert Pollin

Jonathan Cook
The Acre Riots

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Is Obama Playing to the Gallery? Or Has He Lost the Plot in South Asia?

Alan Maass
A Supreme Injustice: the Death Penalty Case of Troy Davis

Chuck O'Connell
Our Needs Do Not Fit on Their Ballots

Mary Lynn Cramer
Krugman's Prize: Iconoclast, Apologist or Propagandist?

P. Sainath
The Race May be Over, But Race Isn't

Andy Worthington
The Shrinking Case Against Binyam Mohamed: Justice Department Drops "Dirty Bomb Plot" Allegation

Peter Gelderloos
Enric Duran, the Good Thief?

Stephen Martin
The Nourishment of Idleness: Where Has All the Money Gone?

Douglas Valentine
Why I'm Voting for Obama

Website of the Day
The Mormon Worker

October 15, 2008

Steve Conn
The Real Story of Troopergate

William P. O'Connor
The Legend of John McCain

Robert Weissman
The Partial Nationalization of US Banks: Public Ownership, But No Public Control

Jonathan M. Feldman
Before the Second Wave of Crisis: an Alternative to the Triple Failure

Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Race in America: Is a Vote For Obama a Vote Against Racism?

Conn Hallinan
Targeting Unions in Colombia

Justin Podur
The Financial Economy and Real Economy

Karl Grossman
The New Nuclear Navy

Dave Lindorff
Is the Government Really Turning Socialist?

Eric Walberg
The Quiet Russian

Martha Rosenberg
Of Blood and Eggs

Uri Avnery
A Fairy Tale

Monica Benderman
No More

Website of the Day
Contractor Misconduct Database

October 27, 2008

No One Remembers Anything

Origins of the Fall

By ALAN FARAGO

The Miami Herald Business Section reports, "Planning the cities of the future/ 2050", through an interview with the president of the Urban Land Institute, Richard M. Rosan. There is a backstory that today's readers of The Herald are not privy to; that bears repeating for the full context of the Urban Land Institute and its involvement in what could have been a model "city of the future" right here in Miami Dade only a few years ago. The year was 2002. The story was scarcely reported by The Miami Herald ... a shame, because without that background information, today's story marking the conference in Miami of more than 5,000 urban planning professionals, developers, architects and bankers from around the world provides no cautionary note, no benefit of experience, nothing to indicate the "greenwashing" that seeks to white-out the mistakes right here in Miami where greed and corruption met political opportunity in the mid-1990's and triggered the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The story begins with powerful interests who had grown wealthy and powerful manipulating Miami Dade county contracts and federal housing dollars. A group, called HABDI, constituted from the board of directors of the Latin Builders Association, tried to seize control of the Homestead Air Force Base after it was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Its goal was to turn the air base into a privatized, commercial airport. Its plan had the full backing and support of every elected officials in Florida except County Commissioner Katy Sorenson.

In 1994 HABDI persuaded the majority of the county commission, led by the county commission chairman Alex Penelas, to award a no-bid lease for 99 years for the entire air base even though it still belonged to the US Air Force. After a six year war with environmentalists, it became clear that the multi-year hijacking of the public interest-- entailing tens of millions of dollars of waste of taxpayer money in planning and diversion of energies of professional county staff, the deformation of the Office of the Mayor to serve the interests of powerful campaign contributors and big engineering firms like Post, Buckley-- had run out of energy.

That's where the story involving the Urban Land Institute begins.

The Beacon Council, Miami-Dade's business development agency, in 2001 hired the ULI to study what could be done with the property, providing of course that the conveyance of the property would proceed. After nearly a year of work, the ULI came up with a very simple recommendation in 2002; essentially the vision Mr. Rosan talks about in the Herald today; "exploring what cities should look like in 2050."

An October 16th, 2002 email gives a sense of the civic frustration: "... we have had very little information from Miami-Dade county on its plans. Mayor Alex Penelas and his appointee, county manager Steve Shiver--former mayor of Homestead--were the strongest advocates of the airport option, when it was viable. The county rejected a proposal from the Urban Land Institute, a respected and independent industry group, that had proposed maximizing the economic development potential for Homestead by utilizing the air base property for a land swap, providing for development close to the business district of Homestead."

Penelas was Mayor of Miami-Dade in 2000; the sole elected official who could have ordered the recount of the 2000 presidential ballots to continue. His fit of pique that the Clinton/Gore administration had failed to "deliver" the air base to his supporters was largely responsible for his being unavailable for comment at the time.

The ULI recommendation was based on the unique cultural, historic, and geographic location of Homestead next to America's Everglades and Biscayne National Parks. It recommended that the air base property be used for a land swap for acreage in the center of Homestead and Florida City in order to densify the cities and thus build commercial opportunities that would otherwise be provided by low density suburban sprawl. The ULI reasoned that “Destination Everglades” could provide considerable economic stimulus to the region and expressly stated that this proposed development could not succeed at the Homestead AFB. It recommended a land exchange through which the economic value of surplus property at the air base could be realized. Trading surplus property at the air base for a parcel close to the business core of Homestead would provide synergy, momentum, and job creation at a level and scale deemed appropriate by ULI panelists. ULI also provided recommendations by which all the surplus property would be redeveloped to its maximum potential as promptly as possible.

County Commissioner Natacha Seijas who ran point for the Homestead Air Base developers once Penelas faded to political obscurity, rejected out of hand the ULI recommendation. It never saw the light of day beyond a dismissive waving onto a planning department bookshelf.

The story continues: the same builders, developers, and bankers who left the Homestead Air Force Base to hang out in the open air, like an orphan, after wasting so much money, time, and energy in 2001 then plowed suburban sprawl into South Dade as Fed Chief Alan Greenspan and compliant permitting agencies allowed the biggest asset bubble in housing in US history to proceed unchecked by forethought or regulation. The civic opponents of the air base conversion to a major commercial airport won the battle and lost the war.

Today South Miami Dade is a poster child for widespread foreclosure, loss and personal misery from the housing market crash. Some of the operators cashed out like carpetbaggers but the record of what they did is etched on the landscape in an awful testament. This is the county that not only embraced the values of the housing asset bubble; its prime instigators layed down political tracks taking us to this point in time-- the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

None of the attendees at the conference this week have any inkling of what transpired here; instead, they will hear what "green" initiatives Miami should be applauded for. There is no accounting. No reckoning. No admission or acceptance of responsibility. But there is the record and it is far, far from pristine.

Alan Farago, who writes on the environment and politics from Coral Gables, Florida, and can be reached at alanfarago@yahoo.com

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