Commentary:
The Tea Party in Action sent me this article which I found edifying to read. I always wanted to know the deal between Charlie Crist and U. S. Sugar. Names like U.S. Sugar make me cringe a little bit not because its a big large business but because it must have hired and let go many, many employees. Employees worked the sugar cane fields for many years; they were hard-working poor to middle class people, the working class. I don’t believe in corporate welfare or bailouts because I see the funding moving in the wrong direction. This is exactly what has occurred. This time we used the guise that the land must be returned to the Everglades, and the way to do that is to bailout the large business (buy the land) by the government of course, and then, the government will repair the land. Afterall, the land is contaminated and the groves are diseased. However, the funding disease also needs repair. Why didn’t U.S. Sugar just give the land back to the state, or sell it to another private concern? Was there not any other buyer besides the government (taxpayers)? Did the taxpayers really want to buy this land, anyway? The land doesn’t belong to the taxpayers; it belongs to U.S. Sugar. By golly, if this land doesn’t really belong to U.S. Sugar because of some rural stewardship arrangement, then why is the government even paying for it? I don’t have anything against large corporations. I want to see them gain and prosper and create jobs and return on investment. This is social responsibility, but it has turned into bail responsibility by the government. Our current leadership, Democrat and Republican alike, have bailed out U.S. Sugar. At the same time, they used the middleman, South Florida Water Management District, to regulate and thereby increase government costs. The South Florida Water Management District thinks its saving the taxpayer money by downsizing the deal. Not so. The fees for the deal-making (whatever they are) and the lobbyists fees remain the same because of the amount of work they justify it costs to make the deal in the first place. U.S. Sugar should either find a private buyer or give the land back to the state consisting of part of the working class that really farmed that land. Is it too late? Maybe not.
Related Articles
- Florida Everglades Protection Effort Scaled Down Drastically (huffingtonpost.com)
- Scaled-down Everglades plan would secure 27K acres (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- Florida Everglades Plan Shrinks on Thwarted Bond Sale (businessweek.com)
- Florida Considers Cash for Smaller Everglades Buy (businessweek.com)
- The Miracle That Wasn’t: Everglades Restoration (green.blogs.nytimes.com)
- For the Everglades, a Dream Loses Much of Its Grandeur (nytimes.com)
ThursdayMan | el hombre del jueves 