Mike Pouraryan
Florida...A Harbinger of Things To Come....
Time Magazine (http://www.time.com) had a story in its' July 21, 2008 edition on Florida. The headline of the story went like this: ' Water Crisis, Mortgage Fraud, Political Dysfunction, Polluted Beaches, Failing Public Schools, Foreclosures, Algae, Foreclosures: Welcome to Florida" Under the byline by Michael Grunwlad, it pointed out the death of the Florida Dream. I found the analogy of a ponzi scheme to be especially damning. What Florida is facing, to me, can be a challenge for the whole country. For instance, in the West, the prolonged drought is quite scary. In California, at one time over the past thirty days, over 2000 fires were burning. According to reports today, there were only 33 fires left out of the original 2000. Although the firefighters did win this one, there is no guarantee that they will win the next one. The Colorado River's flow into Lake Mead (the massive reservoir outside Las Vegas) is at its' lowest level ever. It will present a profound challenge to Las Vegas and the entire Southwest of the country. Right now, in Los Angeles, a water emergency is on the horizon.
In Michael Grumwald's report, the state of despair was depressing enough. According to his article, when the Florida State Budget was debated, schools lost and prisons won. That is a failure of leadership and a failure of commitment. There is of course the Space Shuttle. NASA will be shutting down the Space Shuttle Program in 2010. 6000 jobs will have to be replaced. I see Florida's predicament because leadership was virtually non-existent and focused on superficial battles while not addressing the long-term challenges the state had. George W. Bush's Brother, Jeb, was Governor. His successor, Charlie Crist, is being touted as one of the folks on John McCain's short list. Jeb is also being potentially touted to go for the Presidency in 2012. The record and the predicament of the state is fair game if John McCain picks Charlie Crist. Although, the decision by the Governor to have the state invest in the Everglades may at least be a step in the right direction for its' environment in preserving the everglades. As I thought about Michael Grumwald's reporting I wondered whether Florida's predicament is a precursor for what the United States may be faced with. For the sake of the entire country, I pray not. I wonder though.
In Michael Grumwald's report, the state of despair was depressing enough. According to his article, when the Florida State Budget was debated, schools lost and prisons won. That is a failure of leadership and a failure of commitment. There is of course the Space Shuttle. NASA will be shutting down the Space Shuttle Program in 2010. 6000 jobs will have to be replaced. I see Florida's predicament because leadership was virtually non-existent and focused on superficial battles while not addressing the long-term challenges the state had. George W. Bush's Brother, Jeb, was Governor. His successor, Charlie Crist, is being touted as one of the folks on John McCain's short list. Jeb is also being potentially touted to go for the Presidency in 2012. The record and the predicament of the state is fair game if John McCain picks Charlie Crist. Although, the decision by the Governor to have the state invest in the Everglades may at least be a step in the right direction for its' environment in preserving the everglades. As I thought about Michael Grumwald's reporting I wondered whether Florida's predicament is a precursor for what the United States may be faced with. For the sake of the entire country, I pray not. I wonder though.
Tech News
Can you HACK it?
Genyration
Now maybe you guys could use a few less SUV's and we should be sweet lol.
Tim
I've lived down in FL, attended and graduated from college down there and I'm very familiar with SE FLorida in particular. The main problem in that state comes from "inviting" too many people.
The state should've had a slow-gan of its own saying "What you pulled up and out there -- stays there."
Oh no, not a state with a wide open mentality when it comes to business and almost anything else. What turned me off greatly about the overall social climate of the place is that while Florida is part of the so-called "Bible Belt" which promotes a very individualistic outlook about Godly living and caring the less fortunate -- the state government, counties, and local chambers of commerce are also busy doing what they can to make the place "more business-friendly," which in layman's terms means anti-labor, anti-social safety net, anti-big government -- though they allowed their cities and counties to bleed them white.
By the way, in Massachusetts you DO NOT PAY ANY COUNTY TAXES. Just your Fed'l, (fixed) state income taxes, sales taxes (much lower than FL's) and property taxes, which are far less complicated and in many instances lately, lower than the cloudier state of the Sunbelt.
Schools? Remember them? You get what you pay for. In some towns you pay very little in property taxes and your kids get very little in return. And those towns and cities aren't necessarily all havens of poverty, either -- unless you figure in another more intangible form of poverty. (But hey, check out the shiny new latest cruisers and fire trucks the local town just bought, even though they could in a pinch rely on the county. (Counties down in FL are much bigger entities than they are up north, esp. in MA which exist in name only for records keeping and maintaining historical judicial geographical venues.
I've been doing a lot of reading about Florida during the past year, particularly about Broward County, where I've known several people from many years past. Perhaps they've been foreclosed out of there, or just had their fill. It's not what it used to be. Broward has started losing people for the first time since it began keeping official population stats. Other counties gained, but Broward sunk so low, yet it was feted for so many years as THE kind of place for people to come on down to enjoy all the Sunbelt had to offer.
I remember the father of a friend of mine who may still live in the NW corner of the county. While she and I were listening to him one morning, he was (reasonably, back in 1970) boasting that his area would surpass all other areas in Florida for growth, etc. (including Miami,-Dade where I was a student at then Biscayne College. ) Whew, I thought, and this was just after I'd visited Orlando for the first time and saw what its planners had in mind with Walt Disney World then under construction.)
My friend's father was right, that area did in leaps and bounds -- but so did a lot of other stuff that went with it. No thanks. Some of it was "planned" but by and large, the only "planning" that came with these huge tract towns of Tamarac, Margate, Plantation and Lauderdale Lakes, etc. was what the county and state "governments" deemed miminally necessary to tie these cities and towns together for police, fire and commercial needs.
I returned to FL in 1979-80 and intended to relocated to the Miami-Dade/Broward area. By then it was becoming plainly apparent this part of "paradise" was beginning to resemble a stairway into an abyss, at first clad in marble, only dip to rough granite, porous limestone and eventually crumbling concrete straight into a hell of their own making.
I'll never flinch in admitting my strong socially conservative Catholic beliefs, particularly in matters where more programs, be they private, governmental or a combination of both can be of enormous help. I'm not a fiscal conservative because it's plainly immroral to play the role of Cain when it comes to how we carry out our societal obligations, particularly in teeming urban areas. (Just because an area looks like a giant surburban tract, it's just as "urban" as any other more "traditional" cityscape. Ask its residents.
Nor am I a widly fiscal liberal, especially when money needed badly for schools, muncipal services, sewer/water/environmental concerns, public libraries, parks, senior centers, drug rehab centers, youth centers -- add as you wish -- always seems to be diverted to glitzy projects like big hotels and tourist centers, as if somehow that money will be right around the bend with the checks in the mail for cash strapped muncipal finance committees, etc.
Let's get real here. Tourism is nice to promote. But when your community's headed into the tank, why bother with that when you need to take care of what you've (deluded yourself into thinking what have is still worth promoting to the rest of the world.) It isn't.
Thanks to weak zoning laws (if any in some counties like Orange and Broward,) strip joints, "adult motels," large scale porn film complexes, etc., can be built with nary a thought given to the overall social impact. (Well, maybe that's been adjusted somewhat.) But if you had the money honey, the movers and shakers down there would have the time. No illegalities here because there were no laws to break. Only taboos and those were being broken all the time as the sleaze industrial sex slave "entertainment industry" always got its way in one fashion or another. Small wonder FL became a haven for the worst of the worst sexual predators walking the face of the planet.
Tim, it's stuff like this that's gone on for years that's finally exploding over that's causing the state's social structure to implode on itself. This what people are doing to people!
Mix laissez faire/decontructionist/dysfun ctional mentalities with an unplanned laissez faire economic structure and the result is predictable: a hellish HUMAN climate that Satan himself couldn't have done a better job in "planning," much less expecting.
Never mind the SUVs and "Global Warming."It's the local "climate change" people in Florida need to worry more about, and do something about it, PDQ!
SHOULD HAVE READ:
Sorry for the confusion.