Today's Stories

August 10, 2009

David Price
Trial by FBI Investigation

August 7 - 9, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
It Pays to Have a Nuke

Mike Whitney
Economy on a Scaffold

Elaine C. Hagopian
Obama's Israel Albatross

Carl Ginsburg
RX For Healthcare

Miguel Tinker Salas
Honduras is Only Part of the Story: the Conservative Counter-Attack in Latin America

Saul Landau
The Kidney Broker and the Money Laundering Rabbis

John Ross
The Mexican Genome: Big Science in the Service of Indian Genocide?

Anthony DiMaggio Obama and the Israel Lobby: Origins of Power

John Stanton
Expanding Human Terrain Systems?

Christopher Brauchli Legal Absurdities: Outing Three Strikes

Wajahat Ali
A Muslim American Hero: an Interview with Dave Eggers on "Zeitoun"

Ron Jacobs
As Long as the Wars Continue, We Must Resist Them

Franklin Lamb
Sunday Morning on the Dunes: Cleaning "Free Gaza Beach"

Bruce E. Levine
Protect Us From Our Friends

Michael Winship
Neighborhood Watch for Planet Earth

David Macaray
Glimmers of Hope for Labor?

Stephen Fleischman
Suicide Squad

Robert Bryce
Unplugging the Next Big Thing: the Hype Over Electric Cars

Robert Dodge, MD: Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered

Mark Seth Lender
The Message of the Glossy Ibis

David Yearsley
Vaucanson's Faun and the Duck in the Attic

Ben Sonnenberg
Chris Fuller's Brilliant Debut

Lorenzo Wolff
When Music's the Character

Poets' Basement
Dominguez and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Warren Buffett's Betrayal

August 6, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Let's All Have a Beer

Paul Craig Roberts
The Expiring Economy

William Blum Assassinations and Coups: Keeping Track of the Empire's Crimes

Michael Donnelly
Rod Coronado: the Hardest Working Man in Animal Rights "Terrorism"

Jonathan Cook
Rabbis Ban Marriage for Israeli "Untouchables"

Dave Lindorff
The Health Care Reform Sell-Out

Ellen Brown
The Public Option in Banking

Website of the Day
Ellsberg on Hiroshima

August 5, 2009

Dedrick Muhammad /
Barbara Ehrenreich
The Destruction of the Black Middle Class

Norman Solomon
The Incredible, Shrinking Health Care Plan

William Blum
The Myths of Afghanistan: Past and Present

Gareth Porter
The ISI and the Taliban: US Officials Are Protecting Pakistani Aid to Taliban

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Myth of Medicare for All

Jim Goodman
Obama Needs to Take a Stand on Trade

Nadia Hijab
Playing From Strength in the Middle East

Gretchen Kroth
Guatemala's Garbage Dump Education System

Steve Macek /
Scott Sanders
Privatizing the Airwaves

Sarah Lazare
Inside G.I. Resistance

Website of the Day
The Locavore Myth

August 4, 2009

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Shell Game

Dave Lindorff
The Recession Isn't Over, By a Long Shot

Patrick Cockburn
Did British Bomb Attacks in Iran Provoke Hostage Crisis?

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Campaign to Silence Human Rights Groups

Jeff Sher
Making a Mess of Health Care Reform

Dean Baker
Why Don't We Globalize Health Care?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo as Hotel California

Uri Avnery
A Jeremiad

Mark Weisbrot
U.S.-Brokered Mediation in Honduras Has Failed

Alvaro Huerta
Hold That Dustbin! So Much for the "End of Racism"

Website of the Day
Pentagon to Ban Facebook and Twitter?

August 3, 2009

Pam Martens
Millions of Americans Pushed Into No-Law System by Colluding Banks

Anthony DiMaggio
Media Backlash: Obama and the Settlements

Udi Aloni
And Who Shall I Say is Calling? A Plea to Leonard Cohen

Mike Roselle
See the Mountains of WestVirginia ... Before They're Blown Up!

Dr. Susan Block
Beat It! Sex, Death and Michael Jackson

Roy Bourgeois / Margaret Knapke
School of Coups

Joe Bageant
A Yard Sale in Chernobyl

Dina Jadallah
Hiding the State

Dave Lindorff
Of Blue Dogs and Jellyfish

Martha Rosenberg
Grand Closings in Evanston: How the Recession is Hitting Illinois

Website of the Day
Why We Can't "Afford" Health Care

July 31 - August 2, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Biden and Clinton Mutinies

Gabriel Kolko
Searching For Enemies

John Prados
The Intelligence Oversight Mess

Joe Bageant
The Bastards Never Die

Tim Wise
Rationalizing Racial Oppression

Carl Ginsburg
Frist First: Follow the Money (and Find the Plump Heart of "Health Care")

Michael Fox
The Honduran Coup as Overture

John Lindsay-Poland
Revamping Plan Colombia

Michael Winship
Pay-to-Play: Washington's Sport of Kings

Rev. William Alberts
White Men Can Jump ... to Conclusions

Andy Worthington
Judge Orders Release of Tortured Gitmo Prisoner

Steve Breyman
Counting the Unemployed

Cyrus Bina
Racism, Class and Profiling

Missy Beattie
Promises Ignored

Ron Jacobs
Into the Vapid: Consuming the Cultural Product

Willie L. Pelote, Sr.
Party of Concessions: Democrats Never Learn

Lucia Alvarez
Fall of the House of Kirchner? Return of the Right in Argentina

Dave Lindorff
David Brooks' White Guy Nightmare

Lawrence R. Velvel
Madoff: What Should be Done Now?

Omar Barghouti /
Sid Shniad
United for Freedom and Universal Justice

James L. Secor
The Name of the Game is Wipe-Out

Belén Fernández
Zelaya in Nicaragua: Has Another Constitution Been Violated?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Frank Lloyd Wright in Hollywood: the Ennis House as Imperial Ruin

David Yearsley
Beauty in Dark Places: Berlin's Olympic Stadium

Brian J. Foley
Pre-Eating: a Threat to Restaurants Everywhere

Alan Cabal
Onward, Into the Fog: Thomas Pynchon's
"Inherent Vice"

Kim Nicolini
The Way War Feels

Lorenzo Wolff
The Way It Felt the First Time: the Jump Rope Magic of the Shangri-Las

Poets' Basement
Four Poems From the Chinese

Website of the Weekend
Obama's Ex-Doc Knocks ObamaCare

July 30, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Victims of a Covert Tit-for-Tat War

Gareth Porter
Afghanistan's US-Backed Child-Raping Police

Saul Landau
Summer of Denial

Greg Grandin
Honduran Coup Over?

Diane Farsetta
Pentagon Pundits Get a Pass

Stephen Soldz
The King Case, the APA and the Missing Ethics Investigation

Alan Farago
Learning How to Survive in a Depression From "Weeds"

David Macaray
Cops and Labor Unions

Mike Howells /
Jay Arena
Volunteerism Will Not Rebuild the Gulf Coast

Christopher Brauchli
Oatmeal Envy

Website of the Day
Changing the SOFA

July 29, 2009

Carl Ginsburg
Our Crisis, Their Gain

Clifton Ross
From Tegucigalpa to El Paraiso: a Voyage From Curfew to State of Siege

Paul Craig Roberts
How Fake is the "Recovery"?

Franklin C. Spinney
Winning Hearts and Minds, Pentagon Style

James Bovard Lackawanna Six: Bogus Charges and Martial Law

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, the Media and Public Opinion

Bouthaina Shaaban
How Will Arabs Wake Up?

Greg Moses
A Catch and Trade Policy for Labor Costs

Wajahat Ali
No Racism in Obama's Post-Race America?

Gary Leupp
Beer Will Not Solve This

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Musharraf, Imran Khan and Overseas Pakistanis

Website of the Day
Why Single-Payer Gets No Respect

July 28, 2009

Jean Bricmont
Bombing for a Juster World?

Uri Avnery
Obama, Netanyahu and the Settlements

Dean Baker
Right to Rent: a Remedy for the Foreclosure Crisis

Heather Gray
Stupid Cop Tricks: Driving Too Close to a White Female and Other Episodes in Racist Policing

Jonathan Cook
Can an "Arab Soul" Yearn for Israel's Anthem?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Beyond the F-22: the Future of Pentagon Reform

Belén Fernández
Thomas Friedman Does Afghanistan

Carl Finamore
The Hotel Workers' Kickass Local 2

Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Striking the World Cup

Harvey Wasserman
We All Stand Before Peltier's Parole Board

Website of the Day
Behind the Wheel

July 27, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Gates: Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism

Patrick Cockburn
Elections Shake Kurdistan

Roger Burbach
Hillary and Obama Nix Change in Honduras

Steve Breyman
Bomber Joe and Russia: Why is Biden Channeling Cheney?

Ramzy Kysia
Gaza: On the Right of Resistance

Stephen Soldz
Will the American Psychological Association Renounce the Nuremberg Defense?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Sexual Hocus Pocus in the Episcopal Church

Greg Moses
The Color Line is Black

Binoy Kampmark
Swine Flu Panic

Kim Ives
Lavalas and Haiti's Student Union Unite

Website of the Day
Meet the Paid Assassins of Health Care

July 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"A Damned Murder, Inc."

Clifton Ross
Surreal Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Party of "Change" Challenges Old Guard in Kurdistan

William Polk
Report Card on Obama From a New Frontiersman

David Sterritt
Screening the Politics Out of the Iraq War

Ray McGovern
Hooded in Bush's Hood

David Lindorff
Cops Gone Wild

Hannah Mermelstein
"The War is With the Arabs"

Carl Ginsburg
The Actually Existing Health Care System

Helen Redmond
The Selling of Single-Payer Features

John Ross
The Song of the Guerrilla

Bill Simpich
Fair Play for Cuba and the Cuban Revolution

Mark Weisbrot
Learning From China on How to Beat the Recession

Lee Sustar
U.S. Labor in Crisis

David Macaray
Union Workers Forced to Accept Massive Cuts

Felipe Matsunaga
Obama's Slow (and Familiar) Dance With Cuba

Sara Mann
Why Health Care Will Kill My TV

Martha Rosenberg
Which is Worse? Germs in Our Food or the Antibiotics That Kill Them?

Missy Beattie
Cha-ching Culture

David Ker Thomson
Empty Nest: a Natural History of Now

Ron Jacobs
United4Iran, a Footnote

Stephen Martin
The Crying of Lots 1 Thru 50

David Yearsley
Psst, I Show You a Feelthy Gluck

Gilad Atzmon
Bruno: a Glimpse Into Zionism?

Kim Nicolini
Guilty Laughter in the Dark: Seeing Brüno Twice

Poets' Basement
Kakak and McLellan

Website of the Weekend
Dead Prez: Summertime

July 23, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Masters of Perfidy: AIG and the System

Saul Landau /
Nelson Valdés
Hypocrisy and the Honduran Coup: Term Limits Only Apply When Governments Help People

Jonathan Cook
The Reality of Israel's "Open" Jerusalem

Nadia Hijab
Israeli Warships in the Red Sea

Dave Lindorff
Living in a Police State: the Gates Incident

Laura Carlsen
21st Century Coups d'Etat

Steve Breyman
Bankers Beware?

Ellen Brown
How California Could Turn Its IOUs Into Dollars

Norman Solomon
Spinning Health Care

Jorge Mariscal
Youth Activists Demand Military-Free Schools

Website of the Day
Copy-Editing Sarah Palin

July 22, 2009

Bernard Chazelle
How to Argue Against Torture

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras

Carl Ginsburg
The Recovery, Phase Two

Clifton Ross
Back to the Future? Return to El Salvador

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, Media and the Case for Socialized Medicine

Michael Donnelly
The Whoppers Behind WOPR

Nadia Hijab
Memoirs of a Lost Arab World

Dedrick Muhammad
Structural Inequality: News Not Fit to Print?

Charles Thomson
Cronyism at the Tate

Alan Farago
Ted Williams and the Florida Keys

Website of the Day
Himmelstein: Howard Dean is a Liar

July 21, 2009

Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Iranian Election and Its Aftermath

Uri Avnery
Breaking the Silence on Israeli War Crimes

Dean Baker
Séance on Wall Street

Jonathan Cook
Team Twitter: Israel's Internet War

Dave Lindorff
Saving Private Bergdahl

Andy Worthington
Interrogating the Uighurs

David Macaray
Heat, Dust and OSHA

Carl Finamore
The Deferential Party

Harvey Wasserman
Cronkite and Three Mile Island

Walter Brasch
The Marie Antoinettes of Health Care

Website of the Day
Linebaugh: Magna Carta and the Commons

July 20, 2009

Pam Martens
Judicial Apartheid

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduras and the Big Stick: Obama's Bullish Behavoir in Latin America

Paul Craig Roberts
Threatening Iran

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Policy on China and Iran

Ira Glunts
Netanyahu's Time Bomb: Building in the Vineyard of the Mufti

P. Sainath
Put Your Money Down, Boys

Binoy Kampmark
The Moon Landing and the Cold War

Stephen Fleischman
The First Anchorman

Norman Solomon
Cronkite and Vietnam: Beyond the Hype

Andy Worthington
Predictable Chaos as Gitmo Trials Resume

Ron Jacobs
Out of the Haze, Into the Darkness: Recalling 1979

Website of the Day
Why Publishing Can't be Saved (as it is)

July 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"Watch What We Do, Not What We Say"

Nikolas Kozloff
Chiquita in Latin America: From Arbenz to Zelaya

Joanne Mariner
CIA Apples: Bad at the Top of the Tree

Joe Bageant
America's White Underclass

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Road Signs: Wiping Arabic Names Off the Map

Saul Landau
Why So Much Sympathy for Madoff's Dupes and So Little for the Poor?

John Ross
Jurassic Fallout in Mexico

Sue Sturgis
Senator Sessions, Race and Impartiality

Anita Sinha /
Daniel Farbman
The Ricci Case and the Myth of Special Treatment

Peter Morici
Obama's Donut Economics

Pervez Hoodbhoy
Whither Pakistan? A Five-Year Forecast

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the Language of Power

Greg Moses
The Real Demand Crisis

Kia Mistilis
The Niger Delta Crisis

Missy Beattie
The Placebo President

David Ker Thomson
How Not to See: Things to Tell Your Eyeballs

James G. Abourezk
Evil Spirits: the Booze Strip in Indian Country

Paul Richards
Why Does Jon Tester Want to Log Wild Montana?

Dave Lindorff
Dark Days for Working People (With Three Small Rays of Light)

Marc Levy
Just Like Hanoi Jane

Matt Siegfried
The Good War Goes Hot

Stephen Martin
Panopticon Blues

Ben Sonnenberg
Sembène's Faat Kiné

David Macaray
Casablanca: When Melodrama Trumped History

Charles R. Larson
A Pakistani, Victorian Novel Celebrating Women

David Yearsley
That's Women for You: Abbas Kiarostami's Così

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Rattle and Roll: the Sound From England's Gutters

Poets' Basement
Payne, Anderson and Williams

Website of the Weekend
Hitler Learns of Sarah Palin's Resignation

July 16, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
What Economy?

Afshin Rattansi Iranian Planes and the Hidden Toll of Economic Sanctions

Gregory V. Button
The Search for Environmental Justice in Perry County, Alabama

Evan Knappenberger
Profile of a Deserter

Michelle Bollinger
Why is Leonard Peltier Still in Prison?

Russell Mokhiber
White House to ABC News: No Obama Single-Payer Doc

Belén Fernández
Iranian Penetration, Oh My!

Alice Walker
What is Torture Like? A Letter to Obama

Nicholas Dearden
Paying the Climate Debt: the G-8's Troubling Model

Albert Osueke
Sotomayor and the Identity Mountain

Website of the Day
Sotomayor for the Prosecution

July 15, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Assassination Bureau

Vijay Prashad
A Political Recession

Dean Baker
Stimulus Arithmetic

Ray McGovern
Cheney Sweating Bullets

Jonathan Cook
Jenin's Model of "Economic Peace"

David Rosen
Shouts From the Gallery: the Sotomayor Hearings and the Culture Wars

Eric Walberg
Uighurs vs. Afghans: a Study in Contrast

Greg Moses
Three Dimensions of a Complete Stimulus Plan

Sousan Hammad
Decolonizing Israel

Binoy Kampmark
The Trial of Charles Taylor

Tracy McLellan
The Story of My Arrest

Website of the Day
11 Days in Saudi Gitmo

July 14, 2009

Eamonn McCann
The Emperors of Bombast: Bono, U2 and the Crisis of World Capitalism

Joanne Mariner
Obama's New Euphemism

Franklin Spinney
The Taliban Rope-a-Dope

Steve Heilig
Walking Mount Tam: an Interview with Gary Snyder

Ali Abunimah
Hamas' Choice

Dave Lindorff
The End of "Nice" Health Care Reform

Nikolas Kozloff
The Politics of Destabilization: McCain and Honduras

Ellen Brown
From Golden State to Subprime State

Alice Slater
How US Missile Defense Plans Sabotaged Nuclear Disarmament Talks With Russia

Ron Jacobs
Protest U.S. Aggression

Joe Allen
The Fight to Save James Hickman in Jim Crow-Style Chicago

Website of the Day
Mel Brooks Does the French Revolution

July 13, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Essence of the Regime

Mike Whitney
The Deflating Economy

P. Sainath
How the World Depression Hits Orissa

Gareth Porter
A US / Iraq Conflict on Iran

Paul Moore
Rap in the Streets, Rap in the Suites

Tim Wise
Off the Deep End: Private Clubs, Public Prejudice

Andy Worthington Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

David Macaray
Cartoon Voices: Serf's Up in Hollywood

Cal Winslow
The Healthcare Worker War

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Spring in the Time of Obama

Website of the Day
Washington's Deep Game with China

July 10-12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Biden Problem

José Pertierra
The Cuban Five: a Cold War Case in a Post-Cold War World

John Ross
After the Honduran Coup

Conn Hallinan
The Settlements and the Quartet

Nikolas Kozloff
C Street Band: Sex Scandals, Moral Hypocrisy and the Far Right Agenda in Latin America

Clifton Ross /
Marcy Rein
U.S. and Honduras: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Good Neighbor

Carl Ginsburg
Summers' Clouded Crystal Ball

Michael Neumann
Say It Loud, Say It Proud: There is No God!

Gilad Atzmon
The Left and Islam: Thinking Outside of the Secular Box

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Parable of the Golden Parachute

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California Dreamin': How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes

Jim Goodman
Rural America Needs More Than Listening Sessions

Christopher Bickerton
Europe's New Politics of Hard Times

Wendell Potter
Health Care Industry Adopts Tobacco Lobby's Tactics

Dave Lindorff
CIA Lies: Why Isn't Congress in Open Revolt?

David Ker Thomson
Switchbacking Toward Bastille Day

Anthony DiMaggio
The Michael Jackson Feeding Frenzy

Raymond Lawrence
Michael Jackson as Sexual Pervert: the Calumnies of Peter King

Walid El Houri
Neda and Marwa: a Tale of Two Murdered Women

Stephanie Westbrook
Yes, We Camp

Roger Gaess
The Shades of Highgate Cemetery

David Yearsley
Tara, America's Dream House

Kim Nicolini
Caution: Men at Work, Robbing Banks

Poets' Basement
Five Poems From the Japanese

Website of the Weekend
Free Tiga and Hugh!

August 10, 2009

How the Economy was Wrecked by the Politics of Deregulation in Florida

Seeds of Destruction

By ALAN FARAGO

In a series of reports, The Miami Herald discloses the astounding facts behind the $7 billion fraud of Stanford Financial. An absence of regulators. Shredded documents. Bags of cash airlifted from Miami International. It all sounds so Miami Vice. But it is more. Back in the late 1990s, when the Stanford scheme gathered the support of Florida regulators, I toiled as a late career financial advisor at Smith Barney. What it means to be "late career" is that I knew enough by that time that honestly toiling within the lines and hash marks of regulatory authority could not possibly account for the wealth that defined the Miami skyline. Its provenance had far more to do with flight capital from Latin and South America, drugs, and the snatch-and-grab growth schemes that turned Florida's Everglades into Mercedes, private jets, and educational family vacations in Europe by an entire supply chain that prospered by turning a blind eye to the true costs of development. Their Grand Tour of Europe excluded every aspect of the strip mall culture that paid the freight.

Although the Stanford thievery by-passed 99 percent of Quik Mart consumers who bought a pack of cigarettes, a six-pack of beer and a quick box of cereal for the kids, its genesis shares certain common traits with the avoidance and sometimes criminal disregard of development regulations, laws and accounting that provided the backdrop for so much Florida Chamber of Commerce cheerleading, love, and fun in the sun. Stanford created and sold CD's to anyone, but especially to investors who sought out a little more yield, a little better return, and who bought the promise that financial regulators in Florida had guaranteed these were real debt instruments and not a Ponzi Scheme through which Stanford funded his own lifestyle, trappings and accoutrements of a billionaire including virtual control of a sovereign nation, the island of Antigua in the Caribbean. That's where the $7 billion went in satchels, exchanged as script of currencies, then disappeared in a blizzard of electronic transfers through undersea fiber optic cables to accounts and banks in places far, far removed from the scrutiny I endured as a financial advisor who believed in the bedrock values of buying and holding great American corporations as the dot.com bubble inflated, turning the US economy into a patient sucking on a tube filled with laughing gas.

That $7 billion that Allen Stanford allegedly stole isn't funny today. Its fact is buried in a vast blizzard of real debt landing on the plates of real taxpayers: trillions and counting. The Miami Herald reports: "The key to understanding Stanford Financial Group's business at the Miami office could be found on the third page of every customer order. In clear language, the documents show the money paid by clients for the firm's prized investment: certificates of deposit. The next page contained the signature of the broker selling the security. Those records -- blueprints of Stanford's business venture -- were routinely shredded in what became a regular exercise at the downtown center." ("At Stanford's Miami office, documents were routinely shredded", Miami Herald, August 9, 2009)

The Herald reporter is right, but the Herald publisher and editor-in-chief still hold the high cards in this particular hand. Here is what those cards represent. The shredding isn't "the key" to understanding the massive fraud. It is the fact that Stanford Financial, based in Miami, secured a unique privilege from Florida banking regulators in 1998. The year is important. The year is the face card.

It wasn't 9/11 and the historic cuts in interest rates that followed, triggering the housing boom, that spawned our national economic emergency. We did it all ourselves. We required no outside intervention of terrorists. We only had to follow the course of political ambitions that transformed American politics in the 1990's, and in particular the aspirations of grand Republican thinkers who still strut the national stage; plotting now to overturn Democratic advances as they did quite successfully after Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. It all has to do with regulation; the enemy-- in their conception-- of property rights and free enterprise. And its focus was Florida.

In 1998, Lt. Gov. Buddy McKay fought a losing battle to become governor of Florida against developer/campaign contributors-- Miami Republicans-- who organized to push forward their candidate: Jeb Bush. (The Herald news reports do not disclose the exact dates of the Stanford lobbying effort with Florida banking regulators in Tallahassee, the state capitol. Those dates are very important to this story, and investigative journalists should weave these threads closer.)

After losing the governor's race to former US Senator Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, in 1994, Jeb Bush went back to the drawing board to lay the framework for the next election. Jeb's platform was the Foundation for Florida's Future. It was his springboard, employing writers and thinkers who would later become senior staffers and appointees in his administration, to launch attacks on government regulation. It was critical, in their conception, to allow the creative energies of free enterprise to mobilize capital and build wealth. The way this would happen was simply to let the gears of commerce do what they do best: leverage human ingenuity in whatever form it should take. The key concept: leverage.

Besides tourism and agriculture, Florida produces little of anything. But it has been, until the worst economic crisis since the Depression, a magnet for new residents. Developers in Miami, Jeb Bush's adoptive hometown, had far earlier mastered the machinery of building roads and ring suburbs on the cheap. By 1998, Miami-Dade County had turned into a vast melting pot; one of the largest and also poorest counties in the nation with a well developed and wealthy class of developer entrepreneurs eager to do their forefathers one better. They controlled local legislatures through campaign contributions. They owned banks and law firms. What they really needed was more capital and more freedom from burdensome regulation impeding where their large-scale communities could grow.

The Democrat Lawton Chiles, who preceeded Jeb Bush, was highly sensitive to the national trend that President Clinton had captured in 1992 and then lost in 1994 mid-term elections. In Florida, the political context was also to "triangulate" toward conservatives and away from government regulations. Chiles, for instance, endorsed land speculators and big developers by pushing away from growth management policies-- the central regulatory authority that had been established by a Republican governor, Bob Martinez, in 1985.

In an earlier report, the Herald noted the Stanford operation was created as a foreign trust operation, "the only one of its kind in Florida." ("Florida regulators never acted on troubling findings regarding banker Allen Stanford", July 18, 2009) "... when the state allowed the transfer of money (to a foreign nation, Antigua) -- an unprecedented freedom -- it created a completely new enterprise, say experts. To this day, Florida regulators claim they don't know why Stanford -- aided by powerful Miami law firm Greenberg Traurig-- (succeeded in escaping regulatory and law enforcement scrutiny)." The Greenberg Traurig connection is important.

In Miami, Greenberg Traurig is well known as a black hat law firm that virtually operates out of the inner sanctums of Miami and Miami-Dade County zoning processes: the bread and butter work that laid a foundation for a diverse and successful lobbying and regulatory practice. But the Greenberg Traurig connection is another key. Finding ways around regulations for its clients, at the inside edge of the law, is a Greenberg Traurig business model. The law firm's image was badly tarnished by well-known employees like Jack Abramoff, but in 1998 it was on its game. In Miami, the law firm represented campaign contributors-- Republican developers-- who were well-known factors in national electoral politics and exerting substantial influence in the Florida governor's race.

The game, in 1998, pitted a horse-trader in the White House, President Bill Clinton, whose legendary command of political demographics put the competition for Hispanic votes in full view. One of Greenberg Traurig's projects had started in the wake of the devastating 1992 hurricane in South Florida: to convert a massive Air Force Base in Homestead, Florida into a privatized commercial airport for the benefit of Cuban American developers. By 1994, they had already secured a 99 year, no-bid lease from local county commissioners. (The palpable friction between Cuban American Republicans and the White House over the Homestead Air Base issue was a factor in both the 1996 presidential election, that Clinton won, and the 2000 Gore campaign.) The State of Florida, when confronted with air base political support, had rolled over on growth management regulations like a docile pet, inviting lawsuits by environmental groups because the proposed $10 billion dollar venture was on the edge of America's Everglades. Stanford's Miami venture, described by the Herald as a bold plan to "entice Latin Americans to pour millions to his ventures-- in secrecy" did something else: it gave those cracker Tallahassee Democrats a chance to show that the party also understood Spanish. ("Florida aided Allen Stanford, suspect in huge swindle", August 9, 2009)

''It's absolutely insane,'' Bill Branscum, a former U.S. Treasury agent, told the Herald. "That money could have been coming from anyone and going to anyone -- like narco-traffickers or terrorists -- and you never would have known.'' And no one did know: bags of cash were stuffed on planes and sent to Antigua from Miami, where most of Stanford's fraud was generated. State records show, according to the Herald, that 2100 accounts were set up at the Stanford office, generating hundreds of millions in sales of fraudulent financial products, in the first six years.

During this time, Jeb Bush was governor of Florida. In the six years from 1998 state banking officials visited the Miami office of the Stanford operation just two times. "When Florida regulator Keith Jasper arrived at the opulent Miami trust offices of billionaire banker Allen Stanford in 2001, he expected to see records showing that money turned over to the company was safely invested. But when the veteran bank examiner asked for the reports, he was told there were none. In fact, records of the millions of dollars that flowed through the office had been shredded." ("Florida regulators never acted on troubling findings regarding banker Allen Stanford", July 19, 2009)

By 2001, the dot.com boom had deflated. The laughing gas had sucked its own trillions from the economy. The Republican Reformation could now marry its mandate to opportunity, shrinking government, in Grover Norquist's fertile conception, so that it could be drowned in a bathtub. State regulators returned to the Stanford Miami office in 2005. The Herald reports, "After both visits, state agents sent their findings to supervisors, including David Burgess, a senior analyst who helped negotiate the deal with Stanford. At the time of the proposal in 1998, Burgess wrote a crucial memo that helped find a legal justification for Stanford to create his ambitious center. Burgess said a foreign trust office was not supported by Florida law, but said if ''the definition of a trust company can be stretched,'' the office could open "pursuant to the laws of another country.'' He also wrote in his report that Stanford had been "active in cleaning up the Antiguan banking laws.'' But federal records show that six months after Burgess wrote his memo, the U.S. Treasury put Antigua on a money-laundering alert list, saying the new laws pushed by Stanford actually weakened enforcement efforts. Burgess, who still works for the state, did not return calls."

In January 2003, Governor Jeb Bush confidently marked the commencement of his second term: “There will be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers; as silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill.” To the agency bureaucrats, elbow to elbow with economic stakeholders in the front rows, the point was clear. Those bureaucrats included the newly appointed head of the Bureau of Professional Licensing, Donald Saxton, whose office would permit more than 10,000 former felons in Florida to operate as mortgage originators and lenders during the housing boom. ("Borrowers Betrayed", Miami Herald, 2008) The central point was no longer about making government smaller: it was about removing those workers. And who exactly were they? Regulators who threatened developers and bankers.

The crushing irony is that this con game-- not Stanford himself, but the one that allowed him to drive airplanes full of cash to God knows what enterprises helping to undermine the US national security-- is still going on. Amidst a ravaged national economy that makes the dot.com bubble look positively innocent, arguments have been successfully levied by Florida Republicans to loosen regulations still more to allow free markets to breathe new energies and trickle down benefits to weary, angry citizens. The Florida legislature and Governor Charlie Crist, for instance, recently claimed that new laws dismantling regulatory authority for growth management were necessary to revive the struggling home building industry.

It only remains for the mainstream press to connect the dots up the political food chain. The Miami Herald has raised not a whiff of complaint against the jihad against regulation that marked the Jeb Bush terms as governor and continues to this day. It simply will not go there, even though its reporters have laid out the case and facts like rungs of a ladder lacking only vertical supports. Like Bernie Madoff, Allen Stanford was a smart guy who used greed and fear to exploit the politics of regulatory authority. When nothing means anything, anything can happen. Although I left the wealth management business in 1999, I learned: as goes Florida, so goes the nation.

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

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Yellowstone Drift:
Floating the Past
in Real Time
by John Holt
Introduction by Doug Peacock

Click here to Buy!

Spell Albuquerque:
Memoir of a
"Difficult Student"
By Tennessee Reed

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont