Two Good Things

"Two Good Things Jeb Bush Did For The State of Florida" by v. johns

Despite last Tuesday’s results in the midterm elections, I’m pretty pleased with how things have turned out, nationally. For one thing, the corporate-owned, stand-for-nothing “Conserva-Dems” are gone, baby, gone! (Half of them, anyway.) Second, Harry Reid, not Mitch McConnell, is Senate Majority leader! Third, Republican’s actually have power, now. (No more whining, please!) Fourth, the Tea Party’s upcoming battles with the their parasitic Republican hosts will make the internal squabbles between the Democrats look like Pokémon! Fifth, can you imagine former Florida Governor Jeb Bush facing off against Sarah Palin in a Republican primary bid for the 2012 Presidential election?

Holy cow! Man, this is gonna be GOOD!

Unfortunately, my tolerance for Republican successes stops there. Here, in Florida, we’ve elected a Republican billionaire outsider as governor (Rick Scott). We’ve also elected an overwhelmingly Republican state legislature. And, finally, we’ve elected, to the U.S. Senate, one of the few successful Tea Party-affiliated candidates to win a seat on that level (Marco Rubio).

Given this state’s decade-long anti-intellectual lull, under Republican rule, there’s a real chance that education, transportation, and scientific research and innovation will fall by the wayside, as lobbyists who specialize in Republican handouts and payoffs head to Tallahassee to feed at the trough, in record numbers. I’m not entirely sure that a Democratic majority, in the state legislature, would be that much better than a Republican one (This is Florida, after all), but their overall perceived commitment to public investment (education, transportation, innovation, etc.) is what separates them from their private-wealth driven counterparts.

Florida’s overall failure in capitalizing on its own diversity, via smart public investment in its people, through education, mobility, and robust research capacity, will only intensify under unchecked one-party control. Keep in mind, long before the nation’s economic collapse, Florida, with its overpriced, speculator-dominated housing market, was well on it’s way to becoming… a lost paradise.

As I had promised to do in a previous post, I’d like to give credit where credit is due by mentioning the two things Jeb Bush left Florida with that Governor-elect Scott can probably only dream of accomplishing. Bush paved the way. It’s up to the citizens of the state of Florida to find the public and political will to move these things forward in a more meaningful way.

First, at the outset of constructing this blog, I recall reading about Jeb Bush’s attendance at a “Power of Regionalism” conference in which Bush encouraged South Florida counties (Palm Beach, Broward, Dade) to work together and cooperate across county lines. Since then, Florida Atlantic University has taken the lead in expanding South Florida’s boundaries beyond the Tri-County Area to include the Treasure Coast and the Keys by encouraging governmental entities to form regional partnerships to tackle common problems like housing, schooling, crime and transportation.

(Ref: FAU CUES, SoFlo.org)

Second, perhaps his most famous act, here in Southeast Florida, was the luring of the prestigious La Jolla, CA-based Scripps Research Institute. Largely seen as a means to steer public funds toward Bush’s greedy home developer friends, this move did not come without controversy. Public and political pressure eventually landed the Institute’s Florida campus in the town of Jupiter, rather than out near the Acreage, where what amounts to a new city would have been created. Scripps Florida is now permanently headquartered near FAU’s Jupiter campus working to develop innovations in such areas as chemistry, infectology and neuroscience.

(Ref: PalmBeachPost.com, TCPalm.com)

With every new governor and every new set of lawmakers comes new sets of priorities. Just as Bush-era priorities, like Scripps, gave way to Charlie Crist’s Everglades land deal, incoming governor Rick Scott will have his own pet projects that will take priority over those of the aforementioned former governors of this state. It’s up to the people to see to it that our investments in these projects continue to get priority so that we can get a valuable return on them.

So far, our state’s investment in the “power of regionalism” has not only led to more cooperation among local governments and businesses in Tampa and Orlando, thanks to the Southeast Florida Regional Partnership, here in South Florida, it has also netted our own home region, the state’s flagship region, a 4.5 million dollar federal grant to begin developing a regional master plan. Furthermore, the addition of Scripps Florida to our region, even on a scale smaller than imagined, has added economic diversity, higher paying jobs, biotech spin-offs, has attracted other institutions (Torrey Pines, VGTI, Max Planck, Digital Domain?, etc.) and has ensured our state a promising spot at the biotechnology research and development table… should our nation actually insist that massive research and innovation should form a higher proportion of GDP than consumption.

(Ref: PalmBeachPost.com, Fareed Zakaria GPS).

I really do believe that good governance, here in Florida, combined with better education systems and a more solid mobility infrastructure, could have spared our state from some components of the national economic meltdown, had we been prepared. This, based on our state’s untapped capacity to function similarly to a small country.

Only time will tell what direction Florida will find itself heading in, anytime after January… I’ve come to expect nothing short of total ruthlessness and incompetence from politicians of any political stripe, though I do have my own personal exemptions from these notions. What troubles me these days, more than anything, is the seeming inability of the public, at large, to avoid meaningless distractions and to settle civilly on priorities that will benefit all of our state’s inhabitants… all of our nation’s inhabitants… starting with those most in need and working our way on up from there...

Only through committed public and private investments in three surefire areas – (1) education, (2) transportation, (3) research and innovation - can this be done most effectively …and efficiently. All this, in effect, would render our state in its highest position to become the premiere place in the world to live, work, study, play, relax and do business… But only if the will to do so is there…