Florida Governor Rick Scott is running scared, as the natives become more and more restless over his disastrous environmental policies that are ravaging our beautiful and fragile watery environments.
In Venice, Florida, Scott, who is in a closely contested Senate race against Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, was booed out of the Mojo’s Real Cuban restaurant in the ruby-red county of Sarasota—only to face an even larger, angrier crowd when the coward fled out the back door.
Venice, along with other southwestern Florida communities, has been hard hit by a toxic red tide, which, although a natural occurrence, has been supercharged by agricultural runoff and subsequent discharge from Lake Okeechobee into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers, which carry the pollution to both Florida coasts. Horrified and tearful citizens up and down the Gulf Coast have watched as red tides spread over 1 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico, obliterating beloved manatees and the rest of our treasured marine life. The red tide has slowly inched north, where it has now begun to bring to the metropolitan Tampa Bay area the same death and economic misery that has been ongoing in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico since the beginning of the rainy season.
Florida’s renowned sugar-white sand beaches, now fouled by dark and toxic seaweed and rotting marine-life carcasses, are not the only victims of Florida’ s corrupt and pro-pollution GOP-controlled government. The tourism industry has been hit hard by vacation cancellations, resulting in empty hotels and restaurants, all the while crippling the paychecks of waitresses and waiters, as well as those of deep-sea fishing captains and others dependent on a clean and flourishing marine environment for their livelihoods.
In the below presser, a campaigning Rick Scott is proud as he can be about his water-quality record as governor. Gosh! He is a special kind of dick.
It is Scott, Agriculture Secretary Adam Putnam, and Attorney General Pam Bondi who, within days of taking power in 2010, fought furiously against regulations that would have mitigated the ecological catastrophe unfolding in South Florida, which has its origin in the polluted waters of Lake Okeechobee in Palm Beach County. Julie Hauserman of the Florida Phoenix wondered what the “Republican supporters living on waterfront estates fouled by the rotting stench of dead fish think about pollution regulation now?” Good question. If the toxins wafting in the air from the algae outbreak do not disappear soon, the pampered rich will just have to winter somewhere else this year.
She writes:
Their opposition was ideological; In the November 2010 letter of objection to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, they complained that setting pollution limits for sewage, manure and fertilizer runoff would be an “onerous regulation” by an “overbearing federal government.”
It would also, they argued, interfere with the ability to squeeze every last dollar out of the cash cow that is the Sunshine State.
“We are very concerned about the cost of this onerous regulation to Floridians,” the letter said. “Businesses across Florida are struggling and our unemployment rate is nearly 12%.”
It’s not clear how they thought keeping poop out of the public’s water would make unemployment worse, but whatever.
Senator Nelson has accepted a few Big Sugar donations (grrrr), but that in no way compares to what the corrupt Rick Scott did to the state’s waters after cutting nearly 700 million dollars from environmental agencies that oversee algae outbreaks, in addition to relaxing and/or eliminating environmental regulations.
A Tampa Bay Times piece by Steve Bousquet titled “For Rick Scott, a gusher of oil, gas, and energy campaign money” reveals the deep corruption of an unrepentant ecosystems-killing GOP candidate who has been attempting to green wash his abysmal record since Donald Trump endorsed him for Senate. It is to the polluters from Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma that Oil-Slick Rick has sworn allegiance, and not to the 86 percent of Florida citizens that want this ecological crisis stopped yesterday.
Bousquet writes:
America's oil and gas industry is making a serious investment in Gov. Rick Scott's U.S. Senate campaign.
Scott's midyear campaign report shows at least $880,000 in contributions from oil, gas and energy executives and employees to his campaign and from the industry to a pro-Scott super PAC. The industry is generally aligned with Republican candidates.
Scott's campaign or pro-Scott PACs report donations from Murray Energy PAC, Chevron Employees PAC, Occidental Petroleum PAC, Marathon Petroleum Employees PAC, Valero PAC, Chemstream, Consumer Energy Solutions and Complete Drilling Solutions.
It is essential that polluter-funded Rick Scott not bring his radical anti-environmental agenda to Washington.
Bill Nelson for Senate
Andrew Gillum for Governor
Sean Shaw for Attorney General
Nikki Fried for Florida Commissioner of Agriculture