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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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July 7, 2016
Miami Herald
Governor ignores Big Sugar’s role in toxic algae infestation
Toxic algae bloom along the St. Lucie watershed choking tourism and sickening residents
Latest outbreak just a severe variation of the algae problems plaguing the St. Lucie over the last decade
Governor blames federal government but fails to mention farm pollution flowing into Lake Okeechobee
A blue-green algae bloom near the St. Lucie Canal in Lake Okeechobee. The bloom has been blamed for affecting water quality downstream all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Water full of algae laps along the Sewell's Point shore on the St. Lucie River under an Ocean Boulevard bridge, Monday, June 27, 2016. Sign near the waterfront in Stuart A blue-green algae bloom near the St. Lucie Canal in Lake Okeechobee. The bloom has been blamed for affecting water quality downstream all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Water full of algae laps along the Sewell's Point shore on the St. Lucie River under an Ocean Boulevard bridge, Monday, June 27, 2016.
STUART, FLA.
Marta Rivera paused for a moment to read the city’s “declaration of emergency” sign near the entrance of the Boatyard, a waterfront restaurant in downtown Stuart with a deck offering diners what used to be an alluring proximity to the St. Lucie River.
Bold red letters on the yellow poster warned, “ADVISORY. High Bacteria and Blue Green Algae. AVOID CONTACT WITH THE WATER.” So much for the river’s allure. “Wow,” said Rivera, a visitor from Orlando. “This can’t be good for business.”
Talk about understatement. Tourism in Stuart and Martin County is choking on a toxic cyanobacteria scum called called microcystis. Residents? They’re retching. “When the wind’s right, the air just gags you,” said part-time resident Beverly Nelson, wrinkling her nose. Fellow Martin Countians have complained of rashes, nausea, diarrhea, inflamed eyes and irritated throats.
A massive algae bloom has flourished along the St. Lucie estuary, forming Starry Night swirls on the water surface, like a Van Gogh painted in DayGlo green. Then the wind blows the stuff against the river bank or into coves and marinas. The algae piles up into foamy layers, inches thick, while the sun bakes it into a reeking gelatinous mess.
So much for waterside dining, paddle boarding, kayaking. Beaches were (temporarily) closed. Fish kills preempted fishing. At MarineMax, a high-end boat dealership upriver from Stuart, Mike Damask and his co-workers talk about the absurdity of trying to sell an expensive motor launch next to a waterway garnished in green fetid slime.
“THE SUMMER IS LOST.”
Sebastian Lahara
Sebastian Lahara, who in a normal summer would be leading kayaking expeditions out of Tri-Athletica, his Stuart sports shop next to Frazier Creek, has given up. No one wants to pay to paddle through the pea soup clogging up the St. Lucie and its tributaries. Even on summer days when the algae infestation seems less acute, his customers complain of headaches and respiratory discomfort. “The summer is lost,” he said.
On June 26, Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency for Martin, St. Lucie and Palm Beach counties on the east coast and Lee County in the west coast, where a similar dross has afflicted the Caloosahatchee River. Except Stuart residents dislike the use of the term “emergency” to describe a recurring, predictable, preventable water crisis.
This year’s cyanobacteria outbreak is only a severe variation of the algae blooms that have plagued these watersheds for more than a decade. Infestations follow major water releases from Lake Okeechobee, when the Army Corps of Engineers opens the spillways to relieve pressure on the lake’s old earthen dike and billions of gallons of nutrient-laden water cascade into the St. Lucie and the Caloosahatchie waterways.
Scott blamed President Obama and the “negligence of the federal government” for the slow progress in hardening the dike that surrounds the lake. But the governor can’t bring himself to mention the primary source of the nitrogen and phosphorus pollution that’s tainting the lake water. Most of that comes from farm runoff, particularly from the area’s sugar cane fields.
This is a governor who has resisted clean water standards, who disparages environmental regulations, who’s allied himself with corporate agriculture. Earlier this year, he signed a law that essentially allows Big Ag to police itself when it comes to fertilizer pollution. And last year, Scott’s appointees on the South Florida Water Management District scuttled plans to buy 46,800 acres of sugar company land below the lake where the state had once planned to build giant retention ponds to store and filter the polluted lake water.
We can see (and smell) what his policies have wrought. After unusually heavy rains last January, the Corps opened the spillways and Martin County was soon choking on the results. “We’ve never had algae that bad so early in the year,” Lahara told me.
It would get worse. In May, the NASA Observatory released satellite photos showing an algae bloom that covered 33 square miles of Lake Okeechobee’s surface. It was pretty obvious what would be flowing Stuart’s way.
On Wednesday, Scott’s office, still avoiding the subject of farm runoff, announced he would seek money in next year’s budget for matching funds “to encourage residents to move from septic tanks to sewer systems in order to curb pollution.”
Sure, leaky septic tanks contribute to algae blooms and fish kills, but Scott is ignoring the damage caused by agricultural pollution.
“Oh, the politicians know how they can stop the algae,” Beverly Nelson said. Except Big Sugar has a lot more influence than little Stuart.
Fred Grimm: fgrimm@miamiherald.com, @grimm_fred
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fred-grimm/article88286317.html#storylink=cpy |
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Sat Jul 09, 2016 7:37 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Huffington Post
THE BLOG
When Charity That Begins at Home, Wrecks the Home: US Sugar Corporation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation
02/29/2016 07:17 pm ET | Updated Mar 04, 2016
430
Alan Farago
1300 miles separates Flint, Michigan where mostly poor African Americans have been exposed to toxic amounts of lead in drinking water, and Clewiston, Florida — home of US Sugar Corporation. The distance is nothing to the descendants of Charles Stewart Mott.
Mott built his fortune in the early 20th century through an automotive empire that became General Motors. He also bought a Florida sugar company along the way, US Sugar Corporation; the largest producer of sugarcane in the state.
River Warriors protest filthy water coating both coasts, Stuart FL, Feb. 26 2016
The Charles Stuart Mott Foundation, based in Flint, has an endowment of more than $2.7 billion. One of its core missions is protection of fresh water resources. In recent years the foundation awarded grants to; “ensuring healthy river flows”, “Alabama Urban Stormwater Project”, “Harbor Maintainance and Upstream Sediment Reduction”, “Great Lakes Water Quality Project”, and the “Tulane Environmental Law Clinic Water Quality and Wetlands Project”. The Foundation and the CS Mott Children’s Hospital are controlling shareholders of US Sugar Corporation.
Mott established the C.S. Mott Foundation in 1926; a lasting legacy of care and help protecting the welfare of Flint, Michigan. Despite its long history supporting clean water, the foundation was surprised as anyone about the massive contamination of drinking water brewing under its own feet. It is hard to know how the foundation squares its ownership of US Sugar with similar perils to water quality in Florida.
The problem with Big Sugar that dominates water policies and politics in Florida: it is everyone’s peril.
The vast toilet in Florida called Lake Okeechobee is overflowing. The lake is the largest in Florida and also defines the political geography of one of the nation’s most politically influential states. Historic January rainfall elevated lake water levels a foot above the safety zone in the middle of winter, the season the lake is normally allowed to dry down in anticipation of coming rains. Because of concentrated drainage basins upstream and downstream, too, where sugarcane is grown, a foot of rainfall translates to a four-foot rise in lake levels. After unprecedented winter rainfall and to relieve pressure on the aging dike, the state and the US Army Corps of Engineers opened the floodgates of hell on downstream communities. Beginning in late January, more than 60,000 gallons per second of filthy water began spewing towards billions of dollars of downstream real estate and tourism-dependent businesses on both Florida coasts.
Fort Myers pollution, Feb 27 2016 photo credit: John Heim
This failed response by government to pollution in some ways resembles the Flint catastrophe, except that Florida’s does not strictly involve poor African Americans requiring rescue from trucks filled with bottled water. In Florida, the manifest failures of state government and politics have beached the livelihoods of fishing guides, realtors, hotels and motel and tourism-dependent businesses onto scummy shores of political indecision like dead fish.
The bright fact is that water infrastructure in South Florida is organized around powerful sugar growers who farm on nearly 450,000 acres around the southern rim of the Lake in an area called the Everglades Agricultural Area. When it is too dry or when it is too wet, Big Sugar demands that its fields are irrigated to extract maximum profits. The Goldilocks principle of water management serves Big Sugar, whether it floods or drought prevails. And especially when it is too wet, if water managers deem the dike integrity to be threatened, massive pump stations and spigot are turned to release billions of gallons of polluted water to the east and to the west, pouring scum from beaches on the Gulf and Atlantic to the horizon.
The industry’s privileges are well-documented including massive profits through federal farm subsidies regularly approved by Congress and control of water infrastructure and pollution by the GOP led state legislature in Tallahassee. Through adroit manipulation of Congressional votes on US farm policy, Florida sugar producers are among the richest recipients of subsidized, corporate welfare in the nation. Forbes Magazine crystalized the sugar subsidy embedded in the Farm Bill:
“The federal program that resembles a Soviet Union relic works as follows: the U.S. Department of Agriculture guarantees a price floor for American sugar, below which it spends hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up excess sugar and bump the price back up to the minimum. Uncle Sam then sells the sugar at a steep discount to ethanol producers. Limits on imports also artificially prop up the prices that domestic sugar producers can charge. American consumers get fleeced on two fronts. Not only must they foot the bill for the subsidy scheme, they also have to pay higher prices at the grocery store for sugar, cakes, and confections. The U.S. sugar regime is cronyism at its finest.” (“Big Sugar: Sanders and Rubio Share A Sweet Tooth“, Forbes Magazine, August 25, 2015)
These days, protesters are massing along bridges and on beaches, in public meetings but especially on social media: a modern-day Florida Uprising in an electorate that is largely conservative, wealthy compared to the citizens of Flint, and inclined to vote Republican.
The industry at the center of emergency is also pushing back. Big Sugar and its supporters are blanketing affected counties with full page ads in local newspapers, assuring readers and politicians they support that Big Sugar is really just plain ordinary folk trying to make an honest hourly wage like the rest of Florida.
But massive pollution events have a way of blowing apart false equivalencies that serve an entrenched political status quo. That status quo in Flint is primarily a Republican invention: that burdensome environmental rules are a symptom of bloated environmental regulation and bureaucrats who go overboard in oppressing business and inhibiting jobs when, after all, the water you drink is perfectly fine as it is. With everyone looking the other way, the people of Flint were poisoned by a GOP governor.
It is a different demographic in Florida’s water crisis. These aren’t environmentalists, as Big Sugar portrays, raising alarm from privileged sanctuaries. Poisoned water is linking hundreds of thousands of people who don’t belong to Sierra Club or any other organization and vote mainly Republican.
One YouTube video by fishing guide Mike Conner has been viewed nearly 400,000 times. Capt. Conner vents while in the background, filthy water courses through the gates of hell out of Lake Okeechobee. Facebook is filled, now, with photos of dead dolphin, fish floating white bellies up, and the lament of small business owners whose livelihoods depend on water too afraid of infection to even touch it. Both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts are now coated in toxic pollution, extending into the ocean.
Buy the land, send clean water south. Communities downstream barely recovered from the vomitorium the lake had turned into three years ago. GOP legislators, Gov. Rick Scott and presumptive heir, Agriculture Secretary Adam Putnam, are studiously side-stepping the single measure that could provide future relief for taxpayers, for the rivers, estuaries and for the Everglades: purchase enough land now in sugarcane production south of Lake Okeechobee so that eventually clean, fresh water could course as it did naturally. Yesterday, Gov. Scott finally responded to the protesters declaring a state of emergency, nearly two months after the crisis started, blaming President Obama although everyone in Florida understands that Scott had a chance to take steps to resolve the crisis and failed: buy the land and send clean water south.
People are pushing back at a political order that has held in Florida for decades: the use of water infrastructure to keep Big Sugar in place by using others’ property as sacrifice zones and taxpayers to prop up the whole, stinking mess.
“The bulk of the Mott Foundation’s environmental work in the United States focuses on the freshwater challenge, with special emphasis on the country’s Great Lakes region.” There is no difference between the impacts of industrial agriculture on the Great Lakes, where the Foundation is investing resources to protect, and former Everglades, polluted by a corporation it controls: US Sugar. (William S. White has been both president of the Flint, Michigan-based foundation and chairman and CEO of US Sugar Corporation.)
Charitable organizations like the Mott Foundation are prohibited by law from engaging in political activities, but US Sugar exercises its massive leverage through campaign contributions at every level of government; from local county commissions to the White House. In the last quarter of 2015, US Sugar Corporation spent $165,000 lobbying in Tallahassee (“AT&T, HCA, U.S. Sugar in top three for lobbying expenses“, Feb. 15, 2016).
These days, US Sugar is seeking out voices from poor African American communities to come to its defense, but in 2014, the Tampa Bay Times reported secret trips hosted by US Sugar at the King Ranch in Texas - one of the wealthiest corporate entities in Texas — , with top Florida GOP officials, including the Gov. Rick Scott and Ag Secretary Adam Putnam. Only Republicans were invited, ferried by private jet to the exclusive hunting lodge. “The King Ranch trips weren’t disclosed in any financial reports the Republican Party of Florida filed with the state. Unlike other fundraisers that were clearly listed, the trips were only alluded to by the listing of non-cash contributions that the party reported having accepted from U.S. Sugar.” (“Florida legislators have stopped taking US Sugar trips to King Ranch“, Feb. 9, 2015)
US Sugar was also a key player in a county commission race in Lee County in 2012. The corporation invested nearly $1MM dollars to defeat a 24-year incumbent, Ray Judah, a rare Republican leader who had been one of the staunchest critics of Big Sugar’s polluting practices. Judah said, in an interview, this was the first time so much money had been invested in a coordinated attack through television, in a local county election.
“A number of individuals and organizations came together to create that perfect storm that was an overwhelming avalanche that I could not prevent from removing me from office,” Judah told the Naples Daily News (August 6, 2012). Judah was removed in the first election cycle after the 2010 US Supreme Court 5-4 decision on Citizens United; the legal challenge to campaign finance limits that let the wild dogs loose.
Judah, one of the strongest advocates on Florida’s west coast —had been a strong supporter of the effort by the state in 2008 to acquire US Sugar’s 187,000 acres in the EAA. The deal had been approved by the shareholders including the board of the Charles Stuart Mott Foundation. Former GOP Gov. Charlie Crist had initiated the deal and paid his own political price only a few years later when his quixotic effort to run for the US Senate as a Democrat was thwarted by a Republican challenger with deep support from Big Sugar, Marco Rubio.
“They wanted me out.” ... Judah said of the tsunami of political money that was spent against him by a PAC called Florida First. ... Florida First’s contributions came largely from other political committees.”
Documents filed with the state at the time show Nancy H. Watkins as treasurer of the poitical action committee. In 2012, The Palm Beach Post reported, “Watkins said she oversees as many as 120 political committees, some of them existing largely just on paper. But about half that number, she said, “are going fast and furiously right now.” ... The biggest contributors to Florida’s ruling Republicans are Florida’s largest industries and associations, with the state’s Chamber of Commerce, Walt Disney Corp., Florida Association of Realtors and U.S. Sugar among those dominating.” (“Florida the ‘Wild West’ for third-party PACs“, Oct. 8 2012,) Palm Beach Post.
Exactly how this happened should send shudders through the charitable foundation.
On June 27, 2012, US Sugar contributed $125,000 to a political committee called Partnership for Florida’s Future, identified in the state campaign finance database as “an electioneering communications organization”. Two months later, on August 7, US Sugar contributed an additional $200,000.
The same day, Partnership for Florida’s Future contributed $225,000 to Florida First, and on August 9th, an additional $70,000.
Bear in mind, this was the first election cycle after the Citizens United decision by the US Supreme Court unleashed a tidal wave of unlimited corporate contributions to political campaigns through dark money vehicles.
Only four years earlier, Judah had been alone among GOP public officials to advocate and to support the state buyout of 187,000 acres of lands owned by US Sugar. The land sale was approved by shareholders of Charles Stuart Mott Foundation.
Judah’s defeat was part of a coordinated effort by Big Sugar to halt the purchase of sugar lands south of Florida’s polluted lake. If the land sale had been completed, the state of Florida would have been on the way to solving the crisis that materialized in 2016 crisis coating both Florida coasts with scum.
In 2008, when the Mott family interests solicited bids and decided to sell US Sugar, the corporation generated considerable anger among long-time US Sugar pensioners. When the descendants of Charles Stuart Mott approved the deal with the state of Florda, environmentalists entertained a glimmer of hope that such a large land acquisition would finally point in the direction of purchasing key parcels held by competitors like the Fanjul’s Flo-Sun/Florida Crystals and the King Ranch, also farmers and strategic land speculators in the EAA.
In 2010, US Sugar Corporation invested $100,000 in opposition to Fair Districts, the constitutional amendment to prohibit gerry-mandering that passed with more than 60 percent of a populist vote. The corporation donated more than $2.6 million to the Republican Party and Gov. Scott’s re-election committee since 2012. U.S. Sugar gave $200,000 and competitor Florida Crystals and subsidiaries contributed $275,000 to the campaign of Gov. Rick Scott, (“US Sugar Corporation makes big contribution to Scott’s inauguration, Treasure Coast Newspaper, Dec. 12, 2014).
Despite the fact that Florida voters approved a dedicated funding source in the 2014 election cycle, by more than 75 percent of the popular vote, to buy environmentally sensitive lands like those south of Lake Okeechobee, Scott has refused any discussion of state purchases of Big Sugar lands.
In the current election cycle, US Sugar has give to $249,000 to four PACs: Citizens Speaking Out, Florida Citizens for Change, Truth Matters, and The Committee for Responsible Representation. Its record, as analyzed over the past 17 years by the website, Follow The Money, is favoring the GOP and its candidates over Democrats by a ration of 10:1. US Sugar Corporation gave $505,000 to the PAC supporting Jeb Bush, Right To Rise, in early 2015. The gift was at first made by a charitable foundation of US Sugar, controlled by three US Sugar executives, but was quickly amended to a direct contribution from the corporation in order for the US Sugar Charitable Trust to avoid prosecution for violating IRS rules. (“Jeb Bush’s shadow campaign chalks up a fishy donor disclosure to an administrative error“, Quartz, August 5, 2015 )
In 2015, the Naples Daily News reported: (“Sugar from Cuba not a concern to US sugar producers”, June 29, 2015)
“U.S. Sugar has paid the D.C. lobbying law firm Davis and Harman $50,000 per quarter since January 2014, when the most recent five-year Farm Bill was being negotiated. Florida Crystals paid the Washington-based firm Smith and Boyette $120,000 in the same period for work on legislation involving free-trade agreements, among other things, records show. Five sugar industry groups — the American Sugar Alliance, American Crystal Sugar, U.S. Beet Sugar Association, Fanjul Corp. and the Sugar Cane League — paid $8.4 million for lobbyist last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a good-government watchdog group.”
Big Sugar’s recent efforts resulted in the South Florida Water Management District board’s unanimous vote in May to terminate its option to buy 48,600 acres of U.S. Sugar Corp. land south of Lake Okeechobee for use as a water storage area.
The water management district had been in favor of the plan until recently, but Big Sugar’s plans changed, said Richard Grosso, director of the Land Use Law Clinic at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale.
Grosso believes it’s no coincidence that U.S. Sugar is proposing an 18,000-unit residential development called Sugar Hill on some of the option land south of Clewiston, accommodating 58,000 people by the time it is built out, according to Southwest Florida Regional Planning District documents. Part of the development would be on Caloosahatchee restoration land.
U.S. Sugar maintained that the largest 26,000-acre parcel of the option land, if dug out four feet deep, would only have held 104,000 acre-feet of water, a small fraction of the 4.5 million acre-feet discharged to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers in 2013.”
In a letter published in the Treasure Coast Newspapers, Fort Pierce resident Kevin Stinnette wrote recently: “Despite studies that show that temporarily flooded fields do not pose a major risk to sugar production, Big Sugar puts communities south of the lake at risk, pollutes the lake, puts more pressure on the dike and causes devastation to coastal estuaries and the economies that are driven by diverse and healthy waters. Excess storm water should recharge aquifers by soaking in on EAA farms. It should not be pumped into the canals that threaten communities like Belle Glade. SFWMD backpumps under emergency provisions that could just as easily be used to have farmers turn off their pumps for two or three weeks while water evaporates or soaks in. Such a suspension could free up capacity for Lake Okeechobee water in the water conservation areas and reduce the chances of a dike failure that could devastate communities south of the lake. It would be a good start toward sending the water south when it needs to go south. Cost to taxpayers? Zilch!” (Treasure Coast Palm, February 15, 2016)
In its published information, the Charles Stuart Mott Foundation writes: “From its earliest origins, the Foundation’s major concern has been the well-being of communities and all that they encompass — individuals, families, neighborhoods and civic organizations. Today, this interest continues to play out through grantmaking in Flint as well as communities far beyond the Foundation’s home city.”
One can only guess how the founder of the family fortune would feel about these inescapable contradictions. Charles Stuart Mott was not just a philanthropist. He was deeply engaged in improving the lives of workers in Flint and also a three-time mayor of the city. He would likely be horrified by the steady, persistent erosion of federal authority and lax indifference of the state that lead to the massive lead contamination of his city today.
Here, too, there is a parallel with Big Sugar in Florida and the role of US Sugar in suppressing the regulation of toxics. The issue isn’t phosphorous or nitrogen, used to fertilize sugar fields. It is sulfate, used as a soil additive to increase crop yield. The science is well-established how sulfate, drained from sugar farms, leads to the formation of one of the deadliest toxins; methyl mercury.
The website of the CS Mott Children’s Hospital in Flint explains: “When mercury builds up to toxic levels in the human body, it can cause permanent neurological damage. If you are pregnant, mercury is dangerous to your developing fetus and later to your breast-feeding baby. A fetus exposed to mercury during pregnancy is especially likely to suffer mild to severe nervous system damage. In the same way, young children who eat a lot of fish containing mercury can suffer permanent brain damage.”
One of the detrimental actions in the Everglades agricultural area occurs because these former Everglades soils lack free nutrients. To grow crops, farmers must make phosphate available. Because alkaline soils bind all the nutrients, farmers add elemental sulfur by the ton to adjust the soil pH and free the nutrients. Sulfur is converted to sulfate (sulfuric acid) by bacterial action. This feeds the sulfate-reducing bacteria that make methylmercury. As it turns out, it is evident that sulfate additions in this agricultural area have more to do with the methylmercury problem in the Everglades than mercury falling from the sky. Efforts are now being made to work out what the primary controlling set of processes is and the external factors that led to this large problem of mercury contamination in the Everglades.
South Florida is an area with ecosystem-wide postings for mercury, unique to fish consumption advisories for mercury in the United States. Only in South Florida does it say that no one should eat fish. Everywhere else, advisories state that one can eat one fish per month if you are not pregnant or of childbearing age. The eating and catching of fish are curtailed as revenue of hundreds of millions of dollars is being lost because tourists no longer come to fish.
Drainage canals in the agricultural area keep fields from becoming flooded, but they also convey the sulfate put on fields to the Everglades. The result is a 100-mile-long sulfate gradient that runs from the agricultural area just south of Lake Okeechobee all the way down to Everglades National Park. (Methylmercury Contamination of Aquatic Ecosystems: A Widespread Problem with Many Challenges for the Chemical Sciences, David P. Krabbenhoft, U.S. Geological Survey, Water Resources Division)
According to its website, The CS Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan is launching a new telemedicine program to help reduce childhood obesity. (April 21, 2015) It is paradoxical, to say the least, that the hospital also profits from the massive political influence-peddling that makes sugar a widely available addictive substance to consumers and also the most ubiquitous. About seventy percent of processed foods contain sugar additives.
The children’s hospital is consistently ranked as one of the top pediatric centers in the country according to U.S. News and World Report, but it is the influence peddling of US Sugar that contributes to the illnesses like obesity its dedicated employees are fighting every day. Pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig assesses the cumulative health cares cost of too-much-sugar in the American diet at a trillion dollars, annually.
Big Sugar is pushing back. In Florida, it is deploying the same tactics it used twenty years ago to thwart a constitutional amendment referendum that would have assessed a penny-a-pound tax on sugar to clean up the frightful mess it has caused by rallying poor African Americans around the issue of threatened jobs. In Washington, the industry is so powerful that Michele Obama and her “Get Moving” campaign was called off from criticizing sugar consumption, the primary cause of childhood diabetes and a disease focusing the attention of the CS Mott Children’s Hospital.
The US Sugar Corporation website states, “As the vision of Charles Stewart Mott continues to unfold, U.S. Sugar is positioned to meet the challenges of the future with the same innovative thinking and respect for its employees and the environment that it has always exhibited.”
For people, though, this time is different. The civic convulsion is uniting voters on both Florida coasts. In the past, voters in Sarasota and Fort Myers have not coalesced with the same energy around the same causes as Port St. Lucie or Stewart on the east coast. By-passing traditional media that has served as a blockade for Big Sugar, this turmoil around water pollution is coursing through a state heading to presidential primaries on March 15.
Water is personal, as the people of Flint, Michigan can attest. It is also political. In the last session of the state legislature, the GOP led officials including Gov. Scott refused to allocate funds to buy environmentally sensitive lands as voters had overwhelmingly approved in 2014. In the current session of the legislature, the same GOP officials overhauled state water policy to benefit agriculture; lower pollution standards and voluntary compliance measures were cemented as the new order at the same time historic rainfall over-filled Florida’s polluted cup.
By accounts, Charles Stewart Mott understood how taking care of workers, quality of life, and protecting the environment were complementary activities of sound business practices.
The controlling shareholders of US Sugar are a family philanthropy and a children’s hospital not the other way around. Based on the confusion of roles, one can easily imagine that were he alive today, Charles Stewart Mott would be funding protesters holding signs on Florida bridges and in town squares demanding the end to pollution in Florida, not abetting the rampant pollution of Florida. |
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Sat Jul 09, 2016 7:50 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Chronicle of Philanthropy
ELSEWHERE ONLINE
MARCH 02, 2016
Fla. Activists Hit Mott Foundation for U.S. Sugar Ties
Environmental activists are targeting the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation over its ownership of the U.S. Sugar Corporation, which critics blame for environmental degradation in the Everglades, Broward Palm Beach New Times writes. Protesters demonstrated Monday outside a conference for environmental grant makers in Miami attended by Mott Foundation representatives.
The allegations are detailed in a Huffington Post article by Alan Farago, a former local Sierra Club official and head of an Everglades preservation group, who contends state water-management policies are skewed toward protecting sugar production around Lake Okeechobee. Charles Stewart Mott purchased U.S. Sugar in 1931, and the company is now majority-owned by the foundation and the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital.
The $2.8 billion foundation counts environmental protection among its priorities, funding clean-water programs for the Great Lakes and across the country. A Mott representative did not return a New Times call for comment.
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ADVOCACY AND MISSION, GOVERNMENT AND REGULATION, FOUNDATION GIVING |
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Sat Jul 09, 2016 7:55 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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NEW YORK TIMES
In Stock Plan, Employees See Stacked Deck
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
MAY 29, 2008
A DIFFERENT CULTURE In Clewiston, Fla., U.S. Sugar was known as a good citizen. But after Nafta, the company changed as it rushed to lower its costs. Credit Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times
CLEWISTON, Fla. — Thousands of workers at U.S. Sugar thought they were getting a good deal when the company shelved their pension plan and gave them stock for their retirement instead. They had a heady sense of controlling their own destiny as they became the company’s biggest shareholders, Vic McCorvey, a former farm manager there, said.
“It was always stressed to me, as manager of that 20,000-acre farm, that the better you do, the higher your stock will be and the more retirement you could get,” Mr. McCorvey said. “That’s why I worked six and seven days a week, 14 hours a day,” slogging through wet and buggy cane fields, doing whatever it took.
Now that many U.S. Sugar workers are reaching retirement age, though, the company has been cashing them out of the retirement plan at a much lower price than they could have received. Unknown to them, an outside investor was offering to buy the company — and their shares — for far more. Longtime employees say they have lost out on tens of thousands of dollars each and millions of dollars as a group, while insiders of the company came out ahead.
Some former U.S. Sugar employees have since filed a lawsuit accusing company insiders of cheating them out of money that was rightfully theirs. Throughout, the worker-owners have been shut out of information about the company’s finances and unable to challenge management’s moves or vote because their shares were held through a retirement plan, not directly.
What has happened at U.S. Sugar could happen at many other companies because of a type of retirement plan that proliferated in the 1980s, after powerful members of Congress took an interest in “worker ownership” as a way to improve productivity.
Thousands of companies, large and small, embraced the ensuing tax benefits by creating employee stock ownership plans, known as ESOPs. U.S. Sugar, the largest American producer of cane sugar, took its stock off the public market in the transaction that created its ESOP, in 1983.
Nearly 95 percent of the country’s 10,000 ESOPs are now at privately held companies, like U.S. Sugar. Because their shares are not publicly traded, there is no market price. So workers cash out shares without knowing what the price would be on an open market.
The former employees accuse U.S. Sugar insiders — descendants of the industrialist Charles Stewart Mott — of scheming to enrich themselves by buying back workers’ shares on the cheap. They say “the principal actor” is William S. White, the company’s longtime chairman, who is married to Mr. Mott’s granddaughter. They also say he improperly exerted his influence as chairman of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, whose mission is to advance human rights and fight poverty and which holds a big stake in U.S. Sugar.
Photo
Vic McCorvey at his home in Clewiston, Fla. “It was always stressed to me, as manager of that 20,000-acre farm, that the better you do, the higher your stock will be and the more retirement you could get,” Mr. McCorvey said. Credit Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times
“They robbed us,” said Loretta Weeks, who worked in U.S. Sugar’s lab, testing sucrose levels in cane juice. “It’s like the last 15 years we were working for nothing.”
U.S. Sugar said in a statement that the lawsuit had no merit and that the company would vigorously contest it, but it did not respond to any specific accusations.
Through his lawyer, Mr. White denied that he had improperly exerted control over the U.S. Sugar board, or that the Mott Foundation had anything to do with the decision not to sell to the outside investor. The lawyer, H. Douglas Hinson, also said that Mr. White and the Mott Foundation had no role in deciding what price employees received for their stock, because the price was set in an independent appraisal.
Members of Congress tried to prevent disputes over the fair market value of shares in employee stock plans by requiring private companies to get independent appraisals each year. But workers at U.S. Sugar say the chairman and his allies withheld crucial information from the appraiser and artificially depressed the share price, something the chairman denies. The employees do not accuse the appraiser of wrongdoing.
Missed Opportunities
To document their claims, the former workers cite two offers to buy U.S. Sugar for $293 a share — offers that came as the workers were being cashed out of their shares by the company for as little as $194 a share. The worker-owners were not told about these outside offers and had no chance to tender their shares. They found out only through word of mouth, after the board of U.S. Sugar had rejected both offers.
As retiring workers cash out their shares, the company then retires their stock. That leaves fewer shares outstanding over time, the lawsuit says, allowing the insiders’ control of U.S. Sugar to grow, without their having to spend a penny buying stock. In this way, Mr. White’s immediate family increased its stake in U.S. Sugar by 19 percent from 2000 to 2005, the lawsuit says.
The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation issued a statement saying that as a major U.S. Sugar shareholder, it was confident that U.S. Sugar’s board had “acted responsibly and within its duties.” It also said the workers’ lawsuit contained accusations that were inaccurate.
While they wait for their lawsuit to inch through federal court, U.S. Sugar’s former employees say they are struggling to get by on fewer retirement dollars than they should have received. Many are former field workers, machine operators and mechanics, paid by the hour and living in one of Florida’s poorest counties. Some said the disputed stock plan was their sole retirement nest egg.
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YEARS OF WORK Vic McCorvey when he managed a farm for U.S. Sugar. He was laid off in 2004. Credit Vic McCorvey, 2000
“I had to go back to work,” said Randy Smith, who retired last year after 25 years as a welder and machinist. He was only 55, but said U.S. Sugar had forced him to retire after declaring him no longer qualified to do his job. The company has been cutting staff aggressively for several years.
Mr. Smith said he cashed out of the retirement plan for about $90,000, but could have received about $53,000 more, if he had had the chance to tender his shares and the company had accepted the outside offers. The extra money would help a lot, he said, because his wife, Sandra, has rheumatoid arthritis, and after he retired, U.S. Sugar canceled its retiree health plan.
Mr. Smith has since found a new job, with health benefits — but it pays $10 an hour, compared with the $23 an hour he once earned at U.S. Sugar.
“My wife, she’s having to work two jobs just to make ends meet,” he said.
Mr. McCorvey said that he and his wife, Marilyn, also a former employee, have calculated that the outside offers would have been worth $137,000 more to them. He was laid off in 2004; an executive assistant, she was laid off in 2002.
Even though they no longer work at the company, they cannot cash out their stock, because of plan vesting rules, they said.
Meanwhile, the stock price has been falling, based on appraisals and cash-out values supplied by the company.
“I’m scared I’m going to lose it all,” Mr. McCorvey said.
Owners, but Excluded
To make matters worse, U.S. Sugar announced in April that it was eliminating its dividend. The McCorveys had been receiving dividends worth about $7,000 a year on their shares.
They and other former U.S. Sugar workers said they had planned to attend the company’s annual meeting this month, so they could tell management their complaints as shareholders.
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Tommy Miller retired after 32 years. Credit James Patterson for The New York Times
But this year, for the first time, the company announced that employee-shareholders would not be allowed to attend the annual meeting. It said that they were not the shareholders of record, and that as a result they would be represented by the trustee of their plan, the U.S. Trust Company.
A spokeswoman for Bank of America, which owns U.S. Trust, said the company believed it had fulfilled all of its duties as the trustee.
Experts said it was unusual to bar participants in employee stock plans from shareholders’ meetings.
“It is legal,” said Loren Rodgers, project director for the National Center for Employee Ownership. But he cited research indicating that worker-owned companies tended to have better results when workers had a say in operations.
Mr. Rodgers said that Congress had decided to limit the workers’ powers as shareholders out of concern that companies might avoid the structure if workers received full rights.
Many former workers at U.S. Sugar acknowledged that they had never tried to attend an annual meeting until now. But that did not quell their anger at discovering they could not. “It was real nasty, the company to do us like they did us,” said Tommy Miller, who retired last fall after 32 years as a supervisor in a locomotive repair shop. He was only 56 but was caught in a mass layoff.
He said he cashed out his shares and invested in an individual retirement account, only to learn that a bidder had been willing to pay him a lot more.
“So you took my job and you took my stock, too,” Mr. Miller said.
The workers describe a harsh new face on a company once known as paternalistic. U.S. Sugar was bought out of bankruptcy during the Great Depression by Mr. Mott, an entrepreneur who said companies should strengthen the towns where they did business.
Photo
Mr. Mott, who started out making bicycle wheels and ended up with the largest single block of General Motors stock, created charities in Flint, Mich., and also provided Clewiston with swimming pools, libraries and a youth center.
“When somebody’s child got hurt or was seriously ill, the company would fly that child to a hospital in Tampa, or wherever they needed to go,” John Perry, a former mayor of Clewiston, said. “This was a wonderful, wonderful place to live.”
But that homey culture did not survive the tide of globalization. The North American Free Trade Agreement raised the prospect of a flood of cheap sugar from Mexico and other countries with low wages. U.S. Sugar scrambled to lower its costs.
Ellen Simms, U.S. Sugar’s former comptroller, said that when the company had to trim its payroll, it seemed to choose people with many years at the company.
“It was very obvious, with few exceptions, that they were targeting the employees who had been there the most time and who had the most ESOP shares,” she said. She resigned in protest in 2004.
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Meanwhile, the falling stock price reported in the appraisals was a boon to the company, she said, because it made it cheaper to buy out the workers.
Conspicuous Offers
The reported declines in the stock price might not have been questioned, had it not been for two offers to acquire U.S. Sugar, one in the summer of 2005 and the other in early 2007. Both were made by the Lawrence Group, a large father-son agribusiness concern in Sikeston, Mo., for $293 a share in cash. Gaylon Lawrence Jr. confirmed the price but declined to comment further.
The worker-shareholders were being paid $205 to $194 a share at the time, based on ESOP appraisals.
But to help vet the Lawrence Group’s offer, U.S. Sugar hired a second appraisal firm to calculate the company’s breakup value. This appraiser came up with $2.5 billion, or about $1,273 a share.
U.S. Sugar then rejected the Lawrence Group’s offer as inadequate.
Mr. McCorvey said he would have tendered his shares to the Lawrence Group without a moment’s hesitation. “But we were never given the opportunity,” he said.
John Logue, an ESOP specialist at Kent State University, said federal law does not require worker-owners to vote on acquisition offers. But, he said, “when you’re in doubt, let the participants vote. We have kind of an innate sense in the United States that people are entitled to do what they want with the property they own.”
A version of this article appears in print on , on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Stock Plan, Employees See Stacked Deck. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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RELATED COVERAGE
U.S. Sugar Ownership FEB. 23, 2015
Ostensibly Independent, a Charity Is U.S. Sugar’s Swing-Vote Shareholder MAY 29, 2008
Not So Sweet a Deal MAY 28, 2008
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THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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Sat Jul 09, 2016 8:00 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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WALL STREET JOURNAL
OPINION REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Sugar Scandal
Congress takes a run at an egregious business welfare scheme.
July 29, 2015 7:22 p.m. ET
Americans pay nearly twice as much per pound as foreigners do for sugar, thanks to U.S. import restrictions and subsidies. We’ve tilted at this corporate welfare for decades, but new political forces are aligning to take another run.
The absurdity of the federal sugar program is legendary. Every year the government grants sugar processors nonrecourse loans linked to the amount of sugar the government says they can produce at a set price per pound: 18.75 cents for raw cane sugar and 24.09 cents for refined beet sugar. If the market price is below the loan price when it’s time to sell, the processors simply forfeit their crop to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in lieu of repaying the loan. They can still make a profit thanks to the price guaranteed by the loan.
To ensure that imported sugar doesn’t drive down U.S. prices, provoking a sugar dump on Uncle Sam, there are also import quotas. Anything above the quotas gets hit with a hefty tariff—16 cents a pound on refined sugar.
Yet all of this central planning is harder than it sounds. According to a January 2014 USDA report, for the 2013 crop year the government’s net cost “to remove” sugar from the marketplace was $258 million. But sometimes there’s not enough sugar, as in 2010, and prices skyrocket. If the secretary of agriculture decides that shortages will drive prices too high, he can increase the quota. But he has to make sure that more imports won’t mean lower prices and thus sugar forfeitures to the feds. All the risk lies with consumers or taxpayers—not producers.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the loan program will cost some $115 million over the next 10 years. But the greater cost is to the economy. The food and drink industry, which has sales of some $387 billion, is less competitive when it has to pay twice the world price for sugar. In a July 2 letter to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, the Coalition for Sugar Reform estimated the program has cost American consumers and businesses $15 billion since 2008 and 120,000 jobs since 1997.
The relatively few sugar cane and beet producers have grown fat and happy off this racket, but they are losing support. Growers of other crops had their subsidies cut in the last farm bill, and many are asking why sugar gets a pass. Last month the Corn Refiners Association, which produces high-fructose corn syrup, began lobbying on Capitol Hill for a level playing field with sugar.
They’re allied with Republican tea party Members of Congress who dislike business subsidies, led by Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.). In 2013 he led a floor revolt with an amendment to the farm bill that would have permitted more foreign sugar to enter the U.S. and reduced the price guaranteed by the federal loan. He lost 221 to 206.
Mr. Pitts is now seeking another opportunity for a vote to limit the size of the nonrecourse loan to any single sugar processor, and we hope he gets it. This wouldn’t end all of the political help that guarantees profits for sugar producers. But it would be a start, and a sign that American democracy isn’t so calcified by special interests that it can’t reform one of Washington’s worst welfare schemes.
WILLIAM A TAYLOR Aug 1, 2015
This is a very old game.
http://www.scragged.com/articles/congress-and-campaign-contributions-are-not-soon-parted explains that politicians typically get back about 1% of the value of the money they give their friends as campaign contributions. It's our fault - we keep re-electing the same bunch of thieves.
Dan Morris Jul 31, 2015
We'd all like a deal like the Sugar Barons have had for all these years, but most of us detest this kind of criminal crony capitalism. The ethanol scam is another example of this type of crime, but the RINOs love that program, despite the fact that it commandeers 1/3 of the US corn crop. The fuel it produces destroys engines, hoses, seals etc.
David Holmes Jul 30, 2015
You had me at, "all of this central planning is harder..." Why on earth, in 2015, is the US government involved in central planning for sugar or any other good/service? Raisins, milk, lemons, petroleum... Enough, already. With congress' chokehold on the purse strings (and regulations), lobbyists abound. |
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Sat Jul 09, 2016 8:11 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Marco Rubio, Rick Scott are top recipients of sugar contributions
lead article image
By Isadora Rangel of TCPalm
Posted: July 09, 2016
Standing just feet away from putrid algae fouling local waters last week, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio questioned whether buying land south of Lake Okeechobee to build reservoirs to reduce discharges would help clean the St. Lucie River.
Another elected official who hasn't publicly supported buying land is Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who's been noncommittal despite reporters asking for his stance several times in recent years.
Rubio and Scott have another thing in common: They are the elected officials who have received the most campaign contributions from the sugar industry, according to a Treasure Coast Newspapers analysis of the last elections of Florida politicians who either represent the Treasure Coast areas mostly impacted by lake discharges or have the power to push for a land purchase.
The sugar industry has donated $2.7 million since 2011 to support six politicians in D.C. and Tallahassee; the Republican Party of Florida, which controls both legislative chambers; and committees dedicated to electing Republicans to the Legislature.
Sugar interests funneled more than $486,000 alone into Rubio's failed presidential bid.
A plan to reduce lake discharges into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers is expected to come up for a vote in Tallahassee next year.
Incoming Senate President Joe Negron, R-Stuart, is working on a proposal that likely will include buying land south of the lake, much of which is owned by sugar farmers. The land would be used to redirect excess lake water into the Everglades instead of the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers. Negron receive $2,500 from sugar interests before his 2014 race.
The hope is the current algae blooms, which flowed into the St. Lucie River via Lake O discharges, will push other lawmakers to support Negron's plan, said Everglades Foundation CEO Eric Eikenberg.
"The American political system is dominated by big money, and big money talks," Eikenberg said. "But we are hopeful in this crisis that the governor and other decision makers see through any of that."
Scott and Sugar
U.S. Sugar Corp. is the fourth largest donor to Scott's political committee, Let's Get to Work, since 2014, giving almost $960,000, state records show.
The Clewiston-based company lobbied last year against selling 46,800 acres to the state despite entering a 2010 contract to do so. Scott's appointees on the South Florida Water Management District board voted to void that contract in 2015, just as environmentalists were pushing the Legislature to allocate money for the purchase.
Scott and U.S. Sugar have pushed similar agendas to restore the Everglades and the Indian River Lagoon. Both say the state should focus on finishing projects already on the books, despite cries from environmentalists that more storage south of the lake is needed. Scott also signed a 2013 law that blocked lawsuits on 30-year, no-bid leases for sugar farmers in the northern Everglades. Negron was the only senator who voted against the bill, despite accepting more than $700,000 in sugar donations to his 2012 campaign and to political committees for which he raised money since 2008.
"I think the sugar industry has been influential with the Scott administration from the time that he was elected," said Audubon Florida Executive Director Eric Draper. "We are trying to get the governor to agree to have a planning process for storage south of the lake. ... We are having a hard time even getting that done."
Scott's office Friday said he's "looking at all options" to address lake discharges. When asked whether sugar contributions influenced the governor, spokeswoman Lauren Schenone said, "Absolutely not."
Same script
On his July 1 visit to Stuart, Rubio said the state and federal governments should work on storage north of Lake Okeechobee instead of south, noting most pollution enters the lake from the Kissimmee River and northern waters. That's despite a 2015 University of Florida study that found while north storage is needed, 11,000 to 120,000 acres of storage south of the lake also are needed to reduce discharges.
U.S. Sugar made a similar argument against buying land in a series of ads that ran in several Florida newspapers. One ad stated the state should "divert, store and treat polluted water before it reaches Lake Okeechobee."
The Fanjul family, owners of sugar giant Florida Crystals, made most of the donations to Rubio's presidential campaign and to a super PAC that supported him called Conservative Solutions.
At a news conference in Stuart, Rubio ignored a Treasure Coast Newspapers' reporter's question: Did the Fanjuls' money influence his stance on supporting storage north of the lake instead of the land purchase?
While sugar has great influence over lawmakers, it's hard to tell whether that's because of campaign donations or relationships with those politicians, said Draper, who works as a lobbyist on environmental issues in Tallahassee. Relationships are key in politics; it's what gets your phone calls returned, he said.
"How much of that is campaign contributions?" Draper said. "How much is relationships — because that's another place the sugar industry is particularly good? How much is the lobbyists working for them?"
Sugar donations
$980,512: Gov. Rick Scott and his Let’s Get to Work committee
$633,733: Republican Party of Florida
$486,765: U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and pro-Rubio super PAC Conservative Solutions
$328,486: Florida Senatorial Campaign Committee (dedicated to electing Republicans to the Florida Senate)
$125,000: House Republican Campaign Committee (dedicated to electing Republicans to the Florida House)
$71,500: Florida Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater, and Florida Leadership Committee (Latvala will serve as the Senate budget committee chairman next year)
$53,000: Incoming Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran, R-Trinity, and Florida Roundtable committee
$35,950: U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.
$2,500: Incoming Florida Senate President Joe Negron, R-Stuart (previous to his 2014 race)
$0: U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Jupiter, and pro-Murphy super PAC Floridians for a Strong Middle Class
NOTE: Totals reflect donations from sugar companies, their executives and close relatives for the last races in which these officials were elected
Rangel headshot
About Isadora Rangel
Isadora covers politics, elections and the state Legislature. She graduated from Florida International University and has worked at Treasure Coast Newspapers since 2011. Isadora was born in Brazil and speaks Portuguese and Spanish fluently. |
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Mon Jul 11, 2016 1:41 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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U.S. Sugar Corp. is the fourth largest donor to Scott's political committee, Let's Get to Work, since 2014, giving almost $960,000, state records show.
Note: US Sugar = Mott Foundation |
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Mon Jul 11, 2016 1:43 pm |
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