Jeb Bush makes the big time: Letterman's top 10 No No No No No No No No No No

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMe-PpgfbeI

You'll find your blogger down in the comments declaring the real reason Jeb Bush won't run for president is he'd have to reveal how much he was paid by Lehman to be a "consultant" after he left the governorship, and why he got Florida to buy worthless Lehman investments.

Thanks to the Miami Herald's Naked Politics blog for pointing this out. Thanks, Beth.

Alex Sink at Democratic Party fundraiser in Little Havana

We see a little furrow of worry on the president's brow in this painting, and it's because Florida might not be quite up to putting him over the top again in 2012. We did it in 2008. And whether we do it again will depend a lot on whether we campaign long and hard this year, right now, and make Alex Sink Florida's governor.

Having her as a Democrat in the driver's seat for two years before election day 2012 will make a world of difference. She will veto the next Republican attempt to wreck our public schools -- you know it's coming up again, sure as Jeb Bush is calling the shots from his cave. She will drive the agenda and put a Democrat atop the news budget again. She will deploy her business skills to build jobs in partnership with the federal government -- not in blind opposition like the Republican contenders. With her in charge and the Fair Districts amendments in the Florida constitution, redistricting will be done fairly and we can expect our delegations to the Florida and US House to reflect public opinion more than Republican ideology.

We must be far-sighted in this. Quibbling about minor matters must stop. Enjoy watching our local Republicans show how NOT to get along.

This photo comes from the Thursday fundraiser at Cuba Ocho Art and Research Center in Little Havana, where Alex Sink was introduced by State Rep. Luis Garcia in his own District 107, where he's going for his second re-election in a formerly Republican district. Garcia calls Sink, currently the chief financial officer in state government, "the best mind in Tallahassee." He's 100 percent for making her the check and balance we need to block the Republican majority in the legislature.

Her view: "Tally is out of touch and out of control."

Our mission is to elect her.

She had a special request: "Put me on your Facebook page." You'll see her in fresh text and photos on the Miami-Dade Democrats group page. Now it's your turn.

FL-25: Crist switch gets the Republican name-callers into high gear

OK, the headline is a little premature. So far I've only got one Republican name-caller, but I'm sure there will be more.

The first out of the blocks is David Rivera, known on this blog as the Republican likely to be Joe Garcia's opponent for the US House in District 25. Last time we wrote about him, his ethical standards were quite low -- way behind even Jeb Bush in the ethical arena -- and now he's very high in the name-calling arena.

Read it on Naked Politics, the Herald's political blog, where Rivera says that what Crist is doing is the biggest betrayal in US history since Benedict Arnold. Wow! That's really big. Like almost sinking the American Revolution, George Washington and all. And what's Crist's offense? Dropping the ID of the party that has already dropped him -- that's what Crist is doing.

Now let's start looking for all the photos of David Rivera and Charlie Crist in fond embrace.

And while we may be distracted for a day or two by Crist's maneuver, remember that we will have to get back to listening to what Rivera says and searching for fact and meaning.

Sen LeMieux voted with Dems for cloture on jobs bill

Interesting that our stand-in Republican US Senator, George LeMieux, was in the R-crowd that joined Dems in voting for cloture today on the jobs bill.

A Daily Kos post on it: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/2/24/840248/-Flippity-floppeters?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29&utm_content=Twitter

Would this reflect what his alter ego, Charlie Crist, would do in in the Senate? We can think so, since the former governor, Jeb Bush, who's also a former worker for Lehman the failed investment bank, thinks it's unforgivable that Crist wanted jobs for Florida coming from the stimulus bill. Jeb, we understand, only favored Wall Street bailouts, not the Main Street stimulus.

Gosh, what does this say about our Jebbie, the popular governor? And about Marco Rubio, his guy for the Senate?

Memo to Miami Herald: Need story on our losses on Stuyvesant Town

Where’s the Miami Herald on this story? Referring to the fiasco now two years old with the Florida State Board of Administration and the way it lost money – taxpayers’ money that was supposed to be held in close and careful trust for pension funds, hospitals and the like.

This blog has been mad as hell and not standing for it any more for some time with main focus on Jeb Bush and his well-paid gig with Lehman Brothers after he left the governor’s office, whereupon Lehman went belly-up and the Lehman investments Jeb pushed on us became worthless.

There’s another famous episode, however, that’s now maturing to Florida’s detriment, and I don’t see it properly explicated in the Herald. It surfaced in New York early this week when Tishman Speyer caved on the $5.4 billion developments at Stuyvesant Town and Cooper Village. This cost Florida $250 million plus spare change amounting to millions, and you can read about it in the Jacksonville newspaper. But not in the Herald.

Is this a political decision, or is the Herald’s financial investigative staff overwhelmed?

Anyway, we need to have the Herald nag the perpetrators until they lay out their roles in this. And they are Charlie Crist and Jeb Bush. Meanwhile, you can read about it in the Jacksonville paper and in the New York Times today, which is looking at how the Democrat Andrew Cuomo is getting tons of campaign money from real estate interests, including Tishman.

A recent post on this topic can be found at this link. Or look up Jeb Bush on the tags list on the right.

More dirty money -- ripoff followed by coverup

This is an unsung scandal of our state government, and though the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times have done spadework to unearth details, the ripoff of the State Board of Administration is not known as widely as it should be.


The Herald is part of the problem. In this instance Alex Sink, the Florida chief financial officer and leading Democratic candidate for governor, is reduced to complaining in a letter to the editor – as if she’s only a reader of the state’s putative flagship newspaper. And in her letter the key details are buried in the 6th paragraph. There she names her likely Republican opponent for governor, Attorney General Bill McCollum, and Gov. Charlie Crist as the ones not taking appropriate action.

Let’s call it by its proper name – they are conspiring in a coverup. Coverup of what? “Lost billions for taxpayers.” Billions. With BBBB. And who did it? This blog repeatedly has named former Gov. Jeb Bush as a leading suspect, since he was a paid consultant for Lehman Brothers after leaving office in 2006, and Lehman investments are among the biggest reasons for the losses.

(This link is to a blog post last Tuesday on the St. Petersburg Times story – also published in the Herald – that occasioned Sink’s letter, and down in the 4th paragraph is a link to an earlier post on the SBA scandal.)

Lehman, you’ll please remember, is an ex-resident of Wall Street, now that the bubble there has burst.

And Crist, well, he was attorney general when some of the shenanigans in the State Board of Administration happened, and thus he would have been one of the three trustees overseeing that board, along with the governor (Bush) and the chief financial officer, then Tom Gallagher, a veteran Republican politician who lost to Crist for the 2006 gubernatorial nomination.

Plenty of reason for Crist and McCollum to want to keep this scandal quiet. Would Crist’s bid for the US Senate have any life left at all if this scandal got its due exposure? Would McCollum’s bid for governor need a wheelchair?

Jeb Bush never has stood still for a question on this now almost two-year-old scandal. Jeb, tell us – How much did Lehman pay you to “consult” on having Florida buy their crap investments? Why should Florida taxpayers not consider that a delayed bribe payment?

But back to 2010. This is a complicated story, yet it should be rising to the top of Alex Sink’s drumbeat of campaign talk in this election year. The voters are fed up with corruption and dirty money in politics, and when they go to vote in November they should know that Republicans were the ones ripping them off in Tallahassee. Time for a clean sweep.

With a grit of the teeth: I browsed over to the St. Pete Times to see whether Sink’s letter also was published there, since the investigative piece originated in the Times. No, but the Times had an editorial  worrying that Sink’s office might have favored one law firm over another because of political donations. That’s understandable. I have worried about the same question. My conclusion is that we must get money out of politics. Check out http://www.fairelectionsnow.org/ for a bill in Congress that would do it.

Who gets kicked off Elephant Island?

Thanks to Franco Caliz, the almost 20-year-old president of Democracy for America-Miami-Dade, for the tip on this one. Franco thinks he's young but he's really quite old.

Tim Geithner and Jeb Bush in the same scandal-plagued blog post

Is there a label for “read this and weep?” That’s the category for this Truthdig story about a scandal reported in the Wall Street Journal. It’s about the NY Federal Reserve Bank and the crony way they do business with a wink at the rules.

As the piece asks, where is the outcry? Is there silence because Timothy Geithner is one of the actors in this scandal and it’s not PC to tarnish his name? The reason given for his falling in line was that it would help find a successor for him at the New York Federal Reserve as he became secretary of the treasury. Pretty lame.

If this isn’t rolled out and fixed somehow, a few years down the line we’ll see how rich Geithner gets when he leaves government work and returns to the world of private finance. This falls into a category I call the delayed bribe.

And speaking of that, there’s an article on the bottom of p. 1 of the Miami Herald business section today that got my steam up.

Faithful readers will recognize one of my hobbyhorses – the role that Jeb Bush played in the ripoff of Florida’s money-market fund when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. To summarize, while he was governor Lehman was permitted to sell its junk to the money-market-like fund where local governments can park money until needed to pay police, fire, schools, staff, construction – you know, all the stuff we expect from government.

According to the Herald article, it cost Florida $300 million when Lehman went south. By then, Jeb Bush was a consultant to Lehman raking in an amount I’d like to hear from his lips or accountants.

Here's a link to one of my early posts on this, with numerous links therein to background on this little-known fiasco. Well, it's about only a couple hundred millions of dollars -- not the billions and trillions that we're used to.

If you look down into the comments of the Herald story you’ll find what I posted there this afternoon. I reproduce below in case it’s been whited out.

Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

• 

LarryThorson wrote on 05/06/2009 04:05:53 PM:

I'd appreciate this article more if it pointed out that former Gov. Jeb Bush became a consultant to Lehman brothers after leaving office. And that he had ushered Lehman's junk into the Florida state money-market fund when he was governor. I call his lucrative employment with Lehman a delayed bribe. If Jeb came to a pizza parlor in my town on a listening tour, and I got to the microphone, I'd ask how much Lehman paid him, and when he's giving it to the ripped-off Florida treasury.

Let's think again of how Jeb and Lehman cost Florida bigtime

In Wednesday's NY Times, this article:
New Jersey Sues Over Its Lehman Losses - DealBook Blog - NYTimes.com
served as a reminder of how Florida got ripped off in the same way. Has Florida sued? Not mentioned in the article, though California was cited as having sued before New Jersey.

Where are we? Why no suit?

New Jersey is out $180 million thanks to the collapse of Lehman. Florida also lost many millions, though a light search doesn't reveal how much. There is an interesting similarity between Florida and New Jersey, in that both states had a board of officials supposedly overseeing the operation of the fund -- like the money market funds we ordinary citizens have been forced to use by our friendly banks -- where revenue was parked until needed by local governments to pay their staff and other obligations. In Florida it's the State Board of Administration. New Jersey calls it the State Investment Council. Here's a quote from the Times story about that board:

State Senator Joseph Pennacchio, a Republican who has been critical of both Lehman and the State Investment Council, told The Times in an interview that it made sense to sue. But he also called for legislative hearings into the council’s investment practices and said that the council included three former Lehman executives and the wife of a former Lehman executive.

“That raises our level of suspicion and cynicism about the whole deal,” Mr. Pennacchio told The Times. “It makes sense to go after Lehman. But we also want to know if people on the council did things they should not have done.”

I'd like to know the same kind of stuff about our Florida counterpart. It's deeply suspicious because Jeb Bush was on that board and then when he left the governor's office he became a well-paid consultant to Lehman.

Jeb, are you refunding your bonuses?

Dan Gelber joins Kendrick Meek in 2010 race for U.S. Senate

Dan Gelber announced for the U.S. Senate this morning, putting two Miami-Dade Democrats in the race to occupy the seat being vacated by one-term Mel Martinez. The election is in 2010 -- right around the corner.

Gelber has been my state representative (District 106) and now my state senator (District 35), and I like his work. The formidable opponent he faces, U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek (FL-17), showed up Saturday at a funeral for homeless veterans and spoke well about a cause I support. I like Meek, too. So this blog will be neutral and positive, and if others announce their candidacy, I hope to find they are good candidates, too.

Here are links to web sites of the two candidates, and I'll add them to the list of links in the right-hand column.

• Dan Gelber for Senate
• Kendrick Meek for Senate
  

There's also a post on Daily Kos today about Gelber, with the excellent theme that this is an election -- not an appointment. Good for Florida to have an election, right? Well, we don't have a choice. Unlike New York, Illinois, Delaware and Colorado, our U.S. Senate seat hasn't suddenly become open in the middle of the term, and Mel Martinez seems to plan to serve it out. No appointment needed. Thank goodness, since like some of those other states we do have a dynastic politico lurking in the wings -- Jeb Bush -- and he's of the same party as the governor. Ugh, what an unwelcome thought.

So just to remind us that Jeb remains a possibility even though he's declared himself out of the race, I'm putting up a link here to a post from last year with a blizzard of ammunition that J. Bush has left behind. Jeb, if you run, you're dead meat. Also let's note that no Republican has announced yet for this seat. This will not last.

Can't wait for Jeb to run

It would be a fantastic test of the Florida electorate's new-found intelligence, were the former Gov. Jeb Bush to run for U.S. Senate or anything else -- dogcatcher, for instance. What a record he has. The following rant from Florida Politics is an example of what should be planted repeatedly in front of the public until Jeb slinks off to, say, Oklahoma, where minds are not clouded by facts and Bushite candidates win big. (In the presidential voting Oklahoma went for McCain-Palin 2-1 (66% to 34%) -- the biggest red margin in the nation -- while we smarter Floridians were 51% to 48% for Obama-Biden.)

UPDATE: A few hours after this went up I learned that George W. Bush is touting his brother for U.S. Senate. Check out the Tampa Tribune where it's reported that W and Laura pushed the idea at their Christmas party Thursday. My dream coming true ... END of UPDATE.

Here without any abridgement is what was posted Thursday on Florida Politics. Please linger a while and click on the links. This fine blog post is a treasure of trusted sources about bad stuff on Jeb. Your attention is especially drawn to the last paragraph's compact summary of the cruel condition we Floridians are in, thanks to Jeb Bush and his party:

Laff Riot

It has been quite the laffer to read Florida's newspaper companies blasting Illinois state government corruption, after sitting on their hands in Florida for the last decade.

Where were these geniuses - who are all atwitter about the Illinois Governor - when Florida's own Mr. "Make the Money and Run" ...

... who has since cashed in by jumping on board several gravy trains, including Lehman Brothers (the investment company that sold the state millions in bad mortgages), Rayonier (the Jacksonville-based timber and real estate company from which the state purchased nearly $100M in land during Jebbie's tenure), and the "nearly $37,000 a day" Tenet joy ride ...

... was corrupting Florida's election process, fomenting state constitutional crises, gutting Florida's system of public finance*, handing state work to "'a network of contractors who have given him, other Republican politicians and the Florida G.O.P. millions of dollars in campaign donations'", and otherwise according to the radical Time Magazine, leaving Florida with the

worst real estate meltdown since the Depression. We've got a water crisis, insurance crisis, environmental crisis and budget crisis to go with our housing crisis. We're first in the nation in mortgage fraud, second in foreclosures, last in high school graduation rates. Our consumer confidence just hit an all-time low, and our icons are in trouble--the citrus industry, battered by freezes and diseases; the Florida panther, displaced by highways and driveways; the space shuttle, approaching its final countdown. New research suggests that the Everglades is collapsing, that our barrier beaches could be under water within decades, that a major hurricane could cost us $150 billion.

Thankful for small things, like the Miami Herald business page

You may think I'm not having much of a Thanksgiving when I say I'm thankful for this piece in today's Miami Herald Investors wary of state pool - Business - MiamiHerald.com. I'm far more thankful for many other things including the feast coming later this afternoon. But for the moment I'm happy and thankful that I'm not the only one worried about health of the Florida state money market fund for local governments and their agencies.

Yes, faithful readers, this dense story is back, and I'm still wondering why Jeb Bush hasn't been called on the carpet over this one. This blog has hacked away on this story (a link here to a post a year ago, too prescient by far in predicting the global financial crisis that is falling into Barack Obama's lap), trying to keep the questions alive:

• Why did Jeb Bush let crappy Lehman Brothers investments sneak into the fund backing up our school boards and police departments?
• Why did Jeb Bush become a well-paid consultant to Lehman after leaving the governor's office two years ago?
• Why hasn't he been called on the carpet? (Oh, sorry, already posed that one.)

So, yes, thank you, Miami Herald for keeping the story alive, though I'd appreciate your putting Jeb's name in it as one of the causitive agents in this rip-off of public money. Next time, huh?

As the Herald's story started:

Last fall, a state investment fund in which counties, cities and other local agencies parked extra cash temporarily was the largest in the country, at $26.1 billion.

There was a big run on that fund and it's now down to $5.7 billion, the Herald reports, and agencies can't pull all their money out anymore. Why? Because some of the investments are still crap. Thanks, Jeb. Were you planning to run for any other office anytime in this century?

Homeless in Alachua County

Your blogger is on the road again, but the headline above does not refer to me. I’m safely housed in Super8 Country tonight somewhere between Tallahassee and Pensacola en route to the bloggers’ convention in Austin via back-roads Louisiana.

As I was barreling up I-75 past Gainesville I believe the FM locked on UF public radio for a while and there was a local story about a big surge of homelessness in Alachua County. I was driving and couldn’t take notes, of course, but I believe they said the number was up 40 percent from last year, and the total was 1,800. Taking care of the homeless is more difficult than usual because donations to charities are off, the report said.

This is what we get after a Bush as governor and a Bush as president. How could this have happened in our splendidly well-educated land?

Anyway, I am away from my usual desk for a couple weeks but will try to blog as much as possible. This is also a time for readers to step up and contribute tasty comments, photos, song and dance. If you’d like to post something on the main page, email it to me and I’ll try to put it up crediting you as guest blogger.

Restaurant Review: Jay’s Restaurant on US 90 in Live Oak serves up a mean liver and onions. Don’t tell my cardiologist.

Jeb is half-right; he recognizes there's a problem. If he had a mirror, he could see it.

Thanks, Larry, for welcoming me to post here at the Miami-Dade-Dems blog. I'm not just your candidate for State Representative in District 119, but I've been building online communities, blogging, and using the net to foster interactivity for the past 10 years. While my posts here won't be directly about our campaign, I look forward to discussing some of the issues that matter most to us Floridians and I suspect my perspective as a Young Democrat born and raised here in Miami-Dade will shine through.

I don't want this to be a place to preach. I want to fully encourage you to interact with the bloggers here. Let us know where you stand. We can learn from each other, and together, implement some of the change we need.

Our kids' education is always among the top concerns of Florida's parents and voters. And though it's taken a backseat lately to more immediately pressing economic issues (this week, the crazy offshore drilling plans), it's an issue that deserves attention.

At this weekend's national education conference in Orlando, former Governor Jeb Bush used the following metaphor to describe our schools:

"The world is much more interconnected, much more technologically advanced, and it is much more interdependent. And yet our education system is an 8-track system living in an iPod world."

I couldn't have said it better myself. But that's as far as Jeb and I agree.

Bush's education gamble hasn't paid off for Florida's students.

Our dropout rates were worse when he left than when he came into office. They're the worst in the country — and that's using some funny math that includes students who don't really graduate.

Our students are being exposed to less learning as they're being taught how to pass the FCAT. Rep. Dan Gelber probably said it best: "Most parents want more than minimal competence for their children." I'd add that most companies want more than minimal competence for their employees as well.

Our per-student spending is shameful. Bush's counterparts at the conference spend far more and their students see the benefits. New York spends more than twice what we do. And yet, the legislature keeps cutting funding, even after promising to "hold education harmless."

I like metaphors. I think they can help make points more clear. So let me stretch this one out a bit.

Our public school system is not the outdated 8-track. No, what's obsolete is the stereotypical politician who thinks he knows better than experts.

Our public school system is the music we all want to hear. The artists performing that music — our teachers — need to be given the freedom to teach as their students need them to.

If we want to be a well-rounded society, we need to listen to different types of music. A wide variety of different subjects have to be important in school.

And if we want that music to sound the best it can, we need to be willing to make the investment in our children's future. For our kids to be competitive, we have to recruit and keep the best talent, we have to upgrade the technology used, and we have to remix our curriculum.

We need a strong system of public education. Let's be honest about the real problem. The real problem is that we've had people in leadership roles who don't want to see it work. We need to rise above ideology and embrace the solution that works. Public schools work, but we have to give them the resources and freedom to prosper.

Look out for constitutional amendments headed to the ballot this year that, if passed, will further damage public schools and make it more difficult for our children to get the education they need. I'm sure we'll have a chance to discuss them soon.

Edit: Wouldn't you know... just hours after I originally posted this, Ray Seaman adds some information on Progress Florida's initiative to fight the amendments on FLA Politics.

Subprime crisis in your insurance company?

Last year this blogger dipped into financial fiasco several times as the subprime crisis began to affect Florida’s public bodies. That is: Your tax dollars had been whacked right out of the savings accounts of school districts, county agencies and city governments and sent to perdition.

New stuff trickles out from time to time, so here’s a little roundup. I pause to say that this is probably far from complete, as other stories may be coming out every day. It’s just that they are hard to recognize, disguised under headlines like this one in the Miami Herald, “Citizens discounts millions.”


What’s that supposed to mean? Well, it’s talking about Citizens Property Insurance, which you may know as the largest insurer of homes in Florida, a state-run company to which you probably pay premiums.

What does “discounts millions” mean? It means that $88 million that used to be in Citizens’ accounts to pay your claims and otherwise do business isn’t there anymore. That is, an investment that used to be so solid that it was like cash now doesn’t sell, so it has to be downgraded to nothing on a balance sheet.

Who’s to blame? Start with Jeb Bush, who managed this for two terms as governor and now is a consultant for Lehman Bros., which sold a ton of subprime stuff to Florida. Talk about a conflict of interest! While in office Jeb was a trustee of the State Board of Administration, which is like a bank or money market fund for government bodies to park their money, and now he’s “advising” the company that sold bad investments to the SBA.

Back in December some bloggers were demanding that Jeb disclose the details of his contract with Lehman. Heard anything? Jeb! Speak up! Can’t hear you!

The reader may be baffled. Haven’t heard of this? Try Googling “jeb bush lehman brothers” and see what’s under the rock.

Next item: The NY Times business section on Tuesday had a front-page story with the headline “High Finance Backfires on Alabama County.”

Again, the headline is a little obfuscatory. The county in question is Jefferson County, home to Birmingham, the largest city in Alabama, so not exactly some remote place out in the sticks. Ought to have some people with financial acumen.

Nonetheless, they are in danger of going belly-up. The whole county. The subprime thing hit them with $5.4 billion worth of funny investments. A ton of swaps. Exotic bond deals. Interest rates ballooning like those funny mortgages for poor folks.

Next item: If we’re lucky to be doing better than Jefferson County in neighboring Alabama, thank goodness we’re not in the private sector, where the numbers can be much higher. Here’s Carlyle Capital Group defaulting on $16.6 billion. Pretty soon this is going to add up to real money.

Florida’s Financial Fiasco: Chapter Two

This could start out like the preceding post: So glad to have dipped into Florida Politics this morning. It’s a good blog that has two thought-provokers in the early going. Must do this every day: click on Florida Politics. Now, I’ll write myself a reminder if I can find the to-do list. Lord, the Christmas Cards!! Too late, anyway …

The very top of Florida Politics’ reading recommendations was this Bloomberg article, or at least its excerpts in the Pensacola blog, wherein “Beach Blogger” concluded of our former governor:

“It’s past time for Mr. Jeb Bush to disclose the details of his contract with Lehman brothers.”

For starters, Do I hear any Democrats demanding it?

Actually, there’s not much about Jeb in the Bloomberg piece, though as a critic says therein:

“Bush is a consultant to the company selling bad investments to the same agency on which he served as a trustee until January.”

Before launching deeper into a Bushian broadside, let’s step back. We’re talking about a fiasco that ripped some $2 billion out of the pockets of Florida taxpayers, and it’s hardly making a ripple. Maybe it’s my fault. I haven’t posted on this since Dec. 3 when my headline announced “Florida’s financial crisis.” The news then was a run on the equivalent of a Florida state money-market fund. Call that Chapter One of my meager attempt to foment rebellion.

Now in Chapter Two we have a lot more detail provided in the Bloomberg piece, also in the Miami Herald and maybe other outlets around the state.

Has anyone heard of this on TV, where most folks get their news? Probably not, no good video – until we get to the boarded-up schools and laid-off firemen. These are possible casualties down the line as local government agencies find they can’t get money they put on deposit with the governor.

Essentially, that’s the deal here: depositing your tax revenues with the governor until you need to write checks to pay your staff and bills. Banks aren’t good enough, you see. They don’t pay high-enough interest. The governor knows this guy, you see, who will give higher rates. And don’t ask about the risk.

Well, thank goodness they didn’t put all their – our – money in the subprime swamp.

Getting back to the kernel of Chapter Two: The problem for the governor is that folks didn't have to be financial insiders to be aware that subprime lenders were in trouble. Many months ago all it took was occasional glances at the headlines to see that they needed ever greater infusions of capital. If I’d had any spare money to invest earlier this year, I would have gone 180 degrees away from subprime lenders. No sir, those guys are in bad shape. But the governor kept on buying. And then bought some more. And more and more.

Of course, it wasn’t the governor alone. He and the attorney general and our top Democratic elected official in Florida, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, make up the board that oversees the “state bank.” Until the run on the bank erupted in late November, they were advised by a former crony of Jeb’s, Coleman Stipanovich, with the title of executive director and a salary reported as $180,214 in 2006. Stipanovich was fired soon after the run forced closure of the fund.

In the Bloomberg article, Alex Sink explained why: The CFO thought that Stipanovich was getting independent advice from the big Lehman Brothers investment bank, when in fact Lehman Brothers was selling (unloading) dubious debt to Florida’s unsuspecting taxpayers.

We with suspicious minds may ask: Did Jeb Bush, in his role as consultant to Lehman Brothers, have any role in all this? Helping those paying him an undisclosed amount (Lehman) sell dubious debt to Florida taxpayers through a crony (Stipanovich)?

Bloomberg and the Miami Herald report Jeb’s not commenting.

In this corner, that’s not good enough. Nor is it satisfying to see Jeb’s big brother George W. in the paper today contorting his face when asked about those destroyed CIA videos of (probably) torture. “Let’s wait and see … no opinion from the podium.”

Disgusting stonewalling.

FOOTNOTE: The Bloomberg article reports that the “state bank” managed $184 billion. That’s about two years of the state budget, isn’t it? I know there are pension funds in there and all that, but isn’t it a lot of money to be stashed away with little public oversight? Call that a memo to anyone running for state legislature.

Jeb's biographer has a blog: Jeb watch

So glad to have dipped into Florida Politics this morning. An item as short as this one advises that S. V. Date, the Palm Beach Post reporter whose biography of Jeb Bush would not make the former governor happy, has a blog: www.svdate.com. Go and read.

Florida financial crisis meeting on Tuesday

Do you see this in today’s paper? On TV?

Well, here are a few sound bites to catch your interest.

• “…essentially the breakdown of our modern-day banking system…” (NY Times column).
• “…decision that could disrupt the finances of dozens of cities and counties across the state…” (Miami Herald).

Talk about the Grinch!

Maybe that’s why they’re not telling us. It wouldn’t do to deflate our shopping mood as the Red and Green holiday approaches.

It’s not only that some poor people who swallowed hook line and sinker suffer from blocked throats as they must cough up more money for their homes. And it’s not only that some subprime lenders are seeing their stock prices plummet.

Now they’re having trouble paying the schoolteachers. The police and firefighters are next. Your mayor’s inflated salary, the public hospital staff.

I may be wrong, but it seems that Florida is leading the way into this new chapter of the financial crisis of the early 21^st Century. My sources are the NY Times, Bloomberg and the Miami Herald, and they all seem to say the tipping point occurred last week in the Local Government Investment Pool in Tallahassee.

If you’re the financial officer of your local school board, you may know this Pool well. Otherwise, terra incognita. It’s where local government bodies park their money, with the full trust that they can withdraw it when time comes to pay salaries and bills.

Last Thursday there was a run on the Pool amid disclosures that it held some “downgraded and defaulted debt,” according to Bloomberg’s report .

Management stopped withdrawals. Management, it should be said, is Gov. Charlie Crist, CFO Alex Sink and Attorney General Bill McCollum, in their role as trustees of the State Board of Administration. That’s one more official body that’s little known but with great responsibility.

Well, it will all be OK. They will meet Tuesday and figure it out. Be warned, however, that the Bloomberg story reported that they already tried to get the affected agencies around the state to accept as little as 90 cents on the dollar. (The agencies meanwhile are scrambling to take short-term loans to make necessary payments.)

Hey, there goes your tax money, or 10 percent of it for starters. Wasted on the housing bubble.

That takes me back to the top of this post, where I cited a snip from NY Times columnist Paul Krugman’s Monday column. Here’s the full citation, itself a quote:

“What we are witnessing,” says Bill Gross of the bond manager Pimco, “is essentially the breakdown of our modern-day banking system, a complex of leveraged lending so hard to understand that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke required a face-to-face refresher course from hedge fund managers in mid-August.”

That’s a stark factoid: Our lending system is so complex that the Fed Chair doesn’t have a clue!

I think I heard on the radio that Hillary Clinton wants a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson also wants ways to avoid foreclosures. Perhaps useful ideas.

But what do we do about the absurd complexity of the lending system? And what about the joyful greed we all felt as real estate prices went crazy?

Holiday bubbles are not only in the Champagne.

Here are links to the sources, and be advised that they include more dire stuff than what I've quoted above. The Miami Herald story. The Bloomberg story. One more Bloomberg story. NY Times column by Krugman.

UPDATE: This post is also up on DailyKos, where it quickly got a number of useful comments. First up was a suggestion to follow the money to Jeb Bush, and the link was to a Forbes story with the delicious headline "Where was Jeb?" Turns out he has become a consultant to Lehman Brothers, which had sold some of the dubious paper to the Florida Pool while Jeb was governor and sitting on the management board. Wonder how much he's been paid (bribed post facto) for having done that deal?

Thanks to ThirstyGator for excellent info.

UPDATE II:He points out that Atrios is covering the subprime situation thoroughly.

Neil Bush: Finally someone sees the link

Here’s a headline I’ve waited years to see: “Bush brother’s firm faces inquiry over purchases.” It was in Wednesday’s NY Times, back on p. 18, but at least it was there (the headline, I must say, is from the on-line Times, not the printed edition, which worded it differently).

Might there be a conflict of interest when the brother of the U.S. president, also the brother of the governor of Florida, is selling software to the United States and to Florida?

This came to my attention a few years ago via, I believe, the teachers’ union, which thought it was at least a little dubious.

Now finally CREW – the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (there’s an uphill battle) – has lodged a complaint, and the inspector general of the federal Department of Education will look into whether federal money was used appropriately by three states to buy educational products from a company owned by Neil Bush. Florida, Texas and Nevada are the states.

I raised this connection early this week at a meeting the Miami Beach Democratic Club had with Richard Steinberg, city commissioner and candidate for the state House district 106. “Isn’t this a scandal? Why isn’t anyone at least asking?” I asked. He didn’t know.

A few years ago I asked the same thing of Eric Copeland, candidate for Florida commissioner of agriculture and consumer affairs. He didn’t know.

Now, maybe we’ll all have a chance to know.

One thing that’s coming out as this scandal gets an airing is that the software isn’t much good, at least in the view of a former curriculum director for the Houston schools, Jay Spuck. He’s quoted in the Times saying, “”It’s not helping kids at all. It’s not helping teachers. The only way Neil has gotten in is by his name.” That's what's really wrong about this: it doesn't work!

The sainted Barbara Bush also is part of the conspiracy: she gave some of the stuff to schools attended by hurricane evacuees.

We’ll have to ask the Miami Herald’s Washington bureau how they got scooped on something so relevant to their state. The NY Times had it for the Wednesday paper, while the Herald got it on the Naked Politics blog only Wednesday morning, and in the on-line edition in the afternoon.

Is Jeb coming back?

This video interview of our former and not-missed governor turned up the other day, and there also was a little story in the Miami Herald about Jeb and his son George P. Bush in Dallas. So take a look and I wonder if there are any comments.

The link to the Hoover Institute video

And the Herald's search engine has stopped working, so here's a link to the Dallas Morning News story that the Herald reprinted.