What’s the most common palm in South Florida? A "greased" palm...
.Although corruption in SoFla is a staggeringly sincere and morosely monumental topic of preposterous proportions, we feel compelled to attempt to point out some of the epic "Floridirt" that will enlighten non-residents of Florida as to the reality of "what goes on here" and why no one should consider moving here -- and vacation "at your own risk"...
Hollywood Florida is "number one" -- in corruption. From an old article in the local "New Times" rag sheet regarding the mis-management of money, the statement is made that Hollywood is "a city that's seen more corruption scandals and
Corruption, Shmurruption, SO WHAT! Broward county, encompassing Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale, is synonymous with blatantly open corruption. So much so, that a legislative bill was introduced to appoint a "watchdog office" in an attempt to do something about the abject corruption. Simple, pass the bill -- right? WRONG! The legislation has been declared "dead", although we surmised it could have been classified as DOA from the very start. That's the way it is here, corruption abounds, and no one does anything about it. If you think we made this up, just click on this link for proof of this certifiably preposterous scenario.
Corrupt SoFla Officials. "Public corruption is so widespread throughout Florida that last fall the governor petitioned the state’s Supreme Court to impanel a special grand jury to investigate the crisis. Since taking office the governor has removed dozens of public officials from office for crimes including bribery, extortion, murder, prostitution, burglary, racketeering, and drug offenses" (such a lovely state...and remember that the southeastern region of Florida makes the rest of the state look like a bunch of innocently naïve "girl scouts"). Note that this was only a purge of outright known "criminals", and of course did nothing to resolve the hoard of incompetent brainless puppet hypocrites that infest the remainder of public offices. Consider how crooked the entire process was (is?) that these types of criminals ("murderers"!?) were appointed to public office in the first place? The preceding excerpt was from an article which can be found at this link.
Corrupt County Commissioners, aka "Committers" of crime. This is a huge subject, but for now we will mainly point to a few recent examples of how the regional county commissioners -- a bunch of self-important hooligans, shameless swindlers, and downright unethical crooks -- that act as judge and jury for what goes on, or doesn't, in the region, are mainly a bunch of heavy-handed incompetent jerks that are on the take (in the Rubin scenario linked below, tens of MILLIONS of taxpayer dollars were doled out to the commissioner and her husband). Commissioners not only get high
> "The Broward County Commission Is A Nest Of Whores". Article headline from a local newspaper -- not that we wouldn't say exactly the same thing about those disgustingly self-serving self-important unconscionable creeps...
> "County Swine Stick It to Those Who Can Least Afford It". While corrupt commissioners unconscionably rake in crooked money while feasting in the lap of luxury via public monies, they have the asininely rapacious audacity to cut services of public libraries, county parks, and metro busses while raising the rates of those same services, hurting the poor, the unemployed, the starving people that use those dwindling services (some affected will have bus routes eliminated that they use as their only means of transportation). What a rotten bunch of certifiable low-life greedy creeps...
> Commissioner Josephus Eggelletion began serving a federal prison sentence for money-laundering.
> Article: "Broward government [aka, commissioners] is crazy in a bad way".
> There are many more examples of course, far too many, but we close this out, for now, with emphasis on the reality that most of these crooks don't get caught for most of their crimes, or they know who to bribe (using their stolen public taxpayer monies) to avoid convictions and even bad publicity, and therefore most stay out of jail, ripping off the public...
Why the (ex) governor became "persona non grata"... Regarding the prior point of the governor having the audacity to crack down on public officials that were known criminals, we are compelled to point of that the governor has been shunned by his political party and now trails a new rival within his (soon to be prior) political party in the upcoming senatorial election. So, just who is this rival candidate that the governor's political party (soon to be ex-party) is now backing instead of him? Someone to carry on the fight against corruption? Nottt quiiite. You guessed it, the new rival "reeks of corruption" -- somebody that can reinstate all those murderers, extortionists, racketeers, and whores back into public office where they belong, doing what politicians and appointed officials do best. And appoint a few new ones -- are there any good ole Nazi war criminals still available? This is a link to just one article on the subject of how crooked the new goober-nut-oral candidate is. Note that the original article that all the websites reference and link to was quickly deleted from the Miami Herald website, but the link above has some of the original content. Hmmm...now why did the good old Herald delete the article...no doubt the target of the article threatened to murder someone at the Herald, the normal SoFla tactics. To more fully address just how corrupt the rival goober-notorious candidate is, here is a link to blog that provides TEN links to articles on some of the lowly schemes that this sinisterly seedy character was involved in (see next note on that site's links). Florida gives a whole new meaning to the word corruption, and we should give them a new word for it, like "Floruption", or "Floriduption", or "FloriDUHption".
Corruption Coverup. Regarding the prior point and the links to the Miami Herald articles that targeted the sleazy schemes that the sinisterly cheesy character was involved in: a total of five links are now "broken" because the Herald deleted all of their articles "under pressure". They no doubt deleted the articles largely due to the fact that Miami is in Dade county, the corrupt candidate is Hispanic, and Dade county is largely Hispanic. So, the Herald "caved in" under pressure and eradicated viable information which the public should have available to them rather than withheld. To us, this equates to the loss of freedom of speech, or in this case it's more like the concealment of the truth. That's how it is in the state of Floruption...
Florida politicians sacrifice Florida tourism industry for bribes from oil industry. As a footnote to the "Spill Baby Spill" blurb over on the "News" page, not only did the Florida TOURISM industry support building offshore oil rigs within ten miles of the coast of Florida -- SOUTH Florida -- but the politicians fell in line also, including not only the governor, but also Florida House Speaker Dean Cannon (hmmm, a "loose cannon"?), who aggressively pursued offshore oil drilling on the coast of Florida. This link details the scenario, and has a link to the "Follow the Money" website, which reveals the fact that the Florida politicians just happened to be heavily funded by the oil industry via "campaign contributions", more realistically know as "bribes".
Fifty state of Florida employees are paid to "lobby" (aka, "bribe") the state of Florida legislature for money. That's right, the state of Florida pays high dollar salaries to a menagerie of at least FIFTY state employees (aka, "johns"), whose job it is to "wine and dine" legislators, giving taxpayer money to legislators (aka, "ho's"), to bribe the legislators to give vast sums of taxpayer money back to the state organizations that the lobbyists are paid to be "lobbying" for.
"We have a $70 billion budget. We're not going back and looking at how we spend everything. And for example, we have 50 state lobbyists that just lobby the Legislature for money every year. That's not what state governments ought to be doing."
Now, performing an online search for "define lobbying" results in hits that suggest synonyms such as bribery and corruption and prostitution. Consider that the definition of bribery for some reason states that "Bribery of a public official is a felony". Riiiight...
OK, fine, "lobbying" [sic] takes place nationwide and especially in the U.S. congress and senate, and nobody gets arrested for it, but always remember that the state of Florida actually hires people to be lobbyists to give money to legislators to get them to give your taxpayer dollars back to their organizations so that they have more money to do more lobbying...
Here is a link to an extensive "Politifact Florida" article on the subject. If you do not wish to read through the entire article, or even look at it, at the end of the piece Politifact concluded that the contention was "mostly true". "MOSTLY"?!?
Broward County Schools Corruption. The following link is to an article condemning Broward school officials overpaying millions on school cafeteria projects (can you say "kickbacks"?). Click on this link for article on the topic.
Broward County Politicians Corruption. The following link is to a recent article which lists Broward officials arrested for corruption. Click on this link for article on the topic.
Broward County pays millions in overtime each year to Law EnFARCEment. The following link is to an article detailing the exorbitant overtime paid to Broward Sheriff employees. If only, in our experience, they actually did something to earn it, but our observations point toward sitting around in air conditioned patrol cars on the beach "guarding sailboat exhibitions"...... This is only the infinitesimal tip of the farcical iceberg, but enough to for us to get "BOLO'd" and harassed and even falsely ticketed, arrested, or incarcerated (while they release 19,000 hardened criminals from jail due solely to "budget cuts" so that they can pay overtime to the Sheriffs...). Broward County pays millions in overtime each year to Law EnFARCEment.
Florida Fraud. Be aware that Florida has the infamous rep for being the worst state in the nation for a great number of egregious wrongs, and they are again in 2010 given the title of "number one in mortgage fraud". Click on this link for article on the topic.
A point for emphasis on the topic of corruption in Florida is that performing an online search on the keywords "florida corruption" yielded 4,740,000 hits (which is two to three times more than the normal average states, but slightly less than Nevada). Footnote: the above-noted count jumped from 3.4 million hits to the above 4.7 million hits in just a couple of months, which says something else altogether doesn't it... Also, here is a link to an article indicating that -- based on available reported federal statistics -- Florida ranks as one of the most corrupt states. However, we question if some Florida politicians didn't bribe the author of the report or somehow rigged the stats to make themselves look better. I mean really, does anyone believe that Tennessee, Virginia, Mississippi, Delaware, and North Carolina are all more corrupt than Florida???
To date, the above examples are all that we have had time to document, but realize that this is only the infinitesimal tip of the proverbial iceberg. We also can only document so much of this horribly disgusting garbage at a given short session before we become depressed and nauseated, and we have to take a break and get out and try to not think about how seriously rotten the low-life ivory tower "powers that be" are here. The old saying for Florida is that "the rules are different here", but we assure you that in many cases there are no rules for the corrupt, and of course no ethics nor common sense either.
The point of this is to beware, that this contagious cancer of corruption has a way of infecting others that observe it, and the community as a whole has become disgustingly jaded, feeling like if they can be crooked and get away with it, why not... Like they say, "Floridiot see, Floridiot do". The bottom line effect is that you will not get a fair shake, a square deal, and that rather you will get screwed by the city, the county, the state, and just about anybody else that you encounter, like your neighbor or the clerk in the checkout...
Best to stay away from Florida, especially Broward county, best go elsewhere...
"Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough." -- J. Van de Wetering
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