New Quaker Notebook

I was amused by a report suggesting that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is becoming irrelevant.¹ My amusement was not vicious or snide, but rather the involuntary consequence, I think, of too much irony in the blood.

We're pretty sure we know what she was doing during Katrina.² The question is what she will be found doing when the Cheney-Bush presidency declares martial law.

1. "Waning Influence: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice finds that her star is fading," San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 2007.
2. "Shopping During Katrina," CounterPunch, May 15, 2007. Excerpted from Marcus Mabry's new book Twice as Good.

Impeach the Beast

Get thee over to the website of artist and printmaker Art Hazelwood and order a copy of his 24" x 18" Impeach the Beast poster, either in black and white or in color.

You can also download your own high-resolution image and print it yourself.

We have to get the impeachment option back on the Congressional table. After all, there's still Dennis Kucinich's H Res 333, and David Swanson reported yesterday that "Conyers said that all he needs is three more Congress Members backing impeachment, and he'll move on it, even without Pelosi."

How to Solve the US Immigration Problem

Miami Condo Glut Pushes Florida's Economy to Brink of Recession

July 20 (Bloomberg) - In the middle of the biggest glut of condominiums in more than 30 years, Miami developers keep on building.

The oversupply will force prices down as much as 30 percent, the worst decline since the 1970s, and help push Florida's economy into recession as early as October, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Moody's Economy.com, who owns a home in Vero Beach, Florida.

"Florida is the epicenter for all the problems that exist in the housing industry," said Lewis Goodkin, president of Goodkin Consulting Corp. and a property adviser in Miami for the past 30 years, who also foresees a recession. "The problems we have now are unprecedented and a lot of people will get burnt."

Thirty-seven new high-rise condos and 20,000 new units are being built in Miami's 1,040-acre downtown, where sales fell almost 50 percent in May, according to the Florida Association of Realtors. The new units will join the 22,924 existing condos in Miami-Dade County that were for sale in April, according to Jack McCabe, chief executive officer of McCabe Research & Consulting LLC in Deerfield Beach, Florida. That's the most unsold units since McCabe began tracking sales in 2002.

"Have you been to Miami lately?'' Florida Governor Charlie Crist said at a homebuilders' conference last week in Orlando. "It's like we have a new state bird: the building crane."

[ READ MORE » ]

This is not an issue limited to Miami, but extends throughout the state. I see this now in the Daytona Beach area especially. Who's buying all of these properties, you ask? Florida Developer Tibor Hollo has an answer for that:

Hollo started building in Miami in 1956 and now his Florida East Coast Realty Inc. has two high-rises under construction, the $603 million, 787-unit Villa Magna, and the $120 million, 635-unit Opera Tower.

"Residential buildings, if they are well-located and top of the line, they will sell," Hollo said in an interview in his Biscayne Boulevard office, where the east-facing windows offer a vista of about a dozen new condo constructions.

Well-to-do Central and South Americans like Miami because of its Hispanic culture, while the dollar's weakness against the euro has made Miami attractive to Europeans who seek second homes in the Florida sunshine, Hollo said.

"We sold 38 units of the Opera Tower's 635 units to Russians," Hollo said, his eyes widening. "I would never have dreamed it. I would understand 38 Venezuelans, not 38 Russians."

The great American sell-off begins. At some point, those oil reserves in Iraq just won't seem quite so important.

Invisible Woman

Impeach the Beast

How to Solve the US Immigration Problem