Susan G. Komen for the Cure founder and CEO Nancy Goodman Brinker, a part-time resident of Palm Beach and a former George W. Bush appointee, denied that the initial decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood was politically motivated. (Photo courtesy of Susan G. Komen for the Cure.)

By Howard Goodman
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Few controversies have flared as quickly, caught steam so fast and come to a conclusion as rapidly as the outrage over the Komen Foundation’s withdrawal of funding for Planned Parenthood.

Short of last year’s Arab Spring, it might the most striking example yet of the power and speed of social media to spread the news — and change it.

It was just Tuesday that the news broke that Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the nation’s biggest breast-cancer fundraiser and sponsor of the annual pink-ribbon Race for the Cure, a staple that draws tens of thousands of runners in West Palm Beach, Miami and other Florida cities, was cutting its contributions to Planned Parenthood — a favorite target of anti-abortion forces, though abortions are a small part of the women’s health services the organization provides, and none of Komen’s money went toward abortions. Komen’s money went instead toward breast-cancer screenings and preventative education — $680,000 last year — largely for women from underserved communities.

By Wednesday, the story, which shocked many people who had assumed that Komen and Planned Parenthood were on the same side — the side of women’s health — dominated countless Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. By Thursday, Planned Parenthood basked in a flood of unexpected contributions, including $250,000 from billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

And on Friday, in a stunning reversal in the face of a torrential storm of bad publicity, Komen caved. It announced an about-face. Planned Parenthood could qualify for Komen grants after all.

This was no small thing. In the past five years, Planned Parenthood reported, Komen grants provided referrals for nearly 170,000 clinical breast exams and 6,400 mammograms across the nation.

This year, Planned Parenthood of South Florida and the Treasure Coast received $10,000, the only Florida affiliate of Planned Parenthood to get Komen money. President Lillian Tamayo told the Palm Beach Post that the grant paid for community outreach in poorer areas such as the Glades. The program teaches women about breast health and how to do self-exams, and refers them to screenings at one of 10 clinics, including those in Boca Raton, Lake Worth, West Palm Beach and Stuart.

Though the controversy is over for now, the fight is sure to endure. As historian Jill Lepore astutely noted in her New Yorker blog, the flareup exposed a “gruesome truth” about American politics: there is no more highly charged subject than embryos and fetuses. The fight has become almost insanely partisan, as if some women’s body parts are Republican and other part Democrat.

The current president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, a former deputy chief of staff for Nancy Pelosi, is the daughter of the former Texas governor Ann Richards, a prominent Democrat. Susan G. Komen for the Cure was founded in 1982 by Nancy Goodman Brinker, a Texas Republican who went on to serve in the Bush Administration. Karen Handel, Komen’s senior vice-president for public policy, is a Republican who ran for governor of Georgia in 2010. On Thursday,22 Democratic Senators sent Komen a letter asking the group to reverse its decision …

Brinker is a part-time resident of Palm Beach. A longtime fundraiser for Republican causes, she was a “Ranger” for George W. Bush’s  campaigns. Bush appointed her as ambassador to Hungary and, later, chief of protocol, an ambassadorial rank. She started her foundation in 1982 after her only sister, Susan G. Komen, died of breast cancer at age 36. The group has since raised almost $2 billion and become the largest breast-cancer charity in the world.

In an interview on Thursday, Brinker denied that the cut-off was politically motivated,but was done because Planned Parenthood was being investigated by Congress for possibly spending tax dollars on abortions. A new Komen policy prohibits grants to groups under government investigation. Left unexplained was why Planned Parenthood was the only one of roughly 2,000 organizations to which the policy was applied.

This Congressional investigation, interestingly, is the creation of US Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican from Ocala, who has been a longtime foe of abortions.

Last year, Stearns helped lead the charge in Congress to try to eliminate all federal funding for Planned Parenthood. That effort passed the House, 240 to 185, but the Senate voted down the House budget, 56 to 44. But not before Jon Kyl, the Republican whip, said on the floor of the Senate that abortion constitutes “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” As Lepore wrote in The New Yorker last November, “Planned Parenthood reported that abortions make up less than 3 percent of its services, whereupon a Kyl staffer offered that what Kyl had said ‘was not intended to be a factual statement.’ ”

With Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul all on record as opposing Planned Parenthood, there’s no reason to think that the political divisions over women’s bodies and women’s health will end anytime soon.

The Corporation for Enterprise Development ranked Florida near the bottom for income and financial security of residents. (Photo illustration: Flickr.)

By Howard Goodman
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

In the run-up to Tuesday’s Florida Republican presidential primaries, our state’s distressed economy got national attention from the likes of the New York Times, NBC News and Bloomberg News.

Those portraits were grim enough, but here come a batch of statistics that makes Florida’s situation look even darker.

The Corporation for Enterprise Development, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, released on Tuesday a sweeping study of the finances of average Americans. Their biggest finding: 43 percent of U.S. households are “liquid-asset poor.” That’s about 127 million people.

That means that “if one of these households experiences a sudden loss of income, caused, for example, by a layoff or a medical emergency, it will fall below the poverty line within three months,” according to Huffington Post reporter Alexander Eichler. “People in these households simply don’t have enough cash to make it for very long in a crisis.”

These are people who generally are working, but struggling. They’re doing better than the 15 percent of Americans — 46 million people — living below the poverty line.

That was the headline. In the finer print, the CFED broke down its data state by state. And Florida, it turns out, is one of the worst states in the nation for what the group calls “income and financial security.”

Florida’s overall ranking on the “Assets and Opportunity Scorecard”: 45th, out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

CFED graded the state in five categories. The grades are nothing to brag about.

• Financial assets and income: D.
• Businesses and jobs: D.
• Housing and home ownership: D.
• Health care: F.
• Education: C.

The highest-ranking state? Vermont.

The lowest? Georgia.

What can Florida do to improve? The group recommends three main avenues of attack:

Preserve Homeownership: To address its worst-place rank for foreclosures, Florida should regulate mortgage servicers and enable land banking to help stabilize communities.

Increase Incomes and Encourage Savings: To address high rates of income and asset poverty, Florida should enact state tax credits to supplement earnings for working families and remove the disincentive to save for very low-income families by lifting asset limits in two public benefit programs: TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] and family Medicaid.

Expand Health Care Coverage: To address its high uninsured rate, which is the third worst in the nation, Florida should expand coverage to more low-income people by raising income eligibility thresholds for Medicaid and implementing procedures that facilitate enrollment and renewal of coverage in CHIP [Children's Health Insurance Program] and Medicaid.

The details, including the supporting statistics, are here.

Bruce Benson, the Economics Department chair at FSU, told the Washington Post that while the Koch money paid for two new professor positions, the Koch people didn't suggest candidates for the job. (Photo courtesy of Florida State University.)

By Howard Goodman
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Could it be that students at Florida State University have a deeper understanding of academic freedom than their professors do?

The FSU Student Senate has introduced a resolution denouncing the university’s acceptance of big donations from a foundation run by the billionaire Koch brothers to fund positions in the economics department — and to have a say in who gets the appointments.

David and Charles Koch, septuagenarian owners of one of the world’s largest privately held companies and each worth about $20 billion, are prominent funders of groups that believe that government regulation is stifling American business. They’ve been increasingly active in politics as actors behind the scenes, using their deep pockets to promote tea party groups and anti-union governors including Wisconsin’s Scott Walker. Our own Florida Gov. Rick Scott admitted in June that he snuck away to a Koch brothers’ invitation-only retreat for conservative politicians in Vail, Colo. — a trip that wasn’t on his public schedule.

Last May, the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) reported that the Koch foundation had pledged $1.5 million for positions in FSU’s economics department. “In return,” wrote the Times, Koch representatives “get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting ‘political economy and free enterprise.’” In total, FSU received a pledge of $6.5 million over the course of six years from the Koch Foundation.

At any serious university, allowing donors to dictate the content of teaching or research would be a cardinal sin. FSU officials have denied that their deal with the Charles G. Koch Foundation violates academic freedom. Bruce Benson, the Economics Department chair at FSU, told the Washington Post that while the Koch money paid for two new professor positions, the Koch people didn’t suggest candidates for the job. “It was the other way around,” Benson said. “The department gave such a list to the foundation.”

Benson added: “It must be made perfectly clear that the two positions the Koch Foundation offered to fund were not positions the economics department would have been hiring on because it had no other funding source. The Koch Foundation provided the department with the opportunity to add to its faculty, but it was not held hostage.”

The Koch brothers, whose businesses in chemicals, textiles, trading and refining bring in revenues of at least $100 billion a year, have made financial agreements with more than 150 U.S. campuses, a trend that the president of the American Association of University Professors finds very troubling. “The Koch brothers have paid tens of millions of dollars to get their point of view instilled in classrooms, amongst faculty members and in students,” Cary Nelson said. “Programs they start tend to be one point of view only.”

At a time when money is being slashed from Florida’s university system, FSU has every motivation to accept gifts of private dollars. But the ancients teach that it’s wise to be wary of who’s bearing the gifts. As Bloomberg Markets revealed in a recent investigation, the Kochs are men with extreme views to go with their bottomless bank accounts. In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket, “pledging to abolish Social Security, the Federal Reserve System, welfare, minimum wage laws and federal agencies — including the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.”

In business, Koch Industries has made improper payments to secure deals in India, Africa and the Middle East — and sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism, Bloomberg reported.

Students are right to worry if the Economics Department is for sale. As the documentary Inside Job noted, some economics departments are already — in the words of University of Michigan history professor Juan Coles — “hopelessly corrupt.”

The FSU Student Senate resolution decries the Kochs’ “undue influence on academics as established by the current agreement between the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the FSU Economics department.”

“No public institution should accept funding that is conditional upon a willingness to fulfill  or conform to a private entity’s ideological goals,” the resolution states.

The campaign against the FSU-Koch agreement is organized in part by Progress Florida and Florida Watch Action.

Howard Goodman

Goodman is a prize-winning journalist with a 35-year career. A former metro columnist and editor at the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Goodman more recently worked as a newspaper editor in Shanghai and Hong Kong. He’s been an investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, an editor at Bloomberg News, and a staff writer at newspapers in Kansas City and Salem, Ore. Originally from Chicago, Goodman graduated from Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He now lives in Delray Beach.

Goodman will blog regularly as well as work on special projects that will be published online and by FCIR’s media partners in print, broadcast and online. He replaces Ralph De La Cruz, whose last item for FCIR was published Jan. 25.

(Photo: SXC.)

The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting will launch the first summer investigative journalism workshop for high school students in South Florida.

The 2012 Summer Investigative Journalism Workshop is designed to give high school students intensive training in investigative reporting and the chance to work on investigative stories that could be published in their school publications or in major media outlets in Florida.

Students attending this week-long session will learn how to research and write compelling stories for multiple platforms — print, broadcast and online. The workshop will teach students how to initiate investigative stories, conduct interviews, adhere to standard newsgathering ethics, use social media and publish with WordPress and other tools.

Although this training is geared toward students interested in journalism, attendees will learn research, critical-thinking, writing, technology and other skills essential for college admission. Students will learn from award-winning journalists at the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and other Florida news organizations.

In addition to exposing students to investigative reporting techniques and providing them with skills applicable to college, the Summer Investigative Journalism Workshop will also provide the next generation of Florida leaders with a greater understanding of how civic engagement has changed and how government operates during a time of increasingly fragmented news media.

A limited number of seats will also be available for journalism advisers during the two sessions. Florida Scholastic Press Association offers scholarships for advisers (Dodd or Webb-Stapler) to attend workshops. For more information visit FSPA’s website.

For more information about the week-long workshop, scholarship application, e-mail Linda Davis, coordinator for the Summer Investigative Journalism Workshop.

Dates and Time

Session 1: June 18-22, 2012 (Space limited to 25 students)
Session 2: June 25-29, 2012 (Space limited to 25 students)
9 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. daily (lunch included)
Transportation is not included.

Location

Florida International University, Biscayne Bay Campus
3000 NE 151st Street
North Miami, FL 33182

Tuition and Deadline

Tuition: $1,000 ($300 to reserve your space no later than March 2, 2012)
No refunds after April 1.

Sen. John Thrasher has proposed a bill that would prohibit college professors from serving in the state legislature. (Photo: screen capture from Senate video.)

By Ralph De La Cruz
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Triangulate this story and you’ll find it falls somewhere between laughable, maddening and ironic: A bill moving forward in the Florida Senate would ban state college and university employees, such as professors, from serving in the state legislature.

Cue up the “Yeah, no need to taint the Capitol gene pool with some smart people” joke.

Although the proposal seems far from certain (SB 1560 only passed the Senate Rules Subcommittee on Ethics and Elections by a 7-6 vote on Monday), it has nevertheless passed its first legislative obstacle.

The bill, authored by Sen. John Thrasher, is supposed to prevent conflicts of interest by folks from state colleges and universities. But banning them from serving in the legislature doesn’t make sense. Because, almost by definition, every person in the state has the potential for a conflict of interest. That’s true not just for the state legislature, but every county commission, town council and water district seat.

It’s how our citizen government works. We pick people who live and work in our communities and ask them to manage the affairs of those towns and counties and the state. That’s why every governing body already has conflict-of-interest rules that forbid voting on a bill or ordinance from which you could benefit.

And if lawmakers are so concerned about conflicts of interest, why single out state college and university employees? Spend a little time going through the current Florida Senate roster and you’ll find that more than a quarter of the 40-person Florida Senate (12 lawmakers) identify themselves as lawyers or paralegals (one senator). And these are people who — wait for it — make laws. Talk about a conflict of interest. Or are they simply people with expertise and familiarity in that area? Thrasher, by the way, is on that list.

Another six see themselves as professional politicians. Four are farmers or ranchers. Another four are from the health care industry, and four more in education. Two are from real estate, two  contractors, two former sheriffs, two bankers.

Which of those industries doesn’t have a vested interest in state laws?

If Thrasher’s bill keeps moving forward, it should be interesting to see how it will be received by Sen. Dennis Jones, a vice president with St. Petersburg College. Not to speak of Senate President Mike Haridopolos, who lists his occupation as a professor at Brevard Community College (remember the $152,000 he got for a 175-page double-spaced book manuscript on Florida politics?).

The other major problem with Thrasher’s bill is that it’s another law for a problem that doesn’t exist (remember the bill that would ban Sharia law and the other bill to end the ban on dwarf-tossing?). How many times has there been a serious problem with folks from state colleges and universities taking over government?

Aside from Haridopolos’ book deal, the most obvious example is the case of former state House Speaker Ray Sansom, who was hired by Northwest Florida State College after he left the legislature, and subsequently used his political power and influence to the advantage of the college, himself and a developer.

Sansom was a lot of things — depending on your view: a hired gun, a politician/lobbyist, a scalawag — but no one ever seriously identified him as a professor.

And if this is really about addressing the Sansom and Haridopolos embarrassments, wouldn’t it make more sense to propose a bill that would ban politicians from becoming college professors, rather than the other way around?

Thrasher’s bill just doesn’t make sense. Yet seven senators — supposedly our most senior, respected lawmakers — voted for it and moved it past the first legislative hurdle.

And chew on this: SB 1560 has already gotten further than a bill that would have allowed Florida voters to recall state leaders.

*   *   *

I won’t be updating you on the fate of SB 1560. Today’s item will be my last for the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. I’m leaving behind 28 years in journalism to write books and movies. I look forward to the opportunity to pursue that lifelong dream, but will seriously miss writing this blog and interacting with readers.

Every writer knows (or should know) that, by themselves, words are meaningless. It’s only when they’re read that they acquire any power. Thanks for giving some of mine a little juice.

I will continue to be an avid reader and fan of FCIR. If any of you feel a need to reach me, send me a line at elvientogrande@gmail.com.

Good luck, all.

Newt Gingrich's win in South Carolina opened up the Republican primaries, making Florida a potential kingmaker. (Photo by Gage Skidmore.)

By Ralph De La Cruz
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Buckle up, Florida. After tour stops in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary and Wild West Show is coming to a town near you.

The Republican Party of Florida accepted all sorts of penalties (loss of delegates and poorer floor position at the national convention in Tampa, plus worse hotel rooms) to move the date of the Florida primary up to January 31. That date assured the state would be alone in the national spotlight.

Republican leaders got their wish, though it might feel more like we’ve moved into the middle of the crosshairs than the spotlight.

Prepare to be inundated with fliers, letters, robo-calls, billboards, sky-writing planes, e-mails, newspaper missives and, most definitely, TV ads over the next eight days. Think of it the way you might see the winter tourist season: We can sure use the money, but not the aggravation.

And this year there’s sure to be record amounts of both. That’s because two years and two days ago, a deeply divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that campaign contributions are an expression of free speech. The Citizens United decision effectively voided most restrictions on campaign contributions.

The effect has been predictable.

“There are probably fewer than 100 people who are fueling 90 percent of this outside money right now,” David Donnelly, national campaigns director at the Public Campaign Action Fund, told the Washington Post.

Super PACs are political action committees on steroids. They are the Frankensteinian offspring of Citizens United – fundraising groups with little or no limits. And their presence has been overwhelming so far in the first three Republican primaries. That trend is expected to continue in the Sunshine State. Of the $12.5 million spent in Iowa, just one-third was by the campaigns themselves. According to ProPublica, at least 283 super PACs have been registered since the Citizens United decision. And congratulations to Floridian Josue Larose, who alone has registered 60 — apparently for no reason at all.

At first, after relatively light spending early in Iowa and New Hampshire, it seemed the Citizens United effect may have been overestimated.

But late spending came in from the super PACs. And by the end of the contests, campaigns had taken up all available commercial time on TV. And when the sniping got really serious in the last half of the South Carolina primary, so did the spending. In all three contests, super PACs outspent the regular campaigns. In South Carolina, the margin was two-to-one.

And now that Newt Gingrich steamrolled frontrunner Mitt Romney in South Carolina, truly opening up the nomination, Florida is expected to be a Republican kingmaker. Translation: no holding back financially.

“They’re going to go for broke in Florida, because Florida is such a symbol of Republican strength,” University of South Florida political science professor Susan MacManus told the Orlando Sentinel. “The Republicans know if you don’t win in Florida, you don’t win the White House.”

Just the Romney campaign and its associated super PACs have spent $7.3 million in Florida – more than half what was spent by everyone in South Carolina — before the race even got here.

So expect a heaping helping of Mitt and Newt on TV — particularly if you live along the I-4 corridor, home to 45 percent of the state’s Republicans. Empty the trash and recycling in preparation for the armfuls of unread campaign “literature” that will soon make its way there. And just keep repeating: it’s good for the economy.

Although keep in mind that the real money isn’t being made locally. A lot of it — surprise — goes to overseas interests.

And if you’re interested in keeping score in the money game, spend some time at OpenSecrets. They’ve got the goods.

Enjoy the show.

Ash Williams was reappointed as executive director of the State Board of Administration, which oversees Florida's $120 billion pension fund. (Photo courtesy of State Board of Administration.)

By Ralph De La Cruz
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Ash Williams, the man who runs Florida’s pension fund, was unanimously reaffirmed to that post Wednesday.

That might prompt the question: What do you have to do not to be reappointed as executive director of the State Board of Administration, which oversees the $120 billion pension fund, the fourth-largest in the country? Be transparent, cooperative and above-board?

Because Williams has displayed none of those qualities during his three years as head of the SBA.

Let’s review:

Last summer, the former hedge fund manager was questioned about his investment in funds operated by former clients and partners. The St. Petersburg Times ran a story showing that the state would have done better if it had used a quick and easy automated index rather than the hundreds of high-priced Wall Street experts.

The incident revealed a troubling lack of transparencyby the public agency about its investment operations. It was so troubling that Gov. Rick Scott asked Williams about it in an August cabinet meeting. Williams answered: “I think the transparency issue got a great airing the last legislative session. We have for the most part full transparency.”

That response subsequently earned a “false” ranking by Politifact Florida, the fact-checking website operated by the Times and The Miami Herald. Turns out that the issue received all of 36 minutes of discussion throughout the entire legislative session. And most of that time it was a back-and-forth between Williams and Sen. Mike Fasano, who at one point showed an SBA document that had been so heavily redacted that it was useless.

“It’s all blank, Mr. Chairman,” Fasano said during a hearing. “There’s nothing. It just goes on and on.”

Fasano subsequently asked for documents concerning the state’s $125 million investment in Starboard Value and Opportunity, a company spun off of Ramius LLC. Ramius was run by Thomas Strauss, one of Williams’ former clients.

Strauss and Williams had a cozy enough relationship. Weeks after Williams took over the SBA, Strauss approached him with first-name familiarity.  ”Ash,” Strauss e-mailed Williams, “I hope you’ll consider Ramius.”

According to the Times, Williams wrote back two months later “that he had approved documents to keep confidential the SBA’s review of a possible investment with Ramius.”

So it’s understandable why Fasano might have an interest in the particulars of that transaction. Williams answered the senior senator’s request for the records with a bill for almost $11,000.

After public and legislative outcry, Williams backed off from the $11,000 bill. But as of this week, Fasano was still complaining that he has not received all of the necessary records.

The incident with Fasano led the state’s Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Atwater, to insist that Williams appoint an inspector general. Williams resisted.

“I have repeatedly asked you to fill this position over the past few months, as have members of my staff, and I am frustrated by the lack of response,” Atwater wrote to Williams.

And yet, Williams has managed to retain the support of Scott, who along with CFO Atwater and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi make up the three-person board that provides the only real oversight to SBA’s management of what was once a $200 billion portfolio.

The embattled governor who took office with a damn-the-criticism-I’m-the-CEO attitude apparently relates to Williams’ woes.

“It’s frustrating when you get asked questions all the time,” Scott said in November.

And now Williams has been unanimously approved – including a yes vote from Atwater, of all people. And by Bondi, who has had her own issues with Wall Street (she’s currently suing the Bank of New York Mellon for grossly overcharging the Florida Retirement System Trust Fund on transactions).

So why would those three endorse a public employee who has proven uncooperative and recalcitrant, and whose investment decisions have resulted in $8 billion worth of losses since June?

You might find the answer in this 2009 profile of Williams in Institutional Investor magazine.

Williams was director of the SBA during the glory days of the pension fund in the 1990s, and then was brought in after the SBA’s risky policies almost bankrupted local government pension funds during the real estate collapse in 2007. That near-emergency prompted the former executive director, Coleman Stipanovitch, to resign abruptly.

Williams shepherded the SBA through the crisis, which is probably why state leaders are now reluctant to get rid of Williams despite his sometimes open defiance.

“If you think about his job, his job is to get the best returns we can without taking more risk than he should. That’s not easy,” Scott said in November. “So today I think he’s doing that.”

But you’d think that Scott, of all people, has learned that government cannot be run like a business. And recent history has taught us that Wall Street wizards sometimes come with baggage — primarily a lack of openness coupled with a willingness to push rules in the name of head-turning results.

Those characteristics might be coveted on Wall Street, but they are not conducive to governing and to conducting the people’s business.

The Institutional Investor article (which can be accessed here if you don’t want to subscribe) reports that after the fund fell apart in 2007, the state hired two outside consultants to perform due diligence.

“One of them, Miami attorney Thomas Tew,” the article reports, “says problems were immediately apparent: a lack of Securities and Exchange Commission regulation and oversight as well as the SBA’s dependence on three elected officials — who spend 15 minutes twice a month at the end of the state’s bimonthly cabinet meetings overseeing the agency’s business.”

Tews told reporter Frances Denmark: “If you don’t have auditors and you don’t have regulators, what have you got?“

Tanya Beder, Tews’ due diligence partner, added: “They are in the Dark Ages of risk management.”

But, as the article also pointed out, that lack of oversight is what makes the state job palatable to a big-dollar Wall Streeter. After all, it only pays $325,000 a year.

So Williams not only gets reappointed, but he wants to double the amount of money he can invest without any real oversight.

Aaronson wrote “The Informants” as an investigative reporting fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. The story documented how the FBI recruits and uses informants in U.S. Muslim communities nationwide to initiate terrorism sting operations. Most recently, the FBI conducted a terrorism sting in Tampa.

One of the judges said Aaronson’s story “helps renew my faith in the future of investigative journalism,” calling it “a critically serious subject packaged and presented as a smooth, suspenseful read.”

Gina Barton of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel won in the series category for “Both Sides of the Law,” an investigation of the Milwaukee police force.

An American alligator and a Burmese python locked in a struggle in Everglades National Park. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service.)

By Ralph De La Cruz
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar went to the Everglades Tuesday to announce, with the usual fanfare and political backslapping, a ban on the importation of four species of invasive snakes, including the Burmese python.

“Thanks to the work of our scientists, Sen. Bill Nelson, and others, there is a large and growing understanding of the real and immediate threat that the Burmese python and other invasive snakes pose to the Everglades and other ecosystems in the United States,” Salazar said.

Lovers of the Everglades might have preferred something less self-congratulatory, perhaps more along the line of Pope John Paul II’s plea for forgiveness for the past sins of the Catholic Church.

It would be warranted. In the name of making money, the United States has allowed its citizens to dredge and drain the Everglades for real estate, to poison it with fertilizer and corrupt it with invasive species.

The extent of the abuse was so dramatic that it will cost $12 billion to begin its restoration. It’s become such a severe and embarrassing problem that it seems to have actually, and briefly, brought together the administrations of President Barack Obama and Gov. Rick Scott.

The first big problem with non-native species in the Everglades began almost as soon as modern American entrepreneurs came in contact with the impressive wetlands. Melaleuca trees were introduced into the Everglades in 1906 by folks who wanted to harvest them as ornamental plants and for paper (the tree is also called the paperbark tea tree). Because they grew so fast and propagated so easily, they were intentionally planted into the sides of levees to stabilize the dirt. In the 1930s, planes actually scattered them from the air to promote their growth in the Everglades. Today it’s illegal “to introduce, multiply, possess, move, or release” melaleucas. But it’s too late. Because 106 years later, we haven’t been able to figure out how to eradicate it.

More recently, as South Florida’s urban population ballooned, invasive snakes such as the Burmese python became the next problem. The snakes, often bought for pets, were subsequently released into the wetlands after a bout of buyer’s remorse — or owner’s laziness.

Lacking natural predators, they’ve taken over. It’s believed that there are now 30,000 pythons in Everglades National Park. And they’re spreading.

“It’s sad that it’s gotten this far — and unfortunately, there is no reason to think that they aren’t going to disperse farther north,” said Kris Serbesoff-King, the Florida invasive species program manager for The Nature Conservancy, one of the groups that has been pushing for the ban.

And yet despite all that history, it still took five years of studies, hearings and debate before Salazar was able to announce a ban. And it will be another 60 days before the ban begins.

So those familiar with the history can be excused for finding Salazar’s announcement lacking.

The first commenter on The Miami Herald story about the announcement expressed it succinctly and eloquently: “You are about thirty years too late.”