Column: St. Petersburg's bid to grab island is a troubling sign

In case you didn't see my Sunday column on St. Petersburg's plans to annex part of Tierra Verde...

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If you take the Bayway exit off Interstate 275 southbound in Pinellas County, head for the beaches, and then turn left toward Fort De Soto Park, you'll pass through the unincorporated island community of Tierra Verde.

There's a little village of marinas, restaurants and shops on your right just after you cross a drawbridge over the Intracoastal Waterway. I used to stop there at the Bait Bucket on my way to the park, back in the days when I pretended to be trying to catch snook or redfish.

But if the city of St. Petersburg has its way — and if the residents of Tierra Verde can't stop it — this northern end of the island will soon be known as, uh …

"St. Petersburg."

Yep. The city proposes to reach across the water and bring an odd appendix of land in Tierra Verde into its city limits. The proposed annexation consists of 18.25 acres of land and 10.07 acres of water, including the submerged strip needed to connect Tierra Verde to the mainland.

The circumstances behind this annexation are, shall we say, unusually interesting.

First, there are allegations of an effort to make sure that any pesky residents of the affected area — who might be entitled to vote in an annexation election — are no longer "residents." Presto, change-o! No election needed.

Based on voter complaints, the Pinellas supervisor of elections has asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether live-aboard marina residents were forced to change their voter-registration addresses elsewhere.

Next, the major property owners agreeing to the annexation, including Steve Sembler, a son of well-known developer Mel Sembler, apparently figure the city will like their development plans.

The residents of Tierra Verde, who get no vote at all, are overwhelmingly opposed to the annexation. So is Pinellas County, which is sending a letter to the city.

"Going across the Intracoastal Waterway and starting to annex another island, another community," county planning director Brian Smith told me, "doesn't seem to be what we think is the intent of the law."

But the city says its proposal satisfies the law. I was especially interested in the paragraph in city documents explaining how the city, which already provides some services to the area, plans to extend its police protection.

"The area will be served by the St. Petersburg Police Department after annexation, which has adequate resources to provide such services," the city document says.

(I am curious as to whether the men and women who drive the police cars agree.)

You can see the attraction of this deal to Mayor Rick Baker and the City Council. The city gets to increase its tax base and its territory — and it can approve development without worrying about any angry constituents.

And once it gets a beachhead in Tierra Verde, St. Petersburg can keep going.

The first public hearing on the annexation is 3:30 p.m. Thursday at St. Petersburg City Hall. There's a second hearing the next Thursday.

I just hope these tactics don't give St. Petersburg any ideas about its upcoming election on a baseball stadium.

Is it possible to tell 275,000 people that they don't live here either? If I were the opponents, I might start looking for "St. Petersburg city limits" signs on the edge of my yard — facing inward.

Comments

[justme]

The Terra Verde deal smells a bit fishy to me, and its not a good smell.

This is getting scary. If this can happen.. then this could happen with the stadium. Guess those in office think they have a higher power to do whatever they damn well please and screw what the residents and voters want.

Hmmm is it time we oust a few political figures and get someone fresh in office that will actually do what the residents and tax payers want for the city instead of having their own personal/financial agenda.

[guy]

Mr.T, How many times have I refered to a "Shadow, Government here in ST. Pete.
They are back and alive and healthy.
My instinct tells me that if you checked the bank accounts of the council members, you might find something strange!!!!
Too many things are happening here in a flash.
There is not enough talent on our city staff to be making all these dramatic moves.

[Reality]

I find it fascinating that politicians (those predominantly funded by the development industry, that is) will proclaim that property owners have the right to do what the wish with their property, particularly if they are developers who recently purchased a piece of property that now needs a land-use or zoning change in order to build more speculation and/or investment condos.

On the other hand, we can’t seem to adequately explain or resolve the fundamental, if not constitutional issue of “involuntary” annexation.

So it seems that property owners do have rights, so long as it complies with a political agenda.

Maybe the Chamber of Commerce should put together a Task Force to study the feasibility of the land grab! Oh wait! They just have, just ask Sembler.

[Allan Greene]

May 5-6, 2008: Actually, land grabs by greedy rich propertied and possessing ruling classes are nothing new. They go back thousands of years.

I think to comprehend what "private property" really is, and why it is different from "personal property," we have to read the Marxist, Frederick Engels. Engels wrote a book entitled, "Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State." He analyzed private property in there not as what we think of as "personal property," but, rather, as a social relationship that emerged roughly 20 thousand or so years ago when humankind's tool-making got to the point where food, clothing, shelter, and comforts secured and produced by it not only were adequate to feed the immediate tribe, but others beyond the immediate tribe as well.

Tribes engaged in warfare with each other over food, clothing, shelter, and comforts. This was before the agricultural revolution which, about 10 thousand years later, saw the domestication of animals and the ability of humans to cultivate fruits, vegetables, plants, that, in turn, led to settled human communities. We're talking of about 20 thousand years ago, when people pretty much still lived like nomads, running around searching out the best sources for food, clothing, shelter, comforts. People lived pretty much as hunters and gatherers in those circumstances.

And in those circumstances, before about 20 thousand years ago, when tribes fought each other for scarce resources, the tribe victorious over another tribe saw the defeated tribe simply as another food source -- so the defeated tribe often became lunch or dinner.

However, with the development of human toolmaking to the point wherein enough food sources other than humans could be gotten (fish, wildlife, roots, tubers, wild fruits and vegetables, etc.) to feed both the immediate tribe and the tribe beyond the immediate tribe, captives defeated in inter-tribal wars could be kept alive for the purposes of doing forced labor for the victorious tribe.

Engels argued in "Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" that this is the origin of private property, private property in slaves. The social relationship of slavery in which one class, the owners of slaves, kept in bondage another class of slaves whom they owned, is the first form of private property.

Actually, however, the first slaves were collectively owned or cooperatively owned by the entire victorious tribe. But this arrangement over time proved unviable and unfeasible. First, slaves either fought back or ran away. To keep them in the new condition of remaining slaves, a special institution had to be set up -- armed men plus prisons. This is the origin of what is today called, the police and prisons, which Engels argued was the real institution or core of what is called the state. The state was never impartial or neutral. It arose as an institution for the keeping of the defeated tribe in a condition of being owned by the victorious tribe.

But special bodies of armed men plus prisons defending the given new institution of property in slaves owned by the entire tribe -- the real nature of the state at its origins -- led over a period of time to the gradual taking advantage by the new armed men plus prisons of the situation and the exploitation of the fact the armed men plus prisons increasingly had the training in and monopoly of armaments. By and large, historically, it had been the men in the tribes who had done the fighting and the hunting, while the women in the tribe, historically, had done the gathering. The men therefore historically had had the training in the actual tools of hunting, the heavy weaponry of the time, such as there was. This situation only continued and was magnified with the emergence of the new institution called, the state, aimed at defending the new slaveowners from the slave laborers captured in inter-tribal wars. Only now, this led to the increasing specialization and centralization and development of the situation so that instead of the entire tribe having access to the armaments and weaponry, this became increasingly the monopoly of the special bodies of armed men. This, in turn, led them to where they could and did impose their ability to seize for themselves greater amounts of the new "private property," slave laborers, and those with greater numbers of slave laborers were deemed over historical time to be those with the greatest social and political and economic influence in the society.

Additionally, also given the fact historically that the females had done most of the gathering, they lacked by and large (not always, it must here be stressed; there were instances of important exceptions; but by and large) the ability to wield the heavy armaments and weapons. As the institution of the armed men plus prisons developed apace over time into a smaller class of people owning the greatest numbers of slaves, this excluded from the ownership of slaves most tribal members, but it also led to the development into second-class citizenship, such as it were, of the female portion of the tribes, because the new increasingly centralized ruling class of owners of greater numbers of slaves decided there had to be a way to pass their private property in slaves down from parents to children. And this came to be done not along the lines of both men and women (unlike, for instance, in earlier tribal societies, wherein there was a kind of rough sex equality among both the men and the women), but strictly along the male line.

This development came to be sanctioned in new fairy tales of a new kind of religion. The old religions had more or less spoken of spirits as residing in the natural, the nature-made, the animals, fish, brooks, plants, etc., and the spirits were both male and female, and a kind of equality or, in some cases, even female superiority, prevailed in the older religions. In the older religions, there was "mother right," and the earth was a mother of all creation or seen as the mother of all creation. In the new fairy tales, the mother goddess was replaced by the male gods, and at the start, there were lots of them as there had been lots of gods and goddesses before.

But as private property in slaves centralized into fewer and fewer hands and became the monopoly of fewer and fewer owners of slaves, owning more and more slaves as their symbol of real clout, in the new fairy tales, gradually, some of the male gods got more powerful and more distant from all the other gods and goddesses, and as this occurred, finally, you see the development of the one-male-god-based fairy tales about 5 or 6 thousands of years ago out of the earlier multi-god fairy tales.

Additionally, the superior god was always a male god now, unlike in earlier times when there were female and male gods acting on a more or less equal basis.

The new clergy or priesthood earned their livelihood based on the new fairy tales, and they had no toleration for the older fairy tales, and they incited violence and terror to wipe out the old fairy tales and old ways of thinking.

But this new priesthood basically simply reflected the new development of monopoly of ownership of most private property in slaves into fewer hands, male hands, and with that, enforced passing of the slaves from parents down to sons, not daughters -- inheritance along the male line as the primary institution. Additionally, the original emergence about 20 thousand or so years ago of the private property in slaves with the institution of armed men plus prisons and the development over time of exploitation of ability to seize more and more slaves by the new armed men plus prisons implied and led to centralization of slave ownership into a smaller and smaller and smaller ruling class separate and apart from the great bulk of the tribe, who increasingly were dispossessed of not only capacity to own slaves, but eventually of all political rights.

In the earlier tribal societies of pre-20 thousand years ago, while the downside certainly was eating captive tribes -- cannibalism, -- the upside was, at least, pretty generally universal tribal equality both along the lines of sex, and along the lines of the communal organization of property ownership, so that everything was pretty universally shared. There were no special bodies of armed men plus prisons, since they were not needed. There were no inheritances along sex lines, since there was nothing to inherit, and such "inheritance" as existed was communist or communal in nature, social in nature, tribal in nature, and the entire tribe participated in it. There was no monopoly of armaments in the hands of a small clique with a monopoly of the right of use of armed force, and so, there was no state.

So even though the earning and getting of life and the means of life in this early kind of society was very hard -- "nasty, brutish, and short," as the great 17th Century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, put it, -- the very hardship made for a kind of inherently needed camaraderie among all tribal members and a sense that nobody's labor was any better or more worthwhile than anybody else's kind of labor. Everybody more or less had to pitch in to get the means of life, or else the entire tribe would fall apart and die.

Tool-making is technology. Other animals make primitive or rudimentary tools. But unlike humans, other animals do not make progress in tool-making. We humans are the only animals who make progress -- development -- in tool-making. And over great periods of time, that affords us an advantage over the rest of the animals with whom, when we were living in tribes, we had to compete for scarce resources.

Engels wrote his book, however, in the later 19th Century, in the 1880s, which was the beginning of contemporary society internationally. That is, he lived at a time when the international division of labor and international capitalism had led to this spread of making of enormously complex modern tools all over the world and, he thought, this could only continue and get more complex and more involved. He and Marx both felt that the making of really progressively involved modern technology could potentially become internationally the basis for achieving globally a new kind of international communal or communist equality again, but one in which all the downsides of the older kind of communal or communist equality would no longer be there. In the new vision he and Marx had, machines and technology would become the slaves of humankind and the objective need for all enslavement by any humans of other humans would gradually disappear. But the precondition for this would be, in his and Marx's view, the overthrow of the current kind of slavery, which he and Marx saw as wage slavery, the necessity of the vast majority of humankind to labor to produce the enormous property and wealth and profits of an increasingly smaller and smaller and smaller ruling class of big property owners and possessing classes.

In his and Marx's view, "personal property" was not the same as "private property," and so, for instance, a corporation or a bank or a factory are not "private property," because they inherently impact on the lives of too many other human beings, and therefore should by the nature of them be social property. But, on the other hand, your book, your house, your computer, your car, are personal property. They did not want to see people deprived of their personal property; rather, they wanted to see technology expand to such an extraordinary degree that such kinds of personal property would be available to all. They would not, for instance, have thought highly of Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot, who, in the case of Stalin, literally wiped out the little bits of personal property of smallholding little Russian farmers, killing millions to get to that end, and in the case of Pol Pot, wiped out the entire technical and intellectual stratum of society. Both Engels and Marx saw knowledge, intelligence, technology, science, as the potential agent of human liberation, not something to destroy.

Additionally, they would have had contempt for Stalin's notion of "building socialism in one country," because in the view of Engels and Marx, the kind of society they envisioned required the joint efforts of at least several countries worldwide. One country alone, even a powerhouse of a country, never possesses adequate technology and resources to "go it alone" if we're talking about getting to a stage of society in which the objective material basis for the division of society into classes (ruled classes and ruling classes) is to go the way of the dinosaurs, and if with the extinction of the class division, the extinction of the institution of the state (armed men plus prisons) is also to go the way of the dinosaurs, and with this, the extinction of the inequality of the sexes that grew up originally about 20 thousand years ago (with what Engels called the "great counter-revolution against the female sex," i.e., the development of the institution of inheritance in the male line of private property in slaves) is also to go the way of the dinosaurs. For this vision to come about, it would, in their view, require the joint efforts of several countries to start the process in motion.

So Stalin's notion of "building socialism in one country" is a counter-revolutionary notion against Marx's and Engels' original materialistic notion of science, technology, machinery, becoming the tools of human liberation globally, because the boundaries of the nation-state inherently lead to limiting human productive capacity, and ultimately, to wars among the new kinds of "tribes," that is, in modern times, wars between nation-states based on corporate profits and the wish to extend the reach of the owning ruling classes.

So when I read of the smallscale effort of Rick Baker and the St. Pete government to imperialistically seize the little territory of Tierra Verde, it does not surprise me one bit. Those with lots of profit and property holdings have throughout the ages of history sought to seize more and more and more. Modern capitalism is that kind of system of private property holding that is not like the ancient slave holding system in the sense that the modern system of extraction of a surplus product from the labor of the masses is based on who owns the factories, mines, mills, banks, corporations, real estate -- who owns the bulk of it. This ownership has proceeded from the time when Engels and Marx wrote in the period of 1844-1880s through now to where, the NY Times noted in 1996, 537 individual human beings own roughly 60 percent of the assets of the planet earth. Marx in his book, "Capital," predicted this enormous centralization of capital in fewer and fewer and fewer hands would happen over time, and it has. It's become a super-monopoly in the hands of a small ruling class.

And the seizure of the small area of Tierra Verde by the profiteers and speculators of St. Petersburg is simply a continuation of a very, very, very old story, of seizure of the lands of the vulnerable and weaker portions of humankind by the more powerful sections of humankind.

The American Civil War came out of that here in America. The slaveowners sought to seize more and more in territory so more and more new states entering the union would be slave states. That competed with the Northern and Western capitalist bourgeoisie whose profit was based on employment of free labor or mobile labor, not slave labor. But once the North won the Civil War, the capitalists set about monopolizing everything for themselves, this time monopolizing all banking and corporate and real estate property for themselves. The American industrial revolution that set in right in the middle of the Civil War in 1863 saw big capitalist industrialists at the top of the heap only for a relatively short period, before, finally, in 1900-1901, the new change over to where big bankers were on an "even-Steven" par with big industrial capitalists was symbolized by the takeover of Andrew Carnegie's steel works by the big banker J. P. Morgan. The 20th Century Marxist, Lenin, wrote of the new trend in his middle-of-World-War-One book, "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism," wherein Lenin talked in there of the new modern institution of interlocking directorates, where members of the boards of banks and corporations sit on each others' boards as the centralization and monopolization of the private property in holdings becomes more and more and more over time. And today, in 2008, that centralization has become enormous. The notion that globalization is "new" is false; globalization has been around since at least 1848. But the globalization is proceeded apace and become huge. Notions of trying to have one national economy separate from a world economy are childish fairy tales and childish superstitions, and ultimately only lead to war, as in Hitler's notion of "national autarchy" (going it alone), which ironically led him to seize all of Europe, then to try unsuccessfully to seize the Soviet Union, which, ironically, led to his downfall.

Anyway, this little microcosm of a seizure by the property holding and possessing classes of St. Pete, supported by Baker and the bipartisan St. Pete politicians of Demopublican and Republicrat type, is nothing new.

It's simply a continuation of a very old story.

And when the working people finally tire of this crap and take over the means of production here in America and worldwide, we'll stop the looting and piracy and thieving and robbery and pillage of the masses by the ruling looting rich owning class.

May that day come soon.

[Paul]

Interesting post. I'm tired of the land grabs in St Pete. How do we stop it?