To ALL Concerned Citizens

To ALL the concerned citizens of Bay County: I started to notice these anti-patterns developing in our community some time ago.  An anti-pattern does things wrongly, yet appears attractive for some reason…profitable or easy in the short term, dysfunctional, wasteful of resources, unsustainable, and unhealthy in the long term.  It also keeps reappearing. 

Inflation expands the money supply; this legalized form of counterfeiting dilutes the savings of the most productive members in our society.  In 2008 the United States refused to admit bankruptcy and administered the grossest display of corporate welfare to have ever occurred on U.S. soil, commonly referred to as the Bailout.  Capitalism had been preached religiously in this country; however when the time came for these responsible parties to accept their losses as a result of their own high risk taking, banking institutions in congruence with government organizations used their financial leverage as a means to legislatively avoid accounting. In this way the federal system was manipulated into public losses and private gains, in direct confliction to the previously agreed upon capitalist motto of private gains and private losses. 

The central bank’s manipulation of interest rates allowed local banks to drastically reduce the price at which they borrowed money, which increased the amount of borrowing and thus lead to more land purchases, more construction, and more developers.  This caused the price, size, and number of houses to inflate.  This distorted the entire local economy and siphoned dollars away from other sectors and other individuals. Condominiums, neighborhoods, complexes, and government buildings flooded the landscape. None of this seemed odd to developers or buyers at the time as the mantra was one could always sell the homes for more. 

An inherently insolvent Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation claims that certain community banks in the area were negligently using extravagant appraisal values and an over reliance on income from completed developments as a source of collateral on high risk loans.  In layman’s terms, in the hopes of making a lot of money, the richest were taking unlimited risks at the cost of the lives of the poorest with the belief that they had unlimited insurance.  It remains in the best interest of the community that these two parties go to a public trial instead of settling outside of court so that we may gather prized testimony that would release the information of what these particular financial institutions were up to. 

The oil leak continues to plague our environment. The physical damage caused to our local waters pains all the life that surrounds it, however the economic onslaught has yet to been uncovered.  The organizational structure of the Bay Zoning and Planning Board and the Tourist Development Council consists of non-elected members who have been granted authority to essentially design the infrastructure and economic movements of local citizens.  Majority of the representatives on the TDC own numerous and substantial pieces of property. They consist primarily of wealthy condominium, attraction, and restaurant owners.  Research into the political contributions to the county commission indicates that certain members of the TDC who were appointed by the commission also contributed to the campaigns of the commission.  The representative on the commission from the beach received overwhelming support in his campaign from developers, construction companies, financiers, real estate firms, insurance corporations, attorneys, and other business groups.  Upon further investigation campaign contributions to the Panama City mayor, the former chairman of the planning board, the property appraiser, the clerk of court, and the former sheriff links to a single donor.  In the book the Green Empire this individual was identified as the “unofficial king of infrastructure in Northwest Florida.” At this point in time assistance in a more detailed investigation into the alleged accounting fraud and racketeering of the events surrounding our economic downfall would be heavily welcomed so the community can relocate the assets from the incompetent and put it into the hands of the competent.