The Fanjul family of Palm Beach County, Florida are some of the most powerful, influential and wealthy people on the planet. Their power and their endless wealth is so strong that they have been able to cause politicians of both parties to sell their very souls to them, and along with it, our public resources and tax dollars.
Their power and influence has created an image to their liking as job creators, and philanthropists, and they have been able to do so with the cooperation and fawning media attention, similar to what the Koch Brothers have achieved with corporate owned media. But that faux image is not to be believed. The Fanjul family has a well deserved reputation for viciousness whose riches were made on the backs of migrant laborers and even accusations of slavery in their Dominican Republic operations. Their Florida empire alone includes a 700,000-acre region between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades known as the Everglades Agricultural Area. (Actual farming acreage, which includes other crops, is 470,000 because of conservation areas and other projects.) The sugar cane agricultural runoff from their plantations is funneled via canal into Lake Okeechobee where depending on lake levels is released into the Everglades, as well as both the Indian River Lagoon on the Atlantic coast, and the Caloosahatchee river on Florida’s Gulf coast. At times of heavy rainfall the release has become not only massive but commonplace due to seasonal and non-seasonal heavy rainfall which is enhanced by the effects of Global Warming. The water should be recycled in holding ponds in the Everglades to be purified and sent south to restore part of the original flow of the river of grass. In fact, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 1 in 2014 which to do just that. But the funds have been spent on other priorities of Rick Scott and the GOP legislature which controls the levers of power in the state. With a wink and a nod the Fanjul billionaires continue to dump their deadly poison into Florida’s estuaries.
José "Pepe" Fanjul, part owner of Fanjul Corporation which owns Florida Crystals. (Getty)The Fanjul empire is dependent on artificial federal price supports of sugar, because without it their industrial advantage and wealth would collapse. Before the birth of the Tea Party, Florida was making progress in cleaning up Lake Okeechobee. In 2008, then-governor Charlie Crist so enraged the Fanjul family when he offered to buy US Sugar lands -- more than 125,000 acres at a projected cost to the state of about $1.2 billion -- without consulting them. The outrage was due to the fact that if government built wetland marshes using US Sugar lands to store and filter the deadly agricultural waters, then the state would be a step closer to key parcels owned by the Fanjuls in the Everglades Agricultural Area. In 2010, the greedy and peeved Fanjul family summoned the Florida House Majority Leader, Marco Rubio, to their compound where they showered him with multiple, six-figure campaign contributions for his successful primary challenge against Charlie Crist for US Senate. Like House Lanister, Senator Rubio always pays his debts. He has voted nay on such laws as S954 - Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2013, SAMNDT2985- Repeals the Limit on the Use of Funds to Procure Alternative Fuel and other environmental protection legislation in order to protect his corporate overlord’s interests.