Monday, July 12, 2010

As Justice Louis Brandeis said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant"

And "electric light is the best policeman."

Learn more about AKERMAN SENTERFITT, BP's law firm, which billed our City of St. Augustine more than $200,000 in racist City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS' insane effort resisting a Florida DEP order to put contaminated solid waste in a Class I landfill (where it now lives). AKERMAN SENTERFITT partner WILLIAM PENCE euchred FDEP into accepting this harebrained scheme. The people of Lincolnville, West Augustine and other St. Augustine communities united, and in our righteous wrath, defeated AKERMAN SENTERFITT and its mendacious defense lawyers.

Now AKERMAN SENTERFITT lawyER DANIEL SAUL GELBER wants to be our next Attorney General of Florida.

What do you reckon?

See below.

Price-fixers, polluters, influence-peddlers, Big Oil, Big Sugar, Big Tobacco.



Who do they hire? AKERMAN SENTERFITT, Florida's largest law firm. See below.

AKERMAN SENTERFITT represented our CIty of St. Augustine in its efforts to inflict pain on the people of Lincolnville, empowering racist City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS in his: (A) avoiding criminal and civil liability for putting 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in our Old City Reservoir and (B) seeking to move that solid waste back to Linclnville. Both these environmental crimes involved African-American communities.

AKERMAN SENTERFITT, DAN GELBER's law firm represents more malefactors of great wealth than any other law firm in FLorida. With 500 lawyers, it represents the rich and powerful of Florida. Three AKERMAN SENTERFITT lawyers are State Senators (one is a State Representative)

DAN GELBER worked for AKERMAN SENTERFITT for at least twelve years (another blog said 25 years).

AKERMAN SENTERFITT lawyer DAN GELBER did internal investigations of corporations and traded on his Capitol Hill experience as Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (1994-1998), chaired by homophobic Senator Sam Nunn.


That's the condescending AKERMAN SENTERFITT lawyer WILLIAM PENCE in the funny hat, attending a fancy-pants masqued ball several years ago (our City Attorney RONALD BROWN), gets his tickets for free. (PENCE has now moved to another firm).

AKERMAN SENTERFITT was involved in the continuing coverup of the City of St. Augustine's illegal dumping since 2006. He was present when false statements were mnade to the Florida DEP and U.S. EPA. He pursued the nefarious scheme to send solid waste back to the community of Lincolnville. He talked down to the people of West Augustine and Lincolnville at the Jsnuary 10, 2008 meeting. Now he's negotiated with FDEP, in secret, excluding community activists. He had the nerve (as did our City) to refuse to hold another meeting at the A.M.E. Church in Lincolnville, stiffing the request from the Lincolnville Neighborhood Association to hold Thursday's meeting there. As a result, one City Hall meeting was all-white (except for the city employee who tape-recorded the meeting).
That meeting was not televised or videotaped. Not one City Commmissioner attended the meeting, although Commissioner ERROL JONES was seen a few minutes later - was he watching from his office in City Hall, refusing to be associated with the scandal he helped create and continue?
JONES was repeatedly rude to persons asking questions about the illegal dumping.
Then, on November 13, 2007, it was JONES who made the motion to ship the waste back to Lincolnville, where he himself grew up. (Two Commissioners -- Ex-Mayor GEORGE GARDNER and ex-Vice-Mayor SUSAN BURK -- did not attend the November 13, 2007 meeting.
Only because seven citizen activists filed a petition with FDEP was tne notion of shipping illegally dumped solid waste back to Lincolnville rejected.
AKERMAN SENTERFITT lawyer WILLIAM PENCE (and GELBER) personally profited from this stupid, racist idea, which would have depressed Lincolnville property values.
City mouthpiece WILLIAM PENCE had the nerve to call the citizen petition "frivolous." The nerve of this malefactor of great wealth and his corporate law firm.
It is hardly "frivolous" to defend one's city and community from illegal dumping and Environnmental Racism.
PENCE is typical of corporate lawyers -- soulless, reckless and feckless, wasting our City's money, looking down his distended nostrils at lesser mortals. What a waste of a good education (which includes the London School of Economics).
The people won. WILLIAM PENCE, the City of St. Augustine and AKERMAN SENTERFITT lost.
The solid waste was not shipped back to Lincolnville.
It's been removed from the Old City Reservoir and put in a Class I landfill, which City officials brazenly said they would "never" tolerate.
The racist City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS and the racist city government -- the one Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the "most lawless city in America" -- aided and abetted by AKERMAN SENTERFITT refused to agree to public participation in negotiations, refusing to answer questions about what was dumped and why, keeping tatterdemalion City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS in office, and lying about everything (even falsely claiming to have changed procedures to prevent further environmental violations and claiming to have done a "root cause analysis" when none exists).
WILLIAM (PENCE and DAN GELBER) and AERFMAN SENTERFITT -- we see right through you. Your services, such as they were, cost our City hundreds of thousands of dollars and provide guidance about who we should support in the Democratic Primary for Attorney General.
Not DAN GELBER, whose oleaginous firm now represents BP.

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