Time to bring a little anarchy back to Lake Worth?
What the 2021 city election could mean for this coastal Florida city and beyond
by Panagioti Tsolkas / Antistasis Project
[UPDATE: Since the time this was published, the candidates labeled “radical obstructionists” all won their seats at the commission. Stay tuned to find out what this means for community organizing on the ground.]
It’s two days away from an election in this small beach town amidst the sprawling strip of concrete that covers much of southeast Florida. It will bring a welcome end to the barrage of political mailers warning of the “radical obstructionists” threatening to poison peoples’ minds with socialist plots (unless there are runoffs that drag it out). In cities across the country, this red-baiting rhetoric is the standard line that Republicans toss at Democrats. But here in Lake Worth it hits a little closer to home, since just 10 years back the nightmare of capitalists the world around came true. An anarchist menace did in fact overtake the city commission.
PAUSE: If you’re just reading this to help you figure out how to vote on Tuesday, I suggest checking out the PBC Environmental Coalition guide on the city election.
If you are genuinely interested in what anarchists have to do with this quaint beach town election, read on…
The truth is it was just one person who openly considered herself an anarchist that got elected to the city commission back in 2005, but she helped several other community activist candidates and a broad grassroots movement to join her, giving a majority commission vote to people unaffiliated with the chamber of commerce (gasp!). Based on the amount of money that came pouring in from statewide and national corporate donors, one could make the case that it did terrify some people. Though multiple election results indicate that more people voted for the anarchist and her allies than than the openly capitalist ones.
While the haters, skeptics (and a few wonks) focused on the contradiction of an anarchist in local government, the numbers show that she inspired and empowered people to engage in their community who otherwise hadn’t bothered, outside maybe the occasional presidential race. And if you also take in account the undeniable fact that a vast majority in the city, upwards of 80% some years, steer clear of local politics as a combined result of being ignored for generations, immigrant disenfranchisement and anarchistic distrust of the system, then you can make a pretty safe guess that she just might be the most popular elected official out there, regardless of election results.
Over the past decade there has been a concerted effort to re-write the story, making it seem like the anarchists in Lake Worth were anathema to residents of the city, in effort to divert attention way from the short-sighted and destructive profiteering of developers and investors. But the truth, evidenced ironically in half-a-dozen victorious electoral campaigns, is that we’ve had a lot of broad support. So in effort to preserve the legacy a bit more accurately than a pile of election mailers, here’s a little piece of the story from this anarchist. Learn the recent local history, decide for yourself if you too might want it to repeat itself.
Though Lake Worth is considered “a principal city” of the Miami metropolitan area (home to over 6 million) the roughly 38,000 people that the census recognizes in Lake Worth could seem like a very random, even insignificant, factor in the politics of the region, let alone the entire state. But for the past decade and a half, real estate developer interest groups at a national level have taken notice of Lake Worth, and made campaign contributions accordingly. 1
It’s not just because Lake Worth is a real estate goldmine where working class immigrant families who make up over half the town are currently standing in the way of a full scale rush to level entire neighborhoods for luxury condos. (Yes, the current commissioners even added “Beach” to the city name just to make the property flippers drool.) While that is clearly a factor, it’s also the case with dozens of coastal towns that are in line to get gentrified beyond recognition.
Generally the local real estate thugs handle these elections effectively on their own, basically putting up candidates for sport. A chamber of commerce president runs against a construction company lawyer to provide enough of a spectacle to satisfy the tiny fraction of voting residents, many of whom seem to vote in municipal races as a hobby more than a commitment to democracy.
But politics took a different direction in Lake Worth about 17 years ago: Enter the anarchists.
Don’t get too excited. I’m not talking about an unruly mob trashing downtown and burning cop cars (though as we’ve seen over the past year, and the 500 before that, there is a time and place for everything.) The anarchist movement in Lake Worth Beach has certainly had its moments of excitement, like when it helped organize tens-of-thousands to face off with riot cops at the Free Trade summit in Miami 2003, featuring tear gas and all. But on the local front, the organizing burned at a slower, steadier pace.
A relatively small group of anarchists began organizing among an only slightly larger group of like-minded neighbors and activists comprised of an assorted mix of Quaker Friends, apolitical Baha'i followers, community gardeners, beach-lovers, teachers, lifeguards, lawyers (the public interest type), immigrants, Indigenous, queers, feminists, Green Party members, some disgruntled Democrats, maybe even a few rogue Republicans and libertarians. Point being, it was not a partisan affair.
We had meetings, conferences, art shows, dance parties, even some musical theater productions. We attended long boring commission meetings as members of the public to fight over proposed development, abuse of code enforcement, disrespect to immigrant workers and other pressing issues.
One of us ran for mayor, succeeded in splitting the vote just enough to force a runoff, bumping out the construction lawyer — a 4 term incumbent. And when the now-disgraced chamber of commerce president tried to get back in next time around, he failed too. I took it as a good sign that the people who had been alternating in the seat for most the past century were losing ground in a big way. 2
The city had a mayor that wasn’t a tool of the developers and local business elite, and it felt pretty damn good. He was a kindergarten teacher and lifeguard. His is main motivation to get involved was that a student in class wanted to know why the police were bothering his uncle for waiting on day labor work along Lake Avenue.
Then Cara Jennings ran and won. Sure, you may know of her now as the woman who called Rick Scott an asshole and scared him out of a coffee shop (or that time she heckled Newt Gingrich… or Marco Rubio, and even Bill Clinton’s daughter during the 2000 Gore campaign, though I couldn’t find a link for that one). Before most of that, she was an openly anarchist city commissioner for two terms, from 2005–2010. If not the first in Florida, than one of the few in the history of the state. (I couldn’t find any others. But there are a lot of little towns and cities spread across this state.)
So, you’re thinking that there is some massive contradiction here, ‘cause the 3–5 minutes that you may have discussed the philosophy of anarchism in high school, you were told that it was people who opposed the existence of government. But in Greek, archos (or αρχος) is a suffix used in nouns indicating a person with power. Sure, there is a debate to be had there. And it’s one that has been in play since the inception of the concept. Spanish Civil War historian Murray Bookchin even turned it into a philosophical subset of its own, called Libertarian Municipalism, which later became the social ecology movement. It’s entirely likely you never heard of it in those terms, but almost certain you’ve seen its impact in recent international news headlines as it became a foundational theory of the villages opposing ISIS in Rojava, Syria.
Anarchism is simply a philosophy of distributing power to the greatest extent possible so that social equality can be achieved, and as such it actually couples quite well with the role of overseeing the operations of shared public resources. In fact, I think it’s pretty easy to argue that an anarchist makes a better commissioner than anyone whose campaign financial contributions indicates that they are seeking the position to accumulate power and wealth, rather than ensure its dispersal.
I mean, this is the movement that brought you the 8-hour day and the weekend, birth control, free speech, the modern (non-religious) school, and some of the most passionate organizers in civil rights, anti-war, feminism, anti-nukes, climate justice, anti-globalization, and anti-fascism (that’s right, the “antifa” bogeyman, like the partisans that beat back the Nazis in Europe, the Emperor in Japan, etc.)
“I believe in a form of governance where people have the utmost say over how they are governed,” Jennings once said in a 2010 interview with the Palm Beach Post reporter Carlos Frías. “I’m not anti-government. I’m for the utmost public input into the things that impact our lives.”
Frías went on to explain how she “proposed a vanguard program that would pay residents to get solar panels to power their homes and feed electricity back into the city’s grid — quite literally giving power to the people.”
Though the current city commission has tried to turn “Cara Jennings” into a bad word, its impossible to ignore that she was wildly popular. After she won her first election on a platform of openly challenging real estate greed and the cops who protect it, the commission majority voted to change the city election date from March to the November general election, thinking they could bury her under the mass of presidential voters who were not engaged with municipal issues and could be heavily influenced by the PAC funds coming from state and national developer interests. She still won a second term, by a significant margin, gaining 6 more months for her and several other new candidates she also worked to helped elect.
That established a majority of community activists in office and a clear mandate to act in the interest of residents and the greater environment rather than for those who made campaign donations.
That commission accomplished a lot, both stopping bad permits and pushing forward good policy on energy use and climate change, affordable housing, remodeling the beach casino and keeping it public, canceling the dredge and fill activity on the public beach, protecting public land from sale to developers without voter approval, mobilizing relief work after the earthquake in Haiti, and a lot more.
After her second term, she voluntarily stepped down, believing that the position should rotate for other community members to engage in the process. But she stayed active and continued assisting people in winning popular support.
And all of that, of course, terrified the defenders of an established order that had honed the facade of democratic participation into a fine art with which to steal land and plunder resources, first across a county and then on a global scale, and convince people that they were at the helm of the operation. 3
In a very darkly symbolic gesture, upon regaining a developer-driven and right-wing majority, members of the current commission swiftly gutted the energy conservation programs that came out of the commission Jennings sat on.
They shut down the day labor resource center she helped start. They sold a public lot that had been recognized by the city as a community garden. They fired the city manager, who had come to Lake Worth after being fired in response to coming out as transgender and had assisted us in pushing back against big energy interests and the bloated sheriff budget. They disbanded the Community Relations Board (CRB), which had been tasked with addressing issues of discrimination and abuse in the various city agencies including the police… That’s just scratching the surface.
In fact, they scrapped the local police altogether in favor of handing control over to the sheriff rather than actually addressing the racism and corruption that was prevalent in the city’s police force. They opted for the slightly better polished PR option... who continued racist beatings and killing people who needed help and sucking down over half of the city budget with impunity (yes, when you include the pensions, over half).
I feel the impact of this decision very personally, perhaps because I was the chairperson of the CRB at the time it was disbanded, just as we were about to weigh in on a series of complaints from Haitian youth being harassed and assaulted by PBSO in and around Sunset Ridge park. And I really hate to see a half-assed narratives by folks like developer shill Bob Lepa and the former consultant for Kilday & Associates turned blogger-troll Wes Blackman actually convince people that they can shape public perception.
Ok. Well that’s all for now… No wait. I’ll leave you, once again, with an excerpt from a particularly poignant letter-to-the-editor, printed in the Palm Beach Post back in 2011 (back when Scott Maxwell started dragging the city far right). I think it gives a good kick in the ass to those of us engaging the political process as grassroots activists and visionaries:
“Lake Worth selling out, losing its earthy charm”
What’s going on in Lake Worth? …I moved to Lake Worth from Homestead in 1985 to get away from narrow-minded people and their meddling tendencies, settling here mainly because of the high tolerance/population of hippies,students, gays and active, tranquil retirees. As the years went by I watched a covey of lawyers, Realtors and big-money good ol’ boys milk the city for their own profitable ends.
But we started taking our city back. We had a couple of mayors
and city commissioners who actually cared for Lake Worth and its
residents. I guess with the economy going to hell it’s left us with a
political vacuum, which has been filled by anal-retentive, politically
correct yuppies. Where are the anarchists when you really need them?
— BEN POGUE, Lake Worth, April 22, 2011”
If you’re reading this, then yes, he’s probably talking about you too, whether you call yourself an anarchist or not. I think Ben (still never met him, that I know of) continues to represent a familiar sentiment in town. We’d be idiots to ignore it and let our political movement continue sliding towards status quo. We’ve come this far…
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Notes
- The campaign contributions are occasionally made directly into local candidates’ campaigns but when they start getting too obvious (as can be seen in current faux-progressive candidate Carla Blockson’s 2010 donor connection to the environmental racism of Southern Waste Systems), they come increasingly in the form of remote Political Action Committees (PACs), where nefarious donations can more easily be obscured. Take for example, 21st Century Florida or the Committee to Protect Florida which are both bombarding Lake Worth voters right now, under the guidance of Commissioner Scott Maxwell who is hoping to win a 7th term in office. In particular, PACs out of the address 610 South Blvd, Tampa, FL, (as 21st Century Florida is) are found on disclosure forms of countless political committees, in Florida and all over the country. This is one of the nation’s major “PAC mills,” churning out millions of dollars to influence elections. They tend to focus their funds on the big races — state and federal, sometimes County. But why in a city of less than 40,000, unless for the fear of the anarchists’ larger threat to their bottom line?
- The Marc Drautz victory over Romano was probably the most significant shift in power since the Socialist James Love was mayor of the city back in 1914. And I guess there was also Ron Exline back in ’84. He wasn’t too bad, as far as mayors tend to go.
- If you’re going to be afraid of something, maybe it should be the self-centered greed-driven political agenda that has gotten way too comfortable expecting to control the direction of this society, giving millions of your local tax dollars to rich developers, real estate flippers and the police who protect them. Just saying.
