DeSantis and FL moving to hammer Disney

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04/21/2022 18:16

Subject: DeSantis and FL moving to hammer Disney

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Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This should make everyone afraid, regardless of party affiliation. A company disagrees with a politician on a [insert description here] issue and within weeks has a 50+ year deal revoked. That doesn't scare the crap out of you people???

+1 This is a long but really good piece running down the speed of this and all the potential ramifications. The bill sponsor didn’t speak to Disney or any local or county officials before drafting it.

That's an excellent and thorough read. Thank you for posting.

Yes thank you for the article. I had assumed it was a crackpot culture wars move that would hurt Florida financially and bolster DeSantis national stage ambitions — but had no idea how truly cynical it is. Unlikely to survive legal challenges, or financial realities of Florida’s dependence on Disney, the bill will still serve to silence DeSantis corporate critics during the midterms. Great Fascist move Governor DeSantis.

“Disney is the state’s largest employer, with Walt Disney World employing nearly 80,000 people, with a payroll of over $3 billion, plus those employed by the Disney Cruise Line ships departing from Port Canaveral and Miami. Mickey is the multi-billion dollar fuel for the economic engine of the entire state; it’s the magnet that draws in visitors to other area attractions and hotels. We can avoid a state income tax largely because of hotel and sales taxes collected from the more than 100 million people who visit the Sunshine State each year.

HB 3C (along with an identical companion bill in the Florida Senate that passed on Wednesday) is a deceptively simple one-and-a-half page bill that eliminates independent special districts that were enacted before the 1968 Florida Constitution, unless the legislature moves to reauthorize them. That cutoff point just so happens to include RCID and five other much simpler special districts.

The bill essentially sets up a system of legislative blackmail with a short clause establishing that the included special districts would be “dissolved effective June 1, 2023” — in other words, after the upcoming midterm elections in which DeSantis and the Republican legislators sponsoring the bill are running for re-election and after the regular 2023 legislative session.

The legislature is “putting Disney on a leash,” as one Florida attorney Board Certified in Local Government Law told me, “so they better do what Ron DeSantis says, they better give to the PACs Ron DeSantis says, or else.” In his view, it was more egregious than immediately dissolving RCID, sending Disney the message that “if you do what we say [and stop criticizing HB 1557] then after session, we’ll quietly let you come back.”

The governor and his allies have characterized ending RCID as a justifiable blow against crony capitalism, but it’s a far cry from the multi-million dollar incentives handed out to build sports stadiums, instead comprising a grant of interwoven powers and responsibilities that would be excruciatingly difficult to unwind, assuming such an effort survived the likely legal challenges.”

This is a fascinating example--one among many and a particularly cynical one--of how elements of the GOP try to manipulate the political system to their benefit.

But what's scarier to me is that this move provides some insight into how the mind of DeSantis--who is smarter and better educated than Trump--works. If he is Trump's successor, then we are truly screwed, maybe even more so than with Trump at the helm.