Their voices won't be silenced
Even if someone cuts off the live stream
Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report!
Apologies for the delay on this one — I’ve been swamped at work, dealing with a growing cold, and prepping for a trip to DC this weekend.
The upside is that the extra day allowed me to comb through some footage and do some reporting. Tonight’s newsletter focuses on the absolute chaos taking place in Tallahassee right now, with an appetizer of some exciting (and funny) news for the labor movement.
I know we focus quite frequently on Ron DeSantis’s reign of terror and the systemic corruption at the center of Florida’s politics, but with the national media seemingly incapable of grasping the depth of treachery and cynicism happening there (see: this CNN “analysis” piece), much less the danger that DeSantis poses to the rest of the country, it’s really up to all of us to stay on the beat. That includes reporting on the people fighting back against this regime, who often go even more ignored.
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I may have just called Ron DeSantis dangerous, but that doesn’t mean I think the guy is scary. In fact, part of what so vexes me about what’s happening in Florida is that DeSantis is an unmitigated dork, a whiny weenie in pleats with the charisma and people skills of the dad everybody avoids at a fifth grade Little League game. Ron DeSantis would be the least successful salesman at just about any used car lot. He has the charisma of an infected boil. That he’s been accorded the deference given to mid-century fascist strongmen is hard to fathom.
The extent of his inexplicable power was truly made clear over the past two days, when DeSantis forced Republicans to vote for a racist Congressional gerrymander and throw a grenade into the middle of Central Florida.
The GOP legislature acquiesced to DeSantis’s redistricting demands after he twice vetoed bipartisan maps that more or less obeyed the Florida Constitution. His map specifically eliminates two districts drawn to ensure that Black residents could choose their representatives, cracking and packing them out of majorities so that Republicans are almost guaranteed to win 20 seats and Democrats just eight.
Silencing Black voices, in more ways than one
The map passed the State Senate on Wednesday, setting it up for debate in the House a day later. I’m using the term “debate” pretty loosely here, because given both the size of the Republican majority and their preemptive surrender to the governor, there was never any doubt that it would sail through either chamber.
Democrats were well aware of the situation and planned to use their floor time to put their most strenuous objections on the record before the bill’s inevitable passage. As they prepared their speeches, a few Democrats reached out to suggest that I watch the floor proceedings, which they hoped would bring some public attention to a broad and overtly pernicious attack on minority voters that has been covered almost entirely through the soulless lens of national horse-race politics.
There were indeed a number of powerful speeches delivered by Democrats, especially the Black representatives whose constituents were on the verge of losing any representation in Congress.
Rep. Michelle Rayner-Goolsby delivered a barn burner, invoking her family and community in a speech that utilized the legal and political talents that could land her in the US House of Representatives next year.
A handful of speeches later, Rep. Yvonne Hayes Hinson took the microphone to provide the sort of history lesson that Republicans have banned from schools across Florida.
Hinson spent her younger years battling the first iteration of Jim Crow, working side by side with the great icons of the civil rights era, including Martin Luther King, Jr. Florida’s new gerrymander would take them back to those dark days of unmitigated racism and false democracy, she said, silencing any bad-faith GOP efforts to co-opt MLK’s words and legacy.
As Hinson detailed just how her constituents would be silenced by the map, Republican House Speaker Chris Sprowls cut her microphone and then the chamber’s wifi, silencing her voice in an attempt to keep the damning truth out of the public record.
Hinson and several colleagues tried to project loud enough for the House’s recording system to capture their protests. Instead of allowing the representative to finish her speech, Republicans decided to cut the live feed altogether.
Several Black representatives made their way down into the House floor to stage a short sit-in as several of their Democratic colleagues stood nearby to protect them.
“My role was to support them and stand in solidarity,” Rep. Rayner-Goolsby told me. “I was also making sure they would be safe from a legal standpoint, as a movement lawyer… I was there to so support my people, make sure they were safe, and also let the public know we were not going to stand quietly by while this was happening.”
Republicans did their best to keep the public in the dark about the protest, keeping the live feed and wifi down throughout the entirety of the sit-in. But the cell reception was good enough for some lawmakers to broadcast the event themselves — you can watch one of them, from Rep. Dianne Hart, right here.
Here’s a quick clip of the protest:
The sit-in lasted about an hour and featured chants and protests from most Democratic lawmakers. Notably absent from the proceedings was Rep. Ben Diamond, a moderate Democrat from the St. Petersburg area who fled the floor as soon as the protest began. He happens to be running against Rayner in a primary in one of the few Democratic districts that could still viably elect a Black lawmaker.
Republicans ultimately passed DeSantis’s map, which the governor gleefully signed into law on Friday. He was immediately sued by a number of different civil and voting rights groups, and though Florida citizens very voted to make gerrymandering illegal just over a decade ago, DeSantis’s takeover of the State Supreme Court inspires little confidence that the maps will be overruled.
The Hackiest Place on Earth
DeSantis’s so-called war with Disney is a prime example of the gobsmackingly brainless coverage that the angry dweeb so often receives from the news media.
As a vindictive weasel obsessed with projecting strongman energy, DeSantis has led a weeks-long right-wing attack on the Walt Disney Company for putting out a weak and hollow statement of opposition to his odious “Don’t Say Gay” law. This has been covered as some populist punishment of a major corporation, giving cover to DeSantis’s much more cynical intentions.
DeSantis isn’t attacking Disney for greed or abuse of state funding — after all, his administration has handed out nearly $600 million to the entertainment conglomerate over the past few years alone. Instead, DeSantis is accusing Disney of being a “woke” corporation and using a very specific slur to weaponize the homophobic panic that he’s made a centerpiece of his political agenda over the past year.
This week, DeSantis’s rhetorical attacks escalated to a perceived attack on Disney’s financial advantages in the state, though once again, coverage and reality are two very different things. If only Rep. Anna Eskamani could go on TV every day to set the record straight.
Over the course of a confusing and chaotic 72 hours, DeSantis proposed and then signed a bill to wind down special administrative districts established before 1968. The legal end-around specifically targets the Reedy Creek Improvement District, an autonomous region in the Orlando area run by Disney since 1967.
The district, home to Walt Disney World and its connected parks and resorts, is run as a sort of privatized fiefdom by the mega-corporation, which taxes itself to pay for all of its operating costs. The fire department, security, sewers, and upkeep — it’s all funded by $106 million in self-imposed taxes, which will be voided when this new law goes into effect. The company also pays $58 million a year on bond debt.
When those income streams are blown up, the debt transfers to the surrounding counties, Orange and Osceola. It’s a $163 million-per-year tax break for Disney, on top of what the company already receives from DeSantis. On the other hand, Orange and Osceola counties, which are both already struggling with skyrocketing housing prices and other issues, would be crushed by assuming the debt.
Salvaging the budgets won’t be pretty. State law prevents the counties from raising sales taxes or impact fees to cover the costs. They also must tax all areas of the county equally, meaning whatever they enact must apply to everyone.
That leaves one avenue: property taxes, of which Orange County collects approximately $600 million per year right now.
“I don’t see how Orange County doesn’t raise property taxes by 20% to 25%,” Randolph said. “That’s what [the county] would probably have to do to cover this financial situation.”
As Eskamani, who represents parts of the area, told me on Thursday, it’s entirely unclear what the hell is going to happen. They don’t know exactly how the debt will be distributed, how the services will be paid for, and how working families will be impacted. It’s a political stunt by a weak little man that has somehow been portrayed as a master tactician.
Worker organizing campaigns have become my main beat at More Perfect Union, and on Thursday, I broke yet another explosive story about Starbucks’ union-busting effort. The video below gives you just a taste of what we published:
The story has gotten plenty of pickup, which is both excellent news and a reflection on our warped reality. Corporate executives say these sorts of things — and far worse things! — about workers all the time, but no one ever hears it. Businesses have been able to paint themselves as progressive allies, embraced by politicians, and offered flattering media coverage that makes even challenging them at all far too rare.
Starbucks has insisted over and over again that it has not engaged in any union-busting — you can see the company’s president for North America shedding crocodile tears over it in the full video in the link above — and it has become much more aggressive in publicly pushing back against the union over the past few weeks.
That, too, is backfiring — just moments after the company tweeted out a story with strong words condemning the protests being held by fired and abused workers, the NLRB filed for an emergency injunction against the Howard Schultz’s coffee monolith, asking a court to force Starbucks to rehire three workers in Phoenix that I’ve gotten to know quite well over the past few months.
Meanwhile, the union won three more elections over the past two days, including a 30-2 blowout in Falls Church, VA and a tighter but historically significant victory at the Reserve Roastery in Seattle.
I’ll be meeting with Starbucks workers at a big event with Bernie Sanders on Sunday in Virginia — but don’t worry, we’ll still have a newsletter coming your way.
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