While the news media in Florida featured heavy coverage of tea party members at “Awake the State” budget protest rallies, YouTube video and eyewitness accounts tell a different story. Here is just one gathering in Jacksonville, where a mayoral primary was being held. Other events were staged around the city, and repeated throughout the state.
Sign at an “Awake the State” rally in Orlando
When the Florida legislature opened its 2011 session, there were a lot more people than usual in Tallahassee. The tea party sent in folks from all over, not just Florida, to support Gov. Rick Scott’s proposals to give away billions in revenue breaks to corporate interests and make it up by slashing paychecks and benefits to public service workers like teachers, rescue personnel, and law enforcement officers. But across Florida, counter-protests by these public servants and their supporters carried the day.
Ocoee Elementary School media specialist Isabel Chipungu electrified the Orlando crowd, declaring that teachers are being demonized.
“I love my job, but I’m angry,” she screamed from atop a picnic table in Senator Beth Johnson Park in downtown Orlando. “Teachers in this state are once again being made the scapegoat for all of the budget problems our politicians created. And we are again asked to pay the price. We have not had a raise in five years.”
While tea party zealots cultivate an air of chronic aggrievement and persecution, their leaders think nothing of taking back promises – and legal contracts – to union employees.
“People seem to have forgotten that the middle class is made up of hard-working individuals — firefighters, police officers, teachers, the people who pick up your garbage,” said Ron Glass, an Orlando firefighter who is secretary-treasurer of the International Association of Firefighters-Orlando, Local 1365.
Florida’s new tea party governor, Rick Scott, didn’t make any friends when he met recently with 20 of Florida’s black state legislators.
The luncheon was billed as a get-to-know-you welcome to Tallahassee from Scott, who has barely been in town a month. But the political novice wasted no time in offending his guests.
In discussing his own humble origins, Scott implied that all black lawmakers grew up poor.
“I grew up probably in the same situation as you guys,” Scott said to the group of 20 Democrats. “I started school in public housing. My dad had a sixth-grade education.”
Rep. Betty Reed, D-Tampa, said she was offended by the remark…Afterward, she said, “He assumed that everyone [in the room] was poor and that can only be because you’re black.”
Rep. Joe Gibbons, D-Hallandale Beach, said Scott’s choice of words was unfortunate even if he was trying to “empathize” with the black caucus.
“Some of us might be from the projects, but we come from all spectrums of life,” Gibbons said.
Scott of all people should know there are rich African Americans. He chose as his lieutenant governor former state Rep. Jennifer Carroll despite her ongoing problems in reporting her net worth. When she was not trying to win minority small business contracts, she said was worth about $23 million. When she was applying for the set-asides, she said it was only $2 million and explained she got her zeros and decimal places wrong. Either way, it’s doubtful the Florida legislature’s first black Republican woman can empathize with those in public housing.
Nor any longer can Scott, who didn’t spend $75 million of his own money to buy the governorship without the expectation of a hefty return on his investment.
While folks born from the late ’70s on reflect fondly on the 100th birthday of Pres. Ronald Reagan, I wanted to inject a little reality on the subject of the Gipper.
As someone who was already around when he was in office, I have a different view of the golden age conservatives now see as the greatest in our country’s history, except of course, for the halcyon days of 3/5ths personhood and what-not at our country’s founding. Reagan gave us:
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
