Is it all just a part of political theater meant to propel Meatball Ron into the spotlight, or are there deeper causes that this legislation is being created in reaction to? The purposeful dismantling of the education system seems like one piece, but what else is going on?
i think the material basis for it is the hollowing out of the state from it's productive forces into a gerrymandered retirement home / real estate experiment, as well as the imports of every reactionary comprador from latin america.
and also from what I understand before that Florida was mostly farm country, right? those already skew reactionary in the US and only now began to realize that maybe having cheap employees working in their farms might be more important than whatever culture war bullshit the radio man screams at them.
There’s also a likelihood that they’re politics of pure reactionary contrarianism. They’re doing the opposite of what other states are doing.
There is an active contradiction between the “protection of the fatherland” and the “cheap labor required for profits.” The same landlords and agrocapitalists who love the flag and hate immigrants need their labor to sustain and expand their surplus.
Well, there's definitely a national agenda in place. And I'm sure there's a bunch of floridians who see themselves at the vanguard of True America. 'When some ban trans health care, we make it so paramedics can let people die if we don't like them'.
I'm more interested in the cognitive dissonance involved. On one hand I can only imagine that the contradiction sustains itself because labour is disorganized. If cheap labour truly vacated Florida, what would happen? Would those farmlords start voting for liberal republicans? Or would they sell their land to real estate speculators and join the local KKK chapter?
It’s hard to predict what would happen but it seems like other things may happen like loosening regs to exploit a more exploitable population like children or the poor in general. Anti union laws are coming through for example. The state has 23M people with huge numbers of disenfranchised and undocumented people whose mobility is limited.
If we are in a perpetual crisis mode then I’d expect that tightening of the screw with the increasingly disempowered and growing majority juxtaposed against a bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie increasingly liberated to exploit. I don’t know if this would result in some sort of flashpoint but it’s also possible a series of climate change related calamities force mass migration to the north.
Even before the current situation FL was always a bastion of capital flight within the US due to its tax laws. Hearing from my chud extended family that retired from the northeast to FL that was near the top of the list for reasons. iirc FL is also the top state that the wealthy are currently moving into. They could be building out a fortress state for capital in decline and the punitive legislation is to both continue the neoliberalization of potential profit centers of state capacity while building up enforcement capacities. Shooting from the hip tho
hope their fortress state includes uh something to protect the groundwater from chemical pollution and the coastline
The supreme irony that the two neo-fascist strongholds are in some of the states that will be least habitable within the end of the century. If it was literature I’d call it too on the nose
third time's a charm! 🏛️🌊