Rick Scott, Florida's own Governor Gone Wild, just can't stay out of the news. Today the
ACLU sued him for requiring state employees to submit to random drug tests (presumably he's exempt from the requirement).
Recently, Scott held a
private ceremony to sign the
state's budget. He held the event at a retirement community, but had sheriff's deputies remove any senior wearing a liberal-looking pin or button or carrying an anti-Scott sign.
In recounting Scott's antics, Elias Isquith, a blogger with
The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, questions whether the Florida governor should be called "conservative."
I just can’t for the life of me see what the philosophies of F.A. Hayek or Barry Goldwater have in common with Rick Scott...the man is either an unhinged ideologue, a shameless grifter or, most likely, a noxious combination of the two.
Here at TeamsterNation we lean toward calling him a grifter. After all, he ran a company that pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and paid $1.7 billion in fines for stealing from Medicare.
But economist James K. Galbraith has a better word: "Predator."
Five years ago, Galbraith wrote a piece in
Mother Jones that best describes Scott and all the other Governors Gone Wild. Called "The Predator State," it's almost a crystal ball into the future of Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and...the list goes on.
Galbraith argues that American capitalism is a system in which the rich feast on decaying systems built for the middle class. Writes Galbraith,
Everywhere you look, public decisions yield gains to specific private entities.
Galbraith describes rulers who deliver favors for their corporate clients: Native American casinos, Appalachian coal companies, Saipan sweatshops. That was five years ago. Today we have, well, governors like Rick Scott who deliver privatized prisons and drug tests to state employees in order to fatten the profit of his corporate clients. He tried to weaken unions by ending their ability to collect dues through an automatic paycheck deduction (as
Harold Meyerson pointed out, the proposal lost "when some Cuban American Republican state senators opposed it on the grounds that they detected a whiff of Fidel Castro’s suppression of independent unions"). Scott also delivered $300 million in taxes and incentives to his corporate clients, but only after complaining that he wanted more.
Galbraith makes another key point: Predators have no sense of public purpose. They try to control the state in order to prevent any carrying out of public purpose.
...the men in charge do not recognize that “public purposes” exist. They have friends, and enemies, and as for the rest—we’re the prey...
Here's what Scott vetoed in the budget: programs for homeless veterans, meals for poor seniors, a council for deafness, a children’s hospital, cancer research, public radio, whooping-cough vaccines for poor mothers, and aid for the paralyzed. And education funding was slashed. No public purpose there.
What happens in the predator state? Government fails, writes Galbraith. Not politically, but in the things that it's supposed to do, like protect its citizens, educate its children, care for its sick.
Government will not cope with global warming, or Hurricane Katrina, or Iraq—not because it is incompetent but because it is willfully indifferent to the problem of competence.
The question then becomes how to hold these predators accountable? Well, Wisconsin has an answer: Recall. Unfortunately, Florida doesn't allow governors to be recalled. There's a campaign to change all that. Sign up for the Facebook page
here.
