Shadows over the Sunshine State

By Max J. Castro

MIAMI – Florida. They call it the Sunshine State. At least, that’s what the public relation shills for the tourist industry and the chambers of commerce like to say. But there is another Florida; one with a darker, nastier side than the sun and fun image the state tries hard to project.  

I am not talking here about ancient history, the genocidal campaign against the Seminoles in particular and Indians in general, carried out in the nineteenth century by that great pillar of American democracy, Andrew Jackson. I am not even talking about Eatonville and Virginia Key, names that evoke the history of violence and discrimination against African Americans in the twentieth century.

No, I am talking about last week’s news, and about the pattern that emerges from reading the April 26 edition of the Miami Herald. Three items, all of which involved a callous disregard for justice and human suffering, caught my attention.

Headline: “House approves speeding up executions.” Lead: “Despite warnings that Florida will shrink the appeals of the innocent, the Florida House passed a bill Thursday designed to accelerate the execution of many of the 404 inmates on Florida’s Death Row.”

Here is a measure that can accurately be described as unmindful of the lessons of recent history, truly reactionary and in brazen disregard of what the author of the Declaration of Independence referred to as “a decent respect to the opinions of Mankind.”

Start with the fact that in the last ten years this state has freed 13 wrongfully convicted Death Row prisoners. What would have been their fate under the new fast-track rules the House wants to impose?

The experience of Florida is hardly unique. Especially since the advent of DNA testing, all across the country a significant number of people condemned to death have been found to be innocent and released. The inescapable conclusion is that capital punishment, like all human endeavors, is subject to error. That realization is probably an important reason executions in this country have declined by 75 percent since 1996.

The Florida House’s recent paroxysm of bloodlust not only bucks a strong trend in the opposite direction nationally, it runs against the nearly total global consensus against the death penalty. There are, of course, exceptions to this consensus, such as China and Iran, among a few other countries which continue to practice capital punishment. But among the developed, democratic countries of the world, the United States is clearly the outlier in regard to the death penalty. And even in a country that is one of a handful of nations that still carry out executions – the others being mainly notorious bad actors from the standpoint of human rights – Florida is an outlier compared to most other states. In 2012, for example, Florida was one of just four states that accounted for 65 percent of all death sentences handed down.

Headline: “Hopes for compromise on health care dwindle.” Lead: “House Republicans rejected a bipartisan Senate proposal to accept $51 billion in federal healthcare money on Thursday, diminishing hopes that lawmakers will reach a healthcare compromise before the legislative session ends next week.”

The perversity of this action is breathtaking. And the arguments used to justify refusing the money would be laughable if the consequences were not so serious. Access to health care is often a matter of life or death. The unconscionable cruelty of playing with the lives, or provoking the deaths, of thousands of people is outrageous but not surprising coming from the most radical wing of a political party that has been defunding, demonizing, and destroying anything that helps the poor and the lower middle class for more than a generation.

But there was a reason for that. The money saved could be used to cut taxes for the rich, to subsidize incredibly profitable corporations, and to enable warmongering all over the planet.

But for Florida to refuse to accept a huge federal gift of $51 billion dollars to provide health care, at no cost to the state, to hundreds of thousands of its citizens who work but don’t make enough money to afford the exorbitant price of private health insurance would seem to defy common sense and normal political logic. Traditionally, politicians are supposed to bring home the bacon. Yet here were a zillion free pigs for the taking and this particular group of politicos said nay.

Looking deeper, there is both a point and a pathology working here. The point is to try to nullify the mandate of the national election regarding the role of government and the will of Congress vis-à-vis health care through state-by-state obstructionism. The pathology I will call “the punitive streak in American politics.” Even if it costs us nothing, Romney’s 47 percent of “takers” don’t deserve health care programs, they deserve punishment for their fecklessness.

Headline: “Feds: State denies rights of jobless.” Lead: “The U.S. Department of Labor slammed the state of Florida for making it difficult for some unemployed people to get jobless benefits, particularly the disabled and those who speak Spanish and Creole.”

In 2008, Florida Republicans pioneered the art of preventing inconvenient people (especially blacks) from voting, thus handing George W. Bush the presidency (even with that an assist from a right-leaning Supreme Court was required). In 2011, the state led the way in devising ways of making it very difficult for the unemployed to collect the benefits to which they are entitled. The result is that only 17 percent of unemployed Floridians eligible to collect benefits are actually receiving them. That’s the lowest rate of any state.

Chuck up another victory for the Florida GOP’s politics of electoral and economic exclusion.