BREAKING NEWS: DeSantis astounds Floridians

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke to Channel 4 reporter Jim DeFede and told the truth. This should not even be news, but it is.

DeSantis said that the rules for collecting unemployment in Florida were constructed with so many jumps and hoops—unnecessary obstacles—that it was deliberately built to discourage people from applying. To paraphrase the governor, unemployment in Florida was designed to frustrate applicants so much they finally say the hell with it, I am done beating my head against wall and give up.

That is a fact but a truth that obscures the Truth, the big picture. At least since Jeb Bush was governor, Republicans have been busy making Florida a capitalist paradise and a nightmare for most everyone else. A nightmare for workers who lack union rights. A nightmare for white collar employees who suffer low pay. A disaster for the least fortunate of every stripe like all those who lack health insurance because Florida rejected free federal money for Medicaid expansion. An injustice for felons who have served their sentences and had their voting restored by a vote of more than 60 percent of the people of the state but who probably won’t be able to cast this ballots because Republicans are using every trick in the book to prevent it. Finally, Republicans intend to hurt by denying drivers’ licenses which are critical to holding a job and for most everything else, a virtual necessity for employment and most of life in a state with lousy public transportation.

Realizing that DeSantis was pointing the finger at him, former Governor Rick Scott also did something rare for him, uttering a truth, when he charged that DeSantis was trying to avoid responsibility for the unemployment debacle. True. DeSantis had the time to fix the system Scott helped build had he wanted to.

The big picture is that Republicans at every level have no interest in making the lives of average people easier, unlike their great desire to ease things for the fat cats and, especially, the morbidly obese cats. Unemployment insurance is just one more example, albeit an especially cruel and crystal-clear bit of malevolence of mass unemployment.

The Soviet Union was supposed to build a workers’ paradise but never did. For several decades, the United States has been succeeding in building a hyper-capitalist paradise. In the Soviet Union, the false slogan was all power to the Soviets, here hyper-capitalism is not an empty slogan but a reality that means all power to the corporation.

It’s fun to see DeSantis and Scott blasting each other. They deserve the shots and each other. The two deserve a plague on both your houses.