Since I started following the cruel and unusual policies of Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, I have seen him repeatedly attack public schools, divert public money to private and religious schools, and remove whatever offends him from the curriculum (such as accurate histories of Black people).
I have also discovered some fearless bloggers who are not afraid of DeSantis. Billy Townsend and Jason Garcia. They take on political corruption without flinching.
Jason Garcia, an investigative reporter, wrote recently about how conservative billionaires have shaped DeSantis’s political agenda. The part I don’t understand is why someone of vast personal wealth would want to take food stamps away from impoverished children or make the lives of homeless people even more miserable. What kinds of sadists are they?
Jason Garcia writes:
Late last year, the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made it harder for older Floridians to get food stamps.
Earlier this month, the DeSantis administration sued the federal government for the right to remove poor children from public health insurance.
And last week, the Republican governor came out in support of a plan to round up homeless people across Florida and — potentially — put them into secured camps.
Each move was, at least on the surface, a disparate executive decision. But they share something in common: They are all ideas promoted by conservative billionaires and the right-wing think tanks they fund.
Taken together, the moves offer a window into how super-rich mega donors shape action across DeSantis’ state government.
Let’s start with the food stamps.
Though it didn’t get much attention at the time, the Florida Department of Children and Families late last year changed the rules for the state’s food-stamps program, which is formally known as the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.”
Funded by the federal government but administered by the states, food stamps currently help more than 3 million impoverished Floridians buy groceries and keep food on the table for themselves and their families.
But the state of Florida makes it much harder for some people to qualify for food stamps, by imposing what are commonly called “work requirements” — mandatory employment and training programs that someone must participate in each week in order to obtain and continue receiving aid.
Florida had previously imposed work requirements on adults without children between the ages of 18 and 52. But late last year, the state expanded work requirements to adults without children up to age 59 — sweeping up somewhere around 100,000 more very low-income Floridians, according to materials provided to the governor’s office and obtained in a public-records request.
Anti-poverty activists and advocates for working families have long argued that work requirements don’t actually work. Rather than helping people find sustainable employment in which they can work themselves out of poverty, mandatory work requirements merely create barriers that block some people from receiving any aid at all and push others into erratic, poor-paying and poverty-entrapping jobs — all while enriching a few private contractors that administer the programs.
But work requirements have some influential supporters — like the Foundation for Government Accountability, an anti-worker think thank based in Naples that is also pushing bills in Tallahassee this session that would weaken Florida’s child-labor laws, erase wage and benefit protections for employees, and cut more laid-off workers off from unemployment insurance.
And the FGA isn’t just promoting work requirements generally. Records show it pitched this exact idea to DeSantis’ staff.
It happened in December 2022, when, emails show, the FGA met with senior staffers in the Governor’s Office and provided a series of policy proposals. One of the ideas they pitched? Forcing Floridians as old as 59 years old to participate in mandatory work requirements before they can get food stamps.
The recommendation was contained in a memo provided to the Governor’s Office tiled, “Taking Florida’s Food Stamp Work Requirements to the Next Level.”
One reason the FGA may have the ear of the DeSantis administration: Tax records show that its largest funder in recent years has been Richard “Dick” Uihlein, a Midwestern billionaire who is one of the biggest conservative donors in American politics.
More specifically, Uihlein is one of DeSantis’ top funders: Records show he has given DeSantis roughly $3 million in recent years — including $1.5 million to the Super PAC that supported DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign.
It’s important to note that the FGA wants DeSantis to go even further: The organization has also urged the Governor’s Office to extend food stamp work requirements to adults with children as young as six years old.
Kicking kids off health insurance
Food stamps aren’t the only safety net program that has come into DeSantis’ crosshairs recently.
Earlier this month, the state of Florida surprised anti-poverty advocates by suing the federal government over new rules related to Florida KidCare — a program that provides health insurance for low-income children whose families do not qualify for Medicaid.
KidCare is funded jointly by the federal government and the state. And Florida has long required families participating the program to pay monthly premiums in order to get coverage for their kids.
But new federal rules require the state to provide at least one year of continuous health insurance coverage for any child who enrolls in the program — even if the child’s family misses a monthly premium payment.
The DeSantis administration has sued to overturn that rule. The suit argues that federal officials have overstepped their authority, and that forcing Florida to continue providing health insurance to kids whose parents have missed a payment would undermine the integrity of the KidCare program.
To buttress its argument, the DeSantis administration cited a think tank report, published a little more than a month before the lawsuit was filed, titled, “Resisting the Wave of Medicaid Expansion: Why Florida is Right.”
The report was produced by a two-year-old organization called the Paragon Health Institute. Tax records show it is largely funded by the nonprofit network of billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, another of the nation’s biggest conservative political donors.
All of Paragon’s first-year funding came from one of Koch’s “Stand Together Trust.” Most of its second-year funding came from the Koch group, too.
Paragon is also intertwined with the FGA. The institute’s president — and the lead author of the report Florida cited in its lawsuit — is Brian Blase. Blase is also a visiting fellow with the FGA, according to the group’s website.
Blase said he wasn’t consulted by anyone from the state about the litigation and that he didn’t know anything about the lawsuit before it was filed.
Asked if the Governor’s Office conferred with anyone from the Paragon Health Institute or the FGA before launching its suit, DeSantis spokesperson Jeremy Redfern responded, “Not to my knowledge.”
Other closely aligned conservative groups are now cheering on the state’s lawsuit — such as the Tallahassee-based James Madison Institute, which tax records show also receives substantial fundingfrom Charles Koch’s network.
Koch and his network were important early supporters of DeSantis, though they splintered during the governor’s presidential campaign when Koch’s Americans for Prosperity ultimately decided to endorse former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
But this is a relationship that DeSantis likely wants to repair as tries to rehabilitate his political reputation and prepare for a second presidential run. Politico Florida reported last week that DeSantis allies expect him to run again in 2028 — and to restart his political fundraising operation later this year.
Positively bracing! To read a story about billionaires behaving badly in Florida, and a prime villain isn’t named Fanjul. Or did I miss that part?
Duh-Satan…what a pos.
I have been waiting for working people in Florida to wake up to the fact that DeSantis does not work for them. There is some backlash against DeSantis’ failure to address the insurance crisis, but those on the right will likely continue to follow this manipulative opportunist. Sometimes people only start to take notice of a problem when it hits them in their wallets. DeSantis’ next theft of the commons will likely be going after water systems. He is in the process of consolidating water systems and giving the state more power to control them.
As for the poor and vulnerable, there are few advocates that represent them. Florida is an example of what happens to a state when it is run by brutal billionaires that have the high heel fan boy leader on a leash. $$$
I just don’t get it. Why would someone with billions of dollars be so cruel to those who have nothing?
So people dig the cruelty. It makes little men feel powerful.
The head of the James Madison Institute was born with a silver spoon in his mouth-seven generations of assistant attorney general, Senate Presidents, etc. He’s on the board of the Journal of School Choice.
A VP of JMI has a role at the Maclay school, tuition for 9-12 is $18,500. The school is reportedly 6.4% Black and 77% White. Tallahassee where it is located is 35.5% Black and 52% White. Another VP was an advisor to the Koch-linked Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Another VP leads the J Stanley Marshall Center for Education Options.
If you look at the photo array of the 15 staff and 12 board of directors, there’s a huge demographic concentration. I didn’t recognize a single anomaly in the 27.
Denying government money to the poor has a rationale as expressed by state rep Phil Jensen. Providing for the poor is God’s work and, religionists get to deign to whom it is given or withheld.
The aim is to keep the members of the right wing, authoritarian, patriarchal churches in control of society.
Taxpayers should not be paying a huge amount of the freight of Catholic charities
just because they succeeded, through political process, in usurping government function.
Ron DeSantis
Because cruelty is its own reward.
As has been said before, the cruelty is the point. Koch another American oligarchs hark back to the strain of punitive Protestantism . Poverty is a adult of sloth, sin; thrn you have Calvinism, and a disturbing dogma of predeterminism- individuals are divinely destined to their earthly lot.
Yes. This is deep in American culture. I get around mostly on a bicycle. I LOVE bicycling, and so, for example, I go to the grocery on my bike and load up my paniers (saddlebags). If I lived in the Netherlands, this would be NORMAL. But here in Flor-uh-duh people automatically assume that if you are on a bike, you live in dire poverty, and they look down on you. It’s sad and insulting.
Also, if they in their cars, which they take to go two houses down, they literally do not see you on a bike. Inattentional blindness. I have been hit twice. Fortunately not at full speed.
This is one thing that Libertarians like Koch and fundamentalist nationalist evangelical authoritarians like DeSantis have in common–this rootedness in American Puritanism/Calvinism. And then there are those like you and me, Birdchurn, whose ideas and values reflect a different stream of American thought–that of the Transcendentalists. I’m fascinated by Nathaniel Hawthorne because he strides the two and can’t figure out which side he wants to be on. ROFL. (and because he writes so well, ofc)
Both Calvinists and libertarians have little empathy for others. The cruelty may be influenced in part by religion and part by political ideology. DeSantis is Catholic, but he is more of an “eye for an eye” Christian than “I am my brother’s keeper” version.
Thank you retired teacher for rejecting the cover that media (and, well almost everyone) gives to politicized, right wing Catholics. DeSantis attended Catholic schools K-8.
The Director of the James Madison Institute (2006) was Catholic activist, Robert P George. In a comment below that is in moderation, additional info. about Robert P George, co-author of the Manhattan Declaration signed by the bishops of 15 major cities, is provided.
FDR’s social gospel provided the foundation for the New Deal. It was supported by both Catholics who were voting Democratic at the time and Protestants. Italian Catholics are given credit, as a bloc of voters, for electing FDR.
The part I don’t understand is, if you can’t
even bring the “test-givers” to heel,
do you imagine the “word-whip” will
bring the concocted notorieties to heel?
It’s always useful to follow the money. Apparently any dollar that doesn’t flow directly or indirectly into the hands of the 1% is money they want.
It’s shameful that DeSantis is so willing to curry favor with oligarchs while Florida children and families go without.
Billionaires have given their toady governors their marching orders. Plunder the commons! Right wing governors are working to transfer wealth from the working class to the already wealthy. Privatization is aided by the lawless Citizen’s United decision, and working people keep losing ground economically and politically.
Nov. 10, 2005,
University of Delaware- a blurb about an upcoming speech by Robert P George,
“Robert P George directs the James Madison Institute, a Florida based public policy research organization. ..a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton.” He lectures on the role ethics play in science and medicine. His “book, In Defense of Natural Law; Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality.”
Ron DeSantis attended Catholic schools K-8 and Robert P George is a Catholic activist. An organization that George co-founded, American Principles Project, was one of the top 5 spenders on the GOP anti-democracy Issue 1 on the ballot in Ohio in Aug. The state’s bishops said the ballot issue had no moral content. Never the less, three dioceses spent almost $1 mil. to aid the GOP in the effort. Ohio is a red state. Almost all of the elected officials at the state level including the jurists on the state Supreme Court are right wing Catholic.
correction- Nov. 10, 2006
THE CATHOLIC CONFERENCES KNOCKED OVER A POT OF BASIL ON MY PORCH UNDER COVER OF A THUNDERSTORM WITH STRONG WINDS! NEFARIOUS, HUH? I THINK THEY ARE TRYING TO END DEMOCRACY HERE.
Bob-
Your pay grade must be above mine.
I don’t have access to knowledge about conspiracies. If I did, I would discount the stories in favor of what is public knowledge. I appreciate the transparency afforded to the public about the Church’s right wing influence and politicking.
You and I have a choice. Each time you repeatedly write ridicule in the same vein as your 11:57 comment, I will repeat what I’ve written in the above paragraph. We can reduce Diane’s workload by refraining from the exercise. Your call.
What, stop writing about the Koch/Catholic Conference Conspiracy to END DEMOCRACY and steal all our precious body fluids and become the world’s largest employer to democracy destroyers?!?!?!?!
Bob,
Some of your comments qualify as emotionally abusive.
Florida’s GOP government and its backers are similar in moral and ethical view to Ohio’s. Both are steeped in right wing religion. (Btw-Ohio is experiencing the largest government scandal in its history.)
A former James Madison Institute VP (departed to a new job this month) calls himself on Twitter, “Christ’s flawed but happy freedom fighter.” It would be interesting to know how God views him. The Miami New Times included him in a list of “12 people who brought deep shame to Miami in 2016.” “(The guy) was caught on tape at an industry conference bragging about how he and his cohorts had used the ‘savvy maneuver’ of turning solar power’s popularity against it.” Oh, he also was associated with the Koch-linked ALEC. As a side note, ridiculing customers for being exploited, was that an example on tape at Enron?
Citizens can look forward to the guy working in his new 501c4 advocacy group – the goal is to work against woke corporatism.
You’ve got to wonder why he even invokes Christ’s name on the X platform, if not to shame him.
The next time Diane posts about Ohio, I’ll reference the reporting of former Ohio Democratic chair, David Pepper, about Dewine/Husted and the corruption of First Energy, Ohio’s biggest government scandal in history.
David Pepper wrote today in his newsletter about Celco and Peter Spitalieri, a Dewine supporter whose firm sold services to the state of Ohio. Above the Law covered the story, “Is Something Rotten in the State of Ohio. It appears that Dewine claimed then, as now, that he had/has no knowledge about any possible paying and playing (technically legal or, not). The story dates to 2014, the allegations about pay to play in the state of Ohio have not diminished over time nor, evidently the profits, nor Dewine’s political star.
Spitlieri is a big donor to things, Catholic (Clarence Thomas is too, via Harlan Crow’s checkbook).
One of the charities Spitlieri supports is art in the Vatican museums. Research shows the more politics and religion intertwine the more people abandon religion. Maybe, one day the Vatican’s art can be moved to public museums where there is a better understanding about honest government, accountability and democracy.