Florida

The Tampa 5 Are Facing Ten-Plus Years In Jail

May 21, 2023 Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Fight Back News!. Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Florida, Higher Education, Tampa 5

Tampa, Florida – Florida state prosecutor Justin Diaz it trying to put the Tampa 5 in prison. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members, arrested at a campus protest against the racist agenda of Governor Ron DeSantis, each face a trumped-up felony charge, alleging “battery on a police officer,” carrying five years of jail time. When the activists rejected a plea deal requiring them to apologize for doing the right thing, the prosecutor added on more felony charges. This means that three of the activists are facing more than ten years behind bars. In addition, the activists face ten misdemeanor charges.

Truck Drivers Plan Boycott Of Florida Over State’s New Anti-Immigrant Bill

May 18, 2023 J. L’Heureau, World Socialist Web Site. Resist! boycott, Florida, Immigration, Truckers, Worker Rights and Jobs

A nationwide truckers boycott of Florida is being organized in opposition to a new state law targeting undocumented migrants and refugees. The new legislation was initially announced by the state’s fascistic governor Ron DeSantis in February and framed as a means of countering what he termed “the Biden administration’s failure to secure our nation’s borders.” In a statement published on a government website, DeSantis declared, “Florida is a law and order state, and we won’t turn a blind eye to the dangers of Biden’s Border Crisis. We will continue to take steps to protect Floridians from reckless federal open border policies.”

Police Unions Are Spitting In The Face Of Solidarity

May 12, 2023 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. Strategize! Florida, Police, Solidarity, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

This week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into a law a bill aimed at making it much harder for public employee unions to exist and function. Watching a Republican governor with his eye on the White House aim a crude legislative club at public unions is a familiar sight. Rather than dwelling on why DeSantis is an oily bum, let us use this opportunity to discuss another, unseen villain in this sickening process: police unions. The Florida bill — which bans automatic deduction of union dues from paychecks and decertifies unions when their membership drops below 60% of the workforce — is aimed primarily at weakening the state’s teachers union, which represents some of DeSantis’s strongest political opposition.

Stop The War On LGBTQ Teachers

April 28, 2023 Peter Certo, OtherWords. Educate! Education, Florida, LGBTQ Rights, State legislature

Messages keep coming in to me from LGBTQ teachers throughout the South who have been fired or threatened with firing. These teachers have years of experience and exemplary records. Many have advanced degrees. LGBTQ teachers are increasingly fearful. The Stonewall National Education Project, which educates teachers about inclusive classroom practices, reports that its annual symposium was sparsely attended due to fear of repercussions. One teacher who did attend wore a mask and asked not to be photographed. This trepidation is not new, but it’s been heightened by the current climate.

Farmworkers In Florida Are Marching Against Slave Conditions

March 15, 2023 Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network. Resist! Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Fair Food Campaign, Farmworkers, Florida

In December of 2016, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), based out of Immokalee, Florida, received a phone call from two men who had just escaped captivity near the town of Pahokee by hiding in the trunk of a car. The two men were migrant farmworkers, working on H-2A visas, who had been harvesting watermelons for Bladimir Moreno, owner of the farm labor contracting business Los Villatoros Harvesting LLC—a business that, in reality, was little more than a modern-day slave camp. “They told of being held against their will on a labor camp surrounded by barbed wire,” the CIW notes, “working and living under constant surveillance, and earning extremely low pay.”

Flooding Increasingly Pummels The Southeast; Organizers Fight Back

March 6, 2023 Cameron Oglesby, Next City. Organize! climate crisis, Flooding, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Texas

Beverly May, retired nurse practitioner and current epidemiologist at the University of Kentucky, lives maybe 100 feet from the house she grew up in Floyd County, Kentucky. She characterizes her community as “hillbilly country,” an area in central Appalachia that once served as a critical cog in the coal industry’s wheel. When historic floods ravaged the area in late July 2022, May decided to trade in her medical work for flood research and activism with the nonprofit community well-being organization Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I could not believe it when I saw helicopters going out to rescue people,” she says. “Never has there been this many deaths.”

‘It’s Disrupted All Of My Lesson Plans’: Florida Ramps Up Censorship

March 1, 2023 Michael Sainato, The Real News Network. Educate! Censorship, Critical Race Theory, Education, Florida, LGBTQ Rights, Ron DeSantis

As the new semester began, teachers throughout Florida were faced with new state laws strictly limiting curricula—prompting schools to remove droves of books from their classrooms and libraries for fear of being in violation of the draconian but opaque new laws. An already-chilling reality gripping the third most populous state is getting even chillier in the wake of controversial legislation such as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and the Stop Woke Act, which both went into effect in July 2022. The DeSantis administration rolled out several initiatives in January 2023 aimed at eliminating broad swathes of the existing curriculum, including banning the teaching of Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies for high school students throughout Florida.

Florida Is Poised To Ban Gender-Affirming Care For Minors

November 2, 2022 Ezra Brain, Left Voice. Educate! Florida, Health Care, Human Rights, Transgender Rights

On Saturday October 29, the Florida Board of Medicine voted to begin drafting rules that will ban all gender affirming care for anyone under 18. They did this based on a “medical report” written by a dentist, after refusing to let activists and experts opposed to the ban speak at the hearing while trans youth led a die-in outside. This is the latest advance of the far-right’s deadly and radical anti-trans agenda. The Florida Board of Medicine sets and regulates medical practices and medical professionals in the state of Florida. This rule would essentially ban medical professionals from providing gender affirming care unless they want to risk losing their licenses. This vote follows the DeSantis administration issuing a non-binding order to the Florida Department of Health to stop not just medical transition but also social transition for trans children.

The Gangster Socialists Of The Red State Beaches

October 13, 2022 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. Educate! Capitalism, climate crisis, Environment, Extreme weather, Florida

Say what you want about the insurance industry — damn bloodsuckers constantly cranking up your bills — but you must admit that they understand risk. It is, at its heart, a simple business: Estimate with great precision how much you are likely to pay out in claims, and then charge customers more than that, so you make a profit. The success of insurance companies is closely wedded to their ability to analyze the real world with accuracy. Some businesses, like advertising, may run on delusion, but in insurance, that sort of thing is poison. So it poses a problem for a certain variety of right-wing free market fundamentalists when the insurance industry begins sending signals that climate change is very, very real — so real that it should be upending our way of life already.

How Did A Hurricane Kill Over 100 People In Florida?

October 7, 2022 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Educate! Evacuation, Florida, Hurricane, Public safety

Over 100 people are dead in Florida after Hurricane Ian ripped through the state, making landfall on September 28 as a Category 4 storm. Over 202,000 Florida homes and businesses are still without power. The hurricane caused damage that Biden claimed could rank as “the worst in the nation’s history,” with economic damage that could cost up to $75 billion—possibly among the five costliest storms in US history. The death toll combined with the imagery of utter destruction paints a harrowing picture of the fate of Floridians after this storm. Cities such as Fort Myers were leveled, Sanibel Island completely cut off from the mainland, and 3.4 million homes and businesses experienced power outages across several states and a boil water notice was issued in the hardest hit county.

100% Solar-Powered Town Left Virtually Unscathed After Hurricane

October 7, 2022 Kristina Zagame, EcoWatch. Create! climate crisis, Extreme weather, Florida, Solar Energy

Hurricane Ian caused mass destruction to Southwest Florida, taking dozens of lives and leaving millions without power. But in the midst of devastation, a small solar-powered community was left virtually unscathed — despite being just 12 miles northeast of hard-hit Fort Myers. Babcock Ranch is a solar-powered town with roughly 2,000 homes and more than 700,000 solar panels. Homes and businesses in Babcock are built to be energy efficient and weather resistant, many of them constructed with durable insulated panels meant to withstand Florida’s extreme weather. Many residents have additional solar panels and solar battery systems as an extra layer of protection from power outages. If Hurricane Ian was a test of the town’s resiliency, Babcock Ranch passed with flying colors.

Asylum, Migration And US Foreign Policy

September 25, 2022 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Asylum, Florida, Migrants, Texas, US Foreign Policy

Every day the republican governors of Texas, Greg Abbott, and Florida, Ron DeSantis, eagerly announce that they are sending people generically labeled as migrants to what are known as sanctuary cities. The corporate media report that thousands of people have been convinced to board buses to New York City or Washington DC or Sacramento or Chicago or even chartered flights to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. What they don’t explain is who these migrants are and why their status is highly problematic and a function of imperialist foreign policy. Republicans rail against what are called sanctuary cities and imply that federal law doesn’t apply in these places or that undocumented people get some sort of special deal. However, the term sanctuary city doesn’t really mean very much.

Tampa Bay Teachers Share Horrendous Working Conditions

September 25, 2022 Joseph Nohava, Fight Back News. Resist! Education, Florida, Teachers, Worker Rights and Jobs

Members of the Hillsborough County teachers union packed the school board meeting, September 20, to demand a better contract that takes teachers' needs for a livable salary into account. A sea of the union's red shirts confronted the board members and the county's superintendent, who with faux concern, offered nothing but the platitude that he "heard" teachers’ concerns. The crisis could not have been clearer to anyone with eyes and ears, as union members shared stories not just of having to work second jobs for pennies, but unsafe conditions for students. One teacher said that because of understaffing due to a lack of funding, students were left without school counselors, wandering the campus, vaping in bathrooms, fighting and wandering off campus. Teachers emphasized to the school board that it was impossible to be pro-student and anti-teacher. School officials even suggested a plan to train high school students in technical repair and assign them to repair district computers and electronics, owing to a lack of adequate staff.

Florida Letter Carriers Won Back Our Sunday Breaks With Direct Action

September 23, 2022 John Murphy, Labor Notes. Resist! Direct Action, Florida, Unions, US Postal Service, Worker Rights and Jobs

Naples, Florida - A simple grievance can take many months to get results. But at the post office where I work, we got fast results defending our breaks with a different approach: direct action. I’m a city carrier assistant (CCA)—part of the lower-paid second tier of letter carriers—in Naples, Florida. The retention rate for CCAs nationwide hovers around 20 percent. Letter carriers start each day by sorting the mail and loading it into our trucks. In my post office, Mondays through Saturdays we take our first 10-minute break together inside the office, with the air conditioning, before heading out to start deliveries. We used to take our breaks together on Sundays, too. We would chip in for donuts and coffee, a sign of our camaraderie. But in April, the Postal Service implemented a new way of doing the Sunday package runs.

UPDATE: DeSantis defends phony brochure; sheriff launches criminal investigation

September 20, 2022 Judd Legum, Popular Information. Educate! Florida, Immigration, Ron DeSantis

On Monday morning, Popular Information broke the news that migrants from Venezuela were provided with false information to convince them to board flights chartered by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R). A brochure distributed to migrants says that they will be eligible for numerous benefits in Massachusetts, including "8 months cash assistance," "assistance with housing," "food," "clothing," "job placement," "registering children for school," and many other benefits. None of this is true. The benefits described in the brochure are resettlement benefits available to refugees who have been referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and authorized to live in the United States. These benefits are not available in Massachusetts to the migrants who boarded the flights, who are still in the process of seeking asylum.

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