Florida’s Republican Governor, Rick Scott, who suddenly emerged just nine months ago in politics, after having brought about the greatest Medicare scam ever through his health care company in the mid 1990s, has now been in office one month, and it is not a good sign for the future of Florida politics! 🙁
The concept that a corrupt, crooked business executive, who enriched himself on fraud, and yet was able to avoid prison time for his transgressions, could go ahead and spend $73 million of his ill begotten fortune to “buy” the Florida governorship, is enough of an outrage by itself! 🙁
But Scott, who overcame the GOP establishment in the state to win the nomination for Governor over Attorney General Bill McCollum, and went on to defeat Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink in the closest gubernatorial election in history (about 50,000 votes), has now shown just how arrogant and destructive he really is! 🙁
Scott is setting out to destroy the Florida Retirement System, and is trashing the public servants of Florida, who went into public service understanding the low pay of most public jobs, but were drawn to the FRS as an important benefit that made up for the lack of competitive salaries.
Scott is attempting to force all public employees to take a five percent paycut to contribute toward their pension plans, at a time when there have been no salary increases for a number of years. He also wishes to take other aspects of the FRS away, and make the pension system one of the worst in the nation! 🙁
Scott shows no respect for the significance and sacrifice of teachers, police, fire fighters, paramedics, nurses, librarians, prison guards, and all the other public servants who commit themselves to the myriad of jobs that the average Floridian takes for granted.
And Scott is declaring war on the teaching profession, which will only discourage new entries into the profession by young people, and will cause many to leave the field. To blame the teachers for failures of students, rather than place it on inadequate budgets and class sizes, and the essential role of parents and families on children’s learning, is an absolute outrage! 🙁
If teachers will not have respect, decent pay and benefits, and the backing of administrators, then we will lose the chance to gain the best young minds to go into our classrooms. Mediocrity will reign, and Florida will fall further back into what one could call a “third world” mentality, one of ignorance and
narrow mindedness! If we condemn and attack our teaching force, we lose the opportunity to gain the “best and the brightest” for the future and to put Florida into the 21st century!
Not only is Scott trying to destroy education, but also he has refused to enforce the Obama Health Care legislation, is sending back federal aid to implement it, and has encouraged legal attacks on the legislation, including the recent declaration by a Florida district court judge that the whole legislation is unconstitutional! Interesting that a former health care executive who engaged in fraud is leading the charge to destroy national health care, not giving a damn about the millions of Floridians and other Americans who have no access to health care! 🙁
Beyond all this, Scott refuses to communicate with the news media other than in so called “tweets”, comments no longer than 140 characters. He would rather speak to private groups such as the Tea Party, who he will be addressing privately this coming week about his budget plans. He requires journalists who wish to address him at a public gathering to stand up before asking a question, which he then answers in a few sentences, with no desire to really explain himself in detail. After all, he is the GOVERNOR, and need not be accountable! 🙁
His budget plans call for MASSIVE cuts in Medicaid and education, with no possibility of tax increases, even though it will devastate the state, lead to much higher unemployment, and make Florida more backward than ever. And unless his party in the legislature, more than two thirds membership in each house, have the guts to fight him, he will get his way. Realize that many Republicans have their private doubts about this man who refuses to explain himself in detail, and is known as difficult to talk to, even in private, as he thinks he has all the answers! 🙁
To top it off, there are now strong rumors that Rick Scott has national ambitions, and not just for 2016, even possibly for 2012! Newspapers in the state and National Public Radio are reporting that Scott hopes to make an impression with his budget, and his stands on the health care legislation, budget cuts, and education, and utilize it as a pretext to seek the Presidential nomination of his party! 🙁
A man who should be in prison for his Medicare fraud, who refuses to communicate with the news media, who is arrogant and nasty and dismissive toward his critics, who “bought” the Florida Governorship, seems to have no limits to his ego and ambitions! 🙁
This is the man that Florida has to deal with for the next four years at least, unless the whole nation is, somehow, bamboozled to make him our President in 2013. Let’s hope that terrible, nightmarish scenario never comes to be, and that maybe, just maybe, his own party in the Florida legislature may realize how his lack of ethics and belief in obeying the law in his past, may yet lead to such abuses in the state of Florida to warrant them to forget about party loyalty and move to impeach and remove him from office! 🙁