Florida Messed-Up By Republicans, Part MMDCXCVIII: Screwing the Unemployed (Again!)

The headline to Politico's article from Gary Fineout and Marc Caputo about the impending employment crisis in Florida pretty much sums it up:

On this blog, I stopped caring about censoring the Shit word after trump stole the election.
So there.

This is something I could have told you ten years ago - hold up, maybe I did - but let's get on with the current troubles shall we:

Already anxious about Trump’s chances in the nation’s biggest swing state, Republicans now are dealing with thousands of unemployed workers unable to navigate the Florida system to apply for help. And the blowback is directed straight at Trump’s top allies in the state, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott.

Privately, Republicans admit that the $77.9 million system that is now failing Florida workers is doing exactly what Scott designed it to do — lower the state’s reported number of jobless claims after the great recession...

Let's just pause here for a minute, okay? The Florida Republicans are admitting that the benefits system they set up - they screwed up - back in 2014 was MEANT to be screwed up, it was meant to force enough of the unemployed to not even bother registering for benefits and job-hunting help. They were fudging the numbers: Keep the unemployed from even getting tallied, keep them hidden, keep them away from any assistance at all...

Grrr. Back to Politico:

“It’s a sh-- sandwich, and it was designed that way by Scott,” said one DeSantis advisor. “It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about.”

Republican Party of Florida chairman Joe Gruters was more succinct: “$77 million? Someone should go to jail over that.” (Note: If you click on my blog links above from 2014, you'll notice the complaints filed back THEN about the CONNECT system being buggy, more on that later...)

With hundreds of thousands of Floridians out of work, the state’s overwhelmed system is making it nearly impossible for many people to even get in line for benefits...

There are several problems with relying entirely on an online system, to wit:

• Not everyone owns a computer. Smartphones, mostly yes. Laptops or Desktops or Tablets, not always especially the low-income populations most likely to be job-hunting in the first place. So to begin with, not every unemployed person could/can file. And as you can figure out, the CONNECT website was NOT designed for mobile app use so smartphones weren't helping...
• The places where computer-less unemployed people go - libraries - are all closed right now because the Coronavirus crisis requires public places be closed to reduce the risks of spreading it. Even before this all happened, we at the libraries would get 4-5 people a week trying to login to the CONNECT system, and nearly every one would run into problems with their accounts getting locked, information improperly stored, problems we couldn't solve at the library. 
• The places they COULD go for that tech help back when we were all open - the county career offices - were often swamped already and they sent these job-seekers right back to the libraries anyway. A nasty Catch-22.
• There would be days, weeks even when the servers at the state's end of things were bugged, crashing, or overwhelmed. It's turning out now to be intentional on Rick "NO ETHICS" Scott and his Republican buddies' part, but it was frustrating as hell at OUR end of things for the last six years...

Sigh. Back to the article:

After a record number of claims were reported Thursday, DeSantis said the state would resort to paper applications, build a mobile app to handle the flood of traffic and deploy hundreds, even thousands, of state workers to provide stopgap help.

Why wasn't this all fixed back in 2019 when you got into office, DeSantis? Oh, right, you're Republican, you didn't see the problem and you didn't care when it mattered to others.

The new online system was part of a series of changes designed to limit benefits. The ultimate goal — which it delivered on — was to lower unemployment taxes paid by Florida businesses. A 2011 analysis done by the Florida Legislature estimated that the changes pushed by Scott would save businesses more than $2.3 billion between 2011 and 2020.

Now, as thousands of people try to get help, the system crashes or denies them access. Nearly 400,000 people have managed to file claims in the last two and half weeks. It’s not known how many have tried and failed.

Most of those who do submit applications won’t qualify for aid, and the benefits that are paid out are among the most meager in the country — a maximum of $275 a week...

Remember when Republicans were griping about the benefits of the stimulus package just voted on, where they complained the unemployment benefits would be too tempting to Americans who would turn into lazy bastards living off the unemployment dole? That's one reason why the Florida Republicans kept it so low... and they didn't fucking care that in this day and age - even back in 2012 - that $275 a week was nowhere near enough to pay for rent, food, utilities, gas, and everything else.

Trust me. Between January 2009 to January 2013, I was unemployed for much of that. I was hired by a few part-time jobs but was unable to keep most of them (one was the temp US Census job in 2010 that only last two months, one company only had me for two weeks before they kicked me out telling me my college degrees made me too overqualified). I spent week after week trying to find jobs and keep my unemployment benefits going - after a point I couldn't - and even WITH that $275 a week my parents still had to help every month with the mortgage payments for the condo I lived in (and because the housing market sucked after 2008, we couldn't sell it until we were forced to in 2013 at a loss). If the Florida Republicans thought keeping it low was an incentive to find work, it wasn't: it was punishment for being unhireable in a bad job market.

Like it never occurred to those Republicans that if the unemployment benefits were that tempting, then maybe companies and businesses should raise their wages to bring the workers back. Oh wait, they probably did and dreaded that too.

Anyhoo. I digress. Back to Politico:

“This is horrible for people. I don’t want to minimize that,” one DeSantis adviser told POLITICO. “But if we have to look past the crisis, it’s bad for the president and it’s bad for the governor.”

“Everyone we talk to in that office when we ask them what happened tells us, ‘the system was designed to fail,’” the adviser said. “That’s not a problem when unemployment is 2.8 percent, but it’s a problem now. And no system we have can handle 25,000 people a day.”

Don't forget kids: the real victims in all this are the Republicans who designed this system to fail and didn't care about it until their electoral chances were on the line.

Remember: "That's not a problem when unemployment is 2.8 percent." YES, YES IT IS A PROBLEM, especially for the 2.8 percent - THAT WE KNEW OF - you were screwing over with a bad website.

State auditors have routinely chronicled shortcomings with the CONNECT system, most recently in a report issued in March 2019, two months after DeSantis took office.

Like I asked earlier, WHY didn't DeSantis do anything when he took office? Oh, right. It was poor people he didn't have to care about.

Republicans in the Legislature share the blame, said Rep. Jose Javier Rodriguez, a Miami Democrat.

“Rick Scott is the most culpable human being when we look at who’s responsible for the failed system,” Rodriguez said. “But I don’t know of any Republican who resisted these efforts to make Florida the most Scrooge-like state in the nation.”

Something you might not know about Florida: It's been a Far Right Conservative state for a very long time. Back when the Conservatism was with the Democrats - the Civil Rights era of the Sixties and Seventies - the political shifts between Republicans and Democrats didn't matter as much, and through it all some genuine reformers and moderate leadership from both parties would hold sway. But when Reagan showed up and the party shifts began, the Democrats slowly lost a lot of authority - and responsibility - across the Sunshine State. I can't remember the last time either house of the State lege was controlled by the Dems. I do know the last Governor: Lawton Chiles, who died in office back in 1998 (technically it was Buddy McKay who filled the seat for a month until the 1999 inauguration, but Chiles is the one who served most of that two-term tenure) and was replaced by a dead dog Jeb Bush and it's been Republicans ever since.

Ever since 1998, Republicans had been, are doing, continue to threaten to fulfill every Far Right agenda that wouldn't kill them at the polls. Underpay teachers and overfill classrooms? Sure. Let developers bulldoze across every sensitive ecosystem to build shopping malls and gated communities? Mo' money. Ignore the poor elderly who could use Obamacare's Medicaid expansion to provide better conditions in their assisted living facilities? Screw the elderly.

But now they're running into a big problem out of their control. The COVID-19 crisis has essentially shut down the state. Our major industry - tourism - had to close its theme parks and hotels for the current situation with no guarantee they'll re-open by Summer. That is hitting a ton of low-wage service workers, with few other places and industries hiring (and few ought to, it's not SAFE dammit). It's hitting a lot of small business owners - the gift shops and restaurants and most other service-oriented businesses - that can't risk viral exposure and had to send their workers and themselves home.

The number of unemployed is going to jump from 2-point-8 to 28 percent within this month (I am not sure if I am exaggerating the 28 percent, or being to cautious).

There's a lot that has to get fixed, and not just the CONNECT benefits website. The benefits themselves are minuscule and insulting. The Governor and State Lege had gotten away with it being low for so long because quite honestly not enough people were paying attention. Well, they'll be noticing it now. The push to boost the weekly payments to something more tolerable and supportive is going to be on everyone's agenda now.

Except... all of this goes against the hard-core philosophy of the Republican Party itself, not just nationally but in the Sunshine State. To get a majority of "Fuck the Public Trust" party members to switch mindsets would be like getting a majority of Dolphins fans to start cheering for the Patriots.

And they have only themselves to blame (and judging by the Politico article, they know it). Having controlled two of three state branches (and now likely controlling the judiciary too) since 1998, they can't blame the Democrats for any of the problems today. It's all been Republican Governors and all been Republican Legislatures that did NOTHING to provide better social safety nets for the 22 million residents. Any attempt to accuse the opposition - the way trump's been blaming everything on his failures handling this crisis on Obama and Democratic Congressional leaders and Blue State Governors - isn't going to fly in a Florida that's only known Red for 22 years.

And they can't blame the voters for electing such foolish critters as themselves because 1) that's suicidal in an election year and 2) there's been a slim majority of Democratic voters every year but thanks to GOP-led gerrymandering the Republicans hold a skewed percentage (around 60 percent) of the elective seats to control the Lege. (And for the statewide offices like Governor, there's a good argument that Republican-led suppression efforts stymied Dem voter turnout anyway)

And I doubt the Florida Republicans are going to do anything to relieve the stress and nightmares that a solid majority of residents are going to feel over the next two-three months (maybe well into September), because doing so violates their core tenets, and if any of it proves helpful would cripple any campaigning they do against those changes down the road.

I do not trust our state's current leadership to do anything - establishing stronger Stay At Home policies, providing long-term unemployment benefits that can honestly pay everyone's bills, keeping our hospitals working as the pandemic hits our medical staffs the hardest - that would help my family, my neighbors, my coworkers, my peeps.

And I do not trust the Republicans to play fair this election cycle. I was expecting them to cheat with voter suppression before all this, and with the crisis now I guarantee they are thinking of ways to 1) use it as an excuse to stop most voters in Democratic areas to even try, or 2) shut down voting altogether.

Gods help us in the Sunshine State, America.

Gods help each and every one of you in all the other states and territories as well.