Let's review what's going on in Florida. Walt Disney Corp., under pressure from its employees, publicly opposed Ron DeSantis's "Don't Say Gay" bill, but they were the only theme park that did so. There wasn't a peep from SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, Legoland, or Universal Studios (though their parent signed a petition opposing the bill).
SeaWorld and Busch are both owned by a New York hedge fund. Legoland is owned by three different investment firms based in Denmark, Canada, and New York. Universal, of course, is owned by Comcast, headquartered in Philadelphia. Only Disney is headquartered in California.
So that may explain why Disney was the only theme park to speak up about the legislation. However, they weren't the only high-profile company to do so. Among others, there are Sony Interactive, Deutsche Bank USA, Airbnb, Hyatt Hotels, Wells Fargo, Yahoo!, Citigroup, Dell, Shutterstock, Target, Intel, Kellogg's, Mattel, Lululemon, IBM, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Pinterest, Google, Apple, Warner Music, Kraft, Amazon, Mars, Nike, Microsoft, Hilton, American Airlines, United Airlines, Oracle, and Pepsi, which all represent tens of thousands of employees in Florida. The full list (currently about 250 companies) is here.
So why was Disney specifically called out for revenge? Partly because their special district privileges were easy to target, I imagine. They're also really big, and their opposition garnered a lot more attention than the others. If you want to send a message, targeting a company like Disney is a good way to do it.
Disney is also different from many of those other large companies in that it is a media company that is geared towards families and in particular children. If you are afflicted with the weirdo feverswamp conspiracy theory that ostensibly wholesome media companies are secretly, for some reason, trying to get children to be genderfluid or something, entities like Wells Fargo, Microsoft, and Pepsi don't present as attractive a target as Disney does.
Pepsi merely wants to get their fluid into your children. Totally fine.
And defile their Purity of Essence?
(sigh) It's all "messaging" with these guys. No real policies -- or accomplishments.
Speaking of which, we just returned from Texas. There were a couple of power outages nearby while we were there, a wildlife refuge had no running water and was down to using outhouses, the replacement harbor bridge looked no further along than when we were there a year or so ago, and the streets and roads needed work.
But now women aren't allowed to get abortions! You can't say "gay"! You can carry your guns anywhere you go! So it's all good, just what the voters have said they wanted.
Disney can be broken by forcing them to back down. Sony, Microsoft? It can skip the state without losing a cent. Airlines and hotels can't draw down easily but can say, "Well, no new investments then..." And it's harder to target them precisely.
Another reason is that Governor Kemp tried this a while back and Disney handed him his head on a platter by threatening to move movie production out of state. DeSantis can prove he can "break" liberal corporations whereas rivals cannot.
except he hasn't. all he's done is inconvenienced them a tad while handing them a billion-dollar-plus windfall to be paid for by the people of osceola and orange counties.
That is the interesting thing. He has "broken" them by giving them a $1 billion immediate windfall and a permanent gift of at least $140 million all to be paid for by the people of Osceola and Orange counties.
I think the Disney executives are getting out their old copies of Br'er Rabbit and saying to each other that, my god, there's actually people so stupid that this actually works on them!
i believe orange county officials estimate that this will increase property taxes by 25 percent. nice going ronnie!
No one is breaking Disney. It's one of the largest and most successful media companies in the world. Sony is tiny in comparison. Microsoft is a behemoth and can do business wherever it pleases.
Just a theory, but none of the other companies are influencing young children through their "woke" media creations. Because, you know, teaching children that other cultures are equally good and it's OK for people to be different is going to destroy the world.
It's interesting how Disney went from being the darling of the "family values" crowd to evil incarnate for now promoting family values.
Conservatives are choosing interesting hills to die on, I assume it stems from a lot of research suggesting "woke" and "gender" will get voters to the polls. I know culture warrior stuff has worked in the past, but it's going to start failing soon. Possibly by November, but then again it is Florida.
Right wing groups have tried to organize Disney boycotts for years going back to the 90's (at least) when the parks began sponsoring "Gay Days" for LGTBQ guests. Unlike Universal or SeaWorld, Disney is a brand with a distinct family-friendly sensibility, but also an inclusive one (esp. around race and gender). It has a large LGTBQ fan base that it doesn't want (for now) to alienate, so it was forced to speak out on the Don't Say Gay legislation and DeSantis saw a chance to bloody the Mouse's nose in a way 30 years of toothless evangelical boycotts never could. He might succeed. We'll see. After all, Disney's raison d'etre isn't its LTBQ fans or employees, but $$$. As soon as profits might be at stake, much underbussing will occur.
It's not just the fan base, the creative team at every level of Disney is also very LGTBQ.
Remember, Pence hated Mulan!
It's rather obvious. Disney is pro-family and vocal about it. That makes it an obvious target for Republicans who are anti-family.
I doubt Florida's change will have a lot of impact. Most companies don't look past the next quarter, so they'd be willing to make a deal with Florida for a few months or a few years, but any business looking to the long term - i.e. unable to unload its real estate or tied to the state for marketing purposes - might think twice about making a deal with a state known to renege for petty reasons.
Disney was targeted because:
(1) Unlike most (all?) of the other companies cited, it can't easily pick up and leave the state. Citigroup, for example, could simply not renew any of their leases, close branches and simply convert the state to Internet-and-ATM only banking like they already do for other states where they don't own any branches. But Disney would have to completely abandon one of its 2 largest properties in the US, somehow sell off lots of buildings that have no other use but as theme park rides/stores, and then build a completely new DisneyWorld someplace else.
(2) Ron DeSantis needed to grab headlines to launch his presidential bid and/or audition for America's Next Top Asshole, er, I mean, America's Next Republican VP. And by going after the Mouse, he got weeks of attention.
Somehow this was left off:
Attention that he wouldn't have gotten if he simply went after an airline or bank (lots of people hate on them all the time), after a company that most average people have no idea what it does, or after a laundry list of companies. A fight plays better in the media when there's a single Hero up against a single Arch Villain instead of a Hero up against a medley of Mostly Unrelated Vaguely Bad Guys.
You seem confused as to who are the heroes and who are the villains.
Uh, I think he was posing it as the right-wingers see it.
I agree completely with 2, but no one is going to leave Florida because of this or anything else the state is likely to do. They are going to stay as long as it's in their interest. Disney has no reason to leave over the actions of one administration.
Disney has been a target of right wing Christian groups for a long time. Back in the 90’s I was told by an investigator with the Department of Social Services that children were regularly kidnapped from Disneyland for sex trafficking purposes. She had been told this by an Orange County DA. The powerful Disney Company had covered it up.
I told her that was ridiculous. You can’t cover up something like that. The Lion King had recently been released on tape and some kid had watched it upside down and freeze framed it and said he saw the word “sex” written in the sand in one of the scenes. This somehow was big news. How could they cover up children being kidnapped? Since, she said, she had heard it from a DA obviously I was wrong. And isn’t Disneyland the perfect place to kidnap children? No, actually it’s not. You can’t pick your nose there without being seen by their security cameras. The claim was absurd, but people I was with agreed with her that Disneyland is the perfect place to kidnap children.
By the way, she had worked on the McMartin Preschool fiasco and was a firm believer the defendants guilt.
Man, the OC was a looney bin back in the day...
My understanding was because of that leaked Disney internal video where c-level execs were talking about producing "queer" content for kids. I don't know of any other corporations basically just handing their heads on a platter to the Florida taliban.
Noticed in the publicity pic of Desantis signing the bill he is surrounded by small children. It’s the whole “we are protecting children from abuse” thing.
DeSantis strikes me as the type of guy who would have no problem grabbing one of the kids and using them as a shield if someone was shooting at him. Probably his Republican supporters wouldn’t hold it against him either.
Walt Disney Corp. never publicly opposed Ron DeSantis's "Don't Say Gay" bill until after the bill passed! Disney chief weasel Bob Chapek was silent on the bill and in fact a financial supporter of the bill's sponsors.
It's irritating to see Disney portrayed as making some sort of principled stand when the company is run by poltroons.
It was the employee walkout that made the company do an about-face. Credit also to other Disney stakeholders, including members of the family.
Lost in much of the coverage is that this story is about the powerful voices of workers.
You cannot run a company with a progressive workforce and think it's OK to let anti-LGBTQ laws pass without a peep. How did Chapek get the job while being so ignorant about Hollywood?
If Disney had put out a statement earlier like the other corporations the story might already be over. But the controversy at the company made Disney's late objection a far bigger story that would have been otherwise. The rebuke to DeSantis from Disney was national news and stung more than anyone else's objection. That more than anything is why DeSantis targeted Disney for retaliation.
(Disney has been a blight on our culture for decades, infantalizing generations of Americans in the name of making a buck. Its market dominance is a sorry aspect of our time. It pisses me off to root for them in the current controversy.)
this isn't about disney as much as it about desantis and the republican-dominated florida legislature using political power to extract revenge on a corporation that chose to exercise its right to free speech. that disney was late to the party doesn't matter.
De Santis is trying to edge in on Disney itself, which is of course all about Performance™.
i live in florida. microsoft is a big employer here? could have fooled me. there are tons of major companies with significant operations here that fly under the proverbial radar. disney, on there other hand, is the state's largest employer. a good chunk of the people who visit florida come here at least in part to visit disney. you're a hack pol with no scruples and oval office aspirations and you want to make some national noise, who else are you going to target than disney? and disney's self-governing arrangement through the reedy creek improvement district provides a fig leaf of legitimacy. for bonus points, it serves as a warning shot to other corporate interests in the state to toe the republican line or else.
"it serves as a warning shot to other corporate interests in the state to toe the republican line or else"
This was Larry Summers' warning about Trump being a direct threat to US capitalism. You can't have a modern market economy if businesses are beholden to politicians. Trump isn't really someone who can focus and follow through, but DeSantis probably can.
oh i don't know. this is turning into something very trump-like. turns out there's a little matter of $1 billion in bond debt that's going to fall on the heads of the taxpayers of osceola and orange counties because of desantis's revenge play. state just can't make reedy creek go away because of the way the law was written and assurances created that allowed reedy creek to raise money from the bond market. and there's also the matter of $167 million a year in taxes that disney paid reedy creek that's going to go away and, again, fall on the taxpayers of the two counties.
This story is one of several reasons our next President will be DeSantis.
The 3rd youngest President. Second, if you count actually elected (TDR was the youngest, but only due to McKinley's assassination).
A part of the modern tradition of electing white men with degrees from Yale - seriously, Ford, both Bush's and Clinton. Either undergrad or Law School.
desantis is a slightly more skilled politician than ted "the lizard" cruz but not nearly as smart. if he does to the democratic party what he did to disney, the republicans will never win another election.
I've read that insider Dems worry most about DeSantis in 2024, but he has to beat Drumpf in the primary and it's not obvious to me that he's got that much appeal to swing voters. He doubles down on culture war stuff as the country is getting more tolerant. The US electorate is quite young right now. I'm not sure what the appeal is nationally.
Remember, Trump was a huge TV star. DeSantis looks like a B-movie henchman.
Plus the Harvard-educated DeSantis is politician. Trump isn't and never was. Advantage Trump. His people will never support DeSantis with the same fervor.
you should watch desantis in action. remember that photo op where trump shoved some european leader out of the way so he could get front and center for the pic? desantis did that to a handful of high school kids.
The story in the Miami Herald this morning points to a Florida law that makes it impossible for Florida to undo the special treatment of Disney without assuming a debt of about $1 billion from Disney. The MH claims that Disney knows this and is going about its business quietly, making sure that the laws are followed.
I think it's going to be fun to watch DeSantis have this blow back in his face. Hand me some popcorn!
I think it's because Disney is tied to children, and this whole panic is about a conspiracy theory involving gays grooming children. (God, I threw up a little on my mouth just typing that.) That and the GOP thought they could make a big public show of revoking Disney's special status, which seems to have worked. Made news everywhere.