As though replaying the Natacha Seijas affair for the entire state, the Florida legislature is now considering new measures to allow shopping center and grocery story owners to pick and choose who can solicit petition signatures for referendum campaigns. If it’s good enough for Hialeah-- why not block Florida citizens from any chance to redistrict, stop a toxic power plant, a waste site, or tract housing in sugar fields and historic wetlands. In Florida, screwing citizens is a line item on marketing budgets for those special interests guarding the castle gates.
The recent citizen’s effort to recall the de facto chair of the Miami-Dade county commission, Natacha Seijas, was long, nasty and brutish. The petition by signature campaign triggered new laws recently passed by a majority of the unreformable county commission that make such efforts virtually impossible in the future.
In one nasty moment, Seijas left her skid marks on a Publix store manager for allowing signature gatherers outside the store but on store property. That was before the citizens were arrested without cause and held in a Hialeah City jail and, terrified, abandoned the campaign.
Although court cases have upheld Floridians’ rights to engage in political activity at hubs of social interaction like shopping malls, industry lobbyists must have been amazed, startled and sensed money to be made by the success of the intimidation campaign against signature gatherers at public locations in Hialeah—political Bethlehem to powerful Cuban American developers.
Not content (in last November's industry sponsored effort to "protect the Florida constitution") to raise the threshold for signatures required to change the Constitution by petition, from 50 to 60 percent, here are the bills/numbers in draft form for new state-wide legislation to make intimidation of free speech and petition drives in Florida even harder than they are.
Economic Expansion and Infrastructure Council Committee Bill EEIC 07-01:
Let's shopping center and grocery store owners pick and choose permissible political speech on property.
House Ethics & Elections Committee HB 556- Rep. Brown
Let's shopping center and grocery store owners pick and choose permissible political speech on property.
Senate Ethics & Elections Committee SB 900- Sen. Posey
Places barriers on petition initiative process, unfairly denying citizens the right to engage in direct democracy.
7 comments:
Great, yet another attacks on voters voices.
this issue is unbelievable. Why are our elected officials behaving this way!?!?!?!
I don't think any of the Republicans like what the voters dream up and they are trying to a stop to it. We are trying to make an end run around them...what would you expect?
For more on this topic GOOGLE "right to petition government". You will find: "Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people … to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
— from the First Amendment
Both the state and the county are passing legislation trying to block this right. See http://www.co.miami-dade.fl.us/govaction/matter.asp?matter=063376&file=true&yearFolder=Y2006 Note: Only Commissioners Heyman and Sorenson voted "No".
I am a disabled American with limited income trying to help my family.
I applied for Hialeah section 8 in 1996 and never heard from them yet people who only have been in this country 5 years or less have section 8 in Hialeah. I applied for public housing when it opened in April 2006 and was called December 28, 2006 and promptly denied on a technicality. I am MAAAAD!
Who watches how the Hialeah Housing Authority gives housing to whom? How many needy people have been denied? How many not qualified get in because they are the sister, brother, aunt, grandmother, cousin of "perensejo" of those with political ties? How many actual Americans live in any of the many housing projects and I mean people who have paid taxes at least 43 years like I have or have lived and worked in Florida for 34 years like I have or have had a parent serve 30 years in 3 wars in the Army like I have. I feel there is a propensity for the federal government to look the other way in anything regarding Hialeah governing itself, not as an American city but as a foreign nation with rules all of its own.
The citizens are a kind of people who are very honest and very giving, crime is low at least, but in how things are done where non-cubans are concerned, is very unfair.
Who will see to it that things are done fairly, at least at the Hialeah Housing Authority?
The Hialeah Housing Authority: now THERE is a can of worms...
you applied for public housing in the county or just for Hialeah?
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