MARRIED TO THE MOUSE - RICHARD FOGELSONG

Should have been an article. Well, that’s not totally fair. The book is really well-written and informative and doesn’t seem overstuffed, I would just say I overestimated my interest in Municipal/Disney relations. But I had a rule, or rather a habit, of reading a book about conspiracies or the CIA or something along those lines right before I go to sleep at night. I don’t know, it’s soothing. Anyway, early into this book we find out that Disney employees a relative of OSS founder Bill Donovan who helps Disney employees get fake IDs and backgrounds as they buy land on the cheap in central Florida. It’s a tenuous connection, I know, but that meant I read this before bed over a week or so. And as a resident of Seattle, a town that is constantly fighting with our own giant mega-corporation, Amazon, which seeks to reshape the city in ways the benefit itself, there was a lot to learn. That being said, the situation in Orlando/Central Florida, is much worse than the very bad situation in Seattle. Disney pulled off a God-level finesse in their deal with Orange/Osceola counties that included rights up-to and including the ability to create their own power, including nuclear, power plants. So many areas were lining up for the right to be the East Coast DisneyLand they could get almost anything they wanted. Actually, as a quick aside, the site was almost outside of St. Louis but at a final sort of signing dinner the heir to the Budweiser company got drunk and berated Walt for not letting beer in the park and Walt was personally disgusted and looked elsewhere. But back to Florida, part of these benefits, which included ones they actually used, like the ability to issue tax-free bonds, we given based on the false pretense that EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), the strangest Disney park by a safe margin, would be an actual town where people lived in a Disney-designed Utopia. This didn’t work out because they couldn’t figure out how to get around the pesky if-people-live-here-they-get-to-vote-and-disagree problem but they used this pretense to secure the bag in perpetuity w/r/t Central Florida. They endlessly play them by refusing any sort of public transportation into or out of the park, eventually going as far as building, along with Universal, their own simulacrum downtown area. I’ve actually seen these areas and they are indeed insane. They constantly get the counties to subsidize expensive “public” works programs like building highway exits. Disney, taking a page out of (perhaps even writing, I’m not much of a business historian) corporation handbook makes sure to harp on the jobs their bringing in and the money they spend on local charity but, of course, the jobs are almost all low-wage (often so low the county/state has to provide benefits like food stamps or low-income housing) and the “charity” is in loo of taxes and provides a culture where you “don’t speak ill of the mouse” if you’re a non-profit. It’s a sad tale, there are points where DisneyWorld is really the cash cow of the whole company which was, at times, otherwise unprofitable. The various local “movers and shakers” (the book’s term) are too blinded by the “growth” to realize they’re not getting a real cut. Very interesting from a public policy perspective. Thoughtful, though never in these terms, about the growths and mutations of capitalism and space. Maybe a bit too wonky for me on the sub-committee-meetings-for-special-district-zoning kinda stuff. 1971 miles of swampland.