Children’s Services Council raises many questions

Dr. Edward Holifield

What is the Children’s Services Council? Is it anything other than a fraud being hoisted onto the Black community by some very powerful White people who have devised a scheme for making money off of poor people in general and Black people in particular?

Mayor John Dailey, his wife and Leadership Tallahassee types believe that they can get away with this because they truly believe that Black people are stupid.

They act as if the misery of poverty is something new to Tallahassee, and that Whole Child Leon, Loranne Ausley, and powerful lobbyists such as Southern Group and Ballard Partners have arrived just in time to save pathetic poor children from their miserable plight.

Why is Whole Child Leon, a major pusher of CSC, in bed with big tobacco with the Southern Group lobbying firm sitting on its board of directors. Southern Group has as a client Liggett tobacco, one of the largest tobacco companies in the country.

According to the March of Dimes, Tobacco smoke is known to be one of the most toxic substances known to the developing fetus.

Some of the same people who pretend to be interested in the well being of Black and poor children said absolutely nothing when Governors Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis refused to expand Medicaid. Many people without health insurance died as a consequence.

In 2010, the Commonwealth Fund reported that Florida had the highest percentage of Black uninsured children in the country at more than 20 percent. All other things being equal, infant mortality was higher in those states that refused to expand Medicaid.

In 2011 the United States census confirmed that there were 43,653 people in Leon County with no health insurance. In 2013 the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation indicated that as many as 19 percent of the population on Leon County has no health insurance.

Yet in 2014 when Commissioner Bill Proctor first moved that the Leon County commission send a resolution to state officials asking them to reverse their decision not to to expand Medicaid for the poor as provided by the Affordable Care Act, the motion died for lack of a second.

Where were all the county commissioners then such as Dailey, Desloge, Dozier, Lindley, and others who are now trying to shove this CSC down our throats?

Strange how people of all stripes appear interested in doing good when $8 million a year generated by the CSC will be up for grabs if this ballot initiative passes. And who will control this newly created pot of money?

The answer is a bunch of White people some of whom despise Black people.
Commissioner Bryan Desloge is pushing for the CSC. This is the same Desloge who spoke of “million dollar crack babies” when discussing Black infant mortality with lobbyist Gary Yordon.

Mark O’Bryant, the CEO of Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, is also pushing the CSC. This is the same O’Bryant who reportedly pays his workers in the cafeteria so little money that they can work full time at his city owned hospital and still be eligible for Medicaid and food stamps. Janitors reportedly make as little as $9.25 an hour.

This is the same TMH that for nearly two decades allowed Black people to die rather than admit them to the hospital.

Meanwhile the city allows a cabal of overwhelmingly White men to control TMH via a racist dollar-a-year lease agreement. The lease grants them control over more than a billion dollars worth of hospital assets owned by the city including the TMH buildings and the land.

Meanwhile O’Bryant makes $1.2 million annually with his bonus. If O’Bryant were to pay Black and brown workers a decent wage, they wouldn’t need a CSC. They could take care of their own children.

Consider for example Governor Ron DeSantis, a Donald Trump sycophant. He will appoint directly or indirectly 6 out of the 10 people to be placed on the CSC. What is known about DeSantis is that he could care less whether Black people live or die.

The CSC is even being touted as a measure to control violence and shootings. This is fantasy. Such violence will not stop until the rich people who run this town stop giving away all the tax money to their rich friends who don’t even need it.

What DeSantis wants to do more than anything else is to help Trump build his wall to keep Black and brown people out. Nor does his friend Richard Corcoran, the Education Commissioner, care about Black or brown people.
They have absolutely no interest in controlling COVID-19 because they realize that disproportionately large numbers of Blacks and Hispanics will be killed off before herd immunity that they are pushing is ever attained.
Why else would DeSantis be “opening up” long before the virus has been controlled? Why would Corcoran insist on opening up the schools even though the virus in the schools has yet to be contained?

Corcoran ran one of the most racist ads in the history Florida politics when he was speaker of the house. It glorified White supremacy and featured a dark skinned immigrant in a video gunning down the Whitest looking White woman you will ever see.
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n 1860 at the dawn of the Civil War, Tallahassee was comprised of nearly 75 percent enslaved people resulting in generational Black poverty and generational White wealth.

If White people really want to help Black people, they can keep their CSC. Instead 100 former slave owning families including Ausley and others should contribute $1 million each to needy Black students at FAMU with preference going to Black students from Tallahassee.

This $100 million generated would be a down payment on reparations that are long overdue to the Black citizens in Tallahassee.