some type of adult girl

afloweroutofstone:

My third article on the Walt Disney Company is out now, and it’s a doozy. To see the author’s click through on the author line in the article.

As odd as the situation may seem, the theme park carve-out [in a new social media bill in Florida] is far from the first time that the presence of Disney World has allowed the Walt Disney Company to operate above the law. Disney—a media monopoly with dangerous reach—has long used the park to flex its political muscles in Florida. This corporate influence over the state’s politics runs deep through the park’s past.

In 1965, the Walt Disney Company bought 27,000 acres of land spread out across two counties for use in building the new theme park. However, the company desired greater control over how it used the land than existing law would allow. So two years later, at Walt Disney’s personal request, the Florida state legislature created the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID) on the land, a private Disney-led government with primary control over infrastructure, utilities, licensing and permitting powers, and more. According to the RCID’s founding charter, its Board of Supervisors elections are open only to “landowners within the district.” Because Disney owns two-thirds of the district’s land, the company alone selects all five board members.

When someone visits Disney World, they exist within a one-company government. Disney gives itself the building permits for new construction, and issues its own liquor licenses for restaurants. The RCID charter even gives Disney the right to build a nuclear power plant without having to seek state or local permission. Though the RCID has never been evaluated by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that its ability to issue its own tax-free bonds was constitutional.

The district is a strong symbol of Walt Disney’s personal vision of private-sector utopianism. Disney World’s Epcot theme park was originally designed to be a planned community that would serve as a model city: “a showcase to the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise,” as Disney himself put it. In the 1990s, Disney brought this idea back to life in the form of Celebration, Florida, a town fully designed by the company itself. Though it has since sold off much of it, Disney still [owns many properties in the town].

The RCID also contains two modern company towns: Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista. Residents of Bay Lake are personally selected by Disney to ensure that the town’s city council obeys the company line. Many are current or former employees, workers in a famously low-pay industry, and have to pay for their own mobile homes on top of a $75 monthly “lot rent” to Disney. It’s not only workers, though: In Lake Buena Vista, Disney runs Golden Oak, a luxury “private residential community.” But whether in a trailer park or a luxury cul-de-sac, none of these local citizens have voting rights on district matters.

Regardless of intention, Disney’s embrace of private governments “has redefined the boundaries between private and public space,” raising fundamental questions about political accountability. And like most privatization efforts, Disney’s corporate utopias have rarely lived up to their promises. Today, Disney’s former model city of Celebration is racially segregated and literally falling apart.

(via averyterrible)