by Ray Keating
Commentary
DisneyBizJournal.com
March 28, 2024
The announcement that the Walt Disney Company and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have agreed to move on from their dueling lawsuits is a case of politics and business as usual.
Disney has a major shareholder meeting coming on April 3, and, no doubt, wanted this controversy to go away. Meanwhile, since DeSantis’s attempt to become the Republican presidential candidate for 2024 crashed and burned, the governor had little reason to drag on his political show of attacking Disney to gin up the GOP base.
So, it was time to move on for all parties. In fact, new development deals between Disney and Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, which signed off on the settlement with the House of Mouse, will be hammered out.
A trial was set to begin in June. But now, Disney holds that prior agreements are null and void and intends to negotiate a new deal that likely would be beneficial to Disney’s development plans in the area.
Separately, in January a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit Disney filed accusing DeSantis of weaponizing his political power to punish the company for exercising its right to free speech. Disney quickly filed an appeal, but it will now put that on hold “pending negotiations” on a new development deal, among other matters, with the district.
Additionally, both parties agreed to drop the various state-wide lawsuits they’ve filed against one another. Instead, both agreed to resolve their differences outside of the courtroom in way that would not require either to admit any fault or liability, according to text of the settlement.
That’s nice.
Of course, serious questions are left on the table. For example, does it make sense for a business to weigh in on political issues that have nothing to do with its actual business? Can politicians get away with abusing the powers of government to attack particular businesses with whom they disagree on an issue?
Anyone thinking that a company like Disney would stand on principled ground regarding free speech and fighting government overreach fails to understand that publicly traded businesses will go only so far as management believes it will benefit the company. (That is, unless a company is captured by a leftist social agenda, and then management tends to blindly step into politics even if it creates risks and uncertainties for the bottom line.) None of this should surprise anyone.
Meanwhile, anyone thinking that politicians today take stands based on principle fails to understand politics as it particularly has further degraded over the past decade-and-a-half or so. On both sides of the aisle, few, if any, serious thinkers hold elected office. Instead, Democrats make a point of pandering to the party’s hard-core leftist base, and Republicans pander to its recently emerged populist base.
If you doubt these points, consider that for all of the attacks Governor DeSantis had hurled at the Disney company, including the special treatment it received, CNN noted the following from the press conference this week announcing the Disney-DeSantis deal: “DeSantis suggested the settlement could give Disney more of an edge to compete with neighboring Universal Orlando’s theme park, which recently announced an expansion slated to be complete next year.”
If it weren’t all so sordid and dangerous, it might be funny.
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Ray Keating is the editor, publisher and economist for DisneyBizJournal.com; and author of the Pastor Stephen Grant thrillers and mysteries, the Alliance of Saint Michael novels, and assorted nonfiction books. Have Ray Keating speak your group, business, school, church, or organization. Email him at raykeating@keatingreports.com.
The views expressed here are his own – after all, no one else should be held responsible for this stuff, right?
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