Jeb Bush Administration Invested Florida Pension Money In Porn Purveyor
Conservatives in Florida were aghast: State documents said that Gov. Jeb Bush and other overseers of Florida’s pension system had shifted retirees’ money into a company called Movie Gallery, one of the largest film rental firms in America. Most of the titles were standard comedy and action fare, but a fraction were X-rated titles.
In short, the state of Florida was investing taxpayer money in pornography.
Bush recently released 280,000 emails from his two terms as governor, and buried in the trove are exchanges about the Movie Gallery investment that highlight the tension between Bush’s stance as a firm social conservative and his readiness to align himself with the Republican Party’s pro-businesses sensibilities — even at the cost of right-wing ideals.
“Have you people lost your minds?” one outraged voter wrote in an email to Bush and the State Board of Administration (SBA), which made the investment. Another angry voter emailed that pornography was “enslaving men and women to its addiction.”
But Bush, then the highest-profile trustee of the board that oversees Florida’s $149 billion pension system, was unmoved by conservatives’ outrage, and maintained the investment. In one of the newly surfaced emails, the SBA’s director told an angry Floridian that the state could not take investment advice from “various constituency groups.” The Bush administration would not let political ideology shape pension decisions, the director explained, saying the state’s pension trustees were “required to act solely in the best interest of the [pension] beneficiaries.”
More: International Business TImes
Jeb Bush’s people are working to portray him as a reliable conservative and this makes their task more difficult. Movie Gallery was far from being a chain of porn shops yet in the superheated atmosphere of Republican primaries it might as well have been.