Our friend digby sez:
Next step in our Randian dystopia: stig[ma]tize the unemployed
So now they're going to "reform" unemployment. The first thing they say they'll do do is stop the millionaires from collecting it. I don't know how many millionaires are collecting it now or how this will be administered, but fine. I guess that makes them populists now.
But this is the really good stuff. We know most of the Jaaahb Creators are busy trying to create Jaaahbs even if they're collecting benefits. But these lazy good for nothing workers need to prove they are worthy:
The bill by Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) would require unemployment claimants to pass a drug test if they are identified in an initial screening as having a high probability of drug use...
Kingston cited an overwhelming number of job applicants flunking drug tests as the rationale for his proposal.
"I had an employer tell me of an overwhelming response for job openings," Kingston said in a statement. "There was just one problem: half the people who applied could not even pass a drug test."
Earlier this year, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) used an identical anecdote to promote drug testing the jobless. When HuffPost checked the claim, however, it turned out to be completely false—the employer said it tested only new hires, not applicants. And among new hires, less than 1 percent flunked a drug test. Haley later admitted her claim was bogus, but did not relent in her support for drug testing the unemployed. ...
But just as you can tell if someone looks like an "illegal" you can tell if someone's likely to be a drug user. They're just looking for the "bad people" who are stealing the money from hard-working taxpayers. ...
These stories have been circulating among our "representatives" for quite some time. Many of them now believe the unemployed are just refusing to take work and as long as we "subsidize" them, they'll never get off their lazy duffs and take one of the many open jobs available to them. That's a tale they are being told by their big money contributors when asked why they are sitting on their profits—they assure their puppets that they'd love to hire, they just can't find anyone to work. The economic slump is the fault of lazy Americans who just want to milk the system and it's all Washington's fault for allowing it.
It isn't bad enough that the nation still spends billions of dollars annually pursuing the War on Some DrugsTM, filling our prisons and emptying the public treasuries? Now our leaders want to expand the failed policy even further?
A failed policy that was doomed to failure from the instant it was initiated? A failed policy that has cost tens of thousands of lives, a trillion or two dollars, and respect for the law among countless numbers of people who freely choose to put proscribed mind-altering substances into their bloodstreams the same way countless numbers legally slam down Heinekens and margaritas every day of the week?
Not a policy of total failure, to be sure. It has helped create a private prison industry that generates a lot of jobs, albeit lower-paid ones than prison employees make in the public sector.
It's given a lot of lawyers work they wouldn't have otherwise had and given idle prosecutors something to do instead of hunt down white-collar frauds and scam artists.
It's put money in the pockets of drug-testing companies and padded the budgets of local police forces who get a percentage of the take when drug money and property bought with drug money is confiscated.
And it's boosted the economies of certain regions like the counties of northern California's marijuana belt by keeping the price high for a weed that anybody with a little experience can successfully cultivate in just about any climate but the Arctic.
All that money, or most of it at least, could have been directed toward providing jobs imagining and designing and building stuff America actually needs. Educating and training people to do imagining, designing and building. Diverting and rehabilitating citizens who get too entangled with drugs. All this would vastly lower the need for unemployment benefits in the first place. But no. We're too stupid for that. And it appears that some state officials such as Governor Haley are determined to prove we're even stupider.
On this date at Daily Kos in 2007:
In a combination of Bush administration fatigue and campaign season fatigue, lately a number of political cliches have begun grating on me. It's tough - when a particular state of political being drags on and on and on, we all run out of new words to describe it. Nonetheless, there are a few phrases I'm ready to declare tired and mockable, and I'm sure other people will have plenty to add.
Lately, a lot of things have been dying, rhetorically. Democracy has died, the Constitution has died, innocence has died. Whether rumors of those deaths are exaggerated or not, repetition has certainly killed the effectiveness of that phrase.
"The third rail of American politics." Recently, Social Security and immigration have been battling it out for the title of "third rail of American politics," but Medicare and a number of other issues have been so called. In fact, Gelf Magazine actually compiled a list a few months ago finding references to 12 third rails other than those I've mentioned. Does the phrase even have real meaning to people who don't spend much time in one of a few large cities? (Or who didn't see Beat Street at an impressionable age, I guess.)
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