Drug testing and the poor

File it under... Take your pick, the relentless crushing of hopes and dreams, the continuing class war, canary in the coal mine, or a last, desperate measure by the deluded rich to keep the little people divided but Barbara Ehrenrich's recent column on the criminalization of poverty should be a real eye-opener. I'd dare all the cruel and mean-spirited people who answered yes on that poll circulating facebook on whether people getting "welfare" should be drug-tested to read it but why waste my time. Just one of those leftover battles from the Great Society and backlash that has persisted as the "culture war" but it is good to ask from time to time why so many Americans feel that hating the poor is so much fun.

Of course, the latest meme circulating in this regard goes like this: "Thank you Florida, Kentucky, and Missouri, which are the first states that will require drug testing when applying for welfare. Some people are crying and calling this unconstitutional. How is this unconstitutional? It's OK to drug test people who WORK for their money but not those who don't?… Re-post this if you'd like to see this done in all 50 states."

It took all of two seconds on google to discover that this was a hoax, or at least hasn't happened yet. A refutation and analysis can be found here. Well, it's not okay to drug test people applying for a job but for some reason people have accepting peeing in a cup as just another inconvenience they will put up with in order to rent themselves. The first thing that pops into my mind on this is, where do people flogging this dumb idea expect the money to come from for this? When I was in the army, we had to pee on command about once a month and sometimes more often. The hq quys told me that they could only afford to actually analyze one out of twenty samples at random and the test itself was ridiculously easy to beat. So what was actually accomplished I don't know, just to keep us scared I suppose. There is a difference between rhetoric and reality, maybe when the price tag comes out this symbolic victory of the welfare hordes will seem slightly more Pyrric than as a rhetorical club to beat them with.

This is my third attempt at writing this post and the updates keep coming. Apparently Florida did implement the drug tests, at a cost to the taxpayers of $178 million, and were only able to kick 2% of applicants off. Florida has one of these new gop governors that is a blatant dictator, suprize suprize, when it comes to passing laws that might help people like the health care reform it takes forever but government moves quite quickly when it is harming people at great expense. Whether this is accurate or not, who knows. Maybe it just illustrates how dysfunctional our government is, or who's interest it serves.

We all know the stereotypes of the poor and welfare, so it would be a waste of time to recount them. Noam Chomsky once speculated that if a ruling class wants to institute a dictatorship they need to create a dispised minority that the general public can really be made to fear and hate, then punish that minority to show how the dictatorship is able to protect you. The larger problem that stares our society in the face is that industrial capitalism, with it's ever-increasing pressure to push down labor costs and raise profits, creates a superfluous
population that contributes little to profits and post-crash this population is increasing. The situation is unique in American history, Kevin Phillips has written in several of his last few books that past hegemonic societies (Spain, the Netherlands, and England) in decline experience a similar phenomenon where capital goes abroad in search of greater returns, skilled labor at home atrophies, and inequality increases and calcifies.

Paul Krugman, in The Conscience of a Liberal, generalized that inequality before the New Deal was relatively constant, economic growth raised the income of workers though they never closed the gap. So, industrial workers faced great insecurity but generally their incomes rose. Since the mid-1980s however, the incomes of regular workers has actually declined adjusted for inflation and almost all growth has gone to the rich. This is a lot of assumptions but especially in light of the sustained campaign to yank away pensions, health benefits and so on from public-sector workers like teachers seems to provide evidence to the frustrations. Enter the right-wing noise machine that stokes fear of the other. This is a very good illustration of what Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about in Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study of Ethics and Politics (Library of Theological Ethics) many years ago, it is a thesis that requires a good deal of qualification but group identity tends to reinforce group interests and the selfishness of members toward outsiders.

If distilled to a single question, such as "why do so many working class Americans hate the poor?" this leaves out many group dynamics that serve to maintain not just the status quo but continual degradation of the majority of Americans. Looking down on lowere groups must give some comfort in their own declining status as big business sits on its trillions in offshore cash and small business creation stagnates because big banks find it more profitable to invest in speculation than productive enterprises. It is also really painful to look helplessly at the huge bonuses the elite pay themselves, so scolding the masses of welfare queens supposedly hoovering gobs of taxpayer's money is a way of averting one's eyes to real problems.

Anyway, these viral memes and talking points are dropped into the roiling mass of working class ferment like poo bombs by professional intellectual hucksters from places like the heritage foundation and american enterprise institute to prevent and distract from any kind of mass awakening. Maybe I have it all wrong but I sure wish the people who propagate this kind of meme could recognize that they are often one layoff, catastrophic illness or accident away from joining the poor they dispise. What happens when you're the one on the other side, trying to fanangle the bureaucratic nightmare to feed your family because it is the only way to avoid starving in the street?

Just food for thought as we trudge off to the daily grind.