247.4 - Outrage of the Week: Wisconsin Gov. Scott WalkAllOverYou

Outrage of the Week: Wisconsin Gov. Scott WalkAllOverYou

Now for our other regular feature, this is the Outrage of the Week.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott WalkAllOverYou is at it again, trying to find ways to humiliate and denigrate people applying for public benefits which they need and to which they are entitled.

We start with the fact that federal regulations do not allow states to make applicants for unemployment benefits or SNAP benefits (what we used to call Food Stamps) take a drug test. Scotty boy does not like that and is suing the federal government. Y'see, in the case of applying for cash benefits under the program of TANF, which stands for Transitional Aid to Needy Families and is what we used to call welfare, drug testing can be allowed - and WalkAllOverYou is insisting that unemployment and Food Stamps are exactly the same as TANF.

Scott WalkAllOverYou

Not satisfied with that, on May 4, he authorized rules allowing employers who made drug tests a condition of employment to voluntarily submit to the state information about the results of those tests and considerations of privacy be damned. If any of those people later apply for unemployment or SNAP benefits but either failed the employer's drug test or wouldn't take it, they can be denied benefits unless they agree to get drug treatment.

In other words, he is trying to make an end run around the federal regulations by creating a database of pee, allowing him the opening to potentially deny benefits to those in need with the claim that "Well, we didn't make them take the test." This, he says, is part of moving people from "government dependence to true independence," with "independence," it seems, consisting of getting no help at all and screw you. The "independence" which he seeks, that is, is for him and his cat cat cronies to be freed from any legal or ethical obligation to care about anyone or anything other than their own selfish desires.

And no matter how many times these drug-test regimens fail, no matter how many times they wind up showing that the poor are less likely to use drugs than the general population, as they invariably do, still we are afflicted with stupid, obnoxious, sneering, classist jerks like Scott WalkAllOverYou looking down their noses at the poor and viewing them as inferior beings.

It is - he is - a moral and ethical outrage.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/5/7/1523972/-Gov-Scott-Walker-to-form-statewide-pee-database-in-his-latest-attempt-to-stick-it-to-the-poors
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2016/05/06/3776097/walker-drug-test-unemployment/
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/02/26/3624447/tanf-drug-testing-states/