By Gavrielle Gemma
In the latest attempt to criminalize working class folks, the Department of Labor is proposing a new rule that forces a mandatory drug test on people who lose their jobs and need unemployment insurance. They want to extend this to food stamp users.
This is a back-door attack on benefits that we pay for. For years, the right wing, ultra-rich parasites attacked welfare programs with false stories and a lot of racism. The fact that most welfare recipients were white, and a majority children, did not stop racist attacks or keep the greedy from taking from the needy. They wanted workers to turn on each other.
In several states, drug testing is already imposed on adult users of TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (welfare). Tests have shown drug use rates to be very low, around one-tenth the national average. But the dirty work has been done with the help of big business media. Politicians claim that drug tests are aimed at getting people help yet no rehab is actually offered and benefits are cut off regardless of harm to children.
The rich are also trying to cut people off social programs by requiring that recipients work to get benefits. Instead of providing decent paying public jobs, the state gets away with paying welfare recipients less than minimum wage to work in public parks, streets, hospitals, schools, offices and more. Already, more than 12,000 people in Arkansas have lost Medicaid coverage for failing to provide evidence of hours worked; 6,000 more are at risk of losing coverage in December. Many poor and rural residents lack access to the internet in order to complete the mandated web reporting. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said his administration is “actively working” on imposing work requirements for Medicaid recipients.
This is what the capitalists want: slave labor in prisons, forcing people to work just for food. Apart from causing misery to those targeted, these schemes have the effect of lowering wages for all workers. This shows how necessary it is that workers reject the capitalist lies about welfare (another form of unemployment insurance). If you believe their lies, they will come back to take away another benefit that we have paid for.
THE BIG LIE
So how does this work? Rich capitalist parasites and their flunkey politicians hire media firms to convince us overworked and underpaid workers to blame even poorer workers for our troubles. “Those people,” they say, are lazy while you’re working your fingers to the bone. They trot out whatever racist garbage their experts deem effective and maybe show a poor woman driving a Benz. These stories are all invented for the purpose of turning workers against one another and for drawing our attention away from our common enemy: the parasites whose endless piles of cash pay for these ugly fantasies.
The capitalists and war profiteers act like the budgets belong to them even though they use countless loopholes to get out of paying the taxes that we workers pay. The more they cut programs, the more of the budget they feel they’re entitled to. Amazon, headed by the richest man on earth, is getting billions in subsidies and tax cuts and we’re supposed to blame poor people for our unmet needs? Really?
Our lives, just like the lives destroyed by their drone bombs overseas, do not matter to the rich. They don’t consider our lives, our families, our children to be important. They consider themselves royalty entitled to “their” wealth, endowed with the right to own everything and to exploit our labor at whatever cost to us. They think that we’re stealing from them when we demand a raise, a vacation, or a benefit that we paid for!
We need to build a workers’ movement that stands by the motto “An Injury to One Is An Injury to All.” Workers are angry at how difficult our lives are, but we need to turn this anger in the right direction. Just start by asking yourself: How do you know that politicians and the rich are lying? Their lips are moving.