SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the unreasonable-searches-and-seizures dept.
Via Common Dreams, the American Civil Liberties Union reports
[December 3], a three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that a 2011 Florida law mandating that all applicants for the state's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program submit to suspicion-less drug tests violates the Constitution's protection against unreasonable government searches.
[...]The 11th Circuit panel's order rejects arguments made by attorneys for the State of Florida that government has the authority to require people to submit to invasive searches of their bodily fluids without suspicion of wrongdoing, stating "the warrantless, suspicionless urinalysis drug testing of every Florida TANF applicant as a mandatory requirement for receiving Temporary Cash Assistance offends the Fourth Amendment."
[...]A 2012 review of the TANF mandatory urinalysis program found that the state of Florida spent more money reimbursing individuals for drug tests than the state saved on screening out the extremely small percentage.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday December 04 2014, @07:37PM
It's not just hatred of the poor, and to limit this phenomenon to that statement is to lie by omission.
What poor rural people have been told for at least 50 years now is that the reason they're poor is that the federal government came and took their money and gave it to poor urban people so that the poor urban people could spend it on hookers and blow. Not coincidentally, the people who, when hearing this story, are most likely to believe it wholeheartedly are those that 60 years ago were using the threat of mob violence to ensure that the people that are now poor urban people couldn't live in their towns. And also not coincidentally, the poor rural people in question are almost universally white, and the poor urban people in question are almost universally black or Hispanic. Hence the opposition to taxation and welfare programs is that they see it as the federal government stealing their money and giving it to n*****s and w******s - they dress this sentiment up a whole lot of ways, but that's what it is in a nutshell.
And there is no government report, no speech, no professor, no statistical data, and no research paper that can convince them that this isn't the reality of the situation. They've already made up their minds, and if you present any opposing facts you are part of the grand conspiracy to take their money. The idea that their money was actually taken mostly by Wall Street (who, incidentally, are statistically the most likely to be indulging in hookers and blow) just never crosses their mind.
Those that are paid to stoke this opinion who are historically minded also like to wrap it up in the Lost Cause post-Confederate ideology that says that the reason for the Civil War was that Abe Lincoln started the war to steal white southerner's property (in fact, South Carolina started the war to protect slavery, and said so proudly), and that the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson allowed the Civil Rights Movement to happen so they could dominate politics by buying black votes with money taxed away from white people. And that logically leads to the idea that by 2065 they believe white people in the US will be enslaved by a black-and-Hispanic-controlled government unless something is done to stop that from happening. And as before it is acceptable to use violence to prevent that outcome.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.