Bigotry is not racism.

Okay people, let's once again consider the differences between racist and racism with bigotry and bigot. Most of what gets labeled as racism today is nothing more than simple bigotry. A racist believes in the superiority or inferiority of one or more races over the other. A bigot is someone that treats a group of people with intolerance or some level of animosity because of what or who they are. A bigot doesn't have to think someone is genetically inferior, a racist does.

Racist and racism have been so grossly misused and abused that they've all but lost their true meaning. They're nothing more than sound bites now. And that's a shame, because when real racists come along we're likely to ignore them until it's too late. It's also a shame that the words have lost all their power with their meaning. Please stop to make the distinction instead of adding to the knee jerk reactionary moralistic outrage bull crap that permeates our national discourse today.

Everyone is bigoted in some way, everyone is fearful of something, the new, the different, change, the loss of control. That's an evolutionary defense mechanism. But God gave us the good grace to rise above our base instincts. Some just more grace than others.

Florida's modern day poll tax; Pt. II

So what about clinic certification and inspection costs? What tests do the state accept? Do they inspect testing facilities? Do they contract with local companies? What if there are no testing facilities in a large rural area? What if the people are in home due to health issues, do they have to pay extra for the tester to come to their home?

People knee jerking their support for this law aren't thinking it through. The percentage of over all welfare recipients on drugs is not going to be that high. if you think it is, you're completely ignorant of the stats. So called 'generational welfare' recipients are a low percentage of people on welfare nationally. It's going to be high in places like maybe Miami slums, but lower in more rural or other areas. It's not going to be the same everywhere.

No one is considering the ongoing costs to both businesses and the state in enforcing and certifying these testing facilities and results. Is there a provision for false positives? Even people in prison if they get tested positive, the sample gets sent to another facility to get retested for a false positive. Does it factor in medication people might be on?

This is nothing more than a modern day poll tax, specifically designed to discourage people from applying for welfare at all. It's not going to lower costs in the long run, it's nothing more than base, empty politics. If they were serious about it, they would have made the law pay for all tests upfront and then bill or sue the people that fail. Instead, they're treating everyone as if they ALL use drugs. It's knee jerk puffy chest partisan politics, nothing more.

Florida's modern day poll tax.

Governor Rick Scott (I won't even get into his personal history or how the hell the piece of shit got elected in a state full of fucking old people) just signed a law in Florida requiring everyone applying for welfare to pay for and take a drug test first.

Now, at first glance that might not seem so bad. But rethink it. People have to pay for the drug test first. They can get reimbursed by the state once they are accepted into the program. If they do not get accepted, for any reason, even unrelated to the testing, they do not get reimbursed. They have to pay to apply for a government service they might not even get accepted to.

This is blatantly a modern day poll tax, designed specifically to keep people from applying for welfare in the first place. You think the state is going to accept just any old drug test result? No, they are going to contract with private testing agencies, either by subcontracting some company directly or by making them pay to get 'certified' by the state to be an 'official' program tester, which is almost certainly to lead to ongoing re-certification fees by the state, inspecting fees so people aren't running 'clinics' out of the home or a garage. So there's more fees and more costs.

When they first passed the breathalyzer law in Michigan the state contracted two companies to run it state wide. Of course they didn't have facilities everywhere so they had to contract with local businesses like truck and car accessory places. What the fuck did these sub sub contractors know about anything? The program was a fucking mess. You had two choices, period. And depending on where you lived, you might have only one choice if there is only one place in town and they only contract one service. It was a state sanctioned monopoly, and it didn't work for shit. Even the people that worked at the local car accessory place admitted the program was fucked up, so bad at the time, only a couple years into it, they were think of dropping it.

But back to the current ideological war on society. This is just one more front in the ongoing war against social programs. It's designed specifically to prevent people from even applying. If they were serious about it, they would have written the law to allow the state to pay for all pre-application testing and then bill or sue the people that fail. But they didn't. On purpose.

They're applying for fucking welfare! They don't have any fucking money! And if they get denied for reasons other than drugs, they're still out the fucking money!

It's a modern day poll tax. It's open war on poor people. It's nothing less than the abdication of social responsibility to consumer market capitalism.

The new color of racism is green.