When it comes to treating Florida’s poor like social parasites, it’s full speed ahead for Gov. Rick Scott. Reuters reported last Friday that the U.S. Department of Labor is investigating radical changes in unemployment insurance recently passed by Scott and the Republican-dominated legislature.
The investigation is the result of a complaint filed by the National Employment Law Project, a national workers’ rights group, and Florida Legal Services, a state nonprofit organization, on behalf of unemployed Floridians.
The reasoning for the complaint is simple: The passed measures restrict access to unemployment benefits in extreme ways. Now any citizen attempting to apply for compensation will be required to sign up online, as telephone applications have been eliminated. Assuming that the applicant can afford a computer or is physically able to get to a library, he or she will then be forced to prove his or her intellectual worthiness by taking a 45-question “skills review” of math, reading and research abilities.
But just in case that makes things too easy, the state will now also require applicants to provide a personal email address, adding yet another obstacle for those on the lower end of the digital divide.
On top of that, the New Times Broward-Palm Beach reported that they will have to “fill out forms through snail mail and then wait on hold for hours and hours before hearing an automated service that makes them press a bunch of buttons so it can tell them to keep holding, all in order to receive aid.”
Despite being ignored by even his own party, Gov. Scott and his minions, led by Florida Senate President Mike Haridopolos and Speaker of the House Dean Cannon, have spent the past two years jamming through draconian legislation that attacks workers, the unemployed, students, women, voters and practically every average Floridian.
For example, we have Florida Republicans to thank for their concerted war on voting rights, which they waged last year following the passage of several new voter suppression measures, including cutting the time frame for early voting from 14 days to eight. Thankfully, some of these measures have been challenged and struck down, including the imposition of harsh limits on voter registration drives.
However, we can’t forget Scott’s now infamous voter purge, through which he has endangered hundreds of legitimate citizens’ right to vote behind the guise of blocking undocumented immigrants from the polls.
The U.S. Department of Justice has already sued the state government over the voter purge, but evidently Gov. Scott takes some strange, reactionary pleasure in thumbing his nose at President Obama and the federal government, welcoming the latest investigation of his jobless benefits overhaul with open arms.
After all, these are the kind of actions that his grossly misguided Tea Party base drools over.
Why else would a freshman governor refuse federal funds to build the nation’s very first high-speed rail system, which would have supported a multitude of jobs and jump-started healthy, innovative development of his state’s infrastructure?
Why else would he refuse to expand Medicaid coverage in compliance with the Affordable Care Act or force welfare recipients to submit to humiliating drug tests based on a debunked falsehood that citizens on welfare are more likely to abuse drugs?
Very simply, it’s all based on conservatives’ delusional connection of anything public with the dark machinations of Satan. Is it any wonder our state is a laughing stock in rankings of education, income inequality and a host of other categories?
If we’re ever to make progress, we Floridians must push back against Republicans’ own dark machinations and advance an agenda of constructive investment, not disingenuous constraint.
Moises Reyes is a journalism grad student at UF. His column runs on Fridays. You can contact him at opinions@alligator.org.
