South Carolina's Sen. Jim Demint leads the far right fridges of the Republican Party and Tea Party movement. His state has been dominated by extremely conservative political leadership for over 200 years and is home to some of the most severe poverty, public health problems and unemployment in the U.S.A. Add to that massive failures in education and public health and the most violent crime in the nation, and you can get an idea of what Demint’s vision for the rest of the country looks like.
Showing posts with label savannah river nuclear site. Show all posts
Showing posts with label savannah river nuclear site. Show all posts
Gov. Nikki Haley admits exaggerated claims about drug use among unemployed applicants at the Department of Energy's Savannah River nuclear facility which happens to be just a few miles upstream from Allendale County, the 10th poorest county in the United States
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) has admitted that she has no evidence backing her claim that half of job applicants at a local government facility flunked a drug test. She'd used the claim to push for requiring the jobless to pass a drug test to be eligible for benefits.
"I so want drug testing, I so want it." Hear Nikki Haley lie about drug test results at Savannah River nuclear facility. With less than 2% of job applicants typically failing drug tests is the Governor pandering for votes or pursuing sound fiscal management?
Unemployment insurance, paid for in part by the unemployed themselves would be denied to jobless unless they pass a drug test if Governor Haley has her way. The costly program would probably weed out only 1% to 2% of applicants according to evidence. But undoubtedly it plays well with conservative voters and those who want to blame "deadbeats" rather than a depressed South Carolina economy for the problem.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) wants the jobless to pass a drug test before they can receive benefits, but she seems to have an exaggerated sense of drug use among the unemployed.
"I so want drug testing. I so want it," Haley said during a Thursday question-and-answer session at the Lexington Rotary Club. She noted that the government had to make sure it would be feasible: "We have to make sure this works. We have to see what the return is on it. And, we have to see federally and legally if we can do it."
Haley said scads of job applicants flunked a drug test at the Savannah River Site, a nuclear reservation along the Savannah River.
"Down on River Site, they were hiring a few hundred people, and when we sat down and talked to them -- this was back before the campaign -- when we sat down and talked to them, they said of everybody they interviewed, half of them failed a drug test..."
SAVANNAH RIVER EMPLOYER MAKES CLEAR HALEY'S EXAGGERATION OF DRUG USE AMONG JOBLESS
Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, which owns the River Site, told HuffPost he had no idea what Haley was talking about with regard to applicants flunking a drug test.
"Half the people who applied for a job last year or year 2009 did not fail the drug test," Giusti said. "At the peak of hiring under the Recovery Act we had less than 1 percent of those hired test positive."
The River Site doesn't even test applicants. "We only test them when they have been accepted," Giusti said.
A spokesman for Gov. Haley did not respond to requests for comment.
The unemployment rate in South Carolina, which recently trimmed benefits for the jobless, is 10.9 percent.
NO STATE DENIES BENEFITS TO THE UNEMPLOYED BASED ON A DRUG TEST
According to the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group, no state has ever instituted mandatory drug tests for the jobless to receive unemployment benefits, though Wisconsin and Indiana have passed laws that disqualify the jobless from benefits if they fail a prospective employer's drug test.
HALEY POLICY WOULD DELAY TIMELY DELIVERY OF UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION BENEFITS: WOULD VIOLATE FEDERAL LAW
"The process of referring claimants to drug tests would delay timely delivery of benefits required by federal law," said NELP senior staff attorney George Wentworth in an email. "Administration of state unemployment insurance laws is federally funded but the federal government will only subsidize reasonable administrative costs. Sending hundreds of thousands of South Carolina citizens who have just lost their jobs off to a laboratory so that their state government will be satisfied they are not drug abusers is not a cost that the federal government would or should pay, and it would violate federal unemployment law to make unemployed workers pay for the test."
With little industry other than the US nuclear facility on the Savannah River, run down infrastructure, dilapidated rail lines, some marginal cotton and timber farming and no Interstate highway to bring in traffic, Allendale County, South Carolina is the poorest and most neglected county in South Carolina and the 10th poorest county in the United States.
The rapidly diminishing population is overwhelmingly African-American and majority female. When I visited the City of Allendale in January 2011, I saw no operating businesses on either of the two main drags. Likewise the streets were striking in their absence of both cars and people. The single operating restaurant was a warm and friendly place that was not prepared to serve more than coffee and iced tea.
Here are some pictures and links that illustrate the long term effects of conservative politics on a community.
---J.A.M.
This boarded up filling station on the virtually abandoned main road into Allendale, SC is typical of the state of businesses in Allendale, SC.
Cotton, the mainstay of the Allendale, SC economy since slavery, continues to be the basis of a local economy where industry and business are almost completely absent. This photo was taken just south of the Allendale city limits.
Palmetto and cedar swamps like this one found within the city limits, restrain agricultural and other economic development in the Allendale, South Carolina region.
Rusted railroad track and businesses like this dilapidated grain operation in neighboring Hampton County, SC explain much about why the economy has been sidelined and unemployment continues to soar not just in south west South Carolina but throughout the State.
With a population with little to pawn and no money to "rent to own" even businesses like this Spartanburg, SC pawnshop that dot the landscape in the rest of the State are virtually invisible in Allendale County.
