Left has blind spot on disability issues

There is a struggle going on and we are on the wrong side. On September 23, as part of the Jobs with Justice national meeting, there was a demonstration that put JwJ squarely on the side of the oppressors and exploiters.

The Bellefontaine Habilitation Center outside St. Louis is a nearly 100 year old institution built to separate people with disabilities away from mainstream society. It is one of many such institutions built in a time when locking people with disabilities up was what passed for treatment.

Across the country rank and file activists are fighting for liberation; to tear down the walls of places like Bellefontaine that keeps an entire class of people living separate and apart from family and friends. The disability rights movement is engaged in a battle to shut down state-run institutions that segregate and imprison people with disabilities.

The primary aspect is not jobs but to continue the apartheid of people with disabilities. Would Jobs with Justice join with AFSCME in fighting for more prisons? After all, AFSCME stands to gain members with each additional jail guard position. So what is so progressive about places like Bellefontaine?

People on the left should familiarize themselves with disability issues and the disability rights movement. After all, many of us are starting to think about if our futures are going to be in some nursing home or other place of care or confinement.

The disability rights movement has a history. We have our own “Brown v Board of Education”. In July 1999, the Supreme Court issued the Olmstead v. L.C. decision. The court’s decision in that case decreed that Federal, state and local governments develop more opportunities for individuals with disabilities through more integrated housing options. The Olmstead decision requires that the states administer their services, programs and activities “in the most integrated setting appropriate…”

Let me offer a quote from Marta Russell in her book “Beyond Ramps”,

THE FINAL (PROFITABLE) SOLUTION-- MODERN INSTITUTIONALIZATION AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF DISABILITY

Nobody wants to go into a nursing home. That should tell us something. . .

-Wade Blank, co~founder of ADAPT

The truth has always been dangerous to the rule of the rogue, the exploiter, the robber. So the truth must be suppressed.

-Eugene Debs

The question for the entrepreneurial nation remained, what to do with the "unproductive," those not exploitable as laborers? And ultimately, how can disabled people be made of use to the economic order? The solution has been to make disablement big business.

Under the Money Model of disability, the disabled human being is a commodity around which social policies are created or rejected based on their market value. The corporate "solution" to disablement-institutionalization in a nursing home-evolved from the cold realization that disabled people could be commodified; we could be made to serve profit because federal financing (Medicaid funds 60 percent, Medicare 15 percent, private insurance 25 percent) guarantees an endless source of revenue. Disabled people are "worth" more to the Gross Domestic Product when we occupy a "bed" instead of a home. When we individually generate $30,000~$82,000 in annual revenues, the electronic brokers on Wall Street count us as assets and we contribute to companies' net worth. The "final solution"--corporate dominion over disability policy-measures a person's "worth" by its dollar value to the economy.

In order to optimize profits, the nursing home industry must maintain control over the lives of the disabled. Our current public policy predicament is an acknowledgement that the Money Model is well in place-but the prisoners of profit are intent upon revolt.

THE JAIL BREAK

Wade Blank, co-founder of ADAPT, Americans Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, began his long career as a disability advocate while he was employed by a Denver, Colorado, nursing home to set up a ward for young disabled people. His short-lived nursing home career fell within the years when legislatures were ending the old form of institutionalization by closing the doors of state institutions for the disabled, and nursing homes were finding that housing the displaced individuals could be very profitable.

The old sort, well documented by Wolf Wolfensberger in The Origin and Nature of Our Institutional Models, ran the gamut on social "solutions" for disability. Wolfensberger traces the original societal goals of institutions for mentally disabled people: first the professional's goal was to make the "deviant" un-deviant through behavior modification; that gave way to sheltering the deviant from society by isolation; and next, the goal was to protect society from the deviant through inexpensive warehousing, segregation, and sterilization. But eventually experience and research led professionals to a loss of rationale for all of the above practices. Wolfensberger concluded, "Today, of course, we know that most retarded adults make an adequate adjustment in the community, and that they are more likely to be the victims rather than the perpetrators of social injustice." The experts realized that "deviance" was largely a social construct.

Disability historian Dr. Paul Longmore explains that the first widely held view of physical disability is the "moral model;" that is, society believed that disablement was a "deviance," caused by a lack of moral character or intervening supernatural forces, in any case, dangerous to society. The next historical view is the medical model-that disability is biological by nature but must be con~ trolled by curing the "defects "-and resulted in medical and paternalistic social intervention such as sterilization, segregation, and institutionalization…

Jobs with Justice and AFSCME come down on the other side, praising state legislators for halting the creation of community based group homes in favor of keeping Bellefontaine open. Our progressives make a point in that the Governor of Missouri is a right wing asshole and his policies must be opposed. But it was Lenin who said; “Even a broken clock is right two times a day”.

I would suggest that people read “Beyond Ramps” by Marta Russell and check out a couple of on line sites like http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/ or the mainstream http://www.dredf.org/

afscme sells out disabled

The Illinois League of Advocates for the Developmentally Disabled misses the boat in their recent letter defending the institutionalizing of people with disabilities. The only advocacy that this group does is to keep institutions like in Lincoln Developmental Center open. Is this to benefit the inmates of such places or is it to insure that dues money from the employees there continues to flow into the coffers of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

For some reason the leadership of AFSCME is betraying the union ideal of fighting for a better society in their efforts to keep these establishments open. The top leadership of AFSCME has been oblivious to the advances being made in how best to liberate people with disabilities from huge tax eating “Developmental Centers”. AFSCME should learn from the Service Employees International Union that also has had many of its members providing care for people with disabilities. Within the SEIU a number of leaders saw that Institutions were a vestige of the past and saw the need for union representation of people who provide care in community settings or as personal assistants. In Illinois SEIU local 880 just received recognition as the bargaining agent for these workers and is developing a working relationship with real disability rights organizations. It is interesting that after years of ignoring this fertile new area to be organized, AFSCME petitioned to be part of the statewide recognition vote. The national leadership of the AFL-CIO slapped down Illinois’ AFSCME leaders and AFSCME was taken off the workers’ ballot.

It is too bad that the leadership of AFSCME has led them to create organizations like the Illinois League of Advocates for the Developmentally Disabled, to try to hold on to the status quo rather that look to the future. If AFSCME devoted more of its energy to organizing the unorganized and for an egalitarian future they would recognize that the interests of their members and the lives of people with disabilities are not antagonistic. AFSCME can do the right thing and still have its membership grow.

Illinois' Not-So-Universal Healtcare Plan

We have questions as to how many eggs we should be putting in the Governor’s health care plan. It’s not so much a matter of the bill’s passage or not. It is more a question of how much this legislation does to advance the cause of universal/single payer access to health care.

First, we agree that reforms are a good thing. We don’t have to win everything all at once. But we must keep our eye on the prize and our organizing around health care must revolve around that.

What is the prize, the vision that we have for healthcare? Everyone is covered regardless of income, job status, age, or health status. You can go to any doctor you want without worrying about co-payments, deductibles or premiums. All healthcare services are covered, including hospital stays, doctor visits, prescription drugs, long-term care and mental health care.

A problem with the current campaign for the Governor’s plan is it draws a line of demarcation between itself and universal health care. By the Governor’s own admission, his plan will only help one third of the state’s 1.8 million uninsured residents get coverage. Worse is that supporters of the Governor’s bill are putting this forward as a positive thing. Several of the chants at the recent demonstration before the Chamber of Commerce clearly stated that we weren’t in favor of “free loafers” being covered and stressed how “our” plan encouraged “responsibility”. This line of delineation was also very noticeable a couple of months ago when the Coalition for better health care threw its multi-media presentation at a special large meeting. The presentation put forward as a positive that it would only cover the deserving.

Other indications of the weaknesses of the Governor’s bill include that it utilized subsidies to the insurance industry. This will lead to serious problems over who will the insurance companies agree to cover. Money that would be better spent in insuring health care for all will instead go to subsidizing insurance company profits. The only way to cheapen the cost of these private plans would be to strip down coverage with higher deductibles, bigger co-pays, and the exclusion of important services. The Governor’s plan does nothing for the millions of Illinoisans who already are saddled with inadequate insurance plans. Instead it expands these defective plans to more people.

There is a bill H. B. 311 in the Illinois Legislature, sponsored by Mary Flowers of Chicago and Mike Boland from Moline that supports Universal Healthcare.

I’m not sure if we know the answer to the questions we started off with. We do know we should dialogue on this though. We are anxious to hear your thoughts.

Please send this to others involved in the struggle for healthcare. Let’s include as many as we can in this important discussion.

Much of this information came from http://www.healthcareforallillinois.org/

This is the web site of the people who were dissatisfied with Campaign for Better Health Care’s support for the Governor’s bill.