Search Results for "budget cuts dora raymaker"
CIL Budget Cuts Reversed--Victory in NJ!
Published June 30, 2009 @ 04:00PM PT
Preempting my planned post for this afternoon to give good news for a change regarding state budget cuts! This just hot in my in box from Next Step:
The 200-plus people who rallied in Trenton on May 14 to restore budget cuts to New Jersey Centers for Independent Living can declare victory. All budget cuts have been restored!
This is the first time I've been able to post back with some good news, some positive results of self-advocate efforts to prevent the states from taking away our lifelines. Hopefully this can help encourage us to keep rallying, protesting, calling, and complaining. Keep telling your stories and making it known that it is not OK to balance the budget by taking away people's ability to survive or have any sort of quality of life.
It's hard work, but we still have hope of success, one small bit at a time.
Read more at Corzine Watch blog.
First Person Cut Consequences
Published June 24, 2009 @ 11:44AM PT
The U.S. budget cuts to particularly adult supports and services is something I've been following a lot, my interest admittedly in part out of anxiety at having my own (already really poor) "support" situation become completely untenable.
What those news stories I post about all have in common is they were written by an outsider reporter, by someone who is covering the protest, the town hall meeting, or the legislative decision, not by someone who is participating. The news stories may have quotes from a parent or professional (and occasionally, very rarely, from a self-advocate), but they are not first person accounts.
No one asked us, a blog entry by KibbutzAmiad on DailyKos, is a first person account. It is a first person account by a support worker that includes the perspective of people who are affected by the budget cuts, but who were, for various reasons, not part of protests, town hall meetings, or giving input into legislative decisions.
Long quotes are considered bad form. But KibbutzAmiad's post is so powerful that deciding what blurbs to crop out was beyond even my brutal editorial sheers. Do read the whole thing as well; this is still only an excerpt.
Imagine being told that you will lose your means to get to work, your home, your means to grocery shop, and all the people that make up your daily life. Imagine being told this and being unable to read, unable to do your own banking, unable to take care of yourself in the ways most of us take for granted. You can't just move home with mom and dad - you are 40, 50, or 60 years old and your parents, if they are alive, are in no position to take care of you. You have questions, you have terrible fears, and none of the people you have relied on and trusted to help you have any answers.
So the past two weeks have been extremely difficult for all of us. Every single person I work with is facing the loss of all the structures and components that make up their life. They are all terrified. They all feel helpless, and angry. These are people who have spent a lifetime struggling to cope with a society that tells them daily that they are less than "normal", not worthy of much. Yet for the most part they remain polite, and friendly, and optimistic. But this has gutted them.
Today I went to visit one of them, a 43 year old man named Will. Will looks ten years younger than his actual age. Unlike many of the people I work with, he is in good shape - he is careful to work out regularly and eat as well as he can on his budget. He works at a discount store and does a good job, taking the train to work and back. He smiles a lot, and makes an effort to be friendly, even to strangers. This takes some extraordinary optimism on his part because strangers have not always been kind to Will. He does not look "disabled". But he cannot really read or write, and has an IQ in the low 60s. He cannot drive or pay his own bills or - most significantly for him right now - handle the complexities of his medical treatment for stage IV melanoma. All of those tasks are currently handled by the staff that supports him. All of those services will end July 1.
..."No one asked us", he suddenly said, quite forcefully for him - he's very soft spoken normally. "No one asked us if it was okay to do this. No one asked us ANYTHING and we're the ones who are hurt by it. It's not right. No one asked us."
No, they sure as hell did not. In this nation, when changes in public policy are made, who gets asked? The rich and the powerful. Those least affected are carefully consulted and their best interests put front and center. But as Scarlett O'Hara succinctly put it, it's a sight easier to steal from the poor and weak than from the rich and strong.
I've followed the situation in Oregon through my state's self-advocacy channels, testified before legislative groups twice, and done what I can to prevent the loss of funding which, ultimately, for all the enmasse protest of thousands in my state, I have zero control over. Sometimes it seems like whether we are asked or not, we will all still lose. How can we fight this more effectively, before it is too late?
P.S. Many thanks to the reader who brought the Daily Kos entry to my attention.
Unacceptable Choices for Service Cuts
Published January 24, 2009 @ 09:41AM PT
Kristina and I have both been blogging about budget cuts to human services programs in the U.S., some impending, and some becoming an actuality. The question of, "do we support the elderly or do we support children" literally came up at the town hall meeting I attended with my state officials earlier this month. The Salt Lake Tribune ran a story on exactly those choices being faced at a Department of Human Services meeting in Utah last Wednesday. From the story it sounds like preschools for autistic children won renewed funding, but Adult Protective Services, an agency that helps protect autistic adults (and and many others) from abuse by caregivers may have lost funding completely.
Choices like that--between educating children and keeping adults safe from abuse--are just... I can't even come up with words for how violating such choices are. Who gets to pass judgement on human beings like that? From the article, in the words of LouAnne Stevenson who is facing loss of necessary medical care, "You're cutting people's quality of life. We're real human beings here, we're not just another number."
Even if basic human rights are tossed out the window and financial costs alone are considered, cutting some programs may result in an even worse financial situation. This issue of sacrificing long term benefit for short term gain was also touched on at the Utah meeting,
Several speakers said the so-called savings would result in more costs in the future. For example, cutting 5,600 women from Medicaid-funded prenatal care could result in astronomical hospitalization costs, according to March of Dimes spokesman Stephen McDonald.
This sacrifice of the long term for the short term is deeply troubling to me as it could be argued that such thinking has contributed substantially to why we're in this economic (and environmental, and every other sort of mess) mess in the first place.
There has got to be a better way of dealing with the economic problems we face--a way that neither involves thrashing essential human rights nor ends up burying us deeper in the same mess we're already in. How do we find that way? How would things have been different at the Utah Meeting if the parents of autistic preschoolers and the self-advocates demanding freedom from abuse lobbied together to find a way to fund both the preschools and protective services? Will we find a better solution in time for it to make a difference?
Cutting Us Up: Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should
Published May 08, 2009 @ 04:00PM PT
Appeals Court rules Arizona can cut services to residents with developmental disabilities. Well, goody for them. "The appellate judges said lawmakers did nothing wrong in making a lump-sum cut to the DES budget and letting the agency decide what services to trim."
Perhaps they did "nothing wrong" in terms of the law, but
Jennifer Nye, an attorney for the Arizona Center for Disability Law, said she was disappointed in the ruling.
"We know that thousands of adults and children with disability are going to be harmed by these cuts in services and rates," she said. Nye also called it "very shortsighted on the part of the state to balance its budget on the backs of its most vulnerable population."
There's another kind of right and wrong that isn't part of the courts: the ethical responsibility human beings have to treat each other with some remote amount of decency.
Just because it may not be legally "wrong" to prevent a disabled person from having access to the same civil rights (or ability to survive) as everyone else doesn't mean that ethically it should be done. A bit of law does not make ethics irrelevant.
(Side note: Many cuts were to service workers as well as to people who were formerly able to work with support--and who now can't. <sarcasm>Way to go to stimulate the economy and create jobs!</sarcasm>)
Needing Funding to Provide Funding
Published July 15, 2009 @ 09:42AM PT
Needing Funding to Provide Funding in Illinois
This was going to be an update on my State Budget Cut Watch in this week's news potpourri, but then I got going with it and it got longer and longer and--
Illinois just made some pretty severe cuts.
In fact, he [Dale Morrissey CEO of Developmental Services Center] added, in three decades on the job he's never seen a state budget mess have this severe an effect on social-service funding.
"I've never seen it this bad and I've never seen it go this far," he said.
Jobs and programs being cut by one or the other of the two local agencies allow parents of developmentally disabled clients to leave their homes and earn a living. They keep people with disabilities in homes and employed. They help the homeless and keep those with mental health issues out of emergency rooms and police squad cars.
So here's the thing--without the services, a number of people are no longer able to work or avoid crisis situations. Because they are no longer working, they are no longer paying taxes. Because they are no longer paying taxes, they are no longer contributing to the funding that would provide them with the services to enable them work, and pay taxes, and support themselves. Without the services, people are more likely to enter crisis situations and use significantly more costly services such as emergency housing assistance and hospital emergency care.
So we end up with people who have no jobs, people who are in costly crisis situations, and because of these two things even less chance of economic recovery (not to mention anything resembling quality of life).
In order to say anything conclusive of the financial and health and safety impact a real analysis would have to be undertaken, but the potential for a vicious cycle that quickly becomes very hard to break is pretty clear.
Has such an analysis happened? Or are these types of decisions merely panic reactions?
What Does the State Get in Return for Our Lives?
Published June 05, 2009 @ 04:00PM PT
I've been tracking state budget cuts to programs that service autistic adults and people with other disabilities as much as possible here (service cuts is an item IMO worth the repeated news coverage). One recent bit of coverage is of this rally in Pennsylvania. Something state officials seem to say in all these cases--indeed it's what state officials have said at hearings I've been to in my own state--is that while they regret cutting funding for seniors and people with disabilities, it has to be done in order to balance the budget.
The PA article brings up the interesting point that the cuts wouldn't necessarily have to happen if there was a small increase in taxes. Politically (not ethically) however, a small increase in taxes has been rejected as an option.
I want to bring up the also interesting point that while we hear so much about "we have to cut programs for vulnerable people because of the budget" we never hear about what items exactly aren't being cut, or cut as much. What exactly is it that we're being asked to sacrifice our quality of life for? What is at the other end of the "hard choices?" Is it really just so that people don't have to take a small tax increase? Or is it for something that's more worthwhile like sewage treatment? Or what?
As state cuts continue, I'd like to hear more about what exactly it is we are buying, perhaps literally, with out lives here.
Monday Autism News Potpourri
Published June 15, 2009 @ 10:30AM PT
1. Actions: NextStep has put out three important action alerts.
Urge the Senate to pass the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Bill. Recall that we had a tremendous victory for this bill recently when it passed in the House. This is an anti-discrimination bill that affects a lot of different people, people on the spectrum included. It's time to urge the Senate now to pass this important bill!
Ratify UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I covered the Convention a little a million years ago (a.k.a. the beginning of January) in relation to some self advocacy manuals from Harvard. The Convention is a human rights document which focuses on social model thinking.
Support the Community Choice Act. If you follow this blog regularly, I've been reporting in on this since the federal government decided to bail on its promise to include the Community Choice Act in health care reform last April. For those who don't follow this blog regularly, here's the coverage. This bill is important for any autistic person who needs long term supports and services, in order to ensure that they are able to, if they desire, live in the community. There are also two related actions here at change.org, Community Choice Act in Health Care Reform and Sign the AAPD Petition for Health Care Reform.
2. Cuts: This week on budget cut watch, just one new item to report: California May End Social Programs. This article is especially interesting in that it repeats the tax issue that Pennsylvania brought up. Is it true that what the state gets in return for our lives is really just looking good to people who are unwilling to pay a little so that we can survive? If the public was better aware of the consequences of them not wanting to pay a few extra bucks to the state a month, would they still be against paying it?
3. Coincidences: Last week I posted on voting access issues, and one day later the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report on voter access issues. The report finds that while conditions have improved since 2000 when last examined in detail, they are still quite unacceptable. JFActivist has further comments on the report.
