Disability and the War Economy
2003: The Iraq War Begins
I happen to be one of those movement people who do not believe disability civil rights or “equal opportunity” will equate with a reduction of government outlay. To my way of thinking, equity and inclusion for disabled persons under capitalism will mean ongoing government supports, not ending them via welfare reform for some mythological libertarian “independence” in a free-market storybook. Entitlements and rights must go hand in hand to advance disabled people’s liberation.
We need to be damned concerned about what [President George—Ed.] Bush’s cronies are doing inside the administration and beyond it. Under the cloak of words like “human rights,” “free markets,” and “democracy,” current US foreign policy makers have embarked on a long-planned military imperialist aggression that will cost billions of taxpayer dollars.
At the same time, the Bush administration demands more tax cuts for the richest Americans during times of recession. That has left massive deficits—and will leave them for years to come. This portends a further narrowing of social programs—read restriction of civil rights and a rollback of expenditures on public healthcare, education, and social services.
Across the nation the official unemployment rate is over 6 percent (double that to include those who have given up finding a job). Teachers are being laid off, schools closed, healthcare pared down, in-home support services curbed, college aid slashed.
How can that happen in the richest nation in the world?
Since 1973 the reigning economic ideology has been neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, the elites moved to protect the rates of investment profit by appropriating an increased share of the treasury’s surplus in light of the steadily-slowing growth of the global economy as a whole. If the elites and corporations get more, and the pie doesn’t get that much bigger (like now), the people get less.
At a time when inequality is at a seventy-year high, Bush has given the rich $1.6 trillion in tax cuts. […]
The predicament is dire. Sources estimate up to a trillion-dollar deficit each year for the next five years. A Brookings Institution study shows that Bush’s militarism will require a 40 percent cut in spending on discretionary programs—items like IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—Ed.], housing, assistive technology—over the next decade.
“More extreme Republicans,” reported London’s Financial Times, actually want what New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman called a “fiscal train wreck”: “Proposing to slash federal spending, particularly on social programs, is a tricky electoral proposition,” FT said, “but a fiscal crisis offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing such cuts through the back door.”1 […]
Bush funding-formula changes meant nearly 3.9 million children, over 1.2 million disabled people, almost six hundred and ninety thousand seniors, and approximately 1.7 million other adults stood to lose health coverage, according to Families USA. […]
Current policy can be dropped at the feet of the neoconservatives— “neocons”—running US foreign policy.
Remember when US Army Brigadier General Vincent Brooks unveiled pictures of fifty-five “wanted” men from Saddam’s administration at a briefing at Central Command in Qatar? These were pictures of those whom the US wanted chased, caught, or killed.
The Trade Regulation Organization—a spoof on the World Trade Organization run by the Yes Men, a loose-knit group of online hoaxers—then issued a “55 most wanted” playing-card deck similar to the one the Pentagon issued in Iraq. The heads here, though, are the neocons and American Enterprise Institute think-tank fellows who have moved national policy to that of “preventative” war and opened the door to unilateral attacks on any nation deemed a threat to US interests.
In this deck, Bush factors in only as a four of clubs (but the head shot of Bush in front of the Great Seal of Office makes him seem to be sporting a halo). Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is the ace of diamonds, and Bush senior advisor Karl Rove is the ace of clubs.
The ace of spades in the deck is Dick Cheney. Iraq War I was good to Cheney financially. While Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root got a lucrative contract to reconstruct the demolished oil fields. Halliburton is reportedly setting aside even more sums of money for Cheney when he leaves public office.
Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, and Irving Kristol, editor of the Public Interest, two of the most influential leaders of the neocon community, are missing from the deck—a major oversight since they have buoyed the neocon line for the American public. But publishing magnate Rupert Murdock is the King of Hearts. Irving’s son William Kristol edits Murdock’s magazine the Weekly Standard. Podhoretz once claimed that the neocons “shook the position of leftists and liberals in the world of ideas and by doing so cleared the way to the presidency of Ronald Reagan.”
The neocons—William Bennett is also amongst them—diagnosed the 1960s student unrest, countercultural movements, concern for poverty and racial justice, and the women’s liberation movement as “cultural problems,” a “moral breakdown in society.” They attacked social welfare programs because these programs, they claim, cause dependency on government rather than the corporation. Ending “dependency” was part of the economic rationale for passing the ADA—crips will get jobs and they’ll quit taking government handouts.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a well-funded right-wing think-tank that for years has been making the case for getting rid of entitlements. Bush has appointed some 20 AEI fellows to his administration. Richard Perle, who resigned his chairmanship of Bush’s Defense Policy Board over a business conflict of interest, is a fellow at AEI.
AEI sees “entitlement spending” as consuming too much of the budget and doomed to programmatic failure. The neocon directive is toward increasing the military budget and “national security.” “Freedom” at home means fewer entitlements (fewer jobs as well). “Freedom” abroad means military might to impose rule that will carry out the interests of the US corporations.
Michael Ledeen, holder of the Freedom Chair at AEI, says, “Every ten years or so, the US needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” reports the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg.2
It’s actually better planned than that. If Americans had looked deeply enough they would have found the rationale for war in the Middle East laid out in The Project for the New American Century’s 1997 “Statement of Principles.” The group is not a secret cabal nor are its goals any conspiracy theory. It was run out of Kristol’s Weekly Standard office and is available online.3
The statement, signed by Rumsfeld, Podhoretz, Cheney, Bennett, and Enron’s Ken Lay, plus a few others like the president’s brother, Jeb Bush, asserted that conservatives had not fought for a big enough military budget and vowed to “maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century.”
The language is clearly imperialist: the US “stands as the world’s preeminent power”; we must “increase defense spending significantly” and “promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad”; the US needs “the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” The neocons have never made any secret of their imperialist intent.
The founding document of neocon policy is the Defense Planning Guidance drafted for Cheney in 1992 during his stint as defense secretary. Written by Paul Wolfowitz, now Bush’s deputy secretary of defense, and “Scooter” Lewis Libby, then Cheney’s chief of staff and another AEI fellow, with input from Rumsfeld and four of diamonds Jeb Bush, this document raised the idea of “pre-emptive” attacks and called on America to increase military spending to a level that would make the US virtually unchallenged in the world.
The neocons and crony capitalists have come together in one big giddy-on-power Dubya cocktail government—making him a most dangerous president.
In Eugene, Oregon, parents and teachers and friends of the public school are selling their blood plasma to raise money for next year’s school budget. What is this kind of pressure going to add to the budget woes of inclusive education?
The House gutted the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act on April 30.4 Every disabled kid receiving any kind of education services is affected. “Right of appeal? Gone,” a parent wrote me in frustration. “Yearly reviews? Let’s make those optional, every three years. Legal fees? Limit what families can hope to retrieve in fighting mistreatment from the school district (the school districts have no such limits).”
The American Association of Retired Persons reported that one-third of disabled people over fifty have postponed healthcare because of cost. This is an increase over previous surveys—yet a lot more state health spending cuts and private health insurance out-of-pocket expense increases are on the way. The future portends worse as insurance companies hike premiums more than 10 percent in one year.
Meanwhile Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), the under-rated seven of diamonds, told the Tennessean in May that Medicare is an “antiquated system” that cannot sustain itself in the current healthcare market. Frist is part owner of Columbia/HCA, the healthcare corporation nabbed by the government for tens of thousands of dollars of fraudulent Medicare billing.
Domestic programs, crony capitalism, and the national bent towards militarism are connected. Militarism is diverting money from state and local governments. While AEI complains, “entitlement programs are crowding out the rest of government,” the US spends more [on its military] than the defense budgets of countries with the next 14 biggest militaries combined, and is accelerating production of state-of-the-art weapons of mass destruction—initiating another costly arms race.
Bush, in his Memorial Day speech, referred to the “battles of Afghanistan and Iraq” as mere moments in Cheney’s fifty-year war. As Michael Hardt, author of Empire, said on WBAI radio recently, war used to be considered an exception; now the exception has become the norm. […]
2005: Two Years On
Defending the success of the Iraq War a defiant Bush bragged, “[there are] more cell phones in the hands of Iraqis than before.”5 And guess what, some sod has been laid in a Najaf soccer field.
That is no consolation to Maggie Dee, a significantly disabled woman living in northern California who worked through most of her adulthood as a disabled woman and has fought for disability rights for years. Now, unable to work, she survives only on her Social Security disability check, a meager $812 per month.
Economic insecurity has gotten worse for the average American as earnings fail to keep up with inflation or jobs get shipped overseas. The exception, of course, is the richest, upon whom the Bush administration has bestowed unbridled wealth. Before the Congress is a $70 billion package that would include an extension of Bush’s 2001 tax cut for stock dividends and capital gains.
But for disabled people economic insecurity has gotten really bad.
“All the things we have to cope with,” says Maggie Dee, “take so much out of people. They cannot keep chipping away at people.”
“One can only take so much oppression without wanting to just give up,” she added.
A fellow advocate in Marin County had recently committed suicide because he just found his life overwhelming with the lack of support as a quadriplegic. He had lost several attendants who had come in each day to assist him with daily tasks and was having a hard time finding and keeping a stable situation. He wrote in a note to his family that he loved them so much and he knew it would hurt them but he just could not stand the stress of being so poor and the lack of a sufficient support system to keep him afloat. And he is not alone. Reports have come in from Tennessee where [Democratic Governor Phil—Ed.] Bredesen severed about 191,000 poor people from TennCare—the state’s version of Medicaid.
Journalist John Spragens reported from Tennessee on the TennCare cuts. One story he told was about a forty-eight-year-old man who had a bipolar condition and thought he would be cut from TennCare and unable to get his meds.
“Bob wrote a note to his family and a poem for his sister. ‘I know what a burden I’m going to be, and I don’t want to put you all through it,’ he wrote. He went to the local cemetery, called 911 and told the dispatcher that they could find him on his mother’s tombstone. Then, he pulled out a gun and shot himself,” wrote Spragens.6
If I traveled the country and visited states where Medicaid has been cut back like Missouri, Mississippi, and Minnesota I certainly would find more stories of similar life and death distress.
Maggie’s benefit amount would have been increased by $48 starting January 1, 2006 were it not for Republican Governor Schwarzenegger and the Democrat-dominated California legislature that made a budget compromise in which disabled people who rely upon Supplemental Security Income would be denied both their federal and state cost of living increases for 2006.
SSI cost of living increases are small but greatly needed. This year the increase due is 4.1 percent. Twenty-four dollars are due to those on SSI from the state and twenty-four from the federal government, but they won’t see that forty-eight dollars at all. They may get twenty-four dollars in April if the state keeps its word. So, in April, Maggie may have $836 to survive on each month while the state pockets the federal twenty-four dollars pretty much for good.
Meanwhile, the California legislators who are the highest paid in the country will see a 12 percent increase in their salaries bringing their salaries up to a whopping $110,880 per year. That is their cost of living increase! (California lawmakers also receive $153 a day in expense money when they are in session.)
Says Maggie, “they are taking our SSI money and giving it to themselves.”
There is no deficit in California this year. Is that any consolation to anyone with any sense of social or economic justice? Look at how the state has done it. The disparity is so great that there are no words for these wrongful acts.
What is happening to poor disabled persons at the state level is happening at the federal.
The squeeze on poor disabled people goes deeper. Section 8 [low-income rental assistance—Ed.] voucher formulas have changed. Once, disabled people paid one-third of their income for rent while the federal government paid the rest (up to the established federal rent rate for the area). Now Public Housing Authorities are taking a greater share of people’s income. In one case an individual’s share went from $246 to $330 per month. On an income of $812 that leaves $482 to pay for food, utilities, transportation, postage, clothing, and other necessities.
Add to this the fact that many of these individuals are on both Medicare and Medicaid and must sign onto a Medicare Part D drug plan by January 1. They will go from having no co-pays to paying $2–5 per prescription. While that may not sound like much, think about what $40 might do to one’s food budget when there is too little to begin with.
It is a humiliating, debasing, demeaning life this nation condemns on poor disabled persons.
There is more to come. House and Senate Republican leaders have edged closer (at the time of this writing) toward an agreement to cut as much as $45 billion over the next five years from domestic programs like Medicaid, food stamps, student loans, and child-support enforcement.
Big money in control of government cuts taxes for the wealthy and corporations at the expense of the rest of us.
So, neoliberalism continues to worm its way through our social fabric, wreaking havoc while the neocons advance their death march to “democracy” in the Middle East at a cost of $225,076,331,348 to this minute, 2:46 p.m. PST on December 8, 2005.7
They say the neocons don’t have a domestic agenda.
While the Bush administration is killing Americans abroad in an illegal war largely financed by the Chinese continuing to buy US bonds, the neocon foreign agenda is killing Americans at home by starving the nation of funds for taking care of our own.
Disabled people are going first. That is how it always happens.
None call it cleansing. The euphemism is benign neglect or balancing the budget—but it is criminal neglect and just as murderous as the state-sponsored death penalty.
While Bush is pushing cell phones in Iraq we must recognize and stop this gross infraction of human rights under our noses.