Kasich, ADAPT, and the Disability Integration Act

The Disability Integration Act was introduced by Senator Schumer to, in the words of the important disability rights group ADAPT, "address the fundamental issue that people who need Long Term Services and Supports (LTSS) are forced into institutions and losing their basic civil rights. The legislation (S.2427) builds on the 25 years of work that ADAPT has done to end the institutional bias and provide seniors and people with disabilities home and community-based services (HCBS) as an alternative to institutionalization. It is the next step in our national advocacy after securing the Community First Choice (CFC) option."

Recently, the DIA has gotten into the presidential campaign, thanks to direction action by ADAPT and the work of many other disability rights advocates. Clinton came out in favor of it, affirming her full support. Then Sanders added himself as a co-sponsor of the legislation (details from The RespectAbility Report). Next, ADAPT in Rochester, NY, went to a Kasich rally to try to get him on record.

Here's what happened:

Although ADAPT was first in line, waiting out in the cold for good seats, they were forced to the back of the auditorium (and from there protested their position). After, Kasich did not go on record about the DIA, but he smiled and kept saying he'd take pictures with them and got their numbers for his staff. So far, I haven't heard about any follow up. We'll see.

Kasich was quoted as saying:

Here's what I'm going to tell you," Kasich continued. "When everybody was like, they wanted to start saying, chanting my name and quieting you, I'm not going for that. Because I'll tell you, the developmentally disabled have lived in the shadows for 100 years. Okay, I know that. I don't want that to happen to anybody. And I'm not saying that because I'm a politician or I want your vote. I'm a human being just like you are."
Kasich took pictures with the group and got their contact information so his staff could get in further touch.
"Do you know why I want to do this?" Kasich told them, after the pictures. "Because Jesus wants me to." 

Sanders on Sub-Minimum Wage

Yesterday the Sanders campaign released a statement on New York's new 15$ minimum wage law. So much credit goes to the fight-for-15 folks who have the seemingly impossible into a new norm in progressive states around the country.

On disability, Sanders wrote [my emphasis]

“I’m proud that today two of our largest states will be increasing the minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour – raising the wages of some 9 million workers in this country. Not too long ago, the establishment told us that a $15 minimum wage was unrealistic. Some thought it was ‘pie-in-the-sky.’ But a grassroots movement led by millions of working people refused to take ‘no’ for an answer. Loudly and clearly workers said, ‘yes we can increase the minimum wage, not just to $10.10 an hour, not just to $12 an hour, but to a living wage of $15 an hour.’
“This campaign is about building on these successes so that everyone in this country can enjoy the dignity and basic economic security that comes from a living wage, no matter what state they live in. That includes ending the subminimum wage for tipped workers and persons with disabilities.

As noted by RespectAbility, this isn't Sanders' first statement on subminimum wage, but I like seeing it here. I want the issue firmly entwined with the fight-for-15$ movement.

ABLE Act Reforms

Over a year ago I wrote about problems with the ABLE Act, the well-intentioned bill that the divide-and-conquer wing of the GOP was tweaking into semi-irrelevancy. It passed with a definition of disability that only included those disagnosed before age 26, a sign of the way too many politicians like to differentiate between the worthy and unworthy disabled, as they do between the worthy and unworthy poor. I listed lots of rhetoric showing this pattern, then asked:

As we head into the final few weeks of the 113th Congress, questions remain. Will ABLE pass? What definition of disability will emerge in the final bill? Who will Congress consider worthy?
This is why Courtney’s story is so important. I am the father of a boy with Down syndrome and am personally invested in this bill’s passage. I know, though, that whatever passes, my son — diagnosed since birth — will be included in the definition. No one wants to take his benefits away. But what about Courtney? What about the person who develops disability through injury, age or disease later in life? They too need the ability to save, to work and to garner what independence they can.
This is the danger of playing politics with disability. Definitions are complicated, and needs are real. Instead of trying to divide and conquer, let’s pass a bill that can offer dignity and security to all.

Why should my son, diagnosed with a disability 5 minutes into his life, be treated better than someone who gets a traumatic brain injury on their 27th birthday?

I have to say, though, that disability politics are never simple left-wing/right-wing. There are so many GOP officials who do great work on disability, and good disability legislation routinely passes with huge majorities. So I read this piece on tweaking ABLE with some optimism.

Under the latest proposals, people with disabilities who are employed would be able to allocate extra money each year to their ABLE account. Beyond the existing annual cap of $14,000, those who are working could also deposit their earnings up to the federal poverty level – currently $11,770 for a single person.
In addition, eligibility for the accounts would be expanded to include people with disabilities that onset by the age of 46, an increase over the current requirement that conditions must exist prior to age 26.
Finally, the lawmakers want to allow families to be able to rollover money they’ve saved for an individual with a disability in a 529 college savings plan to an ABLE account.

Let's keep pushing for better policy.

#CripTheVote on Sub-Minimum Wage Policy

A few months ago I wrote about Clinton's policy on helping people with Autism and their families. More recently, I wrote about disability entering the political frame of "interest groups."

Yesterday (Monday, 3/28), I was alerted by Ari Ne'eman of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network that Clinton was asked by an autistic adult about subminimum wages for disabled workers. Clinton's reply was excellent (transcript from Ne'eman):

"When it comes to jobs, we've got to figure out how we get the minimum wage up and include people with disabilities in the minimum wage. There should not be a tiered wage, and right now there is a tiered wage when it comes to facilities that do provide opportunities but not at a self-sufficient wage that enables people to gain a degree of independence as far as they can go. So I want us to take a hard look at raising the minimum wage and ending the tiered minimum wages, whether it's for people with disabilities or the tipped wage....When people talk about raising the minimum wage, they don't always talk about the legal loopholes that we have in it and I want to get rid of those and I want to get rid of that for people with disabilities too."

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvcPtKZo7yE&feature=youtu.be&t=47m30s

Here's what comes next:

If you are not a Clinton supporter, you need to push your favorite presidential candidate to take a public position, not on their website, but in their speeches, on this issue. It's not enough to just "know they would be good on this," because for generations politicians generally good on social issues have failed disabled Americans. 

If you are a Clinton supporter, you need to push your favorite gubernatorial, Congressional, or more local candidates to take a public position on this.

A few years ago, Senator Reid appointed a friend of his who promoted sub-minimum wage and sheltered workshops to the National Council on Disability. That can't happen again. Let's shift the window.

Debating the Cold War

Charles Pierce has a piece on the many victims of the Cold War in Latin America. It's being raised as an issue versus Sanders (and will be used to hammer him in the general, if he gets there, because much of America remains afraid of "socialists" and "Communists").

History in public!

Resource: #CripTheVote Coverage

#CripTheVote has become an important hashtag, founded by Alice Wong, Andrew Pulrang, and Gregg Beratan, intended to bring disability into the  conversation around the 2016 presidential campaign.

Like most forms of online activism, its primary function (to my mind) is to thicken networks. We tweet, we use the hashtag, we encounter each other and find the depth and breadth of our community. Twitter is a more accessible space than most, so it's particularly well suited to the diversity of the disability community.

For hashtag activism (not a dismissive term from me) to jump beyond the platform requires help from the media. It's beginning to work, perhaps.

Valerie Payne for HLNtv.com writes:

A new hashtag surfaced Thursday night during the PBS "NewsHour" Democratic debate, which was simulcast on CNN. Amidst the debate between presidential contenders Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, disability advocates are demanding their voices be heard and their issues addressed during this election cycle, so they developed that hashtag: #cripthevote.

Washington Post feature writer Caitlin Gibson writes:

It’s a safe bet that certain hot-button issues will be addressed in the next round of Democratic and Republican presidential debates this week: unemployment, health care, gun control, the economy.
But will the candidates talk about how the unemployment rate among the disabled is more than double that of non-disabled Americans? Or that people with disabilities are far more likely to be victims of violent crime? Will there be any mention of the many disabled people whose struggles are compounded by poverty and inadequate health care?
Probably not, say disability rights advocates — so they aim to change that. As the candidates take the stage, and a vast audience follows along on social media, disabled voters plan to make their voices heard by rallying under the Twitter hashtag #CripTheVote.

Best of all s.e. smith, one of my favorite journalists who writes on disability, got a piece into The Guardian on disability and politics more generally:

Disabled people are also very worried about police violence, says Pulrang. “The police killings that have garnered so much attention in the last few years include people with disabilities, who were killed in part because of poor understanding of how to communicate with people who have various kinds of disabilities.” That could be another point of collaborative organizing, as the black community is similarly concerned with the issue – notably, many victims of police violence are both disabled and black, in an intersection of injustice.

RespectAbility is one group that’s hoping to promote voting in the disability community with outreach on these issues. The group is surveying and educating candidates on disability issues and conveying responses to disabled voters and other interested parties. Their hope, as with other disability activists, is to increase voter participation and push candidates to do better on disability issues – ultimately, that may include promoting bloc voting, with initiatives like#CriptheVote and RevUp! doing voter outreach as well. Wong is cautious about turning the disability community into a monolith, though, preferring to focus on uniting people behind common issues like social services.

It’s not enough to mobilize as a group, Pulrang, Schur, Cruse and Dickson all argue: We need more data on disabled voters to learn more about barriers to voting access, how people are voting, and which sectors of the disability community should be targeted to increase political engagement.

Let me know if you see more mainstream media articles like this (not diminishing blogs. Blogs, like hashtags, thicken networks and sharpen arguments. I'm interested though when disability pieces get through mainstream media editors and possibly reach new audiences).

My recent pieces on the subject:

• A Reporting Project Puts Disabilities on the Political Agenda (The Atlantic, 1/25/16)
• Autism: Can other candidates match Hillary Clinton's plan? (CNN.com, 1/10/16)
• Politicians are Ignoring Americans with Disabilities (Al Jazeera America, 11/10/15)

#CripTheVote: Where Disability Could Have Fit in the Democratic Debate

Until last week, neither Sanders nor Clinton used the word "disability" at most rarely. Then, in her close to the final debate in New Hampshire, Clinton concluded her remarks as follows:

You know, we didn’t get to talk about the continuing struggles that Americans face with racism, with sexism, with discrimination against the LGBT community, with new Americans, with people with disabilities. Yes, we have income inequality, we have other forms of inequality that we need to stand up against and absolutely diminish from our society.

In this passage, her call outs to specific forms of discrimination faced by specific groups serves as a critique of Sanders' focus on income inequality more generally. She kept it up throughout the weekend before the New Hampshire primary, although has not (to my knowledge - she may have in stump speeches) discussed disability since.

Sanders almost never mentions disability either, but then in his victory speech in New Hampshire, Sanders said:

We must pursue the fight for women's rights, for gay rights, for disability rights. We must against stronger and stronger opposition protect the right of a woman to control her own body.

The Sanders campaign, I think, recognizes that they need to expand their outreach and, for one moment, disability was in that calculus.

Last week's debate in Wisconsin had spaces where disability would have fit perfectly, but neither candidate brought it up. That's fine. They don't have to reach out to our community (and we don't have to vote for them!). What's interesting to me, though, is to see where disability fits within their existing rhetoric.

Here's the section where a sentence fit for Clinton. It came near the end of her closing statement as she said, reminiscent of her close on the previous debate, "I am not a single- issue candidate, and I do not believe we live in a single-issue country." She continued:

"Yes, does Wall Street and big financial interests, along with drug companies, insurance companies, big oil, all of it, have too much influence? You’re right.

But if we were to stop that tomorrow, we would still have the indifference, the negligence that we saw in Flint. We would still have racism holding people back. We would still have sexism preventing women from getting equal pay. We would still have LGBT people who get married on Saturday and get fired on Monday. And we would still have governors like Scott Walker and others trying to rip out the heart of the middle class by making it impossible to organize and stand up for better wages and working conditions. So I’m going to keep talking about tearing down all the barriers that stand in the way of Americans fulfilling their potential, because I don’t think our country can live up to its potential unless we give a chance to every single American to live up to theirs."

Notice how she's expanded from the previous set of shout-outs to more content. Disability would fit nicely here. After "Monday," she could add something on inclusion, on discrimination, and disability.  She could name "ableism" as she has sexism and racism. I think my ideal, again within the rhetoric of this paragraph would be, "We would still have sexism preventing women from getting equal pay. We would still have ableism keeping disabled Americans locked up in institutions rather than included in our communities."

For Sanders, I always have the feeling that his shout outs to specific groups fit a little less well with his political philosophy. He wants to talk about poverty, not the differences between black poverty and white poverty. He wants to talk about jobs, not abled jobs and disabled jobs. He's a macro-vision candidate. He's less interested in the diverse identities that make up the Democratic coalition. Instead, his campaign invites a new coalition focused collectively on class-related issues. Still, he's learned in the last few weeks, to name-check key identity groups, such as here:

SANDERS: Look, we are fighting for every vote that we can get from women, from men, straight, gay, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans. We are trying to bring America together around an agenda that works for working families and the middle class.

Disability does fit here, as in his NH talk, just as a name-check: "...Latinos, Asian-Americans, Americans with disabilities." [let's face it, his campaign would tell him people-first, as it's safer]

Moreover, his signature issues - jobs and wealth - play directly to major disability issues.

But there's another space in Sanders' rhetoric where disability absolutely belongs, not just as a shout-out for political purposes, but if he really wants to solve the problem. Consider this quote:

We need fundamental police reform, clearly, clearly, when we talk about a criminal justice system. I would hope that we could all agree that we are sick and tired of seeing videos on television of unarmed people, often African-Americans, shot by police officers.

As I tweeted at the time:

RE https://twitter.com/Lollardfish/status/697972250339909632

The problem, of course, is that by leaving disability of the police violence conversation, we miss a major component of why and how this happens.

Here are two broader two points are these.

1. There's lots of room within the current rhetorical structures of the two candidates to talk about disability without demanding they become someone they are not. Neither is talking about it now, and that matters to me (if they want my vote).

2. Disabled Democrats and their allies fit within both the existing and transformative ideas about what are Democratic identities. The candidate and campaign who pursues them would, I think, find a deep well of support and activism within the disability community due to these natural alliances. It's a winning strategy.

Disability and Politics - SEVEN issues

It's primary day in New Hampshire and later I'll be observing a new tablet-based system for disabled voters. In the meantime, I now know who the best candidate is for disabled Americans.

No-one has done more for people with disabilities than me. I have spent many millions of dollars to help out-and am happy to have done so!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2016

That settles that then. On the other hand, if you aren't sure what issues disabled voters might care about, or are undecided yourself, read on.

The writer s.e. smith, one of my favorite collaborators and conversationalists, has written an outstanding piece for Bustle about "seven issues" that should matter to disabled voters as they head to the polls.

With all eyes on Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, the candidates are facing growing demands from all sides to fully articulate their platforms, so that voters can start making some tough decisions. However, one group of voters hasn't been well-represented in discussions about the upcoming presidential race. In fact, this group is being largely ignored by both the candidates and the media: The disability community, which accounts for nearly 20 percent of Americans. The candidates, and the American public, need to be thinking about what disabled Americans need, because many of their concerns dovetail with those of the larger country as a whole — and disability is the only minority status that can be acquired at the blink of an eye.

Experiences of disability are, of course, incredibly diverse. While there's a broad umbrella over a community that shares the commonality of living with a variety of impairments (from amputations to congenital disorders), disability is not a monolith. However, there are some key issues that are of vital concern to a significant proportion of the disability voting block, and many disabled voters are keeping their eyes on how candidates address them.15.6 million disabled people voted in the 2012 cycle, and if the disability community mobilizes this year, it could become a considerable force, with many more showing up at the polls. Voting organizers are certainly hoping so, with groups like RespectAbility providing candidate information and encouraging disabled people to register — so here are seven issues relevant to disabled voters that are worth focusing on.

They are: Jobs, Independent Living, Benefits Penalty, Autism Funding, Police Violence, Access to Education, and Mental Health Care

You should read this; better yet, you should share it, as there are people in your social media network with no idea what the issues are, and you'd be hard pressed to find a better primer than this piece.

P.S. Trump has spent millions of dollars in his buildings on accessibility. It's because if you build a new building, it's the law. Thank you ADA.

Disability Rights: Not even in the frame

.@JessicaValenti sigh. I hate to say it. But disability rights would be nice to hear. Just once.

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) February 2, 2016

This tweet came in response to Clinton's Iowa speech, in which she said:

I know we can make college affordable and get student debt off the backs of young people. And I know we can protect our rights, women's rights, gay rights, voting rights, immigrant rights, workers rights. I know too we can stand up to the gun lobby and get common sense gun safety measures.

Later, Sanders talked about jobs and climate change, with this passage as the only call out to specific groups (he knows his lead is predicated on two lily white states, Iowa and NH, and that he hasn't made inroads with non-white voters):

We will end the disgrace of having more people in jail than any other country. Disproportionately African-American and Latino. What we are going to do is provide jobs and education for our kids not more jails and incarceration.

Each candidate has ideas on disability, having completed the RespectAbility questionnaire in considerable detail (storify with all relevant links here). The differences between them are important and interesting, and reveal much about the nature of this election. I'll have more to say about that in the leadup to New Hampshire (I'm going on Sunday, thanks to an invitation by RespectAbility to meet with them and disability rights leaders in the state).

For now, though, I just want to go back to those Iowa speeches - I don't blame Clinton and Sanders for not name-checking disability, but disabled individuals are in need of health care, jobs, protection of reproductive rights, and more. In any marginalized group, the disabled members of that group will be multiply marginalized (just as the non-white, non-heterosexual, etc. members of the disability community are multiply marginalized).

Clinton is running an intersectional campaign. Disability isn't in the frame.
Sanders is running an economics only campaign. Disability isn't in the frame.

We have a lot of work to do.

Sanders speaks on Mental Health Crisis

From last night's Town Hall.

SANDERS: I get calls - I have gotten calls in my office, and I'm sure other senators have as well. This is the call. Somebody calls us up and said, I'm very worried about my brother. I'm worried what he might do to himself or, to answer your question, to somebody else. He may be homicidal. He may be suicidal.

We have searched desperately to find health care - mental health treatment for him. We cannot find mental health treatment which is affordable, which is accessible.

In my view, we have got to move in the direction of making sure that everybody in this country who has a mental health crisis gets health care when they need it, not two months from today.

This is a pretty good answer, as politicians go. He didn't blame mental health for gun violence. He did talk about accessibility.

The better answer is - we need to make sure care is accessible for people long BEFORE they go into crisis. That's not happening currently (see my pieces here and here).

Laquan McDonald - "Acting Erratic" while black (#CultOfCompliance)

I've been out of town so haven't been commenting directly on the Laquan McDonald killing. Two major points.

First, I believe that the elected officials of Chicago tried to cover this up and delay justice for political gain.

The Cook County prosecutor, Anita Alvarez, must have had probable cause to indict Officer Van Dyke for the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting death of Mr. McDonald the moment she viewed the police dash-cam video, after her office received it two weeks later. That video, in her own words, was “everything that it has been described to be by the news accounts. It is graphic. It is violent. It is chilling.”

But the timing, in late 2014, was not good.

Then up for re-election, the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, was looking ahead to a contested election on Feb. 24, 2015, which would ultimately result in a runoff election on April 7. In Ferguson, Mo., a grand jury was hearing testimony on the police shooting of Michael Brown. The video of Eric Garner being choked to death during an arrest in New York had gone viral. The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum across the country.

The video of a police shooting like this in Chicago could have buried Mr. Emanuel’s chances for re-election. And it would likely have ended the career of the police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy.

Second, as regular readers know, I frequently write about the ways that being disabled acts as a risk multiplier when it comes to interactions with police. It's one of many risk factors - including race, class, gender, and more - that multiply as oppressive forces intersect.

McDonald was not, to my knowledge, disabled. He was, though, acting in an unpredictable way. Here's the text we see again and again from the police report:

According to the police, the young man was walking down a street on the Southwest side of Chicago, carrying a 4-inch knife and behaving erratically. The officer reportedly told McDonald to drop the knife, but the teen did not comply. Van Dyke purportedly shot McDonald for fear of his life, claiming the teen lunged at him.

We've seen this before. Failure to comply resulting a quick escalation to use of lethal force, particularly when confronting black men. It's the same pattern.

Decouple Gun Violence and Mental Health Conversations (Democratic Debate Edition)

Disability continues to be a largely ignored issue in the presidential primaries except for when it comes to gun violence, when the candidates get things entirely wrong. Here's 100% of what Sanders or Clinton (the only candidates that actually might get nominated) said about disability last night.

SANDERS: Let's begin, Anderson, by understanding that Bernie Sanders has a D-minus voting rating from the NRA. Let's also understand that back in 1988 when I first ran for the United States Congress, way back then, I told the gun owners of the state of Vermont and I told the people of the state of Vermont, a state which has virtually no gun control, that I supported a ban on assault weapons. And over the years, I have strongly avoided instant background checks, doing away with this terrible gun show loophole. And I think we've got to move aggressively at the federal level in dealing with the straw man purchasers.

Also I believe, and I've fought for, to understand that there are thousands of people in this country today who are suicidal, who are homicidal, but can't get the healthcare that they need, the mental healthcare, because they don't have insurance or they're too poor. I believe that everybody in this country who has a mental crisis has got to get mental health counseling immediately. 

COOPER: Do you want to shield gun companies from lawsuits?

SANDERS: Of course not. This was a large and complicated bill. There were provisions in it that I think made sense. For example, do I think that a gun shop in the state of Vermont that sells legally a gun to somebody, and that somebody goes out and does something crazy, that that gun shop owner should be held responsible? I don't.
On the other hand, where you have manufacturers and where you have gun shops knowingly giving guns to criminals or aiding and abetting that, of course we should take action.

Sanders needs to stop stigmatizing mental health. He's learned to speak much better about racial injustice (good job activists. And all my white liberal friends who were complaining that BLM activists were unfairly pressuring him, that's why. So he learns). But this stigmatizing of mental health crisis as causally linked to our gun violence, rather than easy access to firearms, when people with mental health issues are vastly  more likely to be victims, has to stop.

I'm delighted to have a candidate advocating for better mental health care - so long as it doesn't involve forced institutionalization or forced medication. But we have to decouple the conversation about mental health from the conversation about gun violence. 

Whatever Sanders' intention, his comments reinforce the notion that gun violence is due to mental illness. We've got to push back hard against that. And Sanders supporters, if they want my vote for their candidate, will need to lead the way. Teach your candidate.

The Liberal Arts, Carly Fiorina, and the Middle Ages

Bruce Holsinger is a medieval literary scholar, a novelist, a public intellectual, and a friend. Here's my review of his novels, political thrillers set in medieval London, with John Gower as the protagonist. You should read them.

Holsinger has a piece in the New York Times today on Fiorina, extending the conversation about her regular invocation of her medieval studies B.A. (for my take, you can read here). Holsinger writes:

How could medieval studies prepare a president for the global struggle against Islamist fundamentalism? Well, Mrs. Fiorina explained, “What ISIS wants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally.”
And did she mean literally. “Every single one of the techniques that ISIS is using,” she elaborated, “the crucifixions, the beheadings, the burning alive, those were commonly used techniques in the Middle Ages.” She added, “ISIS wants to take its territory back to the Middle Ages.”
Sounds familiar. Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, American political discourse was flooded with this kind of language. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld spoke of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s “medieval vision of the future.” The writer Christopher Hitchens warned of the Taliban’s program of “medieval stultification.” Osama bin Laden himself mastered this medievalist idiom, invoking the Crusades time and again in his polemics against the West.
Mrs. Fiorina’s resort to this sort of garden-variety medievalism represents a failure of historical imagination on at least three levels.

One - ISIS is very, very, modern.

Two - By claiming that non-state actors aren't modern nations, we can torture them and otherwise be as savage as we like.

Three, and here Holsinger makes a point I tried to hint at, but didn't really nail in my own piece, Fiorina has been an eloquent defender of the vitality of the humanities, something so critical in an era with Republicans (and neoliberal Democrats) have so gleefully attacked in recent years.

This came across most clearly in Mrs. Fiorina’s address to the Stanford University class of 2001. The most valuable course she took at Stanford, she told the graduates, wasn’t economics or politics, but a seminar called “Christian, Islamic and Jewish Political Philosophies of the Middle Ages.”
Each week, she explained, students had to distill what they’d read into a mere two pages: “The rigor of the distillation process, the exercise of refinement, that’s where the real learning happened. It was an incredible, heady skill to master. Through the years, I’ve used it again and again — the mental exercise of synthesis and distillation and getting to the very heart of things.”
Rarely has the value of humanistic education been defended so eloquently.

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio is snarking about the uselessness of Greek Philosophy. He, of course, studied Political Science in college, a discipline that traces its roots directly back to people like Thucydides and Aristotle.

Trump and the "F-word" - Rick Perlstein

Rick Perstein, a foremost historian on the rise of the American right, has a long piece on Donald Trump and fascism, comparing his emergence to the politics of other demagogues and fascists throughout the 20th century. It's a thoughtful, detailed, assessment of the risks and the process.

When Trump emerged, many folks started to compare him to Berlusconi, but I continued to suggest that Il Duce was a better model. I stand by that assessment. Here's Perlstein:

Trump has now provided more “specifics” about his immigration plan: a forced population transfer greater than any attempted in history, greater than the French and Spanish expulsions of the Jews in 1308 and 1492; greater than theNabka of approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from British-mandate Palestine; greater than the 1.5 million Stalin consigned to Siberia and the Central Asian republics; greater than Pol Pot’s exile of 2.5 million city-dwellers to the Cambodian countryside, or the scattering of Turkey’s Assyrian Christians, which the scholar Mordechai Zaken says numbers in the millions and required 180 years to complete. Trump has promised to move 12 million Mexicans in under two years––“so fast your head will spin.”
Only then will he start building the wall.
But all Republican politicians say stuff like this, right? They all want a wall, they all want to bury criminals under the jail, they all crave war, even if they’re not quite so explicit about it.
Not quite, actually. Previous Republican leaders were sufficiently frightened by the daemonic anger that energized their constituencies that they avoided surrendering to it completely, even for political advantage. Think of Barry Goldwater, who was so frightened of the racists supporting him that he told Lyndon Johnson he’d drop out of the race if they started making race riots a campaign issue. And Ronald Reagan refusing to back a 1978 ballot initiative to fire gay schoolteachers in California, at a time vigilantes were hunting down gays in the street. Think of George W. Bush guiding Congress toward a comprehensive immigration bill (akin to that proposed by President Obama) until the onslaught of vitriol that talk-radio hosts directed at Republican members of Congress forced him to quit. Think of George W. Bush’s repeated references to Islam as a “religion of peace.”

That's right, W. was the responsible one. Trump is much more dangerous. Trump is also not doctrinally conservative when it comes to economics, but rather has grasped the power of economic demagoguery.

Describe Donald Trump to a mid-century social scientist and he would respond: of course he is in first place. And I’m fairly certain George W. Bush would fully understand that he could have further expanded his own massive grant of post-9/11 power were he only to scapegoat all Muslims. It is to his great credit that he did not. He seemed to have understood something the current crop of Republican candidates chasing after Trump do not—something about Pandora’s Boxes, toothpaste that cannot be put back into tubes, the demiurge. Bush was, unlike Donald Trump, unwilling to say anything.
...
Our notional midcentury social scientist, or better historically informed pundits, wouldn’t be so sanguine. They would recognize the phenomenon that sociologist Pierre van den Berghe in 1967 labeled herrenvolk democracy: a political ideology in which members of the dominant ethnic group enjoy privileged provision from the state, as a function of the economic and civic disenfranchisement of the scapegoated group, to better cement dictatorship. This was why elites feared Huey Long’s promise of a guaranteed income––“Every Man A King.” This was how George Wallace governed Alabama. This was apartheid South Africa.

Read the whole thing. I still can't believe Trump will win the nomination, let alone the election. But a savvier politician, perhaps also a billionaire, will come along who appropriates these pieces and will win. History tells us to be worried about that future.

We Cannot Arm Our Way To Less Gun Violence

Image Description: Me on CNN. Michigan Ave/Chicago River behind me.

David Perry: Associate Professor, Dominican University

Headline: Oregon Massacre, Campus Shooter Kills 9, Wounds 9

I went on CNN on Friday, 10/1, to discuss the terrible shooting on a community college campus in Oregon. CNN hasn't released a clip so I can't show it to you.

I'm glad to have had the chance to go on the air and say some of the things I believe. I was originally supposed to be paired with John Lott, a man who believes that more guns equals less crime (they don't). The show decided instead to separate us and so by the time I came on, the host wanted to talk about other things. I had about 90 seconds and said three sentences. I described our upcoming active-shooter drill at Dominican, about which I will write next week. I said that I do not want guns on campus.  I said that I do not believe adding more guns in the form of armed civilians will make us safer. Then my segment ended fairly abruptly.

At any rate, 90 seconds is a difficult time to make one's stance perfectly clear. Here are four things I wish I could have said more clearly on CNN.

1. I have no problem with highly-trained law enforcement positioned appropriately near campuses. Some universities are basically cities unto themselves, so they likely need their own armed police. My small suburban campus needs to coordinate its security with our small suburban police, the tactical units assigned to our area, and other highly-trained law enforcement officers.

2. I do not believe that allowing civilians, whether teachers, staff, faculty, or just random visitors, to carry arms on our campus is the right response. First, college campuses are sacred spaces to me, and I do not want to see them further profaned by these weapons of murder. More importantly, though, we cannot arm our way out of this crisis. If we turn every school into a fortress, mass shootings will move to the malls. Arm the malls, killers will go the churches. Arm the churches, then it will be little league games. We can take appropriate measures to defend against copycat killers, but cannot stop gun violence by reacting to the specifics of the last attack.

3. Around the world, there are people who are angry and potentially violent. People hate other people. People get personally slighted. People have mental health breakdowns (though people with mental illness are vastly more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence). It's only in America that these individuals are likely to react to their anger by using a firearm to commit an act of mass murder.

4. The only solution is to find ways to make access to firearms more difficult for people in those moments. There are simple steps - ban assault weapons, close gun show loopholes, expand background checks and waiting periods, share information across state lines, slow down the ability to purchase lots of handguns at once (used to buy from suburban gun shops and bring to illegal urban markets), and remove the Congressional ban on government-sponsored research on gun violence. None of these steps will restrict the ability of Americans to acquire firearms to hunt, for home defense, or even for conceal-carry purposes. But it will slow the flow, and that's what we need right now.

We cannot arm our way out of this crisis.

Some resources on gun violence. Whitehouse.gov on gun violence.

Bruce Rauner and the Destruction of Illinois History

Say goodbye to the Illinois History Museum. Bruce Rauner has pulled the plug.

There's something populist about museums like this. They tend to be free or cheap, they serve school kids from across the state, and they make our history accessible and interesting.

Naturally, Billionaire Bruce isn't going to permit that sort of thing to continue.

Sunday Roundup - The Republican Assault on Higher Education

I have a bunch of pieces out in various stages of edits, and hope to have 3 or 4 pieces published next week. This week I had only one, a new Game of Thrones piece for Vice. I think the changing relationship between the books and the show is interesting. Eventually, the show will become canon, if indeed it hasn't already. 

Of course, Game of Thrones is a very problematic show, as I try to face directly in my writing. I also wrote a blog post on Liking Problematic Things then had some thoughts about the way that Trigger Warnings Are Your Friends (focused more on academia than TV/entertainment).

Finally, I had a brief post on Language and Power: Stop Saying Troll. Center the victim. Call people who abuse folks online ... abusers.

-------------------

But the most important pieces I read this week emerged from various writers focusing on the Republican attack on higher education in Wisconsin. Here are some links:

In the last few days, the GOP in WI have removed definitions of tenure from the statute, cute around 250 million in funding from UW, and change "subject to" to "subordinate to" as a piece of their plan to destroy shared governance. Even worse, if everything passes, WI will become the only state in the country to not require even a BA to become a teacher. I don't really understand the kind of person who looks at the problems faced by WI and decides ... What we need are teachers with less education! That'll fix it.

Here are a few links. What are you reading?

• Chuck Ryback on the Final Struggle. A painful personal essay from a UW prof.
• Here are the actual changes in the Omnibus bill.
• Another prof hopes that this might spark a combined labor movement between tenure-track faculty and contingent faculty.
• And here's my favorite - Bombs Away.

In short, Wisconsin Republicans have declared total war on public education. Both the K-12 bill and the UW bill were negotiated and written totally in secret by committee Republicans, with the details released to the public only hours before the final, fore-ordained votes were held. Moral and political commitments aside, this leaves one to wonder whether those legislators who are quickest to cite “market-based” considerations have even a basic understanding of what Wisconsin’s comparative advantage is. Wisconsin has a hard-earned and well-deserved reputation for its excellent public schools and universities. Without those, what is the point of living in Wisconsin as opposed to some other state? Set aside the fact that no UW campus will ever be able to recruit a top-tier scholar again. Why would anyone choose Wisconsin as a place to raise their family? Why would anyone in their right mind move to Wisconsin after this budget?

And let's not forget North Carolina and Louisiana 

Resources: Republican Governors Attack Disability

This is a collection of links about Republican cuts to programs serving people with disabilities, as well as comments from Republican officials/candidates questioning the rationales behind such programs.

Resource pages offer collections of links for pieces I am writing, usually without comment. The comment comes in the piece I write later. Please suggest other links via social media, email, or in comments.

Bruce Rauner (Illinois)

• Proposes cuts to respite care.
• Proposes cuts to early intervention.

Scott Walker (Wisconsin)

• Walker cuts "Family Care" plan, closing options.
• Walker cuts long-term care services.
• Disability Rights Wisconsin has a call out for people affected by Wisconsin cuts to share their stories at upcoming hearings, along with budget numbers.

Rick Scott (Florida)

• Florida cuts hit department of health hardest.
• Overview of funding cuts since 2003 (to the present day).
• Within this article on workers' comp: "Florida has cut benefits to its most severely disabled workers by 65 percent since 1994."

Scott Brownbeck (Kansas)

• "KanCare" makes life harder for disabled Kansans.
• Kansas forces disabled people off Medicaid.

Paul LePage (Maine)

• Governor's proposal would shred safety net for people with mental illness.

Greg Abbot (Texas)

• Despite being personally disabled, record on disability issues concerning, including his "sovereign immunity" defense against the ADA.

North Carolina

• Cuts in Early Intervention funding closes centers.

Bonus federal links:

• Medicare block grant plan from Senate Republicans targets people with disabilities (among others)
• SSDI - Divide and Conquer Strategy, limiting the ABLE act, Thom Tillis makes it explicit, new attacks on SSDI on day one of the 2015 congress,  Rand Paul claims half of SSDI is wasted on fraud (fact-checked less than 1%), threaten to send millions of disabled Americans into poverty.

And just for fun, remember when a Fox News host told a woman her bipolar disorder was made up? 

Republican Vision for Higher Education - More NBA Arenas.

Over the border from me, the Scott Walker experiment to dismantle the state of Wisconsin continues. He wants to create Kansas-North. Conservatives are loving it, and he's just the kind of boring white guy with an allegedly criminal past that the GOP establishment might nominate for president.

Not long after President Obama unveiled his ideas for Free Community College, a proposal that, among other things, articulates a vision of public education as a common good, Walker has come out with his own brilliant plan for higher ed - more NBA Arenas.

In the last few days, Walker has proposed a 300 million dollar budget cut for the UW system. At the same time, he's proposed a 220 million dollar giveaway to the Milwaukee Bucks, owned, like all NBA teams, by one of the richest humans in the history of the world. The Republican love for corporate welfare knows no limits (and it's a smart investment, as the masters of the universe turn around to fund their campaigns and hire them after their political career is over), and Democrats are equally willing to shill for pro-sports teams (the new Vikings stadium in downtown Minneapolis is going to be a neat place, except for the bird-killing). Still, to have these simultaneous announcements come out from the Walker administration does reveal their priorities fairly neatly.

Corporate welfare = "An investment." In the link above, Walker talks about how much money the NBA team brings to Milwaulkee.

Higher Ed Cuts = Making the UW system "more independent." Indeed, so independent he's stripping out tenure and faculty governance from state law, so that his appointed Regents can chip away at a world-class network of institutions.

To lose an NBA team means losing tax revenue, to be sure, although in general stadiums create only service jobs and concentrate entertainment revenue in a certain spot, rather than create more revenue. I wonder, though, how much revenue Wisconsin will lose over time with a less-educated citizenry? It will be less quantifiable. It won't involve any billionaires. It will come, though.

As my bandmate Kurt said, That Ain't Right.

Meanwhile, I love that one of my hero bands, the Dropkick Murphys - union lovers and Southie Boston working men all, called out Walker for using their music for his intro (seriously, GOP, you get most country music and Ted Nugent and that's it).

#SOTU4PWD - The Fight for Economic Justice is the Fight for Disability Rights

Basic principle: The fight for basic economic justice for everyone is the fight for better lives for people with disabilities. #SOTU4PWD
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) January 21, 2015

Yesterday President Obama mentioned "Americans with mental illness or physical disability" as part of his long list of inclusive terms. This is not my preferred language. It excludes my son, who has neither a mental illness nor a physical disability (he has an intellectual disability). It excludes a lot of people, and moreover separates people into categories in ways I find unhelpful. Still, it's good to see some entry disability in inclusive language in such a high profile address.

On Twitter, #SOTU4PWD (State of the Union for People With Disabilities) contains an ongoing discussion of that clause and what it might mean.

Here's my contribution, or at least some opening thoughts. Comments always welcome.

We are in an era of intensifying income inequality matched with political movements that want to shred safety nets and basic supports. Fights against those political movements and in favor of greater equality are, it turns out, fights for better lives for people with disabilities.

It's vital to keep this in mind, because in the U.S., the GOP plan is to divide and conquer. They play off the disabled vs the poor, the poor vs the elderly, the chronically disabled vs those hurt on the job, people with Down syndrome vs people with Schizophrenia, and more. If your political philosophy despises concepts like universal healthcare, social security, and basic income guarantees - and the GOP despises these - divide and conquer is the politically viable way to fight otherwise popular program.

So they have pitted Medicare vs the Affordable Care Act. Social Security for the elderly vs for the disabled. People with disabilities diagnosed under age 26 vs people with disabilities diagnosed after 26. The alleged "fakers" on SSDI vs the worthy disabled. The working poor vs the not working poor.

We fight back by refusing to be divided. Good policy is good policy and should be available to all. The fight for economic justice is the fight for disability rights.

At the same time, we have to advocate for our specific causes and specific needs, lest be rendered invisible. We need the president to nod to disability in his speech, if he's going to list problems. We need to demand that he say, as he did, "transgender," the first time that word appeared in a State of the Union.We need to make #BlackLivesMatter, rather then letting it fall into the softer, meaningless, all lives matter (because all lives do matter, but black lives are specifically treated as disposable). We need to be specific.

The way to be both specific and universal is called intersectionality. I write about it a lot - on abortion, on police violence, on mass killings, and so forth. It's a frame of mind, a mode of argument, and an analytical tool that pushes you to both see the specific issue at hand, not derail it, but link it to other kinds of issues.

In fact, intersectionality demands that we make these kinds of links, emerging from black feminist

arguments that we had to focus on race AND gender. Disability AND poverty. Poverty AND race. Etc.

Intersectional disability studies enables the focus on specific needs and reforms that people with disabilities require, but also keeps us from demanding that our issue, whatever it is, is explicitly on the table all the time. When people are marching because black lives do matter, people in the disability community don't have to say - why aren't you marching for us? Instead, we rally together, because your fight is our fight.

Your fight is our fight.

The fight for economic justice, in whatever form it takes, is the fight for disability rights. And the fight for disability rights, in whatever form it takes, should matter equally to those outside the community, working for economic justice.