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New York Times (7/22/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The mainstream US media debate on the starvation and violence and war crimes in Gaza still, in July 2025, makes room for Bret Stephens, who explains in the country’s paper of record that Israel can’t be committing genocide as rights groups claim, because if they were, they’d be much better at it. Says Stephens:

It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal—if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans—why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?

“It may seem harsh to say” is a time-honored line from those who want to note but justify human suffering, or excuse the crimes of the powerful. It looks bad to you, is the message, because you’re stupid. If you were smart, like me, you’d understand that your empathy is misplaced; these people suffering need to suffer in order to…. Well, they don’t seem to feel a need to fully explain that part. Something about democracy and freeing the world from, like, suffering.

It’s true that corporate media are now gesturing toward engaging questions of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. But what does that amount to at this late date? We’ll talk about corporate media’s Gaza coverage with independent reporter and frequent FAIR.org contributor Ari Paul.

Disability Scoop (8/1/25)

Also on the show: The Americans with Disabilities Act is generally acknowledged in July, with a lot of anodyne “come a long way, still a long way to go” type of reporting. There’s an opening for a different sort of coverage this month, as the Trump administration is actively taking apart laws that protect disabled people in the workplace, and cutting off healthcare benefits, and disabled kids’ educational rights, and rescinding an order that would have moved disabled workers to at least the federal minimum wage; and, with a recent executive order, calling on localities to forcibly institutionalize any unhoused people someone decides is mentally ill or drug-addicted or just living on the street.

Does that serve the hedge funds pricing homes out of reach of even full-time workers? Yes. Does it undercut years of evidence-based work about moving people into homes and services? Absolutely. Does it aim to rocket us back to a dark era of criminalizing illness and disability and poverty? Of course. But Trump calls it “ending crime and disorder,” so you can bet elite media will honor that viewpoint in their reporting. We’ll get a different view from Scout Katovich, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

People with disabilities are among those most heavily impacted by Trump’s cuts to Medicaid. “I know so many people like me, disabled adults living and thriving now, who were able to get to adulthood because Medicaid existed,” says Maria Town, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities. We feature additional testimonies from disabled members of the advocacy group Caring Across Generations, and speak to Town, who says she fears “so many kids [will] not get a chance to make it to adulthood,” while countless adults “will not be able to live into old age because of these cuts.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Kali Larsen sat at her desk at Fruitland Elementary School in Idaho earlier this year, trying to read the test questions as her classmates silently worked around her. Her anxiety climbed as she stared at the paper. She asked to use the bathroom and left the room.

Her mother, Jessica Larsen, had been substitute teaching that day when she received a call from the front office, notifying her that her 9-year-old daughter was having a panic attack. Kali, now 10, has dyslexia and struggles with reading and writing, Larsen said.

“Wouldn’t you be anxious?” Larsen told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica.

For years, Larsen had been pleading with the Fruitland School District to get Kali qualified for special education for reading. Larsen, who herself was diagnosed later in life with dyslexia, had her daughter tested in first grade in 2021 by a private specialist who said Kali had the same disability. But a diagnosis doesn’t automatically qualify a student for special education. The school still wouldn’t evaluate Kali for help, saying she likely wouldn’t qualify, in part because her scores weren’t low enough, Larsen said.

Larsen grew more frustrated with each passing school year as her child — a shy girl who feels most confident when competing in rodeos on her horse, Pie — would cry after school and tell her she felt “dumb.” A year before her daughter’s panic attack in fourth grade, Larsen had filed a state complaint against the district, saying it refused to evaluate Kali for special education. A few months later, in March 2024, a state investigator agreed: The district had broken the law.

Parents of students with disabilities have increasingly resorted to filing complaints with the state over their schools’ failure to educate their children, alleging districts are violating federal law. Most of the time, state investigators have agreed and found that districts refuse to identify and evaluate children with disabilities, such as dyslexia or autism, and fail to follow plans to educate them fairly.

In Idaho, students with disabilities have performed worse in reading and math than many of their peers in other states, federal data shows. Idaho was among the states with the most founded complaints per capita in recent years, according to a national center that analyzes data on complaints and provides support to states. Over the past five years, investigators found in over 70% of the complaints filed in Idaho that districts had broken the law.

But the state often closes cases without making sure the districts have fully solved the problems, parents across Idaho told the Statesman and ProPublica.

Districts can resolve the violations without “really changing their ways,” said Amy Martz, a Utah-based attorney who has worked with families in Idaho. “There’s no teeth.”

State Superintendent Debbie Critchfield said the state Department of Education expects districts to make any corrections needed to be in full compliance with state and federal law, and that it has conducted listening sessions and piloted other programs to help meet the needs of students and parents.

Critchfield said the challenge with educating students with disabilities comes down, in part, to the way the state distributes funding, which is based on a flat percentage and not the actual number of students with disabilities in each district. She said staff members have large caseloads and districts lack trained staff and specialists.

Parents say it can take months for the districts to evaluate a child for services, and in some cases, districts have refused to provide the instruction or behavioral interventions students need.

Lawmakers have been reluctant to approve changes to the funding formula despite warnings from state officials about a shortfall between what districts spend on special education and what the state allocates. An independent oversight office this year estimated the gap to be over $80 million. Idaho routinely ranks last in the nation for funding per student overall.

Larsen said she didn’t want to get the district or teachers in trouble when she filed her complaint. But she said she risked retaliation, in a small community where speaking out can be damaging, because she intended to make public schools better for her daughter and other kids.

“We’re failing our kids. This is our future,” Larsen said. “Why are we failing them? And that’s my question to them, but they can’t answer.”

School districts nationwide are required to identify children who have disabilities or health impairments that could make it harder to learn, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or dyslexia, and evaluate them for special education services. A parent can also formally request an evaluation of their child. Under federal law, if the school has any reason to suspect a disability, it must provide that evaluation.

But when Larsen asked the district to evaluate her daughter, the school pushed back.

Records show that district officials over a period of 1 1/2 years provided numerous reasons Kali didn’t need or wouldn’t qualify for special education: Her low reading scores were mainly due to anxiety, rather than a disability; she needed to advocate for herself; she was “making progress”; a special education evaluation would take a long time; if she received special education services, she’d miss out on valuable instruction time in a general education classroom.

A few months after Larsen filed her complaint in 2024, an investigator contracted by the state Department of Education concluded that the district didn’t have procedures in place to make sure all students with disabilities were identified and helped, and that it hadn’t conducted a full evaluation of Kali, even after Larsen requested it. The investigators issued a corrective action plan and ordered the district to begin the evaluation process with Kali within about two weeks and to help her within two months if they found she qualified for special education.

Fruitland Superintendent Stoney Winston, who started in July 2024, after the state issued the corrective action plan, said the district has “made corrections” and is meeting current requirements. He said he can’t speak to what happened before he assumed his role.

Do you have personal experience with problems related to special education in Idaho or accessibility through the Americans with Disabilities Act in schools? We want to hear from you, whether you’re a student, a parent, an educator or an administrator. We will only use your name with permission. Reach out to Becca Savransky at bsavransky@idahostatesman.com or 208-495-5661.

Disability advocates have said the lack of funding makes it hard for school districts in the state to attract qualified specialists or special education teachers who fully understand the law, which can lead to improper education plans or other violations. High caseloads for staff members also mean less time for making or implementing specialized education plans, they said.

The state relies on a decades-old funding formula that assumes a set percentage of students in every district would qualify for special education: 6% in elementary school and 5.5% in middle and high school. State education officials acknowledged those percentages were never adequate. Officials said they don’t know how lawmakers first arrived at that formula.

“That 5.5 and that 6%, which was already insufficient back in 2016, is even more insufficient,” said Casey Petti, from Idaho’s Office of Performance Evaluations, an independent oversight agency.

According to the most recent data, about 12% of students in Idaho qualify for special education services — the lowest in the country.

In 2009, that agency told Idaho officials to consider tying special education funding to the actual cost of educating those students. In 2016, the office came out with a report with the same findings.

That same year, the Legislature created a committee to research the issue and rewrite the state’s funding formula. The committee met for three years, and in 2019, lawmakers proposed legislation. While those proposals would have provided money for special education based on the number of students actually receiving services, state education officials and school administrators said they were left out of the process and the legislation would be difficult to implement. The state superintendent at the time questioned whether it would even adequately fund special education.

Nearly 75% of school districts that received state funding for special education programs spent anywhere from $640 to $19 million more than what the state provided during the 2023-24 school year.

In the years since, lawmakers have introduced other bills to revise the funding formula, but the Legislature did not approve any of them. The cost to investigate complaints overall has nearly tripled since the 2020 school year, according to the state Department of Education, with each investigation ranging from a few hundred dollars to $30,000.

This year, the Idaho Legislature approved adding another specialist to help handle complaints. During the 2023-24 school year, the state received 53 complaints and found districts were out of compliance in most of them.

But while the state has spent more money to investigate the problems, administrators said they have been given little to fix them. In Idaho, districts rely on local taxpayers to fund special education more than in many other states, according to a 2024 study by Bellwether, a nonprofit that analyzed data from the National Center for Education Statistics for the 24 states where it was available.

Boundary County Superintendent Jan Bayer described special education as an “unfunded mandate.” The district spends about $1.7 million from its general fund to educate students with disabilities and goes to its taxpayers every two years to ask for additional funding to provide other programs.

Other superintendents said it was difficult to meet the needs of every student in special education.

“While we provide the vast majority of our students with the services they need, we do have a couple of higher need students who need more services than we can provide,” Butte County Superintendent Joe Steele, who retired this summer, said in an email to the Statesman. But finding educators or specialists with the proper training, and paying for them, would be challenging in the remote area, he said.

Kendra Scheid watched her son struggle in a larger district with high caseloads and inexperienced staff. Scheid’s son, who is autistic and nonverbal, qualified for developmental preschool before moving into the Pocatello-Chubbuck School District in eastern Idaho. But the district told her that her son could attend preschool only two days a week for 2 1/2 hours each day.

Before her son started attending full-day kindergarten, Scheid asked the school for a meeting to put together a revised education plan for her son. But the district refused, according to the complaint investigation.

Scheid went to school with her son on the first days, where he was placed with other students with disabilities, and witnessed what she described as chaos: kids climbing on tables, students injuring themselves with no staff intervention and teachers restraining children in their chairs. “They had no idea what any of these kids needed, what any of these kids were like coming into the classroom,” she said.

Pocatello school district spokesperson Courtney Fisher said the district is committed to “proactively addressing parent concerns” and improving its special education services. That includes putting into place a plan that meets all state requirements and hiring more staff, she said, and trying to address any gaps in its system to prevent issues in the future.

I feel like a bad mom because I didn’t know this stuff at the time. And I feel like I let my son down.

After school on the second day, Scheid’s son came home crying and covering his ears, something she said he hadn’t done before. After day three, Scheid disenrolled her son from the district. For the rest of that year, he saw outside therapists and Scheid worked with him at home.

After she filed a complaint with the state, an investigator found the district had broken the law when it failed to create a plan that would work for her son and to ensure the teacher had his previous education plan before school started. The state said the district must create a new education plan for her son should he reenroll, but Scheid had lost faith. Instead, she entered and won one of the few available lottery spots in a charter school, which her son now attends.

“I feel like a bad mom because I didn’t know this stuff at the time,” reflected Scheid, who said her son is now doing well in a charter school that’s more accommodating. “And I feel like I let my son down.”

About 20% of Idaho districts have broken federal disability law multiple times in the past five years, and nearly 40% have violated the law at least once, according to data from the state Department of Education. When they do, the state, which enforces the federal law and corresponding state rules, asks them to fix the problems through corrective action plans.

The plans reviewed by the news outlets ask district staff to undergo training, and sometimes a child gets additional hours of education to make up for the time missed. But a Statesman and ProPublica review of corrective action plans and interviews with parents showed districts repeatedly receive training for the same problems and commit similar violations.

Critchfield, the state superintendent, said there are several factors that could play a role in whether training is successful for districts permanently, including staff turnover and access to resources.

“Compliance with state and federal law is the ultimate goal,” she said in an email. “As a department, we are always prepared to provide remedial training and intervention to address additional concerns as they arise.”

The Pocatello school district received 11 complaints over the past five years, according to data from the state Department of Education. The Garden Valley School District received 10. In both of these districts, federal investigators found systemic violations in special education law that impacted more than one student. The state Department of Education refused to provide the number of founded complaints per district, citing federal law on student privacy, though some other states publicly post much of their complaint investigations online.

Andrew Branham was among several parents who filed complaints against the Garden Valley School District over the past three years.

The Branhams wrote in the complaint that their daughter received “virtually no education” and was denied services, such as speech and counseling. At one point, they said a school resource officer called her parents threatening to arrest her. Her parents said they rushed to school to find her barefoot in the middle of the parking lot as several adults looked on. A state investigator concluded that the district in some instances had “relied” on the resource officer to address the student’s behavior.

Branham said the district was “unwilling” to meet the needs of their daughter. The Branhams elevated their case, hiring an attorney who presented it before a state-contracted hearing officer. The Branhams received a financial settlement with the district and moved to Washington to get their daughter a better education.

“It is a shame what Idaho is doing to kids in that state,” Branham said in December. “I would never move back there, and I would never recommend anyone live in that state, especially if you have special needs kids.”

After the Branhams filed their complaint and went public, more than 20 families shared similar experiences, they said. So they filed a complaint on behalf of other families that alleged that the district ignored state and federal laws meant to protect students with disabilities and denied them an education.

The resulting state investigations concluded that at least 13 of the allegations were founded. The district failed to properly construct education plans for students. It also didn’t have the proper plans for supporting a child with behavioral issues. The district did not gather or share the data it needed to assess student progress and could not adequately determine whether students were meeting their learning goals, the investigations found.

The state decided the district needed extra help, ranking Garden Valley in 2024 as one of three districts in need of substantial intervention. The state now requires the district to follow an improvement plan and monitors its progress — but the district’s funding remains the same.

The Garden Valley School District did not respond to requests for comment.

Families in other districts have also pulled their children from local schools. Some parents and advocates who talked to the Statesman said they are especially worried about President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and leave it to the states when Idaho has long struggled to provide an education to students with disabilities.

In Kali’s case, the state’s corrective action plan issued in 2024, in addition to requiring that the district start to evaluate Larsen’s daughter, also mandated that the district help teachers learn how to spot students who should be evaluated for special education and identify those with disabilities.

The state closed the case earlier this year, about a year after it was filed. Kali had been struggling without adequate help for three years before the district conceded she was eligible for special education services.

Kali now has an education plan, but Larsen said the district still isn’t giving her the help she needs. She just finished fourth grade and still hasn’t mastered reading and writing. As her daughter prepares for middle school, Larsen is considering pulling her from the district next year. But Larsen doesn’t plan on filing another complaint. It was too much stress with little to show for it, she said.

When Kali was moved to a different classroom each day to receive more specialized instruction, her teachers sometimes told her to sit and read quietly, Larsen said.

“She can’t read,” Larsen said, exasperated. “It’s so frustrating.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman.

Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and its depictions.

The New York Times Magazine (6/1/25) ignored ethical guidelines designed to keep reporting from encouraging suicide.

The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story (6/1/25) that gave in-depth representation to the challenges faced by a chronically sick, disabled woman named Paula Ritchie, age 52. Ritchie dealt with underdiagnosed illnesses and pain, as well as challenges in supporting herself and managing her mental health.

The Times then told the story of Ritchie ending her own life out of despair over her situation. The journalist, Katie Engelhart, observed and documented her suicide, up until the last breath left her body. “I was with Ritchie until the very end,” she posted on X (6/1/25). Engelhart gave lengthy justifications for Ritchie’s choice to end her life, and described several people who supported her in that decision.

Articles like this aren’t common in the media. Suicide prevention is typically regarded as both a social good and an ethical responsibility. In the US and Canada (where the article takes place), suicidal people are involuntarily detained to prevent their deaths. It has long been illegal in Canada (and many US states) to assist or even “counsel” a person to commit suicide.

There are also ethical standards that guide media outlets in reporting on suicide, in order to minimize the risk of glamorizing or idealizing it. These guidelines are based on research showing that the media has an outsized influence when it comes to suicide. Graphic, detailed and sensationalized coverage has been shown to increase the “risk of contagion,” according to one guide. AP News specifically tries to avoid detailing the “methods used” in stories that reference suicide, based on this research.

The Times violated almost all of the published guidelines by personalizing, detailing, dramatizing, justifying and sentimentalizing Ritchie’s suicide, as well as by making it a cover story. The story featured close-up images of the method of Ritchie’s death and what appears to be her post-mortem body.

The World Health Organization urges journalists covering suicide not to “explicitly describe the method used” or “use photographs, video footage or social media links that relate to the circumstances of the suicide,” among other guidelines.

So why wasn’t there generalized outrage or pushback from other media? The only significant outcry came from thousands of disabled people on social media.

The simplest answer is that Ritchie’s suicide was administered by a doctor, and legal in Canada. Media tend to be more accepting of the unacceptable when it is government-sanctioned. In 2021, the country expanded its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law to permit physician-assisted suicide for disabled people who aren’t suffering terminal illnesses. The law and its implementation have been extremely controversial, as the article noted. Similar laws have been passed or introduced across Europe.

The Times article reinforced a popular belief that disability is a fate worse than death. The disabled author Imani Barbarin sums it up in the title of her forthcoming book: If I Were You, I’d Kill Myself. It’s a refrain disabled people are accustomed to hearing, the frightful implication of which is that accommodations aren’t worth the bother, and death is for their own good.

The media has a tendency to reinforce this idea in stories about disability. As I previously wrote about for FAIR (1/20/21), the New York Times (4/10/20, 12/24/20) published stories early in the Covid-19 pandemic suggesting that disability should be considered in determining who had a right to Covid ventilators, based on unproven myths of “quality of life.” The articles cited literal eugenicists as experts, and didn’t invite disabled people to the conversation.

Both sides, and propaganda

In Engelhart’s Times article, she appeared to offer a sensitive and balanced view on the debates around MAiD expansion. Yet the article was laden with ableist rhetoric, medical misinformation and subtle propaganda from the well-funded “right to die” movement. It also left out prominent critical facts about MAiD.

Engelhart omitted that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (3/11/25) issued a report in March that condemned Canada’s MAiD, and recommended that the country “repeal” the expanded law and halt plans for future expansion. The report outlined how benefits and healthcare for disabled people are inadequate in Canada, resulting in coercion around MAiD, especially for women and marginalized groups. People have been sharing stories of coercive MAiD practices since it was expanded (e.g., Independent, 6/23/23; New York Post, 11/8/22; X, 6/4/25).

It’s significant that the most powerful international body issued such a strong condemnation of MAiD; it’s something that anyone following the issue should know about, and Engelhart has published a book on MAiD and speaks about it constantly, yet she left it out of her article.

Dying With Dignity Canada’s goals include, according to the Walrus (1/12/24) “making MAiD available to people whose sole condition is a mental disorder” and “expanding MAID to ‘mature minors’ age twelve and older.”

Engelhart did discuss some of the issues exposed by the UN, but she cited “disability rights advocates,” “critics” and “opponents,” not the UN. She also didn’t name or quote these opponents, aside from a few uneasy doctors. None of the many disability rights, human rights and religious organizations that have condemned MAiD expansion were named, and only some of their arguments were discussed. Missing, for instance, was the fact that a promised expansion of disability benefits was tabled just after MAiD expansion was approved, suggesting the government saw the suicide program as another solution, of sorts, to the disability problem.

Also missing from the article was the role of a powerful lobbying group known as Dying with Dignity Canada (DwD), which has raised millions of dollars from corporate and wealthy donors (Walrus, 1/12/24). DwD has had an enormous influence on the Canadian government and media conversations on MAiD. The organization isn’t named in the Times Magazine piece, but its propaganda is subtly woven throughout.

Engelhart has been more explicit about her pro-MAiD leanings in other writings and statements (e.g., Neiman Storyboard, 3/3/21; NPR, 3/9/21), as well as in online responses to comments on her Times Magazine piece.

In search of euphemism

As evidence of her bias, look at the way Engelhart introduced the terminology in the Times article: “Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program—what critics call physician-assisted suicide.” It’s a curious attribution. Is there a more direct, factual way to describe what happened to Ritchie than suicide? It’s a subtle nod to DwD, which seeks to remove the “suicide” from assisted suicide. From the organization’s website:

We do not use the terms assisted suicide or euthanasia because they stigmatize people who are suffering intolerably and want to access their right to a peaceful death. Suicide is a desperate act of self-harm, while medical assistance in dying is a legal, federally regulated end-of-life choice, driven by hope and autonomy.

The Merriam-Webster definition of suicide is “the act or an instance of ending one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally.” DwD seems to be attempting to redefine the word to soften what happens with MAiD.

On Twitter, Engelhart has argued that “assisted death” is a less “politically loaded” term than “assisted suicide.” She has also taken issue with the AP for referring to MAiD recipients as “killed.” It’s not propaganda to state that when someone dies, they are “killed” by the cause of death. People are killed by cancer, accidents and self-inflicted wounds as much as by murder.

Engelhart’s efforts to soften the language of assisted suicide calls to mind crime reporters using “police-involved shooting” to say that police have shot someone. The common norms for speaking about suicide and shootings can apply without harm or distortion of the facts.

The Times Magazine article reflected some of the contradictions inherent to DwD ideology that appear throughout Engelhart’s work. For instance, she often compares assisted suicide rights to abortion rights, a DwD talking point. But she also compares it to the merciful “euthanizing” of “beloved pets.” Unlike people who elect abortions, animals do not get to choose their fates, or even express their wishes. Humans project our assumptions onto pets, including that their suffering must be a fate worse than death.

Despite Engelhart’s seeming alignment with the “dying with dignity” movement, to her credit, she did expose that there wasn’t absolute “dignity” in Ritchie’s death. The article ends with a gruesome description of Ritchie’s last moments, including her expression of “horrible” discomfort.

A ‘difficult case’

Dr. Matt Wonnacott, the doctor who approved euthanasia for Paula Ritchie: “If you tell me that you’re suffering, who am I to question that?” he told Engelhart.

Engelhart provided a lot of detail about Ritchie’s medical conditions, but relied on outdated, vaguely sourced and ableist ways of describing chronic illness. Here and elsewhere, her work is mostly sourced to doctors, especially MAiD providers, and patients who want to die, but not the many people who live with and manage complex chronic disease.

As a disabled journalist, I see Ritchie’s story through a different lens than Engelhart. I have many of her conditions, deal with ongoing suffering, sometimes severe, and was suicidal at one point.

Engelhart described Ritchie as if she were too difficult to diagnose sufficiently beyond a collection of symptoms, including head injury, migraine, fatigue, dizziness, long-standing depression and PTSD from childhood trauma. Yet I know that it can take ten or more years for a person to get properly diagnosed with most chronic illnesses, if they are lucky. I also know that chronic illness patients deal with doctors who gaslight, misdiagnose and psychologize symptoms.

The doctor who authorized Ritchie’s suicide, Matt Wonnacott, appears to be one of those. He was a primary source in the story. Engelhart did leave it open for readers to feel uncomfortable with Wonnacott’s approach. Although he acknowledged that Ritchie still had treatment options, he admitted to making decisions to approve assisted suicide based on “gestalt” and “patient choice” more than medicine. On the other hand, Engelhart seemed to take the doctor’s medical assessments at face value, not interrogating his knowledge or biases.

At one point, Engelhart referred to a category of MAiD patients with “functional disorders…that are poorly understood within medicine, and disputed within medicine, and that some clinicians believe have a significant psychological component.” Who are these clinicians? She did not say, but then listed a series of conditions that are not considered, by official diagnostic criteria, to be psychological: “fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, irritable-bowel syndrome, some kinds of chronic headaches.”  “Functional” has a history, like “hysteria” before it, of being used as a catch-all for misunderstood women’s illnesses.

As for “chronic fatigue,” it is more properly known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or ME. There is an epidemic of it lately, as it is commonly caused by Covid-19. As such, there are countless recent studies proving its physiological causes. At one point, Engelhart discussed how Ritchie’s muscles work one minute, then “suddenly buckle” the next, writing: “This suggested that the buckling was due to psychological causes or a lack of effort.” Yet Ritchie seemed to be demonstrating a hallmark symptom of ME known as “post-exertional malaise.”

Engelhart included a lot of detail about Ritchie’s care and medications, with the effect of seeming like every option was exhausted. Yet I am surprised by what is missing. There is no mention of dysautonomia or its treatments, even though Ritchie has difficulty bathing herself and getting out of the bath, both common in that illness. There is no mention of cutting-edge treatments for ME, like antivirals for reactivated viruses, or naltrexone. And there is no mention of the new class of CGRP migraine drugs, which have rescued millions of people from horrible constant pain.

In place of medical investigation, Engelhart uses rhetoric and sentiment to portray Ritchie as a lost cause. She supports this portrait with classist and ableist imagery, like mentioning Ritchie’s “old TV and a window that looked out on a row of garbage bins,” her “stained” floors, her trouble bathing and long history of depression. She quotes people in Ritchie’s life who liked her, but also found her difficult, “vicious,” and “loud and excessive.”

I have a different perspective on Ritchie. She comes across to me as resourceful in pursuing help, a strong person who has survived tremendous suffering, and compassionate to others. She is surrounded by friends when she dies. She has common illnesses that have been under-researched due to medical misogyny. And she has been denied cutting-edge treatments due to the profound gulf between research and practice, as well as long-established bigotry in medical care. In my perception, if she had been properly diagnosed and treated, she may or may not have felt differently about ending her life.

Fly on the wall

The Economist‘s cover story (11/21/24) seemed to encourage not just legalizing suicide, but suicide itself.

Engelhart did a skillful job of portraying her own role in Ritchie’s suicide as if she were a passive observer. In a separate interview she gave with the Times about writing the piece, she said she “was trying to be as small a presence as possible in the room.” Yet she also admitted that Ritchie reached for her hand just before she died, so she couldn’t have been that small. Engelhart didn’t reflect, in the interview, on the role she may have played in Ritchie’s fate, or the ethics of her project.

The article emphasized that Ritchie knew she was being interviewed by a writer for the New York Times Magazine. She knew that her story would be amplified worldwide, but especially if she continued to end her life. Engelhart’s body of work on MAiD is mostly about people who elect and complete the act of suicide. That validation, alone, could have been a form of encouragement, especially for someone who felt isolated and unheard.

Best practices in suicide prevention are based on studies showing that suicidal people are uniquely and extremely vulnerable to suggestion, and that suicidality is usually temporary. According to a journalism guide from the Trevor Project, which aims to prevent suicide in LGBTQ youth, “More than 50 research studies worldwide have found that certain types of news coverage can increase the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable individuals.”

With the Times’ story, the worst-case scenario almost happened. One reader, a patient with Long Covid, responded on social media that the article caused him to consider that maybe assisted suicide would be a good option for him. After reading the responses of disabled people, he had more context and changed his mind. (I am protecting his identity.)

There is growing support for the expansion of assisted suicide across the world and in the media (e.g., Economist, 11/13/21, 11/21/24). The pandemic has eased people’s discomfort with preventable death, especially of elderly and disabled people. Engelhart’s book got a lot of attention around the height of Covid-19’s Omicron wave. Meanwhile, the current US administration is suggesting that worthiness for healthcare should be tied to social value.

It’s a key time for news organizations to recall their ethical obligations around reporting on suicide. At the very least, the news shouldn’t stop calling it “suicide” just because those who die have been approved for MAiD due to disability.

Stories of chronically sick people who resist MAiD and/or survive suicide attempts are rarely given as much in-depth treatment or column inches in the media. But those stories might give readers more context in considering how to feel about these policies. The New York Times even gave a flattering interview (11/16/24) to a doctor who has elsewhere been condemned for her unethical and too-eager MAiD practices and has been restricted from practicing everywhere (London Times, 7/19/24; Globe and Mail, 3/9/16).

News outlets should also consider hiring disabled journalists and editors to work on stories like this, or at least journalists who are curious enough to investigate medicine critically. Mainstream writing about health and disability has long ignored the insights of chronic illness patients, unless to use individual cases to speak over collective concerns. We need stories about disability and illness that don’t rely mostly on the medical establishment for expertise, especially given its long history of aligning with eugenics.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Justine Barron.

Over two dozen disability rights activists were arrested on Capitol Hill last week when they protested the Trump-backed Republican budget bill and its cuts to Medicaid, affordable housing and more. “We’re putting our bodies on the line [because] our bodies are on the line,” says Julie Farrar, an activist with ADAPT, which organized the protest. “It is blood on the hands of the GOP and the president and the administration, that they want this big, beautiful bill for billionaires that will kill poor people [and] disabled people.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Minority Staff Report, United States Senate, SUBCOMMITTEE ON SOCIAL SECURITY, PENSIONS, AND FAMILY POLICY, Bernie Sanders, Ranking Member, March 26, 2025

Social Security is the most successful government program in our nation’s history. For more than 86 years, through good times and bad, Social Security has paid out every benefit owed to every eligible American on time and without delay. Social Security lifts roughly 27 million Americans out of poverty each and every year.i And yet, despite this success, we can do better. We must do better. At a time of massive wealth inequality, our job must be to expand and strengthen Social Security.

Americans across both parties agree with this sentiment. Roughly 87 percent agree that Social Security should remain a top priority for Congress—no matter the state of budget deficits.ii This is unsurprising since Americans view Social Security as a lifeline. In this country, half of older Americans have no retirement savings and have no idea how they will ever be able to retire with any shred of dignity or respect.iii One in three seniors, or roughly 17 million people, are economically insecure.iv Roughly 22 percent of seniors are trying to survive on an income of less than $15,000 a year and nearly half of seniors are trying to survive on an income of less than $30,000 a year.v

These numbers are even more startling for people with disabilities. Nearly 27 percent of people with disabilities live in poverty.vi Living with a disability involves extra costs, requiring families to spend an estimated 28 percent more income to maintain the same standard of living as non- disabled people, or roughly an additional $17,690 annually.vii For a person with a disability on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the maximum support they receive is just $11,604 annually for individuals and $17,400 for couples.viii And for people on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), the average annual benefit is $18,972.ix Millions of people with disabilities are living paycheck to paycheck and certainly do not have the necessary resources to cover additional costs of living with a disability.

Nor do they have the time to wait for their disability benefits. Yet, the number of Social Security Administration (SSA) staff completing disability determinations began declining even before the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In 2023, there were 5,252 full time employees making disability determinations at SSA, which has steadily decreased from previous years.x The average wait time for a decision grew from 111 days in 2017 to 217 days in 2023. Even before this Administration started making cuts to SSA, the number of people who died waiting for a benefit decision grew from 10,000 to 30,000 from 2017 to 2023.xi In February 2025, there was an average 236 day wait time for a determination.xii

Yet, instead of focusing on delivering benefits to seniors and people with disabilities, President Trump and unelected billionaire Elon Musk are systematically dismantling SSA. Roughly 3,000 employees have already been terminated or accepted voluntary separations from SSA.xiii They have made unsubstantiated claims that there is massive fraud in the program and are proposing reckless cuts to SSA’s workforce—upwards of 7,000 workers.xiv In March 2025, former Commissioner of Social Security Martin O’Malley stated that due to the efforts of Elon Musk and DOGE, Americans could “see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits” in “the next 30 to 90 days.”xv

In order to show the devastating nature of these proposed cuts, the Ranking Member examined the impact SSA workforce reductions will have on wait times and deaths of Americans waiting for a disability determination. The analysis reveals that average wait times for Social Security disability benefits will double, and—more startlingly—the number of people who will die waiting for benefits will double to roughly 67,000 Americans.

Key Findings

+ If SSA cuts 50 percent of employees making disability determinations, this will result in nearly 67,000 people dying waiting for an initial decision on SSI or SSDI in 2025.

+ Every day of wait time means an estimated additional 188.7 people will die waiting for benefits.

+ If SSA cuts 50 percent of employees making disability determinations, this will result in a 412 day wait for an initial decision on SSI or SSDI in 2025.

2017 2023 Projected 2025 with DOGE Cuts Methodology:

Using SSA data, the relationship between wait times and deaths with workforce reductions was examined, correlating the number of relevant employeesxvi, the average wait time for a decisionxvii, and the number of people who died waiting for a decision from 2017-2023 data reported by SSAxviii xix

Stories from Across America: Stress, Fear, and Anxiety a Common Refrain

The stress of waitlists and backlogs is immense for seniors and people with disabilities as they agonizingly wait for answers and a determination that they will receive the benefits needed to be able to put food on the table or make rent. Ranking Member Sanders asked working people directly, via a social media survey, how stress impacts their lives and received over 1,000 responses from people across the country.

The stories they shared paint a picture of daily hardship: the stress of affording health care, food, and gas; the anxiety of living paycheck to paycheck; and the feeling of hopelessness that comes from constant financial strain, including from seniors and people with disabilities who rely on Social Security.

People across the country vividly described the struggle of applying for disability benefits, even before DOGE cuts:

+ One example came from Kelly in New York, who shared that she is “in the process of applying for SSDI. It has been a year, and is scheduled to take another 10 months… how is a single person supposed to keep her home and car with no person to have her back while she applies?? It’s insane and making me sicker going through this.”

+ Sheryl from California told us, “Right now I’m waiting for approval from SSDI and getting feedback from my private long-term disability insurance company that they want to try to send me back to work, while I have 13 doctors overseeing my care. If I succeed in convincing these heartless vultures that I’m disabled enough to rest, I will continue to worry that my fixed income will go less and less toward being able to live. If I don’t, I will be put in a position to ignore my health and go back to work long enough to kill myself and leave my kids with no one. Welcome to America!

One thing that would relieve a lot of stress is getting an approval…so that I know what my income will be and not have to worry that I’ll end up in an economic landslide into the abyss.”

They also shared their worries that SSDI was not enough to cover their bills:

+ A former special education teacher from Georgia told us she, “had to take disability from the stress and demands of the job. I live on SSDI, which is barely $1600/month, and does not include Medicare premiums. I can’t qualify for Medicaid or SNAP. I have chronic anxiety due to the financial stress, and it has adversely affected my physical health.”

+ The stress is overwhelming, according to Monique from Florida: “I’m unemployed and trying to get on disability. My life is all pain and stress. I’m down to my last few hundred dollars. I desperately need to see several specialists for my ongoing care, but I’m freaking out that I will no longer be able to pay my costs of living. I take multiple prescriptions and they’re costly.

+ Heather from Vermont said her biggest stresses are, “[f]inding available affordable housing, making rent, my disability & continued funding of SSDI by current administration, cost of groceries/living on fixed income.”

We also heard palpable fear from respondents that they would lose their disability benefits:

+ Wendy from Texas told us, “I worry [m]y social security disability benefits might be taken away … SSDI does not cover the cost of living for a person. I would never be able to live on my own on my SSDI income, even if I lived in a rented room with no car.”

“Stress exacerbates my medical condition. It causes me to be more fatigued and eventually lowers my baseline wellness. There have been weeks at a time I have had to completely disconnect from the news, my bills, friends, and family to allow my body to recover enough to function in my household enough to care for myself only.”

Wendy wishes she could, “eliminate the stress surrounding my SSDI. The amount being increased to a “living wage” would allow me to budget more freely for additional medical treatments, as well as not constantly watch to see if I have to choose which bills to pay.”

A Path Forward

The bottom line is this: Social Security belongs to the people who worked hard all their lives to earn their benefit. This is a program based on a promise—if you pay in, then you earn the right to guaranteed benefits. We cannot allow this promise to be broken. This means:

+ Immediately ceasing the cuts from DOGE at SSA and across the government.

+ Passing the Social Security Expansion Act to enhance Social Security benefits by $2,400 annually, ensure the program’s solvency for the next 75 years by applying a payroll tax on higher-income workers, and increase the benefit to help low-income workers stay out of poverty.

+ Passing the Social Security Administration Fairness Act, which would prevent office closures and increase the budget for SSA rather than institute draconian DOGE cuts.

+ Passing the Stop the Wait Act to eliminate the Medicare waiting period for SSDI beneficiaries.

+ Passing the SSI Savings Penalty Act to update SSI’s asset limits to allow people to save without risking their essential benefits.

+ Raising the minimum wage to at least $17 an hour to ensure that full-time workers can afford a healthy, stable life and phasing out subminimum wages for workers with disabilities.

+ Ensure that all Americans have access to a pension.

Notes.

i Shrider, E. (2024). Poverty in the united states: 2023. Census.

iiKenneally, K., & Bond, T. (2024). Americans’ views of social security. National Institution of Retirement Security.

iii De Vise, D. (05/08/23). Nearly half of baby boomers have no retirement savings. The Hill

iv NCOA. (2024). Get the facts on economic security for seniors.

v U.S Census Bureau (2023). Current Population Survey (CPS).

vi Drake, P., & Burns, A. (2024). Working-age adults with disabilities living in the community. KFF.

vii Goodman, N., Morris, Z., Morris, M., & McGarity, S. (2020). The extra costs of living with a disability in the U.S. — resetting the policy table.

viii SSA. (2025). SSI federal payment amounts for 2025

ix SSA. (2025). Benefits paid by type of beneficiary.

x Smalligan, J., & Vance, A. (2025). Downsizing staff will make it harder to receive social security payments. Urban Institute

xi O’Malley, M. (2024). Testimony by Martin O’Malley commissioner, social security administration, before the house committee on appropriations, subcommittee on labor, health and human services, education, and related agencies. SSA. SSA. (2025). Social security administration (SSA) monthly data for combined title II disability and title XVI blind and disabled average processing time (excludes technical denials).

xii SSA. (2025). Social security administration (SSA) monthly data for combined title II disability and title XVI blind and disabled average processing time (excludes technical denials).

xiii SSA. (2025). Workforce Update | News | SSA

xiv Dayen, D. (2025, Mar 6). How social security administration cuts affect you. The American Prospect Blogs.

xv Konish. (2025). Social security has never missed a payment. DOGE actions threaten ‘interruption of benefits,’ ex-agency head says. CNBC.

xvi SSA. (2024). Social Security Disability Claims Pending Determination: Past and Projected.

xvii SSA. (2025). Social security administration (SSA) monthly data for combined title II disability and title XVI blind and disabled average processing time (excludes technical denials).

xviii Committee on Budget, U.S. Senate. (2024). Statement for the Record, Martin O’Malley.

xix Washington Post. (2017). 597 days. And still waiting.

The post Musk’s Social Security Administration Cuts: Longer Wait Times, More People Will Die Waiting for Disability Benefits appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bernie Sanders.

Janine Jackson interviewed historian David Perry about MAGA and disability for the March 14, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

MSNBC (3/3/25)

Janine Jackson: A fair amount is being written about Linda McMahon’s lack of qualifications to be secretary of education, except the one that matters: an evident willingness to destroy the department she’s charged with leading. Our guest’s piece for MSNBC.com was one of few, so far, to address the impact of the Trump White House, including McMahon’s appointment, on the rights and lives of people with disabilities.

David Perry is a journalist and a historian; he joins us now by phone from Minnesota. Welcome back to CounterSpin, David Perry.

David Perry: It’s so nice to talk to you again.

JJ: McMahon at the DoE is not the only piece of this story, of course, but we might start with that. There’s some confusion, I think, around what the Department of Education does. They don’t really write curricula, but they do have a role in the school experiences of students with disabilities, don’t they?

DP: Yeah. It’s one of the places where the federal level really matters. It matters across the board. It matters that we have a functioning Department of Education that cares about education. But there are specific things it does, when it comes to students with disabilities—like, actually, both of my kids in different ways—particularly around something called a 504 plan. And we don’t need to get into the weeds there, but there’s two different kinds of ways that students with disabilities get services, and one are things we can call special ed, where kids are pulled out or get really modified curricula, but most people just get small accommodations; that really makes a difference.

Conversation (2/13/25)

If there’s a problem, it is the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education, that you appeal to. If there are materials that aren’t accessible—say, for example, you’re blind, and you can’t get materials over audio—you can file an OCR complaint to the Office of Civil Rights and expect to get some kind of response. And certainly under the Obama administration, and even under the first Trump administration, under Betsy DeVos—I’m not a fan of Betsy DeVos, but that office remained functional—and then more recently, all of that was happening. These civil rights offices are not surviving what Trump is doing these first six weeks, and I don’t expect the Ed Department’s to either.

JJ: In your piece for MSNBC, you situate McMahon’s appointment among a number of top-down threats to people with disabilities, and some of it’s old, things people have been pushing for for a while, off and on, but some of it feels kind of new, and some of it is policy, and some of it is, I guess, cultural. What are you seeing?

DP: Yeah, I wrote this piece in MSNBC, and I’ve been thinking about it in some ways since last summer, when I saw this coming. But here’s the version that came out.

AP (3/19/25)

There has been, with incredible amounts of work since the ’50s and ’60s and all the way through to today, the creation of a bipartisan, basic consensus that people with disabilities deserve to be able to work, deserve education, deserve housing that is accessible, deserve healthcare through things like Medicaid.

It has never been a great consensus. It has never been sufficient. The divisions between Democrats and Republicans, or even among Democrats and among Republicans, are vast and important and worth fighting for.

But I do think we achieved that kind of basic consensus, and I do not believe that the current Trump administration supports that consensus, and I have a lot of evidence to talk about it. And we’re going to see more, with the shuttering of Social Security offices, and the things that are coming from Medicaid. And, again, these basic issues around education.

And I think it’s really important for liberals, people like me, to not just say, “Oh, Republicans were always bad on this.” Again, we really disagreed on things, but the example I used is when Fred Trump Jr.—or the third, I can’t always remember their name—the president’s nephew, he has a son who has cerebral palsy and significant needs, went to the first Trump administration for help. He found a lot of people who were ready to help him, who were ready to do important work around access and around medical support.

Guardian (7/24/24)

None of those people are working in the second Trump White House except for Trump, whose famous or infamous response to his nephew is, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if your kid was just dead? It’s too much work. It’s too expensive.” And that’s the attitude we’re seeing now.

And that’s not even getting into what Elon Musk says about disabled people, or RFK, what he’s doing. I mean, we could talk for an hour just about the ways in which anti-disability rhetoric and policy lies at the heart of the second Trump administration.

JJ: It’s so appalling, and so many different appalling things are happening, and yet one can still be surprised to hear people, including Elon Musk, throwing around the r-word. Again, I don’t quite get what is so enjoyable about punching down, but people with disabilities, it seems, are always going to be at the sharp end of that.

DP: It is amazing to me. I’m a historian; I’m pretty cynical about things like progress. I know that things can be cyclical, that things we expect we achieve, we discover that ten, 20 years later, we did not achieve them. We’re seeing that right now with issues of integration, with the attempt to resegregate America racially.

HuffPost (3/14/25)

But I really felt we had gotten somewhere on the r-word, and really basic issues of respect. And all it takes is one billionaire constantly using that as his favorite insult, and now it’s back. It’s back everywhere. I see it all the time on social media. I’m sure it’s being said by kids at school to other kids. That’s something that never happened to my elder son—he’s 18, he’s about to graduate high school—that I’m aware of. I never heard that, but I bet kids following his footsteps are going to be called by the r-word. And I just thought we had beaten that one, and we clearly didn’t.

And I shouldn’t be surprised, as you say, right? I mean, that these things happen. We lose progress. But I’ll tell you that, in my heart, I thought we had beaten at least that slur, and we clearly haven’t.

JJ: I am surprised at my continued capacity to be surprised.

DP: Yeah.

JJ: When we spoke with you some years back, you had just co-written a white paper on extreme use of force by police, and the particular connection to people with disabilities. And part of what we were lamenting then was news media’s tendency to artificially compartmentalize disability issues.

So there were stories that focus on disabled people or on disability, and they can be good or bad or indifferent. They often have a “very special episode” feeling to them. But then, the point was, when the story is wildfires, there’s no thought about what might be the particular impact on people with disabilities. So it’s like spotlight or absence, but not ongoing, integrated consideration.

David Perry: “When you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.”

DP: The thing about disability, as opposed to other categories of difference—by which I mean race, gender, sexuality—is the ways in which people can move in and out of disability, the ways in which disability, while it is associated with issues like poverty, it does transcend it. It’s everywhere. Every family, everyone who lives long enough, if we’re lucky to live long enough, we will experience disability in our own bodies and minds. It is a different kind of difference, is one of the things that I like to say, lots of people like to say.

And so there is no issue in which disability is not part of it, including, as you say, the weather. And one of the things that was cut from my MSNBC story was when the wildfires were raging through California, conservative influencers—and these are not just people who tweet, but people who get to talk to Trump, right? People who get to talk to Musk, like Chris Rufo—started making fun of ASL, American Sign Language interpretation, when it came to wildfire announcements. Like, who are these people gesticulating? Well, there are deaf people who need to know how to evacuate, right? This is not a joke. This is not wokeness, right? This is trying to save lives, and I really do see it all of a piece that when the planes crashed, that first plane crashed right after Trump took office, the first thing Trump did was blame hiring people with disabilities for the FAA.

I think at the heart of their failures around Covid response is a real fear and dislike for disability and disease, and kind of a eugenic mentality. Just again and again, when you start to look—and I never want to say that disability is the only issue, or the most important issue; one of my kids is disabled, but also trans, right? I’m very aware of other ways in which other people are being attacked for different kinds of identities. But when you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.

JJ: You’re speaking also to this absence of intersectionality in media, and we talked about this last time, too, because, “Oh, police brutality is a Black problem. It’s not a disabled problem.” People can’t be Black and have a disability, right? Media just can’t grok that, because those are two different sections in the paper, so it’s like they can’t combine them.

Indianapolis Star (3/6/25)

And I want to say, I have seen some coverage, not a tremendous amount, but some coverage, of likely and already occurring impacts of things like budget cuts and agency dysfunction on people with disabilities. A lot of that coverage was local: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Garden City Telegram in Kansas, the Indianapolis Star: local folks, local reporters—who are, I guess, just listening to folks saying, “This is going to close this program. This is going to impact us in this way”—seem to be doing the story as kind of a local government function story.

DP: Nine years has been a long time, and I would say that the disability community has organized around both media outreach, around getting disabled reporters into the media. There are things I just don’t write anymore, because there are too many better people working on them, who are—I mean, I’m also disabled. I’m dyslexic and have mental illness. But my primary relationship to writing about disability hasn’t always come from that.

Things have gotten better in the media about talking about disability. It’s still something that gets missed. It still gets compartmentalized and sidelined. There’s a number of national outlets, like Mother Jones or the Indypendent or 19th News, that have people who’ve come out of the disability community and are full-time journalists. But also I think local organizations have gotten very good at working with local media to tell better stories. And there’s social media organization, starting really with Crip the Vote, was the phrase on Twitter a long time ago, with Alice Wong out of the Bay Area….

JJ: And Andrew Pulrang.

DP: Yeah, that’s right. I just want to say, things have gotten better, and they’ve gotten better, in part, because the disability community and these wonderful leaders have pushed very hard. And it is particularly trying to show these connections across areas, so that when we talk about Medicaid, we also talk about Social Security, and we also talk about the Department of Education, and we see—that’s what I’m trying to do in this piece, is I’m trying to say, “Look, there’s a consistent problem here that manifests with these different policies.”

Man of Steele (1/15/25)

JJ: There is a line in your MSNBC piece, and maybe it was cut back from more, because you do say in response to Trump’s wild, weird claims after the plane crash, that “with mental illness, their lives are shortened because of the stress they have.” And you say, “Well, no, their lives are shortened when they don’t have healthcare, when they can’t get jobs, when they can’t get housing.”

And it does have the line, “because when a wildfire rages, no one communicates the threat in a way they can understand.” But that sentence alone does not convey the energy with which right wingers attacked the very idea of communicating to, in this case, deaf people or hard-of-hearing people in a wildfire. So just to say those things don’t exist, I see why that one sentence doesn’t convey quite the pushback on that.

DP: I mean, I could have written an entire essay, and I think other people did when it happened, on Chris Rufo’s specific attack on ASL, and the way they got picked up by Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and these other really influential people online, attacking ASL, right, ASL! It should be the least controversial kind of adaptation, right? We’ve had it for a long time. Everyone understands what ASL is, and yet, here we go.

JJ: It’s like pushing the limits to see what we will tolerate.

CBS Mornings (3/3/25)

Finally, I will have a positive note, which was just a little snippet on CBS Mornings on March 3, where they were talking about cuts to DoE, and they had just a fraction of a moment with a woman whose kid has autism, and she was asked what a downsized DoE could mean if federal oversight, as we’re talking about, goes to another agency, which is of course what they’re saying. They’re not just going to shutter DoE, they’re going to shuffle these things off somewhere else. And she said, “My fear is that other schools, instead of helping a child with a disability get the services that they need in the school, they’re going to fix their football field, and it’s going to be OK, because nobody is regulating special education.”

DP: That’s really, really good. Yeah.

JJ: That’s a real good nugget that pulls together the fact of something that might be portrayed as abstract—budget-cutting, efficiency—the way that that actually falls down and affects people’s lives.

DP: We didn’t talk about it, but my framing for this piece was my son, who was 18, saying my name for the first time, which was an amazing moment, and we’ve had lots of these moments, but what I want to say is, they don’t just happen. They’re not just things that magically happen. It takes work and it takes funding and it takes policy and it takes good government and it takes schools, it takes all these different things, and I just don’t see that work being done. And I see where it is being done, the support being stripped away, and it’s terrible to watch.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with David Perry. His piece, “The Trump Administration Is Ready to Abandon Kids Like My Son,” is up at MSNBC.com. Thank you so much, David Perry, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DP: It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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This week on CounterSpin: In early February, when Rep. Maxwell Frost tweeted that he and Rep. Maxine Waters were denied access to the Department of Education, Elon Musk responded on the platform he owns: “What is this ‘Department of Education’ you keep talking about? I just checked and it doesn’t exist.” That, we understand, was the shadow president skating where the puck’s gonna be, as they say—because a month later, we learned that indeed newly appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon is tasked not with running but with erasing the department.

Elite media have talked about the political machinations, how this was expected, how it fits with Trump/Musk’s grand schemes. When it comes to what will happen to the under-resourced schools, and the students with disabilities for whom the DoE supported access and recourse for discrimination? Media seem happy with McMahon’s handwaving about how that stuff might be better off in a different agency.

The impacts of policy on people with disabilities are overwhelmingly an afterthought for corporate media, even though it’s a large community, and one anyone can join at any moment. We talked, on March 5, with journalist and historian David Perry about the threats McMahon and MAGA pose to people—including students—with disabilities.

Also on the show: You wouldn’t know it from what comes out of the mouths of today’s “leaders,” but there has long been a widely shared view in this country that people with disabilities deserve full human rights, but don’t have them. July 2023 marked the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And, as happens every year, a dismaying amount of the anniversary coverage was about buildings or spaces coming into compliance with the ADA—as though complying with a decades-old law was a feel-good story, and despite the relative absence of feel-bad stories about decades of noncompliance.

CounterSpin spoke at the time with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder of New Disabled South, about what’s lost when the public conversation around disability justice revolves around abiding by a baseline law, rather than a bigger vision of a world we can all live in. We revisit that conversation this week on CounterSpin.

Featured Image: A protester at a disability rights protest in May 2022 in new York City. Credit: FollowingNYC from Pexels

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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New York Times (1/9/25)

This week on CounterSpin: While the New York Times rolls out claptrap about how both “the left and the right” have ideas about causes behind the devastating Los Angeles wildfires—the right blame DEI hires, while the left blame climate change—many people have moved beyond that sort of stultifying nonsense to work that directly confronts the fossil fuel companies, and their political enablers, for the obvious role that fossil fuels play in climate disruption, and that climate disruption plays in extreme weather events. Many are also now calling out insurance companies that take folks’ money, but then hinder their ability to come out from under when these predictable and predicted crises occur.

Would you be surprised to hear that these powerful industries—fossil fuels and insurers—are intertwined? We talked about it last year with writer and historian Derek Seidman. We’ll hear that conversation on this week’s show.

19th (12/6/23)

Also on the show: Did you see the coverage of how people with disabilities are dealing with the California fires’ impact? Probably not, given that the place of people with disabilities in elite media coverage ranges roughly from afterthought to absent. We talked about that last year with disability rights advocate and policy analyst Ariel Adelman, in the wake of a Supreme Court case that considered dismantling civil rights protections for people with disabilities, by criminalizing the ways that we learn about whether those protections are actually real. We’ll hear that too.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The Economist published a cover story on July 6 with the stark image of a walker, a mobility device typically used by disabled people, with the United States presidential seal on it. “No Way to Run a Country,” the headline stated. Disabled people responded angrily on social media at the implication that mobility aids are disqualifying for office, mentioning former President Franklin Roosevelt, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, all wheelchair users.

Similar visual messages previously appeared on a New Yorker cover (10/2/23) and in a Roll Call magazine political cartoon (9/6/23), both from the fall of 2023. The New Yorker cover showed President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Mitch McConnell using walkers while competing in an athletic race. The joke was that it would be absurd for such elderly people to compete in a race, but the implication was that anyone similarly disabled might not be fit to serve in political office. None of these leaders use walkers in real life.

Economist (7/6/24)

The Roll Call cartoon showed the US Capitol transformed into the “Senate Assisted Legislating Facility,” with a stairlift and elderly people with walkers. Disability advocates often write about how the media and others should avoid using disabilities and medical conditions as metaphors, as it’s usually done to negatively stigmatize them.

The Economist cover appeared during a period of intense media conversation over presidential fitness, which ramped up just after the last presidential debate on June 27, and continued until Biden withdrew from his campaign for re-election on July 21. With Biden and Trump both older than any other presidential candidates in history—and both showing many common signs of age—media have been discussing their capabilities for years.

Ability and age shouldn’t be off the table as media topics during elections, but there are ways to have these conversations without promoting harm. By not interrogating “fitness for office” as a concept, the media has contributed to a culture in which two elderly presidential candidates constantly bragged about their prowess, culminating in the surreal moment of their competitive discussion of golfing abilities during the debate.

Disability organizations have created style guides for non-ableist journalism in general. In terms of covering political campaigns, some common pitfalls to avoid include: stating or implying that all disabilities or conditions are inherent liabilities, even cognitive disabilities; diagnosing candidates without evidence; using illness or disability as a metaphor; conflating age with ability; conflating physical and cognitive health; using stigmatizing language to describe incapacities; and highlighting issues with ability or health without explaining why they are concerning.

‘Agony to watch’

New Yorker (10/2/23)

Biden’s struggles with articulating and completing his thoughts during the last debate prompted a flurry of news stories, including reporting on his tendency to forget people and events (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 6/4/24; New York Times, 7/2/24). Some of the same outlets that had previously defended him against claims of being cognitively impaired (New York, 7/31/23) were suddenly diagnosing him with possible medical conditions and doubting his ability to lead (New York, 7/7/24).

The Hill (7/20/24) called Biden’s verbal gaffes “embarrassing,” and casually quoted insiders referring to “brain farts” with scorn. “It was agony to watch a befuddled old man struggling to recall words and facts,” the Economist wrote in an editorial (7/4/24), which accompanied the cover image of the walker and called for Biden to drop out. The piece linked to another Economist piece (6/28/24) which argued that Biden had failed to prove he was “mentally fit,” and called on him to stand down and make room for a “younger standard-bearer.”

There are reasonable concerns about the age of candidates, including that our leadership doesn’t represent the majority of the country demographically and that elderly candidates may not live long. But the Economist made implicit assumptions about age and disability, including that a “younger standard-bearer” would likely be more “mentally fit.” According to scientists, slower communication and short-term memory loss are associated with aging, but some other cognitive abilities have been shown to strengthen.

What’s more, Biden’s gaffes might have been “embarrassing” to him, or “agony” for him to experience, but characterizing disability or struggle from the outside as embarrassing or unpleasant to observe is a common form of ableism. It’s reasonable to report on his mistakes without editorializing and stigmatizing language.

Neither Trump nor Biden have a record of supporting the needs of disabled people while in office, especially around the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, their disabilities or capacity issues do deserve sensitivity. By insulting memory lapses and mobility issues, even implicitly, the media insults everyone with those conditions.

It seems some part of the media’s panic around the abilities of presidential candidates has more to do with elections than with who is running the country. Biden’s re-election chances fell into jeopardy after the debate. The Washington Post (7/22/24) recently made this clear. “Trump’s age and health under renewed scrutiny after Biden’s exit,” it reported:

After weeks of intense focus on President Biden’s health and age that ended with his withdrawal from the campaign on Sunday, the script has flipped: Former president Donald Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in history—and one who has been less transparent about his medical condition than his former opponent.

The Post makes it sound as if media are passively reporting on the next inevitable story, and not actively choosing to focus its disability-related concerns around its election concerns.

Best in show?

Roll Call (9/6/23)

The recent Washington Post article (7/22/24) on Trump’s abilities points out that he hasn’t released his medical records since he was president, when he had “had heart disease and was obese.” It also points out his “elevated genetic risk of dementia.”

With the intense focus on medical records and physical tests, the news media often writes about the bodies of presidential candidates as if they were competing for Best in Show, instead of for a job that primarily involves decision-making, leadership and communication—and for which disability might even be an asset in terms of compassion and understanding.

News outlets have reported with concern on how Biden and Trump walk, despite the fact that the majority of people in their 80s deal with mobility challenges. (Biden is 81; Trump is 78.) According to the Boston Globe (3/12/24), “Joe Biden needs to explain his slow and cautious walk.” The news article does offer his physician’s explanation of neuropathy but doesn’t seem to accept it.

The article argues that Biden’s silence about his gait was contributing to concerns that he might have an illness like dementia or Parkinson’s. The Globe seemed to take for granted that Parkinson’s would be a problem for voters and not, say, an asset. Many voters have similar conditions and might appreciate the representation. The article then mentions that Biden’s slower walking might be a sign of diminished “mental capacity,” conflating physical and cognitive issues.

In 2020, there were similar articles about Trump showing signs of unsteadiness while walking and drinking from a glass of water, with the implication that difficulties with both might undermine his fitness for office (New York Times, 6/14/20).

No privacy for presidents?

Bloomberg (7/3/24)

The Americans with Disabilities Act protects disabled people from having to disclose details about their conditions. This is because stigma and bigotry are so widespread that it’s understood such details might be handled with prejudice by employers. Media outlets undermine those principles in their lust for detailed information about the medical records of presidential candidates.

Just after the last presidential debate, Bloomberg (7/3/24) insisted in a headline that “Presidential Candidates Shouldn’t Have Health Secrets.” The article not only demanded clarity on what caused Biden’s “poor performance” in the debate, but also that candidates go through independent medical evaluations, with the full results being released to the public. Implicit in this demand is that pre-existing conditions would be liabilities. Otherwise, why would the public need to know?

“Americans are naturally curious about the health of their president, and any sign of illness or frailty gets subjected to intense public scrutiny,” a follow-up Bloomberg article (7/10/24) insisted. Are Americans curious, or are the media? The article pointed out that the US obsession with presidential health is unusual; in most countries, leaders don’t release their medical records. Still, the article went into intense detail about everything known and speculated about in terms of Biden and Trump’s health, body weight, medications and the like.

The media’s focus on the physical imperfections of presidential candidates is biased not only towards abled people, but towards white men. Women and people of color are more likely to have pre-existing medical conditions, and more likely to face stigma as a result of them. The Washington Post (7/22/24) already noted that Kamala Harris hasn’t released her medical records, or responded to questions about it.

During the 2016 campaign for presidency, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton fainted. Her doctor said she had pneumonia and was overheated. Not surprisingly, right-wing media used it as a chance to portray her as weak and unfit, but even some liberal outlets (CNN, 9/12/16), decided this was a significant incident worthy of endless commentary, speculation and demands for investigations. Fainting is something many people, especially women, experience routinely, as part of illness, heat, exhaustion or just standing for too long. The media worked to denormalize it.

Obsession with candidate bodies

NBC (7/4/24)

Overall, media seem to have a unique preoccupation with the bodies of presidential candidates–more than, say, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices or governors. There is a mythology around presidents, which Trump himself played into by recently referring to himself as a “fine and brilliant young man,” along with celebrating his survival of a recent assassination attempt.

Biden, who has historically portrayed himself as strong, and even claimed to overcome his stutter, finally started to let go of this mythology just before he dropped out of the race. He acknowledged age, exhaustion and slower speech. He joked about being fine besides his “brain.” And he mentioned that he might need more sleep. He was exhibiting another kind of strength through honesty, though it might have been strategic. It turned out to not be the most politically effective approach: Some media outlets highlighted him needing more sleep as headline-worthy and a red flag (NBC, 7/4/24; New York Times, 7/4/24).

The challenges Biden and Trump face in walking and speaking are evident to the public. Questions about underlying health issues are fair, but the implication of all of this “Best in Show” coverage is that people with significant disabilities, or even just a need for regular sleep, might face a hostile, intrusive media if they ran for president. And this discourse trickles down to how people feel permitted to speak about ordinary disabled civilians.

The presidency isn’t a sporting event. If media outlets are going to express concern about a candidate’s physical abilities, they should clarify what assumptions are guiding their concerns. As it stands, most of these articles and images just seem concerned with any signs of disability, which they implicitly associate with not being fit to serve.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Justine Barron.

Janine Jackson interviewed Ariel Adelman about disability and civil rights for the February 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: In 2000, when the Americans with Disabilities Act was already 10 years old, actor Clint Eastwood was accused of running a California hotel with inadequately accessible rooms, bathrooms and parking lot. “It’s just not fair,” the millionaire complained, and his beleaguered stance found echo in the press, with the likes of ABC‘s John Stossel wondering, if people with disabilities want access to a business or an accommodation that bars them, why don’t they “just ask”? Presumably, the answer could be no, but wouldn’t that be “the decent thing to do,” rather than bringing a lawsuit, which, as Eastwood quipped, means lawyers “drive off in a big Mercedes and the disabled end up riding off in a wheelchair.”

ABC‘s Stossel, in a segment called “Give Me a Break,” introduced by Barbara Walters, called legal efforts to enforce the ADA a “shakedown racket.” The presentation recasts human rights, never mind compliance with a decades-old law, as fundamentally corporate noblesse oblige.

Unfortunately, that still inflects media coverage, and forms part of the backdrop of a current legal case, Acheson Hotels v. Laufer. Our guest will bring us up to date on what’s happening and what it means.

CEPR (1/31/24)

Ariel Adelman is a disability rights advocate and policy analyst. Her piece with Hayley Brown on Acheson v. Laufer appears at CEPR.net. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ariel Adelman.

Ariel Adelman: Hi, good to be here.

JJ: Most recently, in December, the Supreme Court declined to hear Acheson, and that’s significant, but it doesn’t mean the core of the case has been fully addressed. I’m quite sure that many listeners have never heard of this case, so if you could talk us through, what are the facts in Acheson v. Laufer, and what’s at stake?

AA: I’ll give a brief overview of the background of the case. Laufer is a disabled woman with multiple sclerosis who acts as a civil rights tester, specifically for the ADA. Testers are people who basically check to see if people are in compliance with a certain civil rights law. There are individual testers, and testers who volunteer or work for legal organizations.

And so Laufer began testing hotel websites for their compliance with the reservation rule, after a personal experience with a hotel that violated the ADA’s reservation rule. The incident forced her to sleep in her car, when she arrived at the hotel only to find that the room was inaccessible to her.

And something important to note is that it’s completely free for businesses to comply with the reservation rule, which is part of title three of the ADA. All it means is they have to add accessibility information about their rooms and other facilities, even if they’re inaccessible. The hotel just needs to say the room is or isn’t wheelchair accessible, or does or doesn’t have visual fire alarms, for example.

So Laufer was acting as a tester when she sued Acheson Hotels for failing to comply with the reservation rule. And after the Supreme Court heard the case on October 4, they dismissed the case on mootness, because Laufer withdrew her claim in fear that the decision would upend “test your rights” as a whole.

And it’s important also to know that lawsuits filed by individuals are currently the primary enforcement mechanism for the ADA, which is already generally underenforced. The DoJ is technically in charge of enforcing the ADA, aside from individual lawsuits. The DoJ can sue ADA violators, or they can attempt mediation, which only comprises a tiny percentage of cases.

And the DoJ really doesn’t have sufficient incentive, really, to pursue ADA violations in court, even when they’re egregious. And so civil rights testers for the ADA, for the Civil Rights Act, for the Fair Housing Act, for any civil rights legislation, they’re really needed.

And, unfortunately, that also means that individual suits are an unfair burden, especially when it’s on people who are being actively discriminated against. And testers fill that gap, so that people with very few means—which is important to note, that disabled people are generally living in forced poverty; they don’t have the means, the time or the health, really, to bring a lawsuit to sue every single person that violates the ADA. If we were doing that, every disabled person would just constantly be in court, suing people. So testers are really needed to fill that gap.

JJ:The objection to testers has been about standing, right?

AA: Yes. So the big issue at the center of this case is standing, and standing is basically whether or not you have the right to sue. And the case that sets up important precedent for Acheson v. Laufer is Havens Realty Corp v. Coleman, which was a 1982 Supreme Court case that established standing to sue for civil rights testers, regardless of whether they expected to be discriminated against, and, importantly, regardless of their intent to, for example, in that case, buy or rent a home.

So Havens established, it doesn’t matter if you do truly intend to use that good or service. If you’re discriminated against, that constitutes a real injury. And that includes dignitary injury. There’s a bunch of legalese we could go into, that the article covers, but basically you need to know, Havens is already established. You don’t need to actually truly intend.

Unfortunately, the court’s opinion in Acheson, and Acheson’s lawyer’s argument hinged, in part, on the idea that Laufer supposedly had no intent to stay at the inn owned by Acheson Hotels. And the court’s opinion and Justice Thomas’ concurrence repeatedly referred to Laufer, and to civil rights testers in general, as “serial filers,” which, to me, showed pretty open disdain for civil rights testing, despite testers having standing enshrined by Havens for over four decades at this point.

JJ: In case anyone is missing it, the idea is, if you are a person with a disability, you need to wait until you are actively suffering harm, and then you can have standing to sue. And we can’t do proactive compliance testing, with testers who go in to see whether, in fact, these accommodations or venues or whatever are compliant. The idea is, well, “You were just pretending you were going to stay at this hotel, and therefore you don’t have standing to sue that the hotel or whatever is inaccessible.”

AA: That’s kind of the status quo that the conservative elements of the court are gunning for, and business interests in general are hoping for, because they don’t want to have to comply with civil rights law, even if it’s completely free to comply with it.

JJ: And the idea, I think, for the general public is, well, we have the ADA, so something has already happened to make all businesses aware that they need to be compliant, and so why do lawyers need to get involved? But the truth is, the ADA doesn’t have a lot of aggressive enforcement attached to it. So there’s a real critical role for these testers.

AA: Exactly. And the point that my co-author Hayley Brown and I make in our report is that, one, testers fill a really important gap in enforcement. And two, if people are really taking issue with the concept of civil rights testers, that means that we would need to have really aggressive, as you said, proactive enforcement on the part of the government to enforce these civil rights laws, because people right now are just getting away with completely flouting civil rights laws with no consequences.

JJ: What do you think are the implications if Acheson v. Laufer goes the wrong way? I mean, what should folks understand? I’m happy to center the ADA and disabled people at this point, but it does actually have huge implications if we decide that civil rights testers don’t have standing to bring lawsuits.

Ariel Adelman: “How would we go about suing every single time we have our rights violated, when that happens every single day?”

AA: So this case was dismissed on mootness, but if you read the opinion of the court and the concurrence by Justice Clarence Thomas, they make it extremely clear that if this were not dismissed on mootness, they would have ruled in favor of Acheson, which would effectively upend and eviscerate civil rights testing.

And that has really dire consequences for enforcing and maintaining civil rights in general, because that means that overwhelmingly disenfranchised, impoverished, really under-resourced populations are now being burdened with the task of enforcing major federal legislation. And, again, these communities are extremely under-resourced. How would we go about suing every single time we have our rights violated, when that happens every single day?

And the businesses we’re going up against often have these monstrous legal teams that could take down anyone in court. And, of course, with a court that doesn’t want to side with disabled people, it’s really just bad news for civil rights in general in the United States.

JJ: CounterSpin listeners in particular might remember the case Food Lion, in which reporters in 1992, reporters from ABC‘s Primetime Live, went undercover to investigate claims of unsanitary food handling at Food Lion, the supermarket chain. And they found it: old meat being redated and put out again, out-of-date chicken getting soaked in barbecue sauce and then moved to the gourmet section.

But then Food Lion sued ABC, not so much on the accuracy of the story, but that the reporters misrepresented themselves fraudulently by applying for jobs, and then since they were there fraudulently, they were trespassing. And Food Lion won; they won $5.5 million in 1997.

And this chilled investigative reporting as inherently deceptive, for getting stories that they couldn’t get otherwise, and revealing things that were true and in the public interest. And I tie that here because Acheson seems to have implications also for journalism, at least in the way that it touches on the public’s right to know, and the right to know things that folks don’t want to show us.

AA: Interestingly, the opinion talks about the right to information—or I should say, I think it was actually Justice Thomas’ concurrence that talks about whether or not people have a right to information under the reservation rule. And he argues that it doesn’t, even though, at least in my view, in plain text, and according to a lot of disability rights scholars, it does give you the right to information.

And when business interests, or even government entities, are allowed to cloak themselves in uncertainty, even when people affected by their civil rights violations or health code violations, violations of any kind of protection, even if people know for a fact that they’re violating these laws, there’s really no way to bring that to light until you’re actually harmed. And that could harm people, it can kill people.

Extra! (3–4/08)

In the case of that supermarket, if we had to wait for multiple people to die, there’s a death toll to not being able to uncover health code violations. In the case of the ADA, Laufer had to sleep in her car. And who knows if someone has died because they slept in their car, because they didn’t have adequate shelter? What if there was a snowstorm?

And that’s just with inadequate access to information. There’s, of course, issues of literal physical access to buildings. But I think people really undercount the importance of access to information, because if you don’t have proper information, you can’t make the proper decisions to keep yourself safe.

And that’s actually an issue of equal dignity. I wanted to quote from the ACLU amicus brief for Laufer, where they said, “Guaranteeing equal dignity was an animating purpose of the statute’s”—the Civil Rights Act of 1964, its “other antidiscrimination protections.”

And I think that’s really important to keep in mind, is that equal dignity is at the center of basically every civil rights statute. And if we can’t guarantee equal access to information, which is part of the issue in Acheson v. Laufer, then you don’t have equal dignity. And that is not only legally wrong, as it constitutes a dignitary injury, but it’s also morally wrong, if we want to treat disabled people, or anyone part of a marginalized group, as an equal person in society.

JJ: And that equal dignity runs right up against where we started: “Well, why don’t they just ask? Why don’t they just come, hat in hand, and say, ‘Hey, I’d really like to get into your restaurant.’ And then maybe we would say, ‘OK, you could come around the back and we can let you in this other entrance.’” Dignity is often missing from that whole conversation about what businesses are required to do, as if we aren’t talking about human beings.

AA: It’s so bizarre to me. I mean, it’s not bizarre, because I expect it, because ableism is so entrenched in our society. But if you asked someone, “Oh, do you think it would be OK if instead of having robust health code enforcement, if we should just ask if people in restaurants could wash their hands before cooking our food?” Or if small businesses dodge state taxes for 10 years, nobody would go, “Oh, well, they didn’t know any better, and nobody asked them for those taxes. It’s really not their fault.” We only really treat it like this when it comes to civil rights, and it’s not OK.

And a lot of that, I think, is because our society places a really high premium on productivity, and sees disabled people—and, by extension, other marginalized people, whether racially, in terms of gender, religion—they see us as a drain, rather than as a vital part of the population. And as I want to point out to people, disabled people comprise at least a quarter of the population, and that’s rising, because of the ongoing pandemic, which many people have called a mass disabling event.

So we comprise a very large part of society, but people see us as a drain, or they think that our rights shouldn’t really be real, because we’re perceived as not being productive or contributing to society.

Extra! (11–12/00)

JJ: And, finally, the way that folks are seen has not everything, but a lot to do with news media. And back in 2000, many years ago, I wrote about major news outlets presenting the ADA as mainly a regulatory issue affecting private businesses, rather than a human rights issue facing society as a whole.

And my beef, among many others, at the time, as now, was that we saw stories about “It goes too far.” “The ADA goes too far, it’s too expensive and it harms and it’s well-intentioned, but it actually harms.” And that those stories were not sufficiently countered by stories saying, “Well, what if it doesn’t go far enough?” And then, instead, you get the hardy perennial of, “We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go.”

It’s not unique, but I feel like there is something special about the way the rights of disabled people, a community that anyone can join at any minute, are somehow never urgent. They’re never front-page news, somehow, there’s never urgency attached to it. And I just wonder, finally, what you think about media coverage, and what you would like to see more of, what you’d like to see less of, in terms of news media?

Vox (9/25/23)

AA: As you said, it’s never seen as urgent or important, despite it being the only marginalized group that you could join at any point. I think that most coverage is really unnuanced, and tends to be overly sympathetic to business interests.

There’s one reporter that I think has had good coverage of this case specifically, which is Ian Millhiser over at Vox. I think his articles are excellent.

With everyone else, there’s headlines like the “Supreme Court Dodges This Ruling,” or “This Woman Sued Over 600 Hotels,” but they never have any headlines that are anything like ”Tourism Industry Tends to Fail to Comply With the ADA,” or “This Hotel Owner and Former Anthropology Professor Repeatedly Flouts Civil Rights Laws.”

And, again, if it were any other major regulatory issue, nobody would really question it, except for maybe small sections of society. But most people think, yeah, we should probably have people regularly checking up to make sure the building doesn’t fall down on us because it’s not up to code, or that we can escape in a fire, or that people are washing their hands before they cook, or give us vaccinations.

And like you said, it’s treated as not urgent. And I think, in part, it’s because disabled people are not just seen as a drain, but we’re seen as somehow cunning, or kind of getting one over on the system. And we’ve seen this kind of backlash before: After the 1918 influenza, postviral disability skyrocketed, and so did the popularity of eugenics and fascism. And so we’ve had reactionaries going after disability rights the exact same way they’re going after immigration, abortion rights, racial equality, labor protections.

CEPR (10/12/22)

And a huge problem is that people across the political spectrum, especially white people, are hostile to the idea that disabled people should have rights at all. And that really is reflected in media, and then it’s reflected back on the population, and then artistic media reflects that back, and then journalism. It’s like a cycle that perpetuates this idea that disabled people are a drain, and their rights are somehow a zero-sum game, that they’re stealing rights from other people.

I did want to add in that there’s really important work being done on these issues, and that if people want to continue to educate themselves, and to follow ongoing disability rights issues, look at my co-author Hayley Brown’s ongoing work on disability and labor, her co-authored piece, “The Long Reach of Long Covid.” And CEPR also has an updated chart book coming on disability and economic justice.

So keep looking at those. There’s really mind-boggling stats that you’ll find that CEPR digs up. Their work is incredible, and I think everyone should look at disability as a cornerstone of civil rights as we are fighting against right-wing reactionaries.

JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Ariel Adelman; the piece “Disability Justice and Civil Rights: The Fight Isn’t Over After Acheson v. Laufer” can be found at CEPR.net. Ariel Adelman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AA: Thank you.

The post ‘Disenfranchised, Under-Resourced Populations Are Burdened With Enforcing Major Federal Regulation’  appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

CEPR (1/31/24)

This week on CounterSpin: There’s an announcement on the New York City subway where a voice chirps: “Attention, everyone! There are 150 accessible subway stations!” One can imagine an alternate world where we’d hear, “Only 150 of New York City’s 472 subway stations are accessible, and that’s a problem!”

But people with disabilities are meant to be grateful, excited even, for whatever access or accommodation is made available for them to participate in daily life. There’s often an implied corollary suggestion that any violation of the rights of disabled people is an individual matter, to be fought over in the courts, rather than something to be acknowledged and addressed societally.

The overarching law we have, the Americans with Disabilities Act, is meant to be proactive; it is, the government website tells us, a law, “not a benefits program.” In reality, though, the ADA still meets resistance, confusion and various combinations thereof, 33 years after its passage. And news media, as a rule, don’t help.

The Supreme Court recently dismissed, but did not do away with, a case that gets at the heart of enforcement of civil rights laws for people with disabilities—though not them alone. Acheson v. Laufer is an under-the-radar case that, our guest says, is “part of a pattern of far-right reactionaries weaponizing the courts to dismantle labor protections, housing rights and health guidelines.”

Ariel Adelman is a disability rights advocate and policy analyst. Her piece, with Hayley Brown, appeared recently on CEPR.net, the website of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. She’ll tell us what’s going on and what’s at stake.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of the racist Charles Stuart murder hoax.

The post Ariel Adelman on Disability Civil Rights appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Civil rights leader Bishop William Barber joins us to discuss his calls for more awareness and justice for disabled people after he was kicked out of a Greenville, North Carolina, AMC movie theater last week when he went to see The Color Purple with his 90-year-old mother. Barber was threatened with trespassing and police forcibly removed him from the theater when the manager refused to allow him to use a specialized chair he carries to assist with an arthritic condition. “There was no attempt to accommodate,” Barber says of the theater’s discrimination on the basis of disability and the danger of its staff’s decision to call the police. “You cannot keep [people with disabilities] from enjoying what the rest of the public enjoys simply because they have some form of a disability.” He describes his meeting with the AMC CEO, discusses how the Americans with Disabilities Act is linked to the struggle for the Civil Rights Act, and says he plans to continue the fight for justice.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This is a lightly edited transcript of “The Best of CounterSpin 2023,” originally aired on December 29, 2023.

Janine Jackson: Every week, CounterSpin tries to bring you a look behind the headlines of the mainstream news—not because headlines are false, necessarily, but because the full story is rarely reflected there. The voices, the communities, the ideas that are not front and center in the discourse of the powerful, but could help us move toward a more equitable, peaceful, healthy communal life.

Many—most—conversations we need to have, have to happen around corporate news media, while deconstructing and re-imagining the discourse that they’re pumping out day after day.

CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They all help us see the world and one another more clearly, give us tools to make a better future, and offer other resources once we understand that we can’t believe everything we read.

You’re listening to the Best of CounterSpin for 2023, brought to you by the media watch group FAIR.

***

Just about a year ago, lots of people were traveling, or trying to, on holiday and vacation trips. Thousands of them found themselves stranded in airports, their flights canceled, their luggage who knows where, and airlines utterly unresponsive to their complaints. Beyond chaotic, it was confusing in a country where the rhetoric is all about the customer being king, and getting what you pay for. In January 2023, CounterSpin spoke with Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights, a nonprofit that organizes the consumer rights of airline passengers.

Paul Hudson: “The airlines, unfortunately, are only incidentally in the transportation business. They’re primarily, especially their executives, in the business of making money.”

Paul Hudson: The intention of the PPP programs and some other bailouts of the airlines, which altogether involved about $90 billion, was that you would keep the staff on the payroll so they would be ready when pandemic ended to restore traffic, and they wouldn’t have to go from a cold start.

But the airlines, unfortunately, are only incidentally in the transportation business. They’re primarily, especially their executives, in the business of making money. If that meant reducing their payroll through other means, that got around the intention of the law—and there was no real oversight by the federal government on money—that’s what they did.

And they continued to pay, in some cases, dividends. They paid large bonuses to CEOs and top executives. Some of them also did stock buybacks to keep their stock price up, while their profits, of course, were dwindling to nothing.

The reforms that we’ve been promoting pretty much have been ignored by DoT, which is the only regulator of the airline industry. And, as a result, things have gotten worse and worse.

For example, you would think there would be some requirement to have a certain level of backup or reserve capacity, for personnel as well as equipment. But there is none. There is no requirement, and some airlines actually have negative reserves. So even on their best day, they cancel 1 or 2 percent of their fights. It’s profitable to do that.

Another example is that there is no requirement that they maintain any level of customer service. Each airline sets their own goals about that, but there’s no enforcement. And they just say, “Well, I’m sorry.” They don’t answer your phones. They don’t have the personnel to do it.

And the area that’s most crucial, which is pilots: We have a shortage of pilots. Pretty much everyone agrees with that; except perhaps the pilot union, that wants to leverage the situation, says there is no shortage. But the airlines are simply not recruiting the pilots they need, and haven’t done so for years, especially for regional airlines. They don’t pay them nearly enough.

And the proposals that FlyersRights made, going back to June of this year, about 17 of them, have pretty much been ignored by DoT, at least until recently.

***

JJ: In a year that called for and saw a great deal of organized protest, one focal point was Cop City, a militarized police training complex being built on Atlanta’s South River Forest, over and against community opposition. An environmental activist known as Tortuguita was killed in a hail of police bullets, while, as an independently ordered autopsy revealed, they sat cross-legged with their hands up.

Kamau Franklin is founder of the national grassroots organization Community Movement Builders, and co-host of the podcast Renegade Culture. We talked about Cop City with him in March, starting with the history of the land itself.

Kamau Franklin: “This is a city that doubled down on police violence and police militarization after these uprisings.”

Kamau Franklin: That land, in terms of it being a forest before the invention of Cop City, was promised to the adjacent community, which is 70% Black, as a recreational and park area, particularly as the land reforested itself over time. Park areas where there were supposed to be nature trails, hiking available, parks available.

And when the idea of Cop City arose, from the Atlanta Police Department, the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation, all of those plans were scrapped immediately, without any input from that adjoining community. And instead they decided to move forward with this idea of Cop City.

This is a perfect illustration of how the state, vis-a-vis the city, the state government and even, in some ways, the federal government, operate in tandem. And a lot of times, most of the time, it doesn’t matter what party they are, but operate in tandem at the whim of capital, and at the whim of a, relatively speaking, right-wing ideological outlook.

And, again, it doesn’t matter which party it is we’re talking about. It doesn’t matter whether or not those folks are Black or white, but an ideological outlook that says overpolicing in Black and brown communities is the answer to every problem.

And so here in particular, you talked about the process. This process of developing Cop City came after the 2020 uprisings against police violence, the 2020 uprisings that were national in scope, that started after Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and, here in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks were killed by the police, and it caused a massive uprising and movement across the nation again.

The response by the authorities here in Atlanta was to push through their plans on building Cop City, to double down on their efforts, again, to continue the overpolicing of Black communities, particularly here in Atlanta.

Atlanta is a city that is gentrifying at an astronomical rate. It’s gone from a 60% Black city to one that’s less than 50% in only a matter of 20, 30 years, all of that under Black leadership.

It’s a city that, in terms of those who are arrested, 90% of those who are arrested in Atlanta by the police are Black people; its jails are filled with Black people.

And so this is a city that doubled down on police violence and police militarization after these uprisings.

***

JJ: If baristas on strike were surprising, Hollywood writers on strike were downright shocking for those who vaguely imagine that these are dream jobs for which the only appropriate response is  “thank you.” We got a window on a world of people who are, at the end of the day, workers, from Eric Thurm, campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. He wrote an informative piece on the historic writers and actors strike for GQ. One topic we touched on was AI—not the science-y, techno aspect of it, but the power part.

Eric Thurm: “Every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out.”

Eric Thurm: Technology has been a source of struggle for decades, in particularly the Writers Guild contracts. Because, essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out, which I suspect a lot of people will be intimately familiar with. This is the business model of some of the biggest companies and most worker-hostile companies in the world.

And that dates back to when home video emerged, or when DVD box sets emerged. And part of the reason that streaming pays so little is that it was new the last time that the writers went on strike in 2007, and they agreed to have it be covered by the minimum basic agreement, but not as fully as, like, a TV network.

And so, of course, the companies exploited that as much as possible. And on some level, it’s hard to blame them, at least in the sense that the purpose of the company is to take as much value out of the workers as it can.

And this is what people are referring to when they say that the studios are really trying, as much as possible, to turn writing, but also acting, and all of the other myriad jobs that go into making entertainment that people watch, into gig work, into stuff where you just have no say in your work, and are told by this unfeeling algorithm, or app or whatever it is, what you are and are not supposed to do.

And in the context of what people like to call AI, beyond the fact that the issue with a lot of these programs is that they are trained on a lot of other people’s work—I saw someone recently describe it as, “This is just a plagiarism machine,” which I think is a very accurate description. Even in cases where it does something interesting, you can use it as a smoke screen to avoid having to credit the people that created something.

I think that’s something that we are going to see the studios try more and more, even without necessarily having AI be involved.

***

JJ: Corporate journalists still invoke, and many people still believe in, a vision of an intrepid, independent press corps that is speaking truth to power. The sad extent to which that is not true was spotlighted painfully in June, when CNBC‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin hosted a chummy interview with Chevron CEO Mike Wirth. CounterSpin heard from Emily Sanders, editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity and founder of ExxonKnews, who saw it as emblematic of a larger—and, let’s acknowledge, historically environmentally devastating—media failure.

Emily Sanders: “The fossil fuel industry has a long history of investing in the media in order to manipulate the conversation about our reliance on oil and gas.”

Emily Sanders: Mainstream media have had a very hard time connecting climate change to oil companies, and their decades of pollution and deception about the harms caused by fossil fuels.

And when you see coverage of deadly heat waves and wildfire smoke, for instance, there’s often no mention of things like how the major oil companies are still spending millions every year lobbying to delay the transition to renewable energy, or how Chevron, the world’s most-polluting investor-owned oil company, is currently pouring even more money into increased fossil fuel extraction and production, after making record profits last year.

So it’s also not a coincidence that mainstream media is so far behind on this. The fossil fuel industry has a long history of investing in the media in order to manipulate the conversation about our reliance on oil and gas, what needs to be done about it and what the obstacles really are to addressing climate change.

And that goes back to at least the ’80s and ’90s, when oil companies began placing ads and advertorials, or ads disguised as news editorials, in major outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, that downplayed the reality of climate change.

And even today, as we learned from last year’s congressional investigations and hearings into the industry’s disinformation, companies like Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell are still running advertisements that look like articles in the country’s biggest news outlets, promoting things like algae and so-called natural gas as climate solutions. So they’ve really used the veil of journalistic credibility to help disguise their misleading and deceptive advertising for quite a while.

And we’re seeing that, not just with advertising, but with some reporters themselves still failing to name the source of climate inaction, and still unable or unwilling to recognize and call out disinformation, sometimes even parroting fossil fuel industry framing about how we can’t move off oil too quickly, or how Big Oil is working on ways to solve climate change, despite that they’re causing it, without actually challenging those misconceptions.

***

JJ: August 2023 saw the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And Joe Biden, while acknowledging that disabled people still face discrimination, led with the sort of rhetoric that politicians and news media generally use, claiming that it’s

hard for younger generations to imagine a world without the ADA, but before it existed, if you were disabled, stores could turn you away and employers could refuse to hire you. Transit was largely inaccessible.

That rang weirdly out of touch to many, including our guest, Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder and chief operating officer of New Disabled South.

Kehsi Iman Wilson: “In no social movement is a victory, whether minor or major, an indicator that there need be no additional social movement.”

Kehsi Iman Wilson: In no social movement is a victory, whether minor or major, an indicator that there need be no additional social movement—or political movement, for that matter.

And when we’re talking about disability—disability rights, disability access, certainly disability justice—so much of the real, lived experience of disabled people contradicts a lot of President Biden’s opening statements.

For example, when you talk about “couldn’t imagine a world where there was inaccessible public transit”—there’s still inaccessible public transit for the majority of disabled people. And unless you’re in the privileged few who can afford paratransit services, where they’re accessible where you live, things even as basic as access to sidewalks is still a major issue.

We’re dealing with so many infrastructure issues in this country, and, as we know, any issue doubly or triply impacts disabled people.

We’ve seen, and we continue to see, a spate of laws being passed across counties, across states, making it more difficult to access the ballot box—for example, getting rid of drop boxes, ballot boxes. But when you do that, you are not only disenfranchising, effectively, large portions of people of color, of people who live in rural areas, but disabled people. And that’s not talked about.

***

JJ: Media like the Washington Post got the positive vapors this year about the scourge of “organized retail crime.” The Post called for an aggressive federal crackdown on people stealing from grocery stores, etc., even after the National Retail Federation acknowledged that the data they had put out about the impact of such theft was bogus.

If elite media cared about theft, of course, they’d be tracking a different story: companies stealing straight out of the paychecks of employees struggling to make ends meet. We talked about wage theft this fall with Rodrigo Camarena, director of Justicia Lab and Co-creator of ¡Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat the problem.

Rodrigo Camarena: “In some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage.”

Rodrigo Camarena: Wage theft is so common and so ubiquitous that we don’t really consider it in our day-to-day lives. But, like you mentioned, it’s this huge problem. It’s actually the largest form of theft, when you compare it to burglaries, armed robberies, motor vehicle thefts combined.

And it happens whenever a worker is deprived of the wages that they’re owed lawfully. So that could mean not being paid a minimum wage, not being paid overtime, having deductions from someone’s paycheck made, or just not paying someone; they show up at the job one day and the person that hired them isn’t there anymore. Failing to honor sick leave or other benefits is another form of wage theft.

In some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage. And it’s a problem that disproportionately impacts low-wage workers, women and immigrants, and in particular undocumented immigrants, who often don’t feel like they can stand up for themselves, or request what they’re owed lawfully, because of their status.

So I think there’s a lot of misinformation about your rights as a worker that might prevent people from standing up for themselves and defending these rights, but this is part of the challenge in addressing this problem.

***

JJ: You might not guess it from coverage, but Covid-19 did not magically disappear in 2023. People continued to get sick and to die in the US and around the world. And drug companies like Pfizer continued to make hay from that sickness and death. Peter Maybarduk brought us an update in October. He’s director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines Group.

Peter Maybarduk: “Drug corporations have really been in the driver’s seat, working privately, secretly, on their own logic’s terms, of where they can make the most money.”

Peter Maybarduk: Pfizer has more than doubled the price of its Covid-19 treatment Paxlovid—nirmatrelvir plus ritonavir—to the US government from around $530 a course up to $1,390 for a list price now. And that despite the fact that Pfizer’s already made $18 billion off this drug in global sales. And they’re raising the price right at a time when it hurts most, because will, obviously, to fight and to fund pandemic response has diminished greatly, and the US government is transitioning its response to the commercial market.

So there’s very limited public resources now, in the United States and around the world, to ensure continuity of treatment. And in order to make up for the loss of volume, Pfizer has decided to increase prices, but that’s going to suppress demand further; that’s going to make it harder worldwide to access Covid treatment for people that need it.

In many ways, Covid-19 is a pandemic where prescription drug corporations have determined who receives what treatment or vaccine when, at least at a population level, at a sort of country-by-country level. And health agencies have been on the receiving end of that; they haven’t always known what price another country’s paying, they haven’t known what’s their place in line, the terms and conditions.

And, of course, global health authorities haven’t been able to effectively prioritize and indicate that we must prioritize population A, B and C, in these ratios, in order to end the pandemic as quickly as possible. Instead, drug corporations have really been in the driver’s seat, working privately, secretly, on their own logic’s terms, of where they can make the most money, or what public relations and pandemic concessions they want to make. And, unfortunately, that’s continuing here in this case.

***

JJ: Many people’s worst fears when they learned of Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel have been borne out and beyond in subsequent weeks. The moment called for context— historical, social and human. But that has been largely missing, at least in most major US media. We talked about how an absence of understanding of the present impairs our ability to move forward with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies

Phyllis Bennis: “If we’re serious about preventing acts of violence in the future…we have to be prepared to do the hard work of looking at context.”

Phyllis Bennis: Resistance, including resistance violence, never just happens out of thin air. It happens in response to something. It happens in the context of something.

And if we’re serious about preventing acts of violence in the future, understanding the acts of violence that have already occurred, we have to be prepared to do the hard work of looking at context, looking at root causes, something that at moments of crisis— which, for Israelis, this is clearly a moment of unexpected crisis, but for people in this country as well—it’s crucial that we take those hard steps to figure out what gives rise to this. Because otherwise we’re simply mouthing platitudes of condemnation.

Condemnation of violent attacks on civilians is completely appropriate. Some of the acts of some of the Hamas militants were in complete violation of international law, and should be condemned.

And it’s also true that they didn’t just happen. They happened in the context of 75 years of oppression of Palestinians, decades of an apartheid system. The lives of the people in Gaza, the 2.2 million people who live in that enclosed, open-air prison, if you will, one of the most crowded places on the face of the Earth, have lived under a state of siege that was imposed by Israel in 2007.

So all of those things have to be taken into account to understand—not to justify, not to ever justify—the killings of civilians, the killings of children and old people; unacceptable, should be condemned; and we have to understand from where that comes, why these things happen. Otherwise, we have no basis to figure out a strategy to stop the violence on all sides.

***

JJ: And as Israel’s siege of Gaza goes on, to the increasing horror and outrage in this country and around the world, some powerful figures in politics and the press have turned their sights on those who would protest the bloodshed. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens told readers that opposition to Israel’s violence was evidence that US progressives are, at bottom, antisemitic. Because if Jewish people oppose racist policing, for example, Black people should “trade back” uncritical support for the State of Israel.

It’s a cynical view of coalitional social movements, but there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be the vision that wins the day. CounterSpin heard a very different story from Sonya Meyerson-Knox, communications director at Jewish Voice for Peace.

Sonya Meyerson-Knox: “As long as there’s been the concept of a State of Israel, there have been Jews that have been leading opposition to it.” (image: Zero Hour)

Sonya Meyerson-Knox: The belief that none of us are free unless all of us are free, it’s not just a slogan. It’s absolutely, I think, the only way that any of us are going to have the future that we’re trying to build.

Look at all the polls, including the ones that are coming out right now. A majority of US voters, and the vast majority of Democratic voters, are all demanding a lasting ceasefire, and most of them want to see US military aid to the Israeli government conditioned, if not stopped entirely.

And yet none of that actually appears on the pages of the New York Times. It treats the Palestine movement, and those of us who stand for Palestinian freedom and liberation, as though we are somehow an anomaly, when in fact we are the vastly growing majority.

As long as there’s been the concept of a State of Israel, there have been Jews that have been leading opposition to it. The American Jewish population, let alone the global Jewish population, is not a monolith, and it never was and it never will be.

And that’s one of the things I think that makes the Jewish community so strong, is our long cultural and historical understanding of ourselves as a place that values debate and introspection and proving your sources, and then doubting them and challenging them and researching them, and coming back to the discussion and teasing things out, over and over again, along with, and this is especially important to the younger generation, I would argue, that are coming up now as young adults, the idea of social justice, of tikkun olam, repairing the world.

When I was growing up, as a kid, I thought being Jewish meant that my grandparents were union supporters and Communist activists, and I thought that’s what being Jewish was. And not everyone has that particular background, but so many of us have absolutely been raised to the idea that part of what it means to be a Jew and to practice Judaism, not just once a week or twice a week, but every day, constantly, is this commitment to trying to make the world a better place. And increasingly, like we’re seeing right now, that has to include Palestine, that has to include what’s happening to Palestinians.

***

JJ: That was Sonya Meyerson-Knox. Before her you heard Phyllis Bennis, Peter Maybarduk, Rodrigo Camarena, Kehsi Iman Wilson, Emily Sanders, Kamau Franklin and Paul Hudson.

And that’s it for The best of CounterSpin for 2023 is only a sample of the valuable conversations it’s been our pleasure to host this year.CounterSpin is produced by the media watch group FAIR, and you can find decades of CounterSpin shows and transcripts at FAIR.org. The show is engineered by Reilly Bair and the one and only Alex Noyes. I’m Janine Jackson. Thank you for listening to CounterSpin.

The post ‘We Have to Do the Hard Work of Looking at Context’<br></em><span style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1em; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>Transcript of The Best of CounterSpin 2023 appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

This is a lightly edited transcript of “The Best of CounterSpin 2023,” originally aired on December 29, 2023.

Janine Jackson: Every week, CounterSpin tries to bring you a look behind the headlines of the mainstream news—not because headlines are false, necessarily, but because the full story is rarely reflected there. The voices, the communities, the ideas that are not front and center in the discourse of the powerful, but could help us move toward a more equitable, peaceful, healthy communal life.

Many—most—conversations we need to have, have to happen around corporate news media, while deconstructing and re-imagining the discourse that they’re pumping out day after day.

CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They all help us see the world and one another more clearly, give us tools to make a better future, and offer other resources once we understand that we can’t believe everything we read.

You’re listening to the Best of CounterSpin for 2023, brought to you by the media watch group FAIR.

***

Just about a year ago, lots of people were traveling, or trying to, on holiday and vacation trips. Thousands of them found themselves stranded in airports, their flights canceled, their luggage who knows where, and airlines utterly unresponsive to their complaints. Beyond chaotic, it was confusing in a country where the rhetoric is all about the customer being king, and getting what you pay for. In January 2023, CounterSpin spoke with Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights, a nonprofit that organizes the consumer rights of airline passengers.

Paul Hudson: “The airlines, unfortunately, are only incidentally in the transportation business. They’re primarily, especially their executives, in the business of making money.”

Paul Hudson: The intention of the PPP programs and some other bailouts of the airlines, which altogether involved about $90 billion, was that you would keep the staff on the payroll so they would be ready when pandemic ended to restore traffic, and they wouldn’t have to go from a cold start.

But the airlines, unfortunately, are only incidentally in the transportation business. They’re primarily, especially their executives, in the business of making money. If that meant reducing their payroll through other means, that got around the intention of the law—and there was no real oversight by the federal government on money—that’s what they did.

And they continued to pay, in some cases, dividends. They paid large bonuses to CEOs and top executives. Some of them also did stock buybacks to keep their stock price up, while their profits, of course, were dwindling to nothing.

The reforms that we’ve been promoting pretty much have been ignored by DoT, which is the only regulator of the airline industry. And, as a result, things have gotten worse and worse.

For example, you would think there would be some requirement to have a certain level of backup or reserve capacity, for personnel as well as equipment. But there is none. There is no requirement, and some airlines actually have negative reserves. So even on their best day, they cancel 1 or 2 percent of their fights. It’s profitable to do that.

Another example is that there is no requirement that they maintain any level of customer service. Each airline sets their own goals about that, but there’s no enforcement. And they just say, “Well, I’m sorry.” They don’t answer your phones. They don’t have the personnel to do it.

And the area that’s most crucial, which is pilots: We have a shortage of pilots. Pretty much everyone agrees with that; except perhaps the pilot union, that wants to leverage the situation, says there is no shortage. But the airlines are simply not recruiting the pilots they need, and haven’t done so for years, especially for regional airlines. They don’t pay them nearly enough.

And the proposals that FlyersRights made, going back to June of this year, about 17 of them, have pretty much been ignored by DoT, at least until recently.

***

JJ: In a year that called for and saw a great deal of organized protest, one focal point was Cop City, a militarized police training complex being built on Atlanta’s South River Forest, over and against community opposition. An environmental activist known as Tortuguita was killed in a hail of police bullets, while, as an independently ordered autopsy revealed, they sat cross-legged with their hands up.

Kamau Franklin is founder of the national grassroots organization Community Movement Builders, and co-host of the podcast Renegade Culture. We talked about Cop City with him in March, starting with the history of the land itself.

Kamau Franklin: “This is a city that doubled down on police violence and police militarization after these uprisings.”

Kamau Franklin: That land, in terms of it being a forest before the invention of Cop City, was promised to the adjacent community, which is 70% Black, as a recreational and park area, particularly as the land reforested itself over time. Park areas where there were supposed to be nature trails, hiking available, parks available.

And when the idea of Cop City arose, from the Atlanta Police Department, the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation, all of those plans were scrapped immediately, without any input from that adjoining community. And instead they decided to move forward with this idea of Cop City.

This is a perfect illustration of how the state, vis-a-vis the city, the state government and even, in some ways, the federal government, operate in tandem. And a lot of times, most of the time, it doesn’t matter what party they are, but operate in tandem at the whim of capital, and at the whim of a, relatively speaking, right-wing ideological outlook.

And, again, it doesn’t matter which party it is we’re talking about. It doesn’t matter whether or not those folks are Black or white, but an ideological outlook that says overpolicing in Black and brown communities is the answer to every problem.

And so here in particular, you talked about the process. This process of developing Cop City came after the 2020 uprisings against police violence, the 2020 uprisings that were national in scope, that started after Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and, here in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks were killed by the police, and it caused a massive uprising and movement across the nation again.

The response by the authorities here in Atlanta was to push through their plans on building Cop City, to double down on their efforts, again, to continue the overpolicing of Black communities, particularly here in Atlanta.

Atlanta is a city that is gentrifying at an astronomical rate. It’s gone from a 60% Black city to one that’s less than 50% in only a matter of 20, 30 years, all of that under Black leadership.

It’s a city that, in terms of those who are arrested, 90% of those who are arrested in Atlanta by the police are Black people; its jails are filled with Black people.

And so this is a city that doubled down on police violence and police militarization after these uprisings.

***

JJ: If baristas on strike were surprising, Hollywood writers on strike were downright shocking for those who vaguely imagine that these are dream jobs for which the only appropriate response is  “thank you.” We got a window on a world of people who are, at the end of the day, workers, from Eric Thurm, campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. He wrote an informative piece on the historic writers and actors strike for GQ. One topic we touched on was AI—not the science-y, techno aspect of it, but the power part.

Eric Thurm: “Every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out.”

Eric Thurm: Technology has been a source of struggle for decades, in particularly the Writers Guild contracts. Because, essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out, which I suspect a lot of people will be intimately familiar with. This is the business model of some of the biggest companies and most worker-hostile companies in the world.

And that dates back to when home video emerged, or when DVD box sets emerged. And part of the reason that streaming pays so little is that it was new the last time that the writers went on strike in 2007, and they agreed to have it be covered by the minimum basic agreement, but not as fully as, like, a TV network.

And so, of course, the companies exploited that as much as possible. And on some level, it’s hard to blame them, at least in the sense that the purpose of the company is to take as much value out of the workers as it can.

And this is what people are referring to when they say that the studios are really trying, as much as possible, to turn writing, but also acting, and all of the other myriad jobs that go into making entertainment that people watch, into gig work, into stuff where you just have no say in your work, and are told by this unfeeling algorithm, or app or whatever it is, what you are and are not supposed to do.

And in the context of what people like to call AI, beyond the fact that the issue with a lot of these programs is that they are trained on a lot of other people’s work—I saw someone recently describe it as, “This is just a plagiarism machine,” which I think is a very accurate description. Even in cases where it does something interesting, you can use it as a smoke screen to avoid having to credit the people that created something.

I think that’s something that we are going to see the studios try more and more, even without necessarily having AI be involved.

***

JJ: Corporate journalists still invoke, and many people still believe in, a vision of an intrepid, independent press corps that is speaking truth to power. The sad extent to which that is not true was spotlighted painfully in June, when CNBC‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin hosted a chummy interview with Chevron CEO Mike Wirth. CounterSpin heard from Emily Sanders, editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity and founder of ExxonKnews, who saw it as emblematic of a larger—and, let’s acknowledge, historically environmentally devastating—media failure.

Emily Sanders: “The fossil fuel industry has a long history of investing in the media in order to manipulate the conversation about our reliance on oil and gas.”

Emily Sanders: Mainstream media have had a very hard time connecting climate change to oil companies, and their decades of pollution and deception about the harms caused by fossil fuels.

And when you see coverage of deadly heat waves and wildfire smoke, for instance, there’s often no mention of things like how the major oil companies are still spending millions every year lobbying to delay the transition to renewable energy, or how Chevron, the world’s most-polluting investor-owned oil company, is currently pouring even more money into increased fossil fuel extraction and production, after making record profits last year.

So it’s also not a coincidence that mainstream media is so far behind on this. The fossil fuel industry has a long history of investing in the media in order to manipulate the conversation about our reliance on oil and gas, what needs to be done about it and what the obstacles really are to addressing climate change.

And that goes back to at least the ’80s and ’90s, when oil companies began placing ads and advertorials, or ads disguised as news editorials, in major outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, that downplayed the reality of climate change.

And even today, as we learned from last year’s congressional investigations and hearings into the industry’s disinformation, companies like Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell are still running advertisements that look like articles in the country’s biggest news outlets, promoting things like algae and so-called natural gas as climate solutions. So they’ve really used the veil of journalistic credibility to help disguise their misleading and deceptive advertising for quite a while.

And we’re seeing that, not just with advertising, but with some reporters themselves still failing to name the source of climate inaction, and still unable or unwilling to recognize and call out disinformation, sometimes even parroting fossil fuel industry framing about how we can’t move off oil too quickly, or how Big Oil is working on ways to solve climate change, despite that they’re causing it, without actually challenging those misconceptions.

***

JJ: August 2023 saw the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And Joe Biden, while acknowledging that disabled people still face discrimination, led with the sort of rhetoric that politicians and news media generally use, claiming that it’s

hard for younger generations to imagine a world without the ADA, but before it existed, if you were disabled, stores could turn you away and employers could refuse to hire you. Transit was largely inaccessible.

That rang weirdly out of touch to many, including our guest, Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder and chief operating officer of New Disabled South.

Kehsi Iman Wilson: “In no social movement is a victory, whether minor or major, an indicator that there need be no additional social movement.”

Kehsi Iman Wilson: In no social movement is a victory, whether minor or major, an indicator that there need be no additional social movement—or political movement, for that matter.

And when we’re talking about disability—disability rights, disability access, certainly disability justice—so much of the real, lived experience of disabled people contradicts a lot of President Biden’s opening statements.

For example, when you talk about “couldn’t imagine a world where there was inaccessible public transit”—there’s still inaccessible public transit for the majority of disabled people. And unless you’re in the privileged few who can afford paratransit services, where they’re accessible where you live, things even as basic as access to sidewalks is still a major issue.

We’re dealing with so many infrastructure issues in this country, and, as we know, any issue doubly or triply impacts disabled people.

We’ve seen, and we continue to see, a spate of laws being passed across counties, across states, making it more difficult to access the ballot box—for example, getting rid of drop boxes, ballot boxes. But when you do that, you are not only disenfranchising, effectively, large portions of people of color, of people who live in rural areas, but disabled people. And that’s not talked about.

***

JJ: Media like the Washington Post got the positive vapors this year about the scourge of “organized retail crime.” The Post called for an aggressive federal crackdown on people stealing from grocery stores, etc., even after the National Retail Federation acknowledged that the data they had put out about the impact of such theft was bogus.

If elite media cared about theft, of course, they’d be tracking a different story: companies stealing straight out of the paychecks of employees struggling to make ends meet. We talked about wage theft this fall with Rodrigo Camarena, director of Justicia Lab and Co-creator of ¡Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat the problem.

Rodrigo Camarena: “In some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage.”

Rodrigo Camarena: Wage theft is so common and so ubiquitous that we don’t really consider it in our day-to-day lives. But, like you mentioned, it’s this huge problem. It’s actually the largest form of theft, when you compare it to burglaries, armed robberies, motor vehicle thefts combined.

And it happens whenever a worker is deprived of the wages that they’re owed lawfully. So that could mean not being paid a minimum wage, not being paid overtime, having deductions from someone’s paycheck made, or just not paying someone; they show up at the job one day and the person that hired them isn’t there anymore. Failing to honor sick leave or other benefits is another form of wage theft.

In some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage. And it’s a problem that disproportionately impacts low-wage workers, women and immigrants, and in particular undocumented immigrants, who often don’t feel like they can stand up for themselves, or request what they’re owed lawfully, because of their status.

So I think there’s a lot of misinformation about your rights as a worker that might prevent people from standing up for themselves and defending these rights, but this is part of the challenge in addressing this problem.

***

JJ: You might not guess it from coverage, but Covid-19 did not magically disappear in 2023. People continued to get sick and to die in the US and around the world. And drug companies like Pfizer continued to make hay from that sickness and death. Peter Maybarduk brought us an update in October. He’s director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines Group.

Peter Maybarduk: “Drug corporations have really been in the driver’s seat, working privately, secretly, on their own logic’s terms, of where they can make the most money.”

Peter Maybarduk: Pfizer has more than doubled the price of its Covid-19 treatment Paxlovid—nirmatrelvir plus ritonavir—to the US government from around $530 a course up to $1,390 for a list price now. And that despite the fact that Pfizer’s already made $18 billion off this drug in global sales. And they’re raising the price right at a time when it hurts most, because will, obviously, to fight and to fund pandemic response has diminished greatly, and the US government is transitioning its response to the commercial market.

So there’s very limited public resources now, in the United States and around the world, to ensure continuity of treatment. And in order to make up for the loss of volume, Pfizer has decided to increase prices, but that’s going to suppress demand further; that’s going to make it harder worldwide to access Covid treatment for people that need it.

In many ways, Covid-19 is a pandemic where prescription drug corporations have determined who receives what treatment or vaccine when, at least at a population level, at a sort of country-by-country level. And health agencies have been on the receiving end of that; they haven’t always known what price another country’s paying, they haven’t known what’s their place in line, the terms and conditions.

And, of course, global health authorities haven’t been able to effectively prioritize and indicate that we must prioritize population A, B and C, in these ratios, in order to end the pandemic as quickly as possible. Instead, drug corporations have really been in the driver’s seat, working privately, secretly, on their own logic’s terms, of where they can make the most money, or what public relations and pandemic concessions they want to make. And, unfortunately, that’s continuing here in this case.

***

JJ: Many people’s worst fears when they learned of Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel have been borne out and beyond in subsequent weeks. The moment called for context— historical, social and human. But that has been largely missing, at least in most major US media. We talked about how an absence of understanding of the present impairs our ability to move forward with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies

Phyllis Bennis: “If we’re serious about preventing acts of violence in the future…we have to be prepared to do the hard work of looking at context.”

Phyllis Bennis: Resistance, including resistance violence, never just happens out of thin air. It happens in response to something. It happens in the context of something.

And if we’re serious about preventing acts of violence in the future, understanding the acts of violence that have already occurred, we have to be prepared to do the hard work of looking at context, looking at root causes, something that at moments of crisis— which, for Israelis, this is clearly a moment of unexpected crisis, but for people in this country as well—it’s crucial that we take those hard steps to figure out what gives rise to this. Because otherwise we’re simply mouthing platitudes of condemnation.

Condemnation of violent attacks on civilians is completely appropriate. Some of the acts of some of the Hamas militants were in complete violation of international law, and should be condemned.

And it’s also true that they didn’t just happen. They happened in the context of 75 years of oppression of Palestinians, decades of an apartheid system. The lives of the people in Gaza, the 2.2 million people who live in that enclosed, open-air prison, if you will, one of the most crowded places on the face of the Earth, have lived under a state of siege that was imposed by Israel in 2007.

So all of those things have to be taken into account to understand—not to justify, not to ever justify—the killings of civilians, the killings of children and old people; unacceptable, should be condemned; and we have to understand from where that comes, why these things happen. Otherwise, we have no basis to figure out a strategy to stop the violence on all sides.

***

JJ: And as Israel’s siege of Gaza goes on, to the increasing horror and outrage in this country and around the world, some powerful figures in politics and the press have turned their sights on those who would protest the bloodshed. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens told readers that opposition to Israel’s violence was evidence that US progressives are, at bottom, antisemitic. Because if Jewish people oppose racist policing, for example, Black people should “trade back” uncritical support for the State of Israel.

It’s a cynical view of coalitional social movements, but there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be the vision that wins the day. CounterSpin heard a very different story from Sonya Meyerson-Knox, communications director at Jewish Voice for Peace.

Sonya Meyerson-Knox: “As long as there’s been the concept of a State of Israel, there have been Jews that have been leading opposition to it.” (image: Zero Hour)

Sonya Meyerson-Knox: The belief that none of us are free unless all of us are free, it’s not just a slogan. It’s absolutely, I think, the only way that any of us are going to have the future that we’re trying to build.

Look at all the polls, including the ones that are coming out right now. A majority of US voters, and the vast majority of Democratic voters, are all demanding a lasting ceasefire, and most of them want to see US military aid to the Israeli government conditioned, if not stopped entirely.

And yet none of that actually appears on the pages of the New York Times. It treats the Palestine movement, and those of us who stand for Palestinian freedom and liberation, as though we are somehow an anomaly, when in fact we are the vastly growing majority.

As long as there’s been the concept of a State of Israel, there have been Jews that have been leading opposition to it. The American Jewish population, let alone the global Jewish population, is not a monolith, and it never was and it never will be.

And that’s one of the things I think that makes the Jewish community so strong, is our long cultural and historical understanding of ourselves as a place that values debate and introspection and proving your sources, and then doubting them and challenging them and researching them, and coming back to the discussion and teasing things out, over and over again, along with, and this is especially important to the younger generation, I would argue, that are coming up now as young adults, the idea of social justice, of tikkun olam, repairing the world.

When I was growing up, as a kid, I thought being Jewish meant that my grandparents were union supporters and Communist activists, and I thought that’s what being Jewish was. And not everyone has that particular background, but so many of us have absolutely been raised to the idea that part of what it means to be a Jew and to practice Judaism, not just once a week or twice a week, but every day, constantly, is this commitment to trying to make the world a better place. And increasingly, like we’re seeing right now, that has to include Palestine, that has to include what’s happening to Palestinians.

***

JJ: That was Sonya Meyerson-Knox. Before her you heard Phyllis Bennis, Peter Maybarduk, Rodrigo Camarena, Kehsi Iman Wilson, Emily Sanders, Kamau Franklin and Paul Hudson.

And that’s it for The best of CounterSpin for 2023 is only a sample of the valuable conversations it’s been our pleasure to host this year.CounterSpin is produced by the media watch group FAIR, and you can find decades of CounterSpin shows and transcripts at FAIR.org. The show is engineered by Reilly Bair and the one and only Alex Noyes. I’m Janine Jackson. Thank you for listening to CounterSpin.

The post ‘We Have to Do the Hard Work of Looking at Context’<br></em><span style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1em; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>Transcript of The Best of CounterSpin 2023 appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Janine Jackson interviewed New Disabled South’s Kehsi Iman Wilson about the Americans with Disabilities Act for the August 25, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Washington Post (8/19/23)

Janine Jackson: July 26 marked the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The 1990 law intended “to provide clear, strong, consistent, enforceable standards addressing discrimination” against individuals with disabilities.

The occasion connected with some serious, multi-layered stories, including news of a critical ruling that the state of Florida has been violating the rights of children with complex medical needs by keeping them institutionalized when they could be living in community.

A sizable admixture of stories, though, were reports on buildings or spaces coming into compliance with the ADA—as though complying with a 33-year-old law was a feel-good story, and despite a relative absence of feel-bad stories about decades of noncompliance.

But more, what is lost when the public conversation around disability justice revolves around the ins and outs of abiding by law, rather than a bigger, deeper vision of a world we can all live in?

Kehsi Iman Wilson is co-founder and chief operating officer of New Disabled South. She joins us now by phone from Tampa, Florida. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kehsi Iman Wilson.

Kehsi Iman Wilson: Thanks so much for having me, Janine.

JJ: In his official proclamation around the ADA’s anniversary, Joe Biden said the sort of thing politicians say:

It is hard for younger generations to imagine a world without the ADA, but before it existed, if you were disabled, stores could turn you away and employers could refuse to hire you. Transit was largely inaccessible.

Now, he goes on to note ways that disabled people are still discriminated against, but that lead, that opening, reflects the way many media, certainly, talk about the ADA, that it was sort of night-to-day, and now we just need to incrementally build on it.

In These Times (7/28/23)

But it doesn’t require undermining the work that went into the ADA to suggest, as you do in a recent piece for In These Times, that that is maybe just not the most useful way of thinking about that act.

KIW: It’s the same to me, it‘s as ridiculous as the frame we hear, like, “Oh, because we had a Black president in Barack Obama, somehow we’re in a post-racial society,” or “racism is over.”

In no social movement is a victory, whether minor or major, an indicator that there need be no additional social movement—or political movement, for that matter.

And when we’re talking about disability—disability rights, disability access, certainly disability justice—so much of the real, lived experience of disabled people contradicts a lot of President Biden’s opening statements.

For example, when you talk about “couldn’t imagine a world where there was inaccessible public transit”—there’s still inaccessible public transit for the majority of disabled people. And unless you can afford, you’re in the privileged few who can afford, paratransit services where they’re accessible, where you live, things even as basic as access to sidewalks is still a major issue.

We’re dealing with so many infrastructure issues in this country, and as we know, any issue doubly or triply impacts disabled people.

JJ: Well, what did the ADA do?

KIW: I’ll attempt my best brief answer of that, but as the title of my piece for In These Times stated, the ADA is the floor, not the ceiling. Similar to the Civil Rights Act, similar to the Voting Rights Act, it got the issue on the map, whereas before—one thing that’s a little bit more accurate in President Biden’s remarks—yes, it was not codified in law, anti-discrimination.

But as most regular citizens, I think, and certainly those of us who are directly impacted by any of the laws I just named, or any law for that matter, law has to be enforced, right? Law is only as good as the enforcement of the law, as the awareness of the law.

Truthout (2/20/23)

We’re still fighting battles across this country as it relates to the physical accessibility of buildings and spaces. So to answer the question briefly, again, it’s a starting point. It’s a good step, a huge step—not to discredit any of the work that went into getting this law passed—but it’s a starting point.

And the hope and dream was never that that be the end of the road, but that we would continue working as a country on materially improving the lives of disabled people day to day. And, unfortunately, a lot of that work is just not happening.

JJ: In terms of one of the many things that exist to be changed, that the law has not changed, I was shocked to learn that something as—I mean, I guess I wasn’t surprised—but that polling places, which are often in schools or older buildings, but the idea that the inaccessibility of places to vote was not a major issue, that that was sort of an afterthought for media.

And it’s kind of like, “Yeah, sure, you have the right to vote. You just can’t exercise it.” That seems to be one of the many undercovered or underexplored aspects here.

KIW: Oh my gosh, we could talk for hours about this. And my partner and co-founder Dom, he is really an expert when it comes to navigating the political realities and inaccessibility of voting.

But because of what you’ve named, this is a key part of our work at New Disabled South and New Disabled South Rising. Our (c)(4) arm is working to change media narratives around disabled people: Disabled people want to vote, have a right to vote and should be allowed to vote.

New York Times (11/8/22)

We’ve seen, and we continue to see, a spate of laws being passed across counties, across states, making it more difficult to access the ballot box. And we know things like—for example, getting rid of drop boxes, ballot boxes. I could spew off some statistics, but I’ll save that for another time. But when you do that, you are not only disenfranchising, effectively, large portions of people of color, of people who live in rural areas, but disabled people. And that’s not talked about.

And so for this reason, one of the key bodies of work that we are focusing on is passing  disabled voter bills of rights in five states over the next five years. We want things like a guaranteed minimum number of accessible voting machines at every polling place. We want things like the right to turn in a completed absentee ballot at any polling location, or to be able to mail it in without having to purchase a stamp.

These things sound very basic in conversation, like the one you and I are having, but when you have laws that have been passed to criminalize some of these things, literally making it a felony, it effectively continues to disenfranchise disabled people.

And we’re not even yet talking about the very real barriers of transportation, being able to read materials and make sure they’re in a plain language and in a way that we can understand. So things like the right to assistance with voting, and more.

JJ: And it always is shocking to me that, even to the extent that journalists might say, “Oh yes, these polling places are inaccessible,” I don’t see the corollary piece where they say: “What happens when we don’t have the voices of disabled people in the vote? What does it mean to disenfranchise an entire community?” Which, as you are saying, is an intersectional community.

So it’s almost like it’s just a story about access, about curb cuts, and not about the political and social and economic and all of the impacts that come from cutting off the franchise.

KIW: Absolutely. And that’s why we can’t stop at conversations like law, or the ADA. We have to expand the conversation to address the intersecting realities and the intersecting barriers that disabled people are facing across this country.

Going into this next election year, we are poised to do some very powerful work. And first among that is letting people know, and this goes for progressive media outlets, progressive organizations, and of course folks on the other side alike, that disabled people are a voting bloc. We are engaged in politics and the issues that directly affect us.

And part of our work at New Disabled South is making sure that our community is educated about the policies, the laws, all of the things that are impacting us in our lived experiences day-to-day, and sharing information, power and resources so that we can continue to organize ourselves in increasingly effective ways, so that our voices can be heard and we can start to see real change.

JJ: I’m going to bring you back to media coverage in just a second, but I just wanted to say, the group is New Disabled South. The South is home to not just decades’ worth, but much present-day critical, deep, important organizing. And I wonder if you could speak for a moment about the particular meaning of the regionality of what you’re doing.

States that haven’t expanded Medicaid (Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 3/3/23)

KIW: We know that many of this country’s disabled people are concentrated in the South, but we also know that the reality, when we talk about policies, laws, culture that is harmful to disabled people, a lot of that is concentrated in the South. A majority of states that have yet to expand Medicaid coverage, for example, are in the South.

And so the South has this unfortunate stigma, stereotype and reality of being a place that’s less progressive, less quick to move.

But I want to be clear, this is not because of the people in the South, right, that we are any less committed to progressive change. On the contrary, we know, with the South being the cradle of the civil rights movement, the birthplace of civil rights, and so much of the change we’ve seen in this country originating in the South, we have to do a better job of changing the narrative, and also the accountability piece.

And that is why we’re doing our work. We decided we’re all from the South, of the South, and this is a home for us. Dom and I both have concentrated our political work, organizing work, advocacy work on Southern communities.

Kehsi Iman Wilson: “If you’re talking about social justice issues, progressive issues, political issues, you need to be centering disability justice.”

And we know that there’s immense power here. And part of what we’re working to do is eliminate the barriers to mobilizing people who are equally as passionate about these issues, so that, again, as I said, we can start to see real change.

And we’re not willing to wait another 10 years for it. We want that change in our lifetime. We need that change now. People are literally perishing every day in the face of these laws and policies.

As you mentioned at the introduction, kids are languishing in nursing homes, in institutions. These are real live issues that are happening across the South every single day, and we are here to help mobilize our community, policymakers, change makers, especially those in progressive space, to know if you’re talking about social justice issues, progressive issues, political issues, you need to be centering disability justice as part of that conversation.

JJ: And we know that, first of all, it’s not just a matter, in terms of journalists, of media doing more stories that are centered on disabled people; it’s about finding the disabled people who are already in every story that you’re doing, right?

KIW: Love that.

JJ: You’re talking about police violence, you’re talking about voting, you’re talking about housing. All of that is a disability rights story. So thoughts about media coverage?

KIW: Yeah, I think you’ve said some great things, it’s a real call to action. One of our funders is New Media Ventures, and early on, we spoke about centering a focus to change media narratives.

So much of what is covered, when it comes to disabled people, the frame is one of fear or pity, which is also why we focus on disability justice and not simply disability rights, or even advocacy, which often centers a medical model, and what we call inspiration porn.

American Progress (2/10/21)

Disabled people are whole people, and we need to see the media focusing on stories that address that reality. And like you said, and I’ve never heard it said that way before, so I’m going to steal it, but it’s a matter of finding the disabled people who are already in the stories.

Nearly half of people killed by police in the United States have a disability. When you talk about the reform of the criminal/industrial complex, the prison/industrial complex, how often are we centering the lived experiences of the reality of the disabled people in those stories? Very rarely.

Which is why when I name statistics like that, or the fact that 55% of Black disabled men have been arrested at least once by the time they’re 28, people ooh and aw, like, “Wow, I had no idea.”

And I could go on, of course, right? And so it’s a matter of, again, shining a light on the fact that disabled people are people, and we exist as part of every community that is at discussion in any story that needs to be covered.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, I also wanted to say, as we both know so many stories, for example, are about the difficulties of complying with the ADA, and then there’s the whole other layer of stories about the greedy lawyers who are fighting for compliance just to shake down small business owners.

And we do see stories about the harms of inaccessibility, but what I want to say is, I feel like we virtually never hear about the beauty of universal access, the positive vision of what a world could look like.

It’s all like a fight between disabled people who want access and businesses, “Oh my god, it costs a lot to provide access.”

Where’s the vision? Where’s the vision of a world that could include all of us, if that’s not too big a question for you?

Mother Jones (11/4/13)

KIW: Oh, gosh, that’s a big question. But yeah, what you speak to is a lack of imagination that plagues the effectiveness of many of our movements. We create these false dichotomies, these binaries, these either/ors, and we don’t come to the table with the view of collective liberation, quite frankly, of what is possible.

And the reality’s that if it’s good for disabled people, it’s good for everybody. Not commodifying human bodies and extracting labor and disabling people in warehouse conditions—to avoid naming any particular companies that are some of the largest employers in America—that is beneficial for everybody.

And it speaks, also, to the type of work that you all do at FAIR.org; we know that we need reform, for lack of a better word, in terms of the media, because so much of what is covered is the negative, is the fight, is the drama, instead of shining a light on the progress, and, like you said, how is this beneficial for everybody?

And that is how we create buy-in. So getting the media and progressive media outlets, folks who have the power to tell the story, to shift the narrative, to focus more on the ways in which accessibility is beneficial for all of us, not just disabled people, not coming from a framework of pity or inspiration, or even from a moral or ethical, you know, the hearts-and-minds approach.

It’s common-sense good policy, and it’s the foundation of democracy. And I think we need to be talking more about those things.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder and COO of New Disabled South, online at NewDisabledSouth.org. Her piece, “The ADA Is the Floor, Not the Ceiling—We Need More” can also be found at InTheseTimes.com. Thank you so much, Kehsi Iman Wilson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KIW: Thank you, Janine. It’s been an honor.

The post ‘Disabled People Are Whole People; We Need to See Media Address That Reality’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

(image: New Disabled South)

This week on CounterSpin: “We’ve come a long way but there’s a long way to go” is a familiar, facile framing that robs urgency from fights for justice. It’s the frame that tends to dominate annual journalistic acknowledgement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed 33 years ago in late July.

Like Black history month, the ADA anniversary is a peg—an opportunity for journalists to offer information and insight on issues they might not have felt there was space for throughout the year. As depressing as that is, media coverage of the date often doesn’t even rise to the occasion. You wouldn’t guess from elite media’s afterthought approach that some 1 in 4 people in this country have some type of disability, or that it’s one group that any of us could join at any moment.

Likewise, you might not understand that the ADA didn’t call for curb cuts at every corner, but for an end to “persistent discrimination in such critical areas as: employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting and access to public services.” Nothing less than the maximal integration of disabled people into community and political life—you know, like people.

And if that’s the story, it’s clear that it demands all kinds of attention, every day—not a once a year pat on the back about “how far we’ve come.”

We talk about some of all of that with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder and chief operating officer of New Disabled South.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Maui fires and the climate crisis.

The post Kehsi Iman Wilson on Americans with Disability Act appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

• News

Know Your RIghts: What To Do If You Have A Disability and Are Questioned By Police

Understanding and asserting the rights of people with disabilities during police interrogations is paramount to ensuring their fair treatment and safeguarding their well-being.

07.31.23 By Meghan Nguyen

(Image: Nguyen Minh/Unsplash)

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The post Know Your RIghts: What To Do If You Have A Disability and Are Questioned By Police appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Meghan Nguyen.

• News

8 Ways People With Disabilities Can Be Vulnerable To Wrongful Conviction

For Disability Pride Month, we're taking a look at how people with disabilities can face unique challenges that hinder their ability to effectively participate in the criminal legal system.

07.31.23 By Meghan Nguyen

(Image: Tim Mossholder/Unsplash)

Pervis Payne, who has an intellectual disability, spent 33 years on Tennessee’s death row. (Image: Courtesy of PervisPayne.Org)

5. Prejudice and bias

Disabled individuals can be subject to societal prejudice, leading to unfair treatment and bias from judges, jurors, or other legal professionals. Jurors and witnesses might unconsciously rely on stereotypes and misconceptions about people with disabilities, influencing their perception of the defendant’s guilt or innocence

Pervis Payne has maintained his innocence for more than three decades on death row for murder. Because of his disability, Mr. Payne was not able to fully participate in his defense and was not a strong witness on his own behalf. Additionally, the prosecution’s case against him exploited his intellectual disability and relied on racist stereotypes of Black men to paint a portrait of Mr. Payne as a dangerous and hypersexualized drug user. In 2021, Mr. Payne was officially removed from death row following the Shelby County district attorney’s concession that he is a person with an intellectual disability and therefore cannot be executed.

6. Inadequate accommodations

The criminal justice system might not always provide the necessary accommodations, such as accessible facilities, sign language interpreters, or assistive technologies, to ensure a fair trial for people with disabilities.

Pervis Payne, who has an intellectual disability, spent 33 years on Tennessee’s death row. (Image: Courtesy of PervisPayne.Org)

Sandra Hemme was wrongly convicted after police exploited her mental illness and coerced her into making false statements while she was sedated and receiving treatment for hallucinatory episodes. (Image: Courtesy of the Hemme family)

7. Memory and perception issues

Certain disabilities can impact memory and perception, making it harder for the individual to recall details accurately or provide a coherent account of events, leading to inconsistencies in their testimony.

Sandra Hemme has spent the last 42 years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit, making her the longest-known wrongly convicted woman. Ms. Hemme was a psychiatric patient receiving treatment for auditory hallucinations, derealization, and drug misuse when she was targeted by police. She had spent the majority of her life starting at age 12 in inpatient psychiatric treatment.

Ms. Hemme was repeatedly interviewed by police under extremely coercive circumstances. Police conducted hours-long interviews with Ms. Hemme while she was in the hospital.  At several points, she was so heavily medicated that she was unable to even hold her head up and was restrained and strapped to a chair. Over the course of these coercive interrogations, Ms. Hemme’s statements conflicted with the known facts of the crime and were internally inconsistent.

8. Burden of proof

Some states rely on arcane and unscientific standards for determining and defining intellectual disability, making it difficult for individuals with these disabilities to prove that they even have one. For instance, there are states that appoint people without the requisite expertise to conduct the “assessment” and make the “diagnosis” of intellectual disability.

At least 12 states define intellectual disability as having an IQ of 70 or lower, even though many experts consider IQ scores alone to be a blunt and highly fallible method of measuring ability. And the burden of proof required to prevail on a claim of intellectual disability varies by state. Indiana, for example, requires clear and convincing evidence. In Missouri, there only needs to be a preponderance of evidence. This means that often, geography, not science, will determine whether or not a person is found to be intellectually disabled.

To address these vulnerabilities and ensure the fair treatment of those with disabilities, those in the legal system need to be proactive in providing appropriate accommodations and understanding the unique needs of individuals with disabilities during investigations, trials, and the entire criminal justice process. This includes the training of law enforcement, lawyers, judges, and jurors to be more aware of disability-related issues and biases that might impact their decision-making.

Sandra Hemme was wrongly convicted after police exploited her mental illness and coerced her into making false statements while she was sedated and receiving treatment for hallucinatory episodes. (Image: Courtesy of the Hemme family)

Tagged

death penaltydisabilitydisability pride monthfalse confessionintellectual disabilitywrongful conviction

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The post 8 Ways People With Disabilities Can Be Vulnerable To Wrongful Conviction appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Meghan Nguyen.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative’s Kim Knackstedt about disability policy for the March 10, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Human rights advocates everywhere marked the death, March 5, of groundbreaking disability justice activist, spokesperson and policymaker Judy Heumann.

Obituaries rightfully noted meaningful advances Heumann played a role in, like the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Washington Post (3/6/23)

It rang a bit odd though to read in the Washington Post that Heumann, born in 1947, “came of age at a time when disabled people had restricted access to libraries, schools and public transportation, with limited opportunities for education or employment.”

Perhaps the outpouring of attention for Heumann’s life and work could encourage journalists to explore present-day restrictions, limitations, crises, confronted by people with disabilities—one in four adults in the country—along with what responses, including policy responses, are called for.

Kim Knackstedt is senior fellow at the Century Foundation and director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kim Knackstedt.

Kim Knackstedt: Hi. I’m glad to be with everyone today.

JJ: Well, I’m not making fun of that piece. But I was just struck by that “cast your mind back, if you can, to a time when disabled people didn’t enjoy all the freedoms…”

I guess my thought, just to start us off, is that. But also, Judy Heumann was emphatically not of the “wait patiently and progress will inevitably come” school of thinking, was she?

KK: Oh, no, no, not at all. Judy was definitely one to fight for what she wanted, and she was fiery. One of the words she loved to use was “feisty.” And she really went after what she knew was wrong.

And during her services yesterday—I was very lucky to attend and be in community with so many people from around the country, and by video, around the world—we got to hear so many stories about her, and every story had a note about her fighting for the rights of disabled people, and against the injustices that so many of us face.

Time (9/19/22)

JJ: And still face. And this is of course what I’m complaining about here, the treatment of disabled people as an afterthought in policy, in media, which I know is what you engage.

And it’s weird, given not only that so many people in the country are living with disabilities of varying kinds, but also because it’s a community that anyone can join at any moment. And, indeed, I’ve heard Covid described as a “mass disabling event.”

And I wanted to ask you, what is Covid showing us about policy responsiveness, about movement responsiveness? What are some of the impacts when the disabled community grows, as it were, suddenly in this way?

KK: I appreciate you pointing out that anyone can become disabled at any time, because that is part of what I think the US economy is actually facing right now, with the growth of the disability community in a very abrupt way because of Covid.

And we do have the largest influx of the community that we’ve seen in many, many years, and that has really caused the workforce to try to make an adjustment. And that adjustment’s been slow, it’s been difficult, because we have so many people that now cannot do the job that they used to do because of long Covid. And that is extremely difficult, not only for the entire, again, US economy, but for that person.

We’ve had some great pieces, actually, through one of the projects at the Century Foundation, called the Voices of Disability Economic Justice project, with people talking about this, and what it means to become disabled because of long Covid, and not be able to do the things you used to be able to do so easily every day.

Our policies have not changed fast enough to be able to support everyone. That includes our healthcare policies. That includes, now, our education policies. And it includes, again, those workforce policies and accommodations that people need.

Washington Post (7/23/22)

JJ: There was a thoughtful piece from last June in the Washington Post that talked about what supports and education veteran advocates can offer to “long haulers,” dealing with not just new problems, but with, as you’re saying, a new identity. And it also talked about tensions within the disability community, which as with many marginalized communities often finds itself struggling over limited resources. And now there are millions more people involved.

And it’s an interesting situation. But I just wanted to lift up—there was one quote in this piece from a guy who says long Covid gives a chance to make some updates to health policy, in part because the condition is affecting, he said, “a different mix of people than what we’ve seen in the traditional disability population.”

Now, I’m not trying to stir up trouble here, but it sounds a little like “we’re getting a better class of disabled now, not that ragtag group you’re used to,” and there’s an implication, in other words, that now maybe there will be the power to change things. And I guess that arouses mixed feelings in me, is what I want to say.

KK: It does. And I think there’s a couple ways to unpack that. One, there’s a narrative out there that the disability community are kind of fakers and takers. That’s a narrative that we have to undo, because it’s an incorrect narrative, and it’s a narrative that really doesn’t actually help, it only harms the disability community, because, again, anyone can become disabled at any point in their life.

That quote that you mentioned, it really ignores the fact that there’s a false narrative that’s already circulated about the disability community.

But I think, on the other side, what the quote does acknowledge is that having a whole new influx of people to the community gives a renewed energy, and a renewed movement, to the policies that are needed.

When all of the sudden you have a bunch of other people that have entered any community, any movement, there’s different energy behind it. You know, all of a sudden, we have senators saying, “I need this, I am part of this community. I guess now we need a bill on it.”

That’s very different, and we don’t always see that. And so we do get some of that renewed energy, and that’s really important. But at the same time, we have to balance that with the fact that we have a false narrative that exists. And that just breeds into the stigma against disability that we really need to try to overcome.

JJ: If the comment is partly acknowledging that some of the Covid long haulers have wealth, then one can, very sadly, ask, for how long?

The nexus between disability and poverty is central, and of course that’s key to the Collaborative’s work. I’m not sure that it’s really understood how policy choices—not disability, but policy choices—put disabled people in struggle, and keep them there. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Kim Knackstedt: “Undoing that entangled web of policies that really focus on keeping people with disabilities in poverty is extraordinarily difficult.”

KK: Yes, the problem is I could talk about that for hours! Disability and poverty are so connected, and some say the whole structure and the whole system is broken. Well, unfortunately, the whole system is actually working exactly how it was designed.

It is keeping disabled people in poverty because that’s how the system was structured. And so it’s not that the system was broken. The system has to be completely corrected. And what I mean by that is that so many of our policies have been designed to keep disabled people out of work, to keep disabled people from actually building wealth, and to keep disabled people from even getting the care that they need to live independently.

Some of our healthcare policies really actually preference institutional care, not living in a community.

So undoing that entangled web of policies that really focus on keeping people with disabilities in poverty is extraordinarily difficult, and that’s something that we have to do. Even outside of wealth, I would say, social and political capital that people hold? Leveraging that as we start to make some work on all of this is going to be really important.

JJ: CounterSpin listeners will have heard us referenced the “Medicaid divorce,” in which people have to get divorced in order to keep their health care because if they’re married, or they can’t get married, because together, they make too much money. It’s cruel, and it’s often hidden, I think, to other folks.

KK: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s so many choices that I think so many people do have to make, and it’s just how you start to allocate funds to try to just live day to day.

I mean, I acknowledge that I have privilege, because I work at a great place that has health insurance. But I also am a high health cost user; I have infusions that without insurance would be $30,000 a month. Thank goodness for insurance. I also have to spend a lot of money towards that, because I could never qualify for Medicaid to help pay for that.

So you think about, even though I acknowledge the privilege that I have to be able to afford what I do, the whole system is stacked against you when you are a person with a disability and trying to get the care you need, from the cost of prescriptions, the cost of specialists, the cost of getting home, community-based living, the cost of a direct care worker, trying to access the workplace you need. And the list goes on.

JJ: And the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative is saying there are things we can do, there are policy changes that we can make, that can, as you’re saying, not tweak and not fiddle with and “perfect” the system that we have, but really fundamentally overhaul it.

Century Foundation (1/12/23)

KK: Absolutely. So much of what we do does tinker on the edges, and we’re saying we need to stop just tinkering. And so much of disability policy is siloed, and again, we’ve been caught in this web that I mentioned before for so long.

Instead, what we’re saying is, let’s bring a lens of disability to all economic policymaking: food security, transportation, housing.

What we are trying to do at the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative is really bring a disability lens to all economic policymaking. And that’s really the goal, whether, again, you’re doing all of these different policies, it’s trying to embed disability into every single piece that you are working on.

So we are saying, let’s center the values that disabled people need, and bring that into all of our domestic policy work.

So I’m going to give an example. We believe every disabled person needs to have access to reliable, affordable and accessible transportation. That’s something that’s fundamental. And so we want to see that, no matter what the bill is, what the proposal is, what the law is, regulation—I could go on, right?—that’s the goal we want to see throughout. And the same thing for healthcare, access to healthcare they need, access to food.

And so we’ve developed a framework, we call it the Disability Economic Justice Policy framework; we want to see that embedded into domestic policymaking to really move the needle on how we think about policymaking with a disability lens.

JJ: Because every issue is a disability issue. And that goes for media as well as for policy. Every story that impacts disabled people should include awareness of the impact, is my feeling.

It’s not bad to have occasional reports that focus solely on disability or the disabled community. But if you’re reporting rent hikes or food prices or criminal justice, well, disabled people are in that reality, so they should be in the story.

Do you have any thoughts, finally, about media coverage?

KK: Yeah, I think it is really important for media coverage to think more about disability. I think one of the things we see is—you’re exactly right, there will be a story about something related to disability and then you won’t see something else until it’s very disability-centric, and everything in between ignores that disability exists.

And we know that that’s just not how disability is in our lives. Disability is part of the natural human experience.

And so, very much so, I think disability just needs to be embedded more into the stories that we hear about, and part of the narrative throughout everyone’s life.

I also would encourage, in the media, that it’s not about disability being an “inspiration.” I think that’s where the lean tends to go when there is a disability-centric story. And it’s just, disability is part of the life that we all live, and here’s the story that happens to be about a disabled person, or a narrative that we’re talking about.

And so those are some of the pieces that I think would be great to think about more.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Kim Knackstedt of the Century Foundation and the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. You can find their work online at TCF.org. Kim Knackstedt, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KK: Thanks for having me.

The post ‘The Whole System Is Stacked Against a Person With a Disability’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Judy Heumann

This week on CounterSpin:  “I wanna see feisty disabled people change the world.” So declared disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who died last weekend at age 75. As a child with polio, Heumann was denied entry to kindergarten on grounds that her wheelchair was a fire hazard. Later, she was denied a teachers license for reasons no more elevated. She sued, won and became the first teacher in New York to use a wheelchair. Media love those kinds of breakthroughs, and they matter. Here’s hoping they’ll extend their interest into the barriers disabled people face in 2023, and how policy changes could address them. We’ll talk with Kim Knackstedt, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963

And speaking of problems that aren’t actually behind us: You will have heard that the US is experiencing “blowout job growth,” and unemployment is at a “historic low,” with gains extending even to historically marginalized Black people. Algernon Austin from the Center for Economic Policy and Research will help us understand how employment data can obscure even as it reveals, and how—if our problem is joblessness—there are, in fact, time-tested responses.

The post Kim Knackstedt on Disability Policy, Algernon Austin on Unemployment & Race appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Disability rights advocates were joined by labor leaders, progressive politicians, and other advocates for justice on Monday in mourning the death of influential activist Judy Heumann, who began decades of advocacy work fighting for employment as a teacher and was credited with paving the way for numerous federal laws to protect people with disabilities. She was 75 and died on March 4.

Known as the "mother of the disability rights movement," Heumann's first experience with advocacy work came in 1970 after she was denied employment at a New York City public school, with the school citing her "paralysis of both lower extremities" as the reason and saying she would not be able to evacuate students and herself in case of a fire.

The denial harkened back to her treatment as a young child, when a school principal stopped Heumann's mother from enrolling her in kindergarten and said her wheelchair—which she used as a result of contracting polio at 18 months—rendered her a "fire hazard."

Heumann sued the New York City school district and won her case, becoming the city's first teacher who used a wheelchair and drawing national attention to the issue of discrimination against people with disabilities. One newspaper ran an article about the case titled, "You Can Be President, Not Teacher, with Polio," in which Heumann told the outlet, "We're not going to let a hypocritical society give us a token education and then bury us."

"Disability only becomes a tragedy when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives—job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example," she told journalist Joseph Shapiro years later. "It is not a tragedy to me that I'm living in a wheelchair."

Seven years later Heumann led more than 100 people in San Francisco in joining nationwide protests to demand that President Jimmy Carter's health, education, and welfare secretary, James Califano, implement a crucial statute within the 1973 Rehabilitation Act.

The law had been signed by President Richard Nixon and included Section 504, which prohibited institutions that receive federal funding from discriminating against disabled people. Califano delayed implementing the provision and failed to meet a deadline—April 4, 1977—set by disability rights advocates. The next day Heumann led a sit-in at a government office which turned into a weekslong occupation, culminating in Califano signing Section 504 on April 28. According toThe New York Times, Heumann's action was the "longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building in American history."

"We will no longer allow the government to oppress disabled individuals," Heumann told a representative for Califano at one meeting. "We want the law enforced. We want no more segregation."

Section 504 paved the way for the Americans With Disabilities Act, which extended protections to the private sector.

"Judy’s impact is vast," said the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. "Each action she took built on the one before it. In her early life, she learned perseverance and patience from witnessing her mother's ongoing advocacy to have her go to school with her non-disabled peers... Those years of segregation sparked her thinking about disability and identity."

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, noted that Heumann's work was instrumental in securing the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, then known as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, in 1975.

Organizer Ady Barkan, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), wrote on social media that Heumann's decades of advocacy made it possible for people with disabilities to take part in numerous aspects of public life.

"We owe so much to Judy Heumann," he said.

Heumann served for eight years in the Clinton administration as assistant secretary of the office of special education and rehabilitation services and for seven years in the Obama administration as the State Department's first special adviser for international disability rights.

"I join the disability community in mourning the passing of Judy Heumann," said Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "From leading the 504 sit-ins to fighting for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Judy dedicated her life to advancing the rights of people with disabilities. We must continue her work."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Disability rights advocates were joined by labor leaders, progressive politicians, and other advocates for justice on Monday in mourning the death of influential activist Judy Heumann, who began decades of advocacy work fighting for employment as a teacher and was credited with paving the way for numerous federal laws to protect people with disabilities. She was 75 and died on March 4.

Known as the "mother of the disability rights movement," Heumann's first experience with advocacy work came in 1970 after she was denied employment at a New York City public school, with the school citing her "paralysis of both lower extremities" as the reason and saying she would not be able to evacuate students and herself in case of a fire.

The denial harkened back to her treatment as a young child, when a school principal stopped Heumann's mother from enrolling her in kindergarten and said her wheelchair—which she used as a result of contracting polio at 18 months—rendered her a "fire hazard."

Heumann sued the New York City school district and won her case, becoming the city's first teacher who used a wheelchair and drawing national attention to the issue of discrimination against people with disabilities. One newspaper ran an article about the case titled, "You Can Be President, Not Teacher, with Polio," in which Heumann told the outlet, "We're not going to let a hypocritical society give us a token education and then bury us."

"Disability only becomes a tragedy when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives—job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example," she told journalist Joseph Shapiro years later. "It is not a tragedy to me that I'm living in a wheelchair."

Seven years later Heumann led more than 100 people in San Francisco in joining nationwide protests to demand that President Jimmy Carter's health, education, and welfare secretary, James Califano, implement a crucial statute within the 1973 Rehabilitation Act.

The law had been signed by President Richard Nixon and included Section 504, which prohibited institutions that receive federal funding from discriminating against disabled people. Califano delayed implementing the provision and failed to meet a deadline—April 4, 1977—set by disability rights advocates. The next day Heumann led a sit-in at a government office which turned into a weekslong occupation, culminating in Califano signing Section 504 on April 28. According toThe New York Times, Heumann's action was the "longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building in American history."

"We will no longer allow the government to oppress disabled individuals," Heumann told a representative for Califano at one meeting. "We want the law enforced. We want no more segregation."

Section 504 paved the way for the Americans With Disabilities Act, which extended protections to the private sector.

"Judy’s impact is vast," said the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. "Each action she took built on the one before it. In her early life, she learned perseverance and patience from witnessing her mother's ongoing advocacy to have her go to school with her non-disabled peers... Those years of segregation sparked her thinking about disability and identity."

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, noted that Heumann's work was instrumental in securing the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, then known as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, in 1975.

Organizer Ady Barkan, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), wrote on social media that Heumann's decades of advocacy made it possible for people with disabilities to take part in numerous aspects of public life.

"We owe so much to Judy Heumann," he said.

Heumann served for eight years in the Clinton administration as assistant secretary of the office of special education and rehabilitation services and for seven years in the Obama administration as the State Department's first special adviser for international disability rights.

"I join the disability community in mourning the passing of Judy Heumann," said Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "From leading the 504 sit-ins to fighting for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Judy dedicated her life to advancing the rights of people with disabilities. We must continue her work."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Progressive groups and activists showed an outpouring of love and admiration for Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of Common Cause, after her death from an undisclosed cause was reported by the pro-democracy group on Friday.

Hobert Flynn, who joined Common Cause in 1985 as an organizer and program director, was named president of the watchdog in 2016 after serving as executive director and chair of the group's Connecticut branch.

"Today, democracy lost one of its fiercest defenders: Karen Hobert Flynn," Common Cause board chair Martha Tierney said in a statement.

"A trailblazer and powerful advocate, Karen dedicated her career to reforming our government so it served everyone," Tierney noted. "Under her leadership of Common Cause in Connecticut, she secured landmark reforms—including winning Connecticut's groundbreaking full public finance system, numerous ethics laws, and disclosure laws."

Tierney continued:

During turbulent times for our country and our organization, she led Common Cause with tenacity and grace, never backing down from holding the White House accountable and never losing sight of the non-partisan vision for a more inclusive and representative democracy...

In her last year of life, she led a national coalition in the fight to protect and strengthen the right to vote for all and oversaw the largest national non-partisan election protection program for the 2022 midterms. Within Common Cause, she started the 50-year-old organization's process to become a more equitable workplace and doubled down on the commitment to secure an inclusive democracy for all.

"May her memory give us strength as together we carry forward her legacy of fighting for a government that lives up to the ideals of its people," Tierney added.

Other progressives also remembered Hobert Flynn's life and work.

"Such devastating news today with the loss of Common Cause's Karen Hobert Flynn," wrote Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington president Noah Bookbinder. "A great person and a fierce leader in the fight for democracy. Heartbreaking."

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights tweeted that "we're so deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Karen Hobert Flynn—a brilliant leader, dedicated advocate, and fierce defender of our democracy."

The National Disability Rights Network hailed Hobert Flynn as "a fierce civic advocate" who "will be missed by friends, family, and all who fight to make our democracy stronger."

End Citizens Unitedremembered a "remarkable individual who touched the lives of so many in the fight to protect democracy."

"Her tireless work on behalf of women, workers, and marginalized communities will have a lasting impact," the group added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Fiji’s new Minister for Women, Children and Poverty Alleviation, Lynda Tabuya, plans to use surveys and online platforms as an integral part of her ministry

During her official welcome yesterday along with her assistant minister, Sashi Kiran, Tabuya said that over the years she had made it her life goal to help those less fortunate.

She was happy that she could continue what she loved to do on a national stage in helping all Fijians.

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“As an integral part of my ministry, I plan on asking you — the citizens of Fiji — about the best way forward utilising surveys and online platforms,” Tabuya said.

“One of the foundations for building a better Fiji is providing equal opportunities to all Fijians irrespective of age, gender, physical ability or income level.”

To promote inclusivity and development, her ministry would continue to serve all Fijians through:

• The care and protection of children
• Greater policy intervention for older persons and persons with disability
• More innovative and targeted income support to families living or caught in the cycle of poverty; and
• Promoting gender equality and empowering women to reach their full potential.

Tabuya looked forward to strengthening and building on good partnerships with organisations whose activities and outputs support the ministries strategic objectives and those who provide services in the area of child protection and safeguarding, older people, people with disability, gender equality, women’s empowerment and ending violence against women and girls.

“During the turmoil of the last couple of months, the hymn ‘We Shall Overcome’ was often used as a source of inspiration,” she said.

“At this juncture, Fiji faces daunting poverty levels and incidences of domestic violence, but despite all these challenges I believe with God’s help and everyone working together, we shall overcome.

“I’m looking forward to working for the most disadvantaged in our society and together rebuilding Fiji into the way the world should be.”

Talebula Kate is a Fiji Times journalist. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative’s Rebecca Vallas about the economics of disability for the December 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Hey, have you heard about “Medicaid divorce”? It’s this trendy thing where people get divorced because it’s the only way to allow one partner to qualify for the Medicaid they need to live their lives, because if they’re married, they’re too rich.

Kiplinger (11/7/21)

That’s a nightmare, not to mention in a country where some people get to forget how many houses they own. But corporate media’s response has seemed to be just a bunch of articles about how maybe you, as an individual, might potentially game the system, like Kiplinger‘s “How to Restructure Your Assets to Qualify for Medicaid.” 

And then sort of, “well, would you look at that” pieces about the phenomenon, like Newsweek‘s “Internet Backs Wife’s Plan to Divorce Husband After Cancer Diagnosis.”

There are, of course, many people who couldn’t conscience the idea that having a disability, or a partner with a disability, should mean choosing between your marriage and your healthcare. But they just haven’t given it much thought, or even known that it was happening—thanks, in part, to media coverage that suggests that only people with disabilities care about disability policy, just like only Black people care about racism, and only poor people care about poverty.

It’s an inaccurate, inappropriate approach to core issues of the day that makes us seem more divided than we actually are, and makes change harder to bring about.

So our next guest’s project is not so much about connecting issues of disability and the economy as illuminating how they have always been connected, even if those connections have been obscured.

Rebecca Vallas is senior fellow and co-director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, based out of the Century Foundation. She joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Rebecca Vallas.

Rebecca Vallas: Janine, it’s always a pleasure to speak with you. I feel very strongly about the important role that this show plays in larger conversations, and it’s always, always fun to talk with you.

JJ: Well, thank you.

I was thinking about this project walking to work, and I overheard a woman, equal parts angry and tired, saying to a friend, “Why is Medicaid saying they’ll only pay for one hearing aid? He needs two.”

And I just thought about the hours of this woman’s life. She was waiting outside a workplace, she was on her way to work, but this is obviously her other job—trying to get hearing aids for her husband or her child, I don’t know.

But the point is, if you don’t have to be familiar with this system, then you aren’t, and you count yourself lucky. But disability is one community that anyone could be part of tomorrow. And so I will genuinely never understand the sort of general media disinterest.

But into this void comes this project. And so I would like you to just talk about the need for it and, in part, just the informational gap that this project is looking to fill.

Rebecca Vallas: “Disability has been viewed as some kind of an afterthought…to larger conversation around public policy in this country.” (photo: Center for American Progress)

RV: I appreciate that so much, Janine, and you’re so right that for an incredibly and often, to me at least, surprisingly long period of time, disability has been viewed as some kind of an afterthought to larger conversations, not just conversations that we have in the media, but also conversations that go on in Washington, DC, around public policy in this country.

And, you know, I spend a lot of my time working on public policy, and trying to make it fairer for people who have historically been marginalized. And this project really is centered around that general need.

And so backing up just a little bit, folks might be listening to this and thinking, “Well, didn’t we pass the Americans with Disabilities Act? Didn’t we solve disability problems in the US?”

Well, yes, the ADA has been around for more than 32 years now. But more than 32 years after the ADA became law, people with disabilities in the United States still face poverty rates twice as high as our non-disabled peers. And that’s because of discrimination that remains widespread and, frankly, a litany of structural barriers to economic security and upward mobility that keep the American disability community stuck in a permanent recession.

And while this is an economic crisis that long predates Covid-19, it’s also really important to acknowledge that the impact of the pandemic, which itself has been a mass disabling event, has really only made it clearer: We can no longer afford to ignore disabled people in our policymaking.

And we at the Century Foundation actually did some polling on this issue. We partnered up with Data for Progress, a polling firm in Washington, DC, and New York, and earlier this year, we found that just three in ten disabled voters believe that leaders in Washington care about people with disabilities.

And so, really, that’s where the idea of starting the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative came from. Here we are, living through a pandemic—which it doesn’t go without repeating, we’re still in the middle of a pandemic that has not ended. This is a pandemic that has spurred the largest influx of new entrants to the American disability community in modern history.

And yet, we’re still in a place of needing to play 50-plus years of catch-up to make sure that we have public policies that work for disabled people, and, frankly, even public policies that contemplate disabled people.

And you are doing such a great job in your setup of highlighting, from a human perspective, how public policies that don’t contemplate disabled people’s lives can end up landing when people with disabilities are either an afterthought or, frankly, understood as a “them” instead of as part of an “us.”

And so that’s really the story behind the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. The Century Foundation teamed up with our friends at the Ford Foundation and, in particular, my dear friend and sister Rebecca Cokley, who was the first-ever US disability rights program officer at any major foundation in the United States, we teamed up to bring together what are now more than 40 organizations.

It’s a set of leading think tanks who have outsized power in shaping the economic policy conversations in the US, together with disability rights and justice groups, to work together, to learn from each other and, most importantly, to actually work to ensure that American economic policy conversations include a disability lens, and that’s really the through line, and the theory of change of this collaborative, is to say every issue is a disability issue.

And it’s long past time that we understood, with one in four Americans living with disabilities, that this can’t continue to be a conversation that happens in July, once a year, when we acknowledge the unfinished business of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This needs to be an every day conversation that includes and centers the impact of the pandemic.

But they understand that people with disabilities are part of the “us,” and need to be at the table in shaping the public policies that have an outsized influence in impacting our lives every single day.

And so, yes, we see lots of media coverage trying to say, “Oh, look at the lifeboat”—which is a program like Social Security Disability Insurance, for example, or SSI—and let’s shine a spotlight on that, and try and say that people are wrong for seeking and claiming what are often life-saving and life-preserving benefits, when what we really need is a lot more attention paid to the doors that are closed in people’s faces because of their disabilities, that are the employment doors, that for many people, because millions of disabled people can and do work, that for many is the avenue that economic security and mobility would flow from.

And so a story I would love to see as a headline in the Washington Post, how about some coverage about the fact that disabled workers were paid an average of 74 cents on the dollar in 2020, compared with non-disabled workers? Right?

How about some coverage highlighting the fact that people with disabilities face three times the rates of food insecurity as non-disabled people?

How about some coverage highlighting that roughly half of American adults who need to turn to homeless shelters to have a roof over their head have a disability?

This is a picture that I really can’t describe in any other terms than saying the economy is not working for disabled people. And disabled people, we are the economy, we are part of the economy, and want to be contributors to the economy, both in the form of being workers and consumers.

And that’s a flip of the narrative that possibly the Covid pandemic is creating an opportunity for us to make, given the broader awareness that people now have that the disability community is a community that any of us can join at any time.

And with millions and millions of people now newly disabled by long Covid, I am hopeful that that is a shift in the conversation that we as a society are ready to start to make.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Rebecca Vallas. She’s senior fellow and co-director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. You can find that project’s work at TCF.org. Rebecca Vallas, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RV: Thanks so much, Janine, for shining a spotlight on the Collaborative’s work, and I really do appreciate your show.

The post ‘Every Issue Is a Disability Issue’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

AP (12/10/22)

This week on CounterSpin: When the Keystone pipeline spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of hard-to-clean, sludgy oil in Kansas, AP‘s headline explained that the disaster “raises questions” about the pipeline’s operation. The utterly predictable harms of fossil fuel companies are forever “raising questions” for elite media. What in the world would happen if they were seen as answering them, and calling for requisite response? We talk about the latest revelations about fossil fuel industry lying about climate change with Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity.

Disability Economic Justice Collaborative (11/2/22)

Also on the show: As powerful people call loudly for a “post-Covid” “return to normal,” many are demanding we acknowledge that not only are we not post-Covid, but that “normal” was not actually good for millions of us. Rebecca Vallas is senior fellow and co-director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, based out of the Century Foundation. We talk with her about what that new project does, and why they need to do it.

The post Richard Wiles on Fossil Fuel Lies, Rebecca Vallas on Disability Economics appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

A new initiative has been launched in 15 Pacific Island countries to improve educational standards.

The Pacific Regional Inclusive Education Review was launched last week with each country having their own national surveys with the assistance of community groups, NGOs and stakeholders.

It has has been signed by Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific education reports

The Pacific Disability Forum comprises one of the many networks used to complete the survey, and it has roots in 21 countries.

Its main objective is to ensure children, including those living with disabilities, access quality learning.

The Forum’s CEO, Setareki Macanawai, said the review allowed for an understanding of the current issues within education across the region.

“[The purpose is] to have a shared understanding, and I think this is what this review has done. It has provided a lens-key, a good starting point. A good starting point condition for us in the Pacific to then develop a shared understanding of what inclusive education should look like for us in the Pacific.”

Making education accessible
Macanawai also said it was hard to make education accessible in the region due to various pre-conditions.

“There is a lot of stigma, there is a lot of discrimination broadly and generally across the Pacific in the different cultures and societies which is a pre-condition that makes it hard to create an inclusive education for all, particularly those with impairments,” he said.

The review is conducted by UNICEF Pacific and the Pacific Regional Inclusive Education Taskforce.

UNICEF Pacific’s Chief of Education Programme Anna Smeby said the biggest challenge to inclusive education in the Pacific is limited access or children living in poor housing.

“We know that challenges can be in physical access, teaching approaches and availability of extra support, and it can be in the inclusiveness of the environment which means the infrastructure, but also social and emotionally whether it is a welcoming environment,” she said.

“Improving policy for inclusive education, building and strengthening to adapt and differentiate instruction, the resource in classroom so that they have the resources they need and improving school infrastructure, bringing inclusive education leaves us to learn from each other both the shared challenges and the promising practices.

Vulnerable groups
“Vulnerable groups include learners with a disability or some sort of impairment, commonly students in remote places who do not have access to full-cycle schooling and students who have missed earlier learning but also gifted and talented students that need additional support in different ways,” Smeby said.

The collaboration between the 15 countries, regional partners, and the Pacific Inclusive Education Taskforce, supports Sustainable Development Goal 4 to achieve quality education for all and to build a pathway for all children to a productive and healthy adulthood.

UNICEF Pacific’s Deputy Representative Roshni Basu said countries needed to include the review’s recommendations into its policies urgently.

“UNICEF is committed to ensure that all children of our Pacific shores are able to enjoy their right to inclusive, and of course quality, education.

I urge all countries to maximise effort and commitment to translate the review findings into concrete investments for inclusive education.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Kansas City Beacon. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Earlier this week, we published a story about sheltered workshops in Missouri — facilities where it’s legal to pay employees less than the minimum wage because they have intellectual, developmental or physical disabilities. More than 5,000 disabled adults work in Missouri’s sheltered workshops, some earning less than $1 per hour.

Across the country, disability rights advocates have lamented these facilities and their low wages, calling them discriminatory and exploitative. At least 14 states have banned subminimum wages, and advocates are ramping up pressure on the federal government to repeal the more than 80-year-old law authorizing them nationwide.

So when my reporting for this story got underway in April — part of a yearlong collaboration between The Kansas City Beacon and ProPublica — I expected to hear similar sentiments in Missouri.

Instead, one of my early findings surprised me: Disabled adults and their families in Missouri seemed to strongly support sheltered workshops. They didn’t focus on the low pay or the dearth of other opportunities. Most said they were simply grateful for the jobs that the facilities offered.

This led my editors and me to wonder: Do we even have a story to tell here, if sheltered workshop employees themselves did not see any problems with their situation?

Instead of turning away from the story, we decided to dive deeper. We began an outreach effort to connect with as many sheltered workshop employees and their families as possible, so we could better understand their sentiments and find out if they saw any downsides to working with such low pay.

To do this well, we needed to make our outreach accessible to a community with diverse abilities. We knew that some sheltered workshop employees might not have access to computers and that others could be visually impaired or have difficulty understanding our questions.

I worked with ProPublica engagement reporter Maryam Jameel to come up with a few solutions. The first was to consult a plain-language translator — an expert in writing clear and concise messages for audiences with intellectual or developmental disabilities — and have her develop a plain-language version of our outreach questions. (We also published a plain-language version of our resulting story.)

Next, we talked to several advocates, some of whom are disabled themselves, about additional ways to spread the word. To connect with people who are visually impaired or otherwise unable to read our questions, we included an option for people to call and leave voicemails with their thoughts. As a no-tech option, we crafted a much smaller printout version of our questions. I handed the copies out to sheltered workshop employees as I visited these facilities and asked my sources to share them among their networks.

The responses came flowing in. We heard from more than 90 people, most of them sheltered workshop employees and their families. And their responses dovetailed with what I had heard back in April: strong support of sheltered workshops.

The respondents told me that they would be devastated if their sheltered workshops were forced to shut down. Some family members even bypassed our outreach questions and instead sent in letters expressing opposition to any changes to the federal subminimum wage law or requesting that sheltered workshops remain open in the state. A few respondents later told me that they were encouraged to respond by their sheltered workshop managers. One sheltered workshop employee said she and her coworkers were given time at work to answer our questions online.

“This job has given people with disabilities a chance to work instead of being stuck at home,” one parent of a sheltered workshop employee wrote.

As I kept following up with the respondents, I recognized a common thread: Many felt that their choice wasn’t between sheltered workshops and regular jobs, but rather between sheltered workshops and nothing at all.

Some said sheltered workshops provided a safe place for their family members to spend their days with peers and find a sense of purpose. Others said their loved ones had previously held a regular job or could handle the demands of one, but hurdles like workplace discrimination ultimately led them to believe sheltered workshops were the only realistic option.

“There’s lots of things that can be potential barriers for people working in regular competitive employment,” said Robin Prado, the mother of a sheltered workshop employee. She said her daughter had previously spent a couple of weeks working at a local library but was fired when she didn’t pick up on her training quickly enough — a problem she believes could have been solved with a little additional help.

“I didn’t really feel like we had a lot of support,” Prado said.

A current sheltered workshop employee expressed similar feelings, saying she was “afraid of going back” to a regular job. “I’ve tried jobs on the outside, and this is the first job where I feel really supported by people,” she said.

It was clear to me that the respondents saw no real alternatives in Missouri — but it doesn’t have to be this way. I talked with several experts and advocates, including Steven Schwartz, legal director for the Center for Public Representation, who told me that many other states have proven that disabled adults can successfully move into the regular workforce. To help them with the transition, these states have been directing more funding toward breaking down the kinds of barriers that Missouri’s sheltered workshop employees and their families spoke to me about.

Missouri, however, does little to help sheltered workshop employees make that move — even though getting disabled workers ready for the regular workforce is the goal behind the federal law authorizing subminimum wages. What’s more, state officials told me that they would be unconcerned if sheltered workshop employees in Missouri do not “graduate” to the regular workforce for years, or even decades, because they view the state’s sheltered workshops as employment programs rather than stepping stones to regular jobs.

Ultimately, we decided that there was a story to tell about sheltered workshops in Missouri: The seemingly widespread support among sheltered workshop employees and their families masked the failure of the state to provide them with meaningful employment options.

You can read more about what we found in the full story. We will continue reporting on sheltered workshops in Missouri, so please share our outreach questions, our phone number and the plain-language story with anyone you think would like to get in touch with us.

Help Us Learn About Sheltered Workshops in Missouri

Maryam Jameel contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Madison Hopkins, The Kansas City Beacon.

After NBC‘s roundly criticized interview (10/11/22) of Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, journalists covering Fetterman’s race ought to have learned a thing or two about covering his disability. Fetterman, who experienced a stroke in May, was left with auditory-processing issues and some impact on his speaking fluency. Analyses of the televised debate (10/25/22) between Fetterman and his Republican opponent, TV doctor Mehmet Oz, proved that, for the election press corps, ableism is not so easily overcome, and style is always likely to trump substance.

‘Will only fuel questions’

Introducing an interview that was conducted through closed captioning, NBC‘s Dasha Burns (10/11/22) expressed surprise that John Fetterman didn’t understand her as well without the captioning.

When NBC‘s Dasha Burns interviewed Fetterman for his first national television one-on-one since the stroke, her emphasis was on his language-processing issues and his health, rather than on his policy positions. Because of his auditory-processing issues, Fetterman needs closed captioning to participate fully in a conversation. It’s not an issue of cognition; it’s a likely temporary disability—common among those recovering from strokes—that simply requires accommodation.

But to introduce the interview on NBC Nightly News (10/11/22), Burns said, “In small talk before the interview without captioning, it wasn’t clear [Fetterman] was understanding our conversation.”

Burns spent the first nine minutes of the 30-minute interview exclusively on Fetterman’s health and post-stroke symptoms, asking him repeatedly about whether he was fit for office and why he wouldn’t release his full medical records. She didn’t ask a single policy-related question until nearly 12 minutes in.

Burns wasn’t the only journalist sowing doubts about Fetterman based on his disability. CBS‘s Ed O’Keefe (10/11/22) tweeted about Fetterman’s use of closed captioning for the interview, “Will Pennsylvanians be comfortable with someone representing them who had to conduct a TV interview this way?” The New York Times‘ Jonathan Martin (10/11/22) tweeted that it was a “rough clip” that “will only fuel questions about his health.”

The next day, after coming under criticism from both the disability community and some fellow journalists, Burns issued a sort of clarification on NBC‘s Today (10/12/22):

Stroke experts do say that this does not mean he has any cognitive impairment. Doesn’t mean his memory or his cognitive condition is impaired, and he didn’t fully recover from this. And once the closed captioning was on, he was able to fully understand my questions.

As disability rights activists argue, if a disability doesn’t impact someone’s cognitive functioning or ability to do their job, then highlighting it only stokes prejudice. Some thoughtful pieces were published drawing attention to ableism in media (e.g.,  Buzzfeed, 10/12/22; New York Times, 10/13/22; Slate, 10/14/22) , which offered ample opportunity for some introspection among political reporters.

‘I almost feel sorry for him’

It was not the debate but CNN‘s panel (including former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent—10/25/22) that highlighted Fetterman’s recovery.

Yet when Fetterman and Oz engaged in their only debate of the race just two weeks later, many journalists continued to present his disability as a source of doubt or weakness, and focused on that at the expense of policy differences.

In one of the most cringe-worthy examples of post-debate punditry, CNN Tonight (10/25/22) spent its entire panel on the debate critiquing Fetterman’s performance and questioning his mental capacities, with virtually no discussion of the two candidates’ actual policy positions and how well they align with voters’ interests.

Host Laura Coates framed “the” question about the debate as “how would [Fetterman] perform, given the stroke that he experienced back in May?” Her fellow panelists were ruthless in their assessment. Former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent said “somebody should have invoked the mercy rule” and ended the debate, claiming that Fetterman was “confused.” Later, Dent patronizingly commented, “I almost feel very sorry for him that, you know, he’s in a bad, bad way.”

Former Trump communications strategist Alyssa Farrah Griffin “found it extremely hard to watch,” and said:

I want to be careful because I think some of the most consequential leaders in history have had different kinds of disabilities. I don’t think it should preclude someone from serving, but what we saw today was someone who is not ready to be in office.

She repeatedly suggested that his processing issues were actually cognitive issues: “Is the way that he’s struggling a result of this stroke? Or is it because he doesn’t have a grasp on the issues?” And:

I was genuinely unclear if he understood how to address crime, how to address the economy and inflation. And then when he did try to lob attacks on Oz, they didn’t land. It didn’t seem like he had a full grasp.

It’s not surprising that GOP panelists would parrot GOP talking points, but it’s the responsibility of actual journalists to rebut false aspersions, especially ones that promote stereotypes and prejudices. Instead, Coates kept playing more clips of Fetterman’s miscues, and CNN‘s Alisyn Camerota pointed out that she had interviewed Fetterman many times in past years and that he “sounded different before the stroke. I mean, in the interviews he was much more sort of clear-spoken than what I’m hearing now.” By highlighting the obvious—that after the stroke, Fetterman’s speech is impacted—Camerota made an issue of his disability.

Symptoms in the spotlight

Politico (10/25/22) emphasized Fetterman’s “speech and hearing problems” in its framing of the debate.

Many print publications also put Fetterman’s performance in the spotlight. Politico (10/25/22) went with the headline: “Fetterman Struggles During TV Debate With Oz,” followed by the subhead:

The Democrat’s speech and hearing problems were evident during a contentious debate with the celebrity physician that addressed abortion, the minimum wage and fracking.

The Washington Post (10/25/22) also put Fetterman’s post-stroke symptoms in its headline: “For Fetterman, Contentious Exchanges, Verbal Struggles in Debate With Oz.” Reporters Colby Itkowitz and Amanda Morris noted in their lead that Fetterman “often stumbled over his words and struggled with the rapid-fire format of questions and answers.”

In their second paragraph, they continued the theme, writing that his “speech was halting, and he mispronounced words and tripped over phrases.” Questions of policy didn’t appear until the fifth paragraph, but they were subordinated throughout to repeated returns to Fetterman’s health and verbal missteps.

At one point midway through, Itkowitz and Morris paraphrased a disability civic  engagement expert who argued that verbal “miscues should not be seen as a reflection on Fetterman’s ability to serve.” In the very next paragraph, they seemed to blithely dismiss her admonishment, writing that Fetterman “struggled over many of the lines” and printing one somewhat garbled response to a debate question as a gratuitous illustration of those struggles.

The Washington Post (10/25/22) likewise made Fetterman’s medical condition the focus of its debate coverage.

“His performance will test whether voters regard his impairments as temporary or even humanizing setbacks, or whether it fuels questions about his fitness for office,” wrote the New York Times‘ Katie Glueck and Trip Gabriel (10/25/22). Journalistic glosses like this imply it is really “voters,” and not elite media, whose concerns are at issue, and that questions about fitness are mysteriously “fueled,” rather than stoked by precisely this sort of coverage.

Both the Post and the Times pointed out that Fetterman opened the debate by saying “Good night” instead of “Good evening.” Obviously both knew that offers no useful evidence about his fitness for office; publishing it reads more like childish taunting than serious reporting.

Meanwhile, Oz, who during the primaries said abortion at any stage is “murder,” stated in the debate that abortion decisions should be made by women, their doctors—and “local political leaders.” He wouldn’t support raising Pennsylvania’s $7.25 per hour minimum wage. As the Philadelphia Inquirer (10/16/22) pointed out, he “opposes the expanded child tax credit, would repeal the Affordable Care Act and would vote against red flag gun-control laws.”

All of these major positions are out of step with the majority of voters. And, of course, he has promised to kiss the ring and support Trump in 2024, posing a threat to representative democracy. But in the debate and in the followup coverage, journalists seemed to find questions of Fetterman’s fitness, based primarily on ableist notions, far more interesting.

The post Framing Disability as Disqualification in Fetterman/Oz Debate appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

And UN humanitarians remind us of the likely heavy human cost of the Ukraine crisis in Europe, while on other continents, a new biotechnology hub to make COVID vaccines, insulin and more is announced for South Korea, as African nations take stock, one year after coronavirus vaccines starting arriving in the country via the UN-partnered COVAX initiative.

This content originally appeared on UN News and was authored by Daniel Johnson and Solange Behoteguy-Cortes, UN News - Geneva.

“Estoy bien, no te preocupes (I am good, don’t worry).”

In one way or another, Mr. Boquete, who came to the U.S. as a Cuban refugee in 1980 has always been on the move. He calls himself a survivor, and makes friends easily, everywhere he goes. 

Since we first met at the Innocence Project Network Conference in San Antonio in 2016, we became fast friends and Mr. Boquete and I have kept in touch. Months later, he asked me to get him a last-minute slot in the Brooklyn half marathon, without having trained for it, to commemorate 10 years of his freedom. I was moved to tears to see him, along with fellow exoneree Jeff Deskovic, cross the finish line in Coney Island as he threw boxing jabs and danced around like Muhammad Ali.

“Life is great because I’m free.”

In the time that I’ve known him, he’s lived a nomadic life, frequently calling from a new cell phone number, but always with the same message: “Life is great because I’m free.” Even when he calls from the bed where he sleeps in his truck, a temporary motel room, or the gym where he bathes.

In the summer of 2020, I spent several weeks with Mr. Boquete in Chicago and teamed up with VeryTaste to produce a short film about Mr. Boquete’s extraordinary path to freedom and his life today.

At the time of his trial, he only spoke Spanish, was unable to navigate the complicated legal system, and was let down by his legal team. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison and the day he arrived at the maximum security prison, he had one goal and that was to leave.

Mr. Boquete was wrongly convicted of attempted sexual battery and assault in Florida in 1983. Two years later, he escaped Florida’s Glades Correctional Institution — a place he never should have been — and lived on the run as a fugitive from injustice for 11 years before he was caught and reincarcerated.  The Innocence Project then took up his case, and he was freed by the courts – with an apology from the State Attorney’s Office – in 2006.

Because of Mr. Boquete’s non-violent criminal record from the years he was a prison escapee, Florida will not compensate Mr. Boquete for any of the time he spent wrongly imprisoned. It is the only state in the country with a so-called “clean hands ban” in its compensation statute – one that prevents people with unrelated convictions from being compensated altogether.

Mr. Boquete lives on a disability subsidy of $783 per month.

Since his exoneration in 2006, Mr. Boquete has frequently been homeless. Due to his post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, he is unable to work full-time and lives on a disability subsidy of $783 per month.

Mr. Boquete, along with Robert DuBoise, Clemente Aguirre, Nathan Meyers, and other exonerees, the Innocence Project and the Florida Innocence Project have lobbied the Florida legislature to remove the “clean hands” clause as well as a prohibitively short 90-day filing deadline that prevents many exonerees from actually being compensated. This year, two bills — S.B. 526 and H.B. 241 — could bring justice to Mr. Boquete, Mr. DuBoise, and many others exonerated people who are struggling to make ends meet after spending decades in prison for crimes they did not commit.

Mr. Boquete maintains a high spirit and wants people to know that while he is homeless and urges the state of Florida to fix the law, he holds onto joy through boating, fishing, and his love for children. He returned to Cuba for the first time in 2018, raising money and supplies to give back to his hometown, where many live below the poverty line. He dreams of opening a gym, Real Innocent Fugitive, to give children whose families are experiencing poverty a chance to become boxers and athletes in Miami. 

“I want to get the youth on a positive path. I want to use my story to do beautiful things,” Mr. Boquete said. 

A Run for Freedom: Orlando Boquete’s Story

Presented by Innocence Project

A verytaste Co-Production

Director: Alicia Maule 

Producers: Alicia Maule, Daniel Selby

Translation: Isabel Vasquez

Cinematography: Johnny Castle, Nick Castle, VeryTaste

The post Watch: A Run For Freedom: Orlando Boquete’s Story appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Alicia Maule.

CDC director Rochelle Wallensky told Good Morning America (1/7/22) that it was “really encouraging news” that the vaccinated people dying from Covid were mostly “people who were unwell to begin with.”

Asked on ABC‘s Good Morning America (1/7/22) about “encouraging headlines that we’re talking about this morning, this new study showing just how well vaccines are working to prevent severe illness,” CDC director Rochelle Wallensky responded:

The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with. And, yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron; this means not only just to get your primary series but to get your booster series, and, yes, we’re really encouraged by these results.

As the hashtag #MyDisabledLifeIsWorthSaving began trending on Twitter, disability rights activists like Ady Barkan were asking, “Are our deaths less tragic? Are our lives less valuable? Are we less human?”

Because they were picked up by right-wingers as proof that Covid concerns are overblown, media outlets like CNN (1/12/22) went into factcheck mode to explain that Wallensky’s comments were distorted and taken from context.

CNN‘s factcheck (1/12/22) focused on the false claim that Covid-19 is not a real threat—and not on the genuine implication that it’s “really encouraging” when mostly people with health issues die from Covid when they’re vaccinated.

Crucial seconds were missing from the tape, you see, which would clarify that Wallensky was referring specifically to the results of a study that found that a majority of deaths among the vaccinated involved comorbidities, not deaths overall. The subtext seemed to be that it’s a confusing time and, just maybe, some people might be looking for something to be offended by.

Yeah, no. Information may certainly be unclear or shift with time, but priorities and attitudes remain—and those reflected in a statement that, within whatever subgroup, fatalities affecting primarily those with preexisting health issues are “good news” is disturbing. (For what it’s worth, some of the things the CDC defines as comorbidities: diabetes, high blood pressure, Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis, obesity, pregnancy and asthma.)

Susan Henderson of the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund did not misunderstand the context of Wallensky’s comment. She wrote in an open letter that the message from the CDC was not only

abhorrent, it perpetuates widely and wrongly held perceptions that disabled people have a worse quality of life than nondisabled people and our lives are more expendable.

When physicians hold these beliefs, and they do…the outcomes for disabled people, especially during a pandemic such as we are living through, can be fatal.

Messages from the head of the CDC must convey that all lives are valuable, and the loss of any life from COVID-19, whether it is the life of a person with a disability, an older adult, or a 32-year-old with no known disabilities, is a tragedy.

As Barkan said:

We live in the wealthiest country in history. We can afford to give healthcare to everyone. We can afford enough masks, tests and medical staff to keep everyone safe. But that requires seeing the full humanity of each of us.

News media could aid that effort if they would set aside the frame of back-and-forth political gotchas, and assume the value of all human beings, and our right to live full lives, as not a talking point but a premise.

The post It’s Not ‘Encouraging’ That Mostly the Disabled Die Despite Covid Shots appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) has called on the international community to immediately suspend Indonesia from the UN Human Rights Council over a shocking assault on a young deaf indigenous Papuan that has been likened to the George Floyd tragedy in the United States.

The treatment of Steven Yadohamang, 18, who was crushed under the boot of two Indonesian military policemen in Merauke on Tuesday was the latest incident “in a long history of systematic racism and discrimination against my people”, said ULMWP interim president Benny Wenda.

“The reality of everyday life for my people in West Papua is violence and racism at the hands of Indonesian soldiers, police and intelligence officers,” he said in a statement as the assault caught on video sparked angry condemnation by community leaders.

• READ MORE: Outrage over Indonesian officers for stomping on disabled Papuan teen’s head
• Indonesian military duo to be punished for attack on deaf Papuan
• Other articles about West Papua by Yamin Kogoya
• More West Papua coverage

In the middle of a pandemic, Indonesia had continued to launch military operations, displacing more than 50,000 people, Wenda said.

“We have suffered trauma, we have suffered the impunity of the Indonesian colonial regime since the illegal invasion of 1963,” he said.

“There is no difference between what happens to African Americans in the US and what happens to West Papuans at the hands of the illegal Indonesian occupation.”

He said the images of Yadohamang being crushed under the foot of an Indonesian police had been compared to the images of George Floyd before he died at the hands of US police in May 2020.

‘Papuan Lives Matter’
“My people rose up against racist treatment in 2019 [the Papuan Uprising], and followed the global BLM [Black Lives Matter] movement with our own cry: Papuan Lives Matter. What we are suffering is the same as the Rohingya, the same as South Africa under apartheid,” Wenda said.

He said Indonesia’s systematic, institutional racism against West Papuans violated international law.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which Indonesia has ratified, ban racial discrimination.

“Indonesia’s military operations, racial abuse, ethnic cleansing, and systematic destruction of our health and educational opportunities represent clear violations of these conventions,” Wenda said.

“The international community must respond by suspending Indonesia from the UN Human Rights Council immediately. If our international human rights protections mean anything, there must be a global response to what is happening to my people.”

Reuters reports that the Indonesian government had apologised for the actions of the two Air Force military officers it said used “excessive force” to pin down Yadohamang’s head after a video of the incident was widely shared online.

In a statement on Wednesday, presidential chief of staff Moeldoko said his office condemned what it characterised as “a form of excessive force and unlawful conduct”.

The statement also said the Papuan man was unarmed, did not resist and had been identified as a person with a disability.

Indonesian Air Force spokesman Indan Gilang Buldansyah said the two officers would be tried in a military court.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Latest on the chopping block? Social Security disability payments.

Cuts to the social safety net are often justified for budgetary reasons, but I find that hard to swallow while Amazon is still paying $0 in federal taxes. If the budget is the problem, then the wealthiest corporations should pay their taxes.

If the administration won’t see to that, then it’s not about the budget at all — it’s about cruelty.

If anything, disability programs aren’t generous enough.

I’ve lived my entire adult life with a disability. I had a migraine every day for 23 years. Yet I’m not eligible for either federal disability program — Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

Even though I was in severe chronic pain and struggling financially, I was not entirely incapable of work — although holding down a 9-5 job exacerbated my pain. The thing is, there’s no provision for partial disability; if you apply for disability, it is because you cannot work at all.

Second, the process for getting disability benefits is notoriously long and grueling. Disabled friends who have done it say you can expect to be denied your first time, and you might go through years of appeals.

Third, being on disability means living in poverty. The payments are small. There’s no thrill of free money. If you can work, you’re better off working.

The people I know who are on disability all tried and tried and tried to work first. In some cases it was a matter of personal pride and self-worth. It does not feel good to admit to yourself that you cannot work and you need public assistance. By the time someone ends up on SSDI or SSI, they have no other choice.

These are the people Trump is targeting with his latest proposal, which stems from the false idea that disabled people are defrauding taxpayers by receiving benefits when they could actually just go get jobs.

Rehashing a Reagan-era disaster, Trump’s version will require some people with disabilities that won’t get better to re-qualify for benefits every two years based on another false assumption that their medical conditions are likely to improve.

Trump’s proposal won’t even save taxpayers any money — it’s expected to cost about as much to administer as it will save by denying benefits to the disabled. It is, expected, however, to cause thousands of people to lose benefits simply for not keeping up with the complicated paperwork.

Reagan’s version took benefits away from tens of thousands of disabled people who needed them. It was overwhelmingly overturned a few years later.

Do we expect this version to work out differently? And why are disabled people today getting stripped of benefits, for no net taxpayer savings at all, while Amazon still pays no taxes?

Our economic outlooks are tied to one another. When the poor have money in their pockets, they spend it. That creates jobs and profits businesses. Social safety net programs are also an economic stimulus, in addition to a moral imperative.

There are a number of reasons, both altruistic and selfish, to keep our social safety net in place — and none to dismantle it besides cruelty.

This article originally appeared on Common Dreams.

The Trump administration on Thursday unveiled a plan allowing states to convert federal Medicaid funding into block grants, a longstanding conservative goal that critics warn could have deadly consequences for millions of vulnerable people who rely on the healthcare program as a major source of income.

Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), announced the so-called “Healthy Adult Opportunity” initiative in a statement claiming the policy will “improve health outcomes and care” for low-income people.

Progressive advocacy groups warned the plan could do precisely the opposite by giving states a green light to cut Medicaid spending and divert federal funding to other state programs, potentially leaving millions without essential healthcare coverage.

“People, poor disabled people in particular, are going to die,” tweeted Alice Wong, director of the Disability Visibility Project. “Not an exaggeration.”

Urging the public to look beyond the plan’s benign label, Public Citizen healthcare policy advocate Eagan Kemp said President Donald Trump’s “nefarious program is just a Medicaid block grant by another name, and the only opportunity it will provide is to miss out on needed care or go broke trying to get it.”

“Trump’s plan will ensure that many working families who are currently covered by Medicaid will face cuts to their services, wait lists for needed care, and the risk of medical debt and bankruptcy from trying to pay for illness,” Kemp said in a statement. “These further attempts to cut health care are just more evidence that Americans need Medicare for All now to protect their access to care once and for all.”

Today, Trump released his plan to ruthlessly cut Medicaid.

Let’s be clear: Americans will die. https://t.co/iEik7mJBEV

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) January 30, 2020

The proposal, which is likely to face legal challenges, invites states to apply for a waiver to receive a lump-sum payment from the federal government for Medicaid instead of open-ended matching funds. Right-wing supporters of block-granting Medicaid claim it would give states more “flexibility,” but critics warn the move could limit states’ ability to increase healthcare spending in response to public need.

“Any state taking this offer is engaging in fiscal malpractice,” Eliot Fishman, senior director of health policy with advocacy group Families USA, said in a statement. “Furthermore, the administration is acting lawlessly. None of the statute regarding Medicaid match rates can be waived administratively.”

“We are better than this, and we—the American people—must hold the Trump administration and Republican members of Congress accountable,” said Fishman.

Congressional Democrats joined healthcare advocacy groups in condemning the plan.

“Trump wants to destroy Medicaid while claiming to save it,” tweeted Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.). “This fiendish scheme is an Orwellian fable conjured up by the most shameless pack of liars to ever occupy our government. Never forget Republicans’ goal is to steal healthcare from as many Americans as they can.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Health Committee, said in a statement that “even after people across the country spoke out and pressed Congress to reject President Trump’s plan to gut Medicaid with his Trumpcare bill, he’s still charging forward with harmful policies that will hurt the many families who rely on Medicaid.”