ArnieVille

Disabled activists are camping out to protest cuts in IHSS (in home support services).

From the IndyBay, by Jonathan Nack: "Last month, on May 21, a week after the Governor's proposed budget was announced, outrage and anger led Stewart and a small group of other activists to seize a traffic island on a major thoroughfare in Berkeley. Tents, banners and picket signs sprouted up.

For four days and nights the little tent city they dubbed “Arnieville” visually dominated Adeline at Stewart Street. Motorists and passersby could hardly miss their message to put a halt to cuts to In-Home Support Services, social security income, Cal Works, General Assistance and Medi-Cal."

ArnieVille has been reestablished.  This speech is an important press release given and, possibly, written by Jean Stewart.

6/24/10 PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT

Welcome to ArnieVille!, our humble temporary home. If the budget cuts go through this may be our humble permanent home. We’re CUIDO, Communities United In Defense of Olmstead. We’re here because we’re sick and tired of a budget process that treats us as expendable. Every year our governor & legislators look for items they can cut from the budget, & every year they single out  In-Home Supportive Services and Medi-Cal, along with other programs that elderly, disabled, & poor people depend on, like CalWORKs, Adult Day Health Care, & mental health rehab. And every year we go thru terror, fearing that we’ll lose our workers. Meanwhile our caregivers go through their own dread that they’ll lose their jobs and be unable to feed their families.

In case you’re not familiar with IHSS, it’s a model program, one of the most effective in the country. IHSS pays workers to help low-income people with disabilities with critical daily activities like eating, dressing, bathing etc, so that they—we--can remain independent in our homes and not be shunted into nursing homes against our will. 490,000 elderly & disabled people in CA receive services under IHSS.

Governor Schwarzenegger wants to slash IHSS by up to 40%. The Democrats offer a counter-proposal, and the Republicans a counter counter proposal. From one day to the next, the percentage keeps shifting. In other words, we’re a moving target.

Try being told that from now on you MIGHT NOT—depending on the final budget negotiations, depending on the governor’s mood, depending on political machinations that go on behind closed doors—you MIGHT NOT be able to get up in the morning anymore, starting July 1. You MIGHT NOT be able to eat. You MIGHT have to go to a nursing home. It all depends. But don’t worry, be happy!

Well we’re not happy! But it’s a democracy, right? So we’ve marched, we’ve rallied, we’ve met with legislators. Various disability rights organizations have filed lawsuits. We blockaded the governor’s office in Sacramento for an entire day, and were arrested.

Pretty dramatic, right? We were all over the news. And yet here we are, in 2010, going through it all over again. Same attitude on the part of the lawmakers. Same dread in our hearts, and in the hearts of our caregivers.

Arnold wants us to file meekly into nursing homes & into our graves, while he attends to his 3 luxury cars and 4 houses. California is the only oil-drilling state that does not impose an oil severance tax. And California has the highest percentage of billionaires in the country. They come here for a reason, folks, and it ain’t just the California sun.

Legislators target us because they think we’re powerless, because we don’t have wealth. A lot of us can’t work because of our disabilities, so in their eyes, we don’t contribute to the economy. But real power isn’t related to wealth, real power happens when people join hands, forge common cause, and resist injustice together.

So here we are, camping out, in the tradition of the Hoovervilles, shantytowns that sprang up around the country during the Great Depression. We named our Hooverville ArnieVille, and we ground our resistance in Olmstead, [5 mins] a Supreme Court decision which held that the unnecessary segregation of people with disabilities in institutions constitutes discrimination based on disability. Olmstead is the engine that fires us, and Olmstead gave us our name—Communities United In Defense of Olmstead, CUIDO, which comes from a beautiful Spanish verb that means “to care for”.

We camped out in May for 4 days, and the support we received from the community was so gratifying, and the media coverage so positive, that we decided to reprise ArnieVille, choosing June 22 because it’s the anniversary of Olmstead.

But why Olmstead? What’s the connection? If the proposed cuts to IHSS, Medi-Cal, and other programs are passed, tens of thousands of frail elderly and disabled people will end up in nursing homes, emergency rooms, homeless shelters, and mortuaries. And the incarceration of our people in nursing homes is a violation of Olmstead. Not to mention the fact that nursing homes are 5 times more expensive than maintaining people in their homes.

Arnold has targeted us in another way as well: he plans unannounced visits to IHSS recipients’ homes, based on the deeply offensive notion, supported by zero evidence, that WE are frauds,  bilking the system. It’s a trick that’s old as dirt: criminalize a class of people in order to deflect criticism of malevolent social policies.

We may seem very festive to you on this occasion, with our signs and banners festooning the trees. But make no mistake: we’re deadly earnest; we’re in this struggle because lives hang in the balance. We’re no longer requesting accommodation; we DEMAND that these programs be fully funded, not just this year, but PERMANENTLY. We refuse to go through this dread every single year. Enough is enough!,

Indeed it is.

BTW: here's some of the summary for Olmstead.

In the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), Congress described the isolation and segregation of individuals with disabilities as a serious and pervasive form of discrimination. 42 U.S.C. § 12101(a)(2), (5). Title II of the ADA, which proscribes discrimination in the provision of public services, specifies, inter alia, that no qualified individual with a disability shall, “by reason of such disability,” be excluded from participation in, or be denied the benefits of, a public entity’s services, programs, or activities. §12132. Congress instructed the Attorney General to issue regulations implementing Title II’s discrimination proscription. See §12134(a). One such regulation, known as the “integration regulation,” requires a “public entity [to] administer … programs … in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of qualified individuals with disabilities.” 28 CFR § 35.130(d). A further prescription, here called the “reasonable-modifications regulation,” requires public entities to “make reasonable modifications” to avoid “discrimination on the basis of disability,” but does not require measures that would “fundamentally alter” the nature of the entity’s programs. §35.130(b)(7).

Respondents L. C. and E. W. are mentally retarded women; L. C. has also been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and E. W., with a personality disorder. Both women were voluntarily admitted to Georgia Regional Hospital at Atlanta (GRH), where they were confined for treatment in a psychiatric unit. Although their treatment professionals eventually concluded that each of the women could be cared for appropriately in a community-based program, the women remained institutionalized at GRH. Seeking placement in community care, L. C. filed this suit against petitioner state officials (collectively, the State) under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and Title II. She alleged that the State violated Title II in failing to place her in a community-based program once her treating professionals determined that such placement was appropriate. E. W. intervened, stating an identical claim. The District Court granted partial summary judgment for the women, ordering their placement in an appropriate community-based treatment program. The court rejected the State’s argument that inadequate funding, not discrimination against L. C. and E. W. “by reason of [their] disabilit[ies],” accounted for their retention at GRH. Under Title II, the court concluded, unnecessary institutional segregation constitutes discrimination per se, which cannot be justified by a lack of funding. The court also rejected the State’s defense that requiring immediate transfers in such cases would “fundamentally alter” the State’s programs. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the District Court’s judgment, but remanded for reassessment of the State’s cost-based defense. The District Court had left virtually no room for such a defense. The appeals court read the statute and regulations to allow the defense, but only in tightly limited circumstances. Accordingly, the Eleventh Circuit instructed the District Court to consider, as a key factor, whether the additional cost for treatment of L. C. and E. W. in community-based care would be unreasonable given the demands of the State’s mental health budget.