discipline posted:this was done earlier this month but maybe you haven't seen it yet. it's good. I wrote a big ol' blog post with plenty of angry polemics but maybe the posters here can come up with some good stuff.
Soto is paralyzed from the shoulders down but does not let that keep her from doing advocacy work for people with disabilities at a Los Angeles independent living center. Using her mouth, she can operate a computer trackball and type numbers into a phone with a Popsicle stick. Several times a week, an aide helps her into an electric wheelchair so she can take the train to work.
Most of the $800 she earns a month goes toward work expenses, including paying someone to feed her lunch. She has relied on $723 a month in SSI to cover rent and utilities. In July, the state reduced its portion of the grant for single beneficiaries like Soto to the federal minimum, shaving $15 from her income.
The same month, the state began charging Medi-Cal beneficiaries copayments of $5 for prescriptions, $50 for emergency room visits and up to $200 for hospital stays. Soto has five prescriptions and went to the hospital four times last year. “That can really add up,” she said.
But the cuts that worry her most are those to the In-Home Supportive Services program, which is paying for about nine hours of care a day. The two women who have been assisting Soto for more than a decade have told her they will have to look for other jobs if their hours are cut again. Without them, she fears she would have to go into a nursing home.
“Oh, my gosh. That’s no way to live,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to continue working. I would lose my quality of life…. I think I would rather just die.”
- From LA Times
Does anyone have any ideas? There’s a movement from Adbusters of all places to occupy Wall St. on September 17th. Yet Wall St. is more fortified than the White House nowadays. The rich of this Gilded Age are isolated and live in jets and fortresses. They don’t just hire security – they hire media firms and think tanks and create a culture of docile security. Our prisons are overflowing and our heads are empty. We elected a man who ran on “change” and he delivered us more of the same but in the way of a grotesque pornographic minstrel show for the rich. Do we see how tight the noose gets before we start thinking how to get out of this? I’ve been toying with ideas around grassroots democracy at local levels, community (re)building on small scales as the Great American Federal Age fades to a fiery sunset. Youth empowerment, that sort of thing. There needs to be a foundation of civil society for that to work, though, and I fear it’s all been shot to hell by secular self-medicated psychiatry. At least, this is what my mother tells me as she grades papers. It’s what I see in the educated, unemployed, and going-nowheres, the depressed and dejected activists who had to move back home. So, seriously… does anyone have any ideas?
haha remember this guys, it was cool that something pierced this kind of pessimism we share while simultaneously affirming it
roseweird posted:i have some ideas for what to do, and how i hope i might help in the future, but they all revolve around getting a master's and getting a job with a decent salary and saving up so i can buy some space with others so we can live communally and organize to encourage others to do the same. space is so expensive in new york, and the arrangement of the city is so deeply alienating, developers and gentrifiers are the only enemies i can currently see being able to do anything about. i like to dream about such communes as the basis for a new civil infrastructure of greenhouse agriculture and small-scale community industry, but that is obviously insane, as right now even managing to secure a foothold in a part of new york feels difficult. without reaching some critical mass of resources and influence, anything i do in service of these goals will obviously play directly into the hands of rich urban developers and their yuppie hangers-on. i could leave, but this city feels like home and i don't know where else i would go anyway. i hope that in ten years or so i will be in a place to start thinking more seriously about this.
greenhouse agriculture actually really interests me as part of an overall program in agriculture and nutrition reform, but in truth it is very hard to feel optimistic about any of that stuff yet. i have met some of new york's urban gardeners and i'm not sure any of them are interested in talking about real problems like crop yields and breeding programs, pest management, food distribution justice, community ownership of means of production (i wouldn't even have tried to use the word "proletarian" with these people), they seem to be mostly glorified landscapers and kale-enthusiasts.
meanwhile, some huge developer bought an enormous building in sunset park and is building acres of greenhouse on its roof. it will draw upon the neighborhood's very large populations of poor asians and latinos to pick food at or below minimum wage, while concentrating the profits in the hands of its ownership, bringing rural agricultural injustice to an exciting new urban terrain. lower manhattan restaurants are apparently thrilled at the prospect of really fresh tomatoes from just across the bridge, but others complain that hydroponic tomatoes are too watery.
i will give you the same offer i give every one of you ppl, i have a field in south central serbia, it's yours if you want it. if you come over the summer, i'll even help you out. good luck actually growing enough of a surplus to be able to afford any experimental methods or fancy equipment.
somehow nobody has taken me up on this offer...
elemennop posted:i have a field in south central serbia,
where are you from elemennop? was this an inheritance or what?
hydroponic tomatoes are too watery.
as a first world marxist, I too struggle with the water content of my hydroponic vegetables.
SariBari posted:elemennop posted:i have a field in south central serbia,
where are you from elemennop? was this an inheritance or what?
i'm from serbia, but i've lived in the states for most life. currently back in serbia. that field i was talking about isn't mine, but in the family. it's not being used, so i offer it to americans with strains of pastorial utopianism. i do currently own land in slovenia as of inheritance from my great uncle 2x removed, but i'm signing that over to my mom.
elemennop posted:i do currently own land in slovenia as of inheritance from my great uncle 2x removed, but i'm signing that over to my mom.
cool mom
poverty is relative though and i still feel kind of oppressed so can we change the terminology to 99.12% vs the evil .88%?
discipline posted:I was right though. they had to take that building and they never got anywhere closer than across the street from it
still became a pretty big thing.
Ironicwarcriminal posted:someone sent me a unicef-sponsored income calculator the other day and it turns out my middling salary literally puts me in the top 1% of the world's income earners
poverty is relative though and i still feel kind of oppressed so can we change the terminology to 99.12% vs the evil .88%?
if it makes you feel any better, income alone doesnt actually determine quality of life. im sure there are plenty of people living more meaningful, fulfilling lives than yours
discipline posted:jools posted:haha remember this guys, it was cool that something pierced this kind of pessimism we share while simultaneously affirming it
I was right though. they had to take that building and they never got anywhere closer than across the street from it
sure but it was still kind of a big thing
VoxNihili posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
someone sent me a unicef-sponsored income calculator the other day and it turns out my middling salary literally puts me in the top 1% of the world's income earners
poverty is relative though and i still feel kind of oppressed so can we change the terminology to 99.12% vs the evil .88%?
if it makes you feel any better, income alone doesnt actually determine quality of life. im sure there are plenty of people living more meaningful, fulfilling lives than yours
of course...at first i was upset because i was like 'man if i'm anxious and unsettled then what's it like for all those people who earn less' but then i realized that much of the world's population had the privilege of being born into non-liberal, non post-industrial societies where religion and community still mean something
genuinely kind of impressed here, lol
daddyholes posted:those don't exist
daddyholes posted:Saudi Arabia, my favorite pre-industrial society,
i think you'll find that i said 'non post-industrial'
Ironicwarcriminal posted:can you check the prevalence of 'friend zone' for me jools
you can do it yourself you know...
http://www.google.com/trends/
how to friendzone