What is the Difference Between Harvey Victims and the “Invisible Silent Minorities That Everyone is Happy to Ignore”?

by Scott Creighton

And it’s not just the homeless we are conditioned to detest. Truly, it is all the least of the brothers and sisters of mine who are at risk.

At a time when an ever-larger share of national income is going to the richest 1 percent, and large segments of the working class population are seeing rising mortality rates, the Washington Post naturally turns to the country’s most pressing problem: the number of people receiving disability payments from the government.

Its second piece on the topic profiled a family with multiple generations receiving disability benefits. It seemed to go out of its way to include every possible negative aspect of their lives in order to give an unfavorable view of the family, and leave readers with the impression that the country has a serious problem of families who do nothing but collect disability checks generation after generation. FAIR June 2017

The Washington Post, a so-called “liberal” institution and one currently at war with Trump on everything EXCEPT THIS… promoting in two separate recent articles the notion that everyone on disability is lazy or a drug addict or all of the above and faking their disabilities. This trend is a developing/bipartisan one as well.

I wrote about this several months ago. How, after deliberately under-funding Social Security for a couple of years so a “crisis” could be declared,  the Obama administration and congress passed a bill which provided increased funding (to the tune of 1.4 billion dollars) to the SSA ODAR office which is in charge with reviewing disability claims of persons already declared disabled with the intention of finding a percentage of them no longer disabled and kicking them off the program. They started this increased effort back in 2014 and yours truly was one of the first to have their cases reviewed.

Obama put together a panel to decide how to fix the “crisis” of Social Security after his “compromise” caused it in the first place. The panel was comprised of neoliberals who wanted nothing more than to see SS privatized one piece at a time. One of those panel members was a member of the RAND Corporation. I wrote about her:

Her field of study is how to push older people out of retirement and back into the work-force as cheap labor and showing how people on disability tend to not want to work for minimum wage and how that hurts Big Business’s pool OF CHEAP LABOR. Read her evaluation of the SSDI program on “human capital” which she wrote a year before serving on that panel

Also read how she wants older retired people on Social Security to get their asses back to work to “help the economy”

And she was appointed by the Obama administration to help FIX Social Security.

This neoliberal reactionary fascist is one of the key reasons many people are being forced off disability, disabled or not, and back into the work force. me

I also wrote back then how this seemingly inhumane agenda of theirs is actually a repeat of the first year of the Ronald Reagan administration’s first term in office. Yep, before anything else Ronny Raygun did to harm workers and poor people in America back in 1981, he first went after the weakest and most defenseless… the disabled.

Tens of thousands of people were wrongly kicked off the disability program they had paid into their entire working lives and as a result, thousands died and still more drifted off into homelessness and obscurity before congress took action and forced an end to the ruthless action.

It took em three years to expose their efforts and the SSA put in place protections for disabled people in order to ensure the program was never enacted again. Those protections have been removed since 2014 of course and we are back to attacking the least of our brothers when they, like the victims of Hurricane Harvey, fall victim to circumstances beyond their control.

What happened to me was a CDR (continuing disability review) and back before this 1.4 billion dollars and the move by congress and the “liberal” president to reduce the number of people on disability, in 2012 the CDR rate was at about 6% meaning 6% of the people reviewed were kicked off disability and most were children.

CDRs — regular follow-ups of DI and SSI beneficiaries to weed out those who’ve recovered enough to work — lead to termination of benefits in a minority of cases.  About 6 percent of CDRs conducted in 2012 led the agency to stop benefits, though the rate was much lower for adults and higher for children (whose medical conditions tend to be more changeable).” Kathy Ruffing

You see, there was already a program in place for this process and in fact, it’s terribly difficult for someone to be put on disability these days. Was so when I applied after my first DVT and PE and had only gotten harder in the years that followed. That’s why the number is so low.

However, in my case, the Administrative Law Judge hired as part of the new 1.4 billion dollar push to kick disabled people out into the street has a much higher than average percentage than most:

My judge, Judge Wallace E Weakley, has dismissed 26% of all of the disability cases that came before him, approved 32% and denied 42%. Those are reviews and new cases. His actions have generated feedback on the website that keeps track of the Tampa office’s work. His individual stats also come from that same website me

Not intending to turn this article inward about myself, I post this information in lieu of actual statistical information about how many disabled people are now being kicked off the SSA program since this new purge started back in 2014.

The SSA website does contain statistical information about such reviews, but it’s complied in a way that focuses entirely on individual ALJs and does not provide overall numbers or statistics that I can find.

The point is, as the Washington Post’s recent efforts illuminate, there is a consistent and ongoing effort to demonize the disabled so that people like that woman working with the RAND Corp can get away with re-enacting cruel policies from the Reagan days to launch attacks on the least of our brothers and sisters while the general public sits back and does/says nothing about it.

Much like they do when laws are passed to criminalize homelessness.

In that sense it’s understandable the general public will flock to any and all opportunities to provide aid and EMPATHY to victims of hurricanes… they do it because those whom they might otherwise have held such feelings for are no longer allowed to share in such things.

Perhaps it is an oversimplification too say that as a society, as a community, we generally care more for the victims of hurricanes (temporary as their circumstances may be) than we do the homeless or the disabled because… we don’t think it’s the hurricane victim’s fault for being in that situation whereas we have been conditioned by the like of the Washington Post and other outlets to blame the homeless and the disabled for their condition.

Perhaps it is an oversimplification. Perhaps it is not. But it is a fact we view them and their plights differently and that is, to me, an obscenity that shames our nation now and for future generations.

It should also serve as a warning because we have not always been this way toward our troubled brothers and sisters and in the end I wonder, I fear, perhaps even empathy toward Harvey’s victims might be conditioned out of us in the future in just such a manner.

Yes, my current condition makes me hyper sensitive I suppose, but I have covered this issues and these topics for years and more to the point I have covered their efforts to remake our consciences in their model, their neoliberal model, for just as long. I had hoped they were failing. Some indicators are there to suggest as much. But as I see more and more suffering, and more and more dismissal of those who suffer the most, I worry their continuous efforts have not been in vain.

Like I said… I do not begrudge Harvey’s victims their sympathy. I chide. Like that nagging voice in the back of your head I say we can and should do better for all of the least of our brothers in their ongoing time of need.