Corporate and 1%-er GDP Ownership Class Greed Forces 99%-ers to Fight Amongst Themselves for decreasing GDP share left - Some of which funds Social Safety Net

  Walter Olson's and Rand Paul's examples of corporate cost-shifting of disability inclusion, from civil society by democratic fiscal policy to individuals, is as bad as, if not worse than, parents of children whose medical diagnoses were formerly known as (FKA) Higher Functioning Autism or Asperger's Syndrome and may have been socially regarded by others as "shiny aspies."  The corporate and richest 1% cost-shifting harms all autistics trying to live in communities of their own choosing regardless of individual profiles of strengths and weaknesses and how they support themselves with either paid job income or do unpaid work with the financial support of relatives, SSI/SSDI and other 'safety net' programs paid for by taxes (the public).

 Parents who were accused of "neurelitism"  (self-advocate distortion of parental high expectations for their children with a disability without cognizance of other autistic parents' and childrens' differing needs) by self-advocates for other autistics who were 'labelled' 'lower functioning autistic' or 'Kanner-type severe autism,'  are less responsible for the division in the autistic segment of the disabled and disability communities by a severity contest/oppression olympics/respectability politics.


 The 2015-16 personal reputation 'teardown' of Hans Asperger, after the erasure of the former AS medical diagnosis by the DSM 5, as allegedly a nazi sympathizer because of the death of one patient Herta Schreiber in Spiegelgrund 'hospital,' actually a eugenic killing center, in Austria


Contrary to Mr. Silberman I do not defend or condone these murderous actions. Mr. Silberman’s callousness is articulated in his book Neurotribes where he glorifies autism by exalting its gifts but failing to emphasize its handicaps, drawbacks or comorbidities. This fact is agreed upon by Mr. Silberman himself who in a Forbes magazine interview stated that he had left out the diaper wearers and head bangers because, “If we live long enough, we all become ‘diaper wearers’ eventually…Disability is a part of the human experience.” Again, this is NOT the case. Head banging or wearing diapers is not part of our human experience, no matter the age of the person. Mr. Silberman should stop callously minimizing some of the symptoms observed in autism spectrum disorders. As is now too common to Mr. Silberman his statements are insulting to those who are most seriously disabled and to the families who are taking care of them.

continued the erasure of the economic intersection by ignoring 'who pays the costs' of inclusion of all autistics, regardless of the degree of 'intense needs' individual autistics demonstrate, at an individual level to live in communities of their own choosing.

  Steve Silberman's Forbes interview reference

“If we live long enough, we all become ‘diaper wearers’ eventually…Disability is a part of the human experience.”


 is conflating many individual independent living problems related to disability with independent living problems related to aging to enlarge the 'community' of people to make it more representative (closer to a majority) of the population as a whole in a political subdivision (level of government local, state or nation).  Local governments make the same conflation of disability and aging in how they organize and fund public services while still balancing their public budgets.
  
  Examples are the Commonwealth (officially not a State) of Virginia Department of Aging and Rehabilitative Services, mission shift thanks to leadership of the late Theresa Preda.




On July 14, 2016, Theresa Preda passed away following a brief illness.
Theresa was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, on July 30, 1950. Theresa, a 1968 graduate of Monaca High School, has been Director of Independent Living for the Virginia Department of Rehabilitative Services, now the Virginia Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services, for 29 years. She was a founding member of ADAPT and the National Council of Independent Living. Theresa was involved with the National Educational Leadership Policy Fellowship, Metropolitan Leadership Richmond, and Leadership Denver and was appointed to the Council on Women by Governor Kaine.

  Virginia did the same 'mission merge' of combining rehabilitation, including job-search assistance, for senior citizens and PwDs (people with disabilities) that Montgomery County, Md has already done with the combined mission of Aging and Disability Resources Unit in the county DHHS that supervises the Commission on People with Disabilities.  Aging individuals (seniors) likely don't want to continue working their issues are more likely to be physical barriers that intersect with people with physical or sensory disabilities.  Intellectual disabilities intersect with seniors living with dementia.  People living with/recovering from mental illness or DD without ID are left unserved in the 'mission merge.' A separate Mental Health Advisory Committee advises the Montgomery County Executive about mental health disabilities allowing the Commission on People with Disabilities to ignore even intersectional issues like job development and affordable housing.  




  Fairfax
http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/csb/wellness/drop-in-centers.htm

http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/csb/publications/intellectual-disability-services-description.htm

http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/csb/

http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/csb/publications/autism-resources.htm

and Arlington Counties in VA


https://commissions.arlingtonva.us/community-services-board/csb-committee-meetings/

https://commissions.arlingtonva.us/community-services-board/

https://commissions.arlingtonva.us/disability-advisory-commission-dac/

https://commissions.arlingtonva.us/disability-advisory-commission-dac/regional-grants-to-disability-groups/
 
and Montgomery County in MD



http://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/HHS-Program/Program.aspx?id=ADS/ADSResourceCoord-p234.html

also have Aging and Disability Services Departments with combined missions that leave some people with disabilities excluded in the benefit payments, for services delivered, provided. 


  People whose issues are not 'intense' 'enough' to be found eligible for services in the process of administratively 'grading people,' are repeatedly left out in the 'grading people' administrative decisions on who is helped with paying the costs of inclusion, as the 2008 ANI Autreat presentation described.  The term 'grading people,' recalls a 2010 Autreat presentation, by Amanda Baggs, Drew Goldsmith and Morton Ann Gernsbacher mentioned here is 
about the concept of socially, but not administratively, 'grading people' to minimize the publicly-paid monetary costs to helping only autistics with the most 'intense needs' formerly known as 'low functioning.'  That presentation ignored equitable ways of providing help paying the costs of inclusion in a community of one's own choosing when a person with a disability, that is also a medical diagnosis, can't pay the costs themselves in money, or time building relationships, with similarly situated people with disabilities.




 The author of the corticalchauvinism blog post misses the economic intersectionality of who pays the costs to a lesser extent than Silberman, who also ignores the economic intersectionality of who pays the costs an individual can't, in favor of trying to claim a 'moral high ground' to guide the advocacy and public policy of how to treat people placed in vulnerable life journeys by the disabilities they were born with. 
As is now too common to Mr. Silberman his statements are insulting to those who are most seriously disabled and to the families who are taking care of them.

  Self-advocates, who also advocate for others who cannot advocate for themselves, continue to ignore the public costs of autistic inclusion by minimizing them to helping the autistics with the most 'intense needs' after diverting as many autistics with less 'intense needs' to 'building autistic community together' to individually privatize the costs, in money and time, of the 'social safety net' to get 'bipartisan' legislative votes in the "gloomy" (as Tyler Cowen described) 'political' and 'governing' process, for what little is left of the 'social safety net.' 


  Disputes about 'individual representation is a legislative fiction,' written about in earlier posts




Try telling that to Autism Speaks or Grasp then, who act with much less
honourable motives than ASAN.
Individual representation is always a legislative fiction, no one person in 
any large community can accurately represent the beliefs and aspirations of 
every single constituent, not in the least because those are likely to be 
paradoxical an contradictory. One therfore advocates a community rather than 
individuals.
 

were about trying to claim a role of majority 'influencer' of movement decisions for autistics leading advocacy by process complaints if they could not be the majority 'influencer' of decisions on issue complaints of what to demand in collective advocacy.  

  In simpler words, 'win an argument' by controlling the group decision making process (including public discourse about disability without equal participation of people with disabilities e.g. the slogan 'nothing about us without us') while 'agreeing to disagree' on issue positions to advocate for.  People who disagree may drop out of one organization in a bigger movement and address the same issues differently, often leading to further conflict if the two organizations attempt to work in coalitions.  The sustainable growth of both organizations, as well as the movement as a whole, may be hampered as well.  


  The choice to 'self-advocate' as 'one autistic community' to expand the social safety net to help more autistics more quickly, with administrative and public policymaking cognizance of individual variation, was a choice that too few autistic self-advocates, in leadership positions and seeking to retain them, in organizations like GRASP, ASAN nationally and in local chapters, AASCEND, Autism National Committee, ANI Autism Network International and AAC (Association for Autistic Community successor to ANI at least in Autreat management), as well as organizations not led by autistics, made to the detriment of the autistic community as a whole. 

Abandoning 'political' activism at systemic levels absorbing inclusion costs individually after 'center' moves to the right

  Why do people with invisible, not physically manifested, disabilities have to 'pass' or 'fake it until they make it' with soft skill self-help plugged on social media and email lists from sources like govexec.com and theladders.com


and others,






among other 'free advice' ('that's worth the price') 'pop/positive psychology' or 'professional/personal development journalism' sources?  People with physically manifested, visible or 'intense needs' disabilities retain access to IL (independent living) services paid for in part by someone else.  The oppression olympics/severity contest/respectability politics games started, as cost-shifting backlash to disability civil rights law ADA and 2008 ADAA, in part, with Walter Olson's 1997 book.  

  The book "The Excuse Factory" by Walter Olson distorted individual circumstances where civil rights law was applied into allegations of manipulating law to excuse incompetence that developed into stigma and stereotypes of people with disabilities attempting to obtain reasonable accommodation to perform essential job functions in their workplaces.  Anyone who supervised anyone else in their workplace became unnecessarily wary.  People with disabilities started learning how to pass as not disabled to avoid the stigma and stereotypes out of fear that attempting to 'come out' or 'disclose their disabilities' would cost them their jobs or job opportunities.    
Chapter 7 "Accommodating Demons" was particularly problematic in this regard.  The first page of the printed chapter is inserted above.  



   Walter Olson returned to dividing people with disabilities by severity to shift costs of inclusion from the corporate class that did harm to the (oppressed) class with disabilities, in 2010, 20 years after the ADA was signed.


   The division was echoed in 2015 by Senator Rand Paul R-KY to push Republicans farther right and Democratic legislators farther right in 'centrist bipartisan consensus' that is a revision of the social contract  after gas lighting a similar policy argument tactic to black knighting .   A third 'label' for the same problem in public discourse is


centrist-extremist politics described in a 1998 political research associates paper.


  People drop out of civic involvement or 'politics,' because it's "gloomy" as Tyler Cowen describes it in "Create Your Own Economy/Age of the Infovore,"  and Cowen credits autistics for understanding politics as "gloomy," for their focus only on helping themselves and others they self-select as equal members of an 'identity politics' or 'autistic community' to solve individual problems without the use of publicly-funded resources. 
 

 

  The alternative, viewing many similar individual problems as a sign of a systemic problem, is not a focus of 'identity politics" activism unless it involves immediate threats to the life or freedom of movement of a person in the 'identity politics' community.  Solving individual problems without systemic solutions allows cost-shifting that enables the income and wealth inequality that's a hallmark of neoliberalism/neoconservatism/market anarchism/pre-Keynes Austrian school economics of Friedrich Hayek.  Hayek's neurology and psychology writings are also cited by Tyler Cowen perhaps as a basis for experimental or behavioral economics two more new names for the same old neoliberalism/neoconservatism/market anarchism/pre-Keynes neoclassical economics.  By failing to blame Republicans for making 'politics' "gloomy" in the first place Tyler Cowen shows the Republican/corporatist/libertarian/pre-Keynes Austrian school economic biases of the donors to George Mason University and its Mercatus Center (Charles and David Koch and their fellow donors organized through Freedom Partners) who might pay part of Cowen's salary and support his "marginal revolution" blog marketed with the slogan 'world's most popular economist.'  George Mason University had a 2002 Nobel Prize winning (economics same field as Cowen) faculty member named Vernon L. Smith who disclosed his disability/'came out autistic.'

 

  The advantages of 'mild autism' may likely include ability to shift public costs to individual costs in money, or time, to restrain the growth of federal spending to allow balanced budgets at the federal level overturning the Keynesian concept that deficit spending can overturn bad business cycles by keeping demand drops from worsening bad business cycles.











  Vernon L. Smith actually disclosed his disability/'came out' as living with Asperger's Syndrome before erasure of the diagnosis and Hans Asperger was 'exposed' as a nazi sympathizer personally, as well as erasing his contribution to spreading knowledge of the diversity of independent living skills, in people on the later-recognized autism spectrum.  Smith was allowed to leave for a job at Chapman University in Orange, CA.  Maybe Vernon Smith's scholarship didn't legitimize neoliberals (where neoclassical, neoconservative, market anarchist, Austrian school economics are new names for the same political/economic view) as much as Tyler Cowen's publication record has, at a lower pay level that George Mason University's state-funded budget could 'afford,' since a 2000 paper.










  More people could be helped more quickly if the many selves in self advocacy communities would change and repair the existing systems.  The struggle for Medicaid as is, rather than expanding it as well as ending its 'institutional bias' toward paying for nursing homes not HCBS providing LTSS delivered in communities chosen by the beneficiary with a disability in compliance with Olmstead vs. LC and EW, and the broader struggle to save the ACA in 2017 is an example.

  I rustedaspie (humble author of this post), and about 3 other people I was hired with, lost Medicaid benefits in 2003 for supported employment services that helped us find jobs




  The Md. Medicaid cut in 2003, and 2009 demands to restore the cut, (2 images below) that restricted eligibility criteria to incomes above 116% of poverty after it had been at 300% of poverty, proposed by then-Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich devastated, to the point of closure and leaving people with disabilities unserved including the author of this blog post, by 2017 is shown in the images below.



for the same employer in 2000.  Fewer people organized or fought, to a comparable extent, because the independent living issues lost a severity contest/oppression olympics/we weren't 'graded' as suffering from intense 'enough' needs.  The only direct risk was unemployment not being forced to live in a nursing home



Around that time, disability justice activists, including Carl Peterson of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), had what Peterson describes as a "really, really disconcerting call" with Gregoire's people. "They basically said, 'This is her budget, she's not going to make any changes to it.' It was horrible," he remembers. "It was her budget, and she felt very entitled that she had that power." The district attorney's office made the situation worse, according to Ganapathiraju, by trying "to convince the governor that if you back down on this issue, you'll never be able to make any cuts on any of your programs ever again. Which is not true, but that's the kind of message the governor was getting," he says.


On paper, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provides that disabled people are entitled to the "most integrated" setting and the Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C. (known in disabled activist circles as disability's Brown v. Board of Education) found that people with mental disabilities should be allowed to live in the community, not institutions, on the condition that states have the resources to provide community care. In 2011, Governor Gregoire's cuts led to another case that was based around Olmstead, a case called M.R. v. Dreyfus. In Dreyfus, 12 disabled plaintiffs successfully argued that Washington's budget cuts would mean they wouldn't be able to get the hours with a care assistant they needed for basics like bathing, eating and going to the doctor. Their health would deteriorate, and they'd inevitably be sent to nursing homes. The plaintiffs won, but the fight wasn't over. Gregoire filed to extend the deadline for appealing the decision. Disability justice activists went into overdrive, calling in organizers from as far away as DC, New York and Texas.


In the case of Washington State, the pushback worked. After several protests, press conferences and petitions, Gregoire re-checked her pocketbook. In October 2012, Gregoire released an official statement: she would not challenge M.R. v. Dreyfus. It was a big win for disability rights advocates. ASAN's Peterson believes the national organizing made a "huge" difference. Without it, "honestly, we wouldn't have been able to pull this off," he says. "If we didn't organize, if that protest didn't happen" at the state capitol, "if those op-eds didn't get written, and what have you, I think she probably would have sent [the original budget] out."


….
Petty, whose business caters mostly to seniors, believes the socialization offered by his "continuing care retirement communities" (CCRCs) helps combat depression. And even Ganapathiraju, who now sits on the Governor's Committee on Disability Issues and Employment, admits that often nursing homes are "Sometimes the only option, or the best option, especially for folks, say, with special needs, that need an extra kind of guide throughout the day." Still, the majority of disabled people (and seniors) would rather live outside of such facilities - even a place like Wesley, with its game rooms outfitted with Nintendo Wii systems, shuttles to the mall and concierge services. In fact, when asked whether or not he sees himself ever living in a CCRC, Petty laughs: "That's a great question. Everybody in the field, when they're my age, go, 'No.' As does everybody else. I have no idea, to be honest with you." So it shouldn't come as a surprise that in 2011, there were 511,000 people in the United States on waiting lists for waivers for home care services. Likewise, an AARP study from 2012 found that 64 percent of Medicaid long-term service dollars for older people and adults with physical disabilities went to nursing facilities, the study's authors noted, "even though most people prefer to live at home." (Meanwhile, the most recent Congressional report on the subject found that 9 out of 10 nursing homes were understaffed over a two-year period from 1999-2001.)  










  or having our communication needs misunderstood and criminalized (Zakh Price and Kayleb Moon-Robinson).  





  Passing, by consciously changing how one presents oneself to the world, to be accepted as a 'member' of a privileged (or socially and economically dominant) class has been written about mostly in a context of racial discrimination. 






Call number for the book below, with a summary and a review, (Dewey Decimal System) is 305.8 HOB.

Title:
A chosen exile : a history of racial passing in American life / Allyson Hobbs.
Author:
Hobbs, Allyson Vanessa.
ISBN:
9780674368101
Personal Author:
Hobbs, Allyson Vanessa.
Publication Information:
Harvard Univ Pr 2014



Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss.
As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one's birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one's own.
Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied-and often outweighed-these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to "pass out" and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.



Choice Review
In contrast to most scholarship on racial passing, Hobbs (Stanford) focuses on the losses rather than the rewards that racially ambiguous individuals experienced as a result of their decision to assume a white identity. In addition to literary texts, Hobbs draws on a wide range of historical sources, including runaway slave advertisements, censuses, diaries, letters, and newspapers to demonstrate that from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries, racial passing was neither a hidden enterprise nor an individualistic endeavor. The decision of racially indeterminate men and women to reject their black racial identity deeply affected the larger communities they left behind. Hobbs, whose own family history is marked by the phenomenon of passing, contends that the losses-personal, familial, and psychological-outweighed the advantages that racially ambiguous persons accrued from passing, encouraging many of these individuals to "come home," as she calls it, by the 1940s and 1950s. Hobbs's cultural history of passing provides greater insight into the simultaneous malleability and salience of race in US life, and helps readers understand the continued tensions surrounding racial hybridity in the 21st century. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Meredith L. Roman, SUNY Brockport
 

  This older book, with a Dewey Decimal call number of 302.1 KRO,


Title:
Passing : when people can't be who they are / Brooke Kroeger.
Author:
Kroeger, Brooke, 1949-
ISBN:
9781891620997
Personal Author:
Kroeger, Brooke, 1949-
Edition:
1st ed.
Publication Information:
New York : Public Affairs, c2003.


 broadens the concept of passing from avoiding racial discrimination to avoiding any form of discrimination that civil rights law 'protected class' framework, enforced by 'test case' litigation one person at a time, attempts to remedy.   The costs of 'following the law' by the dominant sociopolitical class are shifted to the dominated sociopolitical class instead of being borne by the dominant class that originally caused the social and economic individual and class harm.  The dominated sociopolitical class has less ability to pay those costs in money and in time, to learn skills to 'save money' by making whatever could not be purchased at an individual, and collective, level.  Inequalities in paying the shifted costs lead to arguments within the dominated class that slow class-wide progress by keeping the dominated class divided against itself 'looking down the privilege class ladder' instead of unified to 'look up' the 'privilege class ladder.'






  The Booklist review nails the economic intersectionality of why people try to 'pass' or 'fake it until they make it' with help of other selves (people) in self-advocacy/identity politics communities.  "Politics' is too "gloomy," as Tyler Cowen wrote in Create Your Own Economy/Age of the Infovore," to wait for progress to 'trickle down' to all individuals.  


 Booklist Review
The term passing is most often thought of as racial minorities passing for white to receive the privileges denied them due to race. But [K]roeger plumbs the varieties and complexities of passing across racial, sexual, and economic lines. She offers profiles of a black man who passed for a white [J]ew; a working-class Puerto Rican woman who became an Orthodox [J]ew and passed for privileged; a gay man at a conservative [J]ewish seminary passing for straight; a lesbian naval officer who passed for straight; and a respected poet who, on a lark, adopts a difference persona and ends up writing pseudonymously about the rock-and-roll music scene. [K]roeger intersperses these profiles with references in history, literature, psychology, and contemporary culture that explore the dynamics of passing--the lies and deception involved as well as the separation from community and family. She also explores the parallels between civil disobedience and passing, which, although it is a self-centered act, allows the passer to secure opportunities in the present rather than waiting for social change. An engaging look at how certain people choose to deal with social inequities. --Vanessa Bush Copyright 2003 Booklist