RIL’s STATEMENT ON THE “OCCUPY MOVEMENT”

November 28, 2011

In solidarity with our sister Independent Living Center in Chico, Independent Living Services of Northern California (ILSNC), RIL sends a message of support to peaceful protesters in Sacramento, Oakland, UC Davis, and all other American cities and around the world.  We call upon all protesters to remain steadfast in their commitment to non-violence.  We condemn not only the violence and excessive force deployed by the Oakland Police and the UC Davis Campus Police, but also the vandalism perpetrated by misguided individuals who reject the values of the Occupy Movement.

Russell Rawlings-President of DOGFITE.

RIL believes that public protest and non-violent civil disobedience is often necessary to correct injustice.  It’s a core American tradition going back to the founding of our democracy.  From the Boston Tea Party to the women’s suffragette and labor movements; from the civil rights sit-ins to the Section 504 and ADA occupations by disability rights pioneers, our cherished victories required direct action.

Since long before the economic crash of 2008, people with disabilities have been fighting relentless cuts to our support programs and services. In California, we’re facing even more cuts, including a massive “trigger cut” to In-Home Supportive Services on December 15^th.  This planned 20% reduction hangs like an axe over the head of thousands of low-income people with disabilities.  Having been pushed to the limits of human endurance, we clearly identify with the pain and frustration expressed by the new “Occupy” movement.  Many of us feel like the general population has finally caught up with what we’ve been experiencing for a very long time.

Throughout this economic crisis we have asked for nothing more than shared sacrifice. We assert that catastrophic program cuts can be prevented by employing fair, common sense tax reforms to produce desperately needed revenue.  Tragically, as public treasuries continue to drain, our elected leaders act like obedient servants to the tax-cutting demands of their powerful campaign donors.  The full weight of “deficit reduction” is therefore borne by those already struggling in poverty.

While we live in dread of the next cut, enormous tax breaks are given to corporations who promise to “create jobs” that never materialize. Bankers, whose blatant criminality eliminated millions of American jobs, enjoy billion-dollar bailouts while unemployed protesters are arrested for “camping.” As vital disability programs and services are gutted, we learn that 2/3 of U.S. corporations – particularly the largest and most profitable – pay zero annual income taxes. Fear-mongering politicians pontificate about the federal deficit while pouring trillions of dollars of new debt – not to mention thousands of young American lives – into foreign wars that a growing majority of Americans find difficult to justify.

In today’s political environment, we find ourselves either patronized or completely ignored.  Now is the time for everyday Americans to unite and organize a bold resistance to this injustice.  We believe that the peaceful protests taking place in over a thousand U.S. cities demonstrate the beginning of a new awakening.

For these reasons RIL urges members and allies of the disability community to take action now.  Make a personal commitment to contribute and to persevere for as long as it takes.  Get involved with disability advocates in your community.  Visit and support your local Occupy encampment. While you’re there, educate on disability issues and advocate for inclusion. Help build diverse alliances and think beyond immediate self-interests. Do whatever you can – start today!

Despite enormously powerful forces that stand against us, indifferent to the suffering of millions, we are confident in the power of our unity. Each of us has the ability to make a personal choice to work together for the common good. We will succeed if we can overcome our own apathy, disunity and defeatism.

We are the inheritors of a world made possible by the activists who came before us.  Let’s honor their legacy, change our lives and save our children’s future by seizing this moment to do something great.  Occupy Wall Street can become our best chance to restore fairness and opportunity before it’s too late. There has never been a better time to build the powerful kind of coalition we’ve dreamed about. And we’ll only have ourselves to blame if it turns out otherwise.

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”

- Frederick Douglass

(RIL thanks Evan LeVang, the Executive Director of ILSNC for drafting the original Statement on the “Occupy Movement”.)

Proposed State Budget Trigger Cuts to IHSS

Submitted by Frances Gracechild, Chair, Advisory

Committee, based on excerpts from the California

Disability Community Action Network Report, 

Nov 1,2001

Dear Yolo County Supervisors and all Yolo County IHSS stakeholders:

As the current Chair of the Yolo County IHSS Advisory Committee I am pleased to report the following committee activities during the last year.

Monthly Advisory Committee (AC) meetings were held on topics of urgent concern for the continuance of a quality IHSS program in California and Yolo County: Those topics included the State Budget deficit crisis, reductions in funding to the IHSS program, new requirements for mandated provider enrollment and DOJ checks, information regarding lists of “Tier I and Tier II” crimes, proposed and final changes to IHSS and elimination of Adult Day Health Care as a Medicaid benefit. Committee members spent several sessions working on how to run a meaningful Advisory Committee without the customary AC budget of $50,000. We found ways to continue our work with an estimated budget of $4,500. Our biggest regret during those committee negotiations was the inability to continue to pay a portion (%) of the salary of the PA Director. We had taken great pride in previous budget years in donating to preserve full time status of our Public Authority Director. We are blessed that Supervisor Provenza provided the necessary leadership in finding and obtaining board approval for contingency funding for 2011-2012. Without the full time status of our devoted PA Director we would have been unable to conduct the following activities:

ADVOCACY:

• Four AC members traveled to San Jose to a statewide conference designed to empower California Advisory Committee members through communication and education;

• Three members traveled to Sacramento in January on the day of the Governor Brown’s press conference and all were interviewed by media – the governor shook hands with one of our members;

• One member had an editorial published in the Woodland Daily Democrat about protecting In-Home Supportive Services from further budget reductions;

• Three members participated in the Capitol Action Day Rally to protest budget cuts to IHSS and Adult Day Health Care centers; and

• One member gave personal testimony to the Assembly Aging and Long Term Care Committee.

Back in June, 2010, as the California Legislature struggled to balance the state budget, rather than forcing additional massive spending cuts, they estimated that the economy would improve and state revenues would increase. They added two “triggers” that would impose automatic spending cuts if the amount if state revenues of $85.5 billion dollars were not reached by December 15th.

According to figures from the State Controller, the state economy is showing improvement, but it is not bringing in revenues as hoped for. Some in the State Capitol believe if the trend continues one or both of the “trigger cuts” will likely be pulled.

If State revenues are forecast in December 2011 to be lower by $1 billion to $2 billion, the first State budget “trigger” will be pulled, causing $600 million in automatic spending cuts for specific programs effective sometime after January 1, 2012.

If State revenue numbers in December 2011 are forecast to be lower by more than $2 billion, then the second State budget “trigger” would be pulled, causing spending cuts of up to $1.9 billion.

Though, as of this writing, no decisions on the State Budget “trigger cuts” have yet been made – and will not be made until December- the State Department of Social Services is preparing notices and documents just in case they are needed.

Cuts to IHSS would be a 20% across the board cut estimated to save the state $100 million in the remaining 6 months of the 2011-2012 budget year.

If this “trigger cut” is pulled it would be in addition to the 3.6% cut that took effect in February of this year.

If this “trigger cut” goes into effect, it allows for exemptions for those who are at serious risk of out of home placement if they lost 20% of their service hours.

If the “trigger cut” goes into effect recipients may choose how the total reduction in service hours is applied to their individual authorized services.

If the “trigger cut” goes into effect it will not apply to individuals receiving IHSS who also receive services under one of the State Home and  Community Based Services Waivers; i.e. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) Waiver, Home and Community-Based Services Waiver for the Developmentally Disabled (HCBS-DD),  In-Home Operations (IHO), Multipurpose Senior Services Program (MSSP), and Nursing Facility/ Acute Hospital (NF/AH).

If the “trigger cut” goes into effect the 20% reduction will first be applied to any documented unmet need, excluding protective supervision, before being applied to authorized hours.

If the “trigger cut” goes into effect any IHSS recipient who receives notice of the reduction in authorized services who believes the reduction puts her/him at serious risk of placement in out-of-home care may submit an application for IHSS Supplemental Care to request full or partial restoration of her/his reduced hours.

If the “trigger cut” goes into effect the California State Department will work with counties to develop a process to allow for counties to pre-approve IHSS Supplemental Care requests.

If the “trigger cut” goes into effect in January, you will receive appropriate notice(s) and forms from your Yolo County Adult Service worker.

If the “trigger cut” goes into effect in January, you will need to remember to request “Aid Paid Pending” to maintain your current authorized hours while the appeal of the NOA is processed.

If the “trigger cut” go into effect in January we must stage a resistance on multiple fronts: Rallies, press conferences, visits to our representatives and, for the very bravest of justice warriors, join the non-violent protesters of Occupy Wall Street. Many years from now when our grandchildren ask us what we were doing in 2012 during a worldwide  uprising for economic justice we want to say we stood up for In- Home Supportive Services so  people with disabilities could live safely and with dignity in their homes and communities.

RIL sponsors Allen and Catherine Davenport as they cycle for $$ for Bay Outreach Recreation Program 9-24-11

Bay Area Outreach & Recreation Program (BORP): “Faces of the Revolution,” Stories from the people who make BORP’s Revolution Happen. Visit their website at: http://www.borp.org/

(CNN) — Everyone to the left of Michele Bachmann seems to agree that America’s most immediate problem isn’t the budget deficit, but the jobs deficit.

Fourteen million Americans are unemployed, and the number ranges up to almost 16 million if you include those who want full-time jobs but can only find part-time ones. Put all those people to work, and they will cheerfully run out to the malls and spend, thus reigniting the engine of consumer capitalism. Or so the conventional wisdom goes.

But just how many jobs will the economy have to generate to cure the jobs deficit — 14 million? Sixteen million? Or a whole lot more? The answer depends not just on the number of people out of work but on the quality of jobs being offered.

According to a January report from the National Employment Law Project, 76% of the new jobs generated in 2010 were of the low-paying variety, offering between $9 to $15 an hour. Some people can get by quite handily on $9 or so an hour — especially if they’re willing to live outdoors or on a friend’s couch — but, generally speaking, the less jobs pay, the more of them you’re going to need to get.

Suppose you’re a parking lot attendant, a dishwasher or an office cleaner, and you earn only the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. If you have two children to support, your annual earnings will be $3,000 below the official poverty level for a family of three, so you’ll need at least a part-time second job. Not to mention the fact that you’ll need to designate one of your children as a full-time baby sitter for the other.

Having worked in several low-paid jobs myself, I get a little nervous when people start throwing around the word “jobs” unmodified by adjectives such as “decent-paying” or “good.” What kind of jobs are we talking about? Are we talking about jobs with union-style wages and benefits or big-box McJobs that come with the assumption that you’ll qualify for food stamps?

Between 1998 and 2000, while doing research for my book “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America,” I worked as a waitress, a maid with a cleaning service, a nursing home aide and a Walmart associate, with my pay averaging $7 an hour, or the equivalent of about $9 an hour in today’s dollars. Even when I managed to line up my schedule so I could work two jobs at a time, discretionary spending wasn’t on the agenda — not after gas, food and rent for a half-size trailer or a room in a shabby residential motel. Fortunately, jobs were easy to find at the time, and the soaring dot-com economy wasn’t depending on me.

I know the argument: The more jobs there are, even low-paying, the more power workers have to demand higher wages, so wages will automatically rise. But in the late ’90s, while employers were experiencing a “labor shortage,” hourly wages rose only slightly — not because the law of supply and demand had been suspended, but because employers had become fiendishly efficient at preventing workers from organizing to demand higher wages. Today, with the very concept of collective bargaining under political attack from the right, the chance that more jobs will mean better jobs has grown even slimmer.

President Barack Obama promised — just three years ago when he was in general a more promising sort of fellow — that he would raise the federal minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011. Maybe he forgot, just as he forgot his promise to press for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made it easier for workers to organize. Or maybe he was intimidated by unemployment rates in excess of 9% and accepted the defeatist notion that any job — no matter how low-paid, backbreaking or abusive — is better than none.

That’s been the sad trajectory of the American middle-class spirit from the late ’70s to the present day: We’ve gone from Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” to begging the sleek-suited “job creators” for whatever they can throw our way.

Fortunately there are some courageous exceptions to this idea. Forty-five thousand Verizon employees are walking picket lines to defend their hard-won union wages and benefits. Thousands of Walmart employees have signed up as members of an association (“Our Walmart”) to demand respect from the company.

Even the most isolated and “invisible” workers — nannies and maids — are organizing themselves into a National Domestic Workers Alliance. As anyone in these groups could you tell: We don’t just need more jobs, we need more jobs that treat employees like humans and pay what you could actually live on.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Barbara Ehrenreich.

By Assemblymember Mariko Yamada

Chair, Assembly Committee on Aging and Long Term Care

Almost forty years ago, California pioneered a system to keep frail elders and persons with disabilities in supportive community day settings.  In response to the highly publicized, disturbing stories of nursing home abuse in the ‘70’s, the Adult Day Health Care Center (ADHC) model emerged as a more humane and less costly alternative.

Today, there are 37,000 low-income nursing home-eligible seniors and disabled adults enrolled in over 300 ADHC’s throughout the state.  These clients are served by over 7,000 care providers—physical therapists, nurses, social workers, nutritionists and more—who provide a constellation of health and social service interventions to keep adults free from institutions.  This daytime care model is as important to a frail elder as childcare is to a toddler.  In neither case is it moral, ethical, or legal to leave a dependent individual home alone, unsupervised and without care.  Also, in each case, a working adult family member has some peace-of-mind—if he or she is still lucky enough to have a job in today’s economy.

The late 90’s saw an explosion in adult day health care, after the Legislature lifted the restriction against “for profit” centers.  Regrettably, relaxation also allowed unscrupulous operators to proliferate, particularly in southern California.  By 2004, the Legislature enacted a statewide moratorium on new ADHC Medi-Cal certifications, effectively capping program enrollment.

Since then, an ever-growing population of impoverished and disabled older adults, many with complex chronic conditions, along with the State’s continuing rocky financial condition, has put the “optional” adult day health care benefit at the crux of the annual game of “budget chicken”.  Both Republican and Democratic governors have proposed either severe cuts or outright elimination of the program.  Along the way, the courts have provided measured but short-term relief while ADHC clients, their families, and those who cared for them were cast-about in the stormy seas of fiscal uncertainty.

In March of this year, I, along with every other Democrat in the Assembly, voted to support Governor Jerry Brown’s proposal to eliminate the optional ADHC benefit in California.  It is a vote I regret daily. The unified Assembly majority support came tempered with the belief that our Governor would provide for a scaled-down transition program, “Keeping Adults Free From Institutions” (KAFI).  KAFI would continue the program using the underlying principles of the adult day health care system—an integrated model of social and medical services.

Incomprehensibly, on Monday, July 25, the Governor vetoed AB 96 (Blumenfield, D – Van Nuys), legislation that would have allocated $85 million, with 100% federal matching funds doubling to $170 million, to establish the “KAFI” program with eligibility based on medical acuity.  Our scaled-down approach vanished.

Although recent state and federal administrative actions have extended the ADHC benefit to December 1, an expected court hearing challenging the original ADHC cuts has been continued to November 1, plunging existing centers further into chaos and confusion.

Without a clear transition vehicle, and a judicial decision expected less than 30 days prior to the federal deadline for elimination, 17  ADHC’s have already closed and many more will not risk keeping their doors open.  The Assembly Committee on Aging and Long Term Care which I chair will convene a hearing on Tuesday, August 16 at 2 p.m. in the State Capitol to assess the costs and consequences of these closures.

Over thirty years ago, State Senator Henry Mello issued a paper establishing the need for 600 adult day health care centers in our state.  Yet now, we have less than half that many in operation, with more closing each day.  The “silver tsunami” is at our doorstep; the fastest growing age cohort is 85-100, and thousands of persons with autism will be coming of age in the next decade.  Instead of protecting and preserving a cost-effective, integrated system of community care, we are in the process of destroying not only the innovation, but the spirits of  all those who have fought so valiantly  to continue this program.  Once this now maimed system is eliminated, and clients are shunted to less appropriate and more expensive services, many family members will have to quit their jobs to care for their aging or disabled loved ones.  This, along with the ripple effects in a bad economy puts our State in a more precarious fiscal situation.  Beyond the financial deficit we face, the elimination of the adult day health care model in California reflects a moral deficit from which I am not sure we will ever fully recover.

###

Dear Readers,

As this newsletter goes to the printer (JUNE 29TH) the Governor and
Democratic leadership have reached a budget deal without Republican support.
This revised version contains the mysteriously evil practice of “TRIGGERS”
to achieve a projected (a lot like gambling) balanced budget.

What is a “trigger” you ask me ?

A “trigger” is a mechanism that gives the Governor and Legislature the
authority to make mid year cuts ( even deep draconian cuts…if their rosy
revenue projection falls short) We’ve been through this before with
previous structurally unbalanced budgets and partisan impasses between the
Dems. and Reps.

The seductive (promising more than is probably possible) problem with using
trigger mechanisms is that when the time comes to pull the trigger there is
no process for public input. The miscalculation of expected revenue
necessitates an even deeper cut to services because it is contracted into a
shorter time period. According to our expert advocate in the IHSS
Coalition, Deborah Doctor, the IHSS trigger would produce a 20% cut across
the board in service hours funded per IHSS consumer.

For those of you desiring more detail on the state budget and how it will
reduce critical program services please go to CDCAN’s website (California
Disability Community Action Network) and review Marty Omoto’s Report #
133-2011, June 28. 2011. www.cdcan.us

And now let us turn to the Yolo County budget and the state of our IHSS
Public Authority and IHSS Advisory Committee. The amount of money allocated
by the state for Public Authority administration costs will be reduced in
2011-2012, not by a cut made by the governor, but because the IHSS caseload
did not increase in the last fiscal year and is not projected to grow in the
next one. The California Department of Social Services has convened a work
group to design an improved method of determining an allocation that will be
more stable and fair to small, medium and large Public Authorities.

Ways to trim the Public Authority budget to live within the state allocation
are being explored to continue operations of the Registry to be able to
refer screened providers to recipients, offer free training to providers,
manage provider health benefits, continue the emergent back up care program
and serve as the employer of record for all IHSS providers in Yolo County.
The Board of Supervisors will take action on the PA budget later in July.

The funds for County IHSS Advisory Committees were eliminated but thanks to
a couple of IHSS advocates who acted quickly, $3,000 for Public Authority
Advisory Committees was added to the budget. This minimal amount will be
matched by federal funds and could be matched by the County.

As chair of the Yolo County IHSS Advisory Committee I commit to working to
keep the Committee together as a way to give a forum for consumers. Remember
the Public Authority Model is an organized voice for all the stakeholders in
the IHSS program. We care about the well-being of our consumers, our care
providers and our administrative staff. We also care about our elected officials.
Our prayers and positive thinking concentrates on all of us keeping ourselves
informed about the details of the program. The whole concept of consumer directed
services requires implementing the principle of informed consent. It is our job
to understand the policy laws and regulations that implement our IHSS services.
Thanks to our Public Authority Director, Fran Smith, and our California IHSS
Consumer Alliance (CICA) leadership and to the California Association of Public
Authorities we have a plethora of quality commentary. Fran Smith and I will work
together for the coming year to keep you all abreast of the emerging budgetary issues.

My Best to All,
Frances Gracechild, Chair
Yolo County IHSS Advisory Committee

“Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”: A blog by executive director Frances Gracechild

RIL hits the airwaves this spring on Access Sacramento. Taping begins March 29th, 2011. Check back for broadcast date and time.
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