Handicap This!: May-June 2023

June 7, 2023

Takes up: Minnesota Personal Care Assistants (PCAs) who agitated for better wages and overtime pay won; Hereford’s Mercia Learning in the UK applied to convert a day nursery into a Growth, Empowerment and Motivation school, to educate 30 neurodivergent students; and on April 26 people with disabilities protested train travel into Paris, France, as most of the 12 million people with disabilities in France struggle because of taxis and train ramps that cannot accommodate wheelchairs, or no ramps at all.

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Is COVID over when thousands still die?

March 21, 2023

Efforts to declare an end to the COVID pandemic are part of a drive to return to a pretended normal, to keep anything fundamental from changing–even if it means leaving the door wide open for the next pandemic

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Handicap This! December 2022

December 8, 2022

Asian-American disability rights activist Alice Wong’s memoir “Year of the Tiger”; In Poland, caregivers of children with disabilities called for the right to work part-time jobs while keeping government stipends; and disability rights activists critique California’s CARE Courts Act, where courts can order involuntary treatment plans for people with psychotic disorders.

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Handicap this!, March-April 2021

March 11, 2021

Autistic man in UK awarded damages in a discrimination case against Virgin Active; professor at Oxnard College put on leave for berating hard-of-hearing student; “little person” banned from a cooking class at Heart of Worcestershire College; London Stansted Airport pulls special assistance from woman because she “didn’t look ill.”

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Handicap this!, May-June 2020

April 29, 2020

April Dunn, advocate for alternative ways for students with disabilities to get a diploma; workers and disabled adults in group homes don’t get medical equipment they need to avoid COVID-19 and to care for those who have it; the fear that the disabled have that they are disposable in the COVID-19 pandemic; and how pediatricians are considering denying organ transplants to kids with disabilities.

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Handicap This!, March-April 2019

March 9, 2019

Handicap This! column on Black Disability History; maltreatment of children with disabilities; and bill aimed at phasing out the subminimum wage paid to over 150,000 disabled workers.

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Women’s Marches sweep the world

February 3, 2018

Women’s Marches took place around the U.S. and the world in 2017 AND 2018, once again showing that the opposition to U.S. President Donald Trump is alive, thriving, militant and exuberant.

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Readers’ Views, July-August 2015

July 4, 2015

Black lives as Subject; Russia in crisis; Nothing about us without us; Homelessness in L.A.; Central Canada Alliance; Perspectives and philosophy; Elderly to the streets?; Women and Yemen half-peace; Labor and climate justice; Dialectic and women’s liberation; Voices from behind the bars

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Handicap This! July-August 2015

June 30, 2015

A roundup of actions around disabilities, including the police gunning down of mentally ill Thaddeus McCarroll in St. Louis, MO; a protest against Peter Singer, who called for legalizing killing disabled infants; and how American Airlines forced a woman in crawl onto a plane.

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Things fall apart

May 6, 2015

In the absence of successful social revolution, today’s total crisis is shown in a world capitalist order that is falling apart economically, politically, environmentally, and in thought. That does not mean that we can wait for capitalism to collapse and step aside for a new society. On the contrary. Its desperation makes it that much more vicious, and it threatens to doom all of humanity with it.

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Budget cuts are death sentences!

Rauner’s $1.5 billion Medicaid cuts will have a devastating impact on those who depend on this program for their healthcare. “Some people will die from these cuts,” a woman at the rally said.

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Handicap This! January-February 2015

January 30, 2015

Missouri school district forced to return student’s cane; memorial for people with disabilities systematically murdered by Nazis; people with disabilities enslaved in South Korea’s salt fields.

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Readers’ Views, May-June 2014

May 25, 2014

LABOR AND IMMIGRATION

On April 8, about 100 people, the majority young Latinas/os, gathered in front of Los Angeles City Hall to protest the deportation of immigrants. Obama’s administration has aggressively deported 2,000,000 immigrants. We held signs reading: “Not Even One More!” and “No Separation of Family!” Separation of family members has serious adverse effects [=>]

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Handicap This! May-June 2014

May 24, 2014

Hungary’s discrimination; violence against women with disabilities in EU; Jenny Hatch wins right to make her own decisions; death of Michael Anthony Kerr, a North Carolina prisoner with disabilities.

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Disabled demand services from DHS/DRS

May 23, 2014

Chicago ADAPT, along with Community Alliance and Northside Action For Justice, held an action at the offices of the Department of Human Services, which also houses the office of the Department of Rehabilitation Services because of the conflicting and confusing information we were getting from the state heads of human services versus the various DRS offices throughout Illinois.

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Handicap This! March-April 2014

April 7, 2014

Cops beat deaf man in Hawthorne, Calif.; Assad’s forces torment man with Down Syndrome in Syria; South Carolina abuses mentally ill prisoners; disabled Chicago woman illegally evicted.

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Legislators let us down

April 6, 2014

People shared stories about their experiences with Medicaid, the minimum wage, disability rights, and talked about the importance of seeing the human side of issues. The only things the legislators would say was that “revenues were the problem.”

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Handicap This! January-February 2014

February 18, 2014

Vigil for Rights of Persons with Disabilities bill in India; 6.5 million refugees with disabilities; Iraq camp for Syrian refugees with disabilities; Georgia: marginalization of children with disabilities.

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Readers’ Views, Nov.-Dec. 2013, Part 1

December 14, 2013

Readers’ Views from Nov.-Dec. 2013 N&L: U.S. RACISM AND BLACK AND LATINO STRUGGLES; LABOR UNDER ATTACK; CTA vs. THE HOMELESS; DISABILITY AND HUMANITY; ABORTION IS A HUMAN NEED; EGYPT’S CONTRADICTIONS; DETROIT CRISIS; NUCLEAR PERIL; WHY A NEWSPAPER LIKE N&L?

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Catch-22 for prisoner with disabilities

December 7, 2013

The only way to get out of Administrative Segregation is by attending the Gang Renouncement and Dissociation Process. After many months I was told that I could not attend this program because the units do not house inmates with wheelchairs and don’t have cells or showers for the handicapped.

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Stop Detroit evictions

November 20, 2013

Detroit Eviction Defense is fighting to keep Jerome Jackson in his home in Inkster, Mich. Jackson has been a leading fighter in Detroit Eviction Defense, active in many campaigns to keep others in their homes. We fight with the Hernandez and Orozco families in Southwest Detroit fighting Fannie Mae and its out-of-control efforts to throw families from their homes and cause further damage to our neighborhoods. Resistance is growing; join us! We demand no more foreclosures, no more evictions and good housing for all.

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May-June 2013 issue of News & Letters is out

April 29, 2013

News & Letters, Vol. 58, No. 3
May – June 2013

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2013-2014
Capitalism’s violence, masses’ revolt show need for total view

The world today is riven between the creativity of masses in revolt and the violent degeneracy of counter-revolution, whose destructiveness even extends to the revived specter of nuclear war two decades after the collapse [=>]

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Readers’ Views, March-April 2013, Part 2

April 26, 2013

AT THE CROSSROADS OF HISTORY

When the Green Movement started in Iran over the 2009 election, the so-called leaders were part of the government who were against Ahmadinejad. The growth of the movement of women and youth got so big it became “out of control” by the so-called leaders. The government leaders got scared because [=>]

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Handicap This! January-February 2013

March 1, 2013

by Suzanne Rose

England—Church of England leaders want doctors to have the right to withhold treatment from disabled newborn babies in “exceptional circumstances,” even though it will “certainly result in death.” The church states that the principle of “justice” inevitably means that the potential cost of long term healthcare and education in the saving of [=>]

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Rape and people with disabilities

December 19, 2012

On Oct. 3 the Connecticut State Supreme Court made the inhuman and sexist decision to overturn the sexual assault conviction of a man who “had sex” with a woman who has severe cerebral palsy, with the intellectual functional equivalent to a three-year-old and who cannot verbally communicate. The Court held that, because Connecticut statutes define [=>]

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November-December 2012 issue of News & Letters is now available on the web

November 24, 2012

Lead
Obama’s re-election doesn’t end clash of two worlds

The two worlds of the rulers and the ruled shone through the suffocating blanket of propaganda surrounding the election in which Barack Obama won a second term. A pronounced gender gap and long lines at the polls in African-American and Latino areas reflected the determination to defeat the [=>]

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Readers’ Views, September-October 2012, Part 2

October 16, 2012

From the September-October 2012 issue of News & Letters:

Readers’ Views, Part 2

REVOLUTIONARY SYNDICALISM DISCUSSION CONTINUES

The discussion article on “Revolutionary Syndicalism” (July-August N&L) reminds me of when it was considered a major force of revolution. There was a syndicalist party, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), that thought we could vote in socialism. [=>]

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Disabled are human, deserve transplants

October 13, 2012

A 23-year-old man was denied a heart transplant by the University of Pennsylvania Hospital because of his autism, says his mom, Karen Corby. Paul Corby has autism and a mood disorder. He has a good quality of life and a social network to support him after the surgery. Paul was diagnosed with a deadly heart [=>]

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ADAPT activists sentenced

August 7, 2012

Washington, D.C—Fourteen of 74 ADAPT activists arrested in April for protesting Chair of the House Budget Committee Representative Ryan’s proposal to cut Medicaid funding by $800 billion were sentenced in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

During the court proceedings, Mike Oxford, an ADAPT organizer from Kansas, made a statement on behalf of the [=>]

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Protest Brown’s cuts

April 8, 2011

Hundreds of low-income and unemployed people and people with disabilities marched through San Francisco on Feb. 28 wearing signs identifying services they would lose under Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed draconian cuts. They chanted, “They say lie down and die/we say organize,” and demanded budget solutions that do not devastate lives. Their sentiment was that the [=>]

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