The March 11-12 Next Step Membership Ret

The March 11-12 Next Step Membership Retreat will be postponed until further notice. Please call (732) 738-4388 for more information.

Do you live in NJ? Use a mobility device

Do you live in NJ? Use a mobility device? ThisAbled is looking for individuals who have experienced accessibility issues on Rt 1. Contact ThisAbled here: http://www.thisabled.com/contact/contact-us.php

“Have I Done Enough?”

by: Ethan B. Ellis

In January, I wrote a blog titled  The Coming Conflict between the Haves and Have-nots…And What That Has to Do with People with Disabilities. In it, I wrote about the gap between rich and poor, how that gap was linked to so many social problems in this country and despaired of seeing that gap shrunk without a revolution because most of the levers of power are in the hands of those who benefit from it. I asked whether the middle-class liberals who decry this state of affairs were willing risk their comfortable lives to participate in that revolution.

Some have asked whether Next Step is a disability advocate or a poverty activist organization. Given how poor most people with disabilities are, I think we have no choice but to be both. Two recent events confirm that belief.

Yesterday Desiree commented on the blog in part as follows:

I’m at the point where either I’m going to fight or I’m going to end up on the streets…. This isn’t right – but it’s what’s GOING to happen because the nation sacrificed me and countless others to disability rather than paying for functional health care or a functional safety net that uses a realistic measure of poverty….

For example, out of an income that’s a whopping 25% over the Federal Poverty Line, I’m supposed to pay HALF my income as a “Medicaid Spend Down”. HALF. Reality already requires that I spend HALF my income (not 1/3) as rent as the FPL thinks I should. I’ve looked all over the country for a non-subsidized home for the $389/mo apartment that is the cut-off under welfare program guidelines thanks to the FPL. It doesn’t exist. And this is all on top of about $100/mo out of pocket medical expenses for a service dog and required (prescribed) supplements. Am I supposed to be able to print my own money? The math doesn’t work on my end of things.

Two weeks ago, Doreen’s 19 year-old son, whose brain was severely damaged due to chicken pox as a baby, choked to death in his mother’s arms because the Medicaid doctor wouldn’t see him.  His mother, our personal assistant and friend, wept as she described how she carried him into the doctor’s office on a stretcher, only to be turned away by the nurse who forgot to put his appointment in her computer and claimed he wasn’t an emergency. “You’ll have to make another appointment,” she said.

I responded to Desiree:

“I have read your comment three times, slept on it and still have no adequate response. You illustrate all I have said and yet you are no illustration; you’re a flesh and blood human being driven to the edge of existence by an uncaring society. Given a few different circumstances, yours could be my story and yet I cannot even comfort you adequately, let alone assist you materially.

I cannot do enough. Please stay in touch. Sadly being here is all I have to offer.”

 

Janet and I could at least hold Doreen as she wept, inadequate as that was.

After Doreen left, Janet reminded me that half the clients she sees as a clinician at the community mental health center come to her with disabled bodies as well as troubled minds or with minds troubled by children like Doreen’s boy who are as desperately in need of care that isn’t there.

When what I write about in these blogs becomes flesh and confronts me, I wonder if I, if any of us, can ever do enough as long as unnecessary human misery exists.

 

What is the longest you have waited to have your DME repaired?

What is the longest you have waited to have DME(Durable Medical Equipment) repaired? Tell us on Ethan Ellis’ Blog! https://gonextstep.wordpress.com/

Ed, Betty, and You: Making Change Happen

by: Ethan B. Ellis

About a dozen years ago Ed and Betty went out shopping after their street had been plowed following a blizzard. Both used wheelchairs and were expecting to park their van in one of the reserved spaces in front of the supermarket.

Not that day. All of those spaces, in fact, every space reserved for people with disabilities in the entire mall, were filled with ten feet of snow, piled up in them by the plows that cleared the rest of the parking lot for the benefit of the other customers.

Determined to act, Ed and Betty bought the matter up at the next meeting of the Middlesex County Monday Morning Network* and the Snow Removal Law was born. Signed two years later by Governor Christine Todd Whitman, it now gives New Jersey shop owners 24 hours after a storm to clear the snow out of our parking places or face a stiff fine.

I won’t go into the details that led the determination of a single couple to mobilize an entire state’s disability community into action. Let me just say that it happened and that it is happening again.

A couple of months ago, while I was attending a meeting of the Ocean County Chapter of Next Step, somebody was complaining about being home-bound for six months because their wheelchair had broken down and it took that long to fix it. They were not alone. For the next half hour or more, other members swapped tales about how delays in repairing durable medical equipment (DMEs) had put their lives on hold. Sometime it was a wheelchair; sometimes it was a scooter; sometimes it was just a walker with a screw missing. Some people missed work; some people couldn’t go to the doctor’s; some people couldn’t attend church or volunteer at the hospital; one guy even missed his own birthday party.

They were all mad, mad enough to do something about it and the DME campaign was launched.

It has begun, like all good campaigns do, with some questions. How common is the problem? How many people are affected? What are the causes: not enough repair places? Too much red tape? Too long to authorize repairs? To make payments for them? Where are the bottlenecks? With Medicaid or Medicare? With county or state agencies? With CMS? Can we get personal stories that make the problem real for people who know nothing about it?

Once the questions started, they didn’t stop…and still haven’t. Who are our potential allies? (In Ocean, that was easy: it has the largest populations of seniors of any county in the country and they use the same DMEs that we do.)

Do members of Next Step’s other chapters have the same problem? (The answer is ‘Yes.’) Do they want to be part of the campaign? (Again, ‘Yes.’) Do people with disabilities on other states have the same problem? Do they want to join the campaign? Individually or in groups? If so, how do we work together to expand the campaign?

The answers of some of these questions are still coming in. When we get enough of them, we’ll put our heads together with everyone who wants to be a part of the campaign and build a strategy to kick it off. Like most campaigns, the strategy will probably expand once it gets rolling and we find opportunities and obstacles we didn’t think of at the start. That’s part of the fun. That’s how Ed and Betty changed a bad day at the mall into a state law.

If you want to be a part of the campaign, contact Colleen Roche at colleen@gonextstep.org or 732-738-4388 ext. 119. If you have a good story to tell or can video it, we’ll post it on the DME Campaign Page on the Next Step website. Just visit the “Share Your Story” section on our website, or email it to Samantha Rauscher at samantha@gonextstep.org. If you need someone to help write it down, call her at 732-738-4388 ext 122.

Join the campaign! Have a party! Make change happen!

*The Monday Morning Project was the precursor of Next Step. Begun at the New Jersey Council on Developmental Disabilities in 1993 when I was its Exec, it grew to 2,000 members and became a force in shaping disability policy for the state. Many Next Step leaders are Monday Morning veterans.

The Coming Conflict Between the Haves and Have-Nots…And What That Has to Do with People With Disabilities

by: Ethan B. Ellis

On January 21, 200 of us met with Richard Wilkinson at Kean University to discuss the ground-breaking book, The Spirit Level, he co-authored with Kate Pickett. The colloquy, sponsored by the university, Community Access Unlimited and Next Step, brought together academics, service providers and activists in a milestone for social change.

By demonstrating the positive link between income inequality and the major social problems of developed countries, Wilkinson and Pickett have created a unified theory of social activism, which should unite all progressive social movements in the common goal of reducing that divide. If we do not achieve that goal, then shame on us. We now possess a road map to do so.

That said, we must answer two basic questions:

Has the gap between rich and poor in the U.S., widest in the industrialized world, become so wide that we can no longer bridge it by peaceful means or will using those means put us and those who follow us at risk of retaliation, including arrest, bodily harm and death?

And, if so:

Do those of us who would lead a social change movement fully understand those risks and still have the courage to take them?

I do not think I exaggerate that gap or the threat it poses. Consider:

In the last 40 years, productivity of American workers has increased 4-fold but the income of middleclass families has only increased by 2% and that of the poor has decreased by 2%, while the income of the top ten percent has quadrupled; they have absorbed all the wealth generated by the productivity of others;

That top ten percent now own 49% of this country’s wealth, leaving the other 90% of us to divide up the other half;

During that 40  years, government has continually cut taxes on the rich and the large corporations while raising them on the poor and middleclass; at the same time it has cut public services and shifted the cost of those diminished services to the poor and middleclass;

We now have the best government money can buy:

During the last 25 years, the 14 richest families spent $471 million to reduce the estate tax, buying an advertising campaign to re-brand it as a ‘death tax’ and buying elected officials. Both investments paid off. The recent ‘tax reform’ bill will save those 14 families $71 billion;

When the health care reform debate began, 74% of us favored it, but the medical/industrial complex spent $1.4 million a day buying advertising to confuse us and buying legislators to oppose it. By the time it passed, over half of us did oppose it and the medical/industrial complex gained billions of dollars through provisions slipped into the law by the politicians it bought.

Despite overwhelming opposition from the American people, we spend $2 billion a week in Afghanistan and Iraq and $1 trillion a year on ‘defense,’ half of it hidden in non-defense agencies, to support the military/industrial complex that President and five-star general Eisenhower warned us against 50 years ago;

The average worth of a Congressperson is $3 million, a Senator $13 million, the President $5 million; they increase their own wealth every time they pass another tax break for the rich. They have no way of understanding the needs of the average American and no incentive to.

The social and economic costs of the wealth gap on all of us are enormous. We live shorter lives, have worse health and health care, are exposed to more violence and crime, and are less well educated and more obese than the citizens of any other modern society. Average income doesn’t account for our relative misery. Only the gap between the top and the bottom does. Read the book.

While everyone in this society is worse off because of the gap, including the wealthy, its impact on the poor is devastating. They suffer most from the social ills that come in its wake.

And most people with disabilities are poor. And so are most people of color. And so are most women. And so are most of the people this society does not value, including a disproportionate number of children.

Dr. Wilkinson is an epidemiologist with a background in public health. His findings pose significant challenges to all academics who study us human beings. None are more challenged by them than political scientists and political economists and their second cousins, us social activists.

Our academic cousins teach us that wealth is power and that no person or group gives up power voluntarily. They also teach us that all the levers of power in this society are now in the hands of wealthy people and corporations: the executive, the legislature, the courts and even the military and the popular media. In fact, the most thoughtful of them have concluded that the modern capitalism we live under is incompatible with representative democracy.

Without democracy, people with disabilities and other devalued groups cannot live in this society – or any other – with pride as equals. We must demand a fundamental change in the economic and political structure that denies us that equality. That puts us in direct conflict with those who benefit from that economic and political structure as it is and who control the levers of power that keep it in place.

That conflict is inevitable if we are to pursue our goal of equality with pride in our humanity. Similar conflicts have broken out over the last 3 decades around the world beginning with the union uprising in Poland and the fall of the Berlin wall. They continued throughout Latin America and East Asia and have recently spread to the Middle East where they now roil the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and the smaller towns of Egypt.

It may be hard for those of us who have grown up in this stable society to see a connection between those conflicts and the one we face, particularly because the structures of those societies appear so different and the shape those conflicts take appear so alien to us. Indeed, those differences are real and the conflicts they spawn are shaped by those differences. But they are linked to ours by important commonalities: disparities of wealth and denials of equality and human dignity.

It is not clear what shape our conflict will take or how it will be resolved. Such things never are; they grow organically from events planned and unplanned.  All we can do is be aware of its inevitability and begin to build the alliances that will increase the possibility that positive social change will result from it. Wilkinson and Pickett make it clear who many of those natural allies are.

Conservative Tsunami – Wave One: Repealing Healthcare Reform

by: Ethan B. Ellis

The tragic, senseless shootings in Tucson shut down the House of Representatives last week, but when John Boehner and Company return to Washington, DC , they will try to repeal the health care reforms we enacted last year. If they do, here are some of the things that health insurance companies will be able to do to people with disabilities and members of other devalued groups again:

Deny us coverage for pre-existing conditions such as disabilities and other chronic conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, heart conditions and arthritis;

Terminate our insurance if we get any of these conditions or raise our rates so high that we can’t afford them;

Terminate our insurance if our medical costs exceed a certain amount in any one year or over a lifetime;

Stop covering children up to 26 years old under their family’s health insurance.

Let me say it again so it is very clear: we have these now; they want to take away from us.

Let me also be very clear that many people who you and I know will die if they lose these life-saving benefits.

The repealers know that. They also know that the murders they would commit are legal. No matter how much blood they have on their hands, they won’t be prosecuted.

Now many pundits say that this is just political posturing, that the conservatives in the House feel safe in repealing health care reform because the Senate won’t pass it and that President Obama will veto it if it does .

But that is just the first step in their plan. The second is to cut off the money needed to make the law work. All appropriations start in the House, which the conservatives control. If the House doesn’t vote the money, health care reform is dead. The first step just sets the stage for the second, cutting off the money.

It does so by giving the medical/industrial complex another chance to confuse us about the real benefits we get from health care reform. And if there’s one thing that the medical/industrial complex does really well, it is spending  billions on buying advertising and well-known spokesmen and women to spread lies about health care reform.

For months before health care reform passed, it spent $1.4 million every day sowing that confusion and buying Senators and Congresspersons to oppose health care reform. When it started spending that money, 74% of Americans favored reform; when the last vote was counted, more than half of us opposed it.

The new campaign of lies has already started. Before health care reform even became law, Boehner started calling it a ‘job killer’ and a ‘budget buster’. H.R. 2, the conservative bill to repeal it is called, “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.”

Experts as diverse as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Moody’s Analytics and the Center for Budget Policies and Priorities refute those claims. None find that the law will have any effect on employment and all agree that it will reduce the budget deficit by $143 billion by 2019 and by $1.3 trillion in the following decade. Despite this conclusive evidence , the lies are taking hold. I see them repeated on the TV news with breakfast and the talk shows, even the supposedly liberal ones, after dinner.

And that raises another threat to our well-being, not to mention our democracy. The public media are exclusively owned by conservative corporations who control what we are allowed to know and what opinions we are allowed to hear about it. Most of us are denied the information we need to fight the lies that deprive us of life, liberty and the pursuit of truth, let alone happiness.

This will become critical in the weeks and months ahead. After launching their attacks on health care, Congressional conservatives have announced plans for second , third and fourth waves attacking people who are poor, old or disabled. They intend to gut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security and reduce over-all domestic non-security spending by $105 billion.

On average, that would reduce federal money for education,housing, food stamps and all disability programs by 21.1% or over one fifth. It would also add $32 billion to state budget deficits estimated to be between $90 and $110 next year. Since states are where the rubber meets the road when most services are delivered, a lot of us will be road-kill.

That raises a question that I will return to in the days ahead. Since we live in a country where our votes don’t count because big money owns our government and dictates the policies that kill millions of us for profit, we seem to have only two choices: live with those policies and die slowly or revolt against the tyranny of power as the founders did 235 years ago.

I’m a peaceable man. Violence frightens me. Please let me know if you see another alternative. If not, tell me which choice you prefer.

Lighting the Spark of Unity for the New Year – ‘The Spirit Level’ Comes to New Jersey

by: Ethan B. Ellis

At this time of year, media are filled with talk shows, articles and editorials that take a look back at the year just past and review its political and economic decisions, how they were made and what impact they have had. Most of them have concluded that, while the richest 10% of us got richer, 2010 was not a good year for the average American.

While people with disabilities are not often covered in these look-backs, 2010 has been a particularly tough year for us and not much better for others whom this society devalues. With that in mind, here is my own look-back, not just at 2010, but at the last three decades during which, not only our fortunes, but the fortunes of other devalued Americans have steadily declined. Then let me conclude on a brighter note with the announcement of an event that has the potential to light the spark of change here in New Jersey that can ignite a united social movement across the nation.

The so-called Great Recession has hit people with disabilities harder than the average American, despite programs specifically designed to assist us . Already underemployed, with only 12% of us working full-time all year, we have been laid off at twice the rate of other Americans. Some state governments have cut programs like personal assistance and other Medicaid-funded avenues to independence. Our efforts to move out of institutions and nursing homes into the community as the Supreme Court mandated in the Olmstead decision have stalled despite increased pressure from the Justice Department. Waiting lists for all disability services, whether officially recorded or not, continue to grow. Cuts in programs that support poor people generally have hurt us just as much because most of us are poor, too.

Prospects for the next two years are no brighter. States, facing deficits totaling $90 billion for fiscal year 2012, are projecting more cuts in Medicaid and other basic services and a more conservative Congress is threatening drastic reductions in social spending. Many talk publicly about cutting Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, while privately talking about dismantling them completely. Their leaders dismiss unemployment insurance as unAmerican because it encourages laziness and talk openly about repealing it.

Prejudice and discrimination are also on the rise, reflected not only in layoffs but in an increase in violent crimes against us as reported to the Justice Department. That’s no surprise to those of us with visible disabilities. Others without disabilities show less patience when we move slowly and are more apt to say so.

Other devalued Americans, people of color, women, others who are poor and, yes, even children, have had to deal with similar cuts in services and increases in prejudice, discrimination and violence. Nor is there any evidence that these trends will reverse soon unless we unite to reverse them.

However, these trends are not new. They began in the early 1970s with Richard Nixon’s war on the War on Poverty and continued with the slow but systematic dismantling of the social safety net during the Administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. The reductions in federal human services have been matched  by an equally systematic reduction in taxes paid by rich Americans and large corporations which has increasingly shifted the cost of government to the poor and middle-class, while reducing the benefits they get from it. So far, Barak Obama has not reversed those trends and there is diminishing hope that he will.

Today’s great Recession has taught us the disastrous results of these trends and even raised the question of whether they  contributed to it. What is not in doubt, however, is that both trends, taken together, have created the widest gap between rich and poor in his nation among all industrial countries and have increased its social disfunction.

Many have come to believe that these two trends are related. Now, books, blogs and even the popular media are full of talk about the social ills attributable to income inequality and the threat it poses to our democracy.

The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, supports that belief with scientific evidence. It is the most probing analysis of the research on the impact of income inequality on first world societies, especially Great Britain and the United States. That research, which they have assembled from a broad range of disciplines, makes it clear that increasing inequality is directly related to the rising incidence of educational failure, crime, discrimination and a variety of other social ills from infant mortality to obesity.

Their findings give all of us committed to social reform a powerful incentive to unite to shrink the gap between rich and poor in this country. They also confront us with at least two powerful challenges: Will we find the wisdom to unite, and, if so, will that wisdom produce successful strategies that succeed in shrinking that gap.

Here in New Jersey, we have an early opportunity to find out. Richard Wilkinson , co-author of The Spirit Level is coming to Kean University on January 21 to discuss his work with an audience of activists, academics and human service professionals. It is my hope that this event will spark a unity of purpose that will spread across the country.

Next Step is proud to co-sponsor the event with Community Access Unlimited, the New Jersey chapter of the National Association of Social Workers and Kean University. To register, go to http://caunj.org/outreach/event00.html. Accessible transportation is available to Kean by bus and rail. For out-of-state travelers, the university is a short distance from Newark Liberty International Airport which also has a variety of overnight lodgings.

Christmas Questions

by: Ethan B. Ellis

It’s been a good Christmas at the little red house on Logan Lane. Janet and I got to bed around 2:30 a.m. after completing the late night wrapping ritual (mostly Janet – I buy, she wraps). Ethan James woke us at 6:30 on the dot exactly as promised – not bad for a boy nine days shy of his fifth birthday. We emptied our stockings in record time – his was full of small toys and large candies, Janet’s with an assortment of gadgets, topped off with Hershey’s kisses, mine mostly with blues and Bob Dylan CDs.

Through skillful negotiation (“Please, Mom, can I open just one more?), Ethan James managed to delay breakfast until more than half the presents were unwrapped. After we ate, I headed for bed for a long winter’s nap and all followed.

Now a telltale trail of paper scraps, ribbons and tape that evaded the garbage bag attest that all presents have been opened. Ethan James is shifting between the the tabletop digs where he’s excavating plastic dinosaur bones with hammer and chisel and watching Toy Story 3 on our bedroom TV with his ‘work’ googles pushed back on top of his head (yes, he says, “I’m going back to work when the shift changes”).

Pro basketball just pre-empted C-SPAN 2’s Book TV, so I’ve resorted reading blogs on the iMac. The first I see is Many Americans Face Poverty and Hardship During the Holiday by CBPP’s LaDonna Pavetti. This catches my attention:

1.6 million people were homeless in 2009 and spent at least part of the year in a shelter; nearly 325,000 of them were children.

15 million people were unemployed as of November, 6 million of whom had been looking for work for more than half a year.

44 million people were poor in 2009, 19 million of whom had incomes below half of the poverty line (half of the poverty line corresponds to an income of $5,478 for an individual and $10,977 for a family of four).

50 million people lived in households that lacked access to adequate food at some point in 2009 because they did not have enough money for groceries. Nearly 18 million people lived in households where one or more people had to skip meals or take other steps to reduce their food intake because of lack of resources.

I shiver when I read it. By the law of averages, the Ellis family, with two adults with disabilities, should fall into some of these categories. The image of little Ethan hungry, homeless or in a shelter is too horrible to contemplate for more than an instant. And yet that image is all too real for many Americans with disabilities, most of whom live just above or below the poverty line, particularly if they are also people of color, already poor and more likely to have disabilities as a result.

It is far safer to wonder how many there might be than to imagine us among them…so that is what I do.

My next reaction is anger, no, rage. Growing up,I was taught, beginning when I was only a little older than Ethan James, that this was the land of democracy, opportunity, equality and plenty. How could our leaders, most of whom are millionaires several times over, allow one sixth of all Americans to be so poor that they often do not have enough to eat?

Of course, I know the answers. Money has so corrupted our politics that we no longer live in a democracy. Our politicians are so rich that they can no longer imagine how the rest of us live, if they ever knew.

They have let our public education disintegrate so far that the smart young grad students I meet today have never been exposed to our history, the basic principles on which this country was founded, the way our government was designed to work, basic things I learned in high school. (While the reasons are more complex, it is no coincidence that the dumming down of America began at the same time that money began to errode our democracy.)

Students today are being robbed of their citizenship, brainwashed as surely as the students in twentieth century totalitarian dictatorships were brainwashed.

Will that be the future of that bright little boy of ours who wants to know the why of everything? Do I have the time left to teach him what my father taught me, more by example than by words, that justice is a precious, fragile thing, that one has an obligation to preserve it whatever the personal risk? Will he know me long enough to remember that as I have?

As these questions race through my head without answers, Ethan James reappears from the  bedroom with some books in his hands: “Daddy, will you read these to me?”

Time for Change. Time for Revolution (Part 2)

by: Ethan B. Ellis

Part One: Time for a Change – Wrap-Up

The Obama-Republican Tax Compromise extends unemployment insurance, but it does so only for those who are still getting it. It does nothing for the 99ers, people who have already maxed out of the system. Two million of them who still haven’t found jobs after ninety-nine weeks of no work will go hungry this Christmas.

The bill temporarily increases the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for those making $25,000 or less. However, due to a provision in the bill that repeals another program for the working poor, they will lose more than they gain and will pay more than their share of the bill’s cost.

A provision temporarily reduces the payroll tax for Social Security. So for a couple of years, Uncle Sam will leave more in our paychecks so we will spend it to jumpstart the economy. Uncle will make up the difference by paying for it out of general tax receipts.

Economists think this is the most dangerous provision in the bill. Conservatives have been trying to kill Social Security since it was created in the 1930s. The argument that has stopped them is that Social Security doesn’t cost the government anything. Unlike other programs, it pays for itself. It’s an insurance program that pays us back when we retire with what we pay into it while we’re working.

By using its money to give us a temporary tax break now and replacing it with money from general tax revenues, they argue, it loses it’s special status as a self-sufficient insurance fund and becomes just another program Congress can cut or eliminate whenever it pleases. Given all the conservative talk about doing away with Social Security recently, that argument makes a lot of sense.

So what does the Obama-Republican Compromise look like as a whole? It’s a bill that makes the rich enormously richer while putting a little more money in the pockets of the rest of us for a little while at an enormous cost that most of us who are not rich will have to pay off later. In other words, we get a couple of thousand dollars or less (most of us less) so the richest people can get a hundred thousand dollar or more (most of them more).

In total, it will cost more than one trillion dollars over the next ten years. Since the country is already in debt, we will have to borrow the money, most of which will go to rich people. Since rich people hardly ever pay their fair share of taxes, the rest of us will pay the bill; poor and middle-class tax-payers borrowing more money from China to make the rich richer.

Can you afford that? I can’t.

Part Two: Revolution?

So what do we do?

There’s been some talk by liberals (pardon me, ‘progressives’) about making it so apparent that this deal is unfair that they will embarrass Congress into making it fairer. Who are they kidding? The Congress that takes office this January is more conservative than the one that leaves next week. Its leaders are already talking about cutting Medicaid and Medicare and ‘privatizing’ Social Security – giving its money to their rich friends on Wall Street to play with. Others are openly saying that unemployment insurance makes people lazy and should be repealed.

Others claim that the victories that Obama won in the last couple of weeks, inelegantly called the lame duck session, will turn him into the leader he fooled us into thinking he was when we elected him.

Really? The guy who gave away the store in secret negotiations with the medical/industrial complex before the health care reform bill was even drafted? The Commander-in Chief who said he would get us out of Afghanistan and then sent in more troops when the military/industrial complex refused to give him a plan to do anything else? The leader who only started to fight for tax reform after the votes were counted?

They’ve got to be kidding. They’re dealing with superficial solutions when the problems that the average person with a disability, the average person of color, the average woman and all other poor people confront have much deeper roots.

The gulf between them and those who make the political and economic decisions that control their lives is so large that it can hardly be imagined. They live in two different worlds. Most socially devalued people live in poverty, while the average Congressperson is worth over $3 million, the average senator just under $13 million, while President Obama is worth about $5 million and over half of his Cabinet members are millionaires. One can hardly expect them to understand our problems, let alone, do anything about them…and they haven’t.

Historically, revolutions happen when the gulf between rich and poor becomes unbridgeable as it has now. Historically, revolutions have been bloody and unpredictable, conjuring up images of pitchforks, fire and guillotines.

More recently, revolutions have been less bloody, more symbolic and more successful. Mass movements in Latin America, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have led to mass demonstrations that removed undemocratic governments and attempted to replace social injustice with human rights. The jury is still out on their ultimate success.

It is already clear, however, that it will take a powerful social movement to establish equality and human rights for all of us in this country. Whether that can be done without some form of revolution and, if so, what form it will take, are still open questions. The current Great Recession and the widening gulf between rich and poor make the answers to them more imminent and urgent.