Year: 2011

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS– [Excerpt] A federally backed watchdog group says it has identified at least five more deaths involving poor care at a troubled Chicago nursing facility for disabled children and young adults, as well as a pattern of the home destroying evidence of medication errors.

The group, Equip for Equality, found that illnesses at Alden Village North were improperly treated, doctors failed to return pages, lab results were ignored and internal investigations into deaths were superficial, incomplete or inaccurate.

The state already has moved to close Alden following revelations in the Tribune about deadly neglect at the North Side facility.

Chicago-based Equip for Equality was able to begin its own inquiry because it is part of a nationwide network of advocacy groups granted broad powers by Congress to help protect people with disabilities.

Entire article:
More deaths identified at North Side nursing facility for disabled kids
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2011/red/0329a.htm

Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily.

S.K.

I put my hopes in the blinder and turn the dial to the cellular setting. When my aspirations are properly atomized I put them in the crackpot for slow cooking. Add sleepless nights, moribund social workers advice, nutmeg, and all the solidified tears from all the institutions in the world. Set crackpot to the lifetime setting. Meanwhile put the sermon on the mount in the bardo-matic food processor and hit the pulse button to produce an excellent garnish.

Serves billions…

**

Of course the point is that disability is not what we first perceive it to be. Additionally it is a manufactured circumstance much like all aspects of human well being. Now Barabas was a chef.

**

Just to clarify things, on a personal note, our friend Leslie B is correct: I turned 56 yesterday. How one loses track of time in the industrial human subjectivity kitchen!

S.K.

 

In this moment of severe budget cutting people with disabilities do not have time for everything. Ecclesiastes goes back on the shelf. This is not a season for every purpose–rather it’s a time for laughing and crying simultaneously. The hands of the clock are absurd right now for people with disabilities, the numbers appear like obscure writing in a foreign phone book. Let’s say that time doesn’t seem to be on our side; let’s say that time will come around for us in the long view. Certainly this is a good moment for pwds to gather our wits.

 

The Tea Party impetus to slash government spending has lead to what I believe is a wilfully anti-intellectual revisionism about our nation’s social history. You would never know that the arts or rehabilitation programs for the poor have been remarkably successful in generating income; you’d never know that the middle class owes its emergence to beneficent governance. Not if you’re reading the utterances of contemporary pols who have bought into the idea that cutting spending is all that matters. In Kansas where a Tea Party dominated Governor has slashed arts spending to the bone there will be no state wide forum on disabilities and the arts–a program that was scheduled for next week (and where I was to speak). Hope is in short supply for the dominos are falling in the direction of budget cuts that will harm the poor. In New York Andrew Cuomo has opted for cutting aid to the state’s poorest school districts. His rhetoric misses the point, gets muddled in the stampeding syllables of cutting the abstractions. This is my point: whatever cannot be seen (whatever is not a bridge or a road) must be cut. Slashing education and the arts are no joke in a nation that’s falling behind the rest of the developed world in critical thinking.

 

We’ve written before about New Jersey Gov. Christie’s antipathy to funding programs for blind people in the Garden State. One is reminded of Lou Reed’s song with the refrain:”Get ’em out on the dirty boulevard…”

 

The hands of the clock are pointing to the place where there’s time for nothing. No books. No hope. Not even basic training for a blind kid who wants to learn how to walk safely. What have we come to?

 

The ADA will protect some services. This is a nation of laws and there are certain guarantees. The budget cutters are not operating in a vacuum. It doesn’t take a visionary gleaming to see that certain human rights in this country are guaranteed. But the programs and services that pwds have traditionally relied upon are under savage attack.

 

As the poet Donald Justice once wrote: “the hands of the clock are sad”.

 

S.K.      

  We like this Huff Post article and recommend it…

An American Industrial Renaissance?

In the sorting out of the wreckage after Japan's earthquake
and tsunami, many Americans have begun paying more attention to a phrase they had barely known — "supply chains." The outsourcing of so much production, combined with lean and supposedly more efficient "just in time" inventories, leaves companies vulnerable
to supply disruptions half a world away. Does it really make sense for China to import coal and iron ore from Australia, so that it can fabricate giant wind turbines and send them by ship to the United States? Labor cost savings no longer justify the epidemic
of outsourcing, given all of the vulnerabilities that it entails.

 

Sent from my iPad

EEOC Announces Final Bipartisan Regulations for the ADA Amendments Act
(U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission)
March 25, 2011
(Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express)

WASHINGTON, DC– [Excerpt] The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s final regulations to implement the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) are now available on the Federal Register website. Like the law they implement, the regulations are designed to simplify the determination of who has a “disability” and make it easier for people to establish that they are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The ADAAA went into effect on Jan. 1, 2009. In the ADAAA, Congress directed the EEOC to revise its regulations to conform to changes made by the Act, and expressly authorized the EEOC to do so. The EEOC issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeking comment on proposed implementing regulations on September 23, 2009, and received well over 600 public comments in response. The final regulations reflect the feedback the EEOC received from a broad spectrum of stakeholders.

The ADAAA overturned several Supreme Court decisions that Congress believed had interpreted the definition of “disability” too narrowly, resulting in a denial of protection for many individuals with impairments such as cancer, diabetes or epilepsy. The ADAAA states that the definition of disability should be interpreted in favor of broad coverage of individuals. The effect of these changes is to make it easier for an individual seeking protection under the ADA to establish that he or she has a disability within the meaning of the ADA.

The ADAAA and the final regulations keep the ADA’s definition of the term “disability” as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities; a record (or past history) of such an impairment; or being regarded as having a disability. But the law made significant changes in how those terms are interpreted, and the regulations implement those changes.

Entire article:
EEOC Announces Final Bipartisan Regulations for the ADA Amendments Act
http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/3-24-11.cfm
Related:
Regulations To Implement the Equal Employment Provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act, as Amended (Federal Register)
http://tinyurl.com/62hmmnw

Fun.  We live in a country that would prefer to close libraries than ask millionaires to pay a little extra in taxes or multi-billon dollar corporations with whopping big government contracts to pay any taxes at all.

via lancemannion.typepad.com

Pish Posh! Who needs books?

I was messing around with my BlackBerry while waiting for a phone call. Why would anyone take a picture of him or herself? Vanity. But in my case it had more to do with the fact that I now can see just enough with one eye to aim a phone camera. My right eye can’t see but the left is doing a good job of tracking where the phone is located. I’m sending this phone photo into the multiverse. My twin brother is alive somewhere on the far range of the dark matter sluice that bridges our simultaneity. Hi brother. I’m still here. I like to think I don’t look like I’ll be 55 on Tuesday. Still happy brother. Still singing to the crickets…

S.K.

I’ve an old friend, the poet David Weiss. David and I go back a long way–we first met when we were teaching together at Hobart & William Smith Colleges back in the early 1980’s. David was married to the poet and memoirist Deborah Tall who also taught at HWS. Deborah passed away four years ago after a long fight with a virulent form of breast cancer.

And now my dear friend has done what poets have often done in the dark seasons: he’s built himself a stone tower. The tower is in the woods outside of Ithaca, New York. The construction has been a labor of extraordinary proportions for David is in his mid fifties and he did an enormous amount of the work himself. He also had the wisdom to hire Amish carpenters who know some truly old world crafts and who also know how to find a good bargain when it comes to quarrying. But Amish help aside, the tower which is now almost complete is a rare and exacting testimony to poetry’s province for this is a room of one’s own–a building that’s so quiet you can hear the ringing of the air behind its foot thick walls.

The tower is also currently the home of a white rat who nibbles at David’s produce in the night. I’m urging him to tame the rat for surely it’s proper if you’re a poet in a tower to have a white rat as your guest.

We do not know what David’s lovely new wife Bobbi will think of the rat idea.

S.K.

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