Michigan Disability Resistance

http://bit.ly/2q3eSRp

With commitment from nearly all Democratic senators to oppose HR 620, Duckworth has gained enough votes to filibuster any attempt to bring the bill to the Senate floor.

Last week, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and 42 of her Democratic Senate colleagues wrote to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pledging to block a vote on the ADA Education and Reform Act (HR 620). Passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in February, HR 620 would devastate the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) by undermining enforcement provisions that safeguard accessibility in public accommodations.

Forty-three senators committing to oppose a Senate version of HR 620 is enough to filibuster the legislation, making it unlikely that a vote will go to the floor at this time. This, advocates say, warrants a celebration.

As I have explained previously for Rewire.News, HR 620 is an assault on disability rights and completely upends enforcement of the ADA. Since the ADA’s passage nearly 28 years ago, people with disabilities have enjoyed two means for enforcing their rights under the ADA if a business is inaccessible: They can bring a lawsuit in court or file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which will investigate the alleged accessibility barrier and determine if the business violated the ADA. If the DOJ decides that the business did violate the law, the agency may sue the business on the person’s before or enter into mediation with the complainant and business. Both means of enforcement generally allow for a swift resolution.

However, if HR 620 becomes law, enforcement of the ADA will become burdensome for people with disabilities. This, in turn, will likely lead to less accessibility in public accommodations.

https://wapo.st/2Guyskr

In February 2000, Cheryl McCollins sent her son Andre, an 18-year-old autistic student, to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center for help with his behavioral and developmental difficulties. Andre had already tried  two other residential schools, including one where another student sexually assaulted him, to overcome his tendency to break things or hit people in rage attacks. Twenty months later, in October 2002, Cheryl received a terrifying call from a center employee, who told her, “Andre had a bad day.” Earlier in the day, a staffer told Andre to take off his jacket. When he said no, another staff member pressed a button to activate the electric-shock machine attached to Andre’s body with taped electrodes. Andre screamed and threw himself under a table. Four adults dragged him out, and strapped him, facedown, into four-point restraints. Over the next seven hours, Andre was shocked 31 times with a device that emits 45.5 milliamps of electricity — a shock more than 15 times as powerful as the stun belts designed to incapacitate violent adult prisoners. Staff members recorded the reason for each shock — all but two entries on his recording sheet list tensing up or screaming. In the surveillance video, Andre can be heard pleading for staff members to stop. At the Rotenberg center, in Canton, Mass., this is called treatment.

The center’s founder, Matthew Israel, invented the shock device in the early 1990s, under a theory of behaviorism drawn from work by B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov. Israel’s theory was that exposure to painful stimuli — “aversives” — reduces or eliminates undesirable behavior. Known as the graduated electronic decelerator (GED), the device emits a shock stronger than the stun guns used by police. The center’s own staff frequently claims that the GED is mild. In an interview with ABC News, Rotenberg spokesman Ernest Corrigan said, “The skin shock that we’re talking about is two seconds, and people who have experienced it say it feels like a bee sting.” The center (and its defenders) claim that it is a treatment of last resort used for those with the most severely dangerous, self-injurious and aggressive behavior. They claim that it is effective, despite no evidence of long-term efficacy, something even Israel acknowledges. They claim that it is supported by a robust array of research, despite no independent peer-reviewed research in decades. (What looks at first glance like an impressive array of articles on Rotenberg’s Web site is, upon close examination, mostly internal case studies or data analyses, or items written by Israel or people associated with him.)

My friends and colleagues know otherwise. At a recent hearing in April convened by the Food and Drug Administration, former Rotenberg resident Jennifer Msumba testified that she has nightmares about the center at least once a week. “In these nightmares, I’m getting shocked,” she said. “If I hear certain noises, like the Velcro they use to keep [the remote controls for the device] closed, I freeze. I feel like it’s about to happen to me.” Rather than teaching adaptive functioning skills to change dangerous behaviors, aversive electric shock causes only great suffering, pain and trauma. At best, the shocks temporarily repress behaviors by using fear to control residents. That is not treatment. That is torture, as Disability Rights International argued in its damning investigative report on Rotenberg’s practices.

http://bit.ly/2uNuNsE 

Vaccines don’t cause autism. But even if they did, is being like me really a fate worse than death?

The anti-vaccination movement is a particularly bitter issue for me because it doesn’t just dehumanize me as an autistic person; it also sets off two of my biggest triggers. Like many people on the spectrum, I don’t handle it well when people are 1) wrong, and 2) unfair.

No fluoride treatment for this decay.....

http://bit.ly/2uKAvLA 

Key Findings......

I don't normally publish stuff like this, but this is such a perfect reflection of the current value system in America, that I just couldn't bring myself to hide it. McCabe had better give away most of it to activist charities.....

http://bit.ly/2H0W0KN

“The crowning achievement in hypocrisy must go to those staunch Republicans and Democrats of the Midwest and West who were given land by our government when they came here as immigrants from Europe. They were given education through the land grant colleges. They were provided with agricultural agents to keep them abreast of forming trends. They were granted low interest loans to aid in the mechanization of their farms, and now that they have succeeded in becoming successful, they are paid not to farm. And these are the same people that now say to black people, whose ancestors were brought to this country in chains and who were emancipated in 1863 without being given land to cultivate or bread to eat, that they must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. What they truly advocate is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr

“I gotta get rid of this stuff. Man, I don’t know what I’m gonna do with it. The more money you make, the more free shit they give you. It makes no sense.”
~ Adam Sandler, Funny People (2009)

A GoFundMe for former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired two weeks ago by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has raised over $400,000 in less than a day.

Another way to say that would be that a former officer from the US intelligence community, who is married to a successful physician and will surely receive a book deal worth millions of dollars, just had a charity drive which in less than a day raised an amount of money it would take the average American years to earn.

Meanwhile, an impoverished American recently died because his GoFundMe failed to raise enough money for his insulin and an FBI whistleblower was just arrested for trying to bring transparency to the Bureau’s secret domestic surveillance practices while banks receive massive bailouts, global fossil fuel subsidies total trillions of dollars, and Amazon paid zero federal taxes last year despite earning billions.