Stepping Up the Struggle: the Fight for Disability Rights Today

Stepping Up the Struggle

In this print edition...

• Able to Fight: the Struggle for Civil Rights for People with Disabilities

• The Battle for Congress 2006

• Uprising: Bolivian Workers Topple President

• No Way! French Workers Reject EU Constitution

• Short Story: One Thousand Dollars – A Thin Slice of My Life

• September/October's Letters (updated 10-03-05)

• September/October's Poetry

• Nobody Asked Me, But...

Click to submit your short story. Save $4 – subscribe online. Donate online.

Last June, a group of disabled civil rights activists took over the office of Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen following his announcement that approximately 100 individuals with disabilities who are dependent on ventilators but otherwise live independently would have their benefits continued under the state medical benefits program, known as TennCare, only if they received treatment in a nursing home.

As the 2006 election draws nearer, Congress is becoming the battleground for Bush administration policies. The President’s loyalists continue to support the war drive and privatization of Social Security, but more than a few are jumping ship. The shifts within Congress, and breaks in the Republican stronghold, provide an important opening to mobilize voters, blunt the attacks, and build support for bold pro-worker legislation.

“Landlocked Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, is once again locked in uncertainty. In June, 2005, for the second time in the 21st century, a Bolivian president has been forced to resign in the face of massive popular demonstrations, strikes and road blockades. An interim caretaker government has been installed, headed by a lawyer and former Supreme Court justice, Eduardo Rodriguez, with the sole purpose of administrating general elections in December.

Neoliberalism, a strategy of finance capital, was implemented in France at the beginning of the 1980s. Circumstances were that it was not imposed by a Reagan or a Thatcher, but with a French touch by successive “socialist” and right-wing governments. Marked by measures of financial austerity, debt restructuring and anti-inflation measures, the neoliberal turning point was resolutely and definitively adopted by the Socialist Party (PS) controlled government in 1984.

The US entered World War II, and Hoke Inc. (a company on Eagle Avenue in the Bronx where I was employed as a machinist, manufacturing small torches for use in the jewelry industry), changed its production to flamethrowers. Flamethrowers shot a gasoline mixture more than one hundred feet and then ignited it, burning everything it doused. It was a horrible weapon, but its justification was that this was a war against fascism.