In 1981 I was a Managing Attorney of the Senior Citizen Unit at The Legal Aid Society in Columbus, Ohio. Our ability to represent our clients was severely curtailed by President Reagan’s cut-off of funds to the Legal Service Corporation which distributed funds to agencies serving the legal needs of the poor, disabled and senior citizens through grants. Suddenly, we learned we could no longer be paid. Many left the agency. I remained, the sole attorney left to handle over 300 open cases. His reason? He disliked that our agencies sued the county, state and federal governments when benefits were illegally denied.
I found a part-time job at a toy store 5 nights a week and on Saturday and Sunday to pay my school loan. I became a live-in manager at two rooming houses for women students at The Ohio State University to provide a roof over my head. I took over the yard work and minor maintenance( I taught myself to tile the shower, repair locks and lay carpet)and installed soda machines in the basement to pay for transportation, phone service and medical care. My clients fared far worse.
Reagan laid off 2,840 workers, eliminated or reduced benefits to the poor. He also terminated every recipient of Social Security and SSI payments based on disability, requiring each person to reapply for benefits. He claimed massive fraud when the actual fraud rate for food stamps, for example, was one-tenth of 1 percent. This is the same time frame when a huge Savings and Loan fraud scandal decimated clients of Savings and Loans and saw bankers imprisoned for fraud.
Three of my clients died as a direct result of losing benefits. I was able file suit to get benefits restored. However, legal justice is a slow process. Court cases take time. Especially when hundreds thousands of cases increase docket constraints. Especially, when the attorneys who would represent persons with zero incomes also lost their jobs.
It was a brilliant strategy to reduce expenses so wealthy citizens and corporations could see a decrease in taxes. The public relations campaign his administration promoted claimed taxes were too high, public benefits too costly, and “those people” too lazy to work. He also claimed a Nuer to be illustrated massive fraud.
It is difficult to survive such programmatic loss of income, housing,food and healthcare. But, particularly horrendous for those disabled and unable to work, or those aged and too exhausted and ill to work. This were the clients I watched suffer and die. There were many more I did not know. Many more who suffered or died across the country. Yes, it was temporary. How quickly would die living on the street? Hungry and without sufficient food? Unable to buy your insulin or blood pressure medication? Would you even seek medical care?
We are watching a much more massive attack on our fellow citizens and the institutions in place to meet all of our needs. Those discussing the anti-fraud hunt by private citizen Elon Musk mistakenly buy into the story. Let me give you a few reasons why the stories you are hearing about fraud are meaningless.
If a person on Social Security does not survive the full month, the benefit they received at the start of their month becomes an overpayment. It then must be paid back to the SSA. If you have ever settled an estate you know it takes months, if not years, to settle the decedent’s death. In fact, it may be there is no survivor to even notify creditors, including SSA, that the person has died.
For example, my own mother died of cancer. She died on the 27th. Of February. As a result, the Social Security check she had received and used became an overpayment. If she had died on the 28th. She would have remained entitled to the check. How many of those the media says appear as overpayments are truly simple accounting practices in motion, some slower than others. Even when the overpayments are cleared and checks no longer mailed out or deposited because the recipient’s mail is returned or bank account is closed, there may have been no death notice to SSA so the person issued a SS card remains on the books even though they are no longer receiving benefits. What we are hearing on the news is an over simplistic analysis of complex situations handled by our pubic servants, civil service workers who know how to work their way through a system that covers every single person ever issued a SS card. Can you even balance your check book?
A second example illustrating the tendency to use propaganda rather than complex analysis delivering the “news”. As a law student I worked for IRS during tax season. I was one of thousands of temporary workers needed across the country to first help, print, count, package and ship tax forms. As the date arrived for returns to be filed, I shifted to a temporary location to review and approve returns, checking for errors and calculation for payments due or the issuance of refunds for individual taxpayers. Others were hired to audit the returns. And others handled more complex corporate returns. Inspectors reviewed our work on a daily basis. We were sworn to secrecy and not permitted to discuss or disclose any information on the forms we reviewed, even among ourselves.
Since that time the work forces at SSA and IRS have been greatly reduced. They are now being decimated. Who will guard our information? Who will assure the data describing our earnings and payments will be accurate and forthcoming? The Inspectors General have been fired. The leadership is being removed because they know they are required by law to hold the information in total confidentiality, and resist the prying eyes of non-employees demanding access for no stated purpose based on fact or substantiated cause. In trying to protect us and follow the law they are losing their jobs.
This is not business as usual. This is a continuation of attempts to hamstring care for our citizenry in order to benefit a few which began with a President Reagan and has been on-going for 40 years. Propaganda works. The attacks on, and underfunding of, public education over these 40 years has made it easier to believe propaganda. The attacks on labor unions and decrease in actual wages has left less time for self-education, civic involvement, and attention to detail in families now needing 2-4 jobs to keep a roof over their heads.
Do not listen to what is being said to you. Watch what is being done to you: increasing unemployment, un-regulated union-busting which decreases wages, more people losing housing, going hungry, unable to access health care… more suffering…more death. All for no good purpose. Actually, for no purpose whatever; other than to enrich the few at the expense of the many. Is this what you voted for?
annarino writes 
2024 NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION
A new year begins with hope and praise for new beginnings. New year’s resolutions? I still wonder what I shall be when I grow up. It becomes harder with age to grow up. Angela and Angelo who brought me into world, parented me through life, showing me the way to be better and stronger, have been dead many years. The aunts and uncles who shepherded me through trials and struggles are also gone from the sight of those of my family still alive. Even my older brother Angelo and several lovable cousins have died. Childhood friends, too, have accepted their mortality and left me behind.
Who is left to help me grow up? To remind me how to behave myself, and direct my steps of exploration? Too few for one as strong-willed as I. I find myself more child-like and childish than ever. Perhaps I do it deliberately so that I may hear my Mother’s chiding tone in my head as she shares her exasperation over my antics,. Her words have taken up permanent residence in my brain. She comments on everything I do, still. It is a mystery to me, one I endure willingly, now.
I fought that constant harangue and meddlesome interference while she lived. All the older Italian women, family and friends, had no qualms about meddling in my life. I laugh now, at their efforts, with some stirring of guilt. It was a hopeless task, and I made certain they knew it as I laughed in their faces. Who is laughing now? I hope they are. I hope I can still make them smile. I only wanted to watch their determined faces break into smiles as they hit me with a rolled-up newspaper and shook their heads. Oh, yes, they operated as a gang. When my mother’s singular efforts seemed to get nowhere, she called in the troops. They would descend on my latest apartment, in the latest city I had moved to, to take the latest job. I was supposed to remain at home, or live next door with a husband, or at least within a few blocks of Mom. I never did. When I was about 35 years old she asked her sister, “ She is not coming home, is she?” Aunt Millie disclosed this to me long after Mom had died. Aunt Millie kept Mom with me all those years after her death. Now, Aunt Millie is also dead to this world. But, she and mom, and all those other Italian women who mothered me will always be alive in my head and my heart. One day, I will be grown up enough to join them. I dread that newspaper. My guess is they still keep it at-the-ready.
Dad lives in my head and heart, too; along with uncles, brothers and older male cousins who formed a protective barrier around me sight unseen. I seldom hear their words. What I hear is their laughter. I see their smiles and watch them quietly hand me a baseball, fishing pole, chocolate milk shake, deck of cards, rake, electrical tape, cement tool. And best of all, their grins. They stood behind the women who were intent on “setting me straight” with grins on their faces and laughter in their eyes. They redirected my thoughts from my transgressions, as I watched them with great delight. Probably, they smiled and smirked because I had taken the focus of the women off their own antics, temporarily relieving them of the women’s attention.
I felt more kinship with them. I wanted their freedom. The women were content to stay in their place. I wanted to go find my place, separate and apart. I wanted the right to control every choice. I did not want to “ask my husband” before I took a step. I wanted to go farther and wider than our insular neighborhood of people and ideas, which seemed enough to satisfy those I knew. I am still searching for that place. I seek a place where freedom of thought and affection expand rather than contract. Often, but not always, like E.T. and all travelers, I simply want to “go home.” So, I do.
I travel through memories tough and sweet back to the South side, just beyond the railroad tracks where Italian immigrant families had settled down. Eventually, most of the children of those families left the neighborhood, as did I. But, I truly still live there no matter my current address. There are no dead parents, no dead aunts and uncles, no dead cousins, no dead brother or dead friends there. All those I love still live there.
Aging brains do not become forgetful. Aging brains simply choose to remember all that once was alive, all those whom they loved. Aging brains hold memory alive with a strength no young brain can comprehend. We do it out of love, not loss. We have lost no ability to remember. We simply choose to remember what we chose to love.
So, here is my New Year’s resolution; I shall love all that is new, and all I can remember from what is old. I shall continue trying to grow up. I shall look for new paths, new journeys of discovery. I may appear to move more slowly than I did last year. I am carrying more baggage with me. I am carrying more of those who died and can no longer physically walk beside me. I love this journey. I am in no hurry to end it. However, I may have to take more stops along the way. The journey of life may seem slower when young. But, it is not. The young simply have fewer bags to carry. They only imagine they go faster, because they go lighter. I may be old now, but I feel light, too. Those whom I carry share their lightness of spirit with me. Someday, I shall become as light a spirit as they.
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Tagged as aging, childhood, Death, growing up, happy new year, Italian family, journeys, love, memory, Memory loss, new year resolutions