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 
A LETTER TO US ALL
Dear Us:
Did you ever hear of the Golden Rule? “Treat others as you would be treated.” When asked which of the ten commandments Moses shared with the Israelites was the most important, Jesus advised questioners to “Love others as I have loved you.” In the 60s, even non-believers of any religion, or of even the existent of God, followed the precept “Lead with your heart.” “Flower children” believed in love, for everyone, at all times. And those were turbulent times. We watched freedom riders maimed and killed, their busses set on fire, their murdered bodies hidden and buried in shallow graves. We watched the perpetrators of violence go free; the Citizen Councils ( marketing change for KKK) often included law enforcement and local judges. This is the America currently referred to when Trump supporters urge us all to “Make America Great Again.” They no longer wear white robes nor hide their faces. They wear red ties, dark suits and sometimes red hats.They pretend to be news anchors on FOX News and elsewhere. They pretend to be president like Elon Musk. The delivery system of hate may have changed; the racism and sexism have not. We are experiencing a backlash to the progress made over the past 50 years. It took 50 years for it to grow this strong.
I was a resident student advisor (RA) at Lincoln Tower on the OSU campus in Columbus, Ohio in the late sixties and early 70s. I was also a student activist. I had to become one because I believed in the Golden Rule. I watched Black students, Jewish students and women students derided and demeaned. I was privy to racist commentary because white students assumed they could say them to my white face with my full agreement. White men also felt safe making sexist comments to me despite the fact I was a woman. As an Italian-American I was sometimes mistaken for Jewish and heard my share of anti-semitic remarks. Much of the time such hate-talk was passed off as a joke. Whenever I heard the joke I stopped the speaker and explained nothing they said was funny, nor factual. I demanded such language never be used while in my presence. Those who just joined in to feel safe in the crowd became serious and apologized. The bullies did not apologize. But they shut up. “Stand up to shut them up” became part of every day life on campus. That is activism at its core.
I had a few empty suites on my floor due to an on-going criminal investigation. A mentally ill student was on trial for arson, having set fire in a suite the year before. Once the case was resolved, those suites were re-opened and spaces filled, as were other vacancies on my floor. Who moved in to those spaces? Black women looking for a safe space. Some had repeatedly been locked out of their rooms by white roommates. Several had threatening notes nailed to their door; threats to rape or kill them because they were Black. Most were ostracized and demeaned daily by white roommates. Their complaint to Student Affairs fell on deaf ears. When the spaces opened on my floor, they found refuge there.
Our dorm was typical for OSU where Black students made up a tiny percentage of the student population. My floor was unique. I held floor meetings to discuss expectations that we would all follow the Golden Rule. When I saw or heard of a racial incident I immediately intervened. Soon, I was doing racial mediation on a regular basis. Black women entered the elevator and experienced white women moving close to the emergency call button, with hand hovering, ready to cry for help from women just like themselves returning exhausted from a day of classes ? Time for mediation! Call everyone together and talk it through. Day after day. Incident after incident. It was exhausting for the Black women, and the Black men who visited them, to face daily racial challenges and outright discrimination.
Another RA and two students worked with me to develop a racial mediation program in our dorm. Whenever the Student Judicial Council was handed a case involving a white student and a Black student in dispute, it was handed off to us to mediate the conflict. Our efforts were not always welcomed, but we persisted. Incidents of violence, write-ups to judiciary, and racial conflict decreased. Today, this program would be outlawed by the President who gleefully extorts OSU by threatening loss of education grants and federal funds for programs and research. OSU has caved to the bullies. OSU is not standing up to shut up the racism. It would cost money. And money is god in America, and on college campuses.
OSU is caving to racists and bullies again. And, not just OSU. Columbia University, indeed nearly all colleges and universities, if not all, are caving to racist bullies under the guise of following the law, accepting the lawless and illegal actions of the current administration. Following the law would require universities to protect the free speech rights of faculty and students, to abide by employment contracts and civil service laws to protect both administrative employees and faculty. Universities with law schools had readily-available experts to stand up, speak out and take action. I was an Associate Director of Law at Ohio University. There is a national organization of such attorneys. Why are they so silent? Why have university presidents and provosts not joined arms to defend their campuses against illegal searches and seizures of students? Why did Columbia University not come to the aid of Mahmoud Khalil and his family? If they did so in any way, it was neither apparent nor sufficient.
The Poster Boy President leading the racist mob of greedy Americans spoke at the DOJ recently. His racist and personal attacks on lawyers, prosecutors and judges, was accepted and even cheered. Racism and greed cross all boundaries and sexual preferences, exist within every profession, religion and community group. It is a constant and persistent threat to the principles of democracy. Those whose racism had been laid low, who crawled under rocks to hide their sins, have crawled back out, empowered by the greed for wealth and power, threatened by those they spurn who have finally found success on a more equal path, and undermined by their own sense of failure despite the promise of an American Dream. Instead of blaming the greedy power-brokers of industry, banking and finance, politics and education they blame their fellow victims. Their racism blinds them to truth, and they willingly embrace false-hoods and disinformation. They would not recognize a fact if it stared them in the face. They would prefer to attack the fact and the experts offering the truth of the fact.
As a lawyer, as an educator, as a writer, I am heart-broken over the loss of my country, my Constitution and its guarantees of personal freedom for all persons who are in this country…no matter where they came from, or how they got here. That is the promise of America. That is the American Dream. Shopping for cheap goods because your existence only matters if those power-brokers can make a buck off you cannot fill the place freedom once filled within the American heart and psyche. Woke? Woke is what is required to survive the on-slaught against a free people who simply want to find a good-paying job, buy a house, feed and educate their family. The power-brokers want us to stay asleep. Like children, we are angels in our sleep, causing them no discomfort, and quietly staying out of their way as they take over our economy, our government institutions, our military, our banking system, our educational systems and local/public schools…even our post office!
Wake up, my fellow lawyers, my fellow professors, my fellow school teachers, my fellow social workers, my fellow counselors, my fellow retail workers, my fellow waitresses and caterers, my fellow babysitters, my fellow students, my fellow Catholics and people of faith, my fellow Americans. Wake up and stay woke! We have work to do, if we can stay awake to do it loudly and persistently. This is no time to lie down and feign sleep. God knows, none of us sleep well theses days.
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