New Freedom Initiative: Survival of the Fittest “Equality”

Unveiling his New Freedom Initiative (NFI), President George W. Bush pronounced "my Administration is committed to tearing down the barriers to equality that face many of the 54 million Americans with disabilities."

The feel-good "equality" and "freedom" speech W. delivered was well received, even by liberals like Ted Kennedy. Bobby Silverstein, a key staffer on the congressional Disability subcommittee spearheaded by Senator Tom Harkin, reportedly remarked "you could take NFI, switch around the order, sign Harkin's name and not know the difference."

Disability has been a bipartisan issue in Washington politics largely because it is nonthreatening to either party. Both parties have found ways to use it to fit their agenda. The GOP can put the emphasis on empowerment and ending dependency on government entitlements while the Democrats can focus on civil rights and equal opportunity -- both parties get political mileage for it. That doesn't mean that the disability movement has made substantial gains, however, especially when it comes to income equality.

Harris Poll surveys commissioned by the National Organization on Disability over the past decade since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, for instance, have found persistent gaps in employment, education, voting and political participation, and in involvement in community, social and religious life, between disabled persons and other Americans. Despite a record expansion of the economy and an overall low official unemployment rate, only a third of working age disabled individuals are currently employed, compared to more than 80% of the nondisabled. Disabled persons also are twice as likely not to finish high school (22 versus 9%). A far higher percentage live in households that are below the poverty level (29 versus 10%), and a similarly disproportionate number report not having adequate access to health care (28 versus 12%) or transportation (30 versus 10%). (2000 N.O.D./Harris Survey of Americans with Disabilities)

Disabled persons have suffered from watered-down legislation and middle-of-the-road approaches which satisfy both political parties, don't accomplish much in the way of equality of results and keep us as vulnerable as ever to the capitalist economy. Mostly disabled peoples' advancement has suffered from both the New Democrats and GOP's unwillingness to address the relationship between "equality" and redistribution.

W. states in the NFI, for instance, that new technologies like text telephones for those with hearing impairments; computer monitors with braille displays for those with visual impairments; infrared pointers for people who cannot use their hands, allowing them to operate computers by pointing at functions on the monitor or the keyboard; lighter wheelchairs; lighter artificial limbs, are essential to disabled people's participation.

"These modern wonders make the world more accessible, yet they are often inaccessible to people who need but cannot afford them," says W.

But what does W. propose to remedy this situation? He is asking Congress to create a new fund - a federal investment - that would go directly to rehabilitation centers and businesses to develop and produce such equipment. Here is the clincher: these organizations will get money to pay staff and develop products while disabled people who absolutley need them will have to purchase the equipment by taking out low-interest loans. The developers get the government money outright, while the disabled person must pay for the product they produce using taxpayer dollars.

If we examine W.'s remedy from the standpoint of equality, it becomes clear that equality is entirely avoided here. For instance, the National Council on Disability has noted "for Americans without disabilities, technology makes things easier. For Americans with disabilities, technology makes things possible."

In other words, it is necessary from the get-go for a disabled person to have this technology in order to function. Assistive technology is an expense on top of and beyond what a nondisabled person must make to accomplish similar tasks. To fulfill any notion of "equality" would require taking into account this difference. As the economist Amarta Sen has explained, a disabled person will not extract the same benefit from a given bundle of resources as someone who does not have a functional disadvantage. For equality to exist in this particular situation, the disabled person *must* have the technology to experience any freedom, it is not optional, yet W.'s New Freedom Initiative would make their freedom contingent upon being able to take out a loan and pay for it themselves.

Now how likely is it that disabled persons who have been surviving on the average Social Security benefits (for SSI it is $372 per month, for SSDI, $786) will be in the position to risk taking out a loan with no guarantee of a job? Further, how can a disabled person without the assistive technology be job-ready?  The devices take a learning curve to master them before they can be exploited by employers. Moreover, disabled persons need access to this equipment regardless of whether they will ever become a worker.

That cuts to the quick of the neo-liberal and Third Way politics which have placed all the emphasis on ending dependency and increasing productivity without any attention to equality of income which is directly tied into the freedom to live one type of life or another. Both replace redistributive (egalitarian) goals with a market approach; both adopt the supply-side theory that the economy is burdened by rigid labor markets, powerful trade unions, and overly-generous welfare provisions. In an era of flexible accumulation as demanded by the corporations government has shifted its top priority to justifying expenditures only if they address human capital development (early education, job training, vocational pursuit) which feeds into the so-called new economy, i.e., if it suits business needs. The Third Way melding of a left and right mantra is "rights and responsibility" capped off with the agreement so stated by Clinton, that the "era of big government is over." It follows that there is a keen government interest in programs that target the long-term unemployed and disadvantaged for employment.

Now we hear W. tell disabled persons in his NFI speech that "too many Americans with disabilities remain trapped in bureaucracies of dependence." Where have we heard that before? In 1996, right before the passage of welfare "reform," the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). In order to reduce the "dependency" of mothers on government benefits and to feed more low wage workers into the labor-shortaged economy, Clinton (in typical triangulation strategy of keeping in step with the GOP), ended welfare as we know it by eliminating the poor women's entitlement to a social safety net from the Social Security Act.

Women, however, did not find an expanded benefits or services program that would lift them out of poverty in the PRWORA, but faced a termination of benefits without any guarantee of a job, much less a living wage job with health care and benefits. A Wisconsin study of the Tommy Thompson (now Secretary of Health & Human Services) welfare reform transition period conducted by John Pawasarat of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, found 75% of those hired lost their jobs within nine months. Only 28% sustained projected annual earnings of $10,000 for two consecutive quarters and such work was often part-time, low-paying and quick to end. When the Children's Defense Fund and the National Coalition for the Homeless reevaluated the status of former welfare recipients in 1998, they found that only about 50% to 60% of those who leave welfare were working and those who work typically earn less than $250 per week - too little to lift a family out of poverty.

If readers believe that disabled persons are somehow immune from similar tactics and treatment consider that Jonathan Young, celebrated disability liaison for the Clinton administration, regularly disparaged the "cycle of dependency" which he applied to both welfare and disability programs like the Return to Work program. Clinton's counterpart in Great Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair has gone further in England. "New policies to offer unemployed people jobs and training are a social democratic priority -- but we also expect everyone to take up the opportunity offered," says Blair.

Blair's remarks were soon followed with a notice from British officials telling disabled persons to seek work or lose benefits. The Independent reported "Sick and disabled people who refuse to look for work will face the withdrawal of their state benefits under a tough new government drive to slash "welfare dependency."

When W. intones the negatives of bureaucracies, he will not be aiming to fix them as might serve disabled persons' long standing inequality nor will he be focused on acheiving an equality of results. His allegiance is to the powerful elite who put him in office and the trend is clearly towards further cutting, if not ending, entitlements.

W.'s proposal to revamp Social Security by creating individual investment accounts, for instance, would be a backdoor way to do just that. The new study, by the General Accounting Office concludes that "even under the best of circumstances, W.'s Social Security reform proposals would reduce benefits for disabled persons. For a worker with average earnings who first receives disability benefits at the age of 45, the reduction in lifetime benefits would be in the range of 4% to 18%. (The average benefit for disabled workers is now $786 a month).

The NFI does not mention alleviating the poverty of those trying to struggle on SSDI or SSI below-poverty checks. As one activist in Southern California put it "SSI pays people just enough to scrape by on, unless of course you are a crip, in which case everything you need to live is so expensive you can't live on it."

NFI does not address daily problems disabled persons face dealing with Medicaid (which is cutting back what it will pay for all the time) nor access to an attendant (a grossly underpaid job that no one wants) nor Medicare (which has never been designed to provide services of the type disabled persons need). By omitting such realities, NFI is more useless talk about "freedom" in a country where people's material needs do not get met.

Significantly NFI ignores the power relations of employment. The duty to become employed rests entirely on the back of the disabled individual whose labor power is not often perceived as equal by employers under the simplistic banner of "equal employment opportunity." Under NFI, private employers have no obligation to hire disabled workers, rather it's a purely voluntary situation. Without affirmative action or requirements on employers to hire disabled workers - a minor effort at interventionism that might produce greater equality of results - will the barriers disabled people face be "torn down"?

Further, W. has said the country is in a recession. If he is correct, that not only means fewer jobs but traditionally disabled persons have been the first to loose their jobs when the economy turns sour. How does "personal responsibility" work into that scenario? Unemployment is not an aberration but a permanent condition of capitalist economies. How do "personal responsibility" and "rights" fit into that systemic reality?  There is no right to a job. Without a government effort towards job creation, will the barriers disabled people face be "torn down" the next four years?

W. version of "freedom" and "equality" in the capitalist context is not redeemable. The fact that some bourgeois disabled persons think it is a step forward is a shame. But then, the bourgeois of all races, genders, ages and disabililities have usually gone along with the survival-of-the-fittest type "equality" and "freedom" the NFI represents.

Once the neo-liberals and Third Way politicos have been convinced they have done all they can do to help the disadvantaged seize their "opportunities" and become "independent and productive" as W. puts it the mood is likely to shift to blaming those disabled persons left on entitlement programs for their individual failure to make the grade -- all the more reason to shave benefits to induce more incentives to the recalcitrant to get a job (regardless of the fact that there will not ever be enough jobs because unemployment is a built-in component of capitalism). Or, as with the welfare population, government may force disabled persons into workfare programs where they must show up at designated work spots in order to continue to receive their benefit checks.

Ending disabled peoples oppression -- which is a direct result of the relations of production in a capitalist economy -- requires addressing egalitarian principles of redistributive justice first. It takes economic equality to produce social equality.  Economic equality is something which data clearly shows has not materialized in America, not just for disabled persons but for the majority of Americans.

Marta Russell is author of Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract. http://disweb.org/