Crip News v.160
Analysis: the anti-profit motives in recent news.
hey’all, i’m offering some analysis of recent headlines as today’s issue. it features stuff that might press on your tender points. if it’s too much, scroll pass to a few events at the bottom and we’ll be back to lots of new works by disabled artists next week. thanks for being here.
-kevin
NEWS ANALYSIS: Anti-Profit Motives
In the recent stream of major breaking news from the US, disability is front and center. Now is a good chance to identify disability as a constitutive element, not merely an angle or journalistic beat.
The killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO in NYC has focused attention on an enduring and infuriating pattern of corporate wrongdoing. The shooter - seemingly radicalized by his chronic pain - performed an expressive pierce into the often-depoliticized sphere of health insurance with bullet casing messages at the scene and Monopoly money in his backpack.
In 2023, UHC took in nearly $205 billion (much of it from public sources) to manage plans for millions of elders and poor and disabled people, not including its $76 billion revenue stream for employer-sponsored plans that keep disabled people out of work.
How does the fast violence of a single gun draw more attention than the slow violence of the industry’s debilitation of an entire public?
The answer is threaded through other headlines about the predominance of corporations in the so-called safety net.
Trump has picked businessman Frank Bisignano, one of the country’s highest paid executives whose current company has targeted remote employees in layoffs, to lead the Social Security Administration. Television charlatan Mehmet Oz, a major supporter of Medicare Advantage plans that rob the public, has been chosen to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Meanwhile, billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a troll agency on “government efficiency” to curtail civil servants’ public duties, with uncertain effects for Trump’s campaign promises not to touch Social Security. Treating public budgets like corporate balance sheets is how Trump’s allies are able to propose ideas like cutting Medicaid and SNAP benefits to pay for tax cuts.
Disabled organizers have told us for decades: a market is a lethally inadequate framework for public service.
The judiciary has set the stage for an unprecedented gutting of regulatory oversight while preventing an accurate description of the scale of the problems. The Supreme Court’s overturning of what’s called “Chevron deference” is an existential threat to disability anti-discrimination legislation. And last week’s decision by a federal court to block the collection of “beneficial ownership information” required by the Corporate Transparency Act halts long-awaited documents that would reveal the true scale of private equity’s role in the care crisis, among other things.
There was one major win for disabled organizers in recent news: finally, we got the proposed rule to end sub-minimum wages for disabled workers. But here, the coverage has misrepresented the scale of disability in labor terms. It would not end the practice for workers in the fundamentally disabling settings of prisons. Half of the people incarcerated in the US are full-time workers with hourly wages between $.33 and $1.41, producing an estimated $11 billion in goods and services annually.
Ableist premises have overtaken press even where disabled people’s agency is supposedly at the center. Lawmakers’ advance of a so-called “assisted dying” bill in England and Wales has consistently been framed as an expansion of independence, contrary to the evidence in Canada. This was the news context for the passing of a fierce anti-euthanasia activist: Rest in power, Diane Coleman.
Disabled organizers are calling for an urgent focus on mutual aid and community safety. We can learn what we need to prepare for by looking at how disability shows up, and how accurately, in the seemingly unrelated or mundane aspects of public life right now.
EVENTS
Art/Access Lab: Work in Progress Showing with Youree Kim
TODAY, Dec. 10, 6 - 8pm MT, in-person at Experimental Station (Chicago)
Work in Progress Showings provide artists in the disability community an affinity space to share and discuss developing projects. Youree Kim is a disability interdisciplinary artist, activist, and researcher. Kim will present two video-based works: Occupied Lives (2024) and Archiving Sites as Resistance and Reimagination (2024).
Anti-Ableist Manifesto with Tiffany Yu
TODAY, Dec. 10, 3 - 4pm ET, on Zoom
Join Tiffany Yu, author of the new book The Anti-Ableist Manifesto: Smashing Stereotypes, Forging Change, and Building a Disability-Inclusive World in conversation with human rights attorney Haben Girma. We’ll discuss her process for writing the book, her aspirations for change, and her lessons for building an anti-ableist world.
Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry, Radical Politics, and Art
Thursday, Dec. 12, 7 - 8:30pm, in-person at the American Folk Art Museum (NYC)
A conversation and launch of a new publication with contributors to the text.