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Disability and Debtors prisons
(revised)
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and other aspects of the safety net are being cut, but you aren't disabled, so it's not your problem -- right? Think again.
The government gave us (disabled people like me) our checks, and some-
times when they could afford it our families put us away from interfering with the smooth operation of their lives with that 'help'. We get our SSI,
subsidized housing, and we don't become burdens on relatives. And if we are
lucky, while they try to "manage us," we can get helped.
Relatives everywhere may be in for a rude awakening as SSI gets cut. Welfare and medicaid/medicare..Things will become unmanageable -- fast. Some relatives already balk
at having to help house and care for old parents. What will they do with their sisters or brothers
with mental illness, autism, retardation, brain damage, cancer, work-related injuries, war
damage, or wheelchairs? What if the money is just not there any more, or not enough to care for disabled family members? When government budget cuts dump the disabled on their
unprepared, untrained, unfunded, sometimes dysfunctional families, and the family budget just can't afford the care a disabled uncle, or father, or sister needs, what do you think will happen? What happens when the IOU's become worthless?
Masses of disabled people with no help and no money will be out in the street, avoiding abuse, guilty, depressed, un-cared for.
And the well off will scream something MUST be done! Fearful of being a burden or a victim, some on the street will kill themselves. The disabled will become easy scapegoats for
frustrated, bored, neglected, sociopath teens
and thugs. This will eventually cause an outrage, because people who are "normal" can't stand to
see and relate to a human being who's
handicapped up-close, in their own neighborhoods or homes -- they certainly don't want to admit they helped them die.
When the middle class become poor themselves, they will resent their disabled relatives rather than resent the wealthy, just like they resent poor already. Would there be a great turning away? I hope not.
When you have mental illness, for instance, and things get hairy at home ... your family can send you away to the hospital where "professionals" handle big problems if they have insurance or can pay. Most families can't do this now, but provided they can navigate the maze of SSI applications and bureaucracy while working double shifts they might get the state to do something.
But what if they can't get help anymore? What if families are barely able to handle their own dysfunctions are now homeless? Imagine what stressed out, overworked, dysfunctional families who have to deal with suicidal family members or PSTD vets home from Iraq all by themselves who can't get shelter or food will do.
Families living paycheck to paycheck, who cannot afford a disabled person's medication -- what would they do, watching their child or sister deteriorate into a psychosis? Or watching a loved one who needs dialysis, with no money or Medicaid to pay for it, horribly, painfully, pitifully, dying at home for want of an hour once a day on a machine in a doctor's office? Or those living with a person who is immobilized, unable to buy the medicine or have the state help them to control the pain so they can live? What would families do if suddenly cut off from help?
We are seeing this very thing unfold in California.
Would Futility of life laws become more tasty ... for a solution? Would that be "better" than denying the wealthy their fees,the bloated insurance companies thier co-pays and the credit companies their usuerious interest and the rich their stolen wealth gained on the blood-sweat-tears and broken dreams and lost happiness of billions?
What if on top of these burdens imposed on the lower classes by wealthy people who refuse to change thier decadent lifestyles pushing all these stressed-out families who are forced to deal with a loved one with disability issues, personally, all by themselves, all of a sudden?
How would they cope? What would their reactions be? Would they crack under the strains?
Get real! Families that can function or care will make a stink about it, because they still like the idea of the state helping them take care of the more difficult tasks of a child, mother, or other relative in their care who's living with a disability. Parents and relatives of disabled people like having the state take up the care and financial slack, so they can work without having to stop to tend to the routine crises that people go through when they are mentally ill or otherwise disabled.
Some families don't care, and would rather their disabled relatives be dead than have them live in THEIR home. And some dysfunctional families, or families with abuse histories or sociopath family members, will take their anger at the state out on the disabled family members.
They will be beaten, abused, starved, ignored -- don't pretend this will not happen. Mental illness and other kinds of disability can strike ANYONE down at ANY time.
No-one is immune to potential disability. It is scary more families will be forced to go into debt, much faster, much deeper,to fill up all those shiny new debtors prisons. So people can be forced to work for free, to work off obscene "interests" that never will get paid down, debts and interest caused by hospital bills from families struggling to pay what the state once paid.
The noose is closing in on the wage-slave system. Soon credit lords will create a never-ending excuse for the continuing debt slavery of the American people. Don't believe me? Why was the bankruptcy law changed for the poor, but not for corporations? Why have credit card companies been allowed by law to become more predatory, allowed to hike fees and charge hidden fees at a whim? It's almost as if they want people to STAY in debt. Almost as if.
Charging up the interest on debts will make sure that the debts people incur for medicine or medical emergencies are NEVER paid off. And when good Christian liberals too scared to throw away the Bible, unwilling to offend social Darwinists cry "Slavery is un Christian," they will have no place to turn in the Bible or in the law code -- because the Bible is OK with slavery, and so are the corporate ass-sucking cheap labor neocons.
The rich few are creating all the conditions it will take, for our system to become one of endless debt slavery. This is their reason for cutting SSI, for tort reform, for rewriting bankruptcy laws, for fucking with interest rates, etc. Medical debt and credit card debt will be a tool used to screw us all into slavery.
The illusion of the legitimacy of owing interest on a loan has created debt slavery. Usury is a sneaky slavery scam that is very effective in getting people to work for longer than it takes to repay the debt, long enough to pay the debt over and over again, for nothing in return. Debt slavery has kept generations of Indian families under the yoke of their masters, giving them free labor. If it works in India, it will work here.
Debt slavery is "legitimized" by playing a scam based in interest, a scam based in rationalizing why you owe more than you were given when you borrowed. This scam exploits things like basic human decency, misery, the puritan work ethic, desperation, desire, addiction, our self-sufficient pride, reinforcing our cultural denial over whatever non-existent work the rich do in gaining their wealth they lord over us.
It's insane, but it has been internalized so deeply it's often unquestioned, and there is no limit how much others can take and have from a society that deprives all to ensure the obscene power, leisure, and wealth of the few.
This scam exploits our honesty in deal-making, and the urge for repaying "kindness," and a blind gratefulness for help in a desperate situation, misdirected to those who help us in desperate times but only for a big fee that keeps us paying forever. That is a scam, and that (among other things) is how we are being exploited.
I fear a debt slavery scam will dupe us just as bad as it does in India and other places. How many people DARE to refuse to pay usury, the unconscionable interests on loans? How many people seek to improve their "lot in life," and when they work for long hours and that lot gets worse..I ask whom will risk everything for their kids?(quite a few I bet). How do you think slave recruiters in disaster areas can get desperate people hooked into slavery and human trafficking? What do you think is the bait they use, to lure people in? Misery, desperation, and the love of family and improving their lot in life? Not with fair wealth sharing and compassion in a community,but with JOBS.
How many Americans have the guts to refuse to pay those sudden interest hikes or hidden fees credit companies and other insurance companies put in the fine print, clauses and subclauses written to make sure you NEVER will think you can stand up against them? How many Americans refuse to pay taxes to a government that clearly, obviously, no longer represents us?
How many Americans facing a health crisis would march into a insurance company and stay there and demand to see the owner of that company and not leave until they meet with them?
Remember how Obama was going to investigate torture? and how Obama blew off the need for justice? That is NOT representation. With this rightward tilt even in the democrats with 60 votes still sucking up to the republicans ,allowing the church infiltration into state affairs, and corporate lobbyists paying big bucks to Congress, real people like you and I have no representation in our government any more. Yet we pay taxes out of fear,and corporations they hardly pay taxes at all. This is extortion without representation.
And cutting SIS,Welfare,Cutting off access to health care is just another way of closing the noose on the American people -- slowly, imperceptibly tightening the rope around our necks, while distracting us with non issues like Michael Jackson overload. What they've done and what they're doing creates situations that generate personal debts so huge they can never be paid off,in this"recession" .Because personal debts can no longer be defaulted (bankruptcy has been effectively killed). How else will our infinite debt be collected, except to send us to work in debt prison, or find ways for us to 'work it off' or avoid starvation through indentured servitude?
Ever wonder why the draft has not been revived, and the states are starved of funds? It's not racial, it's class-based. The rich have greased congressional palms to pass laws to set up the entire less than filthy rich country for a fall(all except the top 1 or 2% of the wealthiest) enabling the U.S. become a debt slave state.
What better way to dupe the over-obedient people already willing to pay half their yearly earnings to this government that doesn't represent them, without questioning how that money is spent. People who willingly carry and pay outrageous credit card debts to buy shit they don't need will never get to pay off their debts, but they pay without contest, without recourse. The addicted American consumer is ripe for accepting the chains of debt slavery, especially when the social safety net is gone.
Bird flu or some other engineered bio-weapon from Fort Dietrich will hit,health care will be a requirement many may not be able to afford, and nobody except the well-off or preferred people will have insurance either way. The poor and working classes will rush to emergency rooms to get help, because there is nowhere to turn and they'll be buried in debt, and soon it will dawn on them that they can't pay anything off.
Then comes the new "solution." If you work a year in debtors' prison, your debt is paid. Or maybe two years. And the fine print says you owe for your own upkeep in prison, where all your wages pay off hospital bills and you are set up to NEVER leave...
There may be an outcry for national health insurance, but by the time it's enacted, if ever, we will have become the institutional/slave/prison industry state. It is a perfect set-up for feeding the wealthy. Slave maintenance is very cost effective for the rich, much more cost effective than letting us be free to disobey and cause uprisings. People who don't go along with the "program to heal America" and pay up one way or the other, will mysteriously disappear and be found dead.
© by the author.
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