“The greatest thing our art does, and our industry does is to erase the lines in the sand. We should continue doing that, when the world tells us to make them deeper.”
— Guillermo del Toro in his acceptance speech for Best Director at the 90th Annual Academy Awards.
i only heard about this 2 months ago. its been 3 years????
Remember this started because Snyder switched Flint from a freshwater mountain lake to the polluted Flint River simply to allow his wife’s company to use the lake for bottling instead. This is a manufactured crisis of corruption and capitalism.
Also remember that the pipes corroded because they refused to pay for the chemical used to make the water less acidic.
Remember that when the first E. coli outbreak from the water popped up, the city hall was given water coolers by the state, free of charge, all while denying that the water could be unsafe to drink.
Remember that, despite having a huge budget surplus and a “rainy day fund,” set aside that could easily cover the cost of relocating the residents by buying their houses/paying their debt, or could cover a large chunk of the cost of replacing the pipes, the state has decided to continue to only put in the minimal amount of effort.
Remember that flint is majority POC, majority impoverished, and is still being faced with crippling water bills from the Detroit water supply company, where they are often charged $50 a month just to use the service, on top of the cost of their water bill.
Remember that there will now be an entire generation of children who will now be damaged by lead poisoning and damage from the multitude of neurotoxins.
Remember that this is what privatized natural resources looks like. Remember that these people are being punished for having the audacity to dare to be poor in an economy that won’t let them be anything but.
At every level, this has not been a mistake.
The State and City are most upset that people know its happening and are resisting nation-wide.
But if we lose focus they lose even the small amount of aid they’ve managed to get.
This is how they do it. It’s a siege on the public empathy. Eventually we become numb to the problem and despair. Or something bigger happens.
Y’all please reblog because this is fucking terrifying. It’s yet another attempt to sabotage any attempt at the poor receiving any kind of health care. God forbid you ever get fired and can’t declare yourself permanently disabled.
Make no mistake: people WILL DIE from this.
Contact your reps however you can. Use Resistbot and more importantly, just spread this shit around because I KNOW there’s a bunch of you on here that are directly affected by this.
Please share far and wide.
It’s murder. Murder by apathy. Murder by politics. Murder by making sick people choose between bankrupting their families or dying to save them from that fate.
There’s a reason why they’re doing this. Why they’re trying to bury the ADA. The ACA. Food stamps. Every social program.
They want to hoard even more money for the rich, for the military industrial complex, for themselves. And they’ll literally kill sick and poor people for that goal. Because we’re nothing to them. We’re not worth a damn thing. If we die? If we go bankrupt? Homeless? Starve? They don’t care. It’s a benefit for their desires to be richer if we’re dead.
This isn’t just politics. This isn’t policy differences. Calling it that santizes and disguises the truth: we, as a people, let other human beings die, starve, go bankrupt and homeless every single day. Those in power are just trying to expand that to more of us now.
If any of y’all think “this is murder” is an exaggeration… Let me paint you a picture.
My clients are all disabled, in some way or another. They all have a serious physical disability, chronic illness, or psychiatric diagnosis that prevents them from working. They are also all homeless. And every single one is on Medicaid.
And, I bet many of you didn’t know, but dictating who gets access to certain kinds of housing (specifically housing for people with serious mental illness- permanent housing) is in part determined by how high your Medicaid usage is.
So, where does this shit leave us? Well, first off, it leaves my clients without any kind of insurance. All of them need medication, all of them go to the doctor and/or hospital frequently. All of them rely on Medicaid. So add a work requirement to Medicaid, and where does that leave people who are physically and mentally incapable of working? Yeah. In the fucking dust.
Now, take away their Medicaid, and their chances of getting into permanent housing drop, too. So not only do they not have the means to get their medications and see their doctors and go to the hospital when they fucking NEED TO, now they no longer qualify for most of the housing that I am trying to get them into. So, they end up back on the street or in dangerous, overcrowded shelters with NO medication, NO doctors, NO hospitals, and almost no fucking chance of getting into housing because they have no Medicaid because they apparently need to work to have Medicaid and they CANNOT. FUCKING. WORK.
SO this is murder. This is murder of people like my clients, who rely on Medicaid and related services. This will be the death of hundreds if not thousands of Americans.
I don’t really have the energy for it, but I looked into things a little.
Kentucky, South Dakota, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, Kansas, Indiana, and Arkansas are the 9 states I could find named as seeking the work requirement. [x]
Kentucky passed their requirement the day after the article link at the top of this post, on Jan 12th. [x] Indiana passed their’s on Feb 2nd. [x] Kansas seems to have possibly enacted this sometime late Jan, but could still be in the proposal stage. [x] Virginia is the most recent, in the past few days of late Feb. [x]
This IS happening. It’s not a posturing thing, or a goal they have. They are acting on it NOW.
Those of you who have been around here a hella long time might remember my ill fated journey into the record dealing business with my mom’s brother. And how he jumped ship and left me with around $7000 in IRS debt I couldn’t pay back in addition to my student loans that were about to start needing to be paid. I was mentally exhausted and couldn’t – just couldn’t – do grad school, so I was left with a bunch of debt and about 10 boxes of records I couldn’t sell.
WELL.
After 4 years of damn hard work, sweat, tears, cursing the heaven’s and my former business partners name, and patiently and diligently paying monthly installments, plus all my tax returns, toward the amount,
IT IS FINALLY PAID OFF.
And that’s not all. Today my tax return – my first proper tax return in four years – hit the bank.
The majority of it went into my savings account, but I also got paid and this is a 5 week month, so I am in Treat Yourself mode. I’m going on a lush shopping spree online, I got tex-mex, next week I might get pizza. But I am so excited and happy, and now the amount I would have been sending to the IRS, I’m going to put into savings. I’ve spent the last 4 years with my life on hold. Now maybe I can afford grad school, or at least get a decent amount of money in my savings account.
It feels so good.
Tipsy me + trashy party tunes = happy dog
Because that walk lasted forever. My neighbors probably think I’m psycho.
The Paradox Machine 