The Social Movement Left OUT

[Chuck Grimes]

For Marta, and the list.

Jenny K came into the shop this afternoon just after I posted on this
thread from work. She is one of DREDF's lawyers. I asked her if she
knew you (Marta), but I don't think you've met. In any event I also
tried to get her to explain what happened to the DREDF international
law project, but couldn't get much of an answer.

Last year DREDF had a DOJ(?) project to make recommendations on creating
guidelines for international disability law. I have no idea what they
covered. Do you? (I should know, but I don't)

In any event, in some talks with Mary Lou last year, I remember
worrying about some of the possible problems with any international
disability law guidelines lead by the US government. 

My biggest worry was that the US privatized social services system
with its giant healthcare industry, HMOs, private equipment dealers,
obnoxious home care agencies, filthy for profit nursing homes, greedy
drug companies, etc, etc, would become central to any US international
development policy. That developing legal guidelines in this area
might neatly tie (perhaps inadvertently) into the on-going US
neoliberal drives to project these same US corporate healthcare models
into various trade and economic policy agreements and become the de
facto international standard.

The underlying argument goes something like this. Privatizing social
support services takes disability out of the medical model and puts it
into the consumer model. And that is supposed to be progress.

Well, whatever is right and wrong about this argument has to be
injected into the anti-globalization movements and hashed out there by
disabled advocates. The goal would be that some consensus arises from
both the developed world's progressive community and the developing
world's advocates to counter what I would expect to be a future of
brutal repercussions and consequences---if that doesn't happen.

In my opinion the US AIDS drug patent war on the South is just the tip
the iceberg. Imagine the Mexican government contracting Invamex (US
wheelchair manufacturer, Invacare's manquiladora in Ciudad Reynosa--Mc
Allen, TX, dodging the US Steel Workers Union in Cleveland and sending
toxic waste down the Rio Grande instead of into Lake Erie, etc...) to
produce overpriced, shitty chairs from Invacare for disabled Mexicans
under some IMF loan program administered by Kaiser Permenente as an
international HMO under the auspices of NAFTA...

I can see the potential to co-oped any established disability
centered radicalism by US neoliberal policy makers, using the
so-called great successes of the US on disability rights as the
justification for exporting a really heinous privatized healthcare
and social services system.

The only way I can see to prevent this kind of duplicity is for more
disabled advocacy groups to link with the anti-globalization
movements---or whatever you want to call the whole counter-culture
that is co-evolving with globalized neoliberalism.

So all that was the background to my obnoxious comment earlier this
afternoon.  

Chuck Grimes