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