The Silent Protests
by digby
Allison Kilkenny has a full round-up of various actions and protests happening around the country showing opposition to budget cuts. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that it’s getting so little press, especially considering that we vanquished the boogeyman this week, but still. These are fellow Americans all over the country facing a very real threat to their own lives that nobody seems to think is particularly relevant:
Capitol Police arrested eighty-nine disability rights activists [1] on Monday following the group’s occupation of the Cannon House Office Building rotunda. The disability rights group ADAPT [2] staged the event to protest Representative Paul Ryan’s Medicaid cuts, which would force people with disabilities to live in nursing homes rather than in their own houses. Additionally, the House-passed budget resolution would turn Medicaid into block grants and reduce the program’s spending by more than $700 billion over ten years. Combined with other Medicaid cuts at the state level, the protesters said, the block grant plan could restrict funding so much that people with disabilities would not have enough public support to be able to live independently.[…]Nursing home residents in Illinois [3] also turned out to protest proposed Medicaid cuts. Governor Pat Quinn’s budget reduces Lee Manor’s funding by $500,000, a crushing blow that would cut staff and services at the nursing center.Quinn’s plans include cutting Medicaid by 6 percent, or $70 million in state funds, which would result in a federal match of an additional $70 million also being wiped out. Nearly 7,000 healthcare jobs would be lost, according to Pat Cornstock, executive director of Health Care Council of Illinois.
[…]New Jersey firefighters [4] took to the streets Monday to protest budget cuts and a recent reduction in official fire department staff size.
[…]Thousands of people are expected to rally in downtown Raleigh today in order to protest the proposed cuts [6] in the House budget proposal…Republicans have proposed spending $900 million [9] less in public education and health care than what Governor Beverly Perdue (D) offered in her spending proposal to the legislature in February. These cuts are piled atop 15,000 education job cuts that have already occurred over the past two years, according to NCAE.North Carolina’s budget also sets aside $230 million for corporate income tax breaks and private sector job creation.[…]Thousands more are expected to descend upon Pennsylvania’s State Capitol today to protest Governor Tom Corbett’s budget proposal [10], which calls for over a billion dollars in cuts to education and axing 1,500 state jobs.
Read on … There’s much more.
Now I suppose you can chalk that up to a bunch of useless hippies waving their peace signs around if you want to, but it looks like similar protests are happening all over the country over these issues. And the people who are protesting aren’t doing it out of some abstract ideological commitment to the safety net — they are citizens who are going to be personally affected by these cuts. Real human beings, with real lives.
We can blame the blackout on bin Laden, but let’s face it: nobody in the mainstream media was covering this systematically anyway. These guys need to start calling themselves terrorists or Tea Partiers. It’s the only way anyone will notice.
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