With little fanfare, the Bush administration is proposing to stop financing the construction of new housing for the mentally ill and physically handicapped as part of a 50 percent cut in its housing budget for people with disabilities.
The proposal, which has been overshadowed by the administration's plans to shrink its community development programs, affects what is known as the Section 811 program. Since 1998, Section 811 has helped nonprofit developers produce more than 11,000 units of housing for low-income people with disabilities, including more than 700 in New York State.
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NYT.
The Fascisti at work. This is classic. Marginalization of those deemed unfit. What will happen when these programs disappear completely? Don't belive me? Wait until next year's budget. More and more, the burden will fall on family members and institutions.
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This time, the federal government would discontinue financing housing for people with spinal cord injuries or psychiatric illnesses who are not necessarily homeless but may live in nursing homes or psychiatric hospitals.
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You don't think medical insurance will pick up the tab, do you? Wait until they determine these people pose too much of a burden on the nation[1].
On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government instituted the "Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases." This law, one of the first steps taken by the Nazis toward their goal of creating an Aryan "master race," called for the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. With the law's passage the Third Reich also stepped up its propaganda against the disabled, regularly labeling them "life unworthy of life" or "useless eaters" and highlighting their burden upon society.
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How are we doing it here, you ask? By attempting to change the Constitution to declare homosexuals sub-human. By refusing to support programs that help the poor (minority races) and disabled. By scapegoating people who don't share their 'culture-type' as the cause of all the problems in the U.S. 'It's the illegals, coming here and taking our jobs', or 'the blacks expecting handouts', or 'the gays trying to recruit your children'. When our elected representatives advance a culture of hate and marginalization, these pearls become accepted wisdom [cough]. Why do you think Bush's 'ownership society' and 'personal responsibility' memes play so well? They're code words for 'fuck everybody who doesn't look like, speak like, or worship like us. Once that mindset is in place, it's not a far slide to this[1]:
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Just a few years later, the persecution of the disabled escalated even further. In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler secretly authorized a medically administered program of "mercy death" code-named "Operation T4," in reference to the address of the program's Berlin headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. Between 1940 and 1941 approximately 70,000 Austrian and German disabled people were killed under the T4 program, most via large-scale killing operations using poison gas. (This methodology served as the precursor to the streamlined extermination methods of the "Final Solution.") Although Hitler formally ordered a halt to the program in late August 1941, the killings secretly continued until the war's end, resulting in the murder of an estimated 275,000 disabled people.
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This happens slowly, over years. The foundation has been laid by this administration, not to the degree of Hitler, but four more years of this and more Right-wing nutcases (Sen. Frist, for instance) just waiting to take the reins of power just might allow it to happen here.
