Daily Archives: July 28, 2009

According to The ARC (advocacy, respect and commitment) of California, the governor has made devastatingly destructive cuts in the support system for people with developmental disabilities and their families. Recently I received a letter from the president of the ARC, Dwight Stratton, stating that our elected legislators decided to ignore the will of the people of the state of California by decimating the Lanterman Act.

California’s phony bleeding heart liberal Democrats have just helped to pass a Republican budget deal that shreds California’s safety net by cutting $15.5 billion from the state’s service sector to partially close a $26.3 billion funding shortfall in state revenues. The Democrats supported a $1.3 billion cut to MediCal, a $2.8 billion cut to the statewide university system, and a $6 billion cut to California’s K-12 schools. The Democratic leadership also supported the Republicans’ push to slash the children’s health insurance program known as Healthy Families, as well as In-Home Supportive Services and the CalWORKs program by cutting $878 million or more in coming months.

Mass imprisonment is a consequence of the war on drugs. It is estimated that over 600,000 of the 2,300,000 people in state and federal prisons are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. This does not include the other 5 million people who are either confined in county jails or on probation or parole, a majority of whom are nonviolent drug offenders. This means out of a United States population of over 250 million people, over 7 million people are in one way or another under the supervision of the prison system.

“George Jackson was my hero. He set a standard for prisoners, political prisoners, for people. He showed the love, the strength, the revolutionary fervor that’s characteristic of any soldier for the people. He inspired prisoners, whom I later encountered, to put his ideas into practice. And so his spirit became a living thing.” – from the eulogy by Huey P. Newton, former Minister of Defense, Black Panther Party, at the Revolutionary Memorial Service for George Jackson, 1971