Most everyone has heard the saying about the frog in the pot on the stove. The heat is raised ever so slowly that the frog doesn’t really notice.

Of course, the frog eventually dies in boiling water.

It’s similar to the Chinese “death by a thousand cuts,” or the term “creeping normalcy,” which refers to major changes that are accepted as normal when they happen slowly.

This all came to mind last week when I read that the local Easter Seals in Humboldt County is closing. Another small cut in our community life, partly due to state budget “trimming.” A few more area residents experiencing a diminishing of their quality of life.

I thought more about this when I went to do a swim work-out at the Arcata Pool. I was remembering my first two years going there on specific nights when patient, caring swimming instructors worked with developmentally disabled youth. They had a great time.

I realized that I hadn’t seen them there in a long time.

Later, while shopping at Wildberries, I noticed a table asking for donations to save HSU’s Natural History Museum. I looked across the street to the darkened windows of this facility that has been such an asset to the community and Humboldt County.

It’s closed now, except for special occasions. Quality of life. Community. Cuts.

Driving back to Eureka, I thought about a person I hadn’t seen at a work meeting that day. She’s always been an active asset to our community and was frequently seen around town.

In her electric wheelchair. She has a disability and she’s a senior. She couldn’t get out of bed that day because she can’t find an IHSS (In-Home Support Services) care provider. Now she’s worried because the Governor has proposed cutting that program altogether and that she might be forced into a nursing home.

Another disabled person I know, who lives in his own apartment thanks to the IHSS program, says he would prefer dying to ending up in a care facility. It’s a matter of quality of life. One more little cut. One more devastated life.

This made me ponder the phone message that I saved at work, from a woman in Orick who was despondent over further state cuts to her meager SSI.

She said that she’d been having to choose between heat and food over the last winter even before recent cuts. I thought of the blog comments I’d seen referring to “deadbeats” to “get a job.” I note the state’s unemployment rate, which will increase significantly if Arnold gets many of his cuts. I thought of the disabled acquaintance who wants to start working through Calworks, also proposed for elimination, and the number of local jobs not available to the disabled because the work sites are not accessible.

These people certainly notice that stove’s been turned up.

The next day a co-worker told me about an agency consumer with schizophrenia who had her prescribed meds eliminated due to MediCal cuts. She’s now in the hospital and not in her own apartment. Quality of life? Hardly. Not to mention a greater cost to the community.

Another degree or two or five on the stove.

I looked at the newspaper that day and read about Eureka City budget deficits and necessary cuts that are partly due to the state “borrowing” money from local governments. Sacramento won’t ask for an oil extraction fee, but your local taxes will subsidize those corporations’ right to a hefty profit.

Cut a policemen here, close a zoo there. Quality of life. Cuts.

I heard about a community in California that is now charging $300 for 9-1-1 calls. Pay up, or your life is forfeit. The commodification of CPR.

I read about 900 teaching positions being slashed in the Bay Area and of police and fire jobs being cut. I thought of protesters yelling about high taxes, but then complaining about the potholes in the road and the slow response by the police to their calls.

I talked to a friend who can’t afford to continue in college and heard someone complain that they took time off to take care of business at a state agency, only to find it closed that day.

Notes to the Eagles “Hotel California” played somewhere in my head, but Don Henley was singing “They’re killing them off at the Hotel California.  It’s so very clear, the common good is long gone here.”

Feel the temperature rising yet? Is the water tepid or just lukewarm? Is that just another paper cut on your finger?

Grover Nordquist once said of government that he would like to “get it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.” Would he be referring to  government that’s for and by the people?

Grover would cheer the Golden State plan being enacted: golden for the chosen few and a rain (trickle down?) of fool’s gold for the rest.

I think of Arnold, with his budget cuts year after year after year. I hear E-Meg regurgitating “no taxes, more cuts, no taxes, more cuts” and signing a no tax pledge during the greatest recession since the Depression. Sure, let’s turn government into a business appendage and run it properly! Just like Enron and Exxon-Mobil and Bank of America, right?

I think of Republican legislators refusing to even discuss raising any taxes and cowed (majority?) Democrats forced to make “the hard decisions” of cutting the budget (just a few more cuts on the arms and legs; just a few degrees up on the stove, just ONE more time).

I think of the state’s citizens saying that just 500 cuts aren’t enough, but PLEASE don’t kill the patient–clinging to their “have our cake and eat it too” belief system while the cupboards are laid bare and the landlord laughs all the way to his barely taxed mansion. Oh no! Prop. 13 was ONLY about saving grandma’s little house in the neighborhood (wink, wink). We can’t EVER touch that!

So one more Easter Seals closes. One more senior becomes homeless. One more person can’t go to college. The death by a thousand cuts, creeping normalcy, frog in the pot–it’s all the same. Elimination of checks and balances, destruction of the common good and civil society, wiping out government “by the people,” reign by the unregulated chaos of free markets on steroids growing into corporate monopolies, and the entrenchment of a new aristocracy mouthing platitudes to the democracy that they’ve bought and sold out.

But…but…we want to save the poor frog, the people whisper. Then they turn away as the forces of corporate rule wielding their subsidiary government arm turn up the heat another notch. They never notice that it’s most all of us inside the pot.

And that many are already scalded. And that we’ll all soon join them.

The good Governor Schwarzenegger is pretty fond of his own abilities. I mean, if it were all up to him, those boxes would have been good and blown up by now.  Yet that damned meddling legislature is always getting in his way.  Oh, and the people have the temerity to refuse his power plays.  

But that doesn’t mean that he’s given up on taking power for himself.  The most glaring example is the “seating Abel Maldonado” without getting confirmation thing.  We’ll see how this turns out, but at this point, he seems like somebody who wants to grow his power at every turn.  The courts have served the job of backstop for the separation of powers, but is this really where we want to be? A legislature that has to go running to the courts every week to get approval for its very existence?

The St. Abel issue isn’t the only one.  Take this instance of Arnold unilaterally deciding that a law is inconvenient:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had no legal authority to disqualify everyone with a felony record from working in the program that provides in-home care to 430,000 low-income elderly and disabled Californians, a judge ruled Thursday.(SF Chronicle)

The actual law states that felons are ineligible for ten years.  You can see why this regulation is in place. These are people who are vulnerable, and we want them to steer clear of possible con artists and all that.  But Arnold’s recent stunt of cutting off all convicted felons has nothing to do with that. Rather, it’s some sort of crazy budget issue. He’s trying to save money by firing any IHSS workers who currently have a client and have a criminal record, and then hoping that they won’t be able to find a replacement for a while.  You know, save a few bucks while the disabled person has no care and has to go looking.

It’s all about instability. Instability breeds confusion, which causes less people to take advantage of state services.  It’s a really crappy, and cowardly, way to try to save money. Arnold, if you’re going to try to make cuts, do them honestly, and let the people know what you are doing. Come tell the recipients of IHSS care that they are going to have to go to a more expensive residential facility. Oh, right those facilities don’t exist. So, how about this, Governor, why don’t you just go ahead and tell these people that you wish them well as they struggle to survive.

And maybe if you toss in a copy of Terminator 2, all will be forgiven.

When Arnold came to Sacramento, riding a populist wave that was based, in substantial part, to a populist anti-tax message, he promised to “blow up the boxes.”  In the 6+ years since then, not only did he dig a deeper hole in the budget with his “car tax” cut, but he also managed to further mangle an already broken system.

But structural concerns pale in comparison to the toll in lives that we may face in the next few years if something substantial isn’t done to curb his recent budget plan.  One key item that will send the state reeling? The in-home support services (IHSS) cuts. Arnold’s current plan is that if the state gets a bunch of money from the feds, he’ll cut 87% from IHSS. If the state gets nothing, he’ll completely eliminate IHSS.  The depth of the tragedy this would entail is really quite hard to imagine.

If IHSS is eliminated, there simply would not be enough institutional beds in the state to handle all of these cases.  People will literally die in their homes, or because financial support is also being cut, more likely in the streets. And in that respect, Arnold is just like his hero, Ronald Reagan. Reagan dumped millions of people in the streets, and Arnold is attempting to do the same thing

Susan Ferriss has a great article in the Bee today on the social safety net, or what’s left of it:

For Capitol insiders, it’s easy to chalk it up as a bluff when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes terminating welfare-to-work and in-home care for the disabled if California doesn’t get billions in federal money he’s requested.

But it’s no chess game for a welfare-to-work mother seriously trying to find a job, or a person in a wheelchair whose living stipend has already been slashed twice in one year.(SacBee)

And the dumbest part of this? IHSS actually saves the state money.

If Darden moved to a nursing home, the state couldn’t take away these benefits because federal law prohibits withholding services critical to the health of the disabled. At the same time, the state acknowledges that the public cost of institutionalizing disabled people is far greater than if they live in their own homes.

There is a certain set of core services that a government is expected to provide. If Arnold has his way, California will not be in the business of providing care to the disabled, and leave survival of the fittest to do its best to the state.  

Arnold’s legacy? Just look to the streets in 3 years and see for yourself.

For the last time, thankfully, our governor is trying to sell us a pig and a pony…excuse me, I mean a pig in a poke.

The overriding theme of his State of the State message was “jobs, jobs, jobs.”  Oh really?  Frank Mecca, executive director of the California Welfare Directors Association, took a closer look:

“The Governor says he wants to create jobs, but devastating cuts to the social safety net have killed jobs and dimmed the employment prospects for tens of thousands of California families and children. The Governor’s cuts to child care and support services for CalWORKS families will diminish the chances of finding work for almost 40,000 families, and his threatened elimination of the In-Home Supportive Services program will put 350,000 people out of work instantly and increase California’s unemployment rate from 12.3 to 14.2 percent…”

Maybe he thinks he can create 350,000 “new” jobs by selling off the prison system?  

Members of a coalition that supports the popular In Home Supportive Services (IHSS) homecare program have turned their focus toward legislative Democrats, many of whom supported cuts in the program last year.

In a letter to Democratic State Senators and Assemblymembers, coalition members urged them to:

…stand up to the governor, help reform our state’s broken revenue system, and  make decisions on IHSS based on its merits, not on sound bites used to disparage consumers and home care workers…It’s time for Democrats to be accountable and to act like Democrats.

The letter pointed out that 65 Democrats voted for significant cuts in IHSS in last July’s budget deliberations, while nearly two dozen endorsed the governor’s multi-million-dollar campaign to scapegoat IHSS consumers and caregivers as “fraud criminals.”

Interestingly, the letter was sent on Tuesday, January 5, the day before Schwarzenegger’s State of the State message and three days prior to his formal budget proposal.

We already know what the governor will say about IHSS…. Ever since he has been in office, he has targeted IHSS for cuts…. Trying to reason with him about IHSS is like pleading with the bear statue in front of his office….