ALT On the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, disabled people in the "united states" are reflecting on the gains of the disability rights movement and the work ahead to preserve civil rights under the current administration and fight for justice for those left behind. As Black queer disabled elder Anita Cameron reminds us: “I'm grateful for the ADA. I pushed for it; I fought for it; I went to jail for it. But the ADA is the floor. It's not the ceiling.”

ALT Amidst celebration, we must not forget who the ADA has left behind. Designed predominantly by white, middle and upper-middle class physically disabled people, the ADA continues to be unequally applied to schools, hospitals, the economic realm, and the carceral system. Disabled Black and Brown people are abused and refused access in the prison system, punished and arrested as children in the K-12 education system, and denied access to quality medical care afforded to their white counterparts.

ALT Meanwhile, 20 months into the current genocide in Palestine, millions of Palestinians in Gaza are at risk of starvation and death from Israel's ethnic cleansing. The U.S. disability establishment continues to ignore its Palestinian peers, here, in Palestine, and abroad, hundreds of thousands of whom have been disabled or killed from starvation, bombing, disease, loss and denial of access to medical care, and torture in Zionist prisons.

ALT The corporations and governments that are engineering this mass disablement and genocide of Palestinians are also responsible for supporting ICE prisons, destroying our environment for profit, and supporting politicians who are rolling back Medicaid and civil rights in the "united states." The disability establishment continues to accept money from and work with these corporations.

ALT Disability:IN Conference Paid for by BDS Targets and War Profiteers

ALT The 2025 Disability:IN Global Conference & Expo is this week. It started Monday July 14 and ends on Thursday, July 17. Disability:IN has corporate sponsors that fund the conference. Sponsors include companies profiting from war, displacement, child labor, environmental destruction, violence, and genocide around the globe. Those same sponsors contributed a lot of money to the 2025 conference. Like a lot. Disability:IN received $9.3 million in conference sponsorships this year alone

ALT Let’s meet the sponsors, shall we? Conference partners are awarded certain tiers based on how much money they give/sponsor. Headliners: $175,000 Presenting Partners: $100,000 Influencer: $50,000 Thought Leader: $30,000 Collaborator: $20,000 Connector: $15,000 What orgs are in each tier group?

ALT $175,000 Sponsorship: Headlining Displacement: Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo supports Israel and was part of a consortium that gave a $500 million loan deal to Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest military company, which produces a large range of arms and military surveillance technology. (Source: Breach Media) Wells Fargo has also funded multiple resource extraction projects such as the Dakota Access Pipeline, which violates tribal sovereignty and the health and well-being of Native people. Wells Fargo is also a corporate backer of Cop City in Atlanta. (Source: AFSC)

ALT Disability:IN’s Disability Index comes out on Monday. What is it? Post content credit: Liz Jackson and Rua William’s ‘How Disabled People Get Exploited to Build the Technology of War’ article: TinyURL.com/54mtwzrm

ALT Disability:IN is a nonprofit organization that advocates for corporate disability inclusion. Disability:IN is best known for its disability index, (formerly the Disability Equality Index or DEI), “an annual transparent benchmarking tool that gives U.S. businesses an objective score on their disability inclusion policies and practices.” Despite messaging reflecting positive disability-centric inclusion practices for businesses, there is little information about what ‘disability inclusion’ actually looks like. This lack of transparency allows harmful businesses get good Disability Index scores, while they disabled and debilitate people around the world. Top scoring businesses include weapon and military production companies.

ALT In 2023, Disability:IN gave Disability Inclusion Awards to 20 weapons and military-producing companies who profit from the genocide and disablement in Palestine and the Global South. Companies that scored 100% BAE Systems Ball Corp. Boeing Booz Allen Ford General Dynamics General Motors Honeywell Jacobs L3Harris Leidos Lockheed Martin Mitre Motorola Solutions Northrop Grumman Sandia National Laboratories Companies that scored 90% GE Aerospace Leonardo RTX/Raytheon Companies that scored 80% Peraton

ALT In their article, How Disabled People Get Exploited to Build the Technology of War, Liz Jackson and Rua Williams point out that Raytheon had a perfect DEI score from 2019 until 2023, where it dropped to 90%. They write: “Given how other arms suppliers thrive on the DEI, it is obvious that the 10-point drop in score was in no way a reflection of Raytheon’s portfolio of products that maim and kill innocent civilians. Instead, this drop was most likely a mutually agreed-upon slap on the wrist after Raytheon was sued by a disabled former employee for allegedly failing to pay required long-term disability benefits.”

ALT Medicaid Cuts, Expanded ICE funding, and the Deportation of pro-Palestinian Protesters are All Connected

ALT Disability rights organizations are protesting the largest cuts to Medicaid in history.On Thursday, the House voted to pass Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill," cutting more than $1 trillion from Medicaid over a decade and causing 17 million people to lose access to life-saving health insurance by 2034. The legislation also cuts SNAP (food assistance) benefits and increases Medicare costs for low-income beneficiaries. Disability rights organizations have called out this bill for its devastating impact on low-income and disabled Americans who rely on Medicaid for access to home- and community-based services. But few orgs have mentioned an important fact: Cutting Medicaid is directly tied to Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-free speech, and pro-genocide agenda.

ALT It’s not just Medicaid cuts- this bill also makes ICE the federal government’s most heavily funded law enforcement agency. This bill dedicates $170 billion for immigration and border-related operations, with $40 billion for ICE over four years. $ 8 billion to hire 10,000 more ICE agents $858 million for signing and retention bonuses $45 billion for detention facilities $2 billion in bonuses for Customs and Border Protection ICE will have a budget for more officers than the FBI, and more funding for detention centers than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. ICE inflicts ableist violence upon detainees by routinely denying medical care to the people they disappear and incarcerate. This legislation has drastically increased the surveillance state and imperiled the lives of millions of people.

ALT Medicaid, ICE, and Palestine are linked. Over the past several months, we have seen this administration use ICE to kidnap and attempt to deport Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk. Zionist groups understand that these deportation policies are a weapon that can be used to silence Palestinian voices calling out the genocide, and have bragged about sharing the names of pro-Palestinian protesters with the Trump administration for that very reason. The Department of Justice is now “aggressively prioritizing” efforts to denaturalize citizens. Trump has talked about arresting NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani, and Republican Representative Andy Ogles has called for Mamdani to be denaturalized. We cannot ignore how Medicaid is being cut in tandem with bolstering ICE and harming immigrants from the Global South, as well as immigrants and citizens who are critical of Israel.

ALT Palestine, Disability Justice, Greta, & the Freedom Flotilla A picture of Greta Thunberg

ALT Have you ever wondered ‘What happened to Greta Thunberg?’ If you have, you’re not alone. Despite her rise to global fame as a child as one the most famous young climate justice activists, her name has not shown up as much in recent years. While Greta is a reliable and respected activist, people view her as they do most disabled people, someone to move their hearts and feel inspired by, but not serious enough to enact real change or be worthy of legitimacy. The act of her speaking out against injustice as an autistic person with selective mutism was viewed as a wonder rather than what she wanted, to be heard for the dire situation the world is in.

ALT So, why has Greta disappeared from the mainstream spotlight? It’s quite simple. Greta Thunberg is unapologetically anti-imperialist and pro-Palestine. Once nondisbled privileged people in power realized she would continuously challenge them to do something, they discarded her and her activism. Greta also recognizes that genocide and climate change are linked: “We cannot have climate justice without social justice. The reason why I am a climate activist is not because I want to protect trees. I’m a climate activist because I care about human and planetary well-being, and those are extremely interlinked.”

ALT What is happening now? Where is Greta and the Freedom Flotilla crew? Pt 1. Greta was on a boat called the Madleen or Freedom Flotilla. It had a crew of 12 activists including Rima Hassan, a French-Palestinian Member of the European Parliament The boat was going to Palestine to bring aid to the people living there who are trying to survive. This is because Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians and decimating the country of Palestine. The boat never made it to Palestine because Israel stopped it.

ALT A Ceasefire Deal Has Been Reached. Our Work Continues. Disability Divest.

ALT On Wednesday, January 15, 2025, it was announced that a deal for a ceasefire in Gaza has been reached and will take effect on Sunday, January 19. We are encouraged by this news and support our Palestinian peers in their joy and relief. This is an important step in ending Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Palestine. But we know that as allies in the so-called “United States,” our work continues. We demand accountability for our government’s role in facilitating this genocide, its participation in war crimes, and its use of American tax dollars to murder Palestinian children and adults. We continue to demand that the U.S. disability establishment end its relationships with war profiteers. Disability rights cannot be built upon partnerships with weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

ALT For over 466 days, U.S. disability establishment organizations have continued to accept sponsorships from war profiteers and have encouraged disabled workers to become part of the U.S. war machine through employment with companies that profit off genocide. At the same time, U.S. disability establishment organizations and “leaders” have remained silent as our disabled peers in Palestine have been bombed, shot, starved, and frozen to death. They have prioritized their connections to war profiteers and the Biden Administration over the safety and liberation of disabled people. They have been silent and complicit. They do not represent us.

ALT We call on disabled people who believe in disability justice to support Palestinian liberation. Continue to speak up, protest, boycott, and donate to the survival funds of disabled Palestinians. There is no disability justice without a free Palestine.