Autistic self advocacy Network's new fundraising campaign

I see that the Autistic self Advocacy Network has started a new fundraising campaign. They give the potential donor three choices of causes to donate to.

The first is an autism campus inclusion summer leadership training program.  The apparent purpose of this is to train and indoctrinate college students in organizing others to spread the neurodiversity message.  The Mitsubishi corporation has already funded this endeavor of ASAN's in the past.  According to a post written by The canary party, an offshot of the anti-vax movement and one of the few organizations that actively opposes the neurodiversity movement, having a formal diagnosis of autism is not required for a college student to participate in this program. Only self-identification of being on the autism spectrum is required. We also have this announcement of the program by ASAN a few years back where they stated:  
This is an exciting move forward for ASAN and we hope it can be an exciting move forward for you. If you are a current college undergraduate student who identifies on the Autism Spectrum, including Autistic Disorder, Asperger's Syndrome, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, with a strong interest in the Disability Rights and Autistic Rights movements, we invite you to apply for this leadership training.

   Gadfly is intrigued by the words who identifies.  Does this mean that any Tom, Dick, or Harry (or Harriet) can just diagnose themselves with autism and be eligible for the program?   There have been some questions in the past as to whether or not some of the more prominent members of ASAN are self-diagnosed.  One of the commenters on this blog claimed that Paula Durbin Westby told him in 2007 that she was self-diagnosed.  Of course, I have no way of verifying this claim or any other allegations of members of ASAN self-diagnosing themselves, however, this program seems (at least to me) to suggest that there is evidence that ASAN does in fact encourage self-diagnosis.

The second choice is to donate to ASAN's Policy advocacy arm.  Here they are trying to encourage policy against restraint and seclusion, discrimination in organ transplantation and paying subminimum wage to disabled people.

Though restraining and secluding autistic children may sound like a rights violation, it is actually for their own protection.  There have been several reports of autistic children wandering and being hit by cars and accidental drownings.  ASAN does not seem to care or have any alternative for preventing these tragic deaths, except to claim that if neurodiversity were implemented, we could find out what is causing children to wander and deal with it.  Of course, they provide no evidence of this.

As far as organ transplantation is concerned the sad truth is that there are only a finite number of hearts, kidneys, etcetera to go around and the demand for organ transplantation exceeds the supply.  If every autistic person who needed a new heart or kidney was granted one, some other person would be denied and they would die.  This could be an example of reverse discrimination.  In order for organ transplantation to be effective and save or prolong the life of the recipient, a strict regimen of medication, diet, etc. must be adhered to.  Sometimes a disabled person might not be able to do this and they'll end up dying or wasting the organ that could have gone to someone else who would follow the regimen and be able to best utilize this scarce resource.  From what I've read cadavaric transplantation may be underutilized, but I don't see Ari Ne'eman crusading for this.  One of the problems here is that the hospital or ethics committee who rejected the candidate for transplantation is barred by the HIPPA law from telling their side of the story as it would violate patient confidentiality.  I wish there were a solution where every person who needed an organ transplant could get one but unfortunately there is not one.  Gadfly would be at the front of the line in protest, if someone were denying someone a needed life saving treatment just because they happened to be prejudiced against autistic persons.  ASAN has failed miserably (at least in my opinion) to prove that this is the case.

In terms of subminimum wage laws, most of the organizations that pay subminimum wages are 501(c)'s such as the Goodwill who are just creating makework for people with disabilities who would not have anything to do.  Getting rid of these might actually be a good thing as Gadfly is not really a fan of sheltered workshops for a variety of reasons.  As far as the profit sector goes, legally they can pay a disabled person subminimum wage, but there is a burdensome bureaucratic process the employer must go through and much paperwork and proof has to be provided to show the handicapped person is not worth $8.00 an hour (or whatever the minimum wage is).  I suspect most employers would not find this worth their while and they'd just hire a non-handicapped person and pay them minimum wage.   I might agree with ASAN that the subminimum wage law for disabled people should be done away with.  However, the problem is that if this happened, Goodwill and other organizations would get rid of the sheltered workshops and the employers would just hire a non-disabled person for the minimum wage job. It would do nothing to improve employment opportunities for persons on the spectrum.

The last program you can donate to is something that combats stereotypes and misinformation about autism being a tragedy or a burden to families.  I believe that it is ASAN that fosters stereotypes and misinformation about autistic people.  One supporter stated that those who disagree with them should be shot to death or turned into cat food.  ASAN leads to stereotypes of  autistic people being abusive bullies and hate mongers who end up insulting someone's mother if they have no other way of winning an argument.  We are not monsters but I believe ASAN makes us look like monsters.  

For these reasons, I don't believe that ASAN is a cause worth donating to and I hope anyone who reads this post will find some other more worthwhile charity.  Somehow I doubt I'll convince many people. 

Autism daily newscast publishes Gadfly

Here's an article I wrote  about neurodiversity for the autism daily newscast.

84% of ASAN's 2013 revenue goes for overhead

I've waited awhile for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network's 2013 form 990, the mandatory IRS tax form that non-profits are required to fill out and make available to the general public.  I've finally found a website that has the info.  We see that in 2013 ASAN made $452,643 in revenue.  Out of that amount $378,264 went to pay, salaries, rent and other overhead costs including Ari Ne'eman's $71,000 annual salary.  He again raised his salary, this time by about 10%.  Of course this is a far more modest increase than that of the 2011-2012 period, where Ne'eman raised his own salary 62% in one year from $40,000 to $65,000.  In spite of the fact that ASAN had a net fundraising loss in 2012 of nearly $15,000.  We see that nearly half of their revenue covered salaries, benefits and payroll taxes.  We see that they had just under $75,000 in revenue minus expenses.  It is unclear where this money is going, whether it is sitting in the bank as reserves.

In terms of ASAN's service accomplishments, they cite research making medical care more accessible to persons on the spectrum.  Far less was spent on this than on Ne'eman's salary.

They spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars on outreach and advocacy and educating people on the disabilities movement in regards to autism.  I wonder how much of this was in travel expenses to go to Autism Speaks walks and harass parents who were walking trying to raise money to try to help their kids.

The neurodiversity movement has often criticized Autism Speaks for a small percentage of money that goes to help families or services.  On the day6 radio show that Ne'eman and I were recently on, he comments on the small percentage of money that NIMH spends for adult research and services for families rather than on scientific research.

I realize I'm not an accountant on any kind of tax expert, but I'm curious as to what ASAN has accomplished or done in 2013 to help those on the spectrum.  Perhaps they are the pot calling the kettle black.  Well I linked to their 2013 statement above in case anyone's interested.

Addendum:  One thing I neglected to mention in this post is that I'm curious as to how ASAN spent $378,000 plus on overhead out of a little over $450,000 in revenue but managed to spend a quarter of a million dollars on outreach and advocacy and  nearly $50,000 on their health care program.  Perhaps there's overlap between these and the overhead expenses, I don't know.  As I said before, I'm not a tax specialist of any sort, but I'm rather curious.  It's tempting to contact the IRS and ask them to investigate this, but I doubt they'd do it and not sure it's worth my while.  But I'll keep Gadfly readers posted of any future developments.

MTV bites neurodiversity in the ass

Since my profile, which included my anti-neurodiversity activities, was published in Newsweek, neurodiversity has begun to become the topic du jour in the autism world.  In what I suspect was in response to Erika Hayasaki's article about me, The Daily Beast published an article about neurodiversity.  This article was very sympathetic to the ND movement and did not even make an attempt at faux balance.  The Canadian public radio show Day 6 interviewed both Ari Ne'eman and myself (along with a few other guests) about the subject of neurodiversity.  Autism Daily Newscast has called for articles from those on the spectrum about neurodiversity. 

Interestingly enough, MTV got into the act and also wrote a pro-neurodiversity article with no effort at balance.  This article also highlighted the #autismspeaks10 war that some of neurodiversity's more bellicose members created on twitter.  Mysteriously, the article was taken down from MTV's website provoking the ire of a variety of members of neurodiversity.  Article author Robin Lempel offered the explanation that she had tried to contact Autism Speaks to provide balance for the article and had been unable to do so. 

Part of the problem was that neurodiversity activist Amy Sequenzia basically demanded that MTV publish quotes and comments she made for the article verbatim with no editing whatsoever.  MTV neglected to do this.   This apparently made Ms. Sequenzia very angry. She also made the questionable claim that 97% of Autism Speaks money goes only to pay salaries. Yet, she seems to have no objection to the fact that Ari Ne'eman increased his own salary for running ASAN by 62% in one year and that his $65,000 annual salary in 2012 was nearly 20% of all of ASAN's assets. Not to mention of course other salaries ASAN pays and the costs of their rent and overhead with the very limited assets that they have, which, as far as I can tell, goes to nothing to help autistic people.  Perhaps this made MTV rather angry and this was one reason they decided not to keep the article on their website.

There is perhaps another reason that has been overlooked so far by everyone who has written about MTV's ephemeral neurodiversity piece.  MTV may  indirectly be in a partnership with autism speaks in the same manner as build-a-bear, Lindt chocolates and all of the other organizations that members of the neurodiversity movement have urged the public to boycott.  The Night of Too Many Stars which helped raise funds for Autism Speaks aired on the Comedy Channel.  The Comedy Channel's parent company is Viacom, interestingly the same organization that owns MTV.  Perhaps this is why they wanted a balanced article and a response from autism speaks.  Perhaps Autism Speaks fundraisers have helped generate revenue for Viacom along with its subsidiaries the Comedy Channel and MTV.

Since many members of the neurodiversity movement have urged boycotts of build a bear, Lindt Chocolate, Sesame Street and other organizations that have supported autism speaks, I wonder why in the world would they want MTV to write an article about them when it is owned by a parent company who has subsidiaries which fully support AS?

Of course, one could also ask the question of why when Google partnered with autism speaks on the genome project, why various neurodiversity proponents did not urge a boycott of Google.  I wonder how many members of neurodiversity have given up looking at you tube, using gmail accounts, and stopped blogging on blogger which is owned by Google.  I suspect not very many and I have not seen neurodiversity urge a boycott of Google.  Or why they thought it was okay for Laurent Mottron and Michelle Dawson to receive their nearly half million dollar grant from AS.  Or why it was okay for Wrongplanet.net and Autism Talk TV to obtain support from autism speaks.  In fairness to some Wrong Planet denizens though, I will concede that some of them posted frustration over Alex Plank's choice to jump on the AS bandwagon.

All I can say to  members of the ND movement is perhaps you should watch your actions and be careful of associating with organizations that support autism speaks if all you want to do is rant and rave on twitter and other social media outlets how bad they are.  Perhaps you can stop being so nasty, mean and insulting.  If you guys aren't more careful, perhaps it can come around and bite you in the ass.