[This email is a reaction/response to hearing who is
sponsoring the rescue of girls and young women half a globe away,
while I know too much about what’s happening to them in the USA.
Very tired/stressed today and probably not that great a post. But the material in it is relevant.]
Why is it the rich, famous, and well-networked are always ready to globe-trot and help women & children in other countries, while ignoring what the same organizations they network is doing to women, women’s rights, children (boys and girls both), human rights, individual rights, and just about anything that the right to be extorted by our own government — in the USA?
Last night on TV, again the international journalists were helping girls in poverty and illiteracy in other countries; and these girls deserve help. Digital storytelling definitely gets a boost when Meg Ryan, or Gabrielle Union (with a clip from Hillary Clinton — whose husband in 1996 signed a welfare reform bill which undercut American mothers’ safety and self-sufficiency in favor of marriage & fatherhood programming!) can make a work of art out of the drama of survival half a globe away:
Gabrielle Union – Half The Sky
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www.halftheskymovement.org/pages/gabrielle–union
Gabrielle Union will be featured on the first night of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, airing October 1 & 2, 9/8pm CT, …
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The Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide … Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union and Olivia Wilde on a journey to tell the stories of …
http://www.jointcouncil.org/what-we-do/our-partners/alphabetical-listing-of-joint-council-partners/
| Entity Name: |
HALF THE SKY FOUNDATION |
| Entity Number: |
C2125510 |
| Date Filed: |
11/09/1998 |
| Status: |
ACTIVE |
| Jurisdiction: |
CALIFORNIA |
| Entity Address: |
715 HEARST AVE STE 200 |
| Entity City, State, Zip: |
BERKELEY CA 94710 |
| Agent for Service of Process: |
JENNY BOWEN |
| Agent Address: |
1036 MARIPOSA AVE |
| Agent City, State, Zip: |
BERKELEY CA 94707 |
| Entity Number |
Date Filed |
Status |
Entity Name |
Agent for Service of Process |
| C3373033 |
04/12/2011 |
ACTIVE |
HALF THE SKY ENTERTAINMENT, INC. |
MARK E HALL |
| C2125510 |
11/09/1998 |
ACTIVE |
HALF THE SKY FOUNDATION |
JENNY BOWEN |
Let me count the networks:
(this happens when you search a street address; the 1998 foundation on Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, California, the SF Bay Area being one of the most expensive areas in the country to live, and nearby (VERY nearby) to cities with some of the highest homicides.
The local governmental (county, district attorney, police — from top to bottom) leadership in this area and in California as a whole, has been disgraceful, as have the courts; women and children are getting shot through walls while sleeping in their homes, abducted, shot in tollbooths, shot in church parking lots, stabbed and left to die on the roadside, killed and ending up in the trunk of a car a few hours after the on-probation ex had passed a Positive Male Skills class with flying colors; a kidnapped GIRL was kept as a prostitutes and BRED by a married (by the way, Caucasian) pervert on probation in suburban Antioch (Garrido) — and that’s for 18 years. She raised two girls in a ramshackle set of tents in the backyard, homeschooling them as best she could, leading them to believe she was an older sister.
Damages cost this state about $29 million for their screwups in monitoring Mr. Garrido.
There has been absolute unbelievable travesty and murder of mothers and mothers’ co-workers, relatives, and on occasion police officers, surrounding situations where a mother was trying to stay alive by separating from a psychotic. My list above there cites specific cases involving custody matters (for the most part).
A woman in Oakland was found hogtied around street fixtures and burnt to death. The people who discovered her thought she was a pile of rags. A mother of two was found (after convicting the ex of murder) buried in shallow graves after routine “visitation” of the children. A little girl subject to a custody battle where the mother actually worked for the DA’s office was abducted during a court-ordered exchange, and the Amber alert delayed (because the abductor was the father) for enough days that by the time the alert was issued, the child was already dead. With her Dad (Samaan/Fay). There has been a salon-breakin followed by triple-homicide (by the estranged ex; he was killed by a responding officer, who also gave his life to stop it in Northern California. Another woman was shot in the face & killed in that incident; she was a domestic violence advocate, and behind her was crouched another woman terrorized in fear. That woman pulled a “Jesus Christ” and literally gave her life saving another, as did Officer Starczyk. Children were in the apartment at this time. Not to be outdone? in Southern California (Seal Beach), a different salon break-in resulted in as I recall, eight deaths: of the mother of his children, two men, and the rest, people in the wrong place at the wrong time (all female). Unfortunately, the man didn’t kill himself also, so unlike them, he gets a trial. They got executions. . . Many times the mothers being killed are working women, or even successful entrepreneurs, and they were in the process of separating from their ex-husbands, or men.
In 1998, While Jenny Bowen founded “HALF THE SKY” to rescue girls in China like the one they’d adopted, I, being a mother, was fighting for MY family’s lives and facing down guns and knives (after previous assaults, having economic sufficiency shut down, credit stolen, etc. and fighting to keep access to a bank account, transportation, and to receive uncensored access to mail) within marriage not far from “Half the Sky Foundation.” My daughters,’ my, and potentially their fathers’ lives were saved by way of a nonprofit which had origins in the battered women’s movement, who helped me get a restraining civil order with kickout, when a criminal one was in order, but I didn’t know the difference at the time, having not pre-occupied myself (like many people don’t) with how the justice system works, and being unacquainted with illegal drugs, police brutality, gangs, etc.
No one informed us or other mothers at this time that the eventual price for surviving domestic violence and getting a temporary reprieve was later watching others trafficking our own kids into this system, and with that, us, too. There seems to be no top dollar or expiration date on a Social Security Numbers in this business.
[one-para.-rant added 2014 while updating my table of contents/LGH:] We are indeed HALF THE SKY in this country too, but if the whole truth were told, some of these philanthropies might not be so wealthy; we wouldn’t have a tax-system-instituted CASTE in the country, and our less-oppressed citizenry might have been less drugged-up, indoctrinated, pathologized (often for showing human spirit or independence), or so many of our nation’s women and children dealing with fragmentation, intergenerational transmission of VIOLENCE in their home, and because society won’t deal with it, forced to shut up about it if they want to continue functional, either that, or join the profession and keep the PROFESSIONAL COURTESY of SILENCE about the welfare diversions to create out-come based judicial proceedings, presided over by one or another member of a variety of religious fundamentalist, shamanistic, humanistic cultic groups who managed to get appointed as “experts” that judges can call upon and blame for bad custody decisions afterwards.
Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History 