Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History

After about one week’s consistent and intense work on it (including writing new sections and off-ramping them to new posts, digging into some of the subject matter in more depth, poring through years of individual entities’ (and entities’ grantees’) tax returns, red-flagging some for multiple issues, and compiling and organizing well over 100 images from organization websites and tax returns as potential “exhibits”), and reading through it one last time, I’m publishing at about 15,600 words.  It needs “tags” and I’ll try to get these up quickly.  Most of the “intense work” comes on the material BEFORE that representing the title’s subject matter, and formatting it with visual exhibits.

FYI, there is still a functional “DONATE” button on this blog if you’re inspired, but be aware it is NOT tax deductible; I am not posing as, nor am I, a 501©3, and no one else is acting  as a fiscal sponsor or agent either.  Any amounts are welcome, and they would represent moral support as well as financial for what is at several levels, hard work.  Many thanks.  As always, the Comments button is available for feedback. //LGH 5-10-2017.

… By doing my drill-downs, I also learned a few things about what types of “partner” nonprofits are preferred in at least this collaboration, as judged (my point of view!) by when and how they file Form 990s and how close the story on the various websites is to the reality shown by, again, the “drill-downs.”  From what I found, “we are not amused,”  but alarmed and concerned.   I am concerned that the voices of people not “in on” these deliberations or conferences — or university centers — are not about to be heard, or given opportunity to debate the framework.  Which seems intentional… (I posted on this tendency also). The speed, force, stealth, and continual resorting to “public/private collaborations” and “cross-department consolidations” eradicates independence of thought, balance of powers, and — this is a BIG deal — by suddenly altering the operations, obscures and clouds “the money trail,” that is, where public funds are involved — and exactly how much private funding is inappropriately (conflicts-of-interest) involved.

• For much of this blog, I posted specifically on court-connected corporations and the tensions between federal “fatherhood” policy and due process, individual rights under family courts when there have been criminal-level events such as domestic violence (assault and battery, terroristic threats etc.) which were not being handled IN criminal courts, but off-ramped by virtue of the off-ramp having been made available, into the family court system and specialized “domestic violence courts’ with related professionals.
• NOW, in my post these past few quarters (Q4 2016 and Q1, and we are just starting Q2, 2017) on this blog, I have been talking less about the “Federal Designer Families” (fatherhood, marriage vs. domestic violence tensions) but about who decides, and how, in what direction the entire public education system (and alternatives) should go. How they should be transformed or reformed. With my recent encounter with the UCBerkeley Center for Cities & Schools, we seem to have unearthed, alongside that, the same style of public/private planning for major PreK-12 public school facilities infrastructure and where this fits into entire metropolitan region, and regions within the country.

“CC+S promotes high quality education as an essential component of urban and metropolitan vitality to create equitable, healthy and sustainable communities for all.”

Again, I am not completely surprised this time.  At the University of California-Berkeley level, it’s about what I’ve come to expect (as a woman, mother, and domestic violence survivor) from my adopted state (despite how long I’ve lived here, it’s not my home state; the longer I stay, the more alienated I have become from participation in its economy, safely in its court system, and in general, in its social/cultural life while I deal, sometimes reeling, with each new round of abuse of privilege by those I have no real choice to NOT deal with).  I have come to understand the meaning in practice of “politically correct (healthy, sustainable, equitable, green — of course)  to the point of abuse, that is, painfully violating basic civil and legal rights in the name of fixing previous violations and excluding those most violated from the discussions on HOW to fix them, while proclaiming the opposite process is, in fact, under way.

But I am concerned and alarmed. This post alerts readers on three topics and their rapid “deployment” each in its own sectors.

## [This background color and border denotes a “footnote” to second post  topic above.  Third post topic shown below it.]

These designs (intents) include but are not limited to (a) increasing public (federal) investments (of course) — $46B is recommended as of 2016; (b) re-purposing public facilities once restored through increased investments and facilities planning (joint use of school structures as community centers); and (c ) significantly restructuring the decision-making process and leadership (“stakeholders”) on how to plan for all the school facilities that are to be the centers of our new, improved, healthier, more sustainable and (of course) more “equitable” infrastructures for the 21st century.

Under (c ) decision-making process, part of this is involving young people (apparently moreso than their parents as a sector, or all taxpayers as a sector) and, I learned through looking, a “Health in All Policies” (aka “HiAP”) collaborative approach, established in California by a governor’s executive order but (I also learned, again through looking!) as housed at the “Strategic Growth Council” itself a cabinet-level council at the state level.   This “California HiaP” I didn’t talk much about on the post, but did include one image annotated in detail.  Here’s another one saying that “HiAP” is originally (and unsurprisingly) part of a global movement, orignating from the World Health Organization (“WHO.”)  Surely you’ve read this already, as a regular browser of the  Journal of Public Health Management and Practice and a member of the public to be managed and practiced on?

Click IMAGE to read details (HiAP for Big Cities discussed in NIH publication)

Click Image to read #2 of 2, what WHO started in 1988, Finland in 2006 (then Pres. of the EU) promoted as HiAP, which US and other countries quickly adopted. I’ll say (Calif. 2008 Exec Order on HiAP!)

So, overall regarding the second “overload” post — good grief!  I had only searched the terms “round table, stakeholders, school reform” or similar phrase, which brought up the university center and its so-called partners and advisors as reported but not explained very well, on that site!

California HiAP Task Force is listed as a Partner.  It seems to represent a consolidation of 22 gov’t departments around the policy, fine print here (on the Oct. 22, 2014 FAQs sheet doesn’t even name people, just departments but also (eventually) divulges the involvement of another significant (and well-heeled) nonprofit in Oakland, California — Public Health Institute (“PHI”).  The UCBerkeley Center (“CC+S”) Partner page, however, says nothing about this.  Several places I looked linked to a California government page on the “HiAP Task Force,” which links were already broken.

[Broken link #1: http://sgc.ca.gov/docs/ Active_Transportation_Action_Plan_9-26-14.pdf; #2: http://sgc.ca.gov/s_hiap.php; #3: https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Pages/PageNotFoundError.aspx?requestUrl= https://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/Pages/HealthinAllPolicies.aspx which produced an “In Transition” message: Apparently an entire set of CDPH information got archived May 1, 2017, and using the phrase “archive” in front of the web address may correct it as “https://archive.cdph.ca.gov/programs/ Pages/HealthinAllPolicies.aspx.  This works, not including some links which still recycle back to the “Page Not Found” message below.  The page it directs to is basically a page of links.  It does at least contain one to the 2010 Executive Order and reveal yet two more significant trade association 501©3s involved in setting up the Guide, and claiming that it’s in response to popular demand..The unsigned, unstamped, (notarized or anything else) Executive Order there at least names then-Governor (Arnold Schwarzenegger) (also known for recommending that California reduce its prison overpopulation by building some in Mexico).

Normally the words “Task Force” indicate individual people’s names, whether identified by their position alone (i.e., “Speaker of the House” or “Department Head”) or sometimes by specific name. Here, that’s been tossed aside, and somehow an entire state “Department” is named to a Task Force! From that FAQs page (bottom of p1 of 2, image with gray background):

(Click image for better viewing)

Appeal to Logic —

To demand public sector fiscal and financial accountability, FIRST know what that looks like! Understand where it should be found, how it can get accidentally or intentionally “misplaced” (and in a given situation, to get an accurate sense (develop the smell) for whether this “misplaced” is accidental or intentional.  One clue — if it’s habitual and the filing entity’s board of directors are in a position to know better).  

Unfortunately, developing this awareness also gives a glimpse, in fact, ongoing interface with both the ethical, and, in a word, the “evil,” in the generic sense of desiring and designing evasion of accountability and can be personally unsettling.  I don’t know if it would produce vicarious trauma, but I do know how disconcerting and disturbing it is to see such things “in high places.”

But if so, so what?  Is comfort with deception really better than discomfort knowing it’s better based on the truth?  Once you start to see this, and its scope, retreat into denial and pretense (or amnesia) on what you just saw does not really present itself as an option.

Fiscal and Financial Accountability reveals character.  Failure or resistance to providing it signals other abuses of power already in place and/or worse to come later.
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