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

Many will not like my tone or content, but my main concerns remain:  is it true, is it relevant to others beyond myself and immediate family, and beyond my lifetime; is it clear; where not personal anecdotal in character, is it basically substantiated with credible (or as close to it as a reasonable person without a research budget might get),  free, on-line sources outside this blog?

Getting any post into that state requires besides writing it, many reviews, previews, copyediting, layout adjustments (an unpredictable process, on WordPress; what I see in “visual” rarely matches what shows up (image size, affecting the the text wrap-around, which affects visual continuity) in “preview” mode, nor so far do I see how to calculate the discrepancies other than by trial-and-error.

Because I’m developing topics usually over time, some over the weeks or months, but in general, over the years, any writing referring to something previous requires I double-check references, even to check my recall of my own prior research — which often leads to new organization (or their websites’) developments since to post, which then generates even more taking, making, organizing, annotating and captioning and formatting captions to* images from the “credible sources outside this blog.” (*”Annotating” = on the image; “captioning” = what’s added after it’s uploaded to the blog media library, then downloaded  (inserted) to an individual post (= at least two separate locations per image) and which displays below the images).  So much alternating between the visual and preview modes with each adjustment is a constant part of the process.

That process is just plain work, my normal research and writing mode, however periodically adding into that the personal narratives about my experiences with the same systems I’m documenting, in chronological detail, is not.  That added component still feels personally risky; it’s uncomfortable  and requires risk assessment and introspection on my motives for speaking.  That type of narrative puts me into a different (less analytical) mode, which means analysis still has to happen – but (once I start speaking) afterwards.  Sometimes, I just copy it and stick it on a separate file (or delete), but when I feel the deep urge to speak out on my personal experiences again, as I did this past week, having spoken (i.e., written), I still have to reconsider whether what I just called “analysis” (concluding with the decision to stick that section “where the sun don’t shine…”) was this time simple cowardice or in fact wisdom, i.e., my survival instincts kicking in appropriately.

However, whether drawing from a more deeply emotional level, or working from the more analytical/cognitive level as inspired by goals and realizations I’ve come to over time, as a blogger (a.k.a. researcher/writer) I am still one person.

As a life-time and professional (trained, working, and involved) musician until driven out of it by family-related events in the context of these collaborative justice, so-called “problem-solving” courts, with all involved having identified financial incentives to inflict this harm long-term, … recognizing that success in performance requires both aspects is innate; there is no avoiding hard work, but there has to be something there in the first place to call out and sustain the will to work (i.e., “post-poned gratification” as to performance or production of a finished product over time).  Of course the work itself has ingredients of enjoyment or we wouldn’t get involved, BUT I don’t know any artist, musician or writer who ever relishes constant writing or practice without any real prospect of performance (publishing).  Speaking as a musician from a very early age, you need both “modes” functional and dynamically accessible for the work; music in many ways could be called “emotion in sound.”  To clamp down completely on that side, forever, would be, in my opinion, “insane.”

In addition, people dealing with the battering, physical shock and assault — forms of warfare, really — may find operating from different, more “cognitive, analytical, intellectual” ways helpful in handling it.  I know that after major incidents (assault followed by battery, with or without property destruction in further demonstration of his anger and power over things important to me) in the home (even so long ago as it was), after the incident, there would a period, perhaps 24 hours, perhaps more, when I was in a form of psychic shock — functional, but depressed, “down” and not even able to write about it; somehow internally “processing” the event. The routines of life would somehow sustain me through that.  BUT in terms of the energy to figure out how to get out, no question there was passion, emotion, and I know many women who also said, simply love – of their children, of right vs. wrong, and a concern beyond fear for protecting those kids — that generated the courage to follow-through, despite the known risks, of separation.   In the long term, I believe that love is stronger than fear, and we’d better pick the right things to love and commit our lives to in the long term!  

So, I have never identified fully with so-called “left-brain” or “right-brain” thinking.  Both seem innate, and both are valued part of my personality, before, during and after marriage.  As a survivor of years of certain kinds of trouble related with certain individuals with dramatic, destructive impact on the course of my life and work, I found the analytical and objective work of this blog (researching and writing) to also be helpful in healing from without completely dissociating from the events and the subject matter. It gave me leverage and a position (not just a blog as a platform, but a position on the issues) from which to speak about it, being also an interested party (part of the affected “demographic” if you will) and personally knowledgeable, but not basing my entire message on experience alone, but other, as I said above, “credible sources from outside this blog” and in language which I know crosses demographic, party line, religious, ethnic, gender, and other dividing lines of most social policies mainstream media is constantly bringing to our attention these days.

All of these speaking, writing, and evaluating processes translate into more time from concept to “product.” (posts and pages). Some of the narrative this time involves recounting traumatic, life-changing events (and hardly for the first time…) and at times, triggered in me a PTSD or simply emotionally charged response, which tends to kick the “chrono,” [reporting all events as they occurred in time sequence] mode into the back seat, requiring more editing to clean it up than when I am systematically looking at one organization and its various filings, then a related one, then another, etc. to build the overall picture, which is more like laying bricks.  You start with the foundation, lay out the structure, then finish the remaining elements, in specific order according to common practice to obtain  the whole, functional structure. Writing from or while dealing with PTSD comes from a different inner place and works differently, in my experience.  There are SOME parallels with how at least a musician (and no doubt other performing or expressive artists, such as dancers) in top form may be operating in that it’s more immediately dynamic, less calculated, distanced, “cerebral” even though that “cerebral” still has input from years of prior disciplined practice.

So, while I’ve come to realize that [my] average post here without the personal, reflective or anecdotal (my story-telling) mode these days will take at least a week,  these three related ones I expect to publish today, Thursday, Sept.14, 2017, (keep reading for the titles) took even more, meaning they are no longer really major-holiday-specific.

But I believe they still pack powerful information and were worth the extra delay even though not published on the original intended holiday, or even what now for Americans follows that holiday — memories of 9/11/2001 and the destruction of the World Trade Towers

The thing is, without being reached at an emotional level on the reality of certain situations,  without the passion deep enough to sustain the essential levels of planning and persistence, the major personal changes just don’t happen.  So as a communicator, from time to time I still will show my own experiences with their personal, emotional impact (including on my sense of outrage, indignation, or personal determination to disrupt the ongoing SYSTEMS which perpetuate further and escalation/expansion of injustice) over time, One mode of communication cannot entirely substitute for the other.

I don’t expect other people to care about my personal or people in similar situations’ personal interests, really, more than themselves.  I do expect people to care about their own — speaking of which, I do not believe it’s in anyone’s best interests to continue deaf, dumb, blind, or assuming “well, there are experts on the tasks” on the social issues involved, and not seek a basic grasp of operations, recognizing limits of understanding, and where are the black holes of non-accountability to the public?  Who, in these issues, is really partnering with whom, and against what?   The cause?  Well, take a look at the containers, the corporate systems, etc., and see whether that’s true, or not so true….

What about the basic economic systems encouraging “failure-to-track” systems and “take-it-on-faith” social policies?

Regarding those changes:  yes, on this blog and by way of continuing to post on it, I am asking for large-scale change.  I am asking ordinary people I may not even know or ever converse with to recognize that and comprehend why they individually have both the ability AND the “respons-ability,” the duty, to exert themselves to start examining financial reports (990s) of the nonprofit sector and (at a minimum) federal grants and corporate filings (which are at the state, typically “secretary of state” level) databases in the public sector,** and to along the way, develop, if it’s not already there, awareness of where databases reporting on the same are even reliable, let alone functional.  I am asking people to develop and act on (support, don’t support, blog, or don’t re-blog without disclaimer, or exposure!) situations where major discrepancies show up, and from there, even if they do not take direct action to correct, to remember this when further propaganda comes their way.  

[CONTINUED IN A SEPARATE PLACE — CLICK HERE TO SEE:]
Sixteen Years ‘Post-9/11,’ and Nearly Twice That ‘Post-PRWORA’, Yes I’m still asking Ordinary People to Modify Their Own Behavior(!) –> To Accept Individual ‘Response-Ability’ (for a change!) To Look Up, Look at and Compare: IRS Forms 990; Federal Grants; and State-level Corporate filings… To Consider Database Organization (for all of the above)… To Recognize White-collar Crime within the P3* sector, and To Reject, Protest, and Resist Propaganda, including ALL Irrational Excuses for P3*-Engineered Global Paradigm Shifts. (Published at about 5,500 words Thursday, Sept. 14, 2017, with WordPress-generated, case-sensitive shortlink ending “-7Bv”)

Full post title, THIS post: Introducing A New Page, How and When Problem-Solving (make that ‘Collaborative Justice’) Courts were Institutionalized and other Consolidate/Coordinate/Standardize/PRIVATIZE Stories at Courts.CA.Gov. AND, some of the Backdrop (My Personal Experience of Turn-of-Century Social Policy towards Women Reporting Abuse and Efforts to Exit It … (short-link ends “-7xs”)

The geneaology (so to speak) of the new page, as described on it, with a few pronoun updates (where “this” and “that” had to trade places or become simply “the” for accuracy):

Possibly because of the Labor Day holiday weekend I found myself for the last two days (only) moving out of “look-up, annotate, upload, and actively explain” all kinds of large-scale movements — [see next paragraph] — through documenting and posting on specific individual elements (corporations — you got it, nonprofits) over time, into a more reflective mode.  For the new page, the heavy lifting of the former kind is mostly already done and uploaded onto the page this previews.

Currently, comparing 1996ff PRWORA /Welfare Reform Act targeting the American poor and female-headed / fatherless households to reduce their number, and providing system-wide outreach to low-income, noncustodial fathers with criminal and/or child support problems, targeting outreach, evaluation, and solicitation to involvement often by ethnicity with the 1998 State Attorneys-General v. “Big Tobacco” Master Settlement Agreement and thereafter (1999ff) USDO RICO litigation, now a global movement targeting smokers, especially low-income and other populations by ethnicity, i.e., reducing health disparities (not to mention targeting the defendant manufacturers. Both large-scale movements focus on achieving national (aligned with global) population behavioral modification shifts, and both in the course of this driving public funds directly and by way of nonprofits into the public relations (Advertising Council) and other marketing sectors.  Both movements involve major U.S. Federal Agencies and funding of key nonprofits, expanding the scope (“exponentially”) of public/private PROBLEM-SOLVING partnerships, accompanied by loss of accountability for and public visibility funds once they hit those nonprofits (university, etc.

I thought a short preview would be no big deal, but seem to have temporarily switched modes, and am feeling urgently that it’s time to say more; to speak again on my personal perspective as affected by the systems we inhabit and must deal with.

This type of writing means fewer images and longer paragraphs (and sentences) for that portion of the post reflecting on why I no longer “do” holidays.

Meanwhile, locally, we’ve been in the wake of nearly a week of extraordinary heat (over 100′) and currently, a “dirty air” alert in the SF Bay Area — and that air is nearly opaque (no blue, but not real clouds either — it’s just kind of a solid grayish-white); I’ve been choking on it outside and, less so, inside.  How do homeless people survive this heat?  There are air-conditioned retail outlets available and more homeless, maintaining as low profiles as possible, stationed inside them, like I have also been — in part just not to be in an isolated place while writing.

TV news warned about the oppressive heat (an entire map of the area with local temperatures colored basically red) and then the dirty air warning.  Meanwhile, wildfires in various areas are also burning, a common news item in California summers and falls.  These also affect air quality.  But still I cannot remember such long stretches of well over 100-degree heat (up to 110, and 112) in the past years. This Northern California (San Francisco Bay) area is known for its milder climates, not such extreme heat.

Between the constant fires, and periodic earthquakes or threat of them (including some famous fault lines in the heavily-populated metro region) and the insane situation my immediate family was put through in the state, in part from so many politically-correct and expensive policies, and ongoing documented corruption in law enforcement in the area (not to mention significant in-breeding between district attorneys, judges, former Attorney General Bill Lockyer and such creations as the inane/insane “family justice center” model), I’m just tired of and have been thinking about (how to) re-locating outside California for years, but there remain legal and financial complications to doing so, such as a duty of self-preservation (planning finances for more than the immediate future) with consideration for the next generation, I mean specifically the young adults with whom I share DNA.

My thoughts about re-locating now for a fresh start away from the scenes of years of such disasters seems ironic when, during the event many years ago where children were NOT returned to me from a court-ordered visitation with their father, and for “justification” falsely accused of being an abduction risk (I’d just signed a 12-month lease!), falsely accused of having suddenly “quit her job,” (as a classical, performing AND teaching musician, I didn’t have “a job” but multiple clients, including students who take summer breaks and arts organizations which also do) and falsely accused of having failed to enroll our children (per family court order) in a local public school, with the alleged abduction risk specifically naming a city I hadn’t lived in or even visited for years (since arriving here in California, i.e., before we married, not to mention before either child was born), while ignoring the many and known professional, life, social, housing and other connections I had developed and at that time was actively involved in, for well over a decade in this area, and the whole concept ignoring my legal and court-order compliance history — I had never attempted to completely cut off father/children contact, filed for sole legal and physical custody and throughout I had made it a point –including with my husband, and when my [adult, middle-aged, married/childless sibling, who as a couple, both apparently with time on their hands, sibling] sought to intervene inappropriately — that they too, should FIRST comply with the court orders starting as far back as the initial restraining order.  I also from the start had to and did remind these college-educated adult siblings that they lacked standing to intervene in any existing court order — or in our children’s education matters which, so long as compliant with state education codes, which as a mother, I made sure they were, were parenting issues.  I also warned them not to by acting as a messenger for my ex, violate the terms of the restraining order.  

At the time I had only a beginning sense of how little respect my own “kind” had for existing laws and our specific court orders of three kinds (family, child support, and protective) meant when any of it was perceived as a hindrance to their personal, private intents for my life, and his and my children’s….

Not only my historic compliance with court orders, but also my absence of having ever threatened to engage in noncompliance or to engaging in any criminal act, when compared with his recent (and in some aspects, chronic historic) flaunting of compliances was ignored as any positive factor in deciding post-abduction with whom our children would complete their childhoods to adulthood, affecting (naturally) their future college options, among many other things.

My ex’s recent threats to kidnap had been reported to police, and to others involved with the children before he actually did so. It’s been one of the FEW promises (to take the children and make sure I didn’t see them again) over time he actually kept.

At that (historic event) time, in addition to never over many years having cut off contact with their father in violation of ANY court order (and court orders at the time allowed weekly visitation and summers, and alternating major holidays, and Fathers’ Day contact) I had also never threatened to kidnap or leave the area with the children, or to cut off their fathers’ contact with them, which at the time (and since) could not be said of their father, who had issues such threats repeatedly.  In short, this seemed to have been a “pre-emptive” criminal act based on the allegations — absent ANY proof or reference to ANY evidence that I was at ANY risk of doing so —  that I intended to commit the crime the father actually had threatened to, obviously planned to, and that the time with help from others, DID commit. (!!)

I had never interfered with providing the children for visitation on court-ordered days and times; there had been times when the father neglected to pick them up, causing me to often have to restructure planned work during his time with them and in general have constant “backup plans” for each weekend, and exhausting routine. Meanwhile, the previous year I was having major difficulty retrieving the children from visitations with their father, and more than once had to call police (that’s parental interference and violation of a custody order); other times, it took hours or a full day (in a two-day weekend) when it should’ve taken no more than an hour, including round trip to/from pickup points. This was occurring also while he was increasingly withholding regular child support payments, without warning, and had accrued thousands of dollars of child support arrears.

WHY SAY THIS ON MY BLOG NOW?  

In the longer title of this post, I believe such outrageous and unsubstantiated accusations and law enforcements deliberate refusal to enforce basic court orders affecting me, a mother & woman (obviously) when the other party was a father & man (obviously), could ONLY have taken place within the well-established “collaborative justice system” for which California has been a leading actor, and in which while the authorities refuse to handle criminal events, or protect people of certain demographics (including by gender) who have been personally targeted for repeated illegal incidents of that nature, they basically tell individual mothers, fathers, women, and by association, children, to just “manage” it themselves.

Bypassing the requirement to prove (versus just accuse), cases are (ours was) simply diverted into family court again for mediation when the more appropriate response in a fair system would’ve been to (a) stop the abduction, and (b) report it.  This diversion obviously spares the police, law enforcement, sheriffs, and family court judges from having to document and act on the evidence already in their hands, and I’ll bet improves their “prosecution statistics” by reclassifying just how many family-related crimes actually occur.

In our case and in hindsight, I say based on my research since also (not just “experiences”) that the sheer existence of family courts gave the enforcement authorities the perceived permission to just dump the case, do nothing basically, and allowed my children to be first stolen, then have contact with me cut off (almost completely almost at once) and thereafter and because of this deprived of child support they would otherwise have been due and possibly received from their father, and more from me because of the destructive impact of the overnight switch.  The case was “churned.”

Predictably, there were collateral destructive effects after the first shattering of relationship and work momentum on my part, and child support enforcement activity, on the county’s…

It stretches credibility beyond sustainability (beyond the breaking point) to believe that those involved in making all this happen were overall unaware of what those collateral, destructive effects would be.

The same goes at the personal level, and I’m speaking of my family of origin’s position, from the start, on my own protection, divorce, separation, and intent to continue requiring the father (not just myself) to seek to maintain an active work life — if for no other reason than occupying his time with something more beneficial to our children (and society) than coming up with more and more new ways to make sure I couldn’t maintain one..  I naively thought the child support system of enforcement were “the good guys” and concerned about maintaining a gender-neutral reputation, despite increasing symptoms they weren’t.

RE: any relocation (flight vs. fight for what’s right) presently for me it’s not just a matter of finances, but also as a mother preserving a record of basic truths (the “other side” of the family myths) as well on events and needless hardships and deprivations that shaped my children’s earlier lives, inexcusably limiting their education options over time, with side trips through paternal abandonment after overnight maternal deprivation, and being illegally left by their father in the physical and financial care of the people responsible for the same.

So now in 2017, much as I’d like to be done with the whole thing, it’s not a situation of just “duck and run..” or attempting to forget the past while”re-booting” what’s left of the future, a process which both who I married (a batterer, it turned out), and the year in which I decided to separate (quit being a battered wife and subject to potential, in-house “sudden-death-overtime” threats of the same, watching the ongoing erosion of my own economic footprint and functionality, and having to deal with that possibility, while planning to LIVE also…), that time being “half past-1996 PRWORA” has repeatedly made necessary over my past 15-25 years in this state.

So my plans for my future are not just about “me.” Yes, “it’s complicated.”

All this is in part, I guess, why I am in more “reflective” mode than on a typical major holiday.

THIS POST:

By the time I decide whether or not to include the preface to the preview instead of,  “stuffing it where the sun don’t shine” in favor of a maintaining a more objective tone and detached stance, this post’s title will probably look like this:  Introducing A New Page, How and When Problem-Solving (make that ‘Collaborative Justice’) Courts were Institutionalized and other Consolidate/ Coordinate/Standardize/PRIVATIZE Stories at Courts.CA.Gov. AND, some of the Backdrop (My Personal Experience of Turn-of-Century Social Policy towards Women Reporting Abuse and Efforts to Exit It … with the rest of the title: “…Despite Conflicting Federal Declarations stigmatizing Abuse while Demanding Co-Parenting — or forfeit the children and pay former abusers– for Abuse Survivors).”

WHY ANECDOTAL REPORTING ONLY / PRIMARILY ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH

SYSTEMS-AWARENESS vs. SYMPTOMS-AWARENESS

Another large section that developed over an additional day’s writing here… This one, unlike the more personal, reflective (anecdotal, my family’s case and relationships) section below it, has many images reminding us about major systems and how they are strategized for changing, among many other things, family court and custody “outcomes.”  Below both of those is the actual PREVIEW of the NEW PAGE, probably the shortest section.  Some regular readers may already be familiar with my systems summary and examples (images) and/or even my family court case report (although typically when I’ve told it it’s been without specific names), please fast-forward, scroll down or page-down to that Preview section.  Link to new page will be repeated there.  I find periodic reviews and “Where we Were, Where we Stand, New Developments“** are good habits to maintain, but if time is short…(**One reason I even have the new page is some fairly recent [Dec. 2016] developments in a certain domestic violence center in Minnesota; i.e., it announced a status of “closed.” )

In general, this blog isn’t supposed to be anecdotal.  As a strategy or even basis for system reform, I think anecdotal narrative and reporting (case history: true or false, real, understated, or exaggerated) is vulnerable to spin and exploitation. So many people not directly involved instinctively know this, it deters their active involvement / support, and even when they are ready to support, when people wish to become involved, it doesn’t provide enough independent, solid ground on which to make demands for change.

Anecdotal reporting, often containing drama, pathos, outrageous stories, may because of this kickstart, ignite, passion to act, but over time it lacks enduring, bedrock substance, connection to a solid logical, historical, and verifiable foundation to withstand counter-accusations, alternate arguments for the cause of the documented disasters, or “transferability” — being basic and expressed appropriately enough to holding the logic when other contexts or considerations are taken into account.

For example:  for years, people wanted to argue “parental alienation” as an unsound psychological theory.  Major on-line energies and debates were devoted to this, most of them absent even a casual reference to the most likely originator of this theory, the professional association found at AFCCnet.org and related (spinoff) ones.  It also ignored any clear statement of financial incentives which most certainly did exist in other than extremely personal or local terms.

Anecdotal reporting with knee-jerk proposed solutions I believe doesn’t pull the right kind of (thinking / reasoning) people on board understand the system realities of proliferating “problem-solving courts” and how the family courts, with their state-based history often of identifiable start dates within some of our lifetimes, are also a specialized venue (with specialized legal codes) modeled after some of the earlier (drug, mental health) problem-solving courts.   This type of reporting makes for temporary, or maybe even periodic case-based publicity through on-line debates, good for readership, but hardly deepens systems operations understanding, other than that the complainants see problems with it.  Typically it also doesn’t lead to solid evidence transferable to other situations and cases (or even courts), leaving readers and too many participants subject to “guided tours” by on-line rhetoric from groups with financial incentives to “spin” the reality, rather than analyze the different variables.

Without access to verifiable not just individual docket facts, but layers of historical and documented facts about (a) the courts and those running them over time and (b) the professional participants IN the courts, or in attempts to restructure, re-align, or reform them, the discussions remain in the arena of speculation, hearsay, and “take it on faith” based on “choose your experts” or (body of experts, as in, by their affiliations).

Earlier in this blog (including likely some before Sept. 2012, where the Table of Contents starts) I explored and documented start dates for Kentucky, Maryland, and some of the key players involved in promoting them.  It appears that “conciliation courts” preceded the family court divisions in many places, and that also the “family” was tacked onto pre-existing “juvenile” courts and nonprofit associations (example:  the “National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Inc.” although that’s an private nonprofit corporation (with Schedule-R related entities; it files tax returns, not “CAFRs” governmental-entity financial reports), not a court system…  Anecdotal reporting of problems within the system doesn’t explain the system, or document its origins and philosophies in the words of those who originally sought to set them up….

In family courts, “per se,” on their own, by definition, we have outcome-based, problem-solving courts — especially now since PRWORA, and the lead-up to it in the 1980s, with outcomes measured OUTSIDE the courtroom at the state level in social-science/relationship language of “increased noncustodial parental (in translation as practiced, increased father) contact. In other words, not outcome-based in terms referencing due process, rules of evidence, and standards that don’t inherently undermine the strong deterrent of the criminal code accompanied by prosecutions of violations of it, for actual criminal behavior.

Arguing bad outcomes, better outcomes, how to change the outcomes to better protect children, and so forth, doesn’t even deal with the reality that their (family courts’) existence facilitates outside forces applying private opinions on what type of “outcome” is more or less desirable, justified in social science (“Federal Family Design”) terms, and through allegedly supportive arguments involving economics.

At the same time (and I am talking 1996 forward) the promotion of marriage and fatherhood as a patriotic value through the Social Security Act as reformed 1996ff:

(I quoted from this NCBI.NLM.NIH website in “About Blog Motto” page; this section is “Motivation for Reform; I added four bullets to emphaize the list of four “motivations”):

Welfare, The Family, And Reproductive Behavior: Research Perspectives. Show details

From Changing Family Formation Behavior (per https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230338/
“…The recent [published in 1998] welfare reform debate that led to the shift from AFDC to TANF was framed by several premises.

• First, it was widely accepted that AFDC was seriously flawed and required radical repair.
• Second, it was assumed that the era of “solutions from the center” was over and that the future of welfare innovation should and would derive largely from state and local initiatives.
• Third, there was growing acceptance that reforms should redirect the goals of welfare policy from fairly straightforward objectives, such as reducing income poverty or increasing the labor market participation of adults in welfare families, toward more complex objectives involving fundamental changes in individual and community behaviors. This change in attitude was affected, in part, by the observations that 89 percent of children on AFDC lived in households with no father present; that the out-of-wedlock birth rate more than tripled after 1960; and that half of children in never-married households and over three-fourths of children born to teenage mothers ended up on welfare.
• (I added the bullets here, breaking up the above para.) Finally, it has been assumed that states are the ideal laboratories of reform and, through experimentation, will promote both more effective welfare policies and improved knowledge about effective design, implementation, and management of these policies.

Arguably, however, the dominant motivation for reform was the growing perception that welfare, especially AFDC, promoted irresponsible and/or self-destructive behaviors.

Notice, there was no questioning whether behavioral modification (I call it “social science R&D”) SHOULD occur targeting specific households, only whether it should be at the federal level, or at the state level, along with the moral undertone of “irresponsible behavior,” while in fact the 1980s saw, among other things Savings & Loan scandals and bailouts, or such outrages as documented (originating at the highest levels of government and up to the White House) in “The Franklin Coverup: Child Abuse, Satanism and Murder in Nebraska” regarding child kidnapping, prostitution, drug-running, and murder ring run out of Nebraska, involving the Omaha School for Boys and certain foster families, with photographer (Rusty Nelson) kept for purposes of blackmailing politicians in order to get preferred legislation passed; $40 million was said to be embezzled in the process.  About a dozen involved people (incl. investigators, witnesses) died mysteriously and some violently during the investigation, including one man (Gary Caradori) flying home in a plane with his 12 year old? son and photographs..  (Book by John W. DeCamp; this listing is from the Omaha Public Library; link provided on the title link above):

The shut-down of Omaha, Nebraska’s Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, raided by federal agencies in November 1988, sent shock waves all the way to Washington, D.C. $40 million was missing. The credit union’s manager: Republican Party activist Lawrence E. “Larry” King, Jr., behind whose rise to fame and riches stood powerful figures in Nebraska politics and business, and in the nation’s capital.
In the face of opposition from local and state law enforcement, from the FBI, and from the powerful Omaha World-Herald newspaper, a special Franklin committee of the Nebraska Legislature launched its own probe. What looked like a financial swindle, soon exploded into a hideous tale of drugs, Iran-Contra money-laundering, a nationwide child abuse ring, and ritual murder. 

---

Nineteen months later, the legislative committee’s chief investigator died – suddenly, and violently, like more than a dozen other people linked to the Franklin case.

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Author John DeCamp knows the Franklin scandal from the inside. In 1990, his “DeCamp memo” first publicly named the alleged high-ranking abusers. Today, he is attorney for two of the abuse victims.
Using documentation never before made public, DeCamp lays bare not only the crimes, but the cover-up – a textbook case of how dangerous the corruption of institutions of government, and the press, can be. In its sweep and in what it portends for the nation, the Franklin cover-up followed the ugly precedent of the Warren Commission.

Publisher: Lincoln, Neb. ; AWT, 1996 || Edition:2nd ed || ISBN:9780963215802  || 0963215809

Branch Call Number: 978.2254 DeCamp 1996  || NE 978.2254 DECAMP || Characteristics:xxv, 411 p. : ill ; 22 cm

And after that, we [the US Government as expressed in an Act passed by Congress] wants to moralize about out-of-wedlock child-bearing as a social scourge and debt burden for United States citizens….and contributing to juvenile delinquency, crime, and other social problems…

See next two Franklin coverup images (sorry the topic is a dark subject, uncomfortable, but it has been out now for just over two decade.  Notice the author (former Senator, Viet Nam War Vet, and attorney) John DeCamp makes a probable connection (in “Ch. 21 excerpts) between crack-cocaine epidemic in South-Central Los Angeles as possibly sponsored by the CIA AFTER other sources of funding for the war in Nicaragua were stopped by legislative action (the Boland Amendment).  Congresswoman Maxine Waters demanded an investigation; Gary Webb (investigative journalist for the San Jose Mercury News) broke the series (a movie has been made about it since, as well as on the Franklin Coverup).

The second image relates a mind-control (through deliberate torture inducing personality splitting for control and assignment) project using young children as “the lowest levels of Hell” (i.e., even beyond drug-running), and that among the uses for the children was such drug-running.

…  Long ago (when I was more active in email groups or commenting on others custody-related blogs or public forums) a woman with a custody challenge from Nebraska asked me to look up her family court judge. I did and shocked to discover he was a minor person mentioned in the accounts of The Franklin Coverup.  This woman (who as I recall had no contact with her children; she’d become “noncustodial,” later fled the country, and not the only mother to have done so in that context)…

All this raises the question of whether we really want our own government to be perfecting and specializing the art of “behavioral modification” not just of targeted child victims, but also collectively of the masses.  Welfare reform and obviously, tobacco cessation / the stop-smoking movements, not to mention “abstinence” policy that came on board with the federal marriage/fatherhood promotion in some sectors) are obviously attempts to perfect the art and science of mass opinion manipulation for “healthy” or beneficial social purposes.  These should  remind us all how important it is to regain fiscal accountability for governmental operations, and in my opinion this would HAVE to start restricting and reducing the privatization trend, and more open promotion of the CAFRs for each and every government entity, increasing awareness of just which entities are around, and how they are accounting for their fund balances.

So, the re-formulated TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, where block grants to the state kicked in with that 1996 reform) in its purposes facilitates diversion of funding FROM the needy households TO people and organizations/ corporations such as “ICF International” (multi-national global for-profit company) to solving the problem of dependence on the same, or in similar ways, for example, public relations firms (Public Strategies, Inc. (total grants $24M as of 2012) from Bible-belt states (Oklahoma) whose name and fame are virtually made by taking the money for running poor and middle-class people through relationship and marriage-preservation/promotion skills — with grants preferences to those who got in on this game earlier, and have no moral objection the using government to preaching personal morality to the unfortunate (that’s my reference, in part, to PREP, Inc. in Colorado, and its “Within My Reach,” many years ago made part of the historic Oklahoma Marriage Initiative).

EXAMPLES FROM OKLAHOMA MARRIAGE INITIATIVE, AND ICF, INTERNATIONAL

(incl. some on “National Fatherhood Initiative, Inc.” who used ICF as a subcontractor, too)

(MY PREVIOUS WRITING AND SOME UPDATES)

I re-ran a basic search to get a total for “I C F, Inc.” on TAGGS.HHS.Gov and it comes up with over $26M (click for the saved search specs.) It’s also mis-labeled “City Government.”

I wrote up a lot of this in October 19, 2012 at my other blog (less active in recent years), “Cold, Hard.Fact$” with the domain name/url “EconomicBrain.wordpress.com.”

Its post “Scope of the Issue: Unholy Trinity of Excess Welfare Funds, Religious Zealots and Social Scientists.  For Starters“ breaks down both some of the programming mentioned above, and HHS grants to (a) Public Strategies, Inc.” (a for-profit based in Oklahoma), (b) University of Denver (Colorado Seminary) ℅ Principal Investigators Scott Stanley and (separately) Howard J. Markman, as well as (below that) grants to ICF International (mis-labeled at HHS with spaces between the letters — not periods, and not as it shows up on its legal name, “I C F”) for a total of $26M (as of now) GRANTS including $1,500,000/year for a “National Resource Center for Strategies to Promote Healthy Marriage” and a “Self-Sufficiency Clearninghouse” (sic, for one of the grants).

My post started by referencing the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative and Jerry Regier, as well as how it managed to bypass legislative approval in starting (and by grabbing TANF contingency funds):

(From my own Oct. 19, 2012 post on another blog…i.e., this was my thinking then (and still is…).  In 2012 I’d just discovered the “CAFR” (Comprehensive Annual Financial Report) system of government entity reporting and had started this blog to advertise and explain it, while posting many state level CAFRs. )

I keep coming back to the “genius” business strategy of taking TANF money first, and justifying it afterwards, meanwhile, distributing to any number of already vested interests, so that resistance would seem to be heresy.

To understand this, one can start almost anywhere.

However, I suggest starting with the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative + Colorado-based PREP, Inc. (marriage promotion curricula & for-profit business) which was a state-wide test run of how to take TANF Contingency Funding (in this case, about $10 million), bypass the legislature to vote on it, and through the Governor’s office, do a test-run.   This took collaboration with the US Federal Department of HHS and (as it turned out) a certain G.W. Bush administration appointee Jerry Regier, founder (1981) of the Family Research Council, currently back at “HQ” in OJJDP.  People of this stripe tend to go from one state to another, and in and out the revolving door of government, think tanks, and consulting, as the bio above shows:

2004 impassioned testimony to keep the funding going reveals some more about one of the two PREP-involved men at U of Denver called in to advise also on the OMI:

2004 Testimony before a US Subcomittee, … Scott Stanley admitting his research has been HHS (NIMH) supported from the start. “This research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health since 1980… I am also one of two senior advisors to the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative…

With support like this it seems a legitimate question: between <> a poor, fatherless household with children, possibly taking food stamps and even cash aid to keep them clothed over time, and <>the millions of dollars poured into the personal careers of already employed (by the University of Denver [Marriage Center]) professors Stanley and Markman who, IN ADDITION, are having their private, for-profit companies (as I recall it’s more than just one) positioned and privileged to use the public welfare service in several states for distribution/ marketing network to run (translation: SELL) relationships behavioral modification classes as a condition of receiving social services — which are the real “welfare dependents”?

There may be more people in the poor household category overall; perhaps if those who are already employed weren’t so keen on building their careers and post-retirement supplementary income (or whatever else you call companies like PREP, Inc.), there might be a little less poverty making the rounds overall!!  What type of mentality dreamt this up in the first place? What other kind of ethics, morality, or life beliefs, justifies the use of public funds for these purposes?

At what point is receiving social services help because one’s family needs to eat, and housing, and other employment isn’t available or accessible morally or ethically worse than setting up and running this type of social science R&D on any populations one can get access to (previously also included the military), at public expense — and collaborating cross-jurisdictions to make it happen?

This next tiny image of TAGGS.HHS.gov grants table for ICF below (from my Oct. , 2012 post) doesn’t show all the grants and is here only to reference in addition the preceding text about its going public about the time some of the healthy marriage grants started kicking in, in more earnest, 10 years after PRWORA (2006) and referencing ICF’s astounding 21% growth each year thereafter.  Maybe the US DHHS should’ve paid them a little less to maintain a glorified website (the basic definition of most public-funded clearinghouse/resource centers).

Also note (In that find print above the table in image) reference to an LBO — “leveraged buyout.”  By now we should be reasonably aware that this means the resulting corporation has typically substantial debt, which would then be passed on to consumers.  Only in the case of ICF International, major consumers (at least as to the USA) include government.  So in the long run, who’ll be sponsoring those profits?  … Taxpayers.

Click image to enlarge or here for the whole list of “Greenbook Initiative Partners”. I’ve posted on this often, esp. in 2016 (but also earlier). While ICF is on the federal faucet for PRWORA-related and other programming, it’s neutral enough to evaluate the hand that feeds it when it comes to Domestic VIolence, Child Maltreatment and Custody Issues? Guess so…

See my 10/19/2012 post at EconomicBrain.WordPress.com, “Scope of the Issue: Unholy Trinity of Excess Welfare Funds, Religious Zealots and Social Scientists. For Starters..” (Click image to enlarge, or that link for the whole post). Notice lead-in paragraph on ICF, mis-spelling of an award (“typical” TAGGS.hhs.gov”) and that this only shows a partial table of grants as of Oct. 2012.

ICF went public, that is “international” in 2006.  I see from their main website, it has a branch, division, or subsidiary (etc.) in Brussels now (ICF Mostra) and a customer service agency (ICF Olson) (next images). It is a for-profit, NASDAQ-traded company which history shows it went into government (particularly defense and energy) federal contracting AFTER it failed as an investment company under the original “Inner City Fund” name and strategy.

What’s more, ICF was named as one of just a few “Evaluation” Partners in the Greenbook Initiative (2000ff) (see image, and my caption on it above).  I’m not going to look it up again now, but they were also (or one of their “LLC” related entities) showing up on National Fatherhood Initiative more recent tax returns as a subcontractor.  Well, here are the last three years’ of tax returns, showing rapidly declining contributions (see “Schedule A of Support” for FY2014 and 2013), and although this entity obviously has some: legal domicile, start date, and website (It’s fatherhood.org), it doesn’t even bother to fill those out in the Header Section, while continuing, most years, to claim thousands of dollars in cost-overruns (Expenses greater than Revenues by anywhere from ca. $70K to over $300K in a single year) and barely describing their tax-exempt purpose at all.  The board of directors ranging from5 to 6 people only (incl. Roland C. Warren, Christopher Brown, Andy Shoka, at least once a Paul Byus), show one, or sometimes two, of them are actually paid, and NO independent contractors.  What’s really going on there in the last few years, eh?

Total results: 3. Search Again.

Here’s Fiscal Year 2008 Form 990 (which shows state of origin PA, Founding Year 1993 while Roland C. Warren was at the helm — but has other major internal inconsistencies, and missing data.  In addition to, under “revenues” near the bottom, it shows major markup (cost of goods $144K, sold for $1.2M!!) on inventories sold, while contractual services were claimed to be over $3M.  Could that have been because of ICF?  The fiscal year here ended in Dec; later it was ending in Sept.

This return holds the Part VIIB (Subcontractor payments) referencing ICF which I’d mentioned above.  Notice also “Caliber” as a subcontractor.  Later, ICF swallowed Caliber Associates, per Greenbook Initiative Partners page (and probably ICF Acquisitions/History page also).  Another subcontractor was Blackbaud, Inc. which market (or marketed) to school systems; software-based.  It helped make its founder, who wasn’t even American, rich too. See next image/s:

NFI subcontractors FY 2008 including ICF, Inc. and (a company it later? bought), Caliber Associates.  And $861K to The Advertising Council for PSA’s on fatherhood..

(The annotations explain these other images well enough. NFI’s numbers are internally inconsistent, its entries incomplete in several places, and it’s avoiding proper accounting for its sources of revenue over time.  Sloppy, and I wonder perhaps whether an oblique “Is anyone paying attention?” test, which “we the people” continue to flunk by not raising hell about it. Unless there are parallel and somehow miraculously accurate real returns at the IRS, and the ones posted for public consumption are fakes, there’s ongoing symptoms of dishonesty, i.e., corruption, on the financials (some might say “incompetence” in filling out tax returns — despite $198K salaries claimed — but I doubt that.  These men (the board are all men**) are not “dumb” or incompetent.  They are simply dishonest, by agreement.

**Fact-checking that claim, the board were not all men all years.  Three other women (the occasional woman showing up on board over the years) include Maggie Spain, a Denver-area PR professional, Glorybell Silhy Daboub, and Christina Burelli, whose profiles (esp. the last two) would compromise another story, including including the Latin American connections, among other things.  I did take images, but do not recall them exactly now, so am simply making the references.  Anyone else could look up the tax returns, scroll down to where boards of directors are named, and look them up, which is what I did.  Gloria Silhy Daboob family line ran drugstores in El Salvador, which overcoming obstacles, expanded into cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, while passing down family values for family enterprises.

Under:

(I don’t know what an “SME” Is but it is the theme under/near which this article was found).

Passing down family values 

The saying that a family business is founded in the first generation, prospers in the second and is lost in the third is not supported by STEP research which shows that a family enterprise can grow in strength over the generations, when it adheres to important principles such as entrepreneurial attitudes, family values, education and professionalization.

A good example of this is the Grupo San Nicolás in El Salvador.

The Grupo San Nicolás was founded in 1965 with the opening of the Silhy family´s first drugstore. Despite suffering many difficulties over the years including a lengthy civil war that placed family members at daily risk and a devastating earthquake that left much of the company’s property in ruins, founder Victor Silhy repeatedly steered the company away from economic disaster, seeking new markets and converting crisis into opportunity.

In 2011, amid pessimism about prospects for the world economy, the San Nicolás business group was in a phase of rapid business growth and technological development in the respective industries it has expanded into since its early beginnings as a drugstore, namely cosmetics and the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals.

The founder Victor Silhy still remained at the helm of the family business 46 years after he started it and he used his entrepreneurial skills to expand across the nation and to regional markets, created vertical integration in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals and introduced European brands into El Salvador. His wife Gloria took charge of the company’s beauty products and his daughter Glorybell helped professionalize the group through human resource practices that won the company America Economía’s title of best mid-size employer in Latin America in 2006 …

Grupo San Nicolás gives top priority to recruiting professionals for all managerial positions however family members are given preference under equal conditions, as long as they possess the appropriate academic degrees and have gained the practical experience required by the job, including one or two years working in another company with no ties to San Nicolás. Family members are also groomed to occupy seats on the board of directors or in the family council. All appointments of family members must be proposed by a delegate of the family council and approved by the board of directors, with the favorable opinion of the family council.

[Same WikiLeak, cont’d…] Manufacturing and Privatization Guru
————————————
3. After completing his studies, Daboub returned to El Salvador and became Vice-President of INCOMES/CISMAN (International Consultants in Manufacturing and Engineering Systems), a position he held from 1989 to 1995. Daboub and his family founded several businesses over the past several decades, including Productos Dioro (a bakery), Emplaza (plastic packaging), Distribuidora Santa Elena (food distributor) and DABCO (retail candy stores); he has held numerous management positions at those firms. As a consultant on manufacturing practices and processes, he has provided advisory services to numerous U.S. and Salvadoran companies.

4. From 1992 to 1996 Daboub simultaneously served on the boards of directors of several state-owned electricity generation and distribution companies, and he used those positions to push forward privatization of the electricity sector in El Salvador. Privatization of the electricity sector earned the government $1.12 billion in proceeds from asset sales, and electricity prices are now among the lowest in the region.

Daboub was also a proponent of telecommunications privatizations, serving as President of the state-owned ANTEL from 1996 to 1998 and President of INTEL, an ANTEL spin-off, in 1998. He also was President of telecommunications firm Estrategas from 1998 to 1999. As a consultant, he provided advisory services to CTE-France Telecom in El Salvador during its takeover of state-owned ANTEL.

Super Minister Daboub
———————-
5. From 1999 to 2004, Daboub was one of President Flores’ most trusted advisors, and was popularly called the “Super Minister” due to his extensive influence, particularly on government modernization, economic policy and the budgeting. Flores named Daboub Chief of Staff when he took office, but in May 2001 he became Finance Minister–while retaining his former duties as Chief of Staff. He is known as a loyal defender of the Washington Consensus, and in El Salvador he promoted privatization, free markets, and dollarization. When Flores finished his term, Daboub became Executive Director of the America Libre Institute (ILA) in Washington, an effort headed by ex-President Flores.

More description at The Daboub Partnership(™), Board Members.  Between all this, not to mention Mrs. Silhy Daboub’s MIT degree (1992), I can see why an exception to the “mostly male board of directors” might be made over at National Fatherhood Initiative. Not to mention fund-raising abilities for Spanish Catholic Charities (March 2012 article, diff’t from image shown, but same event) in the Archdiocese of Washington, apparently a good match in both power + patriarchal values with NFI.

The other two woman board members on various NFI returns, Christina Burelli (Cambridge educated, connections, with husband Pedro M. Burelli, to Venezuela, running family values classes in Latin America, on the board of a “V5 Initiative” along with Patrick Fagan of Family Research Center fame (I seem to recall he was also listed as “Opus Dei” on a “Defending our Fathers’ House” (DOFH.org or similar site) call to mission (defending the attack on marriage represented by no-fault divorce and, allegedly, welfare help to single mothers incentivizing (us) to have more babies out of wedlock, in impassioned religious terms), and Maggie Spain — more images I collected earlier, but won’t narrate here.  (Patrick Fagan v. Pornography, 2010 in an Opus Dei magazine).  Fagan speaks about his involvement and the benefits of Opus Dei to his lifestyle, incl. as father of eight children and Heritage Foundation staff member (at the time anyhow).  I’m referencing this because of one of the few women board members on National Fatherhood Initiative also being on a board with Patrick Fagan; in addition to the well-known Family Research Council and Heritage Foundation, the Opus Dei connection (shared also by another marriage-promo individual Bradley Wilcox) is relevant:

Catholic Group Tries to Explain Itself: Normally low-profile Opus Dei rebuts the way it’s portrayed in “Da Vinci Code.”  May 14, 2006, Matthew Hay Brown, in the Baltimore Sun

---

…Opus Dei was exactly what Patrick F. Fagan was looking for: a call to holiness that he could live as a family man. The Chevy Chase resident was a university student in Dublin when he joined 37 years ago.

And yes, the school recruits young university students of both genders.

A typical day for Fagan, a supernumerary, begins before 6 a.m., when he prepares for Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. He will pray before the Blessed Sacrament, the consecrated host that Catholics believe is the body of Christ.

Then it’s on to the Heritage Foundation, where the married father of eight is a research fellow specializing in family and cultural issues. He offers up his work to God, trying to perform each task mindfully and to the best of his ability, and taking on the most difficult first.

At noon, Fagan will say the Angelus, a devotion describing the incarnation of God in Jesus, and break for lunch. Ordinarily, he’ll pursue the “apostolate of friendship” – dining with a companion. Before returning to his office, he might visit the Blessed Sacrament at St. Joseph’s on Capitol Hill.

During the afternoon, he’ll take a few minutes for spiritual reading – a passage from the Gospels and whatever book he’s reading. On the way home, he’ll stop again at the shrine for evening prayer. After dinner and conversation with his family, he’ll examine his conscience, say the Act of Contrition and the Hail Mary, and make resolutions for the next day.

Fagan says Opus Dei has been “a huge blessing.”

However, for whichever years these women were on the NFI board, and said nothing about the inconsistent tax returns, that’s on their watch, too, and their responsibility: These are also as you can see highly educated, well-connected (and Washington, D.C.-connected in at least two cases) women, businesswomen, and familiar with sitting on both nonprofit and for-profit boards of directors –and they endorsed these NFI behaviors at taxpayer expense, again, at least while they were on board.  Christina Burelli, in addition, seems to be on a V5 Initiative running similar programming through different entities:

Another NFI website indicating some of the G&S (Goods and Services) — Want your Father Engagement Certificate™?

More from Christina Burelli’s LinkedIn.

Philanthropy Roundtable featuring Alliance for the Family (AFF) and “Alive to the World” classes associated with Ms. Burelli; family values to overcome poverty and violence — sound PRWORA-familiar, US citizens?? (not quite sure how this theme would help curtail family-on-family violence, or violence against women in particular…)

Pedro M. Burelli bio blurb (from his blog) shows more background (showing not that many viewers, however, since 2004):

Founder and Managing Director of B+V Advisors, a financial advisory firm focused on M&A and capital raising advisory in emerging markets. Current advisory assignments focused on Russia, Spain and Latin America. He served as Vice Chairman of the Board of publicly traded Rosinter Restaurants Holding. Served as Chairman of the Board of Synergy also traded on the Moscow exchange. Mr. Burelli was an Executive Board Member of Petróleos de Venezuela until November of 1998. In that capacity he was responsible for financial planning and oversight at the board level. Prior to that, he was Head of JPMorgan Capital Corporation – Latin America, the principal investment arm of JPMorgan. During his career at JPMorgan he was, among other things, a founding Member of the M&A group for Latin America, Director of M&A for the Iberian Peninsula based in Madrid, and Senior Banker for the Andes, Central America and Caribbean region. Mr. Burelli holds a BA in Political Science (Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of Southern California and MPA Degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Contact info: E-mail: pmbcomments@gmail.com
Interests Politics, International Finance and Business, Telecom, Internet, Architecture

Another more recent article under heading “Lagniappe” (just found 9/18/2017) from “PetroleumWorld.com” by Pedro M. Burelli refers to some of the political controversy over Venezuela as an oil-rich country, and with reference to President Maduro; another one I didn’t post (it’s a google book) referred to an attempted, but foiled, coup of Maduro’s regime involving Burelli.

(Full article here)

I am certainly not qualified to comment pro or con, just pointing out that there’s more than meets the eye to the running of this D.C. Nonprofit so associated with “fathers’ rights” and transforming the U.S. Welfare Act to promote untraceable funding, $150M a year, to continue promoting the politically correct family values (or allegedly for this purpose) (image is just the top; it discusses the respective independence day events in this context):

Most excerpts below come from FY2009 “NFI” tax return, one is from FY2012 (Sched A of Support):

This markup is truly offensive in a public-interest (so-called) entity; see Line 10, Gross vs. net (cost of goods) Inventory sales.

Pt. III here “Program Service Activities” and should support  totals shown on the summary (Pt. I Page 1) and should match also Pt. VIII (which breaks down revenues — contributions, program service revenues, and other). There are no other places on the same return where such “revenues” are shown. And, the exact 1:1 Revs = expenses is simply not credible. 

Question:  WHY should ICF (or rather “I C F, Inc.” as HHS labels it..), this prosperous, business-acquiring and gone-public, for-profit, gone-global company, be helped in that process of producing dividends for its shareholders by the US Department of Health and Human Services granting it funds  DIVERTED from needy households (per the Social Security Act) and DONATED — millions of dollars to it — in the form of grants, in addition to its many contracts, enabling it to buy and sell companies almost at will? _____________________

(“ICF ____”-named companies I see have several business filings over the years in California, some active, some merged out, some FTB suspended. Not all may relate to the same VA corporation but the street address shows this one (ICF ENERGY SOLUTIONS, Inc.) formed in 2001 does.)

ICF Mostra (in Brussels, Belgium. Nice to know how US taxpayers, particularly low and middle-income who don’t have the typical loopholes or inherited wealth held in tax-exempt foundations to sustain them and their children + grand-children, “gave at the office” to help make BIG THINGS HAPPEN via this multi-national, for-profit consulting firm, parent company (last I checked) in Virginia, over the years.. See also the “About Us” text in nearby image….

People — I mean particularly women, mothers who have already filed for separation and protection from abuse (PFA) or Temporary Restraining Orders (TRO) which have become so-called “permanent” (longer than a week or two until the hearing) — that is litigants IN the family courts completely Unaware, or only partially or dimly, aware that the weight of the United States of America (federal government) and its major grant-making agency (the Department of HHS) as well as the terms of the Social Security Act have already been brought to bear overall on what takes place in individual custody cases are deprived of critical information on HOW HARD TO FIGHT against compromise of any existing rights, or unfair breakdown of needed protection.

I did at first, and it seems many still do, believe they are in some sort of normal court where facts, evidence, right and wrong, and criminal/non-criminal, including but not limited to, a previous documented pattern of violence towards the other partner, or the children, still really matter — but they aren’t.    A typical response on first evidence of the betrayal is to cry out, on court  documents and/or in-line  and demand that THESE COURTS be “restored” (from their “broken” and “fail to protect”) to their imagined formerly pristine state through fixes, reforms, or “enhancement” adding technical assistance and consulting to fix the “flawed practices.”

That’s utterly illogical given the kinds of courts they were by design, and utterly illogical appears to be where many groups and associated experts (including those practicing in or around the courts) want distressed parents to engage in the pro/con arguments, the more public, dramatic, and accusatory, the better — for the intended fixers (and for, obviously, driving up on-line readership through headlines, including some “it bleeds, so it leads” ones around the theme of divorce, custody, protection, and prosecution of parental interference, etc.).  Meanwhile, the federal funding continues, UNDER-reported…. and that entire network has become entrenched in nonprofits and, at places, universities as well.

This weight of the federal government as referenced above, can’t legally be applied directly — but it has been done by influence. Usually the theme combines pathos for fatherless children, with indignation against over-breeding welfare mothers (sometimes disguised in more official-sounding terms from the, originally, racist sentiment it was) with images of the debt burden caused by welfare dependence, and an (un)healthy dose of intimidation, in that fatherlessness causes criminal behavior — and “your household (neighborhood, etc.) may just be next.”  That obviously is going to work better on communities where that’s a future, not a present reality, in which case appeal to race-based equity* featuring, typically, the oppressed minorities with the emphasis on low-income, urban fathers.

[[*Clarification includes next reference/quote from WHO in post-publication update between these brackets:]]

*in the sense of fairness, equality, correcting race-baced disparities, not in the sense how much “equity” is left on ownership of an debt-financed asset, like a house).  I have been looking at specific organizations, HHS/CDC policy statements over time, but for a quick, although dated (final report 2005-2008) definition from WHO:

The condensed WHO logo from a different site is basically the same except added color + label beneath, not beside, logo. To read about the emblem significance and © (understanding I’m using it in a quote of WHO info, non-commercially, and with no implication that material was my work), Click image.

• Social determinants of health (final report, key concepts <==”you are here”)
  • Commission on Social Determinants of Health, 2005-2008
    • Commission on Social Determinants of Health – final repor

What are health inequities or inequalities?

Health inequities are avoidable inequalities in health between groups of people within countries and between countries. These inequities arise from inequalities within and between societies. Social and economic conditions and their effects on people’s lives determine their risk of illness and the actions taken to prevent them becoming ill or treat illness when it occurs.

What are the social ‘determinants’ of health?

The social determinants of health are the circumstances in which people are born, grow up, live, work and age, and the systems put in place to deal with illness. These circumstances are in turn shaped by a wider set of forces: economics, social policies, and politics.

What are the drivers of health inequities?

The global context affects how societies prosper through its impact on international relations and domestic norms and policies. These in turn shape the way society, both at national and local level, organizes its affairs, giving rise to forms of social position and hierarchy, whereby populations are organized according to income, education, occupation, gender, race/ethnicity and other factors. Where people are in the social hierarchy affects the conditions in which they grow, learn, live, work and age, their vulnerability to ill health and the consequences of ill health.

(The website lists five drivers of health inequities; these are the last two – “gender biases in…and the way …organizations are structured and programmes are run” + including “the position of women in society [re:] child health and survival of boys and girls” and “the ability to “challenge and change the unfair and steeply graded distribution of social resources“):

• …
• Gender biases in power, resources, entitlements, norms and values, and the way in which organizations are structured and programmes are run damage the health of millions of girls and women. The position of women in society is also associated with child health and survival – of boys and girls.
• Health equity depends vitally on the empowerment of individuals to challenge and change the unfair and steeply graded distribution of social resources to which everyone has equal claims and rights. Inequity in power interacts across four main dimensions – political, economic, social, and cultural – together constituting a continuum along which groups are, to varying degrees, excluded or included.

. . . . . .I’ve noticed that US-based organizations over time continue to focus on the position of women and women’s rights in other countries, while continuing to cover up how our own social services system, as revised in the late 1990s, attempted to “even the inequity along gender lines” as perceived to be TOO favorable to women, resulting in the policy response of promoting fatherhood and public messages/campaigns/Congressional testimony (etc.) against “fatherlessness,” and creating the practices, professions, and endorsement of research to support both.  That this might itself be gender-biased, unfair, and unjust, doesn’t seem to have occurred to the promoters… It also sets up a natural conflict of US “health and welfare” policy domestically with US “health and welfare” policy internationally.  [[end, update clarifying the meaning of “race-based equity” in the original.  It had been published with a typo, “face-based” which caught my attention on the re-read…”]]

Those federal payments need not be directly to family court participants (judge, lawyer, mediator, custody evaluator, parenting coordinator, supervised visitation monitor) in individual cases to have an impact — the payments, whether grants or contracts for services,  are made through layers of administrative staff and programming decisions — on switching custody away from non-abusive parents to, often, abusive ones — while sometimes provoking decent, child-support-paying fathers by outrageously high (or low) payments, into starting custody battles they otherwise might not have…. (Now mothers too are getting such outrageous payments, but there is no “motherhood outreach” for “compromise of arrears program” based on the positive qualities of mothering as a socially desirable state for ALL children, as there has been documented for fathers…) All along the way there is opportunity for conflicts of interest beyond the immediate public view.  The public including the public just witnessing it has been played on this for years.

One “problem-solving/diversionary/collaborative justice/ therapeutic court” as a “model” tends to generate more problems (such as repeated trips to the court –> court overload — complaints about overburdened courts —> let us think of more diversionary services —> which can lead to yet more types of problem-solving courts).

So here, I’ve been debating whether to off-ramp this next section into a separate page (as meant by “where the sun don’t shine”) but that inner voice, but instinct, and answer to my innate fear of over-personalizing it (in present context where I still have unresolved issues with my own family-of-origin line, despite both children now being well into their twenties and not even living in this state) is that — this narrative is in effect a symptom of the collaborative, problem-solving mentality in court professionals and (nationwide) when the problems are criminal behavior as a social hazard and personal threat to targeted individuals, or categories of individuals.

Let’s not kid ourselves that this category no longer involves independent women and single mothers who have already demonstrated where they stand when it comes to taking more personal abuse from their ex-partners/spouses (etc.), or standing by silent while the systems facilitating this also work to reframe that reality as a different type of problem, bouncing it into the quasi-religious, psychobabble, social science R&D prop-up sector — and privatized experts who can’t even agree among themselves which end is up — except when challenged by outsiders on the jargon.

So, if by speaking from that stance, I then alienate any male supporters of this blog for its analytical characteristics and my willingness to take on the domestic violence industry, not just the “marriage and fatherhood promotion” practice and research fields, perhaps, so be it.

However, speaking personally is also something of an internal fight (I don’t experience PTSD like I used to, but the struggles are going to show up below in long sentences, and unless I catch all of them, sometimes dropped predicates. It should be understood as personal, expressive, anecdotal in the sense that I realize blog readers are not in a position to (collectively) validate or invalidate my statements about my own experience.

However, I am still a witness and participant of that experience and as such, have a right to speak about it.  It’s not as though I also haven’t been spoken of by the opposing side (in the “tribal warfare” over who gets to dominate my, and while they were young, our children’s futures, and narrate of course also its past) to my face and in writing — and in court pleadings equally absent documentation to support the claims.   So, I expect to leave this (extended) and informative section in.  There is another generation AND MORE of women who may not have heard the earlier, UNofficial version of these types of cases, or be aware of the advocacy groups which, constantly looking for more needy, traumatized parents to join their version of the solutions (the phrase “trawling for trauma” characterizes the process, and I admit to having used this in private communications about the same), i.e., the collective cult, and “legitimize” the proposed statement of facts (“58,000 children a year,” anyone…?) backing up each new recommended solution for protecting children IN the family courts (instead of FROM the same).

The family courts ARE problem-solving courts from the start; the “problem” was divorce, as characterized decades ago, at least back to the civil rights movement of the 1960s… That was the whole concept behind “reconciliation” leading to names like “Association of Family and CONCILIATION Courts” and ongoing insistence on directing attention away from personal responsibility for one’s actions, to relationship-justification for spousal (or even child) abuse, and treatments to behaviorally re-indoctrinate everyone involved about that abuse.

I’ve lived through enough of this all (I count 25 years since the first battering, and now 15 years post-separation, including first with, then mostly without, any real protection from it.  Now we are pushing the scenario into “elder” and fiduciary (probate-related) abuse.  Please pardon the Christian-specific adage here, but “same church, different pew,” meaning — the actual worship of private profits at public expense, sold (promoted, advertised, marketed and proselytized) as in the public interest. In my personal case, I also have reason to believe that the initial incentive to provoking and prosecuting a war surrounding the children was in actuality in pursuit (not on my part — because I was unaware of it personally! and focused on the present work life and income-earning future years as a single mother responsible for two growing children, then (briefly, until they were taken) adolescents) of control of what would otherwise be my portion of a family inheritance, and let me OUT of their immediate extortionist intent to control my options.

The quote is an excerpt with a few images from the page, after which I’ve written a short preview.  The background-color you see here matches the page background-color; I changed it for the quote for contrast:

This page (#28901)  I have named:  How and When Problem-Solving (make that ‘Collaborative Justice’) Courts were Institutionalized and other Consolidate/ Coordinate/Standardize/PRIVATIZE Stories at Courts.CA.Gov 

I [have been] talking on that post  —  NAATPN, Inc (2000ff, Total Current Assets, $0) and Caffee, Caffee and Associates PHF, Inc. (Hattiesburg MS, 2003ff, Total Assets $0, Tax Filings Questionable), and others trying to squeeze a California Race-Based Stop-Smoking Network (AATEN) into that recipe. ..  [Published 8/28/2017 evening and as usual may be updated for clarity, basic copyediting, or length (splitting)//LGH]  —

— about how the 1996ff (PRWORA-related) events overlapped with my current blogging interest, the 1998 (Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement) events, and similarities (not to mention overlap) of involved networking nonprofits, along with the stories told the public omitting the details of Who’s Who and the gradual, (dare I say “progressive” in today’s political climate, but referencing the generic, not political, meaning of the word?) incremental [but I sense, accelerating] erosion of local or even state-level accountability to citizens living within those state, as opposed to privatized special-interest nonprofits continually telling us all that the same are protecting against other privatized special-interest FOR profits as though these two were unrelated….

“www.courts.ca.gov/documents/California_Story.pdf” as viewed Aug 28, 2017.

Notice the lone author is cited as “Center for Court Innovation.” That’s not an “Inc.” and IF that author was paid for writing, it didn’t this non-entity “public/private partnership… I explain this again on [this] page. It’s a Public/Private Partnership (mega-style) with both the private and the public partners located in New York State (one of them in NYC)…while the copyright is held, as its says, by a State of California sub-part of the Executive Branch.

This page looks closer at a 2005 document with url actually labeled “California_Story.pdf” and copyrighted by a California government entity — or rather, a part of the State of California — while authored by what is actually a project (not an incorporated entity) between the NY Unified Court System and Fund for the City of New York (which IS an entity — a private one!  As a 501©3 it’s in the private sector.  That document and some images posted on it below have a dark green cover page.  I’d previously, years ago, noticed, flagged on this post, and over time periodically watched the Center for Court Innovation’s ongoing promotion of certain types of programs, especially diversionary, specialized courts, [including but NOT limited to, domestic violence courts] and in general themes that mesh closely with the known and stated agenda of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts.

PURPOSE of the NEW PAGE, GENERALLY:

In blog terms, the new page (#28901) relates to a 8/28/2017-published post on one of the many nonprofits involved in the anti-smoking movement arising around the major tobacco litigation of the 1980s, 1990s, and this century — a time when the issues I blog on also were developing and, as characterized by major networks of aligned nonprofits, tax-exempt foundation-prompted sponsorships, initiatives, and university (incl. Schools of Law) centers to transform, paradigm-shift, and alter the character of basic public institutions involved in divorce, custody, child support, child abuse and domestic violence issues, as well as the relationships between the male and female genders as a matter of national policy under the theme of public welfare and health.

While this was happening the federal departments and agencies also were expanding and changing their names and functions, I’ve blogged before, and their grantmaking capacities expanding over time.

The “Reorganization Act” under which this happened was last active in 1980; as I understand it a 2012 request to re-boot it was documented by the Congressional Reference Service, but I do not know if this was passed.  The Reorganization Act if authorized by Congress gives the President extra powers to restructure the Executive Branch, leaving Congress a certain window to veto it, and it was under that authority, I think, that we got the US Dept. of Health and Human Services from the middle of the former “HEW” which in 1953 was called FSA (Federal Security Agency).

Links to more information (I am a bystander on this topic, but did post two pages, and at least a few times in 2016, links to a 2012 “CRS” document by Mr. Henry Hogue.  I also see this is addressed at “History.house.gov” and a website I just found “EveryCRS.com” which posts a 2001 report with author name redacted on Pres. George W. Bush’s attempt to re-invigorate, authorize (or whatever the proper term) this authority):

(1) From History.House.gov “Historical Highlights on the Reorganization Act, 1901-1950 (showing 1946):

On this topic, from History.house.gov… (<==highlights 1901-1950) starting with Reorganization Act of 1946 (see reference to reorganization/naming of what is now the CRS…)

(2) CRS Report R24852, from FAS.org (Federation of American Scientists), 2012 by Henry B. Hogue.

2012 CRS report by Henry Hogue (I’ve posted it before)

(3) CRS? Order Code RL30876 (EveryCRSReport.com), 3/1/2001, author name redacted but also by CRS. Note the final disclaimer page — EVERYCRSReport.com is NOT a government website or affiliated with the CRS, and “it” claims no copyright.  It simply wishes to make the reports public:

Order Code RL30876 (EveryCRSReport.com), 3/1/2001 (#1 of about 4 images)

Order Code RL30876 (EveryCRSReport.com), 3/1/2001 (#2 of about 4 images)

Order Code RL30876 (EveryCRSReport.com), 3/1/2001 (#3 of about 4 images, note: this report dated 2001 only has events up to 1984…)

Order Code RL30876 (EveryCRSReport.com), 3/1/2001 (Disclaimer page probably at end of every report).

 

 

Exploring that (EveryCRS.com) link only for a few paragraphs (and images) highlights again the difficulty (if only the extra time it takes!) of tracking who, really, supports which causes once nonprofits, or the 501©3 – 501©4 + (beyond that) use of fiscal agents gets involved:  How would you diagram these relationships, if there was a need to do so, for 3rd party cognitive comprehension in reference to an identified cause (cases in point, but it could be almost any cause, such as global tobacco cessation efforts, or marriage promotion, diversion of criminal prosecutions into problem-solving courts, and so forth — it could be ANY cause…)?

First, EVERYCRSREPORT.com is a PROJECT (not an entity) of Demand Progress (which, collectively is the 501©3 / 4 combo)

Who we are || EveryCRSReport.com is a project of Demand Progress in collaboration with the Congressional Data Coalition — a bipartisan coalition founded by Demand Progress and the R Street Institute to promote open legislative information.

Interesting.  And Off-ramped; I’ll write it up….Look for a title referencing “EVERYCRS.COM, Demand Project, R Street Institute “and friends, fiscal agents” (and/or board member affiliations).

Here it is:
Off-ramped post title (for now…):  EVERYCRSReport.com: a PROJECT of Demand Progress (a 501©3 + 501©4 each w fiscal agent~New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund), the R Street Institute (formerly DC Progress) and Will the Real Sponsors Pls!! For a Change Step From Behind Their Fiscal Agents, wearing Corporate ID – NameTags showing their Home States, and Ages too?)

#####################################

MOVING ON from “Reorganization Act” and fiscal agent (etc.) considerations….

That’s good to be aware of, however there are obviously other ways to restructure “from the sidelines” AND the executive branches of federal — or state — governments which have been developed over the decades. Most of them require access, power, and finances.  The tendency is continually to consolidate, coordinate around causes, and celebrate this happening as good for all, efficient use of resources, and in the public interest.

While by now, as a parent who has run some (not all) of this gauntlet as affected by national policy leading up to and after “Welfare Reform” not to mention events post-9/11 also affecting the US Justice System, I became of aware of these “behind the front // from outside legal jurisdiction // in the nonprofit sector // public/private partnerships, coordinated” operations especially starting with PRWORA of 1996 and the gender wars, and more indications of the public school transformation networks (blogged especially from Dec. 2016 forward), I am now more recently seeing similar characteristics in pushing a different theme nationally through similar means.

I am seeing this from the perspective of the tobacco litigation, which also is (obviously) going to impact the US Dept. of Health and Human Services, and national budgets because of the scope and length of the litigation and the, if possible, it seems even larger tax-exempt associations involved, some of them in the billion-dollar range habitually, others “merely” a few hundred million or even as small (American Lung Association, for example) as “only” Total Gross $51M receipts in a single year.

We may have no specific rights over individual nonprofit corporations who flunk the basic credibility test when it comes to staying incorporated, or telling the truth when they do get around to filing tax returns, or even making good use, when public funds are involved, of that money.  I do, however, choose to post on it where I find it intersecting with some of the above basic issues, both as a parent, and for myself as someone who has called this country home since I was born in it, but am now finding, there is less and less place in it for women, specifically, who stand up to abuse and have chosen to invest years in raising and/or protecting the safety of their children, while our own government, behind closed doors and in various roundtables, spreads rumors about how as a “kind” we are actually the danger because of our gender of birth and from having engaged in a fairly normal human process with a male of the species, i.e., intercourse, conception, gestation and carrying children to term, labor and childbirth, perhaps even nursing and raising them afterwards, while working inside or outside the home for pay.

This scapegoating and minimizing of all of the above is done obliquely through spreading rhetoric such as “fatherlessness” and “female-headed households” substituted for more logical, fair, or normal terms.  Put another way, significant public relations, advertising, marketing, consulting, and asset-acquisition (private sector), software development, trademarking of curriculum or advertising terms for the social causes, for the purpose of training others how to talk about (the above situations), is involved in promoting the cause of demoting the role of women and biological mothers in raising their own children, except for causes of endangerment, drug abuse, abandonment, or documented real or imminently real harm to the children.  The scope and extent of this is NOT immediately visible simply through undergoing a series of family court litigation because “it” doesn’t show its face directly in the courtroom; it shows up in the grants, and on a variety of high-profile institutions (The Urban Institute, Brookings Institution), university centers both at Ivy League and “minor league” universities, and so forth.

I believe we do at least have the basic responsibility to show some curiosity about how the private and public sectors interact, and whether and if so, HOW, that interaction is compromising our safety and the process of government itself.  Along those lines, I also believe we ought to dedicate some personal time (show diligence) to supplement our normal, or mainstream-media-fed language which plays up the political, religious (and gender) conflicts to drive profits (advertising revenue, etc.) and “solve problems” by telling stories — and start talking in different terms which make the concepts found on a basic tax return, for example, or secretary of state corporate registration — more commonplace concepts.

PREVIEW of the PAGE, SPECIFICALLY:

After a few days on this page, its scope came to include:

<> More information on the six intervenor organizations in big tobacco litigation (brief),

<>A reminder (I’ve posted on it before) of who and what is the “Center for Court Innovation” in New York, and why did it show up through sole author credit on a 2005 “courts.ca.gov” document on the problem-solving courts — as well as a closer look at that document which in part documents how the State of California consolidated its power over the justice system to the highest levels — then outsourced the consulting and programming on them…

ALSO,

<>Because my springboard was also a tobacco-associated nonprofit based in North Carolina which had developed close connections with a College of Law (now become a School of Law through late 2015/early 2016 merger) in St. Paul, Minnesota, I look at some of the face documents involved and briefly recount why Minnesota was also a key state in “family court matters” and what both movements (marriage/fatherhood promotion + tobacco cessation) have — such as focus on behavioral modification programming thought essential to counter “the bad guys” or bad ideas.

In the course of this review of things Minnesota which through positioning, connections, and a “lay-low” strategy as to their financials, have exerted national influence, two “group” names came up, one of them a non-entity acting like a real one, the other one, though no longer, temporarily was one from about 2005-2014 while (if you check the Internet Archive WayBack machine), acknowledging sponsorship of legislation as far back as 2000.

One of them a nearly invisible (and rarely filing its annual reports) which I’d documented before (and do again) was specifically promoted by the same College of Law from before it even incorporated, in fact pushing for a presumption for joint custody within the state, using its nonprofit identity name, several years before registering with the state.  This situation involves a fathers’ rights group sponsored, hosted, inspired, and even soliciting volunteer legal students’ help, from William Mitchell College of Law as far back as 2003, 2004.  The significance of this one isn’t the entity itself, but who it was backed by and was fronting for:  Center for Parental Responsibility.

Simultaneously, at the same college, the nonprofit now called “Public Health Law Center” which has also uploaded so many tobacco documents, was going through some of its about five name changes within a single decade, and self-described as functioning as “coordinating center” for a Tobacco Center Legal Consortium actually named in an Amicus Curiae Brief on Big Tobacco, despite (as best I can tell) not even having standing — as it’s a non-entity.

The public health law center is at some points mis-representing itself in a way which probably might stand up to a legal challenge (I have no intention, FYI, of launching one) as having “staff.”  This is a common strategy or practice — the “staff” is shared with a related entity; in this case complicated because the “related entity,” the College of Law just recently also underwent its own merger, name-change, website change, adopting the name of a long-standing university which (incidentally? or not so incidentally) has a long-standing United Methodist Conference, i.e., Christian religious, affiliation.

Speaking of other non-entities, well-known in the domestic violence field, for people who follow organizations and USDOJ discretionary grants at least, for this page, I checked back at the “IDVAAC.org” website and found it had been officially closed in December, 2016 — despite never having officially “opened” as a real business entity in the first place. I found its primary (though not only) representative now associated with an conferencing with a nonprofit “Nerlow Afriki” (NY incorporated although the name shows up in other states) at UTexasHealthSciencesCenterSan Antonio (UTHSCSA.org) in an April 2016 conference on cultural sensitivities within the health field; this center is under the UT School of Nursing.

Meanwhile, back at the home page, the only clue as to which nonprofit the IDVAAC leadership was going to continue the work with, UjIma Inc., was named so vaguely (absent any geographic identifiers, or a link, or start date — ANYthing) and in a way in such common use as a generic term that making the connection is guaranteed to be laborious, if even possible with certainty.

At the same time, the residual associate professorship (Oliver Williams, Ph.D.) page’s “Selected Publications” shows nothing after 2003, and very few publications (articles) by the individual among them.

I was curious why not one reference to any work co-authored with Jeffrey L. Edleson of “The Greenbook” co-authorship (with Susan D. Schechter), and who for years was a colleague at UMN School of Social Work (though back now at UC Berkeley as Dean over the School of Social Work here)…including a book published in 2006 by Oxford University Press and showing up all over the internet.  I believe I commented earlier on this blog on how few independently written books, for a longstanding Ph.D. with stable university association and in a unique field and position over the field, were showing up for Oliver Williams. Now all references to any involvement with Edleson (and any reference past 2003) are removed, as of 2017.  That’s just odd.

<>What’s more, after writing most of this page, and as to the theme of “Collaborative Justice” systems, I found a California Collaborative Justice Foundation website, and its relationship to NADP (National Association of Drug Professionals), and another related association.  I don’t see that there will be space to incorporate that information also onto the page and may include some of it here.

Either way, be aware these related nonprofits using the terminology exist. Examples of ways to look up its “stats” on this blog — and remember as a California organization, there’s also the “registry of charitable trusts” (If it’s on there…).  Three types of filings likely to include:  Form 990, Secretary of state business registration, charitable trust (if it qualifies under that) registration with the history of the annual filing RRFs).

This situation, starting with the foundation itself and its failure to post its own financials (an “Annual Report” unaudited doesn’t count) while admitting it’s serving as fiscal agent and encouraging the setup of “Local Fund Advisory Committees” (or similar name) to raise funds definitely needs to be blogged (any takers?).

There’s also a California Association of Collaborative Court Professionals referenced — but the EIN#, Form 990, Charitable Registration, OR if required, independently audited financial report for “CCJCFoundation.org” (which is a wordpress blog promoting the foundation, soliciting donations, advertising matching grants available from “Children and Family Futures” in Riverside, etc.), as mine is, and far less complete, although possibly of about the same age) — not shown.

Below here mostly added Sept. 17, 2017 (post-publication) after a day spent reviewing some of the CCJCFoundation.org documentation.  There are related associations which would shed more light on the overall scene, but here are some of the documents, or links to them…

The date of organization’s founding also isn’t reported clearly under “About” page but is found on its latest Annual Report advertising and promoting program components.

[Click to enlarge the annotated image above.  The first point I’d been making is that it does not show its financials.  Along the margins are other details]

I took a quick look and already found (by the usual route) conflicts of financial receipts reported to (1) the IRS and (2) the California OAG Registry of Charitable Trusts on its 2012 founding documents, vs. to both the IRS and the California OAG Registry of Charitable Trusts, belated filings of RRFs for the same years, which require a simple statement of gross assets and revenues for the year, and Y/N answers to simple questions:  Did you receive any government agency funding (if so, from whom must be identified), did you file independently audited financial statements, etc.).

One source says a three-year total was over $1.1M.  Another source says the three-year total (FY2010, 2011, 2012) says that total was more like $11K only.  The source that declares lesser receipts (the RRFs — I DNK when the Forms 990N were filed; filing a Form 990N precludes revealing that information) had to be specifically requested by the Calif. OAG, or so at least some letters on its website say.  Meanwhile, the original directors include one judge, original donor, another judge, original incorporator and originator a retired Therapeutic Courts administrator and a number of related associations seem involved.  //LGH…

IRS Exempt Org. Select Check for Fiscal Yr (“Tax period”) 2010 (not to mention, on the same search site, for) 2009 and 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 clearly states “Gross receipts not greater than $50,000,” which slick move helps maintain the lower financial profile, and avoids disclosing what a full Form 990 or even Form 990EZ might require to be disclosed to the public, or show up in accidental searches on the organization name, or even associated searches not specific to this entity.

From same IRS Site and EIN# Search results (the other image was simply detail from these results for FY2010) showing that for its eight (so far reported) years of existence, CA Fndtn for Collaborative Justice Courts has filed Forms 990-N declarations that, as best I understand it, that what they told California OAG when registering as a charity there (in late 2012 only) was wrong. Or, vice versa. Pick one — they aren’t simultaneously both true — we had gross revenues OVER $100K EVERY year 2010, 2011 and 2012 — or we had gross receipts UNDER $50K for the same three years. (See colorful Form 1023 images below, found on “Founding Docts” Charitable Details filings…

[2 to 4 annotated images to be inserted here]

The next two links show Charitable Trust Registry Details page (from which I got the founding documents) and for convenience (although it’s available from that link) a link to the Founding Doct’s on it (39pp) where I found the Form 1023 Declarations above:  On the Charitable Details page 2 bottom and (an added) page 3, I also superimposed some images from above to illustrate the conflicting financial reports here:

CCJC (Entity since 2009, Charity registr-Form1023, Dec?2012) Calif OAG RCT Details (2-3pp)

CCJC.org excerpt from p.1 of California OAG Charitable Trust Details (annotated to show the $$ discrepancy from the start with its own reports to the same gov’t agency about its first few years of revenues…)

CA CollaborativeJusticeCtsFndtn EIN#271518040, CaliEntity 3113591 FoundingDox (only stamped RECEIVED July2012 for org first funded, it says, Feb2010) 39pp

Again, IF there were no receipts over $50,000 ($25,000 for earlier years), then no problem for those IRS filings saying so.  The Form 990-N postcard also doesn’t show any “date received” and not being a pdf image of an IRS form, also has not visible date-stamp from a gov’t entity. Were they filed afterwards?

This all should be a separate post.  I noted with interest because the organization had already come to my attention (and may be referenced on the “New Page” I’m introducing, Children and Families First, in Riverside, CA) had a representative on there.  The emphasis here is primarily drug courts.

TELL ME — would you want a foundation supporting ex- or high-risk drug abusers through drug court which can’t or won’t report its funds correctly (to the same state agency it registers under) to be making important decisions about how to handle the same clientele, or rather, help the local advisory boards it’s funding, do so? And which has to be prompted to file timely “RRF” reports which are simple one-page forms for which most of the entity’s answers are going to be “NO” anyhow as it doesn’t take government grants and is declaring income too small to require independently audited financial statements!  (More images below….)

Sep. 2012 Confirmatn of Registration as a Charity in California with request for Missing Info (RRFs for early years). By this time, the group had already been conferencing in Boston, but apparently forgot some basics at home.See “related doc’ts” section of Charitable Details filings for more info…

Separate website shows some of CCJC leader Dianne Marshall’s prior background and other related nonprofits formed, or on which she’s a member.

01 Search for CCJC President turned up EARLY Annual Rpt (Final Draft) WITH EIN# attached…See current website — EIN# NOT attached there…

02 Search for CCJC President turned up EARLY Annual Rpt (Final Draft) WITH … its Significant Others (Judge Lynn Duryee, Peggy Hora)

04 Search for CCJC President turned up EARLY Annual Rpt (Final Draft) WITH EIN# attached…[[“Every jurisdiction in the State of Calif. has a PayPal account on our website…“]] but hadn’t yet even registered with the State OAGs office — that came only in 2012…

 NOTE: This review, including annotations on the above images, is still preliminary.  I studied this on Sat. 9/16/2017 at length and set up a folder (electronic) for further info.  A more complete study would look at the other involved organizations mentioned, and for those “Local advisory boards.”Any reader can page through the website above for summary of the basic activities and purposes of support for clients in these “collaborative justice” courts — support crossing many different kinds of help (incl. dental, housing, transportation, etc.), kinds of help I know people NOT involved in methamphetamine use, gangs, or even non-violent offences for which diversionary justice was sought, without substance abuse problems, mental illnesses, etc., were certainly not offered in order to get through their family court ordeals involving forced regular, often unsupervised contact, with ex-batterers, and dealing with ongoing threats to take their children, harm them or their children, and in general disrupt a normal work life.I don’t oppose people getting help along the way to getting clean.  But I believe it should come from organizations which keep their own noses clean with the reporting requirements, and who are able to tell the truth when reporting donations received.  This sets up a system, it seems to me, making it easier than easy to NOT do the same. Again, anyone feel free to enlighten me on anything I missed about how the situation of reporting in one place, over $1.1M receipts in three years of operations on one form, and on two other forms (RRFs, and the Forms 990-N), same entity, report “no, we only pulled in about $11K total over three years….) while hosting paypal collection sites (before registering as a charity in the state) “in every California Jurisdiction” (and we have 58 counties)…”