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

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Posts Tagged ‘U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work..

Quips, Thinks and Links on the Most Essential Matters… (on a signature block)

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Post published 8/2/2012, became “Sticky” 4/15/2016, slight revs to top part 12/15/2016

From this post:

There has to be a way to check facts and assemble a workable theory that doesn’t entail slavery for most and freedom for some.  That alone is an ECONOMIC matter, a COMMERCE matter, and as such, has to be dealt with — what are these courts really for?  We can say “kids for cash” and “stop child-trafficking” til we are blue in the face, but sooner or later such things as the murder/suicide of Georgia Senator Nancy Schaeffer and her husband — which was most likely NOT anything close to a murder/suicide — have to be dealt with

My Ideal signature block would show my Current Understanding as Quips with Links for “thinks.”

This is how it looked 4-5 years ago for use in a public forum:

  • JURISDICTION sets RIGHTS.
  • USConstitution Title28/IV sets Jurisdiction
  • Citizenship in USA, Inc. = YOU became collateral for U$A Debt 
War=Debt Collection.   pSILENT weapons = biological warfare by few to enslave MOST.
 I blog FAMILY COURT aspects @ LGH ~ FCF~ LACKaWantsTo (& here*)
pm me for outline, links & blogs

In 2016/2017, I probably would change some links, but retain the basic concepts.   (Will be repeated again, below.)
Read the rest of this entry »

America’s Unified Family Courts (UFCs)– forget! due process, this is about “Treating” the Whole Family

with 3 comments

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation + ABA + HHS/DOJ (+Monsanto, CIGNA + Ford) = Unified Family Courts = Treat the Whole Family


This post is three of (my) comments from the “(Kids for Cash)” topic at Scranton Political Times…   Those who teach about “abuse” should be teaching about this — because how these courts were set up DOES rather explain why they have spawned (comparison intentional), literally, protest movements across the country, from their horrid treatment of litigants, particularly ignoring facts, law, and due process in individual cases).  They are horrible wastes of time and mind (a mind is a terrible thing to waste, is it not?) — and exist to dominate and intimidate, literally, the human spirit and eliminate the “unalienable rights” that SOME believe are innate (“unalienable”) to every man. . . . .And now that “every man” is to include more men – -and women . . . . those crying out for “Children’s Rights” don’t even endorse what’s right to start with — the REPUBLIC (representative government under rule of law) of the United States (plural) of America — not the Oligarchy, the Aristocracy, or the THEocracy of the USA!! — and turning the entire country, starting with children, adding youth, and expanding upwards into adults — into a treatable-at-will population — is hardly a Republic!

I was checking NAFCJ.net for a link to “the money trail” and happened across an unexplored link on there to grants by this Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help the ABA create Unified Courts.  These grants spanned the period 1996-1999; my attention was hooked, and this is what developed:

It is worth processing if you are concerned about these topics.  I believe we need to FULLY understand who’s running the Justice and Legal Systems of the country, particularly if we are in the situation of attempting to squeeze some water out of a stone in those halls. . .   . . . .

I AM WRITING as a single woman who could never have anticipated, as a 20, 30, or 40 year old how dangerous this country has become for ethical, moral, working, and competent women who are also mothers, and value that role as they also value pulling their own weight.  Such women are horrors to this system — as they don’t need treatment, nor do their kids — but after a few years in it, ALL will!

So this is, literally, HOW the ABA (incl. AFCC) and others USED the family law system to turn “divorce” into a disease and treat every one for it, as collateral in treating for substance abuse and of course mental health problems.  That divorce is NOT a disease hardly matters in the face of such a policy backed by such power.

PART I (first comment on the topic from Scranton PT):

Since the idea sucks,
WHOSE IDEA WAS “UNIFIED FAMILY COURTS,”

ANYHOW, and WHY?

 

Hey, remember “unified family courts” and “drug courts” (I believe there have been some complaint about Lackawanna County’s right?) and so forth? – – – I just found an old article detailing how the ABA and specific funders were pushing “treating the whole family” and “changing the justice systems” to address substance abuse by youth. An unexplored link over at NAFCJ.net, and the timing of 1996 with welfare reform.

The goal, and the whole point, was to change the justice system — from the outside, not the inside.  Foundations pushing a concept and working through the ABA & Judges, plus money didn’t hurt either.  HHS/ACF happened to agree — so once that door was open (that it’s OK to revise the courts based on somebody in power’s got a bright idea) — it stayed open.

This is a  link from the ROBERT WOOD FOUNDATION grants page.  They also helped AFCC, I believe:

Liz Richards (NAFCJ.net) had linked to it long ago from:

which leads to:
Grants 

$$$
How our money is misused to discriminate against women and children
http://www.statejustice.org/grantinfo/chifam.htm [broken link]
http://www.rwjf.org/reports/grr/029319s.htm [UFC link]

And here we can read:

Unified Family Courts: Treating the Whole Family, Not Just the Young Drug Offender

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is powerful one, focused exclusively on health fields (and the largest philanthropy with this focus; been doing this for 40 years; influences medical education field, etc.)and Unified Family Courts (for substance abuse treatment) were one of their projects

SUMMARY

From November 1996 through June 1999, the American Bar Association (ABA) developed six Unified Family Court (UFC) systems in three U.S. states and one territory and created a network of national groups to help educate the public about Unified Family Courts.

UFCs combine the functions of family and juvenile courts to provide a comprehensive approach to treating and educating young drug offenders and their families. This approach recognizes that substance abuse results from a combination of problems related to health, family structure, economics and community support. UFCs offer an effective alternative to a justice system that frequently treats substance abuse solely as a legal problem.

Key Results

  • See Grant Detail & Contact Information   Notice the Baltimore Connection (I have — it’s an AFCC stronghold) — this group helped Chester Harhut & Lackawanna County set up ITS “UFC”, remember?
  • In Baltimore, Md., a pilot UFC was established in September 1998. The state legislature approved $1 million for the Baltimore pilot UFC project and $4 million to create Family Divisions in four other judicial districts. For each case, judges can order social services, including substance abuse and mental health counseling, and diversion programs. The Baltimore Family Court has also developed an assessment/evaluation procedure that the project director believes provides a replicable model for evaluation at other UFC sites.

I blogged this (with some sarcasm) in March 2012:

  • Marylands Family Court Expansion, AFCC Model, takes Unifying Symbols to a New Level: Paper, Cotton, Leather, Fruit, Wood, Iron . . .”First of all, they are about as unbelievingly condescending and patronizing (move over, let us experts handle your family give us your kid, etc.) as it is possible for any human relationship to be, apart from some truly unhealthy (i.e., violent/abusive) ones.  They deal in force, and subterfuge when it comes to proliferating the program, and like any good, truly disaster capitalism enterprise, they deal with distressed populations, exploit them, and call that service.”  [My blog connects Barbara Babb of Baltimore to Lackawanna County pilot program in UFC]

After the Grant
The ABA continues to work with the six sites and has provided technical assistance to eight other states. It also is involved in a project funded by the Scripps-Howard Foundation to examine literacy as a way to address substance abuse in four family courts.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) launched a national program, called Reclaiming Futures: Communities Helping Teens Overcome Drugs, Alcohol & Crime®. It is building community solutions to substance abuse and delinquency by developing the systems infrastructure necessary to deliver comprehensive care within the juvenile justice system. See the program’s Web site for more information. . . .Funding

RWJF provided a $481,605 grant to the ABA for its work on UCF systems..(they mean “UFC — Unified Family Courts”)

In 1994, ABA adopted a resolution calling for the promotion and implementation of UFC systems to make the courts more responsive to family problems. {{??}} By 1996, six states had established versions of UFCs statewide, and four states had some UFCs operating on the county level.

[That, friends, is how the ABA operates…] [NOW for the FUNDING]:

Other Funding The ABA solicited and obtained additional project funding from the private sector and government, including:

  • the US Department of Justice ($100,000),
  • the ABA’s Standing Committee on Substance Abuse ($90,000),
  • CIGNA Corporation ($30,000),**
  • Monsanto ($10,000),** and
  • Ford Motor Company ($5,000).  [Ford is into most govermental things, and in the 1970s had helped from MDRC, which runs demonstration programs onw elfare and the courts, etc.]]

Those names should ring a few bells.  Look at some of them!

* *”Grrreat” — Monsanto is “only” the food giant that’s trying to put non-GMO and organic farmers out of business and basically co-opt the US Food supply. (Ya gotta read this one) Monsanto, Wikipedia:

… multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation. It is the world’s leading producer of the herbicide glyphosate, marketed in the Roundup brand, and in other brands. Monsanto is also the second largest producer of genetically engineered (GE) seed; it provides the technology in 49% of the genetically engineered seeds used in the US market.”. . .Monsanto’s development and marketing of genetically engineered seed and bovine growth hormone, as well as its aggressive litigation, political lobbying practices, seed commercialization practices and “strong-arming” of the seed industry[4

In 2009 Monsanto came under scrutiny from the U.S. Justice Department, which began investigating whether the company’s activities in the soybean markets were breaking anti-trust rules.[4][5]


What better corporation to contribute to an ANTI-Drug Abuse program which creates  genetically modified seeds, bovine growth hormone, and strong arm tactics + lobbying to maintain it — and financial clout to help create an alternate justice system (treatment versus accountability….)!!

Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear (Vanity Fair Article):

Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops; infiltrate community meetings; and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Farmers call them the seed police and use words such as Gestapo and Mafia to describe their tactics.

[Starting to sound like the Unified Family Court “treatment Gestapo police” now in place?  Birds of a feather..]

in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, turned seeds into widgets, laying the groundwork for a handful of corporations to begin taking control of the worlds food supply . . .Monsanto patents SEEDS; farmers who use theirs sign an agreement to NOT save seeds, they are suing farmers into whose fields Monsanto seeds may, for example, drift (i.e., by wind).

With an agenda like this, it’s understandable why Monsanto may want a role in dismantling the US legal system!   !!!  (Other Monsanto Gov’t ties)  http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/index.cfm

Millions Against Monsanto

CIGNA’s quite a player also: 

(from 1982 merger of Connecticut General Life — dating to 1865! and INA (Insurance Company of NA)  Before selling its international property and casualty business to the Bermuda-based ACE Insurance company in the late 1990s, CIGNA was among the companies with the largest international network in the league of Allianz, AIG and Zurich.  . . .CIGNA now operates in 25 countries, has in excess of 42,000 employees and manages around US$110 billion in assets . . .In October 2011, CIGNA has agreed to buy HealthSpring Inc. for $3.8 billion to jump-start its business selling Medicare plans from 46,000 Medicare Advantage members to almost 400,000 Medicare Advantage members. The payment would come from issue new equity to cover about 20 percent of the value, with the rest funded by additional cash and debt.

Gee,  I “can’t imagine” why — right around the time of “block grants to the states” welfare reform — CIGNA, being a global “health service” company might want to help the ABA turn large parts of the US Justice system into a treatment-philosophy-based system, including treat the whole family for one member’s substance abuse!

So, here’s the ABA creating all these Unified Family Courts  (hint:  The ABA membership includes subset no doubt of AFCC membership, who also are into unified courts = more business for the mental health membership..)

“Other in-kind support was provided by the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) of the federal Department of HHS, the Administrative Office of the Courts in Maryland (AOC), and ABA volunteers.  “

In short — have to watch out for these outfits… (that’s the UBaltimore one — see blog post)

Contact CFCC

Here’s how the ABA overcame opposition to UFC in Washington DC:

In Washington, D.C., the ABA worked on a strategy to establish a UFC. Judicial opposition to family court reform, based chiefly on economic concerns, blocked significant progress toward the UFC model. The ABA met with the Chief Judge, the primary opponent, and worked with UFC proponents in the District. Family and Child Services, a branch of the District of Columbia’s Child Protection Agency, and an ad hoc group of representatives from the judicial leadership and social service providers, have assumed the lead in efforts to explore the feasibility of a UFC approach in the District.

Does this part of the ABA seem like it’s going to take “No thanks!” as an answer?

Publicizing by ABA:

The ABA developed a network of national organizations to support UFCs. The American Judges Association, the Conference of Chief Justices, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, {{OBVIOUSLY this group would be in favor of UFC’s – gets its membership more customers!!}} the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, [NCJFCJ] and Join Together (a national organization created by RWJF that provides technical assistance and information** to communities on issues involving substance abuse and gun violence) distributed information and/or collaborated with the ABA on UFC programs

– – – – -**The phrase “technical assistance and information” ANYwhere should be better read “indoctrination — do it OUR way; but if anyone asks, we’re just “helping” (and not responsible if it backfires).- – – – – – –

Apparently in 2006, “Join Together” was phased out by RWJF to be replaced by a “VULNERABLE POPULATIONS” project:

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), which for two decades has been the most generous and visible private funder of addiction treatment and prevention programs in the U.S., has announced that it will no longer have a separate program area for funding addiction-related programs.

“Instead, any new grantmaking related to addiction will take place under the foundation’s Vulnerable Populations portfolio, said foundation president and CEO Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., in a recent letter to RWJF grantees. Often the neediest populations such as the chronically homeless, new immigrants, victims of domestic abuse** are faced with multiple health and social issues, including addiction, that must be addressed in an integrated way for these individuals to succeed. The Vulnerable Populations grantmaking effort focuses mainly on these populations.

**the substance abuse is often related to other kinds of abuse, which is already known (acestudy.org) from other longitudinal studies.  Perhaps if someone could focus on stopping the INJUSTiCE (including violence towards family members) instead of constantly TREATING it (both victm and perp as if both were responsible) there’d be less substance abuse!  (who knows?)

So now they’re going for “supportive housing” to keep kids out of the foster care system.  Guess who’s helping with THAT project?

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has partnered with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and three private foundations to jointly fund a $35 million initiative to further test how supportive housing can help stabilize highly vulnerable families and keep children out of the foster care system. . . .Collaborating foundations include the Annie E. Casey FoundationCasey Family Programs, and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation
This groundbreaking initiative is based on a successful pilot effort in New York City, known as Keeping Families Together (KFT) that took place between October 2007 and July 2009

This is actually an upcoming grant opportunity, $5 million available, per HHS. It’s under CAPTA (child abuse prevention).

What’s Wrong with this Picture? (coming….)

Interesting:  AFCC cite to the foundation:  see note at bottom of the page:  http://afcc.crinfo.org/action/search-profile.jsp?key=14482&type=web

This beta-test, demonstration gateway has been developed to demonstrate the structure of the Conflict Research Consortium’s joint gateway program to the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts.

This test site has not, in any way, been approved by the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts.

Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, Co-Directors and Editors
c/o Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado
Campus Box 580, Boulder, CO 80309
Phone: (303) 492-1635; Contac

— Edited by Outlaw_Wild_DoubleBill-KickbackCourts on Wednesday 4th of July 2012 11:06:09 PM on Wednesday 4th of July 2012 11:23:37 PM


PARTS II & III:

The powers that be (like ABA, foundations, HHS, etc.) determined among themselves that treatment is better than justice.  That some of them happened be in the treatment business must just be coincidence.

From November 1996 through June 1999, the American Bar Association (ABA) developed six Unified Family Court (UFC) systems in three U.S. states and one territory and created a network of national groups to help educate the public about Unified Family CourtsUFCs offer an effective alternative to a justice system that frequently treats substance abuse solely as a legal problem

Notice:  justice system — or treatment system.  Which would you rather have when walking into a courtroom?  Would you like to know which one you’re up for when it says “court” on the outside?

So, here comes that Robt Wood Johnson Foundation:

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) launched a national program, called Reclaiming Futures: Communities Helping Teens Overcome Drugs, Alcohol & Crime®.

… USPTO and trademarking social service reform (see that “®”?)

  • Search  . .Reclaiming Futures: Communities Helping Teens Overcome Drugs, Alcohol & Crime and get:

Sure ‘nuf that’s a robert wood johnson trademark:

Serial Number Reg. Number Word Mark Check Status Live/Dead
1 76117473 2592702 RECLAIMING FUTURES TARR LIVE
2 75627894 2540943 PROTECTING OUR FUTURE BY RECLAIMING OUR PAST TARR LIVE

They trademarked the act of giving grants!

IC 036. US 100 101 102. G & S: Charitable services, namely, providing grants to programs to combat substance abuse and delinquency. FIRST USE: 2001/01/25. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20010125

{interesting, executive order GWBush establishing faith-based office was 2001/01/29…}{Filed for opposition: August 24, 2000}

Owner (REGISTRANT) Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The NON-PROFIT CORPORATION NEW JERSEY Route One & College Road East P.O. Box 2316 Princeton NEW JERSEY 085432316
Attorney of Record Richard C. Woodbridge

Reclaiming Futures logo

(the logo is also a hyperlink)

In 2001, with a $21 million investment from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 10 founding communities located throughout the United States began reinventing the way police, courts, detention facilities, treatment providers, and the community work together to meet this urgent need

Amazing what a $21 million investment can do . . ..

“Reclaiming Futures has been evaluated by The Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., in collaboration with the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago.”  (RWJF helped pay for the evaluation also)
Now there are six partners, including from OJJDP, HHS (SAMSHA), another foundation, Portland State, and a research institute at Portland state.

“Re-engineer the justice system in your state” (how-to manual):
Bring Reclaiming Futures to Your State or Tribal Lands »
Re-engineer the juvenile justice system in your state or region to avoid unnecessary costs and cut recidivism. Here’s how to get started.

RWJF + ABA = UFCs + Drug Courts (cont’d.)

For the Record, American Bar Association is listed at HHS as “Private Profit (large) Business.”  

HHS has donated over $20.6 million of grants to the ABA per TAGGS.hhs.gov. So taxpayers are supporting it, too, even if they’re not engaged in litigation.

ABA activism (from site below about Unified Family Courts):

From 1992 to 1996, RWJF funded the ABA Standing Committee on Substance Abuse’s Community Anti-Drug Coalition Initiative to mobilize lawyers, judges, and justice system leaders to help create new justice systems and structures to solve the substance abuse problem (see Grant Results [] on ID#s 019838 and 023195).

The ABA was also instrumental in persuading legal community leaders to support drug courts for juveniles, which link juvenile justice and community treatment resources to juvenile drug offenders and their legal caretakers.

OK, get JUVENILES into treatment, what next?

The ABA then helped cities nationwide set up drug courts for adultoffenders, which offer defendants who have been charged with a drug offense (typically first-time, non-violent offenders) court supervised substance abuse treatment in lieu of incarceration. Drug courts can motivate drug users to enter rehabilitation programs and reestablish productive lifestyles. These courts have dramatically decreased recidivism rates and drug use among participants.  [have they?]

UFC’s complement the work of the drug courts. UFCs combine the functions of family courts (which handle family-related legal issues) and juvenile courts (which handle [criminal or status offence, they should’ve said] cases in which minors are involved) into one entity and provide a comprehensive approach to helping “families in crisis. UFCs incorporate treatment for young substance abuse offenders into the wide range of cases heard in civil court involving family matters.

– – – – -OK, what’s that mean?

– – – – Basically, where family court would’ve been perhaps about custody and divorce primarily, UFC’s tempt the judges to order more services, and treat the entire family — although the case may be as simple as a custody/visitation plan or a divorce, NEITHER of which are criminal matters.  Also omitted — juvenile courts are not just for people of a certain age — they are for juveniles who’ve caused (or allegedly caused) some problems, committing a legitimate crime (breaking and entering, robbery, rape/sexual assault, etc.) OR “status offence,” i.e. violated some rules that wouldn’t apply to adults, like a curfew, or attendance at school (truancy violations).

Changed the entire climate, definitely affecting people with straightforward business in the FAMILY court who may not be sick or criminal.  This was less for the families than for the court’s convenience, and for its liaisons with treatment-providing organizations.

You can look up ABA HHS grants around this time and see:

#90CW1087 
Award Title: CHILD WELFARE RESEARCH AND DEMONSTRATIONS 
OPDIV: ADMINISTRATION FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES (ACF)
Organization: CHILDREN’S BUREAU (CB)
Award Class: DISCRETIONARY
FY Recipient City State CFDA Budget Year of Support Award Code Agency Action Issue Date Amount This Action
1998 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 5 0 ACF 09-17-1998 $ 700,000 
1998 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 4 1 ACF 09-30-1997 $ 80,000 
1998 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 4 2 ACF 04-15-1998 $ 26,004 
1998 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 4 3 ACF 06-24-1998 $ 21,276 
Fiscal Year 1998 Total: $ 827,280
FY Recipient City State CFDA Budget Year of Support Award Code Agency Action Issue Date Amount This Action
1997 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 4 0 ACF 09-10-1997 $ 450,000 
1997 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 3 1 ACF 12-19-1996 $ 0 
1997 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 3 2 ACF 03-29-1997 $ 0 
1997 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 3 3 ACF 08-20-1997 $ 3,369 
Fiscal Year 1997 Total: $ 453,369
FY Recipient City State CFDA Budget Year of Support Award Code Agency Action Issue Date Amount This Action
1996 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 03 000 ACF 09-25-1996 $ 400,000 
1996 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 03 001 ACF 12-19-1996 $ 0 
1996 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 03 002 ACF 03-29-1997 $ 0 
Fiscal Year 1996 Total: $ 400,000
FY Recipient City State CFDA Budget Yr of Support Award Code Agency ActionIssue Date Amount This Action
1995 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 02 000 ACF 09-29-1995 $ 400,000 
1995 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 02 001 ACF 09-29-1995 $ 38,947 
1995 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 02 002 ACF 09-30-1995 $ 3,310 
1995 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 02 003 ACF 01-22-1996 $ 0 
1995 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  WASHINGTON DC 93608 02 004 ACF 07-15-1996 $ 55,125 
Fiscal Year 1995 Total: $ 497,382
Total of all award actions: $ 2,178,031

AND:

Award Number: MCU11A301
Award Title: PARTNERS IN PGRM PLANNING FOR ADOLESCENT HEALTH 
OPDIV: HEALTH RESOURCES AND SERVICES ADMINISTRATION (HRSA)
Organization: MATERNAL CHILD HEALTH / SYSTEMS EDUCATION AND SCIENCE (MCHB)
Award Class: COOPERATIVE AGREEMENT

Showing: 1 – 2 of 2 Award Actions

FY Recipient City State CFDA Budget Year of Support Award Code Agency Action Issue Date Amount This Action
1997 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION  CHICAGO IL 93110 02 000 HRSA 09-02-1997 $ 100,000 
Fiscal Year 1997 Total: $ 100,000
Fiscal Year 1996 Total: $ 100,000
Total of all award actions: $ 200,000

Showing: 1 – 2 of 2 Award Actions

NON-COMPETING CONTINUATN
KATHI GRASSO 7 $ 100,000

So, ABA is a partner in “HEALTH SERVICES.”  Principal Investigator “Kathi Grasso”:

Ms. Grasso worked for the ABA Center for Children and the Law, OJJDP atsome point and is a member of NACC based in WDC.   She has a degree from Catholic University.  .She’s very active around the country and publishing on these matters:

  • (footnote to an NACC publication) A Judges Guide to Improving Legal Representation of Children, edited by Kathi Grasso, ABA Center on Children and the Law, © ABA May 1998.
  • Kathi Grasso  [From OJJDP “staff” list]
    Senior Juvenile Justice Policy and Legal Advisor
    202-xxx-xxxx
    kathi.grasso@usdoj.gov
First she worked for the (activist) ABA center for children, then she moved over to OJJDP which is a large agency which allocates GRANTS in Judicial Programs; as there she also functioned (I see) as OJJDP Liaison to other ABA commissions on Youth At Risk (etc.) causes.
(presented at some workshop on representing Indigents, in Texas)

Video 2: Keynote: Effectuating Reform in Juvenile Justice
Presenters: Kathi Grasso, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention with the U.S. Department of Justice
Link to handout and Juvenile Ten Core Principles

_ _ _ _ _
Curious about who was over the “Child Welfare Research and Demo” Grant (above), I looked — it’s a Mark Hardin, who retired in 2009 after 30 years of this type of advocacy:
Award Number Budg Yr Action Issue Date CFDA Principal Investigator Sum of Actions
90CW1087 02 09/29/1995 93608 MARK HARDIN $ 438,947
90CW1087 02 09/30/1995 93608 $ 3,310
90CW1087 02 01/22/1996 93608 $ 0
90CW1087 02 07/15/1996 93608 $ 55,125
90CW1087 03 09/25/1996 93608 $ 400,000
03 12/19/1996 93608 $ 0
03 03/29/1997 93608 $ 0
3 12/19/1996 93608 $ 0
3 03/29/1997 93608 $ 0
90CW1087 3 08/20/1997 93608 $ 3,369
90CW1087 4 09/10/1997 93608 $ 450,000
90CW1087 4 09/30/1997 93608  (etc.) $ 80,000
90CW1087 4 04/15/1998 93608 $ 26,004
90CW1087 4 06/24/1998 93608 $ 21,276
4 03/24/1999 93608 $ 0
4 04/26/1999 93608 $ 0
90CW1087 5 09/17/1998 93608 MARK HARDIN $ 700,000
5 04/26/1999 93608 MARK HARDIN $ 0
PROFILE from ABA shows:

Mark Hardin, National Child Welfare Law Authority, Retires

WASHINGTON, D.C., Oct. 13, 2009 — The American Bar Association is announcing the retirement of Mark Hardin, director of child welfare at the ABA Center on Children and the Law and an Oregon attorney.  A legal pioneer in the field of foster care and the role of the courts in aiding abused and neglected children and their families, Hardin spent 35 years utilizing his legal skills and knowledge to improve the plight of children removed from their homes due to child maltreatment.

Beginning as a legal aid lawyer in Portland, Ore., Hardin handled family, juvenile and welfare cases, giving him practical insight into the lives of vulnerable children and families.  In the late 70’s, during two years at Portland State University, Hardin forged development of the law on “permanency planning” for abused and neglected children and wrote several early publications helping social workers and policy analysts understand the legal aspects of a child’s placement in foster care.  He was among the country’s first trainers of lawyers and child welfare agency staff, educating them in their legal responsibilities relative to children removed from their homes due to abuse or neglect.

Hardin joined the Center on Children and the Law in 1980 where, according to ABA President Carolyn B. Lamm, he became “the country’s foremost legal scholar on foster care legal and judicial reforms.”

Hardin’s experience includes having directed the ABA’s National Child Welfare Resource Center on Legal and Judicial Issues, a program of the Children’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

  • Wait a minute.  is this “child welfare resource center on legal and judicial issues” something belonging to the ABA (a large, private, FOR-PROFIT BUSINESS) or the HHS (a dept. of the US Federal government, Executive Branch, of, by and for the people?  How can it be an ABA thing AND a program of the Children’s Bureau?  Conflict of interest, much?

. . .With nearly 400,000 members, the American Bar Association is the largest voluntary professional membership organization in the world. As the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA works to improve the administration of justice, promotes programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accredits law schools, provides continuing legal education, and works to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law.”

     [Was that supposed to be a JOKE?  We are having frequent issues with lawyers BREAKING the law!]

AN AWARD NAMED AFTER MARK HARDIN:

First Annual

Mark Hardin Award for Child Welfare Legal Scholarship and Systems Change

The Mark Hardin Award for Child Welfare Legal Scholarship and Systems Change, created by the ABA Center on Children and the Law in 2011 with approval from the ABA Board of Governors, honors the work of Mark Hardin. Before his retirement, Mark served for almost 30 years on the staff of the ABA Center on Children and the Law as director of child welfare. Mark has long been recognized by those who work in this area of law as an early innovator in the child welfare legal field. He is recipient of the “Adoption Excellence Award” bestowed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; an award for “extraordinary contributions to children” from the administrators of the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children; the prestigious “Outstanding Legal Advocacy Award” from the National Association of Counsel for Children; and an award for interdisciplinary collaboration between law and social work.

This is understandable, given common interests in these goups

ANYHOW, now there is a MARK HARDIN AWARD, and the FIRST (2012) recipient of it is the Director of CALIFORNIA’s “AOC” “Center for Families & Children in the Courts,” — which is part of the Judicial Council — DIANE NUNN.


May 23, 2012AOC Director Receives ABA award for Work on Behalf of Families and ChildrenRecipient of ABA’s First Mark Hardin Award . .SAN FRANCISCO—Diane Nunn, Division Director of the Center for Families, Children & the Courts,Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), is the recipient of the First Annual Mark Hardin Award for Child Welfare Scholarship and Systems Change

DIANE NUNN (along with “Depner” along with Isolini Ricci) is AFCC — and the AOC in California — this year, last year, and in recent years — has been split with scandal over fiscal/financial irresponsibility, a bloated bureaucracy, overbilling and fraud in the creation of a new, huge statewide computer system (CCMS) and to my recall, several of its leadership suddenly stepped down:  Ron Overholt (administrator), his replacement, and another person — after a whistleblower suit.  (see this topic at “courthousenews.com” [back issues]).
This AOC/CFCC also administers and distributes the federal grants to nonprofits around the state for the “treatment programs” parents and kids are ordered into, as well as the Access/Visitation Grants.  i can see why a systems change award might go to one of their own!
” In 2000 she became the director of the Judicial Council’s AOC/Center for Families, Children & the Courts (CFCC), the first entity devoted exclusively to family and children’s issues in a statewide administrative office of the courts. As Division Director, Nunn leads a nationally-recognized team that provides an integrated, multidisciplinary approach to serving the state’s family and juvenile courts. ”
…  {{“multidisciplinary” is code word referring to AFCC many times.  It’s their hallmark.  Why just have the rule of law when you could have social workers and psychologists as well?}}
“Describing the Award & Mr. Hardin:   He is recipient of the “Adoption Excellence Award” bestowed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; an award for “extraordinary contributions to children” from the administrators of the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children; the prestigious “Outstanding Legal Advocacy Award” from the National Association of Counsel for Children; and an award for interdisciplinary collaboration between law and social work.”
ABA is a private, for-profit business, supported by business(es) in the form of foundation grants, and with a little too close for comfort cooperation with HHS and the Adoption Incentives, plus the theme of we, the elite, know better how to rule society, so let’s change a few laws, and court practices!  After all, who’s going to complain — the indigent?

Children’s Institute, Project Fatherhood(tm), and Fatherhood Nonprofits that make you go “Huh?”

leave a comment »

(with respect to the late Dr. Hershel K. Swinger, I cannot respect using TANF and other funds to proselytize, and then cheating the California out of transparency and accountability).

(And I SURE as heck don’t respect anyone using the US Government to try to evangelize ANYone!)

This is a SHAMELESS transmigration from a long (project) I’ve been posting over at Scranton Political Times Kids for Cash thread.  ALthough it’s actually in response to Joe Pilchesky having posted a SAVING DAMON case (from Southern Cal / San Diego area, and with full panoply of Protective Mothers Rhetoric and groups) on there.  Totally out of character for him, but I then decided to look closer at the situation and open my big mouth.

(Better understood in the larger context) I feel sorry for mothers who are (like I was) led around by the nose to become activist before they activate common sense lookups of who they’re dealing with — both as advocates and as adversaries in the court system.  For example — get this — Cindy Dumas had somehow a declaration (on her behalf) on “William Eddy” complaint form, but signed by Erik Fox, Ph.D. (who runs sexual abuser treatment programs all over, and actually recommended “abuse inoculation” treatment for Damon, Mom & Dad.  I gather that hasn’t happened yet. [The Rest of This Comment on nonreporting [to California] $40million-budgetChildren’s Institute in Los Angeles, incl. its “Project Fatherhood(sm)”]: I’m trying to find out exactly what it is!

Outlaw_Wild_DoubleBill-KickbackCourts wrote:


Things that make you go “Huh?” In that chart below (TAGGS list of “fatherhood” grantees — at least a few of them) notice the one “Children’s Institute, Inc.” of Los Angeles?  Grant (for 2010) two different grants — $1,000,000 + $500,000 ???  That’s a hefty amount, right? I looked at this one before, and the pattern is just TO O o o o…. common: One has to usually check at least 3 to 4 sources AFTER seeing the HHS grant:

1. State Incorporation record (SOS),

2. State Charitable Record (if they’re a nonprofit or taking donations),

3. Sample check some IRS forms (I use “Foundationfinder” or “Nccsdataweb.urban.org”) — and actually look at a tax form (it gets easier with practice) . . . . and then

4.  what does their website say as well? 

Here we go: 1. California Corporation (Sec of State) registration — there are TWO with the exact same street address (which doesn’t match address on HHS grantee, either).

C3365104 03/30/2011 ACTIVE CHILDREN’S INSTITUTE OF LOS ANGELES MARY EMMONS
C0085636 12/13/1917 ACTIVE CHILDREN’S INSTITUTE, INC. MARK ENGEL
For Fiscal 2010 (year cited on Saving Damon fatherhood funds) they got: (“budget yr” = yr of that particular program:  1,2,3 etc.):

Progr Office Award Number Award Title Bud-get Year Action Issue Date CFDA # CFDA Name Award Action Type Principal Investigator Sum of Actions
CB  90CB0159 ABANDONED INFANT ASSISTANCE  05/03/2010  93551  Abandoned Infants  EXTENSION WITH OR WITHOUT FUNDS  MR LUKAS JAEGGI  $ 0 
CB  90CB0159 ABANDONED INFANT ASSISTANCE  09/13/2010  93551  Abandoned Infants  NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION  MR LUKAS JAEGGI  $ 475,000 
CMHS  SM058241 CENTRAL LOS ANGELES CHILD TRAUMA COLLABORATIVE  02  10/21/2009  93243  Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services: Projects of Regional and National Significance  ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPLEMENT ( + OR – ) (DISCRETIONARY OR BLOCK AWARDS)  LESLIE A ROSS  $ 0 
CMHS  SM058241 CENTRAL LOS ANGELES CHILD TRAUMA COLLABORATIVE  04  06/25/2010  93243  Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services: Projects of Regional and National Significance  NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION  LESLIE A ROSS  $ 400,000 
HSB  09CH9080 EARLY HEAD START  06/04/2010  93600  Head Start  ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPLEMENT ( + OR – ) (DISCRETIONARY OR BLOCK AWARDS)  KATY KELLEY  $ 2,261 
HSB  09CH9080 EARLY HEAD START  07/26/2010  93600  Head Start  NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION  KATY KELLEY  $ 1,590,930 
HSB  09SA9080 EARLY HEAD START ARRA EXPANSION  11/18/2009  93709  ARRA – Early Head Start  NEW  KATY KELLEY  $ 1,098,417 
HSB  09SA9080 EARLY HEAD START ARRA EXPANSION  08/31/2010  93709  ARRA – Early Head Start  NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION  KATY KELLEY  $ 1,403,640 
HSB  09YC0463 EARLY HEAD START  03/26/2010  93600  Head Start  OTHER REVISION  MANUEL CASTELLANOS, JR.  $- 9,269 
OFA  90FR0076 PROMOTING RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD  09/24/2010  93086  Healthy marriage Promotion and Responsible Fatherhood Grants  NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION  HERSHEL SWINGER  $ 500,000 
OFA  90FR0088 PROMOTING RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD, COMMUNITY ACCESS PROGRAM  09/27/2010  93086  Healthy marriage Promotion and Responsible Fatherhood Grants  NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION  HERSHEL SWINGER  $ 1,000,000 

(per IRS form) 2009 salaries of key officers (5 highest) were plenty high: Mary Emmons (see corp. registration) — $310K; Nena Revoyr, $136K, Jeff Catania, $161K, Hershel Swinger, $167K, Kendis Heffley, $131K. (plus retirement & other income from this or related orgs.)). These are the US Trademarks still “LIVE” with the word “Fatherhood” in them.  I didn’t find the one mentioned in the Children’s Institute  descriptions, “Project Fatherhood” But it’s interesting one of them is from a PA corporation.  You can see the details, including first use, whose idea it was and see that someone showed real forethought.  Keeping in mind that welfare reform and the loosening up of federal aid to states for diversions into fatherhood & marriage promotion, both was anticipated — and happened in 1996.

Serial Number Reg. Number Word Mark Check Status Live/Dead
1 77602995 3738768 FATHERHOOD IS SACRED TARR LIVE
2 77013538 3474511 NATIONAL FATHERHOOD INITIATIVE TARR LIVE
3 75442962 2339732 IN SEARCH OF FATHERHOOD TARR LIVE

Quite a few, eh? PROJECT FATHERHOOD // Dr. HERSHEL K. SWINGER was started in 1996:

July 8, 2011

Strengthening relationships between fathers and their at-risk children

Children’s Institute Hosts 4th Annual Fatherhood Solution Conference 

(very nice youtube tribute to him at the link…)

“Due to the recent passing of Dr. Hershel K. Swinger, CII Senior Vice President and Founder of Project Fatherhood, the morning plenary was a special tribute to his life’s work and accomplishments. Project Fatherhood is a nationally-recognized program for disadvantaged fathers to become more engaged and effective parents. 

“Speakers included Dr. Ken Canfield, president and founder of the<> National Center for Fathering; <> Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis, Director of Pepperdine University’s Culture and Trauma Research Lab, an expert on partner and child abuse and societal trauma due to racism, sexism and poverty; and <> Charles Lee-Johnson, MSWCEO of the National Family Life and Education Center,…”

In reverse order:

  • Charles-Lee Johnson’s Nonprofit, that his father incorporated in 1993:

 

Entity Number Date Filed Status Entity Name Agent for Service of Process
C1724782 05/07/1993 ACTIVE THE NATIONAL FAMILY LIFE & EDUCATION CENTER JOYCE REECE-KITCHEN

EIN# 95-4423621 ; their charity is marked “CURRENT” however they haven’t filed an IRS with the state since 2007, or an RRF (state report) since 2008.  Received a Deliquency warning 6/5/2008:

WARNING OF IMPENDING TAX ASSESSMENT FOR WHICH YOU MAY BE PERSONALLY LIABLE ..The Attorney General has not received your organization’s annual report(s) as follows:…IRS Form 990, 990-PF, or 990-EZ report(s) for the year(s) ending: 06/30/03, 06/30/04, 06/30/06, and 06/30/07

###

[spoiler]

Fiscal Begin: 01-JUL-09
Fiscal End: 30-JUN-10
Total Assets: $113,732.00
Gross Annual Revenue: $312,375.00
RRF Received: 02-AUG-11
Returned Date:
990 Attached: Y
Status: Accepted
Related Documents
0034C251 Delinquency Letter
0034C25A Founding Documents
0034C25B RRF-1 2008
0034C25C RRF-1 2007
0034C25E IRS Form 990 2007

IRS inconsistent between two sites (State AG vs 990finder).  One year, the top 3 officers are receivng $65,73 & 95K; (is Joyce Johnson his wife?) another year, nothing, or something.  The 2006 tax return at 990finder was stamped received in 2011; etc. etc.  Very inconsistent.  The “2009” filing below is an empty form, basically… They have no direct HHS grants but some of the RRF forms show they did receive two or three sources of gov’t support, inl. DCFS (note:  they are dealing with foster care youth sometimes).  Assets — two chevy vans; — ??

National Family Life and Education Center CA 2009 $0 990R 1 95-4423621
National Family Life and Education Center CA 2010 $113,732 990 19 95-4423621
National Family Life and Education Center CA 2009 $58,470 990 31 95-4423621
National Family Life and Education Center CA 2008 $48,791 990 25 95-4423621
National Family Life and Education Center CA 2007 $136,014 990 24 95-4423621
National Family Life and Education Center CA 2006 $265,681 990 22 95-4423621

[/spoiler]

  • the “Dr.” in “Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis” is licensed clinical psychologist:  Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Pepperdine (in Malibu, CA — this university puts out a lot of people who work in the courts also):

http://www.drthema.com/biography/

Dr. Bryant-Davis received her doctorate from Duke University in Clinical Psychology with a focus on the cultural context of trauma recovery, as well as the intersection of gender and racial identity. She completed her post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical Center’s Victims of Violence Program. From 2001-2004, she served as Senior Staff Psychologist and Coordinator of the Princeton University SHARE Program. Dr. Bryant-Davis is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Pepperdine University where she teaches on the topics of indivdiual and family development as well as intimate partner violence. She is a contributing author in the books The Psychology of Racism, The Complete Guide to Mental Health for Women, and Featuring Females: Feminist Analyses of the Media.

Dr. Bryant-Davis served for three years as an American Psychological Association representative to the United Nations where she advocated for mental health and human rights globally

MINISTRY:

Apparently also preaches at her brother’s Mega-Church also:

Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis is a licensed preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She preached her initial sermon at Empowerment Temple AME Church where the pastor is Rev. Jamal Harrison-Bryant.:

Wikipedia is a little less than neutral (top of page notes), however, after noting that he is a PK (Both Mom & Dad in Baltimore’s AME).  The reference page to where he got his MDiV has been removed as “Unambiguous advertisement, copyright infringement” — very unusual for Wikipedia” 

[spoiler]

“He is the leader of a new breed of ministers who embrace the idea of capitalizing on the ever-increasing marketplace of Internet and technological innovations to spread the gospel. With more than 7,500 members attending weekly services at Empowerment Temple in Baltimore, Maryland, and approximately 35,000 followers on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, he believes that “God is not just in the church; He is also in technology.” His mission is to “empower people spiritually, develop them educationally, expose them culturally, activate them politically, and strengthen them economically.”

winkbiggrin

FAMILY:   Bryant has four daughters Topaz, Grace, and twins Angel and Adore. They reside in Baltimore. He is also the brother of Thema Simone Bryant Davis.

Mega church pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant and his wife Gizelle are headed to divorce court. After 5 and a half years of marriage Gizelle Bryant filed for a divorce in the Circuit Court for Montgomery County on January 9. The clergyman [i.e. Jamal] also filed divorce papers in Baltimore City Court on the same day, the Baltimore Sun reports.  . . . (then article launches into some more flattery….)

. . . Scandalous rumors of alleged affairs with several women have been rampant since the couple’s engagement. His supposed womanizing went overboard when he impregnated a church member said to be 17 at the time of the time of copulation. [“the time of copulation”deliberate    ]When accusations of this affair surfaced in the Summer of 2007, church leaders asked him to step down while they initiated an investigation and awaited paternity test results. Months after the investigation, Jamal Bryant remains the pastor of Empowerment Temple. Court records acquired from the Circuit Court of Maryland do indicate the pastor is the father of a least one other child who was born before he got married. The couple has a set of 1-year-old twins and a 3-year-old.

As Wikipedia shows, guess he had some of the “evangelizing” [Missionary Position?] (of other women while married) issues common to some in his field.  Baltimore Sun article, 2/16/08 by Samathi Reddy:

Bryant and his wife, a former model, are known for their flashy lifestyle, which includes a Bentley and a multimillion-dollar Canton waterfront property. Their lifestyle has attracted criticism from those who say the church is more about his business enterprises and building wealth than religion. Her original divorce complaint stated that he earned more than $350,000 a year.

He is seeking a “limited divorce,” while his wife has requested an “absolute divorce,” according to papers filed in Baltimore Circuit Court.  A limited divorce is a voluntary legal separation required in Maryland for a year before most absolute divorces. Absolute divorces, however, are allowed immediately under certain circumstances, such as adultery and cruelty. In Gizelle Bryant’s filing last month, she accuses her husband of adultery, cruel treatment and “excessively vicious conduct” that caused “reasonable apprehension of bodily suffering so as to render cohabitation unsafe.” [/spoiler]

One of MANY reasons I’m not too impressed with the concept of soliciting faith-based organizations to teach responsible fatherhood!  However, Dr. Thema Harrison-Bryant is not her brother . . . . More background on their parents’ involvement in civil rights, time in Africa, social justice concern, leadership over many churches

His efforts ( Back to Hershel K. Swinger of The Children’s Institute)  resulted in a major expansion of Project Fatherhood – through funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – to 50 organizations located in various parts of Los Angeles County.”(Very nice obituary in the LA times notes what he did):

Hershel K. Swinger dies at 72; founded a program to aid urban fathers

The clinical psychologist who taught at Cal State L.A. created Project Fatherhood, which has provided therapy, support and training for more than 7,000 low-income urban fathers since 1996.

June 12, 2011|By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times

Swinger, a clinical psychologist, was a senior vice president of Children’s Institute who taught counselor education and directed a state-funded child abuse prevention center at Cal State L.A. for many years.

He was the founder and senior director of Project Fatherhood, a program that has provided therapy, support and training for more than 7,000 low-income urban fathers since its inception 15 years ago. Under Swinger’s leadership, it received a $7.5-million federal grant in 2006 to replicate the program in 50 agencies in Los Angeles County. It was recognized as a model program by the Obama administration last year.

Familiar with studies showing that children with absent fathers are far more likely to be poor, abuse drugs, drop out of school and enter the criminal justice system, Swinger believed that focusing on the fathers was a crucial part of the solution.

No mention of “present mothers” or of the fact that since 1996, one of the most dangerous places to be as a mother is attempting to leave violence with children and having a father contest custody — in other words, the climate towards women because of these programs, has become literally hostile.  If indeed those facts ARE so, who is to say or not say that the real cause was “father-absence” or not something else? Is that a universal truth, like gravity — or a social construction? It helps expand a grants program if you are on the advisory council to another foundation: Federal funding allowed Project Fatherhood SM to expand in 2006 across Los Angeles County. Now, through a community grants program*, small faith-based and community organizations have been empowered to replicate the Project Fatherhood SM model in their own neighborhoods. …*The Project Fatherhood SM Community Grants Program is part of the Responsible Fatherhood Initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Family Assistance.

**National Center for Fathering — another Nonprofit:

ORGANIZATION NAME

STATE

YEAR

TOTAL ASSETS

FORM

PAGES

EIN

National Center for Fathering KS 2010 $414,597 990 28 48-1083848
National Center for Fathering KS 2009 $668,266 990 30 48-1083848
National Center for Fathering KS 2008 $541,246 990 29 48-1083848
National Center for Fathering KS 2007 $1,280,008 990 30 48-1083848
National Center for Fathering Inc. KS 2006 $573,780 990 45 48-1083848
National Center for Fathering Inc. KS 2005 $1,471,113 990 29 48-1083848
National Center for Fathering Inc. KS 2004 $719,773 990 23 48-1083848
National Center for Fathering Inc. KS 2003 $355,475 990 23 48-1083848
National Center for Fathering Inc. KS 2002 $241,183 990 22 48-1083848

Purpose of this group (KS location):

LIVE SEMINARS ON STRENGTHENING FATHERS. EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS PROVIDED FOR FATHERS. PROVIDE LEADERSHIP TRAINING FOR FATHERS. RESEARCH FOR ABOVE SERVICES. SEE ATTACHED SCHEDULE OF PROGRAMS.

One employee listed got $62K — that turns out to be severance pay:

“KEN CANFIELD, THE FOUNDER, RECEIVED PAYMENTS FOR SERVICES PROVIDED DURING 2007.

JIM MOORE RECEIVED PAYMENT IN ACCORDANCE WITH HIS SEVERANCE AGREEMENT. ($62K)”

The National Center for Fathering seeks to improve the well-being of children by promoting responsible fatherhood and equipping men to be more engaged in the lives of children. Programmingissummarizedinfourareas: Research,Training,ProgramsandResources.

Training (notice how many are trademarked. (from 2007 tax return: of its budget, $914K that year was “government grants.” So this is what our gov’t is sponsoring:

. TheNationalCenterforFatheringconductslivetrainingseminarstoequipmen for their role as fathers using its research-based curricula. Specific curricula developed by the National Center include : The 7 Secrets of Effective FathersTM,[+ Book, $12.99] Connecting With Your KidsTM Quenching the Father ThirstTM,Dads ofDestinyTM and R.E.A.D. to KidsTM The Center ‘s father training courses all include a version of its Personal Fathering Profile TM, a self-scored assessment that allows dads to compare their fathering practices with a national database. The Center also conducts train-the-trainer workshops to equip locally-based father trainers who work independently in their communities through faith-based,social service and other organizations to equip men.

I guess if all those fathers need train-train-trainers, maybe they ain’t nuttin’ but a hound-dog, and never will be, according to HHS!Either that, or there’s another reason for all this obsession.

~~~This group is in the business of SALES:  Income from Training:  $205K / Honorarium::  $52K (plural); Gross profit from Sales of INVENTORY:  $403K, and “MISCELLANEOUS:  $17K.”
Five highest paid employees (that year) — doin’ all right: (the 2nd # for each is deferred comp/benefits)
RONALD NICHOLS _ _ _TRAINING DIR.:  $91,362. $15 ,043. SCOTT-HUSE ———————— $83 ,650. 11 ,765. STEVE WILSON ___________ DIR. OF FIN:  $82 ,267. 13 ,109. AMOS_JOHNSON_______URBAN FATHERING DIR.: $61 ,551. 11 ,254. BROCK GRIFFIN _ _ _ _PUBLICATIONS DIR.:  $57 ,088. 11 ,456 Key officers make a (total) of $355K + $40K, split between three men: Carey W. Casey, Peter Spokes & Brian Blomberg.. . I noticed also some borrowing, including a $100K loan for which security was “CD of Peter Spokes” etc.  . . . (??)   Carey w. Casey and Obama Whitehouse get along just fine:

Carey Casey honored as a “Champion of Change” – Watch Video

  As Father’s Day approaches there are so many reasons to be encouraged here at the Center … One big reason is an opportunity I had to visit the White House. I was one of ten people honored as “Champions of Change” in the field of fatherhood.  This is an effort by the White House Office of Public Engagement and Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to promote positive fatherhood, and it’s my privilege to be there and talk about Championship Fathering … “from the White House to the outhouse,” as I always say. I am also humbled. I know that I … [Read More…]

(ET . . .CET. . . eRA). . . .  here’s USPTO.gov — wonder how many of those “tm” items really are “tm” ed! Colorado State marketing a booklet ‘Connecting with your Kids” http://www.courts.state.co.us/userfiles/file/Self_Help/CO_Parenting_Time_Book2004.pdf

Connecting With Your Kids

Copyright © Colorado Foundation for Families and Children

But it thanks Ken Sanders of (the) “Center on Fathering” and a “Colorado Fatherhood Connection”

Notice that in the MIDDLE of “fathers.com” top row of hyperlinks (to other pages) is “STORE” The store page kinda reminds me of the “cooperative parenting institute” store page (Termini & Boyan):

Championship Fathering Wristband

Championship Fathering Wristband 2 Models / Great for Father’s Day Give-Aways!

The 21-Day Dad's Challenge by Carey Casey and others

The 21-Day Dad’s Challengeby Carey Casey & 19 others

Championship Fathering by Carey Casey

Championship Fathering by Carey Casey

52 Things Kids Need from a Dad by Jay Payleitner

52 Things Kids Need from a Dadby Jay Payleitner

52 Things Wives Need from Their Husbands by Jay Payleitner

52 Things Wives Need from Their Husbands by Jay Payleitner

Some are even on discount!

Monthly Specials For July


Boys! by William Beausay II Boys! by William Beausay II $14.99  $7.49 Save: 50% off


My Grandpa Loves Me! Kids' T-shirts My Grandpa Loves Me! Kids’ T-shirts $11.99  $6.00 Save: 50% off
The Way of the Wild Heart by John Eldredge The Way of the Wild Heart by John Eldredge $22.99  $11.50 Save: 50% off


 

There now — that’s WAY better than actually helping custodial mothers and the children in their house DIRECTLy through, say, child support enforcement — or TANF (food stamps / cash aid) — or else, who knows what might happen? Mom might pick up a pair of extra underwear for her kids, and start feeling more, er independent than is appropriate for faith-based, er, churches… **Re: the woman’s version of abstinence education (for those who don’t know this already) is I guess the counterpart to “every man’s battle” which is aimed at men, and the most obvious of the 10 commandments (in sex realm), thou shalt not commit adultery & I guess thou shalt not covet . . .. http://everymansbattlevideo.com/ While I could care less about the original book, here’s what another Christian commentary says about it, which seems apt:  “Psychoheresies”: http://www.psychoheresy-aware.org/emb112.html [PAL Vol11N2 Apr-May ’03] EMB is loaded with unsubstantiated information…There is no reference to research to support what Arterburn says. When important and critical statements like that are made, the reader is entitled to some proof beyond Arterburn’s personal experiences…”  Faulting Fred’s father is repeated and amplified throughout the book. It is sinful to give such details because it violates the commandment to honor one’s father. Such details also give the impression that it wasn’t really Fred’s fault that he sinned in this way. One gets the distinct impression that Fred is painting a picture of personal victimhood. “the authors do not just refer to these sinful activities by name; they spell out these sinful activities and explicitly express details of “ogling,” sexual dreaming, “sexualized acts,” and “rampant masturbation,” biggrin eeketc. Such explicit details feed the flesh and work to build camaraderie among those men involved in lust. … Author Stephen Arterburn is the founder of the chain of New Life Clinics (p. 3). The clinics are advertised on a number of pages in the book with a full-page ad on page 230. An underlying idea here is that, if the reader just can’t make it on his own with this self-help book, he can find help at one of these clinics. As far as insurance coverage is concerned, New Life Clinics function like other secular psychological and psychiatric clinics that dispense psychotherapy and drugs.

Pick one: Bread and Circuses — or Justice, and Freedom. Ideally, the latter…

with one comment

“Justice and Freedom” (they’re partners!)  are on really the auction block, and without dedication to doing something about this, one will need more Bread and Circuses (probably) to live at peace with one’s conscience — or to avoid acknowledging this.

Technology & Capital & Control of markets will always trump Law.  And in this country law doesn’t exist for what we may like to believe it does.

Time to upgrade one’s financial literacy — as well as understanding welfare reform, as well as “give it up” on thinking that dollars = “money.”  Dollars are not the only form of money by a long shot.  And it’s unacceptable NOT to deal with some of this material after work, before work, or while unemployed, if one is.  If our heads are a century behind the definition of a dollar, our behinds will be for sale even sooner.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH FHA-HUD
BACKGROUND INFORMATION FOR UNDERSTANDING 

TAPEWORM ECONOMICS

By Catherine Austin Fitts
June 2003

  • “The war on poverty was sold as helping low and moderate-income people.”
  • “In retrospect, the war on poverty, like the war on drugs, had nothing to do with helping anyone in need and everything to do with organized crime harvesting places and building centralized control, including consolidating local small business and banking into large corporations and banks.”
  • “For more on West Philadelphia, see “The Myth of the Rule of Law
    •  . . a great deal of money was unaccounted for from the US Treasury. This now totals over $3.3 trillion based on General Accounting Office (GAO) reports. The notion that the US Treasury, OMB and DOJ might be capable of significant fraud was gaining credibility in the investment community. A handful of courageous reporters published stories about what was happening.
    • Capital gains are highest for those who can combine liquidity, the value creation of stock price multiples, and the power of new technology with the high margins of narcotics trafficking, financial fraud and control of the Congress, the courts and the enforcement agencies to create and protect markets
    • In August of 1996, the San Jose Mercury News broke Webb’s story of illegal narcotics dealing by the US government, targeting South Central LA with crack cocaine…
    • As a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant I had been counting on the rule of law to protect me. I found, instead, that it is a powerful myth, which has fuelled great wealth for those who run and rule the economy — both legal and illegal.
  • ALSO See  & “Narco Dollars for Dummies”**
    • This is simple enough — scroll down and read “the Economics of Production: Sam and Dave Do Boat Loads of White Agricultural Substances”(“Sam does Sugar & Dave does Drugs.  Dave’s profit is obviously a multiple of Sam’s. . . .  If Sam had sales of X dollars, let say that Dave had sales of 50-100 times X. Dave may carry the same amount of white stuff in a boat but from a financial point of view, Dave the drug man has a lot more “sales per boat” than Sam the sugar man…once Dave has set up his money laundering schemes, even after a 4-10 percent take for the money laundering fees, it’s fair to say his tax rate of 0 percent is lower than Sam’s tax rate. While it is expensive to set up all the many schemes Dave might use to launder his money, once you do it you can save a lot avoiding some or all of the IRS’s take.”
      • which apparently is also exactly what “block grants to states for TANF” was about — it was about the missing money factor.  Much easier than when there was an AFDC dollar-to-household match pre-1996.  Child Support Enforcement?  That’s a WASH, get real!  $4 billion a year to LOSE money and set up new fatherhood programs??  (. . .. .)

***My story began intersecting with C.A. Fitts’ description of HUD mortgage defaults and “narco-dollars” repeatedly — particularly as the HHS has clear connections in some of its policies — like marriage/fatherhood policies, and faith-based ones — to money laundering through the grants system.  For example, the other day, attempting to explain this to some Lackawannans (i.e., Pennsylvanians — Lackawanna being the county right next to the infamous “kids for cash” scheme in Luzerne) who felt discovering the religion of a hated GAL was some kind of information breakthrough– I looked another grantee with the words “faith-based” in its name, out of Oceanside, California (North San Diego, I gather)

This along with some in Florida, was one of the first (2002) showing as receiving a “compassion capital fund” startup.  And yet its umbrella (associated) “interfaith community services” [at the same street address] was recipient of multi-million$$ federal grants, particularly around housing, and had been the subject of studies (it says) from both Texas (as to faith-based) and Columbia Univ.  As I looked at “faith-based community development corporation” one short step (link) showed a related credit union.  None of it was adding up, particularly as USAspending.gov said the group got $150K (same exact grant), and Taggs said it only got $75K.  Both databases allegedly get their sources FROM HHS — and to boot, this FBCDC had an EIN — but no DUNS# (etc.)

The umbrella (my term) nonprofit had been around, it said, since 1979 — incorporated since 1982.  It didn’t take very long to start unearthing discrepancies (one day or far less).  The next day, I studied more on Industrial Areas Foundation (Saul Alinsky) and found out how religious congregations and this type of programming are like male & female chemical receptors — both groups are hungry for power, immoral about how they get it, and have habitual under-reporting of income and failures to stay incorporated and transparent with the public.   It was the match made in heaven…***


This blog here basically represents my study notes over a three-year period of WTF happened to “our” justice system — from the front lines of it.   Not to mention WTF happened to “our” money (in the 1900s), and behind all this was the natural concern for HTF this happened to my life, as a mother (not just “parent” but a mother, in this century, in this political context, and as a person, as a member of a geographic and various other communities, and so forth.

I really do believe there’s truth in “Three Cities that Rule the World” (London, the Vatican, and Washington, D.C. — representing wealth, religion and the military/politics).

When the Bible said “The love of money is the root of all evil,” boy, did it tell the truth!

Also, the 10th commandment as “thou shalt not covet” (bastardized by one major religion into two separate commandments to cover for the deletion of the 2nd commandment about making and bowing down to graven images) — boy, did it tell the truth!

A lot of the evil in this world emanates from (1) political, (2) corporate, and (3) religious leadership in my own country, the USA, and most of this evil has been sold as “good” (or helping others).  This triangle / “Triad” seems almost everywhere, the chief illusion being that they were ever truly separate.  It’s a fine but basically meaningless distinction at this point.

The triangle image crops up everywhere, it seems — but even if it didn’t, those three do represent the major (earthly, at least!) power sources.   Political (1) regulates the relationships (who hooks up with whom) between 2 & 3 — and really, this equilateral triangle could go almost any direction, with any angle on top —  and have the same effect on the customers — financial devastation, homelessness, eventual death from that, starvation, or resulting riots, and definite eventual slavery along the way. EVERYONE accommodates to it — or is involved in fighting it.  There are fewer and fewer DMZ’s left.

(these images sprang from my recent look-ups of HHS grantees with the word “faith-based” in their corporate names.  I found out where HHS this millennia (and since welfare reform) intersects HUD (community development block grants) and has morphed.  I also found out in this that the root of PICO (who trained one of the take the money and run nonprofits, in Oceanside California) is probably in on some real estate deals and has a board member whose nonprofit is based at a (Catholic) church — and which nonprofit was in effect something of a front for PICO Network recruiting.  Don’t expect to follow all that unless you actually do the lookups, or at least read through where I did (bottom of this post). . . . . 

PICO National Network - Unlocking the Power of People

under_construction.jpg

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That triad historically represents the major themes of a hierarchical society based on a caste system.  Anyone NOT in the 1,2, or 3 sector is a client of it, and as such a target market (consumer).  This includes the privatized prison industry, you name it.

The collective unconscious myths are crumbling, and people are looking for scapegoats.

Most of us have arranged our lives and made (too easy) a peace, I think, with these myths and are not willing (or possibly not able) to take the time to go through and dismantle, discard, re-organize and rebuild a world view with less cognitive dissonance.

And who has the guts and moral fiber to do this rebuilding without the easy way out — just joining another “church” — whether it be a literal religious-exempt 501(c)3 style (with or without a mortgage) — or the “church” of domestic violence rhetoric, family court psychobabble/cult-of-the-experts rhetoric, or fathers’ rights/family/children’s rights rehtoric, or “I’m holding down a job, therefore I gave at the office, whatsamatta with those people?” rhetoric (which is often internalized and not spoken openly)??

Unfortunately, the more I learn about where we are and how we got there, the more frightening and disturbing it becomes, collectively.

I have now fought the same basic fight, with pretty much the same basic tiresome people, for over 20 years; children have aged out, an elderly parent has died — with scarcely a pause in the hostilities.  How does one get free of this without homelessness when one’s own governmental institutions are simply filled with fraud, and based on false theories about what causes poverty and violence (or at least on SELLING false theories about what causes poverty and violence to the public) ???

Like many others, members of (my generation of) my “family of origin” has some serious unresolved childhood issues it chose to work out on my hide, and bequeath to my children’s futures, at their, my, and society’s loss.  So I have first-hand acquaintance of when & where the concept of “enlightening” sociopaths to the fact that their abuse is harmful to their children (try that when the adults in question HAVE no children….)

Many things are true — many concepts can hold water — but are not the fundamental, underlying truth surrounding an ongoing problem.  Failing to account for the discrepancies and needing to move on, people turn to superstition and myths, and more “cognitive dissonance” — almost anything — to face truths that would cause a radical change in lifestyle anymore.  Apparently those 1960s were a phase, now back to business — accumulating “money” (which isn’t accumulating wealth, but people still seem to believe this . . . . .).  Similarly, feminism was a phase, now back to business:  faith, family, fathers-dominant-model, & apple pie. . . . .we know it ain’t real, but who’s kidding whom? — it sells public policy!

This model of the wheel of abuse — it does reflect a reality, and more than “intimate partner violence” — it reflects the current relationship of the USA to most of its residents:

From Univ. Illinois @ Chicago, “Campus Advocacy Network“*

(*this “Power & Control” wheel is the hallmark of Duluth Abuse Intervention Programs, about which I have plenty on this blog…  they are not “the good guys” for sure!)

This chart shows you the kinds of behavior abusers use to get and keep control over their partners. Battering is never an accident. It is an intentional act used to gain control over the other person. Physical abuse is only one part of a whole series of behaviors an abuser uses against his/her partner. Violence is never an isolated behavior. There are other forms of abuse, which are shown in the Power and Control Wheel.”

The Duluth Model Power and Control Wheel

Noticing a dynamic doesn’t change the dynamic.  While the wheel dynamic is helpful, that analogy is not thought through and applied well enough.

Those being hurt, railroaded, or simply spun off into a meaningless, powerless existence in such relationships —  need the dynamic to be changed — or, alternately, those on it need to tap a highly superior form of energy & power to stop it, or just jump off it, or to cause that wheel to get stuck in its own rut, digging deeper and deeper.   Using language to describe the dynamic does help — it distances oneself intellectually and psychologically, by commandeering a different language than (generally speaking) an abuser attempts to indoctrinate the target with.

When caught up in this situation, we need OFF the wheel.  USUALLY it takes more than one person to break out when it’s whirling — or greater force than the centrifugal (etc.) forces.

However this doesn’t significantly change the person for who this wheel is a Grrreeeat and comfortable dynamic and worldview.

What happens next is, the energy of being freed from this abuse is a STRONG force in the freed person and, depending on the amount of damages they have to repair, they will often have the competence for independent and functional decision-making, along the lines often of what kept them alive while dealing with hostile environment (unless it was just luck or tenacity…).

But this is what happens when such a person has children — those children become bounty in a larger and different-players “wheel” of control, and often by virtue of needing welfare initially.

This welfare may come directly from the United States Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Title IV-A, and/or Title IV-D (Child support order) initially.  Or it may come from someone outside, or both.   But of all things such a family needs, immediately after the kickout — it’s generally TIME and SELF-DETERMINATION. . . . .   Which are precisely the things they are least likely to get, as the entire country (as we speak) is itself caught up in another similar “wheel of power and control” based on the financial system, selling off debt, bailing out banks, and supporting an expanding administrative bureaucracy in which not just millions — but, literally Billions and Trillions of $$ are missing.  GONE — unaccounted for.

As, we are finding — are children, and young adults, in this same system.

Black & Missing Foundation Inc

My children went missing for a month.  But as law enforcement had deliberately enabled it, and there was legal profit to be made from it, eventually resulting in this blog when I found out WHY, I was on my own handling the shock, distress, trauma — and damage control, both with their school and my clients (work life).  My work life never recovered — their (public) school never helped.  At all — not an iota, including when I asked them for evidence they had.  Nor did churches — anywhere.  Why?  In some religious worlds, a man and children in the congregation is worth something — prestige, finances, and public image.  No matter if Mom is nowhere to be found and the Mom imposter isn’t even married to the guy . . . . 

And in family law rhetoric, almost anything is worth SOMEthing in the system — a noncustodial father, a child support arrears, another person brought somehow back onto a dependency system who might have (with justice) stayed off it; more cases in the custody courts justifies they are “flooded” and need to initiate emergency triage procedures (and continue getting federal access/visitation grants which are only used to help the abusive parents, and/or fathers, regain access when access is an issue — not Moms.  Trust us, that’s the truth!) — and you name it.

~ ~ ~I just wanted to say this today; I am heavy hearted from another round of the “power and control wheel” with someone who has their foot on my jugular IF my future requires finances, and the same person has had their foot on my jugular regarding access to and information about my immediate relatives. Barring outside intervention by the legal system, it’s up to me to make the critical situations in what to bail on and what to fight for.  How’d YOU like to do this when it also included housing?

~ ~ ~So, when I talk about “myths” — the primary myth some of us still held (or in desperation, go through a phase of holding until the next rude awakening) is that government exists in this country to protect any form (whatsoever) of civil or legal rights more than it exists to complete draining the citizens of their blood — and assets — through various federal agencies (HHS & HUD, DOJ, DOE, etc.) — and in order to do this, a caste system must be maintained, as well as secrecy about the basic operations.  My experience personally with my own (sick, truly!) family line (which maintains civic respectability, as many batterers also do) — has actually prepared me to reject inappropriate answers and continue mining for information that pulls it together in a reasonable fashion — that satisfies MY  appetite for truth, and my awareness of many realities.

There are other whistleblowers more highly placed and financially literate than I have ever been (though improvement is always possible) — and they are also taking retaliation for it.

Of these — recently, I have run across the writings of Catherine Austin Fitts, formerly of FHA, and the daughter of a mother who, she writes, was on the Federal Reserve Board in Philadelphia.  I first ran across the concept of “$59 billion missing from HUD” in association with approximately $14 million (collected but not distributed) child support being withheld inappropriately by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, which the attorney Richard Fine (for plaintiff father John Silva) discovered, and filed a case about:  “Silva v. Garcetti.”

Fine ended up going to jail for exposing to much and getting disbarred also.  He spent 18 months incarcerated.  But, Kelly Patricia O’Meara wrote up some of this event — and some of the HUD material, such that when I ran across it again later, I paid closer attention.

There is a place where HUD meets HHS around so-called “low-income people.”  (People can have high or low income, but that doesn’t define them as people!  However one would never know this from policyspeak).

I have been blogging it over at “Scranton Political Times” for a while (where I also learned a few HTML tricks, as you can see by this post) — and I recommend you read some of those comments.  Links at the top of this post.  Thanks for reading this far!

Danielle Ross buh-bye” (Ross being a local GAL).  My comments are kind of off-topic; I simply write as I research in response to some of the too-local-focus of the forum.  At this point, I don’t think it has high viewership and of the viewership, multiple usernames are probably the same person, i.e. Joe Pilchesky  (sign on, and a disclaimer says as much).  Joanne Pilchesky is incarcerated, wrongly or rightly, over elder theft somewhere in Pennsylvania and has been for a while; her voice is missed, but at least the forum’s not being used for a personal vendetta by either one, and they’ve tolerated me posting this research.

Comments along this line over there actually represent days of my look-ups and some conclusions.  The ‘dunwalke” link is to C.A. Fitts writing.  IAF and Saul Alinsky + Church networking + HUD + faith-based funding (HHS grants) = danger!

The four organizations apparently along the “Industrial Areas Foundation” model are listed below:

I knew almost nothing about them before yesterday, but recognized the patterns.  It’s like War of the Worlds between the titans of:

  1. federal govt
  2. corporate wealth (private & through the private wealth foundations)
  3. organized action groups backed by private wealth, but intent on dominating how public funds are used.

Just wanna live and let live?  That’s fine, but sooner or later, where are you gonna be living?  because real estate and finances are involved.

http://dunwalke.com/gideon/fhalist.htm

HUD & HHS are related, and HUD deals with debt, HHS deals with welfare. Both include lots of people in the courts.  Houston, we have a problem…

Centralized government sucks because the gov’t is simply conducting a virtual war on American citizens’ money (not just their families and civil rights etc.).

Chief of Staff to Senator Kit Bond, then Chairman of the Senate subcommittee in charge of HUD appropriations tells Fitts in 2000 that HUD is being run as a “criminal enterprise”. 

AMS is the company that installs, owns and operates HUDCAPS, the system credited with missing $59 billion at HUD in fiscal 1999. As of the time that HUD reports undocumentable adjustments of $59 billion, they have paid AMS $206MM

. . .Apparently this $59 billion is helping run private wars of various sorts, i.e., “narco-dollars.”  Someone oughter be asking more questions about why the Administration (each Presidential) keeps pushing policies that we already know have missing money and are full of/attracting fraudsters — and why the public “buys” it.  Better publicity is needed of this stuff.

I’m not a homeowner, and haven’t been, but what HUD and HHS do affects everyone — including neighborhoods.  So I’m working through this material from Catherine Austin Fitts (who, FYI, is from Philadelphia).  I hope someone whose eyes stray across this page may also consider what I’m saying — this personwas in a position to know, and it also makes sense with what I DO know about the HHS end of things, in re: the courts & child support, etc. — i.e., welfare-related things.

“The following list describes some of my representative experiences working with FHA, the lead US mortgage insurance agency and regulator, as Assistant Secretary-FHA Commissioner in the first Bush Administration, as the President of Hamilton Securities Group, the lead financial advisor FHA during the Clinton Administration,** and then as a litigant with the US Department of Housing & Urban Development [HUD] and their informant, Ervin & Associates, during the Clinton Administration and the second Bush Administration.

This means, before, during and after the period of welfare reform….
CONTINUE READING @ Topic “Daniel Ross buh-bye” or “Kids4Cash (Lack.Cnty) is the FBI digging for facts or burying them?”
 I have also (as “outlaw wild double-bill kickbackcourts” — same gravatar) and as ReadMyLips_ReadTheir990s” (two-turkeys chest to chest gravatar) got a LOT of valuable information up there, and started some topics on Main Message Board and/or Regional.
Namely — one on the Annie E. Casey Foundation. . . . . on the role of  Nonprofits, on Parenting Coordination — you name it.
I haven’t blogged here recently (been over there), and will work on quality of posts as I can.  Now that I realize wordpress can handle more HTML than I thought, I might be back for a while.
FORGET THE BREAD and CIRCUSes — because after a while, those are sure to stop.  Put your heart and soul into what’s literally, ethically right — and to do this, you have got to dedicate some upfront reading time and evaluate that reading in light of experience.  Also talk to your associates and friends and hear multiple stories of how’s it going if they somehow got on the government dole unwittingly, through having believed a myth, such as the rule of law…
Did they have to pull a “Maryanne Godboldo” yet? Over RISPERDAL?
(search the name, Voice of Detroit Press pulled together a great investigative reporting; the case is symbolic of how the system treats independent, competent, and free-thinking mothers, particularly African-American single mothers, and what’s worse, she hadn’t had her child in the traditional school system, either.)
This was about the states’ assertion that ALL children are ITS children and attempt to punish anyone who bucks the system.  Tanks were brought in on this one, the community rallied behind her, but the child was institutionalized anyhow.  The same social worker “Wenk” had done it to another family the previous year (with several children), was being sued for that, and did it to this woman, again in 2011.  What’s more, it appears that adverse reactions to school-related immunizations started the ball rolling.
(Detroit mother)
 4-15-2011 “SWAT attacks Home School Mom who refused to force-medicate her child.”  Detroit mother Maryanne Godboldo faces multiple felony charges and is being held on $500,000 bond after a 10-hour standoff with a heavily armed police SWAT team. Godboldo was protecting her 13-year-old daughter from unnecessary medication ordered by the state.
The Godboldo case is yet another example of CPS working in league with the police in order to kidnap children. Godboldo was obviously an excellent mother and not a threat to the police. The fact they sent a tank to her apartment is more evidence that the state will react in a violent knee-jerk fashion when its authority is challenged.

  • http://www.cchrint.org/tag/maryanne-godboldo/ 3-23-2012
  • DETROIT (WXYZ) – The 7 Action News Investigators were the first to expose how a local court wasn’t following the law when it came to removing children from their homes.  Now one of Michigan’s Congressmen is calling on the Department of Justice to investigate the state’s Child Protective Services system.
  • Testimony under oath in the Godboldo case revealed that probation officers inside the court would routinely stamp Presiding Juvenile Court Judge Leslie Kim Smith’s name onto the removal orders.  By law, a judge must review the CPS workers allegations of abuse, and then sign the order.
(so much for “the law” when there are pharmaceutical interests in the neighborhood.)
  • After we reported on the rubber stamping that legal experts say is against the law – the court stopped doing it.  But we still asked the court and DHS to tell us how long it had been going on, and how many children were taken from their parents illegally.  Judge Smith was not interested in answering our questions.
  • “But it was your name on those removal orders – why was this allowed to happen in your court,” asked Catallo.
  • “I understand,” said Judge Smith.
  • “Are you going to talk to us or not,” asked Catallo.
  • “Have a good day,” said Judge Smith.”

NOTE — this only happened in 2011.  Your town is next.

Things that Don’t Compute: DV Sensitivity Training for Faith-Based Organizations…. SERIOUSLY??

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PART I – Six Sisters Sue, including their former Pastor

Am I supposed to “take it on faith” that major DV organizations care who lives, who dies, and which children are being molested by their own,while their church-going parents know damn well that no one’s going to report, as mandated.

More than the care about their program funding and absolutely fantastic websites . . . .

MEANWHILE:   Look at this article by Malaika Fraley of the Contra Costa Times:

By Malaika Fraley
Contra Costa Times
© Copyright 2012, Bay Area News Group

Posted:   05/16/2012 10:16:47 AM PDT

News for six sisters sue antioch cps


ABC30.com
  1. Antioch sisters suing for missed chances to stop years of sexual abuse

    San Jose Mercury News‎ – 4 days ago
    Ranging in age from 9 to 16, six sisters had been sexually abused by  Child Protective Services went to the Dutro sisters’ Antioch home Aug.

    ANTIOCH — Ranging in age from 9 to 16, six sisters had been sexually abused by their parents virtually every day since they were toddlers before finding hope in 1995 that their nightmare would end.

    Instead, they say, it grew more horrific as the people they counted on to rescue them — police, child-welfare workers, their church pastor — failed to deliver.

    A year after their parents were imprisoned for sex crimes spanning 20 years, the Dutro sisters — Glenda Stripes, Amber and Sarah Dutro, Martha McKnelly, Frances Smith and Christina Moore — are now suing the people and agencies they say failed to protect them as children by not following laws and procedures for handling child abuse.

    Child Protective Services went to the Dutro sisters’ Antioch home Aug. 18, 1995, after police had garnered two confessions from their pedophile father because 14-year-old Glenda had disclosed to a church pastor that she was being molested. Had they been given a moment alone with social workers, the sisters say, they would have told them they had been tortured for 16 days in preparation of the CPS visit, after the pastor had tipped off their parents days before calling police.

    But CPS, like police, never talked to them apart from their parents, and a light punishment for their rapist father only exacerbated their hellish existence.

    1995.   SEVEN YEARS LATER, in 2002, SARAH Dutro (then a teen) gives the pastor a full history of abuse, trying to spare others:

    The lawsuit, filed in Contra Costa Superior Court last week against Contra Costa County, city of Antioch, Calvary Open Bible Church in Antioch, and seven individuals who are either current or former CPS, police department or church employees. It alleges the defendants were negligent and failed to fulfill state-mandated duties that, if done, would have spared the Dutro children years of further abuse.

    One defendant, Calvary pastor Anthony Lee, is named for not contacting police or CPS when a teenage Sarah Dutro gave him a full history of the abuse in 2002 in an effort to stop her mother, Glenda Lea Dutro, the church’s youth adviser before her arrest, from hosting sleepover parties for children from the congregation at the Dutro house.

    Bruce Dutro was the primary sexual abuser, while Glenda Lea Dutro facilitated the crimes, often handpicking children for her husband. Both parents physically, psychologically and verbally abused and neglected the children, two of whom are biological nieces that the Dutros obtained legal guardianship of and raised as their daughters from ages 3 years and 18 months.

A THIRD time, the girls spoke up, this time to protect young children from Mexico.  FYI — a lot of evangelical protestant churches in California (I can’t speak for Catholics) seem to love to head down to Mexico for missionary work.   Supposedly:

For some of them, the sexual abuse lasted into their early 20s.

The parents were arrested in 2009 after an eight-month investigation launched by Antioch police after the sisters came to the department for the third time. The sisters said they were hesitant, having been burned by authority figures before, but anxious that their parents were working with the church to adopt a family with small children from Mexico.

Deputy district attorney Graves and Antioch police Officer Blair Benzler restored their faith in the criminal justice system by getting the 2011 conviction

Let’s go over this again.  The first reporting was 1995.  The conviction was 2011.   Let’s call that one full generation of nonresponse…

I think many women who have been to domestic violence support groups will verify with me that there are loads of Christian women in there, and some of them married to a pastor or a prominent deacon.   I am a Christian, but as a result of what I also have seen as to “coverups” I will not attend. Why should I support such an institution, whether it’s Opus Dei related or similar to this crap, above.  There IS NO EXCUSE, and this is a hallmark of such groups — their mandated reporters, for the most part, don’t.  I was being assaulted in the home in the 1990s, and sought help from plenty of pastors (not only them, but they knew).  This is what happens:  some churches are taught to imitate their leaders.  So there’s a collective silence.

Then, here comes the narcissistic domestic violence agencies and — because they’re into technical assistance and training, and are authorities, “surely” the leadership in the faith communities will respond to their really cool sensitivity trainings, and start sticking up for women.     Actually, if the faith community never does respond, it hardly matters — because the primary activity (other than helping run shelters) these groups are into is training and publicizing.  So long as that can continue, who cares if the agenda isn’t working, and is guaranteed NOT to work?

Do they seriously think none of the faith authorities read a tax return, program goal?  For example, when PCADV’s reads:

(TAX RETURN 2009) purpose:  (#3) “To expose the roots of domestic violence in the institutionalized subservience of women in this culture.

. . .that the Bible-toting evangelical communities (some of who are also in on the faith and fatherhood grants streams) are going to buy that line of thinking?  There are still plenty of groups around who don’t let women speak from the pulpit, and are actively coaching men in how to control their women.  And they aren’t going to go “feminazi” talk especially when it comes to LGBT matters?   Even the book of Genesis is pretty clear (let alone of how it’s further bastardized in practice and preaching) – the trouble with Eve was her independence from her husband, and conversing with ‘the serpent.’

excerpt, talking about “Emotional Abuse.”

✔controlling and/or limiting her behavior (e.g., keeping her from using the phone or seeing friends, not letting her leave the room or the house, following her and monitoring/limiting her phone conversations, checking mileage on her car, or keeping her from reading material, activities and places that he does not approve of)

✔ interrupting her while she is eating, forcing her to stay awake or waking her up

✔ blaming her for everything that goes wrong

ALL of these (and a lot more) were routine in my years of marriage, and going too far afield DID result in retaliation when I got home.  He also retaliated upon the children in attempt to sabotage some of my work relationships by simply not showing up in time to watch them when it was known I had to go, not enough gas in the car to get back home from the event,  sleep deprivation or interruptions (to be shouted at, or lectured), or trashing the house while I was out.

A leopard doesn’t change his spots through sitting through classes, before or afterwards, and GRRrrrreat way to continue control post-domestic violence is for the courts to order joint legal and/or joint physical custody.   This basically means people can’t get away.  

Someone has to TRULY not understand the religious minds in what’s going on (talking, USA, today) to believe that this stuff would change a pastor’s attitude, or a church’s.  For example — do we not yet understand how the Unification Church has been pushing “True Parents” and the healthy marriage/fatherhood programming, or politically how much Sun Myung Moon’s funding of the far right (meaning, conservative religion) is going on?  Have we not read anything by Jeff Sharlett (“The Family” re: the Bushes) The Dominionists, I mean, even some mainstream are starting to catch the drift, here  http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/14/dominionism-michele-bachmann-and-rick-perry-s-dangerous-religious-bond.html; I’m not sure I’d agree with that’s where it comes from, alone (referring to the 1960s and Rushdoony.  It’s been around before.  Like, say, “A.D. 381” or earlier….}}

Meanwhile, the theory that people can be trained out of bad behavior by enlightened education — and not something like, for example, if it’s a church that has been complicit in covering up child abuse, domestic violence, etc. — the pastor’s out and the church loses it’s nonprofit status pretty quickly if that pastor AIN’T out.  They fire pastors for less than this, so it shouldn’t be  a hard concept to grasp if it’s presented with teeth not just “T&A” or rather “technical assistance and training.”

I hope these sisters win every dime they’re entitled to and that the public gets so sick of paying settlements for failures of their own officials that they decide to take a stand voluntarily against child abuse right where it counts– and that includes in the churches.   I’m saying this as a woman who reported to immediate family first (who were worse than useless initially), and my own pastor at the time, weeks later after another, similar, only worse incident occurred.  Both were in my home.  Both were with a toddler in the home at the time, a close witness, and both were while I was pregnant and involved me being thrown to the floor, straddled, slapped repeatedly IN THE FACE while being shouted at by this guy.

It got worse from there . . .. And as I have daughters, I am also seriously concerned (as we speak) about my own family member’s obsession with them, and manic need to keep me from having a real relationship with my own kids.  It’s known that there is incest in an involved family line (actually ,two involved family lines) as well, although it was not an allegation in our family law case.

Some churches may be decent, but many are hellish, and I mean that in the truest sense of the words.  Like batterers, they don’t come out drooling and spitting, but smooth and empathetic many times. On the inside, it’s pretty much like Jesus said — whited sepulchers.  And maybe for some, ignorantly. . . . . .    Let’s put it this way — what those sisters said is entirely credible (as a possibility) based on my own awareness of this situation, and my own case history.  I know how it goes.

Just a reminder — the Jaycee Dugard case also came from the same town, Antioch.  

 

Malaika Fraley and the Contra Costa times should be commended for this reporting.  I intend to follow up when I’m less deeply affected by it, which doesn’t make for very good writing, here.

 

PART II

Over at Scranton Political Times recently, as more evidence that a GAL is recommending custody of little children be switched to fathers who injure mothers, or later get convicted of raping other minors, I have some more commentary — from today.  Others (who live in the area) have said that a recent man arrested for raping a teenager over many years, also had his own custody case involving both DV and child abuse; he got custody.  Search “Tunkhannock” or “Maurice Hunting” on the site, it’ll show up.  Meanwhile, I’m talking about Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence and one of their subgrantees (who is in Scranton), the “Women’s Resource Center” — below.  Hopefullly there’s enough to chew on.  I discuss the HHS grants some as well (easier to view on the forum than below):  Notice all the earmarks:

http://scrantonpoliticaltimes.activeboard.com/f319624/main-message-board/

 dare you to scrutinize these grants:

Recipient Name City State ZIP Code County DUNS Number Sum of Awards
PENNSYLVANIA COALITION AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE  HARRISBURG PA 17112-2669 DAUPHIN 156527558 $ 40,196,794
PENNSYLVANIA COALITION AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE  HARRISBURG PA 17112-2669 DAUPHIN 166527558 $ 945,000

Like, grant 90XP0223 ($85K in 2008, $297K total, congressional earmark)

a training, education, and prevention institute on domestic violence and homicide prevention”

from “Washington Watch

Prevention, Education and Training Institute Project
$250,000

Sen. Robert P., Jr. Casey (PA) requests $250,000 for:
Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence (PCADV)
Harrisburg, PA

“For the first time, USReps are required to publish their requested earmarks ONline”  Rep Holden D-17 requested $377 for this:

PRESS RELEASE on creating this institute, with Case & Specter

A big one is the “National Resource Center on DV” (marked “Discretionary” — most are).     $8 million over 5 years (HHS)

Since 2005:

Award Number: 90EV0353
Award Title: DEMO PROJECT FOR ENHANCING SERVICES FOR CHILDREN EXPOSED TO DV **
OPDIV: ADMINISTRATION FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES (ACF)
Organization: FAMILY AND YOUTH SERVICES BUREAU (FYSB)
Award Class: DISCRETIONARY   ($350K so far)

**popular now, why not expand (note:  how could Penn State Univ have ever happened, Sandusky, with this giant communicator & trainer, PCADV in the same state, Harrisburg?)

They already have a “National Resource Center” which is primarily on-line links to publications (as far as I can tell).  But why stop a good thing?  So here’s $750K or so more, do start up another one:

Award Number: U1VCE324010
Award Title: NATIONAL ON-LINE RESOURCE CENTER FOR VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
OPDIV: CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION (CDC)
Organization: NATIONAL CENTER FOR INJURY PREVENTION AND CONTROL (NCIPC)
Award Class: COOPERATIVE AGREEMENT

( $728K since 2007, small so far).

Goal of the National Resource Center (since 1994):

“To change belief systems and practices that support violence and abuse that disproportionately affects women, and other marginalized people, the DVAP recognizes and promotes the participation of the entire community in building social intolerance towards domestic violence…”

National Resource Center on Domestic Violence

Flowchart — interesting:

FlowChart.jpg

Here’s a profile from a group that tracks nonprofit salaries, revenues, etc (EERI), up through 2004.   Its contributions and its revenues are about equal (??), and ca. $26 million (see bar chart).  SO WHAT IS IT SELLING?

TAX RETURN 2009 shows one of its purposes  (#3) “To expose the roots of domestic violence in the institutionalized subservience of women in this culture.

How Much Mileage Can DV Advocates get out of the press on San Francisco’s Ross Mirkarimi/Eliana Lopez case?

with one comment

This has been headline news for how long?  It definitely brings up mixed feelings on my part — knowing how many women are receiving far more severe battery, false imprisonment, endangering children and intimidating witnesses throughout the Bay Area, and have been for years — many years.  While each time there is some press, someone from one of the organizations gets quoted.

March 31, 2012, last Saturday, Section “C,”* an article laid out at top of the page, full width, and by Columnist C.W. Nevius), reads:

(*Bay Area section of the SF Chronicle)

Wife’s anger misdirected in Mirkarimi case.”

Eliana Lopez is furious at the way her domestic violence dispute with her husband, suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, has been handled.

Too bad. Because the process worked perfectly.

Was it messy and painful? Absolutely. But it is also important and worthwhile.

This week, Myrna Melgar, a survivor of domestic violence,**  wrote a passionate account – with Lopez’s blessing – of her friend’s devastation and anger in how the case was handled. While the opinion piece in the Bay Guardian had some fascinating details, it missed the main point.

Neither Lopez nor Mirkarimi seems able to get beyond the anger toward neighbor Ivory Madison, who called attention to the alleged abuse and then provided the damning video of Lopez crying and pointing to a bruise.

Melgar wrote that the process empowers people “to make decisions on this woman’s behalf, against her consistent and fervently expressed wishes.”

That’s right. It does. And that’s what it should do.

“This is why domestic violence advocates have been seen as evildoers,” said Kathy Black, executive director of La Casa de las Madres. “They say we are breaking up families. The helper becomes the one who is blamed.”
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/30/BANI1NSJ36.DTL#ixzz1quHv5VFi

**not sure this is the same “Myrna Melgar, just included the LinkedIn profile which shows her professional/civic leadership in the area.  It probably is)

This is the Bay Guardian article, and it seems well written enough.  I’m glad someone filled in a few of these details, including a factor that until 5 Mr. Mirkarimi was raised in a bi-cultural family (Russian Jewish mother/ Iranian Muslim father), and then was separated from his father.  There seems to be a sense of father-absence here:

(The bulk of my post is addressing topics raised in this article, particularly a certain reference to a Canadian sociologist for insight into this Californian incident).

03.27.12 – 3:01 pm |

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By Myrna Melgar

Myrna Melgar is a Latina survivor of childhood domestic violence, a feminist, and the mother of three girls. She is a former legislative aide to Sup. Eric Mar.

Eliana Lopez is my friend. I have asked for her permission to put into words, in English, some observations, thoughts and insights reached during our many conversations these past few weeks about her experience with San Francisco’s response to the allegation of domestic violence by her husband, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi  . . .  (Please read the article).

. . .According to Eliana, the context of what happened between them on December 31 actually started much earlier. Ross grew up as the only son of a single teenage mother of Russian Jewish descent and an absent Iranian immigrant father. Pressured by the opposition of her family to her relationship with an Iranian Muslim, Ross’s mother divorced his father by the time he was five. Ross was raised on a small, nearly all-white island in New England, with no connection to his father. When he had the opportunity, Ross traveled to Chicago, where his father had remarried and built a new family with two sons. Ross’s father turned him away. In Eliana’s analysis, Ross’s greatest fear is that his painful story with his father will be replayed again with Theo.

I can just see the fathers’ rights groups (which are mens’ rights groups) spinning this one to blame Mr. Mirkarimi’s abuse of his wife on his lack of a father (and not perhaps some of the standards that might have been learned in the first five years of his life, or anything else).

Eliana Lopez came to San Francisco from Venezuela with hope in her head and love in her heart. She decided to leave behind her beautiful city of Caracas, a successful career as an actress, and her family and friends, following the dream of creating a family and a life with a man she had fallen in love with but barely knew, Ross Mirkarimi.

Whirlwind romance, charmer?  Another article (reporting on this one) adds:

Heather Knight Thursday, March 29, 2012

Melgar’s piece describes how Lopez came to San Francisco after she and then-Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi became pregnant on one of his visits to her native Venezuela

(He got his girlfriend knocked up in the course of leisure? or business?  Not mentioned — were they married at the time?

(Michael Macor/The Chronicle)

Eliana Lopez, wife of San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, speaks to the news media about the three misdemeanor charges against her husband, on Friday Jan. 13, 2012, in San Francisco, Ca

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/28/BAS31NRKL3.DTL#ixzz1qv1dHpDm

Bay Guardian Op-Ed, cont’d.:

Well-educated, progressive, charismatic, and artistic, she made friends easily. She and Ross seemed like a great match. Both were committed environmentalists, articulate and successful. They had a son, Theo. {{see above…}} As they settled into domestic life, however, problems began to surface. The notoriously workaholic politician did not find his family role an easy fit. A bachelor into his late forties, Ross had trouble with the quiet demands of playing a puzzle on the floor with his toddler or having an agenda-less breakfast with his wife. Ross would not make time for Eliana’s request for marriage counseling, blaming the demands of job and campaign.

Now, about prosecuting the low-level domestic violence against the wife’s wishes:

How did it come to be that a system that was intended to empower women has evolved into a system that disempowers them so completely?

I don’t know Ms. Melgar’s life story (or whether she’s currently married — sounds like not).  However, there are TWO ways the District Attorney’s Office can disempower women — if this is correct, prosecuting against the woman’s wishes when it’s supposedly a “minor” event.  Or (and this was my situation and MANY other women’s) NOT prosecuting them despite severe domestic violence, when prosecuting them  might save a life, or save ongoing destruction of life.  See

And in this politically charged event — MADE TO ORDER for anyone who didn’t want Mirkarimi’s Progressive Politics disrupting the city (notice — nothing to do with domestic violence in that phrase) — because the events had some validity.

INTERJECTION — information from Purpleberets.org — and the topic is well-covered at the Sonoma County (Northern CA, not too far from SF) “Women’s Justice Center.”  This is talking about much, MUCH more severe cases where DA refused to prosecute.   (And if you know my blog, the case underlying it — and which eventually led to my blogging habit — was when district attorneys in TWO Counties refused to stop a child-stealing in action, or to prosecute it — ever.  The general practice over a number of years (by law enforcement, specifically — I’m talking police in a number of cities, county sheriffs in more than one, and the district attorney’s office.  As it turns out later, the person in charge of the “Alameda County Family Justice Center” (a hybrid creation by DA’s office and others modeled on San Diego’s one which came out of the City Attorneys’ Office — I’ve blogged this plenty elsewhere), Ms. Nadia Lockyer, then went on to win the position of County Supervisor (with help of a $1 million campaign funding and  very, very, very  well connected spouse 30 years her senior) — had a substance abuse problem, started an affair with someone (closer to her age) she met in rehab — himself getting off ‘meth’ — and had an incident requiring 911 assistance in a Newark (California) motel early a.m.   This is the Bay Area leadership . . . . . it’s typically about politics and careers — and NOT about preventing violence against women and services to them.  In the larger scope.

So, re: the immense power of the District Attorney’s Office: Written, I believe, around the year 2000:

California Passes Tough New Domestic Violence Laws — by Maria DeSantis, director Women’s Justice Center

In effect since January 1, 2000, a patchwork of new California domestic violence laws is already providing added help for domestic violence victims. The laws, however, still leave untouched some of the biggest obstacles victims face.

. . . .

District Attorney Power Still Unfettered

A critical area for victims of rape, domestic violence, and child abuse that has been left ignored by legislators this year and in years past is the district attorney’s absolute power to refuse to file charges no matter how solid the evidence. Even if a district attorney refuses to file charges on a whole crime category, there is no legal remedy for victims. This unrestricted prosecutorial discretion is particularly dangerous for women in Sonoma County where D.A. Mike Mullins’ rate of conviction on domestic violence is one of the lowest in the state, and where he systematically under-charges cases of violence against women and children.

For example, at this writing, we at Women’s Justice Center have a case of three days of spousal rape, sodomy and beatings which the district attorney has filed only as misdemeanor domestic violence. The detective in the case states there is ample evidence to file multiple felonies.

In another case of a woman beaten to the point of a fractured skull, the D. A. refused to file at all for five months until one day the perpetrator went out and committed another assault with a deadly weapon on another victim. In yet another case of spousal rape, the district attorney and Cloverdale Police have been fighting for six months over who should pay for translating key evidence. Sadly, those are just a few of many examples.

Not only are all women put in direct and great danger by the absence of any legislative check on the district attorney’s denial of justice to women, but the D.A.’s refusal to file proper charges on these cases also suffocates and discourages police efforts. We need to work with our legislators to give them the fortitude to put restrictions on district attorney discretion now.

(For Spanish translation of this and other violence against women information, see the WJC website:www.justicewomen.com )

Back

© Marie De Santis
Women’s Justice Center
You can copy and distribute this information at will
if you include credit and don’t edit.

Back to Myrna Melgar’s article, minimizing the incident:

Unquestionably, there are women in deeply abusive relationships who need assistance getting out, who may not be able to initiate an escape on their own. Eliana’s relationship with Ross did not even come close to that standard.

It seems Myrna is oblivious to the fact that, through the family court, if Eliana did decide (later) to go to Venezuela without her husband’s assent, he could — in a moment, and don’t think such a person is unaware of this — charge her (or find someone to charge her) with parental kidnapping, put an arrest warrant out for her, and in the meantime get practically ANY family law judge in San Francisco — unless they had a personal grudge or other political reason to not do this — to switch sole custody to him, demand some sort or extradition, and/or have her thrown in jail if she came back to work things out.  And don’t think that this isn’t a possibility.  Maybe they would’ve worked it out — or maybe not.  But one thing’s for sure — I read a LOT of material put out by domestic violence groups, and have networked with hundreds, literally, of mothers over the years, and most of them were completely ambushed by the concept that appealing to domestic violence laws to protect themselves and kids, even if they were IN a battered womens’ shelter — was no shield at all for later transfer of their children to their abusers.  This is literally a third line of advocacy, now — “protective parents.”  So, while it did not NOW rise to that abusive level, it certainly could’ve later.

Yet in the eyes of Ivory Madison, Phil Bronstein, District Attorney George Gascon, and even the Director of La Casa de las Madres, once her husband had grabbed her arm, Eliana was simply no longer competent and her wishes were irrelevant.

In other words, an action done by a man, over which a woman has no control whatsoever, renders the woman incompetent and irrelevant, and empowers a long list of people — most of whom are male — to make decisions on this woman’s behalf, against her consistent and fervently expressed wishes. No one in the entire chain of people who made decisions on Eliana’s behalf offered her any help — besides prosecuting her husband

 How ironic — because it is literally true, and how I WISH someone would’ve intervened in this manner during the abusive years, while our kids were growing up, in a Bay Area County.   The most dangerous place for ME to be in that county was in my home, which was one reason I became an excellent networker and made sure to get those children into a variety of activities (“healthy,” they’d be called now) in nonabusive environments and connected with other kids their age and families, too.   Police came after incidents more violent than this one (I think — I wasn’t a witness to Eliana’s case) and didn’t arrest — ever.  So they left, and the violence continued, until finally I got out, before the “fatherhood”movement was in full swing — although it was definitly operational and almost prevented me from getting a restraining order at the time.  I hadn’t been assaulted recently enough (in part, because over time one learns how to avert, avoid, dodge and diffuse situations, i.e., live like a near-fugitive in one’s own home).  This man NEVER spent a night in jail on my behalf — but it’s quite likely that if he had, earlier on, he might have woken up and mended his ways.  Maybe.
My kids and I will never know, because no officer ever arrested him.  And now that he’s been very well informed that there will be NO prosecution beyond the initial restraining order with kickout type of even (apparently the DV organizations’ funding is tied to some sort of head count on “clients served”??) — my and my kids’ lives afterwards — though there was a noticeable improvement — no one could assault me IN my house — there has been stalking, serious, harassment around (times right before and right after) my work, repeated job losses surrounding this, and long-term litigation in the family law system, which utterly drained my resources, and finally stolen, then abandoned by their father, children.
So in light of that, I am in favor of more aggressive early intervention — although it’s not quite cldear to me how to label this high-profile case, except it highlights the hypocrisy of who is, and who is not, prosecuted.
Consider, however, if there’d been a subsequent argument around the same issue after Mirkarimi had been installed as sheriff and was still in that role.  How endangered might Eliana be at that time?  I have, literally, taken a phone call from a terrified women form a (DV) support group who had just learned that her (police officer) husband had been released.  She was headed off to a shelter.  Yes, law enforcement can be abusive –and plenty abusive.
From the same article, I want to address these two paragraphs, by Eliana’s friend Ms. Melgar, which make me wonder about her other professional connections in the area:
So here is the challenge to domestic violence advocates and progressive folks who care about women: A more progressive approach to Eliana and Ross’s particular situation, and to domestic violence in general, would be to work on emphasizing early, non-law enforcement intervention and the prevention of violence against women in addition to the necessary work of extricating women from dangerous situations
I.e., she is 100% unaware of one of the largest groups in the nation doing EXACTLY this — and based in San Francisco?  (the Family Violence Prevention Fund, formerly) — and yet has this Op-Ed in the Bay Guardian, a well-respected (progressive) publication?
Professor Laureen Snider at Queens University in Ontario has argued that criminalization is a flawed strategy for dealing with violence against women.
So what? if this person argued so?  And the one anecdote (ms. Melgar’s own life) which would indicate the re-socialization of men (in particular) to not assault family members actually worked in her case.  Perhaps along with the education cited in her case, her father was also aware that criminalization would get them all deported, and that was a factor in his change?   Meanwhile, in this particular area alone (and California, even moreso) we have ample evidence that this policy is a failure — women are still being shot, attacked, stabbed, beaten, burned, stalked, and sometimes put homeless — and what’s more, bystanders are now getting increasingly shot in the process too.  Seal Beach, California.  This has happened, moreover, around the arena of the family law and custody matters, and AFTER separation from violence!!
For the record, we are in the USA, and not Canada, and under a different system of law?  Got it?  They don’t have the Bill of Rights, to my understanding.  They have closer ties (i THINK – am beginning to wonder) to a country with a monarch!  And Dr. (Ph.D.) Snider is a sociologist.  Why would this writer bring in this viewpoint – are there no adequate viewpoints on this matter of an inbound sheriff violating domestic violence laws in the USA?

Laureen Snider

Laureen SniderDepartment of Sociology, Queen’s University, Canada

Laureen Snider, a Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, has published numerous studies on corporate crime, regulation and governance including Bad Business: Corporate Crime in Canada (Nelson: 1993) and Corporate Crime: Contemporary Debates (University of Toronto Press, 1995, co-edited with Dr. Frank Pearce). Her present research centres on the asymmetries of surveillance, comparing the monitoring of employees versus that of employers (“theft of time”); and the surveillance capabilities of traditional police forces against traditional criminality (“crime in the streets”, versus those of regulatory agencies against corporate criminality (“crime in the suites”). Recent publications include: “But They’re Not Real Criminals”: Downsizing Corporate Crime” (in B. Schissel & C. Brooks, eds., Critical Criminology in Canada . Halifax: Fernwood, 2008: 263-86); “Economic Crimes”, (in J. Minkes and L. Minkes, eds.,Corporate and White-Collar Crime. London: Sage, 2008: 39-60), “Safety Through Punishment?”, (in M. Beare, ed., Honouring Social Justice, Honouring Dianne Martin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008) and “Accommodating Power: The “Common Sense” of Regulators”, Social and Legal Studies 18(2), 2008 (forthcoming).

Faculty website: http://www.queensu.ca/sociology/?q=people/faculty/full-time/sniderl

Queens University, Ontario, Canada, is also a known hangout of some serious AFCC propaganda — In looking up Ms. Snider (who may or may not be involved in such things), the same brochure has a large inset designed to honoring Nicholas Bala (search my blog) in association with AFCC.  He is a definite supporter of PAS theory — i.e., minimizing child & wife abuse, or reframing it as NOT a criminal, but a “relationship” issue, as much as possible.  “Coincidentally” the international organization AFCC has a wide membership among relationship counselors and another psychological sorts, plus a clos connection to the fathers’ rights (= mens’ rights) movement in general, no matter what they “say” about how it’s all about the children…
http://law.queensu.ca/alumni/queensLawReports/lawReports2008.pdf  Here he is in this brochure, being honored (photo visible at the link):

Professor Nicholas Bala is introduced as the recipient of the Stanley Cohen Distinguished Research Award by Bill Howe, a board member of the Association of Family and Conciliatory Courts, at its 45th Annual Conference in Vancouver on May 29, 2008.

BALA RECOGNIZED FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO FAMILY AND DIVORCE LAW

On May 29, 2008, Bala received the Stanley Cohen Distinguished Research Award from the Association of Family and Conciliatory Courts (AFCC) in recognition of his outstanding work in family and divorce law. “I am deeply honoured by this recognition,” Bala said, “particularly in light of noteworthy contributions from previous winners.”

Bala became the first Canadian to win the award from the AFCC, an international organization of professionals involved in the family court system striving to empower families and promote healthier futures for children. Most of the award’s previous recipients were leading American researchers in the mental health field, including such scholars as Sanford Braver, Joan Kelly and Janet Johnston, whose work focused primarily on the effects of divorce on parents and children. . . .

In contradiction to the concept of “no-fault” divorce law…

As one of Canada’s leading family and children’s law scholars, Bala has a distinguished reputation for his innovative and traditional research methods and his diverse range of publications. Scholars in Canada and abroad frequently cite Bala, and Canadian lawyers and judges frequently quote his research. In its recent decision in R. v. D.B., the Supreme Court of Canada cited Bala’s work for the 25th time.

In addition to Bala’s traditional legal scholarship, much of his research draws from a variety of disciplines: he collaborates with psychologists, criminologists and social workers to address the problems children and families encounter within the justice system.

“I have not only been involved in consuming the research of social scientists about the justice system; I’ve helped to produce it,” Bala says. “My collaboration with mental health professionals and social scientists has allowed me to appreciate both the value—and the limitations—of their work for the justice system.”

Besides his interdisciplinary work with the Child Witness Project, Bala has been taking a closer look at how domestic violence is handled in the family-law arena. He has been working with three mental-health professionals {{Want to bet $100 they’re all AFCC members?  I could use a little extra cash to upgrade some of the blog….!}}} to produce a series of papers on this issue, and the group recently created a model to address the effects of family violence on the determination of child custody and access. **

**Jargon translation:   wife-beating is no reason to restrict a child who witnessed this having access to their biological father.  Let us do supervised visitation, etc.  — hence (in the US) HHS “Access/Visitation” funding, with help from the (also international) Children’s Rights Council, which developed the term “access” to replace the term “visitation.”   This model will be ADMINSTRATIVELY or PRACTICALLY begun (or has been already) and then other highly placed individuals (state by state in the US) will suggest — hey, why not make it a law?  (Example:  PA:  Commission on Justice Initiatives:  Changing the Culture of Custody).

The team’s article about their family-violence-assessment model, which was published in the most recent issue of the international journal Family Court Review, {{Co-produced with AFCC & Hofstra Univ. School of Law in NY}} is already being cited in a number of countries.

The Stanley Cohen Distinguished Research Award (Stanley Cohen being a principal in the development of AFCC) is Bala’s second major award in three years for his valuable research contributions. He won the Queen’s Prize for Excellence in Research in 2006 during an annual university-wide competition. For more information about this award, see “Nicholas Bala Wins Top University Research Prize” on page 2 of the 2007 issue of Queen’s Law Reports at http://law.queensu.ca/alumni/publications/lawReports2007.pdf

Last I heard, United State of America claims to be somewhat of a unique country, based on its Constitution, Bill of Rights, and reputation for freedom, right to trial by jury, protections of due process, etc. — people immigrate here for a better life.  We are labeled (or maybe were, not too long ago) the “leadership of the free world.”
So why this urgency to bring all our legal institutions — especially one dealing with families, and raising the next generations of children — into consonance with international standards, including socialist countries, countries such as the UK, which still maintain a Queen, a national religion, and until about 100 years ago, were about as imperialistic, colonizing and enslaving a country as could be found on the globe?  HUH?
And why is Ms. Melgar quoting someone who hangs out at a University which is known (at least as to family law) as an “AFCC safe harbor”?  Because she’s a feminist? California doesn’t have enough feminists to reference?    (The New Transparency group) (the Conversation:   Snider blurg:)

My major research interests lie in the intersection between knowledge, punishment and law. I have applied this in several substantive areas, in studies examining the poisoned water disaster in Walkerton, Ontario, the reception of knowledge claims on corporate crime, and the constitution of the punishable woman.

Experience

  • Professor of Sociology, Queen’s University – present

Education

  • Toronto University, B.A., M.A., Ph.D
Site “The Conversation” (Obviously I am just looking up Laureen Snider and wondering why she’s quoted in re: prosecution of a SF inbound sheriff):
OUR CHARTER
  • Give experts a greater voice in shaping scientific, cultural and intellectual agendas by providing a trusted platform that values and promotes new thinking and evidence-based research.
  • Unlock the knowledge and expertise of researchers and academics to provide the public with clarity and insight into society’s biggest problems.
  • Create an open site for people around the world to share best practices and collaborate on developing smart, sustainable solutions.
Not that it may be enforceable at this point, but I happen to live in a country where the underlying concept was NOT an “aristocracy of the experts” to solve social problems, but a government of “We the People” through institutions that limited any resurgence of the tyranny of religion, individual interests (including royalty from other countries), and, to the extent we have taxation, and pass laws, they are to come from our elected representatives, who are accountable to the people living here (i.e. ,citizens) — and are not to be imported laced with concepts NOT innate to the US, and for which it fought a serious “war for independence” — from Great Britain — in the 1770s!  ! !! (not a topic to be developed in this post, but there’s a lot more depth I’m learning these days about HOW we became a country of collective debt to an international banking cartel, etc. etc.)
 The matter at hand here has to do with an  official — appointed Sheriff – a government employee of the USA — not Canada.  have the discussion, but the prosecution, leadership and the dialogue around domestic violence advocacy groups here (mostly nonprofits which take some HHS funding, I’m fairly sure) is not an international matter — as pertains to should or should not it have been prosecuted…
 CONTINUING. . . . .  Bay Guardian article:
Snider argues that feminists and progressives have misidentified social control with police/governmental control. In other words, we are substituting one oppressor for another — and glossing over the fact that in the judicial system, poor people of color fare worse than white middle-class people. We have punted on (forward) the hard work education, and of shaping and reshaping men’s definitions of masculinity and violence, of the social acceptance of the subjugation of women, of violence against children. We have chosen to define success in the fight against domestic violence by women saved from horrible situations and incarceration rates for their abusers — rather than doing the difficult work of community and individual change necessary to prevent violence from happening in the first place
Perhaps Dr. Snider (who operates and was educated in Canada — exclusively — it seems, but shares through internet and other means (I don’t know) an international dialogue on certain issues of interest to her and them) is completely unaware of the heavily subsidized ‘Minnesota Program Development Fund,” the “Duluth Model,” the prevalence of the term “CCR” (COORDINATED COMMUNITY RESPONSE) in this country, thanks in great part to Ellen Pence, who, I note was college-educated also in Toronto:

Ellen Pence

Ellen Pence (1948 – January 6, 2012) was a scholar and a social activist. She co-founded the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project[1], an inter-agency collaboration model used in all 50 states in the U.S. and over 17 countries.[2] A leader in both the battered women’s movement and the emerging field of institutional ethnography, she was the recipient of numerous awards including the Society for the Study of Social Problems Dorothy E. Smith Scholar Activist Award (2008) for significant contributions in a career of activist research. . .

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pence graduated from St. Scholastica in Duluth with a B.A. She was active in institutional change work for battered womensince 1975, and helped found the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in 1980.

She is credited with creating the Duluth Model of intervention in domestic violence cases, Coordinated Community Response (CCR), which uses an interagency collaborative approach involving police, probation, courts and human services in response to domestic abuse. The primary goal of CCR is to protect victims from ongoing abuse.[citation needed]

She earned her Ph.D in Sociology from the University of Toronto in 1996. She used institutional ethnography as a method of organizing community groups to analyze problems created by institutional intervention in families. She founded Praxis International in 1998 and was the chief author and architect of the Praxis Institutional Audit, a method of identifying, analyzing and correcting institutional failures to protect people drawn into legal and human service systems because of violence and poverty.[citation needed] Ellen pence died [RECENTLY] at the age of 63 , from breast cancer .

PRAXIS means “practices.”   Who is practiced upon?  (Sorry, this wasn’t brought before our voters — except it went through the US Reps House Appropriations Committee,  I guess. . . ..

Not before endorsing and propagating a system of educational institutions — taking public funding — based on social theory, and which have attracted a host of inappropriate misappropriations of public employees times, and which set up a built-in HIERARCHY — the exact OPPOSITE of what women, particularly mothers, leaving abuse need.  This hierarchy is a lose/lose situation for any person imagining he/she has enforceable, legal rights in the USA — as an INDIVIDUAL.   It sets up the hierarchy of the TEACHERS (for hire // mercenaries) versus the “TAUGHT.”

The social science THEORY that one can educate or train men out of violence is just taht — a theory.  It is also contrary to the american (USA) form of government, which is to expect people to keep an identifiable law, and maintain a fair process of assigning punishments for those who choose not to.  This means all people can be informed of WHAT their laws are — and leaves no room for speculations on the social  impact of father-absence, single-parenthood, or even violence against women — and then millions of $$ which the public (and private interests) fund to tinker with the demonstration projects each time they get it wrong.

Back to the C.W.Nevius article (top of post), which continues:

Witnesses save lives

“Most cases are not this public,” said Beverly Upton, executive director of San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium. “But if anyone made this more difficult, it was Ross Mirkarimi. There was a lot of activity trying to silence the witness, and that doesn’t usually happen. What we know is that witnesses coming forward saves lives.”

Mirkarimi was initially charged with three misdemeanors related to domestic violence and eventually reached an agreement to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of false imprisonment. Mayor Ed Lee also filed charges to permanently remove him from office.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/30/BANI1NSJ36.DTL#ixzz1quqyOPjT

FYI, I do not live in San Francisco (some may wonder), but have lived in the area for over two decades, and worked frequently in the city and in surrounding counties — both during and after my “domestic violence” marriage.  I notice that whenver there’s a high-profile event, here is this SF DVConsortium and Beverly Upton being consulted for help.  I never got any help from them, nor did I get ANY help from the Family Violence Prevention Fund, although, they do throw a great conference, and how validating to know that domestic violence is a health risk (like, I didn’t know that?).  It did NOTHING to address the ongoing violence enabled by the family law system to any and all mothers who, after doing the right thing, but having for some reasons, very persistent Exes — are thereafter psychologically, economically, legally and in other ways tortured (if not extorted) — in the custody realm.

This group apparently could care less, so long as they get their funds and keep up the reputation for protecting women from violence – without addressing the land mines ahead of them.   SEE MY BLOG!  no one gave me a federal fund to publicize this, and apparently the more other groups immunize themselves from DV rhetoric, the better it is for BOTH pro and con grantseekers.  So, here — for a quick update — this “Consortium” consorts in getting public grants to continue their agenda.  I gather this is a progressive agenda because it’s under the umbrella of the (very large) TIDES Foundation, which also sponsored the nonprofit “Stop Family Violence” — which appears (best I can tell) to consist of a website, and one or two professionals who got to fly around to conferences nationwide (Irene Weiser, i forget who the other person was) and now is perhaps inactive, although the website is still up there.

Members of this agency

aka SFDVC and/or DVC) founded in 1982, is a network of seventeen domestic violence service agencies that come together with the goal of providing high quality, coordinated and comprehensive services to San Francisco’s victims of domestic abuse. {{ABUSE?  or VIOLENCE?  Make up your mind!!}}

The services of the individual agencies include emergency shelter, transitional housing, crisis lines, counseling, prevention programs, education and legal assistance. Services are available in the many different languages of San Francisco’s diverse populations. One of the main activities of the SFDVC is networking. SFDVC agencies share information, learn about issues that impact their work and coordinate their services and activities with a particular focus on public funding, specifically coordinating grant proposals and conducting advocacy/lobbying of government departments as to the importance of funding domestic violence services.

The SFDVC is a nonprofit organization and a project of the Tides Center. The SFDVC is led by its co-chairs and committees. The SFDVC recognizes that San Francisco is a diverse city and domestic violence is a problem in all communities regardless of ethnicity, race, class, physical ability, religion, age, immigration and economic status, sexual orientation and gender identity. 

Obviously this is important work — HOWEVER — notice the collective grants-obtaining clout they have?  That must be HOW there has been such coordinated and collective silence on the fathers’ rights grants and movement I report, and so have other UNsponsored INDIVIDUALS.  Do they teach women about to file a kickout order about the upcoming Access/Visitation grants (in place, $10 million a year since 1996), how the Federal Incentives to the Child SUpport Enforcement system include running demonstration grants on how to increase noncustodial (father) time with the children, and how if they go on welfare, they are quite likely to be ex-parte consolidated into a divorce action, and thrown to the family court wolves, whose funding is MUCH larger?

NO — not last I heard.

Do they say anything about the organization AFCC, which practically runs the local Family Courts, let alone the Family Court Facilitators’ offices where people NOT as well-off financially (probably) than Ms. Lopez will end up seeking remedies?  AFCC publishes most of the brochures available there — and (I checked in recent years) the coverage of domestic violence issues is highly diminished.  So, what does that say about women’s right to know and make an INFormeD decision about whether to confront their batterer (sometimes with a civil protective order — not even mentioned in these dialogues), or call the police and hope a criminal one is instated?

LASTLY (and that’s enough for today!), I wanted to also show the Mayor Ed Lee catering to the FUTURES WITHOUT VIOLENCE organization, which currently owns prime real estate (or owns the organization that owns the real estate) in the SF Praesidio.  Futures without Violence, indeed.  The antidote to tyranny in our country (whether by domestic individuals within their family walls, or outside them by public officials) is a balance of powers between (1) the government and (2) the people, and fair enforcement of crimes against the state which jeopardize the safety of the public — which domestic violence DOES, and there’s plenty of evidence in the form of innocent bystanders shot, businesses disrupted, as well as responding police officers.  We live in one of the more violent countries in the world, in many levels, and despite decades of advocacy by DV groups, their inherent demand for public funds to “coordinate services” and educate — the world, essentially — they are not open to criticism from the street level about this agenda.

TOO BAD – it’s here, it’s coming and I’m not going to stop, if I can help, this outrage.  I have one-third of my adult life thrown down this rabbit hole ,and the concept of betrayal is absolutely high.  MSM is owned, and is never going to tell the whole story.  More bloggers are needed — bloggers that cite their sources where possible, and make sure that this situation is no longer covered up, or specially framed when it comes time to renew the funding for the VAWA act and the counterintuitive simultaneous funding of the next round of fatherhood/marriage etc. grants.  No wonder this keeps going on, perhaps — our society is so stressed and compartmentalized, and has been already pre-trained to have their income taxes garnished, so garnishing wages for child support is a short step away.  No privacy, no safety, and no justice.  Just more debt!

My parting shot, I think:  The Mayor that wants Mirkarimi out references Futures without Violence.  Label this:  “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours!”

Siana Hristova / The Chronicle
S.F. Mayor Ed Lee delivers the keynote address at a national domestic violence conference
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/30/BASJ1NSMGF.DTL#ixzz1qux42sTZ

Without mentioning Ross Mirkarimi by name, Mayor Ed Lee on Friday delivered an indirect rebuke of the man he suspended from the sheriff’s job after he pleaded guilty to a domestic-violence-related charge of false imprisonment of his wife.

The mayor made his remarks during a brief keynote address at a national conference on domestic violence under way in San Francisco sponsored by the Futures Without Violence organization.

Seizing on sentence

Mirkarimi was elected sheriff in November after serving seven years on the Board of Supervisors. He was sworn in to his new job on Jan. 8 and was arrested less than two weeks later for allegedly bruising his wife’s arm during a New Year’s Eve argument in front of their 2-year-old son. The district attorney charged him with misdemeanor domestic violence battery, dissuading a witness and child endangerment.

The new sheriff pleaded not guilty to those three counts, but on March 12, under a plea-bargain agreement, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor false imprisonment. He was sentenced to three years’ probation, weekly domestic violence intervention classes, and one day in jail with time served for when he showed up at the Hall of Justice for booking; he did not serve time behind bars.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/30/BASJ1NSMGF.DTL#ixzz1qv2FUQhL

I have yet to find out a news article actually naming who is the provider of the weekly classes!  But this whole deal sure does give us a picture of how political the entire field is.  NOT TO MENTION — that once they get their mileage and some funds (he has to take those classes, right?) with the case, and the press — these programs that didn’t teach a county supervisor how to behave to his wife — and I’ll bet he probably approved some of the programs too — are going to continue, with MSM coverage while the private tragedies, ongoing, and far larger in scope, danger to the women involved, and near-lethal or lethal — surrounding the insane institution of the family courts — will continue, probably.  Talk about rocking the power structure to the center– if THAT story got out, I seriously doubt MSM (mainstream media) would take it!
They are right to suspend the guy.  Not that there aren’t others in the area that ought to lose their nonprofit standing for simply not profiting the public — like the huge Futures without Violence!
Full Name: FUTURES WITHOUT VIOLENCE FEIN: 943110973
Type: Public Benefit Corporate or Organization Number: 1648791
Registration Number: 077397
Record Type: Charity Registration Type: Charity Registration
Issue Date: 12/31/2005 Renewal Due Date: 5/15/2011
Registration Status: Current Date This Status: 5/16/2007
Date of Last Renewal: 9/23/2010
Address Information
Address Line 1: 100 MONTGOMERY STREET, PRESIDIO – MAIN POST Phone:
Address Line 2:
Address Line 3:
Address Line 4: SAN FRANCISCO CA 94129
Annual Renewal Information
Fiscal Begin: 01-JAN-01
Fiscal End: 31-DEC-01
Total Assets: $8,143,898.00
Gross Annual Revenue: $10,345,721.00
RRF Received: 25-MAR-02
Returned Date:
990 Attached: Y
Status: Accepted
Fast forward 10 years, some additional Annie E. Casey participation and of course the concept of “Fatherhood” as a tool to prevent domestic violence (see my blog), and an institute (downloadable trainings?) to promote that concept:
Fiscal Begin: 01-JAN-09
Fiscal End: 31-DEC-09
Total Assets: $26,157,567.00
Gross Annual Revenue: $11,614,069.00
RRF Received: 12-AUG-10
Returned Date:
990 Attached: Y
Status: Accepted
Fiscal Begin: 01-JAN-10
Fiscal End: 31-DEC-10
Total Assets: $36,603,585.00
Gross Annual Revenue: $17,118,149.00
RRF Received: 14-JUN-11
Returned Date:
990 Attached: Y
Status:
The extra $10 million in ASSETS between 2009 & 2010 is most likely the acquisition of the real estate at the Praesidio.  I dare you to look at their (rejected) tax return to the IRS, and figure out why it was rejected (letter uploaded to the same site).  this is the Office of Attorney General’s site, and anyone can search through it, and should:

(STATE CHARITABLE RETURN FOR 2009) FORM RRF-I INFORMATION REGARDING GOVERNMENT FUNDING STATEMENT 14 ART B, LINE 6

  • U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE OFFICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAM 810 7TH STREET NW, 5TH FLOO~ WASHINGTON, DC 20531 NEELAM PATEL, 202-353-4338  — AMOUNT   $2.9 million
  • U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES 370 L’ENFANTE PROMENADE, 6Tl FLOOR
  • WASHINGTON, DC 20447  — AMOUNT  $1.5 million
  • U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH DHUMAN SERVICES INDIAN HEALTH SERVICE 801 THOMPSON AVENUE ROCKVILLE, MD 20852 — AMOUNT $86K
  • NATIONAL COUNCIL OF JUVENIL! AND FAMILY COURT JUDGES P.O. BOX 8970 RENO, NV 89507  — AMOUNT $91K
  • OTHER GOVERNMENT GRANTS (whose?)  AMOUNT $30K
  • TOTAL GOVERNMENT FUNDING  $ 4,649,368
(that was year 2009)….
the heavy involvement of the US HHS and the NCJFCJ — which is a family court organization (and, the current head of the office of VAW, Susan D. Carbon, used to be president of the NCJFCJ, I heard) — ensures that no real critical analysis of the feminist backlash in the family court system is going to take place — that would be biting the hand that feeds them!
There were (year 2009) TEN (10) paid directors of this NONprofit — and their combined regular compensation was about $1.6 million, with Esta Soler’s being the largest salary ($234K & $71K “other”), and the lowest of any of the others being $112K.   If you add “other compensation” for all ten, the total is NEARLY $THREE MILLION  ($3 mil).
In addition, campaign /project manager professionals — $428,323….three individuals.
There are (moreover– see that tax returns), TWO real estate LLCs and ONE real estate “C-Corp” (an “Inc.”) with the word Praesidio in them, at the same street address (383 Rhode Island #304, SF) of the then-FVPF.  At least one of these is 100% owned by FVPF.
Futures without Violence is international in scope, but heavily supported — year after year (actually decade after decade it seems — I think it began ca. 1989) by US taxpayers, while being itself free from income tax (as a corporation) and investing in real estate.  GO FIGURE!  They are living “high on the hog” and running the show, while men, women and children around them continue to get molested, have their income, lives and assets SQUANDERED through ongoing litigation in the family law arena, which is funded in good part by similar corporations behind this monster DV agency.
I have heard Esta Soler speak, and she’s impressive.  What they have done is impressive.  However it doesn’t compensate for the intrinsic disparity of influence between this group — and actual mothers who need protection and help, and to keep their kids away from violent fathers — AND vice versa.
AND — in 2010 — they decided not to report their Schedule B — List of Contributors, including names and addresses (see amounts, above).  The notice was sent to the group in August 2011 — and the situation apparently has not yet been corrected.  Nor did they send in their annual $225 fee (notice also sent August 2011).  Perhaps this group is going to pull up roots, sell its real estate to a foreign-based corporation and simply stop dealing with the American law and order system entirely.
It should be looked into. It’s not too big to look into.   Why do we need a multimillion$$ NONprofit to run campaigns and things like “Coaching Boys into Men” — that’s the job of schools and parents.  take that money down and make better schools, or almost any situation might be preferable.
Publicize the actual LAWS against such violence on their sites and teach pastors, teachers, and others to report.  I reported to plenty of individuals in mandatory reporting positions during my marriage.  None of them, for the most part, did much.  They must have figured out it was someone else’s job.
Can you imagine running a ‘Batterers Intervention Class” for Ross Mirkarimi?  And can we imagine that a politician of this stature couldn’t convince anyone that he’s absorbed and believed the material?  There’s a LOT more than meets the eye to this case.  I’m glad he got suspended, not that this would have made him an inappropriate county supervisor or other political leader.  Just not sheriff!!

The Roots of Welfare DeForm — An Off-Road List of Links — and the Virtues of Educating Oneself

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At bottom are the links from the blog  “The Family Court Franchise System.”  In one of the recent posts I said, “I’m not your mother” and suggested people educate themselves.  Plus two interesting links, “Educate Yo’self” and “Educate Yourself” which is where I got part of my education.

Where I got the habit of educating myself goes far back — but in these matters, it came from having relied on others’ information, which — though true enough — was (1) not the overview– critical elements were missing, and (2) given what was missing, almost irrelevant.  Instead they (includes Lundy Bancroft, and classic DV rhetoric) talked psychology and group dynamics and some law — something anyone living through what I did has already figured out (though how nice to have the correct terminology).

But they should’ve talked finances — and corporate influence, federal incentives, and private nonprofit associations running demonstration social science projects on as many POOR people (or other distressed populations) as possible, allegedly for the public’s benefit, and definitely at the public’s expense.  In fact, public and private are so blurred at this point, it might be best to ignore what the law says about domestic violence and criminal behavior, and rebuttable presumptions against custody going to the batterer (after all — plenty of judges, family law attorneys, custody evaluators, guardians ad litem and child support professionals most certainly do.  And we have to deal with them anyhow, so why not figure out what’s going on!

ROUGHLY in TWO PARTS:  I.  “EDUCATE YOURSELF” — and several examples.  And then II. (as to the Roots of Welfare) — some links to do so.  (under 7,000 words this time).  That’s if you care to.  I’m not your babysitter, I do this for conscience, possibly for therapy, and for a track record. But they are — as this shows — hauling off (kidnapping) children systematically from good parents, to get drugged under foster care.  They are, when there are two parents fighting for custody, able to prolong and make horrible the fight for years — and so “justify” major grants continuations (under TANF, which makes this possible) to promote marriage and fatherhood, and other very chauvinistic (antifeminist) ideas.  At the heart of this is the concept that it’s OK to force indoctrination (“education”) on poor people to address why they are poor, that the elite are appropriate in “molding” the poor — through force — to understand their function and place in society.  Religion is a good aid to this policy.

Too much of this policy comes from places like the British monarchy, or the Nazi apparatus, or prior to that, Prussian educational ideas.  Too much of it depends on free time to philosophize on the backs of workers that barely make ends meet and have far less freedom or mobility simply because they have no family wealth (assets), whether earned, or inherited.  Add to this things like eminent domain (government condemning, then seizing, then selling to cronies, private property) and we’re headed back towards the concentrations camps.  Depending on when “Judgment Day” comes — or does not.  Whatever the status of “judgment day” — there is nothing “just” or equitable about Welfare Reform, which enables flexible grants to the states, and gives bribes to states for going along with federal policy.  Federal policy rubberstamped by Congress — but managed by the Executive Branch (White House and friends) through a grants system.  The grants system itself is based on the TAX system — and there you go.

This is commonly called fascism ,centralization and we know already where that heads off to.

I know what dictatorship is at the family level, the personal level — and am pretty hot and bothered to see how far down the line it is at the national level as well.  When one’s life’s work is repeatedly interrupted, and finally stopped — talking about the essential things one has done in life — one has to rethink the “hold a job til retirement model,” particularly being a female of a certain age in the USA, Post-Bush1 & Bush 2.

(Read PART I, those comments will make more sense).

PART I

Educate Yo’self was actually the domain name of a link someone else passed along.  What a source!

The Declaration of Independence – 1776
The Articles of Confederation – 1777
The Constitution for the United States – 1787
Its Sources and Its Application

Commitment One: To Freedom

The commitment of greatest importance is a DEDICATION To FREEDOM at all levels of society, and in all dimensions of our existence.

A commitment to freedom, at all levels, is automatically a commitment to Rigorous Honesty, the Truth of Reality. After all, once freedom is insured, why would one need to lie?

Any “security” that is gained through loss of freedom is a Commitment to Fear. Any nation that puts “national security” above personal freedom has lost its power base

And, tidbits such as (from 2008 — an election year. Worth a review this year?):

545 People Responsible for America’s Woes
by Charley ReeseHave you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits? Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don’t write the tax code. Congress does. You and I don’t set fiscal policy. Congress does. You and I don’t control monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices – 545 human beings out of the 300 million – are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered but private central bank.

. . . .Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault.    . . .

REPLACE THE SCOUNDRELS . . .

They continue to re-authorize the bastard child called “Welfare Reform,” which has simply expanded the ways to steal from the public, without proper monitoring, to infinity.  Go review the beginnings of the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative (I’ve blogged).  Or, how from state to state, the We, the People method of disciplining criminal judges (leaving ethical ones on the bench) — which was the grand jury — was replaced by “judicial complaint boards.”

It was passed in 1996, a Bill Clinton year.  See “From the Transvaal to TANF” talking about “triangulation” and how Clinton promoted this version of the “contract with America” as inbetween and somehow “above” party politics.  The fact is, the Republicans had succeeded in shutting down government over this, his ass was in trouble with Monica Lewinsky, and there was the Hillary problem; in fact there were plenty of problems.

The “Transvaal’ refers to Cecil Rhodes.  Bill Clinton, among others, was a Rhodes Scholar.   The purpose of the Rhodes Scholarship, and the beyond-my-liftime-goal of Mr. Rhodes, was to regain the British control of the world, particularly the return of “the US colonies” to their master.  Some people were born to lead, others were born to serve, obviously.  Now, fast-forward to TANF reform and look at who it’s targeting for program indoctrination on how to stay married, and quit propagating outside of marriage, etc.

The fact is, were it not for the artificial income tax / fiat currency situation (our $$ is off the gold standard), were it not the need for extremely wealthy corporations to maintain their wealth by a constant flow of competition for jobs in their industries (i.e., keep wages down, profits up) and to through a HUGE variety of means — including trying to designate everyone, almost, a behavioral health case, and where possible, proscribe some nice medication for them (i.e., control by medication, even sterilization) — it would be a piece of cake for an intelligent, motivated and in control of her own infrastructure single mother (or single father) to handle their own affairs.

One of the affairs the largest mistakes made by OUR forebears (generally speaking of USA citizens), over a century ago, was to hand over the raising of our kids to the government in the form of compulsory public education — which is compulsory time-wasting and dumbing down, and has been for decades.  It’s an ABSOLUTE disgrace and has become simply a values battleground anyhow.    And as to equalization — go check your senators — and all the representatives in the state — how many of them are sending their kids to public schools, and were themselves the product of public schools.  How many of them came from honest working backgrounds and were not raised with a silver spoon, or a political spoon?

Some of the greatest minds and leaders had the least traditional schooling — for themselves.   Horace Mann fits that example, and it appears 1837 was the first year there was a “Secretary of Education” at least in massachusetts.  Now we have a Secretary of Health and Human Services (more control over this country than you realize, and the current one is from Kansas), plus the “Czars” — interesting term, huh?  Look at him:

HORACE MANN‘s SCHOOLING

” The Father of American Education”,” Horace Mann, was born in Franklin, Massachusetts, in 1796. Mann’s schooling consisted only of brief and erratic periods of eight to ten weeks a year. Mann educated himself by reading ponderous volumes from the Franklin Town Library. This self education, combined with the fruits of a brief period of study with an intinerant school master, was sufficient to gain him admission to the sophomore class of Brown University in 1816” (4, Cremin). He went on to study law at Litchfield Law School and finally received admission to the bar in 1823 (15, Filler). In the year 1827 Mann won a seat in the state legislature and in 1833 ran for State Senate and won.” Throughout these years Horace Mann maintained a thriving law practice, first in Dedham and later in Boston” (5, Cremin).

” Of the many causes dear to Mann’s heart, non was closer than the education of the people. He held a keen interest in school policy. April 20, 1837, Mann left his law practice and accepted the post of the newly founded Secretary of Education” (6, Cremin). During his years as Secretary of Education Mann published twelve annual reports on aspects of his work and programs, and the integral relationship between education, freedom, and Republican government. He wanted a school that would be available and equal for all, part of the birth-right of every American child, to be for rich and poor alike. Mann had found “social harmony” to be his primary goal of the school. (8, Cremin).

Horace Mann felt that a common school would be the “great equalizer.” Poverty would most assuredly disappear as a broadened popular intelligence tapped new treasures of natural and material wealth. He felt that through education crime would decline sharply as would a host of moral vices like violence and fraud. In sum, there was no end to the social good which might be derived from a common school (8, Cremin).

SO — how’d you say THAT’s going?  Because in Los Angeles, they had a schoolteacher feeding blindfolded teaspoons of his own semen.  THIRD-graders.  Has poverty, violence and fraud been primarily despite the school system, or perhaps as a consequence of it?
Horace Mann had one thing — freedom.  He had another thing — access to the library.  He was also male, and he could vote — it was another century, from his passing the bar (1823) before women could!  Rather than trying to train a nation (how egotistical!), what about establish these basic rights, and make available justice (and libraries).
Horace Mann and Education Reform
Reformers, some influenced by the Prussian education reforms of the early 1800s, emerged at an incredible rate hoping to change the general form and ideals of American education to keep up with the evolving country. No longer would small rural schoolhouses, untrained teachers, or limitations in education opportunities suffice. A more defined system, which, as Mann and others had hoped, would also be free and universal, slowly garnered both grassroots and governmental support. The goal was to mold individuals from all socio-economic backgrounds into good people and good citizens through education. It was believed that in doing so everyone would be able to achieve to their fullest potential.
I would always much rather see a sermon than hear one.   Moreover, we ought to take care about importing Prussian OR German ideas.  Germans tend to be real organized, excessively so, — and I think it’s fair to say, Centralized. There is a LOT of literature out, particularly I’m thinking about Alice Miller, and “The Drama of the Gifted Child,” (d. 2010; she was a Swiss psychoanalyst, the book is about the consequences of repressed trauma)– talking about how the attempts to “mold” good strong citizens with cruel child-rearing practices (from Germany) may have helped created the cruel, socially-detached, amoral child molesters and sociopaths of today that we are now cleaning up after.
Alice Miller, child abuse and mistreatment
And yet, we have in TANF, a government intent on even more education of the public — in morality issues like fatherhood, marriage, abstinence, and so forth.  The truth is — at least as to TANF — I believe it’s simply another form of wealth-transfer; and it’s a VERY high profit-margin on downloading information by the internet, setting up a franchise system, having people BUY into it to be qualified as a marriage educator (etc.) — it was a real smart development for some very dishonest people.

What about Ben Franklin? (1706-1790)– was he adequately schooled?  Methinks not:

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706. He was the tenth son of soap maker, Josiah Franklin. Benjamin’s mother was Abiah Folger, the second wife of Josiah. In all, Josiah would father 17 children.

Josiah intended for Benjamin to enter into the clergy. However, Josiah could only afford to send his son to school for one year and clergymen needed years of schooling. But, as young Benjamin loved to read he had him apprenticed to his brother James, who was a printer. After helping James compose pamphlets and set type which was grueling work, 12-year-old Benjamin would sell their products in the streets.

What about Albert Einstein’s schooling?(1879-1955) (from a UK site): (take some time, here…)

Albert Einstein was born on 14th March, 1879 at Ulm, Germany. He spent his early life in Munich, where his family owned a small manufacturing business. He studied Judaism at home, where he also was taught to play the violin. He showed a great interest in Mathematics and taught himself Euclidian geometry at the age of 12.

What sort of education did Albert receive?

Albert Einstein began school in Munich, but does not seem to have been particularly interested in what was offered there. . .

He was already a self-motivated learner, with experience in (I presume) language, music, and geometry.  Are schools BORING the gifted? along with how many others?

Einstein hoped to become an electrical engineer and, at the second attempt, enrolled at the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich in 1896.

It seems that he continued to show little respect for his teachers, as he was not a regular attender at lectures. He spent considerable time studying physics on his own. Despite the lack of time in lecture halls, he graduated as a teacher of physics and mathematics in 1900, but was unable to obtain a post in the university. It has been suggested that he had not impressed his professors enough, which is perhaps not surprising, given his attitude, and so did not receive their all-important backing for an academic career.

Perhaps this lack of respect comes from someone who found something better to do with his time, working on self-assigned projects of interest.

What did he do next?

Albert Einstein became a temporary teacher of mathematics, first at the Technical High School in Winterthur, and secondly at a private school at Schaffhausen.

In 1902 he began work at the Swiss patent office in Bern as a technical expert third class. He remained there until 1909, having been promoted, in 1906, to technical expert second class! He married Mileva Maric, by whom he had two sons, in 1903. They later divorced.

During his time there, Albert Einstein devoted a great deal of his spare time to the study of theoretical physics, and in 1905, received his doctorate for a thesis entitled On a new determination of molecular dimensions. He also published three important papers on theoretical physics

 Anyone who’s honest today will admit that a major function of public school education is babysitter — to soak up the TIME of individuals so their parents (both their parents, if there are two) can go to work and pay their taxes to fund the teachers, among other things (or pay off some interest on the national debt).  As such, the kids (and youth) in school are going to have other things they would rather be doing, and/or exploring — so a good deal of the school day goes into administration and managing the kids.  And (now at least) running mental health screenings on them to see if some drugs can be marketed (see recent whistleblower on TMAP, PennMAP, who documented this).   More on Einstein:

In 1952, he declined the offer of the presidency of Israel and continued his work towards the world renouncing nuclear weapons.

Albert Einstein died on 18th April, 1955 at Princeton and was cremated that day at Trenton, New Jersey. He is, perhaps, the best known scientist of the 20th century

And just imagine — he was bored in school from the start, skipped a lot of classes, didn’t brown-nose enough in Swiss National Polytechnic around the turn of the century, resulting in his having a fairly humble job which left him time to study things of personal interest — eventually a Nobel Prize, etc. What does public education in the US do today?  Soak up time, DELETE a lot of music because not enough children are learning to read and write, substitutes values education, and when that (obviously) fails, recommend more money and start kids earlier and have longer school days and years.
The existence of the public school system, and its lower quality, is a caste-sorter, and intentionally so.   Where did our politicians go to school, prior to sponsoring initiatives to train the rest of us about the purpose of life, relationships, sex, and what and what is not healthy?  For example (to bring us to 2012 Presidential Candidacy, and which conservative do you want….)
Mitt Romney went to a private school from 7th grand onwards, where he met his wife, who also attended private schools.  Described as (Wikipedia):
Cranbrook Schools is a private, PK–12 school located on a 319-acre (1.29 km2) campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The schools comprise a co-educational elementary school, a middle school with separate schools for boys and girls, and a co-educational high school with boarding facilities  …Romney went to public elementary schools[17] and then from seventh grade on, attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, a private boys preparatory school of the classic mold where he was the lone Mormon and where many students came from even more privileged backgrounds.[18][23][24][25] He was not particularly athletic and at first did not excel at academics.[18] While a sophomore, he participated in the campaign in which his father was elected Governor of Michigan.[nb 2] 
Cranbrook Schools is a private, PK–12 school located on a 319-acre (1.29 km2) campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The schools comprise a co-educational elementary school, a middle school with separate schools for boys and girls, and a co-educational high school with boarding facilities. Cranbrook Schools is part of the Cranbrook Educational Community (CEC), which includes the Cranbrook Institute of Science, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Cranbrook House and Gardens. (Nearby Christ Church Cranbrook remains outside this formal structure.) The Cranbrook community was established by publishing mogul George Booth,
 Cranbrook was designated a National Historic Landmark on June 29, 1989 for its significant architecture and design. It attracts tourists from around the world. Approximately 40 acres (160,000 m2) of Cranbrook Schools’ campus are gardens.  As of 2006, Cranbrook Schools had an endowment of $191 million, among the 15 largest held by America’s boarding schools.[1] In addition, the Cranbrook Educational Community, of which the Schools is a member, has an endowment in excess of $300 million.[2]
Where did he get his wife from?

Ann Lois Romney (née Davies) (born April 16, 1949) is the wife of American businessman and Republican Party politician Mitt Romney. From 2003 to 2007 she was First Lady of Massachusetts.

She was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and attended the private Kingswood School there, where she dated Mitt Romney. Influenced by their relationship, she converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1966. She attended Brigham Young University and married Mitt Romney in 1969. She completed her undergraduate education through the Extension School at Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in 1975.

As First Lady of Massachusetts, she served as the governor’s liaison for federal faith-based initiatives.

Now THAT is disturbing . . . .

Her background — daughter of the mayor of Bloomfield Hills, who was anti-organized religion.  So, she converts to LDS (like Mitt) and her college is put on hold while he completes his.   Their marriage, being Mormon:

Ann Davies and Mitt Romney were married by a church elder in a civil ceremony on March 21, 1969, at her Bloomfield Hills home, with a reception afterward at a local country club.[4][12] The following day the couple flew to Utah for a wedding ceremony inside the Salt Lake Temple; her family could not attend since they were non-Mormons, but were present at a subsequent wedding breakfast held for them across the street.[4][14]

When she fell ill, she had access to mainstream and alternative treatments for MS (a very serious disease) — such as equestrianism.  Suppose this had been one of her children — they’d have had that access also.

Ann was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998 and has credited a mixture of mainstream and alternative treatments with giving her a lifestyle mostly without limitations. In one of those activities, equestrianism, she has consequently received recognition in dressage as an adult amateur at the national level and competing professionally in Grand Prix as well
The topic is EDUCATION DISPARITIES by WEALTH — as contrasted with Horace Mann’s vision:
By contrast with the ONE child of a black single mother (also in Michigan), who — on finding out that her daughter, having developed complications possibly related to a vaccine, then was given Risperdal — and when that had even worse effects, like any good Mom, she took her child OFF it — and then all hell (including with tanks and helicopters) eventually took place.  (Link is below).  It “just so happened’ that the community they lived in was supposed to do what it was told with their kids, and not buck the system or seek — as Mrs. Romney could — non-mainstream ways to stay alive or keep their kids alive and healthy.  That’s cause for losing one’s kid to the state, apparently.
Ron Paul Op-Ed on Ms. Godboldo in context of overmedication of chidlren in foster care, forced mandatory psychiatric screening of children (think they get that in the Cranbrook Educational Community nowadays?):

“No Mandatory Mental Health Screening For Children!” by Ron Paul

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 Op-Ed by Congressman Ron Paul

Maryanne Godboldo, a mother in Michigan, noticed that pills prescribed by her daughter’s doctor were making her condition worse, not better. So Mrs. Godboldo stopped giving them to her. That’s when the trouble began. When Child Protective Services (CPS) bureaucrats became aware that the girl was not receiving her prescribed medication, they decided the child should be taken away from her mother’s custody on grounds of medical neglect. When Ms. Godboldo refused to surrender her daughter to the state, CPS enlisted the help of a police SWAT team! On March 24 of this year a 12 hour standoff ensued and young Ariana was taken into custody. The drug involved was Risperdal, a neuroleptic antipsychotic medication with numerous known side effects. Ms. Godboldo had decided on a more holistic approach for her daughter. She is still engaged in a costly legal battle with the state over Ariana’s treatment and custody.

This is one example of how government’s increasing proclivity to medicate children with questionable psychiatric drugs violates the rights of parents. Just recently, the Government Accountability Office released a report on the astonishingly high rate of prescriptions for psychotropic drugs for children in the foster care system. It is absolutely astounding that nearly 40% of kids in foster care are on psychotropic drugs, some of them taking up to 5 different pills at a time. Some of these children are under one year of age – too young to safely take over the counter cold medication!

 Another account:

Ethan A. Huff,
Natural News
December 15, 2011

The horrific saga of Maryanne Godboldo’s battle with domestic terrorists in the government of her home state of Michigan appear to finally be coming to an end. TheDetroit Free Pressreports that two higher courts have confirmed the ruling of a lower court several months ago that Godboldo’s refusal to administer the dangerous Risperdal drug to her daughter was fully legal, and that all charges and actions taken against her by the state were unwarranted.

In case you missed the story, Child Protective Services (CPS) in Michigan sent a SWAT team and tank to Godboldo’s Detroit home back in April after the mother refused to keep giving her 13-year-old daughter Risperdal (risperidone), a dangerous schizophrenia drug that had been causing her daughter to experience severe adverse reactions. Godboldo’s doctor had recommended that she discontinue use of the drug, but CPS felt otherwise, and decided to launch a full-scale terrorist raid on the woman’s home, where they proceeded to illegally kidnap her daughter (http://www.naturalnews.com/032090_M…).

In one of the series of articles on this raid, the demographics of the community spoke loudly as to what happened.  It wouldn’t happen in a gated community, and I’ll bet it wouldn’t happen in Bloomfield Hills, either.  However, another clue shows up in this (april 2011) article — not only was this woman acting — in accord with the doctor’s advice to stop Risperdal — not only was she single and African-American, she was also homeschooling her daughter!
Godboldos focus on daughter’s release:  April 17, 2011, The Michigan Citizen, Eric T. Campbell
“This case is very simple,” Defense Attorney Allison Fomar told the Michigan Citizen. “The child was taken out of the home without any legitimate, lawful authority. They took her in the most drastic way they could think of, which was to involve Detroit police.

. . .Ariana has been in state custody since March 25 without medication.

“If the issue was medication, where is the justice?” Penny said. “Why isn’t she home with her father right now? He has complete authority after Maryanne. To me, they sent her into harms way.”

Penny {{the mother’s sister and a dance teacher at Margrove College}} says her niece was active and normal growing up in a home-schooled environment. She was active in church and received lessons in piano and horseback riding.   “There were absolutely no mental issues with her until she had the immunizations and even more with the Risperdal,” Penny said. “It’s been a hell ever since.”

Ron Scott of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality  . . .“The child has a father and an aunt and that’s where the mother thought the child was going when she released her,” Scott said. “Judge Pierce says she’s an advocate for families, so we’ll see what happens.”

According to Scott, CPS knew the daughter was doing fine without Risperdal and she was not considered an imminent danger to herself or anyone else. 

August, in this same case (good article — read it all!)

JURY RULES AGAINST MARYANNE GODBOLDO IN CUSTODY TRIAL

Posted on 08/16/2011 by Diane Bukowski

DETROIT – Despite testimony that Mia Wenk, a “social services specialist” with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, authorized the  psychiatric hospitalization of Ariana Godboldo-Hakim, 13, and the administration of four dangerous psychotropic drugs, without reviewing the child’s  medical records, a jury found Aug. 9 that it was Ariana’s mother Maryanne Godboldo who had neglected her.

Godboldo, who obtained alternative holistic treatment for her daughter from a medical doctor, testified earlier that she was suffering from a reaction to immunizations administered in Sept. 2009. She said Ariana had been diagnosed with encephalitis, not a psychiatric disorder. Neither she nor Ariana’s father Mubarak Hakim authorized their daughter’s treatment at Hawthorn Children’s Psychiatric facility after an army of police seized her from her home on Blaine near Linwood in Detroit March 24, 2011. 

Wenk said that as she watched the stand-off with police that resulted at Ariana’s home, her only concern was, “I didn’t want her to end up shooting her daughter.”**  Wenk is currently facing a federal lawsuit  filed by Nathaniel Brent (see next story) for taking his five children, who are of Native American heritage.

Captions: Maryanne Godboldo speaks at rally July 17, 2011 . . . Children’s Center recruits foster parents in billboard off John C. Lodge Fwy.; they are paid $34 per day per head by DHS for each child they take

(**Wenk provoked the crisis to start with, which seems to be pretty standard protocol, where possible to get away with.   It also signifies a serious attitude problem, job description or no job description.   In this situation, they simply didn’t reckon with an armed mother, and a supportive community expressing its outrage AND investigative reporting on it!  The problem is the presence of a system which enables this.  That the SWAT team would come in this situation shows that Wenk and friends hold far too much sway.  Meanwhile, over in Connecticut, a little boy (and across the country this is happening) is being tortured with symptoms BOTH medical and behavioral, as attested to by doctors — and the GAL in the case still has custody with the father who is doing this!  WHy not remove THAT child?) (Answer:  money in the family hasn’t been sucked out yet. See CT page on my other blog).

I keep finding more — and very disturbing — information on this case.  First of all — we note that this is a mature mother, not a teen mother (see photo, and article below says she’s in her 50s).  She is dedicated to taking care of her daughter who is an amputee, and was doing a good job of it; the troubles began with a school-required vaccination, and reactions to it.   And although parents are separated, this was not a case which could be played Mom VERSUS Dad.

Police use Assault Weapons and Tank against Home School Mom wanting to protect daughter from Dangerous Medications.”

Health Impact News Editor

According to the Detroit News, a 56-year-old woman faces multiple felony charges and is being held on $500,000 bond after a 10-hour standoff with police, claiming she was protecting her 13-year-old daughter from unnecessary medication. The story which led to this incident, as reported in the Detroit News and The Voice of Detroit, is quite disturbing.

Maryanne Godboldo’s daughter was born with a defective foot that required amputation of her leg below the knee, which led to Maryanne becoming a stay-at-home mother after her birth. Maryanne and her sister Penny now run a dance school in Detroit. Penny Godboldo reported in the Detroit News her niece’s confidence grew, and despite her handicap, she swam, sang, danced and played the piano. However, as she approached middle school age, she apparently wanted to start attending school, and therefore had to “catch up” on required immunizations.

As the Detroit News reports:

We believe she had an adverse reaction to her immunizations,” Penny Godboldo said.

She began acting out of character, being irritated, having facial grimaces that have been associated with immunizations.

Evans said Maryanne Godboldo sought help for her daughter from The Children’s Center, an organization that helps families with at-risk children, where a medical and mental health treatment plan was developed. Godboldo told relatives the medications ordered by the doctor worsened symptoms, including behavioral problems.

“It is an undiagnosed condition, but the doctor had given her psychotropic drugs that caused a bad reaction, made things worse,” said the girl’s father, Mubuarak Hakim. “Maryanne’s decision to wean her from that was making a difference, making her better, helping her to be a happy kid again.

Maryanne Godboldo apparently has a good reputation in her community, and during the 10 hour standoff many people from the community offered to help with the negotiations, including ministers and community activists, according to reports in the Detroit News. Ironically, it was Wayne Circuit Judge Deborah Thomas, a former polio sufferer and advocate for the disabled, who finally convinced Maryanne to surrender

Embarrassed — or exposed? — although the mother had her criminal charges dropped, and her child back (late December) the Wayne County District attorney, per spokesman, is thinking of re-instating them.  They are crazy — but smart enough to know that this case is probably a good chink in the wall.

http://www.miweekly.com/news/85-detroit/5705-mom-in-police-standoff-awaits-decision-on-charges

Last Updated: December 10. 2011 1:00AM

Doug Guthrie/ The Detroit News

Detroit— A judge is expected to announce his decision Monday whether to reinstate criminal charges against a mother who resisted police who forced their way into her home to take her teenage daughter during a dispute over medications. . . .

Acting on a call from a Wayne County Child Protective Services (=CPS) worker, who told police she had obtained an order to remove the child on a claim of medical neglect, the officers responding to Godboldo’s home accused her of firing a handgun at them through a plaster wall after she refused to let them in. Godboldo was talked out of the house. She was jailed for several days until her release on bond, and her daughter was held in a state psychiatric facility for almost two months.

Godboldo was charged with resisting and assaulting police, as well as use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. Giles tossed out the charges in August because he said the order used by police as authority to enter the house was invalid. It was never authorized by a judge, but had a rubber stamp signature. Police also testified they don’t normally enforce civil court orders, but had been told by the protective services worker it was a criminal warrant.

And the police didn’t LOOK at the warrant?  Do criminal and civil warrants look different from each other?

http://justice4maryanne.com/

Some excellent reporting.

Talk about the disparity of viewpoints:  Family, Community — versus the System who wants the child to be medicated.

My reading has led me to the conclusion — this is a class war, and at the bottom of the barrel (as to scapegoating) are women who look and act like this one.  Like Albert Einstein, Horace Mann, and other leaders, her daughter’s education was not traditional — and part of schooling these days is getting the vaccinations (I even found a reference to James Franklin — Ben’s older brother — protesting vaccinations in his time!).   Drugging people is a form of medical control — not just profits — get it?  If certain classes of people are being used as test cases for the effects of dangerous drugs, then this comprises a class war against them.   Why should this mother AND her community have to wage a legal battle to “buy” back a daughter which had been kidnapped improperly?   Why should anyone have to?

At some level, we have got to start acknowledging that mature, independent mothers are a threat to the status quo.   For the rest of us, the family law system with its fatherhood funding gets the job done without SWAT teams.  But both methods are extortionist.

Listen to “Managing Oneself” (found by checking out the spelling: Onesself or Oneself?)

(Peter Drucker, Harvard Business Review, 1999)  It’s password protected from copying a single sentence, but (bottom of page 5 or so) talking about what a knowledge ecomony we have, and how one must manage oneself, including knowing one’s learning style.  Are you a writer or a reader?  For those who learn by writing, he says, school is pure torture– writers learn by writing  — not by listening and reading (guess I’m one of those!).  Because schools don’t let them learn that way, they get poor grades (speculation, I suppose, as to cause)….

Schools do not accommodate the different learning styles, forcing everyone to learn “the way the school teaches” is “sheer hell for students who learn differently.”   

“Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves, their strengths, their values and how they best perform.”

Easy to say, but that Michigan Mom seems to be someone who knows herself, her strengths (and her daughters) and certainly her values — so why should she catch this kind of hell, and have her daughter in a psychiatric institution for two months or more, where there is some question whether or not she was also sexually assaulted (some news accounts bring this up) — in the land of the free and the home of the brave?

In case you can’t guess why this case has so grabbed my attention, even though I don’t have a disabled child, while my children were not (to my knowledge) forcibly medicated, the “kidnapping” was enabled around accusations of educational neglect (among others, none of which were proved, as is common) which was in fact educational choice, and an informed one.  When we’ve come to kidnapping and tanks/helicopters to prop up a bad decision by a CPS worker, and (see Voice of Detroit reporting, plus I recognized some of the companies investigated, and the system) everyone has to go into behavioral health testing grounds EXCEPT those who are rich enough and independent enough to escape the target range of these programs – then I have to ask –  what are we putting our lives and taxes toward to start with?  Is THIS something you want to really endorse?

 

A closer look is warranted at the entire system, and its background.  It’s already “culling” the population and in a crisis (see Katrina) guess who gets sacrificed.  Now read from Transvaal to TANF, read the congressional testimony just prior to enacting 1996 Welfare Reform (or even read some of the current talk/writing — if you can do so without regurgitating — and, in the mirror, ask whether this was accidental or planned.)

It took me a while to come to the conclusions I have, and I don’t expect others to agree immediately — or ncessarily ever.  But I do stand my ground — pay less attention to the talking heads, the mainstream media, and a lot more to your legislators and do NOT underestimate the influence of the family court system.  After all, a lot of money is going missing in the process — so what’s that money going INto?  Drugs?  Legal or illegal, or is there a difference?

 

It takes a good deal of context to separate Info from DISinfo. And it’s work, too.  With time, it gets a lot easier, though.

At bottom are the links from the blog  “The Family Court Franchise System.”  In one of the recent posts I said, “I’m not your mother” and suggested people educate themselves.  Plus two interesting links, “Educate Yo’self” and “Educate Yourself” which is where I got part of my education.

 

Where I got the habit of educating myself goes far back — but in these matters, it came from having relied on others’ information, which — though true enough — was (1) not the overview– critical elements were missing, and (2) given what was missing, almost irrelevant.  Instead they (includes Lundy Bancroft, and classic DV rhetoric) talked psychology and group dynamics and some law — something anyone living through what I did has already figured out (though how nice to have the correct terminology).

But they should’ve talked finances — and corporate influence, federal incentives, and private nonprofit associations running demonstration social science projects on as many POOR people (or other distressed populations) as possible, allegedly for the public’s benefit, and definitely at the public’s expense.  In fact, public and private are so blurred at this point, it might be best to ignore what the law says about domestic violence and criminal behavior, and rebuttable presumptions against custody going to the batterer (after all — plenty of judges, family law attorneys, custody evaluators, guardians ad litem and child support professionals most certainly do.  And we have to deal with them anyhow, so why not figure out what’s going on!

 

ROUGHLY in TWO PARTS:  I.  “EDUCATE YOURSELF” — and several examples.  And then II. (as to the Roots of Welfare) — some links to do so.  (under 7,000 words this time).  That’s if you care to.  I’m not your babysitter, I do this for conscience, possibly for therapy, and for a track record. But they are — as this shows — hauling off (kidnapping) children systematically from good parents, to get drugged under foster care.  They are, when there are two parents fighting for custody, able to prolong and make horrible the fight for years — and so “justify” major grants continuations (under TANF, which makes this possible) to promote marriage and fatherhood, and other very chauvinistic (antifeminist) ideas.  At the heart of this is the concept that it’s OK to force indoctrination (“education”) on poor people to address why they are poor, that the elite are appropriate in “molding” the poor — through force — to understand their function and place in society.  Religion is a good aid to this policy.

Too much of this policy comes from places like the British monarchy, or the Nazi apparatus, or prior to that, Prussian educational ideas.  Too much of it depends on free time to philosophize on the backs of workers that barely make ends meet and have far less freedom or mobility simply because they have no family wealth (assets), whether earned, or inherited.  Add to this things like eminent domain (government condemning, then seizing, then selling to cronies, private property) and we’re headed back towards the concentrations camps.  Depending on when “Judgment Day” comes — or does not.  Whatever the status of “judgment day” — there is nothing “just” or equitable about Welfare Reform, which enables flexible grants to the states, and gives bribes to states for going along with federal policy.  Federal policy rubberstamped by Congress — but managed by the Executive Branch (White House and friends) through a grants system.  The grants system itself is based on the TAX system — and there you go.

This is commonly called fascism ,centralization and we know already where that heads off to.

I know what dictatorship is at the family level, the personal level — and am pretty hot and bothered to see how far down the line it is at the national level as well.  When one’s life’s work is repeatedly interrupted, and finally stopped — talking about the essential things one has done in life — one has to rethink the “hold a job til retirement model,” particularly being a female of a certain age in the USA, Post-Bush1 & Bush 2.

(Read PART I, those comments will make more sense).

 

PART I

Educate Yo’self was actually the domain name of a link someone else passed along.  What a source!

The Declaration of Independence – 1776
The Articles of Confederation – 1777
The Constitution for the United States – 1787
Its Sources and Its Application

Commitment One: To Freedom

The commitment of greatest importance is a DEDICATION To FREEDOM at all levels of society, and in all dimensions of our existence.

A commitment to freedom, at all levels, is automatically a commitment to Rigorous Honesty, the Truth of Reality. After all, once freedom is insured, why would one need to lie?

Any “security” that is gained through loss of freedom is a Commitment to Fear. Any nation that puts “national security” above personal freedom has lost its power base

And, tidbits such as (from 2008 — an election year. Worth a review this year?):

545 People Responsible for America’s Woes
by Charley ReeseHave you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits? Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don’t write the tax code. Congress does. You and I don’t set fiscal policy. Congress does. You and I don’t control monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices – 545 human beings out of the 300 million – are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered but private central bank.

. . . .Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault.    . . .

REPLACE THE SCOUNDRELS . . .

They continue to re-authorize the bastard child called “Welfare Reform,” which has simply expanded the ways to steal from the public, without proper monitoring, to infinity.  Go review the beginnings of the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative (I’ve blogged).  Or, how from state to state, the We, the People method of disciplining criminal judges (leaving ethical ones on the bench) — which was the grand jury — was replaced by “judicial complaint boards.”

It was passed in 1996, a Bill Clinton year.  See “From the Transvaal to TANF” talking about “triangulation” and how Clinton promoted this version of the “contract with America” as inbetween and somehow “above” party politics.  The fact is, the Republicans had succeeded in shutting down government over this, his ass was in trouble with Monica Lewinsky, and there was the Hillary problem; in fact there were plenty of problems.

The “Transvaal’ refers to Cecil Rhodes.  Bill Clinton, among others, was a Rhodes Scholar.   The purpose of the Rhodes Scholarship, and the beyond-my-liftime-goal of Mr. Rhodes, was to regain the British control of the world, particularly the return of “the US colonies” to their master.  Some people were born to lead, others were born to serve, obviously.  Now, fast-forward to TANF reform and look at who it’s targeting for program indoctrination on how to stay married, and quit propagating outside of marriage, etc.

The fact is, were it not for the artificial income tax / fiat currency situation (our $$ is off the gold standard), were it not the need for extremely wealthy corporations to maintain their wealth by a constant flow of competition for jobs in their industries (i.e., keep wages down, profits up) and to through a HUGE variety of means — including trying to designate everyone, almost, a behavioral health case, and where possible, proscribe some nice medication for them (i.e., control by medication, even sterilization) — it would be a piece of cake for an intelligent, motivated and in control of her own infrastructure single mother (or single father) to handle their own affairs.

One of the affairs the largest mistakes made by OUR forebears (generally speaking of USA citizens), over a century ago, was to hand over the raising of our kids to the government in the form of compulsory public education — which is compulsory time-wasting and dumbing down, and has been for decades.  It’s an ABSOLUTE disgrace and has become simply a values battleground anyhow.    And as to equalization — go check your senators — and all the representatives in the state — how many of them are sending their kids to public schools, and were themselves the product of public schools.  How many of them came from honest working backgrounds and were not raised with a silver spoon, or a political spoon?

Some of the greatest minds and leaders had the least traditional schooling — for themselves.   Horace Mann fits that example, and it appears 1837 was the first year there was a “Secretary of Education” at least in massachusetts.  Now we have a Secretary of Health and Human Services (more control over this country than you realize, and the current one is from Kansas), plus the “Czars” — interesting term, huh?  Look at him:

HORACE MANN‘s SCHOOLING

” The Father of American Education”,” Horace Mann, was born in Franklin, Massachusetts, in 1796. Mann’s schooling consisted only of brief and erratic periods of eight to ten weeks a year. Mann educated himself by reading ponderous volumes from the Franklin Town Library. This self education, combined with the fruits of a brief period of study with an intinerant school master, was sufficient to gain him admission to the sophomore class of Brown University in 1816” (4, Cremin). He went on to study law at Litchfield Law School and finally received admission to the bar in 1823 (15, Filler). In the year 1827 Mann won a seat in the state legislature and in 1833 ran for State Senate and won.” Throughout these years Horace Mann maintained a thriving law practice, first in Dedham and later in Boston” (5, Cremin).

” Of the many causes dear to Mann’s heart, non was closer than the education of the people. He held a keen interest in school policy. April 20, 1837, Mann left his law practice and accepted the post of the newly founded Secretary of Education” (6, Cremin). During his years as Secretary of Education Mann published twelve annual reports on aspects of his work and programs, and the integral relationship between education, freedom, and Republican government. He wanted a school that would be available and equal for all, part of the birth-right of every American child, to be for rich and poor alike. Mann had found “social harmony” to be his primary goal of the school. (8, Cremin).

Horace Mann felt that a common school would be the “great equalizer.” Poverty would most assuredly disappear as a broadened popular intelligence tapped new treasures of natural and material wealth. He felt that through education crime would decline sharply as would a host of moral vices like violence and fraud. In sum, there was no end to the social good which might be derived from a common school (8, Cremin).

SO — how’d you say THAT’s going?  Because in Los Angeles, they had a schoolteacher feeding blindfolded teaspoons of his own semen.  THIRD-graders.  Has poverty, violence and fraud been primarily despite the school system, or perhaps as a consequence of it?
Horace Mann had one thing — freedom.  He had another thing — access to the library.  He was also male, and he could vote — it was another century, from his passing the bar (1823) before women could!  Rather than trying to train a nation (how egotistical!), what about establish these basic rights, and make available justice (and libraries).
Horace Mann and Education Reform
Reformers, some influenced by the Prussian education reforms of the early 1800s, emerged at an incredible rate hoping to change the general form and ideals of American education to keep up with the evolving country. No longer would small rural schoolhouses, untrained teachers, or limitations in education opportunities suffice. A more defined system, which, as Mann and others had hoped, would also be free and universal, slowly garnered both grassroots and governmental support. The goal was to mold individuals from all socio-economic backgrounds into good people and good citizens through education. It was believed that in doing so everyone would be able to achieve to their fullest potential.
I would always much rather see a sermon than hear one.   Moreover, we ought to take care about importing Prussian OR German ideas.  Germans tend to be real organized, excessively so, — and I think it’s fair to say, Centralized. There is a LOT of literature out, particularly I’m thinking about Alice Miller, and “The Drama of the Gifted Child,” (d. 2010; she was a Swiss psychoanalyst, the book is about the consequences of repressed trauma)– talking about how the attempts to “mold” good strong citizens with cruel child-rearing practices (from Germany) may have helped created the cruel, socially-detached, amoral child molesters and sociopaths of today that we are now cleaning up after.
Alice Miller, child abuse and mistreatment
And yet, we have in TANF, a government intent on even more education of the public — in morality issues like fatherhood, marriage, abstinence, and so forth.  The truth is — at least as to TANF — I believe it’s simply another form of wealth-transfer; and it’s a VERY high profit-margin on downloading information by the internet, setting up a franchise system, having people BUY into it to be qualified as a marriage educator (etc.) — it was a real smart development for some very dishonest people.

What about Ben Franklin? (1706-1790)– was he adequately schooled?  Methinks not:

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706. He was the tenth son of soap maker, Josiah Franklin. Benjamin’s mother was Abiah Folger, the second wife of Josiah. In all, Josiah would father 17 children.

Josiah intended for Benjamin to enter into the clergy. However, Josiah could only afford to send his son to school for one year and clergymen needed years of schooling. But, as young Benjamin loved to read he had him apprenticed to his brother James, who was a printer. After helping James compose pamphlets and set type which was grueling work, 12-year-old Benjamin would sell their products in the streets.

What about Albert Einstein’s schooling?(1879-1955) (from a UK site): (take some time, here…)

Albert Einstein was born on 14th March, 1879 at Ulm, Germany. He spent his early life in Munich, where his family owned a small manufacturing business. He studied Judaism at home, where he also was taught to play the violin. He showed a great interest in Mathematics and taught himself Euclidian geometry at the age of 12.

What sort of education did Albert receive?

Albert Einstein began school in Munich, but does not seem to have been particularly interested in what was offered there. . .

He was already a self-motivated learner, with experience in (I presume) language, music, and geometry.  Are schools BORING the gifted? along with how many others?

Einstein hoped to become an electrical engineer and, at the second attempt, enrolled at the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich in 1896.

It seems that he continued to show little respect for his teachers, as he was not a regular attender at lectures. He spent considerable time studying physics on his own. Despite the lack of time in lecture halls, he graduated as a teacher of physics and mathematics in 1900, but was unable to obtain a post in the university. It has been suggested that he had not impressed his professors enough, which is perhaps not surprising, given his attitude, and so did not receive their all-important backing for an academic career.

Perhaps this lack of respect comes from someone who found something better to do with his time, working on self-assigned projects of interest.

What did he do next?

Albert Einstein became a temporary teacher of mathematics, first at the Technical High School in Winterthur, and secondly at a private school at Schaffhausen.

In 1902 he began work at the Swiss patent office in Bern as a technical expert third class. He remained there until 1909, having been promoted, in 1906, to technical expert second class! He married Mileva Maric, by whom he had two sons, in 1903. They later divorced.

During his time there, Albert Einstein devoted a great deal of his spare time to the study of theoretical physics, and in 1905, received his doctorate for a thesis entitled On a new determination of molecular dimensions. He also published three important papers on theoretical physics

 Anyone who’s honest today will admit that a major function of public school education is babysitter — to soak up the TIME of individuals so their parents (both their parents, if there are two) can go to work and pay their taxes to fund the teachers, among other things (or pay off some interest on the national debt).  As such, the kids (and youth) in school are going to have other things they would rather be doing, and/or exploring — so a good deal of the school day goes into administration and managing the kids.  And (now at least) running mental health screenings on them to see if some drugs can be marketed (see recent whistleblower on TMAP, PennMAP, who documented this).   More on Einstein:

In 1952, he declined the offer of the presidency of Israel and continued his work towards the world renouncing nuclear weapons.

Albert Einstein died on 18th April, 1955 at Princeton and was cremated that day at Trenton, New Jersey. He is, perhaps, the best known scientist of the 20th century

And just imagine — he was bored in school from the start, skipped a lot of classes, didn’t brown-nose enough in Swiss National Polytechnic around the turn of the century, resulting in his having a fairly humble job which left him time to study things of personal interest — eventually a Nobel Prize, etc. What does public education in the US do today?  Soak up time, DELETE a lot of music because not enough children are learning to read and write, substitutes values education, and when that (obviously) fails, recommend more money and start kids earlier and have longer school days and years.
The existence of the public school system, and its lower quality, is a caste-sorter, and intentionally so.   Where did our politicians go to school, prior to sponsoring initiatives to train the rest of us about the purpose of life, relationships, sex, and what and what is not healthy?  For example (to bring us to 2012 Presidential Candidacy, and which conservative do you want….)
Mitt Romney went to a private school from 7th grand onwards, where he met his wife, who also attended private schools.  Described as (Wikipedia):
Cranbrook Schools is a private, PK–12 school located on a 319-acre (1.29 km2) campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The schools comprise a co-educational elementary school, a middle school with separate schools for boys and girls, and a co-educational high school with boarding facilities  …Romney went to public elementary schools[17] and then from seventh grade on, attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, a private boys preparatory school of the classic mold where he was the lone Mormon and where many students came from even more privileged backgrounds.[18][23][24][25] He was not particularly athletic and at first did not excel at academics.[18] While a sophomore, he participated in the campaign in which his father was elected Governor of Michigan.[nb 2] 
Cranbrook Schools is a private, PK–12 school located on a 319-acre (1.29 km2) campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The schools comprise a co-educational elementary school, a middle school with separate schools for boys and girls, and a co-educational high school with boarding facilities. Cranbrook Schools is part of the Cranbrook Educational Community (CEC), which includes the Cranbrook Institute of Science, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Cranbrook House and Gardens. (Nearby Christ Church Cranbrook remains outside this formal structure.) The Cranbrook community was established by publishing mogul George Booth,
 Cranbrook was designated a National Historic Landmark on June 29, 1989 for its significant architecture and design. It attracts tourists from around the world. Approximately 40 acres (160,000 m2) of Cranbrook Schools’ campus are gardens.  As of 2006, Cranbrook Schools had an endowment of $191 million, among the 15 largest held by America’s boarding schools.[1] In addition, the Cranbrook Educational Community, of which the Schools is a member, has an endowment in excess of $300 million.[2]
Where did he get his wife from?

Ann Lois Romney (née Davies) (born April 16, 1949) is the wife of American businessman and Republican Party politician Mitt Romney. From 2003 to 2007 she was First Lady of Massachusetts.

She was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and attended the private Kingswood School there, where she dated Mitt Romney. Influenced by their relationship, she converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1966. She attended Brigham Young University and married Mitt Romney in 1969. She completed her undergraduate education through the Extension School at Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in 1975.

As First Lady of Massachusetts, she served as the governor’s liaison for federal faith-based initiatives.

Now THAT is disturbing . . . .

Her background — daughter of the mayor of Bloomfield Hills, who was anti-organized religion.  So, she converts to LDS (like Mitt) and her college is put on hold while he completes his.   Their marriage, being Mormon:

Ann Davies and Mitt Romney were married by a church elder in a civil ceremony on March 21, 1969, at her Bloomfield Hills home, with a reception afterward at a local country club.[4][12] The following day the couple flew to Utah for a wedding ceremony inside the Salt Lake Temple; her family could not attend since they were non-Mormons, but were present at a subsequent wedding breakfast held for them across the street.[4][14]

When she fell ill, she had access to mainstream and alternative treatments for MS (a very serious disease) — such as equestrianism.  Suppose this had been one of her children — they’d have had that access also.

Ann was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998 and has credited a mixture of mainstream and alternative treatments with giving her a lifestyle mostly without limitations. In one of those activities, equestrianism, she has consequently received recognition in dressage as an adult amateur at the national level and competing professionally in Grand Prix as well
The topic is EDUCATION DISPARITIES by WEALTH — as contrasted with Horace Mann’s vision:
By contrast with the ONE child of a black single mother (also in Michigan), who — on finding out that her daughter, having developed complications possibly related to a vaccine, then was given Risperdal — and when that had even worse effects, like any good Mom, she took her child OFF it — and then all hell (including with tanks and helicopters) eventually took place.  (Link is below).  It “just so happened’ that the community they lived in was supposed to do what it was told with their kids, and not buck the system or seek — as Mrs. Romney could — non-mainstream ways to stay alive or keep their kids alive and healthy.  That’s cause for losing one’s kid to the state, apparently.
Ron Paul Op-Ed on Ms. Godboldo in context of overmedication of chidlren in foster care, forced mandatory psychiatric screening of children (think they get that in the Cranbrook Educational Community nowadays?):

“No Mandatory Mental Health Screening For Children!” by Ron Paul

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 Op-Ed by Congressman Ron Paul

Maryanne Godboldo, a mother in Michigan, noticed that pills prescribed by her daughter’s doctor were making her condition worse, not better. So Mrs. Godboldo stopped giving them to her. That’s when the trouble began. When Child Protective Services (CPS) bureaucrats became aware that the girl was not receiving her prescribed medication, they decided the child should be taken away from her mother’s custody on grounds of medical neglect. When Ms. Godboldo refused to surrender her daughter to the state, CPS enlisted the help of a police SWAT team! On March 24 of this year a 12 hour standoff ensued and young Ariana was taken into custodyThe drug involved was Risperdal, a neuroleptic antipsychotic medication with numerous known side effects. Ms. Godboldo had decided on a more holistic approach for her daughter. She is still engaged in a costly legal battle with the state over Ariana’s treatment and custody.

This is one example of how government’s increasing proclivity to medicate children with questionable psychiatric drugs violates the rights of parents. Just recently, the Government Accountability Office released a report on the astonishingly high rate of prescriptions for psychotropic drugs for children in the foster care system. It is absolutely astounding that nearly 40% of kids in foster care are on psychotropic drugs, some of them taking up to 5 different pills at a time. Some of these children are under one year of age – too young to safely take over the counter cold medication!

 Another account:

Ethan A. Huff,
Natural News
December 15, 2011

The horrific saga of Maryanne Godboldo’s battle with domestic terrorists in the government of her home state of Michigan appear to finally be coming to an end. TheDetroit Free Pressreports that two higher courts have confirmed the ruling of a lower court several months ago that Godboldo’s refusal to administer the dangerous Risperdal drug to her daughter was fully legal, and that all charges and actions taken against her by the state were unwarranted.

In case you missed the story, Child Protective Services (CPS) in Michigan sent a SWAT team and tank to Godboldo’s Detroit home back in April after the mother refused to keep giving her 13-year-old daughter Risperdal (risperidone), a dangerous schizophrenia drug that had been causing her daughter to experience severe adverse reactions. Godboldo’s doctor had recommended that she discontinue use of the drug, but CPS felt otherwise, and decided to launch a full-scale terrorist raid on the woman’s home, where they proceeded to illegally kidnap her daughter (http://www.naturalnews.com/032090_M…).

In one of the series of articles on this raid, the demographics of the community spoke loudly as to what happened.  It wouldn’t happen in a gated community, and I’ll bet it wouldn’t happen in Bloomfield Hills, either.  However, another clue shows up in this (april 2011) article — not only was this woman acting — in accord with the doctor’s advice to stop Risperdal — not only was she single and African-American, she was also homeschooling her daughter!
Godboldos focus on daughter’s release:  April 17, 2011, The Michigan Citizen, Eric T. Campbell
“This case is very simple,” Defense Attorney Allison Fomar told the Michigan Citizen. “The child was taken out of the home without any legitimate, lawful authority. They took her in the most drastic way they could think of, which was to involve Detroit police.

. . .Ariana has been in state custody since March 25 without medication.

“If the issue was medication, where is the justice?” Penny said. “Why isn’t she home with her father right now? He has complete authority after Maryanne. To me, they sent her into harms way.”

Penny {{the mother’s sister and a dance teacher at Margrove College}} says her niece was active and normal growing up in a home-schooled environment. She was active in church and received lessons in piano and horseback riding.   “There were absolutely no mental issues with her until she had the immunizations and even more with the Risperdal,” Penny said. “It’s been a hell ever since.”

Ron Scott of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality  . . .“The child has a father and an aunt and that’s where the mother thought the child was going when she released her,” Scott said. “Judge Pierce says she’s an advocate for families, so we’ll see what happens.”

According to Scott, CPS knew the daughter was doing fine without Risperdal and she was not considered an imminent danger to herself or anyone else. 

August, in this same case (good article — read it all!)

JURY RULES AGAINST MARYANNE GODBOLDO IN CUSTODY TRIAL

Posted on 08/16/2011 by Diane Bukowski

DETROIT – Despite testimony that Mia Wenk, a “social services specialist” with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, authorized the  psychiatric hospitalization of Ariana Godboldo-Hakim, 13, and the administration of four dangerous psychotropic drugs, without reviewing the child’s  medical records, a jury found Aug. 9 that it was Ariana’s mother Maryanne Godboldo who had neglected her.

Godboldo, who obtained alternative holistic treatment for her daughter from a medical doctor, testified earlier that she was suffering from a reaction to immunizations administered in Sept. 2009. She said Ariana had been diagnosed with encephalitis, not a psychiatric disorder. Neither she nor Ariana’s father Mubarak Hakim authorized their daughter’s treatment at Hawthorn Children’s Psychiatric facility after an army of police seized her from her home on Blaine near Linwood in Detroit March 24, 2011. 

Wenk said that as she watched the stand-off with police that resulted at Ariana’s home, her only concern was, “I didn’t want her to end up shooting her daughter.”**  Wenk is currently facing a federal lawsuit  filed by Nathaniel Brent (see next story) for taking his five children, who are of Native American heritage.

Captions: Maryanne Godboldo speaks at rally July 17, 2011 . . . Children’s Center recruits foster parents in billboard off John C. Lodge Fwy.; they are paid $34 per day per head by DHS for each child they take

(**Wenk provoked the crisis to start with, which seems to be pretty standard protocol, where possible to get away with.   It also signifies a serious attitude problem, job description or no job description.   In this situation, they simply didn’t reckon with an armed mother, and a supportive community expressing its outrage AND investigative reporting on it!  The problem is the presence of a system which enables this.  That the SWAT team would come in this situation shows that Wenk and friends hold far too much sway.  Meanwhile, over in Connecticut, a little boy (and across the country this is happening) is being tortured with symptoms BOTH medical and behavioral, as attested to by doctors — and the GAL in the case still has custody with the father who is doing this!  WHy not remove THAT child?) (Answer:  money in the family hasn’t been sucked out yet. See CT page on my other blog).

I keep finding more — and very disturbing — information on this case.  First of all — we note that this is a mature mother, not a teen mother (see photo, and article below says she’s in her 50s).  She is dedicated to taking care of her daughter who is an amputee, and was doing a good job of it; the troubles began with a school-required vaccination, and reactions to it.   And although parents are separated, this was not a case which could be played Mom VERSUS Dad.

Police use Assault Weapons and Tank against Home School Mom wanting to protect daughter from Dangerous Medications.”

Health Impact News Editor

According to the Detroit News, a 56-year-old woman faces multiple felony charges and is being held on $500,000 bond after a 10-hour standoff with police, claiming she was protecting her 13-year-old daughter from unnecessary medication. The story which led to this incident, as reported in the Detroit News and The Voice of Detroit, is quite disturbing.

Maryanne Godboldo’s daughter was born with a defective foot that required amputation of her leg below the knee, which led to Maryanne becoming a stay-at-home mother after her birth. Maryanne and her sister Penny now run a dance school in Detroit. Penny Godboldo reported in the Detroit News her niece’s confidence grew, and despite her handicap, she swam, sang, danced and played the piano. However, as she approached middle school age, she apparently wanted to start attending school, and therefore had to “catch up” on required immunizations.

As the Detroit News reports:

We believe she had an adverse reaction to her immunizations,” Penny Godboldo said.

She began acting out of character, being irritated, having facial grimaces that have been associated with immunizations.

Evans said Maryanne Godboldo sought help for her daughter from The Children’s Center, an organization that helps families with at-risk children, where a medical and mental health treatment plan was developed. Godboldo told relatives the medications ordered by the doctor worsened symptoms, including behavioral problems.

“It is an undiagnosed condition, but the doctor had given her psychotropic drugs that caused a bad reaction, made things worse,” said the girl’s father, Mubuarak Hakim. “Maryanne’s decision to wean her from that was making a difference, making her better, helping her to be a happy kid again.

Maryanne Godboldo apparently has a good reputation in her community, and during the 10 hour standoff many people from the community offered to help with the negotiations, including ministers and community activists, according to reports in the Detroit News. Ironically, it was Wayne Circuit Judge Deborah Thomas, a former polio sufferer and advocate for the disabled, who finally convinced Maryanne to surrender

Embarrassed — or exposed? — although the mother had her criminal charges dropped, and her child back (late December) the Wayne County District attorney, per spokesman, is thinking of re-instating them.  They are crazy — but smart enough to know that this case is probably a good chink in the wall.

http://www.miweekly.com/news/85-detroit/5705-mom-in-police-standoff-awaits-decision-on-charges

Last Updated: December 10. 2011 1:00AM

Doug Guthrie/ The Detroit News

Detroit— A judge is expected to announce his decision Monday whether to reinstate criminal charges against a mother who resisted police who forced their way into her home to take her teenage daughter during a dispute over medications. . . .

Acting on a call from a Wayne County Child Protective Services (=CPS) worker, who told police she had obtained an order to remove the child on a claim of medical neglect, the officers responding to Godboldo’s home accused her of firing a handgun at them through a plaster wall after she refused to let them in. Godboldo was talked out of the house. She was jailed for several days until her release on bond, and her daughter was held in a state psychiatric facility for almost two months.

Godboldo was charged with resisting and assaulting police, as well as use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. Giles tossed out the charges in August because he said the order used by police as authority to enter the house was invalid. It was never authorized by a judge, but had a rubber stamp signature. Police also testified they don’t normally enforce civil court orders, but had been told by the protective services worker it was a criminal warrant.

And the police didn’t LOOK at the warrant?  Do criminal and civil warrants look different from each other?

http://justice4maryanne.com/

Some excellent reporting.

Talk about the disparity of viewpoints:  Family, Community — versus the System who wants the child to be medicated.

My reading has led me to the conclusion — this is a class war, and at the bottom of the barrel (as to scapegoating) are women who look and act like this one.  Like Albert Einstein, Horace Mann, and other leaders, her daughter’s education was not traditional — and part of schooling these days is getting the vaccinations (I even found a reference to James Franklin — Ben’s older brother — protesting vaccinations in his time!).   Drugging people is a form of medical control — not just profits — get it?  If certain classes of people are being used as test cases for the effects of dangerous drugs, then this comprises a class war against them.   Why should this mother AND her community have to wage a legal battle to “buy” back a daughter which had been kidnapped improperly?   Why should anyone have to?

At some level, we have got to start acknowledging that mature, independent mothers are a threat to the status quo.   For the rest of us, the family law system with its fatherhood funding gets the job done without SWAT teams.  But both methods are extortionist.

 

 

PART II LINKS:

 

First set of links are ###  some stats (food for thought in a land flush with marriage/fatherhood theory — and grants).

Second set of links are $$$ — including some searchable databases to know about.

The three links beginning with  “—” I just felt were important summaries.  Right about now, J.A.I.L.4Judges is making a whole lotta sense (see site).  I also put my “What Rhetoric Are You” up there just to remind us — be aware whose rhetoric you are hearing.  It’s in the tone, language, and framing.  The third “—” link is an unbelievable account (except it’s happening nationwide; the rarety here is what a mother did to stand up, and that her case was eventually turned around) that we should read, it’s symptomatic.  (Maryanne Godboldo case).

After that, I go into some chrono links — at least a few references by year.

After that, it’s alphabetical by some of the organizations.

 

There’s a reason librarians are paid — and I’m not one.  But I felt that if I continue writing posts, and writing posts — no one will get through this information.  The best learning — anyhow– is situation relevant, and from people who are highly motivated to acquire the understanding or skill RIGHT NOW to address a problem facing them.  In other words, the best learning is self-taught, and from someone or some source you’ve checked out as reasonable, which knows more than you do.  Period.

Failure can be a far better teacher than success.  Perhaps that’s why I can’t look to those still holding on to their middle-class or lower-middle class jobs to figure this out.  People who’ve been treated like tetherballs IN the public institutions tend to be better reporters; they’ve had to work harder to regain their center of balance.  I am one of many such people around; look for loners, not followers! And always check out FIRST (as to organization) are they honest in (1) corporation status (2) filing tax returns with the IRS and (frequently missing) (3) filing with their local state as required by corporation and by charitable trust, if required.

Another common lie I find is date of the beginning of some organization.  When the corporation “begins” it has a record with a year attached.  Unless mythology is OK, check talk to incorporation.  You’d be amazed what’s out there.

“It’s Elementary” — The Links Tell The Story

Previous posts of this blog have had a little yellow flag labeled “Expose Corruption” up next to some of the posts on parenting coordination and/or Kids’First.  From Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania (next to the infamous Luzerne County).  The visuals (which a forum Administrator only could put up) have rather changed in quality recently, which exposes — well, the mentality or an assumed mentality that’d discredit the gravity of the situations they are handling, namely racketeering, money laundering, child abuse coverups, in general corruption of public officials.
Without saying too much more, I have had some private conversations (there is a messaging function) on the board with its moderators, who were first a couple, then just the wife.  It seems to me that the present graphics are hardly her style, and they do resemble Mr. Pilchesky’s style — but then again, what do I know?  With any forum, there can be multiple identities and some gamesmanship to keep the discussions going.
Either way, FYI:

Also, after several months on a forum in Scranton, the forum message board is posting a photo of a targeted public person (I gather) in his briefs.  JUST FOR THE RECORD — in the past week or so of 2012, the leading photos have featured a hooker leaning over onto a police car, a crude graphic of a man trying to plug a damn with water spouting out through his ear (i.e., flowing through his body) and then this.  Either Mr. Pilchesky is back on board, or something happened — but FYI, I wouldn’t have put out all that research onto the site with this level of visuals, and (though it’s been deleted since) inf act spoke up about some of this in 2011.

 There’s a line between expression and simply sharing the same gutter, and this is over it. There are individuals taking legal action to change the dynamics, but part of life is definitely who you hang out with.  That’s just plain offensive; it doesn’t help the cause at all, and may have been intended to hurt it by association.

PART II LINKS:

First set of links are ###  some stats (food for thought in a land flush with marriage/fatherhood theory — and grants).

Second set of links are $$$ — including some searchable databases to know about.

The three links beginning with  “—” I just felt were important summaries.  Right about now, J.A.I.L.4Judges is making a whole lotta sense (see site).  I also put my “What Rhetoric Are You” up there just to remind us — be aware whose rhetoric you are hearing.  It’s in the tone, language, and framing.  The third “—” link is an unbelievable account (except it’s happening nationwide; the rarety here is what a mother did to stand up, and that her case was eventually turned around) that we should read, it’s symptomatic.  (Maryanne Godboldo case).

After that, I go into some chrono links — at least a few references by year.

After that, it’s alphabetical by some of the organizations.

There’s a reason librarians are paid — and I’m not one.  But I felt that if I continue writing posts, and writing posts — no one will get through this information.  The best learning — anyhow– is situation relevant, and from people who are highly motivated to acquire the understanding or skill RIGHT NOW to address a problem facing them.  In other words, the best learning is self-taught, and from someone or some source you’ve checked out as reasonable, which knows more than you do.  Period.

Failure can be a far better teacher than success.  Perhaps that’s why I can’t look to those still holding on to their middle-class or lower-middle class jobs to figure this out.  People who’ve been treated like tetherballs IN the public institutions tend to be better reporters; they’ve had to work harder to regain their center of balance.  I am one of many such people around; look for loners, not followers! And always check out FIRST (as to organization) are they honest in (1) corporation status (2) filing tax returns with the IRS and (frequently missing) (3) filing with their local state as required by corporation and by charitable trust, if required.

Another common lie I find is date of the beginning of some organization.  When the corporation “begins” it has a record with a year attached.  Unless mythology is OK, check talk to incorporation.  You’d be amazed what’s out there.

“It’s Elementary” — The Links Tell The Story

Previous posts of this blog have had a little yellow flag labeled “Expose Corruption” up next to some of the posts on parenting coordination and/or Kids’First.  From Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania (next to the infamous Luzerne County).  The visuals (which a forum Administrator only could put up) have rather changed in quality recently, which exposes — well, the mentality or an assumed mentality that’d discredit the gravity of the situations they are handling, namely racketeering, money laundering, child abuse coverups, in general corruption of public officials.
Without saying too much more, I have had some private conversations (there is a messaging function) on the board with its moderators, who were first a couple, then just the wife.  It seems to me that the present graphics are hardly her style, and they do resemble Mr. Pilchesky’s style — but then again, what do I know?  With any forum, there can be multiple identities and some gamesmanship to keep the discussions going.
Either way, FYI:

Also, after several months on a forum in Scranton, the forum message board is posting a photo of a targeted public person (I gather) in his briefs.  JUST FOR THE RECORD — in the past week or so of 2012, the leading photos have featured a hooker leaning over onto a police car, a crude graphic of a man trying to plug a damn with water spouting out through his ear (i.e., flowing through his body) and then this.  Either Mr. Pilchesky is back on board, or something happened — but FYI, I wouldn’t have put out all that research onto the site with this level of visuals, and (though it’s been deleted since) inf act spoke up about some of this in 2011.

 There’s a line between expression and simply sharing the same gutter, and this is over it. There are individuals taking legal action to change the dynamics, but part of life is definitely who you hang out with.  That’s just plain offensive; it doesn’t help the cause at all, and may have been intended to hurt it by association.

Get Smart about “ALEC” (American Legislative Exchange Council)! [Publ. Jan. 30. 2012, Re-formatted Mar. 16, 2022].

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THIS POST IS:**
Get Smart about “ALEC” (American Legislative Exchange Council)! [Publ. Jan. 30. 2012, Re-formatted Mar.16, 2022]. (WordPress-generated, case-sensitive shortlink ends “-ZG” | About 6,700 words  See my (new, 2018) Front Page to interpret “shortlink” if needed).


(**in 2012 I didn’t put dates on post titles, add short-links, or include post full titles (with dates published and shortlinks) within the body of the text, generally, use specified width (my default is “700px” FYI), or add borders to my posts.  I was self-taught at all points, still “going through it” in many ways, didn’t always have proper internet access, etc.  When I in later years run across some really early posts I feel summarize something well enough to re-post (or link to), I’ll go back and add this type of formatting.

This post, (reformatted March 16, 2022, briefly only) I’m re-posting because it references ALEC (I saw featured on an upcoming film in 10 Episodes based on New Hampshire corruption, specifically.  If people can comprehend what ALEC does, they should be also able to comprehend what many more nonprofits also do, by subject matter categories, to smooth out differences by states (USA) in standards, and — in the process — continue to nationalize things under state control — like these family courts.. I’d forgotten this post (I don’t often browse “2012” posts!) but it’s short enough I’m going to Tweet it.   ALEC is not the only one around — if what it’s doing is “bad,” by definition, others doing the same thing are also “Bad” — but certainly self-characterized as “good.”  Good or bad, they tend to operate tax-exempt (or below the radar), something we’d better start understanding.

This post (unlike most) actually has a comment (One person at the bottom, I replied, but please see as it deals with Jerry Sandusky (remember Pennsylvania Abuse scandal, the one involving him –not the Luzerne County “Kids For Cash” RICO ?)  charity). //LGH March 16, 2022. 


ALEC is, of course, a nonprofit.   I was surprised to see a photo of it on TV the other day, and attempted a short and sweet post on the dangers of allowing this level of private planning to write model legislation to be delivered to state legislators BY state legislators — who are a good portion of the ALEC membership.

One good summary of how ALEC operates came from another nonprofit** dealing with juvenile justice disparities; I researched this nonprofit and its background and got a good lesson in how & why the very real racism inherent in America’s Incarceration practices tends to lead to a conflicts between diversionary justice programs for youth, commissions and focus on “The African American Male” (etc.) – — and the fact that the fatherhood program as practiced in the custody system prejudices women of all color by definition, thereby breaking down whatever neutrality may have (potentially) existed in those courts.

[Update 2022:  reviewing my ten-year old post now, I”m thinking that the “another nonprofit” referred to (and shown below) was CJCJ.org, Based in San Francisco, and (according to the link) still operational.  I’m putting in two images (not in this post in 2012) just for a point of reference.  The concept of attempting to protect from DV (my theme) and the concept of trying to NOT incarcerate offenders, including violent ones, but direct into diversionary services, still remains an issue. In this post I also reference CCYJ (in Washington State, started and/or run by Susan Dreyfuss).  I’m really not sure which one I meant at the time…//LGH].

It’s a highly appropriate topic for January 16, 2012, Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.  However, this post was too complex to post, really.  Even I hesitated to hit “Publish.”  It needed an introduction.

Today’s post may be a little different, and requests visitors to dedicate a little time to reading about ALEC.    It’s such a hard sell to get even parents with severe family court issues to consider even AFCC and CRC (for the most part) and how it ties into public welfare law (1996 and following revisions). . . ..

This would be far more important.  ALEC makes AFCC look like amateurs when it comes to pretenses, purposes, and intent to dominate the landscape for personal corporate profits.

At the bottom of the post, I’ll link to perhaps four links to “ALEC,” and save the narrative (plus more explanation) for tomorrow.

ReFLeCTiONs from Years of Tracking This Trail:

I usually am blogging about subterranean behaviors by nationwide nonprofits affecting, mostly, the family court system.  This is fairly specific and under-reported, but it turns out to be woven into the very fabric of of our country from top to bottom.

I simply looked and kept following the trail, which often led upwards to HHS and from there to “Institutes” “Task Forces” and “Think Tanks” — and naturally, it got round to the corporations funding the various studies.  I came to the conclusion that the entire “nonprofit” system was set up not to help the poor (which is probably what it was sold as) and for public purposes, but more likely to benefit the already wealthy, for tax write-offs, helping hide income, and influencing government favorably to accumulate more wealth and make sure that competition for jobs remains keen enough to keep wages down and profits high.

Read the rest of this entry »

When Faith in Faith-Based Nonprofits [with Missions to Rescue Helpless (Boys)] is Badly Misplaced. And Potential Remedies.

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(this is a 15,000 word post, including quite a bit of quotes…. and the result of a whole day’s writing, plus some).

NARRATIVE: 

On Christmas Day, yesterday, having no (biologically-related) family contact, I was driving around noticing society’s nearly unanimous agreement to shut down business-as-usual for December 25th, every year, as I know they did across the country.  Streets and curbs that were normally full of cars, and ripe pickings for the parking monitors (producing income for Traffic Court, etc.), were barren.

So why can’t this same society unanimously also decide to shut down “business-as-usual” for more than one day a year, or in a row, when it comes to child abuse?

Perhaps I’m a heretic in bringing up what happens to young boys in a season focused around the Birth of Baby Jesus to (most likely) what we’d now call an underaged young woman, and Who was the real father??

But let’s get honest — it’d be a hard sell to convince anyone that this season is not about sales to start with.  The news, television, local street lighting some places, house decorations, stores, on-line offers, and did I mention, churches?, are all out strutting their stuff, as newspapers frantically take the measure of the economy and encourage people to step up to the plate for the economy and BUY something that won’t outlast the season, might contribute to a diabetic condition, and is otherwise useless in normal life.

And, if possible, another car, or diamond, to show how much you really love each other.

Therefore, I excuse my own lack of reverence for, participation in, or collaboration with this insane holiday.  It has been the source of equal amounts of joy and pain since I got married, and afterwards, a colossal sense of loss (after kids are gone), preceded by sense of dread for which incident was going to be concocted for THIS year’s holiday.  I could write a chronology of my life based on the transformation of this one holiday (in association with probably also Easter, and the beginning and ends of every school year as well) from, special occasions for wonder, joy, fun, and sharing into the Nightmare on Elm Street.  This metamorphosis began shortly after marriage (I remember the marriage — ALL of it, practically — as a living, and pretty much waking nightmare, and it went on quite too long).

So could many others in similar situations.  Still yet others can’t, because one year, the holiday cost them their lives.  And this is still going on, and “blessed be” anyone that has the guts to keep track by reporting — mine can’t stomach it, for sure.

 To me, it’s “Business as Usual,” which is reporting on this– or that.  Today’s post is a “that.”  It’s been eventful (for sure) in the land of local message-boards stopping local corruption (they’re up / they’re down / they’re up — but is it a real one or a mirror site?) and the parties running them (they’re heroes/ they’re villains), and so forth.  This is why I keep an ear to the ground for character indicators, but like to keep a closer eye on the financial flow — which is a little more of an objective thing.

And monitoring and controlling financial flow is a great handle for stopping abuse, better than saying “We Stop Abuse” loudly, often, and expensively.  (Wow.  I found Women’s Justice Center in Sonoma County CA, is with me on questioning not only these bogus “domestic violence” agencies — which are sleeping (figuratively speaking) with both the family law and the law enforcement sectors, plus some — AFCC — while taking ongoing grants labeled “discretionary” — but also the VAWA itself.   Part of my holiday fund-appeal came from a VAWA-related group (it seems), which I think is funny, because when I appealed to some VAWA-type organizations for real-time, tangible help in my situation — the phone line went dead, so to speak.  I fail to see what help they are doing anyone besides the program adminsitrators, and anyone whose expertise is in setting up beautiful websites, i.e., a lot of the telecommunications and conference-hosting sectors of the economy.)

TODAY’S TOPIC:

  • Remember Kids for Cash in Luzerne County?
  • Remember the Penn State Scandal?
  • Remember my blogging Project Pierre Toussaint and consistently blogging the problems with nonprofits that keep on collecting AFTER they’ve lost their corporation status (let alone after their founder gets arrested, as Doug Perlitz did)?
  • Are You Aware of the Administration’s Knee-Jerk Response in Appointing another Task Force to help others stop embarrassing themselves by getting caught?

Some of my (former) associates are always trying to get a Congressional Hearing to Form a Task Force to appoint Somebody Else to fix the problem they are upset about.  They often do this without even bothering to consider what the job of “Task Forces” is to actually do, namely get grants to justify their existence and issue reports (unmonitored, often) about what they actually are doing, did do, or promise to do.  That, among other reasons, is why these are FORMER associates.  See title of this post.

The other thing Congressionally Appointed Task Forces do – becuase typically they are addressing some systemic outrageous problem that government itself previously created — is to expand authority and expense of the Federal Government’s control over (everyone), while blaming (everyone but itself) for the problems it is solving.

Sooner or later all of this looks to be coalescing, pretty swiftly, into one big, fat, fascist mechanism in which we all will play our federally-assigned places in the newly designed breathing mechanism called “one world” government, aka please re-read Brave New World, 1984, and even A Wrinkle in Time.  It’s not like the authors, artists, musicians and playwrights actually ARE functional authors, artists, musicians and playwrights to start with because they don’t notice what’s going on around them, and synthesize it into understandable and symbolic translations, now — is it?  Government and faith groups certainly understand the power of the arts (and architecture) to communicate world views, and restructure reality — that’s why they pour so much money into them. Nowadays, this includes anything on the internet as well.

In this version of the future, perhaps we will all be one big happy family (that’s certainly the True Parents’/Sun Myung Moon et al.’s vision, which appears to have folded into the US Presidents’/Administration’s fetish with marriage/abstinence/faith-based & fatherhood programs) — and our futures will have no violence, if only we could just stop thinking, feeling, observing, and leave it to the qualified experts we are paying for to do this for us.  But in the meantime we already have had CAPTA (see below) since 1974.  There’s been a multitude of task forces and other entities stopping violence against children around.

~ ~ ~ ~

History tells us that this thing about putting everything in “order” with a single, all-knowing & of course kindly male at the top of the heap, and at the top of every family (kind of like the Pope & Santa Claus & God & a Sugar-Daddy all rolled up together) is less benign and altruistic than it may seem.  Everybody know your places, and don’t get out of them, either!   Just accept another Task Force, and we experts will take care of the problems of:

  • Child Abuse AND
  • Children Exposed to Violence AND
  • woman abuse (VAWA) AND
  • domestic violence (NCADV etc.) AND
  • father-absence (Fatherhood.gov) AND
  • also your local affiliates of the US Government (state/county, Unified Family Court etc.) will take care of local domestic ‘disputes’ as directed by the local AFCC & CRC chapter, about which we are not interested.  (i.e., compartmentalization of tasks, but the most important ones lead back to an executive agency).     

Go back to work, don’t worry.  Somebody, after all, has to pay for this great leadership.  Consume, consume, consume — and we will organize and fix.

~ ~ ~ ~

Now, 2011, from the Federal Register — I am talking about, what happened to all the previous Task Forces (etc.) and Initiatives?  Why a new one, and what’s so different about it this time?  Who wishes — really — to analyze why the other ones have failed in their missions?   And why does it take this amount of firepower to convince ANYONE that children being exposed to violence in the home is bad (and can we discuss that it’s also bad for both adults — the person committing the violence as well as the person taking it on the chin, and other body parts).  Parents of these children have been reporting it for decades.   So have news headlines.  So have DV organizations.  So have Child Abuse organizations.  So now, it’s official?

Notices
Establishment of the Attorney General’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence
Pages 67761 – 67761 [FR DOC # 2011-28319] PDF | Text | More
Hearing of the Attorney General’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence
Pages 67761 – 67762 [FR DOC # 2011-28322] PDF | Text | More

(Below, I post Task Force Members and talk about it more….)

I’m not real informed on CAPTA, but here’s a summary on it from a 2009 Congressional Research Service (fairly neutral gov’t source, I believe; their function is summary explanations; I’ve cited their works on other topics before).  Wikipedia describes CRS as the “public policy research arm of the US Congress”  or example, they will summarize bills and post it on Thomas.gov, I think…  Although Wikipedia also notes:

CRS reports are highly regarded as in-depth, accurate, objective, and timely, but as a matter of policy they are not made directly available to members of the public. There have been several attempts to pass legislation requiring all reports to be made available online, most recently in 2003, but none have passed. Instead, the public must request individual reports from their Senators and Representatives in Congress, purchase them from private vendors, or search for them in various web archives of previously-released documents.

(which what I’m about to cite probably is):

The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act: Background, Programs, and Funding

[[==”CAPTA”]]

by  Emilie Stoltzfus, Specialist in Social Policy, November 4, 2009

7-5700 http://www.crs.gov R40899

Child abuse and neglect is a significant social concern. Children who experience abuse and/or neglect are more likely to have developmental delays and impaired language or cognitive skills; be identified as “problem” children (with attention difficulties or challenging behaviors); be arrested for delinquency, adult criminality, and violent criminal behavior; experience depression, anxiety, or other mental health problems as adults; engage in more health-risk behaviors as adults; and have poorer health outcomes as adults.

Currently we have a conflict of interest in this statement with the fatherhood groups.  All of the above situations are supposedly caused by father absence.  This is neatly handled by combining the concept of “father absence” with “child welfare” as seen in the multitude of fatherhood programs on the site “childwelfare.gov.”   Actually, a far more significant problem is likely to be father PRESENCE, in some cases, and society’s reluctance to accept that when for the child’s safety father ABSENCE is required, that the mother then (the careless, overly fertile bitch in heat that can’t choose a companion right, and what’s worse is burdening the public welfare caseloads.  Oh yes, we forgot to mention that in initially passing Welfare Reform, we (the US Congress– see ethnic & gender profile) particularly are concerned about this characteristic among women…, and hereby “tweak” the “AFDC” (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) to create “Welfare-to-Work” concept, from which adequate and ever-increasing amounts of marriage/fatherhood(abstinence, relationship skills education, etc.) will be diverted so this problem can be stopped at its (alleged) root!!”)

This being a typical publication (notice the domain name, Child Welfare.gov)

The Importance of Fathers in the Healthy Development of Children

Author(s): Office on Child Abuse and Neglect, U.S. Children’s Bureau Rosenberg, Jeffrey., Wilcox, W. Bradford.
Year Published: 2006

In fact, for a REAL quick “Cliff Notes” (summary at a glance) version of the field, FIRST click on that title above, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” I mean, (sorry, I mixed up my comedy of errors period piece titles), “The Importance of FATHERS…”) and see all the hyperlinks in the outline.  Then go down to “Appendix B” and do the same thing.  That’s about as good a quick education on what’s happening to public funding of untested theory (although the tests continue….) on fatherhood and preventing child abuse through it as one can get.

Appendix B – Resource Listings of Selected National Organizations Concerned with Fatherhood and Child Maltreatment

Listed below are several representatives of the many national organizations and groups that deal with various aspects of child maltreatment, as well as several that address fatherhood issues.  Like (by now any regular readers of this blog should know a few of these names).  Under the section “For Fathers and Fatherhood Groups” (as opposed to general public)

Bootcamp for New Dads  (Irvine, CA)

Center on Fathers, Families, and Public Policy (Madison, WI)

Center for Successful Fathering  (Austin, TX)
Family and Corrections Network  (Palmyra, VA)
The Fathers Network  (Seattle, WA )
— I guess this one is in case the various state-level Commissions on Fatherhood are falling behind on their nationwide PR, and Fathers and Families Coalition of America ever gets busted for how many improperly incorporated organizations are among its affiliates, that is, allegedly are improperly incorporated — meaning, I haven’t gone through all of them yet).
National Center on Fathering  (St. Louis, MO)
National Fatherhood Initiative (Gaithersville, MD)
National Latino Fatherhood and Family Institute (Los Angeles, CA)
National Practitioners Network for Fathers and Families, Inc. (Washington, D.C. and see my blog)
    let’s not forget this set of fathers:  Stay At Home Dads, who (just like some Moms) might feel isolated, and need a support group.  This is a resource for helping them connect with each other.  It just merged with “AtHomeDad” and can be found there (I linked)
with the motto (at new site — angelfire.com carries it) “men who change diapers change the world.”

Which gets me thinking – if we could enforce this policy with members of Congress — get them to practice this — perhaps there’d be fewer fatherless children around — there’d be fewer wars!

CONGRESSIONAL RESOURCE SERVICE ON CAPTA, cont’d. , now that I’m through with the sarcasm part…  This 2009 summary seems to be in preparation for making sure funding for this act continues.  CAPTA started in 1974.  We are on the topic of how forming child abuse prevention task forces is a surefire way to stop child abuse, as Penn State and the Haitian Fund, and for that matter, a recent child-rape during a supervised visitation (with both of her parents, one with a sex abuse prior on his record, as I recall) in an FCFC (that’s Families & Children First) funded type building, supported 77% by government funding, including a recent state-wide “Children’s Levy” in Trumbull County, Ohio.  Ohio is very “up” on preventing abuse of children — because it has BOTh a commission on Families and Children AND a commission on fatherhood, not to mention a Governor’s Office of FaithBased and Community Initiatives which draws funding (probably) from both sides of that fence (promoting fatherhood and protecting children, as it did the family in Trumbull County which also (I forgot to mention) had an older child — snatched at BIRTH — later (not much later — at about age two) die in foster care too.  Which brings me also to the concept of federal incentives to states for foster care, ALSO, and so on . . .. ).

LIKE I KEEP SAYING — IF YOU WANT TO PREVENT CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR, PASS A LAW AGAINST IT, SET UP A TASK FORCE, PAY, EVALUATE, REPORT, AND HOPE.  THIS IS FROM THE CRS 2009 REPORT ON CAPTA:

In FY2007, states reported an estimated 3.5 million children were in families investigated or assessed by CPS workers and some 794,000 were identified as victims of abuse or neglect.

In 1974, Congress enacted the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA, P.L. 93-247) to create a single federal focus for preventing and responding to child abuse and neglect. As a condition of receiving state grant funds under that act, states are required to have procedures in place for receiving and responding to allegations of abuse or neglect and for ensuring children’s safety.

YES.  and by the same logic, to receive federal fatherhood grants, the state organizations or (whatever) are supposed to have procedures in place to prevent domestic violence also.  Neither says that there is supposed to actually be any evidence that the program LAST year (or last 5 years) actually did prevent child abuse or domestic violence.  Just to have procedures in place.  Again I say — where do all these horrible parents come from to start with?  Who raised THEM?  (See public education, USA??  Foster Care USA?  Prior failure to stop child abuse or domestic violence in or out of the home, USA?).

Further, they must define child abuse and neglect in a way that is consistent with CAPTA, which defines the term as “ at a minimum, any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker, which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation, or an act or failure to act which presents an imminent risk of serious harm.”

Since its enactment, CAPTA has been reauthorized numerous times, most recently by the Keeping Children and Families Safe Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-36). Currently, it authorizes formula grants to states to help improve their child protective services; competitive grants and contracts for research, demonstration, and other activities related to better identifying, preventing, and treating child abuse and neglect; and formula grants to states for support of community-based child abuse and neglect prevention services. Funding authorization for these CAPTA programs expired with FY2008. However, Congress appropriated $110 million for CAPTA in FY2009 (P.L. 111-8) and a similar amount has been proposed for FY2010 (H.R. 3293). In addition, CAPTA authorizes grants to improve the prosecution and handling of child abuse and neglect cases. These formula grants to states, commonly referred to as Children’s Justice Act grants, are funded via an annual set-aside of up to $20 million from the Crime Victims fund.

CAPTA is LARGE, PERVASIVE, INVASIVE & EXPENSIVE — has it been successful?  The CRS summary here shows some of the extent:

Between 1963 and 1967, every state and the District of Columbia enacted some form of child abuse and neglect reporting law to permit individuals to refer cases of suspected child abuse or neglect to a public agency.

Reminder:  by definition any “Public Agency” is being financially supported by the public.  We pay income taxes, sales taxes, city, state taxes, property taxes, and you name it.  Our taxes are used for things far beyond our awareness and comprehension at times, including unwarranted wars on foreign soil (Iraq) and otherwise protecting such things as corporate wealth and Bush Family Interests, aka Oil.    Citizens with or without children pay for public schools that apparently are turning out child abusers, and we also pay for the world’s largest per-capita system of prisons, again, which are getting privatized.  In these prisons, there’s plenty of outcry about juvenile abuse — as in rapes, isolation, you name it.  We fund all levels of law enforcement from the local up to Mr. Holder.   So when a public agency exists to protect children and is failing — that’s a very serious situation, and that IS the situation.

I come from a region of the US where a man previously convicted of kidnapping and raping, and had done jail time for it, was let out and thereafter, something got lost — and he was able (with a wife he married, who met him on a prison visit) — to kidnap another minor, hold her hostage in a series of sheds in the backyard in a suburban area outside the SF Bay Area — and while on probation.  In this matter, he also went to prison for some other reason for a while — and the wife (living in a mother’s home) held down the fort.  This young woman was not only kept hostage and raped, giving birth to two children which she then somehow managed to raise and thought she was their SISTER — she also financially assisted her rapist/captor in his printing business.  This went on for 18 years.  I’m talking about obviously Phil Garrido & Jaycee Dugard.  So I believe from these and plenty of other instances, that it’s time for people at the street level — not the top, most official levels — to examine WHY child abuse continues to be such a horrible problem decade after decade.   And to do this we have to start looking at our mindsets (the cult of the experts) and our willingness to believe everything said on the internet and in a very officious manner — without the means to check it out.

Or, our habits of simply throwing up our hands and saying, it’s out of my control, I don’t know.  Suppose it were your kid?

Sometimes the most valuable learning comes after the most serious setbacks and defeats — but it happens with a cost, a cost of somehow making the TIME to reflect and investigate “how did we get here” and an insistence on acknowledging when the usual answers simply make no sense.

BACK to CAPTA description:  

The rapid adoption of these laws was aided by a model reporting law disseminated by the Children’s Bureau, which is housed within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In 1974, Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA, P.L. 93-247) and state reporting laws were modified to conform to the standards it established. In creating CAPTA, Congress sought to increase understanding of child abuse and neglect and improve the response to its occurrence by establishing a single federal focal point on the issue. Since its enactment 35 years ago, the law has been reauthorized and amended numerous times, most recently by the Keeping Children and Families Safe Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-36).2 Currently, CAPTA authorizes:

State Grants: Formula grants to states and territories to help improve their child protective service (CPS) systems, in exchange for which states must comply with various requirements related to the reporting, investigation, and treatment of child maltreatment cases. The FY2009 appropriation was $26.5 million.

Discretionary Activities: Federal data collection, dissemination, and technical assistance efforts related to child abuse prevention and treatment, as well as competitive grants to a range of eligible entities for research and demonstration projects or other activities related to the identification, prevention, and treatment of child abuse or neglect. The FY2009 appropriation was $41.8 million (including a $13.5 million set-aside for the ACF home visitation initiative, $500,000 for a feasibility study related to a national child abuse and neglect

CAPTA — Children’s Bureau in HHS/ACF sets the standard – CPS strengthening — Federal leadership — millions invested.  Lots of data collection, dissemination, and technical assistance, plus research & demonstration grants.  The same approach has been used for fatherhood and for domestic violence activities, wouldn’t you say (with HHS often the lead public agency, alongside DOJ)….  (All these years, has anyone IN government or HHS bothered to investigate the role of the AFCC, CRC, etc? directorates?)

As a consequence of this huge effort, there are now major reform efforts by parents (and complaints) about CPS abuses of families. It appears their invasions, tossing away due process, guilty-til-proven innocent (but then after proven guilty, other systems still exist to put kids back into the care and comfort of their abusers) and other — a multitude of other — issues tend to bring up whether or not CAPTA was actually a good idea.

See Nancy Schaefer (sorry to keep bringing this up, but a questionable murder/suicide of a State Senator & Her Husband — from Georgia — I feel bears remembering!)

Backing up to 2001 (this is for purposes of simply stating who CAPTA is, and what it’s supposed to be doing, in very basic format, just an intro):

And testimony on its reauthorization in 2001, from a Disabilities Consortium (Disabled Children are at much higher risk of assault, and are assaulted more often, it asserts — which only makes sense when one considers what kind of creep mentality gets off on assaulting helpless children:

Testimony for  The Committee on Education and the Workforce Select Education Subcommittee

United State House of Representatives Hearing on

Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act [[= “CAPTA”]]

August 2, 2001

Room 2175 Rayburn House Office Building

Submitted by:

Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities  (CCD)
Task Force on Child Abuse and Neglect

According to an HHS report released in April 2001, substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect investigated by child protective service (CPS) agencies numbered an estimated 826,000 children nationally in 1999. States report that nearly half (44.2%) of the child victims or their families in confirmed cases of child abuse and neglect receive no treatment or any other kind of services following investigation of the report. Deaths from child maltreatment remain unacceptably high: an estimated 1,100 children died of abuse or neglect in 1999 alone. And, as noted above, near-fatal child maltreatment leaves thousands of children permanently disabled each year.

Ergo, Child Abuse is Bad.  Establish and Fund procedures to Stop it.   When Child Abuse is not stopped by these procedures, just do more of them anyhow, to appease whoever noticed that there’s still child abuse going on.
Hero Worship is Good for the Economy, and particularly while worshipping heroes, include the charities they set up to Help the Helpless (and/or Fatherless) children.  See Penn State, Sandusky and the Second Mile.

Now here’s the resulting Task Force from recent Congressional Hearings:

Here’s an article on how we need — OBviously– more government funding to study and raise people’s consciousness about the effects of domestic violence upon children (i.e., all those parents reporting all these years, and the children themselves reporting, plust abusers that go on to kill their children is not “real” evidence presented in JUST the right way to convince (who? precisely) that it’s actually bad for children to witness one of their parents beating and abusing the other?  We need more evidence that it’s bad WHY?  Perhaps to counter the institution — called, for one, the family law system — that tells one parent (often the mothers) that it’s all in their heads?  Here it goes, again:

By Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) and Brian Martin – 11/03/11 06:36 PM ET

Read on for the translation of what is really meant by this: . . . what do they really want?  First the rhetoric:

There are recent examples of positive steps to address the intractable problem of domestic violence. On Oct. 12, the Makers of Memories Foundationparticipated in a special congressional briefing on Capitol Hill to educate policymakers, leaders and the public about the children affected by domestic violence, which UNICEF has called “one of the most damaging unaddressed human rights violations in the world today.”Children who are raised in homes with domestic violence are 50 times more likely to abuse alcohol and other drugs and six times more likely to commit suicide. Shockingly, 90 percent of prison inmates report that they experienced domestic violence as children.

First of all, whoever wrote this should start talking — we want to listen in of course — to the marriage/fatherhood movement, which asserts that NO, it’s NOT domestic violence that causes criminal behavior and substance abuse, plus suicide — it’s fatherlessness!   . . . But I believe the reason they are NOT getting their talk lined up right is that it’s just too convenient to lump them together — when it comes to obtaining grants and starting up certain groups to get them — and too inconvenient to let on that they know thats the racket!  First of all, we have to hear how no one has done anything to prevent domestic violence against, or traum from witnessing it against someone else, on behalf of children since at least 1974, when CAPTA was passed:

While it is common to hear calls for an “end to the cycle of violence,” it cannot logically end without a substantial focus on the children

Domestic violence programs throughout the country are focused primarily on adults who are involved in violent relationships. A range of services are offered, including temporary housing, crisis counseling, legal assistance, health services, vocational aid, substance abuse programs and anger management and other behavioral modification initiatives for perpetrators. The focus on children comes as a distant second concern.

Perhaps that’s because domestic violence groups are aware of CAPTA already.  In fact, they’ve had plenty of conferences with both the child abuse prevention and the fatherhood promotion groups (including BWJP with AFCC on custody matters) already.  But if this were publicized then what would justfiy more grants with the “new, improved, re-labeled” emphasis?

OF COURSE, here’s yet ANOTHER (presumably nonprofit — should I check them?) calling the Congressional Hearing a bunch of baloney, and reporting AGAINST it.  I’ve heard of this group before, maybe you have:

SAVE: Stop Abusive and Violent Environments

Here’s their E-Alert about the (then’) upcoming 10/12/11 conference on this theme:

ELERT: Trash-Talk: Call on Rep. Gwen Moore to Cancel Gender-Biased Briefing

A Congressional Briefing on the Effects of Domestic Violence on Children has been scheduled for this coming Wednesday, Oct. 12 in Washington DC. The event is hosted by Makers of Memories and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV).

See, when one group sees another group making some inroads against THEIR interests, here comes the negative press, and they go after them with crying gender bias

I see the same reporting and (with my particular background) think:  “Hmmm.  NCADV — I’ve looked at this group, some of its conferences, grants received, items for sale, and bedfellows, but who is this “Makers of Memories”???  And then I read on — it’s a FOUNDATION.  It’s a Nonprofit.

Now here comes “SAVE” to SAVE the day with counterintelligence to the feminists:

As you can see to the side, the image they chose to promote the briefing shows a man, presumably a father, yelling at a small girl who is cowering in the corner. And no surprise, the websites of Makers of Memories and the NCADV are brimming with gender-biased information.

SAVE supports evidence-based efforts to address young victims of family violence. These are the facts that need to be highlighted:

1.    Women are at least as likely as men to engage in intimate partner violence. One national survey found mothers are twice as likely as fathers to engage in severe marital violence. [i]

Well, I’m going to say this anyhow — OK, “SAVE,” show me all the headlines on the “estranged husband” “custody dispute” “crime scene cleanp” and the wife was the killer.    . . .. .  Anyhow, the next two points made:

2.    Most child abuse is committed by mothers. According to the DHHS, “approximately one-half (53.8%) of child abuse and neglect perpetrators were women and more than 40 percent (44.4%) were men.” [ii]

3.    Partner-abusing mothers are equally likely to abuse their children as partner-abusing fathers. [iii]

(I slogged through some of these type of reports on-line in earlier 2011 on the SFWeekly series by Peter Jamison on California Courts giving Custody to Pedophiles.  The GlennSacks hounds were talking like SAVE and NCADV people arguing back.  Some look at the stats shows how the word “mothers” breaks down into biological, step- etc.  I say there is a difference, but more to the point, let’s talk about what all this talk is really about anyhow — it’s going to be, in the bottom line, about who gets more funding.  And I say, it’s about time we scream “WHOA!” — and inspect whether there has been a pattern of tax-compliance and reporting, or tax-EVASION and non-reporting, before voting ANY more appropriations for this stuff.  And then I want more parents like me (mothers, and fathers) to get up there and say what difference did it make in My case, or in anyone’s case in our neighborhoods, that we can point to — or that any of these organizations can point to their having tracked.

The truth is, apparently — most of them do not track much more than who was “served” — and notice the quotes.

– – – — ANYHOW — HERE WE ARE WITH ANOTHER TASK FORCE: (found at “findyouthinfo.org”)

December 05, 2011

National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence Holds First Public Hearing

On November 29, Attorney General Eric Holder’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence, part of the Defending Childhood Initiative, convened its first hearing in Baltimore, Maryland. This hearing is the first of four that will aim to gather expert and community testimony on the epidemic of children’s exposure to violence. Coming out of these hearings, the Task Force will identify {{WHAT ELSE:…..}}} promising practices, programming, and community strategies used to prevent and respond to children’s exposure to violence and will issue a comprehensive report presenting its findings.Learn more.

I’d bet my bottom dollar that this “comprehensive” report doesn’t address — at all — what is going on in the family law system, or how all the previous helping groups (particularly certain categories of them0 are presently using the federal grants stream, which apparently goes underground, lots of it, once it’s out of the the very large faucet pointed at favorites.

Who is actually ON the task force is a real slap in the face to common sense. let alone pointing another one — at all — on the issue.  Like it’s a TASK FORCE — get it?  How many simultaneously operating and funded task forces does it take to turn the other way while some adult in another “help the children” nonprofit (or situation of professional ongoing access to children which already has severe and highly publicized violations of trust track in the record)?

I don’t know — but looks like here’s another one.  Public Outcry — Appoint a Task Force — Go through the routines solemnly — distract the public — end of story.

HERE’s the DOJ Description of Who’s ON that Task Force:

The task force is composed of 13 leading experts from diverse fields and perspectives, including practitioners, child and family advocates, academic experts and licensed clinicians. Joe Torre, Major League Baseball executive vice president of baseball operations, founder of the Joe Torre Safe at Home Foundation, and a witness of domestic violence as a child himself; and Robert Listenbee Jr., chief of the juvenile unit of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, serve as co-chairs of the task force. The full list of Task force members is located at:

How appropriate — in view of recent VERY high-profile incidents of sexual abuse (allegations) to a high-profile sports figures functioning as substitute father figure for youngsters (i.e., young boys especially) , and highly positioned religious leaders (which seems an unending parade), to make sure the leading edge of this “prevent abuse” includes a Leading Sports Figure with close associations with Fatherhood Promoting Organizations (which Joe Torres has) and a Jesuit Priest, simultaneous with a federal lawsuit against “The Society Of Jesus” for outrages in Haiti, and subsequent money-laundering (?) or at least continuing to collect funding after the perpetrator was arrested!

This “Task Force” membership reveals the public expectation that ONLY prominently placed citizens and people running other nonprofits and foundations (etc.) are truly qualified to report on how to stop child abuse — no matter how often we come to understand that it’s exactly in some of these fields (Child Psychiatry much?) that this abuse takes place and is covered up!    I’m listing them all here.

FYI, when I saw this list, I wasn’t just disheartened (hardly unexpected) but also incensed.  Another person, who forwarded the link, although we all seem to know how eager certain protective mothers groups are to get a “Congressional Hearing” and feel victorious once they get one — said (she) was “livid,”

This is who is on the force.  There are 13 members, and to their credit, 6 are women, but that’s beside the point.  Look at the associations:

http://www.justice.gov/defendingchildhood/tf-members.html

Co-Chair:Joe Torre, Chairman of the Joe Torre Safe at Home® Foundation 
Mr. Torre, Major League Baseball’s Executive Vice President for Baseball Operations and former manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, created his foundation to educate students, parents, teachers, and school faculty about the effects of domestic violence.

Everyone wants to educate others about domestic violence.  What an industry.  I don’t mean to disrespect or pick on Mr. Torres as a person, however, as myself a person — and a victim of domestic violence — I can assert most groups dono’t want to hear about it.  Particularly judges in the family law system, GALs, mediators, faith-groups, and for that matter, when I sought help in recent years from a local DV group, they didn’t have anyone to sit with me until the hearing to renew, or re-instate a restraining order to protect my right to work without harassment from this ex.  No money in the budget.  I heard the same thing from another judge after my kids were stolen on an UNsupervised visitation exchange:  No money in the budget.  Eventually, I am out of work and go to the local employment agency looking for some — and lo and behold, there’s LOTS of money from one of the same organizations — to go into middle schools and teach about domestic violence and preventing it.  Something’s wrong with that picture — you can perhaps support yourself (as a DV survivor) by becoming a DV advocate, a professional, if you are willing to promote programs that you already now do not, actually, prevent domestic violence or address what happens when children are involved.  A.k.a. Sell your Soul,  join the business.

Just perhaps people who’ve gone through years of this might want to work in something OUTside the field?

Anyhow — briefly — Joe Torres LOVES the Family VIolence Prevention Fund (and vice versa) which is a major resource center (per HHS) in Preventing Violence.  Obviously it’s working — which is why we need this task force, right?  Here he is, with FVPF founder Esta Soler, amid other luminaries, rejoicing at the new, groundbreaking “Futures without Violence” set up at the SF Praesidio, as reported in “SF Philanthropy”

Photographer: DREW ALTIZER PHOTOGRAPHY
Publication Date: JANUARY 17, 2010

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, UNIFEM Goodwill Ambassador Nicole Kidman, Major League Baseball Manager Joe Torre and Actress Joan ChenCelebrated Renovation of Family Violence Prevention Fund’s New International Center and Exhibit Hall on the Main Post of San Francisco’s Historic Presidio. . . .

The Family Violence Prevention Fund, one of the world’s most innovative and respected agencies working to stop violence against women and children, broke new ground on Friday, January 8th with the start of construction on an international conference center and exhibition hall.

Among those who joined Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF) Founder and President Esta Soler for the groundbreaking ceremony were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose support has provided significant funding for the $18 million project, actress Nicole Kidman, who will appear on behalf of UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) and Los Angeles Dodgers manager Joe Torre, who has been an active supporter of the FVPF’s highly successful national campaign, Coaching Boys Into Men . . .

Building 100, located on the Main Post of San Francisco’s historic Presidio, will be redesigned and reconstructed as a global action center to serve as a forum for international discourse, leadership training, education programs and public exhibitions designed to change attitudes and practices that harm women and children who are oppressed or exploited around the world.  Architectural design was provided by BAR Architects and construction is being managed by Oliver and Company.

Success attracts success attracts federal funding — and the architectual firms, etc. and management, and all kinds of businesses are EXACTLY who is profiting from these types of projects.  From a group that has used years of “DISCRETIONARY” funding, to be shared with battered women’s shelters in the area — to expand it’s customer base, at its clients expenses.   Here’s their own website’s description of the same event.

Meanwhile — in the same city! — we see how the propensity for glamour and royalty and love of the theatrical occasions is shared by family court commissioners and judges — and POOR (Silenced) Mamas continue to speak out against this.  No federal funding fro THAT activity! (At least since last I checked).  I just about started my blog (unintentionally) contrasting Poor Mamas with “what a friend we have in each other” rhetoric, back in 2009.  I didn’t realize at the time that this may have opened a local can of worms.  Anyhow, here’s the latest from the same source (looks like the on-line got SOME funding, as it’s had a facelift also, but nothing close to Futures without Violence’s):

(I have posted this photo before on the blog, but from different URL):

Silenced Mamas Speak back to Commissioner Slabach!  (LGH: please read!)

PNNscholar1 – Posted on 29 September 2010

Author:  Marlon Crump

San Francisco Family Law Commissioner Marjorie A. Slabach was featured as a “queen” alongside of other California county judges in “Familawt” years ago. Picture featured on the Rogues Gallery at http://home.earthlink.net/~elnunes/camelot.htm Silenced Mamas Speak back to Commissioner Slabach!

 FACT:  Family Law Proceedings sometimes result in homeless mothers, a.k.a. Poor.  The article, besides detailing its intent to continue ongoing reports of this particular commissioner, and outrage at a 2010 Glide Foundation honoring her (by another person I believe shown in the royalty picture above)…

. . .Below are details of the upcoming event “Through the Eyes of Children” presented by The Family Law Section of the Bar Association of San Francisco and Rally Visitation Services ** of Saint Francisco Memorial Hospital:

Where: Pierrotti Pavillion Saint Francis Memorial Hospital 900 Hyde Street San Francisco, CA 94109

When: October 7th, 2010. Time: 5:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m. Keynote Speaker: Janise Mirkitani, President, Glide Foundation Honoring: Dr. Patricia Galamba and Commissioner, Marjorie A. Slabach Lifetime Achievement Award presented to: Judge Donna Hitchens In a continued effort in re-porting and supporting the “Silenced Mamas” movement, POOR Magazine/PNN will be at this event to protest the honoring of Marjorie Slabach.

**Translation:  Access/Visitation funding, Supervised Visitation Network, and how to extract a child from a mother, for profit . . . and other things FVPF simply refuses to acknowledge or properly report about – –in their own back yard!   There are 94 signatures on the petition page to have her removed, revealing several of the common practices in family law courts that FWV (formerly FVPF) could care less about — and has treated with silence.

Here’s a slide from an “Winslow Events” organization about this wonderful “futures without violence” group. Obviously the kind of individuals who would know firsthand about the matters they’re dealing with….  They are poor, they are oppressed, and they have walked the walk, particularly with communities of color and helping (groups like Winslow Events — which produced “Produced a stage program and reception event for 500 guests” in order to help stop violence).

Mr. Torres — who says that baseball was a safe refuge for him from violence at home (I understand how getting involved in such activities can help counter it — and until MY family went into the family law system, and even during abuse, I was able to negotiate, bargain and get them there.  However, once the custody courts eliminated the ability to work safely, and insisted on frequent and continuing contact (without REAL protection for me at any time past removal of the restraining order) I could not handle this entire burden — which FVPF simply wasn’t interested in — nor could other women in the same situation.  You can get help from the Feminists to join a DV group, and simultaneously from the Fatherhood Groups (either directly, or while participating in a so-called DV prevention group), but good luck getting any help going through family law as a result of, or after, leaving abuse.   That’s why I believe BOTH terms:  “Domestic Violence”  AND “Fatherhood” need to be retired, and instead, let’s just look at the nonprofits foundations, and etc.

I don’t see the photo was looking for (Mr. Torres actually holding a banner of FVPF), but this will show his close association:

  He tells his story on their website; baseball was a place where he could hide from his father.

On Mother’s Day, he created a video in honor of his mother for the Founding Fathers.  Mr. Torre is a member of the Founding Fathers movement which promotes the Coaching Boys Into Men media campaign and training programs.  Mr. Torre is featured in the Coaching Boys into Men playbook.  You can learn more about the program at the Futures Without Violence’s (formerly the Family Violence Prevention Fund) web site.  Mr. Torre also created a PSA for their RESPECT campaign.

Mr. Torre’s story was featured in “Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories,” a PBS special funded by the Mary Kay Ash Charitable Foundation.

Here’s a listing of a whole BUNCH of the Stop Violence, End Abuse, Prevent Domestic Violence, and “A Call to Men” type groups, including “Safe at Home.”  This one happens to link to another film, “TELLING AMY’s STORY” which likewise, I have some serious issues with.  It is billed as a “Domestic Violence Documentary Film and Public Service Media Project.”

Moreover, it was out of PENN STATE!    If you judge by the beauty of the websites and film productions — I’d rate it highly.  If you judge by content, I give it a zero!  The “Amy” in this situation had a custody case.  They dono’t report anything relevant on the family law situation, and she dies at the end, by making a very foolish decisions right after confronting the father (around getting some diapers!) and her parents were lucky they didn’t die too, given the circumstances.  The film made no commentary on this, and did not reply when I made several attempts to contact (phone messages, phone contact, as I recall email) about this very disturbing omission.    This one even has the One-Stop Justice Shop alliance (that’s what I’m going to call them):

The Family Justice Center Alliance aims to create a network of national and international Family Justice Centers and other models of co-located, multi-agency service centers for victims of family violence and their children with close working relationships, shared training and technical assistance, collaborative learning processes, and coordinated funding assistance.

A LET”S GET HONEST MOMENT (actually, COMment):

The laugh truly is on the public if we continue to believe that people who insist on associating with each other as luminaries, reformes, educators, and collaborators — the coalitions of coalitions, the alliances, the partnerships, the centers, the projects, the initiatives, and — case in point — the Task Forces — are going to ever do anything other than MORE OF THE SAME until it becomes unprofitable for these individual groups to keep doing so.  Seeing as we have been taught to look up them and be reassured by them that “someone” is on the job, that’s probably not anytime soon.

NEXT MEMBER OF THIS DEFENDING THE CHILDREN TYPE TASK FORCE:

Co-Chair:Robert Listenbee, Jr., J.D., Chief of the Juvenile Unit of the Defender Association of Philadelphia 
Mr. Listenbee also serves as a member of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Committee of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.

Father Gregory Boyle, S.J., Founder of Homeboy Industries 
Fr. Boyle was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1984 and serves as a member of the National Gang Center Advisory Board.

I believe that this Father Boyle very likely has done wonders, and helped lots of people.  But as I am in the business of looking at the business angle, I first of all noticed that (no offence) I think it’s relevant that someone decided to put a sports figure (above) and a Jesuit Priest on a task force of this nature, when there’s an open federal court, and a SCANDALOUS one involving a Jesuit Priest at a (I think) Jesuit University scamming the public by continuing to collect funds AFTER arrest of a perp — in Connecticut, USA regarding Haiti.   Would it not make sense for members of some of these organizations, rather than trying to save everyone and stop gang violence, instead started cleaning their own hosue and examining their own consciences?

Be that as it may — and this might be a separate post (except it’s been a long day, and I need to close out).  I looked, naturally, at Fr. Boyle, S.J. and noticed that he was recipient of an “Opus Prize.”  I know Latin, and had heard of a cult called “Opus Dei,” however, this relates to the Opus Corporation.   TO cut matters short, they aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, except that this kind of behavior apparently goes with the territory of being wildly successful as a corporation (particularly real estate) and figuring out the proper use of foundations –and subsidiaries — which is to funnel money torwards the family trusts (in this case “Rauenhorst”)

In such situations, along the way helping stop some gang violence, sooner or later somebody reports.  No matter — at this level, one can afford lawyers, and/or to settle when caught (or accused).  This settlement kind of reminds me of child support contractor, the megalith “Maximus” having to settle for about $30 million on fraud (or — see record) charges in more than one state.  No matter– it’s still in business all over the US and abroad also.

Wealth Accumulation and “keeping it in the Family” hasn’t exactly been a new practice for this religion, or others, but here’s how it played out this time.

To make it clear — I’m not at all connecting the individual, Fr. Gregory Boyle, S.J. — with this corporation other than to say its Prize is funded by its Foundation which is funded by its Corporation, which apparently has some ethical issues.  Didn’t take me too long to find the reports on it — so goes the internet, if you look…..

05/20/2011

Opus Corp. Quietly Settles Suit Filed by Subsidiary

The Star Tribune, citing “two people familiar with the case,” said that the two parties settled last month for $45 million; Opus West had accused its parent company of siphoning tens of millions of dollars and causing its demise.

Once-prominent developer Opus Corporation quietly settled a lawsuit brought by subsidiary Opus West, which claimed that it siphoned vast portions of Opus West earnings and kept the subsidiary in a constant state of financial dependency that ultimately led to bankruptcy.

{{Sounds like family court already, only played larger….}}

The case, which dates back to 2009, was officially dismissed April 29, according to court documents.

The parties aren’t revealing the terms of the settlement. But the Star Tribune, citing “two people familiar with the case,” said that they secretly settled last month in Dallas for $45 million. The case was set to go to trial within a matter of days.

About one-third of the settlement—or $15 million—will go to lawyers, the sources told the Minneapolis newspaper. Most of the remaining $30 million will reportedly go to the two largest creditors in Phoenix-based Opus West’s bankruptcy case: Bank of America and Wells Fargo Bank. The two banks were collectively owed more than $260 million.

Approximately $3 million will be shared by about 150 Opus West employees who lost their jobs when the subsidiary filed for bankruptcy in 2009, according to the unnamed sources.   ($3,000,000 / 150 = $300,000/15 = around $20,000 each, other things being equal (which they probably aren’t). Wonder how many lawyers were involved…

Opus West’s lawsuit claimed that Minnetonka [MN]-based Opus Corporation routinely engaged in “self-dealing transactions, blindly siphoning tens of millions of dollars that left Opus West with almost non-existent levels of working capital…”

{{Like I said, reminds me of conciliation court.}}

It went on to call the once-sterling reputation of the Rauenhorst family—which owns Opus Corporation—a “carefully-cultivated myth, an appealing veneer specifically designed to hide the true guiding ethos of the Rauenhorst business empire: to make sure the Rauenhorst family and their ultra-rich friends got rich and stayed rich.”

According to the suit, 10 percent of Opus West’s pretax income went to charity—and three-quarters of the subsidiary’s remaining income went to Opus Corporation. Opus Corporation and its executives knew that the payments were leaving Opus West “chronically undercapitalized,” according to Opus West’s complaint. 

. . . .

Opus Corporation has since shut down and reorganized under a newly restructured parent company—Opus Holding, LLC. The assets of the two remaining subsidiaries were later bought by Opus Holding.

The Opus Group now includes Opus Holding, LLC, and Opus Holding, Inc., and their operating subsidiaries—Opus Development Corporation; Opus Design Build, LLC; and architectural arm Opus AE Group, Inc.

Legal battles for Opus haven’t ended with the recent settlement. The company still faces a lawsuit filed in July 2010 by 16 former Opus West employees who claim to be collectively owed $32.4 million in deferred compensation, bonuses, and pensions.

According to the complaint, Opus Corporation transferred more than $193.8 million of former subsidiary Opus West’s assets into family trusts linked to Opus founder Gerald Rauenhorst while failing to compensate Opus West employees.

—Christa Meland

Posted in

Twin Cities Business

Thank you, Ms. Meland.  Moral: Always! look up the businesses behind the people!

1999 Feature ARticle from “American Catholic” on the “Jesuit Gang Priest” and his work in East L.A.  I’m sure he’s doing great work, but if he’s almost too busy to tell his story to the reporter here, how is he going to have time to effectively serve on this 2011 task force?

Pico Gardens and Aliso Village, sometimes called “The Projects,” is the largest tract of subsidized housing west of the Mississippi. This huge piece of social engineering hasn’t worked out so well. It’s poor, crowded and packed with gangs.

Some of Pico/Aliso overlaps Boyle Heights (different era, different Boyle). Within those 16 square miles, 60 gangs claim 10,000 members, Hispanic and black. This equals violence and plenty of action at the Hollenbeck division of the Los Angeles Police Department—if Father Greg Boyle doesn’t get there first…

Here he is giving a commencement address at Creighton U in 2009 (A Jesuit university in Omaha, NE . . . . HOW close to BoysTown is Creighton??)

And in 2011 getting the OPUS PRIZE   $100,000 Opus Prize Recipient

Sr. Beatrice Chipeta

Father Gregory Boyle, S.J.
Homeboy Industries 
Los Angeles, United States

Fr. Greg Boyle grew up in the “gang capital of the world,” Los Angeles, California, just west of where he has spent more than 25 years ministering to the families of Dolores Mission parish, and mentoring hundreds of young people whose daily lives have been dominated by membership in neighborhood gangs.  A Jesuit priest, he is the founder and Executive Director of Homeboy Industries, an organization that he created 23 years ago as a modest job training program in the east Los Angeles community of Boyle Heights that continues to be wracked by a seemingly unending cycle of gang violence and murder passed on from generation to generation.

Homeboy Industries — “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job.”  (tell that to the former employees of Opus West).

Entity Number Date Filed Status Entity Name Agent for Service of Process
C2226433 02/29/2000 ACTIVE HOMEBOY INDUSTRIES LARRY KERVIN

(EIN# 954800735, and it seems they are at least filing in CA.  I used the Charity Research Tool)

Available 990s
Year IRS Process Date Form Type Assets
2008 11/06/2009 990 Initial Return $12,635,874
2007 01/17/2009 990 Initial Return $16,009,890
2006 04/04/2008 990 Initial Return $16,070,640
2005 08/25/2006 990 Initial Return $6,567,183
2004 10/06/2005 990 Initial Return $2,982,741
2003 09/10/2004 990 Initial Return $1,940,179
2002 09/16/2003 990 Initial Return $2,148,684

WELL — with the IRS, but not with the STate.  Someone needs to tell this prospering organization that CALIFORNIA gets some of the reporting, and fees, too, please!   Status is still current, despite this pretty poor track record — as to the state level filings at least:

Related Documents
00000156 Delinquency Letter (2nd Request)(hover cursor over link to read the letter)
00000155 Delinquency Letter
1037559 RRF-1 2003
1037560 IRS Form 990 2008
1037561 IRS Form 990 2004
1049341 RRF-1 2008
00000550 CT-550 2009

**=incomplete rept, ltr Oct. 2010.  They sent in an RRF but

no accompanying IRS form, as required, and the RRF was incomplete

also.  As above, “hover cursor over link” to read ltr”

(or read on-line at the OAG”)

I’m putting it here to preserve the record in case

it changes after I start reporting on this group.

(To read these, one probably has to search the group again on the “Registry Search” page for California)  This little square, above, tells us that the 2011 winner of a $100K OPUS Prize, run by someone who just got appointed to help Defend Childhood and (see task force description), etc. — is himself running an operation which DOESN”T FILE ITS STATE TAX RETURNS, INCLUDING AFTER DELINQUENCY LETTER REQUESTS…. it is also engaging at least two professional fundraisers. . . . .

There are two Delinquency letters dating to 2009, including the 2nd one with a significant threat.  No answer is posted, and this is now the end of 2011 and the charity is marked “current.”  There has (meantime) also been a change of administration in the Office of Attorney General (which oversees), so presumably they either made peace with HomeBoy Industries, or it’s now too big to fail (note:  Assets in 2007 were $15 million, Revenues $6 million — and they get a pass?) (This was a very tough time in many people’s lives — but as a foundation, well, what the heck….)

You know the routine — I’ve posted these before on my blog.  (also posted to link in above chart.  The link is inactive, but the description is viewable if you hover cursor over it without clicking):

HOMEBOY INDUSTRIES 130 W. BRUNO ST. LOS ANGELES CA 90012

State of California DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

1300 I Street P. O. Box 903447 Sacramento, CA 94203-4470 Telephone: (916) 445-2021 Ext 6 Fax: (916) 444-3651 E-Mail Address: Delinquency@doj.ca.gov

December 16, 2009 CT FILE NUMBER: 118772

RE: SECOND NOTICE : WARNING OF ASSESSMENT OF PENALTIES AND LATE FEES, AND SUSPENSION OF REGISTERED STATUS

Unless the above-described report(s) are filed with the Registry of Charitable Trusts within thirty (30) days of the date of this letter, the following will occur:

1. The California Franchise Tax Board will be notified to disallow the tax exemption of the above-named entity. In addition, the above-named entity will be billed $800 plus interest by Franchise Tax Board, which represents the minimum tax penalty. (See Revenue and Taxation Code section 23703).

2. Late fees will be imposed by the Registry of Charitable Trusts for each month or partial month for which the report(s) are delinquent. Directors, trustees, officers and return preparers

Doc CT-451A Warning Impend Tax Assess 2nd Notresponsible for failure to timely file these reports are also personally liable for payment of all late fees.

PLEASE NOTE: Charitable assets cannot be used to pay these avoidable costs. Accordingly, directors, trustees, officers and return preparers responsible for failure to timely file the above-described report(s) are personally liable for payment of all penalties, interest and other costs incurred to restore exempt status.

3. In accordance with the provisions of Government Code section 12598, subdivision (e), the Attorney General will suspend the registration of the above-named entity.

As that is now TWO YEARS ago, either they complied — and no one has posted it yet; or the next Attorney General felt differently (and was too busy), or like I say, something else is up.  Because as you and I can see — the OAG has not followed through with its warning.  They are still marked “current.”  Assuming they still ARE current, we can safely assume that such warnings are pretty meaningless, perhaps?  They might affect a smaller group, but not one that is too closely linked with government operations, I’ll speculate.  That’s speculate, but — what do you think?  (Comments field available).

Tax returns should be looked at, and whether or not they are the finalized returns (complete with signature), etc.  For example, I just looked at an (unsighed) 2008 return stating that the organization’s main operation was formerly a bakery, formed in 1994.  That’s not what the date of incorporation shows above: it says 2000.  In which case it’s been more than – not just about 11 years — in which this L.A. business has NOT been filing its returns (?).  The 2008 return shows about $37K of “Donor Determined” vehicle donations, yet a 2010 letter shows that they omitted the “donated vehicle” question #8 on a state RRF that (for once) actually was sent in).   These are definite red flags — and we’re to expect that a LARGE Hoop-law on thhis 13- member task force, recently appointed by US Attorney General Eric Holder (If I got WHo appointed it right) is to help somehow???

QUESTION;  If they don’t notice things like this — which an amateur like myself can pick up IMMEDIATELY — out in the open (once I know enough to look) how do they plan to prevent things like abuse — where the perpetrators obviously are pretty smart and don’t want to get caught?  Unless there is collaboration somewhere along the way….

So the question becomes, what is that “something else” that acounts for why HomeBoy Industries, given its resounding success, doesn’t have to take some of its millions of revenues — or sell off some of its larger millions of assets — to pay a tax return person?  Also, it seems to me that above a certain level of funding (I DNR which) an orgnization ALSO has to hire an independent auditor for its financial statement (not that I see any financial statements here).

Why can individuals get thrown in jail for contempt of IRS (or, for that matter, a child support order), but charities — who cares?  Perhaps the share is being obtained by some other method than traceable tax returns (and, perhaps not).  All I know is, I sure don’t like it!

One more minor detail about this Homeboy Organization — it says it started the bakery operation in 1994 with the homeBOYS.   That’s fine, why not (the Oakland area also had a Bakery operation:   (Google Chauncey Bailey, Oakland, CA) you’ll read all about it).  And then finally in 2004, something for the girls — which was restaurant/cafe.  Boys create, Girls serve it up?  Not to mention a 10 year gap?

SO NOW — HOW DOES THAT MAKE ANY SENSE?  Since this is a DOJ task force, and clearly the person is working from Los Angeles, why wouldn’t someone run at least the 10 minute background check I just did (actually, a bit more) and figure out (which part took 2 minutes) that this organization isn’t filing?   If he can’ handle or delegate someone to correctly file — with $12 million in assets — more than like 3 times in 10 years, why should he be put over a NATIONAL issue of this significance.  Part of protecting the public has to include protecting them from public theft — which failure to file obviously puts us at risk from?

Oh — I forgot — this is in Los Angeles….

ANYHOW, here’s the Opus Prize:

And the Opus PRIZE:  $1,000,000 (writeoff) per year, plus 2X $100,000:

The Opus Prize is given annually to recognize unsung heroes of any faith tradition, anywhere in the world. This $1 million faith-based humanitarian award and two $100,000 awards are collectively one of the world’s largest faith-based, humanitarian awards for social innovation. Father Greg is one of the two $100,000 Opus Prize finalists, the other is Sister Rita Pessoa, R.S.H.M. from the Association of Small Rural Producers of Jacare in Filadelfia, Brazil. The $1,000,000 grand prize winner announced on November 2 at Loyloa Marymount University is Lyn Lusi from Heal Africa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A big congratulations to all three leaders —  “unsung heroes who are conquering the world’s persistent social problems, who have dedicated their lives to help tranform others.

The Prize’s Funding is the OPUS PRIZE FOUNDATION

Origins and Values
The Opus Prize Foundation is a private and independent nonprofit foundation. Established in 1994 by the founding chairman of Opus Corporation, the Opus Prize Foundation is a self-sufficient foundation independent from The Opus Group™.

The Prize has universities help with its nominations, listed here.  Note University of St. Thomas with campuses in St. Paul, MN & Rome…

The Opus Prize Foundation selects universities as partners to organize and execute the Opus Prize selection process and award ceremony. Through these partnerships, students are challenged to think globally and inspired to live lives of service.

The remaining members of the Task Force.  Every One of these associations should be checked out.  However, on the face of it — it’s celar that NOT ONE of them is reporting on the HHS fatherhood grants the Access Visitation grants (in any critical manner) or for that matter — specializing in issues relating to the family law venue.  It’s like it just does not exist!

Sharon W. Cooper, M.D., CEO of Developmental & Forensic Pediatrics, P.A.
Dr. Cooper serves as a consultant and board member of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

Sarah Deer, Citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma
Professor Deer is an assistant professor at William Mitchell College of Law and her scholarship focuses on the intersection of tribal law and victims’ rights.

Deanne Tilton Durfee, Executive Director of the Los Angeles County Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect (ICAN) 
Ms. Tilton Durfee also serves as Chairperson of the National Center on Child Fatality Review.

Thea James, M.D., Director of the Boston Medical Center Massachusetts Violence Intervention Advocacy Program
Dr. James is Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Boston Medical Center/Boston University School of Medicine.

Alicia Lieberman, Ph.D., Director of the Early Trauma Treatment Network
Dr. Lieberman is Irving B. Harris Endowed Chair of Infant Mental Health at UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Director of the Child Trauma Research Program, San Francisco General Hospital.

Robert Macy, Ph.D., Founder, Director, and President of the International Center for Disaster Resilience-Boston
Dr. Macy is also the founder and Executive Director of the Boston Children’s Foundation and serves as Co-Director of the Division of Disaster Resilience at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Steven Marans, Ph.D., Director of the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence
Dr. Marans is Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry, Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, and also serves as director of the Childhood Violent Trauma Center at Yale University.

The NCCEV was established in 1999 at the Yale Child Study Center by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). This occurred in response to the pioneering success of the Yale Child Study Center’s Child Development-Community Policing Program (CD-CP), a community policing model first launched in 1991 in partnership with the City of New Haven and the New Haven Department of Police Service.

Supported by:

NCCEV is supported by grants from the U.S. Departments of Justice (OJJDP grant # 2005-JW-FX-K001) and Health and Human Services (SAMHSA grant # 5 U79 SM54318-06); U.S. Department of Homeland Security; Office of Domestic Preparedness: Urban Area Security Initative (UASI) Program; Pritzker Early Childhood Foundation; Seedlings Foundation & New Alliance Foundation

Jim McDonnell, Chief of Police, Long Beach Police Department, California 
Chief McDonnell teaches public policy issues at UCLA and served with the LAPD for 28 years.

Georgina Mendoza, J.D., Senior Deputy Attorney and Community Safety Director for the City of Salinas, California
Ms. Mendoza has been involved in the California Cities Gang Prevention Network for the past four years and serves as the Salinas lead in the White House’s National Forum on Youth Violence.

Retired Major General Antonio Taguba, President of TDLS Consulting, LLC, and Chairman of Pan Pacific American Leaders and Mentors (PPALM)
General Taguba served 34 years on active duty, including serving as Deputy Commanding General for Support, Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC)/ARCENT/Third U.S. Army, forward deployed to Kuwait and Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

A Retired Major General has earned his stripes, so to speak, and I think him for his service.  However the nonprofit PPALM has NOT, yet.  Look:

Pan-Pacific American Leaders & Mentors is an all-volunteer organization comprised of Military and Civilian professionals committed to mentoring and promoting professional development, retention and the advancement of Asian American Pacific Islander leaders – Active, Reserve, Army National Guard, and DoD Civilians. Pan-Pacific American Leaders & Mentors Organization is incorporated with the Commonwealth of Virginia (April 21, 2010) and approved by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization.

{{just barely — their meeting notes sound like they’re still working on it (See site)}}:

At the Board of Directors meeting on November 19, 2011, we finalized the revised By Laws as required in the PPALM Strategic Plan 2011-2013, and in concert with IRS reporting requirements to maintain our tax exempt, non-profit status. This is to ensure PPALM is compliant within the established governance rules for the Board members and within the leadership, operations and fiscal functions currently and into the future.

We will announce elections of new Board members not later than January 20, 2012 and to be held not later than March 20, 2012. This will be done thru the PPALM website and other forms of notification. I will appoint new members of the nominating committee who will represent the interest of PPALM members at the national level. Written guidance will also be published to ensure we are compliant with the By Laws in electing new members of the BoD.”

{{But the ABOUT US says it was “activated” in November 2007.  In what corporate format, and in which state?}}:

Complementing the Army Strong Campaign, PPALM was activated on November 11, 2007 to mentor and counsel US Army officers and civilians in achieving their career goals.  While PPALM’s current focus in the US Army, we are expanding to include members of the other uniformed services.  Membership is open to Veterans, National Guard, Reserve, Active Duty personnel, and Department of Defense Civilians.  It is also open to spouses and supporters of PPALM’s goals and objectives.

(Virginia Corporations Search shows it incorporated (not as a nonprofit) 6/19/2007) and the Charities Search, that it hasn’t showed up yet as a Charity — although website has donation and membership collection pages already.)  Virginia requires annual filings; there is no history (showing) of efilings so let’s presume they filed elsewhere that isn’t uploaded yet.   2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and this is year 2011.

Pan Pacific American Leaders and Mentors

SCC ID: 06792519
Business Entity Type: Corporation
Jurisdiction of Formation: VA
Date of Formation/Registration: 6/19/2007
Status: Active
Shares Authorized: 0
Filings for Corp ID: 06792519
AR Year Filing Date View Filing
2011 6/28/2011 Click Here To View Report
2010 4/21/2010 Click Here To View Report
Using the SCC ID above, it looks like my organization here has filed in 2010 and 2011, but not 2007, 2008, or 2009.
Sounds like a fine organization; I’m wondering how the consulting plus mentoring plus defending childhood goes together….
(This simply lists officers and addresses; it says nothing about income)

LIKEWISE — TDLS CONSULTING, LLC — was also formed by Retired Major General Taguba, one year ago:

SCC ID: S3454347
Business Entity Type: Limited Liability Company
Jurisdiction of Formation: VA
Date of Formation/Registration: 11/23/2010
Status: Active

AGAIN — HERE’s ANOTHER ANNOUNCEMENT OF THIS TASK FORCE.  Now it’s coming back to me; I remember protesting among on-line advocates; “Puh-LEEZ” stop begging the White House to help you.  All they are going to do is form another initiative, appoint their cronies to it, and laugh there way to more retirement income (multiple streams) and/or grants-funded evaluations.

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), Serving Children, Families, and Communities

Department of Justice Announces the Defending Childhood Task Force

October 14, 2011

Defending Childhood Logo. Protect.  Heal. Thrive.On October 13, 2011, the Department of Justice issued the following press release:

WASHINGTON – Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli today announced the establishment of the Attorney General’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence. The task force is part of the Attorney General’s Defending Childhood initiative, a project arising from the need to respond to the epidemic levels of exposure to violence faced by our nation’s children.

“Our vision of justice must start with preventing crime before it happens, protecting our children, and ending cycles of violence and victimization. Every young person deserves the opportunity to grow and develop free from fear of violence,” said Associate Attorney General Perrelli. “The task force will develop knowledge and spread awareness about the pervasive problem of children’s exposure to violence – this will ultimately improve our homes, cities, towns and communities.”

Following the release of the compelling findings of the first National Survey on Children Exposed to Violence (2009), Attorney General Eric Holder launched the Defending Childhood initiative in September 2010. The goals of the initiative are to prevent children’s exposure to violence as victims and witnesses, reduce the negative effects experienced by children exposed to violence, and develop knowledge about and increase awareness of this issue.

The Defending Childhood Task Force is composed of 14 leading experts from diverse fields and perspectives, including practitioners, child and family advocates, academic experts and licensed clinicians. Joe Torre, Major League Baseball Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations, founder of the Joe Torre Safe at Home® Foundation, and a witness to domestic violence as a child himself, will serve as the co-chair of the task force.

 YES, Yes, Yes, now I recall.  Announce an Initiative and throw some money at it:

WASHINGTON – Attorney General Eric Holder today officially unveiled Defending Childhood, a new Department of Justice initiative focused on addressing children’s exposure to violence.      The goals of the initiative are to prevent children’s exposure to violence as victims and witnesses, mitigate the negative effects experienced by children exposed to violence, and develop knowledge about and increase awareness of this issue.

What’s WiTh our society’s always figuring out we can pay someone to do our monitoring, prevention, enforcement, defence (including of Childhood), protection (including of Children), and so forth?  The more money is extracted to supposedly stop all this (see CAPTA, 1974) — the less responsibility the cash-drained individuals locally can, really, be expected to take for it. After all — they paid, right?  What are police for?   What is CPS for?  What are Judges for, what are prisons for, and all the other superstructure and infrastructure.

What makes us think that the massive infrastructure, as great as it is at wiretapping, computer hacking, monitoring who signs what books out of the library (talking more general here, obviously), and did I mention what happens when people try to get on an airplane flight?   (Like the Mom who was forced to pour out her breast milk, and punished for complaining about the process on a return trip, see courthousenews). — what makes us even THINK that this is going to change Business As Usual?

WILL EVEN FEDERAL LAWSUITS — and I HOPE this one produces some remedies — STEM THE TIDE OF HUMAN FOOLISHNESS ABOUT WHO ELSE IS GONNA DO WHAT WE OUGHT TO DO FOR OURSELVES, BY KNOWING OUR NEIGHBORS, INBETWEEN RUNNING OFF TO JOBS TO FUND THE SYSTEM THAT IS PROMISING MORE JOBS — BUT INSTEAD DELIVERING GRANTS TO JUST ABOUT ANYBODY WHO KNOWS HOW TO INCORPORATE — AND PRIZES TO GROUPS THAT DON’T FILE TAXES YEAR AFTER YEAR, EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE LOCAL CONTRACTS (Homeboy Industries seems to have one with City of Los Angeles or County — see the tax returns) AND POSSIBLY OTHER FEDERAL GRANTS?

Recipient Name City State ZIP Code County DUNS Number Sum of Awards
Homeboy Industries  LOS ANGELES CA 900121815 LOS ANGELES 874873987 $ 799,988

Did it occur to either of the principal investigators of this grant’s projects below to check up on the organizations tax filing status?

Grantee Class Award Number Award Title Action Issue Date Principal Investigator Sum of Actions
2011 SAMHSA Homeboy Industries Non-Profit Public Non-Government Organizations TI022609 PROJECT STAR (SUBSTANCE USE TREATMENT AND RECOVERY) 05/19/2011 FAJIMA BEDRAN $ 0
2011 SAMHSA Homeboy Industries Non-Profit Public Non-Government Organizations TI022609 PROJECT STAR (SUBSTANCE USE TREATMENT AND RECOVERY) 06/27/2011 FAJIMA BEDRAN $ 399,994
2010 SAMHSA Homeboy Industries Non-Profit Public Non-Government Organizations TI022609 PROJECT STAR (SUBSTANCE USE TREATMENT AND RECOVERY) 09/29/2010 MARNEY STOFFLET $ 399,994

(SAMHSA grants, 2010 and 2011 — even though the California OAG dinged this group the same year and earlier on nonfiling) for Substance Abuse Treatment and Recovery, or some such.  Take that “DUNS” # over to USASPENDING.gov and find out what else, if anything.

Well, it’s the end of my blogging day which started with concern about THIS:

PROJECT PIERRE TOUSSAINT victim’s FEDERAL LAWSUIT:

JOSEPH JEAN-CHARLES, a/k/a JEAN-CHARLES JOSEPH,

Plaintiff

v.

DOUGLAS PERLITZ; FATHER PAUL E. CARRIER, S.J.; HOPE E. CARTER; HAITI FUND, INC.; FAIRFIELD UNIVERSITY; THE SOCIETY OF JESUS OF NEW ENGLAND; JOHN DOE ONE; JOHN DOE TWO; JOHN DOE THREE; JOHN DOE FOUR; JOHN DOE FIVE; JOHN DOE SIX; JOHN DOE SEVEN; JOHN DOE EIGHT; JOHN DOE NINE; JOHN DOE TEN; JOHN DOE ELEVEN; AND JOHN DOE TWELVE,

CIVIL ACTION NO.

Defendants

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF CONNECTICUT

COMPLAINT AND JURY TRIAL DEMAND

COMPLAINT AND JURY TRIAL DEMAND

A. INTRODUCTION

1. Defendants Douglas Perlitz, Father Paul E. Carrier, S.J., Fairfield University and other Defendants established a residential school in the Republic of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. This school, Project Pierre Toussaint, purported to provide services to the poorest children of Haiti, many of whom lacked homes and regular meals. Defendant Douglas Perlitz was the director in Haiti of Project Pierre Toussaint, which provided him with an image of substantial trust and authority. Defendant Douglas Perlitz used that trust and authority, with the assistance of other Defendants to sexually molest Plaintiff and numerous other minor boys who attended Project Pierre Toussaint. Defendant Douglas Perlitz was convicted of violating 18 U.S.C. §2423(b), Travel With Intent To Engage In Illicit Sexual Conduct. In molesting Plaintiff, Defendant Douglas Perlitz was aided by the intentional or negligent acts of the other Defendants. Plaintiff seeks damages for Plaintiff’s personal injuries pursuant to 18 U.S.C. §2255 and common law.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

That’s about how most abusive systems get their start, seems to me.  Anyone who is intending to get access to kids, a flow of them, to molest and abuse has to have at least enough strategic organizing ability to know where to get the vulnerable kids, how to convince some people with the money that your real intent is to HELP them, not to – – E W them (i.e., use them carnally, and allow others to).  In addition such personalities also need to have – or associate with people who have — knowledge of incorporations, how to get a nonprofit status & board together, and start fundraising.

FOR EXAMPLE TAKE DOUG PERLITZ & FRIENDS, who I see have been sued in Federal Court in New Haven, Connecticut.  My post today started here — because I browse Courthouse Forum News in general.  See my Dec. 2, 2011 post,  Outrageous Outreach Activities in Haiti //Project Pierre Toussaint.  I will be coming back to this — but it’s a long introduction.  One thing someone forgot to consider when structuring a family court system that eliminates fully-adult mothers (like me) from their primary occupation — taking care of and fighting for their kids’ welfare — and often the secondary one, called normal employment (which often is a battle casualty) — is that, if we are not homeless or dead in the process, that leaves us a lot to think about, and some time to think about it in, time which otherwise would be involved in seeing one’s own children regularly!   And in the process of this thinking, we come with some very unique analyses and creative thinking on how to make sure this type of scam is stopped, permanently, from occurring again in the U.S.

USUALLy our creative thinking — the best of it anyhow — doesn’t come up by repeating the same processes that enabled the abuse to start wtih, such as assuming someone else in the public domain is going to do their job right, or that the systems that be even allow them to actually DO what their appointed job’s title allegedly is for.  Like, for example, “Children’s Protection Services,” ethically, honestly and effectively?  (you answer that question on your spare time….don’t forget to go ask Georgia Senator Nancy Schaefer, or at least what remains of her pre-murder communications on-line, said murder having happened while she was in the process of investigating and reporting on CPS abuses in her state).

ANYHOW, for those who by definition don’t have access to religiously-sanctioned normal marital relationships and a lifelong partnership for normal sexual relationships with consenting adults, other options are alas, sought.

And what better place to do such things and find such unprotected children than “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere”??

1. Defendants Douglas Perlitz, Father Paul E. Carrier, S.J., Fairfield University and other Defendants established a residential school in the Republic of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. This school, Project Pierre Toussaint, purported to provide services to the poorest children of Haiti, many of whom lacked homes and regular meals. Defendant Douglas Perlitz was the director in Haiti of Project Pierre Toussaint, which provided him with an image of substantial trust and authority. . .

And what better type or organization to do this than being a priest? (exception;  Being certain types of Congressional legislators or other powerful civic leaders — see The Franklin Coverup).

HOW FEDS STOP THINGS THEY DON’T APPROVE OF, EVEN IF IT’S LEGAL IN SOME STATES:

TO CONTROL ALLEGED OR REAL ABUSE OF TRAFFICKING IN SUBSTANCES  — WHEN THE FEDS ARE ACTUALLY SERIOUS ABOUT THIS, WHAT DO THEY DO?  THEY GO FOR THE JUGULAR — THE CASH FLOW!

For example*, California has its fights over legalization of medical marijuana, and one dispensary is fighting the feds to stay open, apparently.  Here’s their site:   http://www.harborsidehealthcenter.com/  and here’s how the Feds are trying to stop distribution, even in states which have legalized it, as reported in July 18, 2011 MiamiHerald(.com):   “Federal medical marijuana memo stirs angst in industry

(*and don’t think that this is something I’m following closely.  I have a wide-ranging field of vision and simply happen to live in California which, unlike being a mother in the family court system, doesn’t per se make me a “criminal” to be restrained.  I actually look at the news . . . . and bring this up for a teaching point about a different topic).

By Peter Hecht The Sacramento Bee

In October 2009, medical marijuana advocates celebrated a U.S. Department of Justice memo declaring that federal authorities wouldn’t target the legal use of medicinal pot in states where it is permitted.

The memo from Deputy U.S. Attorney General David Ogden was credited with accelerating a California medical marijuana boom, including a proliferation of dispensaries that now handle more than $1 billion in pot transactions.

But last month brought a new memo from another deputy attorney general, James Cole. And this time, it is stirring industry fears of federal raids on pot dispensaries and sweeping crackdowns on large-scale medical pot cultivation. Cole asserted in the June 29 memo that state laws “are not a defense” from federal prosecution, saying, “Congress has determined that marijuana is a dangerous drug” – and that distributing it “is a serious crime.”Justice Department officials said the memo offered “guidance” for states permitting medical marijuana and didn’t mark a harsher shift in federal policy. But it was a clear signal of the government’s concern about a move toward industrial-scale operations that would generate millions of dollars in revenue.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/07/18/2318955/federal-medical-marijuana-memo.html#storylink=cpy

The federal government is always going to be interesting in anything that generates millions of $$ of revenue. . . . . So are City Goverments.  It’s as much about who gets to control & regulate the funding as about the harm to citizens, if you ask me.  Generally speaking:

In February, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag in San Francisco declared that the Justice Department was “considering civil and criminal remedies” against anyone trying to set up “industrial marijuana-growing warehouses in Oakland.” The Alameda County district attorney* warned that meant public officials weren’t immune from prosecution.Oakland City Councilwoman Patricia Kernighan said the city hasn’t given up on taxing and licensing medical marijuana cultivation.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/07/18/2318955/federal-medical-marijuana-memo.html#storylink=cpy

*re:  “Alameda County District Attorney” — search the term “Steve Boatbrain” (investigative reporting on IndyMedia, will bring up my blogs on the One-Stop Justice Shop, and I just saw another older result from San Mateo, County (California) on greatly reduced bail for accused child molester/Child Psychiatrist Ayres — who was being fed victims (per the active comments field analysis) from the Juvenile Court.  See comments thread 21-48 for Boatbrain input — but it sure does make one think):  “Hunched over and clad in an orange jumpsuit, a prominent child psychiatrist charged with 14 counts of lewd and lascivious acts with three children under the age of 14 stood before a judge Friday . . . .” and among the comments, Blogger “Here They Go Again” April 7, 2007, writes:

It is interesting that this accused child molester was commending him for his “commitment to children” by none other than the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors and had clients (victims) referred to him by Juvenile Court Supervising Judge Marta Diaz, Chief Probation Officer Loren Buddress, and Gerry Hilliard, managing attorney for the Private Defender Program in juvenile court and now he gets a reduction in bail from $1.5 million to $250,000 by San Mateo Superior Court Judge Thomas McGinn Smith. I guess these folks stick pretty close together.

What type of people do we have running San Mateo County’s government? It appears that the reckless and grossly negligent decisions and actions by people in positions of power in San Mateo County’s government are endangering the community.

Maybe it is time for the FBI to investigate San Mateo’s County government?

AND, a little later, commenter “Happy1” writes:

The biggest problem in this case is that the judges themselves are involved because they and their associates in the juvenile justice system were feeding this guy victims. Now, they appear to be getting together and participating in a whitewash by reducing his bail to a ridiculously low level and working behind the scenes to help him.

By helping this guy, isn’t the San Mateo County judiciary making itself part and parcel of the child molestation problem?

SAN MATEO is a county south of SAN FRANCISCO which is just a little west of the East Bay’s ALAMEDA COUNTY.   In Pennsylvania, there were also some judges feeding juveniles — without due process -to institutions the same judges had a financial interest in.  You think that’s just in PA?  Follow the nonprofits ! ! !

Someone then (we’re talking 2007) called the blogger a crazy (paranoid conspiracy delusion) and got this response:

Fred-o wrote:
paranoid conspiracy delusion.

Read the papers fool. This creep’s victims were referred to him by the San Mateo County Courts and Juvenile Probation Department. 

To which conversation  “George” from Seattle, WA (a few months later — June 2007) added:

Cinque- If you read the papers, you will see that boys came forward in the 1980s shortly after they were molested. The police did nothing. That’s why they are coming forward again.

and eventually (Sept. 2007) Mr. Boatbrain:

I want to be absolutely sure on this, Judge Thomas Smith in the past referred boys directly to Dr. Ayres, and now he is not recusing himself from this case? That smells bad, doesn’t it? I am not saying he did anything wrong, but he should not be on this case.

In fact, it sounds like the Attorney General should be handling this altogehter with all these connections between people.

(ALL font changes, italics, underlining, bolding etc. added by me — not the posters).

Let’s think (briefly, here) about the role of the top of the Law Enforcement Pyramid in any state:   Attorney General.  They are over District Attorneys and a whole lot more.  I used to believe (not understanding except by unfortunate experience — see child-stealing — the supreme amount of discretion District Attorneys have in whether to prosecute or NOT prosecute.  As such they are very powerful when it comes to protecting (or not) women & children.  See Sonoma County nonprofit site “Justicewomen.org” on this one, and I’ve blogged it too.

I had had children taken on overnight visitation –completely illegally — no factual or legal justification ever given by any judge, and I had contacted District Attorneys in more than one county (who I understood to be responsible in prosecuting criminal matters, or getting someone to HELP ME recover access to the children, when it was a clear violation of existing court order).  This was somehow mixed in with very abusive treatment by their underlings, county sheriffs and police, in the matters leading up to the situation of an entirely preventable crime.  I’m starting, gradually, to comprehend that the phrase “District Attorney” includes the words “Attorney” and the word “District” simply refers to their territory, turf, and essentially fiefdom.

Regarding the Attorney General should be investigating, that term — while now in California it’s Kamala Harris, who is going to have her hands full if she seeks to ever fully follow up on unregistered or just ain’t filing with the state charities in the state continuing to do business — sometimes WITH THE COURTS & PROBATION– and seek donations.  And one of whose employees (Fay) just had a young girl kidnapped on court-ordered visitation, not returned, and discovered too late as the “murder” victim in a murder-suicide (Samaan/Fay), previously we are talking about Attorney General Bill Lockyer, whose wife Nadya was somehow shuffled to the front of the pack to take over this ONE_STOP_JUSTICE_SHOP in Alameda County, which I’ve blogged on as well.  See my blog or, as I said, google the phrase “steve boatbrain” who obviously has his brain in operation on these matters, too.  Thanks, mister!

CHARITIES THAT DON’T FILE ARE UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE STATE OFFICE OF ATTORNEY GENERAL:

By habitually, and at some point I have to say intentionally refusing or failing to file properly with the Office of Attorney General, these groups are depriving the public, including the taxpayers, of the opportunity to review their tax returns, sometimes their articles of incorporation, or other sources to check who is on their boards, to verify if what’s said on the websites is true, or junk information, and connections between multiple organizations with similar board members.  Which is already hard enough to do on the California Secretary of State Business search site — which doesn’t enable ANY search by incorporator (i.e, person/business who set up the corp.), or even by EIN#!

FROM THE BIBLE:  “HE THAT IS FAITHFUL IN THAT WHICH IS LEAST. . .”

LET THESE FAITH-BASED GROUPS START DEMONSTRATING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY — AND START WITH THE FINANCES.  THOSE WILL LIKELY LEAD TO FURTHER INDICATORS OF CORRUPTION, POSSIBLY INVOLVING MINORS.  HANDLE THE ONE, YOU’RE LIKELY TO HANDLE THE OTHER.  TRY AND PAY YOUR LOCAL GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE TO DO IT — YOU’LL PROBABLY JUST EXPAND THE BASE OF OPERATIONS!
AND DON’T BELIEVE EVERY TOM, DICK & HARRY (OR ESTER, JOE AND ERIC) WHO ARE PROMISING YOU ANYTHING THEY AREN’T QUALIFIED TO DELIVER — SUCH AS “FUTURES WITHOUT VIOLENCE” OR “DEFENSE OF CHILDHOOD.”

Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up

December 26, 2011 at 9:37 PM

Posted in 1996 TANF PRWORA (cat. added 11/2011), After HE Speaks Up - Reporting Child Sexual Abuse, Business Enterprise, Who's Who (bio snapshots)

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Certifiably Irregular Behavior among Certified Specialist Associations, and other Dispensers of Training…

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Warning:

Warning: This article contains language that some will find offensive, but that others will find refreshingly honest.*

(*cite, and this quote again, below)

INSPIRATION FOR THIS POST:

WAS THE “ASSOCIATION OF CERTIFIED FAMILY LAW PROFESSIONALS.”

Entity Number Date Filed Status Entity Name Agent for Service of Process
C1955108 12/04/1995 ACTIVE ASSOCIATION OF CERTIFIED FAMILY LAW   SPECIALISTS, INC. LYNN MARIE PFEIFER

NOT JUST THE CONCEPT OF CERTIFYING A FAMILY LAW PROFESSIONAL TO START WITH, BUT THE CONCEPT OF A CERTIFIED SET OF ASSOCIATES THAT SEEM BELIEVE PSYCHOLOGY IS SCIENCE, AND CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR, ISN’T, WHICH INCLUDES A CRIMINAL DEGREE OF PROFIT FROM PROMOTING SPREADING THIS “COGNITIVE DISSONANCE” AMONG OTHERS, WHILE QUITE CONSCIOUS OF THE PROFIT IN SO DOING.

First, the public face — clearly this is a hot shot, and professionally alert group:

See?

Welcome, from the Association of Certified Family Law Specialists in California, an independent association of California attorneys who specialize in family law.

ACFLS was formed in 1980 following certification of the first group of Family Law Specialists under the “pilot” program, now a permanent program of the State Bar. ACFLS monitors administration by the State Bar of the specialization program, legislation and court rules, develops and promotes Family Law practice skills, and provides advanced educational programs for the bar, judiciary and public.

In the 28 years of ACFLS’ existence, membership has grown to 490 of the approximately 982 California Certified Family Law Specialists, 50% of those certified by the California State Bar Association. . . .

This means one’s chances of hiring an ACFLS member in California is approximately 1 out of 2; 50%. I wonder who certifies the other 50% of family law specialists?

Membership in ACFLS requires Certification by the Board of Legal Specialization of the State Bar of California, and payment of the annual dues. Members receive all ACFLS Newsletters, notices of meetings, are eligible to participate in ACFLS activities (including seminars at reduced cost), and are listed in the ACFLS Referral and Membership Directory published each year and on our web site: www.acfls.org.

It is the Mission of ACFLS to promote and preserve the Family Law Specialty. * * * To that end, the Association seeks to:

  1. Advance the knowledge of Family Law Specialists;
  2. Monitor legislation and proposals affecting the field of family law;
  3. Promote and encourage ethical practice among members of the bar and their clients; and
  4. Promote the specialty to the public and the family law bar.

**notice nothing is mentioned about the best interests of the children.   

They have monthly meetings and occasional regional conferences.  Attorneys know how to through nice conferences, and I’m sure these do too.  For qualifications (of membership) notice:

Because couples who split up also must deal with custody of their children, family law practitioners must also understand child development and other topics touching on emotional and psychological concerns of families.  Part of the certification requirement involves psychological and counseling education.

(which can get written off where? and is provided by whom?)

There is a link for attorneys on Domestic Violence issues — the website intro claims to have “culled the best.”  After the disclaimer, the site says:

Domestic Violence Sites on the Worldwide Web

By Leslie Ellen Shear

Any search engine will turn up thousands of Domestic Violence sites on the internet. I spent many hours culling some of the best. These web sites represent many different perspectives and resources on domestic violence. **(Please note that sites appear, disappear, change or move to new locations regularly. If the link doesn’t work, try searching for a key word or phrase from the description.

** OK, let me review this.  ON a page by an association of lawyers addressing lawyers whose work likely influences where children will live after domestic violence has been reported, Leslie Ellen Shear’ believes that a few hours on the web will sufficiently inform her to post a resource for — lawyers? (Some of who are abusers, or have been victims of this too, no doubt).  This was put up when?  A clear look at the link shows that she’s basically posted parts of references beginning with the letter “A” (with one or two exceptions).   Many links, yes, are inactive, or domain name has been sold.

Every web page needs a list of benefits to readers from plowing through it, right?  So the one on Domestic Violence for Attorneys from this great group, has 20 bulleted points (unprioritized and some of them ridiculous) — of which point# 17 reads “keep your client alive,” thankfully at least one or two higher priorities than “write a great appellate brief,”  and — naturally — right next to an ALMOST acknowledgement that some serious risk is involved, “prepare a competent defense to false or inflated allegations”  See?

  • Keep a client alive.
  • Prepare a competent defense to false or inflated allegations.
  • Write a great appellate brief.

fourth DV link is:

Access to Visitation Grant  (which redirects to the AOC courtsite, and a persistent person might be able to locate the information on this program).

It’s important, yes, to know about this grant program,which has profited some attorneys of fathers saying “false allegations,” and which, on the other hand, has made it possible for some children to be murdered through its premises, and financial incentives to ensure noncustodial parent contact, even if that noncustodial FATHER is in jail, and also supervised visitation (a tool useful in silencing mothers who report abuse, by forcing them to pay to see their kids).  Yes, I believe that any family law specialist, being psychologically trained in child development, should know about this grant system — but it belongs under “endorsing” domestic violence.

Other than that, what’s with this one?

A.P.A.R.T.  The website reads “parentalabductions.org”  the Banner reads “Wives’ Tales’ and it’s simply about single-parenting tips.

A big deal is made about the ACFLS role in the (if you’re from a custody case in California, this should ring a bell) Elkins Family Law Task Force.  I was a standby witness to how little value on actual parental feedback was desired during this task force; read who was on it, and concluded that a task for is a task force is a task force.  Parents are not considered “stakeholders” and a mothers’ group was contacted after the fathers’ group had already been heard.  One could show up and speak for maybe a minute in public, or submit comments on-line (which is not anonymous) while engaged in an active case.   However, their nicely laid-out newsletter goes into great detail on the AFCLS response to the Task Force Recommendations.  Predictably, which includes this:

(paragraph 1, to set the tone — and the time here, 2009):

ACFLS’s Board of Directors unanimously adopted the group’s Family Law Reform Committee’s Comments on the Elkins Family Law Task Force Draft Recommen­dations. The action came on December 5, 2009 at the last meeting of the 2009 Board of Directors, chaired by 2009 President Joseph J. Bell.

(many ACFLS members were on this task force, as it says):

Since the formation of the Elkins Family Law Task Force, ACFLS has been proactive in contributing to the develop- ment of recommendations for reform of California’s family courts. Diane Wasznicky (2010 ACFLS President-Elect) chairs the Family Law Reform committee. Members are David Borges (Ex-Officio Director, Central Coast), Sharon Bryan (former Past President), Vivian Holley (Director at Large, North), Frieda Gordon (Director at Large, South), Michelene Insalaco (Director-Elect, North), Lynette Berg Robe (Legislative Coordinator) and Leslie Ellen Shear  {{WHOSE suggested Domestic Violence links on the ACFLS site I just reviewed; unbelievable that an adult would take the intro — or the set of links — seriously.  It shouldn’t pass a 12th grade essay standard, or even 10th!}}

On page 16, they get down to recommending co-parenting education (can’t miss that, can we?):

Parties to contested custody disputes should receive education about parenting plans and co-parenting. Every county should offer the following FCS services in contested custody- visitation cases:

1. Confidential mediation of custody disputes–including cases in which there is no family law action pending.**

**not to get boringly monotonous, but there’s potential for double-billing around access/vistation grants, county-appointed & paid mediators, and possibly even charging non-indigent parents for this.  Of course it should be offered in every county.  That’s standard AFCC (who are a mediator-promoting group if anyone is….). . … And it’s also been shown repeatedly that domestic violence advocates — earlier, when the word “grassroots” meant something — FOUGHT AGAINST forcing mediation on DV victims.  See Barbara J. Hart writings from the 1990s on this.  Having been through that gauntlet — I have to agree.  There aren’t enough options once a crooked mediator (or a lying one) (or one breaking rules of court) gets that recommendation in.

The next paragraph is utterly ridiculous, as applied in real situations:

2. Same-day emergency screenings for high risk cases.

3. Prompt,brief assessments with recommendations for cases or issues that are not resolved in mediation.

MAYBE this would be tenable IF FIRST — all cases involving abuse and violence were completely removed from the family law jurisdiction, and either handled in criminal court — where they belong, and should be PROSECUTED, after which assuming the abuse really did take place, there should be NO joint legal custody, no overnight visitations, and there should be prompt prosecution of any and ALL violations of court orders by the offending parent, in the criminal venue, not the civil and not the “family.”

This is not going to happen — because this family law exists primarily to defuse and derail people seeking to protect children, or themselves, from physical molestation, violence, threats, and severe destruction that by a stranger would likely lead to jail time.

I had my children stolen and held truant during an UNsupervised visitation — after I’d requested this and been turned down (being female) because “there’s no money” for it (meaning, in our parents).  years later, absent my kids, I learn about the A/V grants stream (and that one of my judges was on the Kids Turn board, too).  Now that it was clear to their father that he was above the law, but could attempt to throw it at me, I had to go again to the same mediator — or not get in front of a judge to get the kids back, knowing that police wouldn’t either.  Basically, nobody gives a damn if a potential program fund could be called into play somehow.

In the subsequent YEAR, after first permanently eliminating child support for our kids (My income was trashed, and his current obligations ceased — within 30 days, and no action on arrears for over a year, and the arrears was significant to the family), the court managed to recommend counseling for the children (both of who said they weren’t interested), which was a friend of a friend of one of the parties who stole them.  Then a court-appointed attorney was called in after yet more noncompliance by the father and complete cessation of visitation, holiday times together, and even phone calls — add a little stalking in there — and we’ve got some serious situations at hand.  This attorney’s apparent role (other than getting paid) was to finish putting the nail in the coffin of my ability to get legal protection in any form, or retain a relationship with my children, having asked the court to state its reasons for switching custody and having that question first mocked, then derailed (never answered).

In other words, zero legal or factual basis was ever stated for switching custody, and I was not given an opportunity in court to cross-examine the father on his allegations, to counter them in writing, and being in a state of shock a few months later, unable to speak (in pro per — what else?) in the matter, my kids lost their mother and all I had to offer them, and had been.  Shortly after, they lost their father too (it happens) in the household, meaning not one legal safeguard to their lives (or mine) existed.

In situations like this — and believe me, they are common — no one needs a damn co-parenting education class.  Co-parenting and joint custody have often been tried.  People who separate from abuse are trying before separation to co-parent with criminal behavior.  So why let them out, then force them back in just to please the court and someone who couldn’t get business in a free, competitive market otherwise?

(I’m sure you feel my heat in the matter . . . . ) ACFLS newsletter continues:

In other words, after co-parenting education, the parties in each contested custody-visitation case should go on to confidential parenting plan mediation. Where the parties fail to resolve all or some issues, they should move on to a brief assessment and recommendations by a different FCS staff member before the matter is adjudicated. Same-day screen- ing should be available for emergencies – such as safety or abduction risk issues.

Waiting times for appointments for mediation and brief assessments need to be very short – the long delays at this stage of custody cases are damaging to children and destabilizing to families.

(hypocrites!  The long delays free up more grants, and justify not disbursing collected child support, too.  Long delays are what the courts feed off!)

Mediators are not engaged in a systematic process of gathering and assessing data for the purposes of making recommendations. Either they compromise mediation or their recommendations are an afterthought. Mediating parents behave differently when they think their bargaining will influence a recommendation.. . .

and of course, market expansion into downloadable modules assembled by existing family court nonprofits is desirable:

It may be helpful for the Center for Families, Children and the Courts to develop a uniform curriculum for the co- parenting education programs, and to make on line classes available. Many parents cannot afford childcare or time off work for these programs. Others are out of state or out of the country. It would be helpful to offer these programs in many languages. The programs could also have various modules addressing children of different ages, long-distance parenting and relocation issues, domestic violence and child abuse, and special needs children. * * *

If domestic violence and child abuse issues impact on “Parenting!” can be handled in downloadable curricula, then why is California paying ONE nonprofit contracting out of Sacramento over $6 million a year for all kinds of counseling and interventions for victims of child abuse, trauma, and for sex addicts, drunks, and victims of crimes?  See Terra Nova Counseling (meaning — see their tax returns and charitable registry page, which shows this).

I wonder what Marcia Fay might have to say about that one.

(* * *In case you didn’t get it, that was the ACFLS’ plug for more Kids Turn stuff, since Gov. Gray Davis vetoed legislating this a few years earlier, which I blogged in “Kicking Salesmanship Up a Notch” post.  It’s interesting how many visitors to this site are following “Let’s Get Honest about Kids’ Turn and Judges’ Profits” yet still miss the follow up post there…

OK — so I added this intro on 12/8/2011 before posting what I wrote probably last week:

Here’s where the proof hits the proselytizing:

Statement:  ACFLS was formed in 1980

Actuality:

Entity Number Date Filed Status Entity Name Agent for Service of Process
C1955108 12/04/1995 ACTIVE ASSOCIATION OF CERTIFIED FAMILY LAW   SPECIALISTS, INC. LYNN MARIE PFEIFER

It’s the same group.  Here’s a nice letterhead, with board members all along the left side, of ACFLS wish to get involved (i guess) with a certain marriage case:   http://www.acfls.org/uploads/files/ACFLS_ltr_to_JaffeClemens-4.pdf, “In re marriage of Valli” (August, 2011).  They are writing to rally to (addressees) who had some objections to writing by (see above) Leslie Ellen Shear who is head of the Amicus Brief Committee of this wonderful group).

OK, so now I’m really curious how anyone with a legal mind could’ve in their right minds put up that webpage suggesting that a few hours on-line (apparently going alphabetically on “Abuse” and not getting past the letter “A”) would qualify someone to write a great appellate brief, protect innocents against false allegations of domestic violence, (above that,) draft a supervised visitation plan, educate one’s experts — and “oh, yeah, I better include this for appearance’ sake”) “Save your client’s life.”

This is a section of what turns out to be a Super Attorney’s Bio, the same person, from the site with url “custodymatters.com

Selected as One of Los Angeles Magazine L.A.’s SuperLawyers (2004-2011)

PRACTICE EMPHASIS

Family Law Trial Court Proceedings

Representation and consultation in complex child custody, complex parentage and assisted reproduction, interstate and international jurisdiction (including Hague Abduction Convention and UCCJEA) cases.

Representation of children in family court by court appointment.

Consensual Dispute Resolution

Trained in mediation, parenting plan coordination (child custody special master), collaborative family law.

 Why doesn’t this next part surprise me — at all?
  • Association of Certified Family Law Specialists (ACFLS). Current Past President; President 2010; various board positions including Newsletter Editor, Technology Coordinator and Secretary from 1997). Author of many ACFLS amicus curiae briefs, current co-chair of Amicus Committee.
  • Editorial Board and contributor, Journal of Child Custody, published by Taylor and Francis.
  • Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC),** Past Board Member, California Chapter, director at large, co-chair 2001 Statewide Conference, steering committee 2003 Statewide Conference, frequent speaker at state and international conferences. Contributor to Family Court Review.
** File under “walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, certain things (like evidence of DV) roll right off its back, probably is a duck”
  • Fellow, International Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.
  • Faculty member, 1981 Vallambrosa Retreat: Mediation of Child Custody and Visitation Disputes (trained statewide court staff mediators for California Courts following enactment of mandatory custody mediation legislation)
Which probably explains (i live in California) why my mediator, under such auspicious culture of mandated mediation and calling serious issues “disputes” — consistently ignored court-order-breaking and otherwise felony behavior by the father of my children, and countless others.  He was employed over the span of my entire case, and when I requested a less biased one (post-abduction) none was available, so it was either forget seeing your kids again (while they were MIA) or go to this dude, again.
ANYHOW — I just showed you — this group incorporated in 1995.  That means that unless they had some other corporate identity, their own website has falsified the record by FIFTEEN YEARS, aka, lied.    And the head of the Amicus Brief Committee of ACFLS, Ms. Shear — is considered by her colleagues a Super Attorney (does this mean, excellent and articulate liar? Wouldn’t be the first one I know (which comment I put in for said attorney), and by me, a person who doesn’t know squat about domestic violence, but considers such knowledge good enough to advise attorneys on it on-line.  Another Super Attorney (Jennifer Jackson) out of SF area came up, apparently, with the concept for kids turn and helped a family law judge set it up, too, in the late 1980s)

Is this personal (except the one I said I know?) — NO.  But I see what product they are putting out regarding situations I’ve lived and know others who have also lived.  Obviously, it’s a matter of viewpoint!   This is why (a long time ago) i contrasted the court’s opinion of a judge I didn’t even know (The Hon. Slabach) with the “Silenced Mamas” (see poormagazine.com) feedback on the same judge.  (That’s how I habitually get in trouble on this blog, but that’s what blogs are for, i.e., airing differing points of view).

How about we go take a look at their registration as a nonprofit — after all this is a membership organization set up by people already working in, and sometimes FOR the courts, and messing with other people’s custody matters through Amicus Briefs (remind me to read  in re:  Valli and what the ACFLS objected to, in said letter I linked to above).

(AFCC & proud of it on Ms. Shear’s website):  work includes:

Ohmer v. Superior Court (1983, 2nd District) 148 Cal.App.3d 661 Child custody evaluations, due process. Validity of former Los Angeles Superior Court policy barring custody litigants from cross-examining child custody investigators, and prohibiting custody litigants from obtaining and presenting evidence of investigator’s lack of mental health education and training. Affirmed. (Appellant)

That sounds like an interesting one…  Here (2008) is more evidence of pushing Parenting Coordination.  Like my post says, these people are pretty pushy:

In Search of Statutory Authority for Parenting Coordinator Orders in California: Using a Grass- roots, Hybrid Model Without an Enabling Statute, 5 Journal of Child Custody 88 (2008)

A few years into a custody dispute, and most mothers couldn’t afford to keep current with this journal, if they even know enough to do so, in their own best interests of knowing what they’re up against…  This is recent, cited all over, and I recommend MOMS read it!  Obviously it’s not displayed in proper format below — see that link.  Randy Rand v. Board of Psychology and the other attorney involved in the brief is Stephen Temko from San Diego.

CASE NO. C064475 SUPERIOR COURT CASE NO. 34-3009-80000359

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL FOR THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA THIRD APPELLATE DISTRICT

__________________

RANDY RAND, ED.D. Plaintiff and Appellant, v. BOARD OF PSYCHOLOGY, Defendant and Respondent. __________________

BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE ASSOCIATION OF CERTIFIED FAMILY LAW SPECIALISTS __________________

LESLIE ELLEN SHEAR, CFLS,* CALS* SBN 72623 16133 Ventura Boulevard, Floor 7 Encino, CA 91436-2403

Telephone: 818-501-3691 Facsimile: 818-501-3692 lescfls@earthlink.net

STEPHEN TEMKO, CFLS,* CALS* SBN 67785 1620 Fifth Avenue, Suite 800 San Diego, CA 92101-2792 Telephone: 858-274-3538 Facsimile: 619-238-0851

Attorneys for Amicus *State Bar of California, Board of Legal Specialization

Curiae ACFLS

Paragraph from the amicus brief shows that FIRST parenting coordinators are appointed, then a clamor to legitimize it occurs.  Sounds (at first look) like the amicus wants only professionals already licensed somewhere else in on the show — but in classic “we want to have our cake and eat it too behavior), they don’t want those professional boards to have disciplinary power (What, are there some NON-AFCC or CRC powerhouses on any of those associations?) because ‘parenting coordination’ is quasi judicial and the best entity to discipline them would be — like, the family court that appointed them (sure, THAT”S a bias-free basis for some real ethical accountability! )  SO we’d best read this one all of it — and I do mean “we.”

“California has failed to adopt legislation and court rules governing parenting coordination despite the growing use of these service models in our family courts.** This leaves parents, parenting coordinators, courts, and licensing boards without clear directives about what practices are required or prohibited.”

**perhaps even California, in heart, agrees with Gov Jeb Bush of Florida’s (2004) objections to the practice of parenting coordination.  I know I sure do!  I read that PCANH handbook, apparentl lifted from Indiana practice?  (nice touch throwing the word “parents” in that sentence about “lacking clear directives!” as if that was the concern!

(the site I chose to post the link from was Matthew Sullivan, Ph.D.’s site called (appropriately) “californiaparentingcoordinator.com”  (got the message yet?) and says of him:

Matthew Sullivan, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist (California Lic. # PSY10214) in private practice in Palo Alto, California, who specializes in forensic** child and family psychology. He has been in private practice in Palo Alto for 20 years, specializing in Forensic Family psychology.

He is a pioneer in the field of Parenting Coordination, which he helped develop in Santa Clara County more than 15 years ago,*** and has led the development of Parenting Coordination across the U.S. He is one of the most experienced Parent Coordinators (called Special Master in California) in the country. Some of the other roles he serves for families going through divorce include:

 **Child psychologists are frustrated child psychiatrists, some of who are probably frustrated MD’s.  They love to throw around the word “forensic” to lend credibility.
***Since he helped develop the field, he might want to rethink posting Ms. Shear’s amicus which states the field basically emerged.
{{Like most AFCC material does when describing some program AFCC has devised and wants legislated & mandated for VERY potentially high-conflict case (i.e., cases where someone — possibly a mediator trained b the sam people — made a really bad custody recommendation, which was enacted, and is having consequences, such as the other parent protesting it.  Voila! !  We have high-conflict, so we get to do parent coordinators, and maybe even some federal grant streams, too!)}}

OK, now that the very active ACFLS cannot ? show its origination, as claimed, in 1980 as a legitimate California corporation, but rather it was incorporated in 1995 (at least the one with “, Inc.” after its name is the only one I could find on SOS site) here’s the Charitable Registration:

From the California Office of Attorney General (Charitable Registry Search Site) — YES !  ACFLS DOES exist and at first glance, it’s charitable status is labeled “Current”:
Organization Name Registration Number Record Type Registration Status City State Registration Type Record Type
ASSOCIATION OF CERTIFIED FAMILY LAW SPECIALISTS, INC. EX548531 Charity Exempt – Active SAN RAFAEL CA Charity Registration Charity
1
which is odd – because if one the looks inside — no EIN# has been assigned yet, it has never filed any IRS or RRF reports (annual requirement for CA nonprofits and for corporations too, for that matter).  Allegedly, per this record, their charitable status was issued in 1990 (10 years after they claim they started, and 5 years before the Secretary of State admitted that they did). (or perhaps this is just the boilerplate charitable registry BLANK format?).
They have NO EIN# and apparently ever bothered to register — NO founding documents are viewable – and obviously if the association is charging its (ATTORNEY) members any dues, they aren’t producing (all 490 members, all those nice monthly meetings and annual regional conferences involving hotels, golf, etc.) any income worht reporting? And though they are actually selling stuff from their blog — they aren’t producing program service revenue enough to require reporting to the IRS?
Yes — and I have some land under the Brooklyn Bridge I wish to sell, also.
Full Name: ASSOCIATION OF CERTIFIED FAMILY LAW SPECIALISTS, INC. FEIN:
Type: Mutual Benefit Corporate or Organization Number: 1955108
Registration Number: EX548531
Record Type: Charity Registration Type: Charity Registration
Issue Date: 12/31/1990 Renewal Due Date: 5/15/1991
Registration Status: Exempt – Active Date This Status:
Date of Last Renewal:
Address Information
Address Line 1: 15 CORRILLO DRIVE Phone:
Address Line 2:
Address Line 3:
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Look it up yourself — here’s the link for the search fields.  Just type in the organization name, or whatever part of it fits:

CHECKING with  my trusty 990-finder, I find out that there IS an EIN# and income — but apparently not one of the Attorney General’s Office seems to have noticed, even though we can hardly say that the Attorney General’s Office is unfamiliar with the family law field.  After all, former Attorney General Bill Lockyer had a wife (about half his age?) from the L.A. area working as Exec. Dir. of the Alameda County Family Justice Law Center, annointed by a republican gov. in 2006, and this leadership was ceded to another family law professional.  San Francisco just went through a crisis and multiple courtroom shutdowns.  I feel it safe to say that PROBABLY the head of the criminal justice system in California — which is supposed to protect taxpayers from financial scam artists — knows about this organization, and that it ain’t reporting to them.   (or, they aren’t posting what it did).

What is a reasonably logical person to assume but that the OAG’s office is getting a cut on the undocumented funds, at the expense of Californians Right To KNow, Fair Political Practices (it would seem) transparency — and our state’s budget!

ORGANIZATION NAME

STATE

YEAR

TOTAL ASSETS

FORM

PAGES

EIN

Association of Certified Family Law Specialists CA 2009 $107,507 990 17 94-3238376
Association of Certified Family Law Specialists CA 2008 $122,073 990 20 94-3238376
Association of Certified Family Law Specialists CA 2007 $158,102 990 19 94-3238376
Association of Certified Family Law Specialists CA 2006 $142,503 990 20 94-3238376
Association of Certified Family Law Specialists CA 2005 $93,608 990 16 94-3238376
Association of Certified Family Law Specialists CA 2004 $127,804 990 15 94-3238376
Association of Certified Family Law Specialists CA 2003 $76,425 990 16 94-3238376
Association of Certified Family Law Specialists CA 2002 $65,302 990 17 94-3238376

2009 IRS reads (probably like the rest) program purpose — why it’s tax exempt and for “PUBLIC” benefit:

“To Promote and Preserve the Family Law Speciality”

There are 20 people on the board of directors, NONE takes any money for this.  How charitable!

Educational Seminars revenue $138K; Membership dues:  $130K.

They are going to HAVE to lie, steal, and cheat to keep promoting this BS — especially with Ms. Shear in charge of education professionals on how to ignore signs of imminent lethality with a few hours of on-line research.  (too busy writing Amicus for other people’s custody disputes, I guess).  California just this past fall had an 8-person massacre after a father given 56% custody was angry he didn’t get 100% fast enough.  An AFCC professional was on his case at the time of his 2007 divorce.  4 years later, Mom dead and 7 other people also.  “Typical Divorce Case” says the family law professional, when interviewed on this.  This followed hard on the heels of an Attorney General employee having her own child (gave birth around age 44, it seemed) abducted and murdered in a murder-suicide by the father.  We also have families going homeless around custody cases (i know some) and in general, it’s one _ _ _ _ ing disgrace.

SO is this organization retaining any credibility and quite frankly, even during the economic crisis (like this arm of teh courts didn’t contribute to it?) it also reflects on the credibility of the Attorney General’s Office as well — at least as to Charitable Trusts.  I am thankful they seem to be getting on some organizations, but I sure can’t figure out how they determine who to let slide — and who to nail.  Unless, that is, there is some money greasing the decsisions — which I think is not an unfair speculation, although of course (at this point) it IS speculation, I admit.

Readers have any other speculations — or hard data — on why the ACFLS is held to ZERO standard within its state of origin, while pompously throwing its weight around, and citing itself as if this is a reputable organization serving the public by promoting and preserving the practice of family law — and pushing parenting coordinators on us — even as the FBI rushes into jurisdiction in Pennsylvania to investigate a racketeering type of setup (possibly) involving one of the parent coordinator trainers!   

Now that I have that off my chest, what’s below is related setups that I’d planned to accompany this one, in particular.

I don’t know how much more evidence – at this point — anyone would need that just because an organization has been around, and has good PR, doesn’t mean it’s legitimate.  Or that the AFCC in particular, has a membership PRONE to forming nonprofits (membership associations especially) and engaging in tax-evasion and tax-reporting-evasion within their local states.

Cf.  Ann Marie Termini lists “Cooperative Parenting Institute” on her linkedin Profile and wherever else possible; so presumably does Susan Boyan, still (out of Georgia).   So what state does it exist in, again?  The parents in Scranton, PA deserve an answer, pending the FBI decision whether to finish their investigation — or shelve it — regarding some of the practices in Lackawanna County (which, FYI, is geographically right next to the infamous Luzerne County and in the state of the Penn State Sandusky scandal, with potential involvement of the charity “The Second Mile.”

I want to let these Preserve and Promote the Family Law Profession People in on a secret — apparently to them, it’s obvious to others:

  • MOST parents are not abusive, and care about their kids more than you do.
  • And if you were’t heating up the conflict (while insisting that your presence is actually intended to help dissipate conflict), probably more of those ids would be alive today — and those abusive parents could’ve been prosecuted as criminals BEFORE the offed their kids, their exes, bystanders, and occasionally a responding police officer.
  • And most mothers reporting abuse by the Dads, or kids reporting — are not lying.  They do not need “responsible motherhood” programs to behave as responsible mothers, even under the extreme conditions put upon them by institutions, advocacy groups (who don’t reveal their own funding comes from welfare diversionary programs, when dealing with mothers forced onto welfare somehow), etc.
  • There is an innate biological bond, particularly when mothers get to also nurse their kids and give birth to them, even in some pretty hostile environments.
  • And the profession that out of two parents, one who complies with court orders, and the other who doesn’t, or one with a criminal record — or criminal behaviors in evidence — and the other NOT — you are actually more concerned about the kids because you talk about “family” while she talks about SAFETY — is offensive.

+ + + + + + +

I have a question.  In fact, several questions:

Have you, has a family member or friend, been operated on recently?  Was your doctor officially vetted by the hospital, and is his or her degree valid?

Is the institution from which your doctor graduated, or was, it a real institution?

When they are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, UCBerkeley, Stanford, etc. — there aren’t that many questions whether or not the schools actually exist, and are “accredited,” for what it’s worth (and it is worth something, as to colleges!).  The only question becomes, did your particular professional actually go there, and has the school not, to date, disowned or otherwise dishonorably discharged them.

Generally, we expect more of Medical Doctors, although this is sometimes not delivered.  See “California prison doctors get millions while not working“, Associated Press article posted 11/29/2011.  Who wants to actually think about a government paying anyone over $226K per year to sort mail while figuring out whether this person was mal-practicing or not?  Not a thought good for the average digestive system, or blood pressure, probably….

At least 30 physicians and mental health professionals collected an estimated $8.7 million since 2006 as they went through a lengthy appeals process to determine whether they should be fired or reinstated, the Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/vOJLlY ) reported Monday. The newspaper cited records from a court-ordered receiver now in charge of the state prison system.

Doctors who were alleged by colleagues to have committed negligence or misconduct — in some cases involving patient deaths — received their full six-figure salaries, even though they were not allowed to treat prisoners. Some did menial work [like, sorting mail…]

Sounds like a lose-lose proposition to me, either the original system, or attempting to “clean up” the systems.

But what is it about the fields of family law and psychologists that attracts people who LOVE to form nonprofit, trade-promoting, dues-paying (membership) associations which:

  • don’t even file tax returns, especially with the state they are registered in, after getting tax-exempt status?  or, alternately
  • don’t file period, and/or
  • cite each others names proudly on websites and on biographies in long strings of apparent officialdom before ording one parent into a situation doomed to bankruptcy, another child to go live with a molester he or she has already reported on, extort fathers into starting a custody battle they didn’t want — or, if they are in arrears somehow — into participating in some ridiculous (psychoeducational) program, typically in 6 to 10 sessions that someone pays for,  no one would otherwise take if there were an alternate choice besides going back to jail?[FN1]  Before adjusting upward or compromising downward child support for a noncustodial parent without notifying the custodial one of the discussion (or programssssssszzsss, plural) that led to this backroom deal?  and/or
  • hold conferences to figure out how to expand their profession, which profession exists at all over public distress and at public expense, i.e,. those who practice are already on state (judges) or county (county commissioners, family law commissioners, child support commissioners — and ANYONE among the support structure of the entire local child support agency, including attorneys, directors, specialists, clerks, data entry people (presumably) and office staff for derailing parents who want a direct answer about their own case.  This also includes court transcriptionists, court clerks, etc.
  •  Bill attendance at these conference, and travel to/from them (wherever possible) to their current employer, usually a county or county-level court  [FN2])
How is it that people who graduated from an institute that gave a degree to an imaginary cat can actually be practing and making custody recommendations for young children?  This literally is true, and a lot more than one thinks.  Surely Dr. Doyne must be a qualified professional (WHAT profession was it, again?) because he got a degree from this place.  However at least one man (see Request to file Amicus Brief in Tadros v. Doyne) decided to challenge (see Tadros v. Doyne; in fact this link summarizes and actually shows the “Specialty Diplomate” and how both the person who issued it, and the court, are retaliating against this M.D. for reporting it!  Many mothers and fathers know already about the “Zoe the Cat” fiasco, but still the custody mill (and other association-certification-mills) continue, one of which I found recently, hence today’s post.)  How can one be silent in the face of material like this?
(1). . .
for $350 dollars, Robert O’Block, who honored a Specialty Diplomate to a house  cat named Zoe (which states on the certificate Zoe has a PhD), and who also granted a Specialty Diplomate to Custody Evaluator Stephen Doyne, is threatening to sue the co-founders of California Coalition for Families and Children (CCFC) with a defamation lawsuit seeking penalties of 1,000,000 Dollars. Robert O’Block is seeking to shutdown The Public Court for exposing the truth about the “cat credentialed?”

If Dr. Tadros and CCFC do not keep quiet or “shut down” public exposure about Zoe the Cat getting a PhD and Diploma, they will be sued for this huge sum of money?

To the solid fact that Zoe the Cat is Dr. Tadros’s best witness, he is left with no other choice than to pursue the timely filing against Robert O’Block’s owner of the ACFE, who according to Professor carol Henderson issued a house Cat with “Diplomate (and Phd)” certificate, (read below) with the filing of Tadros MD vs. American College of Forensic Examiners International (ACFEI), dated January 10, 2011…

(2) . . .Well, here, from, the News Article on Doctor Doyne, but “thepubliccourt.com” is informative*

Custody Evaluator’s Credentials Questioned In Lawsuit

Dr. Stephen Doyne Has Been Involved In 3,000 To 4,000 San Diego Custody Cases

Lauren Reynolds
10News I-Team Reporter
POSTED: 7:10 pm PDT July 7, 2009
SAN DIEGO — Dr. Stephen Doyne, PhD, is widely used in the San Diego Family Court as a custody evaluator. His job is to advise the court on where children of divorce should live, which parent is more fit. The evaluations can be costly, both in emotion and dollars. Clients told the 10 News I-Team they paid Doyne between $5,000 and $30,000.  (That’s per evaluation — do the math)
“A child custody evaluator has tremendous power and influence,” said Marc Angelucci. He’s an attorney representing Dr. Emad Tadros in a civil lawsuit against Dr. Doyne alleging fraud and negligence. . . .
Dr. Doyne is one of a dozen custody evaluators repeatedly used by San Diego Family Court. The court had no response to the allegations against Dr. Doyne. The court also clarified that it does not verify the professional licenses or the resumes of the custody evaluators.

Apparently, per this article, he also falsely claimed to be an adjunct professor at UCSD (University of California, San Diego).  Reminds me of this Sandra Brown, M.A. (Liberty University) I was looking up recently, and her “IRHPE” (Institute for Relational Harm and Pathology Education”), not to mention the “Relationship Training Institute,” also (coincidentally) at San Diego where she was listed as a Guest Lecturer (to my recall), this RTI being a business which takes business from the courts, also.  Speaking of which, …

The “Relationship Training Institute” (EIN# 470942805), which you can (and should) look up on the California Attorney General’s site (http://ag.ca.gov/charities/, and select “Registry” on left side) where charitable organizations are required to register and then file ANNUALLY, and where one can look up their EIN#s) — registered here in 2006 (File issued date) and from the IRS, evidently it’s clear it showed assets of $1.5K and Revenue of $90K in 2005, and by 2010, assets of $13,569 & revenue of $271K.  In 2011, their assets went down by over $4K, but their revenue went up to $291K — and finally, in August 2011, the OAG decided to slap them on the wrist (who knows why), with a letter saying, you didn’t file your fee.

However, in the section where EVERY charity required to register under state law is to file 3 things (that I know of) (two of which the public should be able to look at, right here):  (1) a State return (RRF), (2) a copy of their IRS 990 return which the OAG can upload, and (3) a ‘Schedule B”* which lists their contributors’ names and addresses.  This is also to come with (4) an annual fee, which varies by size of the group.

(*which public doesn’t see, but the OAG, whose purpose here is to prevent Californians from being scammed by tax-exempt organizations and false fundraisers, i.e., professionally organized thieves, public financial predators, and money launderers, etc.  SPeaking of which, did I mention that a previous attorney general (Bill Lockyer) had his (3rd) wife installed, on pay from the DAs office, as the CEO of the “Alameda County Family Justice Center” — an idea from San Diego City Attorney’s Office  Casey Gwinn plus the DV Council, Gael Strack, J.D. (as I recall) — which, somehow in the process of hiring the first CEO, got the slated salary moved from $65K to $90K, and the appointment process of which looks a little slimy (thank you, investigator Steve White, aka boatbrain or similar quirky username).  Nevertheless, we hope and expect the OAG to keep a lid on these things for our (public’s) sake.   They even went after the San Diego based Kid’s Turn for its charitable status, right? 

Organizations larger than the RTI have been noticed by the same OAG for failing to file fees and schedule B of contributors. The far larger Futures Without Violence (formerly, like until 2010, Family Violence Prevention Fund, EIN# 943110973) received one notice in 2010:

1. The $225 renewal fee was not received. Please send a check in that amount, payable to “Attorney General’s Registry of Charitable Trusts”.

and another, August 2011, under separate cover, in stern terms, this time writing reflecting the corporation’s name change:

RE: IRS Form 990, Schedule B, Schedule of Contributors

We have received the IRS Form 990, 990-EZ or 990-PF submitted by the above-named organization for filing with the Registry of Charitable Trusts (Registry) for the fiscal year ending 12/31/10. The filing is incomplete because the copy of Schedule B, Schedule of Contributors, does not include the names and addresses of contributors.

The copy of the IRS Form 990, 990-EZ or 990-PF, including all attachments, filed with the Registry must be identical to the document filed by the organization with the Internal Revenue Service. The Registry retains Schedule B as a confidential record for IRS Form 990 and 990-EZ filers.

Within 30 days of the date of this letter, please submit a complete copy of Schedule B, Schedule of

Contributors, for the fiscal year noted above, as filed with the Internal Revenue Service

Futures Without Violence, now ensconced at the San Francisco Praesidio (a high-profile address to locals and international visitors), does big business:  In 2010, per information the California OAG apparently gets from the IRS (as opposed to the organization), it reads:

Fiscal Begin: 01-JAN-10
Fiscal End: 31-DEC-10
Total Assets: $36,603,585.00
Gross Annual Revenue: $17,118,149.00
RRF Received: 14-JUN-11
Returned Date:
990 Attached: Y
Status: Rejected

I would ask too.  2010 is an increase in ASSETS of roughly $5.5 (million) and in INCOME of $10.5 million.  As Dolly Parton quipped once (possibly in a movie), “it takes a lot of money to look like this!”    Yet FVPF has been fairly regular in filing — up til 2008, anyhow.   Its primary program purpose, as of the last available 990, reads:

Significant activities: TO PIONEER NEW STRATEGIES TO END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND CHILDREN AT HOME AND ABROAD.

“FUTURES WITHOUT VIOLENCE” SETS ITS EYES “Abroad”

And well it might — having continued to ignore a steady stream of violence against women, and children (including some that results in deaths, a relentless litany, the background to their wonderful conferences and PR campaigns, and training institutes about “Fatherhood” as  tool practitioners can wield against family violence.  Sure, OK.  So, MOTHERS lveaing abusive relationships safely (and this group helped get VAWA enacted in 1994), still can’t — because of family court in USA is trending towards sharia law, at least in its “logic” and priorities.

Speaking of “Going Abroad”. . . .literally and allegorically

(I warned you at the top of this post…we are going to talk about defecation, and allegorically, why some nonprofits constantly need to shift localities, names and WHERE they are p*ssing on people’s due process rights, and covering up evidence of this in the family law system, lest they step on the wrong local toes, or bite the han)

The phrase “going abroad” in previous times meant going to take a whizz outside the camp, or home, where one eats and sleeps, so as not to pollute it.  When encased in a wood shelter over a large pit, with or without a porcelain chair, this progressed to the “Outhouses,” topic of many comedies and eventually we progressed to indoor plumbing, which can then get backed up and require a plumber to fix.   The practice of sitting UP to do this, I gather another Western creation, has helped create health problems too, per some.

I’m late reporting this – as it seems November 19th was “World Toilet Day” according to an article, “What would you Do without a Loo?” and another historical discussion points out that civilization and the development of sanitation go together; Rome, for example, could not ignore the problem.

The Medieval Ages (plus emergence of Fundamentalist RC theories related to original sin, and the nobility of suffering, including if necessary in filth, had their impact).  I hope you scan that — it’s a quick read.   “The massive deaths by reason of the plagues had some people rethinking hygiene” (year 1210) . . .”Since the 1820s there have been no fundamental changes.” (parallel — when was the last time any change in what to do about death-causing domestic violence actually surfaced, i.e., that wasn’t “treatment, intervention, publication, and training”?)

Meanwhile, it’s just as healthy not to use “the throne.”  In Fact, Bill Gates is working on re-inventing the toilet (how did my thinking go here?  It’s easy — the phrase “going abroad” — and I believe it’s necessary to use symbols and one systems of meaning to understand another, although if one gets STUCK in a symbol system (i.e., DV as a sickness, conflict as bad, professionals as actually helpful, etc.) the society and its process of observation, labeling, and logic (reasoning) can get, well, “constipated.”  So, I have a little fun connecting the absurdly different (a highly respected organization with an annual revenue of around $36 million and lofty claims to basic human functions that MUST be needed, and if not heeded with sanitation (and sense) can wipe out a civilization, i.e., plague.   Or, for example, we are told that the early settlers in the US didn’t wash in the ocean, and didn’t dig for clams or catch much fish — yet certainly that would’ve fed them and cleansed them.

Bill Gates Seeks to Reinvent the Toilet

Analysis by Nic Halverson
Tue Aug 16, 2011 09:11 AM ET

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently launched a “Reinvent the Toilet” competition and have already awarded $3 million to researchers at eight universities to redesign the porcelain throne. The challenge? Develop an economical toilet that is doesn’t need to be connected to a sewer system, or to any water or electricity grid.

Healthcare Districts, Associations of Healthcare Districts and their Watchdogs:

This blog is not about water, healthcare, or for that matter school boards.  However it IS about use of taxes.  I got derailed into matters of “Water” simply by comparing one Domestic Violence Funds proposition that we (taxpayers) collectively support its $36million plans to create Futures Without Violence Abroad to the practice of pissing outside one’s home area, which of course (how my mind works sometimes) got me on just how complex it becomes when people are crowded together so closely that there IS no backyard to go piss in, at least not for years on end, and thus the community pools its funds to elect people to take care of their shit (literally).  I believe that assaults and violence could (generically speaking) be lumped in that category, as the (stuff) of overcrowding and too many people codependent on others to protect them, feed them, educate their young (handle their money), regulate their parenting practices (?) and in general, nurse them from womb to tomb.   Perhaps that model is a little over-rated, as this example I hope proves.

SUPPOSE BILL GATES DEVELOPS SUCH A TOILET THAT COULD BE USED IN URBAN AREAS TOO?  HOW MANY OF THE PEOPLE AND GROUPS BELOW WOULD BE OUT OF A JOB?

AND WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT THE ROMAN EMPIRE’S FALL HAVING SOMETHING TO DO WITH LEAD IN THE PIPES? ….

I mean, why the chair portion?   Consider how complicated it gets; from a travel article:

 How to Use a Squat Toilet (Frank Burres in Worldhum, 9/25/06)

“Warning: This article contains language that some will find offensive, but that others will find refreshingly honest”

Background: Squatting is an ancient practice, but knowledge of it has recently been lost in the West. The flush toilet wasn’t even invented until 1596. And toilet paper didn’t become popular until the 1900s. According to the Toilet Paper Encyclopedia, pre-TP, humans used corn cobs, Sears Roebuck catalogs, mussel shells, newspaper, leaves, sand, hayballs, gompf sticks and the end of old anchor cables on ships. Ouch!

But the good folks at the TPE seem blissfully unaware that most of the world’s people still use neither toilet paper, nor western sit-down crappers. Nor do they use corn cobs, gompf sticks or anchor cables. Because, while most of us in North America and Europe sit, people on just about every other continent squat, using water and their left hand. In much of Africa and Asia you can be hard-pressed to find anything else besides the squatter.

Beginning Squatting: I called Doug Lansky, a traveler and travel writer who knows the hardships of squatting. “It’s difficult,” said Lansky, who edited a book called, There’s No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled.

I wish Bill Gates well in his exploration of alternates to the water systems that make the economy go whirr and hum, some of which so reduce people’s self-reliance (and thinking about the basics of life) that they willingly allow commissions associations, agencies and task forces to try and keep up with the agencies (and commissions) to take their hard-earned (or, easily earned) income (taxes) and, such that they need a “Local Agency Formation Commission”  (I kid you not) to study whether to dissolve another agency — which no longer has a hospital, but is still collecting funds.  I cannot find this particular agency (maybe it’s been dissolved?) as a corporation or trust anywhere in the state — and the attorney which was hired to determine whether to dissolve the nonexisting entity — who was in 2010 head of an Association of (such) Agencies — which does not exist as either a corporation or charity in California, meaning, if anyone is getting paid for this association of (unregistered entitites),  it’s not reporting to the public without a FOIA request, WTF (that’s an acronym for an expletive) it’s doing, financially.

Association of California Healthcare Districts — and where is this “Mt. Diablo Healthcare District to start with?  I don’t know (I don’t see it registered as nonprofit or corporation), but here comes a news reporter to inform us that the attorney hired to decide whether to dissolve it doesn’t follow the rules either.  So rules were changed accomodate his inability to handle a $5,000 services cap.  Weird:

Mt. Diablo Health Care District lawyer billed beyond board limit

By Lisa Vorderbrueggen
Contra Costa Times

Posted: 11/28/2011 04:15:57 PM PST

An outside attorney hired to help save an imperiled Contra Costa public health district billed the agency nearly three times more than what was authorized.**

Heavily censored invoices obtained through the California Public Records Act show Sacramento lawyer Ralph Ferguson billed the district for 52.3 hours totaling $14,000 in September and October. The district capped his pay at $5,000 when it hired him.

It’s the latest development in the increasing scrutiny of the Mt. Diablo Health Care District, an agency that lost its hospital 15 years ago but has continued to collect and spend hundreds of thousands of tax dollars. Roughly 200,000 residents in Concord, Martinez, Clyde, Pacheco and portions of Lafayette and Pleasant Hill live in the district.

It hired Ferguson three months ago as its liaison with the Contra Costa Local Agency Formation Commission, which is studying whether to dissolve the agency.

**Note:   He’s an attorney.  So this surprises us, why?  Same reporter, earlier this month (11/5/2011), in “Riding in to Rescue a Flailing Agency

The lawyer behind the strategy to rescue the ailing Mt. Diablo Health Care District will be remembered as a visionary or an opportunist.

Ralph Ferguson, the former chief of the Association of California Healthcare Districts and Mt. Diablo’s new attorney, believes the embattled public agency could model itself after the successful Beach Cities or Camarillo health care districts.

By way of background, a regulatory agency could dissolve the taxpayer-funded Central Contra Costa health care district. It has been criticized by four grand juries and others for its failure to do little more than pay its overhead and keep up the health insurance for a current and a former board member.**

Like Mt. Diablo, two Southern California districts no longer operate hospitals.

**perhaps this is what many agencies are for to start with?  Remember the Phoebe Factoids and the problems with Georgia’s chain of nonprofit hospitals, that stiffed uninsured parents and kept huge profits offshore?  Then apparently had enough clout to personally threaten the family of two men reporting on this?

This Commission to control Agencies and “Special Districts” really does exist, and has authority and a staff.  This authority seems to relate largely to taxes, incorporation, annexing or detaching land to one city or another, and things that relate to things we need — like water, schooling, healthcare, and such.  Authority:

▪ Annex land to cities or special districts,

▪ Detach land from cities or special districts,

▪ Consolidate two or more cities or two or more special districts,

Form new special districts and incorporate new cities,

Dissolve special districts and disincorporate cities, — WOW.  And the commission has six people. Only.

▪ Merge cities and special districts,

▪ Allow cities or special districts to provide services outside of their boundaries.

I hope that the term “SPECIAL DISTRICT” is required, by law, to be taught in all K-12 Special Unified School Districts so that, as adults, they can know who helps determine what low-income jobs  global marketplace their education is preparing most of them for, which will increase their odds of becoming part of the welfare caseload (or target in a drive-by- shooting) they will be able to work at, decrease their odds of giving those who know what a special district is — and how to obtain control over it — and cities.  After all, their JOBS provide tax income for these people to hire pricey lawyers to investigate waste of their own taxes. . .

I don’t know any individual that has the time to write “FOIA’s” (Freedom Of Information Act letters, requesting, obviously, information) – for every entity that is affecting that indivual’s personal, well, — Freedom.  Do you?

So JUST PERHAPS if a Bill Gates and friends can figure out that the rest of the west never needed the white throne, either (toilets) — we might be able to figure, as much of the non-Western, Pre-AFCC world, in fact Pre-1913 world  — how to live life without a parenting class. And that would put enough administrative and bureaucratic educators, and real estate, out of work to make OCCUPY THIS look like a children’s birthday party.

Why?  Because once people develop the habit of thinking, non-drug-induced, about HOW their world is run, the habit is catching, and many more taken-for-granteds will topple.

Put that next to a recent news article with the title “Agency in hot water over fees.”  This turns out not to actually be attorney-exaggarated fees on a Health Care District, not about water — however this one, “An End to Padded Water Bills  (Metropolitan Times, Los Angeles, 2009) IS.  This 2010 notice by “Californians Aware” on ” Subject: Notice of Strict Enforcement Concerning Certain Common Brown Act Violations is addressed to people at four different associations involved in basic business of — living — in California.  It is from another association, “Californians Aware” — the Center for Public Forum Rights.”

  • League of California Cities
  • Association of California Water Agencies
  • California School Boards Association
  • California State Association of Counties, and
  • Association of California Healthcare Districts, Ralph Ferguson, Executive Director (see next)
ACHD
In a very well-fleshed-out-website, the group’s (or lack of a better word reflecting their tax & incorporation status)  mission is stated:  “The Association of California Healthcare Districts serves and advances the diverse needs of all California Healthcare Districts through advocacy, education and member driven services. “

The “Association of California Healthcare Districts, INC.” is “Not Registered” as a California Charity (or corporation, that I can see) and “Ralph Ferguson” is the attorney in question mention as overbilling (etc.) in the article “Agency in hot water over fees” I linked to, above.  Go figure!

Organization Name Registration Number Record Type Registration Status City State Registration Type Record Type
ASSOCIATION OF CALIFORNIA HEALTHCARE DISTRICTS, INC. Charity Not Registered RANCHO CORDOVA CA Charity Registration Charity
1

The Secretary of State Site shows zero listing for the same Association.  IN fact, when I searched on only the words “healthcare District” there only 3 local ones showed, one o whose corporate status had been suspended.  If so, why a need for an Association of Healthcare Districts to start with?  Either have them — and force them to expose their corporate status– or don’t have them, at all, and quit playing games with the public.  I believe (?) the word “District” here means a region of people/residents who can be sold on the idea of accepting a tax to support, er, “Healthcare.”

Which of course, have been the topic of some scandal as to use.

Entity Number Date Filed Status Entity Name Agent for Service of Process
C1993854 11/05/1996 ACTIVE BEAR VALLEY COMMUNITY HEALTHCARE DISTRICT FOUNDATION HELEN WALSH
C2439485 03/11/2004 SUSPENDED HEALTHCARE DISTRICT INSURANCE AND MARKETING SERVICES, INC. JAMES L. BEYERS
C2858426 02/21/2006 ACTIVE THE CLOVERDALE HEALTHCARE DISTRICT FOUNDATION JAMES F DEMARTINI

While the phrase “healthcare district” on a charitable registry search produces zero results, which leads me to speculate that this multiple field search site does not have the ability to search phrases in the middle of the group’s name – unlike other states’ corporate searches.  For such a large state, California has a lousy corporation search website!

So I looked up “Bear Valley Community” on the OAG (Charity) site and find SIX charities (and one raffle) beginning with those three phrases.  TWO of the sex are not registered, but our 1996 one (above) is.  One of the “not registered” charities is “Bear Valley Community Hospital.”  If I lived in Bear Valley, California — I’d get on this quick.  The BVHC District tax return of 2002 lists $13K of government funding, of 2004, $26 of public (but no government) and apparently the charitable registration didn’t start until 2006.  Since I’m a nice person, I”ll list what Bear Valley Community anythings are still around (the church — active as a charity — is no longer active as a corporation, but they began in 1946.  Besides (see row one, below).

Entity Number Date Filed Status Entity Name Agent for Service of Process
C1137770 03/24/1983 ACTIVE BEAR VALLEY CENTER FOR SPIRITUAL ENRICHMENT, A RELIGIOUS SCIENCE COMMUNITY CAROLYN DAWLEY
C0208456 08/02/1946 SUSPENDED BEAR VALLEY COMMUNITY CHURCH DONALD FOOR
C2233852 05/08/2000 SUSPENDED BEAR VALLEY COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION TERRY WOODROW
C1993854 11/05/1996 ACTIVE BEAR VALLEY COMMUNITY HEALTHCARE DISTRICT FOUNDATION HELEN WALSH
C1287435 09/30/1985 ACTIVE BEAR VALLEY COMMUNITY HOSPITAL AUXILIARY DOROTHEA SCHWAIGER
C0306083 07/07/1955 DISSOLVED BEAR VALLEY COMMUNITY HOSPITAL FUND, INC.
C1604740 01/19/1988 SUSPENDED BEAR VALLEY COMMUNITY HOSPITAL, INC. VI COLUNGA
C0482507 12/16/1964 ACTIVE BEAR VALLEY COMMUNITY NURSERY SCHOOL AMY PREY
C3189110 01/30/2009 ACTIVE BEAR VALLEY SPRINGS COMMUNITY RECREATION FACILITIES FOUNDATION MARGARET WANGLER
C1764347 05/30/1995 ACTIVE BIG BEAR VALLEY COMMUNITY ARTS THEATER SOCIETY KAREN SARGENT RACHELS
1 2

Bear Valley appears to be a Ski Resort area.  Cloverdale has a multitude of corporations, this is only a sample.  Notice the “Status” column:

Entity Number Date Filed Status Entity Name Agent for Service of Process
C0978805 03/28/1980 SUSPENDED CLOVERDALE BOOSTERS ASSOCIATION, INC. DONALD SATO
C0175845 06/02/1938 SUSPENDED CLOVERDALE BRIDGE CLUB
C0412712 04/18/1961 ACTIVE CLOVERDALE CABANA CLUB NOE LONGORIA
C1602586 12/18/1987 ACTIVE CLOVERDALE CABINETS, INC. ARNOLD M. HAUG
C3098377 05/05/2008 ACTIVE CLOVERDALE CANINE ALLIANCE, INC. MICHAEL P CAMPBELL
C1235613 01/11/1984 SURRENDER CLOVERDALE CASTINGS INC. C T CORPORATION SYSTEM
C0576616 07/31/1969 SUSPENDED CLOVERDALE CB-ERS
C0767052 04/02/1976 SUSPENDED CLOVERDALE CHAPTER #2430 OF AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF RETIRED PERSONS, INC. DIANA TREANKLE
C0772429 06/24/1976 DISSOLVED CLOVERDALE CHILDREN’S CENTER, INCORPORATED
C1934975 05/15/1995 SUSPENDED CLOVERDALE CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP JACK REGO

Cloverdale is in Sonoma County (California Coast, wine country) and in 2010 had a population of 8,618 in 2010, and is in California’s 1st Congressional District (FYI)

Cloverdale is located in the northern portion of Sonoma County, and is the farthest city north in the San Francisco Bay Area, about 85 miles (135 km) north of San FranciscoU.S. 101 runs through the town, as does State Route 128.

The city has a total area of 2.6 square miles (6.7 km2), all of it land.

Cloverdale is located in the Wine Country, being part of the Alexander Valley AVA.

(Thank you, Wikipedia) 

That’s a whole lotta business for a population of 8,000….

Californians Aware:  The Center for Public Forum Rights (who warned the above 4 association heads (at least one of who is an attorney) to mind their legal compliance on the Brown Act as to closed-door meetings) registered as a corporation in 2004, which indicates they filed articles of incorporation and paid a fee, and have a board of directors of at least one person.  THey probably even have a bank account.

Entity Number Date Filed Status Entity Name Agent for Service of Process
C2646702 04/16/2004 ACTIVE CALIFORNIANS AWARE: THE CENTER FOR PUBLIC FORUM RIGHTS EMILY KATHLEEN FRANCKE

They even dutifully filed with the IRS for years 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, with a VERY modest budget (under $50K) and then stopped filing, meaning as of 8/23/2010, they are Delinquent as a charity.  However, their letter to the 4 association heads was written in November, 2010.  They do not appear to ever have sent anything to the OAG at all (either IRS return or RRF):

ull Name: CALIFORNIANS AWARE: THE CENTER FOR PUBLIC FORUM RIGHTS FEIN: 201008855
Type: Public Benefit Corporate or Organization Number: 2646702
Registration Number: 125817
Record Type: Charity Registration Type: Charity Registration
Issue Date: 12/31/2006 Renewal Due Date: 5/14/2008
Registration Status: Delinquent Date This Status: 8/23/2010

They apparently lost a leader very recently, but are still collecting donations — possibly illegally — from their website, not that this would put them in different company than groups they are reporting on, who financially I’m sure leave this group in the dust.  The foundation number shows no (none whatever) returns under this EIN# above, but the California OAG has information from somewhere that is posted.  Then again, neither does the “Association of California Healthcare Districts” show its face — at all under this name, on the foundation finder.  How could it, without even an EIN# to go on?

Notice: The IRS has announced processing errors on electronically filed Forms 990 for filing years 2007-2009. Learn more»

Search criteria: ( Name: association of california healthcare districts State: CA )
0 matching documents retrieved (0 displayed)

Be that as that may, their board of directors is scheduled to meet this week, December 2, 2011.

The Brown Act in California deals with closed-door meetings on actions of public interest.

Perhaps in this case, the term applies.  Futures WIthout Violence has outgrown its britches, and I will not cease reporting on this.

(They’d better go abroad, because word is getting out — principally from me, that I can see — is that media campaigns don’t result in character transformations, and failing to report on the family court scams, and DV organization sell-outs is still getting families killed.  Last one — in the same general locality as this group — is a recent headline — a San Jose Policeman and his wife, apparent murder-suicide, and they have two teenagers. (Not sure about this incident, it looks almost staged from the reporting, and the word “apparently” shows up a lot.  I also note it was a second marriage (or, he had a stepson).  San Jose is not too far from San Francisco, however in the Bay Area there are drive-by-shootings hitting young people (recently a one-year old child) and in more than one neighborhood.  I believe that a $36 million annual revenue, even after subtracting several salaries over $100 million and Esta Soler’s of over $200 million (per year) should demand — not just suggest — some proof of effectiveness before getting one more cent — and this every five years at a minimum.  FVPF (FVW) claims to have begun in 1980.  If the Washington, D.C. corporations search bears this out, then it did — but in SF at least, it only began in 1989, meaning, a company that (now) specializes in media based campaigns and trainings, has been lying in its own self-descriptions.  1980 v. 1989 = nine years’ difference in reporting incorporation is not a minor issue, and I hope my suspicions on that one prove wrong.

Entity Number Date Filed Status Entity Name Agent for Service of Process
C2583174 05/17/2004 ACTIVE RELATIONSHIP TRAINING INSTITUTE DAVID B WEXLER

 Surely Relationship Training Institute (which falls under this category) also has to — but not one RRF or IRS hyperlink has been uploaded to the public website for it) while – there is not one single RFI filing from 2006 – 2011.   And the OAG somehow, hasn’t commented on this, and the charitable status remains labeled “Current.”  I figure this means someone is receiving money somewhere, and the “slap you on your wrist” letter may have indicated said someones wasn’t paid their (kickback, or payoff) this time.  Whether this is instinct, speculation, or error will not be known until other facts are known.

I certainly don’t buy that no one in the criminal branch of California Government (with the Attorney General being the top) knows about this group, for one, on their “About Us” page (including the “Guest Faculty list with Sandra Brown, M.A. (Christian “Liberty University” with on-line degree programs) and no known bachelor’s degree, plus CEO of her group whose corporate and charitable (if any) identity isn’t know either), not to mention  “Brian Erickson, Esq., San Diego City Attorney’s Office )(do a FOIA, get the payroll and reimbursements!), says:

The Relationship Training Institute is approved by the San Diego County Probation Department to provide clinical training for all authorized county domestic violence treatment programs for court-ordered offenders.

and it (RTI) is running certification programs for “Domestic Violence Providers,” probably receiving some help (whether as direct or subgrantee) from an OVW STOP program grant:

The STOP Program: Understanding & Treating Domestic Violence
40-HOUR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE TREATMENT PROVIDER CERTIFICATION COURSE

May 3,4,5 & 11,12, 2012

 Domestic violence is not a crime, but a disease that can be treated.  Sounds like the AFCC plan to transform language is indeed working….)

So, it just seems odd that this group doing quite a bit of business with the California legal and judicial systems (cf.  “court-ordered” “Probation”) has somehow escaped the OAG’s radar as to filing its annual statewide returns. Unlike many sites, I don’t see any claim of when they started (“ask me no questions, I will tell you no lies”), but from the registration site it’s been fully 4 years, from the Secretary of state site (above), fully let’s say 6 (allowing for the 2011 year to end) of its not doing anything.  Does this make you go hmmm? in context?  (it should).

I think I know “what is it” about this — it’s simply that the profits from these practice are pretty hard to profile (trace).

I’ve heard it said (NOYB where) that a psychiatrist is a would-be physician, in other words, the field has a bit of an inferiority complex, even though they can indeed prescribe medications.  And psychologists are would-be psychiatrists, there is a professional jealousy, hierarchy and wish for glory.  I think the evidence supports this characterization, don’t you?  They like to pronounce, but without enough trade promotion, who’s going to give a hoot about what they say?

When psychologists begin to rule a nation – which FYI has already happened — it’s just about gone.  Not much difference from when religion does, which I think is my point in the ridiculous term “faith-based” with which we are now drenched in the field of social service, thanks to President Bush, President Clinton, and a while back (like 1994), Congress slipping up and letting a single HHS grant go to jumpstart the National Fatherhood Initiative, which story EVERy parent (male or female) should know in detail.  This now has morphed and multiplied to HHS funding groups with six-letter acronyms (and only one vowell, or none) like:

NRFCBI

GOFBCI

NCJFCJ

or 5-letter ones such as I’m going to profile today

ACFLS (“Inc.”)

Respectively, “National Responsible Fatherhood Capacity Building Initiative” (translation, more HHS funds and a Certfication College), Governor’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (this is in Ohio; translations — grabs more HHS money, in the form of TANF funds, for starters), National Center for Family and Juvenile Court Judges (HHS and DOJ supported, in Reno, NV), and the Association of Certified Family Law Specialists (as opposed to what kind of Family Law Specialists?) based in California.

Here’s a glimpse at the purpose and method of the “NRFCBI” — think Wade Horn, Don Eberly, Don Blankenhorn, Institute for American Values (another nonprofit), etc.  Thanks to the web and well-trained trainers fo trainers (and not a few on the Congressional Legislative Task forces of NFI, see its site), one can simultaneously be meeting behind closed doors with a new Governor or head of the Social Rehabilitation Services for an entire state — and be training others, and get a whole dang lot of this soaking up public funds to do it.

About NRFCBI

In partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Family Assistance,National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) has designed the National Responsible Fatherhood Capacity-Building Initiative (NRFCBI) to aid grassroots and community-based organizations through a series of capacity-building grants.

These grants will empower community-based organizations by:

  • developing each recipient’s organizational infrastructure
  • enhancing its leadership; introducing sub-awardees to new programming recommendations, and
  • improving each awardee’s connections in the community-at-large

Ultimately, the NRFCBI aims to strategically improve sub-awardees’ capacity to provide services to local fathers and families.**

The NRFCBI was developed with funds and support from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Family Assistance. Each awardee receives a one-time $25,000 award to strengthen fathers and families in communities throughout the United States.

** local mothers — including those dealing with said fathers, to their risk — can go jump in a lake.  Particularly if they hope to actually get the access visitation local sub-grantee, which allegedly is for noncustodial parents (not exclusively men) when there are problems with — access and visitation.

What — really, when you examine it, IS this National Responsible Fatherhood Capacity-Building Initiative?  If you had to explain it to an alien, new to earth, new to the financial system, barely understanding the Internet, and someone who thinks instead in more concrete (versus “virtual” wordy) terms — what would you say?

Let’s try:

And most of these are “nonprofits,” which of itself means ??

Think about it:  Tax-Exempt = an IRS Perk that lets others pick up the “Social Services” 

Tax-exempt status implies (this isn’t actually true, but the theory goes) one is providing a legitimate public service, so this group should be exempt from the indentured service the people they serve (theoretically), that actually results things the public can use — cars, food, steel, paved roads, clothes — things that wage-earners labor at for their business employer, some of which the public actually needs (like homes to live in).  (I omitted the public school system in their intentionally).

Most of my close look at family law fields comes down to the same point:

The presence of the IRS and the accumulation of wealth, per capita (unless people know or figure out how to become tax-exempt or work under the table, which we know happens) — has enabled more inflated programs, initiatives, institutes, centers and for that matter has simply centralized wealth in the wrong hands — in the hands of people with global aspirations, historic to their family (Bush) and associations (Project for a New American Century, Family Research Center, etc.).  Billionaires and millionaires with apparently time on their hands (boredom – “let’s go find someone else to abuse,” and “play dominoes with countries”) and worlds to change, or as it may be starve into oblivion, attack without cause (Iraq), colonize — although supposedly the USA was “independent” of the empire on which the Sun never set, or simply blow off the face of the globe.

No wonder at the individual and family level, such societies have trouble with so many people who do this at the local and family level.  Perhaps it’s the “trickle-down” effect.  The wealth didn’t trickle down, but after enough decades of abuse and deprivation of rights, angry crowds assemble, without sufficient outlets, and they explode — or go home and kick the wife.  Or husband.  Or child.

One guy in France recently, just murdered his three-year-old son in a washing machine, allegedly for misbehavior (he was THREE!) at pre-school.  He was 33.  The mother, of seven (age 25), tried to cover for him.  The neighbors knew of prior abuse in fact the five-year old sister of the three-year old knew, and reported (probably at the same time).  I cannot pardon this mother for lying — but I sure do wonder what conditions had her marrying at age 19 (married to get away from abuse at home) and having one child a year, approximately, with the bastard.  Now the surviving six are going to be in foster care.  I sure hope THAT Grandma won’t put up a fight for custody, after no reporting in time to save her grandson’s life.

I cannot give an answer articles like this (as a mother, I tried), but I sure did notice that the AMERICAN article, reporting on this — had 89 comments, and the summary made no mention of where was the mother.  Only 1 in 10 comments (about 8-9 maximum) even mentioned the mother which (to me, not having read all the links) for all I know was not in the picture.  She wasn’t in the reporter’s picture.  Those who mentioned the mother verbally crucified her along with the Dad.  Others debated contraception and abortion.  A Dad or two got on to say, hey, c’mon, we’re not all bad!  And I couldn’t do a 1500 word response, because more than 1500 word circumstances led to this situation.

What good did the preschool do?  Did it have any concept of abuse going on of a little kid at home, or were traumatized, or acting-out little kids so normal to them, or shut-down emotionally ones — who knows?  Perhaps — barring families like this — preschool just isn’t an appropriate place for three-year olds; maybe they need to be taken care of by the Moms, not by the state, or parochial schools, or daycare centers.   Maybe if there weren’t such a push for early childhood systems (YES< I know this was France, not the USA, but think about it), there’d be more money for other social services — like FOOD — to help support even married or cohabiting mothers while they take care of their children.

What really bothers me was a comment from a woman in Atlanta, Georgia — “don’t they have children’s services in France?”

Don’t they have awake citizens in Georgia?  So many problem situations lead back to there, including people who began in GEorgia and now are so problemmatic in (Scranton), PA area that some parents who began reporting, and getting payment records from one of the dynamic duo of parent coordinators (Boyan, Termini — Boyan was the Georgia connection, but both are among professionals recommended — from Kentucky Courts — in:

  1. Active Parenting Publishers

    www.activeparenting.com/

    Active Parenting programs are built to help educators create successful parent  Active Parenting Publishers has provided award-winning, video-based parenting classes for helping professionals since 1983. Kennesaw, GA 30144-7808 

These professionals (on that roster and others), one of them was so “helpful” that between her, a local judge and a local GAL, apparently, the FBI went and raided the courthouse, walking out with evidence — before a man who’d filed a lawsuit against inappropriate use of public funds could complete the lawsuit.  The thread is here:

http://scrantonpoliticaltimes.activeboard.com/t45346544/family-courts-co-parenting-coordinator-ann-marie-termini-vs-/?page=4

These parents and activists banded together on a forum, and have posted things such as a questionable professional’s contracts, payment vouchers, and made connections, for example (one post) Oct. 4th, from user “Toss Ross” (meaning — see below) — noticed (from the payments posted, presumably):

Is this just a coincidence or was there a natural huge spike in Termini’s income with the county?

January of 2008 is $2,320.00 total for her services.

January of 2009 is $3,220.00

January of 2010 is $4,110.00

January of 2011 is a huge increase to $7,050.00

Isn’t 2008 when Chet started appointing cases like crazy to Ross?

And all of a sudden Termini sees over 300% increase in business since Ross got all those case?  Did Termini get all of Ross’ cases.  Wow, if that’s the case Termini sure got lucky.

Coincidence?  I think not Mr. Fed.  I think not.

How about LiBassi? Did he get lucky, too?  Thank you, Mr. P.  What a treasure of information. I hope the investigators note the luck and the coincidences.

Ross is the GAL, and Termini the Parenting Coordinator.  He noticed a payment spike in 2008.  Well (coincidence?) in Georgia in 2008 a Boyan-Termini Business lost its incorporation status (National Association of Parent Coordinators), etc.

not here (note:  “0 comments”)

FBI searches Lackawanna County (Pennsylvania) court administrator’s office

BY BORYS KRAWCZENIUK (STAFF WRITER)
Published: November 15, 2011

FBI agents executed a search warrant on Lackawanna County Court Administrator Ron Mackay’s office Monday afternoon as part of an investigation into a program that provides lawyers for children in family court cases.

Mackay declined to answer questions about the visit and answered “no” when asked if he would provide Times-Shamrock newspapers a copy of the search warrant.

The visit lasted less than an hour. . .

A source familiar with the visit told the newspaper the search warrant was related to the county’s guardian ad litem system.

The FBI has been investigating the county’s guardian ad litem system, which is in the hands of one lawyer, attorney Danielle Ross. The county court sometimes appoints a guardian ad litem to represent the interests of children in family court disputes between parents, often in cases of divorce or when custody is at stake.

Late last month, agents served subpoenas at the county courthouse and administration building as part of their investigation. In September, a federal grand jury subpoena ordered County Controller Ken McDowell to produce all bills, invoices, receipts and statements for every case assigned to Ross.

Read more: http://citizensvoice.com/news/fbi-searches-lackawanna-county-court-administrator-s-office-1.1232501#ixzz1fzQiFd1s

As we have been talking about groups which are not filing consistently with the State (of California, mostly) for their Charitable Returns — or not doing so correctly — while doing sometimes (Futures without Violence) mega-business within the state — it seems appropriate to remind us about the strange financial relationship between KIDS TURN (SF) and the SFTC:

As below:

Record
Date Document Doc Type E/R Name
Show Name Detail Show APN Detail 12/14/2010 J099605-00 NOTICE LIEN R KIDS TURN
Show Name Detail Show APN Detail 12/14/2010 J098917-00 NOTICE LIEN R KIDS TURN
Show Name Detail Show APN Detail 12/11/2009 I887047-00 NOTICE LIEN R KIDS TURN
Show Name Detail Show APN Detail 01/27/2004 H647258-00 NOTICE LIEN R KIDS TUR

 

 

You can see the four dates.  Every single one of them shows that “SFTC” actually has a LIEN on Kids Turn, meaning (apparently) that at some point in time, the nonprofit Kids Turn RECEIVED some money (or other thing that would be due back) from the SF Courts.  They now owe this to the courts, creating a Recorded Lien (?).    This has happened in 2004, 2009 and twice in one day in 2010, generally around the end or beginning of a year (Dec/January).  Was this for tax reporting purposes as well?
A BIG — very big — stink was made in California about Judges — who are to be paid by the state — receiving payment from the states, and not counties.  Legislation was passed to retroactively immunize the state of California’s Judges from prosecution for this (after Richard Fine casework) let the entire judicial system have to be shutdown.  Then they got back to disbarring the honest man, and throwing him in jail improperly, not to mention somewhere in there cutting off his legitimately earned fees as an attorney.  We should review this from time to time as a reminder of JUST who one is dealing with in the august legislators and judicial authorities of the state with the largest court system in the country, and which is looked to as a model.  I fear that Big Brother in this case has been setting a lousy example, and I cannot hold common Californians responsible for having high-conflict families, either, or being “flawed,” problemmatic, or most recently, having multiple personality problems troubling the court professionals (Bill Eddy High Conflict Institute language, etc.) as we are so often described in AFCC conferences.
KT was founded and “board-ed” as we know by judges, attorneys, and supported by foundations, donations, and of course some of the attorneys and judges on the board at times no doubt also contributed to Kids’ Turn) — which is a parent education model that tried to get iits name — SPECIFICALLY — written into California Law as THE standard, and which model has been followed in other states.
OK, let’s do a hypothetical situation here.  Again, I’m speculating — which so far, is not seditious, it’s simply expressive and cogitational.  I do not believe this is prohibited activity (other than we’ve already discerned that reporting criminal activity against one’s self or one’s kids, including kidnapping, assault, battery, molestation, stalking or other threats — is a self-defeating in the family law forum.   The ROI is just not worth it!  You will be labled and ordered into parenting services, and have another court professional assigned to your high-conflict-parent self.
But let’s just suppose:   At any given time (given the rotating board membership of Kids’ Turn), let’s suppose that a presiding judge, commissioner, or other person is ALSO involved in litigation on a specific case, and a parent, or a parent’s business, makes a nice fat donation to Kids’ Turn at the time.  Money is clearly changing hands between this group and the courts (not to mention, it also showed up as a nonprofit vendor in the City and County of SF 2007, 2008 & 2009) — wouldn’t that compromise the integrity of any ruling?
And because the general public doesn’t have access to the list of contributors in any timely fashion (the OAG does), unless the ruling judges were scrupulously honest (something they don’t exactly have a reputation for) how could any parent wishing to check impartiality, once aware of this particular financial relationship, protect his or her custody case?  Without access to the information.  As we can see below — (I think it was San Francisco) one of the groups had had its corporate license suspended, but now is reinstated (after I reported….):
Entity Number Date Filed Status Entity Name Agent for Service of Process
C1657442 12/29/1989 ACTIVE KID’S TURN CLAIRE BARNES
C1970774 06/05/1996 ACTIVE KID’S TURN, SAN DIEGO JAMES REYNOLDS DAVIS
Here’s the previous version, as I blogged Aug 31, 2011 in “Chasing Down Charitable & Corporate Registrations for (more) Court-Connected Nonprofits”:
Entity Number Date Filed Status Entity Name Agent for Service of Process
C1657442 12/29/1989 SUSPENDED KID’S TURN CLAIRE BARNES
C1970774 06/05/1996 ACTIVE KID’S TURN, SAN DIEGO JAMES REYNOLDS DAVIS

 

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania (which is working on also passing a Faith-based initiative; I hope the bill stalls in suspended animation) civil rules of procedure were amended to specify REQUIRED use of “Kids First” (a fictitious name registered to Chet Muklewicz) a Kids’ Turn knockoff (same idea, same setup basically, different name); only this time, some of the locals caught on, reported, and in comes the FBI.  Believe me, I’ll teach them everything I know in the noble effort.  These are some seriously “high-conflict” parents (they have a serious conflict with court corruption) and may they never settle down, at least in that regard.

The forum was even shut down inappropriately without notice to the moderators, but the resulting suit pulled in the ACLU and up they went again

 

TIt’s self-evident that (given how simple it is to incorporate) the average “consumer” (litigant or “client” of any Family Court Services setup — even if they become aware of their local professionals’ addicition to forming nonprofits, & related for-profits marketing what the nonprofit sells, and memership associations to sell franchise opportunities for the same — while taking public funds as county employees, or contractors (etc.) — there is no way to keep up.

Nor should we have to — or be forced to spend the valuable ours of our lives as parents — or anyone else — tracking down crooked behavior on behalf of our own government that can’t (or doesn’t) keep up with it!

 

Just as certain parties wish to legislate their pet parent education (or abstinence education, for that matter) into mandated status — I believe that anyone who disagrees with this better think about how to get some legislating that starts with “JUST SAY NO!” to allowing ANY court employees or County employees staffing the courts, to form, be employed by, or be on the boards of, ANY nonprofit to which the court, jails, or county — will defer business.

The kazillions of diversionary programs presume that the US population has simply become unmanageable, riotous, incapable of monitoring themselves, dangerously volatile, horrible to children (universally, judging by how popular the foster care and adoption industries are) and in general incompetent idiots incapable of managing themselves or their neighborhoods.

 

I do not share this view.  Yeah, it applies often enough — but I have a problem with the parties stating this so often having been the ones riding herd for decade after decade anyhow — so this should be taken into account.  Starting with the public education system.  Talk about handing over one’s children to the current Administration the moment they go through the doors, and/or metal detectors.   No sir!   This is an institution that doesn’t handle competition very well, and the more centralized it gets, the less freedom the US has, and we’re pretty far down the fascist road already (referring to centralizing control and setting policy without going through Congress).  The more it fails, the more money it demands to compensate.

Taken as a whole, it is quite similar to the family court system, which people universally like to say is “broken” –but it seems to be working according to plan from what I can tell.  It’s the PLAN I have issues with — and which needs to be changed, if it cannot be tolerated by the public any longer.

 

 

Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up

December 8, 2011 at 8:32 PM

Posted in AFCC, Business Enterprise, Cast, Script, Characters, Scenery, Stage Directions, Lackawanna County PA Corruption Protests, Mandatory Mediation, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids, Parent Education promotion, Parent Education promotion, Parenting Coordination promotion, Psychology & Law = an AFCC tactical lobbying unit, Vocabulary Lessons, Who's Who (bio snapshots)

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