Police use Assault Weapons and Tank against Home School Mom wanting to protect daughter from Dangerous Medications | Health Impact News
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.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Was a Detroit mother right to resist efforts by Child Protective Services, police to take her child?
Was a Detroit mother right to resist efforts by Child Protective Services, police to take her child? | MLive.com
Maryanne Godboldo was looking only for help.
Last year, the Detroit mother went to the Children's Center, a group that works with troubled children, to seek advice and a treatment plan for her 13-year-old daughter. The girl, who'd never had behavioral problems before, was suddenly irritable and not her usual self following a series of immunization shots.
Maryanne Godboldo was looking only for help.
Last year, the Detroit mother went to the Children's Center, a group that works with troubled children, to seek advice and a treatment plan for her 13-year-old daughter. The girl, who'd never had behavioral problems before, was suddenly irritable and not her usual self following a series of immunization shots.
Justice for Maryanne Godboldo
Justice for Maryanne Godboldo
Welcome
Hello and welcome to our website.
Join us as we affirm the rights of our people to make decisions independent of force.
Join us in support of Maryanne Godboldo, who had the courage to challenge a state assault on parental rights.
Our site is new, so you will continue to see changes to the content in the coming months. We welcome you to continue to check our site for new updates about our organization and the cause we are supporting.
- The Justice for Maryanne Godboldo Action Committee
" An injustice to one is an injustice to all."
- M. L. King
Welcome
Hello and welcome to our website.
Join us as we affirm the rights of our people to make decisions independent of force.
Join us in support of Maryanne Godboldo, who had the courage to challenge a state assault on parental rights.
Our site is new, so you will continue to see changes to the content in the coming months. We welcome you to continue to check our site for new updates about our organization and the cause we are supporting.
- The Justice for Maryanne Godboldo Action Committee
" An injustice to one is an injustice to all."
- M. L. King
Billion Dollar Drug Company Law Firm Restructures Connecticut Welfare System « CCHR International
Billion Dollar Drug Company Law Firm Restructures Connecticut Welfare System « CCHR International
By Bob Fiddaman and Shelia Matthews
March 10, 2011
For some time now, Sheila Matthews has been suspicious about her home state of Connecticut’s treatment of its most vulnerable children. As a mother of two children and co-founder of Ablechild, her instincts led her to scrutinize the dubious relationships among Connecticut’s Department of Children and Family Services [DCF], the pharmaceutical industry and a billion dollar law firm who has defended the likes of Pfizer Inc and Merck & Co., among others.
Sheila’s investigation has led her on a journey that links a non-profit children’s advocacy group, with assets over $15 million [2009] with nationally-renowned mass tort and class action defense law firms, to the Connecticut DCF – an $865 million bureaucracy, as described by the Connecticut Mirror.
The Connecticut DCF serves approximately 36,000 children and 16,000 families across its four Mandate Areas:
1. Child welfare;
2. Children’s behavioral health;
3. Juvenile Services; and
4. Prevention.
Sheila’s Ablechild has been questioning the Connecticut DCF since 2003, when Ablechild demanded that the Connecticut DCF immediately ban the use of the antidepressant Paxil in its treatment of mental disorders after multiple studies confirmed Paxil increased the risk of suicide in children and adolescents. This was more than a year prior to America’s Food & Drug Association (FDA) announcement that all antidepressants, including Paxil, should bear a black box warning regarding this suicide risk. Ablechild was disturbed that children in state custody were being prescribed this dangerous psychotropic medication. Ablechild’s public pressure paid off, and the Connecticut DCF deemed Paxil unsafe for children and adolescents, and according to the DCF drug approval list, Paxil has not been approved for use in over eight (8) years.
In August 2003, less than one month later, Ablechild reported that the commissioner of the Connecticut DCF held a ‘behind closed doors‘ meeting with Glaxo officials. This meeting was reported by the Associated Press, who wrote:
The maker of the anti-depressant Paxil plans to meet this week with Connecticut officials, weeks after the State stopped using the drug to treat young people in its care.
GlaxoSmithKline, a British pharmaceutical company, is sending its regional medical director and a medical team to meet with officials from the Department of Children and Families. [Source]
Despite repeated requests from Ablechild, the Connecticut DCF refused to inform the public what was discussed at this secret meeting.
Eight years later, Sheila and Ablechild continue to raise concerns and investigate potential wrongdoings and conflicts within the Connecticut DCF. Last month, in February 2011, Sheila attended a meeting sponsored by the Connecticut Behavioral Health Partnership [CBHP], where its medical director, Dr Steven Kant, presented the Husky Behavioral Pharmacy Data. The CBHP is a state vendor that provides mental health services to DCF children. These services are paid, in part, by the State-run insurance program, HUSKY. Incredibly the pharmacy data presentation showed that dangerous psychotropic drugs, like Paxil, are still being prescribed to thousands of children and adolescents. In fact, the Pharmacy Data presentation showed that the HUSKY program, financed by taxpayer dollars, paid drug companies over $60 million for psychotropic drugs for Connecticut’s children and adolescents in 2009 alone – many of which are not approved by the FDA for use in the pediatric population and all of which carry the most serious warning possible regarding the risk of suicide.
According to the pharmacy data presentation: [Which can be downloaded as a Powerpoint presentation HERE]
More than 50% of HUSKY Youth Behavioral med utilizers are on stimulants.
Close to 30% of HUSKY Youth Behavioral med utilizers are on antipsychotics.
The pharmacy data also revealed the following:
Most Frequently Used Behavioral Meds for DCF-Involved Youth
Medications for ADHD
Ritalin (10%)
Adderall (5%)
Vyvanse (4%)
Strattera (3%)
Atypical Antipsychotics
Abilify (11%)
Risperdol (10%)
Seroquel (8%)
Anti-anxiety
Hydroxyzine (2.5%)
Antidepressants
Prozac (4.5%)
Zoloft (4%)
Zyban (3%)
Desyrel (2.5%)
Celexa (2%)
Mood Stabilizers
Lithum (3%)
Depakote (3%)
Lamictal (2.5%)
Curiously, none of the above medications are on the Connecticut DCF list of approved/unapproved drugs listed in its DCF PMAC document.
With this in mind, Sheila Matthews contacted Dr Steven Kant and inquired as to whether any of the above drugs were approved by the Connecticut DCF for use in children.
Dr Kant replied:
… the answer to your question is not that straight forward.. . . Medications may be indicated by age and/or by specific treatment needs so it is not either a simply “yes” or “no”. Also, some medications may have the age indication but for a totally different condition, such as anti epileptic condition. . .Also FDA indications are static, they do not change over time though medical practice is constantly evolving…
Contradicting the very document that lists Connecticut’s approved and unapproved drugs, a “check-off” list that verifies the status of medications, Dr Kant replied, “I don’t think a “check off” for each medication would work in terms of verifying their status.”
With such an ambiguous response from Dr. Kant, we found the DCF Approved Medication List on the Internet. This particular version was revised in 2009.
It appears that the DCF has approved drugs in children that have not been approved for children by the FDA. In fact, the FDA has issued multiple advisories and alerts since 2004 about the increased risk of suicide in children, adolescents and young adults up to age 25 who are treated with psychotropic medications.
And while Fluoxetine (Prozac) is the only medication approved by the FDA for use in treating depression in children ages 8 and older, it still carries a black box warning regarding the risk of suicide.
In contrast, the DCF seems to be ignoring the conclusions of the FDA. Its list of approved medication in children and adolescents include every single antidepressant except paroxetine [Paxil] and venlafaxine [Effexor].
Forest Lab’s citalopram [Celexa] – APPROVED
Forest Lab’s escitalopram [Lexapro] – APPROVED
Solvay Pharmaceuticals’ fluvoxamine [Luvox] – APPROVED
Pfizer’s sertraline [Zoloft] – APPROVED
GlaxoSmithKline’s bupropion [Wellbutrin -also marketed as an anti-smoking cessation drug under the name of Zyban] – APPROVED [1]
Alarmingly, the DCF has produced a guide entitled, “MEDICATIONS USED FOR BEHAVIORAL & EMOTIONAL DISORDERS – A GUIDE FOR PARENTS, FOSTER PARENTS, FAMILIES, YOUTH, CAREGIVERS, GUARDIANS, AND SOCIAL WORKERS” where it writes, “Most of the side effects from the medications are mild and will lessen or go away after the first few weeks of treatment.” The guide also points out possible side effects of SSRI’s/SNRI’s:
SSRIs and SNRIs:
Headache
Nervousness
Nausea
Insomnia
Weight Loss
One of the most dangerous side effects of these medications, suicidal thoughts/ideation, doesn’t even make the 5 bullet-pointed list. The Guide does, however, add the following: “Watch for worsening of depression and thoughts about suicide.”
The DCF Approved Medication List writes:
“The DCF Approved Medication List is a list of psychotropic medications that has been carefully established by the Psychotropic Medication Advisory Committee, a group of DCF and community professionals.”
Sheila has since investigated other advocacy groups that were concerned about the off-label prescribing of psychiatric medications to youths in state custody. This is where she stumbled upon Children’s Rights, a non-profit charity based in New York City.
In 2005, Children’s Rights employed ten (10) attorneys and a staff of 31. It claims to use its expertise to change child welfare red tape and scrutinize failing systems. If the child welfare system fails to respond, Children’s Rights files a lawsuit. If successful, it enforces reform and then monitors its implementation.
In 1989, Children’s Rights had in fact filed a suit against William O’Neill and the Connecticut state Department of Children and Youth Services [DCYS].
The suit charged that an overworked and underfunded DCYS failed to provide services including abuse and neglect investigations, adoption, foster care, mental health care, caseloads and staffing. The case has been pending for over twenty (20) years, and while there have been numerous arguments that DCYS should be more inclusive or has failed to provide certain services, the issue of massive off-label prescription of psychotropic medications has never been brought to the court’s attention.
Children’s Rights is chaired by Alan C Myers, a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, a billion dollar law firm which represents the pharmaceutical industry in mass torts and class actions. Myers is also co-head of the firm’s REIT Group [Real Estate Investment Trust].
Also, listed on the Children’s Rights website are individuals and law firms that have served as co-counsel on Children’s Rights’ legal campaigns to reform America’s failing child welfare systems, including:
Missouri - Shook Hardy & Bacon – Eli Lilly Co. and Forest Labs, defended the original Wesbeker Prozac trial in Kentucky and still defend Prozac, Celexa and Lexapro.
New Jersey – Drinker Biddle & Reath – GlaxoSmithKline attorneys – defended Paxil as local counsel in Philadelphia cases.
Oklahoma – Kaye Scholer LLP – provides work in Pharmaceutical Products Liability defense and employs an attorney who was former General Counsel of Pfizer, Inc.
A particular success for Skadden Arps occurred in 2010 when it secured a summary judgement ruling for Pfizer Inc. in a suit filed by two insurance companies who sought $200 million in damages for Pfizer’s predecessors alleged “off-label” marketing of its epilepsy drug, Neurontin.
Furthermore, in February 2011, Skadden Arps secured the dismissal of over 200 cases in a multi-district litigation pending against their client, Pfizer Inc. The plaintiffs had alleged injuries related to the use of Pfizer’s anti-epilepsy drug, Neurontin.
Neurontin, the generic version is called gabapentin, is prescribed by psychiatrists for a variety of “off-label” indications. It is often tried as an alternative treatment, when patients are unable to tolerate the side effect of more proven mood stabilizers such as lithium. [2]
Gabapentin has also been associated with an increased risk of suicidal acts or violent deaths.
This is a drug that has been known to cause behavioral problems, which include unstable emotions, hostility, aggression, hyperactivity or lack of concentration.
Children dependent on child welfare systems have rights and, according to its web page, Children’s Rights is dedicated to protecting them.
It should come as no surprise that the site fails to discuss the off-label prescription of non-approved psychotropic medications to children and adolescents, unless this falls under the ‘abuse and neglect’ category?
If Children’s Rights’ motive was to accomplish fixing the child welfare system then why hasn’t it investigated why thousands of children under state care are prescribed “off-label” psychiatric drugs? With a partner in a billion dollar pro-pharmaceutical law firm as its Chair, and supporters who also defend pharmaceutical products, is it safe to assume that its stance on the drugging of children is one that is being ignored?
Children’s Rights push to remove abused and neglected children into safety.
The basic question always comes down to trust. When power, money and a good cause is mixed, it is imperative to check motives. We would be less of a society if we didn’t check out all the facts. Abuse and neglect exist, always has and always will, but society is obligated to ensure those victims are not transformed into “good cause victims” and expensed out. There is no doubt we have a right to question the system and those who claim to promote change for the good of the children within it.
Children’s Rights Chairman, Alan C. Myers, Medical Director of Connecticut Behavioral Health Partnership, Steven Kant and the Connecticut Department of Children and Families may get their knickers in a twist with regard to an advocate of Ablechild and a blogger from Birmingham, UK questioning their motives but hey, what’s the downside of shinning a light on all these players, be they good or bad players?
Sheila’s concern is that Children’s Rights with its multi-million dollar budget and with the help of its billion dollar law firms, will continue to ignore the risks of these unapproved and dangerous medications, under the guise of helping our nation’s most vulnerable children. The question remains: how can the lawyers who defend psychotropic drugs also be the same lawyers who advocate for abused and neglected children to get into state welfare programs which place these children on the same drugs? The conflict is clear and obvious – and it poses an unmistakable danger to children who truly need our help.
[1] Bupropion [also known as Wellbutrin, Zyban] is a non-tricyclic antidepressant.
[2] Gabapentin
Bob Fiddaman is the author of the Seroxat Sufferers blog and the book, “The evidence, however, is clear… the Seroxat scandal.” Chipmunka Publishing.
Sheila Matthews is the co-founder of Ablechild and a mother of two children.
By Bob Fiddaman and Shelia Matthews
March 10, 2011
For some time now, Sheila Matthews has been suspicious about her home state of Connecticut’s treatment of its most vulnerable children. As a mother of two children and co-founder of Ablechild, her instincts led her to scrutinize the dubious relationships among Connecticut’s Department of Children and Family Services [DCF], the pharmaceutical industry and a billion dollar law firm who has defended the likes of Pfizer Inc and Merck & Co., among others.
Sheila’s investigation has led her on a journey that links a non-profit children’s advocacy group, with assets over $15 million [2009] with nationally-renowned mass tort and class action defense law firms, to the Connecticut DCF – an $865 million bureaucracy, as described by the Connecticut Mirror.
The Connecticut DCF serves approximately 36,000 children and 16,000 families across its four Mandate Areas:
1. Child welfare;
2. Children’s behavioral health;
3. Juvenile Services; and
4. Prevention.
Sheila’s Ablechild has been questioning the Connecticut DCF since 2003, when Ablechild demanded that the Connecticut DCF immediately ban the use of the antidepressant Paxil in its treatment of mental disorders after multiple studies confirmed Paxil increased the risk of suicide in children and adolescents. This was more than a year prior to America’s Food & Drug Association (FDA) announcement that all antidepressants, including Paxil, should bear a black box warning regarding this suicide risk. Ablechild was disturbed that children in state custody were being prescribed this dangerous psychotropic medication. Ablechild’s public pressure paid off, and the Connecticut DCF deemed Paxil unsafe for children and adolescents, and according to the DCF drug approval list, Paxil has not been approved for use in over eight (8) years.
In August 2003, less than one month later, Ablechild reported that the commissioner of the Connecticut DCF held a ‘behind closed doors‘ meeting with Glaxo officials. This meeting was reported by the Associated Press, who wrote:
The maker of the anti-depressant Paxil plans to meet this week with Connecticut officials, weeks after the State stopped using the drug to treat young people in its care.
GlaxoSmithKline, a British pharmaceutical company, is sending its regional medical director and a medical team to meet with officials from the Department of Children and Families. [Source]
Despite repeated requests from Ablechild, the Connecticut DCF refused to inform the public what was discussed at this secret meeting.
Eight years later, Sheila and Ablechild continue to raise concerns and investigate potential wrongdoings and conflicts within the Connecticut DCF. Last month, in February 2011, Sheila attended a meeting sponsored by the Connecticut Behavioral Health Partnership [CBHP], where its medical director, Dr Steven Kant, presented the Husky Behavioral Pharmacy Data. The CBHP is a state vendor that provides mental health services to DCF children. These services are paid, in part, by the State-run insurance program, HUSKY. Incredibly the pharmacy data presentation showed that dangerous psychotropic drugs, like Paxil, are still being prescribed to thousands of children and adolescents. In fact, the Pharmacy Data presentation showed that the HUSKY program, financed by taxpayer dollars, paid drug companies over $60 million for psychotropic drugs for Connecticut’s children and adolescents in 2009 alone – many of which are not approved by the FDA for use in the pediatric population and all of which carry the most serious warning possible regarding the risk of suicide.
According to the pharmacy data presentation: [Which can be downloaded as a Powerpoint presentation HERE]
More than 50% of HUSKY Youth Behavioral med utilizers are on stimulants.
Close to 30% of HUSKY Youth Behavioral med utilizers are on antipsychotics.
The pharmacy data also revealed the following:
Most Frequently Used Behavioral Meds for DCF-Involved Youth
Medications for ADHD
Ritalin (10%)
Adderall (5%)
Vyvanse (4%)
Strattera (3%)
Atypical Antipsychotics
Abilify (11%)
Risperdol (10%)
Seroquel (8%)
Anti-anxiety
Hydroxyzine (2.5%)
Antidepressants
Prozac (4.5%)
Zoloft (4%)
Zyban (3%)
Desyrel (2.5%)
Celexa (2%)
Mood Stabilizers
Lithum (3%)
Depakote (3%)
Lamictal (2.5%)
Curiously, none of the above medications are on the Connecticut DCF list of approved/unapproved drugs listed in its DCF PMAC document.
With this in mind, Sheila Matthews contacted Dr Steven Kant and inquired as to whether any of the above drugs were approved by the Connecticut DCF for use in children.
Dr Kant replied:
… the answer to your question is not that straight forward.. . . Medications may be indicated by age and/or by specific treatment needs so it is not either a simply “yes” or “no”. Also, some medications may have the age indication but for a totally different condition, such as anti epileptic condition. . .Also FDA indications are static, they do not change over time though medical practice is constantly evolving…
Contradicting the very document that lists Connecticut’s approved and unapproved drugs, a “check-off” list that verifies the status of medications, Dr Kant replied, “I don’t think a “check off” for each medication would work in terms of verifying their status.”
With such an ambiguous response from Dr. Kant, we found the DCF Approved Medication List on the Internet. This particular version was revised in 2009.
It appears that the DCF has approved drugs in children that have not been approved for children by the FDA. In fact, the FDA has issued multiple advisories and alerts since 2004 about the increased risk of suicide in children, adolescents and young adults up to age 25 who are treated with psychotropic medications.
And while Fluoxetine (Prozac) is the only medication approved by the FDA for use in treating depression in children ages 8 and older, it still carries a black box warning regarding the risk of suicide.
In contrast, the DCF seems to be ignoring the conclusions of the FDA. Its list of approved medication in children and adolescents include every single antidepressant except paroxetine [Paxil] and venlafaxine [Effexor].
Forest Lab’s citalopram [Celexa] – APPROVED
Forest Lab’s escitalopram [Lexapro] – APPROVED
Solvay Pharmaceuticals’ fluvoxamine [Luvox] – APPROVED
Pfizer’s sertraline [Zoloft] – APPROVED
GlaxoSmithKline’s bupropion [Wellbutrin -also marketed as an anti-smoking cessation drug under the name of Zyban] – APPROVED [1]
Alarmingly, the DCF has produced a guide entitled, “MEDICATIONS USED FOR BEHAVIORAL & EMOTIONAL DISORDERS – A GUIDE FOR PARENTS, FOSTER PARENTS, FAMILIES, YOUTH, CAREGIVERS, GUARDIANS, AND SOCIAL WORKERS” where it writes, “Most of the side effects from the medications are mild and will lessen or go away after the first few weeks of treatment.” The guide also points out possible side effects of SSRI’s/SNRI’s:
SSRIs and SNRIs:
Headache
Nervousness
Nausea
Insomnia
Weight Loss
One of the most dangerous side effects of these medications, suicidal thoughts/ideation, doesn’t even make the 5 bullet-pointed list. The Guide does, however, add the following: “Watch for worsening of depression and thoughts about suicide.”
The DCF Approved Medication List writes:
“The DCF Approved Medication List is a list of psychotropic medications that has been carefully established by the Psychotropic Medication Advisory Committee, a group of DCF and community professionals.”
Sheila has since investigated other advocacy groups that were concerned about the off-label prescribing of psychiatric medications to youths in state custody. This is where she stumbled upon Children’s Rights, a non-profit charity based in New York City.
In 2005, Children’s Rights employed ten (10) attorneys and a staff of 31. It claims to use its expertise to change child welfare red tape and scrutinize failing systems. If the child welfare system fails to respond, Children’s Rights files a lawsuit. If successful, it enforces reform and then monitors its implementation.
In 1989, Children’s Rights had in fact filed a suit against William O’Neill and the Connecticut state Department of Children and Youth Services [DCYS].
The suit charged that an overworked and underfunded DCYS failed to provide services including abuse and neglect investigations, adoption, foster care, mental health care, caseloads and staffing. The case has been pending for over twenty (20) years, and while there have been numerous arguments that DCYS should be more inclusive or has failed to provide certain services, the issue of massive off-label prescription of psychotropic medications has never been brought to the court’s attention.
Children’s Rights is chaired by Alan C Myers, a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, a billion dollar law firm which represents the pharmaceutical industry in mass torts and class actions. Myers is also co-head of the firm’s REIT Group [Real Estate Investment Trust].
Also, listed on the Children’s Rights website are individuals and law firms that have served as co-counsel on Children’s Rights’ legal campaigns to reform America’s failing child welfare systems, including:
Missouri - Shook Hardy & Bacon – Eli Lilly Co. and Forest Labs, defended the original Wesbeker Prozac trial in Kentucky and still defend Prozac, Celexa and Lexapro.
New Jersey – Drinker Biddle & Reath – GlaxoSmithKline attorneys – defended Paxil as local counsel in Philadelphia cases.
Oklahoma – Kaye Scholer LLP – provides work in Pharmaceutical Products Liability defense and employs an attorney who was former General Counsel of Pfizer, Inc.
A particular success for Skadden Arps occurred in 2010 when it secured a summary judgement ruling for Pfizer Inc. in a suit filed by two insurance companies who sought $200 million in damages for Pfizer’s predecessors alleged “off-label” marketing of its epilepsy drug, Neurontin.
Furthermore, in February 2011, Skadden Arps secured the dismissal of over 200 cases in a multi-district litigation pending against their client, Pfizer Inc. The plaintiffs had alleged injuries related to the use of Pfizer’s anti-epilepsy drug, Neurontin.
Neurontin, the generic version is called gabapentin, is prescribed by psychiatrists for a variety of “off-label” indications. It is often tried as an alternative treatment, when patients are unable to tolerate the side effect of more proven mood stabilizers such as lithium. [2]
Gabapentin has also been associated with an increased risk of suicidal acts or violent deaths.
This is a drug that has been known to cause behavioral problems, which include unstable emotions, hostility, aggression, hyperactivity or lack of concentration.
Children dependent on child welfare systems have rights and, according to its web page, Children’s Rights is dedicated to protecting them.
It should come as no surprise that the site fails to discuss the off-label prescription of non-approved psychotropic medications to children and adolescents, unless this falls under the ‘abuse and neglect’ category?
If Children’s Rights’ motive was to accomplish fixing the child welfare system then why hasn’t it investigated why thousands of children under state care are prescribed “off-label” psychiatric drugs? With a partner in a billion dollar pro-pharmaceutical law firm as its Chair, and supporters who also defend pharmaceutical products, is it safe to assume that its stance on the drugging of children is one that is being ignored?
Children’s Rights push to remove abused and neglected children into safety.
The basic question always comes down to trust. When power, money and a good cause is mixed, it is imperative to check motives. We would be less of a society if we didn’t check out all the facts. Abuse and neglect exist, always has and always will, but society is obligated to ensure those victims are not transformed into “good cause victims” and expensed out. There is no doubt we have a right to question the system and those who claim to promote change for the good of the children within it.
Children’s Rights Chairman, Alan C. Myers, Medical Director of Connecticut Behavioral Health Partnership, Steven Kant and the Connecticut Department of Children and Families may get their knickers in a twist with regard to an advocate of Ablechild and a blogger from Birmingham, UK questioning their motives but hey, what’s the downside of shinning a light on all these players, be they good or bad players?
Sheila’s concern is that Children’s Rights with its multi-million dollar budget and with the help of its billion dollar law firms, will continue to ignore the risks of these unapproved and dangerous medications, under the guise of helping our nation’s most vulnerable children. The question remains: how can the lawyers who defend psychotropic drugs also be the same lawyers who advocate for abused and neglected children to get into state welfare programs which place these children on the same drugs? The conflict is clear and obvious – and it poses an unmistakable danger to children who truly need our help.
[1] Bupropion [also known as Wellbutrin, Zyban] is a non-tricyclic antidepressant.
[2] Gabapentin
Bob Fiddaman is the author of the Seroxat Sufferers blog and the book, “The evidence, however, is clear… the Seroxat scandal.” Chipmunka Publishing.
Sheila Matthews is the co-founder of Ablechild and a mother of two children.
NATIONAL FAMILY RIGHTS PROTEST August 12, 2011
SENDING OUT INFO, AGAIN:
NATIONAL FAMILY RIGHTS PROTEST
to be held in front of every family court courthouse, in every county,
of every state:
link: www.govabuse.org
We need volunteers to head your own county for this protest/ rally/
demonstration/ convention!! Please consider being a Protest Location
Coordinator (PLC) if you can organize a rally in your neck of the woods;
contact me for more info!! thanks!!
OFFICIAL WEBSITE
National Family Rights Protest
“Government Abuse IS Child Abuse for Profit”
When: Friday, August 12, 2011
Where: See State/PLC tab for your area
Who: United States- Child/Family Rights Groups
Why:“We the People”
are no longer tolerating;
· Unjust Laws
· TAXPAYER dollars (billions) used to separate, and financially demolish families.
We the People” demand reformation of:
· OUR FAMILY COURT SYSTEMS including:
· Assigned Judges- (must be abolished)
· Court Appointed Guardian-ad-litem
(must be abolished-severely limited at a minimum)
· Family courts / records must be made public
· Court Gag orders are a violation of 1st amendment
· Adoption incentive payments (must be abolished)
Re; Adoption / Safe Families Act 1997
Every effort must be made for children to stay with Grandparents / family members instead of foster care.
· Grandparents / family must have visitation rights without current criminal treatment
· Families must be given assistance instead of removing their
Children example; removal due to gas shut-off
· Parents must be restored freedoms to raise their children
· Immediate access in all cases for children’s records
· Option to have a Jury, when requested in family courts
We the People” demand reformation of:
OUR FAMILY COURT SYSTEM including:
Assigned Judges- must be abolished
· We are stripped of our right to elect public servants (judges)
· Assigned judges cannot be voted out of office as they are ‘assigned’ to hear cases after pretending to retire.
· They have zero incentive to administer justice or follow law or legal procedures because they cannot be voted out of office after they ‘retire’ THEREFORE, we have been stripped of our legal right to elect (vote) for our judges
· Assigned judges are ‘DOUBLE-DIPPING’. Pretend to ‘retire’
but are assigned to family court cases, collecting approx; $485.00 per ‘day’ while collecting their retirement pay- all paid by taxpayers
· Court appointed guardian-ad-litem / advocate for child / lawyer for child
· Child Protective Services aka; CPS/ DHS / DFS/DSS/Foster Care and Adoption Services
NATIONAL FAMILY RIGHTS PROTEST
to be held in front of every family court courthouse, in every county,
of every state:
link: www.govabuse.org
We need volunteers to head your own county for this protest/ rally/
demonstration/ convention!! Please consider being a Protest Location
Coordinator (PLC) if you can organize a rally in your neck of the woods;
contact me for more info!! thanks!!
OFFICIAL WEBSITE
National Family Rights Protest
“Government Abuse IS Child Abuse for Profit”
When: Friday, August 12, 2011
Where: See State/PLC tab for your area
Who: United States- Child/Family Rights Groups
Why:“We the People”
are no longer tolerating;
· Unjust Laws
· TAXPAYER dollars (billions) used to separate, and financially demolish families.
We the People” demand reformation of:
· OUR FAMILY COURT SYSTEMS including:
· Assigned Judges- (must be abolished)
· Court Appointed Guardian-ad-litem
(must be abolished-severely limited at a minimum)
· Family courts / records must be made public
· Court Gag orders are a violation of 1st amendment
· Adoption incentive payments (must be abolished)
Re; Adoption / Safe Families Act 1997
Every effort must be made for children to stay with Grandparents / family members instead of foster care.
· Grandparents / family must have visitation rights without current criminal treatment
· Families must be given assistance instead of removing their
Children example; removal due to gas shut-off
· Parents must be restored freedoms to raise their children
· Immediate access in all cases for children’s records
· Option to have a Jury, when requested in family courts
We the People” demand reformation of:
OUR FAMILY COURT SYSTEM including:
Assigned Judges- must be abolished
· We are stripped of our right to elect public servants (judges)
· Assigned judges cannot be voted out of office as they are ‘assigned’ to hear cases after pretending to retire.
· They have zero incentive to administer justice or follow law or legal procedures because they cannot be voted out of office after they ‘retire’ THEREFORE, we have been stripped of our legal right to elect (vote) for our judges
· Assigned judges are ‘DOUBLE-DIPPING’. Pretend to ‘retire’
but are assigned to family court cases, collecting approx; $485.00 per ‘day’ while collecting their retirement pay- all paid by taxpayers
· Court appointed guardian-ad-litem / advocate for child / lawyer for child
· Child Protective Services aka; CPS/ DHS / DFS/DSS/Foster Care and Adoption Services
Grandparents to get legal right to access grandchildren after divorce
Grandparents to get legal right to access grandchildren after divorce | Mail Online
Grandparents are to be given legal rights to maintain contact with their grandchildren after a family breakdown or divorce.
A report will today set out radical proposals to enshrine in law greater access rights for grandparents when couples split, Whitehall sources revealed.
The review of the family justice system will also mean couples being pushed into mediation to sort out contact arrangements rather than resorting to the courts.
Grandparents are to be given legal rights to maintain contact with their grandchildren after a family breakdown or divorce.
A report will today set out radical proposals to enshrine in law greater access rights for grandparents when couples split, Whitehall sources revealed.
The review of the family justice system will also mean couples being pushed into mediation to sort out contact arrangements rather than resorting to the courts.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Child not returned to mother after woman takes son from hospital-Another Baby stolen by CPS from a Hospital
Child not returned to mother after woman takes son from hospital | KMOV.com | St. Louis news, Missouri news & breaking news | KMOV.com | News for St. Louis, Missouri
Another baby stolen from a Hospital by CPS!
ST. LOUIS (KMOV) – A local woman accused of taking her baby from Cardinal Glennon Hospital when doctors told her they suspected child abuse still does not have her child back even after the situation was deemed a misunderstanding.
Another baby stolen from a Hospital by CPS!
ST. LOUIS (KMOV) – A local woman accused of taking her baby from Cardinal Glennon Hospital when doctors told her they suspected child abuse still does not have her child back even after the situation was deemed a misunderstanding.
Elimination of foster care subsidies of grave concern-Go New Hampshire!!!!!
Elimination of foster care subsidies of grave concern - Fosters
Go New Hampshire!!!! Without the subsidies, do you honestly think the foster's and adoptive parent's will want these children? I think NOT!!!!!
Elimination of foster care subsidies of grave concern
By JENNIFER KEEFE
jkeefe@fosters.com
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
DOVER — A proposal in the state budget to end subsidies for adoption and foster care is anticipated to put many families in a critical financial situation.
While the financial impact of the cuts is as yet unknown, Jennifer Guillemette, director of the New Hampshire Foster and Adoptive Parent Association, said they had believed any subsidy above $20.39 per day would be reduced to that number, any subsidy at that amount would remain the same and all subsidies would be eliminated after July 1.
However, more accurate numbers are being discussed in Concord as legislators prepare for a vote on the budget Thursday, and there is a possibility that number could increase, she said.
In light of the impending vote, Guillemette said they have been outspoken about what an elimination of the subsidy would mean for New Hampshire families.
"Families who have subsidies have adopted children who are medically fragile and have significant medical needs," Guillemette said. "Subsidies have allowed them to afford the medical care and travel to take these kids to the appointments they need."
She said some have been unable to keep a steady job due to the significant medical treatment their children require and such subsidies have allowed them to stay at home and take care of the child.
Subsidies are provided based on a child's need. Adoptive and foster parents work with the Division of Children, Youth and Families to determine the needs of the children and what their long-term needs are going to be.
Foster's Managing Editor Mary Pat Rowland, who with husband Dan Daigle has adopted five foster children, said the loss of the subsidy would be a "devastating blow" to the household.
"It's a lot of money," she said. "It keeps us afloat. And we use our own money to provide a lot of things for them."
Guillemette said cutting the subsidy would not only impact families currently with foster or adopted children, but families looking to adopt.
Go New Hampshire!!!! Without the subsidies, do you honestly think the foster's and adoptive parent's will want these children? I think NOT!!!!!
Elimination of foster care subsidies of grave concern
By JENNIFER KEEFE
jkeefe@fosters.com
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
DOVER — A proposal in the state budget to end subsidies for adoption and foster care is anticipated to put many families in a critical financial situation.
While the financial impact of the cuts is as yet unknown, Jennifer Guillemette, director of the New Hampshire Foster and Adoptive Parent Association, said they had believed any subsidy above $20.39 per day would be reduced to that number, any subsidy at that amount would remain the same and all subsidies would be eliminated after July 1.
However, more accurate numbers are being discussed in Concord as legislators prepare for a vote on the budget Thursday, and there is a possibility that number could increase, she said.
In light of the impending vote, Guillemette said they have been outspoken about what an elimination of the subsidy would mean for New Hampshire families.
"Families who have subsidies have adopted children who are medically fragile and have significant medical needs," Guillemette said. "Subsidies have allowed them to afford the medical care and travel to take these kids to the appointments they need."
She said some have been unable to keep a steady job due to the significant medical treatment their children require and such subsidies have allowed them to stay at home and take care of the child.
Subsidies are provided based on a child's need. Adoptive and foster parents work with the Division of Children, Youth and Families to determine the needs of the children and what their long-term needs are going to be.
Foster's Managing Editor Mary Pat Rowland, who with husband Dan Daigle has adopted five foster children, said the loss of the subsidy would be a "devastating blow" to the household.
"It's a lot of money," she said. "It keeps us afloat. And we use our own money to provide a lot of things for them."
Guillemette said cutting the subsidy would not only impact families currently with foster or adopted children, but families looking to adopt.
Suit: Adoption agency didn't say kids were abused
Suit: Adoption agency didn't say kids were abused - Florida Wires - MiamiHerald.com
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Andrew Dolan and Suzanne Tyler just wanted a "forever family" when they adopted a son and daughter in 2009 through Family Support Services of North Florida.
Then the Vancouver, British Columbia, couple learned the boy and girl, now 6 and 8 respectively, had been in four foster homes and a failed adoption, suffering physical and sexual abuse the agency never disclosed to the Canadian parents. As they deal with a boy they say punches his nanny and a girl who threatens to kill her adoptive mother, the couple has sued the Jacksonville agency. Filed Tuesday, the lawsuit seeks money to care for the children, plus damages for pain and suffering. It says the agency failed to keep track of JD and WD, as they are named in the lawsuit, or advise the new parents of abuse.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Andrew Dolan and Suzanne Tyler just wanted a "forever family" when they adopted a son and daughter in 2009 through Family Support Services of North Florida.
Then the Vancouver, British Columbia, couple learned the boy and girl, now 6 and 8 respectively, had been in four foster homes and a failed adoption, suffering physical and sexual abuse the agency never disclosed to the Canadian parents. As they deal with a boy they say punches his nanny and a girl who threatens to kill her adoptive mother, the couple has sued the Jacksonville agency. Filed Tuesday, the lawsuit seeks money to care for the children, plus damages for pain and suffering. It says the agency failed to keep track of JD and WD, as they are named in the lawsuit, or advise the new parents of abuse.
Rally to Protest Child Welfare in North Platte
North Platte Nebraska's favorite newspaper - The North Platte Bulletin
Rally to protest child welfare in North Platte
by Ben Schwartz (North Platte Bulletin) - 3/30/2011
They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.
Rally to protest child welfare in North Platte
by Ben Schwartz (North Platte Bulletin) - 3/30/2011
They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.
“Year of the Grandparent” Launched to Highlight Impact of Kin on Foster Care
“Year of the Grandparent” Launched to Highlight Impact of Kin on Foster Care | EON: Enhanced Online News
“Year of the Grandparent” Launched to Highlight Impact of Kin on Foster Care
Campaign Also Stresses Need for Continued Investments in Vulnerable Children
March 29, 2011 06:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time
WASHINGTON--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) is marking the next year as the Year of the Grandparent: Keeping Kin Connected. A year of educational and informational activities—culminating with a grandparent award ceremony—comprise this important initiative, which highlights the growth in kinship care and showcases the improvements in child welfare policy and practice that have helped more children stay with family in lieu of entering foster care.
“Year of the Grandparent” Launched to Highlight Impact of Kin on Foster Care
Campaign Also Stresses Need for Continued Investments in Vulnerable Children
March 29, 2011 06:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time
WASHINGTON--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) is marking the next year as the Year of the Grandparent: Keeping Kin Connected. A year of educational and informational activities—culminating with a grandparent award ceremony—comprise this important initiative, which highlights the growth in kinship care and showcases the improvements in child welfare policy and practice that have helped more children stay with family in lieu of entering foster care.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Law Project for Psychiatric Rights
Law Project for Psychiatric Rights
The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) issued a statement recently, advising health care professionals that it has updated product labels on Anti-psychotic drugs, warning of pregnancy dangers to newborns including EPS and withdrawal symptoms.
Anti-psychotic drugs included in the new labeling process and contra-indicated for use in pregnancy include: Haldol, FazaClo, Fanapt, Clozaril, Risperdal, Zyprexa, Seroquel, Abilify, Geodon, Invega, Loxitane, Moban, Navane, Orap, Saphris, Stelazine, Thorazine and Symbyax.
The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) issued a statement recently, advising health care professionals that it has updated product labels on Anti-psychotic drugs, warning of pregnancy dangers to newborns including EPS and withdrawal symptoms.
Anti-psychotic drugs included in the new labeling process and contra-indicated for use in pregnancy include: Haldol, FazaClo, Fanapt, Clozaril, Risperdal, Zyprexa, Seroquel, Abilify, Geodon, Invega, Loxitane, Moban, Navane, Orap, Saphris, Stelazine, Thorazine and Symbyax.
Charges filed over girl's medications
Charges filed over girl's medications - UPI.com
DETROIT, March 28 (UPI) -- A woman arrested after a 10-hour standoff with Detroit police says she was protecting her 13-year-old daughter from unnecessary medication.
DETROIT, March 28 (UPI) -- A woman arrested after a 10-hour standoff with Detroit police says she was protecting her 13-year-old daughter from unnecessary medication.
Swain DSS director put on leave
Swain DSS workers banned from Cherokee
BRYSON CITY — The director of the Swain County Department of Social Services is off the job pending the outcome of a police investigation into the death of a toddler who was under the agency's care.
Read More:http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20110328/NEWS01/110328041/Swain-DSS-director-put-leave?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|Frontpage
BRYSON CITY — The director of the Swain County Department of Social Services is off the job pending the outcome of a police investigation into the death of a toddler who was under the agency's care.
Read More:http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20110328/NEWS01/110328041/Swain-DSS-director-put-leave?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|Frontpage
DCF worker pleads guilty to fibbing on report
DCF worker pleads guilty to fibbing on report | jacksonville.com
A former state Department of Children and Families investigator in Jacksonville has avoided trial by pleading guilty to falsifying a child abuse record.
A former state Department of Children and Families investigator in Jacksonville has avoided trial by pleading guilty to falsifying a child abuse record.
Ex child welfare investigator pleads guilty
Ex child welfare investigator pleads guilty - Florida Wires - MiamiHerald.com
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- A former child welfare investigator has pleaded guilty in Jacksonville to falsifying a child abuse record.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- A former child welfare investigator has pleaded guilty in Jacksonville to falsifying a child abuse record.
CCHR STL Side Effects of psychiatric Drugs
CCHR STL Side Effects of psychiatric Drugs
Download this CCHR report:
Click here: The Side Effects of Common Psychiatric Drugs
Because violence, suicide and heart attacks can be side effects of taking or withdrawing from various psychotropic drugs, we are providing you this information as a public service.
This report is an overview of the side effects of common psychiatric drugs and includes information on drug regulatory agency warnings, studies and other reports that may not appear in the packaging information for the drugs. For further information consult the Physicians’ Desk Reference, which can be found at http://www.pdrhealth.com.
Download this CCHR report:
Click here: The Side Effects of Common Psychiatric Drugs
Because violence, suicide and heart attacks can be side effects of taking or withdrawing from various psychotropic drugs, we are providing you this information as a public service.
This report is an overview of the side effects of common psychiatric drugs and includes information on drug regulatory agency warnings, studies and other reports that may not appear in the packaging information for the drugs. For further information consult the Physicians’ Desk Reference, which can be found at http://www.pdrhealth.com.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR)
CCHR STL About
About CCHR
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a non-profit 501(c)(3), public benefit organization whose purpose is to restore human rights to the field of mental health by ensuring that criminal abuses are speedily investigated and prosecuted and that people’s rights are legally protected.
The mission of CCHR is to expose and eradicate violations of human rights by the field of psychiatry
About CCHR
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a non-profit 501(c)(3), public benefit organization whose purpose is to restore human rights to the field of mental health by ensuring that criminal abuses are speedily investigated and prosecuted and that people’s rights are legally protected.
The mission of CCHR is to expose and eradicate violations of human rights by the field of psychiatry
Psychdata - Dedicated to exposing the fraud of psychiatry: Psychotropic Drug Use in Foster Care
Psychdata - Dedicated to exposing the fraud of psychiatry: Psychotropic Drug Use in Foster Care
Psychotropic Drug Use in Foster Care
In June of 2010, the US Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigatory arm of the Federal Government, to investigate the prevalence of prescribed psychotropic medications for children in foster care.
According to a number of foster care experts, children in foster care, who are typically concurrently enrolled in Medicaid, are three or four more times as likely to be on antipsychotic medications than other children on Medicaid. A Texas study from 2004 showed that 34.7 percent of foster children were prescribed at least one psychotropic drug with some children taking five or more.
Foster care parents receive more money if a child is on psychiatric drugs; the children are considered "special needs" children, needing a higher level of care.
Unfortunately, psychiatric drugs are not "care." Prescribing psychotropic drugs for children is especially troubling given their addictive nature and the potential side effects associated with them, including the increased risk of suicidal and violent behavior.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that House Bill 23 in the Georgia state legislature proposes to create an independent clinic review of the drugs foster children are given, which has support from both Democrats and Republicans because of its efforts to protect the vulnerable. Projections are that it will save the state millions of dollars, as Georgia spends $7.87 million per year in Medicaid funds on mind-altering psychiatric drugs for foster children.
Click here for more information about the side effects of psychiatric drugs.
Download the report "Drugging Foster Care Children" from the CCHR St. Louis website.
If you are aware of foster care children being abused by psychiatric drugs, please report this to CCHR and to the GAO.
Psychotropic Drug Use in Foster Care
In June of 2010, the US Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigatory arm of the Federal Government, to investigate the prevalence of prescribed psychotropic medications for children in foster care.
According to a number of foster care experts, children in foster care, who are typically concurrently enrolled in Medicaid, are three or four more times as likely to be on antipsychotic medications than other children on Medicaid. A Texas study from 2004 showed that 34.7 percent of foster children were prescribed at least one psychotropic drug with some children taking five or more.
Foster care parents receive more money if a child is on psychiatric drugs; the children are considered "special needs" children, needing a higher level of care.
Unfortunately, psychiatric drugs are not "care." Prescribing psychotropic drugs for children is especially troubling given their addictive nature and the potential side effects associated with them, including the increased risk of suicidal and violent behavior.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that House Bill 23 in the Georgia state legislature proposes to create an independent clinic review of the drugs foster children are given, which has support from both Democrats and Republicans because of its efforts to protect the vulnerable. Projections are that it will save the state millions of dollars, as Georgia spends $7.87 million per year in Medicaid funds on mind-altering psychiatric drugs for foster children.
Click here for more information about the side effects of psychiatric drugs.
Download the report "Drugging Foster Care Children" from the CCHR St. Louis website.
If you are aware of foster care children being abused by psychiatric drugs, please report this to CCHR and to the GAO.
Baby Stealer's Protest Being Held Accountable!
Child Welfare Workers Decry Homicide Charges Against Former ACS Employees - NY1.com
Child welfare workers held protests throughout the city on Friday, saying they were outraged after two of their own were charged in the death of a Brooklyn toddler. NY1's Ruschell Boone went to a protest in Queens and filed the following report.
Child welfare workers held protests throughout the city on Friday, saying they were outraged after two of their own were charged in the death of a Brooklyn toddler. NY1's Ruschell Boone went to a protest in Queens and filed the following report.
Gruesome photos, bogus computer entries are key to homicide case against child welfare workers
Gruesome photos, bogus computer entries are key to homicide case against child welfare workers
Gruesome photos of a battered 4-year-old girl. Autopsy reports showing she was drugged. Twine used to tie her to a bed.
Prosecutors seeking homicide convictions for the two child welfare workers assigned to protect Marchella Brett-Pierce have several pieces of dramatic evidence - but the most damning are a few bogus computer entries.
Gruesome photos of a battered 4-year-old girl. Autopsy reports showing she was drugged. Twine used to tie her to a bed.
Prosecutors seeking homicide convictions for the two child welfare workers assigned to protect Marchella Brett-Pierce have several pieces of dramatic evidence - but the most damning are a few bogus computer entries.
Nancy Schaefer Murdered for Investigation of High-Level CPS Crimes Pt1 And 2, The Sociopaths - Georgia
Nancy Schaefer Murdered for Investigation of High-Level CPS Crimes Pt2/2, A Smoking Gun - Georgia
Judge rules Texas Child Protective Services failed to prove abuse in taking couple's 3 kids
Judge rules Texas Child Protective Services failed to prove abuse in taking couple's 3 kids :: The Republic
HOUSTON — A Houston judge has reprimanded Texas Child Protective Services for not justifying removal of premature infant twins from their parents' custody.
State District Judge Michael Schneider called CPS removal of the infant daughters of Darcy and Tye Miller of Spring a "groundless cause of action" and ordered the agency to pay their $32,000 legal bill, the Houston Chronicle reported in its Sunday editions.
HOUSTON — A Houston judge has reprimanded Texas Child Protective Services for not justifying removal of premature infant twins from their parents' custody.
State District Judge Michael Schneider called CPS removal of the infant daughters of Darcy and Tye Miller of Spring a "groundless cause of action" and ordered the agency to pay their $32,000 legal bill, the Houston Chronicle reported in its Sunday editions.
Monday, March 28, 2011
ADOLF HITLER and today's SOCIAL SERVICE WORKER - “In the best interest of the child” sound familiar?
ADOLF HITLER and today's SOCIAL SERVICE WORKER - “In the best interest of the child” sound familiar?
by Cess Ssec on Sunday, March 27, 2011 at 11:00pm
Adolf Hitler's “In the best interest of the child” is a favorite line perpetually quoted by today's Social Workers the Child Protection Services and Family Court Judges: It was originally a slogan designed by Hitler’s social engineers.
The Lebensborn program was a Nazi organization set up by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, which provided and ran orphanages and relocation programs for children. After World War II, it was reported that Lebensborn was a breeding program. The program promoted the growth of "superior" Aryan populations by providing excellent health care and by restricting access to the programme with medical selections that applied eugenic and "race" criteria. During the war, Lebensborn also processed the adoptions by German families of children from occupied northern and eastern Europe, mostly orphans.
"In the best interest of the child, we are breeding superior aryan children"
The Lebensborn e. V. ('eingetragener Verein, "registered association") was founded on December 12, 1935, to promote the policies of Nazi eugenics. the Lebensborn homes were also used to house very young Polish children (between two and six) kidnapped to be Germanized. While older children were sent to institutions specifically dedicated to Germanization, the younger ones would merely be observed for a time at the home before adoption.
“In the best interest of the child"
Nicolas Stathopoulos
Social service crimes researcher
SSEC Social Service Economic Crimes (research)
by Cess Ssec on Sunday, March 27, 2011 at 11:00pm
Adolf Hitler's “In the best interest of the child” is a favorite line perpetually quoted by today's Social Workers the Child Protection Services and Family Court Judges: It was originally a slogan designed by Hitler’s social engineers.
The Lebensborn program was a Nazi organization set up by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, which provided and ran orphanages and relocation programs for children. After World War II, it was reported that Lebensborn was a breeding program. The program promoted the growth of "superior" Aryan populations by providing excellent health care and by restricting access to the programme with medical selections that applied eugenic and "race" criteria. During the war, Lebensborn also processed the adoptions by German families of children from occupied northern and eastern Europe, mostly orphans.
"In the best interest of the child, we are breeding superior aryan children"
The Lebensborn e. V. ('eingetragener Verein, "registered association") was founded on December 12, 1935, to promote the policies of Nazi eugenics. the Lebensborn homes were also used to house very young Polish children (between two and six) kidnapped to be Germanized. While older children were sent to institutions specifically dedicated to Germanization, the younger ones would merely be observed for a time at the home before adoption.
“In the best interest of the child"
Nicolas Stathopoulos
Social service crimes researcher
SSEC Social Service Economic Crimes (research)
Maryland auditors: Children placed with foster care providers with history of neglect, abuse
Maryland auditors: Children placed with foster care providers with history of neglect, abuse | Alex Pappas | Maryland | Washington Examiner
By: Alex Pappas 03/27/11 8:05 PM
Examiner Staff Writer Follow Him @AlexPappasDC
Officials in Maryland put 32 foster care children in six homes with a history of abuse or neglect, a state audit uncovered.
But the executive director of agency that oversees home placement said officials knew of the findings of neglect and abuse before the children were assigned places to live and granted exceptions -- having determined the children were safe and not at risk of harm.
The review by the state's independent Office of Legislative Audits identified the six caregivers in the homes as having had the children in their care between 2007 and 2010.
State regulations prohibit children from being placed in either foster homes or in the homes of extended family where there has been evidence of abuse or neglect -- unless a local director grants an exception. But the audit said paperwork reflecting that kind of exception could not be found.
The audit said that in all but one of the six homes, the people were kinship providers, meaning they were related to the child.
"It indicated that the kids shouldn't have been in these locations," Bruce Myers, the state's legislative auditor, said of his office's review.
Carnitra White, executive director of the state's Social Services Administration, said local officials made exceptions for the six providers but didn't complete the required paperwork.
"It wasn't the fact that we did not know there had been a finding of abuse or neglect," she said, blaming the mix-up on officials not signing papers.
The area has seen foster parent horror stories before. A woman in Calvert County who adopted three foster care children in D.C. was convicted in 2010 of killing and freezing two of the girls. According to reports, officials in the District allowed her to adopt the girls despite a criminal past.
The instances of abuse or neglect of the six Maryland providers occurred before the state placed children in their homes, White said. She said the agency conducts criminal background checks on all providers.
Almost all of the six had histories of neglect, not abuse, White said. She defined neglect as leaving a child unsupervised or not taking child to a medical appointment, for example.
In a letter responding to the audit, the Maryland Department of Human Resources, which oversees the Social Services Administration, said an internal review was conducted of the six homes and found no evidence of additional child maltreatment.
The six homes were in Allegany, Baltimore and Cecil counties, a spokeswoman for the agency said. The auditors wrote there may be other cases they weren't able to identify.
apappas@washingtonexaminer.com
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/maryland/2011/03/maryland-auditors-children-placed-foster-care-providers-history-neglect-abuse#ixzz1HwccULFP
By: Alex Pappas 03/27/11 8:05 PM
Examiner Staff Writer Follow Him @AlexPappasDC
Officials in Maryland put 32 foster care children in six homes with a history of abuse or neglect, a state audit uncovered.
But the executive director of agency that oversees home placement said officials knew of the findings of neglect and abuse before the children were assigned places to live and granted exceptions -- having determined the children were safe and not at risk of harm.
The review by the state's independent Office of Legislative Audits identified the six caregivers in the homes as having had the children in their care between 2007 and 2010.
State regulations prohibit children from being placed in either foster homes or in the homes of extended family where there has been evidence of abuse or neglect -- unless a local director grants an exception. But the audit said paperwork reflecting that kind of exception could not be found.
The audit said that in all but one of the six homes, the people were kinship providers, meaning they were related to the child.
"It indicated that the kids shouldn't have been in these locations," Bruce Myers, the state's legislative auditor, said of his office's review.
Carnitra White, executive director of the state's Social Services Administration, said local officials made exceptions for the six providers but didn't complete the required paperwork.
"It wasn't the fact that we did not know there had been a finding of abuse or neglect," she said, blaming the mix-up on officials not signing papers.
The area has seen foster parent horror stories before. A woman in Calvert County who adopted three foster care children in D.C. was convicted in 2010 of killing and freezing two of the girls. According to reports, officials in the District allowed her to adopt the girls despite a criminal past.
The instances of abuse or neglect of the six Maryland providers occurred before the state placed children in their homes, White said. She said the agency conducts criminal background checks on all providers.
Almost all of the six had histories of neglect, not abuse, White said. She defined neglect as leaving a child unsupervised or not taking child to a medical appointment, for example.
In a letter responding to the audit, the Maryland Department of Human Resources, which oversees the Social Services Administration, said an internal review was conducted of the six homes and found no evidence of additional child maltreatment.
The six homes were in Allegany, Baltimore and Cecil counties, a spokeswoman for the agency said. The auditors wrote there may be other cases they weren't able to identify.
apappas@washingtonexaminer.com
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/maryland/2011/03/maryland-auditors-children-placed-foster-care-providers-history-neglect-abuse#ixzz1HwccULFP
What Has Government Done to our Families?
What Has Government Done to our Families?
By Allan Carlson
Thursday, 05 February 2004 10:00
There are consequences when a country's children are raised by the State. Allan Carlson examines the historical example of Swedish government education.
The fate of families and children in Sweden shows the truth of Ludwig von Mises's observation that "no compromise" is possible between capitalism and socialism. Here I show how the welfare state's growth can be viewed as the transfer of the "dependency" function from families to state employees. The process began in 19th-century Sweden, through the socialization of children's economic time via school attendance, child labor, and state old-age pension laws. These changes, in turn, created incentives to have only a few, or no children. In the 1930s, social democrats Gunnar and Alva Myrdal used the resulting "depopulation crisis" to argue for the full socialization of child rearing. Their "family policy," implemented over the next forty years, virtually destroyed the autonomous family in Sweden, substituting a "client society" where citizens are clients of public employees. While Sweden is now trying to break out of the welfare state trap, the old arguments for the socialization of children have come to the United States.
In his short volume Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises notes that modern socialism "holds the individual in tight rein from the womb to the tomb," while "the children and the adolescents are firmly integrated into the all-embracing apparatus of state control." In another context, he contrasts "capitalism" with "socialism," and concludes: "There is no compromise possible between these two systems. Contrary to a popular fallacy there is no middle way, no third system possible as a pattern of a permanent social order." My remarks focus on the validity of the latter statement, seen through the fate of family and children in the quintessential "middle way" state of modern Sweden.
In turning to Sweden, we find a classic case of bureaucratic manipulation to destroy the state's principle rival as a focus of loyalty: the family. Viewing this rivalry between state and family, it is important to understand that a basic level of "dependency" is a constant in all societies. In every human community, there are infants and children, persons who are very old, individuals who have severe handicaps, and others who are seriously ill. These people cannot take care of themselves. Without help from others, they will die. Every society must have a way of giving care to these dependents. Under the domain of liberty, the natural institution of the family (supplemented and supported by local communities and voluntary organizations) provides the protection and care which these "dependent" people need. Indeed, it is in the autonomous family -- and only in the family -- where the pure socialist principle actually works: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
The rise of the welfare state can be written as the steady transfer of the "dependency" function from the family to the state; from persons tied together by blood, marriage or adoption to persons tied to public employees. The process began in Sweden in the mid-19th century, through bureaucratic projects that began dismantling the bonds between parents and their children. In classic pattern, the first assertion of state control over children came in the 1840s, with the passage of a mandatory school attendance law. While justified as a measure to improve the knowledge and welfare of the people, the deeper dynamic was the socialization of children's time, through the assumptions that state functionaries -- the Swedish kingdom's bureaucrats -- knew better than parents how children's time should be spent, and that parents could not be expected or trusted to protect their children from exploitation.
The next step came in 1912, with legislation that effectively banned child labor in factories, and to some degree on farms. Again, the implicit assumption was that state welfare officials were better judges of the use of children's time, and more compassionate toward children than parents were or could be.
The final step came at about the same time, when the Swedish government implemented a program of old-age or retirement pensions that quickly became universal. The underlying act here was the socializing of another dependency function, this time, the dependency of the "very old" and the "weak" on mature adults. For eons, the care of the elderly had been a family matter. Henceforward, it would be the state's concern. Taking all of these reforms together, the net effect was to socialize the economic value of children. The natural economy of the household, and the value that children had brought their parents -- be it as workers in the family enterprise or as an 'insurance policy' for old age -- was stripped away. Parents were still left with the costs of raising the children, but the economic gain they would eventually represent had been seized by "society," meaning the bureaucratic state.
The predictable result of this change, as an economist of the "Gary Becker School" would tell you, would be a diminished demand for children, and this is exactly what occurred in Sweden. Starting in the late 1800s, Swedish fertility went into free-fall and by 1935, Sweden had the lowest birthrate in the world, below the zero-growth level where a generation just managed to replace itself.
The standard theory of demographic transition has long been that this fall in the birthrate was the necessary, inevitable consequence of modern industrialization: that the incentives of a capitalist economy disrupt traditional family relations. While it is true that the traditional family structure faces a new kind of stress in industrial society, more recent work suggests that the greater challenge -- in fact -- derives from the growth of the state.
Looking at the experience of many nations, Princeton University demographer Norman Ryder traces the central common cause of fertility decline to the introduction of mass public education. "Education of the junior generation is a subversive influence," he says. "Political organizations, like economic organizations, demand loyalty and attempt to neutralize family particularism. There is a struggle between the family and the state for the minds of the young," where the mandatory state school serves as "the chief instrument for teaching citizenship, in a direct appeal to the children over the heads of their parents." Confirming the universal validity of the Swedish example, Ryder adds that while mandatory education raises the cost to parents of children, bans on child labor further reduce their economic value. Moreover, a state system of social security cuts the natural bonds between generations of a family in still another way, leaving the state as the new locus of first loyalty.
While a nation's family system may reorganize, for a time, around the nuclear "husband-wife" unit of reproduction, even that basis of independence eventually dissolves. The end result of state intervention, Ryder says, is progressively diminished fertility, with living individuals left standing alone in a dependent relationship with the government.
The contradictions inherent in this method of social organization welled up in Sweden in the early 1930s. With the birth rate having fallen below the zero-growth level, Swedish conservatives grew frantic over the "depopulation threat," and the disappearance of Swedish children. These voices argued that the root problem was spiritual dislocation, or the decline of Christianity, or the rise of materialism, or personal selfishness. No one -- not a single soul on the political right -- focused on problems to be found in the educational and social legislation of the past 90 years. So as the "population crisis" reached high boil in Sweden, the opportunity was ripe for demagoguery and exploitation.
Into this situation walked two young Swedish social scientists, Gunnar Myrdal and his wife, Alva Myrdal. Before turning to their use and abuse of the population issue, allow me to say a few things about their background, and the influences brought to bear on their work.
Bureaucratic paternalism had a long history in Sweden, rooted in the state apparatus constructed by the Vasa Kings in the early 16th century, and advanced through the crushing of regional autonomy in wake of the unsuccessful Nils Dacke revolt of the 1540s. Yet the Myrdals represented something new, and "very 20th century." They were social scientists -- intellectuals from the academy -- dedicated to a new kind of state activism. As Alva Myrdal herself explained: "Politics has [now]...been brought under the control of logic and technical knowledge and so has been forced to become in essence constructive social engineering."
Second, even though we Americans have been hounded by repeated comments on the wisdom of "the Swedish model," it is important to note how much of the new Swedish welfare state rested on American experimentation. Both Myrdals spent the 1929?30 academic year, the waning months of "The Progressive Era," traveling in the United States, on fellowships provided by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation. During this time, Alva Myrdal fell under the influence of the so-called "Chicago school of sociology." William Ogburn, in particular, impressed on her his view that the state and the school had inevitably grown at the family's expense; and that the family faced a progressive "loss of function" as it retreated out of historical necessity to an exclusive concern with personality. Alva Myrdal also spent considerable time at the Child Development Institute of Columbia University and visiting experimental preschools and day care centers operating on Rockefeller Foundation grants, examples of social parenting that deeply impressed her.
For his part, Gunnar Myrdal's work at Columbia and at the University of Chicago made him aware of the tremendous political potential to be found in Sweden's emerging "population crisis" debate.
In an important 1932 article, "Social Policy's Dilemma," for the avant garde Swedish journal, Spektrum, Gunnar Myrdal put his finger on the necessary policy lever. He began by tracing the compromise in Europe before 1914 of a "liberal-infused socialism" with a "socialist-infused liberalism." Under this arrangement, he said, 19th century liberalism had abandoned its Malthusian pessimism and free-market dogmatism and instead embraced the necessity of reforms to protect workers; while the socialists had given up the goals of revolution and massive property redistribution, expressing contentment with incremental steps to aid the working class.
The World War, though, had shattered this compromise. Myrdal declared that classical liberalism was now dead, its partisans scattered. He also argued that the workers movement needed to be re-radicalized, and seek a new kind of social policy. Under the old compromise, Myrdal stated, social policy had been symptom-oriented, giving help to the poor, or the sick. The new social policy, he declared, must be preventive in nature. Social scientists, using modern research techniques, now had it in their power to use the state to prevent social pathologies from emerging. When based on human-oriented value premises and a rational science, he said, this preventive social policy led to a "natural marriage" of the correct technical with the politically radical solution. Myrdal specifically pointed to Sweden's population crisis, as an opportunity for rational sociological analysis to produce effective and radical ideas for state-enforced change.
The Myrdals fleshed out this program in their best selling 1934 book, Crisis in the Population Question, a brilliantly argued volume which substantially transformed Sweden. While Swedish conservatives continued to fret over sexual immorality, the Myrdals pointed directly at the contradictions created by an incomplete welfare state. Prior government actions such as mandatory school attendance, the ban on child labor, and state old age pensions, they admitted, had stripped away the value of children to parents. But the costs of children remained at home. In consequence, children had now become the chief cause of poverty. Given the incentives set up by the state, the very persons who contributed the most to the nation's survival by having children were dragged down into poverty, shoddy housing, poor nutrition, and limited recreational opportunities. A voluntary choice between poverty with children or a higher living standard without them was what young couples now faced. Young adults were forced to support the retired and the needy through the state's welfare system, and also the children to which they gave life. Under this multiple burden, they had chosen to reduce their number of children as the only factor over which they had control. The result, for Sweden, was depopulation and the specter of national extinction.
According to the Myrdals, there were only two alternatives. The first -- the dismantling of state schooling, child labor laws, and state old-age pensions in order to restore family autonomy -- was "not even worthy of being discussed." The other, and only practical alternative, was to complete the welfare state, and remove the existing disincentives to children by socializing virtually all of the direct costs involved in their birth and rearing. The real argument went something like this: in order to solve the problems caused, in large part, by prior state interventions, the government now needed to intervene completely.
This meant a commitment to a new kind of welfarism: "It concerns a preventive social policy, closely guided by the goal of raising the quality of human material, and at the same time carrying into effect radical redistribution policies making a significant portion of the child-support burden the concern of all society." The State bureaucracy had never before enjoyed such a mandate. By the very nature of the word, a "preventive" policy opened all Swedish families up to supports, scrutiny, and control. One could never know where a problem might occur: therefore, universal measures of bureaucratic intervention must be implemented to make prevention a reality.
Stressing this imperative, the Myrdals concluded: "the population question is hereby transformed into the most effective argument for a thorough and radical socialist remodeling of society." The alternative, they said simply, was national extinction.
Their program embraced universal state allowances for children's clothing, a universal health insurance plan, a universal entitlement to day care, state- operated summer camps for children, free school breakfasts and lunches, state-funded family housing, birth bonuses to cover the indirect costs of having babies, marriage loans, the expansion of state maternity and midwife services, centralized economic planning, and so on. Their goal was, in effect, the socialization of consumption, providing all families with a rationally determined, fairly uniform set of state services, managed by public employees, and funded through taxes imposed on the rich and the childless.
Criticisms that their program, in fact, threatened the family brought a characteristically blunt response: "the little modern family is almost...pathological," the Myrdals said. "The old ideals must die out with the generations which supported them."
Appeals to liberty and family autonomy evoked equally biting responses. The Myrdals charged that the "false individualistic desire" by parents for the "freedom" to raise their own children had an unhealthy origin: "...much of the tiresome pathos which defends 'individual freedom' and 'responsibility for one's own family,' is based on a sadistic disposition to extend this 'freedom' to an unbound and uncontrolled right to dominate others."
In order to raise children fit for a socially cooperative world, "we must free children more from ourselves," turning them over to state certified experts for care and training. The collective day nursery run by state-controlled experts, rather than the pathological little family, was more in line with the proper goals of eliminating social classes and building a society based on economic democracy.
Between 1935 and 1975, the Myrdals' domestic agenda guided, by fits and starts, the evolution of the Swedish welfare state. Periods of political and bureaucratic activism -- 1935 to 1938, 1944 to 1948, and 1965 to 1973 -- were punctuated by evidence of stubborn resistance among the Swedish populace, or by budgetary restraints that delayed full implementation. Yet by the end of the process, most elements of the Myrdals' family agenda were in place.
What were the specific results? With the family stripped, by state fiat, of all productive functions, of all insurance and welfare functions, and of most consumption functions, it should cause little surprise that ever fewer Swedes chose to live in families. The marriage rate fell to a record low among modern nations, while the proportion of adults living alone soared. In central Stockholm, for example, fully two-thirds of the population lived in single-person households by the mid-1980s. With the costs and benefits of children fully socialized, and with the natural economic gains from marriage intentionally eliminated by law, the bearing of children was also severed from marriage: by 1990, well over half of Swedish births were outside of marriage.
Children, too, enjoyed as 'rights' a great parcel of benefits provided by the state: free medical and dental care; abundant and cheap public transport; free meals; free education; and even state "child advocates" available to intervene when parents overstepped their bounds. Children, too, no longer needed "family": the state now served as their real parent.
Indeed, Rutgers University sociologist David Poponoe suggests that the term 'welfare state' no longer does justice to this form of total personal dependence on the government. Instead, he uses the label, "client society," to describe a nation "in which citizens are for the most part clients of a large group of public employees who take care of them throughout their lives."
In Sweden, the elderly are "free" of potential dependence on their grown children; infants, small children, and teenagers are "free" of reliance on their parents for protection and basic support; grown adults are "free" of meaningful obligations either to their biological parents, or to their children; and men and women are "free" of any of the mutual promises once embodied in marriage. This "freedom" has come in exchange for a universal, common dependence on the state, and the nearly complete bureaucratization of what had once been family living. Von Mises was right: there proved to be no "middle way" here; rather, Sweden represents a more complete and therefore more oppressive version of the socialist domestic order, one surpassing in its comprehensiveness even that of the Soviet Union. But the modern Swedish welfare state contains its own contradictions, problems now coming to the fore.
To begin with, the "demographic contradiction" of the welfare state is not so easily banished. In a rent-seeking democratic order, those who control the greater number of votes enjoy a greater gain. And even in Sweden, it remains true that the old vote; while children do not. While Swedish "family policy" has been effective enough to destroy the family as an independent entity, it has not been successful in ending the net flow of state programs and income from the relatively young to the relatively old.
Second, the client state can never provide all the needed care in a society, simply because to do so would be too expensive. Yet at the same time, families in the welfare state are penalized when they do provide care to their own, because they thereby give up the benefits of public care; and they are rewarded with public care only when they stop giving family-based care. Danish welfare official Bent Andersen has explained the problem this way:
"The rationally founded welfare state has a built-in contradiction: if it is to fulfill its intended functions, its citizens must refrain from exploiting to the fullest its services and provisions -- that is, they must behave irrationally, motivated by informal social controls, which, however, tend to disappear as the welfare state grows."
This contradiction has been the driving force behind the recent rebellion against the modern client state, a rebellion which started (among the Scandinavian countries) in Denmark and Norway through the electoral success of the anti-state Progress parties, and which has now spread to Sweden. Just last month, the Swedish Social Democrats suffered a major political defeat, losing power in national elections to a Center-Right coalition, bound together by a common pledge to cut back the welfare state. Particularly startling was the emergence of two new parties, which won blocks of seats in Sweden's Riksdag (or Parliament) for the first time.
The first of these -- the Christian Democrats -- made the sorry state of Swedish family life their central platform issue. They called for a reduction in bureaucratic interference in family relations, and an end to state incentives that encourage births out-of-wedlock and discourage the parental care of children. The other novel party, called New Democracy, combines libertarian themes of sharp tax reductions, sharp benefit reductions, and an end to foreign aid with measures to curb immigration. Together, these new groups hold the balance of parliamentary power. Eliminating welfare benefits has rarely been successful, in any modern country; but for the first time since the 1930s, the Swedes have an opportunity to recover some measure of family autonomy and personal liberty.
By all the signs, then, it would appear that the Swedish model, "the middle way," the third option, has been discredited, at the same time as Communism, the second way, has collapsed into a heap. Unfortunately, however, the Swedish model lives -- and may soon thrive -- here in the United States, where the very logic and arguments used by the Myrdals in the 1930s are on the verge of political success.
In a 1991 volume entitled When the Bough Breaks, issued by Basic Books (the pre-eminent neo-conservative publishing house), economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett writes: "In the [modern] world, not only are children 'worthless' to their parents, they involve major expenditures of money. Estimates of the cost of raising a child range from $171,000 to $265,000. In return for such expenditures, 'a child is expected to provide love, smiles, and emotional satisfaction,' but no money or labor."
She continues: "Which brings us to a critical American dilemma. We expect parents to expend extraordinary amounts of money and energy on raising their children, when it is society at large that reaps the material rewards. The costs are private; the benefits are increasingly public. . . . In the modern age, relying on irrational parental attachment to underwrite the child-rearing enterprise is a risky, foolhardy, and cruel business. It is time we learned to share the costs and burdens of raising our children. It is time to take some collective responsibility for the next generation."
Hewlett goes on to lay out a new policy agenda for America, including mandated parental leave, guaranteed free access to maternal and child health care, the state provision of quality child care, more "educational investment," substantial housing subsidies for families with children, and so on.
Does this sound familiar? It should: these are the very arguments and the basic agenda proposed for Swedes by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, back in 1934, albeit shorn of their more radical, openly socialist rhetoric. Nonetheless, this is a book which led the Chairman (retired) of Proctor and Gamble, Owen Butler, to state: "The conclusion is inescapable. Unless we invest more wisely in our children today, the nation's economic and social future are in jeopardy." These are also the arguments that are dominating the so-called new politics of children, in Washington.
At the same time, "preventive social policy" has become the rallying cry for other American proponents of change. The arguments ring familiar: help by state officials early in life is more economical and more effective than help later on; the longer we wait before discovering symptoms of stress, the more costly it will be; "early interventions present the problem of all investments in growth- the dividends come later," etc., etc. It all sounds reasonable, in a way, but the end product would be a nightmare of bureaucratic rule, and the virtual destruction of the family in America.
In the September report of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, we catch the flavor of this looming, new American order. This panel, appointed exclusively by the Reagan and Bush administrations, called child abuse a "national emergency," adding: "No other problem may equal its power to cause or exacerbate a range of social ills." The key finding of the report is that the Federal and state governments have spent too much time investigating suspected cases of abuse; instead, the Federal government should focus on preventing abuse and neglect before it happens. The Board recommends that the Federal government immediately develop a national program of "home visits" to all new parents and their babies by government health workers and social investigators, who would identify potential abusers and help them.
In addition to this "welfare bureaucrat in every home" approach, the Board calls for a "national child protection policy" where the Federal government would guarantee the right of all children to live in a safe environment, with appropriate vehicles of enforcement.
Hewlett is right, of course, about the flaws in the existing American welfare state: we have socialized the economic value of children here; but we have left the costs with individual parents. The United States in 1991, as Sweden in 1934, has an incomplete version of the pure welfare state model. She's correct, too, that this exacts a price: the number of American children born annually inside of marriage has been stagnant through the 1980s, at a level 30 percent below the zero-growth rate. Americans are simply not investing their own time and money in more than one or two children, largely because its not worth their while. (The overall birthrate, it is true, has climbed somewhat, but this is due entirely to the sharp rise in the number of out-of-wedlock births from 665,000 in 1980 to over 1,000,000 in 1990; these births, it appears, our welfare system subsidizes well.)
But there is an alternative to the "Swedish solution." It's one that Dr. Hewlett declines to mention; and it's the one that the Myrdals dismissed as "beyond reasonable debate" sixty years ago. This option is called a "free society," where instead of completing the client/welfare state by extending bureaucratic tentacles completely around children, we instead dismantle what we already have done. The agenda here is simple, radical and pragmatically anti-bureaucratic:
end state-mandated and state-controlled education, leaving the training and rearing of children up to their own parents or legal guardians;
abolish child-labor laws, again reasoning that parents or guardians are the best judges of their children's interests and welfare, vastly better than any combination of state bureaucrats;
and dismantle the Social Security system, leaving protection or security in old age to be provided, once again, by individuals and their families.
These acts would restore the economic benefits of children to parents, and so end the anti-child contradiction that lies at the center of the incomplete welfare state.
Most commentators would respond that these would be impossible, inconceivable actions in a modern, industrial society. Given the realities or complexities of the modern world, they would say chaos would be the sure result, if we engaged in such reactionary efforts.
My response would be to point to scattered groups in America which, through some amazing historical quirk or some political miracle, still inhabit one of our few remaining "zones of liberty" and which survive under such an "impossible" regime.
One unexpected but interesting example would be the Amish, who beat off government challenges to their special limited educational practices (namely, schooling only by Amish teachers and only through the eighth grade), who make heavy use of child labor, and who avoid Social Security (as well as government farm welfare) out of principle. Not only have the Amish managed to survive in an industrial, market milieu; they have thrived. Their families are three times the size of the American average. When facing fair competition, their farms turn profits in "good times and bad."
Their savings rate is extraordinarily high. Their farming practices, from any environmental standard, are exemplary, marked by a committed stewardship of the soil and avoidance of chemicals and artificial fertilizers. During a time when the number of American farmers has fallen sharply, Amish farm colonies have spread widely, from a base in southeastern Pennsylvania to Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
It is probably true that relatively few contemporary Americans would choose to live like the Amish, given a true freedom of choice. Then again, no one can be quite sure what America would look like, if citizens were actually freed from the bureaucratic rule over families that began to be imposed here, over one hundred years ago, starting with the rise of the mandated public school.
I have absolutely no doubt, though, that under a true regime of liberty, families would be stronger, children more plentiful, and men and women happier and more content. For me, that's enough.
What Has Government Done to our Families? by Allan Carlson
Allan Carlson, author of The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics and Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis, is president of the Howard Center in Rockford, Illinois. He wrote this paper for the Mises Institute's Williamsburg conference on "The Political Economy of Bureaucracy."
By Allan Carlson
Thursday, 05 February 2004 10:00
There are consequences when a country's children are raised by the State. Allan Carlson examines the historical example of Swedish government education.
The fate of families and children in Sweden shows the truth of Ludwig von Mises's observation that "no compromise" is possible between capitalism and socialism. Here I show how the welfare state's growth can be viewed as the transfer of the "dependency" function from families to state employees. The process began in 19th-century Sweden, through the socialization of children's economic time via school attendance, child labor, and state old-age pension laws. These changes, in turn, created incentives to have only a few, or no children. In the 1930s, social democrats Gunnar and Alva Myrdal used the resulting "depopulation crisis" to argue for the full socialization of child rearing. Their "family policy," implemented over the next forty years, virtually destroyed the autonomous family in Sweden, substituting a "client society" where citizens are clients of public employees. While Sweden is now trying to break out of the welfare state trap, the old arguments for the socialization of children have come to the United States.
In his short volume Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises notes that modern socialism "holds the individual in tight rein from the womb to the tomb," while "the children and the adolescents are firmly integrated into the all-embracing apparatus of state control." In another context, he contrasts "capitalism" with "socialism," and concludes: "There is no compromise possible between these two systems. Contrary to a popular fallacy there is no middle way, no third system possible as a pattern of a permanent social order." My remarks focus on the validity of the latter statement, seen through the fate of family and children in the quintessential "middle way" state of modern Sweden.
In turning to Sweden, we find a classic case of bureaucratic manipulation to destroy the state's principle rival as a focus of loyalty: the family. Viewing this rivalry between state and family, it is important to understand that a basic level of "dependency" is a constant in all societies. In every human community, there are infants and children, persons who are very old, individuals who have severe handicaps, and others who are seriously ill. These people cannot take care of themselves. Without help from others, they will die. Every society must have a way of giving care to these dependents. Under the domain of liberty, the natural institution of the family (supplemented and supported by local communities and voluntary organizations) provides the protection and care which these "dependent" people need. Indeed, it is in the autonomous family -- and only in the family -- where the pure socialist principle actually works: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
The rise of the welfare state can be written as the steady transfer of the "dependency" function from the family to the state; from persons tied together by blood, marriage or adoption to persons tied to public employees. The process began in Sweden in the mid-19th century, through bureaucratic projects that began dismantling the bonds between parents and their children. In classic pattern, the first assertion of state control over children came in the 1840s, with the passage of a mandatory school attendance law. While justified as a measure to improve the knowledge and welfare of the people, the deeper dynamic was the socialization of children's time, through the assumptions that state functionaries -- the Swedish kingdom's bureaucrats -- knew better than parents how children's time should be spent, and that parents could not be expected or trusted to protect their children from exploitation.
The next step came in 1912, with legislation that effectively banned child labor in factories, and to some degree on farms. Again, the implicit assumption was that state welfare officials were better judges of the use of children's time, and more compassionate toward children than parents were or could be.
The final step came at about the same time, when the Swedish government implemented a program of old-age or retirement pensions that quickly became universal. The underlying act here was the socializing of another dependency function, this time, the dependency of the "very old" and the "weak" on mature adults. For eons, the care of the elderly had been a family matter. Henceforward, it would be the state's concern. Taking all of these reforms together, the net effect was to socialize the economic value of children. The natural economy of the household, and the value that children had brought their parents -- be it as workers in the family enterprise or as an 'insurance policy' for old age -- was stripped away. Parents were still left with the costs of raising the children, but the economic gain they would eventually represent had been seized by "society," meaning the bureaucratic state.
The predictable result of this change, as an economist of the "Gary Becker School" would tell you, would be a diminished demand for children, and this is exactly what occurred in Sweden. Starting in the late 1800s, Swedish fertility went into free-fall and by 1935, Sweden had the lowest birthrate in the world, below the zero-growth level where a generation just managed to replace itself.
The standard theory of demographic transition has long been that this fall in the birthrate was the necessary, inevitable consequence of modern industrialization: that the incentives of a capitalist economy disrupt traditional family relations. While it is true that the traditional family structure faces a new kind of stress in industrial society, more recent work suggests that the greater challenge -- in fact -- derives from the growth of the state.
Looking at the experience of many nations, Princeton University demographer Norman Ryder traces the central common cause of fertility decline to the introduction of mass public education. "Education of the junior generation is a subversive influence," he says. "Political organizations, like economic organizations, demand loyalty and attempt to neutralize family particularism. There is a struggle between the family and the state for the minds of the young," where the mandatory state school serves as "the chief instrument for teaching citizenship, in a direct appeal to the children over the heads of their parents." Confirming the universal validity of the Swedish example, Ryder adds that while mandatory education raises the cost to parents of children, bans on child labor further reduce their economic value. Moreover, a state system of social security cuts the natural bonds between generations of a family in still another way, leaving the state as the new locus of first loyalty.
While a nation's family system may reorganize, for a time, around the nuclear "husband-wife" unit of reproduction, even that basis of independence eventually dissolves. The end result of state intervention, Ryder says, is progressively diminished fertility, with living individuals left standing alone in a dependent relationship with the government.
The contradictions inherent in this method of social organization welled up in Sweden in the early 1930s. With the birth rate having fallen below the zero-growth level, Swedish conservatives grew frantic over the "depopulation threat," and the disappearance of Swedish children. These voices argued that the root problem was spiritual dislocation, or the decline of Christianity, or the rise of materialism, or personal selfishness. No one -- not a single soul on the political right -- focused on problems to be found in the educational and social legislation of the past 90 years. So as the "population crisis" reached high boil in Sweden, the opportunity was ripe for demagoguery and exploitation.
Into this situation walked two young Swedish social scientists, Gunnar Myrdal and his wife, Alva Myrdal. Before turning to their use and abuse of the population issue, allow me to say a few things about their background, and the influences brought to bear on their work.
Bureaucratic paternalism had a long history in Sweden, rooted in the state apparatus constructed by the Vasa Kings in the early 16th century, and advanced through the crushing of regional autonomy in wake of the unsuccessful Nils Dacke revolt of the 1540s. Yet the Myrdals represented something new, and "very 20th century." They were social scientists -- intellectuals from the academy -- dedicated to a new kind of state activism. As Alva Myrdal herself explained: "Politics has [now]...been brought under the control of logic and technical knowledge and so has been forced to become in essence constructive social engineering."
Second, even though we Americans have been hounded by repeated comments on the wisdom of "the Swedish model," it is important to note how much of the new Swedish welfare state rested on American experimentation. Both Myrdals spent the 1929?30 academic year, the waning months of "The Progressive Era," traveling in the United States, on fellowships provided by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation. During this time, Alva Myrdal fell under the influence of the so-called "Chicago school of sociology." William Ogburn, in particular, impressed on her his view that the state and the school had inevitably grown at the family's expense; and that the family faced a progressive "loss of function" as it retreated out of historical necessity to an exclusive concern with personality. Alva Myrdal also spent considerable time at the Child Development Institute of Columbia University and visiting experimental preschools and day care centers operating on Rockefeller Foundation grants, examples of social parenting that deeply impressed her.
For his part, Gunnar Myrdal's work at Columbia and at the University of Chicago made him aware of the tremendous political potential to be found in Sweden's emerging "population crisis" debate.
In an important 1932 article, "Social Policy's Dilemma," for the avant garde Swedish journal, Spektrum, Gunnar Myrdal put his finger on the necessary policy lever. He began by tracing the compromise in Europe before 1914 of a "liberal-infused socialism" with a "socialist-infused liberalism." Under this arrangement, he said, 19th century liberalism had abandoned its Malthusian pessimism and free-market dogmatism and instead embraced the necessity of reforms to protect workers; while the socialists had given up the goals of revolution and massive property redistribution, expressing contentment with incremental steps to aid the working class.
The World War, though, had shattered this compromise. Myrdal declared that classical liberalism was now dead, its partisans scattered. He also argued that the workers movement needed to be re-radicalized, and seek a new kind of social policy. Under the old compromise, Myrdal stated, social policy had been symptom-oriented, giving help to the poor, or the sick. The new social policy, he declared, must be preventive in nature. Social scientists, using modern research techniques, now had it in their power to use the state to prevent social pathologies from emerging. When based on human-oriented value premises and a rational science, he said, this preventive social policy led to a "natural marriage" of the correct technical with the politically radical solution. Myrdal specifically pointed to Sweden's population crisis, as an opportunity for rational sociological analysis to produce effective and radical ideas for state-enforced change.
The Myrdals fleshed out this program in their best selling 1934 book, Crisis in the Population Question, a brilliantly argued volume which substantially transformed Sweden. While Swedish conservatives continued to fret over sexual immorality, the Myrdals pointed directly at the contradictions created by an incomplete welfare state. Prior government actions such as mandatory school attendance, the ban on child labor, and state old age pensions, they admitted, had stripped away the value of children to parents. But the costs of children remained at home. In consequence, children had now become the chief cause of poverty. Given the incentives set up by the state, the very persons who contributed the most to the nation's survival by having children were dragged down into poverty, shoddy housing, poor nutrition, and limited recreational opportunities. A voluntary choice between poverty with children or a higher living standard without them was what young couples now faced. Young adults were forced to support the retired and the needy through the state's welfare system, and also the children to which they gave life. Under this multiple burden, they had chosen to reduce their number of children as the only factor over which they had control. The result, for Sweden, was depopulation and the specter of national extinction.
According to the Myrdals, there were only two alternatives. The first -- the dismantling of state schooling, child labor laws, and state old-age pensions in order to restore family autonomy -- was "not even worthy of being discussed." The other, and only practical alternative, was to complete the welfare state, and remove the existing disincentives to children by socializing virtually all of the direct costs involved in their birth and rearing. The real argument went something like this: in order to solve the problems caused, in large part, by prior state interventions, the government now needed to intervene completely.
This meant a commitment to a new kind of welfarism: "It concerns a preventive social policy, closely guided by the goal of raising the quality of human material, and at the same time carrying into effect radical redistribution policies making a significant portion of the child-support burden the concern of all society." The State bureaucracy had never before enjoyed such a mandate. By the very nature of the word, a "preventive" policy opened all Swedish families up to supports, scrutiny, and control. One could never know where a problem might occur: therefore, universal measures of bureaucratic intervention must be implemented to make prevention a reality.
Stressing this imperative, the Myrdals concluded: "the population question is hereby transformed into the most effective argument for a thorough and radical socialist remodeling of society." The alternative, they said simply, was national extinction.
Their program embraced universal state allowances for children's clothing, a universal health insurance plan, a universal entitlement to day care, state- operated summer camps for children, free school breakfasts and lunches, state-funded family housing, birth bonuses to cover the indirect costs of having babies, marriage loans, the expansion of state maternity and midwife services, centralized economic planning, and so on. Their goal was, in effect, the socialization of consumption, providing all families with a rationally determined, fairly uniform set of state services, managed by public employees, and funded through taxes imposed on the rich and the childless.
Criticisms that their program, in fact, threatened the family brought a characteristically blunt response: "the little modern family is almost...pathological," the Myrdals said. "The old ideals must die out with the generations which supported them."
Appeals to liberty and family autonomy evoked equally biting responses. The Myrdals charged that the "false individualistic desire" by parents for the "freedom" to raise their own children had an unhealthy origin: "...much of the tiresome pathos which defends 'individual freedom' and 'responsibility for one's own family,' is based on a sadistic disposition to extend this 'freedom' to an unbound and uncontrolled right to dominate others."
In order to raise children fit for a socially cooperative world, "we must free children more from ourselves," turning them over to state certified experts for care and training. The collective day nursery run by state-controlled experts, rather than the pathological little family, was more in line with the proper goals of eliminating social classes and building a society based on economic democracy.
Between 1935 and 1975, the Myrdals' domestic agenda guided, by fits and starts, the evolution of the Swedish welfare state. Periods of political and bureaucratic activism -- 1935 to 1938, 1944 to 1948, and 1965 to 1973 -- were punctuated by evidence of stubborn resistance among the Swedish populace, or by budgetary restraints that delayed full implementation. Yet by the end of the process, most elements of the Myrdals' family agenda were in place.
What were the specific results? With the family stripped, by state fiat, of all productive functions, of all insurance and welfare functions, and of most consumption functions, it should cause little surprise that ever fewer Swedes chose to live in families. The marriage rate fell to a record low among modern nations, while the proportion of adults living alone soared. In central Stockholm, for example, fully two-thirds of the population lived in single-person households by the mid-1980s. With the costs and benefits of children fully socialized, and with the natural economic gains from marriage intentionally eliminated by law, the bearing of children was also severed from marriage: by 1990, well over half of Swedish births were outside of marriage.
Children, too, enjoyed as 'rights' a great parcel of benefits provided by the state: free medical and dental care; abundant and cheap public transport; free meals; free education; and even state "child advocates" available to intervene when parents overstepped their bounds. Children, too, no longer needed "family": the state now served as their real parent.
Indeed, Rutgers University sociologist David Poponoe suggests that the term 'welfare state' no longer does justice to this form of total personal dependence on the government. Instead, he uses the label, "client society," to describe a nation "in which citizens are for the most part clients of a large group of public employees who take care of them throughout their lives."
In Sweden, the elderly are "free" of potential dependence on their grown children; infants, small children, and teenagers are "free" of reliance on their parents for protection and basic support; grown adults are "free" of meaningful obligations either to their biological parents, or to their children; and men and women are "free" of any of the mutual promises once embodied in marriage. This "freedom" has come in exchange for a universal, common dependence on the state, and the nearly complete bureaucratization of what had once been family living. Von Mises was right: there proved to be no "middle way" here; rather, Sweden represents a more complete and therefore more oppressive version of the socialist domestic order, one surpassing in its comprehensiveness even that of the Soviet Union. But the modern Swedish welfare state contains its own contradictions, problems now coming to the fore.
To begin with, the "demographic contradiction" of the welfare state is not so easily banished. In a rent-seeking democratic order, those who control the greater number of votes enjoy a greater gain. And even in Sweden, it remains true that the old vote; while children do not. While Swedish "family policy" has been effective enough to destroy the family as an independent entity, it has not been successful in ending the net flow of state programs and income from the relatively young to the relatively old.
Second, the client state can never provide all the needed care in a society, simply because to do so would be too expensive. Yet at the same time, families in the welfare state are penalized when they do provide care to their own, because they thereby give up the benefits of public care; and they are rewarded with public care only when they stop giving family-based care. Danish welfare official Bent Andersen has explained the problem this way:
"The rationally founded welfare state has a built-in contradiction: if it is to fulfill its intended functions, its citizens must refrain from exploiting to the fullest its services and provisions -- that is, they must behave irrationally, motivated by informal social controls, which, however, tend to disappear as the welfare state grows."
This contradiction has been the driving force behind the recent rebellion against the modern client state, a rebellion which started (among the Scandinavian countries) in Denmark and Norway through the electoral success of the anti-state Progress parties, and which has now spread to Sweden. Just last month, the Swedish Social Democrats suffered a major political defeat, losing power in national elections to a Center-Right coalition, bound together by a common pledge to cut back the welfare state. Particularly startling was the emergence of two new parties, which won blocks of seats in Sweden's Riksdag (or Parliament) for the first time.
The first of these -- the Christian Democrats -- made the sorry state of Swedish family life their central platform issue. They called for a reduction in bureaucratic interference in family relations, and an end to state incentives that encourage births out-of-wedlock and discourage the parental care of children. The other novel party, called New Democracy, combines libertarian themes of sharp tax reductions, sharp benefit reductions, and an end to foreign aid with measures to curb immigration. Together, these new groups hold the balance of parliamentary power. Eliminating welfare benefits has rarely been successful, in any modern country; but for the first time since the 1930s, the Swedes have an opportunity to recover some measure of family autonomy and personal liberty.
By all the signs, then, it would appear that the Swedish model, "the middle way," the third option, has been discredited, at the same time as Communism, the second way, has collapsed into a heap. Unfortunately, however, the Swedish model lives -- and may soon thrive -- here in the United States, where the very logic and arguments used by the Myrdals in the 1930s are on the verge of political success.
In a 1991 volume entitled When the Bough Breaks, issued by Basic Books (the pre-eminent neo-conservative publishing house), economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett writes: "In the [modern] world, not only are children 'worthless' to their parents, they involve major expenditures of money. Estimates of the cost of raising a child range from $171,000 to $265,000. In return for such expenditures, 'a child is expected to provide love, smiles, and emotional satisfaction,' but no money or labor."
She continues: "Which brings us to a critical American dilemma. We expect parents to expend extraordinary amounts of money and energy on raising their children, when it is society at large that reaps the material rewards. The costs are private; the benefits are increasingly public. . . . In the modern age, relying on irrational parental attachment to underwrite the child-rearing enterprise is a risky, foolhardy, and cruel business. It is time we learned to share the costs and burdens of raising our children. It is time to take some collective responsibility for the next generation."
Hewlett goes on to lay out a new policy agenda for America, including mandated parental leave, guaranteed free access to maternal and child health care, the state provision of quality child care, more "educational investment," substantial housing subsidies for families with children, and so on.
Does this sound familiar? It should: these are the very arguments and the basic agenda proposed for Swedes by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, back in 1934, albeit shorn of their more radical, openly socialist rhetoric. Nonetheless, this is a book which led the Chairman (retired) of Proctor and Gamble, Owen Butler, to state: "The conclusion is inescapable. Unless we invest more wisely in our children today, the nation's economic and social future are in jeopardy." These are also the arguments that are dominating the so-called new politics of children, in Washington.
At the same time, "preventive social policy" has become the rallying cry for other American proponents of change. The arguments ring familiar: help by state officials early in life is more economical and more effective than help later on; the longer we wait before discovering symptoms of stress, the more costly it will be; "early interventions present the problem of all investments in growth- the dividends come later," etc., etc. It all sounds reasonable, in a way, but the end product would be a nightmare of bureaucratic rule, and the virtual destruction of the family in America.
In the September report of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, we catch the flavor of this looming, new American order. This panel, appointed exclusively by the Reagan and Bush administrations, called child abuse a "national emergency," adding: "No other problem may equal its power to cause or exacerbate a range of social ills." The key finding of the report is that the Federal and state governments have spent too much time investigating suspected cases of abuse; instead, the Federal government should focus on preventing abuse and neglect before it happens. The Board recommends that the Federal government immediately develop a national program of "home visits" to all new parents and their babies by government health workers and social investigators, who would identify potential abusers and help them.
In addition to this "welfare bureaucrat in every home" approach, the Board calls for a "national child protection policy" where the Federal government would guarantee the right of all children to live in a safe environment, with appropriate vehicles of enforcement.
Hewlett is right, of course, about the flaws in the existing American welfare state: we have socialized the economic value of children here; but we have left the costs with individual parents. The United States in 1991, as Sweden in 1934, has an incomplete version of the pure welfare state model. She's correct, too, that this exacts a price: the number of American children born annually inside of marriage has been stagnant through the 1980s, at a level 30 percent below the zero-growth rate. Americans are simply not investing their own time and money in more than one or two children, largely because its not worth their while. (The overall birthrate, it is true, has climbed somewhat, but this is due entirely to the sharp rise in the number of out-of-wedlock births from 665,000 in 1980 to over 1,000,000 in 1990; these births, it appears, our welfare system subsidizes well.)
But there is an alternative to the "Swedish solution." It's one that Dr. Hewlett declines to mention; and it's the one that the Myrdals dismissed as "beyond reasonable debate" sixty years ago. This option is called a "free society," where instead of completing the client/welfare state by extending bureaucratic tentacles completely around children, we instead dismantle what we already have done. The agenda here is simple, radical and pragmatically anti-bureaucratic:
end state-mandated and state-controlled education, leaving the training and rearing of children up to their own parents or legal guardians;
abolish child-labor laws, again reasoning that parents or guardians are the best judges of their children's interests and welfare, vastly better than any combination of state bureaucrats;
and dismantle the Social Security system, leaving protection or security in old age to be provided, once again, by individuals and their families.
These acts would restore the economic benefits of children to parents, and so end the anti-child contradiction that lies at the center of the incomplete welfare state.
Most commentators would respond that these would be impossible, inconceivable actions in a modern, industrial society. Given the realities or complexities of the modern world, they would say chaos would be the sure result, if we engaged in such reactionary efforts.
My response would be to point to scattered groups in America which, through some amazing historical quirk or some political miracle, still inhabit one of our few remaining "zones of liberty" and which survive under such an "impossible" regime.
One unexpected but interesting example would be the Amish, who beat off government challenges to their special limited educational practices (namely, schooling only by Amish teachers and only through the eighth grade), who make heavy use of child labor, and who avoid Social Security (as well as government farm welfare) out of principle. Not only have the Amish managed to survive in an industrial, market milieu; they have thrived. Their families are three times the size of the American average. When facing fair competition, their farms turn profits in "good times and bad."
Their savings rate is extraordinarily high. Their farming practices, from any environmental standard, are exemplary, marked by a committed stewardship of the soil and avoidance of chemicals and artificial fertilizers. During a time when the number of American farmers has fallen sharply, Amish farm colonies have spread widely, from a base in southeastern Pennsylvania to Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
It is probably true that relatively few contemporary Americans would choose to live like the Amish, given a true freedom of choice. Then again, no one can be quite sure what America would look like, if citizens were actually freed from the bureaucratic rule over families that began to be imposed here, over one hundred years ago, starting with the rise of the mandated public school.
I have absolutely no doubt, though, that under a true regime of liberty, families would be stronger, children more plentiful, and men and women happier and more content. For me, that's enough.
What Has Government Done to our Families? by Allan Carlson
Allan Carlson, author of The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics and Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis, is president of the Howard Center in Rockford, Illinois. He wrote this paper for the Mises Institute's Williamsburg conference on "The Political Economy of Bureaucracy."
NATIONAL FAMILY RIGHTS PROTEST
SENDING OUT INFO, ONCE AGAIN:
NATIONAL FAMILY RIGHTS PROTEST
to be held in front of every family court courthouse, in every county,
of every state:
link: www.govabuse.org
We need volunteers to head your own county for this protest/ rally/
demonstration/ convention!! Please consider being a Protest Location
Coordinator (PLC) if you can organize a rally in your neck of the woods;
contact me for more info!! thanks!!
OFFICIAL WEBSITE
National Family Rights Protest
"Government Abuse IS Child Abuse for Profit"
When: Friday, August 12, 2011
Where: See State/PLC tab for your area
Who: United States- Child/Family Rights Groups
Why:"We the People"
are no longer tolerating;
· Unjust Laws
· TAXPAYER dollars (billions) used to separate, and
financially demolish families.
We the People" demand reformation of:
· OUR FAMILY COURT SYSTEMS including:
· Assigned Judges- (must be abolished)
· Court Appointed Guardian-ad-litem
(must be abolished-severely limited at a minimum)
· Family courts / records must be made public
· Court Gag orders are a violation of 1st amendment
· Adoption incentive payments (must be abolished)
Re; Adoption / Safe Families Act 1997
Every effort must be made for children to stay with Grandparents /
family members instead of foster care.
· Grandparents / family must have visitation rights
without current criminal treatment
· Families must be given assistance instead of
removing their
Children example; removal due to gas shut-off
· Parents must be restored freedoms to raise their
children
· Immediate access in all cases for children's
records
· Option to have a Jury, when requested in family
courts
We the People" demand reformation of:
OUR FAMILY COURT SYSTEM including:
Assigned Judges- must be abolished
· We are stripped of our right to elect public
servants (judges)
· Assigned judges cannot be voted out of office as
they are `assigned' to hear cases after pretending to retire.
· They have zero incentive to administer justice or
follow law or legal procedures because they cannot be voted out of
office after they `retire' THEREFORE, we have been stripped
of our legal right to elect (vote) for our judges
· Assigned judges are `DOUBLE-DIPPING'.
Pretend to `retire'
but are assigned to family court cases, collecting approx; $485.00
per `day' while collecting their retirement pay- all paid by
taxpayers
· Court appointed guardian-ad-litem / advocate for
child / lawyer for child
· Child Protective Services aka; CPS/ DHS /
DFS/DSS/Foster Care and Adoption Services
LISA NJGrandma4justice
NATIONAL FAMILY RIGHTS PROTEST
to be held in front of every family court courthouse, in every county,
of every state:
link: www.govabuse.org
We need volunteers to head your own county for this protest/ rally/
demonstration/ convention!! Please consider being a Protest Location
Coordinator (PLC) if you can organize a rally in your neck of the woods;
contact me for more info!! thanks!!
OFFICIAL WEBSITE
National Family Rights Protest
"Government Abuse IS Child Abuse for Profit"
When: Friday, August 12, 2011
Where: See State/PLC tab for your area
Who: United States- Child/Family Rights Groups
Why:"We the People"
are no longer tolerating;
· Unjust Laws
· TAXPAYER dollars (billions) used to separate, and
financially demolish families.
We the People" demand reformation of:
· OUR FAMILY COURT SYSTEMS including:
· Assigned Judges- (must be abolished)
· Court Appointed Guardian-ad-litem
(must be abolished-severely limited at a minimum)
· Family courts / records must be made public
· Court Gag orders are a violation of 1st amendment
· Adoption incentive payments (must be abolished)
Re; Adoption / Safe Families Act 1997
Every effort must be made for children to stay with Grandparents /
family members instead of foster care.
· Grandparents / family must have visitation rights
without current criminal treatment
· Families must be given assistance instead of
removing their
Children example; removal due to gas shut-off
· Parents must be restored freedoms to raise their
children
· Immediate access in all cases for children's
records
· Option to have a Jury, when requested in family
courts
We the People" demand reformation of:
OUR FAMILY COURT SYSTEM including:
Assigned Judges- must be abolished
· We are stripped of our right to elect public
servants (judges)
· Assigned judges cannot be voted out of office as
they are `assigned' to hear cases after pretending to retire.
· They have zero incentive to administer justice or
follow law or legal procedures because they cannot be voted out of
office after they `retire' THEREFORE, we have been stripped
of our legal right to elect (vote) for our judges
· Assigned judges are `DOUBLE-DIPPING'.
Pretend to `retire'
but are assigned to family court cases, collecting approx; $485.00
per `day' while collecting their retirement pay- all paid by
taxpayers
· Court appointed guardian-ad-litem / advocate for
child / lawyer for child
· Child Protective Services aka; CPS/ DHS /
DFS/DSS/Foster Care and Adoption Services
LISA NJGrandma4justice
Katz pledges to limit placement of children in group homes
Katz pledges to limit placement of children in group homes | The Connecticut Mirror
The state Department of Children and Families has for years relied on congregate facilities to house abused and neglected children -- but the new commissioner is backing an initiative that would place restrictions on putting its youngest children at such facilities.
The state Department of Children and Families has for years relied on congregate facilities to house abused and neglected children -- but the new commissioner is backing an initiative that would place restrictions on putting its youngest children at such facilities.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Deadbeat parents' photos placed on pizza delivery boxes in Hopkins County
Deadbeat parents' photos placed on pizza delivery boxes in Hopkins County | WHAS11.com | Louisville news, Kentucky news & breaking news | WHAS11.com | News for Louisville, Kentucky
Why not pictures of CPS worker's with the children they've stolen saying,"Have you seen me?"
(WHAS11) - In Hopkins County, Kentucky, they are mixing proactive policing with delivery dinner. Police there have cooked up a creative way to catch deadbeat parents; by putting their faces on pizza boxes.
The county's 12 most wanted individuals are featured on the flyers. They have some of the longest outstanding warrants in the county.
“These people have avoided apprehension for quite some time. And if you want new results, you have to try and be willing to come up with creative and innovative ways,” said Hopkins County Asst. Attorney Lee Riddle.
It's an out-of-the box idea that seems to be working already; it prompted one man who owes $20,000 to turn himself in.
Why not pictures of CPS worker's with the children they've stolen saying,"Have you seen me?"
(WHAS11) - In Hopkins County, Kentucky, they are mixing proactive policing with delivery dinner. Police there have cooked up a creative way to catch deadbeat parents; by putting their faces on pizza boxes.
The county's 12 most wanted individuals are featured on the flyers. They have some of the longest outstanding warrants in the county.
“These people have avoided apprehension for quite some time. And if you want new results, you have to try and be willing to come up with creative and innovative ways,” said Hopkins County Asst. Attorney Lee Riddle.
It's an out-of-the box idea that seems to be working already; it prompted one man who owes $20,000 to turn himself in.
Report all Dishonest and Corrupt Government "Officials"
Report all Dishonest and Corrupt Government "Officials"
Please report all dishonest and corrupt government officials.
LawlessAmerica.com has a new online Complaint Listing Form.
Please take a few minutes and post your complaints...
We want to develop THE comprehensive database of government corruption reports.
See the Corruption Reports here. Click on the category of interest to you, and you will see an alphabetical list of what has been entered thus far.
Note that if someone you want to complain about is already listed, you may page down to the bottom of the listing and add your own Review of this person.
Please click the link above.
Please report all dishonest and corrupt government officials.
LawlessAmerica.com has a new online Complaint Listing Form.
Please take a few minutes and post your complaints...
We want to develop THE comprehensive database of government corruption reports.
See the Corruption Reports here. Click on the category of interest to you, and you will see an alphabetical list of what has been entered thus far.
Note that if someone you want to complain about is already listed, you may page down to the bottom of the listing and add your own Review of this person.
Please click the link above.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Judge Andree Ruffo Admit's Child Protection System in Need of Urgent Major Overhaul Rendered Unfit To Sit On Bench
CBC News - the fifth estate - Judge Andree Ruffo
Andree Ruffo graduated at the top of her law school class and established one of the first practices to specialize in representing children. She seemed the ideal choice to be named to the Quebec youth court. When she was appointed, in 1986, Judge Andree Ruffo was one of the youngest, and one of very few female, judges at the time.
But Ruffo spoke often, and very publicly, about the flaws she saw in the youth protection services system. In her court, she refused to issue judgments that fit the resources rather than the child.
Throughout her career, Ruffo has criticised flaws in the youth protection services system in Quebec.
Her determination to act on her conscience, and to speak her mind during her twenty years as a judge, set her on a collision course with the judiciary and with the social service bureaucracy.
Social workers and even her boss, the Chief Justice of Quebec, complained about her to the judges' disciplinary group, the Quebec Judicial Council. In total, hundreds of complaints were filed against the outspoken judge – though none of those came from children, their families, or the lawyers representing them.
Numerous complaints against Judge Ruffo led the Judicial Council to determine, in 2004, that she was unfit to sit as a judge.
Throughout those years, the Quebec Human Rights Commission, was investigating agencies of the Youth Protection Service. In one case, they found an agency to be so seriously dysfunctional that the Commission advised the province to step in. In another they found children locked in empty cells, sometimes for days. Both agencies were in Ruffo's jurisdiction and had made complaints against Judge Ruffo.
Like Ruffo, the Commission concluded the entire youth protection system was in need of an urgent major overhaul. The province has now started committee hearings on reform.
But being right hasn't helped Judge Ruffo. In 2004, the Judicial Council determined that her behaviour and her refusal to change, rendered her unfit to sit on the bench as a judge. The Court of Appeal of Quebec dismissed Ruffo's appeal of that decision, effectively saying that a good cause does not justify improper judicial behaviour.
Ruffo has asked the Supreme Court of Canada to review her case.
Now Ruffo has asked the Supreme Court of Canada to consider her case. If the highest justices in the land agree to hear her case, she may play a role in changing the law on judges' freedom of speech. If they decline, Andree Ruffo will be a judge no longer.
While she waits for their decision, Andree Ruffo keeps busy working for children. She is a founding member of the group 'Magiciens Sans Frontieres' which travels to orphanages and refugee camps performing free for children.
Andree Ruffo graduated at the top of her law school class and established one of the first practices to specialize in representing children. She seemed the ideal choice to be named to the Quebec youth court. When she was appointed, in 1986, Judge Andree Ruffo was one of the youngest, and one of very few female, judges at the time.
But Ruffo spoke often, and very publicly, about the flaws she saw in the youth protection services system. In her court, she refused to issue judgments that fit the resources rather than the child.
Throughout her career, Ruffo has criticised flaws in the youth protection services system in Quebec.
Her determination to act on her conscience, and to speak her mind during her twenty years as a judge, set her on a collision course with the judiciary and with the social service bureaucracy.
Social workers and even her boss, the Chief Justice of Quebec, complained about her to the judges' disciplinary group, the Quebec Judicial Council. In total, hundreds of complaints were filed against the outspoken judge – though none of those came from children, their families, or the lawyers representing them.
Numerous complaints against Judge Ruffo led the Judicial Council to determine, in 2004, that she was unfit to sit as a judge.
Throughout those years, the Quebec Human Rights Commission, was investigating agencies of the Youth Protection Service. In one case, they found an agency to be so seriously dysfunctional that the Commission advised the province to step in. In another they found children locked in empty cells, sometimes for days. Both agencies were in Ruffo's jurisdiction and had made complaints against Judge Ruffo.
Like Ruffo, the Commission concluded the entire youth protection system was in need of an urgent major overhaul. The province has now started committee hearings on reform.
But being right hasn't helped Judge Ruffo. In 2004, the Judicial Council determined that her behaviour and her refusal to change, rendered her unfit to sit on the bench as a judge. The Court of Appeal of Quebec dismissed Ruffo's appeal of that decision, effectively saying that a good cause does not justify improper judicial behaviour.
Ruffo has asked the Supreme Court of Canada to review her case.
Now Ruffo has asked the Supreme Court of Canada to consider her case. If the highest justices in the land agree to hear her case, she may play a role in changing the law on judges' freedom of speech. If they decline, Andree Ruffo will be a judge no longer.
While she waits for their decision, Andree Ruffo keeps busy working for children. She is a founding member of the group 'Magiciens Sans Frontieres' which travels to orphanages and refugee camps performing free for children.
"CHILD HUNTING" A NEW CLASSIFICATION of CPS CHILD ABUSE CRIMES DISCOVERED
"CHILD HUNTING" A NEW CLASSIFICATION of CPS CHILD ABUSE CRIMES DISCOVERED
by Cess Ssec on Wednesday, March 2, 2011 at 2:50am
Nicolas Stathopoulos and Felicita Luna both social service crime researchers for SSEC have discovered a new type of crime that canvasses children in schools for Child Protection Services.
A correlation between organized crime, social workers, teachers and other mandated workers were discovered to be colluding together for the purpose of canvassing children for CPS.
SSEC (research) has dubbed this type of crime "CHILD HUNTING" and the persons who participate in the crime "CHILD HUNTERS"
CHILD HUNTERS collude together in groups of 2 or more in compartmentalized or de-compartmentalized settings, for the purpose of securing massive quotas of children from schools for Child Protection Services.
The result is profit for all participants involved.
2011 Campaign to expose corrupt Child Protection Services
Child Protection Services
Report CPS and Save a Child's Life
Psychopsema - How Malicious Social Workers use this system to attack parents and steal children.
Psychopsema - How Malicious Social Workers use this system to attack parents and steal children.
by Cess Ssec on Saturday, March 5, 2011 at 8:07am
Angela-May Worthington
Senior Staff writer
SSEC - Social Service Economic Crime (research)
March 5, 2011
Psychopsema [psy•cho-pse-ma] is mainly categorized as an orchestrated assault, utilizing several methods of fraud, psychological operations, psychological intimidation and other similar premeditated offense based systems against a parent or a family. A malicious social worker or other malicious social service professionals usually employed by a Child Protection Service (CPS) agency or a similar social service agency are the perpetrators of the act.
Psychopsema is mainly utilized to deflect attention from crimes committed by said workers against children, as those children are canvased, for the purpose of profit. “Child Protection Service” agencies throughout, North America, the UK, Australia and other European countries are the benefactors of the act.
The term or description was originally created by Canadian and American social service crime researcher experts Nicolas Stathopoulos and Felicita Luna on February 2011, to assist former and present victims, police, prosecutors and other authorities identify previously unknown key strategic systems.
Both researchers are part of [SSEC] Social Service Economic Crimes.
SSEC is a research group dedicated to analytical study of social service crimes throughout North America.
by Cess Ssec on Saturday, March 5, 2011 at 8:07am
Angela-May Worthington
Senior Staff writer
SSEC - Social Service Economic Crime (research)
March 5, 2011
Psychopsema [psy•cho-pse-ma] is mainly categorized as an orchestrated assault, utilizing several methods of fraud, psychological operations, psychological intimidation and other similar premeditated offense based systems against a parent or a family. A malicious social worker or other malicious social service professionals usually employed by a Child Protection Service (CPS) agency or a similar social service agency are the perpetrators of the act.
Psychopsema is mainly utilized to deflect attention from crimes committed by said workers against children, as those children are canvased, for the purpose of profit. “Child Protection Service” agencies throughout, North America, the UK, Australia and other European countries are the benefactors of the act.
The term or description was originally created by Canadian and American social service crime researcher experts Nicolas Stathopoulos and Felicita Luna on February 2011, to assist former and present victims, police, prosecutors and other authorities identify previously unknown key strategic systems.
Both researchers are part of [SSEC] Social Service Economic Crimes.
SSEC is a research group dedicated to analytical study of social service crimes throughout North America.
Private child welfare agency under fire
Private child welfare agency under fire - Miami-Dade - MiamiHerald.com
After the most scandalous child death in a decade, chinks are beginning to show in the armor of the state’s largest private provider of child welfare services, Our Kids
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/25/2133051/private-child-welfare-agency-under.html#ixzz1HklqZ7JW
After the most scandalous child death in a decade, chinks are beginning to show in the armor of the state’s largest private provider of child welfare services, Our Kids
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/25/2133051/private-child-welfare-agency-under.html#ixzz1HklqZ7JW
Foster parent of suicide victim speaks out
Foster parent of suicide victim speaks out » News » The Daily Item, Sunbury, PA
MANDATA — A foster parent of a teenage girl who committed suicide on Feb. 16 after being cyberbullied spoke out passionately Thursday night about the need for parents to communicate with their children because “just doing that could help prevent the kind of tragedy that befell my daughter, Britney Tongel.”
I'm sure being stuck in Foster care didn't help!
MANDATA — A foster parent of a teenage girl who committed suicide on Feb. 16 after being cyberbullied spoke out passionately Thursday night about the need for parents to communicate with their children because “just doing that could help prevent the kind of tragedy that befell my daughter, Britney Tongel.”
I'm sure being stuck in Foster care didn't help!
DA: NYC abuse case goes beyond job incompetence
DA: NYC abuse case goes beyond job incompetence | The Associated Press | News | San Francisco Examiner
Three years before 4-year-old Marchella Pierce was found starved, beaten and drugged, the city's own investigators said child-welfare workers had failed to protect the vulnerable.
New York City's child-welfare agency had overseen 11 cases in less than a year in which a child died after workers reported the child was living in a safe, clean home. In all but one, the 2007 investigation charged, the Administration for Children's Services did inadequate or incomplete work. The inquiry prompted major reforms, but no caseworkers were held criminally responsible.
Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/news/2011/03/da-nyc-abuse-case-goes-beyond-job-incompetence#ixzz1Hkk8Q9C2
Three years before 4-year-old Marchella Pierce was found starved, beaten and drugged, the city's own investigators said child-welfare workers had failed to protect the vulnerable.
New York City's child-welfare agency had overseen 11 cases in less than a year in which a child died after workers reported the child was living in a safe, clean home. In all but one, the 2007 investigation charged, the Administration for Children's Services did inadequate or incomplete work. The inquiry prompted major reforms, but no caseworkers were held criminally responsible.
Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/news/2011/03/da-nyc-abuse-case-goes-beyond-job-incompetence#ixzz1Hkk8Q9C2
Foster mom gets 14 years in toddler death
Foster mom gets 14 years in toddler death - SignOnSanDiego.com
BY KRISTINA DAVIS
FRIDAY, MARCH 25, 2011 AT 1:02 P.M.
NANCEE E. LEWIS
Linda Coleman is arraigned in July 2007 in connection with the death of toddler Malachi Roberts-McBride.
PHOTO BY NELVIN C. CEPEDA
Mourners hold photos of Malachi Roberts-McBride at his funeral in July 2007, just days before he would have turned 2 years old.
PHOTO BY NELVIN C. CEPEDA
Family members bury Malachi Roberts-McBride following a funeral.
SAN DIEGO — A longtime San Diego foster mother was sentenced to 14 years in prison Friday for the abuse she inflicted on a toddler who died in 2007 before he could reach his second birthday.
Linda Faye Coleman, 51, pleaded guilty in January to child abuse, along with two special-circumstance allegations of inflicting great bodily harm and willfully causing injury and harm to a child resulting in death.
San Diego Superior Court Judge Charles G. Rogers also ordered Coleman to pay more than $8,600 in restitution to the county to cover the burial expenses for Malachi Roberts-McBride, who died from blunt-force trauma on June 29, 2007.
Malachi’s mother, Keisha Roberts, who was a 15-year-old foster child herself when she became pregnant, did not attend the hearing Friday. But she told a probation officer recently that she felt cheated by the sentence agreed to in the plea deal.
“How do you kill someone’s kid and have the possibility of getting out (of jail)?” she told the officer, according to court documents.
Roberts, who is about to give birth to her second son, has filed a lawsuit against Coleman and San Diego County in the death.
The judge said in court Friday that he was struck by the starkly divergent views of Coleman when comparing the facts of the case to statements from Coleman’s supporters, who paint her as a trustworthy and loving caretaker.
Friend Robin Simon, who was among the supporters crowded into the courtroom, told the judge that she had “peace of mind” when she allowed Coleman to watch her two grandchildren each day.
“Linda is one of the most caring, conscientious, hardworking people I know,” she said. “She had a special gift of love she pours into every child.”
Court documents released Friday reveal the troubled start to Malachi’s life and the circumstances leading up to his tragic end.
Roberts was 16 when she gave birth, and she was able to stay in school and live with him at her foster home. The baby suffered from asthma, hernias and was slightly delayed in development. He underwent surgery for a heart defect.
As she neared 18, the thought of being turned out on her own as a single mother with adult responsibilities scared her, and she ran away, leaving Malachi behind.
He was then sent to live with Coleman in San Diego’s Mountain View neighborhood.
Coleman, who was caring for her two grandchildren and another foster child, was thought to be a good fit. Another child with similar health problems had thrived under her care.
On June 27, 2007, Coleman called 911 reporting Malachi was seizing. She told authorities he had a spoon in his mouth, and when she took it out, he had trouble breathing. A small amount of blood was found in his mouth, and he was unresponsive to loud noises or gestures, according to records.
At the hospital, doctors found retinal hemorrhages and bruising all over his body, including on his ears, face, foot and torso. Marks on his legs and buttocks were in the shape of a spoon. Doctors also concluded that internal bleeding had shifted his brain, and he was put on life support.
He died two days later. The Medical Examiner’s Office found 29 different angles of injury to the head.
Coleman was arrested July 3 and denied harming the child, saying he often fell.
The death devastated Roberts, who by that time was being housed at the county’s children’s home. She turned to drugs to numb the pain and guilt, and the addiction led to arrests.
“I lost everything because of this,” she recently told a probation officer.
kristina.davis@uniontrib.com • (619) 542-4591 • Twitter @kristinadavis
BY KRISTINA DAVIS
FRIDAY, MARCH 25, 2011 AT 1:02 P.M.
NANCEE E. LEWIS
Linda Coleman is arraigned in July 2007 in connection with the death of toddler Malachi Roberts-McBride.
PHOTO BY NELVIN C. CEPEDA
Mourners hold photos of Malachi Roberts-McBride at his funeral in July 2007, just days before he would have turned 2 years old.
PHOTO BY NELVIN C. CEPEDA
Family members bury Malachi Roberts-McBride following a funeral.
SAN DIEGO — A longtime San Diego foster mother was sentenced to 14 years in prison Friday for the abuse she inflicted on a toddler who died in 2007 before he could reach his second birthday.
Linda Faye Coleman, 51, pleaded guilty in January to child abuse, along with two special-circumstance allegations of inflicting great bodily harm and willfully causing injury and harm to a child resulting in death.
San Diego Superior Court Judge Charles G. Rogers also ordered Coleman to pay more than $8,600 in restitution to the county to cover the burial expenses for Malachi Roberts-McBride, who died from blunt-force trauma on June 29, 2007.
Malachi’s mother, Keisha Roberts, who was a 15-year-old foster child herself when she became pregnant, did not attend the hearing Friday. But she told a probation officer recently that she felt cheated by the sentence agreed to in the plea deal.
“How do you kill someone’s kid and have the possibility of getting out (of jail)?” she told the officer, according to court documents.
Roberts, who is about to give birth to her second son, has filed a lawsuit against Coleman and San Diego County in the death.
The judge said in court Friday that he was struck by the starkly divergent views of Coleman when comparing the facts of the case to statements from Coleman’s supporters, who paint her as a trustworthy and loving caretaker.
Friend Robin Simon, who was among the supporters crowded into the courtroom, told the judge that she had “peace of mind” when she allowed Coleman to watch her two grandchildren each day.
“Linda is one of the most caring, conscientious, hardworking people I know,” she said. “She had a special gift of love she pours into every child.”
Court documents released Friday reveal the troubled start to Malachi’s life and the circumstances leading up to his tragic end.
Roberts was 16 when she gave birth, and she was able to stay in school and live with him at her foster home. The baby suffered from asthma, hernias and was slightly delayed in development. He underwent surgery for a heart defect.
As she neared 18, the thought of being turned out on her own as a single mother with adult responsibilities scared her, and she ran away, leaving Malachi behind.
He was then sent to live with Coleman in San Diego’s Mountain View neighborhood.
Coleman, who was caring for her two grandchildren and another foster child, was thought to be a good fit. Another child with similar health problems had thrived under her care.
On June 27, 2007, Coleman called 911 reporting Malachi was seizing. She told authorities he had a spoon in his mouth, and when she took it out, he had trouble breathing. A small amount of blood was found in his mouth, and he was unresponsive to loud noises or gestures, according to records.
At the hospital, doctors found retinal hemorrhages and bruising all over his body, including on his ears, face, foot and torso. Marks on his legs and buttocks were in the shape of a spoon. Doctors also concluded that internal bleeding had shifted his brain, and he was put on life support.
He died two days later. The Medical Examiner’s Office found 29 different angles of injury to the head.
Coleman was arrested July 3 and denied harming the child, saying he often fell.
The death devastated Roberts, who by that time was being housed at the county’s children’s home. She turned to drugs to numb the pain and guilt, and the addiction led to arrests.
“I lost everything because of this,” she recently told a probation officer.
kristina.davis@uniontrib.com • (619) 542-4591 • Twitter @kristinadavis
Auditors find gaps in monitoring of foster children
Auditors find gaps in monitoring of foster children - baltimoresun.com
State officials placed at least 32 children in foster homes despite credible evidence that the care providers had abused or neglected children, according to a General Assembly audit released Friday.
Auditors found that officials with the Social Services Administration also failed to follow up on 159 children born to parents who had had their parental rights terminated for abuse or neglect.
The auditors blamed the computer system that the Maryland agency uses to monitor child services and said many of the deficiencies had not been corrected. The audit was conducted by the Office of Legislative Audits, the investigative arm of the Assembly.
State officials placed at least 32 children in foster homes despite credible evidence that the care providers had abused or neglected children, according to a General Assembly audit released Friday.
Auditors found that officials with the Social Services Administration also failed to follow up on 159 children born to parents who had had their parental rights terminated for abuse or neglect.
The auditors blamed the computer system that the Maryland agency uses to monitor child services and said many of the deficiencies had not been corrected. The audit was conducted by the Office of Legislative Audits, the investigative arm of the Assembly.
Genetic attraction between parents and children who have never met
Genetic attraction between parents and children who have never met | ProudParenting.com
An article in Yahoo today describes a woman who tracked down her long-lost father in the US who is now pregnant with his child. This highlights the concern of genetic attraction between parent and child who have never previously met, because of adoption or sperm and egg donation.
Garry Ryan, 46, was tracked down by his daughter Penny Lawrence, 28, last year. He had left Ms Lawrence's mother when she was pregnant, so father and daughter had never met.
An article in Yahoo today describes a woman who tracked down her long-lost father in the US who is now pregnant with his child. This highlights the concern of genetic attraction between parent and child who have never previously met, because of adoption or sperm and egg donation.
Garry Ryan, 46, was tracked down by his daughter Penny Lawrence, 28, last year. He had left Ms Lawrence's mother when she was pregnant, so father and daughter had never met.
Former Foster Parent Accused of Abuse
No-one could figure out how CPS could allow him to be a foster stranger.
http://www.legallykidnapped.blogspot.com/
Iowa DHS reports drop in child abuse cases last year (03/25/11)
Le Mars Daily Sentinel: Local News: Iowa DHS reports drop in child abuse cases last year (03/25/11)
In 2010, child abuses of a specific type in Iowa declined 3 percent compared to a 14 percent increase the year before, according to the Iowa Department of Human Services.
In 2010, child abuses of a specific type in Iowa declined 3 percent compared to a 14 percent increase the year before, according to the Iowa Department of Human Services.
» CPS Warrior Nancy Schaefer Gunned Down Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!
» CPS Warrior Nancy Schaefer Gunned Down Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!
Infowars.com
March 29, 2010
From the Associated Press:
State investigators say the husband of former state Senator Nancy Schaefer shot his wife before turning the gun on himself. The couple’s bodies were found in their north Georgia home Friday. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation conducted autopsies on the Schaefer’s Saturday—investigators say all evidence points to the deaths as a murder-suicide. The bodies of Nancy and Bruce Schaefer, 73 and 74 years old respectively, were found by their daughter at the couple’s home in Clarkesville. Nancy Schaefer was a two-term state Senator representing Georgia’s 50th district. She lost her seat in 2008. Schaefer was also a candidate for mayor of Atlanta, Georgia lieutenant governor and governor of the state.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
The corporate media does not bother to mention that Schaefer exposed the abuses of CPS and the international child sex slavery ring.
“Investigators told the Associated Press they believe Bruce Schaefer, 74, shot his wife once in the back while she slept in the bedroom early Friday morning and then shot himself in the head. Police found a handgun near his body and several letters written to family members, including a suicide note,” reports the Associated Baptist Press.
Other reports indicate Bruce Schaefer shot himself in the chest. People who commit suicide usually shoot themselves in the head.
“Contrary to early reports that Bruce Schaefer had cancer, the Gainesville Times reported March 27 that the couple’s daughter, who discovered the bodies, told the local sheriff her father was not suffering from any serious illness at the time of the shootings. Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell said some of the letters mentioned serious financial problems and speculated that might have been a motive,” Associated Baptist Press also reported.
Appearing on the Alex Jones Show last May, Schaefer detailed how CPS is involved in child trafficking rings (see video below). After watching Schaefer’s interview with Jones, if you think Schaefer was involved in a suicide pact with her husband, you may also be interested in a famous bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
Infowars.com
March 29, 2010
From the Associated Press:
State investigators say the husband of former state Senator Nancy Schaefer shot his wife before turning the gun on himself. The couple’s bodies were found in their north Georgia home Friday. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation conducted autopsies on the Schaefer’s Saturday—investigators say all evidence points to the deaths as a murder-suicide. The bodies of Nancy and Bruce Schaefer, 73 and 74 years old respectively, were found by their daughter at the couple’s home in Clarkesville. Nancy Schaefer was a two-term state Senator representing Georgia’s 50th district. She lost her seat in 2008. Schaefer was also a candidate for mayor of Atlanta, Georgia lieutenant governor and governor of the state.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
The corporate media does not bother to mention that Schaefer exposed the abuses of CPS and the international child sex slavery ring.
“Investigators told the Associated Press they believe Bruce Schaefer, 74, shot his wife once in the back while she slept in the bedroom early Friday morning and then shot himself in the head. Police found a handgun near his body and several letters written to family members, including a suicide note,” reports the Associated Baptist Press.
Other reports indicate Bruce Schaefer shot himself in the chest. People who commit suicide usually shoot themselves in the head.
“Contrary to early reports that Bruce Schaefer had cancer, the Gainesville Times reported March 27 that the couple’s daughter, who discovered the bodies, told the local sheriff her father was not suffering from any serious illness at the time of the shootings. Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell said some of the letters mentioned serious financial problems and speculated that might have been a motive,” Associated Baptist Press also reported.
Appearing on the Alex Jones Show last May, Schaefer detailed how CPS is involved in child trafficking rings (see video below). After watching Schaefer’s interview with Jones, if you think Schaefer was involved in a suicide pact with her husband, you may also be interested in a famous bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
Former Judge Is Convicted of Bribery in Divorce Court
Former Judge Is Convicted of Bribery in Divorce Court - New York Times
A former State Supreme Court judge was convicted yesterday of accepting bribes to manipulate the outcome of divorce proceedings in a case that led to a broad political and judicial corruption inquiry in Brooklyn.
The judge, Gerald P. Garson, 74, could face as many as 15 years in prison if he is sentenced consecutively on the three guilty verdicts, on bribery and two lesser charges. The jury acquitted him on four other counts after a four-week trial in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.
In his roughly five years on the bench in Brooklyn, Mr. Garson handled nearly 1,100 matrimony cases, making decisions on child custody and financial matters. In finding him guilty, the jury endorsed the prosecution theory that he had an agreement with a divorce lawyer to take cash, dinners and cigars in exchange for courtroom assignments and favored treatment.
The verdict was a significant victory for the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, and for his chief of investigations, Michael F. Vecchione, a high-ranking assistant district attorney who prosecuted Mr. Garson as part of their larger corruption inquiry.
Outside the courtroom, Mr. Vecchione said the case had put public officials in the borough on notice. “I’m not sure there was any further message that needed to be sent, other than people need to do what’s right,” Mr. Vecchione said.
He told reporters that the jury was probably swayed by surveillance recordings that showed Justice Garson doing “the things he did behind closed doors, and now it’s out in the open.” Mr. Garson, who is undergoing treatment for cancer, showed no reaction to the verdict and left the courthouse without comment. His lawyer, Michael S. Washor, said he would appeal.
“We’re disappointed with the verdict,” Mr. Washor said, adding, “It’s very painful, both emotionally and physically.”
Mr. Garson was first charged in 2003, along with the divorce lawyer, Paul Siminovsky, as well as one of his clients, a court officer, a former clerk and a man described as a fixer. All six were charged with felonies.
The case immediately reverberated throughout Brooklyn, from playpens and dinner tables to the upper echelons of politics. Divorce cases were reopened. Judges feared that their offices were wired for surveillance. The system of nominating judges was ruled unconstitutional.
The longtime Democratic Party leader, Clarence Norman Jr., who helped place Mr. Garson on the bench, was convicted on corruption charges and now faces jail time. Acting on statements Mr. Garson made when confronted with the evidence against him, Mr. Hynes vowed to expose a system in which judgeships were for sale, a charge he has yet to show.
As the minor participants in the case pleaded guilty or were convicted, some agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors, Mr. Garson was suspended from the bench and eventually resigned. Last year, he rejected an offer to plead guilty to two minor felonies in exchange for a 16-month sentence in a local jail, where he might have received treatment from his own doctors.
After years of delay while a pretrial ruling was appealed and Mr. Garson sought medical treatment, the trial began last month in an outsized ceremonial courtroom in Downtown Brooklyn. The spectacle of a judge on trial — a matrimonial judge, no less — drew a sizable audience of lawyers, judicial officials and aggrieved divorcées.
Prosecutors used financial records and video surveillance recordings to buttress testimony from the divorce lawyer, Mr. Siminovsky, who had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in exchange for his cooperation.
In the recordings, Mr. Siminovsky was seen relaxing in the judge’s robing room and handing over an envelope full of cash. In court, he recounted entertaining the judge with drinks and meals in exchange for favorable treatment.
In his closing statement for the prosecution, Mr. Vecchione said on Tuesday, “Supreme Court Judge Gerald Garson became corrupt Supreme Court Judge Gerald Garson, disgraceful Supreme Court Judge Gerald Garson, disgraced Supreme Court Judge Gerald Garson.”
The defense lawyer, Mr. Washor, portrayed Mr. Siminovsky as the architect of a scheme to manipulate the judge, turning on Mr. Garson and setting him up after his arrest.
(Page 2 of 2)
“He deliberately lied to you,” Mr. Washor told the jury in his closing statement. Turning to the prosecutors, he added, “And he did so to curry favor with these gentlemen here.”
Jurors deliberated for a day and a half. At mid-day yesterday, they sent out a note asking for clarification of the requirement for unanimity. They were considering one count of bribery in the third degree, a class D felony, and six counts of receiving a reward for official misconduct in the second degree, a class E felony. The lesser counts related to specific acts, while the bribery charge encompassed a pattern of behavior.
Around 5:30 p.m., the jury foreman, a young man in a T-shirt and gold chain, stood and announced the verdict.
Mr. Vecchione, who was assisted on the case by three assistant district attorneys, Bryan Wallace, Joseph Alexis, and Seth Lieberman, turned to the gallery and gave a thumbs-up sign.
Mr. Washor, who during the trial repeatedly insulted and baited Mr. Vecchione, turned to the prosecutors and said, “Congratulations, gentlemen.”
Mr. Vecchione asked the judge overseeing the case, Jeffrey C. Berry, to order Mr. Garson held without bail.
Mr. Washor argued that Mr. Garson had attended his court dates faithfully and was due in a doctor’s office today. Assured that Mr. Garson had turned over his passport to prosecutors, Justice Berry allowed him to remain free on $15,000 bond and ordered him to report weekly to probation officers. Then he turned to the defendant.
“Gerald Garson, kindly stand, sir,” Justice Berry said.
Taking his lawyer’s arm, Mr. Garson rose slowly but steadily to his feet. Justice Berry warned him to abide by his bail conditions and to report for sentencing on June 5.
Outside the courtroom, Mr. Garson was hurried away by family members and supporters.
“Finally, we have justice,” said Frieda Hanimov, whose divorce case was handled by Mr. Garson and who wore a surveillance device to collect evidence against him. Adding that she and other victims were planning civil lawsuits, she said, “Now hopefully they’re going to learn and realize we have corruption everywhere.”
A former State Supreme Court judge was convicted yesterday of accepting bribes to manipulate the outcome of divorce proceedings in a case that led to a broad political and judicial corruption inquiry in Brooklyn.
The judge, Gerald P. Garson, 74, could face as many as 15 years in prison if he is sentenced consecutively on the three guilty verdicts, on bribery and two lesser charges. The jury acquitted him on four other counts after a four-week trial in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.
In his roughly five years on the bench in Brooklyn, Mr. Garson handled nearly 1,100 matrimony cases, making decisions on child custody and financial matters. In finding him guilty, the jury endorsed the prosecution theory that he had an agreement with a divorce lawyer to take cash, dinners and cigars in exchange for courtroom assignments and favored treatment.
The verdict was a significant victory for the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, and for his chief of investigations, Michael F. Vecchione, a high-ranking assistant district attorney who prosecuted Mr. Garson as part of their larger corruption inquiry.
Outside the courtroom, Mr. Vecchione said the case had put public officials in the borough on notice. “I’m not sure there was any further message that needed to be sent, other than people need to do what’s right,” Mr. Vecchione said.
He told reporters that the jury was probably swayed by surveillance recordings that showed Justice Garson doing “the things he did behind closed doors, and now it’s out in the open.” Mr. Garson, who is undergoing treatment for cancer, showed no reaction to the verdict and left the courthouse without comment. His lawyer, Michael S. Washor, said he would appeal.
“We’re disappointed with the verdict,” Mr. Washor said, adding, “It’s very painful, both emotionally and physically.”
Mr. Garson was first charged in 2003, along with the divorce lawyer, Paul Siminovsky, as well as one of his clients, a court officer, a former clerk and a man described as a fixer. All six were charged with felonies.
The case immediately reverberated throughout Brooklyn, from playpens and dinner tables to the upper echelons of politics. Divorce cases were reopened. Judges feared that their offices were wired for surveillance. The system of nominating judges was ruled unconstitutional.
The longtime Democratic Party leader, Clarence Norman Jr., who helped place Mr. Garson on the bench, was convicted on corruption charges and now faces jail time. Acting on statements Mr. Garson made when confronted with the evidence against him, Mr. Hynes vowed to expose a system in which judgeships were for sale, a charge he has yet to show.
As the minor participants in the case pleaded guilty or were convicted, some agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors, Mr. Garson was suspended from the bench and eventually resigned. Last year, he rejected an offer to plead guilty to two minor felonies in exchange for a 16-month sentence in a local jail, where he might have received treatment from his own doctors.
After years of delay while a pretrial ruling was appealed and Mr. Garson sought medical treatment, the trial began last month in an outsized ceremonial courtroom in Downtown Brooklyn. The spectacle of a judge on trial — a matrimonial judge, no less — drew a sizable audience of lawyers, judicial officials and aggrieved divorcées.
Prosecutors used financial records and video surveillance recordings to buttress testimony from the divorce lawyer, Mr. Siminovsky, who had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in exchange for his cooperation.
In the recordings, Mr. Siminovsky was seen relaxing in the judge’s robing room and handing over an envelope full of cash. In court, he recounted entertaining the judge with drinks and meals in exchange for favorable treatment.
In his closing statement for the prosecution, Mr. Vecchione said on Tuesday, “Supreme Court Judge Gerald Garson became corrupt Supreme Court Judge Gerald Garson, disgraceful Supreme Court Judge Gerald Garson, disgraced Supreme Court Judge Gerald Garson.”
The defense lawyer, Mr. Washor, portrayed Mr. Siminovsky as the architect of a scheme to manipulate the judge, turning on Mr. Garson and setting him up after his arrest.
(Page 2 of 2)
“He deliberately lied to you,” Mr. Washor told the jury in his closing statement. Turning to the prosecutors, he added, “And he did so to curry favor with these gentlemen here.”
Jurors deliberated for a day and a half. At mid-day yesterday, they sent out a note asking for clarification of the requirement for unanimity. They were considering one count of bribery in the third degree, a class D felony, and six counts of receiving a reward for official misconduct in the second degree, a class E felony. The lesser counts related to specific acts, while the bribery charge encompassed a pattern of behavior.
Around 5:30 p.m., the jury foreman, a young man in a T-shirt and gold chain, stood and announced the verdict.
Mr. Vecchione, who was assisted on the case by three assistant district attorneys, Bryan Wallace, Joseph Alexis, and Seth Lieberman, turned to the gallery and gave a thumbs-up sign.
Mr. Washor, who during the trial repeatedly insulted and baited Mr. Vecchione, turned to the prosecutors and said, “Congratulations, gentlemen.”
Mr. Vecchione asked the judge overseeing the case, Jeffrey C. Berry, to order Mr. Garson held without bail.
Mr. Washor argued that Mr. Garson had attended his court dates faithfully and was due in a doctor’s office today. Assured that Mr. Garson had turned over his passport to prosecutors, Justice Berry allowed him to remain free on $15,000 bond and ordered him to report weekly to probation officers. Then he turned to the defendant.
“Gerald Garson, kindly stand, sir,” Justice Berry said.
Taking his lawyer’s arm, Mr. Garson rose slowly but steadily to his feet. Justice Berry warned him to abide by his bail conditions and to report for sentencing on June 5.
Outside the courtroom, Mr. Garson was hurried away by family members and supporters.
“Finally, we have justice,” said Frieda Hanimov, whose divorce case was handled by Mr. Garson and who wore a surveillance device to collect evidence against him. Adding that she and other victims were planning civil lawsuits, she said, “Now hopefully they’re going to learn and realize we have corruption everywhere.”