I’m wanting the rest of my life back — or a few people to converse with who aren’t passively funding the federal incentives that helped dismantle my family – -and so many more.

Most of my life I remember being a “WHY?” person and not believing pat answers.  I also asked the questions about things that others simply took for granted.  Maybe this is genetic, maybe it’s not — but it can’t be shut up, shut down, boxed up, and at some point, you can’t sell any more BS as the real stuff.

One problem with being something of an explorer is what you sometimes pick up en route.

Towards the bottom of the page, I explain why the title.  I’m currently rather pissed at a conservative think tank which had, in my opinion, inordinate respect (unmerited) leading up to the passage of the infamous 1996 PRWORA Welfare act.  I could’ve named the blog something else, but this seemed appropriate.  The organization was “American Enterprise Institute” so I blogged “American Institute Enterprises.”  This is not to be confused with another one, not much better in behavior — “Institute for American Values,” who was running around (still are, behind closed doors and in conferences with others) starting “marriage movements” (see David Blankenhorn and his underlings).

A certain Catholic social science-inclined New York Senator with the last name Moynihan was enamoured of his buddy from the AEI, Douglas J. Besharov.  In 1994, he kept referring to him.

I think the last straw was, after reading about this (and at FamilyCourtMatters you’ll see, I do know my stuff — and constantly learning, too) to run across the logo, in close proximity with one of the individuals (Cassie Statuto Bevan) on the U.S. Commission on Children and Family Welfare, and its final report called ‘PARENTING OUR CHILDREN: IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE NATION.”

Page heading:  “Family Policy, Marriage and Divorce”  Browse the titles:

Books, Monographs, and Papers

Reflections on Family: A Conversation with Douglas Besharov [PDF],U.S. Society & Values, January 2001

Douglas J. Besharov

African American Marriage Patterns [PDF], 2000

Douglas J. Besharov and Andrew West

Welfare Reform and Marriage [PDF], The Public Interest, Fall 1996

Douglas J. Besharov and Timothy S. Sullivan

One Flash: America Is Experiencing an Unprecedented Increase in Black-White Intermarriage [PDF], The New Democrat, July/August 1996

Douglas J. Besharov and Timothy S. Sullivan

Broken Family Values (book review) [PDF], The Washington Post,January 15, 1995

Douglas J. Besharov

Indicators: Not All Single Mothers Are Created Equal [PDF], The American Enterprise, September/October 1992

Douglas J. Besharov

Achieving Better Research on Family Violence: The Need to Address Definitional Issues [PDF], April 12, 1991

Douglas J. Besharov

How Much Are Working Mothers Working? [PDF] Public Opinion, November/December 1986

Douglas J. Besharov and Michelle M. Dally

Op-Eds

Asking More From Matrimony (PDF version), The New York Times, July 14, 1999

Douglas J. Besharov

A Look at Integration: The Interracial Generation: From Mixed Marriages, the Offspring of Hope [PDF], The Washington Post, July 21, 1996

Douglas J. Besharov

Unwed Moms Are White, Too: Once Again the Conventional Wisdom Has It Wrong [PDF], The Washington Post, May 3, 1987

Douglas J. Besharov

One Policy for Working Moms Won’t Fit All [PDF], The Wall Street Journal, October 29, 1986

Douglas J. Besharov

Return the Family to 1954 [PDF], The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 1985

Douglas J. Besharov

 

He seems a little overly concerned about Interracial Marriages, especially given what time it is (see years of publication).  Is the guy married?  Not got something better to do with his time?  Who’s funding all these publications (it’s rarely free, mouths like this need sponsors).  Even the titles kind of sound like Ron Haskins on steroids.

FACULTY PAGE (on About Us Page) has a story to tell:

Douglas J. Besharov (Director)
Douglas J. Besharov, a professor at the School of Public Policy and the Immediate Past President of the Association for Pubic Policy Analysis and Management, is the project director. Professor Besharov teaches courses on family policy, welfare reform, evaluation, and the implementation of social policy. He was the Joseph J. and Violet Jacobs Scholar in Social Welfare Studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) in Washington, D.C. from 1983 to 2009.” From 1991 to 1992, he served as the administrator of the AEI/White House Working Seminar on Integrated Services for Children and Families, a project designed to improve the delivery of services to disadvantaged children and their families.  From 1975 to 1979, he was the first director of the U.S. National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect.  Prior to this, he served as executive director of the New York State Assembly’s Select Committee on Child Abuse.  His most recent book is Rethinking WIC: An Evaluation of the Women, Infants and Children Program, co-authored with Peter Germanis. He is also the author of Recognizing Child Abuse: A Guide for the Concerned, published by the Free Press.  In addition, Mr. Besharov has written over 150 articles, and contributes to The New York Times,The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The American Enterprise Magazine.

Here’s Joseph J. Jacobs obituary in the London Times, although he was an American businessman who built a multinational chemical engineering company from scratch. He made his billions and then went to philanthropy and scholarships and things named after him; but I can at least respect the hard work and resourcefulness.  I guess after doing that, you are welcome to fund scholars at think tanks who will talk down to the poor — but that doesn’t mean I have to respect them.

I was driven back on welfare first time – violent husband; second time– kids stolen overnight by violent husband enabled by welfare reform theorizing hat single-motherhood leads to poverty when, it doesn’t HAVE to if they’ll quit the harassment based on profiling! — and the lsat time because, unfortunately, some of my breed (and DNA) fell for this theory and believed that she who can’t shut up and take it (i.e., codependent enablers of severe violence in the home) should be punished for attempting to stand upright.  I have talked to MANY mothers fighting to stay in contact with their own children whose families (including female relatives) turned on them after they got protection from abuse.  You know what else?  Some of their Moms STAYED MARRIED, in the process, AFTER KNOWING THAT DAUGHTER WAS BEING RAPED OR MOLESTED BY DAD.

These women could be excellent parents — if they weren’t being hounded through federal welfare reform policy that tries to equalize the matter and forces co-parenting with people that have been in jail for sometimes very good reasons.  It is resulting in social chaos.  I never thought I’d live to see this time in our country — and I have every intention of changing the status quo — and have begun to do so in more ways than meets the eye.

There are times when insisting on peace no matter what is to demand that some of us to violence to our own souls, and a true insult to reason.  The demand for peace in some contexts can be a form of violence, and is.  I know about it, too.

DISCLAIMER: I haven’t met either of these individuals and might get along just fine if I wasn’t aware of their publications and impact on the nation’s welfare, in some other context.  They shouldn’t take it personal if they look up and see some complaints from  a mere blogger.  However, I sure take personally anything that messes with (1) my children and their futures and (2) my own safety and prospects, after all I’ve been through in life so far and moreover (3) is so illogical it HAD to be passed by means of stacked commissions and stacked advisory boards, and rushed through as I am seeing, it indeed was.  While they are up in arms [decade after decade] about overly fertile unmarried African American women (single mothers) and disenfranchised FROM MARRIAGE as a leg up in society — I was being assaulted and robbed IN marriage, as were plenty of us – one reason possibly more weren’t signing up for a re-run, or even the first run.

Economically, there is more than one way to succeed — and most of the people adamant and “concerned” about how “low-income” families succeed didn’t succeed that way themselves — and as it turns out, are probably more worried that unemployed black males will get their educations another way and organize better to fight back, turn to Islam (“horrors!” go certain sectors) — or eventually, figure out (like I did — by simply continuing to look for better answers about what’s driving this insanity) — where the government has been (a) hiding and (b) squandering its income, if not its assets.

More “ABOUT”

You want a label?  Which one — profession, marital status, age, gender (measurements?), how many children if any?  Political party, religion?  Quick – what box to file this in?…..

Just read along for a while, I think it communicates.  If you’re short on time, don’t.  But for people who hang around (on my other blogs — start with ColdHardFacts pages, although that’s not the oldest or largest one) they get  that the rambling style has a purpose and a flow — like some rivers do.  They wind, but they have a destination.  So do I.  There’s a purpose to the curves, and for people that don’t assemble their “assertions” into narratives that can cover more than one field at a time — there’s a reason they want to control and take the material OUT of context.  Sometimes, so its reality won’t be perceived.

So I spend a good deal of time talking about the context….

PRE-MARRIAGE  (=Pre-Violence):

I wasn’t challenged in school (who was?), which may account for the active imagination (i.e., other things to think about after the tests or whatever else task was done), was a voracious reader, and thankfully was left fairly alone, in a wonderful setting for any youngster — semi-rural, but with plenty of intellectual and reading material.  It was a somewhat traditional (??) upbringing in a stable nuclear family, at least my parent’s didn’t divorce before all kids hit adulthood, and most of us were, what’s more, through college (a fraction of today’s expenses).   This, plus my subsequent marriage might be why I’m so upset at the obsession with marriage in federal policy terms these days.  Can it be just that misery loves company, or are their other reasons?

I opted for urban areas as a young adult (more people there; more arts, culture, things, potentials, ensembles, opportunities).  I am interested and people, and not for purposes of exploiting, assaulting, raping (I’m female, so that’d be a little tricky), or stealing from them.  It’s just not on the map.

So, it was a rude awakening to pick up a religious husband (Christianity being one of those things I explored into, immersed myself in the Bible as a young adult — my family didn’t, so there was a real ignorance of its contents) and this one was anti-intellectual, insecure, and as it turned out, a beater.  He didn’t beat the crap out of me — no broken bones (if you don’t count bones as teeth) but there were injuries, it was often enough, violent enough and and paranoid control-freak enough of my comings and goings (and yes, we had children) – escalating enough that, and alas not before 1996 welfare reform, I had to get the courts to officially kick him out of the house.

The sheer length of that marathon, however, had a significant impact on the economics, and when he was thrown out, that was THE time to get diligently up and running; which I absolutely did. The sheer exhilaration of not having to come home nightly or be exposed at any time (including while away from home, sometimes) to threats, property damage, dead or abused pets, or attacks — or being dragged out of a sound sleep for an argument in the middle of the night) that’s a real lease on life, and I was very aware (as a mother) of the time lost, and the urgency of the times. I also appreciated self-sufficiency in a chosen profession, something of the quality of miracle was attached to the SHORT interlude between having a restraining order, and having a husband filing a lawsuit for sole custody of our children, visitation to Mom, and Mom pays his way (child support) — just like the old days almost. Back in “control,” like a man should be, right?

So — did you know this? — the case was ex parte’d / consolidated without my input (or I’d have enlightened them) into a divorce hearing, which shifted venue into what I later learned, are called “conciliation” courts, and the walls don’t respond to facts; they seek opportunities to keep the situation in motion, which in cases of clear domestic violence background, assures that someone is going to keep coming back to fix what was just broken — and the courts can then sell the public on how broke they are. But I didn’t learn that til years later.

As I now see it, I was a government virgin — I hadn’t been on social service, didn’t know about Food Stamps, and not in jail.  I didn’t understand that we don’t HAVE a functional justice system any more, or that the family court system had become a therapy.  I had made it through several decades of life, sometimes in dangerous neighborhoods, and was only assaulted a few times — and mugged (lost a purse, but not a huge amount) twice, maybe three times, without injury.

I get married, and over a seven-year period, was repeatedly mugged, in the literal, stalking, and figurative sense.  My credit was stolen under duress after years of what I can only call financial pimping “for the family.”  I have a memory of hell; these memories are specific, many (I’m a writer, so many of them also were journaled, and some things you don’t need to journal — they’re burned into the brain through trauma.  I have read those journals many years later, and can barely stomach them — I was literally living as a POW and still trying to reason with the guy.

I was’t agreeing with him — I was surviving, and taking care of very young children, constantly finding (negotiating) ways (with or without access to a vehicle, or transportation funds) to get them away from the violent situation in front of other, healthier ones, including other nonviolent families, into arts, dance, music, gym, whatever — classes, all if which had to be bargained for, scholar-shipped or (I had some skills) worked off in exchange for their tuition.

The same goes for outside-the-home activities for me, Mom and Wife.  Church was “allowed” (understandably; they enable marital abuse to this day) — and the rest, I could go, but might be punished on return, suddenly.  One time I got us away for two full weeks (not an easy feat) and at that time — especially after seeing the retaliation (after attempts to sabotage my getting up there, monitor me mid-way and in general show his surly self at the camp, which was full of children and other professionals dealing with them.

When I came back – he was in a suddenly better mood, which I was to realize WHY, on returning to the home.  To say what would reveal who I am (still not the best idea) but in short, it was rude, crude, and an escalation.  FYI — ONLY the experience of NOT being abused and exploited for a period, enabled me to emotionally grasp that there was another option still open, including a potential work option.  I was out of there within half a year, by the grace of God, THANKS to God, and NO THANKS to any religious entity, whatsoever, to this day.  Some people who believe in Jesus have been very kind since (no kinder than several atheists as well).   Atheists are often tolerant, and Christians have been trained to patch up and pick up the messes made by their leaders, as too many of certain denominations also train their women that this also is their purpose in life.

That is actually not a bad analogy for what the PUBLIC has been trained to do for ITS leaders, financially and in other ways.  Which brings me to this blog (there are others).

PS.  RE: Judgmentalism — I’ve made my own determinations.  Yours doesn’t count. But, for the record:
Most people have NO idea how much energy it takes to live with, stand up to, attempt to strategize survival AND a way out, AND connect continually with others to see intervention (which I was doing for many years)  – but I wasn’t walking right out the door, with small children and without a functional bank account or a job — or an offer of somewhere to go.

Although word is getting out (just as word gets out about things like Guantanimo) that there is danger in them thar family courts, people can be thrown out of their houses, tossed into jail (which is another way to get them homeless fast) and the court doesn’t respect its own rules, requirements, or court orders. They can issue them, but it takes something else to actually get them enforced – usually something one parent doesn’t have, and if they seek it, are going to be deemed “alienating” or uncooperative, or hostile, etc.

It is a situation that induces major trauma — which is kind of like the courthouse roundup — the insanity of the paradigm leads to conflict with sane people thinking the courts are something they aren’t — which of course then has to be “healed” through further indoctrination by the court-connected corporations.

Which brings me to the naming of this blog — it could’ve been called anything. But I just came from actually reading the “Final Report” (1996) of the nine-month, 15- member “United States Commission on Children and Family Welfare”

Parenting our children : in the best interest of the nation : Report of the U.S. Commission on Child and Family Welfare.

by U.S. Commission on Child and Family Welfare.
Published 1996

HathiTrust Digital Library (search here for the title if link doesn’t produce a link to it on-line):

There’s a history tying to the American Enterprise Institute (in part) leading up to this welfare reform matter — and a certain scholar was referenced by Senator Daniel Moynihan in proudly introducing the “National Advisory Council to Welfare Statistics” (or similar title) name, yet more hand-picked individuals who would be given inordinate control of our country’s social science-engineered future.

(link to Senator Moynihan interview, telling his background and his side of the story.  On the way, note the Harvard Connection, and picking up from another Sociologist James S. Coleman). He got “some Carnegie funding” to help along the study.

He mentioned an “eminent scholar” Douglas J. Besharov of the above conservative  Think Tank, so I looked the guy up, unfortunately for anyone involved in perpetuating this stacked commission and stacked advisory council, and in short anyone who believes that after those of us who survive the policies, will NOT come back and “out” the outrageous attitudes of those who promoted them — and the devious and controlling measures used to push it through Congress.

And a friend of mine, James S. Coleman – a great sociologist – was asked to do this survey. And when he undertakes it, they said, “why are you doing this? Everybody knows these schools are unequal in their facilities and that’s why they’re unequal in their outcomes.” He said, “Well, everybody knows it, but now we’ll know it for once and all.” 

And I’ll tell you, early one evening, there’s a reception at the Harvard Faculty Club, and Seymour Martin Lipset – the incomparable Marty Lipset – walks in, sees me, comes over and says, “You know what Coleman’s finding, don’t you?” And I said, “No.” He said, “It’s all family.” 

And, indeed what [Coleman] found [was that] the predictor of educational achievement was to be found in family setting, structure, and so forth. 

QUESTION: Not in schools? Not principally? 

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Not principally in schools.

How convenient, to dispel educational disparity, or social caste.  A sociologist said so — therefore it must be so.

And up at Harvard, I organized a faculty seminar on the Coleman study. It was a huge study, just 400-page telephone books of correlation coefficients. And you had to get to page 44 in the introduction before you learned it. But by and large, the effects of school facilities is rather weak, you know? And Jim [Coleman] said, “Look, say anything you want, just publish the numbers, the data.” 

And we began. I got a little money from Carnegie, and we thought we’d have a good supper one night and get 12 people to come, and then maybe eight of us would sit around and tinker with this stuff through the year. Time came the following spring, and we had the whole of the second floor of the Harvard Faculty Club taken up with this seminar

1965 Department of Labor — here it is, “The Negro Family:  The Case for National  Action:”

(after reading President Lyndon Johnson’s intro/and remembering the context);

Chapter I. The Negro American Revolution.

Chapter II. The Negro American Family.

Chapter III. The Roots of the Problem.

Chapter IV. The Tangle of Pathology.   ((YEP.  He actually admits that in a patriarchal culture, being matriarchal puts one at a severe disadvantage…..))

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary — a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. That the Negro community has not only survived, but in this political generation has entered national affairs as a moderate, humane, and constructive national force is the highest testament to the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people.

But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.

{{and what fearful price might that be, you will ask?}}

In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.

There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage.

READ HERE:  The model for the United States Constitution was indeed drawn from “Native American Myth,” which is to say, from the Iroquois (Six Nations) Confederacy.  There seems plenty of evidence that while the founding fathers liked the concept OK – one part they weren’t about to stomach was participation of women in government, as did the Iroquois.

COMMENTARY: I am a woman.  I am intelligent, I am competent.  I was granted the privilege of college, and appreciated it — and used this skill and professional degree not just to enrich myself personally (i.e., acquire wealth) – but to help other communities, in win/win relationships, better their schools.  I have seen people uplifted by the addition of arts to their lives, and didn’t need an Oscar or an Emmy to have joy in my life, or add it to others.  I also didn’t need men to make my decisions for me where to live, what to work at, or when it was time to relocate.  I enjoyed being around people from a variety of backgrounds, and didn’t do “cults.”  For a time, I was involved in a particular religious one — but guess what.  When it became clear WHO they were — I walked out, walked away, and didn’t come back, AND quit contributing my money and my time.   Adults do this, and I had every right to.

I have traveled more than halfway across this country, by car, alone (or once or twice with others).  I didn’t ask permission to do it or beg for coaching on on HOW to do it.  I figured it out, went and did.  I went and got another degree (work/study essentially), re-arranging many things to do so, and am glad I did.  All of this was BEFORe welfare reform and the manic backlash against so-called “feminism” which in my opinion, is simply women re-balancing a few things that were obviously out of balance.    I think women, on their good days, are more community minded, which also means we have often times a much better sense of what’s up IN a community then those who spend their lives in one box (whether work, school, or PRISON) within it.  While I wouldn’t want to be ONLY around women, most of us have figured out that somewhere in our lives, we need a mother figure — or some women friends.

At other times we are going to naturally want on outlet from some expression of our sexuality, ideally with someone we love, or respect.   While the imagination of my youth and culture has typically, yes, been a lasting relationship called marriage — that can be a flytrap.  As I cannot go back in life and try it again with less respect for monogamy or marriage (part of mine obviously, for those who know me, comes from my Christianity, which simply says keep it zipped for your spouse. I later understood this is not a two-way street and is simply another form of manic attempt to manage women’s sexuality for some who have a love/hate relationship with it themselves.  There’s even a current movie out encouraging us all to have empathy with the poor sex-addict and understand they need their AA_style groups, too, true friends who understand how hard it is …..  (give us a break!!).

So, YES:

I was born here, I married here, I had children here (basically good pregnancies, full-term, healthy births with the most difficult aspect of the second one being the physical battering and associated drama/trauma (stress hormones n doubt), and sorrow that one kid couldn’t even get born without abuse….

I raised children here (that word applies even to the time married) and have worked here ALL my adult life (including during and after a battering, abusive relationship).

Seeing now, the degree of abuse American women are now (and previously) suffering including deprivation of the right to vote even until the 1920s, and the 1960s-1990sff backlash against ANY basic equality to our life-giving gender (let’s see those clones — you going to keep having a population without our consent?  You want to marginalize non-ruling-caste mothers who aren’t going to kick out any babies and reject our wisdom IF we don’t think along the same lines?) — I can testify that there is something innately self-hating in patriarchy.  It’s the colonialist mentality — and not truly “American.”  

IMMEDIATELY — from my family, not the community and not based on my character, and without regard to my actual behavior or accomplishments — a self-appointed (not legitimate jurisdiction) male began harassing and haranguing me, then a single mother — for believing that I could survive or take care of my children, nay, even make decisions on behalf of my own household, as a single mother.  “everyone knows” was the tone — that this is impossible, what I was attempting to do.

Then again, he wasn’t welcome — with is cooperating local spouse — in my home EVER again to insult, attempt to interrogate, degrade and deride me anywhere near — including anywhere near my still-growing children (who happened to be daughters).  This man had seen what I just did to a man who attempted this pattern of behavior — i.e., I filed a restraining order and had him thrown out, and went about my business.

The childishness and narcissism involved in destroying other lives just to “prove” a point about superiority — it comes from the exploitation, the imperialist arrogance, the colonizing instinct.  Others and their land are not “real” full-status human beings, they are there as OBJECTS of someone else’s PSYCHE and TARGETS of their desire to INDOCTRINATE.

The same thing was done in Africa, but I didn’t learn it til recently how relevant this is.  I’ve written about it plenty on my other blog.

Women sometimes think in more depth and it takes time to understand the different layers.  But one things is typical — we will want to get to the BOTTOM of certain problems (and realize when we haven’t) as a partial skill, probably — in simply, again, raising kids.  We are not innately (it would seem), geared to “whatever makes it go away,” not when we are in legitimately decent communities free from terror.

Families who have experienced long-term abuse will sometimes be harsh towards their younger siblings, or ANY show of weakness, to dissociate from it, and make it shut up — lest the big bad abuser come in and make a scene.  Generations of this gets into some seriously passive/aggressive behavior, in my opinion.  You get children called “it” and they will be “it” for a lifetime, unless they find somewhere else to live.

When this is engrained into the culture — and it is, in ours — then there’s all this tolerance of institutional violence, lest one has to face it individually among sectors that are allegedly (supposedly) safe from it by their lifestyle.  Everyone is slightly “cowed” and into the status quo.

“As the Indians were standing along the shore watching the Puritans arrive, the Indians carried with them a tradition of meeting and democracy, of free speech, of free thinking, of tolerance for each other’s differences of religion, of all those things which got attached to the Bill of Rights.¹³ White leaders watched the method of government that the Iroquois utilized and they learned union and democracy from it. Historians are now beginning to admit what they must have been aware of, that the government of the United States is not patterned after something across the ocean where there was a belief in the divine right of kings and where the people had no voice, but it is patterned after the government of the People of the Long House, where all people, including both men and women were respected and took a part in their government.^14“

Here an earlier word of caution should be repeated. These is much evidence that a considerable number of Negro families have managed to break out of the tangle of pathology and to establish themselves as stable, effective units, living according to patterns of American society in general. E. Franklin Frazier has suggested that the middle-class Negro American family is, if anything, more patriarchal and protective of its children than the general run of such families.²⁷ Given equal opportunities, the children of these families will perform as well or better than their white peers. They need no help from anyone, and ask none.

{{E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER, SOCIOLOGIST, UCHICAGO, 1894-1962)

Chapter V. The Case for National Action.

Footnote References.

He has a B.A. from Queens College (in Flushing New York, since 1937) , and a JD, LLM from SUNY?  I DNR –you can go see.

Moreover, a family who made millions (more likely billions) through diligence, obtaining FOUR degrees from Polytechnic, being smart enough to start his own chemical engineering business (employing 35,000 people worldwide and specializing in the usual things any military-industrial complex society would — constructing plants for corporations that manufacture chemicals, oil, biotech, etc. — things the government wants lots of — and maintaining control of it into old age, and then of course getting into philanthropy and charities named after himself and his wife:  Joseph J.  and Violet J. Jacobs.

So looks like Besharov has been enable to keep spouting off his value system through a scholarship named after the hardworking, resourceful, and diligent entrepreneur J.J. Jacobs .(the photo is the link).

WELFARE REFORM ACADEMY WAS FORMED IN 1997 (Directed by guess how).

The Welfare Reform Academy was created in 1997 to help state and local officials, private social service providers, and other interested parties respond creatively to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the new welfare reform law signed by President Clinton in 1996. While the law pressures public officials and service providers to make their programs more efficient and better targeted, it also presents an unprecedented opportunity for states to reshape and improve their programs. The Academy will provide training in program design, implementation, and evaluation for the new TANF, Food Stamp, Medicaid, job training, child care, child welfare, and child support programs.

(link is to the “Committee to Review Welfare Reform Research” A 2002 REPORT) appointed by whom?

I SEE WADE HORN (Former HHS, National Fatherhood Initiative) GETS to COMMENT

I DNK — but Mr. Besharov (a lawyer) is mentioned first – he directs the academy — followed by NINE more men (plus a male administrator) and ONE woman, Isabel Sawhill, well -known in some circles for her many helpful participations in fatherhood studies, Brookings Institution, who also gave us Ron Haskins, who helped give us federal incentives to increase noncustodial parent access — a.k.a., reduce or eliminate child support and get kids away from mothers like me (and plenty of other mothers who deserved a fair shake in the custody courts).

Isabel Sawhill

Isabel Sawhill has had a respectable career focusing on budget issues; she clearly pre-dates my generation, so may not understand what it’s like to appreciate a period of opportunity for women, and then the feminist backlash when we DIDN’T use our opportunities to go seek a career with the feds, or to become a leading lawyer, or reform the world from the front-stage position.   AS a budgetary specialist, and like many people at Think Tanks with solid source of income from federal and private foundations (who usually run them in association with each other) they are NATURALLY experts on POVERTY:  One thing about being a federally-funded or thinktank poverty expert is — you’ll probably never be poor, or have to live in poor neighborhoods, and if poor people actually found out who decided that their marital status — or gender — or race — and not lousy schools and unmonitored TANF DIVERSIONS INTO MARRIAGE PROMOTION BY CONSERVATIVE (AND, AS IT TURNS OUT PROGRESSIVE) PATRIARCHY PROMOTERS — they’ll be immune from accountability.  If things get bad, unlike us — they can just fly somewhere else temporarily and participate in another webinar, probably.

UNLIKE SOME OF US — WHO ARE BEING FORCED TO CO-PARENT WITH VIOLENT MEN, AND SOME OF US WHO DON’T SURVIVE THE PROCESS, OR OUR KIDS DON’T.  AND HAVE TO SLEEP AND WAKE WITH THIS EVERY DAY.

To be possibly continued, or edited, when I’m in the mood.  You were already notified what gender I am — we have moods — and I should probably also acknowledge there is a PTSD factor I struggle with when writing about things which I’m angry about.  Be thankful I’m not physical-violence prone and have this outlet.  Part of PTSD may be the hovering between FIGHT or FLIGHT — when either mode would put one in a more focused energy.  Be thankful it doesn’t go to “FIGHT” in the outburst fashion, and understand that there’s  a process of balancing speak/don’t speak, which is very difficult still (even years later) for someone who has gotten repeatedly thrown up against the wall, or to the floor straddled, hands over mouth, or around my neck at times, when protesting some other form of abuse — or simply SPEAKING.

I am also dealing with people to this day who retaliate (and not just on me personally, which would be easier, but on others I care about) for protesting cruel and criminal practices designed to silence, or produce submission — long term.  It’s just a tactic of war in a country supposedly at peace with its own laws and of course, home of the brave and land of the free…

To be Edited, naturally…