On Monday October 19, I watched Cristina’s show on Univision. A bunch of stories of illegal immigrants whose families have been separated and broken by the “Migra”. I have blogged on Bally, Missouri’s  circuit court judge spoiling an illegal mother from her child Carlos, but Cristina’s cases defies any understanding. There is not even the varnish of the “court order”.  Immigration officers Rambos forced the doors of an illegal mother, handcuffed her, tell her that she is going to be deported. The mother  does not even have a chance to say bye to her baby who happens to be asthmatic. All she has to do is to tell the Rambos the name of a neighbor who could take care of her kid while adopting parents are found for him. After all, the baby has the sad privilege of being born American. Hence he will stay in this country, away from his mother (Click on the photo below to see a video of the show).

Cristina ’s show highlights the decrepitude of family laws in this country and the indifference thereof for children and parents rights. Obviously, the INS has not heard the floods of platitudes that major channels – CNN included, with its informative but unequal broadcast Latinos in America- serve us, such as “latino culture builds on strong families” (which culture does not?) and latinos can succeed, too. Yet, if it has drawn buckets of tears form its audience, Cristina’s show is short of having raised up to the gravity of the problem. Nothing about the INS officers’ behavior and the latitude they take with human rights.

Not surprisingly, the absence of  feminist outrage after Cristina’s show was deafening. Feminist lawmakers must be too busy, during this child abuse- awareness month, to celebrate the glorious family laws’ enforcement in family court. While awaiting for immigration reforms, let me venture a suggestion: enforce mandatory, medical intakes of marijuana by INS officers. These folks need to cool off.

As societies become more democratic, they trim the grip of the affluent on the legislative and the judicial systems. In the

Debtors' Prison (pecuniarities.com)

nineteenth century, European countries got rid of property qualification to vote, the US banned debtor’s prison, by which somebody could rot in jail for an indefinite period of time. But the progress of democracy is sometimes paved with traps. In the US, debtor’s prison is back for dads with child support arrears, brought back by reactionary feminist legislation. Is it benefiting children? One wonders. Look at family laws across states and you will find no standard range of the cost to raise a child. In most states (except Minnesota and New Jersey perhaps), child support is defined as a percentage of non-custodial parent – dad’s income.  Joe Halderman, who has recently been arrested for blackmailing David Letterman, was ordered to pay $6,800 a month for his two children: more than six times what I actually pay in child support for my girls. Why? Do his children deserve more than mine and mine more than the children of dads who pay less child support for two children? Truly, the goal of such laws has nothing to do with preserving children’s welfare but with securing a status that women acquire trough marriage. The nineteenth century bourgeois dream. The incentives that convey such laws? Screw men across the board, rich and poor.

Now watch the incentives sent by Support Magistrate Karen D. Kolomechuck (replacing Grey) from Manhattan Family Court, to ex-wife, let’s call her Ms Bully. In her findings of facts backing her “order continuing an order of support by default”, Kolomechuck states that “Petitioner (ex-wife) does not seek a finding of willfulness or incarceration at this time”. Meaning: You want to have the bastard incarcerated,  just ask for it. What is Ms Bully going to do?  Ask for it.  Or keep adding up to unreimbursed medical expenses that could be reimbursed by the father’s health insurance, if only Ms Bully were to use it.  That qualifies as debt in the moronic world of  Manhattan family court, which will deliver jail for the sucker.

All of this is, of course, for the well-being of my daughters whom I have not seen “unsupervised” for seven years, and “supervised” for more than four years. Thanks to Manhattan Family Court. And there is nothing that Manhattan Family Court intend to do about it.

Please take a poll:

First, they strip you from the right to see your children. Second they strip you from your money. That’s the job of Support Magistrates in family courts. If you have the bad luck to have your case dealt with by a zealous one such as Support Magistrate Grey, you will get a money  judgment order, by which your employer will have to deduct any amount her Highness decides to deprive you off.  It might exceed the retarded New York State guidelines of 17% of your gross income for one child and 25% for two. You might be left with just enough to pay your rent. It does not matter; you pay fellah.

In my case, things should  be easy. New York State Child Support Processing Center processes child support dues from payments coming from New York State. But New York State Processing Center is facetious. I recently received a “Notice Regarding Child Support and Certification for Tax Offset/Passport Denial”. I owe $393.92 in child support. Why? God knows.To find out why, I can fill up a Request for a administrative  review form, where it is nowhere suggested that  New York State might have made a mistake. In the meantime tough, compassionate New York State charges a 9% interest rate in child support arrears. And good luck to find out on what amount the interest rate applies.

Some parental rights activists are rejoicing. Psychology professor Gordon Finley, from Florida international University,

2001 A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)

has investigated the State of Fatherhood across a sample of some 2,000 young adults and found that yes, fathers are useful. They do more than bringing the bacon at the table. Children with fathers have less risky sexual behavior and, guess what, girls need their dads.

These results don’t make me happy.  Actually, they make me cry. Not that there is nothing wrong with proving the obvious; but while Professor Finley was busy refuting Maureen Dowd’s insinuation that men are useless, family laws in this country were going down the drain, separating children from their fathers, and reducing fathers to child support providers. A huge, irreparable waste of broken lives. But law makers and family courts had an excuse though: they did not know that fathers were useful. Oops!

It is quite strange that in family values country, such damages to families have occurred.  How could they have been  avoided? Perhaps by caring for human rights; children’s for instance.  Since  1989, there is a  UN convention of the rights of children, which among others, states that “States Parties shall respect the right of the child who is separated from one or both parents to maintain personal relations and direct contact with both parents on a regular basis, except if it is contrary to the child’s best interests (article 9, paragraph 1). Going through the convention, one discovers, interestingly enough, that children rights and parents rights – that of useless- or- not fathers included- are intertwined. If you alienate fathers rights, you also alienate children’s.

One of the big absent among the signatories: the US. Let’s dream. Now that the lawmakers know that fathers are useful, that might change. Also, fathers might even see the introduction of shared parenting into family laws.

Public Option

Two weeks ago, there were tea party protesters in Washington. To me these folks are zombies. Public health services in the US are not at par with those of any developed country, there are monstrous gaps in health insurance coverage because the industry is dominated by a few fat private corporations, and these folks were asking for less government?  David Brooks in his last New York Times op-ed piece claims that these demonstrations have nothing to do with racism, that this is just the expression of the Jeffersonian strain in the American political debate. Maybe. Yet, if anything, people should ask for more government, not less. And given the state of affairs in the American public health system, the public option better be strong.

There is another area where more government is urgently needed: family courts. What you have here is a scrawny public element working with an expanding and prosperous private family industry. If you are part of a sixish- year long (!) child abuse trial in family court, you figure out that the judge and the law guardian are in the business of giving access to the pie to their private cronies in the system. Who are those? Forensic psychologists,social workers and family service agencies; not the best and the brightest. Are they necessary to the process? In my case, the answer is a resounding no. Public A.C.S (Administration of Child Services)had done the forensic job, which judge Sturm chose to sit on. Was it for the best? The private forensic evaluator Berrill produced a job which everybody acknowledged as less than mediocre and again, the judge chose to sit on it. The necessity of supervised visits by family services agency? If you have a law guardian who reads visit reports, does her investigative work with the family and warns the mother that alienation of children will not be tolerated, you can easily divide by five the number of  these visits (I had some forty visits from 2002 to 2005). But the law guardian who was supposed to represent the interests of my girls was a non-entity who conceived of her role as an umpire counting the strikes made by each camp during the course of the trial.

The consequences of a stronger public, family judiciary? An increase in taxes, which in final analysis, will be good for the tax payer’s purse. These public servants will take away most of the load from the private family industry: hence you cut the fat where it is and you get  faster, less painful and less onerous trials. And you might even end up with the birth of a public good: family justice. Priceless.

For me, September 10 is a dark day. This year, it was the fourth anniversary of my last “therapeutic, supervised visit” with my girls.

My girls and myself at my sister's place in France (2001)

The visit was supposed to finally take place at my home and mark the onset of the resumption of unsupervised visits, that my girls and I had been deprived of since May 2002.

One more time since May 2002, I had prepared my apartment for the girls’ visit. I wanted them to have the feeling that everything had been waiting for them since they last have came.  Retrospectively, I was incredibly naive: my ex-wife had successfully put pressure on Spitzer, the director of the agency in charge of supervising my visitations with the girls, to have the social worker, who had mapped a quick resumption of my “normal” visitations at my place, to be out of my case. In Manhattan Family court, there is nobody to stand for father and children rights against an alienating mother. But when you are in the unthinkable situation of being deprived of the right to see your children, you hang on to the slightest, slippery rope that Family court throws at you.

I will always remember meeting the girls and the new Comprehensive Family Service  social worker on 145 street and Broadway. My oldest daughter, Camille, was supposed to be aware that the visit would be at my place. Somehow,she seemed to learn the news this very day and she does not like it.  On the way to my place, she started crying and stated she did not want to come to my place. She was in fact professing her loyalty to her mum, whose position in the trial would be shaken by a visit at my place, as it would prove that seeing me without supervision is possible and the trial she initiated was meaningless.

We arrived  at my building. Chloé wanted to go up, Camille did not. I realized that the social worker, Kisha Parrish, did not know how to handle the situation. She called mum to encourage the girls to go on with the visit. Surprise, surprise, mum’s encouragements are inexistent. She turns to her boss, who is clueless. Like George Bush the first with Dan Quayle, Spitzer has hired Parris because there was no danger than she would seem smarter than him.  In the meantime, I tried to convince Camille that she has nothing to fear. After all, the visit is supervised.  My neighbors, who know my girls, go in and out and say hi to our  strange group.

Suddenly, without even consulting with me,  the social worker took the girls and left.  I was speechless. I followed  them to Broadway, to put them in a cab.

Assessment of the visit by the law guardian, Garline Octobre and Judge Sturm: everything is fine.  Both would recommend the continuation of the same rotten recipe of “therapeutic, supervised” visitations with the same people.

September 10, 2005 was my last visitations and the last time I saw my girls. Since then, I have been at least twice a year in court for “unreimbursed medical expenses.”  Alienated girls who don’t see their fathers? Manhattan Family court could care less.

I will never get it.  This must be my French blood.  The thought of becoming rich has never seriously occupied my mind. Also, after the Lehman’s Brothers’ bankruptcy, the near one of AIG, Madoff’’s Ponzi scheme, the meltdown of the real estate market and the collapse of the credit market, I would have thought that many people had given this dream a break, just for a while, until the economy cruises again at a less anemic, non-jobless growth rate. Obviously I had not heard of Robert Kiyosaki and Rich Dad Education.

Robert Kiyosaki does not flatly want to teach people how to become rich. Dads are his target. Dads? Does he mean married dads?  or the rare specie of divorced custodial dads? Because if he has in mind non-custodial fathers, Rich Dad Education has invented the oxymoron of the year. These days, non-custodial fathers cannot make ends meet, and they are  massively denied reduction of child support payments by family courts, which want us to be “fit:” keep paying child support without complaining. Richard Kiyosaki wants to make us rich?

I cannot make Rich Dad seminars on September 10 and 11 in New York City. Can someone please share his notes?

Shared Parenting Ireland

The wind of progress is so desperately rare in the gloomy world of family courts that when you feel it, it looks like it’s the one which is going to bring the most waited rain on the desert. After years of  the regime “mummy gets full custody, daddy pays what the Court says and sees the kids if mummy feels like it”, science found evidence that kids needed both parents for their development. Family courts recently heard about this unsuspected breakthrough. Outcome: mandatory parenting classes for divorced parents in 27 states (I have not heard of such classes in retarded Manhattan family court).

According to Ann Wallace Allen, these parenting classes give pretty good results. They curb down animosity and the incentives to alienate that are spurred by the current biased family laws. Parents discover that if they are not friends, they can yet manage to communicate, meet at parents-teacher conferences and be both part of the social lives of their children.  And kids happen not to be traumatized by the divorce of their parents for it is not the divorce per se that have a negative impact on them, but the inability of parents to deal with one another within the course of a divorce.

Parenting classes are nice , but the decisive step for father rights is the passing of shared-parenting bills. As the revamping of the health care system is doomed to be dwarfed without a serious public option , there will not be real improvements to the current desastrous family laws without the acknowledgment of equal parenting rights for fathers.

Assurancetourix (Asterix's comics)

A few weeks ago, I received a letter from Mark E. Brossman, from Schulte Roth& Zabel LLP, counsel of the Brearley School. Check it out:

Schulte Roth&Zabel

Although I have a Judge Sturm’s court order allowing me to attend parent-teacher conferences, the Brearley School, where my girls are students, has denied me access to the parent-teacher conferences. In the three postings of this blog about my “quest” to be part of the scholarly life of my girls, I relate the steps of my dialogue with the direction of the School.  Contrary to what Mark E. Brossman says, there is nothing defamatory vis-a-vis the school, Dr. Hull or Ms Elsbach, Head of the School and Head of the Middle School, respectively. I believe I have respected one of the basic blogging rules of conduct: don’t say anything online that you would not say in person.

People start being aware that family courts are biased against fathers and don’t even enforce their own ruling when custodial mothers violate them.  Adding to the aggravation, there are institutions, such as the Brearley School in my case, that choose to side with alienating mothers and then close the already-limited windows that fathers might have into the lives of their children. Donald Tenn, president of Fathers for Justice, in 2008, climbed a crane to protest the unfair treatment he received from the Sacramento county family court. I will not climb a crane: I have vertigo. Instead, I have this blog, and I intend to write what I please, without being disrespectful or defamatory. If the Brearley School wants to reply, I will gladly publish their comments.

It is amazing the number of victims one can make on the name of choice. President Obama is trying to revamp the health care system, and the usual suspects – insurance companies, pharmaceutical industry, the American medial association- are trying to sell us the same scary threats: with the creation of a public health insurance, the quality of care will go down, you will not be able to choose your doctor anymore..bla.bla.bla. For sure, these champions of choice do not care about the 47 millions of uninsured Americans, who have given up choosing altogether, nor do they seem to care about the choice of the currently insured. Those are frequently denied care – a medical loss in insurance terminology, or they often face catch 22  choices: I had a colleague at the French Institute who was covered by Aetna. The company was covering for her operation of her hips, but was giving her the choice to pay or not to pay for the anesthesiologist and anesthetics, that Aetna plan was not covering…

In New York State, even if I have one of the best insurance of the country, I have a pre-existing condition: being a non-custodial father, with no-decision making power as to using my insurance for my girls.  Ex-wife does not send me the insurance forms, the periodontist Leifert refuses to do it too even if I pay the bills and for some three years now, I have been ordered by Manhattan Family court to pay for now close to $10,000 in unreimbursed periodontic expenses that my plan covers. Am I too hopeful to think that with a mandatory universal health insurance system, public or not, insurance premiums will finally cover children, even if the policy holder is a non-custodial father?