My friends at Legal Momentum work with Congress every day to ensure our tattered safety net remains or gets better. As President Obama said yesterday, it is *not* at all "courageous" to balance the budget on the elderly and the poor. My friend Tim Casey from Legal Momentum, wrote an article on Politico that says it all but more needs to be done in order to ensure the new beginnings to a safety net for all who need it.
One of the heroes on Legal Momentum's board is Representative Gwen Moore, one of the WI 14. No wonder she stood so steadfast in the wake of worker's rights last month, because Gwen was a welfare recipient at one time and used it as an opportunity to get her education (as 70% of women did before Welfare DEFormed, who now cannot even get a GED anymore). As a witness to the horrible consequences of this act put into motion over 15 years ago, Gwen knows more than most how the punitive, short-sighted system of welfare forces parents, most who are women, into abject, lifelong poverty wages.
Now Welfare DEFormed is on the chopping block and about to be debated.
Families are being torn apart already because the American Safe Family's Act (AFSA), which is the only generous funding right now that is coming in out of the Social Security slush fund and being used for children. Why does this impact welfare and low income families? AFSA is the money used to accuse parents of abuse, take their children and terminate the parent's rights so they can be adopted. Its caveats state "The more children you take, the more money you will receive. If you return these children home, we will take that funding away and furthermore take the money out of the next funding cycle..." At this time Child Protective Services and their minions get on the average of $8000
per month per child. They know that keeping a child in the home with services (even when the parent(s) are drug addicts or alcoholics) gives this child a far better chance of growing up stable than any foster care or adoptive home could ever give because of the trauma they undergo for losing their birth families.
http://nccpr.info/the-evidence-is-in-foster-care-vs-keeping-families-together-the-definitive-studies/ In other words our DSHS offices all over the country who could ask for better caveats to spend money on family preservation, have plenty of money to take kids and would rather use it to destroy families than to help a desperately poor family with assistance that would cost about 1/3 as much.
Furthermore this money is corrupting our court systems because family court and even the "defense" lawyer stand to benefit if the child is taken because they ALL get paid out of AFSA money and CPS workers even get bonuses every time they successfully take a child. They routinely ignore Constitutional rights, lie in court, use their "consultants" (also AFSA paid) to take children on bogus science, have "independent" CASA workers who by their own admission go with CPS 97% of the time, they will do anything to get and keep that money. What does this mean for upper income families? Well when any accusations of abuse come to them, they will be ~ and are to their horror ~ treated the same because of "court precedence".
I wish I were making this up but I have witnessed it over and over with my own eyes as an advocate for low income families. Please write your Congressperson and let them know it is not moral to cut Welfare any more and to give low income moms the opportunity to get an education like Gwen and so many like her who are now doing the good work to make life better for all Americans. If there is one thing we all should learn about Welfare DEFormed, enacted at a time that put into law things the middle class are now experiencing, it is that what affects the least of us affects us all.
Here is the link to Tim's article:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53510.htmlCat in Seattle
Copyright Peoplesing.org 2011 Reprinted in full with permission
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