This is a great promotion and I’m sure will benefit us all by a decrease in overuse and misuse of non-green elements. Nonetheless…. per the request of sponsor, here is our pledge!

We at FelonsCorner, hereby pledge to NOT PRINT ANY PAPER FOR 90 days. We further pledge to only print that which is absolutely necessary beyond the next 90 days. Thereby, producing a minimum reduction in paper use by 1/4th per year with a goal of a 60% reduction. This is no easy task either. Though, we have everything in place to do so.

The standard fax machine as been replaced by an electronic one. (J2 Messenger).  All outgoing mail lists have been replaced by an electronic mail list. From standard mail to E-mail.

That’s at the very least, a good start!

THANK YOU FILEDROPPER!

Programs, I might add, that are already funded by the tax paying citizens. Then assessed in whole (the total estimated balance of everything the state & feds give away via welfare to the custodial parent), against the non-custodial parent. This is a tribunal system that is unregulated, unaccountable and wields unrestricted police powers. These state and county departments employ individuals not licensed to practice law, yet enables them to execute legal action and take other actions that are restricted to certified and licensed law enforcement departments and officers. This is why a few states have already ruled them unconstitutional and illegal.

Not to mention, that they have turned CIVIL proceedings into CRIMINAL proceedings. This is strictly prohibited in every state in the nation. Including Federal Courts.

Take a look at this article by the New York Times.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0DEFD9133AF93AA15752C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

‘Dead Broke’ Dads’ Child-Support Struggle

Every month, on order of a Colorado judge, Jason Stribling sinks deeper into debt.

Mr. Stribling is obligated to pay $899 a month in current and back child support for his 15-month-old son, Nasir. The only job he says he can find is a part-time one at a Denver recreation center that pays $600 a month. When he does the math, Mr. Stribling said, he feels as if he is drowning.

”I am, like, stunned,” the 24- year-old father said. ”Sometimes I get so mad at the mother of my son.”

His personal sinkhole of child-support arrears, which Mr. Stribling dug for himself by failing to support his son for nearly a year and by losing his job because of a citation for driving under the influence of alcohol, is more than $9,000 deep and accruing interest at 12 percent a year. While the specifics of his case are unique, his situation is not. Across the country, child support owed by poor fathers like Mr. Stribling has swollen to about $21 billion and is rising at a faster rate than for any other group of men.

The growing mountain of debt is similar to the arrears owed by absentee fathers who have more money and better jobs. It was created by men ignoring their responsibilities and, in many cases, hiding themselves and their income from child-support enforcement. But there is a fundamental difference, officials agree, between ”deadbeat” and ”dead broke” dads. Once caught, many poor absentee fathers simply cannot pay their monthly child-support orders, nor do they have a reasonable chance of paying their arrears.

After a decade of extraordinary success in establishing paternity, tracking down fathers who owe child support and using high-tech sleuthing methods to sniff out their money, states like Colorado, along with the federal government, have hit a wall in collecting it.

”Even with all our strong-arm tactics, there is a percentage of fathers that is dead broke,” said Dan Welch, a senior administrator at Colorado’s division of child-support enforcement. ”We have come to realize that all of the enforcement tools in the world can’t make somebody pay if they don’t have the money.”

The debts also have the unintended effect of pushing many poor fathers into the underground economy and away from their children, say child-support experts, including advocates for mothers owed child support.

Mr. Stribling is a volunteer in a small, federally supported program here that encourages poor fathers to negotiate with child support enforcement officials, rather than hide from them. The program helps them persuade judges to set child support orders at levels fathers can realistically pay, while forgiving some arrears and helping them re-establish regular contact with their children. If a father begins to avoid making payments again, he will become responsible for all his old child-support debts.

A judge ordered Mr. Stribling last September to pay $899 a month, basing his order not on what Mr. Stribling was earning, but on his ”earning potential,” said Brenda Banks, a caseworker for the Colorado division of child-support enforcement.

The judge’s ruling was understandable. Until August, Mr. Stribling had been earning $48,000 a year as a technician at Qwest Communications, even as he was evading child-support payments. He lost that job after his driver’s license was suspended for the drunken-driving citation. In two court appearances last fall, Mr. Stribling failed to persuade the judge that his earning potential had fallen and that the only job he could find paid $7,200 a year.

As part of the program, Ms. Banks, the caseworker assigned to help fathers, has calculated that Mr. Stribling can afford to pay $350 a month. That is about 40 percent of what the judge ordered, but Ms. Banks said she believed she could help Mr. Stribling convince the judge that the revised amount was reasonable. While the mother of his child would receive lower payments, Ms. Banks said, at least she would be paid regularly.

In the past decade, child-support collections from the estimated 11 million fathers who do not live with their children have nearly doubled, to more than $18 billion a year. Most of that money comes from fathers who have stable jobs and can afford to pay.

Where the money does not come from is the 2.5 million poor noncustodial fathers in the United States. According to a study by the Urban Institute, nearly 30 percent of these men are in prison. Among the remainder, nearly half are unemployed. Those who do have jobs earn an average of $5,600 a year, well below the poverty line.

”You can’t get blood from a turnip,” said Elaine Sorensen, a labor economist at the Urban Institute and an expert on child support. ”The bottom line is that for poor fathers these laws are just unrealistic.”

Poor fathers are often asked to pay significantly more, as a percentage of their income, than middle- class fathers, according to the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a social policy research group that studied 5,500 low-income fathers in seven cities in the 1990′s. Nearly two-thirds of the poor fathers tracked by the study had child support orders that demanded more than half of their income.

That was Mr. Stribling’s experience.

”I could barely live off the $600 I was making,” he said of his monthly salary. ”Then they took 55 percent of it.” (The maximum that child support enforcement can take under federal laws is 65 percent of a person’s salary.)

About the same time that family researchers and policy makers concluded that child-support laws were largely ineffective when it came to poor fathers, a flood of new research was released that emphasized the importance of fathers in children’s healthy emotional development.

As a result, there seems to be growing bipartisan consensus to reconsider the way child-support payments are collected from poor fathers.

”This is the new frontier of child-support enforcement,” said Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families in the Department of Health and Human Services. ”It means reaching out to those men who want to do the right thing, who want to pay child support, but who need a little help getting there.”

To that end, President Bush, in the budget he sends to Congress next week, will propose a change in how child-support payments from poor fathers are handled, said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Researchers have known for years that a major disincentive in the willingness of poor fathers to pay child support is where their money goes. Most of that money is now kept by states, as repayment for welfare benefits paid to an absent father’s children.

The president’s budget will include a provision to send all of the father’s payment directly to his family. It will also propose spending up to $286 million in federal money over five years to reimburse states for welfare benefits they have paid to the children of poor fathers.

Even groups that demand tougher enforcement of child-support orders agree that, when it comes to poor fathers, state and federal laws penalize and isolate men, usually without helping mothers or children.

”What the current system does is accumulate this unrealistic debt that will cause a certain number of poor fathers to just hide,” said Geraldine Jensen, president of the Association for Children for Enforcement Support, an organization of 50,000 parents whose children are owed support.

Efforts at reform, however, are still confined to small demonstration programs like the one here in Denver. It is part of a three-year test program under way in 10 cities, financed with federal and Ford Foundation money.

Mr. Stribling will soon finish an eight-week course that he says has given him a way to gain control over his life, while getting along with the mother of his son. Efforts to reach her were not successful because Mr. Stribling would not provide her name.

There is, however, substantial evidence that many abandoned mothers benefit when the father of their children participates in programs like the one here. A study by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation found that participation increased the dollar amount of child support actually paid by poor fathers. It also found that these programs uncovered large sums that fathers had been hiding.

That is not to say that all poor fathers will be reached. Counselors say some of the poorest fathers lead lives complicated by crime, drugs or alcohol.

Mr. Stribling does not have these complications. An Army veteran with a high school diploma, he says he plans to use the G.I. Bill to attend night school to get a degree in nursing.

In recent weeks, he has been allowed to spend more time with Nasir.

”I can look him in his face and see me,” Mr. Stribling said. ”He’s so funny. It’s the little things he does. He’s the best person in my life.”

When is the pursuit to criminalize our society *(really the ever growing pursuit for the monetary benefit to government) going to end?

We all know that there is no such thing as “rehabilitation”. That’s political smoke that blows out the behinds of any bureaucrat or politician in the public eye. So perhaps what the new statistics indicate is not that they are doing a better job of rehabilitating incarcerated citizens, but that they have over saturated our community’s with too many police officials and as a result, they are arresting people that they never use to arrest. Why do you ask? Because they think that they need to do so and quite likely, for certain in some cases, they get their jolly’s from it.

Therefore, they are making felons out of people that shouldn’t be given the lack luster title of felon. Coupled with the Court TV craze and America’s love of watching unintellectual shows such as COPS, prosecutors are gunning for every case they can get. Why not? They know that the individuals they officially charge with a crime are represented by public defenders (or what we call “public pretenders”) that are going to recommend a plea bargain for every case that they are assigned. There are individuals serving 3 consecutive 1 year sentences in the county jail for driving on a suspended license! This is insanity at the very least.

For Gods sake. I’m sorry. I understand that there must be “checks and balances” and that there must be repercussions for violations of the law. I think we all comprehend that line of you know what. But, TRAFFIC OFFENSES!! First, let me say this. 99.9% of the time, when a person’s license is suspended, it’s because they could not afford to pay a ticket yet and are still saving or working to put themselves in a position to pay it. Contrary to popular opinion, not everybody has access to public transportation. So if the person doesn’t, they still need to drive to work in order to receive a pay check, to pay the ticket.

In case you are wondering, my license is active and valid. But, the point is anybody can have their license suspended. There is not a person alive who could ever convince me, that being cited for Driving on a Suspended License in whatever degree, is worthy of THREE YEARS OF SOMEBODY’S LIFE. Tell me where the threat to public safety is. Where’s the rehabilitation in that? If the person was a hazard, they would have REVOKED the license, not suspended it. Whatever treasonous Judge that sentences people to such cruel and unusual punishment, ought to be brought before the people in the public streets and dealt with. Period.

It’s all psychotic in it’s essence. Though, whatever you may consider it to be, it’s only progressing down it’s socialistic, totalitarian, pop culture road. Tell me how this is beneficial for the economy? 3000 more people incarcerated equates to 3000 less taxpayers. Unless, of course, the federal reimbursement for inmate housing at $36,000 a year equates to more money that what they make on taxes. OH, WAIT! IT DOES! When considering that the national average income is sitting at around $30k a year. Why take a percentage of their earnings, when you can hold them captive and have Uncle Sam pay you what they would have made if they were able to work. Of course the actual cost of housing is a small percentage of that $30k. Very small percentage.

They are all liars, con men and traitors against our country. That is, if you ask me.

We’re faced with a stigmatism and bigotry parallel to that which any minority group has ever faced. If not greater than most. We, the members of this group that society calls EX-FELONS, are drowning by one of the greatest suffrage’s in American History that has yet to be addressed by our government or society. At least not in a positive way.

In a world (particularly post 9-11), where county, state and federal background checks are beyond the definition of prevalent, we are faced with an unforgiving world where the sun has set and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. The generations that could face a conviction by the government and then go on to lead a normal and happy life, often in public service (i.e. politics, government, and even law enforcement) are gone. While the generation that was able to enjoy such understanding and acceptance after the fact, is still enjoying their lives, we, the next generation are deteriorating with every passing day.

We can’t even obtain employment bagging groceries. That is unless, we’re willing to pick up the shovel that society and the government hands us on our way out of those so-called “revolving doors”. I for one, have no intention of digging ditches for a living and dying at age 50 of a massive cardiac arrest.

Since you’re still reading, I would speculate that you know better than to simply “tell them the truth and take responsibility for your actions”. If you have ever tried this comical recommendation given by so many, you might feel like more of an ass for doing it then the person is who suggested it.

Truth and responsibility, they say. Well, let’s do that. But let’s do that amongst ourselves. Collaborate. Reach out. Compare notes. Offer knowledge of loopholes in the system that we’ve found. Share information of employers in cities that have hired or do hire individuals with records. Most importantly though, share information regarding employers that pay livable wages and hire Ex-Felons. But I’m not just focusing this blog on Jobs. Say what you want and communicate how you like. That’s the point.

Don’t you just hate that term? Ex-Felon. Wouldn’t the proper term be CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA? Last time I checked, all of my debts were paid and my time was served. How about that truth and responsibility? We need to take a stand against being labeled EX-FELONS like every other minority group has taken stands about negative slang and politically incorrect terms commonly used against them. We have to band together in every regard and now is the time. Things are only getting worse. Just wait until late 2008 when the Federal Government enact the National Identification System. – (more on that later).

Talk about what you want. There is nothing that is prohibited on this blog. On a side note. There are some things that you should never post anywhere on the Internet under any circumstances. Though, I don’t believe I need to elaborate on that matter. Since we are all family in an odd sort of way, it’s my hopes that everybody will volunteer beneficial information to the group and partake in meaningful discussion. Whether you’re talking about employment, civil rights, new legislation and laws, court rulings, firearms issues, child support, brainstorming on employment tactics, resumes, family, or even talking about the biggest crooks of all, politicians, it doesn’t matter.

The floor is yours…..and welcome brothers and sisters.