Welfare Warriors

FALL 2005

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  Fall 2005

Great news out of Michigan

What great news out of Michigan. Finally a mom suing and exposing the legal Kidnappers Incorporated (as a Milwaukee mom labeled the CPS / non-profits / therapists / and lawyers/judge folks who snatched her daughter). Starletta Banks' (left) description of the mass of professionals benefiting from child removal and the foster care system is so accurate--and it gets worse every day with the increase in privatization of social services and the impoverishment of moms under TANF.

When Welfare Warriors started up our MaGoD (Mothers and Grandmothers of the Disappeared Children) group, we identified 7 layers of professionals benefiting by legal child snatching--a serious conflict of interest. Now there are at least ten layers. The state took over Child Welfare, contracted with multiple non-profits, and even gave our Children's Hospital a lead position. Although that hospital has always been quick to advocate removal of children from poor moms, now they are paid well to be HEAD kidnappers. And while the layers of professionals mushrooms, the moms face ever-increasing "conditions" to provide living wage paychecks to everyone from those bogus "anger management" "teachers" to armies of "therapists" and "visitation supervisors."

A scary development in Milwaukee is the recent creation of "children's villages" where a professional couple are paid huge salaries and provided with double townhouses and paid staff to care for 5 or 6 children (sibling groups). Although in one sense it is great to see motherwork finally properly compensated and rewarded, it is yet one more way that the college-degreed professional poverty pimps have discovered to make a lucrative living at the expense of poor mothers and children. While regular foster moms and all single moms are still struggling to raise 2,3,4,5 or 6 children in sub-poverty, with no help-time-or-money, the "professional" foster families are living in astonishing luxury. (And yes, the "professional" mom is allowed to stay home!!! No work requirements for professionals! And her husband works outside the home.) Even sicker: one of the same non-profits who SNATCH the children, Lutheran Social Services, is the corporation that has created the "Children's Villages." So easy to fill up professional villages that way.

Women in both Portland, Maine and Hawaii have started up their own groups to fight for the return of the missing children and an end to legal kidnapping. The Hawaiians call their group, Stand for the Children. I hope more moms will begin to stand up for the children like Starletta Banks is doing. Lawsuits are clearly a crucial tactic in this david-and-goliath struggle--and moms will have to represent themselves since pro-bono lawyers are mostly non-existent, especially in the lawless children's child-snatching courts.