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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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How the Sacklers rigged the game

Two quotes to ponder as you read “Purdue’s Poison Pill,” Adam Levitin’s forthcoming Texas Law Review paper:

“Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen.” (W. Guthrie)

“Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.” (H. Balzac) (paraphrase)

Some background. Purdue was/is the pharmaceutical company that deliberately kickstarted the opioid crisis by deceptive, aggressive marketing of its drug Oxycontin, amassing a fortune so vast that it made its owners, the Sackler family, richer than the Rockefellers.

Many companies are implicated in the opioid crisis, but Purdue played a larger and more singular role in an epidemic that has killed more Americans than the Vietnam war: Purdue, alone among the pharma companies, is almost exclusively devoted to selling opioids.

And Purdue is also uniquely associated with a single family, the Sacklers, whose family dynasty betrays a multigenerational genius for innovating in crime and sleaze.

The founder of the family fortune, Arthur Sackler, invented modern drug marketing with his campaigns for benzos like Valium, kickstarting an addiction crisis that burned for decades and is still with us today.

His kids, while not inventing the art of reputation laundering through elite philanthropy, did more to advance this practice than anyone since the robber barons whose names grace institutions like Carnegie-Mellon University.

The Sackler name became synonymous not with the cynical creation of a mass death drug epidemic and a media strategy that blamed the victims as “criminal addicts” — rather, “Sackler” was associated with museums from the Met to the Louvre.

Handing out crumbs from their vast trove of blood-money was just one half of the Sacklers’ reputation-laundering. The other half used a phalanx of vicious attack-lawyers who’d threaten anyone who criticized them in public (I personally got one of these).

The Sacklers could not have attained their high body count nor their vast bank-balances without the help of elite legal enablers, both the specialists from discreet boutique firms and the rank-and-file of the great white-shoe firms.

I’m not one to take cheap shots at lawyers. Lawyers are often superheroes, defending the powerless against the powerful. But the law has a bullying problem, a sadistic cadre of brilliant people who live to crush their opponents.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#devils

To see the sadism at work, look no further than the K-shaped world of bankruptcy: for the wealthy, bankruptcy is the sport of kings, a way to skip out on consequences. For the poor, bankruptcy is an anchor — or a noose.

When working people are saddled with debts — even debts they did not themselves amass — they are hounded by petty, vindictive monsters who deluge them with calls and emails and threats.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

But it’s very different for the wealthy. Community Hospital Systems is one of the largest hospital chains in America, thanks to the $7.6b worth of debt it acquired along with 80+ hospitals, which it is running into the ground.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/18/unhealthy-balance-sheet/#health-usury

CHS raked in hundreds of millions in interest-free forgivable loans, stimulus and other public subsidies and paid out millions from that to its execs for “performance bonuses.”

It also leads the industry in suing its indigent patients, some for as little as $201.

Debt and bankruptcy are key to private equity’s playbook, especially the most destructive forms of financial engineering, like “club deal” leveraged buyouts that turn productive businesses into bankrupt husks while the PE firms pocket billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

For mere mortals — those of us who can’t afford to hire legal enablers to work the system — bankruptcy is a mystery. If you know someone who went bankrupt, chances are they had their lives destroyed. How can bankruptcy be a gift, rather than a curse?

Purdue Pharma presents a maddening case-study in the corrupt benefits of bankruptcy. When it was announced in March, many were outraged to learn that the Sacklers were going to walk away with billions, while their victims got stiffed.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished

Levitin’s paper uses the Purdue bankruptcy as a jumping-off point to explain how this can be — how corporate bankruptcy “megacases” have become a sham that subverts the very purpose of bankruptcy: to allow orderly payments to creditors while preserving good businesses.

Levitin identifies three pathologies corrupting the US bankruptcy system.

First is “coercive restructuring techniques” that allow debtors and senior creditors to tie bankruptcy judges’ hands and those of other creditors, overriding bankruptcy law itself.

These techniques — “DIP financing agreements,” “Stalking Horse bidder protections,” “Hurry-up agreements,” etc — are esoteric, though Levitin does a good job of explaining each.

More significant than their underlying rules is their effect.

That effect? Thousands of Oxy survivors and families of Oxycontin victims lost their right to sue the Sacklers and Purdue pharma because of these techniques. In return, the Sacklers surrendered about a third of the billions they reaped.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purduepharma-bankruptcy/sacklers-reaped-up-to-13-billion-from-oxycontin-maker-u-s-states-say-idUSKBN1WJ19V

Depriving the victims of the Sacklers’ drug empire of the right to sue doesn’t just leave the Sacklers with billions; it also means that no official record will be produced detailing the Sacklers’ complicity in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Levitin: “The single most important question in the most socially important chapter 11 case in history will be determined through a process that does not comport with basic notions of due process.”

The Sacklers are not unique beneficiaries of “coercive restructuring techniques.” The rise of “prepack” and 24-hour “drive through” bankruptcies have turned judges into rubberstampers of private agreements between debtors and their cronies, with no look-in for victims.

It in these proceedings that the law descends into self-parody, more Marx Brothers than casebook. Levitin highlights the Feb ’21 “drive-through” bankruptcy of Belk Department Stores, where the judge was told that failing to accede to the private deal would risk 17,000 jobs.

The trustees representing Belk’s non-crony creditors were railroaded through this “agreement,” upon notice consisting of an “unintelligible” one-page, one-paragraph release opening with “a 630-word sentence with 92commas and five parentheticals.”

Sackler lawyers were geniuses at this game, securing judicial approval of a deal where the Sacklers’ personal liability to the Feds went from $4.5b to $225m. The judge heard no evidence about whether the Sacklers’ voluntary payout was even close to their liabilities.

The corruption of bankruptcy is bad enough, as the creditors for finance criminals are often small firms and workers’ pension.

The Sacklers’ case is far worse: they don’t owe billions in unpaid loans — they owe criminal and civil liability for the lives they destroyed.

The next area of corruption that Levitin takes up is the inadequacy of the appeals process for bankruptcy settlements. This, too, is complex, but it has a simple outcome: once a judge agrees to a settlement, it’s virtually impossible to appeal it.

In those rare instances where people do win appeals, they are still denied justice, because the appellate courts typically find that it’s too late to remedy the lower courts’ decisions.

That makes the business of “coercive restructuring techniques” (in which judges rubber-stamp corrupt arrangements between debtors and their cronies) even more important, since any ruling from a bankruptcy judge is apt to be final.

The third and most important corrupt element of elite bankruptcy that Levitin describes is the ability for debtors’ lawyers to pick which judge will rule on their case, a phenomena that means that only three judges hear nearly every major bankruptcy case in America.

“[In 2020] 39% of large public company bankruptcy filings ended up before Judge David Jones in Houston. 57% of the large company cases ended up before either Jones or two other judges, Marvin Isgur in Houston and Robert Drain in White Plains.”

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2021/05/judge-shopping-in-bankruptcy.html

In other words, elite law firms have figured out how to “hack” the bankruptcy process so they can choose from among three judges. And these three judges weren’t picked at random — rather, they competed to bring these “megacases” to their courts.

This competition is visible in how these judges rule — in ways that are favorable to cronyistic arrangements between debtors and their favored, deep-pocketed creditors — and in the public statements the judges themselves have made, going on the record admitting it.

Levitin cites the groundbreaking work of Harvard/UCLA law prof Lynn LoPucki on why judges want to dominate bankruptcy megacases. LoPucki points out hearing these cases definitely increases “post-judicial employment opportunities” — but says the true motives are more complex.

Levitin, summarizing LoPucki: “[it’s more] in the nature of personal aggrandizement and celebrity and ability to indirectly channel to the local bankruptcy bar.. The judge is the star and the ringmaster of a megacase — very appealing to certain personalities”

Obviously, not every judge wants these things, but the ones that do are of a type — “willing and eager to cater to debtors to attract business…[an] assurance to debtors that…these judges will not transfer out cases with improper venue or rule against the debtor…”

Forum-shopping in bankruptcy is not new, but it has accelerated and mutated.

Once, the game was to transfer cases to Delaware and the Southern District of New York.

It’s why the LA Dodgers went bankrupt in Delaware, why Detroit’s iconic General Motors and Texas’s own Enron got their cases heard in the SDNY.

The bankruptcy courts have long been in on this game, allowing the flimsiest of pretences to locate a case in a favorable venue.

For example, GM argued that it was a New York company on the basis that it owned a single Chevy dealership in Harlem.

Other companies simple open an office in a preferred jurisdiction for a few months before filing for bankruptcy there.

Lately, the venue of choice for dirty bankruptcies is in Texas (if only Enron could have held on for a couple more decades!). Only two Houston judges hear bankruptcy cases, and any bankruptcy lawyer who gets on their bad side risks ending their career.

Once a court becomes a national center for complex bankruptcies, the bankruptcy bar works to ensure that only favorable judges hear cases there, punishing a district by seeking other venues when a judge goes “rogue.” The fix is in from the start.

Purdue did not want to have its case heard in Texas. Instead, it manipulated the system so that it could argue in front of SDNY Judge Robert D Drain.

It was a good call, as Drain is notoriously generous with granting “third-party releases,” which would allow the Sacklers to escape their debts to the victims and survivors of their Oxy-pushing.

Once Drain agreed to the restructuring, he ensured that the victims would never get their day in court, and no evidence — from medical examiners, auditors, and medical professionals who received kickbacks for every patient they addicted — would be entered into the record.

Drain is also notoriously hostile to independent examiners, “an independent third-party appointed by the court to investigate ‘fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, misconduct, mismanagement, or irregularity…by current or former management of the debtor.”

But getting the case in front of Drain took some heroic maneuvering by the Sacklers’ lawyers. Levitin tracks each step of a Byzantine plan that somehow allowed a company that gave its address in Connecticut to have its case heard in New York.

The key to getting in front of Judge Drain appears to involve literally hacking the system, by putting a Westchester County location in the machine-readable metadata for its filing in the federal Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system.

CM/ECF does not parse the text of the PDF that it receives from lawyers; only the metadata is parsed. The company listed a White Plains, NY address in this metadata, even though it had never conducted business there.

Purdue seems to have opened this office 192 days earlier for the sole purpose of getting its bankruptcy in front of Judge Drain (they were eligible for Westchester County jurisdiction 180 days after opening the office).

Their lawyers even went so far as to pre-caption the case filing with “RDD” — for “Robert D Drain” — knowing that all complex bankruptcies in Westchester County were Drain’s to hear.

The fact that the Sacklers were able to choose their judge — a judge who was notorious for his policies that abetted elite impunity in bankruptcy — is nakedly corrupt.

This move is how the Sacklers are walking away from corporate mass murder with a giant fortune. The art galleries have started to remove their names from their buildings, but they’ll have a lot of money to keep themselves warm even if they’re shunned in polite society.

A couple weeks ago, a Texas judge ruled against the NRA, denying its bankruptcy, on the grounds that it was a flimsy pretence designed to escape liability in New York, where it was incorporated.

https://apnews.com/article/nra-bankruptcy-dismissed-a281b888b64d391374f24539a820d60f

For many of us, the NRA bankruptcy was a kind of puzzle. We went from glad that the NRA was bankrupt to glad that they WEREN’T, because for dark money orgs like the NRA, bankruptcy isn’t a punishment, it’s a way to escape justice.

The NRA case is evidence that the corruption of the bankruptcy system isn’t yet complete. That’s no reason to assume everything is fine. The Sacklers are developing a playbook that will be used to escape other elite crimes with vast fortunes intact.

Image: Geographer (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serpentine_Sackler_Gallery.jpg

CC BY-SA https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

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ashintheairlikesnow · 4 years

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during the time of danny's captivity, since he was from such a high-profile family, do you think that anyone would've made like,,, true crime videos/documentaries about his dissappearance ?

Yes! During the four years he was missing, Danny's disappearance made regional news throughout NorCal and the Northwest Coast, along with some nationwide news headlines in scattered locations, due to the similarity to some local past disappearances.

He was the subject of a three-part series of episodes on a popular true crime podcast ("always look good and avoid getting slaughtered, listeners!") and his parents gave interviews to People and other magazines expressing their deep worry and fear for his safety. He also appeared on Unsolved Mysteries (in this universe that show never stopped making new eps) and Dateline did a feature on it as well.

He was the subject of one feature-length documentary linking him to a rash of similar disappearances over the course of nearly thirty years, which garnered some attention but never created any new leads.

Upon his return, however, Danny and Nate were nationwide news. For an adult abductee to be gone so long and still turn up alive is absurdly rare - as well as Nathaniel Vandrum having been missing for seven years and turning up alive as well.

Ryan's impact statement was read out loud not only in court but at a later press conference and was broadcast on many different news outlets. Corrine and Patrick did a feature article in People of their happiness at the return of their long-lost estranged son. They also gave interviews to Good Morning America and several other national news networks.

Danny has never participated in any of these interviews or this coverage. Ryan has, but gives only brief statements and doesn't get into details.

Currently a book is in the works and another documentary is being planned with the stunning conclusion of Danny turning up alive and Abraham Denner being sent to prison.

Granted, he'll be out before that documentary is ever done.

@bleeding-demon-teeth 's Lyken, who Bram is a huge fan of, has mentioned the ongoing case in his own podcasts and had several episodes that heavily featured details from the courtroom that were never supposed to become public knowledge - including the makeup of the muzzle, how often Danny wore it, Bram's system for earning basic human comforts as privileges, isolation/the cellar as a way to induce a crippling fear of the dark in someone who did not fear it before, etc. He offers his expertise and experience on how to manage similar effects for interested individuals and his dedicated listeners.

He has copies of Bram and Danny's testimonies available for download for a small fee!

His perspective on it is, ah, shall we say... a little different - in that he genuinely regrets that Bram was caught and wishes him a speedy sentence and hopes that he'll walk right out of there one day.

He's going to be very happy when he hears that Bram did just that.

Now for a meme from @too-aroace-for-this-shit

#ask ash something and she'll answer #too aroace for this shit #whump memes #bleeding demon teeth #lyken

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arcticdementor · 5 years

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Last week in the prison I asked a young man why he was there.

"Just normal burglaries," he replied.

"Normal for whom?" I asked.

"You know, just normal."

He meant, I think, that burglaries were like gray skies in an English winter: unavoidable and to be expected. In an actuarial sense, he was right: Britain is now the burglary capital of the world, as almost every householder here will attest. But there was also a deeper sense to his words, for statistical normality slides rapidly in our minds into moral normality. The wives of burglars often talk to me of their husband's "work," as if breaking into other people's homes were merely a late shift in a factory. Nor is only burglary "normal" in the estimation of its perpetrators. "Just a normal assault," is another frequent answer prisoners give to my question, the little word "just" emphasizing the innocuousness of the crime.

…

As usual, one must look first to the academy when tracing the origins of a change in the Zeitgeist. What starts out as a career-promoting academic hypothesis ends up as an idea so widely accepted that it becomes not only an unchallengeable orthodoxy but a cliche even among the untutored. Academics have used two closely linked arguments to establish the statistical and moral normality of crime and the consequent illegitimacy of the criminal justice system's sanctions. First, they claim, we are all criminal anyway; and when everyone is guilty, everyone is innocent. Their second argument, Marxist in inspiration, is that the law has no moral content, being merely the expression of the power of certain interest groups—of the rich against the poor, for example, or the capitalist against the worker. Since the law is an expression of raw power, there is no essential moral distinction between criminal and non-criminal behavior. It is simply a question of whose foot the boot is on.

Criminologists are the mirror image of Hamlet, who exclaimed that if each man received his deserts, none should escape whipping. On the contrary, say the criminologists, more liberal than the prince (no doubt because of their humbler social origins): none should be punished.

…

It is impossible to state precisely when the Zeitgeist changed and the criminal became a victim in the minds of intellectuals: not only history, but also the history of an idea, is a seamless robe. Let me quote one example, though, now more than a third of a century old. In 1966 (at about the time when Norman Mailer in America, and Jean-Paul Sartre in Europe, portrayed criminals as existential heroes in revolt against a heartless, inauthentic world), the psychiatrist Karl Menninger published a book with the revealing title The Crime of Punishment. It was based upon the Isaac Ray lectures he had given three years earlier—Isaac Ray having been the first American psychiatrist who concerned himself with the problems of crime. Menninger wrote: "Crime is everybody's temptation. It is easy to look with proud disdain upon ‘those people’ who get caught—the stupid ones, the unlucky ones, the blatant ones. But who does not get nervous when a police car follows closely? We squirm over our income tax statements and make some ‘adjustments.’ We tell the customs official we have nothing to declare—well, practically nothing. Some of us who have never been convicted of crime picked up over two billion dollars' worth of merchandise last year from the stores we patronize. Over a billion dollars was embezzled by employees last year."

The moral of the story is that those who go to court and to prison are victims of chance at best and of prejudice at worst: prejudice against the lowly, the unwashed, the uneducated, the poor—those whom literary critics portentously call the Other. This is precisely what many of my patients in the prison tell me. Even when they have been caught in flagrante, loot in hand or blood on fist, they believe the police are unfairly picking on them. Such an attitude, of course, prevents them from reflecting upon their own contribution to their predicament: for chance and prejudice are not forces over which an individual has much personal control. When I ask prisoners whether they'll be coming back after their release, a few say no with an entirely credible vehemence; they are the ones who make the mental connection between their conduct and their fate. But most say they don't know, that no one can foresee the future, that it's up to the courts, that it all depends—on others, never on themselves.

…

Since then, of course, our understanding of theft and other criminal activity has grown more complex, if not necessarily more accurate or realistic. It has been the effect, and quite possibly the intention, of criminologists to shed new obscurity on the matter of crime: the opacity of their writing sometimes leads one to wonder whether they have actually ever met a criminal or a crime victim. Certainly, it is in their professional interest that the wellsprings of crime should remain an unfathomed mystery, for how else is one to convince governments that what a crime-ridden country (such as Britain) needs is further research done by ever more criminologists?

…

In the process of transmission from academy to populace, ideas may change in subtle ways. When the well-known criminologist Jock Young wrote that "the normalization of drug use is paralleled by the normalization of crime," and, because of this normalization, criminal behavior in individuals no longer required special explanation, he surely didn't mean that he wouldn't mind if his own children started to shoot up heroin or rob old ladies in the street. Nor would he be indifferent to the intrusion of burglars into his own house, ascribing it merely to the temper of the times and regarding it as a morally neutral event. But that, of course, is precisely how "just" shoplifters, "just" burglars, "just" assaulters, "just" attempted murderers, taking their cue from him and others like him, would view (or at least say they viewed) their own actions: they have simply moved with the times and therefore done no wrong. And, not surprisingly, the crimes that now attract the deprecatory qualification "just" have escalated in seriousness even in the ten years I have attended the prison as a doctor, so that I have even heard a prisoner wave away "just a poxy little murder charge." The same is true of the drugs that prisoners use: where once they replied that they smoked "just" cannabis, they now say that they take "just" crack cocaine, as if by confining themselves thus they were paragons of self-denial and self-discipline.

…

Recently, biological theories of crime have come back into fashion. Such theories go way back: nineteenth-century Italian and French criminologists and forensic psychiatrists elaborated a theory of hereditary degeneration to account for the criminal's inability to conform to the law. But until recently, biological theories of crime—usually spiced with a strong dose of bogus genetics—were the province of the illiberal right, leading directly to forced sterilization and other eugenic measures.

The latest biological theories of crime, however, stress that criminals cannot help what they do: it is all in their genes, their neurochemistry, or their temporal lobes. Such factors provide no answer to why the mere increase in recorded crime in Britain between 1990 and 1991 was greater than the total of all recorded crime in 1950 (to say nothing of the accelerating increases since 1991), but that failure does not deter researchers in the least. Scholarly books with titles such as Genetics of Criminal and Antisocial Behavior proliferate and do not evoke the outrage among intellectuals that greeted the publication of H. J. Eysenck's Crime and Personality in 1964, a book suggesting that criminality is an hereditary trait. For many years, liberals viewed Eysenck, professor of psychology at London University, as virtually a fascist for suggesting the heritability of almost every human characteristic, but they have since realized that genetic explanations of crime can just as readily be grist for their exculpatory and all-forgiving mills as they can be for the mills of conservatives.

…

The idea that prison is principally a therapeutic institution is now virtually ineradicable. The emphasis on recidivism rates as a measure of its success or failure in the press coverage of prison ("Research by criminologists shows . . . " etc.) reinforces this view, as does the theory put forward by criminologists that crime is a mental disorder. The Psychopathology of Crime by Adrian Raine of the University of Southern California claims that recidivism is a mental disorder like any other, often accompanied by cerebral dysfunction. Addicted to Crime?, a volume edited by psychologists working in one of Britain's few institutions for the criminally insane, contains the work of eight academics. The answer to the question of their title is, of course, yes; addiction being—falsely—conceived as a compulsion that it is futile to expect anyone to resist. (If there is a second edition of the book, the question mark will no doubt disappear from its title, just as it vanished from the second edition of Beatrice and Sidney Webb's book about the Soviet Union, The Soviet Union: A New Civilisation?—which included everything about Russia except the truth.)

Is it surprising that recidivist burglars and car thieves now ask for therapy for their addiction, secure in the knowledge that no such therapy can or will be forthcoming, thereby justifying the continuation of their habit? "I asked for help," they often complain to me, "but didn't get none." One young man aged 21, serving a sentence of six months (three months with time off for good behavior) for having stolen 60 cars, told me that in reality he had stolen over 500 and had made some $160,000 doing so. It is surely an unnecessary mystification to construct an elaborate neuropsychological explanation of his conduct. Burglars who tell me that they are addicted to their craft, thereby implying that the fault will be mine for not having treated them successfully if they continue to burgle after their release, always react in the same way when I ask them how many burglaries they committed for which they were not caught: with a happy but not (from the householder's point of view) an altogether reassuring smile, as if they were recalling the happiest times of their life—soon to return.

…

Since criminologists and sociologists can no longer plausibly attribute crime to raw poverty, they now look to "relative deprivation" to explain its rise in times of prosperity. In this light, they see crime as a quasi-political protest against an unjust distribution of the goods of the world. Several criminological commentators have lamented the apparently contradictory fact that it is the poor who suffer most, including loss of property, from criminals, implying that it would be more acceptable if the criminals robbed the rich. (In a radio discussion about the seasonal riots that break out in poor areas of British cities, a left-wing academic, now a cabinet minister in the present government, said that one of the tragic aspects of these riots is that they caused damage in the rioters' own neighborhood. She didn't answer my question whether she'd prefer the riots to take place in her neighborhood.)

…

Moreover, the very term "dispossessed" carries its own emotional and ideological connotations. The poor have not failed to earn, the term implies, but instead have been robbed of what is rightfully theirs. Crime is thus the expropriation of the expropriators—and so not crime at all, in the moral sense. And this is an attitude I have encountered many times among burglars and car thieves. They believe that anyone who possesses something can, ipso facto, afford to lose it, while someone who does not possess it is, ipso facto, justified in taking it. Crime is but a form of redistributive taxation from below.

Or—when committed by women—crime could be seen "as a way, perhaps of celebrating women as independent of men," to quote Elizabeth Stanko, an American feminist criminologist teaching in a British university. Here we are paddling in the murky waters of Frantz Fanon, the West Indian psychiatrist who believed that a little murder did wonders for the psyche of the downtrodden, and who achieved iconic status precisely at the time of criminology's great expansion as a university discipline.

…

No one gains kudos in the criminological fraternity by suggesting that police and punishment are necessary in a civilized society. To do so would be to appear illiberal and lacking faith in man's primordial goodness. It is much better for one's reputation, for example, to refer to the large number of American prisoners as "the American gulag," as if there were no relevant differences between the former Soviet Union and the United States.

#city journal #theodore dalrymple #blast from the past #read the whole thing #crime #law enforcement #criminology

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oceanwriter · 5 years

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WIP Prep (tag)

I was tagged by @paladin-andric -- thank you!!! I loved filling this out, and sorry for the delay!

Rules: Answer the questions, then tag as many people as there are questions (or as many as you can).

The Colors of War

FIRST LOOK

1. Describe your novel in 1-2 sentences (elevator pitch)

Sent from London, England to Maine, USA by her guardian to escape The Blitz of World War II, Marjorie Borchert is left to navigate her young adult years in a tight-knit and foreign town. As the years progress, she learns war stretches far beyond the front lines.

2. How long do you plan for your novel to be? (Is it a novella, single book, book series, etc.)

A single book with possibly a collection of shorts from the other character’s lives.

3. What is your novel’s aesthetic?

Chilly mountains and moose.

4. What other stories inspire your novel?

Little bits from Number The Stars by Lois Lowry and the character of Emily Bennet from the Molly American Girl series.

5. Share 3+ images that give a feel for your novel

MAIN CHARACTER

6. Who is your protagonist?

Marjorie Borchert. She is in her mid-teens at the beginning of the story. Moody to say the least, but she has a big heart.

7. Who is their closest ally?

Daniel Reynard. Nikita Savas is a close second but Marjorie’s had a special bond with Daniel from the beginning.

8. Who is their enemy?

Kate, Beatrice, and Gina. Kate is the worst despite the fact Marjorie shares a room with Beatrice.

9. What do they want more than anything?

For things to be as they were before the war.

10. Why can’t they have it?

Her parents were both killed.

11. What do they wrongly believe about themselves?

She believes nobody wants her -- which is understandable after being passed off to strangers by her guardian and, in a way, her brother.

12. Draw your protagonist! (Or share a description)

I’m not much of an artist and she’d look like a cartoon, do description it is.

Tall, though not towering over everyone. She keeps her brown hair short or shoulder length until she’s older. She’s thin, possibly malnourished, when she first comes to America. She fills out a bit the longer she’s at the farm and eating three full meals a day. She’s pale, partly due to locations she’s lived. She had prominent German features, most notable, her accent which is mixed with a British tongue.

PLOT POINTS

13. What is the internal conflict?

There’s different stages I’ll say. In the beginning, it’s about Marjorie trying to find her place in this small and established community. Her biggest conflict being a target for the prejudiced Kate. Then it moves on to the progression of the war and her fears around America’s involvement. But she comes to see that war doesn’t just affect those fighting or being captured and bombed. She also sees how different people handle things differently. Priorities fall into place through this.

14. What is the external conflict?

Trying to get by and adapting to the changes the war is bringing to the community. Acceptance, too. Internal and external kind of work together.

15. What is the worst thing that could happen to your protagonist?

Losing her brother for good and/or not being able to return to England.

16. What secret will be revealed that changes the course of the story?

My only secret might not end up working. There would have to be a second book. Either way, I’m not going to reveal it. It might end up being one of things only me and a couple of my writing friends will ever know....

17. Do you know how it ends?

Yes, unless Marjorie decides to change her course of action.

BITS AND BOBS

18. What is the theme?

Acceptance and making the best of a bad situation.

19. What is a recurring symbol?

Change.

20. Where is the story set? (Share a description!)

Jackman, Maine, USA. A small town with a population under 1,000 a few miles from the border of Canada. It’s a heavily wooded area with beautiful mountain and lake views. Lots of wildlife, too. The town is small, running along a single street branching out into houses.

21. Do you have any images or scenes in your mind already?

So. Many.

22. What excited you about this story?

The time period. I’m a history buff and the 1940s has always been my favorite era.

23. Tell us about your usual writing method!

Procrastination. That’s really it. I do my best writing at five in the morning and knowing I have to pick my little cousin up from the bus in a few hours. I tag (if you’d like): @throughwordsiescape @silverscreenwriter and @rachelradner

#tag #wip #The Colors of War #WWII Story #my story #writing

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foundcarcosa · 6 years

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ccxii.

2701. What does ‘equal’ mean? >> Taking random pieces of the 5000q survey is fun. Anyway, I’m not Google. 2702. Do you believe in the phrase 'all men are created equal’? >> I believe in striving, despite biological and social conditioning, to treat other human beings as equally as possible. Even if you don’t entirely succeed, the effort itself has effect. What about woman? >> See above. 2703. Have all persons been specifically 'created’? >> I don’t believe so, but I like the idea. 2704. Are all persons exactly equal? >> I think “people are all equal” doesn’t exactly sound logical. I think “all people should be treated with the same amount of respect, no matter their skin colour, their hormonal/genital configuration, their religious affiliation or lack thereof, their cultural ties, their national ties, their perceived intelligence, their health, or any other criterion a human could possibly use to set someone apart from themself” is what people mean, though, and yes, I agree with that.

2705. Or do they just have equal rights (in theory)? >> That’ll teach me not to read ahead. 2706. Does art reflect society or does society reflect art? >> I think it’s both, simultaneously. 2707. Are you living under a little black raincloud or a ray of sunshine? >> The weather is never constant, right? 2708. What do you wonder about? >> What don’t I wonder about? 2709. What is better..being single and free or being in love and responsible to another person? >> I don’t think either state is better than the other. Nor do I think the “free/un-free” dichotomy of thought is logical. Being in a committed relationship doesn’t restrict my freedom in any ways that I can’t handle or appreciate. A wild thing does not like being tamed, but a wild thing also appreciates having a home to come to, and appreciates not being a slave to survival instinct. A wild thing learns to adapt. 2710. What vitamins do you take? >> I don’t. 2711. In checkers..red or black? >> Meh. 2712. Is The Crow a great movie? >> It’s still one of my enduring favourites. 2713. Do you wear all black frequently? >> Yes, mostly unintentionally these days. 2714. Do you ever call yourself a poet, artist, or musician? >> Yes. Has your writing been published, your art been hung in a gallery or your band been signed? >> I’ve had art displayed in a gallery before. In SoHo. Sounds pretty fancy when I say it like that, right? (I’m not even lying or embellishing, it’s just the circumstances weren’t exactly merit-based or anything. If I had the patience to look for the photo, I’d paste it here.) Does it matter? >> Does it matter if my art is published/displayed? Eh, not particularly. 2715. When insects get into your house, do you kill them or catch them and take them ouside or leave them alone and let them live with you? >> Spiders I usually have to take outside for Sparrow’s sake; most other bugs I just leave alone. 2716. Name at least one person who’s birthday is in: Jan.- Feb.- Anubis. Mar.- Krister. Apr.- May- Me. And Lucian. And darzie. And Candace, I believe. June- July- Arthur, I think? Aug.- Dad. Vlad. Sigma. Sept- Oct- Sparrow. Nov- Phoenix. Valkenhayn. Dec- Caspyr. 2717. Which would you consider to be a worse criminal: a pedophile or a necrophile? >> Neither is a criminal, not inherently. What if it was between a pedophile, a necrophile and a murderer? >> A murderer, however, is a criminal, inherently. 2718. Do we start to die the day we are born or start to live the day we die? >> I think the former is more biologically sound. Both have poetic potential. 2719. Have you ever called your mom or dad a four letter word? >> Certainly not to his face. 2720. Do you believe america should go to war with iraq? >> Heh. 2721. Agree or disagree? (Bold is agree) “There is too much concern in courts for the rights of criminals.” “Abortion should be legal.” “The death penalty should be abolished.” “Marijuana should be legalized.” “It is important to have laws prohibiting homosexual relationships.” “The federal government should do more to control the sale of handguns.” “Racial discrimination is no longer a major problem in America.” “Wealthy people should pay a larger share of taxes than they do now.” “Colleges should prohibit racist/sexist speech on campus.” “Same-sex couples should have the right to legal marital status.” “Affirmative action in college admissions should be abolished.” “The activities of married women are best confined to the home and family.” “People should not obey laws which violate their personal values.” “Federal military spending should be increased.” “Realistically, an individual can do little to bring about changes in our society.” Why did you agree or disagree to that last statement? >> I disagree because I think a certain amount of social change begins with oneself, and one’s household, and one’s social circle. A certain amount of social change also begins in legislation, and in media. But what one can do, to improve the lives of the people around oneself, to improve one’s community, that’s definitely important and often overlooked. 2722. Let’s say that after you die you become a spirit and you join all the other spirits. Not all of them have lived. You are talking to some who have never lived about how you HAVE lived. One of the spirits who has never lived says they think they will travel to earth in a human body soon and live. They ask you what three things on Earth should I be sure not to miss? You say… 1. Learning to accept both fear and love as intrinsic to the human condition will take you far and serve you well. 2. Look for the divine. Keep looking. Always look. You’ll see a lot of cool shit along the way. 3. Listen to a lot of music. Read a lot of books. Eat well and drink merrily. Do a drug or two. It’s such a short trip. 2723. What kind of ass is the sexiest (flat, round, tight, hard, meaty, juicy, small, big, stacked, packed, petite, barely there, curvey, muscular, etc.)? >> Hmm. 2724. Is there something beautiful and special about everyone? >> If one wants to find something beautiful, or something special, one will. If one doesn’t want to, one won’t. If yes is there something beautiful and special about Hitler? >> If I were looking to find something beautiful, or something special, in Hitler, I guarantee you I’d find it. As it stands, though, I don’t really care. How about Bin Laden? >> See above. What is it? >> He likes Final Fantasy, apparently. There, you happy? 2725. Have you ever moshed? >> No. I know my place and my place is at the front row making heart eyes at the band. If yes to what bands? If no then would you ever? >> No. 2726. Do you like sushi? >> I like it fine, but not often. 2727. What mood are you in? >> An unremarkable one. Kinda worried that I didn’t get enough sleep, but that sort of thing usually works itself out. Also, I can get by on five hours just fine, it’s not even that big a deal. What does your mood depend on? >> Brain chemicals, sensory input, and circumstance. What depends on your mood? >> How I socialise, usually. 2728. wHAT IS faith? >> The belief in things often unseen or unverified. what is common sense? >> Paying attention, usually. But sometimes things labelled “common sense” are just things that people have been taught to believe or accept without question. Sometimes that works out all right in the end, but sometimes it really doesn’t. Do you have either or both of them? >> I have both, sure. (And both kinds of “common sense”, too.) 2729. Is perfection or imperfection more beautiful? >> First, I’d have to understand perfection (and I don’t). 2730. Would you think a person doing the following things has a healthy or unhealthy level of insanity? gives the finger while driving? I don’t think that’s insane, just rude. tells their life story to people they just met? I don’t think that’s insane, just socially frowned upon. walks up to people and tried to convert them to a religion? I don’t think that’s insane, just rude. says blah? I don’t think that’s insane, or even remarkable... 2731. Do you think this is a great line of poetry: “Journey with me into the mind of a maniac. Doomed to be a killer since I came out the nutsac” Why or why not? >> I don’t find it particularly interesting. 2732. Do you think that song lyrics are poems with music? >> Yes. 2733. In cases of rape which do you think is more of a crime: a stranger rapes a girl OR a girl’s boyfriend rapes her? >> Rape is a crime, period. There is no “more” or “less” illegal/harmful. It’s just illegal and harmful, and that’s that on that. 2734. Did you know that in the USA it is considered to be LESS of a crime if a rapist knows the victim (because it is 'less of a crime’ the rapist gets a less severe punishment)? Do you agree or disagree and why? >> If that’s true, then it sounds absolutely absurd to me. 2735. In the USA a few weeks ago a guy had beaten up and raped his girlfriend, for which he got 70 days of community service. He had been found guilty, got a year and a half of jail, BUT can you guess why his sentence was reduced to mere community service? He had a steady job. That’s right. He was found less guilty, because he had a long-term steady job. How does this make you feel? >> That’s an absurd way to serve justice. 2736. Does the character limit of notes or entries annoy you more? >> --- 2737. wHO’S YOUR FAVORITE WRESTLER? >> It’s always going to be The Rock, even though I don’t actually watch wrestling now that I no longer know the family that I knew that was obsessed with it. 2738. Have you ever been trapped in an elevator? >> No. 2739. What is more important, tact or honesty? >> That is circumstantial. 2740. Do you have a mentor? Who? >> No. 2741. If you like guys: would you rather have a 'bad’ guy (motorcycles, smokes, drinks, etc) or a 'good’ guy (family, domesticated, nice guy)? I’d rather not make people into character tropes. Would you rather have a virgin or a more experienced guy? -- If you like girls: Would you rather have a virgin or a more experianced girl? -- would you rather have a 'bad’ girl (motorcycles, smokes, drinks, etc) or a 'good’ girl (family, domesticated, nice girl)? -- 2742. Do you feel nervous in crowds? >> “Sensory overload” is a more appropriate term for what I feel in crowds. 2743. Did you write a real entry today? What about? Was it your best writing? >> (I think this survey was first posted on LiveJournal.) 2744. If you were making a 'best of’ entry about your BEST entries ever what would be your top 5 best entries? >> --- 2745. Do you like to play the lottery? >> No. 2746. Guess what? >> Hrm. 2747. Why did you choose to live one more day? >> I didn’t choose, exactly, but I’m certainly glad to do so. 2748. What is the most beautiful myth you have ever read/heard? >> The existence of myth is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read/heard, period. 2749. Have you ever been stood up? >> Sure. 2750. Finish the following sentences any way you want. It’s always darkest before.. you turn the bathroom light on. Never underestimate the power of.. small insects in large groups. Don’t bite the hand that.. has poison on it. A miss is as good as a.. mister. If you lie down with dogs, you.. get free cuddles. and maybe fleas. Love all, trust.. no fart. The pen is mightier than.. a pencil. An idle mind is.. a relief, sometimes. Where there is smoke, there’s.. a smoker. Happy is the bride who.. gets enough sleep. Two is company, three’s.. even more company. None are so blind as.. voles. You get out of something what you.. reach for. When the blind lead the blind.. their guide dogs play. Laugh and the whole world laughs with you. Cry and.. the whole world suddenly remembers they had something important to do elsewhere. 2751. What’s the most interesting assignment you ever had in school? >> I’m not sure. 2752. What’s the most interesting thing you ever had to do for work? >> --- 2753. Do you feel: insignificant? No. unable to evoke change? No. like one person can’t change the world? No. like one life and one person’s suffering doesn’t mean very much? No. If you answered yes to any of those can you describe why in detail? >> --- 2754. Do you feel like you could contribute as much to society as ____ has? Albert Einstein: The answer to all these is ‘yes, just not in the same ways’. Abe Lincoln: Franz Kafka: Jesus Christ: 2755. Are you aware that your brain is the same size as Albert Einstein’s brain? >> Yes. Do you realize that you have the same number of hours in a day as Abraham Lincoln? >> Yes.

Did you know that Franz Kafka wrote all of his amazing litterature during his lunchbreaks at work? >> I didn’t, but neat. Did you know that we are all made of matter and that you are made of the Same Thing that Jesus was made of? >> Sure. Do you still believe that you couldn’t contribute as much to society as they did? If yes than WHY? >> Well, I didn’t believe that in the first place, so. But that’s a good argument you set up, there. 2756. Is your mind in the gutter? >> Usually. 2757. What do you have to complain about? >> Whatever I feel the desire to complain about. It’s my experience, I can interpret it in whatever way I feel like. 2758. Do you remember rock n’ roll radio? >> No. 2759. Is there such a thing as a food that you burn more calories from digesting than you actually absorb from it? >> I wouldn’t know. 2760. Hey, if you’ve gotten this far than you and me go way back. We’ve been hanging out for a while now and I gotta know..do you like me? >> Haha. 2761. What are you doing, Dave? >> If my name was David, I’d ignore anyone who shortened it to Dave. 2762. As far as love goes do you feel it is better to become complete before looking for someone or find someone who completes you? >> I think that people kind of throw those words around because they sound nice and pithy, but they don’t really have a full understanding of what they’re trying to say. I might be wrong, of course, but that’s my interpretation. A person is already complete, and also always evolving. There is nothing to “become”. And a relationship is a making of one out of multiple -- it is two complete entities creating a new thing through their union. We don’t say that wood and nails and brick and mortar were all incomplete things before they were used to make a building. But in the making of a building, those complete things have come together to form something new, something that without any of those parts would fall apart. But hey, also! a brick that doesn’t go towards the construction of a building is still a damn cool brick. Ya dig? Yeah, I don’t know, either. 2763. What attracts you about the opposite sex (or same sex, or both sexes)? >> I’m not entirely sure how attraction works. It just does what it wants. 2764. Do you need people or do you not need anyone? >> I am a social creature. I require other people to stay alive. 2765. Is selfishness always bad? >> No. Is selflessness always good? >> No.

2766. Do you feel like your life is being controlled by a power structure? >> Certain aspects of it are, of course. Those aren’t necessarily the parts of my life that matter most to me, but they are still important. 2767. Can you name three things in society that send the message that being completely yourself and that looking inside yourself and contemplating what’s within is a good thing? >> I don’t feel like it right now, but I know it’s a prominent paradigm in recent generations. 2768. Can you name three things in society that send the message that materialism and the accumulation of stuff is a good thing? >> See above. 2769. What is more important, a picture or its frame? >> Some frames are also works of art. But some frames are just meant to enclose and protect works of art. Don’t think that makes them less important, but their importance is different. What is more important, spirituality or religion? >> Important to what? 2770. How many definitions can you come up with for the word 'fuck’? >> I’m sure Google can think of many more than I can right now. 2771. Is it less offensive when a black person says Nigger than when a white person says it? >> For me, yes, it is. Why or why not? >> Because as a black person, I understand that most other black people’s usage of it is not meant to insult me or reinforce one’s sense of superiority over me. And I understand that most white people’s usage of it is absolutely meant to insult me, reinforce one’s sense of superiority over me, or -- nowadays -- meant to “troll” me, to goad me into responding in a way they can smugly label ‘irrational’. A black person calls me “my nigga” and I feel kinship. A white person calls me “my nigger” and I feel subjugated. That’s never going to be untrue for me. 2772. Do you rationalize often? >> Sure. We all do. 2773. Do you believe that america is an imperialist nation? >> Yes. 2774. Would you agree that: hot topic is the new abercrombie? pink is the new black: you are the new you? 2775. Do you have more internet or real life friends? >> All my friends are people I know through the internet. 2776. What IS the feeding of 5000? >> The what? 2777. What’s an easy way to make money? >> Fiverr. 2778. What’s your favorite slang word and what does it mean? >> “dead ass” and “whole ass” are still favourites of mine. 2779. Are you uncomfortable? >> Right now? Somewhat. My digestive system is being worrisome. I’m hoping it just passes without incident. I plan on enjoying as many moments of this day as possible, considering I’ve been waiting three months for it. 2780. Is anything definite besides death and taxes? >> Neither of those are definite, depending on your philosophy and your socioeconomic class... 2781. Would you rather live fast and die young or live slow and die old? >> Live slow and die old does seem to be more my speed; my moments of living fast are exactly that-- moments. I have no desire to die young. 2782. Can you name 4 people who have committed crimes against humanity? >> I’m sure I could. But I won’t. How do you think they live with themselves? >> --- 2783. If you could imagine, pure fantasy, any God you could concieve, how would you want God to be? >> But... any god I can conceive already exists, somewhere. 2784. do you think the smashing pumpkins have a strong christian theme? >> I never paid attention. 2785. Do you think this survey has a strong christian theme? >> Not this section. Can’t speak for the others. 2786. Fill in the blank for yourself" Give me ____ or give me death! >> Nah. 2787. Have you ever heard of the USA patriotism act? Apparently they have passed laws making torture legal. Also the FBI can sneak and peek into ANYONE’S home. They don’t have to ask or even tell you they were there. This is already the law. So, whaddaya think? >> I mean, I’ve been hearing that for years. It hasn’t changed how I live my life. 2788. The people in power step all over the average citizen, trying to secure all the power and money for themselves and leave us with no rights and under their control. They have the audacity to do this because they know that we will not lift a finger to stop them. Are they right? >> I think it’s a little more complex than that, but it is also not my area of expertise, so. 2789. The Free State Project is a plan in which 20,000 or more liberty-oriented people will move to a single state of the U.S. to secure there a free society. They will accomplish this by first reforming state law, opting out of federal mandates, and finally negotiating directly with the federal government for appropriate political autonomy. They want to be a community of freedom-loving individuals and families, and want to create a shining example of liberty for the rest of the nation and the world. What’s your opinion? Could this work? Why or why not? >> I don’t know enough about governmental systems, especially ones formed from schism, to judge whether it could work or not. I’d support the effort, either way. 2790. Have you ever seen the Neverending Stroy? Remember when Bastian has to prove his worth by looking in that mirror where you see yourself the way you really are with no pretenses, rationalizations or mental lying? Could you stand yourself if you looked into that mirror? >> I’ve seen much worse than that. 2791. What is soilent green? >> Soilent Green is a metal band. Or, was. They probably aren’t still together. Soylent Green, on the other hand, is a movie (and a book, I think?). 2792. What are you proud that you have never done? >> Well, I’m glad I’ve never murdered anyone. That prison time would not suit me. 2793. What things are hopeless? >> I wouldn’t know. 2794. What Are People For? >> Meh? 2795. What book do you feel could change someone’s life? >> That is way too subjective. 2796. Didja ever want to just walk up to the Bush administration and ask them, 'What the fuck?’ >> I mean, probably, at some point. 2797. How do you take your coffeee? >> A little light, a little sweet. 2798. Have you ever played: paintball? No. lazer tag? No. which is better? --- 2799. In what ways are you lucky? >> I don’t know how much of my life to attribute to luck. 2800. If Jesse Jackson wants reparations to be given to black people because he thinks that black people don’t have equal opportunities in this country than why does he drive a Jaguar? >> I can hazard a few guesses: 1) he thinks Jaguar makes good cars; 2) he enjoys the symbols of status; 3) he believes he deserves expensive things. I understand that driving a Jag makes him appear to profit from the very system he’s preaching against, and maybe that’s true. Jesse Jackson very well may be a hypocrite. Here’s the thing: I’m not particularly invested in hanging Jesse Jackson for it.

#surveysofsamedi

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deevah4ever · 4 years

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If you are having conversations and have needed talking points, I found this helpful.

1. “Black people commit more crime”

Black neighborhoods are more heavily policed than white neighborhoods. Nearly every police department has arrest and ticketing quotas. Black crimes are simply better documented, also given the corrupt nature of many departments sometimes crimes are just made up. And lets not forget that we rarely crimilinalize white collar crime.

2. “More white people are killed by cops than black people”

There are 200,000,000 non-hispanic white people and 40,000,000 black people. By shear numbers yes more white people are killed by police. But black people are shot by police 4 times as often. Also do you not think cops killing unarmed people generally is not a problem?

3. “White privilege isn’t real”

One of the most effective ways to transfer wealth generationally is through property. Black people were excluded from owning good property until as late as the 1970s. White people have had a 300 year head start where all the institutions, economic rules, and laws were created by them with them in mind. That doesn’t make you in particular a bad person and it doesn’t mean your life isn’t hard. However it’s an acknowledgement that your life would be more difficult if you were black.

4. “This is all sad but I can’t support rioting and looting”

As black support for congressional legislation rises from 0% to 100% the chances Congress acts falls from 40% to 30%. That’s not true for white people. If you get punished for taking part in the normal political process by voting, lobbying, petitioning, running for office etc....and peaceful protesters are arrested and abused, you’re literally being told “non-violence doesn’t work”. You should be mad at every level of government for making people feel that desperate.

5. “All Lives Matter”

No they don’t and they should hence the reason we’re protesting. Would you say “All Neighborhoods Matter” during natural disaster clean up? No because that’d be horribly insensitive and ignore that there is a neighborhood in particular that is suffering right now. Exactly.

6. “White people have been oppressed too!”

Yeah, by other white people. When Black people create a nation enshrining in their founding documents the right to own and trade white people, we can talk.

7. “How come (insert race here) doesn’t riot or protest or loot?”

They do, I promise you they do but it’s not well reported in the media you consume. White people burn cars and buildings if a sporting event goes wrong.

8. “What about black on black crime”

Black people don’t kill each other because they’re black. America is still very segregated, many neighborhoods are nearly all white or all black. People aren’t driving 20 miles across the county to kill, they kill whoever is nearby. Whites kill about as many whites as blacks kill blacks. Also ask yourself do you only bring this up in conversations about police brutality? Have you literally ever posted or talked about this in any other context?

9. “Blue Lives Matter”

You can stop being a cop, you can’t stop being black. Getting hurt, shot, or killed while on the clock is a occupational hazard, cops signed up for that. People of color did not.

10. “Many of those killed had prior criminal histories. They were no angels”

Many of the cops also have prior records of DUIs, Domestic Abuse, and other on the job murders. Also there are no perfect people and do you deserve to die because you have excessive parking tickets or have been evicted or have tried drugs or yes have even been arrested before?

11. “If they just followed the law, they’d be fine”

Eric Garner was killed for selling loosey cigarettes, which isn’t even a misdemeanor. Even if you do commit a crime, it’s up to the legal system to determine consequences. What traffic stop warrants a death sentence? Also innocent people have been killed for simply fitting a description.

12. “Why can’t they just peacefully protest?”

We still get tear gassed, shot, harassed and arrested. Martin Luther King only peacefully protested and was literally murdered.

13. “Not all cops kill or brutalize people”

But many do and face no pushback from other officers or the systems in place to catch “bad cops”. A system that allows a class of people to exist above the law and above all reproach is not in anyone’s benefit.

14. “Cops are people too and have human reactions”

Famously being a cop is a high pressure job. If you don’t have the mental fortitude to not beat the living hell out of someone because they yelled at you, then you shouldn’t have a gun and you definitely shouldn’t be a cop. Police departments should require anger management, more extensive background checks, and yes regular mental wellness evaluations. But they’d rather spend money on riot gear and drones.

15. “I don’t see color”

That’s bad. You’re ignoring the experience of every black person in this country. You’re pretending everyone is treated equally or have equal experiences in this country when that’s demonstrably false. Just because you wish it true don’t make it so. Those differences and that diversity is important to recognize.

Please share to start dispelling the illusion!! (Copy and pasted) [via Allies of St. Louis Park]!!!!

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Symbol of ’80s Greed Stands to Profit From Trump Tax Break for Poor Areas https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/business/michael-milken-trump-opportunity-zones.html

Greed and corruption are at the heart of the Trump administration. So much for draining the swamp. Usual suspects: Mnuchin, Kushner, Trump Crime family, Giuliani, etc.

Symbol of ’80s Greed Stands to Profit From Trump Tax Break for Poor Areas

By Eric Lipton and Jesse Drucker | Published October 26, 2019 | New York Times | Posted October 27, 2019 |

RENO, Nev. — In the 1980s, Michael Milken embodied Wall Street greed. A swashbuckling financier, he was charged with playing a central role in a vast insider-trading scheme and was sent to prison for violating federal securities and tax laws. He was an inspiration for the Gordon Gekko character in the film “Wall Street.”

Mr. Milken has spent the intervening decades trying to rehabilitate his reputation through an influential nonprofit think tank, the Milken Institute, devoted to initiatives “that advance prosperity.”

These days, the Milken Institute is a leading proponent of a new federal tax break that was intended to coax wealthy investors to plow money into distressed communities known as “opportunity zones.” The institute’s leaders have helped push senior officials in the Trump administration to make the tax incentive more generous, even though it is under fire for being slanted toward the wealthy.

Mr. Milken, it turns out, is in a position to personally gain from some of the changes that his institute has urged the Trump administration to enact. In one case, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, directly intervened in a way that benefited Mr. Milken, his longtime friend.

It is a vivid illustration of the power that Mr. Milken, who was barred from the securities industry and fined $600 million as part of his 1990 felony conviction, has amassed in President Trump’s Washington. In addition to the favorable tax-policy changes, some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers — including Mr. Mnuchin, Jared Kushner and Rudolph W. Giuliani — have lobbied the president to pardon Mr. Milken for his crimes, or supported that effort, according to people familiar with the effort.

While the Milken Institute’s advocacy of opportunity zones is public, Mr. Milken’s financial stake in the outcome is not.

The former “junk bond king” has investments in at least two major real estate projects inside federally designated opportunity zones in Nevada, near Mr. Milken’s Lake Tahoe vacation home, according to public records reviewed by The New York Times.

One of those developments, inside an industrial park, is a nearly 700-acre site in which Mr. Milken is a major investor. Last year, after pressure from Mr. Milken’s business partner and other landowners, the Treasury Department ignored its own guidelines on how to select opportunity zones and made the area eligible for the tax break, according to people involved in the discussions and records reviewed by The Times.

The unusual decision was made at the personal instruction of Mr. Mnuchin, according to internal Treasury Department emails. It came shortly after he had spent time with Mr. Milken at an event his institute hosted.

“People were troubled,” said Annie Donovan, who previously ran the Treasury office in charge of designating areas as opportunity zones. She and two of her former colleagues said they were upset that the Treasury secretary was intervening to bend rules, though they said they didn’t realize at the time that Mr. Mnuchin’s friend stood to profit. The agency’s employees, Ms. Donovan said, “were put in a position where they had to compromise the integrity of the process.”

The opportunity zone initiative, tucked into the tax cut bill that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017, has become one of the White House’s signature initiatives. It allows investors to delay or avoid taxes on capital gains by putting money in projects or companies in more than 8,700 federally designated opportunity zones. Mr. Trump has boasted that it will revitalize downtrodden neighborhoods.

But the incentive, also championed by some prominent Democrats, has been dogged by criticism that it is a gift to wealthy investors and real estate developers. From the start, the tax break targeted people with capital gains, the vast majority of which are held by the very richest investors. The Treasury permitted opportunity zones to encompass not only poor communities but some adjacent affluent neighborhoods. Much of the money so far has flowed to those wealthier areas, including many projects that were planned long before the new law was enacted.

Investors and others — including Mr. Milken’s institute — have been pushing the Treasury Department to write the rules governing opportunity zones in ways that would make it easier to qualify for the tax break. That campaign worked, and Mr. Milken is among the potential beneficiaries.

Geoffrey Moore, a spokesman for Mr. Milken, confirmed that Mr. Milken had investments inside opportunity zones, though they are a sliver of his overall real estate holdings. He disputed that Mr. Milken had used his institute or Washington connections to benefit his investments and said no one at the institute “has any specific knowledge of Mike’s personal investments.”

Mr. Moore added that Mr. Milken’s support for opportunity zones was based on his longstanding belief “that jobs and the democratization of ownership are the keys to helping people in economically struggling areas.”

A spokesman for the Milken Institute, Geoffrey Baum, said that “to suggest that the work of the Milken Institute is motivated by or connected to Mr. Milken’s investments is flat-out wrong.” He said the institute advocated changes that were intended to spread the benefits to more low-income communities, not to help the wealthy.

The White House declined to comment on whether Mr. Trump is considering a presidential pardon for Mr. Milken.

A NOTORIOUS SYMBOL

Mr. Milken — operating from an X-shaped trading desk in Beverly Hills, Calif. — was a Wall Street legend. He pioneered the junk bond, which enabled financially risky companies to borrow billions of dollars and ignited a wave of often-hostile corporate takeovers that came to define a go-go era. His firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, hosted an annual event, which came to be known as the Predators’ Ball, where the era’s greatest financiers mingled. Mr. Milken became a billionaire.

Then, in 1989, federal prosecutors charged him with violating securities and tax laws and with being part of a lucrative insider-trading ring. The next year, Drexel Burnham went bankrupt.

Mr. Milken pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in prison and paid $600 million in fines. After cooperating with the government, he ended up serving about two years behind bars.

Mr. Milken emerged with a considerable fortune intact. He invested in companies in for-profit education, health care and fast food, according to securities filings and company announcements. He also acquired lots of real estate, coming to own roughly 700 properties around the United States, Mr. Moore said.

He continued to attract scrutiny from regulators, including one case in which Mr. Milken paid $47 million to resolve the Securities and Exchange Commission’s allegations that he had violated his lifetime ban from the securities industry.

Mr. Milken, however, has largely managed to restore his reputation — and his clout. His family gave tens of millions of dollars to his Milken Institute, which he founded in 1991 and whose board of directors he leads. After battling prostate cancer, he helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars to fund cancer research.

In Washington, Mr. Milken, 73, and his institute have courted influence, wooing and sometimes adding former federal officials. His family recently spent more than $85 million to buy three buildings opposite the White House and the Treasury Department, which he is transforming into his institute’s new Washington offices.

The most public display of his renewed stature comes each spring in Los Angeles when Mr. Milken presides over a glitzy gathering at the Beverly Hilton — the same venue where his famed Predators’ Balls took place three decades ago.

The Milken Institute’s annual conference attracts thousands of the world’s most powerful people — from government, finance, medicine, Hollywood and the like — for a frenzy of high-powered networking and conspicuous consumption. Recent guests have included Leon Black, the chairman of Apollo Global Management; David M. Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google; and the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.

Mr. Milken is the power broker at the center of the action. Onstage, he interviews famous guests. In private, he organizes exclusive dinners. Some have called the event the Davos of North America.

In the Trump era, cabinet secretaries and White House advisers have been among the event’s marquee guests, more so than in other recent administrations. Coveted speaking roles have gone to Ivanka Trump and her husband, Mr. Kushner, giving them access to an elite audience.

Shaping the Rules of the Road

At last year’s event in Beverly Hills, attendees included Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Mr. Mnuchin. The Treasury secretary was accompanied by several senior aides, including Daniel Kowalski, who is overseeing the department’s drafting of the opportunity zone rules.

Mr. Kowalski, who has spent months drumming up support across the country for opportunity zones, is well acquainted with the Milken Institute.

After the tax incentive became law, it was up to the Treasury, and Mr. Kowalski in particular, to put it in effect through a series of rules. Officials at the Milken Institute met repeatedly with him to try to influence that rule-writing process. The institute submitted a series of letters and presentations to the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service, and at times directly to Mr. Mnuchin, pushing for rules that would make the tax break easier to qualify for.

“Helping to shape the rules of the road” is how the Milken Institute describes its work on opportunity zones.

The institute “is incredibly active,” Mr. Kowalski said in an interview. He said he thought he had discussed opportunity zones with Mr. Milken, although he said he could not specifically recall. He disputed that Mr. Milken or his institute exerted any special influence over the Treasury Department.

Among the Milken Institute’s proposals was for the Treasury to give investors a generous amount of time to build on opportunity zone land and to reduce the amount that investors had to spend upgrading properties to be eligible for the tax break. Those changes would make it easier for investors to reap the benefits.

The institute also asked the Treasury a question that would clarify if investors who owned land in opportunity zones before the tax law was passed were eligible to receive the benefits. The Treasury ruled that such investments were permissible, a controversial decision since the purpose of the opportunity zone initiative was to spur new investments, not reward existing projects.

Mr. Milken’s spokesman, Mr. Moore, said Mr. Milken “never attended any meeting focused on opportunity zone regulations with any federal agency, nor did he consult with any institute representatives who may have interacted with any agency.”

But Aron Betru, who led the Milken Institute’s opportunity zone efforts, told The Times in an interview that he did discuss opportunity zones with Mr. Milken, though he said he was not aware of Mr. Milken’s specific investments. And in 2018 Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Milken attended a small, private event, sponsored by the institute, to discuss opportunity zones.

BOOMTOWN

High above Reno, on a vast hillside where wild horses roam, is the site of one of Nevada’s biggest opportunity zones.

The center of this area is known as Comstock Meadows, a reference to the 1859 discovery of the so-called Comstock Lode, one of the largest deposits of silver ever found in the United States. The find generated hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth, creating a boomtown in nearby Virginia City.

Today it is home to the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. Lured by cheap land, Google is building a huge new complex inside the industrial park. Tesla and Switch, the data-center company, recently opened their own operations. And down the street, Mr. Milken co-owns a company that holds nearly 700 acres of empty land.

He and his partner — Chip Bowlby, president of a development company called Reno Land — planned to use that space to open a so-called tech incubator, where smaller companies could set up operations, among other possible uses.

Being inside an opportunity zone would potentially be a huge boon for the venture. It would mean that start-ups at the tech incubator could attract tax-advantaged money from outside investors.

Nevada officials wanted to nominate the census tract that included the industrial park as an opportunity zone. But in early 2018, Treasury officials had ruled that the area was ineligible because its residents were too affluent.

Major landowners at the site, including Mr. Bowlby, urged state and local officials to try to get the Treasury to reverse that ruling, said Kris Thompson, the project manager at the industrial center.

Storey County, where the industrial park is situated, deployed Jon Porter, a former House Republican from Nevada who is now a lobbyist, to push the matter. Dean Heller, at the time a Republican senator, and Brian Sandoval, then the governor, also were enlisted and had phone calls with Mr. Mnuchin around that time, according to Treasury records. Mr. Heller, Mr. Porter and Mr. Sandoval did not respond to requests for comment.

‘My L.A. Friends’

Just as that lobbying intensified in the spring of 2018, Mr. Milken opened his institute’s annual conference in Beverly Hills.

Mr. Mnuchin was a featured guest. “It’s great to be here with you and all my L.A. friends,” the Treasury secretary said in an onstage interview on April 30.

That afternoon, the institute organized an invitation-only meeting with Mr. Mnuchin and his staff to discuss opportunity zones. Other listed attendees included Sean Parker, the former Facebook president and an early advocate of opportunity zones, and Raymond J. McGuire, a top Citigroup executive. Mr. Betru was the moderator.

Within days, the Treasury Department had shifted its position and was now willing to let the state nominate the area around the Nevada industrial park as an opportunity zone.

Mr. Mnuchin told Mr. Kowalski to inform other Treasury officials that they should accept Storey County’s nomination, according to email records reviewed by The Times.

Mr. Mnuchin spoke on the phone on May 8 with Mr. Sandoval. Forty-five minutes later, Mr. Sandoval formally nominated the site to be part of an opportunity zone, email records, including documents from Nevada, show. And the decision was soon officially blessed by the Treasury Department. (While the Treasury’s reversal has been reported, Mr. Milken’s connection has not been previously disclosed.)

Treasury officials said the change was part of an effort to iron out inconsistencies in different Treasury rules. But the switch provoked intense protests from Treasury and I.R.S. employees.

“Failure to apply the designation standards equally across the board will call into question the legitimacy of the process by which the designations were made,” an unnamed I.R.S. employee wrote in an internal memo in May 2018. It added that the appearance of “arbitrary” Treasury standards risked “opening the door for accusations that the determination process was influenced by political considerations or bias.”

“Any such controversy would in turn taint the opportunity zones and potentially chill or cloud the incentive for investors to invest in the opportunity zones,” the memo said.

In an interview this month at an event co-sponsored by the Milken Institute in Jackson, Miss., Mr. Kowalski would not comment on whether Mr. Mnuchin had been the driving force behind the Treasury’s reversal. “I can certainly say he was apprised of the situation,” Mr. Kowalski said.

Brett Theodos, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, which has advised state governments including Nevada on their nominations of opportunity zones, said the Treasury’s decision-making appeared problematic. “Making exceptions for the politically connected is deeply troubling,” he said.

Spokesmen for Mr. Milken and Mr. Mnuchin said the two men had never discussed the Storey County issue. Mr. Mnuchin’s spokesman, Devin O’Malley, said Mr. Mnuchin “had no knowledge of Milken’s investments in Nevada.”

Wins for Milken

In August 2018, Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Milken met again. This time, the occasion was a small conference hosted by the Milken Institute to discuss opportunity zones. The event took place at the Hamptons home of the real estate developer Richard LeFrak, a friend of and donor to Mr. Trump, according to the event’s agenda.

A handout from the event, which was later posted online, showed a map of all 8,764 opportunity zones in the United States, but focused on the virtues of just one specific area: Reno. The handout promoted the city as a “hub to the western United States.”

The handout did not mention that Mr. Milken was a major investor in two projects in opportunity zones in that area: the tech incubator in the industrial park and a housing, hotel and retail development on the site of an old shopping mall in Reno.

As his institute was continuing to push the Treasury to tinker with its opportunity zone rules, Mr. Milken gave Mr. Mnuchin a flight in January on his private jet to Los Angeles, where both men have homes.

Three months later, the Treasury Department heeded the institute’s request and clarified that investors could receive the opportunity zone tax benefits by simply leasing properties to themselves. As a result, investors who had long owned land inside opportunity zones were now eligible for the tax break.

In a separate round of rule changes, Treasury agreed to loosen rules governing how quickly developers had to start work on opportunity zone projects and how much money they had to spend — both revisions that the Milken Institute, among many others, had sought.

This was a potential win for Mr. Milken. His partner, Mr. Bowlby, had bought the Nevada real estate — for both the tech incubator and the residential and retail complex — before the areas were designated as opportunity zones.

Mr. Bowlby, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, said at a public event this year that he was using a lease on his Reno project with Mr. Milken “so we can still be qualified for the opportunity zone.”

The Treasury’s leasing decision has faced criticism.

“Anybody who owned property in the zone prior to 2018 would have been out of luck until these rules,” said Michelle Layser, a tax law professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. “This really opens the door.”

Mr. Moore, the spokesman for Mr. Milken, denied that he received special treatment.

“Your insinuation that Mike has reaped personal financial benefits from Milken Institute programs is outrageous,” he said. “It’s clear that you are less interested in the objective truth than in assigning to Mike Milken sinister motives that simply do not exist.”

Mr. Moore said that Mr. Milken hadn’t hidden the fact that he had investments in the Nevada opportunity zones. He said Mr. Milken had described them at the Hamptons event that Mr. Mnuchin attended. “There was nothing secretive about it,” he said.

Mr. Kowalski said he hadn’t been aware that Mr. Milken was an investor in the Nevada projects at the same time that his institute was seeking to change the rules governing opportunity zones.

Was he surprised? Mr. Kowalski paused. “Nothing surprises me anymore,” he said.

*********

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annddyyyyb-blog · 6 years

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Black Reconstruction/Jim Crow: Plessy V Ferguson

With the ratification of the 13th and 14th amendments to the U.S. constitution, the future looked bright for African-Americans in the United States. However, former slave-states developed a series of laws, known as the “Jim Crow” laws that actively sought to discriminate African-Americans on the basis of their skin color. Opposition to these laws was often met fierce violence, with many African-Americans ending up as victims of murders through lynching. This system of discrimination met its first major challenge in 1896, through the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. The case rested on the premise of challenging the legality of these discriminatory laws on the basis of violating a person of colors constitutional rights. Despite the argument made, the court ruled in favor of upholding these laws on the basis that they legally provided “separate, but equal” accommodations for people of color.

Prior to the Plessy v. Ferguson case, Jim Crow laws were the law of the land across the Southern United States. People of color lived in a state of legal inferiority and often paid with their lives if they made any challenge to this system. Although African-Americans were legally allowed to vote, an important issue under Jim Crow discrimination were the institutional obstacles that blacks faced when attempting to exercise their right to vote. Through intimidation, African-Americans were kept from the polls and thus their political power was effectively made negligible to null. Through laws that restricted people of color from voting, such as literacy tests, former slaves without education were unable to exercise their right to vote. The Jim Crow system placed an overwhelming legal opposition backed by brutal police power that harassed and oppressed African-Americans across the United States from the civil war to the ratification of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Plessy v. Ferguson stemmed from an 1892 incident in which Homer Plessy had refused to sit in a train car that had been reserved for people of color. While sitting in a “whites only” train car, Plessy refused to switch train cars and was jailed overnight and released on bail. The Louisiana judge who sentenced Homer Plessy, John Howard Ferguson, was challenged in the Supreme Court on the basis of violating the 13th and 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court case was ruled in favor of Ferguson in a 7-1 vote, in which the justices argued that the separation of races was merely a legal distinction, and not an issue that violated their constitutional rights. An upsetting setback for civil rights progress in the United States, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision allowed for the cementing and expansion of discriminatory laws across the American South. These laws did not only cement discriminatory laws for that period in time, they further heightened the notion of racism in the 21st century. Race and the court have a lot to do with Plessy V. Ferguson because it discusses the racial injustices that a black person must face simply because of the color of their skin. The law favors White people and during this time if you were black, the odds of you winning any legal case was highly unlikely.

A creative piece that I felt related to the Plessy V Ferguson court case was the poem “Ferguson,” by Tide. In the poem Tide states, “It's not fair, all these Jim Crow Laws, I see black as a color, not as a flaw.” To me, this was the strongest line in the poem because of the fact that this was one of the misconceptions that the vast majority of White people had during this time. What difference did the color of your skin make when it came to respecting one another? Black people were not given respect or equal rights during this time simply because society said so, since being Black was considered a flaw. In the next line Tide states, “I’m forced to respect one who won't respect me, I’m really a nice person but you'll never see.” This statement is powerful because during this time Black people were forced to put up with all the racism/social injustices in America and could not do anything about it. All they could do was remain quiet and take whatever they had to so their lives would not be at risk. This poem was very clear in its approach to convey the emotions of the author to the reader. I really felt what Tide wrote after I had finished reading the poem.

The Plessy V. Ferguson case relates to race, crime, and punishment because people of color were segregated as well as socially isolated from Whites in America. During this time, Blacks were not allowed to get haircuts at the same barbershops as Whites, Blacks were not allowed to eat at the same restaurants as Whites, Black people were not allowed to be in the same educational institutions as Whites, Blacks were not allowed to partake in playing any games (checkers, dice, dominos, etc.) with Whites, etc. When you segregate people of color from Whites and make the laws more in favor of Whites, a social divide, stemming from racism occurs. As I had previously stated, different types of deterrents were used to make sure Black people did not disobey the law. One these horrifying methods of deterrence was lynching. Lynching refers to killing somebody, especially by hanging, for an alleged offense with or without a legal trial.

Let’s talk about lynchings and beatings and how barbaric they actually were. Not only was lynching unnecessary, it was extremely vile. During this time, Black people were being lynched in front of huge crowds that people paid for to watch. Lynching was a demoralizing public event where people were allowed to buy the remaining body parts of those who were lynched. Some even ate these body parts. Others took pictures next to the dead bodies of those who were lynched. A statistic from the NAACP stated, “From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynching’s occurred in the United States. Of these people that were lynched 3,446 were black. The blacks lynched accounted for 72.7% of the people lynched. These numbers seem large, but it is known that not all of the lynchings were ever recorded. Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched. That is only 27.3%. Many of the whites lynched were lynched for helping the black or being anti lynching and even for domestic crimes.” When we talk about court cases and methods of punishment that have to do with race and crime, we must view lynching as one of the main methods of punishment to deter crime and instill fear in African-Americans. White people made the rules in America and if you disobeyed them, you would face punishment with your life.

#SeparateIsNotEqualItIsRacist #LetsMakeBlackReconstructionFunction

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shirleydazzle · 6 years

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Psychological Evaluations in Utah Divorce and Custody Cases

There is a lot of fuss and fanfare about psychological evaluations in family law to determine child custody. The most common reason we hear for requesting a psychological evaluation in Utah family law cases (divorce, custody, visitation, shared parenting), is, “I think my ex is bipolar and I want custody of my children.” Many clients want to have a psychological evaluation performed in their cases, but what happens in those evaluations is a big mystery to them.

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When the purpose of the psychological evaluation is to determine which parent is more suitable to parent children (a Child Custody Evaluation), there are guidelines that an evaluator must use. On February 21, 2009, the American Psychological Association revised their “Guidelines for Child Custody Evaluations in Divorce Proceedings”. They are now known as the “Guidelines for Child Custody Evaluations in Family Law Proceedings“, an acknowledgment to the fact that the definition of family in America is changing, and psychological evaluations are no longer used only in divorce.

Contrary to what most parents believe, the purpose of a psychological evaluation is not to see if either parent has a mental health diagnosis. The Psychologist’s contact with the parents is unlikely to be sufficient for the Psychologist to actually make a diagnosis. At best, they may be able to observe characteristics which might be “consistent with” a certain diagnosis or disorder.

If the purpose of the examination is not to make a diagnosis, then what is it? In a nutshell, the purpose is of the psychological evaluation, or child custody evaluation, is:

Where possible, to answer the referral question that was set out in the Court’s order which required one or both parents, and the Child, to participate in the evaluation; and

To determine the psychological best interests of the Child. Where appropriate, the Psychologist can make a recommendation as to which parent is better equipped to meet the psychological needs of the Child.

10 Things to Discuss with Your Attorney

Sometimes the Court will choose the evaluator, and sometimes the Court will allow the parties or attorneys to choose or have input regarding which psychologist will perform the evaluation. In that case, here are 10 important things to discuss with your attorney:

How much will the psychological evaluation cost?

Who will pay for the psychological evaluation?

Does this Expert generally prepare a written report? If so, does the Expert generally prepare the report on time, or request multiple extensions of time to prepare the report? If you don’t want your case to drag on, is this the Expert for you?

When this Expert prepares a report, does he or she generally make a recommendation to the Court, or avoid making a recommendation to the Court?

What does this Expert charge for his or her time in depositions, and for court time? Is it a higher hourly rate or an expensive flat fee? If your case goes to trial, you will probably need this Expert to come to court. Can you afford to pay for that?

Has your Attorney worked with this Psychologist before? If so, what were your Attorney’s impression of his or her work?

In your Attorney’s experience, does this Psychologist generally make a recommendation which favors mothers? Or fathers? If your Attorney’s experience is that a particular psychologist almost always recommends one parent over the other, and that parent is not you, you should discuss your concerns with your Attorney.

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If need be, will the Psychologist participate in depositions and testify in court? Believe it or not, some psychologists who will perform custody evaluations do NOT want to give a deposition or go to court in any way, shape or form. Although they can be compelled to do so, discuss with your Attorney why you would voluntarily agree to hire an unwilling expert.

Is the Expert willing to supply his or her information, notes, etc. in response to a subpoena, to the extent permissible by law? Does your Attorney know if the Expert has redacted information or notes when his or her records were subpoenaed? If so, why? Was there a legal basis for doing so, or was the Expert trying to hide something that should be discoverable?

What is the Expert’s working relationship with the Guardian Ad Litem? Does your Guardian Ad Litem always suggest this Expert? If so, why? Does the Expert have discussions with the Guardian Ad Litem that he or she does not disclose to your Attorney?

Free Consultation with Child Custody and Divorce Lawyer

If you have a question about child custody question or if you need to get divorced, please call Ascent Law at (801) 676-5506. We will help you.

Ascent Law LLC8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite CWest Jordan, Utah 84088 United StatesTelephone: (801) 676-5506

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Source: http://www.ascentlawfirm.com/psychological-evaluations-in-utah-divorce-and-custody-cases/

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notesfromthepen · 6 years

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From Junkies To Gang Bangers: Why Incarceration For Addicts Is Failing

First another one of my famous disclaimers: Because the tools I write this with and the method through which I send this out is surveilled and recorded I have to say that the details in this story may or may not be true and some details may have been changed to protect from incriminating those involved. Translation: I’m in prison and I have to watch what I say.

From Junkies to Gang Bangers: How Americas war on drugs is supplying the countries most dangerous street gangs a steady stream of fresh recruits:

For as long as I can remember I’ve had a knack for noticing the things that most people don’t pick up on.

After spending years in prison I’ve been witness to a wide variety of experiences. I need not waste your time with the predictable happenings of prison culture. The movies have already been made, the books well written, and the stories told.

However, with the unique perspective, afforded me by my incarceration and the distance that time provides, to watch patterns unfold, I’ve noticed something. Something unique.

Research has already been done, and attention drawn, to the negative affects of both, mass incarceration as well as the war on drugs. The two come together, to form a two headed beast of misguided justice, in our society’s preferred method of dealing with addiction: The criminalization of addiction and the incarceration of addicts.

A quick statistic: America has only five percent of the earths population yet is responsible for one-fourth of the worlds prison population. 25% of all the prisoners on this entire planet are in American prisons, many of them for drug offenses.

The existing research points to a failure in our attempts to deal with this epidemic. An attempt born and reinforced for years, from J. Edgar Hoover, to the Reagan era ‘Just say No’ campaign, through the Clinton’s tough on crime years, up to the present attorney general’s focus on severe sentences in the prosecution of drug cases.

Statistics like; criminal recidivism rate, drug relapse, and the dissolution of the family unit, point to the shortcomings of these methods.

These are all valid reasons to highlight the need for a change in our approach, but for those not affected by addiction, either personally or through a loved one, these consequences are often compartmentalized as something not affecting their everyday lives. Which, allows them to maintain the delusion that we aren’t interconnected members of society as a whole, and that what affects one, doesn’t affect all. An out of sight out of mind mentality.

Since coming to prison I’ve been witness to a pattern that makes the delusion of isolation from the effects of addiction harder to maintain. Though it is unintended by the police, the prosecutors, the judges, and the prison system, it has become an inevitable consequence nonetheless. Something that threatens to touch all corners of society.

I’ve seen how America’s war on drugs is supplying the countries most dangerous gangs with a steady supply of willing, able, and competent soldiers. Soldiers who would otherwise never be exposed to such a culture. Soldiers from suburbs, small towns, and from intact family units.

The influx of addicts into the state prisons has flooded the system with a mass of new inmates. They range in age, demeanor, intelligence, and capability, but the one common denominator is that they are all newly sober, some for the first time in their lives.

This group, thrust into a new and harsh reality, fresh thinking and relatively clear headed for the first time in years, attempts to navigate this new environment using nothing but their instincts and abilities.

Anyone who knows addicts already knows that there are many who, if it wasn’t for their addiction, are incredible people. Intelligent, capable, hard working, courageous, and competent people. People that could be especially productive and successful members of society if only they could shake their dependence on drugs.

Behind prison walls, many of these freshly sober addicts, begin to realize their capabilities and potential. Attributes, that have remained dormant under the weight of their disease for years, are suddenly revealed. A sort of blossoming takes place in the first year of prison sobriety. Unfortunately their growth and discovery takes place in a harsh unforgiving place. And it isn’t just a self-realization, others take notice of these same qualities, and like everything in prison, it is weighed on the scale of an exploitation.

The social dynamic in prison makes these capable addicts the most highly recruited group of new inmates into the prison gang culture. They are an untapped resource, full of potential, and ready to be put to work.

The vulnerability of the newly sober inmates psyche cannot be overstated. I know this from personal experience.

Your every action is under a microscope. How you walk, how you talk, who you gravitate to, your posture, your body language, even the duration of your eye contact, all analyzed and stored for later use. And this is all within the first twenty-four hours. Everyone watches, everything, all the time.

The adept convicts have an amazing ability to read people in a matter of minutes. Like in the free-world a lot of it is based on appearance, though nothing trumps how you carry yourself. It doesn’t matter how big you are or how many tattoos you have on your face. If you’re a lame, then you are treated like one. But initially, appearance does play a role, more for excluding the useless, than including the useful.

First, there are those inmates that are weeded out immediately based on appearance. Within minutes of stepping foot on the compound a predator, either sexual or financial, will inevitably approach them and lay down their play (con). If someone ‘blows down on you’ (which means you are approached as a potential victim) and you don’t immediately fight, or at least check them aggressively, you are dismissed as damaged goods. When it comes to the gangs you are now viewed as a coward, unwilling to stand up for yourself. You let fear dictate your actions and your well being, so you are treated with the respect you demand, which is none. In this category your food, money, or worse will be taken by play or by force. The rest of your time in prison will be a tough experience to say the least, true Hard Time.

Upon seeing this first culling, a lot of new inmates, make the mistake of trying too hard, to look hard. They play the over the top tough guy role. But any of us who have been around for any amount of time know better. We’ve seen these types let their mouths and attitudes get them into precarious situations leading to stabbings or assaults, and nine times out of ten, they do nothing in response.

Some of these all bark no bite guys are recruited, unknown to them, as temporary quasi gang members called 'supporters’. They are used as disposable soldiers, to hold onto weapons or commit violence, but it never works out for anyone involved. The tough guys usually end up locking up (refusing to go to your cell in order to be placed in protective custody, or to be rode out to another facility. Viewed as an incredibly cowardly act, 'locking up’ is nearly as bad as being a rat.), or they end up telling on their cohorts.

Time passes and the remaining inmates are watched and tested. If you carry yourself with quiet confidence, if you have a good head on your shoulders, if you know how to deal with people, talk to people, build relationships with fellow inmates, if you know when to joke and when to be serious, if you are able to stand on your own, if you can watch your surroundings and act strategically, if you control yourself and are responsible, if you are industrious, if you have work ethic and can make money and be disciplined with that money, if you carry yourself as a stand up guy that gives respect and refuses disrespect, if you posses some of these qualities, over time it will show. And when it does, the gang members are there to recruit those who display these qualities.The same attributes that lead to success in the business world often lead to success in the underworld.

You might think: It’s easy, anyone who’s approached by a gang member should just say no. And theoretically, from the chair in front of your computer, or sitting on your couch with your smart phone in hand, it is easy. But take into consideration the vulnerability I mentioned earlier.

I should explain what an organization offers that would be appealing to a newly incarcerated and freshly sober addict. That’s what they’re called: Organizations. It’s marketing, it’s easier to sell an organization than a 'street gang’.

In a place with little to no control, these organizations offer comfort, psychologically speaking, in the form of a chance to exercise some control of your surroundings. As inmates, we have no say when we eat, when we sleep, when we workout, when we can use the phone, what we are allowed to do, where we go, who we live with, and most importantly who we are surrounded by.

That’s what they offer: control in an otherwise uncontrollable world. The members of the organizations are held to a set of standards regarding conduct of every sort, and those same members are held accountable if they fail to live by this set of ethics, or at least that’s the idea.

As the code of conduct is laid out it sounds like a good idea: A set of admirable rules to live by: responsibility, loyalty, honor, honesty, respect, no gambling, no stealing, no lying, no exploitation, etc.

For the new recruit, it makes sense that they would be drawn to the chance for some control, even if it isn’t a conscious deciding factor for joining. To have a say about the people around you, for everybody to be held to the same set of enforceable standards. To vow to watch out for each other against the other, less virtuous, gangs. To support each other without question and regardless of consequence. To stand together and uplift one another.

Next, the recruit will be told that the organization is a band of like minded brothers. They’ll extol the recruits virtues, the qualities that drew their attention. Their ego will be stroked, and it’s not in an insincere way. They’re not lying when they tell you the reasons they are interested in you.

For so long, while lost in addiction, you hear only your negative qualities exposed, by others as well as yourself. And now, freshly sober, alone in a cold and harsh environment, as you begin to find your self worth and value, you have someone telling you that they can see your value. And not only that, they want to join forces with you, to offer their unwavering loyalty.

Amidst all these influences the most alluring, for an addict, may be the chance to finally be of service to something. To be needed. To finally, however misguided, find meaning in something bigger than yourself. For some the control, the ego stroke, isn’t the pitch that gets them, it’s the ideal that the organization represents: Meaning.

For the most part, these are not evil people who do the recruiting. To view them as some over the top bad guy from some horror movie is to miss the point and misunderstand the situation. These are some of the same people who came into this place just as confused or vulnerable as those they are trying to recruit.

The difference is that they’ve been hardened by years of unforgiving prison life, they’re deeper in this culture and have either refused, or are unable, to see the underlying hypocrisy, the failings of the organization to live up to its own standards.

Many of these men have invested so much into this life, so much of their identity is derived from it, that they refuse to let it go. Some simply can’t give it up for they no longer know who they are outside of their position in the gang. Not to mention the fear of walking the yard alone, is often reason enough to stay in. It’s exponentially easier to get in than to get out.

If these addicts are indeed recruited, and a large majority are (I’d guess 9 out of 10), their mettle is soon tested. If they remain true to qualities that got them recruited, then they quickly move up the ranks.

A convict I know well, who was an addict, was recruited in this same method when he first came to prison. He had no evil intentions or malicious desires in joining. He bought into the loyalty, the brotherhood, the code of conduct and he held true to the oath he took.

Within two years of joining, two years of putting in work, and two years of proving himself, he moved up to a leadership position. He had the yard at the prison he was incarcerated in, which means that he was the top ranking member there with a chain of command under him.

As the years went by, little by little, he began to notice the hypocrisy involved in the lifestyle. But he held onto a hope that, in a higher position, he could control what happened and pull things in a more righteous direction. A direction more inline with the actual laws and the original purpose for the foundation of the organization. He hoped that now he could make sure that nothing dishonorable would occur within the rules of this environment, under his watch. It was a naive hope.

This man justified his position, and there were things that he was able to prevent and situations he resolved without bloodshed, and so he pragmatically decided that he had to stay. All the while in the back of his mind, he knew that the shine was gone, and that he was quickly outgrowing his circumstances.

He came to realize that gangs were inevitable in a place like this. He spoke to the older inmates and learned that there was a time when there were no real gangs. Eventually, back in the day, a religious group had a large membership and they exercised a level of organization that turned, for all intents and purposes, into a gang. For years, this organization ran the yards of the compounds they were on. What they said went. Who they backed was right, and who they didn’t was wrong, and that’s just the way it was. They ruled, for a moment, with little to no opposition. And like any unchecked power it corrupted them. They used unwarranted violence and exploited the other inmates for their own gains. If you weren’t a member of this group you were a second class convict and treated as such.

In a case like this, the result is all too predictable. Necessity is the mother of invention, and in response to this religious gang, an inmate who was a gang member from Chicago started recruiting, and one gang begot another which begot another, until there were many.

My friend, realized that if there was one gang then there would be many. He said that it was like a gun: if one person is in a room with limited food, and he’s the only one with a gun, some people are going to go hungry. Well, no one wants to starve.

Over time my friend continued to see the hypocrisy of his own organization and the rosy illusion began to disappear. But, still he stayed.

There was something changing in this man. He was different from the majority in one important way. Along with his newfound sobriety, he began an unflinching self exploration and worked to gain an unequaled understanding of himself. He says that he as he peeled back the layers and discovered the reality of what led to most of the decisions through out his life that he saw a pattern of flawed thinking.

All this time in prison, he continued to work on himself until he reached a point where he could no longer deny the truth of the situation. He could no longer put off what he needed to do. And as much as he actually loved some of his brothers, he finally had to do the harder thing. To stand alone and turn away from those he’d been closest to since coming to prison. He knew that he had to make a decision for himself this time. A decision based on a true understanding of himself and of the situation. A decision without justification, without delusion, without the silencing of his inner compass. He finally had to make a clear headed and completely aware decision, to do right thing.

Towards the beginning of his ascension he remembered an older member of his organization tell him, “Because of the type of man you are, you will always put in more than you get out. You will always be pulling people up instead of being lifted"

He said that he remembers being told by this higher up that, "You should get out now. I can make it so that you can retire, you can keep your status, you don’t have to cover up your tattoos, you don’t have to take your minutes out (being ritually jumped for leaving the organization)” but at the time my friend still held on to the hope of making things better.

He wasn’t able to hear it then, but now he says, that he knows exactly what the older guy meant.

And so, after much denial, after the justifications ran out, and after the procrastination was no longer a good enough excuse, after the pleading and protestations of his brothers, he finally dropped his flag.

With much more heart than it took to join, he took the steps to officially get out. Because of the respect of his fellow brothers he didn’t have to take his minutes out but he did cover up his tattoos and he walked away like he came in: alone.

Though he says it was the toughest decision he’s had to make in prison he doesn’t regret it. In fact on a nearly daily basis he feels grateful for his decision. He tells me that he feels a literal weight has been lifted from his shoulders. An anxiety has evaporated.

In a sense he is alone now, but the same qualities that put him high on the recruitment list, and propelled him in rank, serves him well in this setting. He stands on his own two feet and has respect from his fellow convicts. And for the most part, his former brothers show him a begrudging respect, especially those who’ve been around for a while and have a more complete understanding of the reality of the lifestyle.

I wanted to give an individual example of how this situation can, and does, play out. I also want to make perfectly clear that this example is completely common in every sense, but one: Most, never find the strength to quit. Most never make it out.

And so these vulnerable and capable addicts, who could’ve been anything if they were just able to get help for their disease, are being systematically indoctrinated into a deeply immersive gang culture. They have found meaning, maybe not the best type of meaning, but meaning nonetheless. The lifestyle, while incarcerated, becomes so intertwined with their identity that it’s hard for them to define themselves without the gang. Leaving them almost no chance of getting out.

These people, failed by the system, return to the streets and with this gang mentality they set up the same structure and organizations in the suburbs and small towns that they come from. They’ve traded drugs for gang life and when they are released they will indoctrinate a whole new market of kids and teens, once unreachable by the inner city gangs that they themselves were recruited by.

In this ironic twist, because of our lack of understanding and compassion, in our misguided attempt to deal with the disease of addiction, we have sewn the seeds of our own adversity.

We have to rethink what doesn’t work.

There are many faults to our war on drugs. And the stigma of addiction still hangs heavy. I don’t claim to have all the answers but I am in the position to witness some of the unseen consequences of our failed attempt to deal with this epidemic.

Until we change things like, mass incarceration, and the way we implement the war on drugs, and the way we deal with the addicts in our communities, change will not come fast enough.

Incarceration needs to be seen in its entirety. The distance between the intended purpose of incarceration and the reality of the effects that it has on those incarcerated needs to been understood. We have to find a way to reach those afflicted by addiction before sending them to prison. We have to avoid using incarceration as a treatment for this disease, because not only is it not working, it is turning around on us. Our failings are reaching out to touch the rest of society. We are perpetuating our own suffering.

The people we throw away will eventually be returned by the current, and until we realize that we are all interconnected members of society and that what happens to one of us affects us all, we will continue to reap tomorrow what we sew today.

I humbly hope that this can be another small addition to the case for change and eventually we can alter the direction of the way in which we deal with the disease of addiction facing our brothers and sisters.

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angel--boyy · 7 years

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Just a friendly reminder: FUCK SAUDI ARABIA. Seriously the most backwards, hate-spewing country besides NK. Let's list everything wrong with Saudi, shall we? 1.) Rape is okay and largely ignored 99% of the time by the police and people of the nation 2. It's okay to marry a child (and is a very common occurrence) because their 'god' Muhammad did it. Recently, the court was faced with a law that would effectively ban child marriage in Saudi. The courts shut it down. It's 2017. 3. Execution of individuals is okay and largely practiced. Execution usually occurs against disbelievers, but it's not limited to that. 4. The strict implementation of Sharia law, which covers politics, economics, sexuality, and social issues. This is what makes Islam far more than just a religion. Sharia strictly follows the Quran, and the Hadiths. So, basically, this means the primitive Arabic tribesmen and their VERY barbaric and primitive ways are the current beliefs of 2017 and the whole nation, which explains the child marriage, rape, pillaging, hate crimes, total belief that they are the superior religion/race etc. 5. Foreigner/migrants often go there and are raped or murdered and the police don't take any action. (If you don't believe me on this, send me a PM and I'll send you around 20+ reputable news articles I've found on my own research that detail these atrocities.) 6. They have a religious police. In modern civilization, they still have a police force to enforce religious practice and ensure you're not a non-believer. 7. Saudi Arabia is the largest funder/supporter/causer of terrorism worldwide. A very unknown fact is that the minds behind 9/11 were majority Saudi Arabians, something like 14/19 people or something along those lines. Also, Osama Bin Laden, is, in fact, a born and raised SAUDI ARABIAN. 8. Women have basically zero rights, they're basically sex slaves and objects to the men which is fucking disturbing. 9. Gays or anything along that line are executed. 10. ISIS stemmed from Saudi Arabia and is a product of their hateful beliefs. Nobody will openly admit/talk about any of these things because AMERICA AND SAUDI ARABIA are huge business partners and America constantly supplies them money, weapons, you name it. This is why Trump didn't add Saudi Arabia to the travel ban list, but added Iran and other countries that have little to no foundation of terrorism. Seriously, Saudi Arabia and their entire belief system and ideals are founded on hatred. Nothing makes me sicker than the Islamic beliefs. An entire nation believes in this shit. Islam needs to be erased, for all the terrorism and hatred that stems from it, you have to ask yourself, can these beliefs really be anything good for a person/healthy when you see what can be interpreted from it? If someone reads their bible and learns from it "children marriage is beautiful, anyone except my race is inferior, women are objects and western nations need to be abolished", there is something deeply wrong with that at a foundational level. Fuck that shit. Seriously fuck Saudi Arabia. Fuck Islam. You would never read 'The Magic School Bus' and interpret it as a guide on how to be a hateful piece of shit, so why are religions like Islam/Wahhabism given a pass when we see the radical bullshit that delves from it and ultimately inspires it? Look at all these terrorist actions done in the name of Islam. Look at ISIS. If you call someone an Islamophobe when they provide you these facts on the radical terrorist nation that is Saudi Arabia, congrats, you're a fucking idiot. Islamophobia is completely justified when you actually research the topic instead of immediately assuming the person is an asshole. I sincerely hope Saudi Arabia is eradicated for all the crimes, atrocities, and hatred that occurs there on a daily basis. I should never have to read multiple articles about women being beaten and killed for not doing something their husband told them too, children being sworn off to a forty year old men to marry, migrants being raped and murdered, people being executed for having different beliefs, or people being sentenced to death because theyre homosexual or are 'different'. Get fucked saudi Arabia. Religion is a concept im very open minded too despite not believing in anything, I am totally accepting of someone who believes in religion even if there is something's i don't agree with or like. But islam? Nah. I have zero tolerance for it.