In honor of John Murtari
In honor of John Murtari and August being Child Support Awareness month in
America.
please redistribute:
International Day of Protest for John Murtari, Equal Parenting and Family
Law Reform – August 9
Members of A Kids Right ,
Fathers4Justice-USAand
Fathers4Justice-Canada ,
along with local parents will be demonstrating in Syracuse, New York on Wednesday, August 9, in support of passive resister John Murtari. Murtari is founder of A Kids Right and proponent of Equal Child Custody and a Family Rights Act.
Inspired by Gandhi, John refuses to cooperate with his captors while he is incarcerated for failure to pay all of his child support.
Murtari has not had any water or food since Monday, July 31. His health started to decline quickly and he was moved to a jail with better medical facilities. By Friday he was in a local emergency room with a rapid and irregular heartbeat. The demonstration will either be at the Syracuse City Jail, or the hospital. Most likely it will be the hospital. Let’s pray it’s not the morgue.
John says:
“We love our children. We have been denied our rights. We need Congressional hearings into reform.
Please understand, this is NOT A HUNGER STRIKE. I have no desire to hurt myself. I want the ‘system’ to expend an enormous amount of effort to keep me captive as they ignore my most basic right to be considered a fit & equal parent to my son.
My son is now 13 and even though he was moved to the other side of the country at age 6 — we keep and grow the warmth and love a parent and child should have. Six weeks together this summer – imagine that! In jail I will certainly remember these moments. Moments we should all be able to take for granted and never lose.”
As Coordinator I get a lot of your email and phone calls. Not being able to see your kids for years! Having children that are now alienated and all you can do is hope & pray for something better in the future. To those of you who had written/called me, I will also remember the indignity and tragedy you have been through. It certainly gives me the motivation to see this through and have hope for a positive outcome.”
Please join the international family law reform community in supporting John Murtari.
If you can, please attend the demonstration in Syracuse. If you can’t make it to New York you can demonstrate in front of your state or county child support agencies, other government buildings like state capitals, or television and radio stations.
If you are not in America, please demonstrate in front of the U.S. Embassy in your country on Wednesday, August 9, 2006.
Please send me photos of all demonstrations and I will make a collage, photo album, or flickr show and distribute it back to everyone. Include names of demonstrators, if possible, and locations.
Purple Ribbon Campaign in support of John Murtari
Please tie purple ribbons around trees in support of John. This can be done in front of child support agencies, politician’s offices, television stations, or other high traffic areas. Cover your town in purple. You can also put purple armbands or headbands on statues, especially patriotic statues. If you can, leave posters of the photo attached with a link to A
Kids Right or your local family law reform group. Once you do this, please send me photos, with location, and I will make a slideshow of these also.
Be sure to call your local radio and television stations too; see if they’ll check it out. Get a few people to call and ask, “What’s up with all of those purple ribbons?” You can also wear purple armbands and if anyone asks why, hand them a poster.
God bless you all. John says, “Thank you.”
Teri Stoddard
[email protected]
Call tollfree: 877-635-1968 ex 212
(ignore the messages, it’s John’s business phone)
By Bruce Eden
After reading the article “NYS Child Support Collections Top $1.5 Billion”
(Feb. 25, 2006), the words that come to mind are “fraud”, “scam”,
“extortion”, “racketeering” and “government oppression”.
The state talks a good story about how all the increased child support
enforcement and collections benefits the children. This is pure fantasy. The
monies that the state awards, enforces and collects is directly proportional
to how much it receives from the federal government as incentive
reimbursement funding.
And that amount is in the several hundreds of millions of dollars. The
monies that the state receives for child support enforcement has no strings
attached. The state uses this funding to bolster their state employee and
judicial pension plans. Sounds like a massive conflict of interest and
criminal conspiracy to me. The U.S. Supreme Court held in Tumey v. Ohio,
Ward v. Monroeville and Gibson v. Berryhill that judges cannot sit on cases
where they have a pecuniary interest in them because it would be a
demonstration of actual bias.
Yet, judges, or state employed judicial hearing officers, in the domestic
relations courts, sit on these cases every day. This has created a tyranny
by having the state criminalize a civil matter. As stated in the article, it
says that the district attorneys are getting into the act in prosecuting
people for child support arrearages.
Again, this is a blatant due process and equal protection violation. When
were the payor parents told, at the inception of the child support matter,
that the matter would be converted from a civil case into a criminal case?
When were they read their Miranda rights, such as right to remain silent
about their financial situation, or given their right to trial by jury or
right to appointed, competent effective counsel to defend them properly.
As can be seen by this lack of substantive due process, the entire child
support enforcement mechanism is a fraud and a scam that smacks of
racketeering. If any debt collection agency did this for any other debt,
they be facing massive fines and criminal charges. They would be put out of
business immediately.
New York State claims it is going after so-called “deadbeats” by
criminalizing child support delinquencies and jailing those with large
arrearages. Sounds good. However, if one were to investigate the situation
they would find that most of the state’s largest delinquent child support
obligors are unemployed, underemployed, undereducated, disabled, minorities,
or deceased. That’s right-deceased! The state needs to keep those numbers on
its books in order to maximize the federal funding it receives.
According to a 7-year longitudinal academic study done by Arizona State
University that became the book, “Divorced Dads-Shattering the Myths”, it
was uncovered that less than 5% of all delinquent child support payors are
true “deadbeats”-those with the expensive sports cars and trophy wives half
their age. So, where is the child support “deadbeat” hysteria? There is
none. It is being contrived by the federal and state governments in order to
control families, steal children, and eliminate fathers from families so
that the state can become the “super-parent”. It is another tyrannical
government program to extract money from taxpayers to support the
government’s own largesse.
The state defrauds the taxpayers by claiming they are doing it “for the
children”. The government never does something for its citizens without a
quid pro quo. In the U.S. Supreme Court case DeShaney v. Winnebago County
Board of Social Services, the high Court ruled that the state owes no duty
to protect its citizens. So, the question begs: “Why is the state
discriminating against one-half of the population to enforce child support?”
It is obvious. It is not about the children or getting people off of
welfare. It is about how much money the states can rake in so they can
appropriate more money from the feds to balance their own budgets.
Federal child support enforcement laws were designed solely for TANF
(Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and for welfare families. It was
never designed for the “never-welfared” middle class. However, child support
bureaucrats and other hangers-on testified before Congress that they needed
to bring the middle-class into the fray in order to receive maximum benefits
from the federal government in order to bolster state budgets.
Interestingly, not one child support payor, or any advocacy group for child
support payors was allowed to testify before Congress and the New York State
legislature (or for any other state for that matter) in devising child
support enforcement legislation. Again, we see a pattern of racketeering
conspiracy and government tyranny at the expense of innocent taxpayers.
There is a large hue and cry across the country to curtail divorces because
it threatens the very fabric of our society. The reason is because one
parent is allowed to divorce the other without any grounds. One parent can
divorce and abuse the legal system to win the divorce, all of the money and
assets of the marriage, and win custody of the children (with all the
attendant financial benefits that come with this). It’s all because of child
support. Child support enforcement has created the “divorce state”. Not only
does child support increase the amount of divorces because of the financial
windfall to the custody-winning parent, it threatens society. Child support
enforcement laws are in reality a threat to national security.
The time has come for lawmakers to take a second look at the draconian child
support enforcement laws in this country because these laws are not
constitutional. Child support enforcement laws are a threat to national
security. To stop this threat, lawmakers either need to eliminate or
seriously curtail child support enforcement against innocent taxpayers, or
they must tax child support the way alimony is taxed. This would immediately
slow down divorces in this country. This is because the custodial parent,
(in over 80% of all cases it is the mother-further gender discrimination
against males), would think twice about divorcing on grounds that their
marriage is not satisfactory, before having to pay the additional large
income tax burden.
Bruce Eden is the director of DADS (Dads Against Discrimination),
New Jersey and New York chapters
Comment by Intrepid — Sun 6th August 2006 @ 4:00 pm
Intrepid,
What a great find. The governments don\’t really run the countries, the economy does. It always come back to money.
This country is in just as much trouble for spending the money set aside for retirees. Just the same as America did to wage war 20 odd years ago and are now at war. They must find a way to get that money. Anything you offer the government of the day as a way to make or save money will always be considered and most likely implemented.
Alcohol and cigarettes are just two things to consider. How anti are we on these and how much every year does the price go up. On the outside we are fed the BS that these 2 things are harmful to our society when really it is a tax scam.
We are so close to the \’matrix\’ becoming a reality.
Here is something I found to add to this theory. This below is about the non-smacking law a \’Green\’s party\’ MP wants to introduce.
The rest is at this site.
panic.org
Comment by julie — Sun 6th August 2006 @ 5:44 pm
Dear Julie,
100% on the mark. Using the slogan of defender of the children to raise higher taxes(it was 78% in Sweden in the past, but has come down a bit lately), to in fact undermine the the family and in the end truly screw up the kids all in the axis of government control and self-rightious busy-bodies who think they know-it-all, and often don’t have kids or healthy relationships themselves. This must be stopped before the passions get extreme on the side of those suffering distructive shot after shot. Time is not on our side here.
Comment by Intrepid — Sun 6th August 2006 @ 9:36 pm
Intrepid,
This is something I saw a person post regarding their pain. I thought you might appreciate it.
“An injustice anywhere, is a threat to justice everywhere.” Martin Luther
King
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke 18th Century
“Against every new outrage and every fresh horror, we shall put up one more piece of love and goodness.” Etty Hillsum
Absolutely. I know you are not alone on that comment.
Comment by julie — Sun 6th August 2006 @ 11:21 pm