NYT letter re, If This Isn’t Slavery, What Is, by Nicholas Kristof Jan.
4, 2009, Jan. 8
Kristof is to be commended for his compassionate efforts to
help stop sex trafficking.
However, I believe why his and other efforts don’t make more
progress is because we don’t set a good enough example. Even he downplays our own culpability by
noting that “forced prostitution is remarkably similar from Pakistan
to Vietnam –
and, sometimes in the United States
as well.” Not long ago, maybe 3 years
back, the NYT had a front cover magazine article about sex trafficking and
reported an estimate of 700,000 per year worldwide, with about 60,000 right
here. 60,000 is a LOT
more than “sometimes!” I was glad to see
mentioned by Kristof that it is typical for brothel owners to be women. However, he omitted what rarely is
emphasized- that abusive practices often cycle.
It has been known for years that something like 80% of prostitutes were
sexually abused, usually as children.
In somewhat the same timeframe the video “Breaking the
Silence,” about abusive custody here was aired by PBS across the country,
though not nearly widely enough, plus there was too little or innocuous
advertising, and some airings were after 11 PM.
I emailed you the web link. At the same time a 2-part 4 hour TV film ran
starring Donald Sutherland with quite graphic depictions of forced sex
trafficking right here. This weekend in Albany
will be the sixth annual national Battered Mothers’ Custody Conference. Cases include whenever custody is taken from
good mothers and unfair financial settlements.
(Impoverishment promotes dysfunctional behavior, which is part of our
entire financial crisis on multiple fronts.)
Many concerned men are panel speakers.
I have suggested for years to the NYT and other major media that they
attend, but to date coverage has been scant at best by any major media. We sorely need legal accountability, no
matter the topic.
OUR KIDS KANT WAIT SO NEITHER CAN WE!
Susan Titus Glascoff, 4 Who’s Whos, Masters- Health Advocacy
and Math, Exec. Dir. of Advisory Bd. to Nat’l Coalition for Justice, lifetime
assorted advocacy,3 sons, 2 stepsons, 5 grandchildren, (1st married
to high-powered attorney for 23 years)
203-454-3193, 10
Manitou Road, Westport, CT
06880
PS- Meant to get this to you a couple days ago, but I had
informed you earlier re above conference.
I have reported elsewhere that I received a personal letter,
June 24, 2005, from Barack
Obama thanking me for sending the long, but outlined and broadly researched
report depicting increasingly urgent need for legal accountability, most
especially as it pertained to families in distress. He said “It is unfortunate that family courts
can often be places that hinder, rather than help, the broken families who
enter them, and this situation must be addressed….. I can tell you care deeply
about this situation and have many good insights on what can, and should, be
done.” You also received a copy of that
report and in it was a paper from the Founding Fathers, established on Fathers’
Day in 2003 with Joseph Biden as one of the founders. I included their opening statements- “It’s Fathers’ Day. Sit back, Relax, and Change the World- We know
the realities of violence against women and children – as witnesses and
victims, as friends and companions of those who have suffered. That’s why we, men in support of our
families, communities and workplaces, have committed to turn our private
concern into public action.” I also
included a page from the group, Manhood and Violence (Michael Thompson, Harvard
PhD and clinical psychologist specializing in children and families, assists
them) which noted “Men’s near monopoly on the perpetration of violence is the
elephant in the room of this national and local discussion on the epidemic of
violence (not necessarily physical, can be emotional and financial) in our
communities. Generic descriptions of
violence seem to be a careful attempt NOT to see this crucial piece of evidence
and a careful way of avoiding the gendered source of violence.”
I also included several statements from an
Expose- “The Failure of Family Courts to Protect Children from Abuse in Custody
Disputes” by a very high-powered group. It stated that it is a resource book for
lawmakers, judges, attorneys, and mental health professionals. It quoted Gloria Steinem exhorting readers to
“get angry and act vs the courts treating children as commodities.” It quoted Alan Rosenfeld, Esq.- “ Some
analysts have suggested that if we intended to create a system that would
guarantee that the smallest number of sexually abused children would be
protected – that system would look very much like our current family court
system.” Yet you in your Oct. 5, 2008 Key
Magazine article, supposedly focusing on real estate, implied Simon Taub and
his stepdaughter, Chana Taub’s daughter from first marriage, were justified in
suing Chana for sexual libel re Simon’s allegedly sleeping with this
stepdaughter. You knew greater detail, and this just added to the abuse,
as did the comment that the youngest son just decided to go live with the
father. You knew the father simply took
him. You knew, too, that renowned expert witness, Dr. Evan Stark, had his
testimony barred from the jury hearing it by Judge Carolyn Demarest. Dr.
Stark testified that after 7 hours of interview, he concluded Chana exhibited
all the four major parameters of an abuse.
I suspect you
are never going to correct the misrepresentations in the Oct. 5, 2008 Key magazine article resulting from
7 hours of interview with Chana Taub, her sister, me, &Katalin Pota who has
PhD but is on disability & was being unfairly evicted from one of Simon
Taub’s apts. Katalin wrote to me that she wondered if we were
all at same interview since article differed so markedly. I especially conclude you are not going to
issue a correction since you have a new article Jan. 8, “When a Tolerable
Solitude Turns Intolerable, Help Arrives.”
The man, 60, depicted surely is in a sad state at this time and needed the
help he is getting from the Neediest Cases Fund. But you make a point of noting his funds were
depleted from child support and alimony payments (which I suspect ended awhile
ago). He had lost his job not too long
ago because of disability from surgery, but prior to that you noted that “he
was active, going to Jets and Mets games, visiting museums, making annual
pilgrimages to the Six Flags amusement park in NJ and of course, playing
golf.” That all takes a fair amount of
money, esp. playing golf, so he surely had not been impoverished by his
requirement of paying maintenance and child support.
How about a more level playing field re your
reporting on family issues? You never
seem to write about the many more women who often find themselves totally
destitute while still at home with dependent children and who have gotten very
inequitable settlements and/or been subject to physical violence here, unless
it is a sensational case. Keep in mind
that the U.S. census stats note that the average woman’s lifestyle drops 45%
after divorce, and the men’s organizations above note that treating domestic
violence issues (inequitable finance is included in the DV category) as harming
both sexes equally hinders finding solutions.
This all has a very negative impact on kids, boys and girls, and lots of
research shows such kids have far higher rates of growing up to be
dysfunctional adults, so the cycle goes on and on & costs society plenty,
including financially. It is part of our financial crisis.
Comments re a few other articles-
1) 12/31/08
Washington Post- “The Big Bailout Lessons,”
“one of the major lessons of the year is that unregulated and
underregulated capitalism ends up confronting democratic governments with a
subprime choice: either let a major institution go down & watch as chaos
follows or funnel gobs of the public’s money into such institutions to avoid
Lehman-like chaos.” Re ANY big ticket
item, unregulated and underregulated capitalism doesn’t work. It surely doesn’t work with our legal system
and healthcare.
2) 1/2/09
South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com- “Put an End to lawsuit Abuse,” noted that
Florida has been “classified as the #2 judicial hellhole in the country and is
recognized nationally as a place you wouldn’t want to do business…… more than1
in 3 small businesses say lawsuit abuse has raised their costs, made products
more expensive, or forced them to restrict, reduce or change their product and
service offerings….. 1 in 10 have had to consider shutting down their business
due to the threat of a lawsuit……The current legal climate is driving up
healthcare costs and driving doctors out of state.” All I can say is those stats are by no means confined to Florida
and we’d better wake up soon to including establishing legal accountability as
part of our top priority for solving our financial crisis.
3) 12/26/08 Galesburg.com- “Put an End
to Lawsuit Abuse,” notes “Cook County, Illinois
was named the #3 judicial hellhole in the country with Madison and St. Clair’s
Counties being troublesome jurisdictions to watch…. They import lawsuits and
export jobs and opportunities.”
Hmmmmmm………
4) 12/16/08 setexasrecord.com- Report: Southeast Texas
courts improve, but still on ‘Hellhole’ watch list. The American Tort Foundation has moved the Texas
Gulf Coast
and the Rio Grand
Valley to the #1 spot on the
hellhole watch list. The article stated
that some trial courts are indifferent to legislative changes enacted in
2005. It defined ‘Judicial Hellholes’ as
“places where judges systematically apply laws and court procedures in an
inequitable manner, generally against defendants in civil lawsuits…. The report
shows that lawsuit abuse remains ‘alive and well’ in many jackpot
jurisdictions….. Lisa Rickard, pres. of U.S. Chamber Institute fro Legal Reform
said ‘During this global economic downturn, we encourage state leaders to
commit to reforming these trial-lawyer dominated jurisdictions that are driving
away local jobs, revenue and opportunity….
The state of West Virginia
ranks as #1 on the judicial hellhole list.”
HOW, I ask, can any legal area
be allowed to get so bad as to be classified as a judicial hellhole, while
essentially no credible efforts are made to correct it? One prime ex. where many know the court
system remains mired in corruption is in Brooklyn,
NY.
They jailed Judge Garson, but seem loathe to pursue anyone else, even
knowing he could not have done all he did with only the help of the one other
lawyer convicted. Part of the problem is
that rules of evidence need to be made more realistic, prosecutors need more
scrutiny, recusals must be made far easier to demand, and impeachment must
become a viable reality, etc, etc,. Dec. 17, 2008 Judge Carolyn Demarest
boldly declared she shouldn’t have to recuse ( 48 formal pages had been filed
against her) because she wasn’t biased against Chana Taub in pursuit of her
divorce for 3 ½ years. Let’s just take
one partial set of items – part of the case is now before a bankruptcy judge
who noted that Simon Taub is worth at least $41 million and has gotten 3
properties in the wife’s name into foreclosure proceedings and failed to pay child
support and even the $350/wk maintenance ordered for her (hence causing the
bankruptcy). HOW can the judge be doing
her job when she enforces hardly any of her own orders and allows a
multimillionaire to say he can’t afford maintenance or child support and has to
allow the home and other properties to go into foreclosure, yet he has reported
ample rental income to support it all and then some? Don’t keeping a case in court a long time and
allowing bankruptcies and foreclosures cost taxpayers and creditors, including
our ailing banks, tons of money??
5) April 23, 2008 TENNESSEAN.COM, Tennessee Voices- Invest in preventing child
abuse to avoid future human financial costs.
“The human costs of child abuse and neglect are, indeed, terrible. There are also monetary costs. In 2007, the direct and indirect costs for Tennessee
were estimated at greater than $676 million.
If that number seems high, consider that the costs of all the following
are directly or indirectly affected by child maltreatment: hospitalization,
chronic health problems, our mental health and child welfare systems, law
enforcement, the judicial system, special education, juvenile delinquency, lost
productivity and adult criminality…..One study showed that for every dollar
invested in prevention, there was a cost savings of $4 to public agencies later
on…. Former Vanderbilt
University professor Isaac
Prilleltensky wrote: ‘ It is only by massive investment in prevention that we
can reasonably expect less suffering.
Such an investment, while costly at first, will more than pay for itself
in dollars saved for remedial services in special education, welfare, health,
and the criminal justice system. In
human terms, savings simply defy
calculation.’ “ I sent this in April.
6) 1/6/09 The Justice Hour weekly radio
program, hosted by atty., Lisa Macci. I
spoke on the show 2 ½ yrs ago. I
recently updated her re the Taub case, emphasizing what I said she knew- that
this is but one case among thousands of judicial abuse cases across the
country. She wrote back- “My own case
was a classic example of legal abuse by the judge. There are more than thousands of cases of
judicial abuse across the country.” Yes,
indeed, per usual I was downplaying the issue somewhat as I usually do. The number is “millions” and it will be the
undoing of the U.S. if we don’t seriously curtail it and make our courts again
a place where justice doesn’t depend on which judge you get, how much money and
influence you have, gender, color, religion, etc. How can we lead??
7) I
attended a local official (part of nat’l
effort) gathering in Dec. to discuss ideas we want Obama to address. The hostess was a lawyer who had held a
prominent legal gov’t job in Wash.
for 5 years. When I said I wanted to
mention getting legal accountability discussed, she said this was not the
appropriate forum to bring up that topic!
When having each person introduce themselves, she saved me till last
(and she had never met me before), closing the meeting before I got introduced. Maybe that was a good thing because it
emphasized my point which I then made very obvious by handing out papers to
everyone and explaining what had happened.
8) 1/07/09 The National Law Journal-
Cravath’s presiding partner: Time to kill the billable hour. “The billable hour makes no sense, not even
for lawyers, Chesler a prominent litigator writes: If you are successful and
win a case early on, you put yourself out of work. If you get bogged down in a land war in Asia,
you make more money. That is frankly
nuts…..The point I am trying to make is that at the start we should define what
the goals are and what the value of the matter is to the client. We need to create an alignment of interests
between the client and the lawyer.”
Article noted that Aug. 2007 ABA
journal said “The Billable Hour Must Die.”
It also noted that at Cravath a midcareer litigation partner posted his
billable rate at $875 an hour, a $205 increase since 2004.”
Keep in mind, too, that anyone ever receiving a legal bill knows it is
impossible to verify how many minutes were spent on research, on phone calls,
on travel, etc., and with little incentive to finish quickly, such a system is
ripe for abuse.
9) March 16, 2008, NYT Emonomics- a book review of
“Predictably Irrational- The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions,” by Dan
Ariely, a behavioral economist. I think
it ought to be required reading for everyone, including periodic rereads! Ariely’s
simple but creative experiments clearly prove what he maintains, but
hardly any of us want to believe- “we aren’t cool calculators of self-interest
who sometimes go crazy; we’re crazies who are, under special circumstances,
sometimes rational.” It was at least
nice to learn that being reminded of any moral code- the Ten Commandments or
the non-existent “M.I.T. honor system- caused cheating to plummet. But we also need to pay attention to his
simple experiment to see how arousal alters sexual attitudes. He asked young men to answer a questionnaire,
then answer it again while watching internet porn on a laptop wrapped in
Saran. He found that “in that state,
their answers to questions about sexual tastes, violence, and condom use were
far less respectable.” The review
states that “the book is far more revolutionary than its unthreatening manner
lets on. It’s a concise summary of why
today’s social science increasingly treats the markets-know-best model as a
fairy tale.” I maintain that
this further strengthens the plea that human inherent self-interest requires
checks and balances re all serious topics.
Everything is interrelated. Our
Kids Kant Wait, So Neither Can We!
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