Bob Edwards Weekend, September 14-15, 2013
HOUR ONE:
Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news.
Andrew Bacevich returns to the program to discuss a book that was intended to be a conventional narrative history of the relationship between the U.S. military and the civilian population since World War II. Instead, he was steered onto a different course by his conviction that our military system is broken and no amount of patriotic sentimentality can disguise it. Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country is Bacevich’s seventh book. For twenty-three years Bacevich served as an officer in the U.S. Army and his son was killed by an IED while serving in Iraq in 2007. Bacevich is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.
Then, the latest installment of our ongoing series This I Believe.
HOUR TWO:
More than 400,000 children are in foster care in the United States. It’s a patchwork system. Each state has different rules, and each city contracts with many different child welfare agencies to place children in foster care. The result is that thousands of foster children live in many different homes during their most formative years, and they’re often unprepared to live on their own once they age out of the system. In the new book, To the End of June, Cris Beam writes about the experiences of several foster parents and the children they try to raise.
Activist and entrepreneur Ben Foss founded Headstrong Nation, a non-profit that helps the dyslexic community. Dyslexia is a brain-based genetic trait that affects over 30 million Americans. His book is The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning.
Visit Bob Edwards Weekend on PRI’s website to find local stations that air the program.
Thank you for your broadcast story today featuring Cris Beam and her perspective from the inside of the foster care system. As a whole, we find this issue goes entirely unreported, and Americans rarely know the facts of what goes on behind the scenes of the child protection industry. While Cris' account did reflect the abuses and trauma to children of the system itself, what is less known and less spoken of are the abuses of this system, social service agencies and family courts to biological parents, the destruction of the family stability and constitutional infractions that occur daily. When wronged parents attempt to speak out about their experiences, most are summarily dismissed as being the ranting of a disgruntled party. Few seem to want to hear about how the system is stacked against them, how the social services agencies and the investigators are allow free reign in the courts. How judges allow all social services agencies and their "expert", PAID witnesses to submit opinionated "testimony" in many cases, but parents are not allowed to speak or provide a "defense". Parents are automatically branded as “guilty” and afforded NONE of the rights against unfair or unjust prosecution given the worst criminal. The rules of law don’t apply to these cases, and parents cannot fight the onslaught of the system.
How the system is fueled by federal funds which profit numerous private service providers: psych services, drug testing, parenting classes, rehab services, visitation and in-home services. However, in some cases parents are subjected to what amounts to compulsory consumerism of these services, based only upon a social worker's perceptions, with no factual evidence provided. They are forced to purchase drug testing, submit to mental health evaluations, which are essentially character assassinations, and parenting classes. Many times these services do not serve to stabilize the family structure, but are also destructive to the individuals and serve to ensure the agency "wins" in maintaining custody of the child, now fueling their per diam funding.
The late Nancy Schaefer, former GA senator, had also uncovered the abuses and corruption in her local agencies. When she spoke out about this, making her findings public and vowing to fight to stop it, she mysteriously ended up dead. There is serious corruption nationally in these agencies, the strange bedfellows of judges, court appointed counsels, and service providers. Fraud is massive in using Medicaid funds for mental health services and forced drugging of foster children, without a parent's knowledge or consent. Over all, this system has cost taxpayers over $83 billion since the inception of Title IV-D in 1998, which lawmakers thought would improve the number of children languishing for years in foster care. Instead of a solution for the problem, this only served to increase the number of children seized, and facilitated massive corruption! We are harming children, destroying families, steamrolling citizen's rights daily throughout this nation, and we hope that more reporting will bring this to light. Thank you for your report. It's a start!