2008-09 Budget
A bigger item is the fiscal 2008-09 budget. The schedule of Public Hearings on the budget is to be set up, so mark your calenders and start training for the arm-wrestling matches.
Bicycle Bridge
$600,000 is up for approval for a Mopac bicycle bridge. This is a start on some real change that can benefit some healthy athletic people as well as everyone who breathes air. But is that really enough? The entire road & street system needs to be opened up to more bicycle traffic, and while they are at it, how about a "motorscooter" consideration for the rest of us? Think of the savings on gas as well as space and pollution! We should have motorscooter concessions leasing them to people at the bus transit centers. And you can park three times as many motor scooters as cars in the same space, so think about the relief of congestion downtown. Congress Ave could be limited to parked scooters! Commuters could easily arrange a lease with something like the bus-pass system and the scooters could have strong enough location detectors in them to be theft-proof. (Yeah yeah yeah, "location detector"="big brother", but just how secret is the average commuter's route? Anyway, it would just assure that the rented scooter is not lost to the leasing system. An alternative could be that the leased scooter is plugged into a prearranged destination....)
(BTW: if anyone picks up on this idea and makes a million bucks, please cut me a check for the creative idea :D, or at least buy me a scooter! )
CARITAS
CARITAS is up for another re-house the homeless grant. That should not be as automatic an approval as some people would like. CARITAS ran a very underhanded campaign to de-fund the Salvation Army last year, mainly becauce the Salvation Army's tradition is not to include political re-education and benefits "entitlement" in their appraoch to helping the homeless. CARITAS does not actually house anyone, and until they began attacking the Salvation Army last year, the Salvation Army was the only agency actually giving women a pallet on the floor if they showed up in emergency after all the bunks were fulled with women enrolled in various help programs. CARITAS staff ran a campaign along with a couple of radical Americorps volunteers to shut down those night services that were the most important to women in crisis. the city's own shelter, the ARCH, did not house women at night, only men. CARITAS knew this, and the churches that run CARITAS also knew this. The Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopaleans, & such could not tolerate the simple life-saving help the Salvation Army was giving women from all walks of life in the middle of the night.
CARITAS exploits & endangers women
CARITAS staff lied about their women's groups, claiming they were for helping the chronically unemployed learn new skills and attitudes from blue-collar and better-trained women, but in fact the groups were for gay-lesbian re-education and for indoctrination against the traditional "patriachal" attitudes of the Salvation Army. Now, I will be as quick as the next independent American woman to criticize the Salvation Army's religious beliefs about women, but they never imposed those beliefs on people outside their church staff, and in the middle of the night a woman trying to escape Austin's street-slave trade needs someplace safer and more accessible than CARITAS.
Predators and CARITAS
While I am on the subject of organizations who exploit and misrepresent statistics in order to get money that does NOT reach the supposed beneficiaries of the grants, something needs to be done about these same corrupt nonprofits placing sexual predators into the connecting points between law enforcement, the courts, and children. Everyone knows about the court advocate who was recently arrested in Austin for sexually assaulting children and videotaping the assaults. Does anyone know CARITAS role in this type of situation? CARITAS is supported by the Catholic Church. I am Catholic, so I know whereof I speak of my own kind, I am not afraid to point out that Bishop Aymond has a negative listing from his previous work in Louisiana, and he is one of the overseers of these so-called faitbh-based "advocacy" agencies. (Here is his listing in the Catholic "Bishop Accountability" website: http://www.bishop-accountability.org/resources/resource-files/databases/DallasMorningNewsBishops.htm)
You can't avoid the way these nonprofits unprofessionally and dishonestly present themselves as "saviors" of children while they harbor and coddle active predators in their midst. I live in a working-class neighborhood and mingle freely with the kind of people these agencies are supposed to be serving (and to be fair, there is still enough good in human nature that some of their staff people do the best they can, in spite of the corruption of the political activists and executives of those agencies)
So-called "Advocates" Make Children Available
Just recently, I was standing a good 20 feet away from two people talking, in a public place, and I could hear the whole gossip fest. A judge took the children away from two parents, according to the loud and totally UNconfidential "advocate" who was talking. . It would take less than fifteen minutes for any predator within earshot to track down the family in question and find those kids. Based on her job as an interpretor and based on finding out the dockets of certain courts, he could find her name in the public record and discover which children are now in that highly dangerous zone of transition from family to foster care. And most likely, the predator would be a gentle-spoken person who could count on the confidence and protection of the so-called "advocacy" system, the one providing FAKE legal aid and FAKE assistance in order to ensure that the criminal underworld thrives while the honest middle and working class people become its victims.
A Zone of Vulnerability
That time & space that follows in the few days after a judge's decision is a zone of emotional confusion and fast-paced bureaucratic case-management. It is one of the primary zones in which the professional pedophile and slave predator rings strike, and that is why there has always been a traditiona of strict confidentiality around family court cases! Look it up in any state in the union and find out what the statistics are for children "lost in the system", when and how they get "lost". And to top it off, the advocate lives in an adults-only building that just happens to be a building of choice, if not last-resort, for sex offendors who either plead out or serve out their time and then face restrictions against living near children, just like the no-child condominiums favored by a certain sector of the upper classes. I saw that advocate openly bragging about a family's case, not even just to people she knows, but out in public places where people 20 feet away can hear, and where some of Troxell's professional drug-addicted panhandlers ply their trade! (Troxell's scam is a column for another day, but just do the math: he, along with CARITAS and the Loaves & Fishes crew, claims everyone who is low-income is "homeless" in order to inflate the actual statistics as a fraud fundraising ploy. Everyone knows it, but everyone plays along, because the churches that run CARITAS also run the hospitals and have their activist members embedded in the schools and social clubs where they can and do terrify potential critics with the threat of consequences to families members.)
Who You Gonna Call?
I was angry enough to try to make a child-endangerment report on that advocate. I did not have my cell phone ready and I only carry plastic, no coins. So I went to a pay phone to use 311 to report the advocate's violation of that family's privacy and the children's safety. Guess what? Those 311 and 211 calls cannot receive calls from pay-phones! This is the very type of call that they are supposed to be handling, in order to take the burden off the 911 system. When I went to the manager to tell him his pay-phone was broken, he said that the calls are simply not allowed by the city and advised me to call 911 and have the 911 operator switch over to the 311, which finally I did. Apparently this is now the routine, because the 911 operator did not seem to mind and shifted me over to a routine APD number. The individual I spoke to there advised me to report the incident through the child-protection system.
So, right there in a nutshell: a system designed to make "soft" reports gets shoved back into the more expensive "hard crisis" system while an advocate paid for by the city via these CARITAS-type grants is openly advertising available children to anyone within earshot of a loud conversation, never mind whether the person she was telling had any right to know.
That money that the city is considering giving CARITAS would be better spent on an investigation of the entire set-up of the so-called "advocacy" system and the presence of a ring of protection that exists around the professional predators inside that system.
Vets Warned Away From CARITAS
And I do have an unconfirmed report from a Gulf veteran who recently won his disability that the VA warned him specifically against allowing CARITAS to assign a payee to his case. In our own casual conversation, in which I was telling him my opinion that he'd be better off to talk to a bank about setting up automatic bill payments than getting a payee, he said "well, the VA told me they won't allow CARITAS, anyway."
City money is wasted on CARITAS. There is too much fraud involved in how they get the money and how they spend it.
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