Saturday, November 26, 2016

Discouraged

I am discouraged.

The Minnesota Supreme Count denied my motion to change the Lawyers Rules of Professional Conduct to include:
The investigator assigned, if a lawyer, shall not be in active practice in the same area of law that the lawyer under investigation practices in. The investigator assigned, if not a lawyer, shall not be a person who works in a profession which commonly receives referrals from lawyers who practice in the same area of law as the lawyer under investigation. 
As I wrote about before, The Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board recommended that my petition be denied.  They said there was no need for it. Which is laughable given the evidence in my complaint against Nelly Wince. Wince so clearly violated the ethical rules and committed criminal fraud that I do not think it is even theoretically possible to have better evidence against her. Yet it was all ignored. Occasionally, lawyers and judges will tell me that the issues I have with Family Law need to be addressed by the legislature. But when they so blatantly ignore current law, what good would better laws have?

I am discouraged.

Spring divorced me. The custody evaluator ruled that she was not the primary parent. A vocational evaluation determined she could make just as much money as me. The children spend far more time with me than Spring and I pay everything for them - both of whom are now in college. Spring committed perjury and her lawyer Nelly Wince clearly committed criminal fraud and fraud upon the court.

I host all the holidays. I don't discourage the boys from seeing their mother but they have gotten in the habit of limiting their time with her. This Thanksgiving they spent one night out of five at her place.

Yet, Spring managed to take most the assets at the time of the divorce and I have to pay her in excess of $30,000 per year until he day I die. The amount actually grows every two years automatically. I can never retire. I can never remarry as that would allow Spring to seek an increase in alimony and would obligate my new wife to pay alimony to Spring should I lose my job or become disabled.  

I am discouraged.

I have a job that I work at every day. I just got off a two month period where I worked an incredible amount of hours, much of it on the road. I do not dislike my job but the fact that the benefit of it goes almost entirely to reward Spring and her lawyer for criminal actions is not exactly motivating. If I lost my job the likely scenario is that I would go to court to reduce alimony and be told to come back when I have no money, Then when I went back after having transferred my remaining assets to Spring I would be told to come back when I have maximized the debt on my credit cards. Then after I had done that, I would be thrown in jail. You may think that would never happen but that is the way the system works. The responsible and honest are financially raped, repeatedly raped, by the criminals.

I am discouraged.

The threads of hope are slipping through my fingers.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

MoveOn.org Petition to Reform Alimony

Catherine Conlin has created a MoveOn.org petition to reform alimony in California.

Specifically Conlin seeks to:
Remove unlimited jurisdiction by the California Family Law courts over long term Marriages with no children. One spouse should not be eternally responsible for the other once a divorce is final. End family law jurisdiction at 5 years, no matter the length of the marriage.
The petition has been signed by hundreds of people. Many have included comments about injustices in the Family Law Courts.

Sunday, November 6, 2016

Alimony Is Bad For Women And Based On Flawed Logic

Emma Johnson on www.wealthysinglemommy.com says that Alimony is bad for women and based on flawed logic. I could not agree more. Many of her arguments are ones that I have also made. In most cases alimony degrades women because it implicitly treats them as less able than men. 
Suffragists and feminists before us fought bitterly (and joyously, one would hope) so you and I have financial and legal parity with men. We have a way to go, but for the most part in this country women have opportunity to support themselves. With opportunity comes responsibility. You choose to be financially dependent on someone else (like a husband), you take a risk. If that marriage ends and you have little career equity and low earning potential as a result, you must pay the consequences of the downside of that risk.
Take alimony out of the career-planning equation and we force women to take full responsibility for their careers and finances from the beginning of adulthood. This is critical if we are going to close the pay gap, which has little to do with workplace sexism, and more to do with women choosing lower-paying professions and stepping away from careers to devote to family life.