History > 2005 > USA > Society

Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World

NYT

19.12.2005

 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/national/19kids.ready.html

Through His Webcam,

a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World

December 19, 2005
The New York Times
By KURT EICHENWALD

The 13-year-old boy sat in his California home, eyes fixed on a computer screen. He had never run with the popular crowd and long ago had turned to the Internet for the friends he craved. But on this day, Justin Berry's fascination with cyberspace would change his life.

Weeks before, Justin had hooked up a Web camera to his computer, hoping to use it to meet other teenagers online. Instead, he heard only from men who chatted with him by instant message as they watched his image on the Internet. To Justin, they seemed just like friends, ready with compliments and always offering gifts.

Now, on an afternoon in 2000, one member of his audience sent a proposal: he would pay Justin $50 to sit bare-chested in front of his Webcam for three minutes. The man explained that Justin could receive the money instantly and helped him open an account on PayPal.com, an online payment system.

"I figured, I took off my shirt at the pool for nothing," he said recently. "So, I was kind of like, what's the difference?"

Justin removed his T-shirt. The men watching him oozed compliments.

So began the secret life of a teenager who was lured into selling images of his body on the Internet over the course of five years. From the seduction that began that day, this soccer-playing honor roll student was drawn into performing in front of the Webcam - undressing, showering, masturbating and even having sex - for an audience of more than 1,500 people who paid him, over the years, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Justin's dark coming-of-age story is a collateral effect of recent technological advances. Minors, often under the online tutelage of adults, are opening for-pay pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by inexpensive Webcams. And they perform from the privacy of home, while parents are nearby, beyond their children's closed bedroom doors.

The business has created youthful Internet pornography stars - with nicknames like Riotboyy, Miss Honey and Gigglez - whose images are traded online long after their sites have vanished. In this world, adolescents announce schedules of their next masturbation for customers who pay fees for the performance or monthly subscription charges. Eager customers can even buy "private shows," in which teenagers sexually perform while following real-time instructions.

A six-month investigation by The New York Times into this corner of the Internet found that such sites had emerged largely without attracting the attention of law enforcement or youth protection organizations. While experts with these groups said they had witnessed a recent deluge of illicit, self-generated Webcam images, they had not known of the evolution of sites where minors sold images of themselves for money.

"We've been aware of the use of the Webcam and its potential use by exploiters," said Ernest E. Allen, chief executive of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private group. "But this is a variation on a theme that we haven't seen. It's unbelievable."

Minors who run these sites find their anonymity amusing, joking that their customers may be the only adults who know of their activities. It is, in the words of one teenage site operator, the "Webcam Matrix," a reference to the movie in which a computerized world exists without the knowledge of most of humanity.

In this virtual universe, adults hunt for minors on legitimate sites used by Webcam owners who post contact information in hopes of attracting friends. If children respond to messages, adults spend time "grooming" them - with praise, attention and gifts - before seeking to persuade them to film themselves pornographically.

The lure is the prospect of easy money. Many teenagers solicit "donations," request gifts through sites like Amazon.com or negotiate payments, while a smaller number charge monthly fees. But there are other beneficiaries, including businesses, some witting and some unwitting, that provide services to the sites like Web hosting and payment processing.

Not all victims profit, with some children ending up as pornographic commodities inadvertently, even unknowingly. Adolescents have appeared naked on their Webcams as a joke, or as presents for boyfriends or girlfriends, only to have their images posted on for-pay pornography sites. One Web site proclaims that it features 140,000 images of "adolescents in cute panties exposing themselves on their teen Webcams."

Entry into this side of cyberspace is simplicity itself. Webcams cost as little as $20, and the number of them being used has mushroomed to 15 million, according to IDC, an industry consulting group. At the same time, instant messaging programs have become ubiquitous, and high-speed connections, allowing for rapid image transmission, are common.

The scale of Webcam child pornography is unknown, because it is new and extremely secretive. One online portal that advertises for-pay Webcam sites, many of them pornographic, lists at least 585 sites created by teenagers, internal site records show. At one computer bulletin board for adults attracted to adolescents, a review of postings over the course of a week revealed Webcam image postings of at least 98 minors.

The Times inquiry has already resulted in a large-scale criminal investigation. In June, The Times located Justin Berry, then 18. In interviews, Justin revealed the existence of a group of more than 1,500 men who paid for his online images, as well as evidence that other identifiable children as young as 13 were being actively exploited.

In a series of meetings, The Times persuaded Justin to abandon his business and, to protect other children at risk, assisted him in contacting the Justice Department. Arrests and indictments of adults he identified as pornography producers and traffickers began in September. Investigators are also focusing on businesses, including credit card processors that have aided illegal sites. Anyone who has created, distributed, marketed, possessed or paid to view such pornography is open to a criminal charge.

"The fact that we are getting so many potential targets, people who knowingly bought into a child pornographic Web site, could lead to hundreds of other subjects and potentially save hundreds of other kids that we are not aware of yet," said Monique Winkis, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is working the case.

Law enforcement officials also said that, with the cooperation of Justin, they had obtained a rare guide into this secluded online world whose story illuminates the exploitation that takes place there.

"I didn't want these people to hurt any more kids," Justin said recently of his decision to become a federal witness. "I didn't want anyone else to live the life I lived."

A High-Tech Transformation

Not long ago, the distribution of child pornography in America was a smallish trade, relegated to back rooms and corners where even the proprietors of X-rated bookstores refused to loiter.

By the mid-1980's, however, technology had transformed the business, with pedophiles going online to communicate anonymously and post images through rudimentary bulletin board systems. As Internet use boomed in the 1990's, these adults honed their computer skills, finding advanced ways to meet online and swap illegal photos; images once hard to obtain were suddenly available with the click of a mouse.

As the decade drew to a close, according to experts and records of online conversations, these adults began openly fantasizing of the day they would be able to reach out to children directly, through instant messaging and live video, to obtain the pornography they desired.

Their dream was realized with the Web camera, which transformed online pornography the way the automobile changed transportation. At first, the cameras, some priced at more than $100, offered little more than grainy snapshots, "refreshed" a few times per minute. But it was not long before easy-to-use $20 Webcams could transmit high-quality continuous color video across the globe instantly.

By 2000, things had worked out exactly the way the pedophiles hoped. Webcams were the rage among computer-savvy minors, creating a bountiful selection of potential targets.

Among them was Justin Berry. That year, he was a gangly 13-year-old with saucer eyes and brown hair that he often dyed blond. He lived with his mother, stepfather and younger sister in Bakersfield, Calif., a midsize city about 90 miles north of Los Angeles. Already he was so adept at the computer that he had registered his own small Web site development business, which he ran from the desk where he did his schoolwork.

So Justin was fascinated when a friend showed off the free Webcam he had received for joining Earthlink, an Internet service provider. The device was simple and elegant. As Justin remembers it, he quickly signed up, too, eager for his own Webcam.

"I didn't really have a lot of friends," he recalled, "and I thought having a Webcam might help me make some new ones online, maybe even meet some girls my age."

As soon as Justin hooked the camera to his bedroom computer and loaded the software, his picture was automatically posted on spotlife.com, an Internet directory of Webcam users, along with his contact information. Then he waited to hear from other teenagers.

No one Justin's age ever contacted him from that listing. But within minutes he heard from his first online predator. That man was soon followed by another, then another.

Justin remembers his earliest communications with these men as nonthreatening, pleasant encounters. There were some oddities - men who pretended to be teenage girls, only to slip up and reveal the truth later - but Justin enjoyed his online community.

His new friends were generous. One explained how to put together a "wish list" on Amazon.com, where Justin could ask for anything, including computer equipment, toys, music CD's or movies. Anyone who knew his wish-list name - Justin Camboy - could buy him a gift. Amazon delivered the presents without revealing his address to the buyers.

The men also filled an emotional void in Justin's life. His relationship with his father, Knute Berry, was troubled. His parents divorced when he was young; afterward, police records show, there were instances of reported abuse. On one occasion Mr. Berry was arrested and charged with slamming Justin's head into a wall, causing an injury that required seven staples in his scalp. Although Justin testified against him, Mr. Berry said the injury was an accident and was acquitted. He declined to comment in a telephone interview.

The emotional turmoil left Justin longing for paternal affection, family members said. And the adult males he met online offered just that. "They complimented me all the time," Justin said. "They told me I was smart, they told me I was handsome."

In that, experts said, the eighth-grade boy's experience reflected the standard methods used by predatory adults to insinuate themselves into the lives of minors they meet online.

"In these cases, there are problems in their own lives that make them predisposed to" manipulation by adults, Lawrence Likar, a former F.B.I. supervisor, said of children persuaded to pose for pornography. "The predators know that and are able to tap into these problems and offer what appear to be solutions."

Justin's mother, Karen Page, said she sensed nothing out of the ordinary. Her son seemed to be just a boy talented with computers who enjoyed speaking to friends online. The Webcam, as she saw it, was just another device that would improve her son's computer skills, and maybe even help him on his Web site development business.

"Everything I ever heard was that children should be exposed to computers and given every opportunity to learn from them," Ms. Page said in an interview.

She never guessed that one of her son's first lessons after turning on his Webcam was that adults would eagerly pay him just to disrobe a little.

The Instant Audience

It was as if the news shot around the Web. By appearing on camera bare-chested, Justin sent an important message: here was a boy who would do things for money.

Gradually the requests became bolder, the cash offers larger: More than $100 for Justin to pose in his underwear. Even more if the boxers came down. The latest request was always just slightly beyond the last, so that each new step never struck him as considerably different. How could adults be so organized at manipulating young people with Webcams?

Unknown to Justin, they honed their persuasive skills by discussing strategy online, sharing advice on how to induce their young targets to go further at each stage.

Moreover, these adults are often people adept at manipulating teenagers. In its investigation, The Times obtained the names and credit card information for the 1,500 people who paid Justin to perform on camera, and analyzed the backgrounds of 300 of them nationwide. A majority of the sample consisted of doctors and lawyers, businessmen and teachers, many of whom work with children on a daily basis.

Not long ago, adults sexually attracted to children were largely isolated from one another. But the Internet has created a virtual community where they can readily communicate and reinforce their feelings, experts said. Indeed, the messages they send among themselves provide not only self-justification, but also often blame minors with Webcam sites for offering temptation.

"These kids are the ones being manipulative," wrote an adult who called himself Upandc in a posting this year to a bulletin board for adults attracted to children.

Or, as an adult who called himself DLW wrote: "Did a sexual predator MAKE them make a site? No. Did they decide to do it for themselves? Yes."

Tempting as it may be for some in society to hold the adolescent Webcam operators responsible, experts in the field say that is misguided, because it fails to recognize the control that adults exercise over highly impressionable minors.

"The world will want to blame the kids, but the reality is, they are victims here," said Mr. Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

But there is no doubt that the minors cash in on their own exploitation. With Justin, for example, the road to cyberporn stardom was paved with cool new equipment. When his growing legion of fans complained about the quality of his Webcam, he put top-rated cameras and computer gear on his Amazon wish list, and his fans rushed to buy him all of it.

A $35 Asante four-port hub, which allowed for the use of multiple cameras, was bought by someone calling himself Wesley Taylor, Amazon receipts show. For $45, a fan nicknamed tuckertheboy bought a Viking memory upgrade to speed up Justin's broadcast. And then there were cameras - a $60 color Webcam by Hawking Technologies from banjo000; a $60 Intel Deluxe USB camera from boyking12; and a $150 Hewlett-Packard camera from eplayernine.

Justin's desk became a high-tech playhouse. To avoid suspicions, he hid the Webcams behind his desk until nighttime. Whenever his mother asked about his new technology and money, Justin told her they were fruits of his Web site development business. In a way, it was true; with one fan's help, he had by then opened his own pornographic Web site, called justinscam.com.

His mother saw little evidence of a boy in trouble. Justin's grades stayed good - mostly A's and B's, although his school attendance declined as he faked illness to spend time with his Webcam.

As he grew familiar with the online underground, Justin learned he was not alone in the business. Other teenagers were doing the same things, taking advantage of an Internet infrastructure of support that was perfectly suited to illicit business.

As a result, while it helped to have Justin's computer skills, even minors who fumbled with technology could operate successful pornography businesses. Yahoo, America Online and MSN were starting to offer free instant message services that contained embedded ability to transmit video, with no expertise required. The programs were offered online, without parental controls. No telltale credit card numbers or other identifying information was necessary. In minutes, any adolescent could have a video and text system up and running, without anyone knowing, a fact that concerns some law enforcement officials.

There were also credit card processing services that handled payments without requiring tax identification numbers. There were companies that helped stream live video onto the Internet - including one in Indiana that offered the service at no charge if the company president could watch free. And there were sites - portals, in the Web vernacular - that took paid advertising from teenage Webcam addresses and allowed fans to vote for their favorites.

Teenagers, hungry for praise, compete for rankings on the portals as desperately as contestants on TV reality shows, offering special performances in exchange for votes. "Everyone please vote me a 10 on my cam site," a girl nicknamed Thunderrockracin told her subscribers in 2002, "and I will have a live sleep cam!"

In other words, she would let members watch her sleep if they boosted her up the rankings.

Fearing the Fans

Justin began to feel he belonged to something important, a broad community of teenagers with their own businesses. Some he knew by their real names, others by the screen names they used for their sites - Strider, Stoner, Kitty, Calvin, Emily, Seth and so on. But collectively, they were known by a name now commonplace in this Internet subculture:

They call themselves "camwhores."

Justin chatted with the boys online, and sometimes persuaded the girls to masturbate on camera while he did the same. Often, he heard himself compared to Riotboyy, another young-looking teenager whose site had experienced as many as 6,400 hits in a single week.

In conversations with Justin, other minors with for-pay sites admitted to being scared of certain fans. Some adults wrote things like "It wants to possess you." They had special wardrobe requests for the adolescents: in jeans with a belt, without a belt, with a lacy bra, showing legs, showing feet, wearing boxers with an erection, and others.

One 16-year-old who called himself hot boyy 23 finally found the entreaties too much. "Hey guys," he wrote when he shut down his site, "I'm sorry, there are just too many freaks out there for me. I need to live a more normal life, too. I might be back someday and I might not. I'm sorry I had to ruin all the fun."

It was not only the minors operating Webcam sites for pay who faced frightening adults. Earlier this year, a teenage girl in Alabama posed seminude on her Webcam in a sexually charged conversation with someone she thought was another teenage girl. But her new confidant, it turned out, was an adult named Julio Bardales from Napa, Calif., law enforcement officials said. And when the girl stopped complying, she received an e-mail message from Mr. Bardales containing a montage of her images. Across them was a threat in red letters that the images would be revealed unless she showed a frontal nude shot over the Webcam. Mr. Bardales was subsequently arrested. The police said he possessed images of more under-age girls on Webcams, including other montages with the same threat.

Justin says that he did not fully understand the dangers his fans posed, and before he turned 14, he was first lured from the relative safety of his home. A man he met online hosted Justin's Web site from Ann Arbor, Mich., and invited him there to attend a computer camp. Justin's mother allowed him to go, thinking the camp sounded worthwhile.

Another time, the man enticed Justin to Michigan by promising to arrange for him to have sex with a girl. Both times, Justin said, the man molested him. Transcripts of their subsequent conversations online support the accusations, and a video viewed by The Times shows that the man, who appears for a short time in the recording, also taped pornography of Justin.

From then on, Justin's personality took on a harder edge, evident in the numerous instant messages he made available to The Times. He became an aggressive negotiator of prices for his performances. Emboldened by a growing contempt for his audience, he would sometimes leave their questions unanswered for hours, just to prove to himself that they would wait for him.

"These people had no lives," Justin said. "They would never get mad."

Unnerved by menacing messages from a fan of his first site, Justin opened a new one called jfwy.com, an online acronym that loosely translates into "just messing with you." This time, following an idea suggested by one of his fans, he charged subscribers $45 a month. In addition, he could command large individual payments for private shows, sometimes $300 for an hourlong performance.

"What's in the hour?" inquired a subscriber named Gran0Stan in one typical exchange in 2002. "What do you do?"

"I'll do everything, if you know what I mean," Justin replied.

Gran0Stan was eager to watch, and said the price was fine. "When?" he asked.

"Tonight," Justin said. "After my mom goes to sleep."

As his obsession with the business grew, Justin became a ferocious competitor. When another under-age site operator called Strider ranked higher on a popular portal, Justin sent him anonymous e-mail messages, threatening to pass along images from Strider's site to the boy's father. The site disappeared.

"I was vicious," Justin said. "But I guess I really did Strider a favor. Looking back, I wish someone had done that to me."

By then, fans had begun offering Justin cash to meet. Gilo Tunno, a former Intel employee, gave him thousands of dollars to visit him in a Las Vegas hotel, according to financial records and other documents. There, Justin said, Mr. Tunno began a series of molestings. At least one assault was videotaped and the recording e-mailed to Justin, who has since turned it over to the F.B.I.

Mr. Tunno played another critical role in Justin's business, the records show. When he was 15, Justin worried that his mother might discover what he was doing. So he asked Mr. Tunno to sign an apartment lease for him and pay rent. Justin promised to raise money to pay a share. "I'll whore," he explained in a message to Mr. Tunno.

Mr. Tunno agreed, signing a lease for $410 a month for an apartment just down the street from Justin's house. From then on, Justin would tell his mother he was visiting friends, then head to the apartment for his next performance. Mr. Tunno, who remains under investigation in the case, is serving an eight-year federal sentence on an unrelated sexual abuse charge involving a child and could not be reached for comment.

The rental symbolized a problem that Justin had not foreseen: his adult fans would do almost anything to ensure that his performances continued. At its worst, they would stand between him and the people in his offline life whom they saw as a threat to his Webcam appearances.

For example, when a girlfriend of Justin's tried to convince him to shut down his site in December 2002, a customer heaped scorn on her.

"She actually gets mad at you for buying her things with the money you make from the cam?" messaged the customer, a man using the nickname Angelaa. "Just try and remember, Justin, that she may not love you, but most of us in your chat room, your friends, love you very much."

A Life Falls Apart

In early 2003, Justin's offline life began to unravel. A former classmate found pornographic videos on the Internet from Justin's Web site, made copies and handed them out around town, including to students at his school. Justin was taunted and beaten.

Feeling embarrassed and unable to continue at school, Justin begged his mother to allow him to be home-schooled through an online program. Knowing he was having trouble with classmates, but in the dark about the reasons why, she agreed.

Then, in February, came another traumatic event. Justin had begun speaking with his father, hoping to repair their relationship. But that month, Mr. Berry, who had been charged with insurance fraud related to massage clinics he ran, disappeared without a word.

Despairing, Justin turned to his online fans. "My dad left. I guess he doesn't love me," he wrote. "Why did I let him back in my life? Let me die, just let me die."

His father did not disappear for long. Soon, Mr. Berry called his son from Mazatlán, Mexico; Justin begged to join him, and his father agreed.

In Mexico, Justin freely spent his cash, leading his father to ask where the money had come from. Justin said that he confessed the details of his lucrative Webcam business, and that the reunion soon became a collaboration. Justin created a new Web site, calling it mexicofriends, his most ambitious ever. It featured Justin having live sex with prostitutes. During some of Justin's sexual encounters, a traffic tracker on his site showed hundreds watching. It rapidly became a wildly popular Webcam pornography site, making Justin one of the Internet's most sought after under-age pornography stars.

For this site, Justin, then 16, used a pricing model favored by legitimate businesses. For standard subscribers, the cost was $35, billed monthly. But discounts were available for three-month, six-month and annual memberships. Justin used the cash to support a growing cocaine and marijuana habit.

Money from the business, Justin said, was shared with his father, an accusation supported by transcripts of their later instant message conversations. In exchange, Justin told prosecutors and The Times, his father helped procure prostitutes. One video obtained by the F.B.I. shows Mr. Berry sitting with Justin as the camera is turned on, then making the bed before a prostitute arrives to engage in intercourse with his teenage son. Asked about Justin's accusations, Mr. Berry said, "Obviously, I am not going to comment on anything."

In the fall of 2003, Justin's life took a new turn when a subscriber named Greg Mitchel, a 36-year-old fast food restaurant manager from Dublin, Va., struck up an online friendship with the boy and soon asked to visit him. Seeing a chance to generate cash, Justin agreed.

Mr. Mitchel arrived that October, and while in Mexico, molested Justin for what would be the first of many times, according to transcripts of their conversations and other evidence. Mr. Mitchel, who is in jail awaiting trial on six child pornography charges stemming from this case, could not be reached for comment.

Over the following year, Justin tried repeatedly to break free of this life. He roamed the United States. He contemplated suicide. For a time he sought solace in a return to his boyhood Christianity. At one point he dismantled his site, loading it instead with Biblical teachings - and taking delight in knowing the surprise his subscribers would experience when they logged on to watch him have sex.

But his drug craving, and the need for money to satisfy it, was always there. Soon, Mr. Mitchel beckoned, urging Justin to return to pornography and offering to be his business partner. With Mr. Mitchel, records and interviews show, Justin created a new Web site, justinsfriends.com, featuring performances by him and other boys he helped recruit. But as videos featuring other minors appeared on his site, Justin felt torn, knowing that these adolescents were on the path that had hurt him so badly.

Justin was now 18, a legal adult. He had crossed the line from under-age victim to adult perpetrator.

A Look Behind the Secrecy

In June, Justin began communicating online with someone who had never messaged him before. The conversations involved many questions, and Justin feared his new contact might be an F.B.I. agent. Still, when a meeting was suggested, Justin agreed. He says part of him hoped he would be arrested, putting an end to the life he was leading.

They met in Los Angeles, and Justin learned that the man was this reporter, who wanted to discuss the world of Webcam pornography with him. After some hesitation, Justin agreed. At one point, asked what he wanted to accomplish in his life, Justin pondered for a moment and replied that he wanted to make his mother and grandmother proud of him.

The next day, Justin began showing the inner workings of his online world. Using a laptop computer, he signed on to the Internet and was quickly bombarded with messages from men urging him to turn on his Webcam and strip.

One man described, without prompting, what he remembered seeing of Justin's genitals during a show. Another asked Justin to recount the furthest distance he had ever ejaculated. Still another offered an unsolicited description of the sexual acts he would perform on Justin if they met.

"This guy is really a pervert," Justin said. "He kind of scares me."

As the sexual pleadings continued, Justin's hands trembled. His pale face dampened with perspiration. For a moment he tried to seem tough, but the protective facade did not last. He turned off the computer without a final word to his online audience.

In the days that followed, Justin agreed in discussions with this reporter to abandon the drugs and his pornography business. He cut himself off from his illicit life. He destroyed his cellphone, stopped using his online screen name and fled to a part of the country where no one would find him.

As he sobered up, Justin disclosed more of what he knew about the Webcam world; within a week, he revealed the names and locations of children who were being actively molested or exploited by adults with Webcam sites. After confirming his revelations, The Times urged him to give his information to prosecutors, and he agreed.

Justin contacted Steven M. Ryan, a former federal prosecutor and partner with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in Washington. Mr. Ryan had learned of Justin's story during an interview with The Times about a related legal question, and offered to represent him.

On July 14, Mr. Ryan contacted the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Justice Department, informing prosecutors that he had a client with evidence that could implicate potentially hundreds of people. By then, Mr. Ryan had learned that some of Justin's old associates, disturbed by his disappearance, were hunting for him and had begun removing records from the Internet. Mr. Ryan informed prosecutors of the dangers to Justin and the potential destruction of evidence. Two weeks passed with little response.

Finally, in late July, Justin met in Washington with the F.B.I. and prosecutors. He identified children who he believed were in the hands of adult predators. He listed the marketers, credit card processors and others who supported Webcam child pornography. He also described the voluminous documentary evidence he had retained on his hard drives: financial information, conversation transcripts with his members, and other records. But that evidence would not be turned over, Mr. Ryan said, until Justin received immunity.

The meeting ended, followed by weeks of silence. Word came back that prosecutors were wrestling with Justin's dual role as a victim and a perpetrator. Justin told associates that he was willing to plead guilty if the government would save the children he had identified; Mr. Ryan dissuaded him.

By September, almost 50 days had passed since the first contact with the government, with no visible progress. Frustrated, Mr. Ryan informed prosecutors that he would have to go elsewhere, and contacted the California attorney general.

That proved unnecessary. Prodded by the F.B.I. and others in the Justice Department, on Sept. 7, prosecutors informed Mr. Ryan that his client would be granted immunity. A little more than four weeks after his 19th birthday, Justin became a federal witness.

A Final Online Confrontation

Five days later, on the third floor of a lakeside house in Dublin, Va., Greg Mitchel - Justin's 38-year-old business partner on his pornography Web site - rested on his bed as he chatted online with others in his illicit business.

Ever since Justin's disappearance weeks before, things had been tense for Mr. Mitchel. Some in the business already suspected that Justin might be talking to law enforcement. One associate had already declared to Mr. Mitchel that, if Justin was revealing their secrets, he would kill the boy.

But this night, Sept. 12, the news on Mr. Mitchel's computer screen was particularly disquieting. An associate in Tennessee sent word that the F.B.I. had just raided a Los Angeles computer server used by an affiliated Webcam site. Then, to Mr. Mitchel's surprise, Justin himself appeared online under a new screen name and sent a greeting.

Mr. Mitchel pleaded with Justin to come out of hiding, inviting the teenager on an all-expense-paid trip to Las Vegas with him and a 15-year-old boy also involved in Webcam pornography. But Justin demurred.

"You act like you're in witness protection," Mr. Mitchel typed. "Are you?"

"Haha," Justin replied. Did Mr. Mitchel think he would be on the Internet if he was a federal witness? he asked. Justin changed the subject, later asking the whereabouts of others who lived with Mr. Mitchel, including two adolescents; Mr. Mitchel replied that everyone was home that night.

In a location in the Southwest, Justin glanced from his computer screen to a speakerphone. On the line was a team of F.B.I. agents who at that moment were pulling several cars into Mr. Mitchel's driveway, preparing to arrest him.

"The kids are in the house!" Justin shouted into the phone, answering a question posed by one of the agents.

As agents approached the house, Justin knew he had little time left. He decided to confront the man who had hurt him for so long.

"Do you even remember how many times you stuck your hand down my pants?" he typed.

Mr. Mitchel responded that many bad things had happened, but he wanted to regain Justin's trust.

"You molested me," Justin replied. "Don't apologize for what you can't admit."

There was no response. "Peekaboo?" Justin typed.

On the screen, a message appeared that Mr. Mitchel had signed off. The arrest was over.

Justin thrust his hands into the air. "Yes!" he shouted.

In the weeks since the first arrest, F.B.I. agents and prosecutors have focused on numerous other potential defendants. For example, Tim Richards, identified by Justin as a marketer and principal of justinsfriends.com, was arrested in Nashville last month and arraigned on child pornography charges. According to law enforcement officials, Mr. Richards was stopped in a moving van in his driveway, accompanied by a young teenage boy featured by Mr. Richards on his own Webcam site. Mr. Richards has pleaded not guilty.

Hundreds of thousands of computer files, including e-mail containing a vast array of illegal images sent among adults, have been seized from around the country. Information about Justin's members has been downloaded by the F.B.I. from Neova.net, the company that processed the credit cards; Neova and its owner, Aaron Brown, are targets of the investigation, according to court records and government officials. And Justin has begun assisting agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who hope to use his evidence to bring new charges against an imprisoned child rapist.

Justin himself has found a measure of control over his life. He revealed the details of his secret life to his family, telling them of all the times in the past that he had lied to them. He has sought counseling, kept off drugs, resumed his connection with his church and plans to attend college beginning in January.

In recent weeks, Justin returned to his mother's home in California, fearing that - once his story was public - he might not be able to do so easily. On their final day together, Justin's mother drove him to the airport. Hugging him as they said goodbye, she said that the son she once knew had finally returned.

Then, as tears welled in her eyes, Justin's mother told him that she and his grandmother were proud of him.

Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World, NYT, 19.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/national/19kids.ready.html

Far and Away

In Exurbs,

Life Framed by Hours Spent in the Car

December 18, 2005
The New York Times
By RICK LYMAN

FRISCO, Tex. - When Max Bledsoe was growing up on a farm here a quarter-century ago, this was a tiny railroad town of 2,000 souls, far removed from the bustle of cosmopolitan Dallas, 30 miles to the south across the flat North Texas plains.

Now, as a health teacher and softball coach at Frisco High School, Mr. Bledsoe works for a school district with more employees than the town once had residents. It serves an exploding exurb of 82,000, where the rush of new roads and shops has almost, but not quite, caught up to the booming population.

"Used to be, a drive into Dallas was a 30- to 40-minute event, something you could do on a whim," Mr. Bledsoe said. "But now, it takes 20 minutes just to get out of town."

Frisco is an exurb caught in an adolescent age of gawkiness, where every major artery is under construction, or soon will be, and a drive across town can be a maddening crawl between orange cones and roaring bulldozers.

America is growing at its fastest in places like this, at the margins of some of its biggest cities, in the domain of the automobile and the master-plan subdivision, far from the urban centers that spawned them.

They begin as embryonic subdivisions of a few hundred homes at the far edge of beyond, surrounded by scrub. Then, they grow - first gradually, but soon with explosive force - attracting stores, creating jobs and struggling to keep pace with the need for more schools, more roads, more everything.

And eventually, when no more land is available and home prices have skyrocketed, the whole cycle starts again, another 15 minutes down the turnpike.

But in the meantime, life here is framed by hours spent in the car.

It is a defining force, a frustrating, physical manifestation of the community's stage of development, shaping how people structure their days, engage in civic activities, interact with their families and inhabit their neighborhoods.

Ask residents why they moved here, and they tend to give the same answers: more house for the money, better schools, a lifestyle relentlessly focused on the family.

Ask them what the trade-off is, and most often they mention the traffic.

Chris Gray, 34, moved to Frisco with her husband eight years ago, eager for a bigger house in an affordable, family-oriented community. Ms. Gray quit her job as a financial consultant for Electronic Data Systems in Plano, the previous exurban boomtown just to Frisco's south, and decided to become a stay-at-home mother for her two daughters. But her husband, who works near downtown Dallas, has paid the price.

"I can't count on him being home before 7 o'clock," she said. "Even if he leaves the office at 5:30, he's not here until 7. This morning, he left at 5:30 and it took him 35 minutes. But if it's raining outside, he can count on a two-hour drive."

Ms. Gray has been able to volunteer for her neighborhood association and local PTA, and to become a cheerleading coach at school. But her husband's uncertain schedule keeps him from volunteering in community activities.

"I love Frisco to death," she said, "but it's having growing pains."

And no wonder.

Between 1990 and 2000, the Dallas North Tollway was extended to these parts, and Frisco's population grew nearly 450 percent, to 33,714. It has been growing about 20 percent a year ever since.

And still, less than half of the 71-square-mile city is developed, leading urban planners to predict that if current growth continues, the population will reach 200,000 to 250,000 in 2020.

A decade ago, there was one elementary school here. Today, there are 18, and four more are due to open next fall. A second high school opened last year, and two more are due in 2006. A seventh middle school will open in 2007. And three times as many schools will be needed by 2020.

The inevitable result, longtime residents fear, will be a breakdown in the small-town atmosphere.

"For a long time, the homecoming parade was a big deal here," Mr. Bledsoe said. "But now, we have two high schools. And before we're finished, there will be seven or eight. So things are going to change. It's inevitable."

Already, the North Texas Tollway Authority is at work on another extension, this one through the center of Frisco to the town's northern edge. Plans call for taking the road north, where developers are carving up the land around Prosper, the next community in the path of exurban growth.

Christine Obenberger was living in Menomonee Falls, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee, when her husband said he wanted to move on with his career in high-tech security systems, to greater opportunities someplace else.

Almost immediately, he got a job offer with a sizable raise in Phoenix. "So I jumped on the Internet and was trying to research the area," Ms. Obenberger said, "when suddenly, this box popped up asking me to take a survey on the best place for us to live. It took me about 20 minutes and gave me a list of 20 potential cities. To my surprise, three-fourths of them were in Texas."

Austin she rejected as being too liberal. Houston seemed too hot. So she started looking at the Dallas area, going for the best combination of highly rated schools and lower-than-average house prices. "And I kept coming back to Frisco, which I'd never heard of before," she said.

On July 1, she, her husband and their two children moved into their new house in the Lone Star Ranch development on Frisco's west side. "I got twice the house for the same price, half the property taxes and better schools," she said. "And politically, I feel a lot more at home here."

In 2004, Republican strategists concentrated much of their efforts on counties they classified as exurban, and President Bush received some of his largest vote margins there.

Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's senior adviser, described an exurb as being "like a new suburb" that had sprung up "past the old, established suburbs." And Kenneth B. Mehlman, the president's campaign manager, attributed much of the party's success to its showing in such places.

In more recent elections, like the Virginia governor's race in November, Democrats have fared better in the exurbs. But Frisco seems secure territory for Republicans.

Collin County, where most of Frisco is located (portions bleed into Denton County), went for Mr. Bush over Senator John Kerry in 2004 by 71 percent to 28 percent, a far different result from the vote in Dallas County, where Mr. Bush drew 50 percent to Mr. Kerry's 49 percent.

Mayor Mike Simpson said it was not uncommon for residents to ask him, even in the town's nonpartisan local elections, whether he was a steadfast Republican.

"I think you'd have to say that this is a pretty conservative area," Mayor Simpson said, "and that people here feel pretty strongly about most of the social conservative issues."

A generation ago, the suburban phenomenon was latchkey children, fending for themselves after school in houses left empty by two working parents.

But one of the forces driving people into the exurbs is the ability, with cheaper housing - in Frisco, the median home price is $228,827, city officials say - to cut back to one income and allow a parent to stay home and get more deeply involved in school and family activities.

Technology has accelerated this trend, allowing some people to work from home and try for the best of both worlds.

That is what Ms. Gray does. Since her youngest daughter began attending preschool, she has returned to her old job part time, working three days a week from home. Ms. Obenberger works from home, too, as a marketing consultant.

And Richard E. Kinnunen, a stay-at-home father, sells insurance from an office in his house and spends large chunks of every day volunteering at school.

"It's my wife who does the commuting," Mr. Kinnunen said, giving him time to be president of the Council of PTA's for Frisco schools.

The result is that the modern exurb has more daytime residents than the suburbs did a generation ago, urban experts say. More people frequent a different mix of shops, restaurants and recreational facilities. And that has created more traffic throughout the day, the morning rush hours giving way to gridlock caused by shoppers, school drop-offs and lunch throngs.

As a resident since 1993, Mr. Kinnunen qualifies as an old-timer in Frisco. And although most newer residents say they have found it easy to make friends, older residents note a subtle change in the pattern of life as subdivisions spread and people spend more time in the car.

"We don't really see our neighbors so much anymore," Mr. Kinnunen said. "We all drive into our back alleys and into our garage, and that's that."

The added commuting time has made it difficult to find volunteers for things like school committees and coaching soccer.

"We have now a generation of people who would rather say, I'll give you some money instead of volunteering," Mr. Kinnunen said. "It's harder to get the year-round commitment, the joining and the being part of something. People are too jealous of their time, because they have to be."

Jay Crutcher, a lawyer who commutes to downtown Dallas from Frisco, said any trip of under an hour constituted a good day.

"We moved here, mainly, for the schools, which are great," he said. "And we're people who want to be as close as we can to the fields and the cows and the coyote."

Still, Mr. Crutcher yearns for the tollway extension to be completed, so that the first 20 minutes of his commute will not be on local roads choked with school traffic.

At a town hall meeting at Benton A. Staley Middle School one evening last month, Mayor Simpson presided over a program extolling the city's achievements and plans.

The minor league baseball park, home to the Frisco RoughRiders, part of the Texas Rangers organization, had been a roaring success, he said, as had the new home for the DFW Tornados, part of the North American Hockey League. And in mid-November, a new soccer complex, soon to be home to Dallas's professional soccer team, was the site of the M.L.S. Cup, the national championship of professional soccer.

A recreational center for Frisco residents, including 21,000 feet of workout space, was scheduled to open in late 2006. And construction proceeded apace on the huge new city hall and its adjacent library, the centerpiece of a new downtown area rising to the west of the old one.

But by far the loudest applause came during the city engineer's presentation as she outlined exactly when new roads would open to traffic over the next few years.

"If you're like me," joked Jeffrey Witt, the administrator overseeing the creation of a comprehensive plan for the town, "at least you want to be stuck in traffic behind a car with a lot of bumper stickers, so you've got something to read and at least you're entertained."

In Exurbs, Life Framed by Hours Spent in the Car, NYT, 18.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/national/18FRISCO.html



 

Unprepared States        NYT        December 10, 2005

The Next Retirement Time Bomb

NYT        11.12.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/business/yourmoney/11retire.html

The Next Retirement Time Bomb

December 11, 2005
By MILT FREUDENHEIM
and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

SINCE 1983, the city of Duluth, Minn., has been promising free lifetime health care to all of its retired workers, their spouses and their children up to age 26. No one really knew how much it would cost. Three years ago, the city decided to find out.

It took an actuary about three months to identify all the past and current city workers who qualified for the benefits. She tallied their data by age, sex, previous insurance claims and other factors. Then she estimated how much it would cost to provide free lifetime care to such a group.

The total came to about $178 million, or more than double the city's operating budget. And the bill was growing.

"Then we knew we were looking down the barrel of a pretty high-caliber weapon," said Gary Meier, Duluth's human resources manager, who attended the meeting where the actuary presented her findings.

Mayor Herb Bergson was more direct. "We can't pay for it," he said in a recent interview. "The city isn't going to function because it's just going to be in the health care business."

Duluth's doleful discovery is about to be repeated across the country. Thousands of government bodies, including states, cities, towns, school districts and water authorities, are in for the same kind of shock in the next year or so. For years, governments have been promising generous medical benefits to millions of schoolteachers, firefighters and other employees when they retire, yet experts say that virtually none of these governments have kept track of the mounting price tag. The usual practice is to budget for health care a year at a time, and to leave the rest for the future.

Off the government balance sheets - out of sight and out of mind - those obligations have been ballooning as health care costs have spiraled and as the baby-boom generation has approached retirement. And now the accounting rulemaker for the public sector, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, says it is time for every government to do what Duluth has done: to come to grips with the total value of its promises, and to report it to their taxpayers and bondholders.

The board has issued a new accounting rule that will take effect in less than two years. It has not yet drawn much attention outside specialists' circles, but it threatens to propel radical cutbacks for government retirees and to open the way for powerful economic and social repercussions. Some experts are warning of tax increases, or of an eventual decline in the quality of public services. States, cities and agencies that do not move quickly enough may see their credit ratings fall. In the worst instances, a city might even be forced into bankruptcy if it could not deliver on its promises to retirees.

"It's not going to be pretty, and it's not the fault of the workers," said Mayor Bergson, himself a former police officer from Duluth's sister city of Superior, Wis. "The people here who've retired did earn their benefits."

The new accounting rule is to be phased in over three years, with all 50 states and hundreds of large cities and counties required to comply first. Those governments are beginning to do the necessary research to determine the current costs and the future obligations of their longstanding promises to help pay for retirees' health care. Local health plans vary widely and have to be analyzed one by one. No one is sure what the total will be, only that it will be big.

Stephen T. McElhaney, an actuary and principal at Mercer Human Resources, a benefits consulting firm that advises states and local governments, estimated that the national total could be $1 trillion. "This is a huge liability," said Jan Lazar, an independent benefits consultant in Lansing, Mich. "If anybody understands it, they'll freak out."

Last spring, the state of Alaska was the scene of a showdown over retirement benefits that those involved said was a precursor of fights to come. Conservative lawmakers who supported scaling back traditional retiree health care and pension benefits squared off against union lobbyists, advocates for the elderly and the schools superintendent of Juneau, the state capital, who defended the current benefits.

After saying that Alaska's future combined obligations for pensions and retiree health care were underfunded by $5.7 billion, Gov. Frank H. Murkowski called a special session of the Legislature and pushed through changes in pension and retirement health care benefits for new state employees. (The state Constitution forbids changing the benefits of current employees.)

Instead of having comprehensive, subsidized medical coverage, new public workers will have a high-deductible plan and health savings accounts. The changes cleared the State Senate and passed by a one-vote margin in the House.

Even the White House weighed in on the Alaska problem. Ruben Barrales, President Bush's director of intergovernmental affairs, lobbied wavering Republican legislators, arguing in favor of replacing pensions and traditional retiree health benefits with private savings accounts for new employees. Mr. Barrales noted that the president was seeking similar changes in Social Security, including a plan for private accounts.

The union that represents state employees in Alaska said the narrower benefits would make it harder to recruit qualified teachers and government workers. "They keep chiseling away" at school employees' pay and benefits, said Julia Black, a single mother and union activist who earns $11 an hour as an aide in classes for disabled children in Juneau.

Actuaries say that about 5.5 million retired public employees have health benefits of some kind - and accountants joke that there are not enough actuaries in the country to do all the calculations necessary to estimate how much all these retirees have been promised.

Though it may seem strange after a decade of double-digit health cost inflation, hardly any public agencies have been tracking their programs' total costs, which must be paid out over many years. The promises seemed reasonable when they were initially made, officials say.

In Duluth, Mayor Bergson said the city actually offered free retiree health care as a cost-cutting measure back in 1983. At the time, Duluth was trying to get rid of another ballooning obligation to city workers: the value of unused sick leave and vacation days. Public workers then were in the habit of saving up this time over the course of their careers and cashing it in for a big payout upon retirement. Compared with the big obligations the city had to book for that unused time, substituting free retiree health care seemed cheap. "Basically, they traded one problem for another," Mayor Bergson said.

WITH some exceptions, most states and cities have set aside no money to pay for retiree medical benefits. Instead, they use the pay-as-you-go system - paying for former employees out of current revenue. Agencies did not have to estimate the total size of their commitment to retiree health care, so few did so.

Under the new accounting rule, local governments will still not have to set aside any money for those promises. But they will be required to lay out a theoretical framework for the funding of retiree health plans over the next 30 years, and to disclose what they are doing about it. If they fail to put money behind their promises to retirees, they may feel the unforgiving discipline of the financial markets. Their credit ratings may go down, making it harder and more expensive to sell bonds or otherwise borrow money.

Parry Young, a public finance director at Standard & Poor's, the credit rating agency, said his analysts look at total liabilities, including pension and now other "post-employment" obligations. Many governments, he added, have already been grappling with big deficits in their employee pension funds.

A few agencies are wrestling with the daunting task of estimating their total retiree health obligations and coming up with a way to slice it into a 30-year funding plan. They are finding that under the new method, the benefit costs for a particular year can be anywhere from 2 to 20 times the pay-as-you-go costs they have been showing on their books.

Maryland, for example, now spends about $311 million annually on retiree health premiums. But when that state calculated the value of the retirement benefits it has promised to current employees, the total was $20.4 billion. And the yearly cost will jump to $1.9 billion under the new rule, according to an analysis for the state by actuaries at Aon Consulting, which advises companies on benefits.

That is because Maryland would not be recording just its insurance premiums as the year's expense, but instead would report the value of the coverage its employees have earned in that year as well as a portion of the $20.4 billion they amassed in the past. After 30 years, the entire $20.4 billion should be accounted for.

Michigan says it has made unfunded promises that are now valued at $17 billion for teachers, part of a possible $30 billion total for all public agency retirees. Other places that have done the math include the state of Alabama; the city of Arlington, Tex.; and the Los Angeles Unified School District. New York City has not yet completed an actuarial valuation of its many retiree benefit plans. But in its most recent financial statements, the city said it expected that the new rule would "result in significant additional expenses and liabilities being recorded" in the future.

The numbers can vary wildly by locality, depending on how rich its benefits are, what assumptions its actuary uses about future demographics and investment earnings, and that great unknown: the cost of health care 30 years in the future.

"Fifteen years ago, who would have projected 10 years of double-digit increases in health care costs?" said Frederick H. Nesbitt, executive director of the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, an advocacy group in Washington. Mr. Nesbitt pointed out that when the accounting rulemakers began requiring a similar change in financial reporting for companies in the 1990's, it was followed by a sharp decline in the retiree medical benefits provided by corporate America.

Today, only one in 20 companies still offers retiree benefits, according to Don Rueckert Jr., an Aon actuary. The rate for large companies is less than one in three, down from more than 40 percent before the private-sector accounting change, according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting. General Motors and Ford are among the big companies that still offer retiree health benefits. But G.M. recently persuaded the United Automobile Workers union to accept certain reductions, and Ford is seeking similar cuts.

"We expect the same thing in the public sector, unless we help employers do the right thing," said John Abraham, deputy research director for the American Federation of Teachers.

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board, known by the acronym GASB (pronounced GAZ-bee), is a nonprofit organization based in Norwalk, Conn., and a sister to the Financial Accounting Standards Board that writes accounting rules for the private sector. Karl Johnson, the project manager for the retiree-benefits rule, said GASB began hearing from public employees' unions as soon as it issued a first draft of its new standard. The unions said that if governments were forced to disclose the cost of their plans, they would probably cut or drop them, just as companies have done.

Mr. Johnson said the accounting board had no interest in trying to reduce anyone's benefits, and no power to dictate local policy even if it wanted to. "Accounting is just trying to hold up a good mirror to what's happening," he said. "These are very expensive benefits."

Under the new rule - outlined in the board's Statement No. 45 in June 2004, and known widely as GASB 45 - large public governments and school boards with large health care obligations to retirees will have to start reporting their overall benefits cost in 2007 - either on Jan. 1 of that year or, for most big governments, on the start of the fiscal year beginning June 1, 2007. Smaller governments will start using the new method in the two years after that.

The change comes at a rough time for state and local governments. Spending on Medicaid and education has been spiraling, and Congress continues to cut federal taxes and shift burdens of governing away from Washington. In some areas, including parts of Michigan, governments are also suffering from the financial difficulties of important local industries. Max B. Sawicky, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group in Washington, called the new requirement "another straw on the camel's back" for state and local governments already straining under their budget burdens.

Mr. Johnson said the accounting board had tried to issue the retiree health care rule 10 years ago, when the economic picture was rosier. It did succeed then in issuing an accounting standard for government pension plans, but before it could turn to the related issue of retiree health care, other urgent accounting issues crowded onto its agenda. The board finally cleared its decks and voted to address retiree benefits in 1999. Coming up with the new methodology took five years.

Now that it is here, "the general sense in the marketplace is that GASB 45 is going to lead to a watershed in public-sector health benefits," said Dallas L. Salisbury, president of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan research center in Washington.

Indeed, the handful of states and cities that have already calculated their obligations to retirees have concluded they must also rein in the costs. Michigan, for example, with its possible $30 billion in largely unfunded health care promises, is already considering legislation that would shift "a considerable amount of the cost for health insurance to the retiree," said Charles Agerstrand, a retirement consultant for the Michigan Education Association, a teachers union. The legislation would require teachers retiring after 20 years to pay 40 percent of their insurance premiums, as well as co-payments and deductibles, he said.

The pressure is greatest in places like Detroit, Flint and Lansing, where school systems offered especially rich benefits during the heyday of the auto plants, aiming to keep teachers from going to work in them. Away from those cities, retiree costs may be easier to manage. In the city of Cadillac, 100 miles north of Grand Rapids, government officials said they felt no urgent need to cut benefits because they promised very little to begin with. Instead, Cadillac has started putting money aside to take care of future retirement benefits for its 85 employees, said Dale M. Walker, the city finance director.

Ohio is one of a few states to set aside significant amounts. Its public employee retirement system has been building a health care trust fund for years, so it has money today to cover at least part of its promises. With active workers contributing 4 percent of their salary, the trust fund has $12 billion. Investment income from the fund pays most current retiree health costs, said Scott Streator, health care director of the Ohio Public Employee Retirement System. "It doesn't mean we can just rest," he said. "It is our belief that almost every state across the country is underfunded." He said his system plans to begin increasing the employee contributions next year.

In Duluth, Mayor Bergson grew quiet for a moment at the thought of a robust trust fund. "There was not a nickel set aside" in Duluth, he said. "The reason was, if you set money aside, you'd do less 'pretty projects.' Less bricks and mortar. Fewer streets. Fewer parks. So no one set the money aside. "If the city had set $1 million aside every year for those 22 years" since the promise was made, he added, "we'd be in really good shape right now."

Mayor Bergson said his city intends to start setting aside money for the first time in 2006, but he is also trying to rein in the growth of new obligations. He raised to 20 from 3 the number of years that an employee must work for the city in order to qualify for retirement benefits.

He also imposed a hiring freeze and pledged not to lift it until Duluth could hire employees without promising them free lifetime health care. As the city has lost police officers, firefighters, an operator of its huge aerial lift bridge and other workers, the remaining employees have racked up more than $2 million in overtime. But Mayor Bergson says that this is still cheaper than dealing with free retirement health care once the new accounting rule takes effect.

Most recently, he reached out for what may prove a political third rail: he took issue with the idea that once a public employee has retired, his benefits can never be reduced. This idea, as applied to pensions, is rooted in the constitutions of about 20 states, and unions argue that it also protects retiree health care.

Active employees in Duluth have had to start paying more for their health care under the city plan, Mayor Bergson said. If active workers must make concessions, he said, retired workers should make concessions, too. Otherwise, in relative terms, they are pulling ahead of the active work force.

"That's not a popular thing to say," Mayor Bergson said. "I'm getting kicked hard by retirees. I'm getting beat up by active employees. The people who are kicking me are the ones I'm trying to protect."

ATTEMPTS to balance the competing interests of retirees, active workers and taxpayers are building tension. Ross Eisenbrey, a former Clinton administration official who is now at the Economic Policy Institute, said that "when taxpayers wake up to these obligations, their first inclination is often to escape them or reduce them."

The problem is that people have counted on those benefits, and many have accepted lower salaries in exchange for better retirement benefits, said Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame. If they are close to retirement, said William R. Pryor, a firefighters' union official who is an elected board member of the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association, it may well be too late for them to make up for the loss with their own savings.

The clock is ticking. In Duluth, a city official approached the actuary who made the city's estimate in 2002 and asked her to refine and update her numbers because economic conditions had changed and the new accounting rule had been announced. This time the obligations worked out to $280 million, a 57 percent increase in less than three years.

    The Next Retirement Time Bomb, NYT, 11.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/business/yourmoney/11retire.html

For a G.M. Family,

the American Dream Vanishes

November 19, 2005
The New York Times
By DANNY HAKIM

FLINT, Mich. - Four generations of the Roy family relied on General Motors for their prosperity.

Over more than seven decades, the company's wages bought the Roys homes, cars and once-unimaginable comforts, while G.M.'s enviable medical and pension benefits have kept them secure in their retirements.

But the G.M. that was once an unassailable symbol of the nation's industrial might is a shadow of its former self, and the post-World War II promise of blue-collar factory work being a secure path to the American dream has faded with it.

After a long slide, it now looks like the end of an era. "General Motors, when I got in there, it was like I'd died and went to heaven," said Jerry Roy, 49 - who started at G.M. in 1977 and now works on an assembly line at a plant operated by Delphi, the bankrupt former G.M. parts unit that was spun off in 1999.

When Mr. Roy was hired at G.M., nearly three decades ago, his salary more than doubled from his job at a local supermarket. He traded in his five-year-old Buick for a new Chevy and since then he has done well enough to buy a pleasant house on a lake near Flint.

But now he faces the prospect of either losing his job or accepting a sharp pay cut. And for those coming after him, "it's just sad that it's ending, that it looks like this," he said. In his hometown, he added, "all these places that used to be factories are now just parking lots."

Those factories supported the Roy family for generations.

Jerry's great-grandfather, John Westley Roy, came to Michigan from Missouri in 1931, in the depths of the Depression. He built a home five blocks north of a plant operated by General Motors' AC Delco division and worked there for a decade before he was injured and retired to a farm.

Mr. Roy's grandfather, Edward, worked at the Delco plant during the war, when it was converted into a machine-gun plant: he would tell a story about a day one of the guns came off a mount and began shooting holes in the wall of a cafeteria.

Mr. Roy's father, Gerald, started at G.M.'s Fisher Body unit in 1951, was laid off after a year and a half, and then got a job in 1954 at AC Delco. Gerald's sister, uncle and future wife, Delores, worked at the plant.

The elder Mr. Roy remembers the 1950's and '60's as a golden era, when everything seemed possible.

"There were three shifts - they worked around the clock," he said of the AC Delco plant, adding, "you'd go in there and you couldn't even hardly walk."

Buoyed by such prosperity, the auto industry was the pioneer in advancing what became the American model for the social contract between workers and their employees - from the $5 a day Henry Ford offered workers in 1914 to the all-inclusive health care and pension benefits that became a mainstay of the vast expansion of the middle class in the second half of the 20th century.

In many ways, it was not the government but Detroit and other major industries, at the prodding of their unions, that created the American-style social safety net, and helped foster the shared prosperity that is now fracturing.

"The days when blue-collar work could be passed on down the family line, those days are over," said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. "Where you did have automobile plants it was always looked at as an elite job. It was hard work, but good, steady work, with wonderful benefits and good solid pay, and you were in the upper middle class."

Now, with G.M. and other domestic automakers and suppliers fighting to survive brutal global competition, Detroit is planning to cut even more manufacturing jobs. At the same time, the industry is moving to rewrite or even tear up its labor contracts in a bid to turn itself around by drastically reducing both wages and benefits. Today, Mr. Roy and Gerald, 71, who once helped him get his job, are both preparing to make sacrifices.

Robert S. Miller, the turnaround specialist who became chairman and chief executive of Delphi in July, said in an interview in October that Delphi and the United Auto Workers would have to grapple with how much to take from the retirees pockets and how much from workers.

"This is a tradeoff," he said. "I can't satisfy what everyone would like to have."

[But Delphi is pressing for such large cuts from both constituencies that one top U.A.W. leader, Richard Shoemaker, recently called the company's proposals a "roadmap for confrontation."] Not only is the company seeking to cut two-thirds of its 34,000 hourly workers in the United States, it wants to cut wages from as much as $30 an hour to as little as $10.

Worries about a strike at Delphi have also been among the many issues weighing on G.M. itself. [Talk of bankruptcy has become so persistent around G.M., despite the significant cash and other resources it still has at its disposal, that Rick Wagoner, the company's chief executive, went out of his way in a letter this week to state that there was "no plan, strategy or intention for G.M. to file."]

Delphi is also seeking major cuts in the health care and pension benefits of retirees, though under the terms of the spin-off of Delphi, G.M. would have to assume much of those costs, setting up a further quandary because simply dumping troubles on G.M., its largest customer, is not necessarily palatable to Delphi or the union.

Delphi plans as well to do more of what it has been doing since its spin-off, by continuing to shift thousands of jobs overseas. An internal memo obtained earlier this month by The Detroit News listed the Flint plant where Jerry Roy works among factories targeted for closure. Delphi has called the memo incomplete and preliminary.

Delphi puts the choices facing Detroit and its workers in starkest relief. G.M., at least so far, has sought a more compromising approach, in large part because automakers face slightly less-onerous competitive dynamics than their suppliers.

Earlier this month, U.A.W. members reluctantly agreed to allow the company to shave $15 billion, or nearly 20 percent, from its retiree health care liability. The elder Mr. Roy and other retirees will now be required to pay monthly premiums, deductibles and co-payments for medical services for the first time, with costs of as much as $752 a year.

For his part, Gerald Roy is more worried for his son Jerry than himself.

"What worries me the most, or bothers me the most, is him working for 28 years for G.M. and he might lose his retirement," he said.

But the Roy's are the lucky ones. Gerald and his wife, Delores, another G.M. retiree, are healthy and not on medication, and their son is single and does not have any children.

They are both aware that the good life that auto work has afforded their family for four generations, and for hundreds of thousands of other families in Michigan and elsewhere across the country, is ending.

Indeed, others face more difficult times ahead.

"We're going to have to make a choice between what bill to pay, whether to go to the doctor," said Larry Mathews, who works at the same Delphi plant as Mr. Roy and is also the editor of The Sparkler, a paper for plant workers. If the pay cuts go through, Mr. Mathews said he would no longer be able to afford his son's college tuition.

"I know I'm going to have to call my son at Central Michigan and tell him to come home," he said. "I bet those executives don't have to make those calls."

Like Gerald Roy, Mr. Mathews's father retired from G.M. at a time when the bond between the company and its workers was still strong. Mr. Mathews's father died from an asbestos-related illness stemming from his plant work. Even so, Mr. Mathews said his father, who became ill in his late seventies, refused to sue.

"He said, 'This place paid for everything I got today; I'm not going to sue them now,' " Mr. Mathews recalled.

But now, Mr. Mathews makes clear that he has no desire for his own son to continue the family tradition.

"Given what we've lost here in the past decade, I really didn't want to see him come to work at G.M. or Delphi," he said. "The security just isn't there."

When the web of labor contracts was woven during the postwar American auto boom, industry executives wanted, above all, to keep the union at bay and profit rolling in. With young workers and no Toyotas and Hondas to worry about, there was little short-term downside to the industry's concessions.

"The work forces were young, the pension costs were low, the exposure for health care wasn't really there and they didn't promise a lot to begin with," said Gerald Meyers, a professor at the University of Michigan and the former chief executive of American Motors. Each contract, he said, "added a little more and a little more and a little more."

"The thinking in top management," he said, speaking from personal experience, "is that they've kicked this ball in front of us, and keep kicking it. And when it comes due, we're not going to have to pay it."

"It's like the national debt," he added. "We'll spend it now and let the kids worry about it. Well, here we are in 2005, and the kids are now the management. They're paying for their fathers' sins."

G.M. workers should not expect the dire approach that Delphi has taken, at least on wages, because assembly work has always been better paying, including for competitors like Toyota and Honda in their American plants.

G.M.'s problem, at least in terms of its costs, is the enormous price of health care benefits for hundreds of thousands of retirees. G.M. is the largest private provider of health care, covering more than a million Americans.

"If I look at our priority list on the things we need to do to get cost competitive, wage rates are nowhere near the top for us," Mr. Wagoner, the G.M. chairman and chief executive, said in a recent interview.

Not that anyone has much chance of getting a job at these companies anymore. Wages are less important because the industry is so much more efficient than it used to be and has already cut so many jobs.

G.M. plans to cut its blue-collar work force even further, though, to 86,000 Americans nationwide by the end of 2008, about the same number of people it once employed in Flint alone in the 1970's. At its peak, G.M. employed more than 600,000 Americans.

"Frankly in our business, the progress in improving productivity has been dramatic," Mr. Wagoner said. "Over a 10-year period, we have gone from a ballpark of 40-plus hours a vehicle in assembly to 20-plus hours a vehicle."

Benefits are another matter. G.M. pays about $1,500 per car assembled in the United States for health care, more than it spends on steel.

Even with the coming cuts for retirees, the elder Mr. Roy is not concerned; he's actually more worried about paying heating bills for the large house he built two years ago, abutting woods just outside Flint.

"It costs a lot to heat this place," he said, sitting on a swivel chair in his sun room, before taking a visitor on a tour of his house, including his own woodcarvings displayed in his basement.

"We really made out," he said. "I bought a little cabin out on the lake and made a chalet on it, turned around and made enough money to buy this house."

But his son Jerry, knowing that his job may disappear and that his pay is likely to shrink no matter where he ends up, faces much greater uncertainty.

"What can you do?" Jerry asked. "People survive somehow, regardless of what happens. I mean, it's sad, I could cry all night, but I'll figure out a way to get by - somehow."

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting from Detroit for this article.

    For a G.M. Family, the American Dream Vanishes, NYT, 19.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/19/business/businessspecial2/19generations.html?hp&ex=1132462800&en=cbda8d1c25ceee66&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Confusion Is Rife

About Drug Plan as Sign-Up Nears

November 13, 2005
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 - Enrollment in the new Medicare drug benefit begins in three days, but even with President Bush hailing the plan on Saturday as "the greatest advance in health care for seniors" in 40 years, large numbers of older Americans appear to be overwhelmed and confused by the choices they will have to make.

"I have a Ph.D., and it's too complicated to suit me," said William Q. Beard, 73, a retired chemist in Wichita, Kan., who takes eight prescription drugs, including several heart medicines. "I wonder how the vast majority of beneficiaries will handle this. I fervently wish that members of Congress had to deal with the same health care program we do."

Mr. Beard was interviewed at First United Methodist Church in Wichita, where he and 100 other members of an adult Sunday school class recently received a two-hour explanation of the drug benefit from a state insurance counselor.

Confusion was a dominant theme at education and counseling sessions held over the last two weeks in Wichita and in Glen Burnie, Md.; Fairfax, Va.; Urbana, Ohio; and Santa Rosa, Calif.

"The whole thing is hopelessly complicated," said Pauline H. Olney, 74, a retired nurse who attended a seminar at a hotel in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco.

The drug benefit, estimated to cost $724 billion over 10 years, is the biggest expansion of Medicare since its creation in 1965 and is often described as Mr. Bush's biggest achievement in domestic policy.

Bush administration officials and other backers of the plan say the new program can cut drug costs in half for a typical beneficiary, to $1,120 a year, with much greater savings for low-income patients. In his radio address on Saturday, Mr. Bush said, "If you or someone you love depends on Medicare, I urge you to learn about the new choices you have so you can make a decision and enroll."

Beneficiaries around the country are flocking to Medicare workshops, where experts present them with complicated descriptions of drug formularies, "tiered co-payments," "creditable coverage" and "true out-of-pocket costs," and caution about penalties for late enrollment.

In most states, beneficiaries have a choice of more than three dozen prescription drug plans. Premiums, deductibles, co-payments and covered drugs vary widely. Many retirees also have other options: getting drug coverage through former employers or through Medicare-managed care plans.

In Kansas, Medicare beneficiaries have a choice of 40 prescription drug plans charging premiums from $9.48 a month to $67.88 a month.

Gene D. Peterson, 71, who attended the session at First United Methodist, said: "The government asks us to sign up for a plan, but we have to figure out which drugs are covered by which of the 40 plans. For the average person, that's almost impossible. It's much too complicated."

Mr. Peterson is far from alone. In a survey issued this week by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, only 35 percent of people 65 and older said they understood the new drug benefit. Those who said they understood it were more likely to have a favorable impression of it.

Asked about beneficiaries' confusion, Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, said: "Health care is complicated. We acknowledge that. Lots of things in life are complicated: filling out a tax return, registering your car, getting cable television. It is going to take time for seniors to become comfortable with the drug benefit."

Paulette Dibbern, a retired State Farm insurance agent in Wichita, said the government was not emphasizing an important fact about the new benefit: "You must go out and shop for a drug plan and buy this coverage from an insurance company."

In principle, Mrs. Dibbern said, drug coverage for older Americans is a good idea. But in practice, she said, the new program is immensely frustrating. "Federal officials seem to go on the philosophy, 'Why keep it simple when you can gum up the works?' " she said.

Mendell F. Butler, 76, a longtime member of First United Methodist, said he wished people could pay $20 a month for a simple Medicare drug plan, "without searching out all these different companies you've got to buy it from."

Mr. Butler said he was deeply concerned about people who did not have the capacity to understand the decisions they had to make. "With the new program," he said, "you go home at night, and your mind is totally boggled, so confused that you think, 'Golly, is it worth it?' "

Mr. Leavitt said beneficiaries could get help on a toll-free telephone number, 1-800-633-4227, and on a Web site, www.medicare.gov, which includes a "plan finder" to sort through the options.

Beneficiaries understand that Parts A and B of Medicare cover hospital care and doctors' services, and many want to know why Medicare does not have its own drug plan. The new prescription drug plans, though heavily subsidized by Medicare, are marketed and administered by private insurers like Aetna, Humana, PacifiCare and UnitedHealth Group.

The Bush administration and Republicans in Congress chose this approach for two reasons. They firmly believe that competition among private plans will hold down costs, and they do not want the government to specify which drugs will be covered.

Brian D. Caswell, a former president of the Kansas Pharmacists Association, said he spent two to three hours a day explaining the Medicare drug benefit to customers at his store in rural Baxter Springs. He encouraged them to take a look at the new program.

But Mr. Caswell said: "The program is so poorly designed and is creating so much confusion that it's having a negative effect on most beneficiaries. It's making people cynical about the whole process - the new program, the government's help."

Robert W. Nyquist, a pharmacist in Lindsborg, Kan., said customers had told him: "This is just beyond me. I can't decipher which drug plan is cheapest."

Suzi Lenker, who coordinates insurance counseling for the Kansas Department on Aging, said that "some people were in tears" at a recent session she held for 140 Medicare beneficiaries in McPherson. "They did not like this newfangled change," Ms. Lenker said.

Bush administration officials said Medicare drug plans were offering more benefits at lower cost than had been expected.

But that does not mean that a person's local pharmacy will be in every plan.

"In some rural areas," Ms. Lenker reported, "beneficiaries say: 'There are 40 Medicare drug plans to choose from, but my pharmacy takes only one or two plans. How does that give me choice?' "

Mr. Nyquist said he was doing business with only one prescription drug plan, Community Care Rx, offered by MemberHealth in cooperation with the National Community Pharmacists Association. If Medicare beneficiaries choose another plan, he said, they cannot get their drugs at his store, the only one in Lindsborg.

"We are not trying to deny access to people," Mr. Nyquist said. "We chose to do business with Community Care Rx because, in my opinion, it is the plan most friendly to senior citizens."

Food shoppers tend to like having a large variety of products and brands, but many Medicare beneficiaries are perplexed by the prospect of an insurance supermarket.

"In a grocery store, we know the products," said Irwin Samet, 74, of Fairfax, Va. "With prescription drug plans, we don't know the products. We are guessing."

After a two-hour class at the Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia, Mr. Samet used a Yiddish word to describe his state of mind. "Farmisht," he said. "Mixed up. All of us here are mixed up."

In Urbana last week, more than 150 people showed up for a Medicare seminar held by the Ohio Insurance Department.

Joseph Rizzutti, 68, said he had found the seminar helpful, but would have to do "a lot of research and homework" to choose plans for himself and his 88-year-old mother, who has Alzheimer's disease and lives in a nursing home.

The Medicare handbook, sent to all beneficiaries, lists 43 drug plans available in Ohio.

Edith L. Kohn, 81, who worked as a cashier in a grocery store in Urbana for two decades, said she had been studying her Medicare options for a month.

"I feel like I'm just about ready to make a decision, signing up for the plan offered by AARP," Mrs. Kohn said. "But the government has made this hard, and it should not be that way. I don't understand why they have to make things so darn complicated."

Even after attending the seminar, Raymond L. Middlesworth, 70, a retired truck driver from Urbana, said he was baffled.

"I've tried reading the Medicare book about the drug plan," Mr. Middlesworth said, "but I couldn't make sense of it. This is the biggest mess that Medicare has ever put us through."

Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting from Santa Rosa, Calif., for this article, and Albert Salvato from Urbana, Ohio.

    Confusion Is Rife About Drug Plan as Sign-Up Nears, NYT, 13.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/national/13drug.html?hp&ex=1131944400&en=1d70bede8102a302&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A Baby's Death,

Grim as the Life of His Mother

November 12, 2005
The New York Times
By ALAN FEUER

This article was reported by Alan Feuer, Ann Farmer and Leslie Kaufman and written by Mr. Feuer.

Her parents were once homeless. A family member says that her mother and her only sister died of AIDS. Her childhood passed in a dismal drift: housing projects, group homes where others stole her clothes. She lived in drug-infested city shelters; she worked in a fast-food place, a relative said, where bosses found her "slow." She cut school. She cleaned bathrooms. And even in her 20's wet the bed.

Then Tracina Vaughn became a mother. There were many men, and, records show, at least one who hit her and hurt her boy. One man tossed the baby clear across a bedroom, officials said. Later, the child was burned in scalding water and left untreated for at least two days. Emergency medical workers found his little body wet with pus. Counseling followed, and five years' probation; then her children - there was now a second baby - were taken from her.

The case file thickened as they were shuffled from one place to another - with relatives, with strangers. But in March, against her family's wishes, the boys were returned.

Then, last Sunday, the younger boy, Dahquay Gillians, died. Ms. Vaughn, 25, had left him unattended in the bathtub, in an unlighted bathroom, with his 3-year-old half-brother, prosecutors say. She found him floating face-down in the water. For 40 minutes, the authorities said, Ms. Vaughn, who had by then added drug use to her list of problems, had been listening to CD's.

"Tracy should never have had children," said a family member who asked not to be named because of the painfully personal nature of her relative's case. "Tracy didn't like children. She didn't like no one. Tracy wasn't affectionate with nobody."

When asked if Ms. Vaughn loved her children, the family member did not say yes; she did not say no. She simply wondered if Ms. Vaughn knew what love was.

The death of Dahquay, 16 months old, has set off several investigations, and much agonizing within Ms. Vaughn's extended family. Prosecutors, who reject the notion that Ms. Vaughn's own troubled life can excuse her indifference to her son's, are waiting for a medical examiner's report as they contemplate filing manslaughter charges.

The city's child welfare agency, the Administration for Children's Services, which over several years had been intimately involved with Ms. Vaughn and her children - taking them away, ordering her to get help, approving the children's return, being informed of recent alarming developments - is conducting its own full inquiry into how it handled the case.

And so a complete accounting - and an apportioning of blame - is months away.

But the emerging details of Ms. Vaughn's life, pieced together through interviews, court documents and foster care records, suggest that, in a world where parenthood is not a privilege that the state can take away like a driver's license, the young Brooklyn woman represented a dizzyingly complex set of challenges for the government officials sworn to protect the welfare of children.

"Drugs, domestic violence and poverty, each one of these things is a burden to bear," said Sue Jacobs, executive director of the Center for Family Representation, which assists families with children in foster care. "Put together, these are unbelievably difficult challenges."

Ms. Vaughn has pleaded not guilty to the charges brought against her so far - reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child - and is in jail awaiting trial. Her lawyer declined to make her available for an interview, but he has said that she was a well-intentioned mother.

Her story begins in the housing projects of Manhattan's Lower East Side, where, on April 30, 1980, she was born to Larry Vaughn and Cordelia Whichard, who had finally obtained an apartment there. Mr. Vaughn was a drinker who might have also suffered from schizophrenia, a family member said.

Ms. Whichard died of AIDS in 1985 or 1986 and infected Tracy's only full sister, Latisha, with the virus at birth. Latisha died of AIDS five years ago - she was 18, a relative said. There were three half-siblings - Quinten, Janine and Jerome - whose own father died of AIDS as well.

A portrait of Ms. Vaughn in childhood: mute, scared, tearful, moody and emotionally detached.

"She didn't talk, she cried all the time," the family member said. "She wet herself. She didn't want anyone to touch her."

Shortly before their mother's death, Ms. Vaughn and her sister went to live with their maternal grandmother, Lizzie Whichard, in Brooklyn. Cordelia Whichard, dying, went as well, but in the end returned to the projects and her troubled husband to live out her final days.

The girls remained in Brooklyn, where Ms. Vaughn, with her blank stares, was placed in a special education class in school. In that class, "She'd just stand and cry and mucus would run down her face," the anonymous family member said. "I got her out of special ed."

When Ms. Vaughn turned 17, Ms. Whichard sent her to a foster care organization on Lawrence Street in Brooklyn. She was placed in a group home; it was awful. Her housemates stole her clothes.

Then the following year she simply disappeared, the family member said, and when, after several months, she turned up just as suddenly, her family helped her move into a shelter.

"I worried so much," the family member said. "Whenever I heard that a black girl was murdered, I thought it was her."

High school was a time of sex and catfights, apathy and suspensions. She held a job at White Castle, where they made her clean the bathrooms. "She never made money, because she had to pay for the food she ate," the family member said. "The register would come up short and they'd blame her. She was too slow."

There were also times when she came back from school still damp with urine. "I'd say, 'Tracy, get out of those clothes,' " the family member said. "She'd be wet and you could smell the urine."

But, the family member added, "The boys liked her."

Boys - then men - had always been a fixture in Ms. Vaughn's life.

Tyrone Gillians, Dahquay's father, entered her life sometime around 2003. He was a troublemaker, even according to his own brother, Reginald Gillians, who described him in a bitter light.

"He lived in the wrong way," Mr. Gillians said. "He lived with the wrong people."

Ms. Vaughn filed her first report about Mr. Gillians with the police on Dec. 9, 2003, claiming he assaulted her. Two months later, in February, there were three more reports: for verbal abuse, for coming to the house to pick up clothes when he was no longer living there and once more for assault.

During the alleged December attack, he not only hit Ms. Vaughn but threw her older son, Tramel, across the room, said Sharman Stein, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services. The boy landed on a bed and burst into tears, and Ms. Vaughn was terrified. She asked for and received an order of protection against Mr. Gillians, Ms. Stein said.

Then, on May 26, 2004, Tramel had diarrhea, and waste dribbled down his buttocks and legs. Mr. Gillians, despite the order of protection, had been allowed to baby-sit for Tramel, and tried to clean him under scalding water, the authorities said. The boy suffered burns over much of his body, which Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Gillians failed to treat for two days. Mr. Gillians was sent to prison on a four-year sentence for that. Ms. Vaughn was sentenced to probation. Tramel was taken from the home and briefly placed by Little Flower Children's Services Inc., a foster care agency under contract with the city, in the custody of Ms. Vaughn's cousin on Long Island, Latisha Bond.

A person who has seen Ms. Vaughn's case file with the child welfare agency said she had pleaded with the authorities after Tramel was taken from her, saying she would do anything to get him back.

Indeed, child welfare officials said that Little Flower oversaw Ms. Vaughn as she attended parenting classes and counseling sessions on how to cope with domestic violence.

Little Flower was one of 10 foster care contract agencies that were put under review last year by the city because their performance over the previous four years was subpar. It ultimately was able to convince the city that it was capable of making all the needed improvements to its services.

Even as Tramel was taken from the home, though, Ms. Vaughn gave birth to Dahquay. Her new son was immediately taken into the custody of the state and placed with his half-brother in foster care - first with Ms. Bond, then with another family.

Last March, the boys were returned to Ms. Vaughn. The city, with input from Little Flower, agreed to the boys' return. So did lawyers for the boys. And, finally, so did a Family Court judge.

Little Flower officials would not comment on the case.

Ms. Bond, the cousin who had cared for the boys when they were first taken into foster care, has objected that Tramel and Dahquay were returned to their mother. And she plans to ask a Brooklyn judge on Monday to name her as Tramel's guardian. She has also railed against the city for failing to protect the boys.

"We had several contacts with A.C.S.," she said. "They knew what was happening and they did nothing. A.C.S. neglected the children."

The spokeswoman for the city's child welfare agency said it has no record of any complaints made by family members about Ms. Vaughn.

At the time the boys were returned, Ms. Vaughn was living in a basement apartment on Herkimer Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The police have described the apartment as something of a dangerous mess. But a visit to the apartment this week found clothes for the two boys hung neatly from a standing rack. Their photos graced the walls. The refrigerator had food in it; the dishes were clean. Still, the place was strewn with clothes and the smell of urine was intense.

It was there, prosecutors say, that Ms. Vaughn put her two boys in the bath on Sunday night and wandered off to another room to play CD's. Her current companion, Gary Young, poked his head in after 15 or 20 minutes and, though he did not see Dahquay, assumed the boy had tucked himself behind the shower curtain and then went out for diapers and some beer.

Twenty minutes later, give or take a few, Ms. Vaughn checked on the boys herself.

"His mother sees the 1-year-old face-down in the water," a prosecutor assigned to the case, Wilfredo Cotto, said on Tuesday at Ms. Vaughn's arraignment. "A large amount of water was extracted from the child."

"This is definitely among the hardest kinds of cases," Gail Nayowith, executive director of the Citizen's Committee for Children, said of Ms. Vaughn and her now-dead child. "You are trying to separate whether the mother can parent, whether her own needs get in the way. This family does exemplify all of the kinds of burdens and problems that families in trouble face."

And for now, in this hard case, Tramel is back in foster care. And Ms. Vaughn is in a cell on Rikers Island.

    A Baby's Death, Grim as the Life of His Mother, NYT, 12.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/12/nyregion/12girl.html

U.S. Poverty Rate Was Up Last Year

August 31, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID LEONHARDT

WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 - Even as the economy grew, incomes stagnated last year and the poverty rate rose, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. It was the first time on record that household incomes failed to increase for five straight years.

The portion of Americans without health insurance remained roughly steady at 16 percent, the bureau said. A smaller percentage of people were covered by their employers, but two big government programs, Medicaid and military insurance, grew.

The census's annual report card on the nation's economic well-being showed that a four-year-old expansion had still not done much to benefit many households. Median pretax income, $44,389, was at its lowest point since 1997, after inflation.

Though the reasons are not wholly clear, economists say technology and global trade appear to be holding down pay for many workers. The rising cost of health care benefits has also eaten into pay increases.

After the report's release, Bush administration officials said that the job market had continued to improve since the end of 2004 and that they hoped incomes were now rising and poverty was falling. The poverty rate "is the last, lonely trailing indicator of the business cycle," said Elizabeth Anderson, chief of staff in the economics and statistics administration of the Commerce Department.

The census numbers also do not reflect the tax cuts passed in President Bush's first term, which have lifted the take-home pay of most families.

But the biggest tax cuts went to high-income families already getting raises, Democrats said Tuesday. The report, they added, showed that the cuts had failed to stimulate the economy as the White House had promised.

"The growth in the economy is not going to families," said Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island. "It's in stark contrast to what happened during the Clinton administration."

The main theme of the census report seemed to be the lingering weakness in compensation and benefits, even as the ranks of the unemployed have dwindled. Fewer people are getting health insurance from their employers or from policies of family members, while raises have generally trailed inflation.

Last year, households kept income from falling by working more hours than they did in 2003, the data showed. The median pay of full-time male workers declined more than 2 percent in 2004, to $40,800; for women, the median dropped 1 percent, to $31,200. When some people switch to full-time work from part-time, they can keep household incomes from dropping even when the pay of individual workers is declining.

"It looks like the gains from the recovery haven't really filtered down," said Phillip L. Swagel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group in Washington. "The gains have gone to owners of capital and not to workers."

There has always been a lag between the end of a recession and the resumption of raises, Mr. Swagel added, but the length of this lag has been confounding.

In addition, the poverty rate rose last year for working-age people, those ages 18 to 64. The portion of people age 65 and older in poverty fell, while child poverty was essentially flat.

Over all, the poverty rate increased to 12.7 percent, from 12.5 percent in 2003. Poverty levels have changed only modestly in the last three decades, rising in the 1980's and falling in the 1990's, after having dropped sharply in the 1960's. They reached a low of 11.1 percent in 1973, from more than 22 percent in 1960.

In the same three decades that poverty has remained fairly steady, median incomes have grown significantly, lifting living standards for most families. After adjusting for inflation, the income of the median household, the one making more than half of all others and less than half of the rest, earns almost one-third more now than it did in the late 1960's.

But income inequality has also risen in that time and was near all-time highs last year, the bureau reported. The census numbers do not include gains from stock holdings, which would further increase inequality.

In New York, the poverty rate rose last year to 20.3 percent, from 19 percent, making it the only city of more than one million people with a significant change. The reason for the increase was not obvious.

Among populous counties, the Bronx had the fourth-highest poverty rate in the nation, trailing three counties on the Texas-Mexico border.

Many economists say the government's statistics undercount poverty in New York and other major cities because the numbers are not adjusted for cost of living. A family of two parents and two children is considered poor if it makes less than $19,157 a year, regardless of whether it lives in a city where $500,000 buys a small apartment or a mansion.

Households in New Hampshire made more last year ($57,400 at the median) than in any other state, while those in West Virginia made the least ($32,600). Fairfax County in Virginia ($88,100) and Somerset County in New Jersey ($84,900) were the counties with the highest earnings, the census said.

The decline in employer-provided health benefits came after four years of rapidly rising health costs. Some of the increases stemmed from inefficiencies in the health care system; others were a result of new treatments that improved health and prolonged life but were often expensive.

Either way, the bill for health care has risen, and more companies are deciding not to pay it for some workers. The percentage of people getting health insurance from an employer fell to 59.8 percent last year, from 63.6 percent in 2000. The percentage receiving it from the government rose to 27.2 percent, from 24.7 percent.

The trend is likely to continue unless the job market becomes as tight as it was in the late 1990's and companies decide they must offer health insurance to retain workers, said Paul Fronstin, director of the health research program at the Employee Benefit Research Group, a nonpartisan organization in Washington.

The numbers released Tuesday showed a slight decline in median income, but the bureau called the drop, $93, statistically insignificant. Incomes were also roughly flat among whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans.

The Midwest, which has been hurt by the weak manufacturing sector, was the only region where the median income fell and poverty rose. Elsewhere, they were unchanged.

Since 1967, incomes have failed to rise for four straight years on two other occasions: starting in the late 1970's and in the early 1990's. The Census Bureau does not report household income for years before 1967, but other data show that incomes were generally rising in the 40's, 50's and 60's.

    U.S. Poverty Rate Was Up Last Year, NYT, August 31, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/national/31census.html

U.S. Poverty Rate Rises to 12.7 Percent

August 30, 2005
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.

The percentage of people without health insurance did not change.

Overall, there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1 million people from 2003.

Asians were the only ethnic group to show a decline in poverty -- from 11.8 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year. The poverty rate among the elderly declined as well, from 10.2 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year.

The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold -- 11.3 percent of the population. Since then, the poverty rate has increased steadily from 11.7 percent in 2001, when the economy slipped into recession, to 12.5 percent in 2003.

The number of people without health insurance grew from 45 million to 45.8 million. At the same time, the number of people with health insurance coverage grew by 2 million last year.

Charles Nelson, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau, said the percentage of uninsured remained steady because of an ''increase in government coverage, notably Medicaid and the state children's health insurance program, that offset a decline in employment-based coverage.''

The median household income, meanwhile, stood at $44,389, unchanged from 2003. Among racial and ethnic groups blacks had the lowest median income and Asians the highest. Median income refers to the point at which half of households earn more and half earn less.

Regionally, income declined only in the Midwest, down 2.8 percent to $44,657. The South was the poorest region and the Northeast and the West had the highest median incomes.

The increase in poverty came despite strong economic growth, which helped create 2.2 million jobs last year.

''I guess what happened last year was kind of similar to what happened in the early 1990s where you had a recession that was officially over and then you had several years after that of rising poverty,'' Nelson said. ''... These numbers do reflect changes between 2003 and 2004. They don't reflect any improvements in the economy in 2005.''

Tim Smeeding, an economics professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, says the nation has experienced a shift from earnings income to capital income and capital gains, which aren't reflected in the Census Bureau's latest numbers.

''Most of that growth in the economy over the last couple of years has gone to higher income people and has taken the form of capital income -- interest, rents, dividends,'' Smeeding said.

The poverty threshold differs by the size and makeup of a household. For instance, a family of four with two children was considered living in poverty if income was $19,157 or less. For a family of two with no children, it was $12,649. For a person 65 and over living alone, it was 9,060.

The estimates on poverty, uninsured and income are based on supplements to the bureau's Current Population Survey, and are conducted over three months, beginning in February, at about 100,000 households nationwide.

The only city with a million or more residents that exhibited a significant change in poverty level last year was New York City, which saw the rate increase from 19 percent to 20.3 percent.

 

On the Net:
Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov 

    U.S. Poverty Rate Rises to 12.7 Percent, NYT, 30.8.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Census-Poverty.html?hp&ex=1125460800&en=d74b58184dd4e9a2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Living Large, by Design,

in the Middle of Nowhere

August 15, 2005
The New York Times
By RICK LYMAN

WESLEY CHAPEL, Fla. - New River Township is, for the moment, the edge of beyond.

Its square mile of tightly packed homes is the outer crest of Tampa's residential swell, four miles from the nearest grocery store and 30 minutes from the nearest major mall. Just down the road, beyond some orange groves, cattle graze languorously amid the insect hum of a sun-baked field, and only a few mobile home parks and a roadside stand selling tiki huts interrupt the vast sea of pine, palmetto and dense thatch.

But it will be a short-lived isolation. More than three dozen other communities in Pasco County, some bigger than New River, are in the works, promising 100,000 new homes in the next five years. A megamall is coming. And the first of the big-box stores, a Home Depot and a Sam's Club, had their gala openings not long ago.

"It used to be just us and the retirees," said Ruth Parker, who was busy decorating a new child care center at the edge of New River, a part of Wesley Chapel, where she has lived for nine years. "Five years from now, there will be a city here."

America is growing. And it is growing the fastest here, at the farm-road margins of metropolitan areas, with planned communities sprouting up and becoming a prime focus, almost a fetish, for election strategists from both major parties.

Such places do not sprout by happenstance. Driven by irresistible economic forces and shaped by subtly shifting social patterns, they are being created, down to the tiniest detail, by a handful of major developers with a master plan for the new America. In the case of New River, that developer is KB Home, one of the nation's biggest and most profitable builders with $7 billion in sales last year, which helped make it sixth among all Standard & Poor's 500 companies in total revenues.

KB Home has 483 communities under development in 13 states and expects to complete more than 40,000 new homes this year. Yet it is just one of about two dozen such corporate giants fiercely competing for land and customers at the edge of America's suburban expanse.

Poring over elaborate market research, these corporations divine what young families want, addressing things like carpet texture and kitchen placement and determining how many streetlights and cul-de-sacs will evoke a soothing sense of safety.

They know almost to the dollar how much buyers are willing to pay to exchange a longer commute for more space, a sense of higher status and the feeling of security.

"You bring people out here, and they say, man, look at all this open space," said Marshall Gray, president of KB's Tampa division. "But I assure you, there are deals in the works for virtually every significant piece of ground you can see out here."

Over the next decade, New River will expand to 1,800 acres and be home to 15,000 people living in 4,800 single-family homes, condominiums, town houses and rental units. It will have a 200-acre town center with 180,000 square feet of office space, 500,000 square feet of commercial space, schools, government offices and a 207-acre park.

At the moment, though, it is nothing more than an island of 400 suburban homes in the middle of nowhere, an infant exurb.

The term "exurb" was coined in the 1950's in "The Exurbanites" by A. C. Spectorsky, a social historian, to describe semirural areas far outside cities where wealthy people had country estates. The exurbs of the 21st century are a different animal. And they are not the same as the older rings of closer suburbs.

The homes in exurbs are generally larger and the space between them smaller. They tend to turn their backs to the street, with the biggest and most used rooms in the rear. And the people who live in them are different. Instead of the all-white enclaves of the 1960's and 70's, the new exurbs are a mélange of colors and cultures.

Living Large, by Design, in the Middle of Nowhere, NYT, August 15, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/national/15exurb.html?hp&ex=1124164800&en=
2a364987468e9be3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A Different Kind of Flight

"In one sense, these exurbs are just suburbs that take a longer time to drive to," said John Husing, a political and economic consultant in California. "With these, white flight has nothing to do with it. It's all housing prices. The makeup of these communities is a reflection of who's migrating, and that's people who have enough money to be middle class."

Look deep into the history of many of the new exurbs, and an entrepreneurial character like Beat (pronounced BAY-at) Kahli, an Orlando-based developer, can often be found.

The son of a baker from a Zurich suburb, Mr. Kahli abandoned his dream of racing in the Tour de France when he realized that he would never be fast enough. Instead, he went to business school in Zurich and became an investment banker.

In 1989, Flag Development, a consortium based in Fort Myers, Fla., bought the land that is becoming New River from a farming family, as well as an even larger tract on the far east side of Orlando. It approached Mr. Kahli about investing in Florida real estate, and he and some other Europeans bought in.

But in 1993, with his investors eager for results, Mr. Kahli, 41, came to Central Florida and was stunned.

"I thought, oh my gosh, what have we done?" Mr. Kahli said. "On the map, these places looked like they were not so far from Disney World and the Kennedy Space Center, but I saw that they were actually way, way out in the middle of nowhere."

In the recession of the early 90's, it was impractical to think of developing such remote properties, Mr. Kahli said. But as the economy improved, he decided he could transform the property outside Tampa and the huge tract east of Orlando into major communities.

"Most people in Florida are from someplace else," said Mr. Kahli, a rotund and ebullient man with an infectious delight in what he has built. "I was just from someplace a little farther away. Everyone was very accepting of me. There is no way an American could go to where I lived in Switzerland and be accepted in this way."

Mr. Kahli bought out his European investors, brought in some new American backers, and came away owning 82 percent of the deal. In 1996, he moved to Florida, first to Fort Lauderdale, where he met his wife, and then to Avalon Park, his development east of Orlando. He now lives in nearby Winter Park in a home with a swimming pool and a five-car garage, a millionaire pillar of the community who sits on the board of the Orlando Regional Chamber of Commerce.

"These are normal homes for normal people," Mr. Kahli said as he steered his gleaming black BMW along Avalon Park's winding lanes like an admiral in his flagship.

He pointed out the schools and the stadium that he helped the county build, and the town center where he owns two restaurants and the local weekly newspaper, the East Orlando Sun, for which he writes a column. Just outside the development is a cement plant, the first of seven he built around the state, making him the co-owner of the largest independent concrete contractor in Florida.

Sometimes developments like Avalon Park grow in unincorporated areas of remote, rural counties. Sometimes they fall within the boundaries of old towns, where they offer tax revenues but bring the challenge of providing services. Often, when they grow large enough, they become cities.

Avalon Park comprises 14 interconnected "villages" around a town center. Its residents, Mr. Kahli said, are mostly young families, with an average of almost three children per household.

When the project is finished in five years, he said, 15,000 people will live there. Already, the town center has cafes, beauty parlors, a gas station and a sprawling supermarket. Fresh banks of condominiums sprout on its periphery.

"This is what New River will look like in five years," Mr. Kahli said.

But it looks nothing like that now. Drive up Interstate 275 from the shimmering towers of downtown Tampa, past the old clapboard neighborhoods and the greyhound track, until the strip-mall muddle thins, and there is an endless canyon of pine and palmetto. Only billboards relieve the monotony, and at least half of them extol the new housing developments: "A new standard for luxury." "Own from the low $200's." Just before it enters Pasco, the county that sits like a hat atop metropolitan Tampa Bay, I-275 meets I-75. Two exits farther north is the ramp for Route 54.

"They used to say that you went to Tampa to visit your parents, and you went to Pasco to visit your grandparents," said Mr. Gray, of KB Home. "Pasco was the realm of the nearly dead and the newlywed."

A thick swirl of commercial clutter chokes the Route 54 exit and its surrounding intersections, but heading east, the roadside becomes a tangle of brush and gravel. Drivers pass eight churches, all Protestant.

About four miles from the interstate exit, the entrance to New River emerges from behind a bank of trees, a flower-lined entryway flanked by stucco walls and a line of homes with their backs turned on the highway clamor.

Mr. Gray, a connoisseur of sod, points to the grass and young trees along the entryway. "Look at the grass in that lawn," he said. "See how nice and thick it is. It's called floratam. Now look at this yard. That's called Bahia sod. It's cheaper, looks a little weedy."

When Mr. Kahli began building in 1999, first in Avalon Park and then in New River, he signed a deal with American Heritage, a company acquired by KB Home in 2002. Now, KB coordinates the residential development, which includes a mix of homes by KB and Windward, another national builder. Mr. Kahli retains control of the town center and other commercial sites.

The Breuer family,

standing from left, Monica, Andrew and Yolanda, and J. J., seated,

with their dogs at their home in New River.

A move from Tampa meant improvements like more square footage and a larger master bedroom.

Richard Patterson for The New York Times

Living Large, by Design, in the Middle of Nowhere, NYT, August 15, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/national/15exurb.html?hp&ex=1124164800&en=
2a364987468e9be3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Focus on Market Research

One area in which KB Home takes pride is its market research. It asks things like where people want their kitchens and how much more of a commute they can stomach. And it surveys its own buyers to get a comprehensive idea of who they are and why they bought.

The data from KB tells much about New River. In the first phase of development, more than 60 percent of the buyers had household incomes of $40,000 to $80,000; in Tampa, that is solidly middle class. Nearly half were between the ages of 30 and 40. They were 38 percent Hispanic, 24 percent white and 16 percent black. Three-quarters of the buyers had children in the house. More than 80 percent commuted, with the vast majority traveling to Tampa, a drive of anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour.

Four years ago, the first New River homes sold for as low as $150,000. Today, the smallest models cost $212,000, and an average home with 2,657 square feet, three bedrooms and a two-car garage costs at least $245,990.

In its most recent survey of Tampa home buyers, KB asked people what they valued the most in their home and community. They wanted more space and a greater sense of security. Safety always ranks second, even in communities where there is virtually no crime.

Asked what they wanted in a home, 88 percent said a home security system, 93 percent said they preferred neighborhoods with "more streetlights" and 96 percent insisted on deadbolt locks or security doors.

So KB Home offers them all. "It's up to us to figure out what people really want and to translate that into architecture," said Erik Kough, KB's vice president for architecture. And the company designs its communities with winding streets with sidewalks and cul-de-sacs to keep traffic slow, to give a sense of containment and to give an appearance distinctly unlike the urban grid that the young, middle-class families instinctively associate with crime. "I definitely feel safe here. I feel protected," said Lisa Crawford, who moved to New River about a year ago with her husband, Steve, and their two children.

"And I can tell you that the people in Tampa are a whole lot different than the people here," Ms. Crawford said. "In Tampa, there's a faster pace. I like it here, that it's more of a community, more of a small-town feel."

Mr. Gray said KB's Tampa division talks about a Mendoza line when determining what features to include in a home. The term comes from baseball and is used to describe someone with a batting average hovering at the .200 mark. Mr. Gray said he did not know how it migrated to real estate, but he uses it to describe components that are strongly desired by 70 percent or more of the home buyers.

Extra closet space, a walk-in pantry and a covered patio are all above the Mendoza line, so they are included in all New River homes. People spending more than $220,000 for their home get space for a home office because it falls above the Mendoza line. More than $260,000, they get dual sinks in the master bathroom.

At the heart of the matter, KB asks home buyers to put a dollar value on their time. Would they accept a commute that was 15 minutes longer for a house that was 10 percent cheaper? What about 15 percent? What if the commute was an additional 30 minutes?

The answer, the company decided, is that a house in New River must be $12,000 cheaper than the same house in the north Tampa suburbs, 15 minutes closer to downtown. And in Silverado, a community that KB hopes to build 15 minutes farther north in Pasco County, the house must be $12,000 cheaper than in New River.

Almost all of the fastest-growing counties in the United States are in exurban areas. And these far-flung communities proved, in the last election, to be among the strongest supporters of President Bush. His top advisers credited the 2004 victory, in part, to a strategy that focused on what the campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, called a Republican "fortress" beyond the cities.

Although opinions differ about why Republicans did so well last year in these areas, it seems to boil down to demographics. The bulk of people who choose to live in exurban communities, families with young children and property owners who share a desire for security and more personal space, are statistically more likely to vote Republican, as are the rural residents who live here before the exurbs arrive.

In 2004, the two precincts nearest to New River - those voting at the nearby middle school and at a Baptist Church a few miles away - gave 1,265 votes, or 61 percent, to Mr. Bush, and 782 votes, or 38 percent, to John Kerry.

In the New River community

the houses resemble those of suburbs from the past,

except they are larger and closer together.

Developers have done surveys to determine what potential owners want.

Richard Patterson for The New York Times

Living Large, by Design, in the Middle of Nowhere, NYT, August 15, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/national/15exurb.html?hp&ex=1124164800&en=
2a364987468e9be3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A Community of Republicans

"Most of the people I know out here are Republican," said Yolanda Breuer, 34, who works for a software company in Tampa. "In the workplace in the city, its more like 50-50. And there were some Kerry supporters out here. But mostly, it's Republican."

Ms. Breuer said that she and her husband, Andrew, 29, who switched jobs to become a Pasco County firefighter, did not move to the exurbs to be near others who shared their values. It just worked out that way.

"What we wanted was a bigger house and a bigger master bedroom," she said. And they got it, moving from about 2,500 square feet to about 4,400, including a patio enclosed by a screen that stretches up two stories. They know they paid a price to live here. On a normal day, Ms. Breuer's commute to work is 35 minutes, but it can balloon to more than an hour on a bad day. The rural roads are already choked at rush hour, and when the caravans of minivans make the daily pilgrimage to schools and soccer games. "Oh, it's awful," Ms. Breuer said. At a KB model home not far away, Piper Bein and her husband, Mike, an electrical contractor, were casually surveying the 3,475-square-foot building. When asked what they wanted in their new home, the Beins, both 28, blurted the same word in unison: "space."

Their two children, Landen, 6, and Cade, 3, scampered from room to room, playing hide-and-seek in the warren of hallways, pantries, walk-in closets and bathrooms.

The sales representative, Ole Pietersen, was delighted with the opportunity to point out the room for storage. "Lots of places to hide, aren't there, boys?" he said, smiling at their parents.

    Living Large, by Design, in the Middle of Nowhere, NYT, August 15, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/national/15exurb.html?hp&ex=1124164800&en=2a364987468e9be3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Racial and Ethnic Minorities

Gain in the Nation as a Whole

August 12, 2005
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Aug. 11 -The nation as a whole is moving in the direction of its two most populous states, California and Texas, where members of racial and ethnic minorities account for more than half the population, the Census Bureau said Thursday.

Non-Hispanic whites now make up two-thirds of the nation's total population, the bureau said, but that proportion will dip to one-half by 2050, according to the agency's latest projections.

In a new report, estimating population levels as of July 1, 2004, the Census Bureau said Texas had a minority population of 11.3 million, accounting for 50.2 percent of its total population of 22.5 million.

Texas is the fourth state in which minority groups, taken together, account for a majority of the population. But no one racial or ethnic group by itself accounts for a majority of the total population there.

Steven H. Murdock, the state demographer for Texas, said, "In some sense, Texas is a preview of what the nation will become in the long run."

"Our future in Texas is increasingly tied to our minority populations," Mr. Murdock said. If their education and skills continue to lag, he added, the state will be less competitive in the global economy.

Members of racial and ethnic minorities also make up more than half the population in Hawaii (77 percent) and New Mexico (56.5 percent). In California, state officials said minorities had accounted for more than half of the population since 1998, and the Census Bureau said they now made up 55.5 percent of the total. Minorities accounted for about 40 percent of the population in each of five other states: Maryland, Mississippi, Georgia, New York and Arizona.

New York had the largest black population, 3.5 million, while California had the largest Hispanic population (12.4 million) and the largest Asian population (4.8 million).

Mr. Murdock said immigration accounted for half of the recent increase in Texas's minority population, while half was because of the excess of births over deaths. Hispanic women, who are having children at a rate of 3 per woman, had a significantly higher fertility rate than blacks, with an average of 2.3, and non-Hispanic whites, with an average of 1.9, Mr. Murdock said.

In the four-year interval from the last census, in April 2000, to July 2004, the bureau reported, the total population of the United States grew 4.3 percent, to 293.7 million, and the black population increased by 5.7 percent, to 39.2 million. But, it said, the Asian population increased 16.2 percent, to 14 million, and the Hispanic population rose 17 percent, to 41.3 million. Hispanics can be of any race.

In the same four-year period, the bureau said, the non-Hispanic white population grew 1.1 percent, to 197.8 million, while the rest of the nation - the "minority population" - grew 11.6 percent, to 95.8 million.

Racial and Ethnic Minorities Gain in the Nation as a Whole

NYT, August 12, 2005,

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/12/national/12census.html

Cecilia Muñoz, a vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights group, said: "This great diversity and constant demographic change make us a dynamic country. They do not cause unrest or commotion. They are part of a process that's intrinsically American."

Ms. Muñoz said "the political strength of Latinos takes a while to catch up with our demographic strength," in part because one-third of the Latino population is under the age of 18 and many Hispanics are not citizens.

Among counties, the Census Bureau said, Los Angeles had the largest Hispanic population, 4.6 million, and the largest Asian population, 1.4 million. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for just 30 percent of the county's total population of 9.9 million.

Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, had the largest black population, 1.4 million.

The Census Bureau figures show that Hispanics account for 36 percent of the total population in the nation's five largest counties: 9.1 million of the 25.4 million people who live in Los Angeles, Cook County, Harris County, Tex. (Houston), Maricopa County, Ariz. (Phoenix) and Orange County, Calif.

In Texas, as in many other states, said Mr. Murdock, a professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio, "the white population is growing very slowly, while other racial and ethnic groups are growing quite rapidly."

Officials in California and Texas said Hispanics had fanned out across their states, while the black population tended to be more concentrated in urban areas.

Hispanics are the largest ethnic group in four of the five largest cities in Texas, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and El Paso, Mr. Murdock said. But, he said, they also account for much of the population growth in rural counties.

    Racial and Ethnic Minorities Gain in the Nation as a Whole, NYT, August 12, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/12/national/12census.html

Class in America:

Shadowy Lines That Still Divide

May 15, 2005
The New York Times
By JANNY SCOTT and DAVID LEONHARDT

There was a time when Americans thought they understood class. The upper crust vacationed in Europe and worshiped an Episcopal God. The middle class drove Ford Fairlanes, settled the San Fernando Valley and enlisted as company men. The working class belonged to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., voted Democratic and did not take cruises to the Caribbean.

Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old markers. It has become harder to read people's status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared.

But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe. [Click here for more information on income mobility.] In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say.

Mobility is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. It is supposed to take the sting out of the widening gulf between the have-mores and the have-nots. There are poor and rich in the United States, of course, the argument goes; but as long as one can become the other, as long as there is something close to equality of opportunity, the differences between them do not add up to class barriers.

Over the next three weeks, The Times will publish a series of articles on class in America, a dimension of the national experience that tends to go unexamined, if acknowledged at all. With class now seeming more elusive than ever, the articles take stock of its influence in the lives of individuals: a lawyer who rose out of an impoverished Kentucky hollow; an unemployed metal worker in Spokane, Wash., regretting his decision to skip college; a multimillionaire in Nantucket, Mass., musing over the cachet of his 200-foot yacht.

The series does not purport to be all-inclusive or the last word on class. It offers no nifty formulas for pigeonholing people or decoding folkways and manners. Instead, it represents an inquiry into class as Americans encounter it: indistinct, ambiguous, the half-seen hand that upon closer examination holds some Americans down while giving others a boost.

The trends are broad and seemingly contradictory: the blurring of the landscape of class and the simultaneous hardening of certain class lines; the rise in standards of living while most people remain moored in their relative places.

Even as mobility seems to have stagnated, the ranks of the elite are opening. Today, anyone may have a shot at becoming a United States Supreme Court justice or a C.E.O., and there are more and more self-made billionaires. Only 37 members of last year's Forbes 400, a list of the richest Americans, inherited their wealth, down from almost 200 in the mid-1980's.

So it appears that while it is easier for a few high achievers to scale the summits of wealth, for many others it has become harder to move up from one economic class to another. Americans are arguably more likely than they were 30 years ago to end up in the class into which they were born.

A paradox lies at the heart of this new American meritocracy. Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the manner born handed down the manor to their children. But merit, it turns out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education and connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards. When their children then succeed, their success is seen as earned.

The scramble to scoop up a house in the best school district, channel a child into the right preschool program or land the best medical specialist are all part of a quiet contest among social groups that the affluent and educated are winning in a rout.

"The old system of hereditary barriers and clubby barriers has pretty much vanished," said Eric Wanner, president of the Russell Sage Foundation, a social science research group in New York City that recently published a series of studies on the social effects of economic inequality.

In place of the old system, Dr. Wanner said, have arisen "new ways of transmitting advantage that are beginning to assert themselves."

Faith in the System

Most Americans remain upbeat about their prospects for getting ahead. A recent New York Times poll on class found that 40 percent of Americans believed that the chance of moving up from one class to another had risen over the last 30 years, a period in which the new research shows that it has not. Thirty-five percent said it had not changed, and only 23 percent said it had dropped.

More Americans than 20 years ago believe it possible to start out poor, work hard and become rich. They say hard work and a good education are more important to getting ahead than connections or a wealthy background.

"I think the system is as fair as you can make it," Ernie Frazier, a 65-year-old real estate investor in Houston, said in an interview after participating in the poll. "I don't think life is necessarily fair. But if you persevere, you can overcome adversity. It has to do with a person's willingness to work hard, and I think it's always been that way."

Most say their standard of living is better than their parents' and imagine that their children will do better still. Even families making less than $30,000 a year subscribe to the American dream; more than half say they have achieved it or will do so.

But most do not see a level playing field. They say the very rich have too much power, and they favor the idea of class-based affirmative action to help those at the bottom. Even so, most say they oppose the government's taxing the assets a person leaves at death.

"They call it the land of opportunity, and I don't think that's changed much," said Diana Lackey, a 60-year-old homemaker and wife of a retired contractor in Fulton, N.Y., near Syracuse. "Times are much, much harder with all the downsizing, but we're still a wonderful country."

The Attributes of Class

One difficulty in talking about class is that the word means different things to different people. Class is rank, it is tribe, it is culture and taste. It is attitudes and assumptions, a source of identity, a system of exclusion. To some, it is just money. It is an accident of birth that can influence the outcome of a life. Some Americans barely notice it; others feel its weight in powerful ways.

At its most basic, class is one way societies sort themselves out. Even societies built on the idea of eliminating class have had stark differences in rank. Classes are groups of people of similar economic and social position; people who, for that reason, may share political attitudes, lifestyles, consumption patterns, cultural interests and opportunities to get ahead. Put 10 people in a room and a pecking order soon emerges.

When societies were simpler, the class landscape was easier to read. Marx divided 19th-century societies into just two classes; Max Weber added a few more. As societies grew increasingly complex, the old classes became more heterogeneous. As some sociologists and marketing consultants see it, the commonly accepted big three - the upper, middle and working classes - have broken down into dozens of microclasses, defined by occupations or lifestyles.

A few sociologists go so far as to say that social complexity has made the concept of class meaningless. Conventional big classes have become so diverse - in income, lifestyle, political views - that they have ceased to be classes at all, said Paul W. Kingston, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. To him, American society is a "ladder with lots and lots of rungs."

"There is not one decisive break saying that the people below this all have this common experience," Professor Kingston said. "Each step is equal-sized. Sure, for the people higher up this ladder, their kids are more apt to get more education, better health insurance. But that doesn't mean there are classes."

Many other researchers disagree. "Class awareness and the class language is receding at the very moment that class has reorganized American society," said Michael Hout, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. "I find these 'end of class' discussions naïve and ironic, because we are at a time of booming inequality and this massive reorganization of where we live and how we feel, even in the dynamics of our politics. Yet people say, 'Well, the era of class is over.' "

One way to think of a person's position in society is to imagine a hand of cards. Everyone is dealt four cards, one from each suit: education, income, occupation and wealth, the four commonly used criteria for gauging class. [Click here to see where you fit in the American population.] Face cards in a few categories may land a player in the upper middle class. At first, a person's class is his parents' class. Later, he may pick up a new hand of his own; it is likely to resemble that of his parents, but not always.

Bill Clinton traded in a hand of low cards with the help of a college education and a Rhodes scholarship and emerged decades later with four face cards. Bill Gates, who started off squarely in the upper middle class, made a fortune without finishing college, drawing three aces.

Many Americans say that they too have moved up the nation's class ladder. In the Times poll, 45 percent of respondents said they were in a higher class than when they grew up, while just 16 percent said they were in a lower one. Over all, 1 percent described themselves as upper class, 15 percent as upper middle class, 42 percent as middle, 35 percent as working and 7 percent as lower.

"I grew up very poor and so did my husband," said Wanda Brown, the 58-year-old wife of a retired planner for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard who lives in Puyallup, Wash., near Tacoma. "We're not rich but we are comfortable and we are middle class and our son is better off than we are."

The American Ideal

The original exemplar of American social mobility was almost certainly Benjamin Franklin, one of 17 children of a candle maker. About 20 years ago, when researchers first began to study mobility in a rigorous way, Franklin seemed representative of a truly fluid society, in which the rags-to-riches trajectory was the readily achievable ideal, just as the nation's self-image promised.

In a 1987 speech, Gary S. Becker, a University of Chicago economist who would later win a Nobel Prize, summed up the research by saying that mobility in the United States was so high that very little advantage was passed down from one generation to the next. In fact, researchers seemed to agree that the grandchildren of privilege and of poverty would be on nearly equal footing.

If that had been the case, the rise in income inequality beginning in the mid-1970's should not have been all that worrisome. The wealthy might have looked as if they were pulling way ahead, but if families were moving in and out of poverty and prosperity all the time, how much did the gap between the top and bottom matter?

But the initial mobility studies were flawed, economists now say. Some studies relied on children's fuzzy recollections of their parents' income. Others compared single years of income, which fluctuate considerably. Still others misread the normal progress people make as they advance in their careers, like from young lawyer to senior partner, as social mobility.

The new studies of mobility, which methodically track peoples' earnings over decades, have found far less movement. The economic advantage once believed to last only two or three generations is now believed to last closer to five. Mobility happens, just not as rapidly as was once thought.

"We all know stories of poor families in which the next generation did much better," said Gary Solon, a University of Michigan economist who is a leading mobility researcher. "It isn't that poor families have no chance."

But in the past, Professor Solon added, "people would say, 'Don't worry about inequality. The offspring of the poor have chances as good as the chances of the offspring of the rich.' Well, that's not true. It's not respectable in scholarly circles anymore to make that argument."

One study, by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, found that fewer families moved from one quintile, or fifth, of the income ladder to another during the 1980's than during the 1970's and that still fewer moved in the 90's than in the 80's. A study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also found that mobility declined from the 80's to the 90's.

The incomes of brothers born around 1960 have followed a more similar path than the incomes of brothers born in the late 1940's, researchers at the Chicago Federal Reserve and the University of California, Berkeley, have found. Whatever children inherit from their parents - habits, skills, genes, contacts, money - seems to matter more today.

Studies on mobility over generations are notoriously difficult, because they require researchers to match the earnings records of parents with those of their children. Some economists consider the findings of the new studies murky; it cannot be definitively shown that mobility has fallen during the last generation, they say, only that it has not risen. The data will probably not be conclusive for years.

Nor do people agree on the implications. Liberals say the findings are evidence of the need for better early-education and antipoverty programs to try to redress an imbalance in opportunities. Conservatives tend to assert that mobility remains quite high, even if it has tailed off a little.

But there is broad consensus about what an optimal range of mobility is. It should be high enough for fluid movement between economic levels but not so high that success is barely tied to achievement and seemingly random, economists on both the right and left say.

As Phillip Swagel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, put it, "We want to give people all the opportunities they want. We want to remove the barriers to upward mobility."

Yet there should remain an incentive for parents to cultivate their children. "Most people are working very hard to transmit their advantages to their children," said David I. Levine, a Berkeley economist and mobility researcher. "And that's quite a good thing."

One surprising finding about mobility is that it is not higher in the United States than in Britain or France. It is lower here than in Canada and some Scandinavian countries but not as low as in developing countries like Brazil, where escape from poverty is so difficult that the lower class is all but frozen in place.

Those comparisons may seem hard to believe. Britain and France had hereditary nobilities; Britain still has a queen. The founding document of the United States proclaims all men to be created equal. The American economy has also grown more quickly than Europe's in recent decades, leaving an impression of boundless opportunity.

But the United States differs from Europe in ways that can gum up the mobility machine. Because income inequality is greater here, there is a wider disparity between what rich and poor parents can invest in their children. Perhaps as a result, a child's economic background is a better predictor of school performance in the United States than in Denmark, the Netherlands or France, one recent study found.

"Being born in the elite in the U.S. gives you a constellation of privileges that very few people in the world have ever experienced," Professor Levine said. "Being born poor in the U.S. gives you disadvantages unlike anything in Western Europe and Japan and Canada."

Blurring the Landscape

Why does it appear that class is fading as a force in American life?

For one thing, it is harder to read position in possessions. Factories in China and elsewhere churn out picture-taking cellphones and other luxuries that are now affordable to almost everyone. Federal deregulation has done the same for plane tickets and long-distance phone calls. Banks, more confident about measuring risk, now extend credit to low-income families, so that owning a home or driving a new car is no longer evidence that someone is middle class.

The economic changes making material goods cheaper have forced businesses to seek out new opportunities so that they now market to groups they once ignored. Cruise ships, years ago a symbol of the high life, have become the ocean-going equivalent of the Jersey Shore. BMW produces a cheaper model with the same insignia. Martha Stewart sells chenille jacquard drapery and scallop-embossed ceramic dinnerware at Kmart.

"The level of material comfort in this country is numbing," said Paul Bellew, executive director for market and industry analysis at General Motors. "You can make a case that the upper half lives as well as the upper 5 percent did 50 years ago."

Like consumption patterns, class alignments in politics have become jumbled. In the 1950's, professionals were reliably Republican; today they lean Democratic. Meanwhile, skilled labor has gone from being heavily Democratic to almost evenly split.

People in both parties have attributed the shift to the rise of social issues, like gun control and same-sex marriage, which have tilted many working-class voters rightward and upper income voters toward the left. But increasing affluence plays an important role, too. When there is not only a chicken, but an organic, free-range chicken, in every pot, the traditional economic appeal to the working class can sound off key.

Religious affiliation, too, is no longer the reliable class marker it once was. The growing economic power of the South has helped lift evangelical Christians into the middle and upper middle classes, just as earlier generations of Roman Catholics moved up in the mid-20th century. It is no longer necessary to switch one's church membership to Episcopal or Presbyterian as proof that one has arrived.

"You go to Charlotte, N.C., and the Baptists are the establishment," said Mark A. Chaves, a sociologist at the University of Arizona. "To imagine that for reasons of respectability, if you lived in North Carolina, you would want to be a Presbyterian rather than a Baptist doesn't play anymore."

The once tight connection between race and class has weakened, too, as many African-Americans have moved into the middle and upper middle classes. Diversity of all sorts - racial, ethnic and gender - has complicated the class picture. And high rates of immigration and immigrant success stories seem to hammer home the point: The rules of advancement have changed.

The American elite, too, is more diverse than it was. The number of corporate chief executives who went to Ivy League colleges has dropped over the past 15 years. There are many more Catholics, Jews and Mormons in the Senate than there were a generation or two ago. Because of the economic earthquakes of the last few decades, a small but growing number of people have shot to the top.

"Anything that creates turbulence creates the opportunity for people to get rich," said Christopher S. Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard. "But that isn't necessarily a big influence on the 99 percent of people who are not entrepreneurs."

These success stories reinforce perceptions of mobility, as does cultural myth-making in the form of television programs like "American Idol" and "The Apprentice."

But beneath all that murkiness and flux, some of the same forces have deepened the hidden divisions of class. Globalization and technological change have shuttered factories, killing jobs that were once stepping-stones to the middle class. Now that manual labor can be done in developing countries for $2 a day, skills and education have become more essential than ever.

This has helped produce the extraordinary jump in income inequality. The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of American households jumped 139 percent, to more than $700,000, from 1979 to 2001, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which adjusted its numbers to account for inflation. The income of the middle fifth rose by just 17 percent, to $43,700, and the income of the poorest fifth rose only 9 percent.

For most workers, the only time in the last three decades when the rise in hourly pay beat inflation was during the speculative bubble of the 90's. Reduced pensions have made retirement less secure.

Clearly, a degree from a four-year college makes even more difference than it once did. More people are getting those degrees than did a generation ago, but class still plays a big role in determining who does or does not. At 250 of the most selective colleges in the country, the proportion of students from upper-income families has grown, not shrunk.

Some colleges, worried about the trend, are adopting programs to enroll more lower-income students. One is Amherst, whose president, Anthony W. Marx, explained: "If economic mobility continues to shut down, not only will we be losing the talent and leadership we need, but we will face a risk of a society of alienation and unhappiness. Even the most privileged among us will suffer the consequences of people not believing in the American dream."

Class differences in health, too, are widening, recent research shows. Life expectancy has increased over all; but upper-middle-class Americans live longer and in better health than middle-class Americans, who live longer and in better health than those at the bottom.

Class plays an increased role, too, in determining where and with whom affluent Americans live. More than in the past, they tend to live apart from everyone else, cocooned in their exurban chateaus. Researchers who have studied data from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses say the isolation of the affluent has increased.

Family structure, too, differs increasingly along class lines. The educated and affluent are more likely than others to have their children while married. They have fewer children and have them later, when their earning power is high. On average, according to one study, college-educated women have their first child at 30, up from 25 in the early 1970's. The average age among women who have never gone to college has stayed at about 22.

Those widening differences have left the educated and affluent in a superior position when it comes to investing in their children. "There is no reason to doubt the old saw that the most important decision you make is choosing your parents," said Professor Levine, the Berkeley economist and mobility researcher. "While it's always been important, it's probably a little more important now."

The benefits of the new meritocracy do come at a price. It once seemed that people worked hard and got rich in order to relax, but a new class marker in upper-income families is having at least one parent who works extremely long hours (and often boasts about it). In 1973, one study found, the highest-paid tenth of the country worked fewer hours than the bottom tenth. Today, those at the top work more.

In downtown Manhattan, black cars line up outside Goldman Sachs's headquarters every weeknight around 9. Employees who work that late get a free ride home, and there are plenty of them. Until 1976, a limousine waited at 4:30 p.m. to ferry partners to Grand Central Terminal. But a new management team eliminated the late-afternoon limo to send a message: 4:30 is the middle of the workday, not the end.

A Rags-to-Riches Faith

Will the trends that have reinforced class lines while papering over the distinctions persist?

The economic forces that caused jobs to migrate to low-wage countries are still active. The gaps in pay, education and health have not become a major political issue. The slicing of society's pie is more unequal than it used to be, but most Americans have a bigger piece than they or their parents once did. They appear to accept the tradeoffs.

Faith in mobility, after all, has been consciously woven into the national self-image. Horatio Alger's books have made his name synonymous with rags-to-riches success, but that was not his personal story. He was a second-generation Harvard man, who became a writer only after losing his Unitarian ministry because of allegations of sexual misconduct. Ben Franklin's autobiography was punched up after his death to underscore his rise from obscurity.

The idea of fixed class positions, on the other hand, rubs many the wrong way. Americans have never been comfortable with the notion of a pecking order based on anything other than talent and hard work. Class contradicts their assumptions about the American dream, equal opportunity and the reasons for their own successes and even failures. Americans, constitutionally optimistic, are disinclined to see themselves as stuck.

Blind optimism has its pitfalls. If opportunity is taken for granted, as something that will be there no matter what, then the country is less likely to do the hard work to make it happen. But defiant optimism has its strengths. Without confidence in the possibility of moving up, there would almost certainly be fewer success stories.

    Class in America: Shadowy Lines That Still Divide, NYT, May 15, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/national/class/OVERVIEW-FINAL.html

Kansans Amend

Constitution to Ban Gay Marriage

Wed Apr 6, 2005
12:24 AM ET
Reuters
By Carey Gillam

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Reuters) - Kansas voters on Tuesday approved an amendment to the state constitution that bars same-sex couples from marrying, making the conservative farming state the 18th in the nation to take such a stance.

More than 70 percent of voters favored passage of the Kansas measure, considered one of the country's most restrictive to date, angering opponents who said it is discriminatory.

"This idea that marriage is reserved and is not a civil right for everyone is fundamentally wrong," said Bruce Ney, chairman of Kansans for Fairness, which led opposition efforts.

Backers of the measure, led by a coalition of Kansas clergy, said the victory signaled a commitment by the majority to moral values, and strengthened efforts for passage of a federal constitutional marriage amendment.

"It is the voice of the people that is making this happen," said Pastor Jerry Johnston of Overland Park, Kansas. "We're sending a message to the President of the United States that we need a federal marriage amendment. It is a great, great day."

Kansas follows Missouri, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana, and 13 other states that have passed amendments to their state constitutions declaring same-sex marriages invalid.

The Kansas amendment is considered more restrictive than most because it goes beyond defining marriage, but also prohibits any relationship other than that between a man and woman as being entitled to the "rights or incidents of marriage."

Opponents to the measure say the ambiguity of that phrase could mean same-sex couples will be denied health insurance benefits, inheritance rights and other benefits.

Last month, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox said passage of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in his state in November made gay and lesbian state workers ineligible for health benefits for their partners.

Both supporters and opponents of the Kansas measure acknowledged it is almost certainly headed for a challenge in court. And both sides said they expected to prevail.

"This is just like women's rights and slavery," said Robert Meneilly, a retired Presbyterian pastor and founding member of the Interfaith Alliance in Washington. "It may take another 10 years, but I think it is progress."

Pastor Johnston disagreed. "That is a bunch of gay scare rhetoric," he said. "The family and a husband and a wife committed to each other for a lifetime ... is the foundation for our government and our nation."

    Kansans Amend Constitution to Ban Gay Marriage, R, Wed Apr 6, 2005 12:24 AM ET, http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=UCW5ISCI5HN40CRBAEZSFFA?type=domesticNews&storyID=8096624

Terri Schiavo Dies,

Bitter Divide Remains

Thu Mar 31, 2005 02:17 PM ET
Reuters
By Jane Sutton

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. (Reuters) - Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman at the heart of a wrenching legal dispute that drew in the U.S. Congress and President Bush, died on Thursday, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed by court order.

Amid the same glare of publicity and outpouring of bitterness that marked the last days of her life, the 41-year-old woman's body was driven away under heavy police guard to a county medical examiner's office for an autopsy.

Schiavo died at 9:05 a.m. (1305 GMT), just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court rebuffed yet another appeal by her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, for the feeding to be restored.

Schiavo had been in what courts ruled was a "persistent vegetative state" since a cardiac arrest in 1990 deprived her brain of oxygen.

Courts had long sided with her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, in ruling she would not have wanted to live in that condition and should be allowed to die. The feeding tube was removed on March 18.

The parents argued that she responded to them and could yet recover with treatment, and their seven-year legal battle against Michael Schiavo was taken up by the Christian right, the Republican-led Congress and President Bush.

The Schiavo case fired fierce passions among right-to-life activists. Michael Schiavo, his lawyer George Felos and the state judge who presided over the case for years, George Greer, have all received death threats.

Michael Schiavo was with his wife when she died at a hospice in Pinellas Park, Florida, where she had been cared for.

Protesters who had kept vigil outside the hospice calling for Schiavo to be kept alive, sobbed and prayed when her death was announced, and then sang hymns in the morning sunshine.

James Dobson, of conservative group Focus on the Family, said judges who had failed to prolong Schiavo's life were guilty of "the cold-blooded, cold-hearted extermination of an innocent human life."

At the Vatican, where an ailing Pope John Paul himself is now being sustained by a feeding tube through his nose, papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said Schiavo's death was an unacceptable "violation of the sacred nature of life."

In Florida, the family feud continued into Schiavo's final moments.

"This is not only a death with all the sadness that brings. This is a killing," said Frank Pavone, a Roman Catholic priest who sided with the Schindlers and visited her shortly before she died.

'HEARTLESS CRUELTY'

Pavone said Schiavo's blood relatives were sent out of her room 10 minutes before she died partly because Michael Schiavo did not want them to be there when he visited.

"Bobby Schindler, her brother, said 'We want to be in the room when she dies.' Michael Schiavo said, 'No, you cannot.' So his heartless cruelty continues until this very last moment," Pavone said.

The Schindlers were able to continue to pursue their case after the U.S. Congress passed a special law giving federal courts jurisdiction in what traditionally has been the domain of state courts, and Bush cut short a vacation to sign it.

Opinion polls have shown most Americans both believed Schiavo should be allowed to die and disapproved of the law. And the congressional effort failed when federal judges refused the parents' requests to order feeding resumed.

The last legal rebuff, from the U.S. Supreme Court, came late on Wednesday night. The highest U.S. court had repeatedly refused to take on the case.

House majority leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican who led congressional efforts to circumvent state courts, said Schiavo's death was "a moral poverty and a legal tragedy."

"This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change," he said.

"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today. Today we grieve, we pray, and we hope to God this fate never befalls another."

President Bush expressed his condolences.

"I urge all those who honor Terri Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life, where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others," he said.

The mood outside the hospice was rancorous.

"Well they got their way," said a grizzled New York City man who gave his name as "Lifeboat" and knelt clutching a wooden rosary. "We've become barbarians. We've lost our humanity in this country."

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother and a Catholic convert, also became heavily involved on the side of the parents, but last week courts denied his efforts to have the state welfare agency take custody of Schiavo.

The governor also failed to persuade the Florida Legislature to push through a new state law to intervene.

Felos said on Monday that an autopsy would be carried out to prove the extent of Terri's brain damage and to dispel questions from critics that Michael Schiavo's plans to cremate his wife's body were aimed at hiding something.

A court has said in the past Michael Schiavo can cremate his wife's body and bury the remains in Pennsylvania, his home state. The Schindlers, who are Roman Catholics, had wanted a full burial.

(Additional reporting by Michael Peltier in Tallahassee, Michael Christie and Frances Kerry in Miami, Giles Elgood and Randall Mikkelsen in Washington and Philip Pullella in Rome)

    Terri Schiavo Dies, Bitter Divide Remains, R, Thu Mar 31, 2005 02:17 PM ET, http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=2UZ51EO3OACZWCRBAEOCFEY?type=domesticNews&storyID=8052601

As Murders Fall,

New Tactics Are Tried

Against Remainder

December 31, 2004
The New York Times
By SHAILA K. DEWAN

Murders in New York City have dropped, again. So low has the number dipped - to 566 so far this year from a high of 2,245 in 1990 - that even Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has begun to gently lower the public's expectations, warning of a core number of homicides resistant to even New York's gargantuan police force.

Low crime rates are more often the stuff of proud news conferences than of intense scrutiny. Yet as street-corner slayings and drug turf drive-bys have melted away, police officials are collecting more data than ever on the remaining few hundred murders, tracking motives, locations, and even the national origin of victims and killers.

A huge endeavor, the new database provides insight into the question of how much lower, in a city of eight million people, the body count can go. It also offers a picture of how the nature of murder in New York City - a post-crack, post-crackdown New York City - has changed, and how anti-violence strategies must change with it.

Some things have not changed: disputes are the most common type of homicide, followed by drug-related slayings. But based on a review of data drawn from multiple agencies, including the Police Department, the Health Department, the Administration for Children's Services and the State Department of Criminal Justice, much has shifted since 1991.

While guns still top the list of murder weapons, there are proportionally fewer gun deaths and far fewer drug-related ones. Street murders are down. Innocent bystanders, once the subject of so many screaming headlines, no longer need Kevlar.

But the most stubborn types of homicide - child abuse, intimate-partner killings and other violence in the home - have increased as a percentage of the total. Gang crimes have given way to rivalries between housing projects. Cocaine and crack dealers have retreated, but violence related to the marijuana trade has persisted and, some experts say, risen, because the market has grown and penalties are lax.

New Yorkers are far less likely to be killed by a stranger or casual acquaintance now than 15 years ago. If you are a foreign-born man, you are also less likely to be a victim, but the percentage of female victims who are foreign-born has gone up markedly. The proportion of victims who are black has increased, with a corresponding decrease in the proportion of Hispanics, while the racial breakdown of perpetrators has stayed roughly the same. Killers are slightly older, with the number of teenage suspects falling and the number aged 30 to 34 rising.

The real challenge is the fewer the deaths, the harder it is to reduce those that remain. New York's homicide rate, 6.9 for every 100,000 people, is already less than that of many far smaller American cities. But some criminologists point to foreign cities like London, with a rate of 2.4, or Amsterdam, at 4.0, as evidence that sizable reductions are possible.

"How low can it go?" said Mr. Kelly, who initiated the database project. "Who knows? Certainly it's our goal, our public policy position, to do everything we can to continue to suppress it. And we're getting more information agencywide that is going to help us do that."

Experts have long debated the causes of New York's startling reduction in crime. While some have argued that socioeconomic forces and shifting demographics - immigrants, for example, are on average less likely to commit crimes - have done most of the work, the police fiercely defend the role of law enforcement strategies like a greater street presence in trouble spots and a focused effort on taking guns off the streets.

But now that the steepest drops in the body count are past, experts agree on one thing: Saving lives now depends on small-bore interventions and ever-greater attention to detail, whether that means handing out tougher sentences for gun possession, meeting with the Mexican consul general to learn more about inroads by gangs who speak the indigenous Mexican language Mixtec, finding jobs for parolees or giving domestic violence victims pendants that let them immediately summon the police.

"It's sort of saying, where are the gaps here?" said John Feinblatt, the criminal justice coordinator for the Bloomberg administration. "Where are things falling through the cracks? Is there something where we're not effectively pulling the thread through from arrest to sentencing? You have to come up with increasingly tailored solutions."

Stubborn Category: Disputes

Luciano Yevenes was a friendly, lonely drunk whose only public transgressions were banging on his neighbors' doors in search of company and sometimes passing out in the hall. He had never been in trouble with the police. He had a dog, Ninos, who enjoyed his own bedroom, with a child's bed. He had a closet stocked with cleaning products in two scents, raspberry and floral. On his door was a picture of Jesus. On his wall was a 2003 calendar from ABC, a friendly neighborhood liquor store.

On Monday afternoon, Mr. Yevenes became No. 563. He was stabbed to death on his kitchen floor, his torso perforated, his throat slit from ear to ear. His hand was thrown over his face as if to ward off further blows.

The mystery in this case is not so much who did it, but why. That day Mr. Yevenes, who sometimes worked as a painter, and his neighbor, Anthony Stanback, 30, were enjoying a couple of midday Colt 45's. Mr. Stanback, who has been arrested on charges that he killed Mr. Yevenes, told detectives that he could not remember what set off his violent rage, the police say. When he finally returned to his family's apartment on Tuesday, he took a kitchen knife and began slicing his own legs. "He just snapped," said Lt. Bernardo Colon, the commander of the 77th Precinct detective squad.

It was the kind of killing that flummoxes the police. It was not hoodlum versus hoodlum. It was not a jealous boyfriend. The small bag of marijuana found on Mr. Yevenes's counter did not make it a drug case. So it goes into the largest category: dispute.

Disputes that end in death can be set off by anything from road rage to a funny look on the dance floor. By Dec. 23, there were 151 homicides in the dispute category, 28 percent of this year's total.

Another 24 percent were considered drug-related, followed by domestic (12 percent), robberies (11), revenge (7), gang-related (6), and on down.

Domestic murders, by the Police Department's definition, include any death that occurs among relatives in the home or between people who have a child in common.

Another category, women killed by current or former intimate partners, is tracked by Dr. Susan Wilt, the assistant commissioner for health promotion and disease prevention at the Health Department. In 1995, the first year such victims were counted, there were 53 - 4.5 percent of the total homicides. In 2000, they reached a low of 23, but now the number is on the rise. In 2003, 34 women were killed by boyfriends, husbands, or other romantic partners. In 2004 there were 41 or 8.5 percent of the total.

For Garry F. McCarthy, the deputy commissioner of operations, who is instrumental in plotting the department's crime-fighting strategy and whose office maintains the new database, domestic homicides are a thorny problem, because there is no clear predictor for which strife-filled relationships will turn fatal. Of the 41 intimate-partner homicides of women this year, 28 of the couples had no previous contact with the police. At least one woman had an order of protection, but let her boyfriend violate it.

As the Police Department strives for more and more specific information, the "dispute" designation has become less and less useful. "I'm thinking of getting rid of that category," Mr. McCarthy said. "By definition, all homicides are disputes."

Others have tackled the same problem. A 1999 study of Brooklyn homicides commissioned by Charles J. Hynes, the borough's district attorney, tried to break disputes into smaller categories: conflicts over property ownership, disputes arising out of illegal business activities, drug or alcohol-fueled disputes, disputes over personal relationships, and disputes that escalate from trivial matters.

The largest category, they found, were long-running feuds, like the one that apparently lay behind the death of Lisa Taylor, 35, early this week. She was shot at the front door of her house in Queens, the police said, by a relative of the 9-year-old boy with whom her 7-year-old daughter had been fighting. Such ongoing fights, the Brooklyn study found, accounted for more than 20 percent of dispute-related killings.

That figure would not surprise detectives, who often say that today's victim is tomorrow's perpetrator. Tracking the cycle of insult and revenge is one objective of the new database, which includes shootings as well as homicides, recording as much information as possible about each incident: primary and secondary motives, aliases, criminal records, even whether the location was ever used as a drug market or gambling den.

The specifics are important: national origin, for example, could reveal something about feuds or family and gang ties. It is more useful to know, Commissioner McCarthy said, that some people involved in a crime are Salvadoran or Dominican than that they are simply Hispanic.

Life, Death and Geography

All crime, like all politics, is local, and to some extent geography is destiny. Luciano Yevenes died in the 77th Precinct, in Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, which has the highest number of homicides of any borough. When his mother appeared, the neighbors told her what had happened, and she fainted on the sidewalk.

The 77th Precinct is one of the hot ones; although the number of homicides there has dropped 82 percent since 2003, it is still in the 10 most dangerous precincts. The 75th Precinct, East New York, is consistently No. 1. Yet others have dropped completely out of sight: the 30th Precinct in Harlem went from 8th in 1993 to 43rd last year, and the 46th Precinct in the Bronx has seen similar improvement.

"You have to look at it precinct by precinct," Commissioner Kelly said when asked about this discrepancy. "Sometimes it's gentrification. Sometimes it's buildings being torn down."

So life, or death, may depend on urban planning. Last year a study commissioned, again, by Mr. Hynes, looked at East Flatbush, which has gone from 10th in homicides to 3rd, and Brownsville, which has gone from 3rd to 15th. The study found that Brownsville's housing projects, and drug markets, were clustered in the center of the precinct, making them easier to police. But in East Flatbush, where violence was more entrenched, the center of the precinct was mostly single-family homes. The rough areas were scattered around the perimeter.

At one time the Vanderveer Estates, a housing project where large drug rings have been dismantled in recent years, was among them. One intersection near the project, Foster and Nostrand, was referred to by residents as the Front Page, because the drug murders that happened there made the news, said Ric Curtis, an anthropologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and one of the study's authors. Another area was called the Back Page, because it was the site of less sensational crimes.

On the surface, it is hard to argue that the death of Mr. Yevenes had anything to do with where he lived. Then again, the man who the police say killed him was an ex-convict. Mr. Stanback had done time in the 1990's for robbery and misdemeanor assault. About 5,000 parolees or former inmates return home to Brooklyn every year. And while only 7 percent of homicide suspects are parolees, almost 68 percent have a previous arrest record.

The Brooklyn district attorney's office has recently expanded a program that gives counseling and jobs to former inmates. "I believe that the key to public safety is recidivism reduction," Mr. Hynes said.

Undoubtedly, alcohol was also a factor in Mr. Yevenes's death. Andrew Karmen, a professor who has spent untold hours studying the factors that affect the homicide rate, from police strategies to demographics to an uptick in the city's education level, combed through autopsy files to see how many homicide victims were drunk or on drugs. He found that in 1997, 39 percent of victims tested positive for alcohol, 17 percent for cocaine, 2 percent for opiates and 21 percent for marijuana. Almost half of all victims had some intoxicant in their bloodstream when they were killed.

Statistics like these suggest the limits of law enforcement in combating violence. "Effective law enforcement can bring down the crime rate to a considerable degree," Dr. Karmen said. "But only by tackling the social roots of crime - poverty, unemployment, failing schools - can a society truly prevent despair and disruption."

But just as law enforcement is telescoping down to the smallest elements of violence, environmental and social measures need not tackle the large questions to be effective. The Brooklyn study found that good management in housing projects helped suppress crime - one replaced the mailboxes and ceiling tiles where dealers liked to stash contraband; another put security cameras and card readers in the laundry room, so residents would not have to use cash.

"The macro changes that we saw - improvements in the economy, changes in demographics, the drop-off in the crack epidemic - all of those have kind of run their course, if you will," Dr. Curtis said. "These further improvements on the local level come from being able to focus on the smaller stuff."

    As Murders Fall, New Tactics Are Tried Against Remainder, NYT, 31.12.2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/nyregion/31crime.html?oref=login

U.S. Marines

Suffer Most Suicides

in Five Years

Tue Dec 21, 2004
06:57 PM ET

Reuters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Suicides of U.S. Marines have reached their highest level in five years, prompting a Defense Department effort to encourage Marines to seek mental health services, a Marine Corps spokesman said on Tuesday.

But spokesman Bryan Driver said there was no evidence linking the higher suicide rate with the long tours of duty and frontline fighting Marines have engaged in Iraq.

There have been 32 confirmed or probable suicides among 178,000 Marines this year, surpassing the 28 who killed themselves in 2001 as the United States invaded Afghanistan, Driver said.

The Marines, the smallest of the U.S. armed services by number of troops, have had the military's highest suicide rate -- about 25 per year among 178,000 active duty troops since 1999, the year the government began keeping detailed records.

"What we found out when we looked into the circumstances are relationship problems, financial problems, legal problems. Those are the three main triggers in these Marines' lives," Driver said.

The suicide data was first reported on Tuesday by the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Camp Pendleton, California-based 1st Marine Expeditionary Force has had more than 200 soldiers killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

The Defense Department has contracted with private provider Ceridian Corp. to provide mental health services to Marines, Driver said.

The military suicide rates remain well below suicide rates of about 21 per 100,000 for similar civilian populations, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

    U.S. Marines Suffer Most Suicides in Five Years, R, Tue Dec 21, 2004 06:57 PM ET, http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=SLIY3FFEE5GUMCRBAEKSFFA?type=domesticNews&storyID=7154053

Georgia Crematory Worker

Pleads Guilty to Body Dumping

Fri Nov 19, 2004 04:43 PM ET

Reuters

By Paul Simao

LAFAYETTE, Ga. (Reuters) - A Georgia crematory operator, cutting a deal that could spare him life in prison, pleaded guilty on Friday to dumping hundreds of bodies meant for cremation in storage sheds, burial pits and the woods.

A somber Ray Brent Marsh, after pleading guilty to theft, fraud, abuse of a corpse and making a false statement, repented for his crimes in a hushed court in LaFayette, Georgia, 100 miles northwest of Atlanta.

"To those who have been injured emotionally by my actions, I apologize," Marsh, wearing a gray business suit and carrying a Bible, said as he turned to face relatives of his victims. He added that he could not explain why he had misled them.

The 31-year-old defendant agreed to serve no more than 12 years in prison and do 75 years of probation following his release. He must also pay a fine of $20,000 and write letters of apology to the families of each of his 334 victims.

If convicted at a trial, he could have been sentenced to between one and 15 years in prison for each of the 787 criminal charges in the case. Cobb County Judge Jim Bodiford, who was appointed to hear the case, is expected to accept the deal after hearing from relatives of the victims early in 2005.

Marsh, who operated the Tri-State Crematory in nearby Noble, Ga., on behalf of his aging parents, was arrested in February 2002 after a local resident stumbled upon decaying corpses in the woods near the crematory.

A total of 334 uncremated bodies were found during a grisly search of the surrounding grounds.

Investigators suspected that Tri-State, which had been in business for about 30 years and did business with funeral homes in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee, was forgoing cremations and passing off wood chips and other substances, including powdered cement, as human ashes to families.

Walker County District Attorney Buzz Franklin, the lead prosecutor, said on Friday that Marsh had begun deceiving funeral homes and the families sometime in 1997 and continued to forego cremations up until the time of his arrest.

Franklin and defense lawyers would not comment on the plea deal because of a gag order issued by an earlier judge in the case. Some relatives of those who were found at Tri-State angrily denounced the compromise.

"We didn't want a deal. We wanted it to go to trial," said Leatha Shropshire, who turned her back on Marsh when he apologized. The uncremated body of Shropshire's mother, Helen McKin, was found in a garage at Tri-State in February, 2002.

Relatives of the families have reached an $80 million settlement with the Marsh family.

Marsh also faced six felony charges of abuse of a corpse in Bradley County, Tennessee. As part of his agreement in Georgia, the two prison sentences will run concurrently.

    Source : R, 19.11.2004, http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=2UI2WAXHEVWIQCRBAEZSFFA?type=domesticNews&storyID=6872437, © Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

Idaho Residents

Seek Compensation

for Nuclear Tests

Sat Nov 6, 2004 07:00 PM ET

Reuters

By Martin Johncox

BOISE, Idaho (Reuters) - Dozens of Idaho residents who claim nuclear tests conducted during the 1950s made them sick asked a panel of scientists on Saturday to recommend that the U.S. government compensate them.

The group, who call themselves "the downwinders" in reference to the toxic clouds that the wind carried their way from test sites in Nevada, described how radioactive waste coated their farms and towns 50 years ago. They said they believe it caused many of them to get cancer.

"My father remembers fallout on the grass like dew. We were exposed to radiation for the national security interests of the United States," said Shari Garmon, 52, who survived thyroid cancer but has contracted breast, bone and liver cancer.

The U.S. government tested nuclear bombs in the Nevada desert during the Cold War through a series of 90 above-ground tests from 1951 to 1962. Wind blew radioactive clouds hundreds of miles to the north and east, coating crops and pastures. The downwinders say residents who ate those crops and drank local cow's milk risked bone, thyroid, gall bladder and other cancers. They argue young children were especially vulnerable because they drank more milk and had smaller thyroids.

Garmon said her fate was decided on June 5, 1952, when the government conducted one of its nuclear tests. Garmon was less than six months old. According to National Cancer Institute estimates, Garmon received the equivalent of 10,000 chest X-rays, or about as much radiation as a person would naturally receive in 750 years, on that single day.

In 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the Radiation Compensation Exposure Act (RECRA) to compensate cancer victims presumed to be injured by testing from nuclear bombs. That measure was expanded in 2000. Now, people in 21 counties in Utah, Nevada and Arizona who have contracted any of 19 cancers can receive $50,000 if they prove they lived in affected areas at the time of the testing.

Residents of Idaho, however, were not covered by the law. The National Academy of Sciences is now reviewing their claims and preparing a recommendation to Congress on whether to expand the law further to include Idaho.

"Our government knew about the harmful effects and planned to inflict this on us without our consent," said Jeannie Purkhart, who said many of her family members have had cancer and thyroid problems. "At age 17, surgeons removed my stomach, spleen and pancreas, which were ensnared in a massive tumor. I undergo surgery every four years to remove the advancing cancer."

Along with testimony from the downwinders, the National Academy of Sciences will weigh scientific studies and historical records to make a recommendation to Congress by June.

Members of Idaho's congressional delegation, who have been criticized for being slow to act and take up the cause of the downwinders, also attended the meeting.

Some critics claim the scientific studies linking the nuclear testing to cancer in many Idaho residents are inconclusive and suggest other people who were exposed to far higher doses of radiation never developed cancer.

    Source : R, 6.11.2004, http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=6735082 , © Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

1 113 militaires américains ont été tués en Irak depuis le début de la guerre, le 19 mars 2003. Les trois quarts l'ont été au combat. Plus de 8 000 ont été blessés.

1 sur 10
Sur 1,4 million de militaires de l'US Army, de la Navy et de l'Air Force, plus de 130 000 sont déployés sur le terrain irakien, soit un sur dix.

1,3 milliard de dollars par jour pour la défense. Les crédits du Pentagone s'élèvent à 466 milliards en 2004. Ce qui représente la moitié des dépenses militaires mondiales.

53 % des Américains pensent que la guerre en Irak n'a pas rendu le monde plus sûr, selon un sondage pour Newsweek. Mais 51 % (contre 40 %) considèrent que Bush est plus capable de gérer la situation en Irak que Kerry.

(...)

    A Savoir, Libération, 28.10.2004, http://www.liberation.com/page.php?Article=249543

Entretien
 

"Le néomessianisme

de cette administration

constitue une rupture radicale"

Sébastien Fath,

auteur de "Dieu bénisse l'Amérique".

Chercheur au CNRS, Sébastien Fath
vient de publier Dieu bénisse l'Amérique(Seuil)
et Militants de la Bible aux Etats-Unis (Autrement).

20.10.2004
Le Monde

Quelle est la mesure exacte du courant évangélique aux Etats-Unis ?

Les Américains sont unis autour de leur fameuse "religion civile", qui est une sorte de vivre ensemble. Avec cinq thématiques : l'héritage des Pères fondateurs ; la foi et la prière ; l'optimisme (l'Amérique, bénie de Dieu, ne peut pas échouer) ; l'individualisme ; enfin le messianisme : les Etats-Unis comme nouvelle Terre promise.

Mais cette "religion civile" n'est pas statique. Depuis les années 1960, la suprématie des Eglises protestantes historiques (presbytérienne, épiscopalienne, méthodiste, etc.) est battue en brèche par le protestantisme évangélique, qui se caractérise par l'accent mis sur la conversion, le rigorisme biblique et les fraternités électives.

Lointains héritiers des puritains du XVIIe siècle et des vagues de "réveils" protestants, les évangéliques sont dotés d'une assise populaire considérable : ils représentent 70 millions d'Américains. Pour eux, la solution passe d'abord par la régénération morale de l'individu : c'est pourquoi on les appelle "born-again Christians" (nés de nouveau).

Le président Bush, en bon Texan, sait flatter cet électorat fondamentaliste...

C'est dans ses rangs qu'est apparue la Nouvelle droite chrétienne à la fin des années 1970. Très conservatrice, elle constitue un soutien crucial pour George Bush, même si ses vieux leaders, Pat Robertson et Jerry Falwell, sont sur le déclin. Cette droite religieuse se retrouve dans un attachement à la démocratie locale, teintée de populisme (grassroot democracy), et dans l'idée que la société américaine ne va pas bien, rongée par la permissivité et le sécularisme. La seule solution est un "retour" à Dieu, par la repentance, l'interdiction de l'avortement et le retour de la prière à l'école. C'est surtout dans le Sud et le Midwest que leur discours fait recette.

Vous comparez souvent le messianisme républicain de George Bush à celui du président Wilson pendant la première guerre mondiale.

Pierre Hassner assimile même l'administration Bush à un " wilsonisme botté"! Ils sont tous deux idéalistes et missionnaires. Mais chez Woodrow Wilson, la mission de l'Amérique intègre l'idée d'une limite : l'Amérique n'est pas Dieu ! D'où l'importance du droit international, du multilatéralisme, qui a débouché sur la création de la Société des Nations (SDN).

Le messianisme de l'administration Bush n'intègre plus ce principe d'autolimitation. Il constitue une rupture radicale avec l'idéalisme universaliste d'un Wilson. Il n'a que faire du multilatéralisme. Pour Wilson, ce qui était bon pour le monde était bon pour l'Amérique. Pour Bush, ce qui est bon pour l'Amérique doit être bon pour le monde. Le messianisme de Bush se confond avec un nationalisme rarement égalé dans l'histoire américaine, doublé d'un populisme anti-establishment qui l'a conduit à défier l'ONU. Le Messie n'est plus un horizon, il devient l'Oncle Sam lui-même.

Est-ce un néomessianisme américain qui s'esquisse ?

Les signes d'un basculement n'ont jamais été aussi nombreux : politique unilatérale, manipulation d'une symbolique religieuse à des fins politiques, et même détournement de prérogatives divines. Deux exemples : l'opération en Afghanistan a d'abord été nommée "Infinite Justice" (Justice infinie). Richard Perle, gourou des néoconservateurs, a publié cette année avec David Frum un ouvrage intitulé Une fin au Mal !

Quant au président, il se substitue aux professionnels du religieux dans la fonction de grand prêtre de la religion civile américaine. La politique ne gère plus le domaine du relatif, elle s'absolutise. C'est dans ce déclin du principe d'autolimitation qui veut que l'Amérique n'est pas Dieu que s'engouffre ce néomessianisme de Bush.

Contrairement aux apparences, cette idéologie est découplée du christianisme. L'habileté de G. W. Bush parvient à le masquer, aidée par la psychose post-11-Septembre qui soude les Eglises dans un réflexe patriotique. Mais le décalage est perceptible : on l'a vu avant la guerre contre l'Irak, où les Eglises avaient constitué la principale force d'opposition au conflit.

Quel est l'avenir de ce néomessianisme ?

Les conséquences du 11 septembre 2001 ont ouvert une avenue aux apprentis sorciers du néomessianisme. Un des lobbies néoconservateurs les plus puissants aujourd'hui s'intitule Project for a New American Century ! Une ambition aussi totalisante peut s'avérer explosive, mais les capacités de régulation de la société américaine sont considérables.

Les prétentions néomessianiques se heurtent aussi au choc du réel, on le voit en Irak. L'Oncle Sam doit composer avec les autres et l'Europe a là un rôle essentiel à jouer. Elle a connu deux messianismes, le marxisme et le nazisme, dépourvus de ce principe d'autolimitation qui est la marque du christianisme. Ils ont conduit le monde au bord du chaos. Les Etats-Unis n'en sont pas là, mais quand Bush affirme en conférence de presse qu'il va "changer le monde", il rappelle aux Européens de mauvais souvenirs.

    Propos recueillis par Henri Tincq, Le Monde, 20.10.2004, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3222,36-383543,0.html

Les évangéliques :

La secte qui veut conquérir le monde

Semaine du jeudi 26 février 2004
Le Nouvel Observateur

C’est le courant religieux qui progresse le plus vite aujourd’hui. Ils sont déjà 500 millions qui croient à l’Armageddon, la bataille finale et prochaine entre les forces du Bien et du Mal. Ils s’appuient sur la télévision, internet, les jeux vidéo ou les romans de science-fiction pour convertir en masse. George W. Bush, comme nombre de ses ministres et conseillers, partage leur vision messianique du monde et de l’avenir. Jusqu’à l’extrême?



Les croisés de l’Apocalypse

Que faire contre un homme qui dispose d’une ligne directe avec le Tout-Puissant? Qui s’estime investi d’une mission divine? Qui croit que l’apocalypse est proche? Que dire quand cet homme est le président des Etats-Unis? A la fin de l’hiver 2003, quelques semaines avant la guerre d’Irak, George W. Bush tente une dernière fois de ranger le président français à ses arguments, de le convaincre d’admettre enfin que la cause est juste et l’opération Liberté pour l’Irak la volonté de Dieu. Pas moins. Tout à sa démonstration, Bush junior fustige les « Etats voyous », stigmatise l’«axe du Mal», évoque Gog et Magog. Gog et Magog? Jacques Chirac en reste coi, sidéré par l’énigmatique référence. Un conseiller de l’Elysée, prié de décrypter la citation en vitesse, finit par trouver la réponse auprès de la Fédération protestante de France. Il s’entend dire qu’à la Fin des Temps, selon le prophète Ezéchiel, Gog et Magog déferleront de Babylone sur Israël. Or Gog et Magog sont l’incarnation des forces du Mal, et Babylone, qui se dresse dans les environs de Bagdad, a été restaurée par... Saddam Hussein!

L’homme le plus puissant du monde n’est ni un exégète de haut vol ni un fou. C’est tout simplement un fidèle d’une curieuse Eglise, protestante, expansionniste, millénariste et apocalyptique. George Bush est un Born Again Christian, littéralement un chrétien né une deuxième fois. Les Born Again Christians sont l’un des mouvements qui composent les très dynamiques et très prospères Evangelical Churches of Jesus Christ, dont les adeptes sont appelés «évangéliques» (1). Ces Eglises, qui par de nombreux aspects évoquent une fédération de sectes, entendent convertir l’Amérique avant de conquérir le monde! Ni plus ni moins. Avec un homme comme Bush à la Maison-Blanche, elles tiennent déjà un bon début.
Publicité

La doctrine évangélique, dont la terre d’élection reste l’Amérique, est aujourd’hui le courant religieux qui progresse le plus dans le monde depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Au détriment de l’Eglise catholique, des Eglises protestantes historiques (baptistes, méthodistes) et même de l’islam. Les chiffres décrivant cet essor colossal donnent le tournis: de 4 millions en 1940 - sur un total de 560millions de chrétiens -, les évangéliques sont aujourd’hui 500 millions, néopentecôtistes et charismatiques confondus, sur 2 milliards de chrétiens, soit un sur quatre! On estime que 52000conversions se produisent par jour. Déjà, il existe 14000dénominations évangéliques, comprenant 1million d’églises qu’animent 1million de pasteurs à plein temps. Harvey Cox, professeur de théologie à Harvard et auteur du «Retour de Dieu. Voyage en pays pentecôtiste» (Desclée de Brouwer), prédit que le courant évangélique devrait toucher, à l’horizon 2050, un disciple du Christ sur deux et qu’il deviendra la religion dominante du xxiesiècle. Les Born Again Christians, quant à eux, s’appellent ainsi parce qu’ils doivent leur conversion, leur seconde naissance, non point à un baptême classique mais à un contact direct, à une rencontre «d’homme à homme, d’homme à Dieu» avec Jésus.

Jésus, George W. Bush l’a rencontré à l’âge de 40 ans, quand il buvait trop, beaucoup trop même, et que sa vie partait à vau-l’eau. Le révérend Billy Graham, le «pape évangélique», a servi d’ambassadeur au Christ et de traducteur au futur président. Celui-ci a cessé de boire et changé de vie. Renaître en Christ lui a donné des ailes et lui a assuré des alliés qui lui ont permis d’accéder au poste de gouverneur du Texas puis à la Maison-Blanche. De là il peut affirmer qu’il se fixe pour objectif de «promouvoir une vision biblique du monde».

Mal élu par les électeurs, George W. Bush n’en passe pas moins pour l’élu de Dieu aux yeux des évangéliques américains - dont il a réussi à capter les trois quarts des suffrages. Mi-janvier encore, le pasteur Pat Robertson, fondateur de la puissante Christian Coalition et ex-patron de la chaîne évangélique The Family Channel, annonce: «J’entends Dieu me dire que l’élection en 2004 sera une explosion.» Et que «George W. Bush gagnera facilement. Peu importe ce qu’il fait, bien ou mal, Dieu le soutient car c’est un homme pieux et Dieu le bénit». Auteur d’un manifeste au titre éloquent, «The New World Order», le révérend met en exergue la vocation messianique de l’Amérique en estimant qu’«il n’y aura jamais de paix mondiale avant que la maison de Dieu et le peuple de Dieu n’assument leur rôle de leadership à la tête du monde» (voir p. 22). Cette conviction tranquille, et souvent sincère, d’une «destinée manifeste» de l’Amérique entretient un véritable prurit prosélyte, un désir de convertir autrui. Ainsi le courant évangélique, qui englobe déjà 70millions d’Américains, soit un citoyen sur quatre, s’exporte aussi facilement que le fast-food, le Coca ou le rap, et s’enracine partout, de l’Amérique latine au Japon en passant par l’Afrique, l’Europe, la Russie, l’Inde, la Chine... Il s’enhardit même à investir avec force l’univers islamique, ultime zone de mission.

L’enjeu saute aux yeux: l’Amérique, berceau et terre d’élection de la doctrine évangélique, en serait donc La Mecque. Washington, à l’origine, n’est-elle pas la «ville illuminée sur la colline», la Nouvelle Jérusalem, la Sion du Nouveau Monde? La Maison-Blanche suit avec un grand intérêt l’expansion des Eglises évangéliques. Un bureau spécial, sorte d’observatoire officiel de la liberté des cultes à travers le monde, édite chaque année un annuaire de la «persécution» des religions, où voisinent parmi les oppresseurs l’Arabie Saoudite, la Russie, la Chine et la France, tous coupables de «sévir» contre des obédiences évangéliques.

Rien de tel en Amérique latine, continent où vit un catholique sur deux et où les Eglises évangéliques prolifèrent sur des terres interdites aux protestants jusqu’au milieu du xixesiècle. Le mouvement de néo-évangélisation commence vers 1970. C’est l’âge d’or de la théologie de la libération, ce courant catholique marxisant et opposant résolu, y compris par les armes, aux impérialistes yankees. Et pourtant, l’Amérique centrale se laisse gagner par les partisans de la «libération de la théologie» - c’est ainsi que se présente le courant évangélique. Le Guatemala élit ainsi Rios Montt à la tête de l’Etat. Pasteur de l’Eglise du Verbe de Dieu, ce président très croyant n’hésitera pourtant pas à décimer des milliers de paysans indiens.

Le pape Jean-Paul II, à peine élu, met à l’index la théologie de la libération et écarte peu à peu les évêques «rouges» au profit de prélats conservateurs. Mû par la volonté d’abattre le rideau de fer, le souverain pontife conclut un pacte avec le président - évangélique - Ronald Reagan, qui accepte en retour, courant 1984, d’établir enfin des relations diplomatiques avec le Saint-Siège. Les courants évangéliques en profitent pour essaimer d’un bout à l’autre du continent américain grâce au zèle missionnaire de milliers d’étudiants américains Born Again parlant, outre l’espagnol ou le portugais, le guarani, l’aymara, le tupi. «Il s’agit, annonce alors Ben Armstrong, le directeur exécutif des Télévisions religieuses nationales américaines, de conquérir un territoire bien défini pour le Christ: l’Amérique latine. La télévision est notre force aérienne, tous les convertis qui vont de maison en maison forment notre infanterie.» Et il émet le voeu de «voir tout le monde uni par le satellite, comme l’annonce l’Apocalypse XIV, 6». Plus d’un prélat latino croit y déceler l’oeuvre de la CIA.
Ainsi aura-t-il suffi d’un quart de siècle de mission évangélique pour que l’Amérique latine, pourtant colonisée au nom de la Contre-Réforme, se laisse détourner de l’Eglise catholique. Déjà un Chilien sur quatre est un Born Again. Quant au Brésil, il n’est plus seulement la plus grande nation catholique, il est devenu également le deuxième pays évangélique, juste après les Etats-Unis (voir p. 26). A tel point que, lors du dernier scrutin électoral, même le très papiste Lula da Silva a dû solliciter les suffrages des groupes néopentecôtistes. Y compris ceux de l’Eglise universelle du Règne de Dieu ou l’Universal, dont le fondateur, Edir Macedo, un ancien employé de la Loterie nationale, fait l’objet de procès pour corruption et fraude fiscale. Le Sénat brésilien compte aujourd’hui 60 députés - sur 512 - issus d’Eglises évangéliques!

Et désormais le Brésil, avec 30 millions de convertis, «rivalise» avec les Etats-Unis pour diffuser la «bonne nouvelle» évangélique. Surtout en Afrique ex-portugaise - Angola, Cap-Vert, Guinée-Bissau, Mozambique -, où l’Universal recrute à tour de bras. Au Congo, en Afrique du Sud, au Bénin, au Burkina, les sectes néopentecôtistes dament le pion à leurs homologues islamistes. Elles en viennent de plus en plus aux mains (armées, le plus souvent!), causant des centaines de morts, comme au nord du Nigeria. En Côte d’Ivoire, une garde rapprochée d’évangéliques conseille et soutient le chef de l’Etat, Laurent Gbagbo.
Le Maghreb n’échappe pas non plus au zèle évangélique. Environ 150missionnaires «travaillent» au Maroc, selon un responsable de l’archevêché catholique de Rabat. En Algérie, le mouvement est encore plus visible: des Eglises néoprotestantes ont déjà pignon sur rue. Des pasteurs étrangers, français, égyptiens ou jordaniens se rendent souvent en visite pastorale, surtout en Grande Kabylie. Au grand dam de la presse locale, qui s’étonne non seulement d’une telle liberté de mouvement mais aussi de l’impunité dont jouissent les convertis auprès des islamistes, aux yeux de qui ils sont pourtant des apostats passibles, selon la charia, de la peine de mort.

Faut-il expliquer cette étonnante indulgence de la part de l’Etat et des barbus par la protection qu’apporte Washington aux Eglises évangéliques? Quoi qu’il en soit, la Maison de l’Islam - désignation classique du monde islamique - fait l’objet d’une véritable stratégie de conquête des âmes. Ainsi l’Université internationale Columbia, en Caroline du Sud, forme-t-elle des missionnaires de choc. Leur objectif? «Liquider l’islam», si l’on en croit l’imposant dossier que leur consacre, mi-2002, le mensuel américain «Mother Jones». 3000 Born Again relevant de la Convention des Baptistes du Sud - l’unique Eglise à avoir béni l’invasion de l’Irak, contraignant l’ex-président Jimmy Carter à la quitter - s’apprêtent à partir évangéliser des musulmans chez eux, et assument de bonne grâce le risque d’y mourir en martyrs. En Irak, la Convention entretient une ONG évangélique, la Samaritan’s Purse, que parraine le pasteur Franklin Graham, fils du célèbre Billy Graham. Elle y diffuse, entre autres, une Bible dont la couverture imite l’uniforme des GI : un lot de 50000 exemplaires aurait déjà trouvé preneur.

De quoi conforter la croyance de George W. Bush en la vocation messianique de l’Amérique. Lorsqu’il clame, au lendemain du 11septembre, que «l’Amérique doit diriger le monde» , il ne réagit pas par orgueil écorné, il réaffirme le credo essentiel du catéchisme national américain: celui de la «destinée manifeste». Un concept dont un sénateur de l’Indiana, Albert Beveridge, résumait déjà l’esprit conquérant lorsqu’il déclarait fin 1898 - l’année où Washington boute manu militari la très catholique Espagne hors de Cuba et des Philippines: «Dieu a fait des Américains les maîtres organisateurs du monde afin d’instituer l’ordre là où règne le chaos.»

Le chaos. C’est ce que prévoit Philip Jenkins, auteur d’un ouvrage impertinent sur le phénomène évangélique, «la Prochaine Chrétienté» («The Next Christendom»). Prenant acte du basculement du centre de gravité de la chrétienté de l’Occident au tiers-monde, du Nord développé et libéral vers le Sud pauvre et conservateur, il craint une cassure radicale entre chrétiens postmodernes et néochrétiens ayant renoué, croyances folkloriques aidant, avec l’Eglise du Moyen Age. Pis encore, ces néochrétiens, en proie à la misère, aux passions nationalistes, tribales et messianiques, et qui vivent au milieu de catholiques, d’hindouistes ou de musulmans - au Pérou, au Mexique, en Inde, en Indonésie, au Nigeria, au Soudan, aux Philippines -, ne manqueront pas d’entrer tôt ou tard en guerre totale contre leurs voisins. L’Occident n’y échappera pas non plus, conclut le chercheur, car il incarnera la nouvelle Babylone, la «prostituée» dont l’Apocalypse de saint Jean considère la destruction comme la condition sine qua non du retour de Jésus-Christ, le Messie attendu.


(1) «Evangéliques» et non évangélistes, comme Matthieu, Marc, Luc et Jean, les quatre disciples du Christ qui ont écrit les Evangiles.

    Slimane Zeghidour, Le Nouvel Observateur, Semaine du jeudi 26 février 2004 - n°2051 - Dossier, http://www.nouvelobs.com/dossiers/p2051/a233849.html

Glossaire

Evangélique. Terme générique désignant une floraison d’obédiences néoprotestantes se réclamant d’un courant «revivaliste» - volonté de «réveiller» des chrétiens assoupis - apparu il y a un siècle au sein du protestantisme anglo-américain.

Armageddon (de l’hébreu Har Megiddo, le «mont de Megiddo» en français). Le livre de l’Apocalypse de saint Jean ainsi que la tradition islamique y situent le combat eschatologique, l’ultime confrontation des forces du Bien contre les légions du Mal, prélude à la conversion des juifs et à l’instauration du millenium.

Millenium. Croyance fortement valorisée par les évangéliques selon laquelle le règne de mille ans du Christ glorieux et ressuscité se réalisera sur terre, de manière visible.

Pentecôtisme. Courant néoprotestant né au début du xxe siècle aux Etats-Unis. Au nom d’un retour aux sources de la Bible, il met l’accent sur le don divin miraculeux - la «rencontre» avec Jésus-Christ -, la guérison par la prière, l’engagement volontaire du croyant. Il donnera naissance, au milieu du siècle, au courant charismatique.

Charismatique. Empruntant au courant pentecôtiste la croyance aux dons miraculeux, il se caractérise par de vibrantes réunions de prière avec des orchestres, y compris de rock ou de rap «évangélique», des pleurs, des transes, des exorcismes publics, des impositions des mains, des guérisons miraculeuses, un grand dévouement aux autres, une disponibilité constante au service de l’Eglise. Un courant charismatique catholique se développe, avec l’aval de Rome, qui y voit un moyen efficace d’endiguer la marée évangélique.

     Slimane Zeghidour, Le Nouvel Observateur, Semaine du jeudi 26 février 2004 - n°2051 - Dossier,
    http://www.nouvelobs.com/dossiers/p2051/a233849.html

Marginaux il y a cinquante ans,

70 millions aujourd’hui

Une Amérique chrétienne

pour sauver le monde

Semaine du jeudi 26 février 2004
Le Nouvel Observateur

Universités, télévisions, sites internet, journaux, livres, tracts: les évangéliques et leurs pasteurs vedettes disposent de grands moyens pour convertir l’Amérique et la planète entière

De notre envoyée spéciale en Virginie

Vinson Synan est un homme très occupé. Il rentre à l’instant d’une conférence à Kiev avant de s’envoler pour Mexico et Santiago. Et dire que, petit, on le traitait de fils de «cinglé» parce que son père prêchait jour et nuit au nom d’une étrange Eglise appelée «pentecôtiste». C’était il y a un peu plus d’un demi-siècle. Dans ce coin de Virginie, berceau de l’Amérique, les autres chrétiens les méprisaient. «Une bande de marginaux», ricanaient-ils... Ils ont cessé de rire. Aujourd’hui, le pays compte plus de 70 millions d’évangéliques, et le mouvement gagne des fidèles partout. «Les églises sont vides et nous, on est en passe de conquérir le monde», dit Vinson.

Vinson Synan a des cheveux gris, de tout petits yeux prêts à lancer des flammes. Pasteur comme son père, il dirige la School of Divinity de Regent University, à Virginia Beach, au sud de Washington. Créée en 1978 au moment où les évangéliques se décident à investir la scène politique, l’université a pour vocation de «former des leaders chrétiens pour changer la société». 77 au départ, ils sont plus de 3 000 étudiants aujourd’hui, qui suivent des masters (à 45 000 dollars) en communication, en économie, en droit... Deux ou trois ans d’études pour apprendre à servir le Christ et l’Amérique. De son bureau, Vinson Synan admire cette école divine nichée dans les bois. Jardins, salle de gym, campus tout en moquette, en lustres, en technologie dernier cri. «Et regardez: avec ça, on en fait, des miracles.» Ça, c’est la tour de télévision, qui trône au milieu de l’université. Diffusée dans 180 pays, CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) a pour mission de «préparer l’Amérique et le monde au retour de Jésus-Christ», selon son fondateur, Pat Robertson.

Tous les Américains connaissent Pat, le papy illuminé qui en a toujours une bonne à balancer. Il veut faire exploser le Département d’Etat, il prie pour chasser les juges libéraux de la Cour suprême, il entend Dieu lui annoncer la réélection de Bush. Candidat à la candidature républicaine à la présidence en 1988, fondateur de la Christian Coalition, le télévangéliste habite au cœur du campus. Chaque matin, il part enregistrer son émission, «le 700 Club», un million de fans rien qu’aux Etats-Unis... Bientôt la fin du monde avant le retour du Christ, il est temps de sauver cette société décadente, de convertir les impies, de nettoyer le pays de tous ces homos, ces féministes, ces libéraux...

Loin de Virginia Beach, des centaines d’autres voix lancent la même croisade. Ce sont TD Jakes, le charismatique pasteur noir de Dallas, James Robinson, l’allumé de «Life Today», James Dobson, le bon vieux doc’ antiporno de la radio, ou encore John Hagee, le pasteur déchaîné de Cornerstone Church. Avec ses 17 000 fidèles, celui-là vend sur 120 stations de télé et de radio des CD, des croisières aux Caraïbes et toujours le même refrain: «Quand Jésus gouvernera Jérusalem, il n’y aura plus d’avortement, plus de divorce, plus d’enfants sans père!» Il y a encore le pasteur Tim Lahaye, dont les thrillers apocalyptiques se sont vendus à plus de 60 millions d’exemplaires... «Time» s’interrogeait récemment: «Pourquoi tant d’Américains parlent de la Fin des Temps?»

La machine évangélique n’a ni organisation unique, ni porte-parole. Elle est faite d’individus isolés qui œuvrent avec leurs fidèles, leurs sites internet, leurs écrits, leurs écoles... Comme le dit Vinson Synan, le guerrier de Regent: «On n’est pas concurrents, on travaille tous dans le même sens.»

Ils n’ont qu’un rêve: recréer une Amérique chrétienne. Dans un pays où plus de 90% de la population croit en Dieu... tout est possible. «Regardez, il y a trente ans, on n’était rien, explique Pat Robertson. Maintenant on contrôle une bonne partie du Parti républicain, on a un Born Again Christian à la Maison-Blanche, un autre à la tête du Congrès...» Ajoutons le machiavélique Karl Rove, le plus proche conseiller du président, et aussi les ministres: Gale Norton à l’Intérieur, Tommy Thompson à la Santé, ou John Ashcroft, l’homme convaincu que «nous avons Jésus pour roi», à la Justice. Ralph Reed, le jeune prodige Born Again de Géorgie, ancien directeur de la Christian Coalition, dirige la campagne 2004 de Bush. L’ex-juif communiste Martin Olavski, passé lui aussi par la re-naissance en Jésus, a convaincu son ami George de redonner du pouvoir aux associations religieuses...

Par conviction, ou simple calcul politique, l’équipe de Bush soigne ses amis évangéliques, qui représenteraient aujourd’hui près du tiers de l’électorat républicain. Quand George junior promet de soutenir le mariage et d’inciter les ados à l’abstinence, c’est pour eux. Quand il promet de modifier la Constitution pour bannir à tout jamais l’idée du mariage gay, c’est encore pour eux... S’il ne va pas assez loin, ou pas assez vite, les fidèles se rappellent à lui. Les chrétiens fondamentalistes se sont constitué au fil des ans une force de frappe efficace. La Christian Coalition revendique 2 millions d’adhérents. Elle orchestre un lobbying considérable dans les Etats, au sein du Parti républicain, et à Washington. Au programme: lutte contre l’avortement, le clonage et les droits des homosexuels, et défense des associations religieuses et d’Israël, la nouvelle grande cause des évangéliques (voir encadré). En 2000 elle a distribué 70 millions de livrets pour guider les électeurs... A ses côtés, on trouve des dizaines d’associations et de cellules de réflexion comme American Values, le Family Research Council ou l’American Center for Law and Justice. Mené par l’ultrabrillant Jay Sekulaw, ce groupe d’une quarantaine d’avocats travaille sans relâche pour abattre la cloison entre l’Eglise et l’Etat. C’est lui, par exemple, qui lutte pour l’enseignement de la Bible et du créationnisme dans les écoles.

Pour ces néosoldats de Dieu, le 11 septembre a révélé l’urgence du combat: le déchaînement de Dieu sur les tours babyloniennes est à la mesure du degré de dépravation de la nation. Quand le World Trade fumait encore, Jerry Falwell, l’influent pasteur de l’ex-Moral Majority, tonnait, sur CBN: «A force de tuer 40 millions de bébés innocents, à force de rejeter Dieu des écoles… on l’a rendu fou.» Il faut sauver l’Amérique pour qu’elle puisse à son tour sauver le monde… Car la frappe terroriste du 11 septembre est aussi à leurs yeux une attaque contre la chrétienté, première étape décisive avant la lutte finale. Du haut de sa School of Divinity, Vinson Synan l’affirme: «Les musulmans, c’est la grande bataille des temps modernes. Ils tuent des chrétiens dans le monde entier et sont extrêmement prolifiques. Vous allez voir la France dans dix ans...»

Tous les évangéliques ne sont pas aussi véhéments. Mais la haine, ou tout au moins la crainte de l’islam, suinte partout, et pas seulement dans les églises. En juin 2003, un des plus hauts responsables du Pentagone, le général Boykin, a déclaré: «On ne battra Saddam et Ben Laden que si l’on combat au nom de Jésus.»

L’évangélisation du monde a toujours fait partie du programme. Mais depuis le 11 septembre et «le galop des chevaux de l’Armageddon qui résonne», comme le clame le pasteur John Hagee, il est urgent d’agir. Sur internet, des dizaines d’associations tentent de pousser les fidèles à partir et, si possible, en terre musulmane. Sauver l’homme de cette «religion perverse et diabolique». Ce sont les mots de Franklin Graham, fils du célébrissime Billy qui a converti Bush en 1986. Le fiston, qui prêche régulièrement au Pentagone, envoie des milliers de Bibles en Irak grâce à son association humanitaire. A Bagdad, d’étranges pasteurs proposent aux soldats de les protéger s’ils acceptent de se faire baptiser. Le site de Campus Crusade International incite à aller distribuer des RDK (Rapid Deployment Kit) avec petit Nouveau Testament «dans un sac waterproof à glisser dans la poche d’un uniforme»… Des universités, comme Columbia University en Caroline du Sud, forment les nouveaux missionnaires. Elles organisent des sessions pour acquérir les «bonnes techniques de persuasion» et apprendre à se fondre dans la culture musulmane. Regent, elle, ne prévoit pas de formations spéciales. Pas nécessaire, assure Vinson Synan: «Les élèves qui veulent partir sont suffisamment motivés.»

Gina partira un jour, c’est sûr. Dès qu’elle aura fini son master de business à Regent. Réfugiée à la cafétéria avec une pile de livres, cette liane aux longs cheveux parle encore et encore… de Dieu. C’est lui qui la guide depuis l’âge de 6 ans, lui encore qui lui a dit d’étudier ici et d’aller bientôt «apporter la foi et la joie au monde». «Au pire, je gagne une vie éternelle avec mon grand amour.» Gina n’a peur de rien. Dans sa paroisse de l’Ohio, on l’a toujours appelée le «missionary missile».

    Sophie des Deserts, Le Nouvel Observateur, Semaine du jeudi 26 février 2004 - n°2051 - Dossier, http://www.nouvelobs.com/dossiers/p2051/a233852.html

Pour le Grand Israël
Les évangélistes proclament
que tous les juifs doivent revenir en Israël...
et se convertir !

Coïncidence ou choix délibéré de calendrier? Le 12 octobre 2003, au moment même où des pacifistes israéliens et palestiniens, réunis en Jordanie, mettent l’ultime touche à l’«accord de Genève», un aréopage d’évangéliques américains et de «likoudniks» israéliens ouvre, sous les auspices du néoconservateur Richard Perle, un Sommet de Jérusalem. «Israël est la solution morale au totalitarisme oriental et au relativisme occidental, déclarent-ils, il est le "Ground Zero" de la bataille centrale de notre civilisation.»

Les évangéliques attribuent un rôle décisif aux juifs et à l’Etat d’Israël dans le projet divin pour la fin des temps. Pour eux, le retour du Messie n’interviendra qu’à la condition sine qua non que tous les juifs retournent en Terre sainte. Aussi financent-ils l’immigration à Sion, parrainent-ils des colonies et défendent-ils à Washington le projet du Grand Israël. «Dieu a donné la terre d’Israël au peuple juif, plaide Gary Bauer, l’étoile montante de la Christian Coalition. Ni l’ONU, ni l’Europe, ni la Russie, ni quelque quartette ou trio que ce soit ne peut décider du sort de ce pays.» Mais ce n’est pas tout: une fois Jésus-Christ de retour en Terre sainte, les juifs pourront se racheter en le reconnaissant, enfin, comme leur Messie! Faute de quoi ils seront anéantis à jamais. «Ils n’aiment pas les juifs, s’indigne l’écrivain israélo-américain Gershom Gorenberg, auteur de "la Fin des temps". La doctrine évangélique du salut est une pièce en cinq actes où les juifs disparaissent au cinquième.»

    Slimane Zeghidour, Le Nouvel Observateur, Semaine du jeudi 26 février 2004 - n°2051 - Dossier, http://www.nouvelobs.com/dossiers/p2051/a233852.html

Surtout, aux yeux des électeurs, il [George W. Bush] est le premier président depuis 1930 à finir son mandat dans une Amérique qui compte moins de jobs qu'à son arrivée au pouvoir. La perte est de 600 000, et, même si le taux de chômage reste bas, à 5,4 %, le thème des disparitions d'emplois et des délocalisations occupe les journaux et les esprits.

C'est le cas, en particulier, dans la douzaine d'"Etats en balance" (swing states), où l'élection va se jouer. Beaucoup d'entre eux, comme l'Ohio, sont dans les régions de vieille industrie, la "rust belt", où l'électeur est à la peine.

(...)

Autre point négatif : les salaires. Le revenu médian net des ménages (43 000 dollars) a reculé de 1 500 dollars de 2000 à 2003, soit de 3,4 %, malgré la croissance. Ces chiffres donnent du poids aux critiques des démocrates d'un Bush qui a privilégié les riches.

Dernière faiblesse du candidat sortant : la sécurité sociale. Aux Etats-Unis, la couverture maladie est payée par le particulier ou par son entreprise. Or, avec l'augmentation rapide du coût des soins et des cotisations (+ 60 % en quatre ans), beaucoup d'employeurs refusent maintenant de cotiser, et nombres d'Américains n'ont pas les moyens de s'assurer seuls. Conséquence : 45 millions de ménages n'ont pas de couverture santé.

    John Kerry ou le retour de la gauche classique, Eric Le Boucher, Le Monde, p. 24, 17/18.10.2004, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3208,36-383335,0.html

Le Monde        27.8.2004

Près de 36 millions d'Américains

vivent sous le seuil de pauvreté

27.8.2004
Le Monde

Pour la troisième année consécutive, leur nombre a augmenté. En 2003, 1,3 million de personnes de plus ont basculé dans la précarité.

Pour la troisième année consécutive, le nombre d'Américains vivant dans la pauvreté et sans couverture sociale a augmenté en 2003. Selon les chiffres officiels publiés, jeudi 26 août, par le Census Bureau américain (service du recensement), le taux officiel de la population américaine vivant dans la pauvreté est passé de 12,1 % en 2002 à 12,5 % en 2003, faisant basculer 1,3 million de personnes supplémentaires dans l'extrême précarité.

Au total, ce sont 35,9 millions d'Américains qui vivent désormais dansla pauvreté. Le taux de pauvreté a augmenté tous les ans depuis 2000 où il atteignait 11,3 %, proche de son plus bas niveau historique de 11,1 % atteint en 1973.

Les plus touchées sont les femmes dont les revenus ont, pour la première fois, décliné depuis 1999, et les enfants. A la fin de 2003, les enfants étaient 12,9 millions à vivre dans la pauvreté. Ils représentent désormais 17,6 % du total (contre 16,7 % en 2002).

PRIVÉ D'ASSURANCE-SANTÉ

De 2002 à 2003, le nombre de personnes ne bénéficiant pas d'une couverture santé a augmenté à 45 millions, 15,6 % de la population (contre 15,2 %) en 2003. Les adultes blancs, notamment dans les Etats du Sud, représentent la majeure partie de cette augmentation du nombre des exclus du système de santé. La proportion de personnes bénéficiant d'une assurance-santé grâce à leur employeur a chuté de 61,3 % 60,4 %, en 2003. C'est le taux le plus bas enregistré depuis une décennie.

L'enquête relève une hausse spectaculaire de la pauvreté parmi les enfants et les adolescents. Quelque 12,9 millions des moins de 18 ans vivaient au-dessous du seuil de la pauvreté en 2003, soit 17,6 % de cette classe d'âge. Cela représente environ 800 000 jeunes de plus qu'en 2002, date à laquelle le taux s'élevait à 16,7 %.

Le taux de pauvreté chez les Noirs est environ deux fois plus élevé que dans la totalité de la population américaine, avec 24,4 % de Noirs vivant sous le seuil de pauvreté. Cette proportion ne s'est cependant pas aggravée en 2003.

En revanche, le pourcentage d'Asiatiques vivant dans la pauvreté a augmenté de près de 2 % en 2003. Pour être considérée comme pauvre, une famille de quatre personnes doit disposer d'un revenu annuel ne dépassant pas 18 810 dollars. Le seuil de pauvreté est fixé à 9 393 dollars pour une personne seule.

Cette tendance à l'aggravation de la situation de la population américaine illustre la manière dont les Etats-Unis ont absorbé la récession de 2001. Les effets du ralentissement de l'économie avaient dans un premier temps touché les familles à revenu élevé. Ils se sont désormais diffusé, avec retard, dans la classe moyenne et les plus démunis. Malgré le rebond de la croissance, le revenu moyen des ménages n'a pas bougé en 2003, à 43 000 dollars. Mais les inégalités entre riches et pauvres se sont accrues après avoir chuté en 2002. Selon les statistiques, la pauvreté s'est accrue plus brutalement dans les familles monoparentales.

Pour Dan Weinberg, du Service du recensement, ces chiffres sont typiques d'une économie qui a traversé la récession. Il souligne cependant que le nombre d'Américains ne bénéficiant pas d'assurance-santé reflétait une incertitude sur le front de l'emploi.

Les chiffres du Census Bureau, dont la publication a été avancée d'un mois en raison de l'élection présidentielle, est du pain bénit pour John Kerry, qui ne cesse d'affirmer que l'administration Bush a toujours favorisé les nantis au détriment de la classe moyenne et des familles les plus pauvres.

Dès l'étude connue, M. Kerry a déclaré qu'elle était l'illustration de la faillite de la politique de George Bush. "Pendant que George Bush essaie de convaincre les familles américaines que nous voyons le bout du tunnel, les slogans et un discours creux ne peuvent cacher la réalité. Sous le mandat de George Bush, 4,3 millions de personnes sont tombées dans la pauvreté et 5,32 millions ont perdu leur assurance-santé", a affirmé le candidat démocrate.

UN ENJEU DE CAMPAGNE

La réaction de l'équipe de campagne de George Bush ne s'est pas fait attendre, à la veille de l'ouverture de la convention républicaine. "Le programme de John Kerry pour une hausse d'impôts, une hausse des dépenses de l'Etat et une plus grande réglementation sont les mauvaises recettes pour créer une Amérique plus riche et étendre le bénéfice d'une couverture maladie abordable", a estimé dans un communiqué Judd Gregg qui préside la commission sénatoriale sur la santé, l'éducation, le travail et les retraites.

George Bush, en campagne au Nouveau-Mexique, ne s'est pas exprimé sur le sujet. Le secrétaire au commerce, Don Evans, s'en est chargé, soulignant que le rapport du Census Bureau se référait "à des temps révolus où l'économie était particulièrement plus faible".

Selon les sondages d'opinion, les questions économiques devraient se montrer déterminantes lors de l'élection du 2 novembre.

    Babette Stern, Le Monde, 27.8.2004, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3222,36-376848,0.html

    Article corollaire : http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3222,36-376093,0.html

Rex Morgan M.D.        Woody Wilson and Graham Nolan        4.3.2005

http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/rmorgan/about.htm

The other planet

Aug 30th 2004
From The Economist Global Agenda

The number of Americans in poverty is rising, as is the number without health insurance. The best anti-poverty programme is a tight labour market. America still doesn’t have one

CONTRARY to popular belief, President George Bush’s campaign against terrorism is not the first time the United States has waged war on an abstract noun. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Then, as now, the administration had some trouble defining the enemy. The poverty line it eventually adopted, a line first drawn by Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration, remains in place today, adjusted for inflation, but otherwise scarcely altered. Two parents, bringing up two kids, are judged to be poor if they live on less than $18,660 a year (for an unencumbered individual under the age of 65, the threshold is $9,573). On Thursday August 26th, the Census Bureau revealed that 35.9m Americans, or 12.5% of the population, fell below this poverty line in 2003, 1.3m more than the year before.

Whatever crude logic it possessed at the time, the Orshansky poverty line is by now quite arbitrary. Its originator calculated the cost of meeting a family’s nutritional needs and then multiplied this figure by three, because families in that era spent about a third of their income on food. The Census Bureau does not repeat this exercise to determine today’s poverty line; it does not recalculate the cost of an adequate diet or remeasure the share of income spent on food. It simply adjusts Ms Orshansky’s figures for inflation. Thus today’s dollar thresholds do not tell us how much a family or individual needs to get by in today’s America; they simply restate the cost of feeding a family in the 1960s in today’s prices, and multiply it by three.

As the Census Bureau is the first to concede, the poverty line is not a “complete description of what people and families need to live”. A more complete description would show that poor families now spend a far bigger share of their budget on housing (nearly 33%, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics) than on food (just 13.2%). Child care, done for free by the mothers and grandmothers of the 1950s and 1960s, is now a big expense. Deducting this expense from the measured income of families would add 1.9m to the official poverty figure, according to estimates by Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas of the Brookings Institution.

But a better measure of poverty would also assess the various weapons the government deploys against it. The current measure ignores non-monetary benefits, such as food stamps. Nor does it count the earned income-tax credit, a benefit paid via the tax code to the working poor, which has become every policy wonk’s favourite way to redistribute money. The Census Bureau has already experimented with such measures, and is probably itching to finally retire the Orshansky line. But its political masters in the Office of Management and Budget may be nervous of any innovation that would raise the official poverty number. To the bureau, the poverty line may be a mere “statistical yardstick”, but to the administration, it is a political stick its opponents might use to beat it with.

But if the level of poverty is fairly arbitrary, changes in the level are quite telling. Poverty fell throughout the long economic expansion of the Clinton years, from 15.1% in 1993 to 11.3% in 2000. Particularly striking was the fall in poverty among single mothers and their families, from 35.6% (4.4m) in 1993 to 25.4% (3.3m) in 2000.

The bubble years were also a period of ferment in the country’s welfare laws. State handouts came with new strings and time limits attached. Single mothers were encouraged, often required, to work. In a 2000 study, Rebecca Blank, who once served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, concluded that welfare reform—both the state experiments of the early 1990s and the federal overhaul of 1996—reduced the poverty rate among female high-school dropouts by about 5 percentage points.

But the latest census figures show a partial reversal of these gains. Poverty among the households of single mothers has increased from 25.4% in 2000 to 28% in 2003. Child poverty has also increased. In retrospect it is clear that Mr Clinton signed his 1996 welfare reform at an auspicious time: the economy was creating jobs faster than people were being ousted from the welfare rolls; the states implementing the reforms were flush with cash. But as Congress now debates how to revamp and extend the law (the 1996 act was due to expire in 2002), all of these stars have fallen out of alignment.

Firms are reluctant to hire, and even when they do, they are loth to offer health insurance. Employer-sponsored health plans covered 1.3m fewer Americans last year than the year before. State governments are strapped for cash; as a result, they are cutting back on child-care assistance. Many welfare recipients are now close to using up all the months of help they are entitled to. Unfortunately, those who remained dependent on welfare when times were good are the least likely to get a job now that times are not so good.

Benjamin Disraeli, a 19th century British prime minister, likened the rich and the poor to “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were…inhabitants of different planets”. As a guide to the less fortunate of these two planets, the Census Bureau’s poverty figures are flawed and anachronistic. But they do show that welfare reform is not by itself enough. Unless the labour market tightens further this year, there will be many more Americans discovering the other planet for themselves in 2004.

    Source : Economist, 30.8.2004,  http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3146724

La fronde des gardiens des libertés

Le choc du 11 septembre s'éloignant, les juristes se mobilisent contre les menaces que fait peser sur les libertés publiques la "guerre contre le terrorisme" de l'administration Bush.

    Les rebelles de l'Amérique, Patrick Jarreau, Le Monde, 17.1.2004, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3230,36-349368,0.html 

L'amertume des cols bleus

Ouvriers sidérurgistes, ils ont fait la guerre de Corée et le Vietnam, ont vu les hauts-fourneaux fermer et leur retraite s'évaporer. Ils maudissent Bush, sa politique douanière et la mondialisation.

    Les rebelles de l'Amérique, Eric Leser, Le Monde, 16.1.2004, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3230,36-349215,0.html

Les branchés de Meet Up

Derrière l'ascension du candidat démocrate Howard Dean, il y a les jeunes de la high-tech qui mobilisent la base sans passer par les structures du parti.

    Les rebelles de l'Amérique, Corine Lesnes, Le Monde, 15.1.2004, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3230,36-349094,0.html

Les états d'âme de la réserve

Mobilisés en Irak et en Afghanistan, les militaires manifestent les premiers signes d'impatience et de lassitude. Les réservistes, surtout, qui ne s'attendaient pas à faire la guerre.

    Les rebelles de l'Amérique, Patrick Jarreau, Le Monde, 14.1.2004, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3230,36-348959,0.html

Ils détestent Bush

On les appelle les "Bush-haters". Ils ont leurs chantres, leurs best-sellers, leurs sites Internet, leur humour, leurs frustrations. Pourquoi tant de haine ?

    Les rebelles de l'Amérique, Sylvie Kauffmann, Le Monde, 13.1.2004, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3230,36-348808,0.html

George Bush

parvient à réformer l'assurance-santé

des personnes âgées,

au grand dam des démocrates

27.11.2003
Lemonde.fr

La loi permettra aux 40 millions d'Américains relevant du Medicare d'obtenir le remboursement partiel de leurs médicaments. Elle devrait coûter 400 milliards de dollars sur dix ans.

George Bush ne cachait pas sa satisfaction, mardi 25 novembre, d'avoir réussi à en remontrer aux démocrates sur leur propre terrain : le système de santé. Quelques heures après le vote, par le Sénat, de la loi sur la modernisation de l'assurance-santé pour les personnes âgées et les handicapés (Medicare), le président américain s'est adressé au personnel et aux pensionnaires de l'hôpital de Spring Valley, à Las Vegas. Il a évoqué une "réforme historique" et une "victoire majeure".

C'est la première réforme du programme Medicare depuis sa création, en 1965. Les démocrates ont régulièrement essayé d'améliorer la couverture sociale des Américains, à commencer par Hillary Clinton, il y a dix ans, mais sans succès. George Bush en avait fait une promesse électorale. La réforme a été votée à l'issue d'une féroce bataille parlementaire. Samedi, à la Chambre des représentants, le scrutin n'a pas été comptabilisé tant que les républicains n'avaient pas la majorité.

DÉBATS ACHARNÉS

A l'échelle du niveau de protection sociale aux Etats-Unis, la réforme est significative. Pour la première fois, les personnes âgées pourront obtenir le remboursement de leurs médicaments. Jusqu'à présent, les assurés du programme Medicare voyaient leurs frais de médecin ou d'hospitalisation couverts, mais pas les médicaments. Il fallait souscrire une assurance privée complémentaire. Un système parallèle d'achat de médicaments s'est développé avec le Canada, où ces produits sont moins chers, au point de provoquer des frictions entre les deux pays.

Selon le nouveau système, les assurés devront verser une cotisation de 35 dollars par mois. Ils devront payer eux-mêmes les premières factures à concurrence de 250 dollars. Au-delà, ils commenceront à être remboursés mais seulement à 75 % (et jusqu'à 2 250 dollars). Si on le compare à l'Europe, le système n'apparaît pas particulièrement généreux. Mais dans un pays où 42 millions de personnes n'ont aucune couverture médicale, Medicare (40 millions d'assurés) a toutes les apparences du confort. Les remboursements ne commenceront qu'en 2006 mais, dès 2004, les assurés auront droit à une carte de réduction de 10 % à 25 % sur les médicaments.

Les débats ont été acharnés et la loi a été assez finement rédigée pour diviser les deux camps. Le vote du Sénat a été acquis par 54 voix (dont 11 démocrates) contre 44 (dont 9 républicains). Les démocrates se sont trouvés en porte-à-faux, coincés entre leur souci de ne pas avoir l'air de pénaliser les "seniors" et leur rejet catégorique de plusieurs dispositions du projet qui ouvrent la voie, selon eux, à une privatisation. Les compagnies privées de "gestion de la santé" vont en effet pouvoir intervenir, désormais, dans ce qui était du ressort fédéral. Elles seront subventionnées pour proposer des assurances-médicaments.

"FRÉNÉSIE DÉPENSIÈRE"

Le sénateur Ted Kennedy a mené la bataille, pariant que les Américains "comprendraient" si on leur expliquait les enjeux. Mais le principal lobby des personnes âgées ayant apporté son soutien à la réforme - une trahison, aux yeux des démocrates -, les jeux étaient faits. Deux des candidats à l'investiture démocrate pour la présidentielle, Joe Lieberman et John Kerry, n'ont pas pris part au vote.

Du côté républicain, les orthodoxes se sont étranglés d'indignation en constatant que la réforme devrait coûter 400 milliards de dollars sur dix ans, à un moment où le budget fédéral est déjà "hors de contrôle", selon la firme Goldman Sachs citée, mardi, par le New York Times. Le Wall Street Journal critique la "frénésie dépensière" du Parti républicain. La National Review, de son côté, dénonce "une expansion de l'Etat-providence sans précédent en quarante ans". Le sénateur John McCain, lui, a voté contre la loi. Il a jugé "extravagant" qu'elle interdise aux responsables de Medicare de négocier directement leurs achats avec l'industrie pharmaceutique. Compte tenu des quantités en jeu, il aurait été possible de faire baisser le prix des médicaments, un avantage aux yeux du public, sinon à celui des compagnies.

    Corine Lesnes, Lemonde.fr, 27.11.2003, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3222,36-343443,0.html

    Informations sur Medicare :

    http://www.medicare.gov/

    http://www.medicare.org/

America's propensity for putting people into jail has clocked up another bleak statistical marker. The Bush government reported yesterday that the total prison population reached two million for the first time last year. (...). But the figures offer little comfort. In particular, they paint a stark picture of how black people are far more likely to be jailed than white people, an intensifying trend. The latest report shows 12 per cent of black men aged 20 to 34 are in prison, compared with 1.6 per cent of the white male population in that age bracket. An estimated 4.8 per cent of all black males are in jail, compared with 1.7 per cent of Hispanics and 0.6 per cent of whites. The figures will fuel charges that the US criminal justice system is biased against African Americans. The United States' incarceration rate, 702 people per 100,000 of population, is the highest among industrialised countries. But that masks striking regional disparities. The south continues to jail proportionately more people than other areas. Louisiana, for instance, had 799 prisoners per 100,000, while Maine on the north-eastern seaboard, jails just 137 per 100,000.

    American jail population hits two million, Rupert Cornwell, I, p. 13, 8.4.2003.

Last year alone, another 1.7 million Americans slipped below the poverty line, bringing the total to 34.6 million, one in eight of the population. Over 13 million of them are children. In fact, the US has the worst child poverty rate and the worst life expectancy of all the world's industrialised countries, and the plight of its poor is worsening.

The ranks of the hungry are increasing in step. About 31 million Americans were deemed to be "food insecure" (they literally did not know where their next meal was coming from). Of those, more than nine million were categorised by the US department of agriculture as experiencing real hunger, defined by the US department of agriculture as an "uneasy or painful sensation caused by lack of food due to lack of resources to obtain food."

    Long queue at drive-in soup kitchen : George Bush's America, the wealthiest nation in history, faces a growing poverty crisis. In the first of a three-part series Julian Borger takes the pulse of the US with elections just a year away, G, 3.11.2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1076591,00.html

The Guardian        p. 16        31.8.2004

Statistiques > Etats-Unis d'Amérique

Crime in the United States    FBI statistics

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm

US Census Bureau

http://www.census.gov/acs/www/

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/BasicFactsServlet

Bureau of Justice Statistics

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pubalp2.htm