Using Foster Care Children as a Ticket to the Good Life

This is how greed and corruption, bankrolled by the govt's insistence on funding any charlatan who hangs a cross around his neck, is making a market of foster children in this country. You really have to read the whole article and some others to which it is linked in order to get the full picture of this type of vile corruption and abuse.

http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061210/NEWS01/612100363
Foster-care empire struggling
'Everybody is saying this could have happened to anybody. But, it's just, "Let's crucify Lifeway." '
BY SHEILA MCLAUGHLIN | ENQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Shirt-sleeves rolled up and his apron soaking wet from the chest down, Mike Berner - a man earning $225,000 a year - washes dishes Friday and Saturday nights in the kitchen of the quaint café he owns three blocks from Wittenberg University in Springfield.

The apron is gone Sunday mornings as the 51-year-old father of three preaches about Jesus and family values to a small congregation at Grace Fellowship Church in New Carlisle, a nondenominational church he and his wife started in 1984.

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He has built Lifeway For Youth from a $35,000 federal grubstake in 1994 to a $15 million-a-year company with branches in six states, hundreds of children in foster-care homes and eight relatives on his payroll.

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The rosy picture has dimmed since August, when 3-year-old Marcus Fiesel died and Berner became the poster child for Ohio's embattled private foster-care industry.

Lifeway is just one agency in a huge network of nonprofit businesses - taking in $250 million from taxpayers annually - that the state depends on to find homes for abused and neglected foster children.

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Lifeway's growth appears to have provided the Berner family with a sliver of the good life.

Berner and his wife, Brenda, the company's assistant director and chief financial officer, draw combined salaries of $385,000 a year from Lifeway.

The Berners own a $337,000 home on 1.6 acres in New Carlisle, another 25 acres with a farmhouse close by, a four-seat Cessna plane and a shiny white baby grand piano in their formal living room.... MORE

Note: I've been following this story for quite some time. At the link provided above their are many links to articles relating to the Lifeway case. Also see: http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061210/NEWS01/612100364