Friday, September 9th, 2005
FEMA Promotes Pat Robertson Charity
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Soon after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, FEMA promoted a a list
of charities on its website that were accepting donations for hurricane
relief. One of the top three was Operation Blessing, an organization
founded by televangelist Pat Robertson. We take a look at some of
Operation Blessing's past dealings with Max Blumenthal of The Nation
and Democracy Now! Co-host and Daily News reporter Juan Gonzalez.
[includes rush transcript]
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Soon after Hurricane Katrina crashed onto the Gulf Coast, the Federal
Emergency Management Agency promoted a list of charities on its website
that were accepting donations for hurricane relief. Dozens of media
outlets, including The New York Times, CNN and the Associated Press,
duly reprinted FEMA's list. The top three charities listed were: the
Red Cross, Operation Second Harvest and Operation Blessing, which was
founded by Christian televangelist Pat Robertson. At a news conference
Thursday, FEMA chief Michael Brown was questioned about the issue.
In the New York Daily News, Juan Gonzalez provides some background for
Pat Robertson and Operations Blessing.
Max Blumenthal, a regular contributor to the Nation magazine. His
latest article is called "Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash."
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to an issue, Juan, that you've been covering
in the New York Daily News, and that is the issue of who gets their
charities on the web pages of the government websites.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. Well, soon after Hurricane Katrina crashed onto the
Gulf Coast, the Federal Emergency Management Agency promoted a list of
charities on its website that were accepting donations for hurricane
relief. Dozens of media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN and
the Associated Press, duly reprinted FEMA's list, as did many local
governments, state and local governments. The top three charities
listed were the Red Cross, Operation Blessing, and Operation Second
Harvest, which, Operation Blessing was founded by Christian
televangelist Pat Robertson. At a news conference Thursday, FEMA Chief,
Michael Brown, was questioned about this issue.
REPORTER: FEMA has three charities listed on the press release they
sent out. One of them is Operation Blessing. Can you tell me why that
charity is on the list and who put it there?
MICHAEL BROWN: I'm sure the staff did, and it's there because they've
offered to help and are doing good work.
REPORTER: Operation Blessing is a Pat Robertson organization. Should
that be on there?
MICHAEL BROWN: If they're willing to work, if they're willing to help,
we're not turning help away, we're not turning away help from anybody.
AMY GOODMAN: In the New York Daily News, Juan Gonzalez provides some
background for Pat Robertson and Operation Blessing. We're also joined
on the phone by Max Blumenthal, a regular contributor to The Nation
magazine. His latest article is called "Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash."
We welcome Max. Juan, why don't you start. Very interesting piece that
you wrote, "Disaster Used as Political Payoff."
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes, Amy. Well, the reality is that Operation Second
Blessing has been part of the Robertson empire now for many years. He
is the chairman of the board himself. His wife is a vice president. One
of his sons is a member of the board of directors. So, it's wholly a
non-profit foundation that is controlled by Robertson.
Interestingly enough, when I checked their latest 990 for the fiscal
year ending of March of 2004, they give hundreds of grants for a few
thousand dollars to churches all around the United States, but the
single largest recipient of assistance from Second Blessing is Pat
Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. It received $885,000 in
grants from the charity. For what purposes, I'm not quite clear.
But the other part of it is also that Second Blessing has had a less
than stellar record. Back in the mid-1990s during the Rwandan genocide,
Robertson appealed for assistance for Operation Second Blessing on his
700 Club for money to fly relief supplies to the Rwandan refugees in
Zaire. What he -- it turns out that an investigation later by the
Virginia Attorney General's office revealed that the planes that were
bought by the charity were actually ferrying mining equipment for a
diamond mining operation, the African Development Corporation, and
low-and-behold, who is the principal shareholder of this private
corporation? None other than Pat Robertson himself. So, he eventually
had to reimburse his own charity $400,000 for the fact that these
planes were being used, not for charitable work, but for his own
enrichment. Although that might itself -- ended up collapsing.
So Robertson's use of this charity has had problems in the past, and
the fact that the federal government listed it among the top three
charities before the Catholic charities, before the United Jewish
Appeal, before AmeriCares, before all kinds of other charities that
have been in existence for decades and decades is quite unusual.
AMY GOODMAN: And let's not forget, this comes right after Pat Robertson
says on his 700 Club program, broadcast all over this country, said
that, essentially that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez should be
assassinated. This comes a week or two after that. Max Blumenthal, can
you continue along the lines that Juan Gonzalez is talking about, your
research into Pat Robertson?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, with respect to the case that Juan was talking
about, which was in 1994 when Robertson bilked Operation Blessing
donors out of money to ferry mining equipment into Zaire, which was a
direct partnership with Mobutu Sese Seko, he was actually -- this
scheme was actually exposed by a reporter from a small paper in
Virginia, and Virginia's Office of Consumer Affairs initiated an
investigation and determined that Robertson "willfully induced
contributions from the public through the use of misleading statements
and other implications." That's a direct quote.
So, they determined that he bilked his donors, and the Attorney General
at the time, a guy named Mark Earley, agreed, but he overruled the
Office of Consumer Affair's recommendation for Robertson's criminal
prosecution. This might have put Robertson in jail and ended the whole
-- ended his entire ministry. So, who is Mark Earley? Mark Earley,
during his campaign for Attorney General, was essentially bought off by
Pat Robertson. Pat Robertson donated $35,000 to his campaign. That was
his largest contribution. Now, today Mark Earley is the head of Prison
Fellowship Ministries. He was appointed by former Richard Nixon dirty
trickster, Chuck Colson, and Prison Fellowship Ministries is very
similar to Operation Blessing. They're a faith-based social work group
that has accepted White House Office of Faith-Based Initiative money to
do social work, and they're actually supposedly doing some relief work
in Louisiana.
So, I think this reflects, you know, sort of the, you know, the larger
hustle going on, which is, you know, being propagated by the White
House. In 2001, Joe Allbaugh, who is a former member of Bush's Iron
Triangle, you know, with Karen Hughes and Karl Rove, his Texas team,
was appointed head of FEMA and he said -- you know, he said before
Congress that FEMA was a giant bureaucratic entitlement program and
that it should basically be whittled down, and its work should be
delegated to faith-based organizations. So we are seeing that being
implemented through his successor, Mike Brown, who is his former
college roommate and was appointed FEMA head solely because he was Joe
Allbaugh's former college roommate.
So we're seeing groups like -- I mean there are only two secular groups
on FEMA's list, and currently, I think there's scores of secular groups
doing relief work. Pat Robertson's group, Operation Blessing, is not
doing relief work in Louisiana. They -- you know, I turned on the 700
Club, which is Pat Robertson's daily TV show where he called for Hugo
Chavez's assassination, to get a sense of the kind of work they were
doing, and what I saw were profiles of white evangelicals who had
suffered as a result of Hurricane Katrina. And undoubtedly, a lot of
white evangelicals in the Gulf Coast of Mississippi have suffered, but
when it came to covering the plight of people in New Orleans who are
largely poor and largely black, I have never -- I haven't witnessed any
coverage of this disaster that's so racist as I saw on the 700 Club.
On the September 5th edition of the 700 Club, there was a report from a
guy named Gary Lane, a CBN [Christian Broadcasting Network]
correspondent from outside the New Orleans Convention Center, which is
where, you know, thousands of, you know, impoverished disaster victims
were held without food and water for some days in some cases. And Lane
declared a number of possessions left behind suggests the mindset of
some of the evacuees. They include this voodoo cup with the saying,
"May the curse be with you," and then a picture of a voodoo cup
from like a souvenir shop in New Orleans came on the screen. Then he --
you know, he started showing piles of music CDs. It reminded me of, you
know, when the U.S. invaded Panama and opened up Manuel Noriega's desk
and found, you know, porno magazines. It was almost like a psy-ops
operation to discredit the evacuees as people not worthy of aid.
And the 700 Club also featured a reverend named Wellington Boone,
who's a far right wing black minister, who seemed like he was invited
to provide a counterpoint to Jesse Jackson, who had been all over the
news. And Boone declared in an interview on CBN's website, separate
from his 700 Club appearance, that these people who have gone through
slavery, segregation and the Voting Rights Act are doing this to
themselves. So what I saw in Pat Robertson's operation was an
intentional attempt to demonize the people who had been victimized by
Hurricane Katrina and by the response of the government, in order to
justify whatever his operation was doing on the ground, which seemed to
be directed at helping only a certain subset of the hurricane victims
which were in his ministry's network, as it were. And when I say
network, I mean within the network of the churches who he is
distributing cash grants to.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, if I can -- just to get back to -- also, I think
in the coming weeks and months, we're going to have to be very vigilant
on the number of groups and organizations that attempt now to feast on
the federal aid that will be going into this area, and Robertson
clearly seems to be one of them, because remember, he also was involved
in Liberia where he was a backer, on the 700 Club, of Charles Taylor,
the former thug and dictator, who was later indicted by the United
Nations for war crimes. And he was backing Taylor on his 700 Club,
visited there several times and at the same time was investing in a
gold mine in a franchise that had been given to him by Charles Taylor.
So, you have this situation with Pat Robertson actually directly
personally profiting from investments in Africa, while at the same time
trying to get charity money here and then ignoring the black
communities here in the United States.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, Charles Taylor had a 10% stake in Robertson's
company. I mean, they were literally business partners.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. But I also wrote this week just briefly about the
oil companies, too. Because the Shell Oil Company on September 1 posted
on their website a warning against price gouging, gasoline price
gouging, to the American Public, and urged Americans to report to their
local governments any price gouging. On the same day that Shell posted
that announcement on its website, it raised the price of -- wholesale
price of gasoline to all its dealers in New York by 20 cents a gallon
and has increased the price of -- the wholesale price of its gasoline
six times in the last ten days, even though only one of its refineries
down there, of the three it has in the Gulf Coast area, is even
temporarily down, and of course, all of the oil that they are now
charging these extra price for was refined way before the hurricane
even occurred. So, you have the oil companies also now feasting on this
tragedy, and we're going to be having to watch more and more of these
hypocrites who say one thing to the public, but then end up doing
another thing in reality.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank Max Blumenthal for joining us, regular
contributor to The Nation, author of the recent article, "Pat
Robertson's Katrina Cash." And Juan, thanks for investigating this. His
piece, Juan's piece, appears in the New York Daily News, "Disaster Used
As Political Payoff."
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