Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/blumenthal
[posted online on September 7, 2005]
Every cloud has a silver lining. Hurricane Katrina has devastated New
Orleans, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless, and
plunging the entire city into chaos. In the hurricane's wake, the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and its director, Michael Brown, forced
out of his former job at the International Arabian Horse Association, with
no credentials in disaster relief, have become targets of withering
criticism. Yet FEMA's relief efforts have brought considerable assistance
to at least one man who stands to benefit from Hurricane Katrina perhaps
more than any other individual: Pat Robertson.
With the Bush Administration's approval, Robertson's $66 million relief
organization, Operation Blessing, has been prominently featured on FEMA's
list of charitable groups accepting donations for hurricane relief. Dozens
of media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN and the Associated
Press, duly reprinted FEMA's list, unwittingly acting as agents soliciting
cash for Robertson. "How in the heck did that happen?" Richard Walden,
president of the disaster-relief group Operation USA, asked of Operation
Blessing's inclusion on FEMA's list. "That gives Pat Robertson millions of
extra dollars."
Though Operation USA has conducted disaster relief for more than
twenty-five years on five continents, like scores of other secular relief
groups currently helping victims of Hurricane Katrina, it was omitted from
FEMA's list. In fact, only two non-"faith-based" organizations were
included. (One of them, the American Red Cross, is being blocked from
entering New Orleans by FEMA's parent agency, the Department of Homeland
Security.) FEMA, meanwhile, has reportedly turned away Wal-Mart trucks
carrying food and water to the stricken city, teams of firemen from
Maryland and Texas, volunteer morticians and a convoy of 1,000 boat owners
offering to help rescue stranded flood victims. While relief efforts falter
in the face of colossal bureaucratic incompetence, the Bush
Administration's promotion of Operation Blessing has ensured that the
floodwaters swallowing New Orleans will be a rising tide lifting
Robertson's boat.
Robertson recently ignited a media firestorm when he called for the
assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez during a broadcast of The
700 Club. He has also blamed the 9/11 attacks on America's tolerance of
abortion and homosexuality and declared the Supreme Court a greater threat
to the United States than Al Qaeda. Robertson assiduously cultivates his
celebrity with remarks like these, casting himself as a divisive bigot to
his foes and a righteous prophet to his allies in Christian right circles.
But there is much more to Robertson than the headline-grabbing hothead he
plays on TV.
Far from the media's gaze, Robertson has used the tax-exempt, nonprofit
Operation Blessing as a front for his shadowy financial schemes, while
exerting his influence within the GOP to cover his tracks. In 1994 he made
an emotional plea on The 700 Club for cash donations to Operation Blessing
to support airlifts of refugees from the Rwandan civil war to Zaire (now
Congo). Reporter Bill Sizemore of The Virginian Pilot later discovered that
Operation Blessing's planes were transporting diamond-mining equipment for
the African Development Corporation, a Robertson-owned venture initiated
with the cooperation of Zaire's then-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
After a lengthy investigation, Virginia's Office of Consumer Affairs
determined that Robertson "willfully induced contributions from the public
through the use of misleading statements and other implications." Yet when
the office called for legal action against Robertson in 1999, Virginia
Attorney General Mark Earley, a Republican, intervened with his own report,
agreeing that Robertson had made deceptive appeals but overruling the
recommendation for his prosecution. Two years earlier, while Virginia's
investigation was gathering steam, Robertson donated $35,000 to Earley's
campaign--Earley's largest contribution. With Earley's report came a sense
of vindication. "From the very beginning," Robertson claimed, "we were
trying to provide help and assistance to those who were facing disease and
death in the war-torn, chaotic nation of Zaire."
(Earley is now president of Prison Fellowship Ministries, an evangelical
social-work organization founded by born-again, former Nixon
dirty-trickster Charles Colson. PFM has accepted White House
faith-based-initiative money and is currently engaged in hurricane relief
efforts in Louisiana. Earley remains a close ally of Robertson.)
Absolved of his sins, Robertson dug his heels back in African soil. In 1999
he signed an $8 million agreement with Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor that
guaranteed Robertson's Freedom Gold Ltd.--an offshore company registered to
the same address as his Christian Broadcasting Network--mining rights in
Liberia, and gave Taylor a 10 percent stake in the company. When the United
States intervened in Liberia in 2003, forcing Taylor and the Al Qaeda
operatives he was harboring to flee, Robertson accused President Bush of
"undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to
take over the country."
Robertson's scheming hasn't abated one bit. He is accused of violating his
ministry's tax-exempt, nonprofit status by using it to market a diet shake
he licensed this August to the health chain General Nutrition Corp.
(Robertson continues to advertise the shake on his personal website.) He
has withstood criticism from fellow evangelicals for investing $520,000 in
a racehorse named Mr. Pat, violating biblical admonitions against gambling.
He was even accused of "Jim Crow-style racial discrimination" by black
employees who successfully sued his Christian Coalition in 2001 for forcing
them enter its offices through a back door and eat in a segregated area
(Robertson has since resigned).
The Bush Administration has studiously overlooked Robertson's misdeeds. In
October 2002, just months after he denounced the White House's faith-based
initiative as "a real Pandora's box"--and one month before midterm
elections--Robertson pocketed $500,000 in government grants to Operation
Blessing. Since then, with the sole exception of his criticism of the US
intervention in Liberia, Robertson has served as a willing surrogate for
the Administration. His Regent University gave John Ashcroft a cushy
professorship to cool his heels after his contentious tenure as US Attorney
General. And Robertson's legal foundation, the American Center for Law and
Justice, is spearheading the effort to rally right-wing Christian support
for Judge John G. Roberts Jr.'s confirmation as Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court.
Now, as fallout from the President's handling of Hurricane Katrina
threatens to derail the GOP's long-term agenda, Robertson is back at the
plate for Bush, echoing the White House's line that state and local
authorities--and even the disaster victims themselves--are to blame for the
tragedy engulfing New Orleans.
The September 5 edition of The 700 Club included a report by Christian
Broadcasting Network correspondent Gary Lane from outside the ruined New
Orleans Convention Center, which had housed mostly impoverished black
disaster victims throughout the weekend. "A number of possessions left
behind suggest the mindset of some of the evacuees," Lane said. "They
include this voodoo cup with the saying, 'May the curse be with you.' " A
shot of a plastic souvenir cup from one of New Orleans's countless trinket
shops appeared on the screen. "Also music CDs with the titles Guerrilla
Warfare and Thugs 'R' Us," Lane stated, pointing out a pile of rap CDs
strewn on the ground.
The 700 Club's featured guest was Wellington Boone, a black minister
invited by Robertson to provide a counterpoint to the ubiquitous Rev. Jesse
Jackson. Boone is a member of the Coalition on Revival, a Christian
Reconstructionist organization that advocates replacing the US Constitution
with biblical law. Throughout his career, he has distinguished himself from
his black clerical colleagues with such remarks as "I believe that slavery,
and the understanding of it when you see it God's way, was redemptive" and
"The black community must stop criticizing Uncle Tom. He is a role model."
Though Boone's appearance on The 700 Club consisted mostly of benign
appeals for "laser-beam prayer," CBN featured a separate interview with
Boone on its website in which he declared, "We need to consider the culture
of those people still stranded in New Orleans. The looting of property, the
trashing of property, et cetera, speaks to the basic character of the
people." He added, "These people who have gone through slavery, segregation
and the Voting Rights Act are doing this to themselves."
Boone's appearance on The 700 Club had been preceded by an interview with
Operation Blessing President Bill Horan. Horan discussed his group's
activities in Biloxi, Mississippi, where it plans to set up a mobile
kitchen, and in Houston, Dallas and Beaumont, Texas, where it is disbursing
cash grants to numerous, mostly unspecified mega-churches, purportedly to
support their work with evacuated hurricane victims.
As for the people still stranded in New Orleans who "are doing this to
themselves," as Boone said, Operation Blessing has a special plan: avoid
them like the plague.
"I've actually heard reports that they [the people of Mississippi] were in
worse trouble" than those in New Orleans, claimed Gordon Robertson, the son
of Pat Robertson and vice president of The 700 Club. "They were actually
harder hit."
"Oh, absolutely," agreed Horan.
At the segment's conclusion, Gordon Robertson asked Horan, "What can people
do today? If you were asking for help today, what's the number-one need?"
"It's cash. Cash is what we need more than anything," Horan pleaded. "The
more cash we get, the more good we can do." And the Bush Administration,
through FEMA, is doing its best to insure that Pat Robertson is getting
that cash just as quickly as humanly possible.
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Posting and reading from alt.politics.usa.constitution OR alt.education
You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads SepChurch&State
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[Its not just Hampton Roads folks who are members]
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.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
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THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
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