Hello, all, this article is angering on so many levels!  I was not
aware that Pat Robertson supported Charles Taylor of Liberia?!  You
learn something new every day!

Ginny

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Asalaamu alaikum.

This is from The Nation.  It's a very interesting expose on Pat
Robertson's financial dealings and generally racist and offensive
self.

   Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash
   by Max Blumenthal

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.

This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/blumenthal

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-- 
Visit my blog at: http://GinnysThoughts.blogspot.com/

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