Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash

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K

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 21:42:22 -0400

Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash

 

 

(Not bad for a guy that has a personal fortune of more than a billion

dollars from asking others to send money)

 

 

Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash

From The Nation http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/blumenthal

 

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.

 

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