The Nation: Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash

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

Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash
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.

more, more more...

a stroke that will paralyze him, leaving him an awake vegetable? :shrug:

Televangelist used donations to set up Cayman Islands company
Edited on Sun Sep-11-05 04:11 PM by elehhhhna

NEW YORK, USA: Political Affairs Magazine, September 7, 2005 – In 1998, American televangelist and one-time presidential candidate, Pat Robertson, used the donations of his flock to set up an offshore mining company in the Cayman Islands called Freedom Gold Limited. The purpose of setting the company offshore, of course, was to avoid taxes and to make its connections to Robertson more difficult to trace.

http://www.caymannetnews.com/2005/09/920/foreign.shtml

Full article, here, w/ dirt galore:
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/180...

All of them, Robertson, Bush, Cheney. Cheney was on vacation reportedly house hunting. Bush was on vacation. And Robertson is just plane nuts. If I believed in hell, they'd all be in it.

Halliburton contracts. That was hard work and he deserved that house!
:grr::argh:

:eyes:

or his enterprises. He makes a habit of soliciting tax exempt donations to build up an enterprise and then "spinning off" the profitable parts into "for profit" companies. If it isn't illegal it should be.