The Christian Coalition:
The Nature of the Beast
by Anton Chaitkin
While many people are squawking about the fact of there being a religious right controlling the government, the reality is that the present government—the Bush Administration and its friends—created a pseudo-religion, like a Roman cult. And it is this religion which is being used as an instrument of tyranny by a rotten government.... People talk about the "religious right." There is no religious right. There is a state-based religion.[1]
* * *
[It is a] delusion, that the array of pro-Bush religious fruitcake collection, built of a partnership, forged in large part by Billy Graham, between Jonathan Edwards/Darbyite Protestant fruitcakes and dark-age fascist, nominal Catholics, is ... a lobby directed to influence government; it is a Bush-government-created state religion, created and deployed to impose a de facto dictatorship on the U.S.A.[2]
—Lyndon LaRouche, April 2005
A dictatorship needs revolutionaries, to destroy the previous lawful nation, and to terrorize citizens into giving up their liberty.
One cold night in the early 1980s, some young men selected for this role drove through the streets of Washington, D.C. with the windows down, singing an anarchist hymn cynically set to the tune of America the Beautiful:
'Tis time to right the great wrong done
ten thousand years ago,
The state conceived
in blood and hate
Remains our only foe,
So circle brothers, circle brothers,
Victory is nigh!
Come meet thy fate, destroy the state
And raise black banners high....[3]
The raucous singers were Ralph Reed, who later created the Christian Coalition and became a top herder of religious voters; and Grover Norquist, who now presides at regular Wednesday supreme strategy meetings of the Religious Right and other components of the present U.S. regime.
Reed and Norquist, together with their young boss Jack Abramoff, had been put in charge of the national College Republicans (CR) at the outset of the Ronald Reagan Presidency. This trio, Abramoff (CR chairman), Norquist (CR executive director) and Reed (their intern, later CR executive director), formed a covert partnership which has persisted to the present time.
Recently, front-page corruption scandals hitting House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), have featured Jack Abramoff's wild influence-selling adventures, and Ralph Reed's bold and profitable manipulations of religious groups, with Norquist's key place in the schemes looming on the edge of news coverage. (See "A Traveling Partnership.")
DeLay's accelerating downfall has put the spotlight on these operatives' roles in building up DeLay's dictatorship over the House of Representatives.
Reed and his close allies have been at the center of an apparatus, used by the current Washington regime to attempt the consolidation of a coup d'état; to impose a dictatorship on the ruins of the lawful government, with the Congress a mere rubber stamp, and the independent judiciary terrorized and taken down. The coup attempt continues, now with an edge of real desperation in the face of more determined opposition.
The Reed-created Christian Coalition (with televangelist Pat Robertson as its public face) has been the most significant element in the Religious Right as the regime's bludgeon. A searching look at that group's background, traced through the career of Reed—beginning in the College Republicans' 1980s leadership trio—yields some useful insights into the true nature of the beast now confronting the republic.
The College Republicans, `On Fire'
Abramoff, Norquist, and Reed first came together in Washington in the Spring of 1981, Abramoff and Norquist having recently left college, Reed still a student. They were determined to ride to power with the pro-feudal faction then seeking to consolidate its power in the incoming Administration of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush.
In the College Republican leadership, there was no pretense of religion, no "Christianity"—just the Revolution. The rush of adrenalin came from being plugged in to powerful sponsors, being on the inside, having the perceived authority from the lodge to tear down the hated old order, to instill fear—and get away with it.
We can better appreciate their state of mind if we take a hint from the second inaugural speech of President George W. Bush, on Jan. 20, 2005. With reference to the policy of limitless wars and regime changes, Bush's keepers had written the following for him to read:
"By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well, a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power. It burns those who fight its progress. And one day, this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world."
The phrase, "fire in the minds of men," comes from The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel about the "demon-possessed" nihilist revolutionaries of 19th-Century Russia. In the book, the governor of a province looks with despair on a fire they have set, that is sweeping through a town. He says, "The fire is in the minds of men, not on the roofs of houses."
Those nihilists in Tsarist Russia had rejected the view of man as in the image of God, held by the monotheistic religions, while adopting Nietzsche's contemptuous opinion that a man is only his base appetites, a worm, who must be ruled by the stronger, the superman. Abraham Lincoln's Ambassador to Russia, Cassius Clay, wrote in his memoirs, that the nihilists who set fire to Russian cities in the 1860s and issued incendiary anarchist leaflets, were for the most part aristocrats who resented the nation's progress out of feudalism.
As for our young nihilists in Washington, 1981-83, Reed, Norquist, and Abramoff: They were in the vanguard, overthrowing the old industrial America of Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Backed by Richard Mellon Scaife and the Coors brewery family, they made war on labor unions, in the war to destroy the steel mills and machine industry in the northern states, where high wages had been protected by U.S. tariffs; they incited the rabble against civil rights, in a war on the poor.
This was the era of 20% interest rates, as Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker promised the "controlled disintegration" of domestic industry, in the shift to cheap overseas labor. The "untamed fire of freedom" was the unlimited expansion of money fortunes from gambling in the new borderless, radically deregulated economy. This was the great boom-time of the financiers' "Black Economy" of narcotics, pornography, and casinos.
The ideological gods of those College Republicans were Friedrich von Hayek (whose book The Road to Serfdom demanded a world government to crush national sovereignty and usher in the absolute free market), and National Review owner William F. Buckley, Jr., the brash dark-ages-fascist Catholic leader whose intrigues would shape Ralph Reed's course into forging the Christian Coalition.
Their spiritual mentor was Newt Gingrich, the new Republican Congressman from Reed's Georgia. Gingrich counselled the College Republicans that the Revolution was at hand. Gingrich was full of the Third Wave fad of futurist Alvin Toffler and Malthusian Jeremy Rifkin: The old days of man dominating and transforming nature are gone; now in the new age, scarce resources will be appropriated by the smart insiders, the cyber-elite. The world's poor are to die by the wayside.
The leadership group reportedly asked each of their cadres going out to build College Republican cells on campus, to memorize a diatribe with the words, "The Democrats are the enemy. WADE into them! Spill THEIR blood! Shoot THEM in the belly!"[4]
The provocative tactics and sneering partisan attitude of these hard-drinking College Republicans did not ingratiate them with President Reagan, and they had no access to him. Soon, the particular avenue through which the trio had taken over the group became extremely messy.
Jack Abramoff's father was chief executive of Diner's Club, America's first credit card, used by the jet set in Hollywood, New York, and Washington. It was Diner's Club owner Alfred Bloomingdale, his father's employer and the family patron, who gave Jack Abramoff his entry to higher politics and international intrigue. Bloomingdale was an early California backer and confidant of Ronald Reagan, and Reagan as President appointed Bloomingdale to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).
Elected and financially sustained as College Republican chairman through Bloomingdale's wealth and connections, Abramoff brought in Grover Norquist, who had been a fellow Massachusetts Republican student activist, as executive director. The 20-year-old Ralph Reed, notorious as a cynical dirty-trickster among Republicans at the University of Georgia, came in first as an intern with Abramoff, sleeping in Abramoff's residence.
Problems developed when Alfred Bloomingdale was accused of taking videotapes of his own sadomasochistic orgies with government leaders and call girls, and these allegations became embarrassing and a serious potential blackmail problem for the Reagan Administration; Bloomingdale's PFIAB access to sensitive intelligence added to the complications. (Bloomingdale conveniently died in 1982.)
A First Try at State Religion
The Abramoff-Reed-Norquist trio were apprentices serving not the U.S. President, but the faction operating what came to be known during the Iran-Contra affair as a "parallel government," away from public view.
Buckleyite ultra-rightist Catholic Paul Weyrich had founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and had turned its control over to international financier strategists associated with von Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society. The bankers and feudal spooks at Heritage, with their members in many government posts after Reagan's 1980 election, prescribed Paul Weyrich the dismantling of public services, an end to government protection for decent living conditions, the crushing of labor unions, and a military-imperial foreign policy coupled with radical free trade—Hayek's "very powerful supranational authority."
Now, it is not so easy to get working people to acquiesce in, let alone actively favor, measures which will destroy their families, steal their pensions, and kill their grandmothers. You have to get someone to whisper in their ears something like, "Homosexuals are going to marry your son." This is precisely what Reed and his Christian Coalition networks were to do in the 2004 elections, to get people to vote for a team that would steal everything from them.
The initiative to accomplish this popular self-degradation was set in motion in the early Reagan years.
The covert Council for National Policy (CNP) was established in 1981 to bind religious impresarios and bankers into a new power structure, congruent with the attempt at a dictatorship. (Later, in 1999, Texas Gov. George W. Bush would speak to a secret CNP meeting in San Antonio, on what they would accomplish together in his projected Presidency. To the present time, Bush will not release any details about the speech or the meeting.)
It is worthwhile identifying some of the CNP founders—a choice assortment of pagan bankers, fascist ideologues, and the cheapest, most cynical manipulators of religious mob opinion.
Early CNP directors included Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner, a later president of Mont Pelerin, a very close associate of William F. Buckley; Paul Weyrich, founding treasurer of CNP, founding president of Heritage Foundation, anti-Pope ultra-Catholic pioneer of Religious Right marEdwin Feulner riage with bankers; Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose Moral Majority group was started at Weyrich's suggestion; Gen. John K. Singlaub, through the World Anti-Communist League a manager of relations between old German Nazis and South American dictators; Morton Blackwell, a youth trainer, initially in charge of the Reagan Administration's religious outreach; televangelist Pat Robertson, later chairman of the Christian Coalition; Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind novels on the End-Times Rapture, founding president of CNP; Thomas Ellis, a wealthy eugenics fanatic and manager of campaigns and funding for Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who was the second president of CNP, replacing LaHaye.
Reed, Abramoff, and Norquist left the College Republicans in 1984, going their separate ways for new political adventures, but maintaining their unofficial partnership.[5]
Reed now embarked on an experimental, entirely covert assignment, through which the Christian Coalition would emerge several years later. As head of Students For America, he would be one of the field leaders for the the feudal Heritage-CNP faction, aiming at dictatorship and state religion.
In this enterprise 20 years ago, the nominal "Catholic," "Protestant," and "Jewish" elements of the current Bush fascist fruitcake array all made their appearances, as we shall see.
1. The `Catholic' Operation
In the Spring of 1984, William F. Buckley's top lieutenant, Marvin Liebman, devised what came to be known as "Students for America," and put Ralph Reed in charge of it. Later, after Reed had made headlines with his Christian Coalition, Liebman told colleagues that he was proud of having groomed Reed for his distinguished career.
Liebman was midwife to the most radically rightist movements of the age. He personally helped to set the global agenda which Reed and his colleagues were to follow, all the way to the present time.
Liebman's 1992 autobiography, Coming Out Conservative, gives only a dim, sterilized version of the astonishing life of this covert operative. Liebman's papers from the archives at the Stanford University Hoover Institution, and personal interviews with those who knew and worked with him, have given us a somewhat more complete view.
Liebman was a bullied, fearful child, a victimized Jew who became a Communist and a homosexual, and a Zionist in the camp of the Jabotinskyites who formed the Israeli right. The Nazis killed his European relatives, and he went to work as a strategist and publicist for the managers of fascism. His autobiography laments that the right-wing movement he built became bigoted!
Liebman led a strange crew around Buckley's magazine National Review, creating the Young Americans for Freedom and the whole Conservative movement of the 1960s. Younger colleagues have related their shock and puzzlement over discovering that so many of the rightist leaders were homosexuals—or as one old timer recently put it, "self-hating, gay-bashing gays"—led by Liebman.
Liebman formed the Committee of One Million (the anti-Communist China Lobby), and took Taiwanese, Japanese war criminals, Korean putschists, and Sun-Myung Moon agents making up the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, into a global action team, with the Buckley family networks in Ibero-America, and with the old European Franco/Hitlerite movements in many countries. He helped build the Cuban exile guerrilla group Alpha 66, and the Caribbean-Mexican underground movement of hatred against President John Kennedy.
Liebman boasted in his autobiography that he personally planned a world anti-Communist revolution. He went to Mexico and started a worldwide organization through the networks of Jorge Prieto Laurens and his Guadalajara-based Tecos group, a Mexican Catholic "synarchist" gang more anti-Semitic than Hitler.[6] They allied with the Eastern European Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which had survived from the Nazi anti-Comintern Axis. In 1966 this whole Buckleyite alliance was christened the World Anti-Communist League (WACL).
Here was the "Catholic" realm into which Reed's Students for America plunged, when the group carried out campus rallies in favor of Oliver North's Nicaraguan Contras; and these are the personal ties which brought Reed into the inner sanctum.
WACL's action enterprise, Operation Condor, (1975-83), was the code name for the combination of the intelligence service and secret police of Chile's dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, with the forces of other South American dictatorships, advised by German Nazi war criminals Klaus Barbie and Walter Rauff, to hunt down and murder their common enemies.[6]
As Operation Condor got under way in 1975, the Chilean government arranged with the Buckley family to make Marvin Liebman officially a public relations consultant, the manager of the dictatorship's propaganda within the United States. Liebman's American-Chilean Council worked for some four years, as the bodies piled up in South America, until President Jimmy Carter's Justice Department closed the Council down, because Liebman had not registered as a foreign agent.[7]
2. Some Peculiar `Protestants'
Marvin Liebman wrote that he advised Reed to set up the new movement's headquarters outside of Washington: North Carolina was the target. But the enterprise became involved in an ugly scandal, and Liebman is at pains to disclaim responsibility for his brainchild, writing that the group took an evil turn to the religious right.
Curiously, Liebman himself had just converted to Catholicism (in 1980), with William Buckley as his godfather. And as if to qualify for this mission, Ralph Reed began reporting that he too had had something of a conversion to "faith," late in 1983 (a light conversion, by sober accounts.)
Students for America crept into the news in 1985, in the context of allegations that students brainwashed by religious cult leaders were being used as zombie-cadres for international rightist politics.
The Wall Street Journal reported (Aug. 16, 1985) on the Maranatha Ministries, whose student-soldiers constituted the core members of the Reed organization. Journal investigative reporter John Fialka wrote that Maranatha leader "Bob Weiner, Jr. says he called some of his `friends' . . . and suggested that they organize to support . . . aid to the rebel forces in Nicaragua. . . . And so, on the eve of a crucial vote in Congress, the rallies were held on as many as 70 college campuses across the U.S. Events like this have made the little-known Mr. Weiner popular with conservative Republican strategists. Mr. Weiner's friends are leaders of 50 chapters of the Maranatha Christian Church. . . . [which] has attracted 3500 to 4000 members, mostly of college age. The group . . . imposes unusually strong discipline upon its members. . . . [It is] drawing criticism from an increasing-number of angry parents, Maranatha dropouts and other religious leaders. They complain that Maranatha uses a form of mind control that isolated students from their parents, and then guides decisions on such personal matters as career choices, politics, and marriage. Last year, a committee including Baptists, Presbyterians, and other evangelical Christian groups, finished a yearlong investigation of Maranatha, concluding that Mr. Weiner's religion `has an authoritarian orientation with potential negative consequences for members.' The committee added, `We would not recommend this organization to anyone.' "
After going through episodes of mind control, psychiatric hospitalization, and youth suicide attempts, the Journal article brings in Reed:
"Others defend the church. `I think that Maranatha has gotten a bum rap,' asserts Ralph Reed, a former College Young Republican leader who has formed Students for America to lobby for President Reagan's policies on campuses. The 4,000-member group, he says, includes over 1,000 members from Maranatha."[8]
3. A `Jewish' Connection
In its founding year, 1984, Reed's campus evangelicals, Students for America, crowded into North Carolina for their main task, the re-election of Sen. Jesse Helms. Reed met his future wife at the Helms campaign's victory party. Jesse Helms spoke at Reed's Students for America 1985 national convention.
Why were Reed's sponsors at Heritage Foundation and Council for National Policy so concerned with Jesse Helms? He was a far-right, opportunistic southern politician, managed by the sick racist Tom Ellis. But Helms was a demagogic populist. He made noises against the elites, against Kissinger, against Rockefeller. He was neutral on Israel.
Israel was now at the top of the imperial agenda. If you want to make people so crazy they will cheer for their own impoverishment and for unending war, get them to hope for the end of the world, coming through an Israel-centered final Battle of Armageddon ordained by God. And the most fanatical advocates of a new one-world empire at that moment were the "neo-conservatives," with their special relationship to the fascist end of the Israeli political spectrum.
After North Carolina Jewish voters were inundated with anti-Helms messages, Helms was informed that he would have to "get with" the pro-Israel program. The gangster lawyer Roy Cohn, Bill Buckley's pal, muscled into the Helms campaign planning. Cohn was to see to it that wealthy New York Jews did not fund Helms' election opponent, if Helms joined with the Israel/End-Times alliance.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who had just gotten a private jet and the Jabotinsky medal from Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, brought his Moral Majority cadres into a door-to-door crusade for Helms.
And televangelist Pat Robertson, a fanatical Middle East war advocate, was an avid supporter of Helms, who managed to secure re-election with this spiritual support.
After 1984 (and after his 1990 re-election under similar auspices), what may be termed traditional Republican conservatives were purged from the Helms staff, and the political machine of Senator Helms became a powerful international base for the most extreme theocratic rightists.
The Networks Intertwine
The mid-1980s Reed enterprise was a small part of a first attempt at the nightmare regime that has come closer to success under the current Bush Administration.
Note that in 1984:
- Robert Weiner, who herded Maranatha zombies for Reed's group, was on the CNP Board of Governors;
- Tom Ellis, for whom Reed's group worked to elect Sen. Helms, had just been the CNP president (1982-83);[9]
- Gen. John K. Singlaub, co-founder of the CNP and the Reagan Administration's designated procurer of covert, illegal funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, was as of 1984 chairman of the Nazi International's "World Anti-Communist League," in support of whose politics Reed drove his student members.
The Christian Coalition, DeLay, and Bush
Students for America gave Pat Robertson its Man of the Year Award for 1988. At the awards dinner in January 1989, Reed sat down with Robertson and they began the discussions which led to their forming the Christian Coalition later that year.
Executive Director Reed, prodigy of the world's most reactionary bankers, had access to money and political networks to start the Christian Coalition on a local and state level throughout the country.
The new organization soon got into gear with a neat, under-the-radar trick. The National Republican Senatorial Committee gave $64,000 to the Christian Coalition—though the coalition claimed tax exemption as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization[10]—in October 1990, just before the November election, to keep the captive Jesse Helms in the Senate. The group distributed 750,000 "voter guides," mainly through churches, on the Sunday before the Tuesday election. Helms came from behind to win.
Reed's professional reputation was now assured. "I want to be invisible," Reed gloated to the Virginian-Pilot in November 1991. "I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night."
The 1994 "Conservative Revolution" takeover of Congress led to another rise in the influence of Reed and his allies. But the headline Revolutionary, the new House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, soon afterwards flamed out politically; and Tom DeLay steadily rose, with the special backing of the Christian Coalition.
DeLay's career and power became at the same time a central project for all three of the shadow partners, Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed. DeLay was by no means a random point of interest.
Tom DeLay staggered into Washington as a freshman Congressman in 1984, a terrible drunk, his life dissolving. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) approached him with a road to salvation. He reportedly showed DeLay a videotape that made him weep. Tom DeLay then radically changed his life, turning his soul over to higher powers.
But by all reliable accounts, DeLay became a much nastier, a fearsomely un-Christian individual.
Frank Wolf represented an old "black operations" soul-robbing agency known as the Fellowship Foundation. Practicing secrecy on about the same level as the National Security Agency, the Fellowship does conduct one public function—it runs the huge annual Congressional/Presidential Prayer Breakfast in Washington, with similar events managed inside the Pentagon and at other government and military sites.
The Fellowship Foundation (earlier called International Christian Leadership and a succession of cover names) was created before World War II by the organization of the pro-Nazi Frank Buchman.[11] Sen. H. Alexander Smith (R-N.J.), Buchman's lieutenant who in 1940 had called for a joint world dictatorship of the United States, Britain, and Nazi Germany, brought the Fellowship into acceptance in Washington. In the 1950s, the group was sponsored by former Nazi SS officer, Holland's Prince Bernhard, and the Dutch royal family.
The Fellowship runs a house near the U.S. Capitol, where Congressmen and Senators, who are members, live. For example, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kans.), the delirious End-Timer, has lived in the cult's house in Washington. Raytheon CEO Tom Phillips and other figures in the military-industrial complex, pay the bills.
The Fellowship specializes in taking over the lives of potentially powerful individuals who have become somehow ruined, and promising them dominion in the world if they will play along. Watergate dirty-trickster Charles Colson, when he was on his way to prison and suddenly powerless, was recruited, and turned his life over to the Fellowship. Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries is a subordinate unit of the cult, with its tentacles in most prisons in the United States.
After Tom DeLay was zapped, Charles Colson became DeLay's personal guru. Colson's militancy for the End-Times war on Muslims has made him a congenial companion to Jack Abramoff in their keeping of DeLay—Abramoff has repeatedly led Tom to Israel to call for all-out war against the Arabs.
And Christian Coalition co-founder Pat Robertson was himself a product of the Fellowship magic.
Robertson was the good-for-nothing playboy son of Sen. A. Willis Robertson (R-Va.), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Pat began speaking in tongues and uttering prophecies under the guidance of Harald Bredesen, a master training agent of the Fellowship group, who had proved himself to the highest circles of British intelligence. Pat Robertson started off as assistant pastor to Bredesen, whose intelligence partners, the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship, raised the money to expand Robertson's and Bredesen's Virginia-based Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) toward global power status.
In the 1990s, Abramoff became DeLay's main financial manager, the principal architect of the system of political action committees through which Enron (and later donors, such as Abramoff's Indian casinos) made DeLay a colossus. Grover Norquist handled the DeLay/Abramoff machine's relations to Washington's K Street lobbyists and more of the big money.
Ralph Reed moved on in 1997, after eight years as Christian Coalition executive director, and set up in business as a private consultant.
Reed's reputation as a cold-blooded political hit man made him a desirable potential leading operative for the circles then preparing to run Texas Gov. George W. Bush for President. But in the first stage of that project, the junior Bush was to be portrayed as a "compassionate moderate," so Reed could not be brought aboard right away. Could he be kept in the orbit of the Bush managers, and kept happy until needed?
The New York Times reported that Bush planner Karl Rove got in touch with the Enron corporation about Reed's virtues, and that Enron thereupon signed up Reed as a consultant. But Reed boasts that while Enron paid him to push Enron's deregulation agenda through the political process, the Bush campaign simultaneously paid him. From early 1999, Reed's Century Strategies was "one of the primary firms used by the campaign."
Reed stayed on with Enron, taking in about $300,000, until Enron blew up, and the state of California, looted by Enron's deregulation scheme, went into a bankrupt decline.[12]
In the 2004 election, Reed officially ran the Bush-Cheney campaign in the southeastern U.S.—the Old South. Using Christian Coalition networks he still deployed, Reed was a chief coordinator of the Bush national strategy for mobilizing religious mobs and demoralizing minority voters.
Target: Congress
During the first George W. Bush Administration, Congress was for the most part neutralized. As a result, the blatant lies that led to the Iraq War, the Abu Ghraib torture policy, and the Ashcroft assault on civil liberties, went essentially unchallenged.
In the Senate, the presiding officer, Vice President Dick Cheney, has been known as "the woodshed"; members who get out of line are sent to him to be whipped.
DeLay has ruled the House of Representatives, installing his own former aide, Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as House Speaker in 1999, and making himself Majority Leader in 2002. Known as "the Hammer," DeLay's office is decorated with an Old-South-style bullwhip.
- His sponsors created slush funds for secret contributions to be given out to Republican candidates who would be under his sway, and withheld from those who crossed him.
- He took control of the Texas legislature (his candidates getting allegedly illegal corporate campaign contributions that got three DeLay aides indicted), in order to rig Texas Congressional District lines to increase his power in the House.
- The House Ethics Committee repeatedly admonished DeLay, so the Republican chairman of the committee was fired, and two other Republican committee members were kicked out, all replaced by DeLay allies; the House ethics rules were changed to protect DeLay from challenges.
- Democrats have been excluded from the conference committees which prepare the final version of Congressional bills, such as budgets, so that whatever happens in floor debate or votes, DeLay, Cheney, and their lieutenants privately decide all matters of importance.
Reed played a particularly ugly role in the emasculation of Congress. As chairman of the Georgia Republican Party in 2001-02, he personally coordinated two obscene 2002 campaigns: African-American Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a courageous critic of the regime's coup process following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, was slandered as "anti-Semitic" and driven out of Congress; and Reed defeated Democratic Senator Max Cleland, who had lost an arm and both legs in Vietnam, depicting Cleland as unpatriotic and helpful to terrorism.
Target: the Judiciary
With the tempo of public attacks against DeLay rapidly increasing in recent months, he and his state-religion entourage have jumped out to incite mob actions against the judicial branch of government.
Pat Robertson demanded Congressional rule changes or a Constitutional amendment, to disable opposition to confirmation of state-religion fanatics as judges. Using judges who declined to order reinsertion of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube as a pretext, DeLay threatened, "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) chimed in that the perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to "engage in violence."
DeLay was the featured speaker to an April 8, 2005 lynch-mob-style meeting entitled "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," run by DeLay's hard-core Texas supporters (calling themselves the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration). "Our next step, whatever it is, must be more than rhetoric," DeLay told the meeting. Michael Schwartz, chief of staff to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), said there, that if a judge misbehaves, "then the judge's term has simply come to an end. The President gives them a call and says, `Clean out your desk, the Capitol Police will be in to help you find your way home.' "
According to the Washington Post (April 9, 2005), lawyer Edwin Vieira told the meeting that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin "had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: `no man, no problem.' " So that no one would miss the point about killing judges, Vieira adverted twice to this Stalin adage about the killing of opponents (the full Stalin quote is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem").
Home-schooling advocate Michael P. Farris of Virginia told the DeLay meeting that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy should be impeached, and that Congressmen who won't impeach him should themselves be impeached. He said judicial power should be nullified by abolishing the use of binding judicial precedents, by allowing Congress to vacate court decisions, and by mass impeachment of judges; and if "about 40 of them get impeached, suddenly a lot of these guys would be retiring." The political point was not left to the imagination. Farris said, "Medicare is a bad idea," and "Social Security is a horrible idea when run by the government."
Farris was the founder of the pro-theocracy Patrick Henry College for home-schooled students, in northern Virginia. The school's namesake, American Revolutionary-era politician Patrick Henry, tried to impose some form of state-enforced religion under Virginia law, which was bitterly opposed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Seeing Patrick Henry as a cheap demagogue, Jefferson wrote to Madison on Dec. 8, 1784, joking that "What we have to do I think is devoutly pray for his death." Jefferson and Madison successfully pushed through a Virginia ban on government involvement in religion[13]—a model for the similar clause in the U.S. Bill of Rights.
Before us in the coming period is a plain test, whether the Founders' beautiful work will be preserved, and the present threat to the life of the republic will be overcome.
[1] Lyndon LaRouche, personal communication.
[2] The full quote is in "Bush's State-Based Religion Is a New Fascist Movement," EIR, April 15, 2005, p. 66.
[3] Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
[4] Ibid.
[5] Grover Norquist joined the management of the radical-Muslim mujahedin in Southwest Asia, the Iran-Contra networks of criminals and terrorists "fighting the Soviets" and systematically producing an anti-Western time bomb. The photos of himself waving rifles around, which decorate Norquist's office walls, date from these episodes.
Jack Abramoff did propaganda sponsored by the military service of the apartheid police state of South Africa; and the casinos there, in the Bantustans of the country's slavelike black population, were the models upon which he was to build his fortune out of the misery of American Indians.
[6] . Just out of Yale in 1951, William F. Buckley, Jr. had joined the CIA and moved to Mexico, where he activated his oilman father's Synarchist Mexican networks. Buckley made his nominal Mexico City station boss, CIA covert operations executive E. Howard Hunt, an appendage of the Buckley family. Buckley moved back to the United States, while Hunt stayed to lead Mexican and Central American covert operations. Hunt would pioneer the organization of the Nazis and far-right Catholics in that region, into the Buckleyite World Anti-Communist League of the 1960s. As a Buckley loyalist, Hunt would shepherd the Cuban exile cadres who were instrumental in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, of interest in the 1963 Kennedy assassination, and all around him in the 1972 Watergate caper. When Hunt was arrested as mastermind of that break-in, Buckley organized his defense and became guardian of Hunt's children.
Hunt's covert CIA operations were coordinated with William Buckley's brother Reid, who had moved to Franco's Spain, and brother-in-law Brent Bozell, who had set up in Spain a pro-feudal, pro-fascist Catholic movement called the Society for the Christian Commonwealth. This Buckley enterprise was transplanted into Front Royal, Virginia as Christendom College, and as the pivot for the Catholic rightists (Paul Weyrich, Antonin Scalia) who were to ally themselves with the Protestant Evangelicals.
[6] See William F. Wertz, Jr., "Nazis, Operation Condor, and Bush's Privatization Plan," EIR, March 25, 2005.
[7] At present, very few American religious agencies are promoting the Bush effort to privatize and piratize Social Security funds, which is directly modeled on the pension privatization carried out by Pinochet in Chile after the murder of thousands. Among these agencies are the Acton Society, the Catholic rightist group controlled by Mont Pelerin; and the Christian Coalition.
[8] Maranatha began recruiting what would eventually be Ralph Reed's cult-troops by harvesting the burned-out drug users and sex freaks, the California human wreckage from the 1960s who had become "Jesus People."
This was an international technology. Efrain Rios Montt was a pastor of California's "el Verbo" (The Word) church, a zombie factory on precisely the Maranatha pattern, its victims drawn from the "Jesus Freak" street people. In 1982, Rios Montt headed the military junta that overthrew the government of Guatemala, becoming President from August 1982 to August 1983.
[9] The above-cited Wall Street Journal article informs us that CNP co-founder "Morton C. Blackwell, a former special assistant to President Reagan, says he suggested that the president write [a] letter lauding Maranatha. `I've not seen anything in their doctrine which is outside the Christian tradition,' he says. Mr. Blackwell . . . currently holds intensive, two-day seminars to teach conservative young people how to become political organizers. So far, he says, about 10% of the 400 people who have gone through the seminars have been members of Maranatha. One of them, Claude Allen, directed young volunteers for the successful 1984 campaign to reelect GOP Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina." Note that in January 2005, President George W. Bush chose this same Claude Allen as White House Domestic Policy Advisor, after Senate Democrats stalled Allen's confirmation to a Federal judgeship.
[10] Ron Fournier of the Associated Press reported on June 10, 1999, that the Internal Revenue Service had concluded years of investigation by finally denying tax exempt status to the Christian Coalition, causing the group to carry out a legal reorganization, through which it sought to qualify some spinoffs as tax-exempt.
[11] See Laurence Hecht, "H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell: The `No Soul' Gang Behind Reverend Moon's Gnostic Sex Cult," EIR, Dec. 20, 2002.
[12] The international financial community pushed hard in the mid-1990s for individual states to allow deregulated looting of the electricity market by energy pirate companies. Enron, bolstered in Washington by Tom DeLay, was the bankers' main political lobbying vehicle for that end.
DeLay became House Whip in 1994, and he then created his first "leadership PAC," Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC), devoted to paying for the election of anti-regulatory politicians. Enron hosted ARMPAC's first fundraising event, in DeLay's hometown of Houston. Of the $280,000 that was initially raised, the amount that came directly from Enron is secret; but Enron chief executive Ken Lay gave at least $50,000, and Enron's vice chairman kicked in $25,000, and Enron soon contributed more than a half million—a large part of the money that DeLay distributed from ARMPAC to pro-deregulation campaigns. Under pressure principally from Enron, California passed the nation's first state electricity deregulation law in 1996. Other states soon followed suit, bowing to the Texas-Washington power axis.
In 1998, the year after Reed came aboard Enron's team, Enron lobbyists met with DeLay at his Texas home, and planned with him a national campaign to roll back Federal energy regulations. Enron paid $750,000 to two of DeLay's lieutenants—his chief of staff, Ed Buckham—an ordained evangelical minister—and ARMPAC consultant Karl Gallant, who together had formed a private company, Alexander Consulting Group, to run a nationwide crusade for electricity deregulation. The Enron-DeLay arrangement was disguised under the front-group name, Americans for Affordable Electricity. Enron soon hired the DeLay men directly, Buckham for a total of $370,000, Gallant for $200,000.
By 2002, Enron and California and thousands of piracy victims were bankrupt . . . and DeLay was crowned House Majority Leader, the wielder of Congressional power without historical precedent.
Buckham, Gallant, and a crew from DeLay, Inc. and The Fellowship continue to run the Alexander Strategy Group as a cosmically connected, nominally private lobbying arm of the DeLay Congressional dictatorship. One Alexander Strategy Group partner, Brian Darling, became a Senate aide—but resigned when he was exposed as the author of the notorious memo on how the Republicans could take opportunistic political advantage of the 2005 Terri Schiavo "feeding tube" case. Republicans had earlier accused Democrats of concocting the memo.
[13] "Statute for Religious Freedom," passed by the Virginia Assembly, Jan. 16, 1786.
