C Street needs to be investigated by the IRS

[ashling]

Congress, etc.

[mod mom]

1. I agree-sounds like money laundering to me.

[glowing]

2. yeah.. strange group that one there.. Wonder if the holy rollers in the south know about

these band of thugs.. Oh wait, their own religious leaders tend to emit Taliban like violence.

[lpbk2713]

3. K&+R

I've got the feeling we are scratching the surface of a very large iceberg here.

[ashling]

4. ... or a very large

pustule. :puke:

[starroute]

5. The problem is that it's been around so long and has such deep roots

For example, consider this quote from Jeffrey Sharlet's 2003 article on the Family:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525

In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy. In 1978 it secretly helped the Carter Administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, and more recently, in 2001, it brought together the warring leaders of Congo and Rwanda for a clandestine meeting, leading to the two sides' eventual peace accord last July. Such benign acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand “Communists” killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise. “We work with power where we can,” the Family's leader, Doug Coe, says, “build new power where we can't.”

This thing has tentacles everywhere. It's like Danny Casolaro's Octopus, only it's doing it all single-handed.

There are any number of really wild theories out there -- from sources ranging from Wayne Madsen (http://www.insider-magazine.com/ChristianMafia.htm) to the LaRouchies -- which might be true or might be disinfo but either way tend to muddy the waters. However, I know of one article -- written from a rather alarmed Christian point of view -- which manages to pull together much of the more conspiratorial end of the story without ever quite straying over the line into unfounded speculation.

http://www.antipasministries.com/html/file0000057.htm

A review of the organization's archives at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College - which, together with Fuller Seminary on the west coast, has been at the very forefront of the development of a new and very militant eschatology (doctrine of "end times") known as "Warfare Theology" - reveals an association that, according to the Times, "HAS HAD EXTRAORDINARY ACCESS AND SIGNIFICANT INFLUENCE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS FOR THE LAST FIFTY YEARS." . . .

The genesis of the Fellowship Foundation can be traced back to Seattle and the "Red Scare" (and resultant "Palmer Raids") of 1919-1921; specifically, to the fear that American businessmen had at the time for what was going on in the Soviet Union: that somehow or other the United States was in grave danger of being engulfed by a socialist revolution directed by the Soviet Union and "mainlined" into the country through sympathetic American trade unions. . . .

Historian Murray Levin writes that it didn't take the business community long to come up with the idea of enlisting members of the Christian community as "foot soldiers" and "grunts" in their war against trade-unionism and socialism - an effort which involved two strategies: (1) waving the "bloody shirt" of "atheistic socialism," and (2) contributing large sums of money to their churches and ministries. Big business would bludgeon organized labor into a bloody pulp using the "poor carpenter of Nazareth" as its cudgel. . . .

The person big business chose to carry its banner in Seattle was Abraham Vereide, the man who was the guiding light behind the establishment of the ICL (i.e., the "Fellowship Foundation"). . . . Not coincidentally, the men Vereide chose to "win Seattle to Christ" - even through the barrel of a gun, if necessary - were all fervent anti-unionists who had played prominent roles in mercilessly CRUSHING labor's General Strike in the city in the early 1920s.

Although this article implies that the Fellowship Foundation began in the early 1920s, its own records at http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/GUIDES/459.htm date things somewhat later: "April 1935 - Vereide pulled together a group of local businessmen to pray about perceived IWW and Socialist subversion and corruption in Seattle, Washington's municipal government. Group began to meet regularly and expanded to include government officials, labor leaders, etc."

I'm not sure which is more accurate -- I didn't think the IWW was still around in the 30's -- but in either case, the real power of the group began when it set up shop in Washington, DC in 1944-45 and started tapping into postwar conservatism and anti-communism.

Since then, 65 years have passed, and what we're witnessing now is not simply a secretive religious organization with its eye set on world domination. Rather, it's a group founded for purely political purposes by a group of conservative businessmen who decided that their best tool for fighting back against the unionists and communists they saw as threatening their ascendancy was a secretive organization which would wear an outward face of simple piety and patriotism while having an inner teaching that perverted Christianity into a corrupt and heretical message of elite power.

In other words, fascism posing as religion.

By now, this group has acquired considerable wealth and power, a great deal of influence over both politicians and military officers, a membership that overlaps with other elite groups such as the Council for National Policy, far more control over US foreign policy than any of us would be happy about, and a significant presence among the elites of other nations.

It certainly needs to be exposed for what it is -- but as far as investigation by Congress or the IRS goes, that's something of a non-starter.