EXPOSED | more $cientology crap

January 16, 2010 at 12:03 am · Filed under ACTivism, American Capitalism, Assclowns, Bullshit, Crap, Dug Up, Educational, Feedback, Freedom of Speech, Fucktards™, Fundies, Health & Wellness, Humor Me, Internet, Jokes, Propaganda, Rantz, Scientolofucks, U.S.A., Weird Shit and tagged: $cientology

Those poor Americans! You really can’t blame them for their ignorance. Their (3rd generation) ignorant PARENTS have got them on this JEEZUS and BIBLE trip…

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NO DOUBT both the MORONMONS™ and the SCIENTOLOFUCKS™ have got them by the balls EASY!! REDEMPTION with the 1st and SALVATION with Zenu!

Part of our PERRENNIAL thread on both these idiot “religions” – BUSINESS seems to be steady…

Just remember – these people are DANGEROUS – because they’re fucking STOOPID and RETARDED! (SORRY, scratch that last one – that would be an insult to RETARDED PEOPLE!!) FUCK YOU SCIENTOLOGY!

The “church” has invented hundreds of goods and services for which members are urged to give “donations.” Are you having trouble “moving swiftly up the Bridge” — that is, advancing up the stepladder of enlightenment? Then you can have your case reviewed for a mere $1,250 “donation.”

Want to know “why a thetan hangs on to the physical universe?” Try 52 of Hubbard’s tape-recorded speeches from 1952, titled “Ron’s Philadelphia Doctorate Course Lectures,” for $2,525. (May 6, 1991 pricing)

Next: nine other series of the same sort. For the collector, gold-and-leather-bound editions of 22 of Hubbard’s books (and bookends) on subjects ranging from Scientology ethics to radiation can be had for just $1,900.

To gain influence and lure richer, more sophisticated followers, Scientology has lately resorted to a wide array of front groups and financial scams. Among them:

CONSULTING. Sterling Management Systems, formed in 1983, has been ranked in recent years by Inc. magazine as one of America’s fastest-growing private companies (estimated 1988 revenues: $20 million). Sterling regularly mails a free newsletter to more than 300,000 health-care professionals, mostly dentists, promising to increase their incomes dramatically. The firm offers seminars and courses that typically cost $10,000. But Sterling’s true aim is to hook customers for Scientology. “The church has a rotten product, so they package it as something else,” says Peter Georgiades, a Pittsburgh attorney who represents Sterling victims. “It’s a kind of bait and switch.” Sterling’s founder, dentist Gregory Hughes is now under investigation by California’s Board of Dental Examiners for incompetence. Nine lawsuits are pending against him for malpractice (seven others have been settled), mostly for orthodontic work on children.

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Many dentists who have unwittingly been drawn into the cult are filing or threatening lawsuits as well. Dentist Robert Geary of Medina, Ohio, who entered a Sterling seminar in 1988, endured “the most extreme high-pressure sales tactics I have ever faced.” Sterling officials told Geary, 45, that their firm was not linked to Scientology, he says, but Geary claims they eventually convinced him that he and his wife Dorothy had personal problems that required auditing.

Over five months, the Gearys say, they spent $130,000 for services, plus $50,000 for “gold-embossed, investment-grade” books signed by Hubbard. Geary contends that Scientologists not only called his bank to increase his credit card limit but also forged his signature on a $20,000 loan application. “It was insane,” he recalls. “I couldn’t even get an accounting from them of what I was paying for.” At one point, the Gearys claim, Scientologists held Dorothy hostage for two weeks in a mountain cabin, after which she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.

THE ROWE FAMILY SPENT $23,000 on Dianetics treatment. Like many dentists, Glover Rowe was drawn in by Sterling Management, which does not publicize its ties to Scientology.

Last October, Sterling broke some bad news to another dentist, Glover Rowe of Gadsden, Ala., and his wife Dee. Tests showed that unless they signed up for auditing Glover’s practice would fail, and Dee would someday abuse their child. The next month the Rowes flew to Glendale, Calif., where they shuttled daily from a local hotel to a Dianetics center. “We thought they were brilliant people because they seemed to know so much about us,” recalls Dee. ” Then we realized our hotel room must have been bugged.” After bolting from the center, $23,000 poorer, the Rowes say, they were chased repeatedly by Scientologists on foot and in cars. Dentists aren’t the only once at risk. Scientology also makes pitches to chiropractors, podiatrists and veterinarians.

PUBLIC INFLUENCE. One front, the Way to Happiness Foundation, has distributed to children in thousands of the nation’s public schools more than 3.5 million copies of a booklet Hubbard wrote on morality. The church calls the scheme “the largest dissemination project in Scientology history.” Applied Scholastics is the name of still another front, which is attempting to install a Hubbard tutorial program in public schools, primarily those populated by minorities. The group also plans a 1,000 acre campus, where it will train educators to teach various Hubbard methods. The disingenuously named Citizens Commission on Human Rights is a Scientology group at war with psychiatry, its primary competitor. The commission typically issues reports aimed at discrediting particular psychiatrists and the field in general. The CCHR is also behind an all-out war against Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, the nation’s top-selling antidepression drug. Despite scant evidence, the group’s members — who call themselves “psychbusters” — claim that Prozac drives people to murder or suicide. Through mass mailings, appearances on talk shows and heavy lobbying, CCHR has hurt drug sales and helped spark dozens of lawsuits against Lilly.

Another Scientology linked group, the Concerned Businessmen’s Association of America, holds antidrug contests and awards $5,000 grants to schools as a way to recruit students and curry favor with education officials. West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV unwittingly commended the CBAA in 1987 on the Senate floor. Last August author Alex Haley was the keynote speaker at its annual awards banquet in Los Angeles. Says Haley: “I didn’t know much about that group going in. I’m a Methodist.” Ignorance about Scientology can be embarrassing: two months ago, Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, noting that Scientology’s founder “has solved the aberrations of the human mind,” proclaimed March 13 “L. Ron Hubbard Day.” He rescinded the proclamation in late March, once he Iearned who Hubbard really was.

HEALTH CARE. HealthMed, a chain of clinics run by Scientologists, promotes a grueling and excessive system of saunas, exercise and vitamins designed by Hubbard to purify the body. Experts denounce the regime as quackery and potentially harmful, yet HealthMed solicits unions and public agencies for contracts. The chain is plugged heavily in a new book, Diet for a Poisoned Planet, by journalist David Steinman, who concludes that scores of common foods (among them: peanuts, bluefish, peaches and cottage cheese) are dangerous.

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop labeled the book “trash, ” and the Food and Drug Administration issued a paper in October that claims Steinman distorts his facts. “HealthMed is a gateway to Scientology, and Steinman’s book is a sorting mechanism,” says physician William Jarvis, who is head of the National Council Against Health Fraud. Steinman, who describes Hubbard favorably as a “researcher,” denies any ties to the church and contends, “HealthMed has no affiliation that I know of with Scientology.”

DRUG TREATMENT. Hubbard’s purification treatments are the mainstay of Narconon, a Scientology-run chain of 33 alcohol and drug rehabilitation centers — some in prisons under the name “Criminon” — in 12 countries. Narconon, a classic vehicle for drawing addicts into the cult, now plans to open what it calls the world’s largest treatment center, a 1,400-bed facility on an Indian reservation near Newkirk, Okla. (pop. 2,400. At a 1989 ceremony in Newkirk, the As- sociation for Better Living and Education presented Narconon a check for $200,000 and a study praising its work. The association turned out to be part of Scientology itself. Today the town is battling to keep out the cult, which has fought back through such tactics as sending private detectives to snoop on the mayor and the local newspaper publisher.

FINANCIAL SCAMS. Three Florida Scientologists, including Ronald Bernstein, a big contributor to the church’s international “war chest,” pleaded guilty in March to using their rare-coin dealership as a money laundry. Other notorious activities by Scientologists include making the shady Vancouver stock exchange even shadier (see box) and plotting to plant operatives in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Export-Import Bank of the U.S. The alleged purpose of this scheme: to gain inside information on which countries are going to be denied credit so that Scientology-linked traders can make illicit profits by taking “short” positions in those countries’ currencies.

In the stock market the practice of “shorting” involves borrowing shares of publicly traded companies in the hope that the price will go down before the stocks must be bought on the market and returned to the lender. The Feshbach brothers of Palo Alto, Calif. — Kurt, Joseph and Matthew – have become the leading short sellers in the U.S., with more than $500 million under management. The Feshbachs command a staff of about 60 employees and claim to have earned better returns than the Dow Jones industrial average for most of the 1980s. And, they say, they owe it all to the teachings of Scientology, whose “war chest” has received more than $1 million from the family.

The Feshbachs also embrace the church’s tactics; the brothers are the terrors of the stock exchanges. In congressional hearings in 1989, the heads of several companies claimed that Feshbach operatives have spread false information to government agencies and posed in various guises — such as a Securities and Exchange Commission official — in an effort to discredit their companies and drive the stocks down. Michael Russell, who ran a chain of business journals, testified that a Feshbach employee called his bankers and interfered with his loans. Sometimes the Feshbachs send private detectives to dig up dirt on firms, which is then shared with business reporters, brokers and fund managers.

The Feshbachs, who wear jackets bearing the slogan “stock busters,” insist they run a clean shop. But as part of a current probe into possible insider stock trading, federal officials are reportedly investigating whether the Feshbachs received confidential information from FDA employees. The brothers seem aligned with Scientology’s war on psychiatry and medicine: many of their targets are health and bio- technology firms. “”Legitimate short selling performs a public service by deflating hyped stocks,” says Robert Flaherty, the editor of Equities magazine and a harsh critic of the brothers. “But the Feshbachs have damaged scores of good start-ups.”

Occasionally a Scientologist’s business antics land him in jail. Last August a former devotee named Steven Fishman began serving a five-year prison term in Florida. His crime: stealing blank stock-confirmation slips from his employer, a major brokerage house, to use as proof that he owned stock entitling him to join dozens of successful class-action lawsuits. Fishman made roughly $1 million this way from 1983 to 1988 and spent as much as 30% of the loot on Scientology books and tapes.

Scientology denies any tie to the Fishman scam, a claim strongly disputed by both Fishman and his longtime psychiatrist, Uwe Geertz, a prominent Florida hypnotist. Both men claim that when arrested, Fishman was ordered by the church to kill Geertz and then do an “EOC,” or end of cycle, which is church jargon for suicide.

BOOK PUBLISHING. Scientology mischiefmaking has even moved to the book industry. Since 1985 at least a dozen Hubbard books, printed by a church company, have made best-seller lists. They range from a 5,000-page sci-fi decology (Black Genesis, The Enemy Within, An Alien Affair) to the 40-year-old Dianetics. In 1988 the trade publication Publishers Weekly awarded the dead author a plaque commemorating the appearance of Dianetics on its best-seller list for 100 consecutive weeks.

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Critics pan most of Hubbard’s books as unreadable, while defectors claim that church insiders are sometimes the real authors. Even so, Scientology has sent out armies of its followers to buy the group’s books at such major chains as B. Dalton’s and Waldenbooks to sustain the illusion of a best-selling author. A former Dalton’s manager says that some books arrived in his store with the chain’s price stickers already on them, suggesting that copies are being recycled. Scientology claims that sales of Hubbard books now top 90 million worldwide. The scheme, set up to gain converts and credibility, is coupled with a radio and TV advertising campaign virtually unparalleled in the book industry.

Scientology devotes vast resources to squelching its critics. Since 1986 Hubbard and his church have been the subject of four unfriendly books, all released by small yet courageous publishers. In each case, the writers have been badgered and heavily sued. One of Hubbard’s policies was that all perceived enemies are “fair game” and subject to being “tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” Those who criticize the church journalists, doctors, lawyers and even judges often find themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up or threatened with death. Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment.

After the Los Angeles Times published a negative series on the church last summer, Scientologists spent an estimated $1 million to plaster the reporters’ names on hundreds of billboards and bus placards across the city. Above their names were quotations taken out of context to portray the church in a positive light.

The church’s most fearsome advocates are its lawyers. Hubbard warned his followers in writing to “beware of attorneys who tell you not to sue . . . the purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than to win.” Result: Scientology has brought hundreds of suits against its perceived enemies and today pays an estimated $20 million annually to more than 100 lawyers.

One legal goal of Scientology is to bankrupt the opposition or bury it under paper.

The church has 71 active lawsuits against the IRS alone. One of them, Miscavige vs. IRS, has required the U.S. to produce an index of 52,000 pages of documents. Boston attorney Michael Flynn, who helped Scientology victims from 1979 to 1987, personally endured 14 frivolous lawsuits, all of them dismissed. Another lawyer, Joseph Yanny, believes the church “has so subverted justice and the judicial system that it should be barred from seeking equity in any court.” He should know: Yanny represented the cult until 1987, when, he says, he was asked to help church officials steal medical records to blackmail an opposing attorney (who was allegedly beaten up instead). Since Yanny quit representing the church, he has been the target of death threats, burglaries, lawsuits and other harassment.

Scientology’s critics contend that the U.S. needs to crack down on the church in a major, organized way.

“I want to know, Where is our government?” demands Toby Plevin, a Los Angeles attorney who handles victims. ” It shouldn’t be left to private litigators, because God knows most of us are afraid to get involved.” But law enforcement agents are also wary. “Every investigator is very cautious, walking on eggshells when it comes to the church, ” says a Florida police detective who has tracked the cult since 1988. “It will take a federal effort with lots of money and manpower.”

So far the agency giving Scientology the most grief is the IRS, whose officials have implied that Hubbard’s successors may be looting the church’s coffers. Since 1988, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the revocation of the cult’s tax-exempt status, a massive IRS probe of church centers across the country has been under way. An IRS agent, Marcus Owens, has estimated that thousands of IRS employees have been involved. Another agent, in an internal IRS memorandum, spoke hopefully of the “ultimate disintegration” of the church. A small but helpful beacon shone last June when a federal appeals court ruled that two cassette tapes featuring conversations between church officials and their lawyers are evidence of a plan to commit “future frauds” against the IRS.

The IRS and FBI have been debriefing Scientology defectors for the past three years, in part to gain evidence for a major racketeering case that appears to have stalled last summer. Federal agents complain that the Justice Department is unwilling to spend the money needed to endure a drawn-out war with Scientology or to fend off the cult’s notorious jihads against individual agents. “In my opinion the church has one of the most effective intelligence operations in the U.S., rivaling even that of the FBI,” says Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.

Foreign governments have been moving even more vigorously against the organization.

In Canada the church and nine of its members will be tried in June on charges of stealing government documents (many of them retrieved in an enormous police raid of the church’s Toronto headquarters). Scientology proposed to give $1 million to the needy if the case was dropped, but Canada spurned the offer. Since 1986 authorities in France, Spain and Italy have raided more than 50 Scien- tology centers. Pending charges against more than 100 of its overseas church members include fraud, extortion, capital flight, coercion, illegally practicing medicine and taking advantage of mentally incapacitated people. In Germany last month, leading politicians accused the cult of trying to infiltrate a major party as well as launching an immense recruitment drive in the east.

Sometimes even the church’s biggest zealots can use a little protection. Screen star Travolta, 37, has long served as an unofficial Scientology spokesman, even though he told a magazine in 1983 that he was opposed to the church’s management.

High-level defectors claim that Travolta has long feared that if he defected, details of his sexual life would be made public.

“He felt pretty intimidated about this getting out and told me so,” recalls William Franks, the church’s former chairman of the board. “There were no outright threats made, but it was implicit. If you leave, they immediately start digging up everything.” Franks was driven out in 1981 after attempting to reform the church.

The church’s former head of security, Richard Aznaran, recalls Scientology ringleader Miscavige repeatedly joking to staffers about Travolta’s allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior.

At this point any threat to expose Travolta seems superfluous: last May a male porn star collected $100,000 from a tabloid for an account of his alleged two-year liaison with the celebrity. Travolta refuses to comment, and in December his lawyer dismissed questions about the subject as “bizarre.” Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist.

Shortly after Hubbard’s death the church retained Trout & Ries, a respected, Connecticut-based firm of marketing consultants, to help boost its public image.

“We were brutally honest,” says Jack Trout. “We advised them to clean up their act, stop with the controversy and even to stop being a church. They didn’t want to hear that.”

Instead, Scientology hired one of the country’s largest p.r. outfits, Hill and Knowlton, whose executives refuse to discuss the lucrative relationship. “Hill and Knowlton must feel that these guys are not totally off the wall,” says Trout. “Unless it’s just for the money.”

One of Scientology’s main strategies is to keep advancing the tired argument that the church is being “persecuted” by antireligionists. It is supported in that position by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Council of Churches. But in the end, money is what Scientology is all about. As long as the organization’s opponents and victims are successfully squelched, Scientology’s managers and lawyers will keep pocketing millions of dollars by helping it achieve its ends.

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END of Part one

John McMaster was the first “clear.” Looking him up on Google produces this:

“Sad to say, John McMaster, Clear #1, was interviewed 2 years before his death in a Manchester England transient hotel (flop house). In a tiny room filled with dead flowers, he told of being tormented and taunted by Hubbard for being gay. He died of cirrosis of the liver due to a long bout of alcoholism – ONE MORE $CIENTOLOGY “SUCCESS STORY.”

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