November 22, 2007
Former ORU Accountant Claims He Was Fired for Refusing to Cook the Books
April Marciszewski, The Tulsa World, November 22, 2007
A former Oral Roberts University senior accountant filed a lawsuit Wednesday claiming he was forced to quit because he refused to stay silent about ORU and others allegedly requiring him to falsely list assets as expenses.
Trent Huddleston’s lawsuit claims “he was directed, against his will and over his objections,” to defraud the Internal Revenue Service, the Oklahoma Tax Commission and the public “in particular for the protection of . . . Richard and Lindsay Roberts . . .”
Richard Roberts is on a leave of absence as ORU president while university regents and independent auditors investigate allegations made in an earlier lawsuit by former professors John Swails, Tim Brooker, and Paulita Brooker. That suit claims the Roberts family misspent ORU and Oral Roberts Ministries money, among other allegations. Lindsay Roberts is his wife. Both are defendants in the earlier lawsuit. They have denied wrongdoing, and Richard Roberts has said that he pays for his family’s personal expenses.
Huddleston’s suit was filed by attorneys Gary Richardson and Paul Boudreaux. They also filed the earlier lawsuit, as well as two lawsuits filed Wednesday from ORU students, one claiming his potential degree has been devalued and the other claiming the history department has been decimated and he cannot complete his history degree. All of the suits were filed in Tulsa County District Court.
ORU Director of Public Relations Jeremy Burton said the university declined to comment on the student cases and was reviewing Huddleston’s allegations. Richard Roberts’ attorney did not return a call just before 5 p.m. Wednesday.
November 21, 2007
What Would Jesus Buy?
Amy Goodman, TruthDig, November 20, 2007
“Black Friday” is the name retailers have given to the day after Thanksgiving in their attempt to make Christmas synonymous with shopping. On Black Friday, Americans are expected to flock to the malls and shopping centers, eager for discounts, armed with plastic. Business analysts fill the airwaves with predictions on how the fickle consumer will perform, how fuel prices and the subprime mortgage crisis will impact holiday shopping. Black Friday is followed by Cyber Monday,” a name coined by the retail industry to hype online shopping. Listening to the business news, one would conclude that the future not only of the U.S. economy but of humanity itself depends on mass, frenzied shopping for the holidays.
Rev. Billy is the street preacher played by Bill Talen, a New York City-based anti-consumerism activist who is the subject of a new feature-length documentary hitting theaters this week, “What Would Jesus Buy?” The film is produced by Morgan Spurlock, who gained fame with his documentary “Super Size Me,” in which he showed his physical and emotional decline while eating only McDonald’s food for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a month.
In the movie, Talen and his amazing Stop Shopping Gospel Choir cross the country in two biodiesel buses, holding public faux-Gospel revivals denouncing the “Shopocalypse,” our crass, corporate, credit-driven consumerist culture and its reliance on sweatshops abroad and low-wage retail jobs at home, while celebrating small-town, Main Street economies, the strength and value of fair-trade shopping, and making do with less.
“We are here today, 28 days before Christmas,” Rev. Billy intones at the outset of his tour, to his home congregation in Greenwich Village, “behind so many layers of billboards, with supermodels looking down on us in their Christmas lingerie, billboards covered with fake Dickensian gingerbread lattes-we’re going to go out across this shopping-addicted country.” He added later, “We will sit down and defeat the bulbous yellow feet of the most famous corporate logo in the world, and the one that has chosen to steal our children’s imaginations for 80 years, the devil, Mickey Mouse.”
En route to Disneyland from New York City, the reverend and his flock stop by the Mall of America in Minnesota, Wal-Mart’s world headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., and numerous Starbucks shops and big-box stores like Target and Staples-educating and engaging, confronting and confounding, with creative street theater and direct action. In Traer, Iowa, we meet Michael Reuman, whose clothing store has been open for more than 100 years: “Wal-Mart is killing small-town America. We’ve got two sons, and I have not encouraged either one of them to come back to the store. There’s no future here.”
Brent Budowsky: Thanksgiving in the Two Americas
Brent Budowsky, The Hill, November 20, 2007
In our two Americas, this holiday season will be the best of times for some and the worst of times for others, and it is a moment to give thanks not for what we have, but to those who live their lives in the true spirit of America.
Last year at this time there was news of soaring bonuses on Wall Street, including some very lavish rewards for those most responsible for the mortgage financing crisis. We will soon read of lavish bonuses again, and of executives at some offending companies reaping hundreds of millions of dollars of personal wealth through legal insider stock sales as their reward for the American tragedy they helped cause.
In one America this Thanksgiving oil prices drive to $100 a barrel, gas prices impose pain on average Americans, and home heating oil rises to punishing heights while some reap record profits from the dictatorship of oil. In the other America there is much work for those who feed the hungry, clothe the needy and heal the hurting among us.
Meanwhile, the number of foreclosures rises through the roof. Many good Americans will spend this Thanksgiving losing their homes, or nervously praying the court order does not arrive while their frail holiday tree hosts modest gifts given with great love.
The sales of luxury presents will be solid at the great shops that cater to the high incomes of one America, while workers in the other America will be searching for bargains at the Wal-Marts, trying to afford their holiday presents sandwiched between skyrocketing gas prices and rising food costs.
Mikey Weinstein… The Anti-Crusader
Josh Harkinson, Mother Jones, November 20, 2007
At Mikey Weinstein’s home in the suburbs of Albuquerque, the picture window in the living room has been twice shot out. Sometimes Weinstein opens his front door to find dead animals on his porch, feces smeared on his walls, or slashes in his tires. Men have called to threaten his daughter, women to chant rhymes about shooting him in the head, small children to inform him that he will burn in hell. To his critics, he says, “Take a number, pack a picnic lunch, and stand in line.” He’s not going anywhere, and neither is his 5’6″ ex-Marine security guard, Shorty.
Weinstein is the middle rung in three generations of soldiers. A former Air Force JAG and White House attorney for Ronald Reagan, he has adopted a shock-and-awe approach to battling efforts by the military to impress Christianity upon American soldiers. “We have the Christian Taliban and the Christian Al Qaeda inside our military,” says Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, “and they really have WMD, unlike Saddam.”
An amateur pugilist with shoulders like a butcher block and a head like a cannonball, he several times challenged evangelical minister Ted Haggard to a boxing match. (Haggard declined.) His adversaries call him, to his great delight, “The Field General of the Godless Armies of Satan,” though his friends prefer nicknames like “Ticktock” and “Motor Mouth.” During one of his trademark rapid-fire, profanity-laced diatribes, he proclaimed, “Our job here is to kick ass, take names, and leave sucking chest wounds on the people who are trying to engage the machinery of the state to push their biblical worldview.” To allies who suggest that perhaps Weinstein should appoint someone more diplomatic to lead the foundation, he offers, “First they will have to prove to me that what we are engaged in is a polite exchange of views” with right-wing Christians, “instead of a bloody battle that only ends with the last person standing.”
Weinstein is certain that fundamentalists will stop at nothing to transform the United States military into an army of God. He notes that Officers Christian Fellowship, with chapters in every major U.S. military installation in the world, envisions-and here he quotes its mission statement-a “spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit.” The group has helped boost fundamentalist Christianity among the armed forces from a negligible presence 20 years ago to a faith currently held by 30 percent of U.S. soldiers, according to Weinstein. He adds that many of those soldiers-hardcore end-timers and Dominionists-desperately want America to invade Iran, thereby triggering the biblical prophecy of the Rapture.
McClellan Looks For Absolution For Bush Misdeeds
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan blames President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for efforts to lie to the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative. McClellan makes this claim in a new book about his time in the Bush White House.
Essentially McClellan claims that he was misled by others in the administration regarding who was involved in the leak. McClellan places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the president, Vice President Cheney, then chief of staff Andy Card, Karl Rove and convicted felon Scooter Libby. Big deal its not like we didn’t know this already.
Hey Al, Yeah You! What else do you have to do in the next four years that is more important than saving your country???
It has now become clear to everybody that the voters are seeking change, a new direction. It’s even apparent to Obama and Hillary. Obama is screaming “I am the candidate for change.” Hillary is screaming, “I am the candidate with experience that can do change.” You know what? You are both full of shit. The only candidate in this race that represents change is Dennis Kucinich, and granted, I do not know if he can actually govern but at a minimum he has the right ideas.
Why is he not getting ahead? Oh yeah, he is small in stature, not a GQ cover type. Yeah people! Let’s keep electing candidates based on their hair stylist, (Ronnie really had a great one, that black hair on a 70 year old man was very virile). In that contest it would be a tight race between Mitt and John Edwards. Is that what we really want? I like John Edwards, but should that be the only criteria for the most important job in the world? And believe me after the chimp, it will take a miracle to return our country just to where we were in 2000, it may take a miracle to return it just to 1975. Hey Richard, still dead? Thank God.
Irony Alert Overload
This is how ‘compassionate conservatives’ reward those who buy into their propaganda: