It's actually part of an article on the famous "straight-talker" John McCain and his willingness (or lack thereof) to investigate the corruption of the Republican Party. I discuss other aspects of the article in this post at Old Hickory's Weblog: That Maverick McCain strikes again 08/25/05.
One of the characters in the article is Ralph Reed, the lobbyist, Georgia politician and former baby-faced director of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, one of the main organizations of the Christian Right. Reed, it seems, used funds from Indian tribes that ran casinos to assist anti-gambling initiatives in states where other tribes had or wanted to set up competing casinos.
It reminded me of the old saying in Mississippi that anti-alcohol measures were typically driven by Baptist preachers and bootleggers. Check it out to see how the present-day coalition of Christian Right anti-gambling activists and Indian casino interests do it now.
In his concluding paragraphs, Dubose writes:
While the Abramoff-Scanlon-Reed-Norquist story is big, the committee's time limited, and Chairman McCain's resolve questionable, it might still be worthwhile to explore one of the more perverse aspects of this sad account of lobbyists plundering Indian tribes. In 2003, when Abramoff and Scanlon had tapped out their Indian sources and were desperate for more money, they conceived of "The Tigua Elder Legacy Program." As previously reported in the Observer, Abramoff planned to purchase term life insurance on Tigua elders and collect the death benefits as they died. It was an imaginative idea by which the deaths of tribal elders would pay for lobbying services for those left behind. It was also more than the Tigua Tribal Council could stomach.
In the summer before his Indian lobbying enterprise collapsed, Abramoff found another
niche market to which the evangelical Reed could connect him: dying African-American
Christians. If Reed could, as he promised Abramoff in an e-mail, ["]deliver 85,000 Christian voters," Abramoff must have assumed he could deliver enough dying black Christians to create a new revenue stream. In July 2003, Abramoff e-mailed Reed regarding "Black Churches Insurance program.""Per our previous discussion. Let me know how we can move forward to chat with folks who can set this up with African American elders. It can be huge." Reed replied that it looked interesting and urged that they meet in D.C. as a next step.
A futures market that commodifies the waning lives of elder Black Christians. Who says this isn't a great country?
The flim-flam operation produced by the combination of the Christian Right with the robber barons and war profiteers of the Republican Party has to be one of the great scams of all time.
At the end of the online article is the text of a sidebar about Abramoff's providing "high-tech military hardware" to an "Israeli paramilitary organizer" who "ran a sniper school in the ultra-orthodox [Israeli] settlement of Beitar Illit." ("End Times Tax Accounting")
Dubose also writes:
Like American End Times Christians who believe the 9/11 attack is an augur of the second coming of Christ, Abramoff's End Times Israeli Jews believe the 9/11 attack anticipates the coming of the Messiah.
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