RICHARD MELLON SCAIFE:
THE EVIL THAT MONEY CAN DO

INTRODUCTION: A SHORT REVIEW

These are hardly the words and the statements a normal Christian would expect to hear from one of the principal financial backers of Jerry Falwell and the Rutherford Institute. But Scaife is just one example of those who today are backing the Religious Right in its attempt to "take back the country for Christ and the church." "Take back the country for Christ and the church" using people like Scaife? How blind is it possible for us to become? The incongruity here is massive in its extent!

Let's back up and review a little bit because it's been about two weeks since we last visited this subject (as you know, over the last few weeks, we've concentrated on our Special Report on the world financial situation): as a result of the Democratic Party's disastrous rout in the 1994 election, Clinton began to successfully re-position the party back to the center and away from the ultra-liberal, special interest group politics of the 1980s which had made the Democrats unable to win the White House. If he succeeded - and the results of the 1996 presidential election seemed to indicate that he was - Republicans could lose both the House and the Senate in 2000 and be shut out of the presidency for another eight years by Vice President Al Gore, the man Clinton was grooming to take over his new centrist Democratic Party. To Republicans who thought long-term, this meant the Supreme Court would be gone along with the entire federal judiciary; and it also meant a resurgence of the hated leftish-tinged federal bureaucracy and its related regulatory agencies. To anti-abortionists, anti-feminists, anti-homosexuals, free marketeers, etc., this meant the devastation of all the dreams of the right - especially, the Religious Right, the dreams of people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Tim LaHaye, etc. By the time the Al Gore presidency finished - in the year 2009 - all of them would very probably be dead and buried, or at least close to it.

It was precisely these people who refused to let Starr give up on his investigation of the president in the summer of 1997 - and thus was born the determination to "get Clinton" at all costs. Their purpose was to remove him from office or to so cripple him (and the Democratic Party) politically that they could successfully install themselves in power in the year 2000 - and by their control of the presidency and both houses of Congress re-institute America as a "Christian nation."

HIJACKING THE PAULA JONES CASE

The methodology hit upon by the "Get Clinton" crowd was for Starr to - in effect - hijack the Paula Jones case and to trap the president in a lie (perjury) - an impeachable offense. In order to accomplish this, they maneuvered Paula Jones into removing Gil Davis and Joseph Cammarata, her original lawyers, from the case and installing a new legal team under the auspices of the Rutherford Institute. The Rutherford Institute is an ultra-conservative legal foundation associated with various Religious Right causes, particularly prayer in the schools. It is based in Charlottesville, Virginia and like so many other conservative legal foundations is a recipient of funds from Richard Mellon Scaife. John Whitehead, the institute's founder and head, is a disciple of Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, head of the Chalcedon Foundation, based in Vallecito, California. Rushdoony reportedly helped Whitehead found the Rutherford Institute, and has been a director of the Institute and a participant in its speakers bureau.

ROUSAS JOHN (R.J.) RUSHDOONY

Rushdoony is the originator of and prime mover behind the many faceted movement which has come to be called "Christian Reconstruction." Christian Reconstruction is dedicated to replacing secular law with "Biblical law," and secular states with "theocratic republics." Reconstructionism in its broadest sense describes the rebuilding by Christians of every aspect of Western Civilization according to biblical strictures, beginning first with the United States. It is founded on the belief that God's laws, as described in the Bible, pertain to all people throughout history and comprise the only legitimate basis for culture. It places a demand on Christians everywhere to involve themselves in this process.

Christians who don't actively participate in the rebuilding of America as a "Christian state" are deemed apostates, and are to be dealt with accordingly - i.e., as the enemies of God.

RICHARD MELLON SCAIFE: THE
KING OF THE CLINTON-HATERS

That brings us at last to Richard Mellon Scaife, the man who Richard Lacayo called "... the king of Clinton haters ..." and who said that "... Scaife is to Clinton haters what the Medicis were to Michelangelo: the ultimate patron." (Time Magazine, April 13, 1998) - the "cash box" behind the Religious Right's attempt to "destroy the Clinton presidency and "take back the country for Christ and the church." And exactly how close is the connection between Scaife and the "Clinton-haters" of the Religious Right? On the March 5 NBC Nightly News, correspondent Lisa Myers reported:

"To the Clinton White House, Scaife is the Darth Vader of the alleged right-wing conspiracy against the President, having helped bankroll a Pittsburgh newspaper that specializes in anti-Clinton conspiracy theories; The American Spectator, which broke the story about Arkansas troopers soliciting women for Clinton; lawyers once involved in Paula Jones' suit against the President; and a group that ran ads in search of other women (who had had affairs with Clinton) ..."

On March 26, MSNBC's nightly show White House in Crisis which devoted a half-hour to Scaife, host Keith Olbermann remarked,

"If you've got a conspiracy, you've gotta have a bankroll ... If the ... charge by the First Lady that the President is the target of a vast right-wing conspiracy is accurate, then nearly all the banking records point to one individual - Richard Scaife."

On April 27th 1998, Mark Hosenball reached the same conclusion; he wrote in Newsweek:

"The evidence linking Starr to conservative Clinton-haters traces back to a single figure: Richard Mellon Scaife ..."

And that's not all: in the April 17th edition of the Los Angeles Times, reporter David Savage notes that Scaife

"has funded ... (almost all of the Religious Right's) underground attack campaigns against President Clinton ..."

The April 27 edition of Time carried a caricature of Scaife with the caption:

"Subsidizing probes, underwriting witnesses, chipping in for a deanship at a Malibu school, the omnipresent megamillionaire Richard Mellon Scaife owns the cashbox of the (Religious Right's) anti-Clinton crusade."

SCAIFE AND THE MELLON BANKING FORTUNE

Richard Mellon Scaife is the multimillion-dollar heir of the Mellon banking fortune and a man who might be described as the ultraconservative's ultraconservative. Gulf Oil company stock also makes up a large part of his fortune. If one were to count not just Richard Scaife's personal holdings in Gulf Oil (including his stock holdings in First Boston Bank), but also those of the various Scaife charitable trusts, the total would surely rank as one of the largest fortunes in the country. He owns numerous newspapers and is a major funder of such conservative foundations and causes, as the Landmark Legal Foundation and the Rutherford Institute, as well as the American Spectator magazine, which has featured attack pieces on Bill and Hillary Clinton since before the 1992 election [he is no longer associated with American Spectator - but not because the Spectator was to ribald in its reporting about Clinton, but because it was not more so]. Scaife family entities currently include the Sarah Scaife Foundation, set up by Scaife's mother; the Allegheny Foundation and the Carthage Foundation. Scaife money to New Right causes has tended over the years to dwarf many better-known conservative funders such as the John M. Olin Foundation, the Adolph Coors Foundation, etc.

Scaife is a handsome man in the blond, beefy style one associates with southwestern ranchers or oil millionaires; but he dresses like the Wall Street executive he really is. His astonishingly blue eyes are his most striking feature. He is quite reserved and is noted for being somewhat reclusive - even secretive. He was a friend and admirer of both J. Edgar Hoover and Barry Goldwater before their deaths, and like many of the "money men" of the New Right, he sees himself as outside the old conservative "Eastern Establishment." Most of all, Scaife is a committed right-wing ideologue who is stubbornly determined to make the alliance between the Religious Right and the Secular Right work.

Scaife is said by those who know him to be fascinated by military and intelligence matters, and from 1973 to 1975, Scaife ran Forum World Features, a foreign news service which was in fact a front used to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world. He is also very evidently steeped in the Illuminati mythology which seems to permeate and infuse the entire right-wing matrix. Scaife - with his money, his interest in politics, and his long-held conservative views - is today one of the so-called New Right's key financial backers. Indeed, the rise of the New Right has very interestingly coincided with a substantial increase in Scaife's power to assist it.

Pittsburgh acquaintances say that Scaife is rarely seen on the social circuit and suggest that Scaife's relations with most of the other Mellons tend to be less than cordial. Certainly that holds true within his own family: Scaife has only one sibling, Cordelia Scaife May, and he has not spoken to her for the past several years. The falling out between the two Scaifes had a lot to do with his steadfast commitment to right-wing politics and can be traced back to 1973 when he took over the chairmanship of the Sarah Scaife Foundation from his sister, changed the foundation's funding priorities, and rather ruthlessly elbowed her out of any control over the family fortune and the rest of the Scaife charitable trusts. Scaife has homes in Pebble Beach, California, and in Pittsburgh, and a large estate in Ligonier, Pennsylvania; he flies from coast to coast in a private plane said to be so big that it can carry up to 100 passengers.

MONEY: THE BASIS OF SCAIFE'S POWER

One rather penetrating insight into Scaife's personality is provided by Pat Minarcin, a former editor of the now-defunct Pittsburgher Magazine, which Scaife financed. "We were talking one time after a meeting and I said to him, 'Is money power?'" Minarcin recalls. "He paused three or four seconds and looked at me really hard. He's just not used to people speaking to him on that level. Then he said, 'I didn't use to think so, but the older I get the more I do.'"

The power of Scaife money is well appreciated by those who benefit from it. For example, an official of an important Religious Right group who prefers not to be named says that whenever he and other religious right leaders discuss possible projects, they "always inevitably think about all that Scaife money and what it's doing."

Certainly money is very much the stuff out from which the Mellon family history is made. Judge Thomas Mellon, the son of an Irish immigrant farmer who settled in the Pennsylvania countryside, rose to prominence in Pittsburgh during the latter half of the nineteenth century through shrewd real estate investments and a lending business that eventually became the Mellon Bank. In time, the family holdings came to include, in addition to the bank, substantial blocks of stock in Gulf Oil and Alcoa, among other companies. By 1957, when Fortune Magazine tried to rank the largest fortunes in America, the Mellon (Scaife) fortune was listed as one of the top eight fortunes in the country. It's now difficult to say how large the fortune is because - like the Rockefeller and Ford fortunes - it has been cunningly broken up into various charitable trusts which makes it difficult to estimate its real size.

THE DEPTH OF SCAIFE'S INVOLVEMENT WITH
THE "GET CLINTON" CROWD: THE AMERICAN
SPECTATOR MAGAZINE AND DAVID BROCKE

When Hillary Rodham Clinton urged the media to investigate the "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband, the donations of Richard M. Scaife became the subject of unusual media scrutiny. The Paula Jones story, and many of the other allegations (e.g., "Troopergate," etc.) about the sex lives of both Bill and Hillary, originated (at least in the US press) in a series of attack pieces that appeared in the American Spectator by David Brocke. The Spectator has received millions in recent years from Scaife. Brocke was the lead hatchet man in the "Get-Clinton" publicity campaign of Clinton's first term.

Brocke has since given up that post and claims to regret some of what he did. Brocke now says that he lost favor with his right-wing employers when he drew the line, in an unauthorized biography of Hillary Clinton, at absolute character assassination. Instead, Brocke settled for a simple smear: according to Brocke, his Clinton-hating superiors wanted him to call Hillary a lesbian; instead, he wrote that unidentified sources from Hillary's past had reported rumors and suspicions that Hillary might be gay.

Brocke was also the source for the most sensational claim in Gary Aldrich's book Unlimited Access. (Aldrich was an FBI agent assigned to the White House; like Linda Tripp, with whom he is friendly, Aldrich was a holdover from the Bush administration. Aldrich has worked with literary agent Lucianne Goldberg and his book was published by Regnery.) Aldrich claimed that Bill Clinton regularly snuck out of the White House in the middle of the night for trysts at local Washington motels. The sensational claim was widely reported and dominated the Sunday chat shows for a couple of weeks in the summer of '96. [While the report was widely smeared in the mainstream press, in the light of what's surfaced recently with regard to both Paula Jones and Monica Lewinski, there's probably some truth to the allegations.]

SCAIFE, FALWELL & THE
CLINTON CHRONICLES

Scaife's Western Journalism Center also produced the Clinton Chronicles - a video which purports to detail the various murders and Illuminati-like conspiracies with which Clinton has allegedly been involved. This video has for several years been shamelessly promoted and sold by Religious Right activist Jerry Falwell on his Old Time Gospel Hour.

One might ask, of course, what's this say about Jerry Falwell? - what's he doing running around with a man who uses language like that which is described at the front of this article? And don't make the mistake that it doesn't matter - i.e., that all sorts of people Christians are forced to deal with use these kinds of words. Yes, that's true; but we shouldn't make "common cause" with such people! - especially a cause like "taking the country back for Christ" - or is it "OK" now to use the devil for God's work?

Falwell also takes money from the Rev. Sung Myung Moon, a man who claims that Christ had sex with the women who followed Him [which, of course, would make all these women "whores" (i.e., Mary Magdalena, Mary, the sister of Lazarus, etc.), and Christ a "fornicator" and "whoremonger"] - the story is that Falwell's Christian Heritage Foundation was going out of business a couple of years ago when suddenly, at the last minute, it became the recipient of a large infusion of funds. The money came from the Women's Federation for World Peace, one of the myriad fronts for the Rev. Sung Myung Moon. Moon, of course, is much more than a religious cult leader. He's a billionaire whose involvement in death squad activity in Central and South America is legendary. He has had extremely close ties to the Korean CIA (which in turn has very close ties to the American CIA). [Please see "Death Squads: Bringing in the Kingdom of God Through Terror, Torture And Death."]

As we just indicated, the inconsistency here is massive in its implications - and there are many, many unbelievers who notice such things. How then is it possible to preach the Gospel to such people in the light of these inconsistencies? Jesus was certainly right when He said, "My name is blasphemed among the unbelievers because of you." These same inconsistencies seem to envelope all those Christian leaders who are today involved in "taking back the country for Christ and the church."

It's also interesting to note in this connection that John Whitehead of the Rutherford institute (see Vol. 1, nos. 2 and 3) has publicly endorsed the claims, hawked by Falwell and Scaife - claims that allege that Clinton is a murderer and a drug-runner, etc. [What's ironic about all this (i.e., the drug-running charges against Clinton, etc.) is that these charges stem from a CIA "black operation" (known in the press as "Mena") which was run out of the White House by Bush and Reagan appointees; if the Clinton-haters would just stop and think for a minute they might realize that by pursuing the Mena matter, they might eventually "catch" themselves.]

Scaife also bankrolls the Free Congress Foundation, which last fall ran a $260,000 TV ad campaign asking women if they had been sexually harassed by the president and encouraging any interested parties to phone in to a "sexual harassment hotline."

SCAIFE AND KENNETH STARR

In addition to all this, Scaife funds a special "Chair" in Legal Studies at Pepperdine University - the same "Chair" which Kenneth Starr is scheduled to take over once he is finished with his work as Special Prosecutor. The connection here between Starr and Scaife is no accident, despite the fact that Starr has never met Scaife. The "go-betweens" between Scaife and Starr are so numerous that if fairly boggles the mind. The Rutherford Institute and the Paula Jones legal team are only two examples of such intermediaries. There are many, many more. Tim Graham reports that nearly every national media outlet has carried stories on the collusion between Starr and Scaife.

MONEY MAKES MERCHANDISE OF US ALL

Sadly, the story here concerning Scaife is all too typical of what's going on in today's effort by Religious Right activists "to take the country back for Christ and the church." Unfortunately, when we take money from people - even for the best of reasons; for example, "taking the country back for Christ and the church" - there's a price to be paid! People like Scaife don't just give their money away. They use their wealth to take advantage of us, and by doing so "make merchandise of (us) ..." (2 Pet. 2:3) In the end, we become their prisoners.

So many of us think that if we could only get our hands on a little more money - then we could "really advance the Kingdom of God." But to think so is to reveal ourselves as nothing more than dupes. It's a fraud, a deceit. The Bible says that when we believe such things - speaks of and warns:

"... (we) fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition ..." (I Tim 6:9)

When Jesus sent His disciples out with the Gospel, He -

"... commanded them that they should take nothing for their journey, save a staff only; no scrip, no bread, no money in their purse (Mark 6:8)

The Kingdom of God is not based on money and the things that money can buy. Some, no doubt, will say, "Be real!" But we are being real.