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helemon
2nd September 2005, 02:34 PM
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0507/S00222.htm#a
It is highly significant, though, that Diebold's former COO, Wesley Vance, was a prominent member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as a graduate of church-funded Brigham Young University.

Vance, for several years was in charge of Diebold's global operations, including research and development, manufacturing, sales and purchasing. He was paid $787,000 in 2003 as COO and had 10,000 Diebold stock options -- with 10% of his annual income likely tithed to the LDS church. Vance died in the spring of 2003 at age 45 while piloting his own plane, crashing southeast of Columbus, Ohio.

Are there other key Diebold associates who are LDS in the mix of 14,000 employees? Without a doubt.

Vance was also in charge of human resources for Diebold, and it is known that the LDS, as a socially-conscious organization, looks out for its own.

As Sally Denton and Roger Morris point out in their book, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America:


". . . the Mormon organization has a great deal in common with the Mafia . . . Strictly hierarchical. Great rewards for loyalty. Great rewards for keeping your word. They take care of their own."FMR Corporation -- Fidelity Management & Research Corporation -- is Diebold's largest shareholder, with 5.7 million shares worth over $313 million. FMR's former president, Robert Pozen, aside from having served as associate general counsel to the SEC, was secretary of economic affairs for Massachusetts governor/LDS celebrity Mitt Romney. Romney is a frontrunner for US president on the Republican 2008 ticket.

Fidelity is the world's largest mutual funds company. It is in the hands of a major Boston family --father and daughter, Ned and Abby Johnson -- with Steve Jonas running things for the Johnsons. (Click here: DBD: Major Holders for DIEBOLD INC - Yahoo! Finance )

Fidelity, has in the past organized fundraisers for Romney, as has the syndicate's venture capital firm, Bain Capital of Boston, which Romney founded in 1984 and where he served as CEO for 17 years.

And the Boston Mormon money connections don't stop there.

Kim B. Clark, long-time dean of America's premier breeding pool for entrepreneurs -- Harvard Business School -- has just become the new president of Brigham Young University in Idaho.

During his time at Harvard, Clark simultaneously served as bishop of the LDS congregation in Cambridge. Prior to Harvard, Clark played a role in the US Department of Labor in the Ford administration, so it is likely he would be a Romney supporter. In fact, BYU has its own Romney Institute established in honor of Mitt Romney's father, the former auto exec and governor, George Romney.

The Mormon church has a history of playing politics, putting up its own prophet, Joseph Smith, for a US presidential run in 1844.

Smith was initiated into the Masons by Abraham Jonas, a Jewish politician (a distant relative of Fidelity's Steve Jonas??), who himself was running for office and hoped to secure the Mormon vote by bringing Smith and his followers into the brotherhood. Smith's "sublime prince of the royal secret" Masonic honors were rushed along in less than the required 30 days, after which Smith persuaded his followers to join. The ranks of the Masons swelled by a third from 2,000 to 3,300 after the Mormon initiation.

According to Brigham Young's wife number 19, Anna Eliza Webb Young, Brigham referred to the Mormon temple endowment ceremony as "Celestial Masonry" because there were such close parallels to the "tokens, signs and penalties" of the Masons -- including the Mormon and Mason secret handshakes.

The question is: When will the Mormon secret handshakes, smoke & mirrors and buck stop?

The financial grip of the LDS behemoth on America is profound. The church, which takes tithes from its members, no-questions-asked, established Zions Bancorp, for instance, in 1873. Brigham Young called it Zions Savings Bank and Trust Company. It now has 400 branches in eight states including Texas, although the church has sold majority control.

And there have been others that have left teethmarks -- including "Jack Mormon" Parry Thomas's Bank of Las Vegas, which Sally Denton and Roger Morris note the FBI referred to as "the Mob's bank". Denton and Morris also cite the Eccles, one of the richest banking families of the 20th century, channeling "enormous, sometimes untraceable sums" to Thomas's Bank of Las Vegas in the 1950s. The Eccles owned First Security bank in Salt Lake City. One of the Eccles brothers served as chairman of the Federal Reserve for over a decade and was an architect of the US banking system. The University of Utah's genetics center now bears the Eccles name.

Then, of course, a private planeload of cash left Las Vegas -- "millions of dollars earned and tithed in the city" -- every Monday for the LDS treasury in Salt Lake City, according to Denton and Morris:

Directly or indirectly, the use of LDS (Latter-day Saints) church money or simply the funds of predominantly Mormon family and business depositors to finance Las Vegas gambling -- to say nothing of aid and stimulation for an international criminal network -- would have been a fateful revelation then and later.

As long as the LDS can keep up the pretense that it is a religion rather than a cash cow (France has forbidden LDS commercial sales there), there will be runaway profits for the "Saints" that will continue to compromise America's political process, as in the Diebold debacle.

helemon
2nd September 2005, 02:47 PM
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0410/S00296.htm
Carlyle "founding fathers" Dan Altobello, Steve Norris, Fred Malek and Dan D'Aniello, who participated in the catering service buyout by Carlyle, all came from the Marriott Mormon culture before joining Carlyle. Malek was number two man at Marriott and a former Director of the Republican Party; it was Malek who brought George W. Bush into the Carlyle fold.

Looking closer at the workings of the Mormon Church and its wealth - it is not particularly choosy about the source of its tithes. It accepts money, for example, from a circle of LDS lawyers, bankers and businessmen who represent the polygamist Mormons living out West.

Former Utah-based child advocate Jay Beswick sees these tithes as "blood money" because the lawyers, bankers and businessmen help to support a 10,000 member polygamist/pedophile colony - the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) - on the Utah-Arizona border, which has branches in Texas, Idaho, Colorado, British Columbia and parts in between. Beswick says that if the main Mormon Church really opposed polygamy, it would reject the tithes and excommunicate the lot.

But getting back to the Briody comment. What could Bill Marriott have known that prompted him to sell his "gold plated" airline catering service to Carlyle, which Carlyle Managing Director David Rubenstein at the time called "the greatest deal since sliced bread"?

Did Marriott have an ear to the ground through Mormon missionary/intelligence connections about a brewing Gulf War which could kill his business? After all, it is widely known that Mormons have had a disproportionate representation in the CIA and FBI through the years, and that J. Edgar Hoover started the FBI with Mormon agents. They also have a disproportionate representation in the US Congress - five Mormon senators and 12 representatives - partly because of the concentration of Mormons in the Western US.

Or maybe Marriott sensed something from Bush I's National Security Adviser, General Brent Scowcroft - another LDS notable. Scowcroft now heads Bush II's President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. And he has his own firm, Scowcroft Group, which sells intelligence to corporations worldwide.

Within reach is the possibility that the buyout of Marriott In-Flite Services by Carlyle was in part a quid pro quo for Mormon support of George W. Bush's political future.

Carlyle co-founder and Managing Director David Rubenstein was close to the Bush family and its cronies as he made apparent to Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association investors in the speech I first exposed in Progressive Review (Click here: HOW BUSH GOT BOUNCED FROM CARLYLE BOARD - Suzan Mazur, Progressive Review):"We'll put him [George W. Bush] on the board [Caterair] because - you know - we'll do a favor for this guy; he's done a favor for us."

The deal went down. Marriott In-Flite was taken private and renamed Caterair. Carlyle took a 50% stake, committing $93.8 million. George W. Bush was made a Managing Director in 1990. George H.W. Bush was US President at the time and would join Carlyle as an adviser after the Gulf War, and after being voted out of office.

Caterair would go into default in August 1994 with Carlyle's recovery 10 cents on the dollar. Rubenstein nudged George W. Bush into resigning from the board. Six months after leaving Carlyle, Bush ran for Governor of Texas. And then for US President in 2000.

The Mormons have been crucial to George W. Bush's political campaigns. A major supporter has been former Utah governor Mike Leavitt, now Bush II's EPA director. Leavitt is part of a 2,000 member clan.

I met his father Dixie during the Tom Green polygamy trial in 2001 in Provo, Utah. He told me in the courtroom that I'd find no cooperation if I attempted to research a book on polygamy there and sided with the polygamists saying, "At least they produce something".

Another LDS star who's been cheerleading for Bush is Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, mentioned as a possible 2008 Presidential candidate.

Then there's Karl Rove -- "Bush's Brain". Although Rove is not Mormon, he was nurtured in the Salt Lake City Mormon culture and educated at the University of Utah.

LDS church member Timothy E. Flanigan, Bush's former Deputy White House Counsel and a father of 14 children (opposes abortion), organized the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court legal argument and was later tasked with making the Homeland Security department come to life.

Harvard Business publications is Mormon-run. And the editor of Harvard Business Review as well as the Dean of Harvard Business School are Mormon.

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch is perhaps the best known LDS celebrity aside from Donny and Marie Osmond. Hatch chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee that oversees the Department of Justice and the FBI.

It is unlikely that any breakup of US government-subsidized polygamist sects will occur on his watch. Hatch announced last year at a town meeting in southern Utah, "I'm not here to justify polygamy. All I can say is I know people in Hildale [the FLDS colony on the Utah-Arizona border] who are polygamists who are very fine people. . . . I personally don't believe in polygamy. But I'm not going to judge others who feel differently."

With the shortcomings of the FBI exposed in recent years, Dawin A. John was tapped by Director Rober Mueller to reorganize the FBI's computer files. What qualified Darwin A. John as bureau Chief Information Officer was his prior job as managing director of information and communication systems for the Mormon Church, where he'd served for 12 years.

So what does all the Mormon influence amount to? A reach for power like every other interest group, except that Mormons are loyal first to the church.

They see the polygamy issue as still smoldering. Tens of thousands of polygamist Mormons live out West from the Canadian to Mexican borders. Despite a federal law outlawing polygamy and a Supreme court ruling - Tom Green, the only convicted polygamist in 50 years in America, is currently appealing the US Supreme Court. If his case is accepted, it could lead to overturning the anti-polygamy law that Abe Lincoln championed. It would also clear the conscience of the Mormon community whose roots are in polgamy.

Moreover, Mormons opposed the Equal Rights Amendent and would like to see the abortion ruling on Roe v.Wade reversed. George W. Bush's promise to further empower faith-based institutions is something for American women especially to consider when voting November 2.