Tkach's Denominational Redo Redoo

The WCG/CGI Canadian National Pastors’ Conference took place June 2 – 5 and Board Meeting June 6 at Providence Renewal Centre.

Thanks to Bob Millman, Edmonton (edmonton.wcgweb.org) there is audio and video of some of what took place at the 2009 conference:
Joe Tkach
Denominational Update
06_03_Denominational_Update.mp3 (audio only)
06_03_Denominational_Update.wmv (video)

Joe Tkach
Q & A
06_05_Q_&_A.mp3
06_05_Q_&_A.wmv

Gary Moore
Canadian Update
06_03_Canada.mp3
06_03_Canada.wmv

Joe Tkach
For The Love Of God June 07, 2009


Better snag it before Tkach's " Iron Curtain" drops down. See the Edmonton website for further conference info. Developing....

Ron Dart Emergency Notice

Ron Dart, age 78, GTA's former favorite sidekick, blares the following warning at RonDart.com to the world:

"Emergency Notice. The Born to Win Website is broken and our Webmaster is sick. So until further notice, the Born to Win site will forward here so we can stay in touch. Our email is working fine, as are the phones, and we can provide every service, but we are having to shift how we provide audio services. I will be notifying our email list and issuing updates there. And we will post stuff here as well--but I will keep this at the top of the page. Don't know exactly what is wrong, but it may take a while to fix. Don't lose touch. If you are new to this site, have a look around. There is a lot here. If you don't have an email address, use the "Comment Here" link at the upper right. Hang in there. We'll be back."

In that case, we'll just have to content ourselves with taking a look at Ron's tax Form 990 accountability reporting:

Period	Total Revenue	Total Expenses
Nov. 1, 2005 - Oct. 31, 2006	$1,622,422	$1,543,110
Nov. 1, 2004 - Oct. 31, 2005	$1,756,737	$1,386,554
Nov. 1, 2003 - Oct. 31, 2004	$1,341,652	$1,270,075
Nov. 1, 2002 - Oct. 31, 2003	$1,217,370	$1,343,955
Nov. 1, 2001 - Oct. 31, 2002	$1,145,929	$1,212,733
Nov. 1, 2000 - Oct. 31, 2001	$1,141,898	$1,135,236
Nov. 1, 1999 - Oct. 31, 2000	$1,122,839	$1,056,658
Nov. 1, 1998 - Oct. 31, 1999	$971,457	$1,021,545
Nov. 1, 1997 - Oct. 31, 1998	$890,102	$863,561

Mr. Dart has been doing quiet well for himself and his CEM creation. According to these 990 tax reports, he has garnered in at least nine million dollars in the last decade...

But what about his latest 990 return, reporting accounts through Oct 31, 2007?

Ron reports total CEM income of $1,412,992. CEM net assets at the end of October 2007 totaled $475,021.

Total compensation of CEM current officers and key employees totaled $207,246. Ron pays himself and wife CEM Vice-President Allie a combined salary of $107,955. The Darts also together take employee benefits or deferred compensation in the amount of $17,350. Ron also gives an expense account to himself (but not Allie) amounting to a generous $30,772 for 2007.

Not included in the above compensation was $19,200 put towards the CEM pension plan. (We can only hope the future payments for retired CEM employees aren't discretionary as is the Tkach WCG pension plan.)

Other CEM employee benefits not itemized or included on above lines 25a-27 amounted to $74, 262.

Overall travel expense claimed for 2007 was $20,886.

CEM also reports 100% business use of a 2005 Cadillac (cost basis $37,116) and 2006 Honda ($27,610).

Any Worldwider interested in looking at these annual CEM 990 reports, with additional unreported information, may do so without charge through Guidestar at the following link: www.Guidestar.org

Can You Spot A Con?

Apparently, the SEC can't.

PBS's Frontline reports (emphasis mine):

In the mid-1960s, Bernard Madoff tapped money from Jewish businessmen at exclusive country clubs with the promise of steady guaranteed returns on their investments. He then set his sights on Europe and Latin America, brokering deals with powerful hedge fund managers and feeder funds from Buenos Aires to Geneva. Billions of dollars were channeled to Madoff’s investment firm, and his feeders became fabulously wealthy. The competition wondered how the man could produce such steady returns in good times and bad. There were allegations that Madoff was “front-running” or operating a Ponzi scheme, which the SEC investigated several times over the last two decades. But Madoff remained untouched until December 11, 2008, when he admitted it was all “one big lie.”

Bernard L. Madoff confessed that his vaunted investment business was all “one big lie,” a Ponzi scheme colossal in volume and scope that cost investors $65 billion. Madoff became the new poster child for Wall Street gall, greed and corruption. (By comparison, Herbert Armstrong and spinoffs have collected over $2 billion in a shakedown off three expected tithes, offerings, wills, and investments).

“The first flush of reports came out at a time when many people were still reluctant to talk,” says reporter Smith. Frontline gave us the time to burrow deeper, gaining access to some of the key players who gave us an understanding of how Madoff pulled it off.”

In a search for clues on how the fraud began, Frontline traces Madoff’s story back to the early 1960s, when he first opened a small investment advisory business and hired two accountants, Frank Avellino and Michael Bienes, to help him recruit clients. In an exclusive television interview, Bienes describes those fruitful early years. It was “easy, easy-peasy, like a money machine,” Bienes tells Frontline. When asked if he had ever questioned Madoff about his approach, Bienes says: “Never. Why would I ask him? I wouldn’t understand it if he explained it.”

By the early ’90s, Avellino & Bienes had amassed more than 3,000 clients. But the accountants were violating the law, selling unregistered securities. Acting on a tip, the SEC closed down Avellino & Bienes. Madoff was forced to return more than $400 million to investors. It was Madoff’s first brush with the SEC, and as would happen again and again during the course of 30 years, Madoff would remain untouched by regulators.

After the 1992 SEC investigation, Madoff insulated himself from his client base by finding several financiers eager to do business with him and willing to accommodate his unusual demands for secrecy. In an exclusive TV interview, Sandra Manzke, the founder of the hedge fund giant Tremont, admits she agreed not to use Madoff’s name in her fund’s prospectus, and she accepted that Madoff would only use a small, off-the-radar accounting firm to audit his work. “Of course it bothered you,” she tells Smith. “But that was one of the conditions of doing business, that you accepted that. That was his proprietary trading model, the black box that he used, and he wasn’t going to disclose what was in it”—not even to Manzke, who for more than 25 years placed upward of $3 billion of investors’ money with Madoff.

The incentive for fund managers like Manzke to ignore their reservations was enormous. Running a feeder for Madoff was a very lucrative business, and nobody got richer than Walter Noel and his partners at Fairfield Greenwich Group. “It’s fair to say that Fairfield, more than anyone else, took Madoff global,” says attorney Stuart Singer of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, who is now representing former Fairfield Greenwich investors in a class-action suit.

Through interviews with former employees of Madoff Securities and footage Frontline unearthed of Madoff’s operation, the film ultimately takes viewers inside the heart of the fraud. Rich Caputo, who maintained the computers and printers at Madoff Securities, saw the volume of paperwork that went into sustaining the fiction. “We were spitting out statements constantly,” Caputo tells Frontline. “The fact that all of these statements were just sort of made out of thin air is pretty shocking.”

Madoff was repeatedly investigated by the SEC, but it found nothing amiss. Madoff remained a pillar of the financial world until the markets came crashing down in late 2008. “The fact is, he easily could have gone through his life without this being found out,” says Madoff investor Burt Ross. “The only reason that this ended was because, at one given point in time, the economy did so badly that people wanted—needed—to get money out of Madoff’s investments.”

FRONTLINE Presents
THE MADOFF AFFAIR
Tuesday, May 12, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS

Check your local listings for exact air times. Or view the entire program linked online and bonus material at: FRONTLINE

Godfather Changes Corporate Name

Feazell pays homage to Tkach Family for now

In contrived timing surrounding the Easter holiday, "Godfather" Tkach has announced the name change of the WCG Church Association and its affiliated California-based subordinate business corporation to Grace Communion International.

Readers of the AR blog may recall the focus on possible criminal legalities surrounding the fraudulent, perjured actions of board members, involving a purported official church member vote attested to on legal documents to effect such a change, filed with the California Secretary of State. An alleged church member vote of precisely 5,051* was concocted to legally satisfy Armstrong's bylaws to legally change the name of the church from Radio Church of God to Worldwide Church of God in 1968. (For more on the 1968 denominational voting, see The Plain Truth Please: Did Herbert Lie About Worldwide?*)

Herbert Armstrong and his Church Association Board of Elders/RCG business board of directors may well have committed a fraud on the church corporation, perjuring themselves when legally affirming a nonexistent vote of the RCG membership approving of the denominational name change to WCG, when such a rank and file member vote on the new denominational name to be, in fact, never took place.

When the Tkachs came to power, Tkach Sr. forced through major questionable changes to the WCG corporate bylaws, which at that time may have required a majority vote of the rank and file membership to be legally approved. You can bet your bottom dollar Tkach Sr. paid substantial money for at least some legal opinion in his favor (even highly frivolous opinion) that no vote of the WCG rank and file members to approve of his changes to the WCG constitution would be required.

The question at issue in the WCG name change is: What has changed since the Radio Church of God Association's bylaws legally required that purported 1968 member vote of 5,051* in favor of the name change to WCG; to the Church bylaws today (with supposedly no rank and file member vote or minimum quorum required) for yet another denominational name change, this time to Grace Communion International?

The California church corporation Armstrong founded in Febuary 1947 does business for the WCG in the United States under the parent legal umbrella of the WCG Association. Those changes Tkach Sr. made to the WCG corporate articles were never legally challenged on the basis that a vote of the rank and file members for amendment would be legally required. It is a frustrating legal guessing game because Armstrong and the Tkachs have always been so highly secretive with the original documents forming the RCG Church Association with its subordinate California corporation, and in particular about any changes made to strip away the rights of rank and file members from the original 1947 RCG constitution. Figuring out the secret workings of the inner sanctum of how Skull and Bones operates would be far easier.

While much has been made in WCG propaganda of Tkach Jr. allegedly wanting to reform the bylaws giving him total control of the Church Association and WCG corporation and all the money, he has refused during his entire time in appointed office to even publish the Church's bylaws of the WCG Association of which he is Pastor General, much less reform them.

Tkach Jr., with Biblical cartoons to back up his announcement, makes it sound as if God changed the name of the Church to GCI or that a popular groundswell of the remaining pastors and members demanded the name be changed to thus and such. But the reality of the church bylaws is that just as in 1968, no formal votes were officially, legally taken of the rank and file membership to approve of such an important change as the name itself of the denomination.

In reality, the denomination name change is Tkach's Jr.'s decision and his alone on all important matters, because he legally retains all the power of Herbert W. Armstrong in the church Association bylaws. Most in the splinters today could probably confirm, no one could stand up to Herbert Armstrong's power and control for long, without getting tossed overboard in a pair of cement shoes. Armstrong's dummy board rules for his appointed Elders and the appointed members of his corporate business Board are still in effect. The Godfather's fix is in. Tkach Jr. controls everything; he refuses to disclose the proceeds of the sale of the Auditorium and AC campus; if GCI is financially solvent; Tkach family compensations; when he will step down from his employment; how he will hand-pick his successor.

Tkach relates that, "The name search team presented their findings and recommendations to a combined meeting of the Board and the Advisory Council of Elders on Dec. 20, 2005. After all factors and criteria were considered, the Board and the Council settled on the name “Grace Communion International.”

I take the above to mean the Council of Elders of the Church Association and the Board of Directors of the California Corporation voted (no doubt unaminously, Tkach doesn't say) more than three years ago on that date back in 2005 to approve of the corporate name change to GCI. This probably means that Tkach will file the paperwork with California to change the church corporation business name from WCG to GCI, without forming a new, separate GCI corporation.

In any case, it has taken more than three years for Tkach to effect the denominational name change his dummy Board pliantly approved for him to make. Or should it be the other way around?

While he says his GCI decision was initially met with resistance, Joe Jr. claims a majority of current WCG membership - that an incredible high of 80 percent now favor- and support his decision to change from WCG to GCI. How convenient for Godfather Tkach to have such popular support for his GCI naming decision, support he didn't have in the 1980s when the Tkach family doctrinal changes began rolling out on schedule.

Tkach also warned, "You will see the name change take shape in a carefully orchestrated way over the next several months."

Given the fact that the Tkachs paid for highly detailed studies of the mailing list statistical demographics, geographics and psychographics of the WCG membership, in terms of what doctrines to change first would have what effect on WCG income, it's not surprising he thinks changing the name from WCG to GCI will also be carefully orchestrated.

UPDATE: Computer records at the California Secretary of State reveal WCG had made, from at least a week ago, prior to Tkach's Easter surprise announcement- the corporate name change to GCI.

Armstrong filed the original incorporation papers for the church business corporation Radio Church of God on 2/20/1947:

DISCLAIMER: The information displayed here is current as of APR 03, 2009 and is updated weekly. It is not a complete or certified record of the Corporation.

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Corporation
GRACE COMMUNION INTERNATIONAL
Number: C0214334	Date Filed: 2/20/1947	Status: active
Jurisdiction: California
Address
PO BOX 5005
GLENDORA, CA 91740-0730
Agent for Service of Process
MATHEW H MORGAN
2011 E FINANCIAL WAY
GLENDORA, CA 91741-4602

---

In Three Tithes They Trust

Let's start with a $100 dollar bill. As of now, it is the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation. Most everyone has seen this denomination. Slightly fewer have owned them; some have dropped the denomination for holy day offerings.

Almost guaranteed to open doors and make friends, in whatever country the Pastor General should grace with a visit. (In the upcoming millennium, should Herbert's face get to be on the $100 bill, hmmm?)

A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2" thick and contains $10,000. Petty cash. Fun money. Fits in Armstrong's pocket easily and is more than enough for day or two of shamefully decadent fun in Monaco, lounging around on the yacht, or shopping trips to Harrod's.

Some Of Herb's Petty Cash - $10,000

Believe it or not, this next little pile below is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). Herbert could stuff that into a Jurgenson's grocery bag; fly to Switzerland, stuff some into his Swiss bank account; and then off to a sex clinic romp in Romania. You don't think he told about all of his private trips on the WCG Gulfstream, courtesy of the WCG dollar, did you? Neither does WCG employee Tkach respect the few remaining members enough to make some basic financial disclosures.

One Million WCG Dollars In $100 Dollar Bills

While a measly $1 million above looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable. More than enough to buy a world-class auditorium. The approximate WCG income for one entire year (in $100 bills) or $100 million, fits neatly on a standard pallet below...

One Hundred Million WCG Dollars In $100 Dollar Bills

But the WCG income for only one year doesn't do justice to the big picture. $1 BILLION dollars pictured below... now we're really getting someplace! Real money!...That's how much Herbert and his WCG garnered from fifty years of mailing out hundreds of his monthly crisis collection letters, taking three tithes, widow's mites, wills, trusts, and sacrificial offerings. Actually, over his lifetime, Armstrong's WCG took members and co-workers for well over a BILLION tax-free US-denominated dollars!

Over One BILLION Dollars Taken By Armstrong-And Counting

Show us the money!

Herbert Armstrong's Entangling Web

Honey, look at what we've got them believing in this issue!

Mary Lane graciously comments, saying: "You can no longer purchase Robinson's book from John Hadden publishers, but there is a site on ESN for purchasing the book, and Painful Truth's editor once had a download of the book. Not sure if Mike still does this. "

So while TW is no longer available from John Hadden publishers, we understand it can be obtained through another source. A letter to ESN from a WCG minister discussing HWA's incest is linked here, along with a link to the form to order Tangled Web.

But there is yet another way to get Tangled Web, right where Herbert W. Armstrong got started, from your local community library.

Though interlibrary loan service, a computer search done today reveals (below) the following libraries have Armstrong's Tangled Web in their respective collections. It is not exhaustive. Some of the first edition initial printing of 6,000 copies of Tangled Web were sent to libraries. One might be nearby you. Most are also willing to mail their copy to distant local libraries for checkout on your card, though interlibrary loan service, completely free, or at a nominal shipping cost. Your local library can assist you with any details.
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Herbert Armstrong's tangled web : an insider's view of the Worldwide Church of God / Author: Robinson, David Publication: Tulsa, Okla. : J. Hadden Publishers, 1980 Libraries Worldwide: 25 More Like This: Search for versions with same title and author Advanced options ... See more details for locating this item

Location - Library:

US,AZ SOUTHWESTERN COL

US,CA GRADUATE THEOL UNION LIBR

US,CA WILLIAM CAREY INT UNIV

US,MI KUYPER COL ZONDERVAN LIBR

US,NY BUFFALO & ERIE CNTY PUB LIBR

US,NY CITY COL, CUNY

US,PA TEMPLE UNIV

US,TN LEE UNIV, SQUIRES LIBR

US,TX DALLAS THEOL SEMINARY

US,TX HIDALGO CNTY LIBR SYST

US,TX TEXAS A&M UNIV, CORPUS CHRISTI

US,TX BAPTIST MISSIONARY ASN THEOL SEMINARY

US,TX HARDIN-SIMMONS UNIV TXS

US,CA LA SIERRA UNIV

US,CA PASADENA PUB LIBRARY

US,CA PEPPERDINE UNIV

US,CA SAN DIEGO CHRISTIAN COL

US,CA UNIV OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

US,FL FLORIDA CTR FOR THEOLOGICAL STUDIES LIBR

US,KS LILLIAN TEAR LIBR

US,KS NEWTON PUB LIBR

US,KS NORTH CENT KANSAS LIBR

US,KS UNIV OF KANSAS

US,KS UNIV OF KS ARCH/MSS/RARE BOOKS/REGL HIST

US,KS WICHITA STATE UNIV US,KY ASBURY THEOL SEMINARY

US,MA GORDON-CONWELL THEOL SEMINARY

US,MI ANDREWS UNIV

US,MN BETHANY LUTHERAN THEOL SEMINARY

US,NE OMAHA PUB LIBR

US,OH CINCINNATI CHRISTIAN UNIV

US,OH SAINT CLAIRSVILLE PUB LIBR

US,OK OKLAHOMA DEPT OF LIBR

US,PA FREE LIBR OF PHILADELPHIA

US,WI T B SCOTT FREE LIBR

CA, MB PROVIDENCE COL AND SEM

UK NEWBOLD COLLEGE

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For benefit of UK readers, Newbold College appears to have a copy of Tangled Web in stock, (the following from the Newbold College library website): Herbert Armstrong's tangled web : an insider's view of the Worldwide Church of God / by David Robinson. Author: Robinson, David. Shelf Number: BR 1725 .A77 R62 1980 Location: LENDING COLLECTION (North Wing, 1st Floor) Available

Readers in the greater Pasadena, CA area may wish to consult the Pasadena Central library Centennial Room, call number R PAS LC 289.9:
PAS Central Library
Centennial Room
R PAS LC 289.9
In Library

If all else fails in getting the book, ask your COG pastor to lend you his edition of Herbert Armstrong’s Tangled Web, or for an honest opinion on its truthful accuracy.