Where the money flows....

Question answered by honorarykid in Scientology

super7 asked this question on 8/10/2000:

After reading here, and reading on A.R.S., I was wondering if, outside a select few, anyone had a guesstimate on how much money the "church" spends in any week/month/year harassing/dealing with critics?

I know one of the two P.I.s following Keith Henson said they were getting $800 per day each (how many in the sea org get paid $100/hour?), and the P.I.s and all the security cameras in Clearwater must be costing a very large pile of money more.

On top of that, are all the tactics like blocking off/avoiding gates, "blue tarp" tech, renting a bunch of trucks to park on the streets so critics cannot park there, erecting covered walkways, ripping up 10 year old sidewalks because they are "worn out", the time and effort it costs to have the same passengers ride the shuttle between buildings for hours and hours, covering the windows of those same vans so the passangers cannot see the critics. All of these have direct costs, indirect costs, and lost opportunity costs.

On top of all the very childish games, add in all the legal fees that are being spent exactly per LRH tech. I'll bet Moxon's law firm retainer is rather huge, along with all the other lawyers all over the world.

I'll bet the P.I. bill is over $2,000,000 a year alone, never mind the rest.

But, has anyone kept a running total or made an estimate of what all the harassment/blinders really costs?

Thanks.

honorarykid gave this response on 8/15/2000:

I can easily accept your numbers. They do indeed spend a lot of money on PIs.

Just recently, Scientology sent a PI by the name of David Lee to Nigeria and Europe and all over the world, in order to manipulate a politically ambitious Nigerian man into serving Scientology's purposes. The man, who's name is Fashanu, "discovered" a whole truckload of allegedly illicit financial transactions by the man Scientology considers to be their number one enemy in the world, multimillionaire, Bob Minton.

Mr. Minton legally made his millions in very aboveboard, debt buy-back transactions which materially assisted Nigeria in restructuring and reducing it's bank debts. Lee and his dupe made up a bunch of lies, which they fed to the European press, in order to pressure Mr. Minton here in the U.S. That operation had to cost a pretty penny.

But whatever amount the Co$ is paying to their Private Investigators, the amount would be dwarfed by the amount they are paying their lawyers.

Grady Ward, Keith Henson, Arnie Lerma, Dennis Erlich, Larry Wollershiem and others have all been sued by Scientology over copyright infringements. In several of these cases, Scientology filed for lawyer's costs, to the tune of millions of dollars per case.

Since early 1995, I would estimate that in just these 5 cases alone, Scientology has spent upwards of 30 million dollars in legal fees and settlement costs. This doesn't include Scientology's European lawsuits against Zenon Panoussis, Karin Spaink, XS4ALL, and others, nor the ongoing costs of monitoring the Internet for potential infringers of their sacred copyrights.

The CoS keeps files and digital records of all people and materials and posts relating to Scientology (or at least they used to). Undoubtedly this very answer, and other Scientology answers on the AskMe.com site are being logged by the CoS as well.

But these days, the news and opinions about Scientology are becoming so common, I don't see how they could keep up with the task of indexing it all. Not without a whole staff of archivists and technicians and computers.

The bottom line is that Scientology is spending a lot of money on it's paranoid, controlling, oppressive manipulations of the people it thinks are it's enemies. That's money that could be better spent on real charitable efforts, such as L.A. food banks, homeless shelters, flood relief for people in Central America and Venezuela, and about a bazillion other good causes.

But giving money and aid to needy people is just not what Scientology is all about. To give money away is to "reward the downstat," which is a crime in Scientology. In Scientology, there are no alms for the poor (except, of course, on those rare occasions when they can make some political or public relations hay from the act of giving).

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