Ladybird
Silver Meritorious Patron
The subject of how many scientologists there are in the world has been discussed for years. IMO, there were only around 25K back in 2000. There is another long discussion where many X-Sea Org agree with me about that on OCMB: http://ocmb.xenu.net/ocmb/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=26084
This new information from Mat Pesch is very interesting:
http://leavingscientology.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/a-poll/#comment-9163
This new information from Mat Pesch is very interesting:
http://leavingscientology.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/a-poll/#comment-9163
Mat Pesch permalink
March 29, 2011 7:00 pm
James,
Great point! Here is some additional information.
While there are many organizations which make up this “church”, there is one that accounts for more income and delivery of actual Scientology services than all others combined. That organization is Flag, located in Clearwater, Florida.
While almost all Scientology “churches” struggle to survive financially, Flag not only supports itself but it supports the Office of Special Affairs (OSA), middle management (L.A.), upper management (Hemet, CA.) and indirectly organizations like the Freewinds.
While I was the Treasury Secretary at Flag in about 2002, we did a computer print out of every person who had paid the Flag Service Org (FSO), at least $1,000 for Scientology services over a 3 year period. To our amazement there were only about 5,000 names.
Now consider that Flag has about 1,200 staff and they are financially supporting about another 500 staff outside Flag that “manage” or “keep Scientology safe from attack”. That’s a total of about 1,700 full time staff being financially supported by 5,000 public!
I would be willing to bet that if you printed out that same list today at least 85% of the names are the same. I would also be willing to bet that those public have made little to no progress up the “Bridge”.
So what are all these staff working so hard to do? I think that it majorly boils down to controlling information and people (internally and externally) so as to extract their labor and money.
Most of the money comes from public who are OT V or above and have been being run around in circles, redoing the same Scientology services over and over while being pressured to make additional direct donations for things like the Super Power Building (collecting donations since 1986), Idle Orgs, translations, Preservation of the Tech, IAS, Library Donations, ABLE , etc.
As an additional note, while Flag is passing out the cash to support this huge amount of staff and overhead, it owes hundreds of millions in undelivered service to parishioners for which it has no money set aside to cover. That situation worsens by hundreds of thousands on a weekly basis. It’s like having a restaurant that has taken in millions of dollars for future meals and than spending the money on overhead. The “direct donations”
is an unusual solution to try to cover their ass financially for a top heavy, criminal and unviable scene.