What's new

What are Scientology staff really there for?

Student of Trinity

Silver Meritorious Patron
This is a subject that came up recently in a staff memories thread. I'd be interested what a wider audience thinks of it.

After hearing many stories about how hard CofS org staff work, on projects that are duly rationalized at the time but in retrospect seem pointless, I started to compare how Scientology staff compares to the paid staff of mainstream religious denominations. There seems to be a striking difference.

Most Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, and I think also most Muslim mosques or Sikh temples, and maybe most other major religions as well, have a sort of similar pattern. For a group of public roughly as large as seems to be served by an Scn org, the mainstream religions will typically have one or two professional staff members with specific training at the university level, who work normal professional hours, work under minimal supervision from any superiors, and are paid at a middle-class level. Beyond this, they will have a sort of core membership of dedicated public, some of whom will serve the institution as volunteers, often under the guidance of the professional staff member. Most of these core members have serious secular careers, and do their religious volunteering on the side; a few may have volunteer charitable or religious activities as the main thing they do with their time. None of these people are paid.

In contrast, the Church of Scientology does not seem to have any staff members with training that is really comparable to a Master's degree, or who are paid anything like a middle class salary. Instead it has a lot more staff who are poorly paid and trained, and in general also very closely but poorly managed.

The conclusion I tentatively draw is that the CofS really has no clergy, and that what its staff (including the Sea Org) represents is not an alternative clergy, but rather, a core membership that is (nominally) paid by the Church, instead of supporting itself with secular careers, and tightly controlled.

If this theory is correct, the true main purpose of org staff is not precisely to serve or promote the Church of Scientology, but rather to BE the Church of Scientology — the stable hard core of adherents that keeps the movement in being, and ensures that any new recruits will have something to join. And the investment in lavish 'Ideal Orgs' is not necessarily to be understood as a recruitment drive to bring in lots more public, but rather as a retention plan to keep the staff in place. A sort of urban alternative to what other cults do when they set up elaborate compounds in remote places and get all their core members to move there.

This guess of mine could of course be wrong, and I welcome other suggestions from people with more knowledge than I have. But the difference between what Scientology does with and for paid staff, and what other religions do, seems pretty striking. I think there ought to be a reason.

And my prejudice is that the reason should not just be incompetence, because I think a truly incompetent organization could not have lasted as long as the CofS already has. I'm not saying that the CofS is competent at what it claims to be doing! But I think it must be competent at something, or it wouldn't have gotten this far. So I think there must be some method to the apparent madness of the way the CofS staffs its orgs, and treats its staff.

What could that method be? Why, really, does the CofS handle staff the way it does?
 

Voltaire's Child

Fool on the Hill
Well, the way they HANDLE staff would be, to me, the way they treat them. Which is to say - quite abusively/badly.

But as to why it's set up that way, it's set up on corporate lines, for the most part, though the SO is set up roughly like the Navy, including the "mud box brigade".

There are clergy, there're ministers and chaplains. But most staff aren't such.

Staff is divided into tech and admin. Tech delivers word clearing, auditing, supervises courses, etc. Admin works on the running of things. Treasury, etc.
 

Mystic

Crusader
Comparing scifaggOTry in this manner is fallacious. ScifaggOTry is not a religion. Religion is but its cloak to hide behind. There is no charity in scifaggOTry, only vampire-fodder being sucked upon.
 

byte301

Crusader
The Ideal Org thing is set up to stroke davey's ego and scam what little public is left out of what little money THEY have left.

It has nothing to do with staff. davey couldn't care less about the staff as evidenced by the way he's driven them off in droves.
 

La La Lou Lou

Crusader
One of things that really struck me in his writing, or was it tape? was about men in a boat at Pearl harbour, and how the clever Captain had his men throw the only weapon at the Japanese planes they could find, which was potatoes. The point being that if there's nothing people can do they feel bad so get them to do something pointless and they'll be happy.

What we did on staff was the equivalent of throwing the potatoes at the enemy. White glove inspections, sending out promo to people who were address unknown, comm evs, doing lower conditions, getting psychiatric patients in for personality tests, getting unworkable programs done in Orgs that had two staff, recieving 25 emails from WDC a day all just ways of chucking spuds!
 

Freeminds

Bitter defrocked apostate
Comparing scifaggOTry in this manner is fallacious. <snip>

I don't agree that the comparison is a waste of time; the comparison was made... and it suggests that Scientology is not like a religion, from the viewpoint of what its staff do.

In that sense, you are agreeing with the OP: Scientology is not a religion.

An insightful thread - thank you.

Now.... let's make sure we aren't just throwing spuds at our enemy. This is a great forum, but I feel the need for something more tangible. Time to drop by the org, and ask some awkward questions....
 

thefiredragon

Patron Meritorious
There is a Christian place ,calls rescue mission,it's kinda like sea org.
It mostly takes in homeless people to "save" them. It has lost of rules (more than SO has):nervous:

Stuff there getting payed a little and people who on campus ,geting about $20 a week for working in the kitchen and stuff like that but they are staying rent-free and taking christian-based classes . I've heard, for those classes they can get college credits if they decide to leave and go to Bible college
 

uniquemand

Unbeliever
Good points, SoT. I do think that auditor training does qualify a person as educated within their subject. It doesn't pass muster as University training, of course, nor should it, because the person never shows the capability of critical thinking. Then again, I'm not sure that most bible colleges train their ministers in critical thinking, either. I really don't know.

There is a difference between training and education, and it lies primarily in emphasis. The Church of Scientology trains you to think as an extension of Hubbard's Will. Whether you are an auditor, or other staff-member, to the extent that you have stats you are managing, and his organization that you are contributing to, you are acting as an extension of his will. Training improves your function as a salesman and as a representative of Ron. It doesn't improve your ability to think critically, or come up with new ideas/applications, yourself. Some people have this inherently (and I think it is these who leave), some people don't (these are the ones who stay).
 

TR'SIN

Patron with Honors
I can see you have put some thought into this piece. Because this deserves at least some insight from those of us who might have a glimmer, I'll share some of my personal inspection.

The CofS uses a public personna created back at a time when it was agreed upon that it is a religion. In keeping with that theme, they must pour volumes of records AT the IRS routinely to prove this premise.

This serves many purposes, one of which is that the Management level can claim that the staff are volunteers, working toward a spiritual goal and justify the excuse of payment to these poor souls as a stipend, base pay shared equally by all or based on performance only. (If I explain how that shakes out to those who actually walk up to the window to collect a few dollars - it would take more time and energy than the topic deserves). For example: working a regular 60 hour week, with a classification as a trained auditor and a clear there are weeks when I recieved as little as $9.00 in pay. Probably around the period of 1989.

In have no expierence in the Sea Org so I can not comment.

When joining the Organization I had several years of business management under my belt and had won awards in my field for budget control, payroll managment and sales records. The longer I worked within the structure of the Church, the more I realized how often the very policy of Administration that is set-up for each Church to follow, is routinely and with abandon violated or not used. Rather, direct orders into the Org would be sent down from higher levels to the current Flag Banking Officer to set certain allocations aside for payments to the higher Orgs. Usually these were Publications Org, Author Services, and various 'New" programs as they would come up.

The task of the local planning group, usually the Adminsitrative Council along with the Treasury Secretary would then have to figure out from the balance that remained, how to pay the basic expenses. I mean really basic stuff; lights, water, mortgage, taxes. Oh so many times we operated without lights or the water would be cut off and so on. Most of the time the staff pay would be a very last consideration when those emergencies had to be handled first hand.

So - NO - I don't think anyone was in it for the pay. Our first carrot that was dangled was the promise of our OT levels if we got our stats to Saint Hill size and the Birthday Game became the goal. Its hard to believe the lengths that people would go to in order to accomplish this most unreachable target.

This new target of the Ideal Orgs reveals more about DM than I'm sure he realizes. A bright shiny Org is for PR purposes only. Again the staff must have something other than what a regular business has to keep them producing.

In business, you have to pay people what they are worth or you lose them. In this group the crazy Ethics policies can be manipulated to convince them they are not worth getting paid because of a dip in there production. Yet the admin policy calls for investigation into the area to see if promo went out or if people missed work or if someone untrained came into the area- many, many things that could be used as tools to fix it. Unfortunately, the jump to ethics was most usually made and those hard working staff were led to believe that it was their own fault and introverted them to believe that is the reason they would not be getting adequate payment.

So they stayed and they worked hard and they scraped together rent & food and would go forward with the purpose to do better and figure out what they
did wrong.

So Student of Trinity - I hope I helped to shed some light and of course defer to all my fellows who did their duty and had their own reasons for staying even if they didn't know the story I told today.
 

GreyWolf

Gold Meritorious Patron
My sister has a regular job and she loves her church. Sho works part time for her church as a sort of book-keeper. The scn eqiv of the Treas Sec. She gets paid for this. Does this make her less religious. I don't think so.
 

Out-Ethics

Patron Meritorious
I don't think there is anything complicated about this question. Hubbard realized all the way back prior to when he came out with KSW that he needed blind obedience with no free will from both staff and public. He knew that public would not fall in lines without an extension of his own "objectives" hence cloning himself through the use of staff. He put out the bridge to freedom as the carrot to get enough believers then grew his empire.

The funny part is his so-call admin tech. It really does work. He put enough workability into it so that money flows always to the top but the orgs below never makes enough income to ever sustain itself. It's like having an army of ants always working for you. Single-minded working as a collective like the "Borgs" in Star Trek. Very intentional and has been been continued into an art form by DM. Of course this doesn't last and staff eventually through all kind of abuses leveled at them end up leaving but the orgs sure got a ton of work out of them.

Admin Tech actually only works for a CoS org and applying that in any business would produce crazy results. Can you imagine any business paying their employees by units or telling them they are in treason as a condition or staying to make their target but not paying them the extra time they are working. Labor lawyers would have a field day with this! But the CoS is classified as a religion so they can get away with this.

Trinity - in a nutshell Hubbard set up orgs for his own welfare and fame. DM took control after Hubbard "went to the stars" and saw how he could increase what Hubbard created. Brilliant but evil!!!
 

Student of Trinity

Silver Meritorious Patron
From several posts here I'm getting the simple reminder that there is an obvious method to org madness: funneling money uplines, originally to Ron, and latterly to David Miscavige. You don't need a lot of training to squeeze money out of people, only a bit of training and the right attitude. But then why have anyone but reges? Well, maybe the rest of the org staff are really only there to be a Potemkin village, a facade of pseudo-purpose to better convince the paying public.

Scientology is a con, but I think it has been an effective con for so long because it isn't only a con. It's a weird hybrid of con and sincere spiritual movement; my take, unfortunately, is that the con is senior in the partnership. Somehow, it seems to me, the strange way that org staff are employed must be an effective mechanism in keeping the hybrid running: keeping the religion serving the con, and hiding the con behind the religion.

Why not have leaner but more efficient orgs? Why not pay staff more, but have fewer staff, and let them work smarter, rather than harder? I still have the feeling that if you have work to do, and need people to do it, you hire as few people as you can to do the work. If you're the boss you try to pay them as little as possible, but you end up better off paying fewer people well than many people poorly. Yet Scientology orgs seem to need to have a lot of staff, first of all, and only secondarily to have things for those people to do. Does this make sense, somehow, as part of the hybrid con?

About Bible colleges: I have no real idea what these places do. I've known a few people who have attended them, but I'm a life-long Anglican (Episcopalian, to Americans), and the churches I know are the old, "mainstream" denominations. And the normal qualifications to be a minister or priest in these older Christian churches are a Bachelor's degree from a recognized university, plus a Master of Divinity degree from a recognized university or seminary, plus a fair amount of psychological evaluation, plus a year or two of interning. And the M.Div. is a pretty normal Master's degree, with a lot of fat papers to write, though I'm not sure there's a thesis. Maybe the M.Div. should be compared more to an MBA than an MA or MSc. Anyway, Bible colleges do not figure in this scheme, though I've known one or two Anglican ministers who had attended one for a year before doing their degrees. So a typical Christian minister or priest in a mainstream denomination is actually a pretty highly educated person. Talk to one sometime; they're generally smart people, and some are even wise.

Apparently complete bozos can nonetheless become pastors, perhaps more easily in some Christian denominations than others, but occasionally in any. And sexual predators can be ordained as priests; not many at all, proportionally, but even one is far too many. My point is not that Christian clergy are perfect, but that they're a different professional class from Scientology staff.
 

Mockingbird6

Patron with Honors
One of things that really struck me in his writing, or was it tape? was about men in a boat at Pearl harbour, and how the clever Captain had his men throw the only weapon at the Japanese planes they could find, which was potatoes. The point being that if there's nothing people can do they feel bad so get them to do something pointless and they'll be happy.

What we did on staff was the equivalent of throwing the potatoes at the enemy. White glove inspections, sending out promo to people who were address unknown, comm evs, doing lower conditions, getting psychiatric patients in for personality tests, getting unworkable programs done in Orgs that had two staff, recieving 25 emails from WDC a day all just ways of chucking spuds!

Excellent point La La.

Someone at our local ideal org touted it recently as "booming." This was because a bunch of newbies were on staff and lots of "motion" was occurring. A local business owner commented, "I could hire 150 people here and pay them nothing and put out no product and I'd be booming?"

:whistling:
 

The Clam

Patron with Honors
Out ethics hit the nail on the head. Taking 10% of the top of a business is alot of money considering that the remaining 90% must be used to pay expenses.Most business owner would kill for a 10% after expenses. When on staff at riverside Bent would take most of the gross income and put it into a bank over seas and pay the staff ridiculously low wages for the amount of work performed. The SO was even more f--k up. Their pay amounted to slave wages but they got to wear cool uniforms. The whole system was set up to create wealth at the top and victims at the bottom.
 

Out-Ethics

Patron Meritorious
Why not have leaner but more efficient orgs? Why not pay staff more said:
This is a good point. Businesses including any Scientology run business would never operate with open-ended hiring. If they did they would go out-of-business. The CoS doesn't have to worry about staff making money. Period! No matter what an org recruiter says to potential staff about making enough money while working on staff it is not going to ever happen. The income pulled in is only for the very top of management mainly DM and the rest is for fighting court cases, PR and the scrap for staff.
 

Mest Lover

Not Sea Org Qualified
They are there because after the initial glow they obtained by joining wears off due to TRUTH SINKING IN, they have been feed the subliminal reality of the negative reward system inherent within Scientology:

If you blow you will experience these things and many more:

SP DECLARE
DISCONNECTION
PTS AND ILLNESS
An inability to work anywhere else due to black listing issues.

You name it, by the time you are on staff they have started you down the road to unhappiness!
 

Human Again

Silver Meritorious Patron
This is a subject that came up recently in a staff memories thread. I'd be interested what a wider audience thinks of it.

After hearing many stories about how hard CofS org staff work, on projects that are duly rationalized at the time but in retrospect seem pointless, I started to compare how Scientology staff compares to the paid staff of mainstream religious denominations. There seems to be a striking difference.

Most Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, and I think also most Muslim mosques or Sikh temples, and maybe most other major religions as well, have a sort of similar pattern. For a group of public roughly as large as seems to be served by an Scn org, the mainstream religions will typically have one or two professional staff members with specific training at the university level, who work normal professional hours, work under minimal supervision from any superiors, and are paid at a middle-class level. Beyond this, they will have a sort of core membership of dedicated public, some of whom will serve the institution as volunteers, often under the guidance of the professional staff member. Most of these core members have serious secular careers, and do their religious volunteering on the side; a few may have volunteer charitable or religious activities as the main thing they do with their time. None of these people are paid.

In contrast, the Church of Scientology does not seem to have any staff members with training that is really comparable to a Master's degree, or who are paid anything like a middle class salary. Instead it has a lot more staff who are poorly paid and trained, and in general also very closely but poorly managed.

The conclusion I tentatively draw is that the CofS really has no clergy, and that what its staff (including the Sea Org) represents is not an alternative clergy, but rather, a core membership that is (nominally) paid by the Church, instead of supporting itself with secular careers, and tightly controlled.

If this theory is correct, the true main purpose of org staff is not precisely to serve or promote the Church of Scientology, but rather to BE the Church of Scientology — the stable hard core of adherents that keeps the movement in being, and ensures that any new recruits will have something to join. And the investment in lavish 'Ideal Orgs' is not necessarily to be understood as a recruitment drive to bring in lots more public, but rather as a retention plan to keep the staff in place. A sort of urban alternative to what other cults do when they set up elaborate compounds in remote places and get all their core members to move there.

This guess of mine could of course be wrong, and I welcome other suggestions from people with more knowledge than I have. But the difference between what Scientology does with and for paid staff, and what other religions do, seems pretty striking. I think there ought to be a reason.

And my prejudice is that the reason should not just be incompetence, because I think a truly incompetent organization could not have lasted as long as the CofS already has. I'm not saying that the CofS is competent at what it claims to be doing! But I think it must be competent at something, or it wouldn't have gotten this far. So I think there must be some method to the apparent madness of the way the CofS staffs its orgs, and treats its staff.

What could that method be? Why, really, does the CofS handle staff the way it does?

Hi, Some interesting questions. To give you my view I need to prise apart a few points:
1. Comparative religions
Scientology SELLS future benefit that is intangible with a heavy emphasis on the afterlife and a premise that you are/have an imortal soul. This benefit is not verifiable.
Like other religions it claims to teach the "true" story of how mankind got to the point where we find ourselves today. Establishes a "world view" with only the adherents being "in the know", again not able to be verified.
It then prescribes values and priorities, determines which behaviours are good or evil, procedures for improvement of the individual, rules, penalties, goals etc.
It establishes a rigid hierachy and in order to rise one must embrace all of the above.
Do YOU think Scientology fits the model for a religion? I do, it even has that last little ingedient - you must have faith in something/someone other than yourself.

2. Academic qualifications at the top.

COB, ED Int, CO FSO, SNR HAS Int, FBO ANZO have something very much in common with top executives in other churches, commercial organisations, government organisations and even charities: They believe they are qualified by training and experience. The difference is that the non-Scientology executives value academic standards, the evolution of professional wisdom and have access to the real world and historical example to judge which business strategies, organisational methods etc they wish to use. And they do not have the same "faith" in their commercial education as they do in their religious education. They demand results, proof, and recognise that a market has choice. They continually update and evolve their own education. They watch other organisations do well and make mistakes, they go to networking functions, access the media and have some degree of acceptance for the processes of the real world.

A Scientology executive has "faith" that his OEC-FEBC is every bit as valid as an MBA - in fact would scoff at an academic qualification and hold that the information in the green vols is much much more acurate - in fact any other material on commerce, marketing, finance, organisational stucture is the product of an abberated world where colarboration is the norm (Hubbard stated creation can only be done by an individual) and which are leading our civilisation down the road to hell. Under this is an endemic and intentional xenophobia against any non-scientology information, organisation or individual.

Any trained admin exec in the SO likley considers his training to be superior to a Doctorate in Organisational Psychology and Global Commerce.

Because Hubbard ceased to plagerise commercial material in the 1970's and thereafter only regurgitated his own paranoid meanderings in thought,
his methods and teaching about the business of the church are mumified and archaic. The strategies are not devised for the world in which they are being applied and in fact even when they were written, they were edited according to what Hubbard liked or didn't like, so fit his values and intentions. (see thread by Hellavahoax about seeds and what grows from them)

3. Clergy of the COS
The Clergy does exist. Trained in the religious practices of Scientology, ministers are called auditors and C/Ses and course supervisors and are all ordained as ministers. in 1983 the order went downthe lines, be ordained or be declared. Scientology went from a non-religious business to a religious business to protect it's tax exemption and this change was the most thorough and permeating change I have ever seen in any organisation and without so much as a peep from the members because other than then word religion and therefore association with organisations that Scientologists held in contempt, this is how we had operated for decades.

Further, administrators could be said to be ordained ministers of the organisational faith and many, if not most have some technical training and many are ordained. There are even clergy who are in the field and practicing the religious activities out there.

4.Being the Church or promoting the Church?
These are not mutually exclusive. Every single ordained minister delivering tech, every administrator ensuring the tech is being delivered and even every field satff member is charged with the growth of the practice. They are pushed in every way, by training, by the internal belief that if they don't get someone in that person is forever lost to their eternity, and down the lines from seniors who are counting every person in, every book sold, every hour audited, ect.
The Laity would be considered pulic who have no mandate to audit and even they are psuhed to be "Feild Staff members" and get their family, friends, neighbours, work colleauges into the faith.

One of the cheif gripes shared by those in and out of Scn staff and SO is that staff and SO do NOT get the services they work so hard to deliver to the public. So in this regard they are not "being the church" actually, they are just prpomoting and ensuring others can "be the church and practice the faith".

This is a major difference between Scientology and the religions you mention. I expect most clergy get counselled, get time to pray, do penance, go to confession, whatever the practice is. Few SO or staff get auditing, other than sec checks which are actually NOT bridge actions.

5. Ideal orgs - for promotion?
Nope and not a staff retention strategy either. It is to move cash reserves from the orgs and public into buildings which are owned by the Int Landlord. Real estate is the core business of all the big franchises - think Mac Donalds -and Scientology is just joining it's big brothers like the Catholic Church. Did you know that the Catholic Church owns more land globally than any other organisation? Perhaps Davie has some idea he'd like more glitz, perhaps he has reaslied the value of real estate? If he felt he needed to address staff retention he might consider paying them or allowing them their bridge services. make the orgs and staff bankcrupt themselves to buy him buildings? Not a staff retention strategy in anyone's mind not even Davy's. My expectation is that it was a strategy to draw the money out of those few public to whom they have nothing more to sell and who still have millions and once it began it was then adopted world wide and the PR generated for the original purpose has gathered faith of its own. And once a strategy is shifting money from one group to another why would they stop it?

6. I am not confident that your information about the organisational set up for other churches is accurate. I have friends who have worked in other church organisations and anecdotally it shounds like they have far more paid staff (unordained and therefore not clergy) than you suggest, and also more un- or under - paid religious clergy. The volunteers who work in addition to a full time secular job or running a family absolutely exist and at cold face level where the services meet the market there may be a lot of them but I suspect the percentage is still low, perhaps 15%. Tithing also occours and in some churches this is 100% of the ministry giving 10%+ to the church of what they earn, Where do you get your information?

7. Why is it set up this way?
Because slave labour makes the best profit. This religion has the faithful believing they MUST be altruistic or they are condemming the planet and therefore their families and themselves to everlasting abberation, war, crime and insanity. It used to be nuclear war Hubbard was suggesting, today I guess it is "fourth dynamic insanity will mean the end of the world by national altercation or global warming". And the carrot is eternal control over your self, and everything else. Pretty big incentives and an indoctrination process that is highly effecive.

Look to the actions taken and what is accepted and what is not to know the real values. Scientology makes profit no matter what. It accepts staff NOT going up the bridge despite saying that reason it iexists is to get people up the bridge. It accepts families being ripped apart, people dying on service lines, staff who are less confident and empowered every year. Staff who are unhappy, poverty stricken, sick and socially disabled. It does NOT accept a downtrending GI statistic. It does NOT accept cross orders to money being sent up lines.
My god, it even accepts "the books Hubbard published for 30 years are wrong" but not "I have one set of books and I don't want to buy another."

It accepts Our EX-most highly trained person was an SP all along.... but not this OT VII says he does not need a sec check,thankyou.

The COS always accepts something that brings in more money and always rejects anything that smacks of someone making their own decision/judgement/observations. They do not respect their own integrity or quality or value to others - there is NO critisism to which they will listen. They DO value their appearance and how it might affect their income. Multi millions spent on legal fights and on events that allow them to tell everyone how well they are doing when all evidence shows the orgs are smaller, staff less stable and public reluctant to introduce their family.

8. Competence
I agree there is no competence in helping people achieve total freedom. And since there is no way to check how they are doing after they die of cancer on OT VIII, I guess we can't hold them to account for that one. (Apologies to anyone who is affected by cancer or on OTVIII for my crass joke). I never met a competent scientologist who was not competant before Scientology. I met some who felt happier, but none who had better lives by the things I value; friends, family a sense of fun, lightheartedness, compassion, wisdom, travel, understanding my fellow man, love, etc.

There is some competence in maintaining the closed system that Scientology depends upon and alot of this is built into the "tech". Once in the connections to outside influence are severed by implanting beliefs; PTS tech, the idea that everyone else is abberated, that you are vulnerable to SPs, all media are evil, all other practices are dangerous, all psychologists are going to prevent your progress, doubt is a lower condition. thoughts against scientology are evil, your opinion is suspect, don't talk to tohers about your case gain. if you don't have case gain you are an sp. I could fill a book.

With all the money coming in and so little going out at org level it is not hard to keep the big machine rolling, the key is the slave labour and tax exemption. Without that, the entire machine would grind to a halt. If minimum wage were imposed, even if staff were forced to put the money back into orgs, the profit margin would dissapear. Many companies run on a 3 -10% profit margin. Imagine a 30% profit tax and what that would do? Imagne the payroll tax? LOL! Imagine how quickly and how many staff would be in ethics for spending their money instead of handing it back? "You what? You paid to take your daughter to the doctor instead of putting it back into the org? Teason!" But it would be a new choice made every week, not one that was made 1.5 years ago and which requries a decision to stand against the group.

Goodness, what a rant! Hope it helps put another perspective on your theory.
 

Ogsonofgroo

Crusader
Out ethics hit the nail on the head. Taking 10% of the top of a business is alot of money considering that the remaining 90% must be used to pay expenses.Most business owner would kill for a 10% after expenses. When on staff at riverside Bent would take most of the gross income and put it into a bank over seas and pay the staff ridiculously low wages for the amount of work performed. The SO was even more f--k up. Their pay amounted to slave wages but they got to wear cool uniforms. The whole system was set up to create wealth at the top and victims at the bottom.
That'd be 'happy victims'
Based on the 'tech' of the con,~ create apparent 'gains' enough to keep the sheeples paying and blithely unaware of the realities/happy to get any frickin thing, pay them next to nothing, filter and funnel all funds up-line to where it can be divested into places where the lower ends cannot retrieve any of it without huge bawwings from the mg't/ and confusing enough to scare any low level auditors (IRS-type) away. This is how it was designed, how Larry B. and co. set things up to evade corporate taxation.
It really is an 'ultimate con'. Topping all the greed-fired regging ect off is the treatment of those who run out of money while on the 'bridge to nowhere', slavery by those who know these folks are getting virtually nothing of value, heaven help you should you become ill with a 'real' disease, or get old, we have read many accounts of basic abandonment of these individuals, they become speed bumps for the ever-rolling short-bus of the cult. You don't like it? Tough shit you PTS/SP, GTFO and 'here's your bill'.... pillaging at its finest!
What better way to end a con then have the victim happily die thinking they have gained something...... and if it ain't going the way it should, well ya know, it is all your fault because Lron's poop is gold plated....EOC you ungrateful heathen Wog-lovers!... :no:
LRon baked this 'raw meat' cake, he knew full well it was full of nuts and fruits and half cooked (at least as much as he was).

My wee afternoon ranty thingy for a rainy day :)
 
Top