Eye-Opening Perspectives for Heroic Hearts

Eye-Opening Perspectives for Heroic Hearts

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Texas Presbyterians and Methodists In Spotlight

Texas Presbyterian Seminary Put on "Poor Performance List" by Methodists As Students Are Withdrawn by Church Leaders

by Logan H Winslow,  Sero Sed Serio News Service for CPW News Service

     Seen as a blow to Ecumenism in Texas, the announcement that Texas Methodist students at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary must withdraw from that institution citing unsatisfactory levels of minority inclusion in its faculty and board, Dr. Theodore Wardlaw, Austin Seminary President, has sent a letter summarizing what he feels are unjust conclusions drawn by Methodist leaders to the school's entire alumni.

"I could see it coming," said one alumnus who wished not to be identified.  "And frankly I can't tell if it's the result of entrenched insensitivity and a history of Anglophile values that are as thick as the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill, or just the fact that with declining enrollments, the Methodists want their students back to help bolster their own seminary's enrollments."

     I talked with Dr. William H. Carr, a graduate of McCormick Seminary in Chicago, but also a former Austin Seminary student.  "Austin Seminary's former President, Jack Stotts, had come to our church in Corpus Christi asking for funding for the General Secretary of the Presbyterian-Reformed Church in Cuba.  First Presbyterian Church is a very conservative church, but we supported Carlos Emilio Ham by paying his tuition for a Doctor of Ministry Degree at Austin Seminary.  I had no idea what the political and emotional implications would be concerning our support, but I suspect looking back that the major supporters of the Bay of Pigs and Iran-Contra are highly concentrated along the Gulf Coast from Miami to Brownsville...heck, maybe from Nantucket to Bogata.... as evidenced by Peter Brewton's The Mafia CIA and George Bush.  Brewton, son of another Presbyterian minister from Texas was a Houston Post reporter when he published his findings and is now a professor of journalism at Texas Tech University in Lubbock," said Carr. 

     "Furthermore," said Carr, "shortly after my arrival from Grace Presbyterian Church, Plano, Texas where we had many minorities in attendance and on our boards, I was asked to do the marriage of one of our Elder's children.  A mixed race wedding, she was a graduate of Southwestern Methodist University in Georgetown, Texas and Mark, her husband, was a standout student who received a commission to the US Military Academy at West Point but gave it up in order to be closer to his future wife.  I am sure there are those who had a difficult time with my decision to conduct that wedding, but it was a huge celebration led by two pastors, one who was the product of the Southern Presbyterian Church, First Presbyterian Church Galveston, Texas where the founder was the Rev. John McCullough and the builder of the church, Robert Bunting, was the chaplain of Terry's Texas Rangers during the Civil War," said Carr.  "The other pastor was the grandson of a slave."

     "My family is from Monroe Georgia in the shadow of Stone Mountain and Monroe is the subject of the book Fire In A Cane Break by Laura Wexler about the Moore's Ford Bridge massacre," said Carr.

     "Did you have trouble leading this wedding?" I asked him.

     "We aren't talking about two different species," said Carr.

     "I've had many of the marriages I have conducted fall apart, but this one has held together through thick and thin.  Mark, a University of Texas graduate, is an architect in Minneapolis," said Carr.

     "I am sure that there are those who think of me as some kind of turncoat.  I was asked to leave the church not long after the wedding and it was a faculty member from Austin Seminary who ran the show, while the President, Jack Stotts, presided over the process with the help of the Committee on Ministry.  Presbyterian Elder "Red" Olander was also involved, relative of Corpus Christi resident Harvey Olander who's father-in-law was the personal chauffeur of Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and William S. Burroughs....not exactly unopinionated in their view of cultural superiority.  But of course we never read O. John Rogge's book, The Official German Report in seminary nor had we ever been told about General Smedley Butler's confrontation with this group which had they had their way we may all be speaking German today....which would also have been a cultural betrayal.  The Brits had given up slavery long before America and the Jews' resistance to slavery goes back to Egypt.  You don't want to be on the wrong side of that history.  If you are, you're frankly going against God Almighty.  Beyond that, " said Carr, "The Gulf Coast's history with Cuba and the Spanish American War in many ways continues the prejudices and fears of the Civil War era.  For example, James K. Vardaman, a radical racialist from Edna, Texas rode with Roosevelt's Rough Riders and wrote about it before returning to the States.  Many from his group trained at Camp Walthall in Mississippi, a camp named for Edward Walthall, while William Tecumseh Walthall was aide de camp to the Confederacy's President Jefferson Davis and Caleb Cushing's interpreter during his trip to China to negotiate the Wanghia Treaty.  The many lives lost in Cuba would provide the prolegomena to America's anger toward Castro's communist revolution without drawing distinctions between the racial bigotry that under girted the fear of socialism," said Carr.  "The legacy of 'the Great White Chief' as James K Vardaman was called can be read in the book Yazoo River by Frank E Smith," said Carr.  "Vardaman's view of mob law and lynching is revolting, but for a Southerner who has not taken the time to understand the relationship between, for example, John Brown of Rhode Island and Harpers' Ferry and Governor Brown of Georgia or John Henry Brown of Texas or the 'George Brown' who was hung from Jean Laffite's yardarm in Galveston Bay and the connection to Brown and Root and Kellogg Brown and Root...what would you expect?  Ignorance is never bliss and the war between Cain and Abel is color blind," said Carr.

   Carr's father had worked most of his life for J. Howard Marshall, Jr. whose son J. Howard Marshall, III teamed up with William Ingraham Koch who attempted in 1999 to take over Koch Industries.  Bill Koch and Marshall brought a law suit against Charles and David Koch, David being William's twin brother.  The bitter battle included charges by William Koch and J. Howard Marshall, III that Koch Industries had made fortunes from stolen oil beneath public and Indian lands.  Meanwhile, in 1999 as the nation faced the 2000 presidential election pitting Texas' Governor George W. Bush against Al Gore, Koch Industries faced another bitter battle in Corpus Christi.  A Koch safety director revealed that the Koch refinery there was hemorrhaging toxic cancer causing Benzene into the air.  Threatened with a 97 count indictment and a $350 million dollar fine, the Bush win as president was followed by a muzzling of the EPA and a reduction of the Koch fine to $20 million in a 1 count indictment.  Engineers for Koch were represented by some of Texas' leading attorneys and the Koch plant which changed its name to Flint Hills was represented by local attorney Tony Canales, but from the time of the Justice Department indictments of Koch on September 28, 2000 to the November Presidential election with an environmental warrior like Al Gore set to enter the office with a victory, the Koch family clearly wanted the non-regulatory Republican, Bush, to win at all costs and feared that Gore's carbon-credits agenda would provide one of the biggest mass transfers of wealth in world history and into coffers controlled by some great unknown, but evolving, power.  The Bush victory insured ecological grid lock and Koch's power intact and their petro chemical spewing by flaw or design in the atmosphere for the foreseeable future.
    By July of 2000, Gore's campaign was also having its issues.  Gore's campaign chair, Tony Coelho, had been linked to money from Mexico's leading banker at Banamex, Roberto Hernandez Ramirez who owned much of the Mexican Riviera on the Yucatan Caribbean shore and was widely accused of promoting drug import across the beaches and harbors there.  In La Prenza and Net Zero, a Mexican and a British political periodical the news broke.  Soon Coelho resigned and was replaced by son of Chicago mayor Richard Daley, William Daley, who would go on to work for AT&T in San Antonio.  AT&T would become ground zero for data mining at the NSA by hardwired cable splitters in its San Luis Abispo and San Francisco offices.  Similar splitters are reportedly now located in over 30 offices nationwide.  Coelho went on to serve on the board of the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, a seemingly odd coupling of political rivals. 
     "But there's much to scratch your head about in all of this," said Carr. "Like the fact that in the heart of Houston, the Petro-Chemical capital of the world, is M.D. Anderson Cancer Hospital.  I'll never forget that at the height of the Iran-Contra affair I was scurrying to find an apartment for the son and wife of the Secretary of State of Belize who had a rare cancer.  Later I'd read of the CIA's use of medical care as a tool of high stakes diplomacy, not to mention that the Iran-Contra training base in Belize would be reported by Peter Brewton to be provided by Coca-Cola Company whose CEO at the time was Houstonian, Charles W. Duncan.  Later I read that it was Roberto Hernandez Ramirez's money that was funding the creation of Cancer Centers of America.  Only later did we hear of what the petro-chems were doing to the food chain and death of bees because of the faulty science used to test its effects."
   

Sally Barnes-Soliz a Koch refinery employee was the key whistle blower on the
Benzene releases resulting in the 1999 indictments.
Texas District Judge Janis Jack oversaw the law suit which was
reduced from a 97 count indictment to one.   Children of
Koch's attorney would clerk for Judge Jack.  Vincent A. Mietlicki,
another of Koch employees cited in the indictment
left the refinery to become a vice-principle at
John Paul II High School in Corpus Christi.


     Fred Koch, progenitor of the Koch fortunes which, in addition to avoiding the real social cost of pollution, was collecting fortunes from both sides of international conflicts and had also funded the creation of the John Birch Society.  William Koch is a collector of one of the world's largest rare wine collections.  J. Howard Marshall, Jr. whose son teamed with Bill Koch against his brothers, had married Anna Nicole Smith from Mexia, Texas while he was in his 90's and a bitter family probate battled ensued between Smith and family members after Marshall's death.  Robert Koch, another relative, would become the head of the largest wine producers association in America and marry the only living daughter of George Herbert Walker Bush.

   "2000 was one hell of a year," said Carr who as a seventeen year old in Missouri had chauffeured J. Howard Marshall around a small southeast Missouri town with the CEO of Allied Chemical Corporation, Chester M. Brown.  "There was no technological Y2K meltdown, but the moral, ethical and spiritual meltdown in that year was clear."
     "My friend Bob Buxbaum from San Antonio conducted my mandated  psychological evaluation which he turned in to the committee saying to me how sorry he was to have been a part of the process and that 'this is the last thing I will do for the Presbytery before I retire.'   The Presbytery hired a former Roman Catholic priest turned expert in Rorschach ink blot tests...the most subjective of all tests, Sean Connolly.   Red Olander, Exxon's chief geologist and a Presbytery firewaller (whose father-in-law was, according to article written in the Hutto, Texas newspaper had been the chauffeur for Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone and John Burroughs whose wife was supposedly married to Robert E. Lee's kin providing for William Seward Burroughs a maternal uncle, Ivy Lee, the public relationship guru for John D. Rockefeller whose Standard Oil morphed into Exxon/Mobil) informed me that I'd never serve a large church again.  Sean Connolly is now a gatekeeper for the Texas Board of Nursing Examiners.  'Keep good notes,'"  said Carr as a warning to nurses in Texas.  "There is a reason you are the most trusted profession in America and you'll want it to stay that way."  Buxbaum retired and six months later died of some mysterious liver ailment, according to Carr.  "I called his widow to offer my deep appreciation for all he did and for his support," said Carr who added....
     "My father, a life long Presbyterian sent a letter to Sylvia Washer, the executive Presbyter in San Antonio...one to the Clerk of the denomination and one to the NAACP citing my treatment in the Corpus Christi Church and he died feeling that his son had been branded by his own kind," said Carr.  "I didn't ask him to write those letters, but I think it was cathartic for him.  He was at heart a very loving Christian man and with a sense of decency a mile wide.  Take away the color differences and there will still be Cain versus Able, the Montagues and Capulets and the Hatfields and McCoys.  I have a dog named Harry, a chocolate lab.   He's got webbed feet, retrieves and swims and is the best dang dog I've ever had," said Carr. "The breed comes from the Saint John's Water Dog in Newfoundland and is a breed less that 200 years old.  I have a Methodist friend in Refugio, Texas named John Barnes.  I was complimenting John on his fine Britney Spaniel. He said "you should have seen that one in the picture on the wall.   I picked him up from a breeder in Pennsylvania.  The breeder said 'this dog is a product of incest between a father and daughter....he's yours if you want him, but I don't know what you'll get'".

     "So what did you get?" Carr asked Mr. Barnes.  "A triple international champion...USA, Mexico and Canada."  Carr smiled.  "I told him....'sounds like the Biblical story of Lot and his daughters which begat the Moabites and Ammonites the longtime enemies of Israel....but then God can make followers of stones or so said Jesus.  God wasn't above using the runt of Jesse' litter, David, and could talk through Balaam's donkey if no one else would speak for him," Carr laughed mumbling "Moab....Ruth....Naiomi...."

     "What do you remember most about all this?" I asked Carr.

     "Sitting on the bridge at Austin Seminary between the administration building and classroom and hearing professor Bob Shelton for whom the chapel is now named saying 'you're not tough enough to be a Presbyterian Minister' and wondering all these years why I wasn't wise enough to ask him to define the word 'tough'. Secondly was my meeting with Rev. Louis Zbinden of First Presbyterian Church, San Antonio during my little crisis in Corpus Christi.  We were in San Antonio at the Argyle Dinner Club. I asked for his help and he said to me 'I think you ought to cut your losses and leave.'  

     "He's on the board of Austin Seminary is he not?" I asked Carr.
     "Last time I checked. Maybe its time for him to cut his losses and leave," said Carr, "but then you're talking about big money behind all this, too.  But it might just bring a bright new breath of fresh air to a declining denomination and as far as the Presbyterians and Methodists are concerned? I can't help but think of when John Joel Glanton, the real-life character of Cormack McCarthy's book Blood Meridian rode his horse into the parsonage shared by Presbyterian and Methodist ministers, Rev. John McCullough and Rev. William Young and their families  in San Antonio and tried to kill them both according to Col. M. L. Crimmins (April, 1940, "John Joel Glanton of San Antonio", Frontier Times) .  We have a lot more to worry about than each other," said Carr who said he is not aware of any relationship between himself and Casandra Carr, a senior executive with AT&T and chair of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary's Board.

     "But then I'm always studying about my family ties.  Who knows what will turn up?" said Carr smiling.  "Maybe Thomas Jefferson's brother-in-law Dabney Carr....maybe Sally Hemmings' half-sister.  As for the Presbyterian Church, I'm still there....you find the perfect church....don't join it.  You'll ruin it," said Carr with a grin as he concluded...."My mother served me many good meals...only a few of them made me sick and I'll stay for her excellent cheese grits."

UPDATE
10/14/15

Bob Buxbaum's influence on fellow ministers was shared on page 6 in a sermon by Dr. David Renwick, pastor of the historic National Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C. where Frederick Douglass was invited to preach in 1866 and where Dwight D. Eisenhower helped lay a new cornerstone in 1967.

10 comments:

  1. Could I get in contact with William H Carr? I am the current pastor at his previous church in Plano, TX (Grace PC).

    Do you have his email or contact information? My email is bryan@gracepc.org

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  2. I believe that Dr. Carr is still in Texas. The email I have is willhcarr@yahoo.com

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  3. Dear Winsip and Logan,

    Some time between the September, 2010 publication of this letter and Feb., 2011 the Austin Seminary Alumni Assocation made the decision to present Carlos Ham and US Army Lt. Col, Gilley Richardson with it Outstanding Alumni Award.

    http://www.austinseminary.edu/cf_news/view.cfm?newsid=296

    I don't know if your article had anything to do with it, and frankly, Mr. Custer, most of your writings appear to me to be from the dark side of the moon....but if this article, Mr. Logan, had any influence on this decision when coupled with the Methodist Church action, God bless you for it.

    Today more than ever Christians need to be like wise old owls who realize that wisdom dictates that we beat our swords into plowshares for plowing the hard ground that cannot be bombed into productivity....even though it makes many in the bombing business wealthy as we have witnessed in Iraq, Afghanistan and countless other targets over which we have waved our evangelistic veil like putting lovely lace curtains over the windows of a slaughter house.

    Sincerely,

    A friend in Christ

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  5. Will you comment on the "Interview With Fabian Colbachi"...was that from the "dark side of the moon" or just from the dark side of American politics as usual, sir?

    Winsip Custer

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  6. CNN’s Colin Barr (Finance Types Praise Daley, January 6, 2011) has noted that after William Daley, son of Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley, left his place as Al Gore’s campaign chairman where he had replaced Tony Coelho, he became head of SBC Communication,San Antonio, Texas, now AT&T. AT&T was featured in the PBS documentary, The Spy Factory by James Bamford. Bamford repored that the NSA’s optic cable splitter linking the San Luis Abispo web cable on the fourth floor of AT&T’s San Francisco office building, a data mining tactic questioned by the film’s author as an invasion of U.S. guaranteed privacy standards and a post-911 overreach by the NSA that had everything it needed to protect America in the FISA courts before the Patriot Bill. Colin Barr writes....

    "Daley 'has threaded the most complicated needles in order to drive growth and create jobs, which is just what the country needs right now,' said Peter Rose of Blackstone.
    Daley, 62, practiced with the family law firm Daley & George before he spending four years in the early 1990s in top posts at Amalgamated Bank of Chicago. He then worked at the global law firm Mayer Brown, at one point counseling Clinton on trade issues, before taking over as Commerce secretary in 1997.
    Daley ran Al Gore's losing presidential campaign in 2000, then moved to SBC Communications, the San Antonio telco now known as AT&T.. In 2004 he joined JPMorgan in Chicago, where he remains a member of the No. 2 U.S. bank's executive committee."

    As what price does Blackstone's Rose make his claim?

    WHC

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  7. Dear Sir,

    James Bamford laid it all out in this interview:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI_k9Xt00YE

    As for Rose of Blackstone? I don't know, but that wouldn't be surprising would it? William Daley of Chicago replaced Tony Coelho as Gore's campaing chief when Coelho called in sick, but at the same time a story was breaking about his connections to Mexico's biggest drug money laundering bank, Banamex, and Roberto Hernandez Ramirez. From there Daley went to AT&T.

    Bamford reports that the NSA will domicile all of its eavesdropping tapes in a new builing the size of the Alamo Dome in San Antonio, Texas not far from AT&T's headquarters.

    You see, sir, if the corruption of Wall Street and Washington were simply fertilizer. You know, normal shit, like the guano that Mr. Grace imported from Peru before making nitrates from oil....if the corruption was simply fertilizer instead of toxic sludge, the U.S. would already be green. Of course, those same nitrates make explosives and those have a poor history of greening up the planet.

    Warmly,

    Winsip Custer

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  8. Iran Contra attorney, Michael Bromwich, who some say was the firewall insuring that the Iran Contra prosecutions went no higher than Oliver North, Poindexter and the others went on to investigate the Harris County Medical Examiner's office and "clean up" the problems that had developed under former Washington D.C. medical examiner, Joyce Carter. Most of Carter's problems surfaced during the same time that Johnny B. Holmes was the Harris County District Attorney, a relative of John H. "Jack" Modessett, whom Houston Post Investigator Peter Brewton reported in his 1992 book, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, was an Iran Contra asset, a former president of the Corpus Christi Symphony and whose Houston partner, Ed Baker, was burned to death in his car like Mr. Carr's son. Paid from confescated drug money, Bromwich's investigation steadily put in for addition funding, eventually costing several million dollars before he was appointed to head the government's agency responsible for investigating the BP oil spill... Deepwater Horizon.
    After this, Bromwich joined the CSIS or Center for Strategic and International Studies on whose board is an assembly of America's darkest personalities including Henry Kissinger, whose connections to Augusto Penochet's rule is undeniable and Richard Armitage who was fingered by Col. Bo Gritz, a backer of H. Ross Perot, as the U.S.'s key Golden Triangle liason to Indonesian drug suppliers. Then there is this painful admission:
    "November/December 2000 was a very politically charged and sensitive time, one that put Patrick Carr in the crosshairs of the tyrannical Bush/Rove/Allbaugh machine in Texas. The minute he stepped onto the Halliburton/Dresser boat in Clear Lake, Patrick was a target. The names listed on the Coast Guard documentation for the Halliburton/Dresser boat (Dresser executive, William R Breland and son-in-law, Thomas Hajecate, who was convicted of racketeering and money laundering) had found their way into Columbia University Professor Ingo's book The Secret Money Market: Inside the Dark World of Tax Evasion, Financial Fraud, Insider Trading, Money Laundering and Capital Flight (Harper Business, 1990 pp. 35-36). Professor Ingo notes that Hajecate's legal counsel in his racketeering case, a lawyer with his own corruption issues, was NY attorney, Lance Eisenberg...see http://www.law.fsu.edu/library/flsupct/71479/op-71479.pdf.
    “Lance Eisenberg's connection to New Yorker, Jeffrey S Silverman, is confirmed in namebase.org, a comprehensive social network tool used by a variety of journalists and investigators. The diagrams confirm Jeffrey S Silverman's relateness to son-in-law of the Dresser Industries executive, Thomas Hajecate and to George Leon Argyros, Robert Mosbacher and Chase Untermeyer. Argyros is buddy of William Stamps Farish, head of Bush family blind trust from Beeville, Texas whose father was head of John D Rockefellers's Standard Oil Company."
    The above is from the website for Mr. Carr's deceased son who died on December 10, 2000 and can be seen at www.patrickcarr.blogspot.com.
    George Leon Argyros, former U.S. Ambassador to Spain is also on the board of CSIS where Michael Bromwich now works.
    Sorry, Mr. Carr and family. I suppose it make's singing "Though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler, yet," poignant, but painful.
    Just remember that evil has within its nature the seeds of its own destruction.

    Winsip Custer




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  10. Dear Rev. Carr,

    Dark side of the moon? In the fall of 2012 your colleague in ministry, Rev. David McKechnie, went to Wichita's Eastminster Presbyterian Church, home of Charles and Liz Koch, as Interim Minister. Charles is the brother of Bill Koch who had teamed up against Charles and David, Bill's twin, with J. Howard Marshall III in a hostile attempt to redirect Koch Industries to God alone knows what end.

    According to Cecil Riney, the church's choir director, choir members auditioned for Liz Koch. Those whose vocal cords had been seared by excessive Benzine releases didn't make the grade, but could hum "Oh, God Our Help in Ages Past, Our Hope For Years To Come" from the back pews.

    The dark side of the moon is dark, but not to those who have eyes to see. Again, I am sorry for your loss. I don't have to tell you that God will survive his "friends".

    Sincerely,

    Winsip Custer

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