Up Against ‘The Dark Agenda’
Sean Robinson; The News Tribune
http://www.tribnet.com/news/crime_safety/story/5318019p-5255837c.html
It’s not easy keeping secrets. sometimes shaini goodwin,
aka “dove of oneness,” wishes she didn’t know so many.'
Life would be simpler.
She wouldn’t have to flood the internet with reports that draw
thousands of readers around the world. she wouldn’t have to write about a
secret law called
NESARA - the National Economic Security and Reformation Act.
Sometimes, she says, she wishes she’d never heard of
NESARA. She claims Congress secretly passed it in 2000. The supposed law
forgives mortgage and credit card debt, abolishes the IRS and declares peace -
but she says a U.S. Supreme Court gag order prevents anyone from revealing it,
under pain of death.
Goodwin says the gag order doesn’t apply to her,
because she isn’t an “official person.” Her self-appointed mission - revealing
the truth about NESARA - forces her to write reports from her mobile home in
Shelton, explaining that the Bush administration plotted the 9/11 attacks and
the East Coast sniper slayings to prevent NESARA’s announcement.
The
knowledge is a heavy burden. Without it, she wouldn’t have to fend off critics
who scoff at her claims, call her the leader of a cybercult and charge that she
links NESARA to the wealth promised by a financial scam. She wouldn’t have to
call for demonstrations around the world, or ask her 15,000 readers for
donations, sent to a mail drop in an Olympia strip mall.
It’s a price she’s willing to pay for the peace she
says NESARA will bring. “NESARA is the most important thing on the planet,” she
says.
Goodwin claims a powerful group called “White
Knights” is fighting a secret war against “the Illuminati” over the secret law.
Her regular updates cite secret sources from the highest levels of government
and finance around the world.
She links her conspiracy theory to a proven con.
Goodwin says NESARA will unlock the wealth allegedly held in more than 50
“prosperity programs.” They include an investment fraud called Omega, run by a
convicted con artist named Clyde Hood of Mattoon, Ill. In the mid-1990s the
scheme robbed thousands of people of more than $20 million and led to the
convictions of 18 conspirators for wire fraud, mail fraud and money laundering.
Followers throughout the world believe Goodwin’s
reports, subscribe to her Internet “e-group” and wave banners for her cause.
They ignore government officials who tell them there is no secret law to
announce, that Congress never passed it, that there is no gag order.
Goodwin dismisses critics and naysayers as tools of
what she calls “the dark agenda.” The Omega convictions were a sham, she says -
a government plot to deprive people of their money. She says she is practicing
political activism, that she tells the truth, that she doesn’t lead a cult.
Her followers don’t know she has registered a
business to make collection of donations easier, that she has declared
bankruptcy at least once, or that she owes the IRS $12,000. Most don’t even
know her name, or that she’s a 57-year-old former parade queen from McCleary.
Goodwin didn’t make the pieces of her Byzantine
puzzle. Omega came from Hood, a retired Illinois electrician who created the
investment fraud scheme in 1994. New Age jargon provided Goodwin’s rhetoric.
The conspiracy theories were rusty boilerplate, covered by “The Da Vinci Code”
author Dan Brown and others, volleyed around thousands of Internet sites. And
the NESARA idea belonged to Harvey Barnard, a retired engineer in Louisiana who
drafted a model bill 13 years ago as an academic exercise.
But the synthesis was Dove’s, and that’s what
catches the trained eye of Andreas Schroeder, co-chairman of the creative
writing department at the University of British Columbia, and author of several
books on scam artists and confidence games.
Dove built a bridge from one scam to another,
shifting from Omega’s unofficial chronicler to the keeper of the secret law.
Schroeder likens the NESARA story to a famous con from the 1920s: the Drake
Legacy.
For more than a decade, Oscar Hartzell, an Illinois
farmer, convinced thousands of people that he controlled the $100 billion
estate of Sir Francis Drake, the 16th-century pirate.
Hartzell went to London to make the con look good.
He stayed there, sending letters to suckers back home that described his
negotiations with the British government and the royal family, and the need for
more public support and money to seal the deal.
He spent his days at the post office and his nights
on liquor and women. He was convicted of fraud in 1934 and died nine years
later. Before his trial, Hartzell’s believers raised more than $68,000 for his
defense.
His method was as old as deceit. Richard Rayner,
author of “Drake’s Fortune,” a book on the scam, calls it “the Scheherazade
factor,” invoking the princess of the Arabian Nights who saved her life with
stories.
Like Hartzell, Dove writes letters describing
government plots too tangled to unravel. Like him, she denounces critics and
skeptics. Like him, she urges her supporters to campaign for the unreal.
It keeps them distracted, Schroeder says. The best
con artists turn passive victims into active supporters. “You’re told to spend
a tremendous amount of effort to get in on the fight and defend yourself,” he
says. “Join up with a bunch of other like-minded people to defend the
enterprise. It keeps you busy, it keeps you involved, and because you’re
chorusing, the din you create overwhelms anything that might be coming in
through the other ear.”
On Nov. 29, 2001, Dove instructed victims of the
Omega scam not to file restitution claims seeking the return of their money.
“Since the whole court thing in Illinois was always
part of the dark agenda opposition trying to brainwash program members, if you
fill out that questionnaire, you are probably signing away your rights to your
prosperity,” she wrote.
In the same message she mentioned another Internet
poster, Jennifer Lee, a California woman who adopted Dove’s methods but lacked
her panache. Lee’s messages, also available on the Internet, are delivered by
phone and quote liberally from Dove’s writings. Lee frequently asks her readers
to send money - “donations” - to pay for her expenses.
In her Nov. 29 message, Dove endorsed Lee’s requests
for donations, but distanced herself from such pleas. “My own policy is to do
my service of providing truth WITHOUT asking the Dove e-group members to donate
money to help me,” she wrote. Her e-group subscriber list climbed above 5,000.
Collectively, 355 Omega victims from 41 states and
three countries filed restitution claims seeking more than $1.69 million.
Esteban “Steve” Sanchez, the assistant U.S. attorney in Illinois who prosecuted
the Omega case, was disappointed. He knew the scam’s victims numbered in the
thousands.
It was the Scheherazade factor, the unshakable faith
of Omega investors, the rough magic of the con, nurtured by Dove. The victims
weren’t talking - not in Illinois, and not in Yelm, where Goodwin then lived.
Many Omega “investors” were clustered in the Thurston County city and
surrounding communities.
Dove was hindering the restitution effort; it was a
pain, but Sanchez and his attorneys chose not to chase her. They already had 19
criminal cases to prosecute.
“The misinformation was more of a thorn in our
sides, as opposed to an evidentiary, crime-solving thing,” he said. “We
couldn’t figure out that she was taking any money. She was just misinforming
people. That may be an issue of the First Amendment. She’s not forcing the
listeners to believe what she says. These people are adults.”
Louise Gilman, then a Yelm resident, invested $4,500
in Omega. She knew several others in the community who gave as much or more. As
soon as she heard of the court case and the restitution program, she filed a
claim. She knew others in Yelm who didn’t.
“So many people did not put in for a refund,” said
Gilman, who now lives in Oregon. “They thought the government was trying to get
in on it. We didn’t know anybody who went in for restitutions. There’s so many
lessons to be learned for people here - the truth really needs to be told. I
have to say that the government protected us.”
On Dec. 23, 2001, Dove posted a report shredding
Barnard, the original author of the NESARA bill. His Web site was a sham, she
said. Bush administration goons had taken control of it. Her opponents,
including Barnard, were “dark agenda stooges.”
Eventually Dove would change the name of the secret
law, but preserve Barnard’s acronym. Instead of the National Economic
Stabilization and Recovery Act, it became the National Economic Security and
Reformation Act.
Barnard had written the NESARA proposal, nursed it
for years and inched it toward the door of respectability, even getting an
occasional sniff from politicians with a libertarian bent. Now the idea no
longer belonged to him. He has taken to calling Goodwin’s reports “Dove
droppings.”
On Jan. 24, 2002, Shaini Goodwin got her business
license. The corporate address appeared in her Internet reports, and she began
to ask for donations to cover her expenses, which ranged from an overdue
electric bill to replacement of a dying computer.
She says it was the hardest thing she’s ever done.
She had been writing reports for two years and never asked for money, but there
was no alternative. If she didn’t, she says, “I probably would have to get a
regular job, and I wouldn’t be able to help NESARA.”
She would repeat her request once every three to
four months for the next two years. Only a few readers respond, she says -
about 100 out of more than 15,000.
Goodwin has never mentioned the business license to
her readers. She told The News Tribune she doesn’t see the need. “The Dove
business is strictly to have a bank account,” Goodwin says. “That’s the only
reason that it’s there. I had to get a business license to open a checking
account with the name of ‘Dove.’”
In subsequent 2002 reports, she urged readers to
send e-mails to Congress, demanding the announcement of NESARA. She claimed the
Bush administration planned the 9/11 attacks to prevent it. Her subscriber list
topped the 6,000 mark.
On April 11, she started a phone line: a Seattle
number where supporters could call for “updates.” The NESARA announcement was
imminent, “on the brink,” and the White Knights were taking new steps to eradicate
the dark agenda. She claimed 7,600 subscribers.
\“Oh, by the way,” snorts Jay Adkisson, a
scam-cracking asset protection attorney from California, “we’re having trouble
paying our phone bill - please send some money in.”
Adkisson edits Quatloos.com, an irreverent Web site
dedicated to exposing financial scams and frauds. (The word “quatloos” is a
pop-culture joke, a reference to sci-fi currency from an old “Star Trek”
episode.) Adkisson appears as an occasional guest expert on network news shows
such as ABC’s “20/20,” and he has testified on investment fraud before the U.S.
Senate Finance Committee. The Quatloos site includes a lengthy history of the
Omega scam and excerpts from Dove’s reports. Adkisson scoffs at them (“the
voice of the clinically insane,” he says), but his words include a hint of
grudging admiration.
“A very subtle scam: Keep me alive for information
because this information impacts you,” he says. “Well, the fact is, it doesn’t
impact anybody. It’s bogus. It’s just a way to grift money from people who want
to believe that their long-forgotten Omega shares are gonna pay out some day.”
Dove calls Quatloos “a CIA disinformation Web site” and says she has confirmed
it with a Secret Service agent she won’t name.
Along with Adkisson, Dove attracted other observers
- hunters who make a hobby of researching scams. One goes by the Internet
handle “goose.” He followed Omega for years and had friends who invested in it.
When Dove’s reports began to appear, he kept an eye on her.
“I give her credit for being able to combine this
stuff in an amazingly confusing way,” he says. “Dove has pulled some really
hurtful things together and built a story, which she continues to spread, and
which, in turn, only causes more hurt for those who hang on to her every word.
“People have been completely ruined because of these
programs that Dove promotes,” the man known as goose says. “Dove has had ample
opportunity to see the hurt people have suffered. Does she stop? Never. She
goes on and on.”
In June 2002, Goodwin asked for donations again. “My
PC needs some expensive repair work done in the NEXT FEW DAYS so I can keep
doing the Dove Reports, and due to unforeseen expenses in our household, I need
your assistance with these repair costs,” she wrote.
She complained that the NESARA announcement had been
delayed until July 4 and chided the White Knights for taking so long. She urged
supporters to send e-mails to the World Court in the Netherlands, where she
claimed judges were assembling for secret hearings on the NESARA issue.
She swept critics aside, announcing that those who
spoke against the secret law were being “monitored” and would forfeit their
prosperity. In August, she said homemaking empress Martha Stewart, under
suspicion for financial crimes, was being framed because she supported NESARA.
On Oct. 1, she asked for money again. On Oct. 2, she
advised a supporter facing mortgage foreclosure to call the bank, inform
whomever answered that NESARA was being announced and explain that banks that
continued to pursue foreclosures would be charged with obstruction of justice.
On Oct. 15, two weeks after the East Coast sniper
shootings ended with the arrest of former Tacoma resident John Allen Muhammad,
Dove’s daily report called the slayings a dark agenda operation carried out by
federal agents.
“I’m told that some of the reported shootings and
deaths are NOT true, but that local police officials and others have been
willing stooges to help out in this CIA operation,” she wrote.
Her claimed subscriptions rose: 8,000, then 9,000,
then 10,000. The numbers are impossible to verify; the Internet is a graveyard
of unreliable statistics, easily rigged and twisted. But her news group at the
Yahoo Web site, which she has since abandoned, listed similar membership
numbers before she moved her reports to a new site. She showed her e-mail inbox
to The News Tribune during an interview Thursday. It included 1,763 new (or
unread) messages.
Whatever her true number of readers, her fame was
growing. Her reports began to appear on multiple “mirror” Web sites, including
the Internet home of the Principality of Camside in Australia, a “fake nation”
created by a handful of anti-government secessionists who say the Australian
government is illegal.
Dove started giving radio interviews. They included
a two-day guest appearance in February 2003 with Cameron Steele, host of a
Seattle-based program called “Contact Radio.” Steele invited Dove after
receiving requests to bring her on, he said. Her appearance drew record
interest: More than 100 people signed up for the show’s e-mail list after the
interview.
“She makes good radio,” he said. During the
interview, Steele didn’t ask about Omega, though he heard rumors of Dove’s ties
to the old scam. That wasn’t the topic of the show, he told The News Tribune.
The topic was NESARA. Steele isn’t sure he buys the business about passage of
the secret law, but he thinks it’s quite an idea. “Maybe this whole thing with
Dove is there just to define what we want with our lives,” he said. “To remind
us we need to investigate more.”
Dove’s appearance on Steele’s show was sponsored by
Stephen Heuer, a California business owner who sells natural goods and organic
products. When he bought the airtime, Heuer knew nothing about Omega or Dove’s
connection to it. He had spoken with her after hearing about NESARA from an
acquaintance. The conversation left him spellbound. “I just found that what she
said was so compelling and so positive and so much what we needed, that if
there was anything I could do to support its coming to fruition, I would do
that,” he said. “I’d like to think it’s a Santa Claus story come true.”
Too good to be true
Though soliciting donations in exchange for phony
information might sound fishy, it isn’t illegal. State and federal law
enforcement authorities say no law prohibits Dove from asking for gifts, even
if they fund conspiracy theories. “She has her First Amendment right to say
things,” said Jeff Scobba, an investigator with the U.S. Postal Service in
Seattle. “As long as she’s saying it’s a gift or a donation to her cause, I
don’t think there’s anything illegal with asking for money. “I think it would
be foolish to send her money.”
Dove hasn’t generated any complaints to the state
attorney general or the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle. No public sources
show how much money she makes from her state-registered business, or whether
she pays obligatory taxes. The state Department of Revenue does not disclose
such information about individual businesses, said spokesman Mike Gowrylow, who
added he hadn’t heard of Dove before The News Tribune asked about her.
“If we become aware of any kind of suspected tax
evasion, we investigate it,” he said. “I’m sure we don’t catch every little bit
of it, and we’re not aware of everything.” In early 2003, Dove orchestrated a
letter-writing campaign to the U.S. Supreme Court, urging her fans to send
postcards (“NESARA now!”) and NESARA fliers, which readers could download for
free. Her followers responded dutifully. Hundreds of postcards arrived. No one
paid much attention. “If correspondence doesn’t relate to a specific court case
or require a response, it’s disposed of,” said Kathy Arberg, spokeswoman for
the court.
On her Web site, Dove describes several ways to
prove NESARA’s reality. None can be verified, though she says public denials
simply prove how secret it is. In some of her reports, she claims Congress
passed the bill March 9, 2000, and that President Clinton signed it on Sept. 10
of that year. Records of congressional actions for March 9 show no NESARA vote.
Records of Clinton’s official actions Sept. 10 don’t include a NESARA
bill-signing. Goodwin now says Clinton signed the bill sometime in October
2000.
Repeated questions from NESARA believers have forced
the Department of the Treasury to issue a statement on its Web site, couched in
inoffensive but direct terms. “The NESARA proposal has not yet been introduced
in the Congress, nor is it part of any current law,” the statement reads. “The
Treasury Department is not authorized, under our political system of checks and
balances, to execute or administer any part of NESARA, without the force of law
as approved by Congress.”
Dove claims some financial experts know about NESARA
and will discuss it if asked. Matt Philichi, an investment broker with the
Tacoma branch of Morgan Stanley, burst out laughing when he heard the story of
the secret law. “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of,” he said.
“There’s absolutely no way that all this information is going to float out of
Yelm, Washington, and miss all the other cities in the world. It sounds like
the typical scam. If there was something in this that we could present to our
clients to help them and make them like us more - you know we’d be all over it.
There’s not one firm out there that would keep it a secret.”
Occasionally, Dove names U.S. Rep. Ron Paul
(R-Texas) as a NESARA supporter. Paul’s libertarian views on the economy make
him “a bit of a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists,” says his spokesman,
Jeff Deist. Deist says the same thing to every NESARA supporter who calls:
NESARA has never been introduced in Congress, and Paul never voted on it. Dove
says members of the national media are under a gag order, and cannot discuss
the secret NESARA law. She says she learned about the gag order from “a New
York journalist.” She will not give his name.
When pressed for other evidence by The News Tribune,
Dove cited “confirmations” of NESARA in the form of messages from her
supporters. She provided 95 pages of printed e-mails. Many of the messages were
duplicated three and four times from the same individual. The pile included 18
messages referencing NESARA. In them, supporters speak of colored currency and
vague hints from unnamed bank tellers and managers. Most of the anecdotes
describe conversations with friends of friends.
At Dove’s request, one of her supporters, Dan
Onerheim of Iowa, spoke to The News Tribune and described the experience he
called a “confirmation.” “A few months back,” Onerheim said, he was talking to
a certified public accountant who mentioned “a lot of changes coming into
effect monetarily.” He said the man mentioned NESARA. The News Tribune asked
for the man’s name. “Al,” Onerheim said. The last name? He didn’t know. The
man’s location? “I think he was out of Phoenix,” Onerheim said.
A second supporter, Herb McKirgan of Oregon, told
The News Tribune he heard U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) confirm NESARA’s
existence during a recent speech. McKirgan said he mentioned NESARA activities
to Kucinich, who allegedly named the law and said it was “very important.” Andy
Juniewicz, senior communications adviser to Kucinich’s presidential campaign,
dismissed the story and criticized Dove’s occasional use of Kucinich’s
name. “Her claim is pure fiction,” he
said. The congressman would not have corroborated the existence of a law that
doesn’t exist. It’s important that she stop using his name as corroboration for
her claims.”
During her interview with The News Tribune on
Thursday, Dove called another supporter, this time in the Netherlands, a woman
named Nel DeBest who participates in NESARA demonstrations at the World Court.
DeBest also reported a “confirmation” of the secret law - she says an
ambassador driving by the demonstrators in a car gave the thumbs-up sign. So
did one of the World Court judges, she said.
At times in the last two years, hundreds of daily
e-mails from NESARA followers have gummed up the World Court’s computers. Local
police recently told the demonstrators to stop planting their signs in the
flower beds. The activists are peaceful, friendly and persistent, says Boris
Heim, one of the court’s information officers. “We have just told them we have
nothing to do with them and can’t help them in any way,” he says. “You see
obviously that they don’t have quite a grip really on what’s happening. They
look at you in a bizarre way. They’re not listening.”
Heim feels sorry for them. It amazes him that they
believe Dove’s words. “It’s just pointless,” he says. “It’s like asking the
president of France to abolish the death penalty in New Zealand. It doesn’t
make any sense. If you talk about this to any normal human being with a
functioning brain, he will understand that the International Court cannot erase
the taxes of the world.”
Court employees used to respond to NESARA e-mails
with a form letter: “The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has nothing to do
with any alleged ‘Nesara’ proceedings, as mentioned in your e-mail and on
certain Internet sites,” it said. They don’t bother to respond anymore. It does
no good.
Edith Cole, a 69-year-old Rochester, Thurston
County, resident, waved a NESARA banner at the World Court when she visited the
Netherlands earlier this year. In February, she passed out NESARA fliers at a
Puyallup gun show. Cole doesn’t send Dove money, but she reads her reports
regularly. She didn’t invest in Omega and says she doesn’t know about Dove’s
connection to it. “I’m under the impression that she’s a caregiver, that she
does humanitarian work,” Cole said. “I’ve talked to Dove directly. She’s very
passionate for what she’s doing. She totally believes in it. I do, too.”
Photos of the World Court demonstrations appear on
Dove’s Web site, along with others of NESARA demonstrations in Seattle, Texas
and South America. The numbers are growing, and Dove feeds the energy.
Recently, she gave herself a new title: Worldwide NESARA Take Action Team
Director.
Though her means are modest, Dove’s influence and
worldwide network of supporters reflect an occasional pattern that surfaces in
“impostor” scams - and provide a partial explanation of what Goodwin gains by
her efforts. “It’s definitely not always money,” says Schroeder, the fraud historian.
“Beyond a certain point, it’s the ability to influence a whole lot of people at
the snap of their fingers. Influence, being the spider at the center of the web
that can get everybody excited by plucking this string. That’s as big a rush
and as good a reason as making a million bucks.”
The scam hunter known as goose can’t decide whether
Dove writes for money or attention, whether she believes her reports or puts on
a good show. Either way, it bothers him. “A lot of people have newsletters, and
people either pay for them or their newsletters are supported by donations.
There’s really nothing illegal about that,” he says. “But the thing is, Omega
has been declared, by the court and in Illinois, a scam. You can’t talk about
funding without connecting it to something that’s been called a scam, something
that’s been declared illegal by the courts. In that sense you’re holding out
hope of a declared scam. There’s the legal question and then there’s the moral,
ethical question.”
Hearing the story of Dove, Sanchez, who prosecuted
the Omega conspirators in Illinois, feels a pulse of fury. “It is so offensive
to me when people victimize victims, kick somebody when they’re down,” he says.
“This is what she’s done, and it’s not right. One could argue that she’s done
more damage than Clyde Hood.”
In Redmond lives a man who wishes he’d never heard
of Dove. Because of her reports, he can’t talk to his sister anymore. Fearing
he will lose all contact with her, the man asked The News Tribune not to publish
his name. Call him John. John’s sister lives in California. Her husband
controls all communication to their household.
The husband was an Omega investor who tried to pull
his relatives into the program. Now the husband is a Dove believer. “He’s an
incredible supporter, to the point where if you mention that it might not be on
the up-and-up, he gets angered,” John says. “It doesn’t matter what you say -
these people want to believe. They want to believe what’s being fed to them.”
He has tried to talk to the husband, to reason with him. It doesn’t work. They
can’t talk anymore; the husband says John is part of the dark agenda. What
started as a dubious get-rich-quick scheme has become something else, something
addictive.
“There is definitely a walking path between
multilevel marketing and this stuff - a doorway drug,” John says. “This is
really a cult. It’s a cybercult.”
The News Tribune reached John’s brother-in-law last
month and asked whether he would talk about his support of Omega and NESARA.
“Take my number off your list and forget you ever met me,” the man said, and
hung up. “This goofy NESARA stuff, it is a cybercult,” said Adkisson, the
scam-busting California attorney. “You’ve got a big pool of proven suckers - a
big pool of people who were dumb enough to buy into these prosperity programs
in the first place. There’s a really bizarre, extremist political strain
through this whole deal. You have to wonder, what’s the end game?”
Through winter and spring of this year, Dove trimmed
NESARA like a Christmas tree. The secret law would bring even more benefits,
she said: a cure for cancer, 90 percent price reductions at the store,
increased Social Security payments ($3,000 a month), a ban on Navy sonar tests
that kill whales, and prosecution for uninsured drivers.
She asked for money on Feb. 4. Petitions to the
World Court were working, she said in March. Judges had agreed to hold a
hearing on the NESARA announcement, now scheduled for April.
On April Fool’s Day, at the end of a long report,
she pushed for another postcard campaign to a familiar target: The Joint Chiefs
of Staff at the Pentagon. To fire up the troops, she added a teaser: “I’m
working on another BIG action which will encourage these high-level officers to
get NESARA announced immediately,” she wrote.
For the next few days, she dropped hints about “the
secret BIG thing,” calling it “a very unusual activity which will give NESARA’s
announcement a BIG boost forward.”
On April 7, the big thing arrived. Four billboard
trucks appeared in Washington, D.C., and drove around Capitol Hill for a few
weeks. The signs they carried called for the announcement of NESARA. The
chrome-style logo and graphics were taken from Dove’s Web site.
In a report posted April 7, Dove cheered. Photos of
the trucks soon appeared on her site. “At last, OUR VOICES are being heard in
D.C. in a BIG way,” she wrote. “It makes me smile every time I see these
beautiful NESARA mobile billboards.” She told The News Tribune the trucks were
paid for by a woman - “a well-to-do NESARA supporter” she would not identify.
A Maryland-based company called Drive-By Ads owns
the billboard trucks. Owner James Miller said he didn’t know anything about
NESARA when the job came in. It was just another campaign. A big one, though;
he had to call in extra drivers. Each truck rents for $600 per day, and vinyl
signs run between $1,200 and $1,400 apiece. The trucks ran for three weeks.
Miller won’t say who paid for them. “Sometimes I’m leery on calls I get for the
NESARA group,” he said. “Some people are for it, and some people are against
it. I’m just the messenger.”
On April 22, a few days after the trucks appeared,
Dove posted her latest request for donations. “NEXT WEEK I must pay for some
large communications expenses and other expenses and I’m asking those of you
who are able to send financial contributions to fund the many actions I’m
leading for the benefit of all of us to move NESARA into announcement
immediately,” she wrote.
She gave the Olympia address and mailbox number
along with the usual precise instructions: “Please address your envelope
EXACTLY as above or your envelope may not be delivered. Also, please REPLY to
this message telling me you are sending me a financial gift. You may make
checks or money orders payable to ‘Dove.’”
Next year, the Elma High School class of 1965 holds
its 40th reunion. Organizer Karen Olson, who still lives in her
hometown, doesn’t know whether Goodwin will come; she didn’t show up for any of
the others. Sharon Van Leeuwen, another graduate who lives in Olympia, is
going. She’s looking forward to seeing old friends. She didn’t know Goodwin
well, but she remembers her. “She was very kind,” Van Leeuwen said. “I thought
she was beautiful. I wished that I looked like her. Kind of a leader,
well-liked, good-natured and very friendly. “She didn’t listen to gossip.”
Sean Robinson: 253-597-8486
sean.robinson@mail.tribnet.com
Despite facts to the contrary, Dove of Oneness insists
Congress passed a secret law in 2000. Here’s what her Web site says the secret
NESARA law does:
• Forgives credit card, mortgage and other bank debt.
• Abolishes the IRS, creates a flat-rate sales tax.
• Initiates the U.S. Treasury Bank System, which absorbs the
Federal Reserve and new precious metals backed U.S. Treasury currency.
• Restores constitutional law.
• Requires resignations of current administration to be replaced
by NESARA president and vice president designates until new elections within
120 days.
• Requires the president designate to declare “peace,” enabling
international banking improvements to proceed; ends “U.S. aggressive military
actions immediately, and many more improvements.”
Shaini Goodwin, who calls herself Dove of Oneness,
is the architect of a conspiracy theory that grew out of a financial scam. Here
it is, in a nutshell:
• In 1998, she puts money into Omega, an investment fraud scheme
that runs from 1994 to 2000 and robs victims of $20 million.
• Omega’s ringleader, Clyde Hood, confesses his crimes in 2001,
and admits Omega is a scam.
• Goodwin writes Internet reports as “Dove,” says Hood’s
confession is a lie and that Omega is real. She claims a secret law called
NESARA - the National Economic Security and Reformation Act - will unlock the
wealth held in Omega and other “prosperity programs.”
• Dove’s reports claim Congress secretly passed NESARA in 2000
but that leaders cannot reveal its existence because violating a U.S. Supreme
Court gag order on NESARA is punishable by death.
• Dove claims the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the East Coast
sniper shootings and the Iraq war are diversions planned and plotted by the
Bush administration to prevent NESARA’s announcement.
• According to Dove, once NESARA is announced, banking rules
will change and “mass deliveries” from more than 60 “prosperity programs,”
including Omega, will arrive.
Dove of Oneness can be read
at www.nesara.us.