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A Major AFRICOM & US State Department Campaign to Undermine Chinese Influence in Central Africa
According to their website, the American NGO, Invisible Children, claims now to have had over 80 million viewers to their YouTube video, “Kony2012,” since its release on YouTube a few weeks ago. For anyone with the patience to sit through the entire YouTube of Kony2012, it is questionable how truthful the figure of 80 million viewers is. Eighty million is unprecedented in YouTube history by all accounts.
The video features such prominent Hollywood personalities as Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Lady GaGa, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and other notables. It’s a slick, sentimental story directed by Jason Russell, a 33-year-old now-hospitalized American filmmaker who apparently just underwent a bizarre mental disconnect on the streets of San Diego. The YouTube video depicts a young Ugandan, Jacob Acaye, whom Russell claims he befriended some ten years earlier after Acaye escaped conscription into Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) as an 11-year-old killer. The film portrays Kony as the world’s worst beast and terrorist, in effect, Africa’s Osama bin Laden.
The Invisible Children NGO is itself opaque. It reportedly rakes in millions from sales of such things as buttons, Invisible Children T-shirts, bracelets and posters priced from $30-$250, but it ranks low on transparency regarding other donors. The group, which employs around 100 people, is expected to raise millions of dollars from their “Kony2012” video, but so far it refuses to say how much has been donated or how it will spend the money. The founders of the group, who advocate direct US military intervention in response to the LRA, had been previously criticized for posing with guns alongside members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in 2008, an organization widely accused of rape and looting. The group issued a statement in response: “We thought it would be funny to bring back to our friends and family a joke photo. You know, ‘Haha – they have bazookas in their hands but they’re actually fighting for peace’.”
According to the London Guardian, Invisible Children’s “accounts show it is a cash-rich operation, which more than tripled its income in 2011” to nearly $9 million, mainly from personal donations. Of this, nearly 25% was spent on travel and film-making. Most of the money raised has been spent in the US, not for Africa’s “invisible children” or even visible ones. According to information obtained by the Guardian, “the accounts show $1.7million went to US employee salaries, $850,000 in film production costs, $244,000 in ‘professional services’ – thought to be Washington lobbyists – and $1.07 million in travel expenses. Nearly $400,000 was spent on office rent in San Diego” Charity Navigator, a US charity evaluator, gave the organization only two stars for “accountability and transparency.” The USAID, a State Department agency which coordinates its foreign interventions with the Pentagon and CIA, openly states on its website that it has funded Invisible Children Inc. in the past.
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The Shock Doctrine
In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.
Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.
The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
Rate Of Unemployed Not Seeking Work Highest Recorded
The official unemployment rate has improved, but the number of jobless Americans at the fringe of the workforce has never been greater. The gap between headline and alternative joblessness is the highest on record, according to an IBD analysis of Labor Department data.
The jobless rate is 8.3%, still high but down from 9.1% last August and 9.9% in April 2010. But many don’t think that gives an accurate picture. The official number excludes a record 2.81 million discouraged or other “marginally attached” people out of work that aren’t currently looking but are willing and able.
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Money insider foresees civil unrest in U.S. this year
Charles Ortel is a managing partner with Newport Value Partners, LLC in New York City. Newport, established in 2007, provides value-added research to executives and investment firms.
An analysis by highly regarded Wall Street financial analyst Charles K. Ortel predicts weak economic growth and disappointing private investment returns in the U.S. economy during 2012 and for the foreseeable future.
What is startling about Ortel’s economic analysis is the rapidity with which his dire economic and political forecasts are being realized on the front pages of newspapers worldwide.
On Jan. 13 the credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded nine eurozone countries, including France and Austria, with the Financial Times in London reporting in words Ortel himself could have crafted that the downgrade “reignited fears about the fiscal sustainability of the eurozone.”
Coming economic violence
“With no existing government or financial institution solvent enough, respected enough or feared enough to lead the required re-balancing in peace, we believe the world will experience a painful re-calibration of economic strength and geo-political standing during 2012 in the midst of widespread civil insurrection and cross-border war,” writes Ortel, a managing partner with Newport Value Partners, LLC in New York City
He further predicts… Continue reading
Fed officials push more stimulus for housing
Two top Federal Reserve officials on Friday pushed the case for more stimulus from the U.S. central bank to help the economic recovery, each zeroing in on the country’s weak housing market.
Policymakers need to consider more action to kick-start the housing sector and help the country’s “frustratingly slow” economic recovery and “unacceptably high” unemployment, William Dudley, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, said in a speech in New Jersey.
Monetary policy should work to complement actions by other U.S. government policymakers, which together could help to stabilize home prices and turn around the housing market within a year or two under good conditions, said Dudley.
Speaking in Hartford, Connecticut, the president of the Boston Fed, Eric Rosengren, said one way to shore up housing would be for the central bank to buy more mortgage-backed securities.
“Given the low inflation rate and weak labor markets that are both likely to persist this year, I believe the Federal Reserve should continue to explore ways to promote more rapid recovery through stronger growth,” Rosengren told a business group.
The speeches from Dudley and Rosengren, both of whom are considered part of the Fed’s “dovish” wing — more concerned with strengthening… Continue reading
Judge Napolitano: What If the Establishment is Lying to Us About Ron Paul?
Once again, Judge Andrew Napolitano tells us the truth. It really is amazing Fox News allows this sort of unvarnished truth to be broadcast over their propaganda venue.
