Kielburger kult death spiral continues

First time I saw a Kielburger presentation, I was underwhelmed. They obviously had a pretty slick shtick, but it was a little too slick for my tastes.

I recall one of the lads regaling the crowd with tales of his first mission to end child labour in Bangladesh or somewhere. Then he was in the paper. Then he decided to start a NGO. Then he met the Prime Minister. Then he met the Sec-Gen of the UN. Then he met Mother Teresa... it was a most cringe-worthy orgy of name dropping.

For fucks sakes, he's gonna pull the Pope out of his ass in a minute...

Sure enough! 

Anyway, I was wrong. Their little NGO caught fire. Soon they were building schools all over Afghanistan and Kenya and all kinds of other benighted lands, or "shit-hole countries," as some would frame it. On paper, that's not a bad idea, but when you think things through, it's pretty obvious that most of the shit-hole countries are shit-holes primarily because they've been ruthlessly plundered and abused by the "liberal democracies" of the West for hundreds of years.

So I'm not impressed by two-bit NGOs who are gonna make it all better. Nevertheless, they soon had hundreds of thousands of school children baking cup-cakes for fundraisers to build schools for needy children in less fortunate countries, an undertaking that apparently demanded a substantial real estate footprint in downtown Toronto.

The latest revelation surprises me somewhat. Sure, they overplayed their shtick, but not even I suspected they would engage in out and out fraud. According to the CBC, the Kielburgers would fly a big money donor to Kenya to witness the opening of a school built with his money. They'd have a big ceremony and unveil a plaque with the donor's name. 

A couple of weeks later, they'd fly another big donor to the same school and repeat. The article doesn't specify how many times they dedicated the same school to different donors, but we definitely seem to be in the realm of criminality here.

I wonder how many of the teachers who fell for the charms of the Kielburgers will embrace this time as a teachable moment?

Beware the child activist

Greta Thunberg is the latest manifestation of the "child activist" phenomenon. In less than a year the Swedish teen has become the world-wide poster child for climate change action. Greta seems an inspiration to many people, and is unafraid to put other people's money where her mouth is. Just now she is on her way to New York aboard a five million euro racing yacht to attend multiple photo-ops. In this,  she is leading by example; in a perfect world we'd all make our transatlantic crossings by sailboat, thereby saving the planet by eliminating the carbon footprint of trans-Atlantic flights.

This is a publicity stunt, of course. I have a hunch that there's nothing remotely "carbon-neutral" about building a sixty-foot racing yacht, and we'd have to build one hell of a fleet if they're to replace air travel!

Before Greta, we had little Bana, the plucky seven year old Aleppo girl whose moving tweets implored the West to do more to save Syria's children from Assad and Putin. Within months of leaving Syria, Bana was at the Oscars, rubbing elbows with the Hollywood elite. Her first book, a memoir, was recently published by Simon and Schuster.

Before Bana, we had Malala, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner in history. Malala campaigns for the rights of women and girls in Muslim countries. This is a popular cause amongst the Western NGO class. Who can be against equal rights for women and girls? In fact, one of the rationales for the initial occupation of Afghanistan was that we were improving the lives of women and girls there. Ironically, eighteen years later the same do-gooders are complaining that if the US quits Afghanistan, all their hard-won gains will be erased.

Before Malala, we had Craig Kielburger, the twelve year old Canadian kid who launched the Me to We non-profit (and the shadow for-profit that cleverly sprang up alongside it.) Craig too wants to help the downtrodden and oppressed in less fortunate lands.

These idealistic children have in every case been "managed" by media-savvy adults working in the background. As such, they are being used to advance the agendas of the grown-ups around them.


Child activism, or child exploitation?

Weekend propaganda barrage

Even though keeping up with the news is a matter of clicking a couple of keys on a laptop any time, anywhere, there's nothing like settling into a favourite chair with the weekend papers and a pot of coffee at hand.

There is an embarrassing bounty of bullshit to shovel through this weekend.

Try this scoop by "international children's rights activist" turned journalist Craig Kielburger, who honoured Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf at the We Day his NGO put on a couple of weeks ago and managed to get an interview out of the occasion, an interview featured in the Globe and Mail this weekend.

Here's Kielburger's backgrounder to the story;

A decade ago, Liberia emerged from 14 years of civil war to become a relatively stable democracy.

Wow! Just like that!

Despite starting five years late, it has already achieved three of the eight Millenium Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2000; gender equality, combating HIV and AIDS, and building partnerships.

Well that's certainly good news, but one might ask what is meant by "already achieved"? Is Craig telling us Liberia has achieved gender equality? The softballs lobbed at Sirleaf touch briefly on corruption while tactfully steering clear of the corruption scandals that have involved her allies and immediate family, and assure us that President Sirleaf must be a great leader because Hillary Clinton gave her a nutcracker.

Get it?

First female African pres gets a nutcracker from Hillary?... oh, we've got the patriarchy on the run now!

The Globe also has a multi-page feature on the latest iteration of the White Man's Burden, Bangladeshi garment workers, titled "The true cost of a T-shirt." Ironically, the article never gets around to clarifying what that cost might be, but we do get to meet Canadian entrepreneur extraordinaire Bruce Rockowitz, who has made himself a billionaire by climbing to the pinnacle of the mountain of middlemen who stand between the $38/month garment worker in Dhaka and the shops in your local mall.

Not one to let the Globe and Mail out-guilt them, the Sunday Star piles on with a front page story on the plight of Bangladeshi garment workers that ends with this plea from one of the $38/month folks; I just wish people in the north paid a bit more for your clothing... maybe if you paid just a bit more, we could have a good life here.

Well maybe, but maybe not. There's a reason why "globalization" and "free trade" have evolved a virtual army of brokers and sub-brokers and middlemen between the producer and the consumer, and that is to blur the lines of responsibility when ugly stories inevitably leak out. Without wholesale reform of the supply chain, any increase in the price of Bangladeshi garments will end up in the already bulging pockets of the Bruce Rockowitz types, not in the pockets of the $38 a month people.

If Dov Charney can bypass this entire architecture of exploitation and make clothes in America while paying workers more in a day than what they get in two months in Bangladesh, others can too.

And of course Malala is in the news. By now everyone knows Malala's story, how she parlayed a bullet in the head into A-list status across the developed world. It's a story we love because it throws into such stark relief the profound darkness of the primitive Taliban when contrasted to the freedoms and democracy we revel in here in the Nations of Virtue.

While she is a compelling story, I think comparisons to Malcolm X and Mandela are wildly premature. Sort of like Obama's Nobel Prize.

Then again, look at the company Alice Munro finds herself in after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here's Pam Belluck writing in my New York Times International Weekly, the sixteen page supplement that the Sunday Star tosses our way to give us backwoods bumpkins a taste of World Class journalism; ...Chekhov or Alice Munro will help you navigate new social territory...

At 82 Alice Munro has become an overnight sensation, claiming her place in the canon right there alongside Anton Chekhov, and it's all thanks to that Nobel selection committee.

Those writers at the NYT have some other good stuff for us. Friedman's got some timely ruminations on Iran, speculating that "it can't keep it's people isolated forever."

That's odd. Junior is working at a restaurant owned by an Iranian family. They travel back and forth regularly. Just this week there's half a dozen of the extended family over on a visit. They send money out of Iran and money back. They are no more isolated than the tens of thousands of Iranian students who are studying at universities across the western world.

The view of Iranians as oppressed and isolated is of course far more comforting for the narrative Friedman and the NYT want to maintain. Facts can be so darned inconvenient.

I'm also treated to a curious story by Rod Nordland titled "Exhibit on Atrocities Awakens Afghans."
I was momentarily taken aback that the NYT would open a discussion about our atrocities in the country, but not to worry; the story is about Soviet atrocities back in the 1970s. That's what's awakening the Afghans!

That's a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, a lot of propaganda for a weekend.

We Day; is Ellen Johnson Sirleaf a blot on the Kielburger brand?

In a couple of weeks 20,000 screaming teens will converge on the Air Canada Centre in Toronto in a celebration of all things Kielburger.

The Kielburger cult claims to have built hundreds of schools around the world and saved countless third world children from whatever it is they save them from. Their "Free the Children" NGO must not be confused with the much longer established "Save the Children" NGO.

One of the keynote speakers at this years "WeDay" is Liberian president and Nobel prize recipient Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female head of state in all of Africa.

Here's a brief quote from the "Human rights in Liberia" Wikipedia page;

Both nepotism and corruption are indeed widespread in Liberia. Among the country's other very serious human-rights problems are ritualistic killings, police abuse, incidents of so-called “trial by ordeal,” arbitrary arrest, the denial of due process, violence against women, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, child abuse, human trafficking, and child labor.

That's not a flattering picture. Furthermore, those idealistic youth would be well advised to delve into Madame President's record on LGBT rights. They would be shocked.

Not that many of those idealistic youth will do that. The Kielburger brand is all about harnessing youthful idealism and energy into a dubious "aid" program that boasts top-drawer corporate sponsorships.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but those 20,000 youthful idealists should be aware that what they're really celebrating is Craig and Marc.

Piers joins Kielburger kult

Piers had one of the Kielburger kids on his show tonight.

There's three of four of them out there. They're famous for having discovered child poverty in the lesser-developed world. They were so moved on discovering poverty in the lesser-developed world that they and their media-savvy parents started a NGO to set things right.

Hence "Free the Children."

Not to be confused with a NGO of long standing, "Save the Children," which apparently spotted child poverty in the lesser-developed world but didn't do nearly enough, at least by Kielburger standards, to fix things.

So before you can say "this sounds like bullshit," those young Kielburgers have got their non-profit doing fund-raising via school programs all over North America. And they've got their for-profit "Me-to-We" subsidiary right in there alongside their non-profit, and schools everywhere are busy raising funds for these selfless Kielburgers who are building schools all over the world... and buying up real estate all over Toronto.

Piers was hugely impressed.

Which, by the way, might be one of the last times you see him being hugely impressed. The noose is tightening on what's left of his former team over in his old country... the phone hacking and all that stuff that was going on under Piers' watch when he was the Big Dog at News of the World...