My Freedom Press

But what do you know about KONY?

KONY 2012 is a half-hour documentary, backed by Invisible Children, that’s tapping into the power of viral media to reach a global audience. It’s based on Joseph Kony – a warlord in Uganda responsible for the enslavement of more than 30,000 children.

Scroll down to watch KONY 2012

Over a period of nearly 30 years, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army has abducted children and forced the boys to kill their parents and turned the girls into sex slaves.

Who is Kony? Read more below

The aim of KONY 2012 is to make the man famous, “not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice”.

Film-maker Jason Russell says Kony is the “most wanted man in the world according to the ICC”, and his documentary aims to put the name into every household’s conversation.

Since going live yesterday, tens of thousands of Australians have signed onto the cause and with millions of views worldwide, the video has certainly grabbed The Internet’s collective attention.

Is KONY cashing in?

But not everyone has fallen in love with KONY 2012. Some are raising doubts as to whether social media is an appropriate forum for advocacy and fund-raising.

Blogs, such as Visiblechildren.tumblr, implore people to research the facts before putting their names to the cause.

“Do I have a better answer? No, I don’t, but that doesn’t mean that you should support KONY 2012 just because it’s something. Something isn’t always better than nothing. Sometimes it’s worse.”

African expert Dr Tanya Lyons says it sounds like KONY 2012 is “cashing in” on a problem that’s been around for 20 years, and she warns that there is no simple solution.

“I love Australian democracy and isn’t it wonderful that we have the choice to click on this link to make us feel better,” the Flinders University senior lecturer told The Punch.

“But they’re not heroes for clicking on a link. They’re just lazy. And giving money won’t help.”

TORY SHEPHERD CALLS BULLS*** ON KONY 2012

It stinks of easy answers, of foreign do-goodery, of over-simplistic interference that gives us all a nice warm fuzzy glow.

Tory Shepherd writes for thepunch.com.au

Who are Invisible Children?

Charity monitor Charity Navigator gives Invisible Children 2/4 stars for accountability and transparency, prompting concerns over how the not-for-profit organisation spends its money.

Invisible Children reports that in an official account of the $13.7 million raised in the 2010/11 financial year, $8.8 million was allocated for expenses – including filming costs, transportation and production.

Filmmaker Russell is one of the co-founders of Invisible Children – the organisation behind KONY 2012.

Jason Russell

KONY 2012 filmmakerJason Russell first met Jacob when he visited Uganda in 2003. Picture: Courtesy of Invisible Children

Source: news.com.au

The project began after he travelled to Uganda nearly a decade ago and befriended a local boy, Jacob, promising to bring an end to his suffering. In 2006, three years after Russell’s trip to Uganda, he co-founded Invisible Children as a not-for-profit organisation tasked with “advocacy and inspiring America’s youth to ‘do more than just watch’.”

Who is Joseph Kony?

For 26 years, Kony has led the guerilla group known as the LRA, a group responsible for mass abductions, murder, rape, torture and slavery.

He was indicted by 2005 by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and late last year the United States sent 100 military advisers to help find Kony and bring him to justice.

Joseph Kony

Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord Resistance Movement, pictured in 2006. Picture: AFP

Source: AFP

Among the most horrific acts of the Kony regime is the abduction of tens of thousands of children. Russell’s film estimates the number at around 30,000; It’s reported elsewhere to be as many 66,000.

Kony is known to have turned abducted boys into child soldiers, forcing them to murder their own parents, and the abducted girls into sex slaves.

The film’s objective – to make Kony famous and bring him to justice by the year’s end – is shared by celebrities and politicians.

“I’d like indicted war criminals to share the same celebrity as me,” George Clooney is quoted as saying in the film.

KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

Dear President Obama:

I pray that you, Michelle, and your daughters are well during these very difficult times in America’s history. It has been three momentous years since you swept into the presidency of the United States on a wave of hope and change, and God knows you, and our nation, have been through much in that time. There is no denying, Mr. President, that your place in history is secure simply because you inspired a nation and an entire planet to say “Yes we can” and believe, in our core, that anything is possible if we come together as a people—all people. Indeed, sir, your very being symbolizes the majestic heights any of us can reach if we simply try. But even on that Tuesday night in November 2008, as I held a party, as many of us did globally, to celebrate your victory—our victory—and the DJ cued up Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” something in me said this was as good as it was going to get. That, like Dr. King after his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963, you would never see this level of popularity and mass adoration again. I had no idea what was going to happen to you, but I did sense a return to reality for most of us, and to the business at hand.

And what business you inherited: a devastated economy near collapse; a broken health-care system; a nation increasingly divided by race, class, region, and political ideology; a people, Americans, desperately seeking a savior. Absolutely no one person, no one man or woman, could meet those great expectations.

You have, Mr. President, had some major victories along the way, be it the passage of the health-care bill—watered down or not, no president before you had ever achieved such landmark legislation. You have provided some relief to homeowners, to middle-class and poor people, to small businesses. You got “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repealed as the official policy on homosexuals serving in the American military. You’ve signed into law new educational funding for persons with disabilities. You appointed the ?rst Latina to the U.S. Supreme Court, and with your hiring of blacks, Latinos, and gays, you have perhaps the most diverse and inclusive presidential administration ever. You signed a nuclear arms reduction pact with Russia, putting off potential nuclear war, we hope, for another generation at least. You signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, restoring basic protections against pay discrimination for women and other workers. You have forcefully challenged banks, corporations, and the wealthy in America to pay their fair share toward our national economic crisis. And you’ve led an administration largely free of scandal, which is rare in American presidential history.

Read the rest of this entry »

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

President Obama would have you believe that 100 elite U.S. Special Forces soldiers are running around in the African Bush looking for what’s left of the Lord’s Resistance Army. “The real target is South Sudan, where the United States is setting the stage for an African proxy oil war with China.” The Green Berets are in central Africa to coordinate military operations by Washington’s African clients. “The United States and Europe can no longer compete economically with China in Africa, and must now resort to raw force, through African puppet armies.”

Coming Soon: Obama’s Big Move in Central Africa

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“The U.S. needs its own Special Forces units in place to coordinate its puppet African armies.”

It’s now becoming apparent why President Obama sent 100 U.S. Special Forces troops to central Africa, back in October of last year. The president’s official explanation was that the Green Berets would be helping Uganda, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the new nation of South Sudan to hunt for remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The L.R.A., which has a reputation for killing civilians, was driven from its home in Uganda and now numbers only a few hundred scattered fighters. It poses no threat to any government in the region, and is not a plausible cause to dispatch significant numbers of U.S. Special Forces. Obama is using the L.R.A. to give his military mission a humanitarian cloak – that he’s going after rogue bad guys in the bush who threaten African civilians. The actual mission has to be something much larger.

It looks like the real target is South Sudan, where the United States is setting the stage for an African proxy oil war with China. Last July, South Sudan won independence from northern Sudan, a country that has been targeted for regime change by presidents Bush and Obama. Sudan’s oil lies right at the border between North and South, and the fields are under production by Chinese companies. The South Sudanese fought a decades long war against the north, during which they were heavily armed and financed by the U.S., Europeans and Israel. The newly independent nation is among poorest and least developed in the world – and broke. South Sudan is also already engaged ethnic civil wars of its own that have killed or displaced many tens of thousands. But chaos is precisely the environment that Washington prefers, in Africa – so that it can establish a new order that is to U.S. advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

“Money is Power”, or shall we say, “The Monopoly to Create Credit Money and charge interest is Absolute Power”. (Alex James)

Amsel (Amschel) Bauer Mayer Rothschild, 1838:

“Let me issue and control a Nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws”.

Letter written from London by the Rothschilds to their New York agents introducing their banking method into America: “The few who can understand the system will be either so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”

Read the rest of this entry »

In an appearance on The Daily Show last night, George Lucas said that he had trouble getting funding for his new movie, “Red Tails,” because of its black cast.

“This has been held up for release since 1942 since it was shot, I’ve been trying to get released ever since,” Lucas quipped to Jon Stewart. “It’s because it’s an all-black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all…I showed it to all of them and they said no. We don’t know how to market a movie like this.”

“Red Tails,” which stars Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Terrence Howard, is based on the Tuskegee Airmen, the group of pioneering black pilots who fought in the United States’ segregated armed forces during World War II. The movie is directed by Anthony Hemingway, the rare black director getting a chance to direct a big-budget feature.

Last week, Lucas told USA Today that he was worried that if Red Tails was a failure, it could have negative repercussions for black filmmakers. “I realize that by accident I’ve now put the black film community at risk [with Red Tails, whose $58 million budget far exceeds typical all-black productions],” he said. “I’m saying, if this doesn’t work, there’s a good chance you’ll stay where you are for quite a while. It’ll be harder for you guys to break out of that [lower-budget] mold. But if I can break through with this movie, then hopefully there will be someone else out there saying let’s make a prequel and sequel, and soon you have more Tyler Perrys out there.”

WATCH:

SNATCHED

His Name Means Love
“A man who fought for freedom
A man who fought for equality
Those who were against him
Were too blind to see
what this man was fighting for
So Blacks, Hispanics, Jews and Asians could put their foot in the door
Yes, we know that this man is great
That’s why today we celebrate
And everyone lifts their voice and sing
For a man who wanted freedom to ring
Martin Luther King is who I’m speaking of
A man who’s name means love”

The leaders of today’s Republican Party are expert storytellers. When it comes to manipulating racial stereotypes for political gain, they are akin to animation artists of the 1920s: coloring the lines in black and white.

Last Thursday Newt Gingrich told a crowd of senior citizens in New Hampshire, “The African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” Rick Santorum was even more egregious, claiming he doesn’t “want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money” (although he later claimed that he never intentionally said “black”).

Gingrich’s latest offense comes only weeks after he received widespread criticism for saying that poor children should work as janitors and clean toilets. He specifically made a point of addressing “inner city” youths — which has become conservative code for black and brown people everywhere, from the South to the coasts, the suburbs to the metropolises, regardless of where they actually live.

For some odd reason, this is acceptable rhetoric among the conservative political class. It is especially troubling because every reliable statistic shows that white Americans are the overwhelming beneficiaries of welfare in this country and make up the largest number of those in poverty by a wide and substantial margin. The Republicans’ well-rehearsed lies on the subject have been so effective that people of every hue have come to believe them, feeding widespread ignorance about the true face of poverty and the ever-growing gap between America’s rich and poor.

Read the rest of this entry »

MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan and I penned a piece for the Huffington Post in honor of the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Here is an excerpt from our piece “Occupy the Dream: The Mathematics of Racism”:

As we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr, it appears we are a far less prejudiced country than we once were.

Individual expressions of racism are less tolerated than ever, we have an African-American President, and African-Americans are increasingly being accepted into executive suites.

Yet when we look closer, we find that Greedy Bastards have re-branded racism and made it acceptable again, by calling it “the war on drugs.”

These statistics compiled by New York Times columnist Charles Blow and author Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow) are mind-blowing.

Read the rest of this entry »

When Stevie Wonder decided to take up the challenge of making sure that the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not fade in the mists of time, and that his life’s work had not been in vain, there were only a few artists making music that reflected the consciousness of the freedom struggles of Dr. King’s time. But Stevie was perhaps the biggest pop music star in the world at that time, and that made all the difference.

I was working closely with him, consulting generally and running his newly purchased station, KJLH-FM in Los Angeles. So when he called me one day in 1980 and said he wanted me to help him in catalyzing a national effort to make Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday I was thrilled.

After all, I was a huge fan of Stevie’s precisely because of the way he often weaved his moral consciousness into his brilliant music. To have the opportunity to now bring to bear his megawatt star power to catalyze the community and the media by using his radio station, where I served as general manager, for such an historic endeavor was a great honor. To play even a small role was exhilarating.

Stevie Wonder is without question the single most important figure in the realization of an MLK National Holiday, because his inner vision, passion and perseverance were the driving force in galvanizing all the forces that came together to make it happen. Read the rest of this entry »