NGOs (Non-governmental organizations) claim they operate independently from any form of government. That’s simply not true. NGOs have a long shoddy history of receiving tax dollars from US government agencies. Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh’s piece is about a $200 pair of sandals she purchased only to find out they were manufactured by an NGO in Africa:
A business is a business; so why call it an NGO? Answer: An accompanying cover story is required in order to give a business tax dollars.
Dr. Paugh touches on how much the shoemakers were actually paid:
I’ll wager that after a little profit-taking, and “shipping & handling” charges, each worker took home a few pennies out of the $200 retail price. I dare anyone to raise the specter of slave labor in light of the people who are still smarting over the African slave trade that took place centuries ago?
Don’t get me wrong here. Everybody is entitled to a profit on an investment. The problem is that the owners of the NGO did not invest a penny of their own money. So it’s quite a stretch to say NGOs help America’s economy.
This final excerpt is the one that got me:
Here’s a thought. Enlarge the IRS scandal to include funding NGOs with tax dollars.
Over the years, I posted messages critical of the history of Nobel Peace Prizes; the first message was back in 2003. I have edited, updated, and posted that original critique several times. My critiques are still valid and worth updating one more time.
When Wangari Maathai (1940 - 2011) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 she was identified as a “Kenyan ecologist.” She won the PP for her work in human Rights and reversing deforestation across Africa.
Human Rights is a catchall term that Socialists love to throw around. Every Third World human Right must be paid for with First World tax dollars according to the United Nations.
I knew what a Kenyan was, but I was not sure what an ecologist did? I soon learned that stopping deforestation was another environmental con job on par with stopping global warming.
Environmental wack jobs are one thing, but nobody moved Wangari over to the screwball column when she said the West created HIV in a lab. I don’t know if that unproven charge was considered by the Nobel Awards Committee along with human Rights and the evils of deforestation. I do know that if a real scientist made such a statement without proof he or she would be ostracized by fellow scientists.
Television tells us about another tragedy in Africa every other day; so I don’t know how much work Wangari did on human Rights since most Africans are worse off now than they were before the UN targeted them for salvation. By the way, fellow Peace Prize recipient, former UN Secretary General Goofy Annan, is from Africa, too. Thank your lucky stars that Goofy and Wangari saved Africa and not the US.
The admiration the media heaps upon Nobel Peace Prize winners because they espouse a global village point of view opens up a lot of questions regarding political propaganda. The Nobel Peace Prize is only important to the mainstream media and the Socialist community. Were it not for the media reporting a political award as though it is news, I doubt if anybody other than the recipients and their families would hear about it, much less care about it.
NOTE: A fair guestimate of the number of people who ever heard of the Nobel PP is around 2 percent of the 6 billion adults in the world. The number of people who care drops to a minute fraction of 1 percent.
Calling it a Peace Prize is a misnomer to begin with because the PP is often awarded for salesmanship rather than achievement, or to put it more succinctly it is based on selling the absence of war rather than predicated on preventing governments from engaging in institutional murder.
The Nobel Peace Prize is not an award that impresses people who respect individual liberties and absolute national sovereignty. Admittedly, I have been critical of the Nobel Peace Prize and some of its recipients. In truth, I don’t know enough about every one of them to say they all suck. To be precise there have been a few good ones mixed in with the others.
George C. Marshall and Mother Teresa were two of the good Peace Prize winners; so it is really upsetting to see their names on a list that also includes characters like Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Albert Schweitzer, Nasser Arafat, Goofy Annan, Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohamed ElBaradei, Al Gore, and Barack Obama.
Remember that Hussein got a Nobel Peace Prize for his touchy-feely rhetoric. The things he’s done, namely getting the New START Treaty ratified, is more than the rhetoric of a demagogue. His betrayals justify his Nobel to the International community if not to Americans. Even if he is nothing more than a fool, the only option he leaves Americans is to beat off enemies with his Nobel when his International pals are strong enough to attack a weakened America. I’m sure that prospect must have Moscow and Peking shaking in their boots.
Gorbachev deserves special mention because of his former dictator status. Have you ever seen an article, or heard a TV blurb, about Gorbachev that didn’t mention his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize? “Gorby,” as he is affectionately referred to by his liberal admirers, founded Green Cross International an environmental outfit. If that doesn’t tell you where all the good little Communists landed after the Cold War ended nothing ever will. Communists would still be running an intact Soviet Union if Gorbachev had his druthers.
Interestingly, Nobel Peace Prizes now favor environmental hustlers. Gorbachev founded Green Cross International. Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, and top global warming hustler Al Gore shared his 2007 prize with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A couple more environmental winners and they can rename the peace prize category the Nobel Prize for Environmental Bullshit?
When Ronald Reagan led the fight that defeated the Soviet Union it was a bold stroke for peace, yet no Peace Prize was forthcoming. Instead, Gorbachev, a Communist dictator got one. Defeating communism is not considered a contribution to peace according to the PP committee. The most perverse Gorby joke of all is that he got his PP for getting booted out on his rear end by his own people.
Ralph Bunche (1904 - 1971) got his PP in 1950 for his work on the United Nations Palestine Commission. In light of what’s happening over there these days his heirs should be asked to return the money.
Another “winner” worth special mention is Philip John Noel-Baker (1889-1982), a British politician who helped draft the Covenant of the League of Nations (1919) and, also, the United Nations Charter (1945). League of Nation global villagers were determined not to be denied success the second time around. Still promoting the same old Wilsonian crapola they moved their desks over to the United Nations in 1945. In short: Same jockey —— different horse. Noel-Baker won the 1959 Nobel Peace Prize.
Since the end of WWI people with a connection to the League of Nations and its successor, the UN, have probably won more Nobel Peace Prizes than the New York Yankees won pennants. Maybe that's the reason the world is far from peaceful! (It is no wonder Clinton is so hot for the United Nations. Winning a PP is his last shot at some kind of immortality that isn’t tainted by his presidency.)
There is no doubt that global government advocates have always had the inside track to Nobel Peace Prizes going all the way back to the early nineteen-hundreds; socialism’s early years in the United States as well as awarding the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. I doubt very much if anyone who believed in a world of sovereign nations ever had a chance of winning a Nobel Peace Prize.
Let me clear up one thing: The PP is clearly a political trophy. No one denies it. The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded by the NORWEGIAN parliament, has always been recognized as a political award:
The commonly held view is that Alfred Nobel feared that the highly political nature of the Peace Prize would make it a tool in power politics and thereby reduce its significance as an instrument for peace; so he willed his PP to the Norwegian parliament. (You can look it up for more details if you’re interested.) Poor Al —— look at what the Socialists/Communists did to his PP.
Peace Prize winners should never be held in the same high esteem as those who get theirs for actually doing something useful in the exact sciences. I have the utmost respect for the men and women who win a Nobel Prize for physics, chemistry, physiology, or medicine
I refuse to give literature and economics the same respect the exact sciences deserve. Literature is especially troubling. Toni Morrison, black American woman and Nobel Prize Winner for literature (1993) was the first person to see through Bill Clinton’s white epidermis. “Clinton is the first black American president” was a Morrison epiphany. (Hussein ran under false pretenses if Morrison is correct about Clinton.) The troubling thing about Nobel prizes for literature is that people who think like Morrison write books.
If the prize for literature is a political joke, the prize for economics is five acts of vaudeville.
The first Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 1969. In other words it was invented. Alfred Nobel never heard of it. The joke is that the award for the Nobel Prize in Economics is paid by the Sveriges Riksbank.
The Sveriges Riksbank pays the Nobel Foundation for the use of the name. The reason is obvious. Nobel Prize for Economics sounds better than Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economics. It’s like Betty Crocker paying a fee to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences so they can call a baking award an Oscar. A prize awarded by a European bank is more obscene than the propaganda prizes for “peace” and literature.
It came as no surprise to see that the 1981 winner in economics was James Tobin of Tobin Tax fame. Mr. Tobin claims he is for free markets at the same time he is a big supporter of globalization —— globalization being code talk for UN taxing authority, and central control in the UN’s hands. Am I the only one that sees a big contradiction there?
In any event the prize in economics is as political, and as meaningless to most Americans, as is the Nobel Peace Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature.
Parenthetically, economists remind me of priests. The only significant difference between the two is that religious missionaries preach to the masses while economists preach to those who control the masses.
Not to be outdone by men of the cloth, economists convinced First World governments that economists are the only ones who know enough about money to talk about it in the halls of power. I am probably being unfair on this point. One cannot seriously expect congressional committees to seek testimony from people working for a minimum wage. The justification for such testimony would be hampered by an overabundance of available witnesses.
A beautiful pair of sandals caught my eyes.
XXXXX
When my box arrived, . . .
. . . I found a glossy inside talking about the story of this brand. This was no ordinary shoe. It was a project developed by the non-governmental organization (NGO) called ADCAM (Association for Development, Alternative Trade and Microcredit) which “specializes in empowering women in developing countries and focuses on establishing stable trade channels with developed nations.”
I was getting warm and fuzzy when the brochure said that when we, the often maligned and “greedy” capitalists, buy these expensive shoes, we are supporting the NGOs vision of “Corporate Social Responsibility,” collaborating with communities that need corporate social responsibility most, and we are pioneering the NGOs quest for developing fair trade.
A business is a business; so why call it an NGO? Answer: An accompanying cover story is required in order to give a business tax dollars.
Dr. Paugh touches on how much the shoemakers were actually paid:
How much of the profit is actually shared with the Maasai women who do such tedious and labor intensive bead work? One magazine claims that “all profits from the sales of the Maasai Project are put towards the creation and further development of these community projects that support the Maasai Mara National Reserve in both Kenya and Tanzania.”
Ultimately, I venture to say, the women’s lives in Kenya will probably be less enriched than the coffers of the NGO and the Spanish brand that sells the sandals world-wide.
I’ll wager that after a little profit-taking, and “shipping & handling” charges, each worker took home a few pennies out of the $200 retail price. I dare anyone to raise the specter of slave labor in light of the people who are still smarting over the African slave trade that took place centuries ago?
Don’t get me wrong here. Everybody is entitled to a profit on an investment. The problem is that the owners of the NGO did not invest a penny of their own money. So it’s quite a stretch to say NGOs help America’s economy.
This final excerpt is the one that got me:
It is glitz, glamor, and greed, carefully packaged in the brochure with tug-at-your-heart strings propaganda. A quote from Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, appears at the end of the glossy. “Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven’t done a thing. You are just talking.” What does this have to do with selling expensive sandals? Regretfully, I returned the shoes.
The Sustainability Shoe Dilemma
By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh Saturday, June 1, 2013
The Sustainability Shoe Dilemma
Here’s a thought. Enlarge the IRS scandal to include funding NGOs with tax dollars.
Over the years, I posted messages critical of the history of Nobel Peace Prizes; the first message was back in 2003. I have edited, updated, and posted that original critique several times. My critiques are still valid and worth updating one more time.
When Wangari Maathai (1940 - 2011) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 she was identified as a “Kenyan ecologist.” She won the PP for her work in human Rights and reversing deforestation across Africa.
Human Rights is a catchall term that Socialists love to throw around. Every Third World human Right must be paid for with First World tax dollars according to the United Nations.
I knew what a Kenyan was, but I was not sure what an ecologist did? I soon learned that stopping deforestation was another environmental con job on par with stopping global warming.
Environmental wack jobs are one thing, but nobody moved Wangari over to the screwball column when she said the West created HIV in a lab. I don’t know if that unproven charge was considered by the Nobel Awards Committee along with human Rights and the evils of deforestation. I do know that if a real scientist made such a statement without proof he or she would be ostracized by fellow scientists.
Television tells us about another tragedy in Africa every other day; so I don’t know how much work Wangari did on human Rights since most Africans are worse off now than they were before the UN targeted them for salvation. By the way, fellow Peace Prize recipient, former UN Secretary General Goofy Annan, is from Africa, too. Thank your lucky stars that Goofy and Wangari saved Africa and not the US.
The admiration the media heaps upon Nobel Peace Prize winners because they espouse a global village point of view opens up a lot of questions regarding political propaganda. The Nobel Peace Prize is only important to the mainstream media and the Socialist community. Were it not for the media reporting a political award as though it is news, I doubt if anybody other than the recipients and their families would hear about it, much less care about it.
NOTE: A fair guestimate of the number of people who ever heard of the Nobel PP is around 2 percent of the 6 billion adults in the world. The number of people who care drops to a minute fraction of 1 percent.
Calling it a Peace Prize is a misnomer to begin with because the PP is often awarded for salesmanship rather than achievement, or to put it more succinctly it is based on selling the absence of war rather than predicated on preventing governments from engaging in institutional murder.
The Nobel Peace Prize is not an award that impresses people who respect individual liberties and absolute national sovereignty. Admittedly, I have been critical of the Nobel Peace Prize and some of its recipients. In truth, I don’t know enough about every one of them to say they all suck. To be precise there have been a few good ones mixed in with the others.
George C. Marshall and Mother Teresa were two of the good Peace Prize winners; so it is really upsetting to see their names on a list that also includes characters like Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Albert Schweitzer, Nasser Arafat, Goofy Annan, Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohamed ElBaradei, Al Gore, and Barack Obama.
Remember that Hussein got a Nobel Peace Prize for his touchy-feely rhetoric. The things he’s done, namely getting the New START Treaty ratified, is more than the rhetoric of a demagogue. His betrayals justify his Nobel to the International community if not to Americans. Even if he is nothing more than a fool, the only option he leaves Americans is to beat off enemies with his Nobel when his International pals are strong enough to attack a weakened America. I’m sure that prospect must have Moscow and Peking shaking in their boots.
Gorbachev deserves special mention because of his former dictator status. Have you ever seen an article, or heard a TV blurb, about Gorbachev that didn’t mention his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize? “Gorby,” as he is affectionately referred to by his liberal admirers, founded Green Cross International an environmental outfit. If that doesn’t tell you where all the good little Communists landed after the Cold War ended nothing ever will. Communists would still be running an intact Soviet Union if Gorbachev had his druthers.
Interestingly, Nobel Peace Prizes now favor environmental hustlers. Gorbachev founded Green Cross International. Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, and top global warming hustler Al Gore shared his 2007 prize with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A couple more environmental winners and they can rename the peace prize category the Nobel Prize for Environmental Bullshit?
When Ronald Reagan led the fight that defeated the Soviet Union it was a bold stroke for peace, yet no Peace Prize was forthcoming. Instead, Gorbachev, a Communist dictator got one. Defeating communism is not considered a contribution to peace according to the PP committee. The most perverse Gorby joke of all is that he got his PP for getting booted out on his rear end by his own people.
Ralph Bunche (1904 - 1971) got his PP in 1950 for his work on the United Nations Palestine Commission. In light of what’s happening over there these days his heirs should be asked to return the money.
Another “winner” worth special mention is Philip John Noel-Baker (1889-1982), a British politician who helped draft the Covenant of the League of Nations (1919) and, also, the United Nations Charter (1945). League of Nation global villagers were determined not to be denied success the second time around. Still promoting the same old Wilsonian crapola they moved their desks over to the United Nations in 1945. In short: Same jockey —— different horse. Noel-Baker won the 1959 Nobel Peace Prize.
Since the end of WWI people with a connection to the League of Nations and its successor, the UN, have probably won more Nobel Peace Prizes than the New York Yankees won pennants. Maybe that's the reason the world is far from peaceful! (It is no wonder Clinton is so hot for the United Nations. Winning a PP is his last shot at some kind of immortality that isn’t tainted by his presidency.)
There is no doubt that global government advocates have always had the inside track to Nobel Peace Prizes going all the way back to the early nineteen-hundreds; socialism’s early years in the United States as well as awarding the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. I doubt very much if anyone who believed in a world of sovereign nations ever had a chance of winning a Nobel Peace Prize.
Let me clear up one thing: The PP is clearly a political trophy. No one denies it. The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded by the NORWEGIAN parliament, has always been recognized as a political award:
The commonly held view is that Alfred Nobel feared that the highly political nature of the Peace Prize would make it a tool in power politics and thereby reduce its significance as an instrument for peace; so he willed his PP to the Norwegian parliament. (You can look it up for more details if you’re interested.) Poor Al —— look at what the Socialists/Communists did to his PP.
Peace Prize winners should never be held in the same high esteem as those who get theirs for actually doing something useful in the exact sciences. I have the utmost respect for the men and women who win a Nobel Prize for physics, chemistry, physiology, or medicine
I refuse to give literature and economics the same respect the exact sciences deserve. Literature is especially troubling. Toni Morrison, black American woman and Nobel Prize Winner for literature (1993) was the first person to see through Bill Clinton’s white epidermis. “Clinton is the first black American president” was a Morrison epiphany. (Hussein ran under false pretenses if Morrison is correct about Clinton.) The troubling thing about Nobel prizes for literature is that people who think like Morrison write books.
If the prize for literature is a political joke, the prize for economics is five acts of vaudeville.
The first Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 1969. In other words it was invented. Alfred Nobel never heard of it. The joke is that the award for the Nobel Prize in Economics is paid by the Sveriges Riksbank.
The Sveriges Riksbank pays the Nobel Foundation for the use of the name. The reason is obvious. Nobel Prize for Economics sounds better than Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economics. It’s like Betty Crocker paying a fee to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences so they can call a baking award an Oscar. A prize awarded by a European bank is more obscene than the propaganda prizes for “peace” and literature.
It came as no surprise to see that the 1981 winner in economics was James Tobin of Tobin Tax fame. Mr. Tobin claims he is for free markets at the same time he is a big supporter of globalization —— globalization being code talk for UN taxing authority, and central control in the UN’s hands. Am I the only one that sees a big contradiction there?
In any event the prize in economics is as political, and as meaningless to most Americans, as is the Nobel Peace Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature.
Parenthetically, economists remind me of priests. The only significant difference between the two is that religious missionaries preach to the masses while economists preach to those who control the masses.
Not to be outdone by men of the cloth, economists convinced First World governments that economists are the only ones who know enough about money to talk about it in the halls of power. I am probably being unfair on this point. One cannot seriously expect congressional committees to seek testimony from people working for a minimum wage. The justification for such testimony would be hampered by an overabundance of available witnesses.
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