Stonewalled by Madonna's posse, local media outlets are taking a closer look at the Material Girl's charity work ostensibly directed at helping kids in Brazil's favelas.
The story from blogger Monica Bergamo at Folha Online connects readers to the Brazilian office of the globalist Kabbalah Centre, the same Kaballah Centre whose Rabbi Eliyahu Yardeni told a BBC reporter that the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust brought their downfall upon themselves because they didn't use the Kabbalah. Apparently in his studies, Rabbi Yardeni had some difficulties sorting out the differences between Arbeit Macht Frei and Kabbalah Macht Frei.
Failure of the Success for Kids program to fulfill requests for substantive details for their "pilot project" involving a radical educational methodology called Social Emotional Learning (SEL) comes at a bad time for Madonna, who has raised about $8 million dollars for the scheme and has a high dollar concert series set for Rio later this year. The Brazilian media is on an anti-corruption crusade linked to the start of the presidential election campaign.
Federal police have jailed the governor of Brasilia in a corruption scandal. And Gilberto Kassab, mayor of Sao Paulo, may find his mandate cut short if accusations of improper activity continue to haunt him in the courts. So it's not surprising that Madonna, after recent high profile meetings with front running presidential candidates, has become a person of interest to bloggers and journalists, among others.
After bagging a million dollar donation from brewing giant AmBev-Brahma Madonna did the samba in their Carnaval skybox, sticking her tongue out for the cameras while wearing a slinky Brahma t-shirt. But beyond the high priced photo op, Folha blogger Monica Bergamo wondered what bang Big Beer Brazil is getting for its bucks.
"What account was the check deposited into," Bergamo blogged. "How will the money be used? Who will benefit." Other online media in Brazil got on the follow the money story, which has also gone viral in Europe.
If the Carnegie Endowment or the Heritage Foundation was developing a $10 million grant proposal Bergamo would be downloading a PFD file full of information as thick as a telephone book. Bergamo has been waiting two months for a detailed response from Success for Kids Sao Paulo representative Estela de Wulf.
Madonna has also been noticeably silent. In spite of her fund raising on behalf of the favela program a visit to the SFK Brazil website provides no evidence of her participation in the leadership group. She is mentioned as a supporter one time in a short newsletter item. The most prominent icon on the Brazil SFK site is the "donate" button.
According to the website, the executive team of Success for Kids is headed by the founder of the organization, Karen Berg, who is also co-director of the Kabbalah Centre. Her son, Michael Berg, is also a co-director of the Kabbalah Centre, and a co-founder of Raising Malawi, along with Madonna.
Bergamo's problems getting information from SFK confirm the disclosure problems revealed by the BBC's benchmark reporting a few years ago. In an investigative article, BBC reported that Israeli authorities refused to give the charity a certificate of proper management for three years running due to accounting inadequacies. In Britain BBC reported that the Charity Commissioners criticized the Centre's accounts for "significant shortcomings in transparency."
With the velocity of information moving faster than the velocity of money competition for religious and charitable donations, and the noise to volume ratio associated with it is becoming more intense. And Kabbalah and its variants, in spite of all the good and positive energy one finds there, has a long and unpleasant history of turf wars among its leaders and followers. To develop an honest snapshot of what Kabbalah is and what it is not, one can read Joseph Dan: Kabbalah, A Very Short Introduction. Dan was awarded the Israel Prize in 1997 for Jewish thought.
Globalism's advocacy of policies that promote the diminution of social contracts between nation states and citizens has helped create a power vacuum that enables non government organizations (NGOs) to assume larger than government responsibilities as new globalist organizations (NGOs). As a NGO, Success for Kids, thanks to its relationship with the Kabbalah Centre machers, has the financial resources, expertise and security connections to parachute into a nation and actually buy a government if it wanted to. Meanwhile, Brazil's favelados remain innocent pawns in the Kabbalah Centre's power game.
