I really didn't want to do this (better things to do with my time), but since there are people who are so poorly informed (yes, including Nancy Pelosi), here we go.
First -- here's the google search results for NED:
http://www.blackboxsearch.com/cgi-bin/searchGoogle.cgi?hl=en&q=National+Endowment+for+Democracy&btnG=SearchNow, here's your first CLUE. It was RONALD REAGAN and his administration who started it. From Wikipedia:
The National Endowment for Democracy, or NED, is a U.S. non-profit organization that was founded in 1983, purportedly to help train people in democracy and manage money grants from the U.S. Congress to that effect. Although administered by a private organization, its funding comes almost entirely from a governmental appropriation by Congress. The NED is sometimes referred to as "Project Democracy", an appellation favored by Lt. Colonel Oliver North.
snip
NED was founded with a view to creating a broad base of political support for the organization.
NED received funds from the US government and distributes funds to four other organizations; one each created by the Republican and Democratic parties, one created by the Chamber of Commerce and one by the AFL-CIO.The United States government created the NED as a semi-governmental arm of the U.S. foreign policy. This allows the U.S. government to promote and provide funds to U.S. allied organizations through a third party entity.
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The following reflects my own understanding of NED (written by Congressman Ron Paul - R, TX, a Libertarian with whom I agree occasionally, at least on foreign affairs):
The misnamed National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is nothing more than a costly program that takes US taxpayer funds to promote favored politicians and political parties abroad. What the NED does in foreign countries, through its recipient organizations the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), would be rightly illegal in the United States. The NED injects "soft money" into the domestic elections of foreign countries in favor of one party or the other. Imagine what a couple of hundred thousand dollars will do to assist a politician or political party in a relatively poor country abroad. It is particularly Orwellian to call US manipulation of foreign elections "promoting democracy." How would Americans feel if the Chinese arrived with millions of dollars to support certain candidates deemed friendly to China? Would this be viewed as a democratic development?
In an excellent study of the folly of the National Endowment for Democracy, Barbara Conry notes that:
snip
Proponents of NED maintain that a private organization is necessary to overcome the restraints that limit the activities of a government agency, yet they insist that the American taxpayer provide full funding for this initiative. NED's detractors point to the inherent contradiction of a publicly funded organization that is charged with executing foreign policy (a power expressly given to the federal government in the Constitution) yet exempt from nearly all political and administrative controls...
snip
The National Endowment for Democracy is dependent on the US taxpayer for funding, but because NED is not a government agency, it is not subject to Congressional oversight. It is indeed a heavily subsidized foreign policy loose cannon.
Since its founding in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy has been headed by Carl Gershman, a member of the neo-Trotskyite Social Democrats/USA.
more at link:
http://www.antiwar.com/paul/paul79.htmlhere's the Cato Institute report quoted:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-027.html------------------------------------------------
This is even better:
The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate-the Church Committee of the Senate, the Pike Committee of the House and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.
Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not.
What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name-the National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations and of cynicism. Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the "nongovernmental"-part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality,
virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991:
"A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.snip
In short, NED's programs are in sync with the basic needs and objectives of the New World Order's economic globalization, just as the programs have for years been on the same wavelength as US foreign policy.snip -- and as for labor unions --
AlFLD's work within Third World unions typically involved a considerable educational effort very similar to the basic NED philosophy described above. The description of one of the 1996 NED grants to AIFLD includes as one its objectives: "build union-management cooperation". Like many things that NED says, this sounds innocuous, if not positive, but these in fact are ideological code words meaning "keep the labor agitation down...don't rock the status quo boat". The relationship between NED and AIFLD very well captures the CIA origins of NED.
The Endowment has funded centrist and rightist labor organizations to help them oppose those unions which were too militantly proworker. This has taken place in France, Portugal and Spain amongst many other places. In France, during the 1983-4 period, NED supported a "trade union-like organization for professors and students" to counter "left-wing organizations of professors". To this end it funded a series of seminars and the publication of posters, books and pamphlets such as "Subversion and the Theology of Revolution" and "Neutralism or Liberty". ("Neutralism" here refers to being unaligned in the Cold War.)
snip
NED would have the world believe that it's only teaching the ABCs of democracy and elections to people who don't know them, but in all five countries named above there had already been free and fair elections held. The problem, from NED's point of view, is that the elections had been won by political parties not on NED's favorites list.
more:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/TrojanHorse_RS.html---------------------
Here's LINK TO Rightweb's coverage:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1513And NED itself, with Carl Gershman still President:
http://www.ned.org/BTW, it is a favorite tactic of the right to get Democrtic buy-in and involvement. PNAC did it in the late 1990s with its legislation or referendum which made getting rid of Saddam Hussein an "official" goal of U.S. foreign policy. That set the stage for the PNACers and Bush and others to FOREVER say not only was it official U.S. foreign policy to get rid of Saddam, but it was a BIPARTISAN effort to make it U.S. foreign policy. SOooo, NED was put together so that its got "legitimacy" on and buy-in from the left, thanks to funding an organization that receives NED funds that Dems control and also once that the AFL-CIO controls.
I'm not persuaded that NED is a
good thing. And IMO anyone who reads all that (and there's more available on-line as well) and still thinks it's a good thing just isn't paying attention. Or doesn't really belong on the left politically -- and yes, that includes Pelosi, et. al. Either she and the others are ignorant, or they're complicit in what I believe are foreign policy interventions we have no right to be involved in.
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