The Planned Chaos of National Security Socialism

The Planned Chaos of National Security Socialism: Time to Give the Central Planners a Dishonorable Discharge

by Scott Lazarowitz

Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: The State vs. Christian Moral Values

With Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama’s new war of Orwellian peaceful violence in Libya, this is yet another reminder of why socialism and central planning in security is a bad idea. The conservatives who are the most outspoken opponents of “socialism” are the true socialists: It is they who cherish national security socialism, the public or State ownership of the means of production in national security, a central-planning monopoly in territorial protection.

Americans and foreign peoples have suffered time and again because of the moral hazard of any form of socialism, from what Ludwig von Mises would call socialism’s “planned chaos,” in this case the planned chaos of socialized national security. The State’s inherently immoral and counter-productive scheme of usurping a people’s right of self-defense has allowed the State to be responsible for the most egregious crimes against humanity, especially in the American “Civil War,” in two World Wars, in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and other parts of the world.

And now Libya. Some are already predicting that Obama’s war in Libya will backfire, with a possible Gaddafirevenge attack similar to the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. Given that socialists and central planners tend to not learn from history, this Obama Libya war looks like another textbook study of planned chaos, similar to George W. Bush’s Iraq.

Former President Bush’s planned chaos in Iraq had effected in the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, widespread destruction of the country, and the establishment of a repressive, pro-Iranian Islamic Sharia Law in Iraq.

Even further than merely a Gaddafi revenge attack against the U.S., Obama may possibly be arming Libyan rebels including members of al Qaeda, a stated enemy of the United States especially since 9/11.

And Syria and Mexico may be next on the list for the inept security socialists.

One only needs to step back and view the history of America’s security blunders in a broad sense. For example, if America did not have a centralized national security monopoly in Washington, and instead allowed open competition in the field of security and required that all individuals follow the rule of law, would President Wilson have risked entering the U.S. into World War I, especially knowing that the War was already ending with treaties already in the works? Would President Lincoln have waged war against the Southern States, targeted thousands of innocent civilians and destroyed entire cities, had there been actual legal and market-based financial consequences applied to Lincoln for such aggressions?

Government bureaucrats, holding a monopoly in territorial protection and lacking incentives to improve performance, do not tend to pay attention to past mistakes and are not held accountable for their transgressions.

Some further questions to ask include these: Would the U.S. government’s agents of the Pentagon or CIA have deliberately radicalized Muslims in Afghanistan during Afghanistan’s 1980s war with Russia, had the U.S. government actually paid attention to the consequences of its CIA-led coup in Iran in 1953? Those consequences were the decades of Iranian anti-Americanism, the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution and the taking of American hostages in Iran.

Also, would the U.S. government have initiated wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s had its monopolists learned from the consequences, throughout the 1990s, of their first war in Iraq of 1991?

Why do the Washington security monopolists repeatedly make Americans less safe with schemes of intrusions and provocations abroad? One possible explanation is the inherently flawed nature of any central planning monopoly.

The comparison of government provision of national security to a hypothetical private security provision may sound absurd to some people. However, it is necessary to point out that, instead of being an economically sound system, the current government monopoly is a political system, in which congressmen and senators’ reelection campaigns (and campaign finances and contributions) are a part of the equation, along with the federal government’s uncoordinated defense bureaucracy and the politically-connected private-sector military contractors.

The current centralized national security monopoly is without competition and profit/loss motives to genuinely provide the most efficient, high quality service at the lowest cost to the consumers. Under the current socialism, the real motive turns into a “breaking windows” scheme to justify an ever-increasing bureaucracy combined with its corporatist colluders.

To illustrate those points, one can study economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s comparison of America’s democratic public ownership of a centralized government to the monarchies of the past. Unlike a monarchy in which the king owns the country’s territory and has a long-term interest in its capital value, in democracies the rulers are “temporary caretakers”:

(The) temporary and interchangeable democratic caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his advantage. He owns its current use but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. Instead, it makes exploitation shortsighted (present-oriented) and uncalculated, i.e., carried out without regard for the value of the capital stock.

Hoppe further notes:

…a private government owner (a monarch) will want to avoid exploiting his subjects so heavily, for instance, as to reduce his future earnings potential to such an extent that the present value of his estate actually falls. Instead, in order to preserve or possibly even enhance the value of his personal property, he will systematically restrain himself in his exploitation policies….. In distinct contrast…. public government ownership will result in continual capital consumption. Instead of maintaining or even enhancing the value of the government estate, as a private owner would tend to do, a government’s temporary caretaker will quickly use up as much of the government resources as possible….

The system of government monopolies, funded largely by coercive taxation and a central bank’s creation of money without genuine value, inherently encourages the irresponsibility of deficit-spending and public debt. The scheme also does not impose punishments for the temporary caretakers’ domestic or foreign aggressions with their misuse of governmental apparatus.

In economic terms, because of government bureaucrats’ lack of competitive incentives and profit/loss motive, government’s central planners cannot take individual market factors into account, making economic calculations impossible. Government monopolists engage in political calculations rather than economic ones. And government’s central planners seem as incapable of understanding the morals and ethics of civil liberties and property rights in foreign relations as they do in domestic policy. Hence, the “planned chaos” and blowback of each and every fiasco of the U.S. government’s national security socialism scheme.

Because of this socialist government monopoly in territorial security and armed force, the bureaucrats act more in their own political self-interests and have tended to act more aggressively, because there are no punishments of their aggressions and short-sightedness. In contrast, there would be punishments, economic and legal, applied to private industries who engage in acts of fraud or deceit (e.g. going to war based on lies, fabricated information and propaganda), trespass on the property of others (e.g. placing military bases and stationing troops on other countries’ territories despite the objections of those territories’ populations), or cause deaths of civilians and destruction of property.

Last year’s Washington Post series, Top Secret America (Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) on this scheme informed Americans about how the current national security socialism has turned into a tax-redistributive racket. (And it did so by the turn of the 20^th Century, no less.) As more private industries became connected with the State, theirprofiting from other Americans’ labor and productivity via the redistributive apparatus of taxation has replaced the principles of private property rights, economic freedom and the rule of law. The U.S. government’s provocations abroad have become justifications for the continued expansion of the parasitic military-industrial-complex.

And in the past several decades especially, Washington’s “security experts” have repeatedly demonstrated that their schemes have more to do with the expansion of the State than with the protection of 300 million Americans. The central planners have turned to extremes – such as, in their TSA, their PATRIOT Act and other policies that have grossly damaged individuals’ rights to due process and presumption of innocence – rather than face the truth that it is the U.S. government’s intrusive and violentforeign policy that has provoked terrorism against the U.S.

The apparatus of the State’s socialization and monopoly of territorial protection has provided a structure of power over others. Unfortunately, that power seems to attract those with less moral character but with more desire for that power, and with a lack of inhibition to exercise that power. The system has encouraged the agents of the State to become increasingly aggressive in their use of governmental apparatus to wield that power, as they have zealously seized on opportunities to expand the size and power of the State especially through their demagogic manipulations of the public’s fears and anxieties. Private security firms could not do that, for they must act under the rule of law.

For example, in 1990, former President George H.W. Bush used the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as a means to further expand the U.S. government’s military and other government apparatus in the Middle East. There were also questionable corporate special interests, such as Henry Kissinger’sKuwait connection, involved in Bush’s 1991 Persian Gulf War against Iraq, a country that was of no threat to the U.S. The propaganda campaign that was used to persuade the American people to support the war was extensive. 12 Years later, Bush’s son George W. Bush also employed a major propaganda campaign to convince the American people to start another war against Iraq.

Governments, with a monopoly over territorial security, have also employed false flag operations as a means of manipulating the fears and anxieties of their countries’ inhabitants, for the purpose of further expanding their State apparatus and power.

Even now, with President Obama’s continuation and expansion of the Bush wars overseas, the U.S. military bureaucrats have become even more zealous in their attempts to justify further expansions of the U.S. government abroad, despite their constant failures and ineptitude. Now, they have been illegally employing the use of psy-ops, or “psychological operations,” on U.S. senators to get congressional support to increase troops and funding for the failing wars.

Psy-ops are generally used on foreign government agents or diplomats to influence their emotions and decisions to become favorable to one’s own ends. Psy-ops are often used on the enemy during times of war; given that the senators being targeted in those operations represent the American people, it gives the appearance that the U.S. government perceives Americans as the enemy. This is usually what happens when a government – through its monopolistic power – grows in its size and power, and its existence becomes more self-serving.

The zeal of U.S. government officials has been exposed now in broad daylight, in their treatment of PFC Bradley Manning, the Army soldier accused of leaking thousands of classified documents exposing alleged U.S. war crimes and U.S. diplomatic incompetence and buffoonery. None of the leaks are said to have posed a threat to any U.S. soldier overseas or to Americans in the U.S. The military has been holding Manning for months in isolation, employing extreme psychological distress, as well as forced prolonged nudity. As I have mentioned, only sick degenerates would treat another human being that way. The officials are really using Manning as an example, a means of threatening others who may consider heroic whistleblowing acts.

Throughout the past century we have seen one example after another, one senseless war after another, millions of deaths and ruined lives, of how the socialist monopoly of national security and its planned chaos have gone against our security, as well as against our freedom and prosperity.

In 19^th Century economist Gustave de Molinari’s comparison of government-monopolized security and the private production of security, Molinari noted,

Under the rule of free competition, war between the producers of security entirely loses its justification. Why would they make war? To conquer consumers? But the consumers would not allow themselves to be conquered. They would be careful not to allow themselves to be protected by men who would unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals.

If private security firms used their armaments, coercion against others and deceit for the purpose of acting aggressively against neighbors or foreigners (for reasons other than “defense” of their clients or fellow territorial inhabitants), that would land them in jail. In fact, because of the invasiveness, enslavements and trespasses inherent in all forms of socialism – not just national security socialism – there logically could not be actual rule of law. Can anyone seriously claim that the U.S. government has been acting under the rule of law?

In fact, we have seen, time and again, how the central planning monopolists of the State are continuously rewarded for their failures, and for their crimes as well.

There need to be legal and competitive incentives to ensure the efficiency and productivity of any service to others. Why? Because of human nature. There need to be market-oriented punishments for failure to achieve, such as bankruptcy and termination of employment or contracts. And there need to be legal punishments applied to those who criminally misuse armed forces. Otherwise, if failures and crimes are allowed to continue without punishments, that is ipso-facto rewarding those failures and crimes, a consequence inherent in a compulsory monopoly in which the citizenry are forced to patronize the one provider of a service – in this case, that of territorial protection, or national security.

For further information on the private alternative to national security socialism, please read No More Military Socialism by Murray Rothbard,Foreign Aggression by Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Private Production of Defense (pdf) by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Myth of National Defense (pdf) also by Hoppe, and The Myth of Efficient Government Service by Rothbard.

But for those who are still skeptical of the notion of privatization of security, and who are not as concerned as I am regarding the growing intrusiveness of the State and its hired guns into our lives and liberty, perhaps an acceptable alternative could be decentralization. Eliminate the U.S. federal government’s centralized monopoly in territorial security and allow each U.S. state to control its own self-protection. Doing so would reduce the possibility that any one state would aggress against others, or against foreigners, for such aggressions would be met with harsh punishments from surrounding states. Additionally, with renewed independence and sovereignty, each state’s inhabitants would be better able to “vote with their feet,” which, given the one monopolistic choice we currently have with Washington, most Americans are not able to do.

Finally, there are those who are concerned that without a centralized National Security monopoly in Washington, that it would be easier for foreign governments to invade the U.S. But those are unfounded fears. If, for example, China were to invade the U.S. with the goal of occupying and taking over America, a likely scenario given how indebted the U.S. is to China and increasingly less likely to pay what is owed, most Americans would readily take up arms to protect themselves, their families and their properties. This situation, however, can be easily avoided by ending the Federal Reserve’s compulsory monopoly in the production of money and allowing for competing currencies, and outlawing Congressional deficit-spending and public debts.

April 15, 2011

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist at Reasonandjest.com.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Dozens wounded as protesters clash in Jordan

By JAMAL HALABY

Associated Press

Hasan Tamimi

A Salafi protester holds a sword during a demonstration for extremist Salafi Muslims in the town of Zarqa, east of Amman, Jordan, Friday, April 15, 2011. The Islamic hard-liners clashed with supporters of Jordan’s king, wounding dozens, in the latest move by the extremist movement to assert itself amid the country’s wave of anti-government demonstrations.

Hundreds of protesting Islamic hard-liners clashed with supporters of Jordan’s king on Friday, wounding dozens, in the latest move by the extremist movement to assert itself amid the country’s wave of anti-government demonstrations.

A crowd of about 350 extremist Salafi Muslims faced off with a slightly smaller group of king loyalists in the town of Zarqa. Salafis beat the government supporters with clubs and fists, and the two sides hurled stones at each other, leaving people bloodied on the ground.

The Salafi movement – an ultraconservative version of Islam with an ideology similar to al-Qaida’s – is banned in Jordan, but it has grown in strength in recent years and Salafis have held a series of rallies in various parts of the country in recent weeks.

Their demonstrations are separate from the 14-week-old wave of anti-government protests by lefitsts and more moderate Islamists demanding democratic reforms in the Arab U.S. ally.

More than 2,000 Jordanians took to the streets throughout the country Friday to press their demands for a greater political voice. About half of them demonstrated outside Amman’s municipal building after Muslim prayers.

They held a huge Jordanian flag and chanted, “We sacrifice our blood and soul for Jordan. Reform the system now.”

Police separated them from a small group of government loyalists who shouted threats: “Those who fight us, beware! Our rocks will smash your heads.”

Unlike protests elsewhere in the region, Jordanians do not want their ruler, King Abdullah II, to step down. Activists are asking for some of his powers to be curbed.

The violence in Zarqa began when a crowd of Salafis rallied in front of the town’s Omar ibn Khattab Mosque, listening to speeches by Salafi leaders denouncing Jordan’s ties to the United States and calling for rule by Islamic Shariah law in Jordan. A crowd of government supporters gathered nearby to watch.

One of the government loyalists waved a framed portrait of Abdullah in the air and marched toward the Salafi crowd. The Salafis started to push him back, then beat him and he fell to the ground, his face bloodied. Other Salafis rushed to nearby cars, pulled out clubs and cables and attacked the rival group, an Associated Press reporter at the scene said.

Stone throwing and fistfights erupted, leaving many bloodied, until police intervened and convinced the government supporters to move farther away from the mosque.

Eighty-three policemen were wounded, including four who were stabbed by Salafis and are in critical condition, said police chief Lt. Gen. Hussein Majali.

He said the attacking Salafis were armed with barbed wire, swords, knives and clubs. The police were unarmed, he said, but used tear gas to disperse crowds. Officers arrested 17 Salafi protesters.

Zarqa, an industrial city north of the capital, Amman, is the birthplace of slain al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The pro-reform demonstrators in Jordan have been pressing for a series of changes to loosen the control of the king over the government, including popular elections for the prime minister, who is currently appointed by the king. Unlike in other Arab countries where protesters have sought the ouster of the leader, they have not demanded the removal of King Abdullah.

New laws on elections and political parties – key demands of the protesters – are expected to be presented to the government by month’s end, said Musa Barhouma, a national dialogue member, during the Amman demonstration.

“The road to reform is long,” said Muath Khawaldeh, spokesman for the youth movement demanding reform. “So far we have not seen serious steps taken by government. But this won’t stop us protesting until our demands are met,” he said.

The government has taken a relatively hands-off stance toward the protests, though some clashes have erupted in recent weeks. The Salafis have taken advantage of the lenient approach to hold rallies pressing their own agenda, including demands for the release of a 300 members of their movement serving prison terms for plotting al-Qaida-linked terror attacks in Jordan.

At the rally in Zarqa on Friday, one senior Salafi figure, Abed Shihadeh al-Tahawi, lashed out at the Jordanian government for its ties with the United States and for its crackdowns on the Salafis, as the crowd chanted, “down down with America, down down with democracy.”

“The Jordanian government has been chasing us everywhere for Americans’ sake. We’re not going anywhere. One day all the Arab world will be ours,” al-Tahawi said. “We will have Shariah law rule in Jordan. It’s only a matter of time, and all America and Israel’s efforts will go away.”

Associated Press writer Dale Gavlak in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

Opposition to huge India nuclear plant hardens after Japan

A policeman stands at a kiosk at the proposed site of the Jaitapur nuclear plant in Ratnagiri district, about 360 km (224 miles) south of Mumbai, April 13, 2011. The stakes are high for chronically power-short India. The plant would eventually have six reactors capable of generating 9,900 megawatts of electricity — enough to provide power to 10 million Indian homes. Long-running opposition to the proposed plant at Jaitapur has hardened amid the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan, with village posters depicting scenes of last month’s devastation at the Fukushima plant and warning of what could be in store for this region in the Western Ghats north of Goa.

By Tony Munroe

JAITAPUR, India | Fri Apr 15, 2011 11:33am EDT

(Reuters) – As far as Taramati Vaghdhare is concerned, there is no question of accepting compensation to make way for the world’s largest nuclear power plant.

“If you want the land, make us stand on the land — shoot us — and then take the land,” said the feisty 53-year-old, wearing a blue and gold sari and gesturing with a spatula.

In the yard outside her house, a young man sorted green mangoes of the prized Alphonso type from her family’s orchards.

“Our land is our mother. We can’t sell her and take compensation,” said Vaghdhare, who was among villagers detained during recent protests against the plant.

The stakes are high for chronically power-short India. The plant would eventually have six reactors capable of generating 9,900 megawatts of electricity — enough to provide power to 10 million Indian homes.

Long-running opposition to the proposed plant at Jaitapur has hardened amid the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan, with village posters depicting scenes of last month’s devastation at the Fukushima plant and warning of what could be in store for this region in the Western Ghats north of Goa.

Even if villagers and fishermen manage to derail the plant, India is unlikely to back down from its broader nuclear ambitions given surging power demand and a lack of alternatives.

India suffers from a peak-hour power deficit of about 12 percent that acts as a brake on an economy growing at nearly 9 percent and causes blackouts in much of the country. About 40 percent of Indians, or 500 million people, lack electricity.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh staked his political career on a 2008 deal with the United States that ended India’s nuclear isolation dating to its 1974 test of a nuclear device, opening up a $150 billion civilian nuclear market.

India now operates 20 mostly small reactors at six sites with a capacity of 4,780 MW, or 3 percent of its total power capacity. It hopes to lift its nuclear capacity to 7,280 MW by next year, more than 20,000 MW by 2020 and 63,000 MW by 2032 by adding nearly 30 reactors.

Shortly after the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the plant at Fukushima and triggered a global rethink of nuclear power, Singh said India’s atomic energy programme was on track but regulators would review safety systems to ensure that plants could withstand similar natural disasters.

“I do not believe that there is any panic reaction in terms of calling for a halt for the nuclear projects,” said M.R. Srinivasan, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India, who selected the Jaitapur site.

“We will certainly review, in respect of new projects, the safety of those sites and the installations we propose to bring there in the context of an extreme, low probability but nonetheless possible natural event such as occurred in Fukushima,” he said.

VANDALISM AND CRICKET

A recent visit to the 938 hectare (2,216 acre) site saw few signs of activity other than a group of policemen playing cricket. Defaced signs and milemarkers on the road to Jaitapur, about 300 km (185 miles) south of Mumbai, are evidence of the opposition to the plant.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• NEXT

Attacks escalate on Libya, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe

By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire

Published Apr 14, 2011 11:22 PM

U.S., U.N. and NATO military forces have intensified the implementation of policies aimed at total economic domination and regime change for states that resist interference in their internal affairs. As Africa becomes more of a major source for exploiting oil, strategic minerals and agricultural commodities, the continent will be under increasing pressure from Western capitalist countries.

Military attacks against African states are accelerating at a time when the capitalist governments in Western Europe and North America continue to assert that the recovery from the global recession is well underway. Nonetheless, a recent International Monetary Fund forecast indicates that the imperialist states are still very concerned about the future stability of the world markets.

An IMF World Economic Outlook reports, “Among the challenges are rising oil prices, unrest in the Middle East, continued inflation in China and debt problems in Europe. The recovery has solidified, but the unemployment remains high.” (BBC News, April 11)

The IMF cites fears related to the cutoff of oil supplies, unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, and the gloomy economic picture facing Portugal, Greece, Spain and the Irish Republic. The African countries that have been targeted for destabilization and regime change are large-scale producers of oil and other valuable resources and commodities.

Libya & African Union peace plan

Since March 19, the U.S. and other imperialist states under the ostensible control of NATO have carried out a bombing campaign against the North African state of Libya. These airstrikes and cruise missile attacks have pounded the capital of Tripoli and other Libyan cities.

On April 10, the African Union sent several heads of state, a foreign minister and the commission chair to begin a mediation process to end the conflict in Libya. The AU delegation consisted of President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, Denis Sassou- Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville, Jean Ping of the AU, the foreign minister of Uganda and Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz.

In meetings with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, the government accepted the AU’s peace proposal. It called for “the immediate cessation of all hostilities, the cooperation of the concerned Libyan authorities to facilitate the diligent delivery of humanitarian assistance to the needy populations, the protection of foreign nationals, including African migrant workers living in Libya, and dialogue between the Libyan parties and the establishment of an inclusive transition period.” (AU Press Release, April 10)

The AU delegation then traveled on April 11 to Benghazi to meet with the Transitional National Council, which represents the opposition rebel forces. The TNC leadership rejected outright the AU’s peace proposal and ruled out any solution short of regime change in Libya.

This is not the first time that peace proposals have been rejected by the rebels and their supporters in the U.S. and Western Europe. Latin American states led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez made overtures prior to the U.S./NATO bombings to work towards a ceasefire, but the efforts were rejected by the imperialists and the rebels.

On March 11, the AU Peace and Security Council issued a communiqué calling for a ceasefire. The statement also opposed foreign military intervention. This proposal was also dismissed by the Western states, which are now bombing Libya and the rebel forces.

The Obama administration has demanded that the Libyan government be toppled. Progressive forces within the U.S. peace movement and the oppressed communities here have condemned U.S. military attacks and the Pentagon’s ongoing naval blockade of Libya. International opposition to the U.S./NATO bombing has increased daily. There have been demonstrations against the war in Egypt, Mali, Greece, Serbia, Canada and other countries.

On April 11, the Associated Press reported, “The military intervention in Libya cost the U.S. an extra $608 million in the first few weeks of the operation. Officials call it extra costs because it doesn’t include complete spending such as paychecks for U.S. sailors, airmen and other forces, who would have been deployed somewhere in the world anyway.”

Ivory Coast president seized by French military forces

Another source of instability in Africa is the world’s largest cocoa-producing West African state of Ivory Coast, where France, the former colonial power, in conjunction with the U.N., has toppled the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo. He was arrested and his rival, the Western-backed Alassane Ouattara, was installed. This conflict stemmed from a dispute over a runoff November election. The imperialist states backed Ouattara’s candidacy.

Gbagbo insisted that he won the elections and that the Ivorian Supreme Court’s decision upholding his position nullified the claims made by U.N. observers and the national electoral commission. On March 31, French and U.N. military forces accompanied by gendarmes (police) under Ouattara’s control launched an offensive against military units that were loyal to Gbagbo.

France and the U.N. used heavy artillery, helicopters and airstrikes to attack the Gbagbo forces. During the siege on the presidential palace in the administrative capital of Abidjan, two massacres were carried out inside the country. Reports are that up to 1,000 people may have been killed in Duekoue. Although Ouattara’s supporters have been accused of the massacre, the U.N. has attempted to also apportion some blame on the Gbagbo forces. Nonetheless, all of the victims were said to have been Gbagbo supporters.

On April 7, Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that 40 bodies were found in Blolequin. Independent journalists will undoubtedly investigate the culpability for these massacres in the weeks to come.

The French and U.N. involvement in the attempts to topple the Libyan government as well as the overthrow and arrest of Ivorian incumbent Gbagbo represents the increasingly aggressive military posture of Paris on the African continent. Although the French said Ouattara forces arrested Gbagbo, initial reports indicated that French Special Forces led the assault on his residence and seized him.

Israeli airstrike near Port Sudan

The Sudanese government has blamed the Israeli Defense Forces for bombing a vehicle and killing two people on April 5. The Sudan Tribune reports, “A foreign plane launched the attack in an area known as Kalaneeb, which was described as 14 kilometers away from the coastal city of Port Sudan and on the main road leading to the regional airport.” According to people nearby, “We heard three loud explosions. We went outside to see what was happening and eyewitnesses told us they saw two helicopters which looked like Apaches flying past.” (April 5)

The Jerusalem Post says that Time magazine reported that a “senior IDF official confirmed that Israel was responsible for the deadly air strike on a car in Port Sudan.” (April 7) A similar attack occurred in early 2009 when IDF fighter jets struck a convoy of vehicles in eastern Sudan, killing 119 people.

Israel has accused Sudan of transporting weapons from Iran to Gaza’s Hamas government. Sudan has denied these allegations.

Zimbabwe launches anti-sanctions campaign

In the Southern African nation of Zimbabwe, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-PF party and the government in Harare have embarked upon a petition campaign calling for the removal of Western economic sanctions against the country. The sanctions were leveled after a radical land redistribution program was adopted in 2000. The program took control of large tracts of territory that British settler-colonialists had seized during the late 19th century.

Although the government under President Robert Mugabe’s leadership has established a coalition with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change factions, the U.S., Britain, Australia and the European Union have maintained economic sanctions against Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe’s government is now preparing for national elections after drafting a new constitution.

The U.S. and other Western imperialist states are continuing to support the Western-oriented MDC-T faction headed by Morgan Tsvangirai. They plan to translate their support for the MDC-T into an electoral victory for the party, which has refused to take an anti-sanctions position.

The state-controlled Zimbabwe Herald published an editorial on April 6 in which Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF said, “The Western hysterical expression about saving civilians in Libya must be dismissed with the contempt it deserves. The civilians of Libya do not matter as their oil does.”

The editorial notes, “What Barack Obama has done in fact is to sign an assassination order for Muammar Gaddafi, and his desire may as well come to materialize as did that of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who pursued Saddam Hussein to the gallows. But Obama only sings humanitarian songs for civilians belonging to countries ruled by leaders that prevent the U.S. from imperially dominating their natural resources, such as the civilians in Libya, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela.”

Role of U.S. anti-war movement

The April 9 and 10 anti-war demonstrations in New York and San Francisco represent the strengthening of the movement for peace and social justice in the U.S. With the increasing attacks on labor, the poor and the oppressed by the bankers and their government backers, it will become increasingly important for people in this country to draw links between the worsening conditions of the workers and the relationship to the ever rising Pentagon budget.

In North Africa and the Middle East, the masses have engaged in mass demonstrations, strikes and rebellions against the ravages of world capitalism and its economic crisis. The struggles of workers in Wisconsin and other states in the U.S. have gained inspiration from the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Bahrain.

This year’s May Day will also take on added significance by providing an opportunity to raise to thousands of workers across the U.S. the links of the worldwide struggles against capitalism and imperialism. It will be the unity of program and action of the workers and oppressed across the globe that will end the exploitative systems and create the conditions for world peace and social justice for the majority of humanity.

The writer was a speaker at the April 9 anti-war rally in New York City.

---

Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Stuxnet, Fukushima, Economic Warfare On Toyota–eliminating the competition

Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay

By WILLIAM J. BROAD, JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID E. SANGER

This article is by William J. Broad, John Markoff and David E. Sanger.

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.

Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms.

“To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,” said an American expert on nuclear intelligence. “The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”

Though American and Israeli officials refuse to talk publicly about what goes on at Dimona, the operations there, as well as related efforts in the United States, are among the newest and strongest clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program.

In recent days, the retiring chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Meir Dagan, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton separately announced that they believed Iran’s efforts had been set back by several years. Mrs. Clinton cited American-led sanctions, which have hurt Iran’s ability to buy components and do business around the world.

The gruff Mr. Dagan, whose organization has been accused by Iran of being behind the deaths of several Iranian scientists, told the Israeli Knesset in recent days that Iran had run into technological difficulties that could delay a bomb until 2015. That represented a sharp reversal from Israel’s long-held argument that Iran was on the cusp of success.

The biggest single factor in putting time on the nuclear clock appears to be Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed.

In interviews over the past three months in the United States and Europe, experts who have picked apart the computer worm describe it as far more complex — and ingenious — than anything they had imagined when it began circulating around the world, unexplained, in mid-2009.

Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits of evidence.

In early 2008 the German company Siemens cooperated with one of the United States’ premier national laboratories, in Idaho, to identify the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the company sells to operate industrial machinery around the world — and that American intelligence agencies have identified as key equipment in Iran’s enrichment facilities.

Siemens says that program was part of routine efforts to secure its products against cyberattacks. Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho National Laboratory — which is part of the Energy Department, responsible for America’s nuclear arms — the chance to identify well-hidden holes in the Siemens systems that were exploited the next year by Stuxnet.

The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.

The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Iran’s operations ground to a halt, while others survived, according to the reports of international nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults.

“It’s like a playbook,” said Ralph Langner, an independent computer security expert in Hamburg, Germany, who was among the first to decode Stuxnet. “Anyone who looks at it carefully can build something like it.” Mr. Langner is among the experts who expressed fear that the attack had legitimized a new form of industrial warfare, one to which the United States is also highly vulnerable.

Officially, neither American nor Israeli officials will even utter the name of the malicious computer program, much less describe any role in designing it.

But Israeli officials grin widely when asked about its effects. Mr. Obama’s chief strategist for combating weapons of mass destruction, Gary Samore, sidestepped a Stuxnet question at a recent conference about Iran, but added with a smile: “I’m glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.”

In recent days, American officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity have said in interviews that they believe Iran’s setbacks have been underreported. That may explain why Mrs. Clinton provided her public assessment while traveling in the Middle East last week.

By the accounts of a number of computer scientists, nuclear enrichment experts and former officials, the covert race to create Stuxnet was a joint project between the Americans and the Israelis, with some help, knowing or unknowing, from the Germans and the British.

The project’s political origins can be found in the last months of the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center. President Obama, first briefed on the program even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials familiar with the administration’s Iran strategy. So did the Israelis, other officials said. Israel has long been seeking a way to cripple Iran’s capability without triggering the opprobrium, or the war, that might follow an overt military strike of the kind they conducted against nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

Two years ago, when Israel still thought its only solution was a military one and approached Mr. Bush for the bunker-busting bombs and other equipment it believed it would need for an air attack, its officials told the White House that such a strike would set back Iran’s programs by roughly three years. Its request was turned down.

Now, Mr. Dagan’s statement suggests that Israel believes it has gained at least that much time, without mounting an attack. So does the Obama administration.

For years, Washington’s approach to Tehran’s program has been one of attempting “to put time on the clock,” a senior administration official said, even while refusing to discuss Stuxnet. “And now, we have a bit more.”

Finding Weaknesses

Paranoia helped, as it turns out.

Years before the worm hit Iran, Washington had become deeply worried about the vulnerability of the millions of computers that run everything in the United States from bank transactions to the power grid.

Computers known as controllers run all kinds of industrial machinery. By early 2008, the Department of Homeland Security had teamed up with the Idaho National Laboratory to study a widely used Siemens controller known as P.C.S.-7, for Process Control System 7. Its complex software, called Step 7, can run whole symphonies of industrial instruments, sensors and machines.

The vulnerability of the controller to cyberattack was an open secret. In July 2008, the Idaho lab and Siemens teamed up on a PowerPoint presentation on the controller’s vulnerabilities that was made to a conference in Chicago at Navy Pier, a top tourist attraction.

“Goal is for attacker to gain control,” the July paper said in describing the many kinds of maneuvers that could exploit system holes. The paper was 62 pages long, including pictures of the controllers as they were examined and tested in Idaho.

In a statement on Friday, the Idaho National Laboratory confirmed that it formed a partnership with Siemens but said it was one of many with manufacturers to identify cybervulnerabilities. It argued that the report did not detail specific flaws that attackers could exploit. But it also said it could not comment on the laboratory’s classified missions, leaving unanswered the question of whether it passed what it learned about the Siemens systems to other parts of the nation’s intelligence apparatus.

The presentation at the Chicago conference, which recently disappeared from a Siemens Web site, never discussed specific places where the machines were used.

But Washington knew. The controllers were critical to operations at Natanz, a sprawling enrichment site in the desert. “If you look for the weak links in the system,” said one former American official, “this one jumps out.”

Controllers, and the electrical regulators they run, became a focus of sanctions efforts. The trove of State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks describes urgent efforts in April 2009 to stop a shipment of Siemens controllers, contained in 111 boxes at the port of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. They were headed for Iran, one cable said, and were meant to control “uranium enrichment cascades” — the term for groups of spinning centrifuges.

Subsequent cables showed that the United Arab Emirates blocked the transfer of the Siemens computers across the Strait of Hormuz to Bandar Abbas, a major Iranian port.

Only months later, in June, Stuxnet began to pop up around the globe. The Symantec Corporation, a maker of computer security software and services based in Silicon Valley, snared it in a global malware collection system. The worm hit primarily inside Iran, Symantec reported, but also in time appeared in India, Indonesia and other countries.

But unlike most malware, it seemed to be doing little harm. It did not slow computer networks or wreak general havoc.

That deepened the mystery.

A ‘Dual Warhead’

No one was more intrigued than Mr. Langner, a former psychologist who runs a small computer security company in a suburb of Hamburg. Eager to design protective software for his clients, he had his five employees focus on picking apart the code and running it on the series of Siemens controllers neatly stacked in racks, their lights blinking.

He quickly discovered that the worm only kicked into gear when it detected the presence of a specific configuration of controllers, running a set of processes that appear to exist only in a centrifuge plant. “The attackers took great care to make sure that only their designated targets were hit,” he said. “It was a marksman’s job.”

For example, one small section of the code appears designed to send commands to 984 machines linked together.

Curiously, when international inspectors visited Natanz in late 2009, they found that the Iranians had taken out of service a total of exactly 984 machines that had been running the previous summer.

But as Mr. Langner kept peeling back the layers, he found more — what he calls the “dual warhead.” One part of the program is designed to lie dormant for long periods, then speed up the machines so that the spinning rotors in the centrifuges wobble and then destroy themselves. Another part, called a “man in the middle” in the computer world, sends out those false sensor signals to make the system believe everything is running smoothly. That prevents a safety system from kicking in, which would shut down the plant before it could self-destruct.

“Code analysis makes it clear that Stuxnet is not about sending a message or proving a concept,” Mr. Langner later wrote. “It is about destroying its targets with utmost determination in military style.”

This was not the work of hackers, he quickly concluded. It had to be the work of someone who knew his way around the specific quirks of the Siemens controllers and had an intimate understanding of exactly how the Iranians had designed their enrichment operations.

In fact, the Americans and the Israelis had a pretty good idea.

Testing the Worm

Perhaps the most secretive part of the Stuxnet story centers on how the theory of cyberdestruction was tested on enrichment machines to make sure the malicious software did its intended job.

The account starts in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, the Dutch designed a tall, thin machine for enriching uranium. As is well known, A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist working for the Dutch, stole the design and in 1976 fled to Pakistan.

The resulting machine, known as the P-1, for Pakistan’s first-generation centrifuge, helped the country get the bomb. And when Dr. Khan later founded an atomic black market, he illegally sold P-1’s to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

The P-1 is more than six feet tall. Inside, a rotor of aluminum spins uranium gas to blinding speeds, slowly concentrating the rare part of the uranium that can fuel reactors and bombs.

How and when Israel obtained this kind of first-generation centrifuge remains unclear, whether from Europe, or the Khan network, or by other means. But nuclear experts agree that Dimona came to hold row upon row of spinning centrifuges.

“They’ve long been an important part of the complex,” said Avner Cohen, author of “The Worst-Kept Secret” (2010), a book about the Israeli bomb program, and a senior fellow at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He added that Israeli intelligence had asked retired senior Dimona personnel to help on the Iranian issue, and that some apparently came from the enrichment program.

“I have no specific knowledge,” Dr. Cohen said of Israel and the Stuxnet worm. “But I see a strong Israeli signature and think that the centrifuge knowledge was critical.”

Another clue involves the United States. It obtained a cache of P-1’s after Libya gave up its nuclear program in late 2003, and the machines were sent to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, another arm of the Energy Department.

By early 2004, a variety of federal and private nuclear experts assembled by the Central Intelligence Agency were calling for the United States to build a secret plant where scientists could set up the P-1’s and study their vulnerabilities. “The notion of a test bed was really pushed,” a participant at the C.I.A. meeting recalled.

The resulting plant, nuclear experts said last week, may also have played a role in Stuxnet testing.

But the United States and its allies ran into the same problem the Iranians have grappled with: the P-1 is a balky, badly designed machine. When the Tennessee laboratory shipped some of its P-1’s to England, in hopes of working with the British on a program of general P-1 testing, they stumbled, according to nuclear experts.

“They failed hopelessly,” one recalled, saying that the machines proved too crude and temperamental to spin properly.

Dr. Cohen said his sources told him that Israel succeeded — with great difficulty — in mastering the centrifuge technology. And the American expert in nuclear intelligence, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Israelis used machines of the P-1 style to test the effectiveness of Stuxnet.

The expert added that Israel worked in collaboration with the United States in targeting Iran, but that Washington was eager for “plausible deniability.”

In November, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, broke the country’s silence about the worm’s impact on its enrichment program, saying a cyberattack had caused “minor problems with some of our centrifuges.” Fortunately, he added, “our experts discovered it.”

The most detailed portrait of the damage comes from the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington. Last month, it issued a lengthy Stuxnet report that said Iran’s P-1 machines at Natanz suffered a series of failures in mid- to late 2009 that culminated in technicians taking 984 machines out of action.

The report called the failures “a major problem” and identified Stuxnet as the likely culprit.

Stuxnet is not the only blow to Iran. Sanctions have hurt its effort to build more advanced (and less temperamental) centrifuges. And last January, and again in November, two scientists who were believed to be central to the nuclear program were killed in Tehran.

The man widely believed to be responsible for much of Iran’s program, Mohsen Fakrizadeh, a college professor, has been hidden away by the Iranians, who know he is high on the target list.

Publicly, Israeli officials make no explicit ties between Stuxnet and Iran’s problems. But in recent weeks, they have given revised and surprisingly upbeat assessments of Tehran’s nuclear status.

“A number of technological challenges and difficulties” have beset Iran’s program, Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, told Israeli public radio late last month.

The troubles, he added, “have postponed the timetable.”

The Globalist Web of Subversion

by Dr. K R Bolton

February 7, 2011

…It is this power structure which the Radical Right in the US has been attacking for years in the belief that they were attacking the Communists.[1]

When Professor Carroll Quigley, the eminent Harvard historian, wrote those words in 1966 he was referring to a “network” (sic) of plutocrats largely centered around the Council on Foreign Relations. Since then this “network” has increased exponentially into a vast, interlocking apparatus that has the ability to bring down regimes by manipulating those who believe themselves to be shaping a new and more humane future.

This international subversive apparatus would have turned the old Bolsheviks of the Comintern[2] red with envy. Indeed, when things turned sour for bolshevism with the advent of Stalin, many Marxists joined forces with America in the Cold War via such institutions as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, attracting sundry Bolsheviks, ex-Bolsheviks, Trots, pro-Marxists, crypto-Marxists and social democrats.[3]

From out of the Cold War emerged organizations committed to spreading the “American Dream” throughout the world in the formation of a “new world order.”[4] The eclipse of the Soviet bloc provided an opportunity for this “new world order” to be created, but there remained the Islamic world, the danger of the resurgence of nationalism and traditionalism in the former Soviet bloc states, and other regimes that are regarded as anachronistic roadblocks in creating a “new world order.” One of these was Serbia under Milosevic, who wished to retain state control over the mineral rich region of Kosovo.[5]

When eliminating Milosevic the use of “Muslim terrorists” was considered expedient by the USA, and the Kosovo Liberation Army went from being listed as a heroin-pushing “terrorist organization” by the US State Department, to being noble freedom fighters.[6] They were an example of “good Muslims,” just as bin Laden was a “good Muslim” when he was needed to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

“Neo-conservatism” also emerged out of the Cold War. The term is a misnomer, however. Neo-conservatism is neither “new” nor “conservative.” There is nothing conservative about the “neocons” (a more apt term). The version of “American tradition” advocated by the neocons is that of global Americanization, Sen. McCain stating the doctrine in 2007 as President of the International Republican Institute:

The promotion of freedom is the most authentic expression of our national character. To accept the abridgement of those rights for other societies should be no less false to the American heart than to accept their abridgment in our own society.[7]

The American tradition was to keep out of foreign entanglements,[8] which was reiterated by the “isolationists.”

Neocons are antithetical to “palaeoconservatives” such as Prof. Paul Gottfried,[9] the late Joe Sobran, Pat Buchanan, et al, who are opposed to American globalism and interference in the affairs of other states. They and politicians such as Ron Paul stand for the traditional American outlook. Neocons are the ideological heirs to Wilsonian internationalism, and his revolutionary manifesto of The Fourteen Points, which in the aftermath of World War I sought to create a new international order based on American hegemony, via the League of Nations, just as the same stunt was tried in the aftermath of World War II by the USA via the United Nations Organization, but was squashed by the intransigence of Stalin.[10]

Indeed the position of palaeoconservatism contra the neocons was cogently expressed by the recently deceased columnist Joe Sobran when he stated that:

Anti-Americanism is no longer a mere fad of Marxist university students; it’s a profound reaction of traditional societies against a corrupt and corrupting modernization that is being imposed on them, by both violence and seduction. The very word values implies a whole modern culture of moral whim, in which good and evil are matters of personal preference and sodomy and abortion can be treated as “rights.” Confronted with today’s America, then, the Christian Arab finds himself in unexpected sympathy with his Muslim enemy.[11]

It should not be too difficult to see – if one can think beyond the mass media hype – that the “color revolutions” and the “spontaneous revolts” that have taken place, and are now taking place in the Arab world, have not arisen from “traditional Christian and Muslim Arabs” in a revolt against Americanization and capitalist moral nihilism, as per the statement by Sobran, but rather arose among bourgeois secular youth under the long-term influence of American globalists. Whether the current revolts will be captured by Arab traditionalists and turned into a genuine liberation movement against Americanization remains to be seen.

Genuine stirrings against global Americanization referred to by Sobran constitute the major roadblock to the “new world order,” whether as regimes such as those of Iran or as grass roots phenomena such as the re-emergence of nationalism and traditionalist movements in the former Soviet bloc states, wishing to revive what American globalists consider to be anachronistic ideas, such as those of religion, ethnic identity and nationalism. Against these they postulate a counter-idealism, concentrating on the youth generation, in the same manner by which the American Establishment sought to co-opt and experiment with American youth via the “New Left” during the 1960s.[12]

The American Establishment, or – if you prefer – what Eisenhower in his presidential “farewell” speech called the “military-industrial complex,”[13] seeks to direct the emergence of revolutionary and reform movements throughout the world, albeit presented by media and political commentators as rebelling against America. Hence the present phenomena of “revolt” that has “spontaneously” (sic) swept North Africa, with the public being simplistically told that this is causing the fall of “pro-American dictators.” As I have previously pointed out, the “spontaneous revolts” in Egypt and Tunisia, for example, portrayed with such unrestrained enthusiasm by the Western news media, are the culmination of years of planning, training, networking, and funding “activists,” following exactly the same pattern as that seen in the “color revolutions” of the former Soviet bloc states.[14] A far-reaching network of interlocking organizations has emerged, funded in part by the US Government, and in part by corporate sources, to foment “world revolution.”

International Republican Institute (IRI)

The IRI is a neocon version of the Comintern. Its by-line is “Advancing Democracy Worldwide” (even if you don’t want their version of it, and then that’s when the bombs start landing). The creation of IRI was supposedly inspired by the words of President Ronald Reagan, who in 1982 called for a “crusade for freedom” throughout the world, stating before the British Parliament that America’s version of democracy, and one might add its concomitant versions of culture[15] and economics, is “the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.” Like Communism, it provides ideological justification for interference in the life sovereign nations, including ultimately the use of force as per Serbia and Iraq.

IRI states that Reagan provided the ideological impetus for the formation in 1983 of the National Endowment for Democracy (which helps fund IRI) to “support democrats worldwide.” This led to a network of fronts: National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, Center for International Private Enterprise, and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity.[16]

• Page 1 of 7
• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• Next »

• Page:1234567

K R Bolton is a Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research, and an assistant editor of the peer reviewed journal Ab Aeterno. Recent publications include ‘Trotskyism and the Anti-Family Agenda,’ CKR website, Sociology Dept., Moscow State University (October 2009); ‘Rivalry over water resources as a potential cause of conflict in Asia,’ Journal of Social Political and Economic Studies, and Russia and China: an approaching conflict?, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 2010; Vol. 34, no. 2, Summer 2009. Read more articles byDr. K R Bolton.

Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy

by Barbara Conry

Barbara Conry is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

---

Executive Summary

The National Endowment for Democracy is a foreign policy loose cannon. Promoting democracy is a nebulous objective that can be manipulated to justify any whim of the special-interest groups–the Republican and Democratic parties, organized labor, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce–that control most of NED’s funds. As those groups execute their own foreign policies, they often work against American interests and meddle needlessly in the affairs of other countries, undermining the democratic movements NED was designed to assist. Moreover, the end of the Cold War has nullified any usefulness that such an organization might ever have had. There is no longer a rival superpower mounting an effective ideological challenge, and democracy is progressing remarkably well on its own.

NED, which also has a history of corruption and financial mismanagement, is superfluous at best and often destructive. Through the endowment, the American taxpayer has paid for special-interest groups to harass the duly elected governments of friendly countries, interfere in foreign elections, and foster the corruption of democratic movements.

Introduction

This is a demonstration that you can have the most egregious abuse in the world for taxpayers’ dollars under [a] program and bring it here [to Washington] and you would find support for that program. . . . If we cannot cut this, Lord, we cannot cut anything.

–Sen. Byron L. Dorgan

The buzzwords of the budget season have been “cut spending first.” We could, perhaps, begin with the National Endowment for Democracy. Its past is rife with scandals, financial and otherwise. It has absolutely no “hometown” constituency; not one member of Congress would face angry voters demanding to know why “their” program had been cut. Very few voters would even have heard of it. Moreover, NED is emblematic of inside-the-beltway political logrolling, the type of enterprise that Washington-weary and government wary voters–including the coveted Perot constituency–would love to see abolished. Such a victimless cut would appear the perfect candidate for the budgetary ax. Yet many mem bers of Congress seem to think that the program should get yet another hefty funding boost, its fourth consecutive increase, which would allow NED’s budget to more than double in four years.

NED is a little-known foreign aid program intended to promote democracy abroad. It is a nominally private organization, but all of its funds come from the federal treasury. Although small in comparison with other federal programs- its annual budget has ranged from a low of $15 million in 1987 to a high of $27.5 million in 1992–NED has been con troversial throughout its 10-year history, engendering intense congressional debate that cuts across party lines. Moreover, although it is a child of the Cold War, NED continues to be a strong point of contention in the post-Cold War era. This year, for instance, NED represented only $35 million of a $23 billion Senate appropriations bill, yet it attracted more speakers to the floor than any other item in the bill.(1)

During deliberations on the fiscal year 1994 budget in the summer of 1993, the Senate approved an appropriation of $35 million, a decrease from the $50 million recommended by the Foreign Relations Committee and included in the foreign aid authorization bill. NED fared worse in the House appropriations bill. Its entire budget was deleted even though $17.5 million had previously been allocated in the House authorization bill. But even the Senate figures represent a sharp rebuff to Clinton’s proposal to increase NED’s budget by 66 percent from FY93, which would have brought the NED budget to $50 million. The final fate of NED’s FY94 budget will be decided in conference committee.

The debate over NED is not a debate about democracy; no one is disputing that democracy and liberty are worthwhile goals. Rather, the controversy surrounding NED questions the wisdom of giving a quasi-private organization the fiat to pursue what is effectively an independent foreign policy under the guise of “promoting democracy.” Proponents of NED maintain that a private organization is necessary to over come 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. Still another aspect of the debate is whether NED is simply a relic of the Cold War that should be eliminated for that reason. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union led a powerful ideological campaign against democracy, but there is no longer any such pervasive, systemic threat to freedom. Critics contend, therefore, that even if there was once a national security rationale for funding NED, that rationale no longer exists.

NED’s Quasi-Private Status

Founded in 1983 following an impassioned call by President Ronald Reagan for renewed efforts to promote global democracy, NED was designed to assist democratic movements abroad in ways that were beyond the reach of established federal programs. NED’s founders were concerned that traditional democracy-building agencies such as the Agency for International Development (AID) and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), as official government programs, faced legal and political restrictions that limited their activities.

Proponents argued that a private aid agency would be able to operate more freely and at the same time escape the stigma attached to U.S. foreign aid in many parts of the world. With that in mind, Congress created NED as a private, nonprofit corporation, although its funding came directly from the federal government as an earmarked item in the USIA budget. From NED, approximately 70 percent of available grant money goes to four “core” grantees: the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, the Free Trade Union Institute of the AFL-CIO (FTUI), and the Center for International Private Enterprise of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Those organizations, deliberately chosen to convey a sense of balance between left and right, labor and big business, then determine which groups abroad receive grants for their activities to further democracy. The remaining 30 percent of available grant money is designated “discretionary” funding to be distributed directly by NED.

That convoluted organizational structure seems to be based on the premise that government money, if filtered through enough layers of bureaucracy, becomes “private” funding, an illogical and dangerously misleading assumption. In effect, the NED structure allows private organizations (in this case organizations with very distinct and disparate interests) to pursue their own foreign policy agendas with out regard to official policy. The vague public-private status of NED blurs the line between U.S. foreign policy and those special-interest agendas. Consequently, NED initia ives have often been misconstrued–understandably–by foreign populations as official policy. In view of NED’s affinity for controversial programs, such confusion between official and private policy is decidedly contrary to the best interests of the United States.

The NED structure also distorts accountability, making it difficult to ascertain at what level mismanagement and poor judgment have occurred in any particular instance. Moreover, despite all attempts to camouflage the government funding, NED continues to suffer from the tarnished image associated with U.S. foreign aid in general. Indeed, NED is resented as American interference; it is often further resented because it attempts to deceive foreigners into viewing its programs as private assistance. In the final analysis, the endowment embodies the most negative aspects of both private aid and official foreign aid–the pitfalls of decentralized “loose cannon” foreign policy efforts combined with the impression that the United States is trying to “run the show” around the world.

NED as Political Pork

When NED was created, some of the more perceptive members of Congress warned of those dangers, only to be dismissed as short-sighted isolationists. Recalling those debates, Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) noted that NED’s defenders still tar opponents in that fashion:

We critics of NED are somehow categorized as people who cannot quite see over the horizon. We just do not get it when it comes to these big international things like the National Endowment for Democracy. . . . If you do not agree with the democracy-speak or the international-speak or the trade-speak here in Washington, D.C., then you are an isolationist.(2)

NED’s 10-year history has proven the skeptics right, however. On a number of occasions the lack of coordination between NED and the federal government has resulted in NED programs that undermine official U.S. foreign policy. Examples of NED failures are ubiquitous, but NED’s defenders are hard-pressed to cite definitive successes.

At its most innocuous, NED is a slush fund for politicians.(3) Journalist David Corn has described it as “a porkbarrel for a small circle of Republican and Democratic party activists, conservative trade unionists and free marketeers who use the endowment money to run their own mini-State Departments.”(4) The distribution of money to opposing interest groups helps NED deflect charges of partisanship in the distribution of pork, but the fact remains that the taxpayer is picking up the tab for politicking.

Moreover, although the four core grantees appear to represent diverse constituencies, Corn and other liberal critics accuse NED of leaning too far to the right, because the Republican party, business (represented by the Chamber of Commerce group), and organized labor all generally adopt a conservative stance when it comes to foreign policy. That leaves only the National Democratic Institute to represent more liberal views.

At the same time, conservative critics bring up the issue of proportion among the four main recipients: the AFL CIO receives approximately 40 percent of available funding, while each of the other groups receives around 10 percent. That imbalance has prompted speculation that NED is in the hands of the neo-Trotskyite Social Democrats/USA, whose membership includes both NED president Carl Gershman and a number of AFL-CIO officials involved with the endowment.(5) Such political rancor is inevitable when an organization is authorized to pursue partisan agendas abroad at taxpayers’ expense.

NED’s handling of its discretionary grant money has also met with harsh criticism. Audits have indicated that much of that money is used to subsidize travel–”political tourism”–for NED board members and friends, although the four core grantees also spend money on junkets. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) recalled: “They would go down in the wintertime, back in 1983, 1984, and 1985, and they would meet in the Bahamas and swim out on the nice sandy beaches. . . . They would call it very important meetings.”(6) In 1990 the AFL-CIO’s FTUI reported excursions to Romania every few months, where NED visitors stayed at the Intercontinental Hotel, the most expensive lodging in Bucharest. Two Romanian labor leaders also traveled–courtesy of NED–to Las Vegas for a Postal Workers Union convention.(7) Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.) has described NED’s largesse as “first class airfare for everybody.”(8)

NED’s Mischief Overseas

Unfortunately, the types of substantive projects that NED has promoted may make many people nostalgic for the comparative insipidity of paying for political junkets. On a number of occasions, for example, NED has taken advantage of its alleged private status to influence foreign elections, an activity that is beyond the scope of AID or USIA and would otherwise be possible only through a CIA covert operation. Such activities, it may also be worth noting, would be illegal for foreign groups operating in the United States. As columnist Mary McGrory mused:

What if a public-spirited group of Italians, whose turnout rate in national elections is in the 90′s, should decide to come over here and run a campaign to induce more Americans to participate in their democratic practices? Our last score in our most important civil rites was a pitiable 55 percent. But let another country tell us what to do? Not, as Eliza Doolittle said, bloody likely.(9)

What finally drew public attention to NED’s meddling in foreign elections was an aborted attempt to provide opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro with $3 million in funding for her 1989 election campaign against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. The plan was abandoned after it was determined that NED’s charter, which expressly forbids campaign contributions, would be violated. In the end, the money was channeled to programs that aided Chamorro indirectly rather than through direct campaign contributions. That incident illustrated that NED had no qualms about interfering in elections in general and stopped short in the Nicaragua case only because of blatant illegality. In 1988, for example, the endowment had given $600,000 to organizations working to defeat Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet. NED considered that endeavor entirely appropriate, even though the recipients themselves lamented it as American intervention in the electoral process. One recipient, contemplating the “hard moral dilemmas” involved in accepting U.S. funds, admitted his reluctance to accept the money, which he bemoaned as a “lesser evil” than the reelection of Pinochet.(10) NED was involved in similar activities in 1990 in Czechoslovakia, where it was criticized for funding 2 parties close to Vaclav Havel to the exclusion of 22 other legitimate parties.(11) So while NED may stop short of violating the letter of its charter by giving direct contributions to specific candidates, it clearly does use funds to interfere with foreign democratic processes. Its willingness to do so ignores the innate contradiction between free elections and outside interference in the electoral process. As George Washington warned in his farewell address, “Foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican govern ment.”(12)

Those particular examples of intervention in foreign elections, if ethically questionable, at least appear consistent with U.S. interests and foreign policy objectives, which is more than can be said for many NED initiatives. In a number of instances, NED activities have worked against official U.S. policy and sometimes even against democratic values. In Panama’s 1984 elections, for instance, the endowment funded a military-backed candidate, Nicholas Ardito Barletta, in direct contradiction of U.S. policy toward Panama, which was to oppose military rule. The U.S. ambassador at the time, James E. Biggs, objected vehemently in a secret cable, “The embassy requests that this hair brained project be abandoned before it hits the fan.”(13)

An even more dubious initiative was NED’s involvement in Costa Rica. Not only is Costa Rica a well-established democracy–former president George Bush visited the country in 1989 to celebrate 100 years of democracy there–it is the only stable democracy in Central America. But Costa Rican president Oscar Arias had opposed Ronald Reagan’s policy in Central America, especially his support of the Nicaraguan Contras. Arias received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to dampen conflicts in the region, but he incurred the wrath of right-wing NED activists. So from 1986 to 1988 NED gave money to Arias’s political opposition, which was also strongly supported by Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. As Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.) commented: “They may technically have been within the law, but I felt this clearly violated the spirit. . . . The whole purpose of NED is to facilitate the emergence of democracy where it doesn’t exist and preserve it where it does exist. In Costa Rica, neither of these [conditions] applies.”(14)

Sometimes NED grants have worked in ways that are simply bizarre. In the mid-1980s, for example, the AFL CIO’s FTUI approved a grant of $1.5 million to defend democ racy in France, which was astonishing for several reasons. First of all, French democracy in the 1980s did not appear to be so fragile that it required financial assistance from American taxpayers to sustain itself. The government of Franáois Mitterrand was duly elected within a democratic system nearly as old as America’s. The AFL-CIO, however, determined that France’s socialist government was permitting a dangerous rise of communist influence. According to the late Irving Brown, Paris-based director of international relations for the AFL-CIO at the time of the incident: “France . . . is threatened by the Communist apparatus. . . . It is a clear and present danger if the present is thought of as 10 years from now.”(15)

That mentality has resulted in AFL-CIO support for highly controversial causes. One of the French groups that received funding, the National Inter-University Union, was widely viewed as a cauldron of rightist extremism and xenophobia and rumored also to have ties to terrorists.(16) Sure ly, the U.S. government did not intend to fund authoritarian groups that work to undermine the government of a stable democratic nation.

Indeed, when NED’s activities in France were publicized in an expose by the French newspaper LibÇration, the U.S. government disassociated itself from the endeavor. While no serious rift in American-French relations seems to have resulted from that diplomatic faux pas, it certainly illustrates the peril of allowing the AFL-CIO (or any other private group) to pursue an independent foreign policy with taxpayers’ money.

The policy is especially dangerous in view of the ambiguity that often surrounds the origins of grants that go through NED. Even the recipients do not always know the precise source of their funding. If NED obscures the sources of funds to the grantees, confusion between NED’s “private” foreign policy and official U.S. policy is to be expected. One grantee, the Committee for Transatlantic Understanding, received $49,000 from what it thought was the American Youth Council. The committee later found out the money was actually from NED. In another instance, a grant of $10,000 was given for three leaders of Equity, the actors’ union, to attend a conference on international ex change of stage actors.(17) While Equity realized the money came from the federal government, the recipients were unaware of the NED connection. If the recipients cannot clearly identify the source of NED funds, foreign governments or political movements certainly will have problems identifying the instigators of NED’s foreign policy ven tures.

Harming Fragile Democracies

It is the height of arrogance to assume that America’s international reputation is so secure that the United States can afford to risk misunderstandings caused by private organizations’ representing their agendas as American policy. It is true that the State Department, the National Security Council, and the other agencies of the federal government responsible for foreign policy can make grave mistakes. They are at least theoretically accountable for their errors, however. As Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) said during recent congressional debate on the issue,

If we are going to make fools of ourselves around the world with our foreign policy and our involvement in the internal political affairs of foreign nations, let our State Department and let our president make that mistake, not a private entity funded by the . . . taxpayers of the U.S.(18)

The favoritism exhibited in the private conduct of foreign policy raises further complications. By dealing with private groups abroad rather than foreign governments, NED invariably ends up playing favorites, engendering strife within the very democratic movements it seeks to assist. When the Bush administration funded anti-Sandinista groups in an attempt to dethrone Daniel Ortega, the competition for U.S. funds splintered the opposition, strengthening some factions at the expense of others. Unfortunately, it was often the strongest anti-Sandinista organizations that were loath to “feed at the U.S. trough,”(19) and as a result those cornerstone groups, which should have led the movement, were ultimately weakened. NED’s blatant involvement was further destructive in that it seemed to validate Ortega’s charge that the anti-Sandinistas were, from the outset, pawns of the U.S. government. For any foreign organization or polit ical movement to be perceived as an American puppet is fatal, particularly in the Third World. NED’s involvement in Nicaragua probably hindered rather than helped the effort to oust Ortega.

Although NED’s defenders frequently boast that the organization helped topple the communist dictators in Eastern Europe, the role of NED in that momentous development was marginal at best and in some cases actually counter productive. Poland is offered as the premier example of the endowment’s effectiveness. Yet Solidarity had begun to challenge communism in 1980, three years before NED’s creation. The decisive events leading to Poland’s liberation a decade later also had little to do with modest NED subsidies. Only when Moscow decided that it would no longer prop up its Leninist puppets throughout Eastern Europe did it prove possible for Polish anti-communist factions to dislodge the communist regime in Warsaw. NED was, at most, a bit player in the process.

There are some critics who question whether NED’s involvement in Poland was beneficial at all. Howard Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus, a grassroots lobbying organization, is one such skeptic.

While I am delighted that communism has fallen in Poland, that [former communist strongman Wojceich] Jaruzelski is no longer running Poland, I am not persuaded that the opposition factions favored by the AFL-CIO were the ones that reflected the republican aspirations of the Polish people.(20)

Criticism of NED’s involvement in Romania is even stronger. The AFL-CIO’s FTUI Romanian representatives selected FRATIA, a trade union confederation, as their player in the Romanian democratic process. According to leaders of other independent trade unions, FTUI then proceeded to actively undermine all unions not associated with FRATIA.

Uneven distribution of aid money, an inevitable result of favoritism, also disturbs the financial equilibrium in the opposition community. Echoing critics of NED’s Nicaraguan involvement, opponents of the endowment’s activities in Eastern Europe believe that NED’s sowing of dissention has harmed democracy far more than its financial support has promoted it. Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has written about the problems that ensue when private foreign organizations favor one dissident group over another:

When the NED, as it does, singles out this or that Emigre magazine or Moscow newspaper to underwrite, it corrupts both the market and the independence of the press; as the prices of paper and printing get pumped up, the unofficial publications find themselves competing for foreign grants, rather than Soviet readers, to survive.(21)

Administrative Problems

In addition to the political problems, a number of administrative problems are inherent in NED’s quasi-private status. One of those problems is oversight. Since NED is not a government entity, it is not subject to the same oversight as an official agency. It does, however, have to submit to audits on occasion, always with scathing results. In March 1991, for instance, both the General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of USIA audited the endowment and revealed a number of major problems.(22) Among the most serious charges were that NED used inadequate procedures for evaluating the effectiveness of its programs, made questionable decisions on awarding grants, and mismanaged federal funds. Many of those irregularities had also been cited in previous audits, but few discernible improvements had been made.

The GAO and OIG specifically criticized NED’s judgment in its selection of programs. In addition to renewing grants to organizations that had previously failed to demonstrate success, NED approved funding for projects for which no feasibility studies or other preliminary work had been completed and therefore funded projects that were inviable from the start. It further erred in awarding grants that duplicated support from other agencies, primarily AID and USIA. Since NED’s very raison d’àtre is its supposed ability to operate where official agencies cannot, the fact that it supported the same programs as AID and USIA should be a clear indication that the endowment is superfluous. NED’s failure to coordinate with other agencies and the consequent duplication of awards to groups that were already receiving significant U.S. support is yet another example of its sloppy administration.

The audits have also identified serious financial mismanagement, which has occurred at all levels. Some problems apparently have been innocent misunderstandings; others seemed to stem from a cavalier attitude toward book keeping; still others have been clear, willful misuse of federal funds. Although NED has been criticized for having financial controls that are too lenient, both internally and for its grantees, even the controls that are in place are routinely violated.

The GAO found that NED subrecipients do not comply with NED’s minimal financial controls. In one case, a South African group received $18,000 to sponsor an international conference but used the money to finance office renovations instead. On other occasions, NED grants were used for personal expenses, including credit card payments and loans. The four core grantees have violated a number of the financial controls as well. All four core recipients, particu larly the International Republican Institute, have charged unallowable travel, per diem, and entertainment costs, including first-class airfare and alcoholic beverages.

There has also been financial mismanagement within the endowment. NED has failed to take appropriate action when abuses at the recipient levels have been apparent. For example, NED was aware that FTUI was not signing the required grant agreements with foreign subgrantees, yet the endowment continued to fund those grants. In another instance, NED’s own internal audit identified the accounts of one grant recipient, China Perspective, as “unauditable” and in violation of the terms of the grant. Yet the endowment continued to authorize the publication’s funding, totaling $482,000, for another two years. Financial mismanagement is thus clearly a problem at the level of the endowment itself just as it is at the recipient levels.

Conclusion

NED’s labyrinthine organizational structure is an administrative and financial disaster. Its “democracy promoting” activities, which have ranged from extraneous to perplexing to counterproductive, are similarly unimpressive. Even if one ignores such indications that NED is a failure, and believes that NED has succeeding in using its unique public-private status to support democracy abroad, the endowment is a relic of the Cold War, and funding for the endowment should be discontinued for that reason alone.

At one time it seemed that Congress realized that. As Senator Bumpers pointed out in his recent congressional testimony, NED was first funded in 1984, at the height of the Cold War, with $18 million. By 1986, Gorbachev’s first year in power, funding was cut to $17.2 million, and by the next year of Gorbachev’s rule it seemed safe to cut NED’s funding to $15 million. Those cutbacks occurred during a time of strong national economic growth when fiscal concerns were given low priority. Inexplicably though, the appropriation jumped dramatically once the Soviet Union dissolved: in 1991 NED’s budget grew from $17 million to $25 million and in 1992 it increased to $27.5 million; in 1993 it grew to $30 million. For FY94 NED appears likely to get $35 million.(23) Moreover, those tremendous increases have come during a recession, and during a call for national sacrifice, when budget constraints should be of utmost impor tance. There is simply no justification for maintaining, much less increasing, NED’s funding.

It is true, as Heritage Foundation analyst James A. Phillips stressed in his defense of NED as “an important weapon in the war of ideas,” that communist dictatorships remain in control of China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam. It is also true that some of the former Soviet republics are led by communists who have cynically assumed the mantle of nationalism.(24) But that argument ignores the fact that in virtually all of those countries, communism is losing, not gaining, strength. Moreover, the remaining communist enclaves are not attempting to export their ideology in the aggressive Cold War style of the Soviet Union, nor do any appear to have the resources to do so. Quite simply, the democratic West has won the war of ideas against its communist adversaries.

NED was always an ineffectual weapon in that war of ideas. Even when funds were not lost, either to poor management or pork-barrel politics, the substantive activities that NED supported caused many more problems for American foreign policy than it solved. Indeed, paying for political tourism is almost an attractive alternative to funding European extremists or intervening in elections in Central America. Now that the Cold War is over, the slightest ghost of justification for NED has disappeared. Congress should recognize that and eliminate funding for the endowment.

Notes

(1) Congressional Record, 103rd Cong., 1st sess., July 28, 1993, p. S9637.

(2) Congressional Record, July 28, 1993, p. S9642.

(3) Martin Morse Wooster, “This Is No Way to Promote Democracy,” Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1991, p. A6.

(4) David Corn, “Beltway Bandits: Better Dead Than N.E.D.,” Nation, July 12, 1993, p. 56.

(5) Michael Massing, “Trotsky’s Orphans,” New Republic, June 22, 1987, p. 22.

(6) Congressional Record, July 28, 1993, p. S9635.

(7) Eleanor Kennelly, “Labor: After the Fall,” Insight, July 27, 1992, p. 8.

(8) Congressional Record, July 28, 1993, p. S9635.

(9) Mary McGrory, “Dollars for Democracy,” Washington Post, August 5, 1993, p. A2.

(10) Shirley Christian, “Group Is Channeling Funds to Parties Opposing Pinochet,” New York Times, January 15, 1988, p. A1.

(11) See, for example, Stephen Engelberg, “U.S. Grant to 2 Czech Parties Is Called Unfair Interference,” New York Times, June 10, 1990, p. A8.

(12) John Spicer Nichols, “Get the NED Out of Nicaragua,” Nation, February 26, 1990, p. 268.

(13) David Pallister and Andy Weir, “Britons Get Reagan `Slush Money,’” Financial Times, December 9, 1985.

(14) Robert S. Greensberger, “U.S. Group Aided Arias’ Costa Rica Foes,” Wall Street Journal, October 14, 1989, p. A11.

(15) Stanley Meisler, “Allocation of Funds in France Embarrassing,” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1986, p. 25

(16) Paul E. Kanjorski, “Group Cloaked in Secrecy Meddling in Foreign Affairs,” Atlanta Constitution, May 24, 1991, p. A17.

(17) Pallister and Weir.

(18) McGrory, p. A2.

(19) Nichols, p. 267.

(20) Kennelly, p. 8.

(21) Vladimir Bukovsky, “Drowning Democracy,” National Review, September 23, 1991, p. 32.

(22) For a full account of the NED’s history of financial mismanagement, see General Accounting Office, “Promoting Democracy: The National Endowment for Democracy’s Management of Grant Needs Improvement,” March 1991; and U.S. Information Agency, Office of the Inspector General, “Review of National Endowment for Democracy, Its Core Grantees and Selected Discretionary Grantees,” March 31, 1993.

(23) Congressional Record, July 28, 1993, p. S9634.

(24) James A. Phillips, “The National Endowment for Democra cy: An Important Weapon in the War of Ideas,” Heritage Foundation Executive Memorandum no. 360, July 8, 1993.

© 1993 The Cato Institute

NED, CIA, and the Orwellian Democracy Project

By Holly Sklar and Chip Berlet, Covert Action Number 39 (WInter 1991-92)

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was first funded in fiscal 1984, an appropriate year for an Orwellian agency making the world safe for hypocrisy. The quasi-private NED does publicly what the CIA has long done and continues to do secretly. Despite successive scandals, U.S. meddling in the internal affairs of other nations — including their “democratic” elections — has not only thrived, it has become respectable.

U.S. manipulation of foreign elections was standard operating procedure well before the CIA’s creation. In 1912, for example, the highly-decorated Marine Corps General Smedley Butler wrote his wife Ethel, “Today, Nicaragua has enjoyed a fine ‘free election’ with only one candidate being allowed to run… In order that this happy event might be pulled off without hitch and to the entire satisfaction of our State Department, we patrolled all the towns to prevent disorders…” In 1935, reporter John Spivak interviewed the then retired Butler, who became a vocal anti-interventionist after being approached to assist a now-forgotten domestic coup attempt against President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Butler spilled over with anger at the hypocrisy that had marked American interference in the internal affairs of other governments, behind a smokescreen of pious expressions of high-sounding purpose. ‘We supervised elections in Haiti,’ he said wryly, ‘and wherever we supervised them our candidate always won.’ “ ^ Butler would recognize the old policy of interference behind the new NED smoke screen.

Contemporary covert and overt operatives, working for or with the U.S. presidency, also intervene in the American political process — from manipulating media and public opinion to working to unseat administration critics in Congress. Constitutional checks and balances are voided as Congress exercises its oversight responsibility largely by overlooking wrongdoing, and the courts defer to Congress and the Executive in “national security” matters.

Contents [hide] 1 Fronts and More Fronts 2 “Project Democracy” 3 Bipartisan Support, Partisan Intervention 4 NED’s Core Four 5 ”Victory” In Nicaragua 6 Good Cop-Bad Cop 7 Old Nazis and New European Democracies 8 Democracy Doublethink 9 Ministries of Truth: Psywar at Home 10 NOTES

Fronts and More Fronts

The covert side of foreign intervention was officially institutionalized in June 1948, when President Truman signed a National Security Directive (NSD 10/2). “The overt foreign activities of the U.S. Government must be supplemented by covert operations,” it read, “(including) any covert activities related to: propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements,’ guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”

The Orwellian democracy machine grew quickly in the warm shadow of the Cold War. The ClA provided a home for the “Gehlen Network” of former German Nazi spies with experience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Under the guise of “liberationism,” CIA fronts such as the Crusade for Freedom promoted these emigre fascist leaders and collaborators to the U.S. public as democratic freedom fighters in the war against communism ^ Some became leaders in the Republican Party’s Ethnic Heritage Groups Council. ^ Others assisted Radio Free Europe and the various propaganda instruments known collectively as the “mighty Wurlitzer” by its proud conductors. The CIA also influenced U.S. and foreign labor organizations through such bodies as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and AFL-CIO affiliates.

With the help of front groups espousing anti-communism and democracy, the U.S. interfered in elections and destabilized governments in many countries, among them Italy, Greece, Iran, the Philippines, Guatemala, Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, Portugal, Jamaica, and EI Salvador. As then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger said on June 27, 1970, speaking in support of secret efforts to block Salvador Allende’s election in Chile, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” ^

In 1967, there was a public outcry when Ramparts magazine exposed secret CIA funding of the National Student Association’s international activities. Follow-up stories and congressional hearings exposed a network of ostensibly private labor, student, cultural media and other organizations that were funded by the CIA, using conduit foundations, under its Psychological; Political and Paramilitary Division.

Faced with mounting criticism, President Johnson appointed the three-member Katzenbach Commission which included CIA Director Richard Helms. This commission laid the groundwork for a new funding technique. It recommended that “The government should promptly develop and establish a public-private mechanism to provide public funds openly for overseas activities of organizations which are adjudged deserving, in the national interest, of public support.” ^ A bill was introduced in Congress in 1967 to create an “Institute of International Affairs,” but it was not approved, and the matter of CIA funding of front groups faded from public scrutiny until Watergate.

The CIA quietly continued covert operations involving front groups and more scandals erupted in the Nixon administration. The congressional Church (Senate) and Pike (House) committees investigated CIA and FBI operations in Watergate’s wake and exposed a wide variety of illicit and antidemocratic programs. Domestic operations included CIA propaganda activities and Operation CHAOS, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO. Foreign operations ranged from CIA programs to manipulate elections and overthrow governments, to plots to assassinate foreign leaders. Amid calls for placing limitations on the CIA or even abolishing it, George Bush was appointed CIA director, serving from 1976 to 1977. His mandate was to mollify his former colleagues in Congress while actually limiting CIA reform.

“Project Democracy”

In the 1980s, with former CIA Director Bush in the vice presidency, the Reagan administration legalized through Executive Order many of the covert activities previously condemned as illegal immoral and antidemocratic. The Katzenbach recommendation of a “public-private mechanism” finally bore fruit in the National Endowment for Democracy.

NED was the public arm of the Reagan administration’s “Project Democracy,” an overt-covert intervention and “public diplomacy” operation coordinated by the National Security Council (NSC). In a speech to the British Parliament on June 8, 1982, President Reagan announced that the U.S. would launch Project Democracy to “foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way.”

According to a secret White House memo setting the agenda for a Cabinet-level planning meeting on Project Democracy, officials decided in August, “We need to examine how law and Executive Order can be made more liberal to permit covert action on a broader scale, as well as what we can do through substantially increased overt political action.” ^

On January 14, 1983, Reagan signed NSDD 77, a secret National Security Decision Directive instructing the NSC to coordinate interagency efforts for Project Democracy. “Public diplomacy,” it stated, “is comprised of those actions of the U.S. Government designed to generate support for our national security objectives.” ^

When legislation was introduced to authorize “Project Democracy” in February 1983, administration officials promised Congress that the CIA would not be involved. A separate bill authorizing funding for NED was introduced in April. The public NED record generally traces its origins to a government funded feasibility study by the bipartisan American Political Foundation (APF) headed by Allen Weinstein. He served as NED’s first acting president until February 1984 and is currently president of the Center for Democracy, an NED grantee. ^

“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” Weinstein told Washington Post foreign editor David Ignatius.” ^ Calling NED “the sugar daddy of overt operations,” Ignatius writes enthusiastically of the “network of overt operatives who during the last ten years have quietly been changing the rules of international politics… doing in public what the CIA used to do in private.”

Actually; CIA footprints are all over Project Democracy, from NED to the Iran-Contra operations. The CIA-NED connection is personified by Walter Raymond Jr. who supervised NED under Reagan. A propaganda expert and senior officer in the CIA Directorate of Operations, Raymond was first detailed by the CIA to the NSC in 1982 as Senior Director of Intelligence Programs. He resigned from the CIA in April 1983 in order to become a special assistant to the President as director of International Communications and Public Diplomacy at the NSC. In mid-I987, he became deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), where he now heads the Eastern European Initiatives Office.

John Richardson, the current and past (1984-88) chair of the NED board of directors, is an old hand in the CIA’s front group network. He was president of the CIA-sponsored Radio Free Europe from 1961 to 1968. From 1963 to 1984, he was variously president and director of Freedom House, a conservative/neoconservative research, publishing. networking, and selective human rights organization. Freedom House is now heavily endowed with NED grants. Richardson later became counselor of the congressionally-funded U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) which is governed by a presidentially-appointed board of directors dominated by past and present government officials, including Defense and CIA, and members of right-wing organizations such as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. ^

(more HERE)

USAID in Bolivia and Venezuela: The Silent Subversion

[Government institutions tasked with overthrowing foreign governments, both friend and foe, for the sake of American domination and exploitation.  This is the war machine engaged in waging war against every member of the human race, for the sake of American corporate profit--capitalist fascism at its finest.  The American Reich shows no hint of ever slowing down, unless it just collapses from the weight of its own gluttony.]

USAID in Bolivia and Venezuela: The Silent Subversion

By EVA GOLINGER, September 12th 2007

The United States government has almost perfected a method of intervention that is able to penetrate and infiltrate all sectors of civil society in a country which it deems to be of economic and strategic interest. In the case of Venezuela, this strategy began to take form in 2002. Now it is also being applied to Bolivia.The United States government has almost perfected a method of intervention that is able to penetrate and infiltrate all sectors of civil society in a country which it deems to be of economic and strategic interest. In the case of Venezuela, this strategy began to take form in 2002, with the increase in financing of sectors of the opposition via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the opening of an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) of USAID in Caracas.

These efforts were able to achieve the consolidation of an opposition movement during those moments, which, despite the failure of the coup d’etat, was able to cause severe damage to the oil industry and the national economy via economic sabotage and a “stoppage” by managers and business owners. Following the division in the opposition, the strategy reoriented its principal focus towards poor communities, the ‘Chavista’ sectors, media and the necessities in the interior of the country. The US embassy in Caracas opened up a series of “satellite consulates” (American Corners) in five states across the country – without the authorisation of the Ministry of Foreign Relations – it has an official presence in regions seen as important to the energy vision of Washington. These states, Anzoátegui, Bolívar, Lara, Monagas, and Nueva Esparta (Margarita) are rich in oil, minerals and other natural resources, which the US is seeking to control. These US headquarters found spaces inside lawyers associations and municipal councils controlled by the opposition, and continue to function as centres of propaganda, conspiring against the Bolivarian revolution.

The work of USAID and its OTI in Venezuela has led to a deepening of the counterrevolutionary subversion in the country. Up until June 2007, more than 360 “scholarships” have been granted to social organisations, political parties, communities and political projects in Venezuela through Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), a company contracted by USAID, which opened an office in the El Rosal sector of Caracas in June 2002. From the centre of Caracas, the DAI/USAID has given more than US$11,575,509 to these 360 groups and projects in Venezuela, under the program “Venezuela: Initiatives for the Construction of Trust” (VICC). The majority of the programs funded by DAI focus (according to their materials) on “political dialogue, public debate, citizen’s participation and the training and capacitation of democratic leaders”. Participating and funded organisations include Súmate, Primero Justicia (Justice First), Un Nuevo Tiempo (a New Time), la Alcaldía de Chacao (Mayoralty of Chacao), Liderazgo y Visión (Leadership and Vision), Los del Medio (Those from the Middle), Convive, Transparencia Internacional (International Transparency), Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (Media and Society Institute), Queremos Elegir (We Want to Chose), la Universidad Metropolitana (Metropolitan University), and other groups generally tied to the opposition sector.

USAID-OTI also funded opposition political parties, such as Primero Justicia (Justice First), Un Nuevo Tiempo (A New Time), Acción Democrática (Democratic Action), COPEI, MAS (Movement Towards Socialism), amongst others, through its international arms of US parties: the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI). Since 2002, more than seven million dollars have been invested as “technical assistance” to this opposition parties in Venezuela by USAID, together with IRI and NDI.

The so-called “defenders of human rights” in Venezuela, and NGOs (non-government organisations), receive a large part of their funding through Freedom House, another group contracted by USAID-OTI in Venezuela. Freedom House has sponsored events such as “The threats to freedom of expression in the 21st century” with the participation of Marcel Granier, president of the coup-plotting television station RCTV, together with Karen Hughes, the Sub secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (the propaganda office of the State Department that supervises Voice of America and other propagandistic media coming from Washington) and the US Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL, Republican- Florida)

Freedom House also funds US institutions, such as the International Centre for Non-violent Conflict (ICNVC) that gives courses in Gene Sharp’s techniques of “resistance”, and which has advised youth and students movements in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Belorussia and Venezuela. Its president during 2003-2005 was James Woolsey, ex-Director of the CIA and its current president, Peter Ackerman, is a multimillionaire banker who has sponsored “regime changes” in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia through the Albert Einstein Institute and its ICNVC. The son of Ackerman participated in the massacre of the Iraqi people in Fallujah.

The last company to be contracted by USAID in Venezuela was the Foundation of Pan-American Development (PADF), whose mission is to “support civil society”. The PADF has granted $937,079 to fourteen Venezuelan NGOs since the end of 2006. For now, the names of these groups are unknown.

The last public reports of USAID point out that in August 2007, they organised a conference with 50 mayors from all the country to cover the issue of “decentralisation” and the “popular networks”. This issue seems very much like the project that Leopoldo Lopez, opposition mayor of Chacao, is currently promoting. The USAID program in Venezuela promises to continue in its efforts to “strengthen civil society and political parties”, “promote decentralisation and municipal councils” and “train human rights defenders”. The US Congress has already approved $3.6 million for this office in Venezuela for the year 2007-8, which indicated that this subversion will continue increasing and threatening the Bolivarian revolution.

Bolivia

But Venezuela is not the only target of US subversion and intervention via USAID and its millions of dollars poured into funding opposition movements. In March 2004, USAID opened up another Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in Bolivia, to supposedly help “reduce tensions in zones of social conflict and help the country with preparations for electoral events”. In this case, USAID contracted the US company Casals & Associates, Inc. (C&A) to manage the more than $13.3 million that they had already granted to 379 organisations, political parties and projects in Bolivia. C&A plays the role in Bolivia which the DAI does in Venezuela, and just like the DAI, C&A is a company with large contracts with the Defence Department, the US Army, US Navy, the Energy Department, Broadcasting Board of Governance, the Voice of America, the Office for Transmissions (of propaganda) to Cuba, the Interior Security Department, the State Department and many more. Up until today, C&A has worked on executing interventionist programs for the different Washington agencies, in more than 40 countries across the world, including Albania, Armenia, Bolivia, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Madagascar, Malawi, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Paraguay.

In Bolivia, USAID-OTI has focussed its efforts on combating and influencing the Constituent Assembly and the separatism of the regions rich in natural resources, such as Santa Cruz and Cochabamba. The majority of the $13.3 million has been given to organisations and programs working towards “reinforcing regional governments”, with the intention of weakening the national government of Evo Morales; “creating links between indigenous groups and democratic structures”, “offering economic opportunities and communitarian development”; “civic education for emergent leaders”; and “the spreading of information”. The noble themes of these programs indicate that Washington is seeking to suffocate the national power of Evo Morales in Bolivia, penetrate and infiltrate the indigenous communities, which constitute the majority of the country, promote the capitalist model, and have influence over the mass media, promoting pro-US, pro-capitalist and anti-socialist propaganda.

The USAID-OTI program in Bolivia is openly supporting the autonomy of certain regions, such as Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija, and therefore promoting separatism and the destabilisation of the country and the government of Evo Morales. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), another one of Washington’s financial organs, which promotes subversion and intervention in more than 70 countries across the world, including Venezuela, is also funding groups in regions such as Santa Cruz, which fight for separatism. The current US ambassador in Bolivia, Philip Goldberg, is an expert in issues of separatism, having been the head of the US mission in ex-Yugoslavia that was divided into two countries: Bosnia and Serbia, with US “help”.

The Evo Morales government has already publicly denounced this subversion via USAID in Bolivia, giving notice to the US government that it must obey the laws of the country or chose to leave. “The door is open”, declared the Bolivian government spokesperson recently, making reference to US intervention in his country.

Nevertheless, Washington will not go so easily. This network of intervention and subversion will not be so easily eradicated. President Chavez has proposed in his constitutional reform, a change to article 67 which included the prohibition of funding of groups with political aims and political campaigns by public or private foreign entities. It is essential to define the concept of “political aims”, because in many cases, the NGOs and groups that work for human rights would attempt to evade being classified as organisations with “political” motives. But no one can deny that human rights is fundamentally a political issue, and it is the terrain, more than any other, where today Washington’s subversion hides, using NGOs as a cover.

What is clear is the urgent necessity of developing strategies to impede and shake this subversion in Venezuela, Bolivia and all our sister countries, today in the sights of the empire, and which are fighting to express their own will and sovereignty.

Translated by Federico Fuentes for Bolivia Rising

Qatar Safe from Obama’s Wrecking Crews, As Long As Al Jazeera Remains His “Pied Piper”

Obama: ‘No big move toward democracy in Qatar’

By David Jackson, USA TODAY

President Obama and the emir of Qatar at the White House on Thursday.

By Pool, Getty Images

During the day Thursday, President Obama met with the emir of Qatar, praising his help in Libya and his leadership “when it comes to democracy in the Middle East.”

That night, Obama provided political donors in Chicago with a somewhat different view of the emir and Qatar.

“Pretty influential guy,” Obama said of Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, noting that he basically owns the Al Jazeera television network. “He is a big booster, big promoter of democracy all throughout the Middle East. Reform, reform, reform — you’re seeing it on Al Jazeera.”

But Obama: “Now, he himself is not reforming significantly. There’s no big move towards democracy in Qatar. But you know part of the reason is that the per capita income of Qatar is $145,000 a year. That will dampen a lot of conflict.”

Having banished the press pool from a q-and-a session with the donors, Obama did not realize he was still speaking on an open mike. Mark Knoller of CBS News recorded his comments.

Serbian Testimony of International Terrorism Pushed By West

“Serbian people have to say that it is enough of terror by the international community in this country. We no longer accept any blackmailing and threats and we especially do not accept to be deprived of authorities given to us by the Dayton Treaty’.”

[Here we have testimony of the true nature of NATO "Humanitarian Intervention," twenty years after the fact.  The Intervention in Serbia, under the pretense of "preventing the slaughter" of civilians in civil war, was a cynical, hypocritical geopolitical move by the West to capitalize on the suffering of the people of the former Yugoslavia.  The intensive high-altitude bombing of Yugoslavian facilities and the Yugoslav Army, intended to destroy the former Soviet ally, with very few NATO casualties gave Bill Clinton's war a sanitized feel, killing thousands, while keeping our hands apparently clean.  This fit the new formula devised to adapt the American military to US plans for global interventionism, as long as it is not Americans who are dying, anything goes.  In the end, in the name of international justice, American state terrorism is instituted in place of Constitutional law, so that each state which is saved from itself becomes just another satellite faux-republic---and the world calls the result "Democracy."]

Dodik: We shall stop terror by international community

Komentara: 0

Milorad Dodik, President of the Republic of Srpska is very satisfied with results of voting at the RS National Assembly the day before yesterday. The deputies adopted by vast majority of votes Decision on referendum in which voters are to reply to the referendum question: ‘Do you support laws enforced by the BiH High Representative, especially those concerning the Court and Prosecution of BiH and their unconstitutional verification at the BiH Parliament?’

‘I have no doubt that the citizens of the Republic of Srpska, too shall go to the
referendum in vast majority and vote’, Dodik said for the ‘Blic’.

What, according to your opinion, are effects of such decision by the RS National Assembly?
‘Above all this is the strongest message to the international community that elected representatives of the Serbian nation do not accept any longer anti-constitutional and anti-Dayton Treaty acting by the High Representative. Decisions made by those representatives were mainly ungrounded. Bosnia/Herzegovina is not exercising its power either since certain important issues could not be decided about because of interference by the OHR. We have been pointing out for years that such damaging policy must stop but found no understanding at the Office of the High Representative. I believe that the voting at the National Assembly of the Republic of Srpska is a strong message to them, too about unity of the Serbian nation but also about their unconstitutional acting until so far’.

If the citizens vote positively about the referendum question, what next steps are you going to take?
‘We are not interested what institutions of BiH are going to say about the referendum and its outcome as some experts claim. After the referendum we shall request that the National Assembly is in session again, that it adopts new laws which shall cancel all anti-Dayton and anti-constitutional laws enforced by high representatives. Serbian people have to say that it is enough of terror by the international community in this country. We no longer accept any blackmailing and threats and we especially do not accept to be deprived of authorities given to us by the Dayton Treaty’.

What if the High Representative places himself again above the RS institutions and for example, cancels result of voting in the referendum?
‘I do not expect the OHR to do so, although anything is possible in this country. The High Representative has already ‘broken teeth’ on unconstitutional decision in the Bosnia/Herzegovina Federation when he was tricked by provocations of one side, so I do not believe that he has the courage to make decisions again as per dictation of that side. Everything going on in Sarajevo is a part of identical scenario which should make the RS weaker so that it is an entity without authority and its institutions. We shall not allow that happen. By this referendum we do not set the question of the BiH status, we do not seek secession. We seek equality and a position guaranteed to us by the Dayton Treaty’.

Tajik Forces Kill Militant Agitator Mullah Abdullo and Ten Supporters

In a special operation killed Mullah Abdullah

Dushanbe. April 15. Asia-Plus »- | In the east, Tajikistan in a special operation of the Tajik security services was killed Abdullah Rakhimov, better known as Mullah Abdullah, and 10 of its supporters. Reported by the Tajik service “Ozodi” referring to the press center of Ministry of Internal Affairs of Tajikistan.

According to the press center, the details of the raid, which began April 14 in the village Samsolik Nurabad district, will be shown on the evening of the Tajik Central Television.

Recall that in the special operation of Tajik law enforcement agencies were involved heavy armored vehicles and aircraft.

Today, as it became known that in a special operation killed at least two members of the Interior Ministry and intelligence agencies in Tajikistan.

Mullah Abdullah accused of a September 19, 2010 armed attack on a convoy of the Ministry of Defence of Tajikistan. As a result of grenade attack in the gorge Kamarob Rasht district killed 28 officers and soldiers of the Tajik army, more than 10 were injured.

According to official sources, the attack also involved Alovuddin Davlatov, known as Ali Bedaki and his supporters who were killed in Rasht January 4, 2011.

Obamanomics – Waging War On American Workers

Obamanomics – Waging War
On American Workers
By Stephen Lendman
4-15-11

 

Since taking office, Obama shamelessly betrayed his constituents by:   – ignoring popular needs during America’s greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression;   – giving Wall Street crooks trillions of taxpayer dollars;   – spending another $1.5 trillion annually on militarism, imperial wars, and related policies at a time America has no enemies;   – waging war on organized labor and public education, as well as civil and human rights; and   – claiming “tough choices” demand class warfare through neoliberal austerity for working Americans, mainly middle and lower income ones least able to afford it.   On April 13, he announced his latest plan through $4 trillion in largely social spending budget cuts over the next 12 years. More on them below.   The same day, New York Times writers Mark Landler and Michael Shear headlined, “Obama’s Debt Plan Sets Stage for Long Battle Over Spending,” saying:   Obama’s Wednesday George Washington University speech “propos(ed) a mix of long-term spending cuts, tax increases, and changes to social welfare programs,” omitting that they harm working Americans most.   A Times editorial headlined, “President Obama, Reinvigorated,” saying:   “The man America elected president has re-emerged.” His budget speech “was a reasonable basis for a conversation and is far better than its most prominent competitors. That is because it is grounded in themes of generosity and responsibility….(I)t was a relief to see Mr. Obama standing up for the values that got him to the table.”   These aren’t surprising comments from a broadsheet long associated with wealth and power interests, now pretending hammering working Americans is fair and just.   A supportive Washington Post editorial headlined, “President Obama’s deficit plan: Benefits and drawbacks,” saying:   Obama “made an important and welcome contribution to the debate over deficit reduction Wednesday…(S)orely needed presidential engagement on the nation’s fiscal crisis has arrived at last.”   A Wall Street Journal editorial, however, called Obama “The Presidential Divider,” saying:   His speech was “toxic,” “dishonest,” (and) even worse (for) deficits and debt” by not matching Rep. Ryan’s (R. WI) slash and burn plan even more draconian that his own – “in the midst of a fiscal crisis” both parties refuse to address responsibly, nor do major media reports, op-eds, and editorials explain it.   In fact, Obama largely embraces plans proposed by Republicans and his own deficit cutting commission, offering a different mix for the same purpose – protecting America’s super-rich while hammering working Americans through “shared sacrifice.”   In other words, middle and low income households “sacrifice” to let wealthy ones “share,” his agenda since day one in office.   For example, his proposed tax increase plan is a sham, knowing Republicans won’t agree. Moreover, since taking office, he broke every major campaign pledge, and twice, since December alone, capitulated to Republicans on taxes and spending:   – last December, with Democrats controlling both Houses, by extending Bush’s tax cuts to the rich after promising to end them; and   – in April, agreeing to $38 billion in largely vital social services cuts after promising to preserve them, rationalized by arguing for “a willingness to give on both sides.”   Representing wealth and power, his promises are empty. His April 8 budget deal includes significant social spending cuts including:   – $3.5 billion from Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funding;   – $2.2 billion from nonprofit health insurance cooperatives;   – $600 million from community healthcare centers;   – $1 billion from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other disease prevention programs;   – $1.6 billion from EPA’s clean/safe drinking water and other projects;   – $950 million from community development grants;   – $504 million from nutrition aid for poor Women, Infants, and Children (WIC);   – $500 million from education programs;   – $390 million from home heating subsidies to the poor, as well as $2.5 billion for the Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) announced in February;   – $350 million from labor programs, including grants for community service jobs for seniors;   – other social service cuts; – $786 million from FEMA first-responder funding;   – $407 million from energy efficiency and renewable energy programs;   – $260 million from National Institutes of Health (NIH) medical research;   – $127 million from the National Park Service; and   – billions less for public infrastructure and transportation spending, while increasing war appropriations by multiples more, including for conquering and controlling Libya.   Moreover, Obama agreed to more draconian FY 2012 cuts and corporate tax breaks as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling before its limit is reached in mid-May. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press April 10, senior White House advisor David Plouffe said he’d consider new austerity measures to raise the debt ceiling and reduce the deficit – an oxymoronic compromise, especially with unlimited defense spending and generous corporate handouts instead of major reductions.   Obama Proposes Draconian Cuts on Working Americans   According to White House.gov, Obama’s plan over 12 years includes:   – $4 trillion overall;   – $770 billion from education, environmental, transportation, and other infrastructure cuts, as well as lower wages and benefits for federal workers when they need more, not less;   – $480 billion from Medicare and Medicaid, besides another $1 trillion from Obamacare;   – $360 billion from mandated domestic programs, including food stamps, home heating assistance, income for the poor and disabled, federal pension insurance, and farm subsidies;   – $400 billion from military-related spending from unneeded weapons, as well as healthcare and other benefits for active service members and veterans – not priority items the Pentagon and war profiteers want to protect generous annual defense spending increases and supplemental add-ons, plus black-hole black budgets for intelligence and other nefarious purposes.   Like all his demagoguery, Obama hypocrically stressed we’re broke and have to make shared sacrifices, suppressing how he’s served wealth and power interests at the expense of working Americans during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.   The times demand stimulus, job creation, help for the working poor and unemployed, and much more, including:   – programs to prevent banks from foreclosing on homeowners they defrauded;   – slashing defense spending;   – ending imperial wars and occupations;   – using the funds for vital domestic programs;   – breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks; prosecuting their officials guilty of grand theft;   – reinvigorating public education; – strengthening Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as assuring universal healthcare;   – guaranteeing every qualified student affordable higher education;   – supporting organized labor;   – instituting tough regulations to end monopoly and oligopoly power, punish corporate theft, curb speculation, end subsidies, and assure they all pay their fair share in taxes;   – replacing today’s dysfunctional tax system with a progressive one, making the rich share the burden they now avoid; – making social justice issue one at a time none exists, Democrats as mean-spirited as Republicans; and   – instituting real government of, by and for the people, what’s never existed and doesn’t now under corrupted duopoly governance, ignoring people needs to serve Wall Street, war profiteers, and other corporate favorites.   The alternative assures greater militarism, social inequality and decay, growing poverty, eroding freedoms, police state harshness, and overall conditions too dire to imagine because public apathy let elected officials do nothing to change things.   Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.   http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

US Subversion Behind Every Arab Uprising and Colored Revolution–(and the whole world knows it)

“The recent ‘color revolutions’ in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan and the widespread suspicion that U.S. groups such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), Freedom House [led by former CIA head James Woolsley, of Project for New American Century fame] and the Open Society Institute [created in 1993 by investor George Soros] played a key behind-the-scenes role in fomenting these upheavals have clearly helped trigger the backlash.”[8]

U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings

By RON NIXON

WASHINGTON — Even as the United States poured billions of dollars into foreign military programs and anti-terrorism campaigns, a small core of American government-financed organizations were promoting democracy in authoritarian Arab states.

Andrea Bruce for The New York Times

Michael Simon, who worked on targeting for the Barack Obama presidential campaign of 2008, spoke last week to members of the Egyptian Democratic Academy in Cairo.

The money spent on these programs was minute compared with efforts led by the Pentagon. But as American officials and others look back at the uprisings of the Arab Spring, they are seeing that the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans in campaigning, organizing through new media tools and monitoring elections.

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

The work of these groups often provoked tensions between the United States and many Middle Eastern leaders, who frequently complained that their leadership was being undermined, according to the cables.

The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.

No one doubts that the Arab uprisings are home grown, rather than resulting from “foreign influence,” as alleged by some Middle Eastern leaders.

“We didn’t fund them to start protests, but we did help support their development of skills and networking,” said Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, a Washington-based advocacy and research group. “That training did play a role in what ultimately happened, but it was their revolution. We didn’t start it.”

Some Egyptian youth leaders attended a 2008 technology meeting in New York, where they were taught to use social networking and mobile technologies to promote democracy. Among those sponsoring the meeting were Facebook, Google, MTV, Columbia Law School and the State Department.

“We learned how to organize and build coalitions,” said Bashem Fathy, a founder of the youth movement that ultimately drove the Egyptian uprisings. Mr. Fathy, who attended training with Freedom House, said, “This certainly helped during the revolution.”

Ms. Qadhi, the Yemeni youth activist, attended American training sessions in Yemen.

“It helped me very much because I used to think that change only takes place by force and by weapons,” she said.

But now, she said, it is clear that results can be achieved with peaceful protests and other nonviolent means.

But some members of the activist groups complained in interviews that the United States was hypocritical for helping them at the same time that it was supporting the governments they sought to change.

“While we appreciated the training we received through the NGOs sponsored by the U.S. government, and it did help us in our struggles, we are also aware that the same government also trained the state security investigative service, which was responsible for the harassment and jailing of many of us,” said Mr. Fathy, the Egyptian activist.

Interviews with officials of the nongovernmental groups and a review of diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks show that the democracy programs were constant sources of tension between the United States and many Arab governments.

The cables, in particular, show how leaders in the Middle East and North Africa viewed these groups with deep suspicion, and tried to weaken them. Today the work of these groups is among the reasons that governments in turmoil claim that Western meddling was behind the uprisings, with some officials noting that leaders like Ms. Qadhi were trained and financed by the United States.

Diplomatic cables report how American officials frequently assured skeptical governments that the training was aimed at reform, not promoting revolutions.

Last year, for example, a few months before national elections in Bahrain, officials there barred a representative of the National Democratic Institute from entering the country.

In Bahrain, officials worried that the group’s political training “disproportionately benefited the opposition,” according to a January 2010 cable.

In Yemen, where the United States has been spending millions on an anti-terrorism program, officials complained that American efforts to promote democracy amounted to “interference in internal Yemeni affairs.”

But nowhere was the opposition to the American groups stronger than in Egypt.

Egypt, whose government receives $1.5 billion annually in military and economic aid from the United States, viewed efforts to promote political change with deep suspicion, even outrage.

Hosni Mubarak, then Egypt’s president, was “deeply skeptical of the U.S. role in democracy promotion,” said a diplomatic cable from the United States Embassy in Cairo dated Oct. 9, 2007.

At one time the United States financed political reform groups by channeling money through the Egyptian government.

But in 2005, under a Bush administration initiative, local groups were given direct grants, much to the chagrin of Egyptian officials.

• 1
• 2

NEXT PAGE »

Behavioral Modification and Coercive Mind Control Measures At Center of Medicare Debate

Healthful behavior is a key to health care system

By Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON— As the House takes up Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal that caps Medicare spending and turns it over to private insurers, some health care industry experts say it won’t work without a key piece: encouraging healthy behavior.

• By J. Scott Applewhite, APRep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has proposed capping Medicare and turning Medicaid over to the states.

“Behavior is central to health care,” said Bob Nease, chief scientist at Express Scripts, which manages health benefits for more than 50 million people. “The health care system’s been barking up the wrong tree.”

Costs will continue to rise, he said, as one-fourth of the population contends with health problems related to behavior: Overeating, lack of exercise, smoking and not managing chronic diseases, such as diabetes or Alzheimer’s, leading to expensive hospital visits.

This week, the House plans to vote on Ryan’s budget proposal today. He also proposed turning Medicaid over to the states and cutting it by $750 billion over the next 10 years.

On Wednesday, the House voted to repeal the Prevention and Public Health Fund, part of the new health care law, which provides $750 million to prevent tobacco use, heart disease, stroke and cancer. Proponents of the repeal argued that the money could be used for any health initiative without congressional approval, and, according to a support letter from Americans for Tax Reform and the Center for Fiscal Accountability, amounts to “little more than a taxpayer-funded exercise in social engineering.”

But health experts gathered for the Atlantic Health Care Forum last week in Washington, D.C., reacted less than glowingly to Ryan’s plan, including Chet Burrell, president of Blue Cross/Blue Shield, who said the gap between the money provided for Medicaid and Medicare and actual health costs would continue to grow without a push for behavioral change. In the District of Columbia region, health care costs have average increases of between 8% and 12% a year, he said.

“This is not cheap stuff, doing this kind of intervention,” said Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “But we all know just how ineffective this is without support.”

As an example, he said his agency conducted a study of 3,234 people who were pre-diabetic, or those with a family history of diabetes, live a sedentary lifestyle or are overweight. About one-third, at a cost of $2,780 each for a three-year period, went through a behavior-modification program with exercise training and life coaches. About 58% of those patients avoided full-blown diabetes. One in 4 Americans older than 20 were considered pre-diabetic in 2007.

“In the long run, it will be cheaper,” Collins said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it cost $299 billion to treat diabetes in 2010.

But in a second study that reduced complications in patients with diabetes by 90%, the behaviors encouraged by daily phone calls disappeared when the program ended, said Myrl Weinberg, president of the National Health Council, which represents people with chronic diseases and disabilities that lobbies for health care for all. “We believe that people absolutely want to change their behaviors,” she said. “They need that social support.”

It may be more important that employers provide wellness programs, such as gym memberships or smoking-cessation classes, than provide more money for health insurance, said Harvey Fineberg, president of theInstitute of Medicine. And that social support will be necessary for behaviors to change.

Nease said such campaigns have worked in the past, when health groups and the government encouraged seat-belt use for children, and created anti-smoking advertisements. At the same time, marketers began to “supersize” products.

“We made smoking socially unacceptable,” Nease said. “We have done the exact opposite with being overweight.”

Healthful behavior is a key to health care system

By Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY

Updated 9h 31m ago |

 23 |  0

Share

Reprints & Permissions

WASHINGTON— As the House takes up Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal that caps Medicare spending and turns it over to private insurers, some health care industry experts say it won’t work without a key piece: encouraging healthy behavior.

• 

  By J. Scott Applewhite, AP

  Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has proposed capping Medicare and turning Medicaid over to the states.

Enlarge

By J. Scott Applewhite, AP

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has proposed capping Medicare and turning Medicaid over to the states.

Ads by Google

Peer Reviewed ResearchResearch by David Wennberg, MD
shows health coaching saves $www.HealthDialog.com/RCT

Health Insurance – $30/moCompare Affordable Health Insurance
Right Now _ Plans from $30 / Month!HealthInsuranceWeb.com

Healthcare InformaticsA Leading Medical Informatics and
Healthcare Solutions Provider.www.medassurant.com

“Behavior is central to health care,” said Bob Nease, chief scientist at Express Scripts, which manages health benefits for more than 50 million people. “The health care system’s been barking up the wrong tree.”

Costs will continue to rise, he said, as one-fourth of the population contends with health problems related to behavior: Overeating, lack of exercise, smoking and not managing chronic diseases, such as diabetes or Alzheimer’s, leading to expensive hospital visits.

• STORY: Congress passes 2011 spending plan

• THE OVAL: White House launches tax calculator

This week, the House plans to vote on Ryan’s budget proposal today. He also proposed turning Medicaid over to the states and cutting it by $750 billion over the next 10 years.

On Wednesday, the House voted to repeal the Prevention and Public Health Fund, part of the new health care law, which provides $750 million to prevent tobacco use, heart disease, stroke and cancer. Proponents of the repeal argued that the money could be used for any health initiative without congressional approval, and, according to a support letter from Americans for Tax Reform and the Center for Fiscal Accountability, amounts to “little more than a taxpayer-funded exercise in social engineering.”

But health experts gathered for the Atlantic Health Care Forum last week in Washington, D.C., reacted less than glowingly to Ryan’s plan, including Chet Burrell, president of Blue Cross/Blue Shield, who said the gap between the money provided for Medicaid and Medicare and actual health costs would continue to grow without a push for behavioral change. In the District of Columbia region, health care costs have average increases of between 8% and 12% a year, he said.

“This is not cheap stuff, doing this kind of intervention,” said Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “But we all know just how ineffective this is without support.”

As an example, he said his agency conducted a study of 3,234 people who were pre-diabetic, or those with a family history of diabetes, live a sedentary lifestyle or are overweight. About one-third, at a cost of $2,780 each for a three-year period, went through a behavior-modification program with exercise training and life coaches. About 58% of those patients avoided full-blown diabetes. One in 4 Americans older than 20 were considered pre-diabetic in 2007.

“In the long run, it will be cheaper,” Collins said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it cost $299 billion to treat diabetes in 2010.

News from On Politics

Latest posts from USA TODAY On Politics blog

• 7:15 AM Senate Dems tout Arizona among gains for 2012
• 5:42 PM Congress sends landmark 2011 budget to Obama
• 4:06 PM GOP conservatives, Tea Party freshmen balk at budget
• 2:24 PM Ron Paul sells his Texas house through Facebook
• 12:33 PM Donald Trump: ‘Great relationship with the blacks’

Read all On Politics posts

But in a second study that reduced complications in patients with diabetes by 90%, the behaviors encouraged by daily phone calls disappeared when the program ended, said Myrl Weinberg, president of the National Health Council, which represents people with chronic diseases and disabilities that lobbies for health care for all. “We believe that people absolutely want to change their behaviors,” she said. “They need that social support.”

It may be more important that employers provide wellness programs, such as gym memberships or smoking-cessation classes, than provide more money for health insurance, said Harvey Fineberg, president of theInstitute of Medicine. And that social support will be necessary for behaviors to change.

Nease said such campaigns have worked in the past, when health groups and the government encouraged seat-belt use for children, and created anti-smoking advertisements. At the same time, marketers began to “supersize” products.

“We made smoking socially unacceptable,” Nease said. “We have done the exact opposite with being overweight.”

A Blast from the Past Seems to be Making New Rounds–(repost)

Shatter the Illusions- Patriots Must Reject the Two-Party System

16 09 2008

By: Peter Chamberlin

The illusion is a shield, a curtain to hide the preparations being made off-stage from the spectators, to seal the fate of mankind. The stage hands know that one day the curtain will be lifted on their epic tragedy, revealing all that is now hidden. Our task is to expose the men behind the curtain before they can stage their final act.

It is time for Americans to grow-up and learn to think for themselves. All our lives we have had it so easy, with the ever-growing “nanny state” keeping us safe from the big bad world, making our decisions for us. This is the year of change. Nothing will ever be the same after this next election.

This is not saying that either of these two candidates will make a difference on anything important, it is simply a hard fact that “the powers that be” have decided that November 4, 2008 is to be a pivotal day in human history. After that day, the tyrants’ hands will be loosed from all restraining considerations, no political force will be able to deter the internationalists’ conspiracy from completing the global empire. The American people must be made to face this fact now, before the day of reckoning arrives.

With the passing of that fateful day, the “dogs of war” will truly be unleashed upon the innocent unprepared world. After the great game is decided, about whether our Nation shall be dominated by Republicans or “Republicans-lite” the real “shock and awe” will get underway. The outcome of this election will not change one thing, for Obama, like Clinton before him, is just another Republican “wannabe.” (Ask yourself: If Bush Sr. would have bombed more people than did Clinton, had he been elected?) Whoever wins in November, we will experience the national pain of a renewed draft, to feed our new war with another of Israel’s mortal enemies (probably all of Israel’s enemies at once).

Both candidates have more or less pledged to continue the failed military policies of Bush and Cheney and pretend that they are not lost causes. Neither of them will shut-down these old wars or the new military aggressions that the “nut jobs” plan to launch before inauguration day. Surely we will be at war with Iran by then, since both candidates and their vices have sworn allegiance at the feet of Israel. The Israel/Neocon alliance surely maintains control, as they openly push us towards nuclear war against Iran.

We are absolutely in a war escalation scenario with Pakistan right now, after Bush’s recent declaration of Pakistan as a third war theater (just like Iran and Afghanistan). One thing is for certain, the Pakistani Army has decided it is no longer Bush’s “bitch,” as evidenced by today’s four-hour firefight with American ground troops and the repelling of two US helicopter gun ships earlier in the day. Other news reports, that Pakistan’s Tehrik Taliban Pakistan (TTP) are CIA tools, and that these American allies are the target of Pakistan’s ongoing military campaign, tell us that America has a rather large fight on its hands if it escalates the war there. Both of America’s presidential candidates have pledged to export the Afghan war into Pakistan.

Neither party could survive without generating mountains of false hope. The voting minority has bought-in to the great false hopes championed by both political parties, an improved economy and an end to the war of terrorism, The candidates both promise to do the impossible, to repair the crumbling capitalist system and to “win” the war by escalating the force to irresistible levels, just like Nixon did in Cambodia. The greed of capitalism is consuming the system itself, and exponentially compounding human misery. The nature of the weapons in our arsenal and the level of force required to kill all those who resist our aggression guarantees that the war will not be “won” by any military means. The false hope that America’s tiny military force can conquer the entire world without destroying it, when it could not conquer either Iraq or Afghanistan, is only believable to the smallest of minds.

The “hope” offered by corporate-sponsored political parties is an illusion created within the people’s minds that somehow the same multinational corporations who have been busily raping this country of its vital industrial and economic resources for decades would, for some inexplicable reason, field candidates who are hostile to their degenerative corporate agenda.

The creation of a promissory illusion is the basis for all the brainwashing techniques employed in creating a scientific dictatorship in this country and over the entire planet. Once we believe the false promise, we set ourselves up to accept all the ensuing lies that support it. Getting people to believe in the lies that you offer them is the key to controlling them. If you can persuade them to go along with you, because you can allegedly see things that they cannot, like a better tomorrow than today, then they will docilely support the obvious evil that you do to bring them that better tomorrow.

The electoral farce is the epitome of this illusion-creating process. The psychologists and political scientists play on loyalties and human trust in their creation of political candidates who will fill party loyalists with false hope. The roots of the two-party system run through generations of families, workplaces and affiliations, binding unsuspecting sheeple with imaginary bonds of loyalty to lying politicians. Candidates with identical goals are portrayed as opposites, in order to catch naive unsuspecting souls from both sides of the fence in the same net. The illusion that either candidate will honestly represent the people, or work to save America or the world from the predatory forces that corrupt and bind us all, is a dangerous psychological poison that blinds the people to the truth, the only basis of real hope.

The sheeple embrace the illusion on a daily basis, making it effective auto-suggestion as they reinforce it repetitively within their own minds, like some hypnotic mantra. They eagerly embrace the corporate media messages, in hopes of someday pleasing their elitist masters enough to gain a seat at their right hand, earning a place alongside the corporate criminals who are gang-raping this planet. All believers in the constructed corporate fantasy world want, more than anything, to become part of that imaginary world.

There is no place for true morality in this illusory world, only a bastardized form of limited morality, that is designed to appease the miniscule aroused consciences of those who suffer twinges of their own humanity as they strangle the human race. The false hope that the massive catastrophic use of military force will tame this enraged planet is rationalized as a pseudo-morality, behind which the soldiers of the apocalypse can hide themselves from the enraged face of God. The illusion that mankind is like some great beast that can be tamed or “domesticated” by the judicious application of both punishment and rewards, thereby changing human nature itself, is the violent false hope that fuels the delusional dream-state.

One massive military setback or a series of smaller military setbacks will shatter this immoral worship of America’s awesome military machine and cause the disillusioned sheeple to awaken and to shake-off the binding illusion. It is our task to hasten that day of awakening by attacking the illusion, exposing the false hope, making room in their little cloistered minds so that the flooding light of true hope can shine through.

If we cannot reach the dreamers who live in the fantasy world constructed by the scientific dictatorship to comfort the disillusioned with delusional fantasies and escapism, then our only option is to shatter the world of fantasy. They hide the truth from the people. The cold truth that presently there is no hope is masked by false hope, offering more of the same disguised as something new.

“We are the change that we have been waiting for.” The way to bring this corrupt dictatorship down is simply by holding-up a mirror before them.

“I shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.”

peter.chamberlin@yahoo.com

Next Comes Famine and Hell was following close behind him.

I looked and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hell was following close behind him.

Food prices: World Bank warns millions face poverty

Prices of foodstuffs such as wheat have been hit by unrest in North Africa

The World Bank has warned that rising food prices, driven partly by rising fuel costs, are pushing millions of people into extreme poverty.

World food prices are 36% above levels of a year ago, driven by problems in the Middle East and North Africa, and remain volatile, the bank said.

That has pushed 44 million people into poverty since last June.

A further 10% rise would push 10m more below the extreme poverty line of $1.25 (76p) a day, the bank said.

And it warned that a 30% cost hike in the price of staples could lead to 34 million more poor.

‘Protect the poor’

The World Bank estimates there are about 1.2 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day.

“More poor people are suffering and more people could become poor because of high and volatile food prices,” said World Bank president Robert Zoellick.

Food price changes Q1 2010 to Q1 2011
SOURCE: WORLD BANK DEVELOPMENT PROSPECTS GROUP
Maize	74%
Wheat	69%
Palm oil	55%
Soybeans	36%
Beef	30%
Rice	-2%

“We have to put food first and protect the poor and vulnerable, who spend most of their money on food.”

Mr Zoellick was speaking before IMF and World Bank spring meetings later this week.

The gatherings will be attended by finance ministers and central bankers including Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, and Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King.

Nutrition

The World Bank says prices of basic commodities remain close to their 2008 peak, with the prices of wheat, maize and soya all rocketing.

The only exception is rice, which has fallen slightly in price in the past year.

The bank suggests a number of measures to help alleviate the impact of high food prices on the poor.

They include encouraging food-producing countries to ease export controls, and to divert production away from biofuels production when food prices exceed certain limits..

Other recommendations include targeting social assistance and nutritional programmes to the poorest, better weather forecasting, more investments in agriculture, the adoption of new technologies – such as rice fortification to make it more nutritious, and efforts to address climate change.

It also said financial measures were needed to prevent poor countries being subject to food price volatility.

Obama Fears Stench of Being Linked To “Al-Qaeda” in Libya

US not returning to Libya frontline

Libyan civilians are seen at a rebel training camp in Benghazi during instruction on weapon use by former Libyan army officers who have defected. (AFP/Mahmud Hams)

BERLIN: The United States resisted pressure Thursday to return its warplanes to the frontline in Libya even as NATO vowed to keep bombing Libyan strongman Muammar al-Gaddafi’s forces and pressed him to quit.

As NATO foreign ministers meeting in Berlin struggled to heal a rift over the mission, rebels said Gaddafi’s forces fired missiles and tank shells on Libya’s besieged city of Misrata, killing 13 people and wounding 50.

The ministers issued a joint statement calling on Gaddafi to leave power, and they vowed to maintain “a high operational tempo” against regime targets and “exert this pressure as long as necessary.”

Despite the show of unity, the allies remained divided over French and British calls to intensify the pace of the bombing campaign and contribute more jets to the mission. Nearly a month of coalition strikes have failed to shift the balance of power so far.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe made a personal appeal to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Washington to resume major air raids in Libya, but he said his plea was rebuffed.

“I told her we needed them back, we would have liked them to return,” Juppe said, adding that Clinton said US planes would continue to fly on a case-by-case basis.

Washington pulled back around 50 combat planes from Libyan operations last week after handing over control of the mission to NATO, although since then they took part in some missions to take our Gaddafi’s air defence systems.

With nearly 100,000 US troops fighting a grinding war in Afghanistan, US President Barack Obama’s administration decided to move into a back-up role in Libya and leave the fighting to its European and Canadian allies.

“For our part, the US is committed to our shared mission. We will strongly support the coalition until our work is completed,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told her counterparts during a working lunch.

“We are also sharing the same goal which is to see the end of the Gaddafi regime in Libya,” she said earlier at a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Other NATO allies in Europe also brushed aside the Franco-British pressure to do more.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the alliance’s military commander in Europe, Admiral James Stavridis, told the ministers that more high-precision planes were needed to safely hit targets hidden in urban areas.

“To avoid civilian casualties we need very sophisticated equipment, so we need a few more precision fighter ground-attack aircraft for air-to-ground missions,” Rasmussen told a news conference after a working lunch.

“I’m confident that nations will step up to the plate,” Rasmussen added, but he admitted that he had not received any “specific pledges” although “I’ve heard indications that give me hope.”

Only six out of 28 nations are conducting air strikes, while France and Britain carry out half of them. The other half are conducted by Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Canada.

Danish Foreign Minister Lene Espersen piled pressure on allies to do more.

“Denmark is making a huge contribution at the moment and I think it is relevant to discuss burden sharing to put pressure on those countries that haven’t started to contribute yet,” she told reporters.

But Spanish Foreign Minister Trinidad Jimenez said her country would not step up its contribution.

The allies found common ground over Gaddafi’s future, as they backed a call made by the international contact group on Libya, which met in Qatar on Wednesday for Gaddafi to step down.

“We welcome the outcome of the first meeting of the contact group which took place yesterday in Doha and strongly endorse its call for Kadhafi to leave power,” they said in a statement.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, whose country shocked allies by refusing to back the UN resolution authorising the military operation, said NATO supports the aspirations of the Libyan people.

“We are united by the common goal, that we want a free and democratic Libya. The dictator Gaddafi, who started a civil war against his own people, must go,” Westerwelle said at the start of the two-day meeting.

-AFP/wk

IMF Demands Deadbeat USA Make First Down Payment–Just Another Third World Pauper State

IMF warns US to make a ‘down payment’ on deficit

The US should make a ‘down payment’ this year on tackling its budget deficit, the International Monetary Fund has warned, as it emerged that the world’s biggest bond investor is shorting the country’s bonds.

President Barack Obama, who is facing increasingly loud calls from Republican opponents to reduce the deficit, is expected to lay out measures on Wednesday. Photo: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

By Richard Blackden, US Business Editor

America will rack up a budget deficit of 10.8pc of gross domestic product this year, the largest of any of the developed economies, the IMF said in its latest Fiscal Monitor report.

In sharp contrast to Britain and much of the rest of Europe, the US has so far delayed any move to cut its budget deficit. Instead, through a combination of extending tax cuts and a second, $600bn round of quantitative easing, Congress and The White House have focused efforts on trying to quicken a recovery that failed to take off last year.

Bill Gross, who manages the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co (Pimco), said it was the failure of politicians in Washington DC to take the country’s deficit – estimated to reach about $1.5 trillion next financial year – seriously that has prompted him to start positioning the $236bn Total Return Fund to benefit from a drop in US government bond. In February, the fund sold its US governments bonds, or Treasuries.

“Without attacking entitlements – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – we are smelling $1 trillion deficits as far the nose can sniff,” Mr Gross said in the firm’s monthly outlook.

President Barack Obama, who is facing increasingly loud calls from Republican opponents to reduce the deficit, is expected to lay out measures on Wednesday.

“Market concerns about sustainability remain subdued in the US, but a further delay of action could prove costly,” the IMF said. The US should move “sooner rather than later”,” Carolo Cottarelli, the director of the IMF’s fiscal division said in Washington DC on Tuesday.

Zionists Fear American Free Ride Is Over

Israel worried by ‘weakening’ US

Peter Hartcher Tel Aviv

April 12, 2011

ISRAEL is troubled by the perception the US is an “empire of the past” and wants a resurgent America to lead a decisive confrontation with Iran, a top official has said.

“America is tested” at a pivotal moment in the history of the Middle East, said Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Dan Meridor, who is also the Minister for Intelligence and Nuclear Energy.

The Arab world was watching the US closely: “They look to America. If America does not seem to be able to contain the Iranian threat, will they go with Iran?”

Advertisement: Story continues below

“This is of world-order magnitude,” he told the Herald in an interview. Israel, which depends on the US as its security guarantor, itself appears to have new doubts about US judgment.

Mr Meridor said he was “surprised” at the Obama administration’s treatment of a longstanding US ally, Egypt’s former president: “Was it necessary to immediately empower the demonstrators against him and let [Hosni] Mubarak go? It’s seen by all the allies of America in the Arab world. I don’t know where the tide of history will go and I’m not sure they know.”

“The perception, that I hope is wrong, that America is weakening is not good, but I hope that America will find a way, and I believe they can, to restore itself as the leading country and not allow those impressions spread by the Iraq war that America is an empire of the past. All this is here on the table.

“America has started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is it a success story or not? What happens in Pakistan? … It may be the use of power showed the limits of power.”

Mr Meridor, a senior member of the Likud party of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the confrontation with Iran was “a decisive conflict”.

“The end of it is very important.

If the end of it is that Iran has nuclear power, it will have grave effects on world order, on balance of power, and on the Middle East.

“It may spell the end of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty regime, not only because Iran will be nuclear, but because other countries say they will need to be nuclear, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and others may do it.

“No more the responsible adults tell the kids what to do. When everybody has the bomb you can’t contain or control or interfere as America could do.”

The US President, Barack Obama, last week called on Israel to take the initiative to break the stalemate over peace talks.

Mr Meridor said the Netanyahu government was still debating its position internally.

His personal position, he said, was “we should be very active in trying to bring them to the table.

“Time is not neutral here. Neither the Palestinians nor we gain from the passage of time. I don’t think their situation gets better.”

The Arab uprisings would affect the internal Palestinian power struggle between the moderate Fatah party, which controls the West Bank, and the radical Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.

Because Fatah drew support from Egypt, it would become relatively weaker than Hamas, which is supported by Syria and Iran.

This would mean “the strengthening of the religious paradigm and the weakening of the national paradigm,” Mr Meridor said. And Israel did not benefit from delay either: “We can’t stay like this with undefined borders. We need to put an end to it if we can.”

Peter Hartcher travelled to Israel as a guest of the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce.