NEWS ALERTS

Destroying Democracy at Home and Abroad

by Chuck Kaufman
Co-Coordinator, Nicaragua Network and National Coordinator, Alliance for Global Justice. Talk in Rochester, NY, 2/29/08.

The United States spends hundreds of millions of US taxpayer’s dollars each year on so-called “democracy building” programs. Everyone is in favor of democracy, right? We’d like to see it spread to every country in the world.  I know I would.  So how do these programs work?  Let me lay out a couple of imaginary scenarios.
.
Imagine a US electoral race in which a marginal candidate suddenly receives major funding from a foreign source.  Let's say, Lyndon LaRouche is funded by North Korea....Or Pat Buchanan is funded by Sweden....Or Pat Paulson by Andorra. (Andorra is a 468 sq. mile constitutional democracy on the border between France and Spain.)  Anyway, suppose that funding were equal to $20 per US voter, which allowed a  saturation of the media with disinformation, misinformation, lies, threats and empty promises designed to sway votes for Mr. LaRouche, Mr. Buchanan, or Mr. Paulson. Suppose at the same time that foreign power was threatening violence and economic damage if the wrong candidate won.

Absurd, right?  Yet that is exactly what happened to Nicaragua in the 1990 election when the Sandinistas were defeated in supposedly free and fair elections.  The US government combined 13 minor parties and even dictated that they would nominate Violeta Chamorro, wife of a martyred newspaper publisher who was killed by Somoza’s National Guard.  Then the US spent more per voter on the election than two years earlier George Bush Sr. and Michael Dukakis spent COMBINED on their US presidential race.  In the US, it is illegal for foreign governments, groups, or individuals to contribute to a political campaign. But free and fair take on a whole new meaning if the US government wants to insure a particular outcome in another nation’s election.

Let's go even further with our imaginary scenario.  Suppose that this hypothetical foreign nation put together a coalition of US citizens and organizations that were hostile to the current president and political power structure and were calling for “regime change.”  Suppose it trained and funded their armed wing just across the border in Canada. Imagine that the armed wing launched a violent urban and rural terror campaign and that Andorra or Sweden, or North Korea used that as a pretext to invade the United States, kidnap the president, send him into exile, and install the violent opposition minority as the new government.  Imagine further that armed supporters of the new government started to round up, arrest, and kill the deposed President's supporters.

Needless to say, US citizens of all stripes and political beliefs would be out in the streets defending their government, their nation, and their right to self-determination.  The people who tried to perpetrate this atrocity would be arrested.  The entire affair would be considered an act of aggression by the interfering foreign government.

And yet, this again is an accurate description of what the US government did to Haiti on February 29, 2004 when US marines forced democratically elected President Jean Paul Aristide onto a US military plane at gunpoint, flew him to the Central African Republic and asked that government to hold him incommunicado.  Only when a small group of US citizens flew to the CAR and smuggled a cell phone to Aristide did the fictions the US government was telling about Aristide’s supposed resignation begin to unravel.  The Central African Republic was embarrassed and Aristide was allowed to leave, but to this day the US government has blocked his return to Haiti and Haiti continues to bleed.

I could go on and make up imaginary scenarios for the US role in the 2002 failed coup against President Chavez in Venezuela, its role in the last presidential election in El Salvador, its role in elections in Mongolia and the Ukraine – indeed all of those color coded so-called Revolutions in the former Soviet bloc.  And I could make up scenarios for the unsuccessful efforts by the US government to sway the outcome of the 2006 presidential elections in Nicaragua and Venezuela.  But I think you get the point.

So how is all this done?

While violence and the threat of violence are the ultimate tools for maintaining the US Empire, the US has other tools in its imperialist toolbox. Among these are its so-called “democracy building” programs.  These are actually anti-democratic programs aimed at distorting and manipulating foreign elections to support US hegemony.

The best known agency of democracy building is the National Endowment for Democracy, a supposedly private organization that operates almost 100% with our tax money.  The NED, as it is known, was created in 1983.  As Allen Weinstein, a founder and theoretical planner for the NED, noted in a 1991 interview with the Washington Post, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”  Considering the difficulty researchers have getting detailed and up-to-date information about the NED and related agencies, the move away from the “covertness” of the CIA is, at best, only a relative notion.

The National Endowment for Democracy is made up of four core groups – The International Republican Institute (IRI)  and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) are affiliated with the two political parties.  Sen. John McCain is chair of the IRI and former Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright chairs the NDI.  The AFL-CIO has its own affiliate, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity also known as the Solidarity Center and to round out the engines of empire, the Chamber of Commerce has its affiliate the Center for International Private Enterprise.

To further confuse things, the NED operates its own grants and also makes grants to its sub-groups which they then give out under their own names.  If you are confused, we can assume that they intend for us to be confused.  That’s also why they call their electoral manipulation projects “democracy building” when they are actually just the opposite.

NED’s first success was to defeat the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in 1990.
The International Republican Institute trained and funded the Haitian thugs whose violence created the pretext for the US to kidnap President Aristide and remove him from the country. They also have a program to train municipal police in Caracas, Venezuela who have committed many extrajudicial killings.

The National Democratic Institute specializes in polling and quick counts.  It’s blatantly manipulated poll in the Venezuela recall election of 2004 claimed Chavez lost when he actually won with 60%.  It’s quick count in the Ukraine in 2003 cast doubt on the socialist victory and spawned the so-called Orange Revolution. They were apparently hoping the same thing would happen in Venezuela as a result of their phony poll. NDI’s pollster is none other than Mark Penn who is now the top strategist in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.  The elite agents of Empire are all entangled with each other. They went to the same schools, they’re of the same social class, they party together and Democrat or Republican, they have the same view of an assumed god-given right of the United States to rule the world.

The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, another core group of the NED, funded the anti-Chavez labor federation whose leader, Carlos Ortega, was one of the coup leaders in the 2002 coup. That coup failed because a million Venezuelans poured into the streets to demand the return of their president. Some people say that the Solidarity Center runs good programs in some countries, but as long as it receives 94% of its money from the US government and only 6% from unions, its programs will remain suspect. There is an obvious need for international solidarity between workers, but that solidarity needs to be funded by the unions, not by the US government. 

In 2004 Congress doubled NED’s budget with most of the additional money going to Iraq.  Recently I pulled up the National Democratic Institute web page and it listed job openings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Angola, Russia, Azerbaijan, Sudan, Mauritania, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates.  The IRI web page offered jobs in Angola, Iraq, Georgia, Afghanistan, Jordan, Mexico, Sudan, Ukraine and Moldova.  These are just the countries where they have job openings, not all the countries where they are manipulating the political systems!  Several months ago, at the time the Bush regime was announcing the creation of a US military Africa Command, the IRI’s job listings were almost all in Africa.

In June and October 2006 I led delegations to Nicaragua and Venezuela to investigate US intervention in the Presidential elections in those two countries.  NED claims to be nonpartisan and that it does not support particular candidates or parties. 

However, Sandinista organizations in Nicaragua didn’t receive any NED grants and US Ambassador Paul Trivelli missed no opportunity to be photographed with the US favored right-wing candidate, Eduardo Montealegre.  Our delegation met with the International Republican Institute in Managua.  Their spokesperson apparently didn’t research who we were because she told us some incredible things.  She said, “The relationship between the US and Nicaragua is like a parent and a child, and a son should not argue with his father.”  Does that encapsulate the history of colonialism and racism or what?

She also said, “We created the Movement for Nicaragua” which was supposedly a nonpartisan civil group that organized marches against Sandinista candidate Daniel Ortega and his so-called pact with former president Arnoldo Aleman.  When we revealed all this in a press conference in Nicaragua, the spokesperson was fired but the policies didn’t change.  Ambassador Trivelli told us that the US was spending $13 million on the Nicaraguan election.  Again, imagine the scenario I wove earlier about a foreign power interfering in a US election. Yet, despite the blatant US intervention, the threats to cut off remittances from Nicaraguans in the US who send money home to their families, and despite thinly veiled allusions to a new war, the people of Nicaragua elected Daniel Ortega president. The tactics that had worked so well in El Salvador’s last presidential election failed in Nicaragua.  So, the US, with all its money and might does not always prevail.

The US also spent $26 million on the Venezuelan election.  Three million of it was NED money and the other $23 million was US Agency for International Development (USAID) money.  USAID is supposed to be the US humanitarian aid agency but under the Bush regime its programs have been even more aligned with the government’s other foreign policy objectives than ever before. The neo-con obsession with imposing their twisted version of democracy on the world has meant that USAID has converted much of its focus to direct election manipulation.

The Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the list of USAID grant recipients in Venezuela.  They got the list but the recipient’s names were blacked out.  About all we know is that there were no pro-Chavez groups on the list. Another interesting fact is that the money was administered by a US embassy department called the Office of Transition Initiatives. We were refused a meeting with them.  But it’s a revealing name isn’t it? Transition to what?  A Venezuela without Chavez of course. A transition back to when the international oil companies and a few local Venezuelans profited from the oil wealth while the vast majority lived in poverty.  Is it any wonder Chavez won with 63% of the vote?

So, US democracy manipulation schemes don’t work everywhere, but they do work often enough.  Even the somewhat benign programs such as training poll watchers aren’t really benign at all.  Their intent is to train foreigners to accept that the only kind of democracy there is, is the free trade, liberal democratic system that we have in the United States where the citizen’s only role is to periodically go to the polls to vote for one of two candidates representing of the ruling class. 

It is a democracy of, by and for the elites.  The rest of us are just props in their little kabuki plays.  Until we realize that, and act on that knowledge, the Empire will just keep rolling over the world’s ordinary people.

That is why the Alliance for Global Justice is launching a Respect for Democracy campaign which will run throughout the US presidential election.  We have two demands:

• Close the mis-named National Endowment fro Democracy and stop meddling in elections in other countries!

• Advance real democracy at home by insuring our votes are verifiable and removing the corrupting influence of corporations.

We will have “campaign headquarters” in communities around the country.  The Respect for Democracy campaign will have “campaign rallies,” issue press releases, sponsor speaking tours.  Eva Golinger has volunteered to be a campaign advisor. Her book, The Chavez Code, exposed the US role in the failed 2002 coup against Chavez and her Freedom of Information Act requests have peeled back the lid and let a little light shine on the so-called democracy building programs of NED and USAID.  I think she’ll give us better advice than Hillary Clinton gets from Mark Penn or Barak Obama gets from Zbigniew Brezinski.  There’s no point in even going into who is advising McCain.  As head of the International Republican Institute, he is an architect of the democracy manipulation programs.

The goal of the campaign is to use the US presidential campaign as a teaching moment to educate people in the US about the exciting advances in real, participatory democracy in Latin America, to teach them about what their government is doing to crush real democracy throughout the world, and to help them realize that the system we call democracy in the US is neither perfect nor the only form of democracy.

 Michael Plattner is a vice-president of the National Endowment for Democracy, and he is an editor of the NED’s Journal for Democracy. In his article, “Globalization and Self-Government,” published in July 2002, he wrote, “Globalization has fostered democratization, and democratization has fostered globalization. Moreover, both trends generally have furthered American interests and contributed to the strengthening of American power….Understood in this way, globalization goes beyond more frequent and more intensive contact among peoples; it is a process of integration that draws together individuals living in different countries. In so doing, it makes national differences not only less sharp but also less consequential. ... this view of globalization holds that it is creating a world where borders matter less and less, or an increasingly borderless world.”

If Mr. Plattner’s statement was an accurate description of corporate-led globalization, I daresay we progressives would be among its foremost advocates.  What we have to understand is that he is talking about a borderless world for capital.  Borders matter very much indeed for flesh and blood people as we can see from the racist, nativist anti-immigration movement that shames our country today.

Plattner went on to write, “There is also, of course, considerable controversy about the meaning of democracy, though much less today than a couple of decades ago, when some still took seriously such notions as "people's democracy”….

Well Mr. Plattner, some of us still take seriously indeed the notion of “people’s democracy.”   Some of us are very excited about the strides countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua are making to move democratic processes from the rarified heights of the political and economic elites down to the neighborhood level such as Venezuela’s Community Councils and Nicaragua’s Councils of Citizen Power.

Our goal with the Respect for Democracy campaign is to help spark a real democracy movement in this country.  Raul Castro said recently that to say that the US has a two party system is like saying that Cuba has a two party system, one led by Fidel and one led by Raul.  It’s a ridiculous notion.  There is no difference.  At least when it comes to US foreign policy and support for corporate globalization, Raul Castro hits the nail right on the head.

Chuck Kaufman is National Co-Coordinator of the Nicaragua Network and Interim Coordinator of the Venezuela Solidarity Network.