Weekend Economists Examine the Root of All Evil: February 28-March 2, 2014

[Demeter]

7. National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela

Remember that Chavez managed to repatriate all the Venezuelan gold bedfore he died...Merkel can't even get 30% until 7 years after she demanded it all....

http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/national-endowment-for-democracy-in-venezuela/

As protests have been taking place in Venezuela for the last couple of weeks, it is good to check on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Empire’s “stealth” destabilizer. What has the NED been up to in Venezuela?

Before going into details, it is important to note what the NED is and is not. First of all, it has nothing to do with the democracy we are taught in civics classes, concerning one person one vote, everyone affected having a say in the decision, etc. (which is commonly known as “popular” or grassroots democracy). The NED opposes this kind of democracy.

The NED promotes top-down, elite, constrained (or “polyarchal”) democracy. This is the democracy where the elites get to decide the candidates or questions suitable to go before the people — always limiting the choices to what the elites are comfortable with. Only after the elites have made their decision are the people presented with the “choice” that the elites approve. And the NED prattles on with its nonsense about how it is “promoting democracy around the world.”

The other thing to note about the NED is that it is not independent as it claims, ad nauseum. It was created by the US Congress, signed into US law by President Ronald Reagan (that staunch defender of democracy), and it operates from funds provided annually by the US Government.

Its Board of Directors is drawn from among the elites in the US Government’s foreign policy-making realm. Past Board members have included Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, General Wesley K. Clark, and Paul Wolfowitz. Today’s board can be found atwww.ned.org/about/board; most notable is Elliot Abrams of Reagan Administration fame.

In reality, the NED is part of the US Empire’s tools, and “independent” only in the sense that no elected presidential administration can directly alter its composition or activities, even if it wanted to. It’s initial project director, Professor Allen Weinstein of Georgetown University, admitted in theWashington Post of September 22, 1991, that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

MORE BETRAYAL OF DEMOCRACY AT LINK...