..... Click the link for more information. . Although administered by a private organization, its funding comes mostly from a governmental appropriation by the United States Congress
The United States Congress is the legislative branch of the United States federal government. The structure and responsibilities of Congress are defined in Article One of the United States Constitution. The United States Congress is bicameral, meaning that it has two houses: the Senate and the House of Representatives.

The Senate has 100 seats, one-third are renewed every two years; two members are elected from each U.S. state by popular vote to serve six-year terms. Each state has equal representation in the Senate because the states are each equal members of the federal union.
..... Click the link for more information. .

Its alleged links with authoritarian The term authoritarianism is used to describe an organization or a state which enforces strong and sometimes oppressive measures against the population. It is distinguished from totalitarianism both by degree and scope, authoritarian administration or governance being less intrusive and in the case of organizations not necessarily backed by the use of force. For example, the Roman Catholic Church can be accurately described as authoritarian; however, in modern times it lacks the means to use force to enforce its edicts and is not a totalitarian organization.
..... Click the link for more information. regimes in Latin America Latin America refers to the countries of South America and North America (including Central America and the islands of the Caribbean) whose inhabitants speak a Romance language. Most frequently the term Latin America is restricted to countries whose inhabitants speak either Spanish or Portuguese, but the French-speaking areas of Haiti, French Guiana, and the French West Indies may also be included.
..... Click the link for more information. during the 1980s Centuries: 19th century - 20th century - 21st century

Decades: 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s - 1980s - 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 2030s

Years: 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989



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Events and Trends
Fall of the Iron Curtain
Solidarity movement in Poland eventually topples the country's Communist regime.


..... Click the link for more information. lead some critics to claim that rather than supporting democracy A democracy is a form of government in which ordinary citizens may take part in governing, in contrast with monarchy or dictatorship.
The word democracy originates from the Greek "demos" meaning "the people" and "kratein" meaning "to rule" or "the people to rule" which meant literally: "Rule by the People." The term is also sometimes used as a measurement of how much influence a people has over their government, as in how much democracy exists. Aristotle called democracy one the three evil forms of government (the other two: ochlocracy and tyranny). Anarchism employs a form of direct democracy, but has no state.
..... Click the link for more information. , it in fact opposes democracy A democracy is a form of government in which ordinary citizens may take part in governing, in contrast with monarchy or dictatorship.

The word democracy originates from the Greek "demos" meaning "the people" and "kratein" meaning "to rule" or "the people to rule" which meant literally: "Rule by the People." The term is also sometimes used as a measurement of how much influence a people has over their government, as in how much democracy exists. Aristotle called democracy one the three evil forms of government (the other two: ochlocracy and tyranny). Anarchism employs a form of direct democracy, but has no state.
..... Click the link for more information. .


Founding of the NED
The NED was first funded by President Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Order: 40th President
Term of Office: January 20, 1981 - January 20, 1989
Predecessor: Jimmy Carter
Successor: George H. W. Bush
Date of Birth: Monday, February 6, 1911
Place of Birth: Tampico, Illinois
First Lady: Nancy Davis
Profession: Actor
Political Party: Republican
Vice President: George H. W. Bush
..... Click the link for more information. in 1982 and shaped by an initial study undertaken by the American Political Foundation. http://www.ned.org/about/nedhistory.html

NED was created with a view to creating a broad base of political support for the organisation. NED received funds from the US government and distributes funds to four other organisations – one each created by the Republican and Democrat parties, one created by the business community and one by the labour movement.

The four affiliated organisations are Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the Free Trade Union Institute.


Funding of foreign political parties
The NED regularly provides funding to opposition candidates in elections in countries other than the USA.

According to left-wing critics, the NED only supports candidates with strong ties to the military and who support the rights of US corporations to invest in those countries. They claim that the NED does not support candidates who oppose investments by US corporations or who promise restrictions on investment rights of US corporations. For example, Bill Berkowitz of Working for Change claims that The NED functions as a full-service infrastructure building clearinghouse. It provides money, technical support, supplies, training programs, media know-how, public relations assistance and state-of-the-art equipment to select political groups, civic organizations, labor unions, dissident movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers, and other media. Its aim is to destabilize progressive movements, particularly those with a socialist or democratic socialist bent. http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=11645

John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton wrote that before the 1990 elections in Nicaragua “President Bush sent $9 million in NED, including a $4 million contribution to the campaign of opposition presidential candidate Violeta Chamorro”. Chamorro won. [Stauber and Rampton]

In the 1990 elections in Haiti Haiti is situated on the western third of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba. A former French colony, it was one of the first countries of the Americas, after the United States, to declare its independence. Haiti is currently in a state of anarchy following a rebellion against its President.

République d'Haïti
(In Detail)

..... Click the link for more information. , the NED supported Marc Bazin providing a big fraction of his total US-supported campaign funds of $36 million. Despite this funding, he only obtained 12% of the vote. Marc Bazin had earlier been a World Bank


The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, in Romance languages: BIRD), better known as the World Bank, came into existence on December 27, 1945 following international ratification of the agreements reached at the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1 - July 22, 1944.
An international organization that provides long term loans to assist developing
..... Click the link for more information. official. He was seen by most Haitians as a "front man for military and business interests", and had been prime minister during military rule, for the presidential election. http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Zone/2424/haiti1.html

During 2001/2002, the NED gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to US and Venezuelan groups who organised protests and a coup d'etat against the elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. The coup happened on 11 April 2002. According to Wayne Madsen, a former intelligence officer with the US navy, US military attaches such as Lieutenant Colonel James Rogers had been in touch with members of the Venezuelan military to examine the possibility of a coup, while Roger Rondon claimed that both James Rogers and another US military officer, Ronald MacCammon, had been at the Fuerte Tiuna military headquarters with the coup leaders during the night of April 11-12. 3604,706802,00.html

NED also funded political groups in the democracies A democracy is a form of government in which ordinary citizens may take part in governing, in contrast with monarchy or dictatorship.

The word democracy originates from the Greek "demos" meaning "the people" and "kratein" meaning "to rule" or "the people to rule" which meant literally: "Rule by the People." The term is also sometimes used as a measurement of how much influence a people has over their government, as in how much democracy exists. Aristotle called democracy one the three evil forms of government (the other two: ochlocracy and tyranny). Anarchism employs a form of direct democracy, but has no state.
..... Click the link for more information. of Western Europe Western Europe is distinguished from Central and Eastern Europe by geography and by differences of history and culture. However, these boundaries are subject to considerable overlap and fluctuation, which makes differentiation difficult. The concept of Western Europe is also associated with liberal democracy; its countries are generally deemed to be well within the cultural hegemony of the United States of America.
..... Click the link for more information. in the 1980s Centuries: 19th century - 20th century - 21st century

Decades: 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s - 1980s - 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 2030s

Years: 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Events and Trends
Fall of the Iron Curtain
Solidarity movement in Poland eventually topples the country's Communist regime.


..... Click the link for more information. . Its funding of French political groups In its Constitution, France declares itself to be an indivisible, laïque [roughly, "secular"], democratic and social republic.

The Constitution
Main article: Constitution of France
A popular referendum approved the constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958, greatly strengthening the authority of the presidency and the executive in relation to Parliament.


The executive branch

..... Click the link for more information. such as the right-wing In politics, right-wing, political right, or simply the right, are terms which refer with no intended precision, to the segment of the political spectrum associated with conservatism, or with opposition to left-wing politics.
This terminology was originally based on the seating-arrangement of parliamentary partisans, during the French Revolution. The monarchists who supported the ancien regime were commonly referred to as rightists because they sat on the right side of successive legislative assemblies. As this original reference became obsolete, the meaning of the terms has changed as appropriate to the spectrum of ideas and stances being compared.
..... Click the link for more information. National Inter-University Union Union Nationale Interuniversitaire or "Inter-University Union" is a French right-wing union of university students.

In the beginning of the 1980s is was very close to the far-right, including to violent groups such as the GUD. At the same time, it was funded by the government of the United States through the National Endowment for Democracy, (see this report from the Cato institute ).

Starting from 1995, UNI has supported president Jacques Chirac against the French Socialist Party.
..... Click the link for more information. (associated with violent groups), was revealed by the French newspaper Libération Libération (affectionately known as Libé) is a French newspaper, founded in 1973 by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July in Paris, in the wake of the protest movements of May 1968.

It is one of the big quality national daily newspapers with a circulation of over 150,000. It was the first French daily newspaper to have a website.


External link
Libération's WWW site

..... Click the link for more information. .
During the 1990s, NED invested some money, at least about $9,000,000 http://www.maloca.com/zagloba/ned.htm, in Eastern Europe to support its vision of economics Economics is a social science that studies human behavior and welfare as a relationship between ends socialy required and scarce means which have alternative uses (Lionell Robbins, 1935). That is, economics is the study of the trade-offs involved when choosing between alternate sets of decisions, considering collective and individual benefits.

Understanding choice by individuals and groups is thus central in economics. With scarcity, choosing one alternative implies foregoing another alternative; economists refer to the best alternative forgone by taking another choice as the opportunity cost. For instance, learning one skill implies time not spent learning another. In a market setting, scarcity is often quantified by price relationships.
..... Click the link for more information. and the shock therapy The shock therapy programs carried out on the economies of the former Soviet Union and countries of Central and Eastern Europe during the 1990s derived from neoliberal economic theory. The shocks took the form of sudden radical changes to the structure and incentives within economies.

Some people consider the effects to be primarily negative, such as unemployment rates ranging from 20-40%, increased crime rates and increased social tensions between the poor and the rich. Others judge that the effects have been positive, and that the theory was inadequately applied.
..... Click the link for more information. program, leading to unemployment rates of about 20-40% in Eastern European countries.


Source of Funding
The NED receives an annual appropriation from the U.S. budget and while a non-governmental organisation is subject to congressional oversight. In the financial year to the end of September 2002 NED had a budget of US$48.5 million. http://www.ned.org/publications/02annual/02finance.pdf


Links with other think tanks Think Tank can be:
a Spoken Word recording by Henry Rollins
an album by the band Blur
a museum in Birmingham, England
think tanks, idea-producing organizations.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A think tank is a group of individuals in military laboratories, corporations, or other institutions dedicated to high-level synergistic research on a variety of subjects.

Discoveries

..... Click the link for more information. Directors of the Board includes Frank Charles Carlucci III of The Carlyle Group The Carlyle Group is a private investment firm which describes itself as "one of the world's largest global private equity investment firms" with more than "$16 billion of equity capital". They employ more than 500 people in 12 countries.

In 2003, Carlyle managed 21 individual funds in five investment disciplines: buyout, venture, real estate, turnaround, and high yield. The industries the group currently specializes in are: Aerospace & Defense, Automotive, Consumer & Industrial, Energy & Power, Healthcare, Opportunistic Real Estate, Technology & Business Services, Telecom & Media, and Transportation.
..... Click the link for more information. , General Wesley Kanne Clark General Wesley Kanne Clark KBE (born December 23, 1944) was the United States Army General who as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO commanded Operation Allied Force. He had a distinguished career in the Army and the Department of Defense. Clark retired a four-star general, and received many US and foreign decorations for his service. He was a candidate for the 2004 Democratic nomination for President of the United States, but withdrew on February 11, 2004.

..... Click the link for more information. , of venture capital company the Stephens Group, Michael Novak Michael Novak (born 1933) is a conservative Roman Catholic American philosopher and diplomat. He writes on capitalism, religion, and the politics of democratization.

He served as U.S. chief ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1981 and also as the ambassador the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Novak is currently George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
..... Click the link for more information. of the American Enterprise Institute The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is a think tank founded in 1943 whose stated mission is to support the "foundations of freedom - limited government, private enterprise, vital cultural and political institutions, and a strong foreign policy and national defense." It has emerged as one of the leading architects of the Bush administration's foreign policy. AEI rents space to the Project for the New American Century, one of the leading voices pushing the Bush administration's plan for "regime change" through war in Iraq. AEI reps have also aggressively denied that the war has anything to do with oil.
..... Click the link for more information. for Public Policy Research and Dr. Francis Fukuyama Francis Fukuyama, born in Chicago, October 27, 1952. He is an American political economist of Japanese ancestry.

Professor of political economy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Author of the controversial book The End of History and the Last Man and Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.

In "The End of History", Fukuyama argued that:
..... Click the link for more information. , Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University.


See also
American Enterprise Institute The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is a think tank founded in 1943 whose stated mission is to support the "foundations of freedom - limited government, private enterprise, vital cultural and political institutions, and a strong foreign policy and national defense." It has emerged as one of the leading architects of the Bush administration's foreign policy. AEI rents space to the Project for the New American Century, one of the leading voices pushing the Bush administration's plan for "regime change" through war in Iraq. AEI reps have also aggressively denied that the war has anything to do with oil.
..... Click the link for more information. Project for the New American Century
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is an American right-wing think tank. It was established in the spring of 1997 as a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. It is based in the same building as the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.

The PNAC is quite controversial, and has raised the concern of many because it can be viewed as proposing military and economic domination of land, space, and cyberspace by the United States, so as to establish American dominance in world affairs for the indefinite future—hence, "the New American Century".
..... Click the link for more information.
Council on Foreign Relations The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is thinktank which describes itself as "dedicated to increasing America's understanding of the world and contributing ideas to U.S. foreign policy. The Council accomplishes this mainly by promoting constructive, closed debates and discussions, clarifying world issues, and publishing Foreign Affairs."
It began in 1921 and is one of the most powerful private organizations with influence on U.S. foreign policy. It has about 4,000 members, selected on the basis of wealth, national security experience, CIA experience, track record in electoral politics, or influence in the corporate media.
..... Click the link for more information.

Ford Foundation The Ford Foundation is a US charitable foundation created to fund programs that promote democracy, reduce poverty and promote international understanding (see mission statement ). It was founded in 1936 with a grant from Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company, and was headed by McGeorge Bundy from 1966 to 1979.
Some critics have charged that the Foundation is a front organisation for the Central
..... Click the link for more information.
Research Triangle Institute
The Research Triangle Institute (RTI) is an organisation based in North Carolina, USA, which claims to offer innovative research and development and ... services in health and pharmaceuticals, advanced technology, survey and statistics, education and training, economic and social development, and the environment.

RTI has regularly received many USA government contracts in reconstructing countries in transition, generally helping to implement the neoliberal doctrine of privatising public institutions, especially in Eastern Europe during the 1990s.
..... Click the link for more information.

External links
http://www.ned.org - NED website
Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy, a critical report from the Cato Institute
1990s NED involvement in Eastern Europe
analysis by Bill Berkowitz, Working for Change
NED funding of Venezuelan organisations, late 1990s
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) receives funding from both the US Congress and the State Department. Its role appears to be to provide funding for foreign entities which act in US interests, under the guise of expanding "democracy". As such, it has legitimized part of the role that the CIA used to play.

At present, the NED offering small grants to a myriad of Venezuelan organizations. One only needs to read a few of them in order to see that the real aim is to remove Venezuela's democratically-elected government.

From 2002 to the present, NED has either funded or is funding the following entities working in Venezuela:



A brief description of NED by William Robinson:
"Despite its officially overt character, the NED also engages in extensive covert operations. In fact, overtness appears to be more an aspect of the "democracy" rhetoric than of actual NED policy. NED activities are often shrouded in secrecy, and NED officials operate more often in the shadows than in the open. Although this situation appears contradictory, the NED*s secret activities have their exact counterparts in the clandestine, under-the-table dealings that are a traditional part of the U.S. political system and that are far from alien to U.S. political professionals who carry out NED operations.

The NED functions through a complex system of intermediaries in which operative aspects, control relationships, and funding trails are nearly impossible to follow and final recipients are difficult to identify. Most moneys originating from the NED are first channeled through U.S. organizations, which in turn pass them on to foreign counterparts that are themselves often pass-throughs for final recipients. Dozens of U.S. organizations have acted as conduits for NED funds. As a result, financial accounting becomes nearly impossible, thereby facilitating all sorts of secret funding, laundering operations, and bookkeeping cover-ups that allow for unscrutinized transactions. Because of the multitiered structure of go-betweens, it is difficult to establish the links between U.S. government operations, on the one hand, and seemingly independent political activities in other countries, on the other hand. In this Alice*s Wonderland of political intervention, things are not what they seem, at first blush, to be.

The NED, as a congressionally chartered organization, is made up of "core groups." These groups, which handle the appropriated NED funds and programs, are the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and its counterpart, the National Republican Institute for International Affairs (NRI)*, which are the "international wings" of the Democratic and Republican parties; the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), a branch of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and the Free Trade Union Institute (FTUI), an international branch of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). These core groups carry out programs in target countries with those sectors considered strategic pillars of society: labor (FTUI), business (CIPE), and political parties and organizations (NDI and NRI). A host of other U.S. "private" organizations enmeshed with foreign policy, such as the right-wing Freedom House and the Council on the Americas, handle programs for "civic" sectors. The concept behind this sectorial specialization in political intervention is the creation of a societywide network of political, social, cultural, business, and civic organizations in the target country that are dependent on and responsive to U.S. direction or at least sympathetic to U.S. concerns."

William Robinson writing from the first chapter of his book "A Faustian Bargain" Westview Press, USA, 1992

* Now called International Republican Institute (IRI)