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Kim Scipes
Before going into details, it is important to note what 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, with everyone affected having a say in the decision, etc. (This is commonly known as “popular” or grassroots democracy.)
This is the democracy where the elites get to decide the candidates or questions suitable to go before the people, while always limiting the choices to what the elites are comfortable with. Then, once the elites have made their decision, the people are presented with the “choice” that the elites approve.  And then the NED prattles on with its nonsense about how it is “promoting democracy around the world”. The other thing to note about 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, and it operates from funds provided by the US government.

However, 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, Paul Wolfowitz, and Elliot Abrams of the Reagan administration fame.

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

According to Prof William Robinson in his 1996 book “Promoting Polyarchy”, NED is a product of US government foreign policy shifts from “earlier strategies to contain social and political mobilisation through a focus on control of the state and governmental apparatus” to a process of “democracy promotion,” whereby “the United States and local elites thoroughly penetrate civil society, and from “that instead of waiting for a client government to be threatened by its people and then responding, US foreign policy shifted to intervening in the civil society of a country ‘of interest’ (as defined by US foreign policy goals) before popular mobilization could become significant, and by

supporting certain groups and certain politicians, then channel any potential mobilisation in the direction desired by the US government”.

This also means that these “civil society” organisations can be used offensively as well, against any government the US opposes.

How do they operate?

They work through four “institutes” — the International Republican Institute (currently headed by US Senator John McCain), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (currently headed by former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright), the Centre for International Private Enterprise (the international wing of the US Chamber of Commerce), and the American Centre for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), the foreign policy operation of the AFL-CIO, with Richard Trumka, the head of its board of directors. ACILS had been indirectly involved in the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela by participating in meetings with leaders later involved in the coup beforehand, and then denying afterwards the involvement of the leaders of the right-wing labour organisation (CTV) in the coup, leaders of an organisation long affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

We also know the NED overall has been active in Venezuela since 1997.

The NED and its institutes continue to actively fund projects in Venezuela.

From the 2012 NED annual report (the latest available), we see they have provided US$1 338 331 to organisations and projects in Venezuela that year alone including: US$120 125 for projects for “accountability”, US$470 870 for “civic education”, US$96 400 for “democratic ideas and values”, US$105 000 for “freedom of information”, US$92 265 for “human rights”, US$216 063 for “political processes”, US$34 962 for “rule of law”, US$45 000 for “strengthening political institutions”, and US$153 646 for the Centre for International Private Enterprise.

• Kim Scipes is Associate Professor of Sociology at Purdue University in Westville, Indiana and author of “AFL-CIO’s Secret War Against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?”