Another Stopped Clock Moment

[UPDATE: I did not look at the date on the article.  It was from over a year ago, but he is looking at cutting its budget again this year.]

In Trump’s latest budget request, he is cutting the funding to the National Endowment for Democracy by ⅔.
Seeing as how the NED is, and always been, little more than a front group for CIA, this is a good thing:

Thank you, President Trump! Finally you have made a foreign policy recommendation that is logical, overdue, and in the long-term interest of the United States. Congress will probably reject it, but you deserve credit for making the effort.

Trump’s budget for the coming fiscal year proposes to gut the National Endowment for Democracy by cutting two-thirds of its budget. The endowment is one of the main instruments by which the United States subverts and undermines foreign governments. In a less Orwellian world, it might be called the “National Endowment for Attacking Democracy.” Cutting the budget would signal that we are re-thinking our policy of relentlessly interfering in the politics of other countries.

That kind of interference is the National Endowment’s mission. Whenever the government of another country challenges or defies the United States, questions the value of unrestrained capitalism, limits the rights of foreign corporations, or adopts policies that we consider socialist, the Endowment swings into action. It pours over $170 million each year into labor unions, political factions, student clubs, civic groups, and other organizations dedicated to protecting or installing pro-American regimes. From Central America to Central Asia, it is a vivid and familiar face of US intervention.

President Ronald Reagan established the program in 1983, following years of scandals that tarnished the Central Intelligence Agency. Soon it took over many of the tasks that the CIA used to perform. When the United States wanted to interfere in the Italian election of 1948, for example, the CIA did the job. Decades later, when Washington sought to push its favored candidate into the presidency of Nicaragua, our instrument was the National Endowment for Democracy. More recently, it has sought to influence elections in Mongolia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” one of the organization’s founders explained during the 1990s.

………

Because its job is to shape the course of other countries, the Endowment has become a darling of Washington’s regime-change crowd. Shortly after ordering invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, President George W. Bush pushed to double its budget. That made sense, because bombing and organizing “peaceful” revolutions are two ways of achieving the same goal: forcing countries to bend to our will. Both reflect our insistence on judging foreign governments, deciding which may survive and which must be attacked.

Leaders of the Endowment include some of our country’s most militant interventionists. One of its board members is Elliott Abrams, who helped direct anti-Sandinista projects in Nicaragua during the 1980s and was later convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. Another is Victoria Nuland, who as assistant secretary of state in 2016 flew to Ukraine to encourage protesters to overthrow their government.

The US efforts at regime change have been a constant source of misery for their targets, and a constant source of blow-back for US foreign policy goals.

The only thing wrong about reducing the budget of the NED by ⅔ is that it’s not been completely defunded.

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