National Endowment for Democracy

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is an organization in the United States founded in 1983 for promoting democracy in other countries by promoting political and economic institutions such as political groups, trade unions, free markets and business groups.  NED is funded primarily by an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress. It as created as a bipartisan, private, non-profit corporation, and acts as a grant-making foundation.

Quotes

• Democracy involves the right of the people freely to determine their own destiny. The exercise of this right requires a system that guarantees freedom of expression, belief and association, free and competitive elections, respect for the inalienable rights of individuals and minorities, free communications media, and the rule of law.
  • NED's Home page, "About Us" https://www.ned.org/about/ “Statement of Principles and Objectives” 1984 (1984)

• It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy.
  • Michael Ignatieff "Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?", New York Times Magazine, June 26, 2005

• The U.S. employed all its traditional tactics leading up to the coup in 2014. The U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has partially taken over the CIA's role in grooming opposition candidates, parties and political movements, with an annual budget of $100 million to spend in countries around the world. The NED made no secret of targeting Ukraine as a top priority, funding 65 projects there, more than in any other country. The NED's neoconservative president, Carl Gershman, called Ukraine "the biggest prize" in a Washington Post op-ed in September 2013, as the U.S. operation there prepared to move into its next phase.
  • Nicolas J. S. Davies America's Coup Machine: Destroying Democracy Since 1953, AlterNet, (April 08, 2014)

• National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman took to the op-ed page of The Washington Post in late September 2013 to declare that Ukraine was now “the biggest prize” and represented an important interim step toward eventually toppling Putin in Russia. Gershman, who is essentially a neocon paymaster dispensing $100 million a year in U.S. taxpayers’ money to activists, journalists and various other operatives, wrote: “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
  • Robert Parry, Do We Really Want Nuclear War with Russia?, Common Dreams, (3 October 2016)

• 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.
  • Stephen Kinzer, Trump Is Gutting the National Endowment for Democracy, and That’s a Good Thing, Boston Globe, (March 15, 2018)

• The empire for its part was working away in secret. For several years the CIA and its “legal” arm, the International Agency for Development (USAID), were training cadres and organizing groups inside the various dissident sectors in Nicaraguan society. The object was to attack, discredit and defeat the Sandinista government. They were working through organizations like National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Freedom House, Heritage Foundation, and the Albert Einstein Institute. They wanted to show the world and particularly our America that being revolutionary is a venal sin. Similarly, acting on behalf of masses of people is a crime against humanity.
  • Fabián Escalante Font, Nicaragua and the U.S. Neo-fascist Offensive, Popular Resistance, (9 November 2018)