Donald Trump was running for the US presidency when he personally raised with senior Indonesian politicians the need to have a toll road completed in Indonesia to benefit a massive new resort development in which he later invested.

• Trump was in negotiations with Indonesian business partner Hary Tanoe over mega-resort development on Java
• Politician estimates Mr Trump and Mr Tanoe have already tripled their value of the resort land
• Human Rights Watch says it is "not appropriate" for any business to ask Government to pay for toll road into property

A senior Indonesian politician who met Mr Trump in New York in 2015 has revealed to Four Corners that he made clear the project would only go ahead if the toll road was completed.

"He was saying that it's impossible without the toll road," Fadli Zon, the deputy speaker of Indonesia's Parliament, said.

Mr Zon, together with the speaker of the Indonesian House of Representatives, Setya Novanto, met with then presidential-hopeful Mr Trump in September 2015 during the presidential primary campaign at Trump Tower in New York.

The meeting, unauthorised by the Indonesian Government, was held with the direct assistance of Mr Trump's new Indonesian business partner, Hary Tanoesoedibjo, known as Hary Tanoe.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-03/donald-trump-business-dealings-in-...

Did Donald beg for charity? Was this blackmail or good business sense? What would be a business centre with no access? Did Donald bribe someone? Is the Barrier Reef endangered more with this deal, than with our gift to Adani? Should we get the Human Right watch onto Adani? What can we do about it? Impeach Donald? Replace him with the Queen of fake charity, Hillary? Are we going to see more road kill? Are we all nuts?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s rival in the upcoming September election has slammed the leader for not standing up to US President Donald Trump.

Martin Schulz, a Social Democrat (SPD), has been hitting the campaign stump in his attempt to unseat Merkel, but is currently a long shot despite taking a brief lead in the polls back in January.

Schulz, in claiming that Merkel does not go far enough to counter comments about Germany by the US president that are seen as being on the rude side of blunt, stated, "I would say to Trump: We don't agree with your reasoning over a military buildup, which isn't justified by anything."

The center-left SPD party candidate asserted, "The German chancellor must sometimes dare to be in conflict with the American president," according to Deutsche Welle.

Merkel has been seen to be patient with Trump's often outlandish and undiplomatic behavior, including after the US president suggested that the three-time German chancellor was "ruining Germany" by accepting refugees.

Trump also referred to Germany as "very bad," because of its trade imbalances, during a meeting of NATO leaders.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/politics/201707031055170014-rival-criticizes-mer...

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — In December 2016, the administration of former US President Barack Obama imposed a set of punitive measures against Russia, including the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and the closure of the two Russian diplomatic compounds. The actions were taken in response to Moscow's alleged interference in the US presidential election, which Russia has repeatedly denied.

Back in December, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided not to respond to sanctions imposed by the outgoing US administration and act in accordance with the ties built with the new US leadership.

The Donald Trump administration is currently considering the return of the two facilities ahead of the US president's first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G50 summit in Germany this week.

"We spoke about the principle of reciprocity. As to the fact that Russia's patience [is running out], this was also said at different levels," Peskov told reporters.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said earlier that Washington pledged to prepare proposals in the near future aimed to settle the issue of Russian diplomatic property seized in the United States.

In May, Minister-Counselor of the Russian Embassy in the United States Denis Gonchar told Sputnik that the US administration is trying to link a positive decision on the issue of the Russian diplomatic property seized in the United States with provision of land for construction of a new US consulate building in St. Petersburg.

Read more;

https://sputniknews.com/politics/201707031055177434-kremlin-diplomatic-c...

But politics, after all, is often a battle of perceptions. Niall Ferguson, a British historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, said in May: “I think one of the things Guardian readers, and their counterparts on the American coasts, don’t want to think about is the possibility that despite his obvious ineptitude, Trump might actually be successful.

“I said last summer to a bunch of liberal friends, ‘Your worst nightmare is not a Trump presidency; it’s a successful Trump presidency.’ The successful Trump presidency scenario is one in which, despite it all, the economy does better thanks to deregulation and tax cuts, foreign policy delivers some big wins on North Korea, the Middle East."

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/03/donald-trump-winning-ova...

The Kremlin has expressed confidence that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will find time to hold their highly anticipated and important first meeting on the sidelines of the upcoming G20 summit to discuss Syria, international terrorism and Russia-US ties among other issues.

“It’s agreed that the presidents will meet, but the schedules are quite tight,” Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov said as cited by TASS. President Putin already has talks scheduled with 11 world leaders during the G20 meeting in Hamburg on July 7 and 8, but “nevertheless, our American partners and us will be looking for openings… to hold this utmost important meeting.”

Since Trump took office in January, the Russian and American leaders have talked on the phone on four occasions, with their latest conversation taking place in early May. Ushakov expressed confidence that Putin and Trump will meet on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

Russian-American relations are currently “on zero mark” and phone talks aren’t enough to improve the situation, the Kremlin aide underlined. Ushakov added that the meeting between Putin and Trump “will also be of primary importance for providing international stability and security.”

As for the agenda of the Hamburg talks, Ushakov confirmed media reports that Syria and Ukraine will be among the issues up for discussion between the two leaders.

“I think it makes sense to discuss these issues,” he said, adding, that Moscow also believes it necessary to address tackling international terrorism, which requires cooperation between Russia and the US.

There are many “problematic areas” and many other issues that Russia is ready to discuss with its American partners, the aide said.

“It seems to me that the very atmosphere of the upcoming meeting can allow solving many problems , including cooperation on the international arena as well as bilateral issues that [has] remained in limbo,”Ushakov said.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/395194-putin-trump-g20-meeting-kremlin/

The forthcoming G20 meeting presents a golden opportunity for the international community to surpass its difficulties, overcome its differences and pull together once and for all to solve, definitively, the mounting pressures facing our planet, challenges which pose an existential threat for the generations to come. It is within our grasp, but...

In the year 2017 by the Christian calendar, or by other approaches over two thousand years after the Roman Empire reached the pinnacle of its development under Augustus Caesar, our planet is sick. Our lands are polluted, our rivers and lakes are polluted, our seas are polluted, our air is polluted, the space around the planet is polluted.

Species of animals and plants are becoming extinct before we discover them and thousands that already exist are at risk or in danger of disappearing before our eyes.

The "green" question aside, which is already serious enough to merit thousands of articles such as this one, international relations are at a level of tension unseen in many decades, with the NATO block pushing in ever-increasing waves of arrogance, making unfounded accusations and building up on Russia's borders. In recent years and since the beginning of the century we have seen breach after breach of international law by the same block, led by the FUKUS Axis (France-UK-US) or by ASS (the Anglo-Saxon Syndicate).

Illegal invasions

The illegal invasion of Iraq led to the destruction of a State which has not yet recovered, indeed, is teeming with terrorists, has endemic unemployment and is far worse off after 14 years than it was before the fingers of Satan touched it, in the hands of Bush and Blair and their bedpals.

The illegal invasion of Libya, in which war crimes were committed, as in Iraq, also led to the collapse of what was the African country with the highest Human Development Index, until Messrs. Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama sent the country back hundreds of years, also teeming with terrorists and split into a myriad of warring factions.

The illegal engagement in Syria, where the USA sits like an unwanted gatecrasher, as welcome as a serial rapist pedophile janitor in a grade school, the backing of terrorist groups, has wreaked havoc and chaos on the people of Syria, another country teeming with terrorists.

It appears that western policy is an abject failure. Never has so much damage been done to international relations by so few in such a short space of time leaving such profound crevasses.

The controlled media has gone into hyperdrive, peddling barefaced lies as the truth, accusing the Syrian Government of carrying out chemical weapons attacks when it does not have any and when it is clear that such attacks are perpetrated by the so-called "opposition" to incriminate the Government, often with puerile levels of carelessness such as launching the chemicals in areas crawling with Syrian Arab Army troops.

Russia is seen and sold as a "threat", when all it does is follow international law to the letter. The tensions in recent years were not caused by Russia. Georgia invaded South Ossetia and murdered Russian peacekeepers; the West invaded Iraq, not Russia; the West invaded Libya, not Russia; the West sided with terrorists in Libya and Syria, not Russia; Crimea voted to rejoin Russia, Russia did not invade Crimea.

So the ball, we can say, is in the Western half of the court. And by "Western" we can say "Washington" because due to their cowardly and sycophantic, groveling stance, the NATO allies have allowed the USA to control not only their foreign policy, but also their budgets, through NATO (spend two per cent of your GDP on NATO weapons systems or else).

So let us then ignore London and Paris, which are basically irrelevant, and address Washington.

The world has the resources, and many times more than the necessary, to solve all our problems in the short-term and definitively. Instead of looking at each other down the barrel of a gun, instead of hurling accusations, instead of making puerile threats, we should be acting under the auspices of the UN Charter, not deriding it and saying it does not work after disrespecting its laws, as the USA and its allies do.

This means that when there is potential for conflict, we should not jump in and take the side of factions taking up arms, we should act as facilitators and try to provide the means for peace and reconciliation. It means we should favor development over deployment of troops and weapons, it means we should be educating civilians and not training soldiers, it means we should be implementing the measures provided already by the UNO, tools to achieve understanding and harmony.

We should be coming together to heal our planet, to clean the seas, to formulate a viable action plan to clear them of the tonnes of plastic pouring into them hour by hour. We should be protecting our forests, not cutting them down, we should have eradicated poaching by now, we should be developing eco-friendly economic solutions which bring sustainable development and prosperity and hope for the future.

We have all the tools at our disposal. The ball is in Mr. Trump's court. Let us see if he plays it back respectfully or if he continues to act like a clown pretending to beat up CNN reporters as if he were in the very worst sort of reality TV show. The population of the world demands nothing less. For Trump, this is an opportunity to seize, or to lose the initiative once and for all.

If this G20 does not deliver, and big time, then maybe it is time for the people of the world to network and create an alternative model of governance and of international organisms.

read more:

http://www.pravdareport.com/opinion/columnists/04-07-2017/138089-golden_...

One America News is an obscure TV channel struggling to emerge from the cellar of the cable ratings, but it is nonetheless one of President Trump’s favorite media outlets. It’s not hard to see why: On One America newscasts, the Trump administration is a juggernaut of progress, a shining success with a daily drumbeat of achievements.

One America — a tiny father-and-sons operation that often delivers four times as many stories per hour as its competitors — promises “straight news, no opinion,” promoting itself as the antidote to the Big Three cable news networks’ focus on punditry and the one big story of the moment.

But since its inception in 2013, and especially since Trump began his march to the White House, One America’s owner, Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire who made his money printing circuit boards, has directed his channel to push Trump’s candidacy, scuttle stories about police shootings, encourage antiabortion stories, minimize coverage of Russian aggression, and steer away from the new president’s troubles, according to more than a dozen current and former producers, writers and anchors, as well as internal emails from Herring and his top news executives.

OAN, based in San Diego, made its first splash in the opening weeks of the Trump campaign, when the channel became the first to carry Trump’s campaign speeches live and in full — a decision followed quickly by the owner’s directive that other candidates’ rallies not be given the same treatment, according to internal emails.

Since then, OAN has become a reliably sympathetic voice of the administration’s goals and actions. Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has a deal to appear regularly on the channel. The network’s White House reporter, Trey Yingst, has become an administration favorite who was called on at the daily news briefings 27 times in Trump’s first 100 days in office. On Friday, OAN won a seat in the White House briefing room, albeit in the back row and shared with the BBC.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/an-inside-look-at-one-ame...

President Donald Trump flew off for his first meeting with Vladimir Putin — with instructions from our foreign policy elite that he get into the Russian president’s face over his hacking in the election of 2016.

Hopefully, Trump will ignore these people. For their record of failure is among the reasons Americans elected him to office.

What president, seeking to repair damaged relations with a rival superpower, would begin by reading from an indictment?

President Eisenhower did not begin his summit with Nikita Khrushchev by berating him for crushing the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956 — a more grievous crime than hacking the emails of John Podesta. (Gus note: The Russians deny having done it)

President Kennedy did not let Russia’s emplacement of missiles in Cuba in 1962 prevent him from offering an olive branch to Moscow in his widely praised American University address of June 1963.

President Nixon, in first meeting Leonid Brezhnev, did not denounce him for extinguishing the Prague Spring. Were Trump to start his first summit with Putin by dressing him down, why meet with him at all?

Trump would do better to explore where we can work together, as in ending Syria’s civil war and averting a new war in Korea.

Moreover, when it comes to interference in the internal politics of other nations to bring about “regime change,” understandably, Putin might see himself as more sinned against than sinning.

Should Trump bring up the email hacking in 2016, Putin could ask him to explain U.S. support for the violent coup d’etat that overthrew a democratically elected pro-Russian government in Ukraine, a land with which Russia has been intimately associated for 1,000 years.

Consider the behavior of post-Cold War America, after Moscow gave up its empire, pulled all its troops out of Europe, let the USSR dissolve into 15 nations and held out a hand in friendship.

We gathered all the Warsaw Pact nations and three former Russian Federation republics into a NATO alliance targeted at Russia. We put troops, ships and bases into the Baltic on the doorstep of St. Petersburg. We bombed Russia’s old ally Serbia for 78 days, forcing it to surrender its birth province of Kosovo.

Among the failings of America’s post-Cold War foreign policy elites are hubris, arrogance and an utter absence of that greatest of gifts that the gods can give us — “to see ourselves as others see us.”

Can we not see why the Russian people, who saw us as friends in the 1990s, no longer do so, and why Putin, a Russia-First nationalist, has an 80 percent approval rating on the issue of standing up for his country?

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/hopefully-trump-will-ign...

It is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually produced the promised compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. But the people interviewed by The Times about the meeting said the expectation was that she would do so.

When he was first asked about the meeting on Saturday, Donald Trump Jr. said that it was primarily about adoptions and mentioned nothing about Mrs. Clinton.

But on Sunday, presented with The Times’s findings, he offered a new account. In a statement, he said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which his father took to Moscow. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”

He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The 2012 law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.

“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said.

Two people briefed on the meeting said the intermediary was Rob Goldstone, a former British tabloid journalist and the president of a company called Oui 2 Entertainment who has worked with the Miss Universe pageant. He did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, said on Sunday that “the president was not aware of and did not attend the meeting.”

read more of this crap at the New York Times

Hello? Anyone in there?... Still speculating about crap, innuendoes and what did or did not happen... That Donald is an idiot may be beyond doubt but strangely enough he does not lie as much as ANY of his White House predecessors. Today's (10/7/17) cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald isn't any better on this score...

Here is a succinct exposé of US journalism, that the English poet Algernon Swinburne wrote in 1874, that the Trump family could use in retort:

I am informed that certain American journalists, not content with providing filth of their own for the consumption of their kind, sometimes offer to their readers a dish of beastliness which they profess to have gathered from under the chairs of most distinguished men …

I … am not sufficiently an expert in the dialect of the cesspool and the dung-cart to retort in their own kind on these venerable gentlemen — I, whose ears and lips are unlike unused to the amenities of conversation embroidered with such fragment of flowery rhetoric as may be fished up by congenial fingers or lapped up by congenial tongues out of the sewers of Sodom …

A foul-mouth is so ill-matched with a white beard that I would gladly believe the newspaper scribes alone responsible for the bestial utterances which they declare to have dropped from a teacher whom such disciples as these exhibit to our disgust and compassion as performing on their obscene platform the last tricks of the tongue now possible to a gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried at first into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle, and who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his own finding and fouling: coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian (buggerising) tribe of autocoprophagous baboons, who make the filth they feed on.

Algernon Swinburne (written in 1874)

In terms of international law, Washington has gone rogue.

In July, the White House and Pentagon requested authority from Congress to build further “temporary intermediate staging facilities” inside Syria in order to combat ISIS more effectively. This request, it must be noted, comes in the wake of devastating ISIS defeats in Syria, mostly by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allied forces.

Shortly afterward, the Turkish state-owned Anadolu news agency revealed previously unknown details and locations of ten U.S. bases and outposts in northern Syria, several of them with airfields. These are in addition to at least two further U.S. outposts already identified in southern Syria, on the Iraqi border.

When asked about these military bases, a CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command) spokesman told me: “We don’t have bases in Syria. We have soldiers throughout Syria providing training and assist to the SDF (the mainly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces in the north of the country).” How many soldiers? “Roughly 1,200 troops,” says CENTCOM.

Yet when questioned about the international law grounds for this U.S. military presence inside Syria, CENTCOM didn’t have a response on hand. They referred me to the Office of the Secretary of Defense whose spokesman obstinately cited U.S. domestic law—an issue quite irrelevant to Syrians. He, in turn, referred me to the White House and State Department on the international-law angle. The State Department sent me back to the Department of Defense, the White House pointed me in the direction of the National Security Council (NSC), and the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel blankly ignored my repeated requests.

It isn’t hard to conclude that official Washington simply doesn’t want to answer the “international law” question on Syria. To be fair, in December 2016, the Obama administration offered up an assessment on the legalities of the use of force in Syria, but perhaps subsequent ground developments—the SAA and its allies defeating ISIS and Al Qaeda left, right, and center—have tightened some lips in the nation’s capital.

The map of U.S. bases in Syria is confusing. For starters, it reveals that many of the US outposts—or “staging facilities”—are nowhere near ISIS-controlled areas. This has generated some legitimate suspicion about U.S. motives in Syria, especially since American forces have begun to attack Syrian military targets with more frequency. This summer saw U.S. strikes against Syrian allied forces, drones, and a fighter jet all in the space of a few weeks. And most memorably, in September 2016, Coalition fighters killed over 100 SAA troops fighting ISIS in Deir Ezzor, paving the way for a brief ISIS takeover of strategic points in the oil-rich province.

It appears that U.S. intentions may go beyond the stated objective of fighting terrorism in Syria—and that Washington’s goals are also territorial and political and seek to retain post-conflict zones of influence within the country: in the south, north, and along the Syrian-Iraqi border.

Former Obama White House and NSC senior legal official Brian Egan believes the coming challenge for U.S. policymakers—in terms of international law—will be to justify clashes with Syrian forces and their allies.

“I think the harder international law question to defend is with respect to use of force against the [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad regime,” warns Egan. “For example, the U.S. strike in response to the [alleged] chemical weapons attack. There’s no self-defense justification, there’s no UN Security Council resolution. It’s an open question what the U.S. depends on in terms of international law.”

“Theories that might be applicable against terrorist groups like ISIS don’t appear to apply for U.S. military ops against Syrian forces. The more that U.S. forces are in-theater in Syria, the greater the chance of conflict between the U.S. and Syrian forces, which makes it essential that [this administration] explains its justification for potential operations in Syria,” emphasizes Egan.

But it’s not only Syrian forces and military targets that have come under American fire. In a stream of letters to the UN Security Council this year, the Syrian government asserts U.S. air strikes have also “systematically” destroyed vital infrastructure and economic assets throughout the country for months, and complains that the attacks are “being carried out outside the framework of international legality.”

With U.S. legal arguments supporting military presence in Syria unravelling, the Pentagon’s untenable position has become noticeable, even within its own ranks.

“Here’s the conundrum,” explained U.S. Special Operations Command Chief Army General Raymond Thomas to an Aspen gathering last week, in response to a question about whether U.S. forces will stay in Syria, post-ISIS: “We are operating in the sovereign country of Syria. The Russians, their stalwarts, their back-stoppers, have already uninvited the Turks from Syria. We’re a bad day away from the Russians saying, ‘Why are you still in Syria, U.S.?’”

The Russians, Iranians, Hezbollah, and other allied Syrian forces are in Syria legally, at the invitation of the UN-recognized state authority. The United States and its coalition partners are not.

At the moment, the latter are trying hard to ignore that elephant in the room. But as ISIS collapses, the question “why are you still here?” is going to rise in volume.

When the U.S.-led coalition first launched overt military operations inside Syria in September 2014, various western governments cited both the recently-passed UNSC Resolution 2249 and Article 51 (Iraq’s invitation for “collective self-defense”) as their legal justification for doing so.

Neither of these justifications provided legal grounds for use of force in Syria, however. There are basically only three clear-cut international law justifications for use of force: a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution providing Chapter 7 authority, self-defense against an act of aggression by a territorial state, and an invitation by the legitimate authority of a sovereign state for foreign troops to act within its borders—“consent of a territorial state.”

While UNSC Res. 2249 called upon member states to “take all necessary measures” against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, it explicitly stated that any such measures must be “in compliance with international law, in particular with the UN Charter”—which requires consent of a territorial state, in this case, the Syrian government.

And while Iraq did invite the Coalition to militarily engage ISIS within its territory, its “collective self-defense” argument does not justify the use of force inside Syrian territory—because Syria did not attack Iraq.

To make up for the gaping holes in its international-law arguments, the U.S.-led Coalition performed some legal acrobatics. The “unwilling and unable” theory posits that the Coalition could engage militarily in Syria because the legitimate government of Syria was either unable or unwilling (or both) to fight ISIS.

An onslaught of media articles and carefully-framed narratives were employed to set the scene for this theory. Recall, if you will, the slew of articles claiming that ISIS controlled around 50 percent of Syria—areas which were outside of Syrian state control—all meant to guide us to the conclusion that Syria was “unable” to fight ISIS. Or the narratives that insisted, until ground evidence proved otherwise, that the Syrian government aided ISIS, that it never fought the terror group, that it only targeted “moderate rebels”—all intended to persuade us that Syria was “unwilling” to target ISIS.

In fact, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies have fought ISIS throughout this conflict, but were often distracted by more urgent battles against U.S., Turkish, British, French, Saudi, UAE and Qatari-backed Islamist militants in the western corridor of the country, where Syria’s main population and infrastructure hubs are located. ISIS-controlled territories, it should be noted, were mostly in the largely barren, sparsely populated and desert regions in the north-east and east of Syria.

The NATO-Gulf Cooperation Council strategy appears to ping-pong Syrian troops from east to west, north to south, wearing them down, cleverly diverting them from any battle in which they were making gains. And it was working, until the Russians stepped into the fray in September 2015 and sunk the Coalition’s “unwilling and unable” theory.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-the-expanding-u-s-mil...

The advances of the Syrian army that resulted in the lifting of the three-year siege of Deir ez-Zor marked a real "peak of excitement" both for civilians and the troops, its governor has told RT. Islamic State terrorists resisted harshly to not give access to the city, which was "suffering in darkness."

To break the siege, Syrian land forces backed by Russia forces from the air, approached the city from several directions, including from Palmyra and from Raqqa, with some of the troops having arrived through the desert, Deir ez-Zor Governor Muhammed Ibrahim Samra told RT's Ruptly agency.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/402375-deir-ez-zor-governor-describes-seige/

“They’re meddling in our politics!” That’s the war cry of outraged Clintonites and neocons, who seem to think election interference is something that Russians do to us and we never, ever do to them. 

But meddling in other countries has been a favorite Washington pastime ever since William McKinley vowed to “Christianize” the Philippines in 1899, despite the fact that most Filipinos were already Catholic. Today, an alphabet soup of U.S. agencies engage in political interference virtually around the clock, everyone from USAID to the VOA, RFE/RL to the DHS—respectively the U.S. Agency for International Development, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Department of Homeland Security. The last maintains some 2,000 U.S. employees in 70 countries to ensure that no one even thinks of doing anything bad to anyone over here.

Then there is the National Endowment for Democracy, a $180-million-a-year government-funded outfit that is a byword for American intrusiveness. The NED is an example of what might be called “speckism,” the tendency to go on about the speck in your neighbor’s eye without ever considering the plank in your own (see Matthew 7 for further details). Prohibited by law from interfering in domestic politics, the endowment devotes endless energy to the democratic shortcomings of other countries, especially when they threaten American interests. In 1984, the year after it was founded, it channeled secret funds to a military-backed presidential candidate in Panama, gave $575,000 to a right-wing French student group, and delivered nearly half a million dollars to right-wing opponents of Costa Rican president Oscar Arias—because Arias had refused to go along with our anti-communist policy in Central America.

A year later, it gave $400,000 to the anti-Sandinista opposition in Nicaragua and then another $2 million in 1988. It used its financial muscle in the mid-1990s to persuade a right-wing party to draw up a “Contract with Slovakia” modeled on Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America; persuaded free marketeers to do the same in Mongolia; gave nearly $1 million to Venezuelan rightists who went on to mount a short-lived putsch against populist leader Hugo Chavez in 2002; and then funded anti-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine in 2005, and the later anti-Russian coup there in 2014. 

What all this had to do with democracy is unclear, although the NED’s role in advancing U.S. imperial interests is beyond doubt. Rather than “my country right or wrong,” its operating assumption is “my country right, full stop.” If Washington says Leader X is out of line, then the endowment will snap to attention and fund his opponents. If it says he’s cooperative and well-behaved, meaning he supports free markets and financial deregulation and doesn’t dally with any of America’s military rivals, it will do the opposite. It doesn’t matter if, like Putin, the alleged dictator swept the last election with 63.6 percent of the vote and was declared the “clear” winner by the European Union and the U.S. State Department. If he’s “expanding [Russia’s] influence in the Middle East,” as NED President Carl Gershman puts it, then he’s a “strongman” and an “autocrat” and must go.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-national-endowment-f...