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12Jul15

The NED's Euro-counterpart: EED

The U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency-financed Cold War contrivance created to advance right-wing governments and attack progressive nations around the world, has spawned a European offspring, the similarly-named European Endowment for Democracy (EED). The NED was largely the idea of conservative Miami Democratic Representative Dante Fascell, whose career was centered on supporting CIA efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro's government in Cuba.

Fascell never met a CIA covert operation he did not like. In fact, Fascell supported the successful effort by the U.S. Congress in 1985 to repeal the 1976 Clark Amendment, which prevented the United States from sending military assistance to Angola's UNITA, the right-wing rebel group that was fighting Angola's Marxist-Leninist government. After he left Congress, Fascell hired on with the Black, Manafort lobbying firm in Washington, DC, which bore the onus of representing in the power centers of the United States some of the CIA's favorite thugs and corrupt kleptocrats, including Jonas Savimbi of UNITA, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Mohammed Siad Barre of Somalia, and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea.

One of Fascell's most inglorious accomplishments was the creation of the NED, which became one of many magnet for America's rising cabal of neo-conservatives who championed a U.S. foreign policy that sought to defeat all opponents that stood in the way of pre-eminent American dominance over the entire planet. Created in 1984, NED became a nonprofit organization that served as a virtual laundry machine for the CIA to pump millions of dollars in support of political right-wing forces around the globe. NED had four components, two of which were to please the bi-partisan Democratic and Republican champions of the organization. NED's International Republican Institute (IRI) was a branch of the Republican Party and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) was a subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

A third component, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), was a virtual department of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest U.S. labor union, which saw its overseas efforts co-opted by the CIA shortly after the end of World War II. Not to be omitted, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which promotes vulture capitalism within the United States and abroad, had control of a fourth element of NED, the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), which, ironically, worked with its «labor» counterpart, ACILS, to work against bona fide labor and workers' rights movements and advanced the interests of U.S. multinational corporations.

The president of NED, since its inception, has been Carl Gershman, the former executive director of Social Democrats, USA, which was a faux socialist political party that was used by the CIA as a «leftist» American group to attack the Soviet Union and Cuba, support the CIA-financed Solidarity trade union movement in Poland, and provide an avenue for Trotskyist-turned-neoconservative loyalists of Max Shachtman, a Polish Jew and former aide to both Leon Trotsky and the AFL-CIO's rabid anti-communist president George Meany, to infiltrate the administration of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and become a festering cancer on the American body politic to the present day.

Washington author and journalist Michael Lind wrote in the New Statesman in 1983 that the George W. Bush administration's neocon cabal, including individuals like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan (the husband of the EED's strongest promoter Victoria Nuland), and dozens of others represented an "amalgamation of the defense intellectuals with the traditions and theories of 'the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement.'» Chief among this gang is Gershman of the NED, a Schactmanite, Zionist activist with B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Committee, and an assistant of the gay African-American activist Bayard Rustin. Gershman served as the U.S. Representative to the United Nations Human Rights Commission during the Reagan administration, a position that resulted in paleo-conservatives charging that neocon Trotskyists were crafting Reagan's foreign policy.

Those charges would return during the George W. Bush administration when the same former Trotskyist neocon elements helped plunge America into two disastrous conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Barack Obama administration's reliance on these same Trotskyist neocons, individuals like Nuland in the State Department and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, has resulted in a Cold War-era showdown with Russia over Ukraine.

The genesis of the European Endowment for Democracy (EED) from the Schachtmanites of NED should come as no surprise. The EED was the brain child of the former Polish foreign and defense minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who is married to arch neocon Anne Applebaum of The Washington Post. Sikorski, who recently resigned in disgrace as the president of the Polish Senate, was a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, where such neocon stalwarts as Michael Rubin, Frederick Kagan - the brother-in-law of Nuland - and Wolfowitz hang their professional hats. While Poland served as president of the European Union in 2011, Sikorski arranged for the EU to fund the European counterpart of the NED.

The EED found its own version of Carl Gershman in Jerzy Pomianowski, who served as Polish deputy foreign minister under Sikorski. Pomianowski became the executive director of the EED in 2012 and he immediately set out to cooperate with the NED in fomenting anti-Russian activities in Ukraine and central Asia, complementing George Soros's destabilization efforts in the Balkans and central and eastern Europe, and establishing EED operations centers in Riga, Copenhagen, The Hague, Oslo, Stockholm, and Kiev. Not all EU members support the efforts of EED. Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, Croatia, Finland, Ireland, Malta, and Luxembourg have remained opposed to the efforts of the EED.

The EED is practically a Polish creation. Upon its creation, Polish foreign ministry spokesman Marcin Bosacki said, «The creation of the Endowment is a double success for Poland... In a short time, Poland implemented - from the ground up - an important project for the EU as a whole. Moreover, a Pole - our Deputy Foreign Minister - proved the best choice from among the several dozen candidates who applied for the position». Pomianowski has placed the themed «color» revolution overthrow of the Aliev government in Azerbaijan and the Lukashenko government in Belarus high on the EED's priority list, along with fomenting other themed revolutions in Macedonia, Serbia, and for Pomianowski, the big prize, in Russia.

The EED, like the NED, does not limit its activities to Europe. In consideration of its strong support by Zionists and Israel, the EED is active in stirring up anti-Hezbollah and anti-Shi'a activities in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon among Druze, Christian, and Sunni inhabitants. EED is also active in Jordan and Tunisia. EED's nominal chairman is German Count Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, Vice President of the European Parliament and the nephew of Otto Graf Lambsdorff. Otto is a longtime official of the pro-capitalist Free Democratic Party, was German Economics Minister from 1977 to 1982, and is a descendant of Russian Count Vladimir Lamsdorf, the Russian foreign minister under Tsar Nicholas II. Count Vladimir was a committed Zionist and a well-known homosexual in the Tsarist government in St. Petersburg. Consequently, there should be little wonder as to why Alexander Graf Lambsdorff is attracted to the patently anti-Russian EED.

The NED, which has long been involved in promoting disruption and political instability around the world, has a partner-in-crime, the EED.

[Source: By Wayne Madsen, Strategic Culture Foundation, Moscow, 12Jul15]
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