Link: Democracy Assistance Bipartisan

Link: Democracy Assistance Promotes Conservative GOP Values

Doyle Stevick, Education Professor-University of South Carolina, 2008, Advancing Democracy Through Education: US influence abroad and domestic practices, eds. E. Stevic & B. Levinson, p. 104-5

Despite the constraints imposed by public funding, such organizations are, through a Byzantine set of relationships, able to advance politically untenable ends by funneling money through affiliates. This task is not difficult because, as Samoff (1999) writes, “the grid of internationally active education organizations and their affiliates is dense, many with overlapping memberships” (p. 63), and that was certainly true with civic education. A review of early civics partnership programs found in Estonia’s Pedagogical Archive Museum show that the International Federation for Election Systems (now just IFES) and the National Endowment for Democracy Systems (NED) were important early partners for civic education in Estonia, and an exploration of the overlapping memberships—what the anthropology of policy refers to as “social network analysis” (Wedel & Feldman, 2005, p. 2) –reveals deep connections with other conservative American organizations, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. NED, which has cooperated with the CIA, has used CIA funds, and was established by Ronald Reagan in 1983, channels money from Congress to the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI)—which are institutions of the two dominant political parties in the United States – as well as to The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) an the American Council on International Labor Solidarity (ACILS, which has merged with the AFL-CIO’s Free Trade Union Institute, or FTUI).

“These organizations, deliberately chosen to convey a sense of balance between left and right, labor and big business, then determine which groups abroad receive grants for their activities to further democracy. The remaining 30 percent of available grant money is designated ‘discretionary’ funding to be distributed directly by NED.”

Established as a private corporation so that it would not be restricted in the same ways that USAID is, NED’s structure of double-funneling the money, first from the government into NED and then through these groups, removes it considerably from public control. Nation journalist David Corn has described NED as “a porkbarrel for a small circle of Republican and Democratic party activists, conservative trade unionists and free marketers who use the endowment money to run their own mini-State Departments.”

Link: Civil Society Assistance Unpopular

Marina Ottaway & Thomas Carothers, Carnegie Endowment, 2000, Funding Virtue: civil society aid and democracy promotion, eds. M. Ottaway & T. Carothers, p. 10

Eric Davis, Political Science Professor-Rutgers, 2009, Publics, Politics and Participation: locating the public sphere in the middle east and north Africa, ed. S. Shami, p. 413-4

Promoting the institutions of civil society and efforts to reconstitute the public sphere could also be accomplished by providing low cost loans for establishing coffeehouses organized by civic, intellectual and artistic groups. Since the fall of the Ba’thist regime, there has been a revival of intellectual and artistic life, despite efforts by insurgents, who seek to reimpose authoritarian rule, to assassinate Iraqi intellectuals, journalists, artists, entertainers, and sports figures. Many of these organizations possess few resources. With small loans, they could organize coffeehouses that could both be used to expand their activities, or, in dangerous areas, to organize underground, and to attract a larger following. Indeed, a number of foreign organizations have been funding the underground activities of Iraqi NGOs engaged in a wide variety of projects from empowering women to teaching conflict resolution. This proposal reflects yet another relatively inexpensive strategy that could be used to encourage the rebuilding of civil society as part of a more long-term transition to democracy in Iraq.