Close the Mis-named National Endowment for Democracy

Haven’t heard of the National Endowment for Democracy? Not many people have. Yet the NED is taxpayer funded and carries out foreign policy with no meaningful public oversight or transparency. In fact, it does more to undermine democracy than not. The NED…
* …spent more than $20 per voter in Nicaragua in 1990--more than had been spent by both candidates in the 1988 US Presidential election!
* …funded and set up meetings between organizations involved in the 2002 attempts to overthrow the elected government of Venezuela.
* …funds far right parties in Eastern Europe, even working with convicted Nazi collaborators like Lazslo Pasztor, of the NED funded Free Congress Foundation.
* …funded, created, and trained most of the groups involved in the overthrow of Haiti’s elected government in 2004, through its core institute, the International Republican Institute, chaired by John McCain. This led to the bloodiest year in Haiti in modern history.
* …spends almost half its budget in support of the occupation of Iraq.
Here in the United States, we care about democratic rights. We fought a revolution against colonialism and we fought a civil war against slavery. In the 20th century we fought for women’s right to vote and we waged a civil rights struggle to secure the vote for people of all ethnicities. We were knocked down a few times when we got a president, in 2000, who actually lost the popular vote, only to turn around and force us into a war that the US people didn’t want. But we’re still here, still struggling on behalf of real democracy!