WATCH: How the U.S. Government and Nonprofits Found Each Other: USAID

“the American foreign policy objectives are these things and if you want to bid on them submit your proposal but you’re gonna do what we want done and we’re gonna pay for it”

This lecture, uploaded Feb. 5,  2009, by the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies titled “Have International NGOs Gotten out of Hand?” (Part 4) provides the following description: “A panel discussion with Professor Richard Falk, Professor Helmut Anheier, President and CEO of Direct Relief International Thomas Tighe, Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Foundation Chuck Slosser, and Dean Melvin Oliver discusses the nuances of globalization and civil society actors’ role in shaping world order.”

During  the panel discussion Thomas Tighe, President and CEO of Direct Relief International states the following in reference to foreign aid (video below):

 

“If I can just say one thing, that in terms of International NGOs, I think there are those who, I think the source of the funding is important too. There’s a lot of, the way the Us government, foreign assistance program has evolved, they don’t have the capacity to actually do anything except fund and oversee those funded. So I think that the United States Agency for International Development is a funder itself and I think they basically put out a tender, the American foreign policy objectives are these things and if you want to bid on them submit your proposal but you’re gonna do what we want done and we’re gonna pay for it”

Tighe goes on to say:

 “I think it’s really been a kind of papered over compromise that’s gone on for 30 years as the U.S. government lost the ability to have access and the nonprofits needed access for funds, they found each other and backing out of that dynamic where most of the US foreign aid is administered through either contract services or non-profit organizations I get frustrated because with some of the big boys, and I used to, you know, run the Peace Corps, and we were a government agency with all that that meant, but there are private groups that receive more federal money than the Peace Corps does & no one knows it …

 

So I think that dilemma of the source of the funding dictating how it is going to be described and the accountability channel that’s going to flow from it is a really hugely unresolved issue in this country, particularly in the realm of foreign aid.”

 

http://youtu.be/_ctbVfLuuXw

The full video can be viewed in it’s entirety, here.

The Destabilization of Bolivia – USAID

Note: In late 2011, the Democracy Centre, Avaaz and Amazon Watch, three international NGOs heavily influenced/funded by U.S. interests (Rockefellers, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Ford Foundation and Soros to name a few), led an International campaign in which they denounced and demonized Bolivian Indigenous leader Evo Morales and his government. This destabilization campaign focused on the TIPNIS protests. A violent confrontation between TIPNIS protestors (influenced/funded by U.S. NGOs/USAID/CIDOB) and the police was the vital opportunity needed in order to execute a destabilization campaign that the U.S. has been strategically planning for decades. This most recent attempt failed. Unlike westerners, Bolivians are today, far advanced in their intellectual understanding of global politics and carefully orchestrated propaganda, having been on the receiving end of Imperialism/colonialism and the capitalist economic system itself, for what surely must feel like an eternity.

Read: Declassified Documents Revealed More than $97 Million from USAID to Separatist Projects in Bolivia.

Read: Evo Morales Through the Prism of Wikileaks – Democracy in Danger.