First let me say that Political Affairs did the right thing in publishing the fine article on the activities of the "National Endowment for Democracy" in Venezuela today, 2014, after the death of Hugo Chavez, in the administration of Barack Obama.

First of all, this sort of "intervention" is nothing new.  From its very inception in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency  involved itself directly in political campaigns and trade union struggles to defeat Communist parties and alliances of the left in French and Italian elections, supported factions of the British Labor Party and German Social Democratic Parties that defended U.S. cold war initiatives(and also opposed those in their parties who supported the nationalization of industry and other anti-capitalist policies)  In Latin America, Africa, and Asia, the "third world," unlike Europe, these policies were also linked to political assassinations and coups.  Organizations like the World Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions were the illegitimate children of these CIA policies.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, these polices were exposed both by CIA defectors like William Agee a nd courageous investigative journalists.  The passage thanks the the Watergate conspiracy of the Freedom  of Information Act  further revealed the extent of such illegal CIA activities through the world, especially the interventions in Chilean politics which began in the 1950s in the CIA's attempt to keep the peoples front coalition led by Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende from coming to power and ended, after CIA involvement of the kind that Golinger describes today in three Chilean presidential elections and numerous other elections and activities, in the brutal overthrow of the elected Allende government and the establishment under Pinochet of a military junta state which combined the state politics of European fascism with the "free market" economics of Milton Friedman.

However, the Reagan administration both expanded the injuries of what were nearly three decades of illegal CIA and other U.S. agency policies by creating the "National Endowment for Democracy" to carry forward these activities "legally"

The idea for such an endowment was floated by Reagan in speech before the British Parliament and his leading lady in Cold WarII, Margaret Thatcher in 1982,  with fancy phrase about fostering "the infrastructure of a democracy---the system of free press, unions, political parties, universities."  Of course, the CIA had been working  surreptiously in all of these areas to foster anti-Communist, anti-socialist, anti national independence forces since its inception, and often to destablilize existing democratic infrastructures.  Since the Reagan administration was against "Big Government" the legislation carried forward in 1983 that established the endowment stressed cooperative actions between  public and private sector groups to foster "democratic pluralism."

In the initial budget for the Endowment in 1983, 13.8 million was to go to the AFL-CIO's free trade union committee, which of course had been involved in supporting anti-Communist and class conscious trade unionism since World War II.  Its most important leader had been Jay Lovestone, former General Secretary of the CPUSA in the late 1920s, champion of Bukharin and the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union and of what he called "American Exceptionalism" in the U.S. who after his defeat in the U.S. and world Communist movement organized his own faction and eventually went to work for the AFL , led its Free Trade Union Committee, became the most important figure in the creation of the ICFTU, and from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s, the leading figure in CIA supported trade union activities through the world

Without going into the groups tangled history, it  is important to note that besides U.S. government funding it receives extensive funding from various foundations and conservative and business organizations. It's apologists(including some in the Obama administration) mention that it supports "democratic forces" in countries where the U.S. supports authoritarian regimes, but of course, the CIA always did that as a kind of plan B.  The "democratic forces" the endowmnent supports are those who will play ball with U.S. economic interests and suppress the left in the name of "democracy."

It is time to cut all public funding from the National Endowment for Democracy and time to put the Obama administration on notice that it was not elected and re-elected to continue Reaganism abroad.