Tag: foreign aid

Slovak PM Robert Fico Writes to Musk – Was Fico’s Would-Be Assassin Radicalized by USAID Media?

Populist pro-Trump Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot outside a meeting in May 2024. He barely survived the attempted assassination.

The neoliberal activist and aspiring poet who shot Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was moved by disagreement over funding for the Ukraine War.

Did USAID money lead to the assassination attempt on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico? The patriotic, MAGA-style leader of the Slavic country has asked Elon Musk for information on the funding of Slovak “non-“governmental organizations and media by the US International Development Authority (USAID).

In a letter to the head of the Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE), Robert Fico asked for details of  USAID grants that may have been used for radical political propaganda in his country. Fico has previously charged that Soros media may have contributed to the radicalization and calls for violence that led to his near-assassination 2024.(The name Fico is pronounced “feet so”.)

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Why USAID No Longer Makes Sense

The Trump administration’s decision to decimate USAID, the foreign assistance agency, has sparked a fierce debate in Washington. While Republicans on the hill and in the media have largely directed their ire against the left-wing ideological character of USAID programs, most of their Democratic counterparts have defended the agency on humanitarian grounds. 

The White House, however, has offered the correct, most urgent view: USAID largely fails to advance American national interests, and Washington can no longer afford to spend taxpayer dollars on programs that don’t benefit Americans.

Reasonable people may disagree about the merits of particular USAID programs, but it’s clear that a large portion of funding goes to meddling in the internal affairs of other countries—presented as benign “governance” projects. In fiscal year 2023, $16.8 billion of the total $43.4 billion of USAID obligations were in this category, which has included such projects as bankrolling “independent media” in Ukraine and pouring tens of millions into elections in Georgia. Perhaps these efforts did some good, but the catastrophe that American meddling has helped produce in Ukraine, and the victory of a pro-Russian party in Georgia’s recent parliamentary elections, suggest that USAID can no longer reliably advance U.S. interests in Moscow’s sphere of influence.  

Of course, USAID has also funded genuine humanitarian projects that have saved lives, such as the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). But even commendable humanitarian projects may not be worth the burden they place on the American taxpayer, meaning partisan debate about them is legitimate and indeed necessary. So long as people in North Carolina and Los Angeles are suffering from recent environmental tragedies, sending their hard-earned money to foreign lands does not sit right with many Americans.

Lost in the domestic hysteria of the moment is a more frank consideration of the sustainability of U.S. primacy in a changing global landscape. Washington doesn’t use USAID just to save lives, but also to expand and sustain American power globally. But if the “unipolar moment” is over and the world is now bipolar or multipolar, American cultural influence—sometimes called “soft power”—deserves reconsideration no less than the hard stuff.

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BOOM: Biden’s USAID Paid Terrorists, and Here’s HOW They Did It

Readers were shocked when we reported that USAID had paid Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists. Now we’ve found out how they moved the money.

In the story “USAID Pays the Terrorists Who Kill Us,” I wrote:

The U.S. State Department and USAID pay millions of dollars per week to the Taliban, the bin Laden family leading the group, and the Haqqani terror network. Remember those guys? Didn’t we wage a 20-year-long war to get rid of them …???

…We left Afghanistan, left behind billions of dollars in equipment, the strategically important Bagram Air Base, and all the biometric data of our Afghani supporters who put their lives on the line to help our efforts to get the Taliban and the terrorists they were hiding from us. So, of course, when Joe Biden, Tony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan had us bug out in disgrace, they left the Taliban a ready-made kill list of our allies.

Former CIA targeter and DoD employee Sarah Adams has reported that the bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and Taliban families have intermarried. Paying the Taliban is paying Al-Qaeda. That wasn’t the plan when U.S. troops went into Afghanistan 20 years ago to get Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda terror cell, which brought down the World Trade Center Towers. 

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Microsoft Drops USAID-Funded NewsGuard After Ted Cruz Starts Digging

Microsoft has dropped NewsGuard, a left-wing fact-checking organization they partnered with that has helped the advertising industry justify blacklists for independent conservative media sites such as ZeroHedge.

The move came after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) began investigating Microsoft for funding the online “media literacy” censorship tool created by NewsGuard to help guide “learners of all ages through the overwhelming landscape of online news and information.”

Now we come to find out that NewsGuard was funded by USAID…

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The Demise of USAID: Few Regrets in Latin America

“Take your money with you,” said Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, when told about Trump’s plans to cut aid to Latin America, “it’s poison.”

USAID (US Agency for International Development) spends around $2 billion annually in Latin America, which is only 5% of its global budget. The temporarily closed-down agency’s future looks bleak, while reactions to its money being cut have been wide-ranging. Only a few were as strong as Petro’s and many condemned the move. For example, WOLA (the Washington Office on Latin America), a leading “liberal” think tank which routinely runs cover for Washington’s regime-change efforts, called it Trump’s “America Last” policy.

While USAID does some good – such as removing landmines in Vietnam (themselves a product of US wrongdoing) – as an agency of the world’s hegemon, its fundamental role is aligned with projecting US world dominance.

Not unexpectedly, the corporate media have largely come to the rescue of USAID. They try to give the impression that they are mainly concerned that some countries would be badly effected by its loss. In fact, the follow-the-flag media understand that USAID is part of the imperial toolkit.

Both the Los Angles Times and Bloomberg suggested that USAID’s shutdown would “open the door” to China. The Associated Press described the withdrawal of aid as a “huge setback” for the region; the BBC echoed these sentiments. The NYT and other mainstream media point to the irony that many of its programs help stem outward migration from Latin America, an issue which is otherwise at the top of Trump’s agenda.

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Forget America, Foreign Leaders Want To Know Exactly How Far US Meddling Went In Their Own Backyards

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico wrote to U.S. President Donald Trump’s close advisor, Elon Musk, who tasked his DOGE with rooting out corruption and waste in the U.S. government. Fico has asked for clarity on exactly what funds the USAID sent to Slovakia, requesting a face-to-face with the X CEO as the past operation of USAID is “extremely serious for the internal affairs of the Slovak Republic.”

The Slovak prime minister also wants to discuss ways in which the two countries, Slovakia and the United States, can cooperate. As of now, Musk has given no public reply. 

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PR Firm Shuts Down Site That Profiled Pesticide Critics After Investigation Reveals USAID Funding

A pesticide industry public relations consultant that secretly profiled hundreds of food and environmental health journalists, scientists and advocates has shut down its profiling operation in response to public outcry, The Guardian reported Monday.

v-Fluence created profiles on more than 3,000 organizations and 500 people. The company coordinated with government officials to counter global resistance to pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops, according to Lighthouse Reports, which conducted a year-long investigation into the firm.

Many profiles include personal details including the names of family members, phone numbers, home addresses and even house values.

v-Fluence published the profiles on a private social network called “Bonus Eventus,” named after a Roman god of agriculture. Bonus Eventus is a private stakeholder “wiki” accessible by about 1,000 members described as the “who’s-who of the agrochemical industry” and its allies, including the world’s largest pesticide companies, academics and government officials from several countries.

More than 30 current U.S. government officials are on the membership list, primarily from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates pesticides and organics.

The profiling was part of a broader effort to minimize pesticide dangers, discredit critics and undermine global policymaking on pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), according to documents obtained by Lighthouse Reports.

v-fluence is run by Monsanto’s former communications director, Jay Byrne, according to GMWatch, which also investigated the firm’s activities.

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USAID Staff Cry for Their Fiefdom

The largest foreign aid agency on earth has, courts willing, abruptly closed its doors in the past week and sent most of its staff home. Finding their virtue has no place to strut its worth, the response of many has been indignation and assurances of retaliation. Many of them had been working from home for years, but now must rouse themselves to show such indignation for being sent (i.e. remaining) home on full pay. Like being told to continue as normal, perhaps, but in a way that exposes uncomfortable realities to those in the community who are actually paying them.

Such cynicism is not the greatest of human traits, and when applied to an entire organization it is unfairly generalizing, but it also has its place. The new government elected by the people of the United States was, specifically, elected to dig into the accounts of large government bureaucracies and address a perception of profligate use of taxpayers’ money. Taxpayers who, mostly, get paid far less than the bureaucrats they are funding. Perhaps unusually, the elected government rapidly set about keeping some of its promises, co-opting a prominent private person (as they had also promised) as an agent to help drive the inquiries. Much of the current surprise, perhaps, arises from an elected President keeping some promises. Annoying as this can be, it is also how democracy is supposed to work.

Much is being made of evidence that USAID had been pushing ideology over need, such as stoking coups in democratic nations or supporting children’s programs that encourage ‘non-traditional beliefs on gender in conservative cultures. Concern is also correctly levelled over apparently reckless funding of bio labs in poorly controlled environments. People will argue on whether such cultural colonialism and risk enhancement are in US taxpayers’ interests (it depends on how you perceive humanity). 

However, it is also important to reflect on how USAID addressed its supposed core function of supporting development and healthcare for the benefit of those in less fortunate countries. This can be considered in America’s interests because a more stable and prosperous world is good for trade, and/or because Americans are humans and there is a moral imperative to care for those less fortunate. Though some have contrary or isolationist views on this, Americans as a nation are generous givers, and this is roughly why most thought USAID was supposed to exist.

For the past 5 years, the staff of USAID has, as a team, supported policies that they knew would impoverish over a hundred million people, push up to 10 million more girls into child marriage, and drive up child deaths from malaria and malnutrition. 

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Corrupt media firm that cited corruption?

Matt Taibi and Walter Kirn just came out with an entertaining video talking about the $10,000 “subscriptions” that Politico was selling to the U.S. government by way of USAID. As high as the price of a used car, after selling gobs and gobs of them, they raked in $8 million from USAID. But Politico often reports on corruption.

When the people reporting on the corruption are taking Big Money from the people that they are supposed to be watching the most, then you get a moral dilemma stemming from a conflict of interest.

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USAID Helped Dems Steal 2020 Election by Funding Wuhan Lab That Created COVID, the Ultimate Excuse for Illegal Election Tampering

As the U.S. Agency for International Development comes under scrutiny for what it’s been spending your money on — something it hasn’t been very forthcoming about before President Donald Trump’s administration made it one of the first targets of its Department of Government Efficiency downsizing initiative — the agency has come under fire for a whole lot of largesse that supported progressive, Democrat causes.

From the small but inexplicable ($32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru) to the larger and more problematic (funding a supposedly independent journalistic non-profit referenced by a CIA analyst whistleblower responsible for catalyzing the first Trump impeachment as a reason to suspect the president of wrongdoing), USAID has had its fingers in plenty of pies it shouldn’t have.

However, what if I told you that USAID played a part in the catastrophic pandemic that helped the Democrats dramatically (and illegally) overhaul election laws — and thus, it could be said, helped steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden?

I know, I know: I sound a bit like a slightly unbalanced Morpheus handing Neo the red pill. Breadcrumb it all back, however, and it begins to make a lot more sense than you’d think.

On Jan. 25, the Central Intelligence Agency announced that it believed the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While they asserted this with “low confidence,” according to The Wall Street Journal, it was a major shift for an agency that had long refused to take a position in the matter, particularly when most U.S. intelligence agencies favored a natural origin.

The CIA now believes, however, “that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting.”

This comes as a surprise to virtually no one with a functioning brain. The virus most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 was not found naturally near Wuhan, nor was any original host animal found, nor were any bats — the source of that family of coronaviruses — ever found being sold at the wet market supposedly responsible for the outbreak.

There was, meanwhile, an institute of virology hundreds of meters from where the outbreak began. There were numerous safety issues documented there and public evidence of a mishap there in October of 2019, around the time when scientists believe the virus would have begun to spread.

While this can’t be said to be dispositive for a lab leak, the balance of the evidence is pretty clear — and despite their best efforts, even the Chinese Communist Party can’t come up with a plausible theory regarding animal-to-human transfer five years in.

To make matters worse, the research being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was — despite Anthony Fauci’s verbal prestidigitations in denying it — so-called “gain of function” research, which is to say it took viruses (in this case, bat coronaviruses), and looked at ways they could become more transmissible or deadly.

This was done at a research facility where, again, security concerns existed going as far back as 2009. (No, I’m not missing a one somewhere in that number.)

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