Reply #1: OUR USAID tax dollars have been used for the last 8 years in Latin America to fund

[Peace Patriot]

the rightwing political opposition including fascists, coup plotters, assassins, mass murderers, rioters, 'brownshirt' thugs, drug traffickers and criminals of various kinds and their political front operations, in order to overthrow honestly elected leftist governments.

I'd say it needs more than reform. I'd say it needs to be abolished. Even without Bushwhacks in charge, the arrogant presumption of the USAID is that the U.S. knows best how other peoples' should organize their governments and their political agendas. We have demonstrated to the world, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the ONLY interests that the U.S. supports are those of our U.S. based global corporate predators, and that we have become singularly incompetent at maintaining our own democracy in the face of global corporate power.

Example: In the U.S., three private, rightwing, Bushite corporations (Diebold, now called "Premier," ES&S and Sequoia) have taken over and privatized our election system, which is now run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code--code that the pubic is forbidden to review--with virtually no audit/recount controls. This is how Bush/Cheney were kept in office in 2004, after the initial Supreme Court coup in 2000. Half the voting systems in the U.S. now have no paper trail at all and no means to verify the results of electronic voting machines. The other half may have a paper ballot, but they conduct only a miserably inadequate 1% audit (automatic handcount), as a check on machine fraud. Statistical experts whom I respect say that a 10% handcount is the minimum needed to detect fraud.

By contrast, Venezuela not only uses OPEN SOURCE code in its electronic voting system--code that is owned by the public and that anyone may review--but they also handcount a whopping 55% of the votes as a check on machine fraud--more then five times the minimum to detect fraud. Their system is also characterized by very high citizen participation, by very high citizen satisfaction levels with their democracy and its direction, with strong election rules of every kind (for instance, a ban on political advertising in the week before the voting, to prevent "hit piece" ads), and with the active participation of international election monitoring groups, including the Carter Center, the OAS and the EU, at the invitation of the Venezuelan government.

Who has the better democracy--the U.S. or Venezuela? Indeed, it can be argued that we have a corpo/fascist state controlled by corporate war profiteers, that can barely be described in democratic terms at all, while Venezuela has the most vibrant democracy in the western hemisphere, and has been a pioneer in the involvement of excluded groups, including the vast poor majority which has never had political power in Venezuela, ever before. And the same goes for other targets of the USAID and its various political destabilization programs--Bolivia, for instance, where the first indigenous president ever to be elected in South America, Evo Morales, was the target, this last September, of USAID, DEA, CIA, U.S. military and U.S. embassy-instigated white separatist riots and mass murder of peasant farmers.

The USAID has become the tool of global corporate predators. And it, and every other U.S. program of interference, and covert and overt war, against democratic countries should be abolished. I do not believe that these corpo/fascist tools can be reformed. The change, if any, will be cosmetic, and then they will again be used for evil purposes when the next corpo/fascist junta gets Diebolded into office here.