The generic operating model of the massive USAID scam under successive US administrations as follows. A bunch of dudes from India or Africa − The Gabon or Cameroon − rock up in Washington: “Um, hi, we have, erm, diarrhoea”.
Because the system is so interconnected, the gentlemen are then marshalled toward a mob boss-like character never far from the action: “Go and speak to one Mr. Bill Kristol, he might know how to get some funding.”
You ought to know who Bill Kristol is: the shady veteran neo-conservative hawk who likes it when people die in war, particularly people from the Middle East. Iranians are his favourites, and whilst he went through an Iraqi phase, that’s now done and he’s reverted to type. Anyway, Bill Kristol meets the parties, they talk, and he tells them he will figure it out − come back in a fortnight.
Two weeks later the group returns and there is Bill Kristol, arm stretched out with his fist in a ball. “Hold out your hands, peasants, see what I’ve got for you here,” he instructs, at which point everyone obeys. But then he twists his fist into a capishe-esque shape − the one where you trick someone to look at it then get to punch them on the arm − and purses his lips. “Suckers,” he jeers, “I’ve stolen all your cash − now piss off back to where you came from and take your ass-spraying mayhem with you.”
Gorging trough
Scams as well established and convoluted as USAID can sometimes only be exposed by adjacent controversy or revelation − think Bernie Madoff being rumbled only because of the global financial crisis in 2008/9. Insofar as USAID is concerned, this happened recently when the suburbs around Washington DC were measured as the most affluent in the world. There are no diamonds, gold, oil or rare earths there. Just proximity to a massive, taxpayer-funded gorging trough.
But people like Bill Kristol weren’t the only features of USAID. As scams beget scams, USAID did actually give money to groups and movements in other countries − on condition they thought and behaved in a specific way: groups such as Democracy Works Foundation, or DWF, in downtown Johannesburg.
A once-recipient of $2.4m of USAID largesse, DWF doesn’t appear to emphasize how democracy works as much as it teaches everyone, including white people, to hate white people, aligning it with the contemporary wisdom of the Liberal Democrats and the Greens Party in the UK. It beds down with the likes of Oxfam − the Jimmy Savile of charities − whilst engaging in ambiguous initiatives such as “climate justice”.
Way back in 2014, DWF published an attack on the Democratic Alliance, in which the sociology Professor Christi van der Westhuizen asks whether the party “can rid itself of its pernicious form of whiteness”. Credit where it’s due: this was published more than half a decade before this sort of talk mainstreamed through scolding books and irate professors seeking crutches for their existence.
At the time Van der Westhuizen’s insights were published, DWF didn’t have a service level / co-operation agreement with USAID. That only came in 2018 when administration was placed in the hands of one Mark Andrew Green − a Republican. Green was previously the US Ambassador to Tanzania under George W. Bush, succeeded by one Alfonso E. Lenhardt − who was also a USAID administrator − before Green’s term.
Greasy passage
Pardon my French, but what the hell was happening in this place? Seen one way, it was a greasy passage of careerists and the all-too-casual business of government; from the other, a disposal plan for the ‘not-quite made its’ – where administrators evidently didn’t bother to monitor the organization’s work. This explains why money ended up in the pockets of people like Bill Kristol, and not in Imodium prescriptions for our poor Africans.
There’s another dimension. At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, was USAID an accidental weapon of mass destruction?
This should be asked in view of its support of an NGO called Turquoise Mountain, the husband of whose President is former British politician Rory Stewart ̶ himself not unfamiliar with getting everything horribly wrong.
Flush with USAID cash since 2008, Turquoise Mountain worked in Afghanistan, ostensibly helping women there living under some of the most oppressive circumstances on earth. How did it do this? We find out in Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake (2015), where a posh young English girl from Turquoise Mountain is merrily teaching a class of Afghan women in a room. The subject is a men’s urinal, or more exactly, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.
The horror. The women shift uncomfortably in their chairs when they see it. The translator then explains that it is a toilet, at which point you can see the whites in their eyes: what the bloody hell is the mad English cow trying to do to us, they appear to be pleading, doesn’t she know what will happen if our husbands find out we’ve been looking at this filth?
Genocide hobbyists
This is channelling money through complicated arrangements to genocide hobbyists and current or future race-baiters, instead of people who genuinely qualified for assistance. Urged on by civil profiles who fail elementary scrutiny of maths, accountability, ethics and initiative.
Stuffing the pockets of teacher’s-pet media and “fact checking”. Being generally mental. If their objective wasn’t to pervert the world where it could with silly ideas and division, they’ll have a hard time explaining Samantha Power’s appointment in the Biden-handler administration.
An Obama alum, she is the fairy godmother of all the women who film themselves in cars melting down over a range of issues. So, thank you…I guess?
[Image: Paris Bilal on Unsplash]
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