Usaid Quotes

As the disasters of Iraq deepened, a bruised Bush administration did attempt to shift additional resources into diplomacy and development. The White House pledged to double the size of USAID’s Foreign Service, and began to speak of rebalancing civilian and military roles and empowering the US ambassador in Iraq. The supposed rebalancing was more pantomime than meaningful policy—there was no redressing the yawning chasm of resources and influence between military and civilian leadership in the war—but there was, at least, an understanding that military policymaking had proved toxic.

in December 2009, the Castros created new problems by arresting a USAID contractor named Alan Gross for bringing computer equipment to the small, aging Jewish community in Havana. Cuban authorities subjected him to a rump trial and then sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. One of my regrets as Secretary was our failure to bring Alan home.

In 2001, the U.S. government paid a record $4 billion in subsidies to cotton growers, a cost that exceeded the market value of the crop by 30 percent. To put it another way, these subsidies amounted to triple that year’s USAID payments to all of Africa, a part of the world where production costs for cotton were only about a third of what they were in the United States. In

Explosive population growth in much of Asia was making it less and less plausible that nations like India, Pakistan, and the Philippines would ever be able to feed themselves. In Famine—1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? William and Paul Paddock argued that a Time of Famines would soon lay waste the developing world. “The famines are inevitable,” they warned. And “riding alongside [them] will surely be riots and other civil tensions which the central government[s] will be too weak to control.” The Paddocks derided the naïve hope that “something [would] turn up” to forestall this doom.102 And the Paddocks were not alone in their assessment. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, for example, argued that Famine—1975! “may be remembered as one of the most important books of our age.” The Rockefeller Foundation shared these men’s sense of urgency. But, rather than advocate a triage system (as the Paddocks did), in which the worst-off nations would be denied assistance and left to their Darwinian fate, the foundation looked for new ways to attack the problem. The foundation had first extended its agriculture programs to India in 1956, at the request of the Indian national government. In the ensuing years, Rockefeller partnered with USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Together, they “helped establish five state agriculture universities in India. ” 103 These universities collaborated with their American counterparts on research and training. As it had in Mexico, the foundation thereby contributed to the development, in India, of a community of homegrown agriculturalists with access to the most advanced technologies in the world.

The United Nations and the U.S. government were also deeply involved. But early on, they had little success transferring “production technology from the industrialized temperate zones to the tropics and sub tropics.” This is why, according to Borlaug, the cooperative Mexican government–Rockefeller Foundation model “ultimately proved to be superior” to “public sector foreign technical assistance programs.... ”114 By the time the Green Revolution really took off, these national and supranational bodies had recognized the success of the foundation-pioneered model and supported it, as demonstrated by USAID’s commitment of funds to the international centers.115 The Green Revolution would not have been possible without earlier scientific breakthroughs. Dr. Borlaug estimates that fully 40 percent of the world’s current population would not be alive today were it not for the Haber-Bosch ammonia-synthesizing process.116 The spread of Mexican dwarf wheat and IR8 rice (and their continually improving offspring) would have been impossible without such breakthroughs in fertilizer technology. But that is the nature of progress. Scientific achievement is not diminished by its debt to the work of previous generations. It has been argued that the Green Revolution produced negative side effects commensurate with its benefits. Critics point out that, in some parts of the world, the greatest benefits of new seed varieties and agricultural technologies have flowed more to well-off rather than poor farmers. They also claim that the irrigation needs of high-yield agriculture drain local water resources. And fertilizer use, essential if high-yield crops are to reach their full potential, can lead to runoff that pollutes streams and rivers. Observers have also worried that, by enabling the developing world to feed more and more of its people, the Green Revolution has been a disincentive for them to get serious about population control. But population growth historically levels out in developed nations, and it is impossible to make the leap from developing to developed without an adequate supply of food.

In 2011, the Clinton Foundation brokered a deal with Digicel, a cell phone service provider seeking to gain access to the Haitian market. The Clintons arranged to have Digicel receive millions in U.S. taxpayer money to provide mobile phones. The USAID Food for Peace program, which the State Department administered through Hillary aide Cheryl Mills, distributed Digicel phones free to Haitians. Digicel didn’t just make money off the U.S. taxpayer; it also made money off the Haitians. When Haitians used the phones, either to make calls or transfer money, they paid Digicel for the service. Haitians using Digicel’s phones also became automatically enrolled in Digicel’s mobile program. By 2012, Digicel had taken over three-quarters of the cell phone market in Haiti. Digicel is owned by Denis O’Brien, a close friend of the Clintons.

allegedly receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in USAID contracts.”[193] The deep-seated corruption of the Palestinian Authority is the principal reason that Palestinians continue to suffer economically. The so-called refugees are largely pawns in a chess match used by Israel’s Arab neighbors who will not accept them into their own lands.

In midsummer Cip Jungberg, the second USAID officer for the district, arrived. As Antoine Huss left, the district needed two officers to work there, plus Mohammad Zahir, our local cultural advisor-cum-interpreter. Cip, who was from North Dakota, had worked on a provincial reconstruction team in Iraq, knew plenty about working in war zones, and had good ideas about developing new businesses. With a wiry beard, a wry sense of humor, and midwestern common sense, Cip was an immediate hit with the Afghans, who were impressed by his empathy and willingness to try anything at least once to get results and back them

The bulk of development funding was spent by the international donors themselves, as USAID or the Canadians did when they spent millions of dollars on roads. They contracted the work directly. None of that money got near the ministries. This proved to be a problem, because when USAID drew down its spending the Afghan government needed to continue to push projects into the villages to motivate people to stay on board with the government.

This so-called “independent” monitoring and accountability body’s purpose was to validate the imposition of police state controls by global and local political leaders and technocrats, endorsing their efforts to take the kind of harsh actions that Gates’s simulation modeled: subduing resistance, ruthlessly censoring dissent, isolating the healthy, collapsing economies, and compelling vaccination during a projected worldwide health crises. GPMB’s board includes a pantheon of technocrats whose cumulative global power to dictate global health policy is virtually irresistible: Anthony Fauci; Sir Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome Trust; Christ Elias of BMGF; China’s CDC director, George Gao; Russian health minister, Veronika Skvortsova; WHO’s health director, Michael Ryan; its former director, Gro Harlem Brundtland; its former programming director, Ilona Kickbusch; and UNICEF’s Henrietta Holsman Fore, who is former director of USAID, that used to be a reliable CIA front.

Instead, contracts were awarded to American consultancies like Bearing Point, or Adam Smith from the UK, to bring in their own people to run ministries and government departments. The Afghans themselves had little say. ‘The quality of internationals was extremely poor,’ complains Jawad. ‘I had an adviser to my office assigned through USAID, and one day I asked him to draft three template letters in English to reply to congratulatory letters to the President, and requests we kept getting for pictures and flags. All it needed to say was “Thank you, but we don’t have any.” This adviser spent two days on this, and then I had to go and correct it – and it wasn’t even my language. In the end I said, “You’re fired.”’ Jawad then received an angry call from the USAID office to say they had spent $60–70,000 on hiring this man, so he could not fire him. ‘I don’t care,’ replied Jawad. ‘I don’t have room for him in my office – send him to Dubai or somewhere. So much money was wasted.’ In

Freedom House is a human rights NGO that has long worked closely with USAID, which distributes U.S. government money for human rights promotion as well as regular aid and which has been condemned as Russophobic by Russian officials. As far back as 2004—before the founding of Donetsk Republic—it was also accused in Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. of indirectly supporting organizations working to promote the election of Viktor Yushchenko.

Wherever the Four Horsemen (Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco & Royal Dutch/Shell) gallop the CIA is close behind. Iran was no exception. By 1957 the Company, as intelligence insiders know the CIA, created one of its first Frankensteins—the Shah of Iran’s brutal secret police known as SAVAK. Kermit Roosevelt, the Mossadegh coup-master turned Northrop salesman, admitted in his memoirs that SAVAK was 100% created by the CIA and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency that acts as appendage of the CIA. For the next 20 years the CIA and SAVAK were joined at the hip when it came to matters of Persian Gulf security. Three hundred fifty SAVAK agents were shuttled each year to CIA training facilities in McLean, Virginia, where they learned the finer arts of interrogation and torture. Top SAVAK brass were trained through the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Public Safety Program, until it was shut down in 1973 due to its reputation for turning out some of the world’s finest terrorists…. Popular anger towards Big Oil, the Shah and his new police state resulted in mass protests. The Shah dealt with the peaceful demonstrations with sheer brutality and got a wink and nod from Langley. From 1957-79 Iran housed 125,000 political prisoners. SAVAK “disappeared” dissenters, a strategy replicated by CIA surrogate dictators in Argentina and Chile. … In 1974 the director of Amnesty International declared that no country had a worse human rights record than Iran. The CIA responded by increasing its support for SAVAK.3