Guerrilla History - USAID: Crossover with Radio Free Amanda

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

In this special crossover episode of Guerrilla History, we collaborate with friend of the show Amanda Yee and her podcast Radio Free Amanda to discuss the history and somewhat covert imperialism of USAID.  This is a conversation that was very interesting to do the background research before, and was a very fun conversation in itself! Amanda Yee is an activist and the creator of the podcast Radio Free Amanda.  Her show focuses on topics such as imperialism, media criticism, and more.  The show is very new, and we are hoping to help get the word out about it!  You can follow Amanda on twitter @catcontentonly and support her and her show at https://www.patreon.com/radiofreeamanda.  Guerrilla History is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.  If you have any questions or guest/topic suggestions, email them to us at [e-mail]. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod, and can be supported on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory.  Your contributions will make the show possible to continue and succeed! To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter @Red_Menace_Pod.  Follow and support these shows on patreon, and find them at https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare, but they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, everybody. and welcome to guerrilla history.

Today's episode is actually a crossover collaboration with friend of the show, Amanda Yee from Radio Free Amanda. Amanda is somebody that I personally wanted to talk to for quite a while, and we finally figured it out that guerrilla history collab would be the best way to do that. So we did it, and it's a really interesting conversation. The focus of this conversation is on USAID, but obviously that is a mechanism through with, which we can explore broader topics around imperialism, and importantly, exactly how American imperialism operates abroad through proxy organizations that are ostensibly dedicated to things like freedom and democracy and human rights. And so we sort of peel back the veil on that and examine how the organization USAID actually operates. And it gives us some insights into

imperialism. So this is a wonderful collaboration. We're really happy with how it turned out. And if you don't already know, definitely go follow Amanda on Twitter and check out her show, Radio Free Amanda. And with that said, enjoy. Gorilla History and Radio Free Amanda. So since this is something different, we're all going to go around and introduce ourselves. So I'm Amanda and I host the podcast Radio Free Amanda and I'm Cat Content Only on Twitter. Hello, I'm Henry Huckimacki. I'm one of the co-hosts of Guerrilla History. You can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. And I'm Adnan Hussein. I teach history and I'm director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and you can find me at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N on Twitter.

And my name is Brett O'Shea. I'm the host of Rev Left Radio, the co-host of Gorilla History, and the co-host of Red Menace. Happy to be here. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I've been talking with you, Amanda, about doing a collaboration about something. And then recently, we came up with the idea for today's episode. Yeah. Well, first of all, great honor for me to be podding with you all. You guys are one of my favorite pods, and I don't really have a lot of time to listen to a podcast, but when I do, I usually listen to yours. And I think I started listening to it when I came across. Was it like the MK Ultra episode? Yeah, yeah, that was really, really good. And so that got me hooked on to you guys. So I'm really glad to be here. But today, we are tackling U.S.Aid. So, yeah, like, I was hoping we could, like,

sort of get into the history of it and perhaps talk a bit about, like, some of the projects that's had in, like, different countries throughout the world and, like, what its missions are. Yeah, and I just want to say up front, first of all, wonderful to be speaking with you, Amanda, a longtime fan of your voice on social media and your work in general. But I think that the U.S. aid is a wonderful topic for us all to collaborate on, specifically because the mechanisms by which U.S. imperial hegemony is maintained throughout the world take these more subtler forms than empires have often taken in the past. And this subtlety and this sort of disappearing from the mainstream political discourse of these organizations,

is a primary way in which they're able to be so effective around the world. And most people don't know. I think the average American doesn't know what U.S. aid is. They'd assume that U.S. imperialism means like boots on the ground war with Iraq or whatever. And so exploring these subtler mechanisms and showing how they work and going through a few case studies, I think is incredibly important to see the many arms of Western imperialism broadly, but U.S. imperialism specifically. Yeah, I agree entirely.

I just briefly before I let Adnan and Amanda you hop back in. Just so that listeners, if you're unaware of what U.S. aid is, we're talking about the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is a body of the federal government of the United States. It's been in existence since 1961 and is primarily tasked with delivering foreign aid and foreign assistance to other countries abroad. So I think that this is a very important topic because when we have nice, polite liberals

or even social Democrats a lot of the time, you often hear an argument, something along the lines of, well, we know that the United States spends far too much money on the military. If instead they would just give all of the money to foreign aid through U.S. aid or something along those lines,

the U.S. would be a constructive and beneficial partner as a member of the, the global community. But again, as Brett mentioned, U.S. aid really also has some pretty prodigious roles in upholding the imperialist world order as well as colonial relations between the United States and other countries. And that's something that I'm hoping to get into during this recording. Yeah, I mean, like the way that it describes itself as an agency for administrating foreign aid development or like handing out humanitarian assistance like cloaked in this like kind of liberal language that appeals to, you know, Westerners. It's really interesting

because, you know, that's what they claim to be. But the purpose of it really is it's basically an agency which the primary task, and it wouldn't ever tell you that, but the primary task of it is to open up foreign markets for Western corporations. And it does that through, you know, what we were talking about, like humanitarian aid, development assistance, but also through contracting out to businesses to conduct that aid and contracting out to businesses, these sort of democracy promotion programs. like these psychological operations that promote or they seek out political dissidents in areas of the world with governments that the U.S. may not like and they sort of train them and then, you know, they train them to become political activists and like give them visibility in hopes that they will lead a movement to overthrow the government. So really, really interesting, like, sort of like a dual pronged approach that they

take. Yeah. And speaking to your point, sorry, Adnan, really quickly, just speaking to your point about buzzwords, you know, who could be against development, who could be against humanitarian aid or human rights or democracy? And this sort of language is what the overall project is shrouded in and making it even, you know, less likely to be critiqued or to have eyebrows raised at what it's doing. It just seems like a wholly good thing because it presents itself in this precise language which really appeals particularly to liberal people. Women's rights is another one that they generally use as justification for a lot of their interventions abroad. Yeah, indeed. I mean, I think you've been emphasizing this liberal soft power orientation that

USAID plays in U.S. foreign policy and geopolitical. empire. And it sounds like it's more subtle, but I think, interestingly, the USAID website itself betrays some very interesting information about how directly national security objectives and goals are priorities for this agency. I mean, the first thing to point out is that it's organized around various world continental regions. But there's one exception. But there's one exception, you know, to that, which is the Middle East gets its own region. And why is that the case? Is because there's so much U.S. imperial military involvement there that the sort of adjunct support that U.S. AID, you know, needs to provide in terms of support, you know, services, democracy

initiatives, all of this kind of programming and U.S. aid being directed needs to support very much the U.S. Imperial military mission. And so they say even in their orientation about the Middle East region, sub-region of USAID, is that its priorities in the Middle East and North Africa fall within three areas. And the very first one they mention is supporting core U.S. national security objectives. And the others, of course, mitigating human impact of ongoing conflicts in the region and fostering inclusive development and reform. And that's the Those latter two are the more liberal kind of soft power orientation, but they're very direct, right? It's not subtle at all supporting U.S. core national security objectives.

So I think that's one thing to point out is that where there is a lot of U.S. military involvement, it's clear that this agency has to do a lot of the kind of cleanup, post-op, kind of political managing of post-conflict situation. And also fomenting, as I think Amanda you were pointing out, you know, pick choosing actors who might overthrow or undermine hostile governments. That seems to be a big part of how they even imagine their work in this region. So there's less talk about, there is, of course, talk about women's rights, democratization, all these things. But they have to be very upfront and obvious with this because that's the reason they're there. But going back to the history, I would be interested to hear what else people think about how it operated within the Cold War and immediately post-Cold War, how those things shifted or changed.

Since it started in 1961, that's clearly, you know, under the Kennedy government where you could say that there was the charm offensive in the Cold War to have the U.S. be this globally identified power on behalf of democracy, meaning capitalism. and that's also the era where, you know, the Peace Corps was developed, and these things seemed to go hand in hand, you know. And so I'm wondering what you think about how it operated in the Cold War and then the immediately post-Cold War, you know, in the 90s, it was the era of globalization and this triumphalist neoliberalism. And during this period, it seems that, humanitarian aid was transformed.

And so maybe it's worth thinking about that before we talk about the contemporary, is just how did this sort of develop? Well, I'll say one thing in terms of the, sorry, I'll let you go to next Amanda. Just one quick thing then, in terms of the early history of USAID, when we're talking about the stated goals versus what was happening under, you know, the cloak of darkness, as it were, even from the very, very early days of this agency being in operation. We're talking about the early 60s here and then into the 70s, well into the 70s, as William Blum

writes in Killing Hope, the CIA was closely enmeshed with USAID, and many, many CIA operatives were on missions using USAID as cover, saying that they were U.S.AID representative in these different countries. So it makes it hard in a way to understand what really U.S. aid was doing in different parts of the world because in some cases, U.S. aid was doing things themselves

that were benefiting the U.S. imperial machine, benefiting U.S. colonial relations with other countries around the world. But in other cases, they were just used as a smokescreen without even necessarily being directly involved with things that were happening that the U.S. was pushing through other organizations like the CIA, which nominatively at least are completely independent from one another. But this was

happening even early on in the early days of U.S. aid being in existence. So it makes it really difficult to be able to say to what extent U.S. aid itself was pushing a lot of these interventions abroad that were trying to topple communist regimes, socialist regimes, trying to open up doors for U.S.-based corporations into different countries, extract further profit in terms of natural resources from different countries. It makes it hard to say. Amanda? Yeah, I'm actually really interested to learn more about the history of ties to the CIA, but I just wanted to add a little bit to the history that Edmund provided earlier. So, as he said, it was created in 1961 during the Kennedy administration, and when it was first created, Kennedy described its mission to Congress and that the U.S. USAID had three obligations to other countries.

And one was like a moral obligation as the wise leader of nations. second was an economic obligation as the wealthiest people in a world of largely poor people, and the third was a political obligation as the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom. So, like, what you saw in the early years of USAID was that it just created an infrastructure where private businesses and market principles could form and thrive. And so that involved easing trade regulations in, like, different countries, offering loan guarantees to businesses, providing scholarships for students to study, for their students to study here in the U.S., and creating these agricultural development programs that open the markets of poor countries to large agribusiness. So these policies benefited the private sector, but the private sector was not involved. necessarily involved in implementing them. But starting, like, more post-Cold War, like, in the 2000s. However, the role of the

private sector in USAID has increasingly grown. And now USAID sets up contracts with private businesses to design and execute foreign development programs under the USAID banner. So it's basically now, it basically functions now as a contractor, like to the private sector and hands out multi-million dollar contracts to corporations like DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Coca-Cola to provide development in countries in the global South. And like maybe we can get into this later, but oftentimes it, these, these programs, it ends up being disastrous. I can say something to that right now, if you'd like. So one of the things that I think is really interesting is this relation between U.S. aid and private companies. And one of the bigger scandals in terms of the scope of it, not necessarily the media coverage that it got, is the Nestle baby food, baby formula scandal.

Anybody remember that when that happened? It happened for like 30 years or something like that, but it really only broke in the news a few years ago. essentially what was happening is Nestle was doing all sorts of advertising and having fake nurses and whatnot push their baby formula to newborn infants and mothers that were still in the hospital so that they would think that baby formula was better for children than breast milk. Of course, it is not. There is nothing better for a child than breast milk for many different reasons, both from nutritive standpoints, both from immunological standpoints. There's many, many aspects where breast milk is better. But of course, you don't make money having kids eat breast milk. You make

money by having them take baby formula. So Nestle was pushing baby formula as this like magic elixir, basically. And they were really trying to, you have women around the world, particularly in poor areas, have baby food use. And one of the areas that this was in widespread usage was West Africa, particularly the ivory coast, what they found is that there was a few problems with this. Not only is baby food not nearly as good as breast milk, but also the water that they were using was not clean. Breast milk is sterile. The water that many of these women were using to make their baby food, not sterile. That's very bad for babies. Also, baby formula is pretty expensive for women that are living in the, you know, rural ivory coast. So they were diluting their baby

formula so much that the children were actually getting sick and dying in many cases of malnutrition. There's some estimates that up to a million children were affected by malnutrition as a result of this baby food being pushed on these women in, you know, the global south. So one thing that I thought was interesting was how USAID was related to Nestle. So I did some digging and I found this article from the Los Angeles Times, April 23rd, 2005, White House comes to U.N. nominee's defense, and the U.N. nominee, of course, is John Bolton. We all remember him. But when you go down in this article, you find this very interesting point, and they're talking about his demeanor. You know, John Bolton was this mean guy, and that was one of the

reasons why he wasn't going to be confirmed. Meanwhile, a former subordinate of Bolton's offered to provide information to the committee about the way she said that Bolton treated her in the early 1980s when they both work at the U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. aid. In a letter to Senator Barbara Boxer, Lynn D. Finney said Bolton had bullied her and tried to have her fired when they clashed over U.S. policy on the distribution of infant formula in developing countries, an issue that was then highly visible and politically charged. Finney said she was working as a U.S. aid attorney and had developed relationships with foreign officials at the United Nations. She said that in late 1982 or early 1983, Bolton called her into his office and told her to use her influence to persuade the United Nations to ease a policy that restricted the marketing and promotion of infant formula in developing countries.

Finney objected saying that she could not in good conscience push for such changes because she believed that the improper use of formula in poor countries was jeopardizing the health of babies. quote, he shouted that Nestle was an important company and that he was giving me a direct order from President Reagan, she wrote in the letter. He yelled that if I didn't obey him, he would fire me. When she persisted, Finney said, he yelled that I was fired. He later found out that she couldn't be fired, but he shifted her out. So it was just a very interesting relation. And I think it goes to tell a little bit of that story of the relation between private

companies and U.S. aid and kind of how that has a somewhat pernicious effect in different parts of the world for the profit of these American, as well, it's Swiss-based, but multinational corporations nonetheless. I think it's worth always saying whenever John Bolton is brought up that, I mean, this person is an absolute psychopath in any healthy society, he would be locked in a cage with a Hannibal Lecter muzzle on, but he flourishes within the American institutions, particularly around foreign policy, you know, all the way up through the Trump administration still has a role as the talking head on Fox News and no amount of blood and suffering from innocent people is enough

to satisfy that particular person. But again, that's just an individual. And the fact that he's been able to maintain a career so long within American institutions, I think says more about American institutions than it does about him proper. Kind of a tangent, but always worth mentioning. Well, I would also, you know, we've talked a little bit about some of the economic work that they've done on behalf of U.S. companies. I think, you know, picking up on that theme of intersections with work for the CIA and, of course, the way in which the CIA was able to use Peace Corps or U.S. AID government programs as cover for their activities, interestingly, I think things are starting to move in the other direction with, you know, the U.S. AID, seeing, you know,

that it needs to be more relevant to U.S. Empire's goals and operations in conflict zones and theaters where it's considered dangerous for aid organizations to work. So there was just a couple of years ago, I believe this new sub-agency or group within USAID, the lab, you know, development lab, you know, is interested in innovation and, you know, new ways of thinking about aid delivery that they have been thinking about training USAID personnel, you know, to work with directly, you know, and openly with U.S. military and intelligence agencies and to give them, you know, particular training, in fact, so that they can be a kind of special forces operating kind of unit and almost advanced teams that will be on the ground, you know, in areas where there isn't other human intelligence. You know, you can have these people on the ground directing, you know, intelligence gathering and also even when it comes to military attacks being, you know, people who can direct where bombardments should happen and so on. And as a result, they would need to be trained, you know, in various ways.

And that includes, and these are a red team, so rapid expeditionary development team. So we see that development, you know, is becoming militarized. You know, there's even this kind of characterization of it as a rapid deployment kind of, you know, expeditionary team. and they would have to be trained in sear, you know, use of weapons. A lot of those kinds of training that would make them similar to special forces. And this is something that I don't know if it's been specifically implemented yet, but was clearly one of the innovative so-called ideas of how to turn U.S. aid operations into more effective arms of U.S. Empire.

And it's sort of a disturbing, you know, trend because even though we might suggest that these groups are obviously have a long history of collaborating and working, you know, on behalf of U.S. Empire with intelligence services and so on, to have them directly being trained, you know, in combat, use of weapons, how to gather intelligence, and also how to, you know, this seer training, I'm forgetting exactly

what it stands for, but it's like a kind of comprehensive, you know, counterinsurgency sort of training that is, of course, where you get, you know, the interrogation techniques that, you know, develop in the training are actually used in places like Guantanamo and, you know, this sort of thing. So it's that same kind of training that they're imagining aid operators, you know, should be receiving in order to enhance their capability to work in, you know, dangerous areas because they've recognized that the U.S. has so little purchase in some of these areas, so few contacts, and that most of the time, for security reasons, they're walled off in these, you know, fortresses. You know, any U.S. embassy you see starting in basically the late 1990s and especially through the 2000s,

during the era of the global war on terrorism, any embassy you went to looked like were being rebuilt with security in mind. And, you know, especially after the attacks on the Kenyan embassy, you know, by Al-Qaeda in the 1990s, you know, they look like fortresses and they're walled off. And so they have no real contact with people outside. And so they feel like they're limited. And this is one way to enhance their reach into society in many of these areas outside of U.S. facilities. How do you guys want to proceed? We can hop into case studies. Yeah, some of the case study. Although I wonder if anybody has any comments on, you know, the fact that Samantha Power, a very, I think, notorious figure, has been, you know, named as the head

of USAID, and this is, of course, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under Obama, former head of Kennedy School of Government and somebody who wrote the book, if you want to say, wrote the book on humanitarian intervention. She's the one who did with Problem from Hell, you know, where she endorsed the importance and the need for U.S. global intervention, you know, for humanitarian reasons under a humanitarian rationale and also is one of the key exponents of the R2P doctrine, the responsibility to protect. So, Henry, go ahead, tell us about why this is a disaster to have Samantha Power as head of USAID.

Well, I think it's fairly obvious for those of anyone who knows who Samantha Power is. Samantha Power, as you laid out, is perhaps the biggest proponent of humanitarian intervention. I can't think of anybody else who would be on the same tier as her, because she's had very prominent roles where she's used this justification for intervention. She used this exact justification to support the intervention in Iraq, as well as being probably the biggest cheerleader for the intervention in Libya. You know, of course, we have other people like Hillary Clinton, for example, who was also a big, big cheerleader of what was going on. in Libya and what happened in Libya.

We came, we saw he died, quote, Hillary Clinton. But Samantha Power really was one of the driving forces for getting the U.S. to intervene in these places and using that justification of humanitarian intervention. She's now in charge of U.S. aid, where essentially the entire modus operandi of the organization is humanitarian intervention, just not of the military. sort, at least, you know, not yet Adnan, as you were laying out perhaps that might change in the future. But the entire purpose of U.S. aid is for this sort of humanitarian intervention. So when you have somebody that you see supporting brutal overthrows of governments and completely subjecting

the people in these countries to absolutely appalling conditions as a result of the interventions in places like Iraq and Libya, it should be a very important. should give us a little bit of pause that she is now at the levers of power within US aid and able to militarize that aid in any way that she sees fit. It is quite scary. That was one of the most concerning picks that Biden made for his administration to me. And there's quite a few worrying picks that he made for his administration. But Samantha Power being anywhere near something that can be weaponized with the justification of humanitarian intervention is just a disaster waiting to happen because you know that she's going to use it any time that she wants.

Yeah, and I don't think it can be understated the private, like the corporate interests and the corporate ties to USAID that are at play here, right, in these military interventions. Like you mentioned Iraq earlier, and USA, you know, it played like a pretty big role in the invasion of Iraq. Even like months before the U.S. even invaded Iraq, USA began to solicit bids from different companies for contracts to rebuild the country. They were thinking of that, you know, months before, months before. And one of these contractors, Bechtel, which is, you know, months before, and one of these contractors, Bechtel, which is, an engineering and construction company, it ended up receiving over a billion dollars in contracts for rebuilding the country. And so they received these contracts because their leadership

sat on advisory boards that were advising the Pentagon and they were the ones drumming up support for the war in the first place. So, you know, they ended up getting these contracts and the results were disastrous, and by 2006, they left the country unable to complete over half of its building projects anyways. But this engineering company, Bechtel, it has a really sorted history. You know, they have, they've done development work in Bolivia, and they've done work in India. In Bolivia, in 1999, they signed an agreement with, the then president to privatize the water in one of the cities. And Bechtel ended up increasing the price of water so that Bolivians making $100 a month had to pay $20 a month

for water. And this was ended up, this policy ended up being later reversed because of the backlash by Bolivians. And Bechtel ended up abandoning the project. but they still sued the country for lost profits. And then they had another project in India where they set up like a power plant, power company. And over time, the government ultimately realized that the electricity that they were producing was so expensive that it ended up being cheaper

to pay a yearly $220 million in fixed charges to maintain the plant instead of actually purchasing power from it. So Bechtel later abandoned this project, but again, they ended up suing the country for lost profits. Absolutely. Brief aside. Criminal, yeah, go ahead. Sorry, Brett, just let me say one brief aside

for listeners of Amanda's show who have not been listening to guerrilla history and shame on you for not. If you're interested in that story of the Cochabamba Water War, in Bolivia with Bechtel, we talked about that for a little bit in our episode that we did with Ali Vargas on the modern history of Bolivia. So if you are interested in hearing more about that, just find guerrilla history, wherever you get your podcasts, find that episode. And we do talk about that in there. Yeah, I just wanted to mention briefly the concept of humanitarian intervention

and then looking at the actual consequences and the results of such intervention in places all around the world, but particularly look at Libya, you know, framed once again as the overthrowing of an authoritarian dictatorship, needing to go in for the benefit of the people who live there, and Libya is in ruins compared to what it was before the American intervention in Iraq is obviously a world historical crime. I recently sat down with Hakeem, a Marxist Iraqi YouTuber, and we went into depth about how the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. military and its allies was the most brutal, most destabilizing tragedy that's happened in Iraq by Hakeem's estimation since the 13th century. So this concept of framing it as if you're going into a country, you know,

with all your, with all the arms at play from USA to actual boots on the ground military, you know, agencies to better the people. But in every situation, it leaves the people. worse off, in many cases, much, much more so. And Iraq is still and probably will for the rest of our lives be recovering from that crime of which nobody in any real way has been held accountable. And so at the very least, before we move forward, it should be very important for people on the left or people who care about other human beings to be able to identify how these things have been articulated and defended in the past. So when they come up next time, you'll be able to identify the exact same patterns of rhetoric, the exact same agencies, the exact same

players, and be able to put the pieces together of like, we have to, at least as much as we can, rally support to stop these things before they happen. And so understanding how these things play out is really essential. And perhaps we'll shift now into some case studies, some individual case studies. I think they're incredibly illuminating. And while USAID operates on every continent, even just a handful of. of case studies in specific countries will show you a very consistent pattern of behavior. And so, you know, what applies to these case studies we're going to go through applies

in almost every incident, even though we can't get to every single country that these organizations have operated in. Yeah, I can start, I can talk about Cuba. Cuba, I think, is a really good case study in which USA does this sort of Psiop regime change work. Whereas, you know, like most of the show we've been talking about how USAID contracts out like private businesses to do development work and provide humanitarian assistance. But in the case of Cuba, they do more, they contract out businesses to do more what they call a democracy promotion, right?

And so the primary business that they work with, US AID, works with in Cuba, is this DC development firm called Creative Associates International. So it's a DC-based development firm, and it sort of, like, like, it did a series of programs in between 2009 and 2012 for the purposes of democracy development. And the Cuban government, for very good reasons, they basically have a no tolerance policy when it comes to these kinds of programs. So if they find out you're working for USAID or a contractor, they will, they will, like, throw you in jail because, you know, they, they, they, live under, you know, U.S. sanctions, and the U.S. is constantly trying to undermine their government, right? So, U.S. aid, U.S. AID, and it has a relationship to Cuba with Cuba for a long time. And in May of this year, the Biden administration actually requested, like,

over $58 billion for the State Department. and the U.S. Agency for International Development for 2022, which is a 10% increase over this year's budget. And the proposed budget includes a $20 million fund for democracy programs aimed at Cuba, which was the same level of funding as 2021. So, you know, what are some of these democracy promotion programs that creative associates,

International and USAID have implemented in Cuba. There was one where they sort of funded hip-hop dissidents, and it was like a two-year project that started in 2009, and it was part of these series of projects that contracted, that USA contracted through Creative Associates, and they were designed as cultural initiatives that would slowly begin injecting more and more political and anti-government messaging into their work. So this DC-based development firm, Creative Associates, it had a contract with USAID in which they, Creative, hired a Serbian music producer who recruited a hip-hop group to infiltrate the underground hip-hop scene in Cuba to spread anti-government messages.

This hip-hop group was called Los Alianas, and the contractors would seek out Cuban musicians in hopes of boosting their visibility and stoking of movement of fans to challenge the government. And so what they would do would, like they would find, like, other hip-hop groups to promote. They would organize music festivals. Sometimes they would even try and infiltrate other music festivals. And so this project was really modeled after the students' protest concerts in Serbia in the early 2000s, which started out as purely cultural, but gradually added more and more political messaging into their work. So that in the end, basically any band that was playing at these protest concerts were saying, you know, we need to get rid of this government.

You guys can do it. come on, come on. And so this hip hop dissonant program, the Cuban government eventually got wind of it. And I think like a few of the contractors were arrested. And then the main hip hop group that was working with this project, Los Aldeanos, they eventually left for Florida after saying that the Cuban government made it basically impossible for them to work. And these other musicians that USA contractors were working with also left the country or stopped performing because the Cuban government just cracked down on this program. So I think that program ended in 2012. But another project that Creative Associates and USAID collaborated on was this like sort of like

Twitter that that they created in Cuba and it was called Zunzuneo and creative was contracted by USA to create this Cuban social media network that was like

sort of supposed to be like a bare bones Twitter and it was through cell phone text messaging and the U.S. government sort of covertly developed the service as a long-term strategy to encourage Cuban youths to revolt against the Cuban government and they were hoping that they would, that these youth would foment kind of a Cuban spring.

Because this program, I think, was implemented around the time of the Arab Spring. So they were hoping that something like that would happen in Cuba. So while conceiving of this operation, you know, like journalists have looked through multiple documents to, like, research this Zunzunea project. And U.S.A. staff had pointed out that text messages had mobilized mobs and political uprisings in the Philippines and other countries. And they also pointed to the case of Iran. And USAID noted that U.S.A. noted that. that social media's role played a really important part following the disputed election of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June of 2009.

And they actually saw, you know, social media and text messaging as a really important foreign policy tool through which they could, you know, like do regime change operations. So Zunzuneo, it was set up, I think, like, in 2009, 2010, and at one point it had maybe like 20, 30,000, 40,000 users. And USAID was actually gathering the users' private data in hopes of using it for political purposes. So they were collecting users' gender, age, and then, you know, like receptiveness. and also their political tendencies and sort of judging, you know, like how, how, like, well they could be used as political activists. So documents show that the U.S. government plan to build a subscriber base through, like,

non-controversial content, news messages about soccer, music, hurricane updates, weather, so on, so on and so forth. And their plan was that, like, once this, like, social media network reached a critical mass of subscribers, it would, again, like the hip-hop program, switch to more political content that was aimed at fomenting and uprising. So I think for the most part, that program was unsuccessful. and USA decided to shut down the program in 2012 when a government grant ended.

And then, like, the third project that Creative Associates and USA collaborated on was what was called the Travelers Project in Cuba. And it ran from, like, October of 2009 to September of 2012. And it was this project where they sent Venezuelan, Costa Rican, and Peruvian, youth to Cuba and they would work undercover often acting as tourists to scout people that they could turn into political activists. And so these youth that they recruited, you know, they only paid them like 541 an hour to do this work. But in one case, they formed an HIV prevention workshop, and that was a method of using of them like recruiting political activists. In another

case, these recruiters would go to Cuban college campuses to try and find potential political activists. The objective was to recruit university students with the long-term goal of turning them against the government and training them to be political activists. So the potential recruits were listed by name and then profiled and their leadership qualities were like sort of assessed in a spreadsheet and they would, you know, assess, you know, whether or not they could be turned into these activists against the government. So, yeah, the Travelers Program went to extensive lengths to hide the workers' activities, and, you know, they were told to communicate in code. Like, for instance, if you said, I have a headache, that meant that they suspected that they

were being monitored by the Cuban authorities. If you said something like, your sister is ill, that was in order to, like, cut the trip short. So this is, like, real spy shit right here. And to evade Cuban authorities, travelers, like, installed, like, this really innocent-looking content on their laptops that would mask sensitive information that they were carrying. They also used, like, encrypted memory six to hide their files and sent, like, encrypted emails using a system, you know, that, like, yeah, they just, like, sent emails through an encrypted system. And, like, creative associates, like, eventually changed strategy in September of 2010, and they shifted from sending outsiders into Cuba in order to develop dissidents to getting exit visas for new leaders and new political activists and training them off the island, like in Florida. and then, like, other beneficiaries in Cuba would receive cash payments to run their recruitment services.

But, yeah, like, I feel like every few years or so we hear about, like, some sort of dissident artist program or dissident hip-hop program in Florida. And I think, you know, that probably explains why they probably have, like, ties to USAID or Creative International or something like that. it's particularly ironic on two fronts one on the idea of you know everything you're mentioning about using social media and infiltrating and trying to intervene in these other countries affairs but here back back in the u.s we just had four years of a liberal meltdown over russia gate where you know russians apparently played into social media and started some facebook pages and that's what got trump elected or whatever so just it's it's almost cliche to point out of out the utter hypocrisy that the U.S. does to other countries what it would never accept other countries doing to them. And that should matter to anybody with values of consistency and moral integrity. But also the other irony is using hip-hop. This is a particular issue for me because hip-hop grew out of the position of black Americans as colonized people within the United States. Really, it was like their own cultural expression of their conditions. And

And hip hop has been picked up as a revolutionary vehicle for oppressed people the world over, from Palestine to Ireland to everywhere in between. And so to use hip hop as a mechanism by which you advance U.S. imperialism against a socialist country is another cruel and grotesque irony. But again, so just to summarize, we have using music and hip hop as a front, we see social media as a front. an HIV prevention program as a front, tapping into youth culture and university campus life more broadly as another front. And these are just a few examples of how these things are utilized by U.S. Imperial Hegemony. I can go next unless anybody else feels strongly that they want to go next. Okay. So I have Venezuela.

And, you know, just a little south of Cuba. And it's in the headlines a lot recently. And I picked it for various reasons. I obviously am fairly knowledgeable. on Venezuela. I care about the situation a lot. And we've seen just in the past few years some incidences which are highly publicized and which could be cast more light on based on what we're talking about here. We saw that absurd coup attempt that was stopped by Venezuelan fishermen. We saw that drone bomb explosion go off over the head of Maduro a few years ago when he was

giving a speech. And we saw, if you remember, which I'll get to in this little piece, the the humanitarian aid crisis at the border between Venezuela and Colombia where, you know, there was this attempt to get humanitarian aid across the Colombian border into Venezuela, just to help the Venezuelan people and the brutal Maduro government stopped it. And we all saw that. And I'll get to exactly what was behind that here in this piece. But let's start off from the USAID's website itself about what its goals are inside Venezuela. So this is from their own website. Inside Venezuela, USAID strengthens local human rights defenders, civil society, independent media, electoral oversight, and the coalition of democratic actors in Venezuela. The goal is to see a democratic transformation in the country with a return to free and fair elections.

As an aside, Venezuela has historically had enormously free and fair elections, even by outside groups like the Jimmy Carter Foundation, has found that Venezuelan elections. are incredibly secure relative to how elections are held around the world. So this idea that you need a democratic transformation and a return to free and fair elections is already sort of shaping the entire thing. And then at the end they say, to help address this man-made crisis, the United States is also providing robust humanitarian support for response efforts in Venezuela and throughout the region. Okay, so this gets at something that I think is really crucial here,

which is this attempt to lend humanitarian, aid to countries, which the U.S. itself is playing the primary role in suffocating, making the economy screen, putting sanctions regimes on countries that they disagree with, which ultimately hurts regular people being able to get basic goods and services. So if your interest was really about robust humanitarian support, maybe the first thing you could do is stop the criminal embargo against Cuba, lift the sanctions on countries like Venezuela, allow them to trade freely, with the rest of the world, but of course, that's not their goal, and so that will never happen. Now, the infiltration of USAID into Venezuela proper goes back at least to 2002, perhaps

further, but a really good resource on all things Venezuela, in my opinion, is Venezuela analysis. And they had an article in 2007, so I'm moving chronologically here. In 2007, I'm just going to read a little bit from that article. It says, quote, the United States government has almost perfected a method of intervention that is able to penetrate and infiltrate all sectors of civil society in a country which it deems to be of economic and strategic interest. In the case of Venezuela, this strategy began to take form in 2002, with the increase in financing of sectors of the opposition via the National Endowment for Democracy and the opening of an Office of Transition Initiatives of USAID in Caracas. These efforts were able to achieve the

consolidation of an opposition movement during those moments, which, despite the failure of the coup d'etat was able to cause severe damage to the oil industry and the national economy via economic sabotage and a stoppage by managers and business owners, aka more or less a capital strike. Following divisions within the opposition, the strategy reoriented its principal focus towards poor communities, the chavista sectors, and the media. The U.S. Embassy in Caracas opened up a series of satellite consulates or American corners in five states across the country without the authorization of the Ministry of Foreign Relations. It has an official presence in regions seen as important to the energy vision of Washington.

These states are rich in oil, minerals, and other natural resources, which the U.S. is seeking to control. The U.S. headquarters found spaces inside lawyers associations and municipal councils controlled by the opposition and continue to function as centers of propaganda conspiring against the Bolivarian Revolution. So here we have the addition of lawyers associations and municipal councils that, you know, as fronts for this effort. Finishing up here, the work of USAID and its OTI and Venezuela has led to a deepening of the counter-revolutionary subversion of the country. Up until June 2007, more than 360 scholarships have been granted to social organizations, political parties, communities and political projects in Venezuela through development alternatives incorporated DIA, a company contracted by USAID, which opened an office in Caracas in June 2002

and has so far gave more than $11 million to these 360 groups. That was between 2002-2007. So it's also funded political opposition parties, and more than $7 million has been invested as technical assistance to these opposition parties in Venezuela by the USAID. Now, catching up to current times, and I mentioned this in the beginning, we all remember the 2019 attempt to bring an aid to Venezuela from across the Colombian border. There was huge media focus on this event, and that's also really crucial. We just saw it with Cuba as well. When you see this something happen in a country that is, you know, an enemy of the United States, and none of it ever gets real media attention except in these crucial times, and it seems like something happened.

and immediately either social media or the mainstream media picks up on it and runs it as far as it can take it. That is not a coincidence. It happened in this instance as well. There was huge media focus on the event and it ended with one of the aid trucks being set on fire. And I remember all over social media when this was happening, anti-imperialists that understand how US imperialism operates. We're saying at the time this looks very much in line with things that the US and USAID do. and we're called conspiracy theorists and tankies and all the normal slurs hurled at anybody who points this stuff out. But of course it turns out years later to have been exactly that. So Western media obviously portrayed this as a brutal and cruel prevention on behalf of Maduro's government to stop, you know,

aid coming into the suffering people of Venezuela, playing into the idea that these socialist authoritarian regimes only care about power, not their own people. So it was like the perfect set of images and the perfect narrative to run on mainstream American corporate news. And they did that. And so following up on this, and this is actually coming from a report by the U.S. Agency for International Development, so within the U.S. even, and Al Jazeera in April of 2021 covered this. And I'm just going to read a little bit from this Al Jazeera page about this incident in 2019, right? So a couple years later, we find out what was really behind it. So Al Jazeera says in April 2021, quote, More than two years later, this risky gambit is being questioned by a U.S. government watchdog.

A new report by the Inspector General at the U.S. Agency for International Development raises doubts about whether the deployment of aid was driven more by the U.S. pursuit of regime change than by technical analysis of needs and the best ways to help struggling Venezuelans. The report focuses on the frenzied few months after opposition leader Juan Guido rose up to challenge Maduro's rule, quickly winning recognition as Venezuela's rightful leader by the U.S. and its allies. As part of that effort, USAID, between January and April 2019, spent two million dollars to position 368 tons of emergency supplies on the Caribbean island of Caraco and on the Columbia-Venezuela border. Under Guido's orders, the aid was supposed to be delivered into

Venezuela in defiance of Maduro, who condemned the effort as a veiled coup attempt, which it was. But when an opposition organized caravan that tried to enter Venezuela was blocked at the border, at least one truck caught fire, destroying 34,000 worth of U.S. supplied aid. As media attention turned away, and Guido's fight to unseat Maduro unraveled in the months that followed, the U.S. assistance was quietly repurposed. So they're advancing this humanitarian aid, and then all of a sudden the Guido thing falls out. Media turns its attention somewhere else. It more or less failed.

So what happened to all this supposed U.S. assistance? Well, in the end, only eight tons ever reached Venezuela, with the remaining 360 tons distributed inside Colombia or ship to Somalia, the report found. The 34-page report said that the U.S. deployment of aid responded in part to the Trump administration's campaign to pressure Maduro rather than coming to the aid of struggling Venezuelans. For example, the assistance was needlessly delivered in giant Air Force C-17 cargo planes instead of much cheaper commercial options that were available, ready to use meals to fight child. malnutrition were also sent, even though USAID's own experts decided the nutritional status of Venezuelan children did not warrant their use at the time. So again, you know, like, oh, these these poor Venezuelan kids suffering under socialist authoritarianism don't have enough nutrition, that's what we're sending them. And then even USAID's own experts said, the kids in Venezuela are

not suffering from the level of malnutrition that you're saying. So just to end here, to bolster Guido, USAID, believing UN agencies had been co-opted by Maduro, minimized funding to the United Nations, even though some UN agencies had infrastructure inside Venezuela to distribute the aid. The directive to preposition humanitarian commodities was not driven by technical expertise or fully aligned with the humanitarian principles of neutrality, independence, and based on the needs assessment, the report says. So that ends that report. So two years after that incident, we found out what was really behind it, what really

happened to that aid and the role that USAID played in it. So here we have a situation in which the USAID in coordination with the Venezuelan right-wing opposition, which it itself helped cultivate and foment, creates a spectacle in which the U.S. appears to be the good guys, sending humanitarian aid to the Venezuelan people, and the Maduro government seems to be sociopathically and unreasonably rejecting it, thus harming his own people, right? So the media runs with this. Most Westerners and most Americans just accept it, you know, slop it right up, and then we never hear about it again. And in truth, as it's turned out, you know, it was a subversive attempt by the U.S. in cahoots with the opposition to make Maduro look bad at a time when

they were actively trying to overthrow his democratically elected government. And so then you have these governments in places like Cuba, Venezuela, and around the entire world, which have to deal with this outside infiltration and intervention in their own country. So they have to say, you know, maybe lock down on what media outlets are acceptable in the country or what, you know, foreign corporations can operate in the country. And then the U.S. turns around and says, see, they're authoritarian. They can't open up their societies. They can't open up their economies because this is what socialism is. It's a top-down authoritarian hatred of liberty or whatever. When in reality, they're just trying to survive under these subversive attempts. And the last

thing I'll say is, this is all happening while Venezuela is under brutal sanctions from United States. So this whole facade, this whole charade is pretending like they're caring about the people when in reality their foreign policies towards Venezuela is causing so much of

the chaos. Both within, right, we've documented in this little section, they're operating within the country, with offices open in Caracas and five other states at least. They're funding and cultivating opposition. And then on the outside, you're being sanctioned and

threatened and slandered in the in the western press and so it's this inside outside you know dual attempt to destabilize the entire country and so that's that's what i have uh for venezuela and there's a lot more i could go into but i just wanted to use that one example that i think most people will remember two years three years later and show just how that whole thing played out so well i'm going to hop in and i've got a lot of somewhat disparate threads that i could expound on but I know that we're already running a bit long. So, hold on to your butts, and we're just going to run through them as quick as possible. I'm going to cover as much as we can.

So sticking with Latin America to begin with, let's talk about Nicaragua for a little bit. So, of course, the United States has a long history of intervention within Nicaragua, and that, of course, is still going on today with the Sandinista government under Daniel Ortega. But even before the Sandinistas came back into power, there was huge, huge amounts of money being thrown to make sure that they didn't come into power. So if we look in the lead up to the 2006 election in Nicaragua, USAID spent $260 million in Nicaragua in the lead up to the 2006 election in no real hidden way to try to bolster the incumbent regime. We're talking about a country that's got six and a half million people with a GDP per capita of about $2,100 per capita per year. Can you imagine what $260 million being pumped into the country in one year would look like for those people that, again, the GDP per capita is $2,100 U.S. dollars per person per year in a country of only 6.5 million people.

of course that did not work the sandinistas were successful in their their electoral bid in 2006 and immediately of course then USAID did two things they slashed the amount of money that was going into Nicaragua because of course they're not just going to be giving money to the Sandinista government who the United States is very hostile to so by 2012 about six years later the amount of USAID spending that was going into the country, went down from about 260 million to under $34 million per year. And what they were spending the money on was very different. Instead of being programs that would be popular amongst the people to try to boost the popularity of the incumbent government, what they were spending money on was alternative platforms. There was one media platform, I believe it was 100% Noticias,

forgive the Spanish pronunciation, they had given $10 million in one year to this one alternative media organization that was extremely hostile to the government, so much so that they were openly calling for coups against the government. What happened in 2018, a coup attempt against the government, being cheer-led the entire time by this popular alternative media organization. And I have a hard time. If you look up this media organization online. You will be told that it is an independent media organization. Can this media organization that's taking $10 million in a year from U.S. government funding claim to be independent in any sort of way? I don't think so. I mean, you know, independent from having

perhaps a CEO, you know, billionaire owner, maybe. But they're getting $10 million a year. again, in a country where the per capita GDP is $2,100 per person per year. So $10 million for a media organization goes a long way there. So not only then did they switch to funding media organizations that were cheerleading for regime change, but USAID was actually pretty explicitly just calling for regime change. they had put together a group called the Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua group and what their entire, their entire purpose was to try to push for a transition to democracy. They had things that they were calling for, including privatizing sectors of the economy,

neoliberal reforms, getting rid of Sandinista individuals within the government, and quote, I'm reading here, a transition to a rules-based market economy based on the protection of private property rights. They also put out a 14-page document talking about their strategy within Nicaragua, and it called for the word transition 102 times within this 14-page document, so they're not exactly being sly about what they're doing with their money. So you can see in a country like Nicaragua, where, again, there's not a whole lot of money in the country. It's one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. It's one of the poorest countries in the world, frankly. And it's a small country. It's only a six and a half million people. And they're spending,

they went from spending $260 million in a year there, which really, if it was used in the right way, could transform the lives of all of the people in the country. They slashed it, and they instead funneled all of the money that they were putting into the country. into institutions that were more or less explicitly trying to overthrow the government that was in charge there. So that is an interesting note staying within Latin America. But now I want to shift out of Latin America briefly because we have focused on Latin America quite a bit.

And this is why I said, hold on to your butts because we're traveling across the world now to Africa. Now, again, I did some pretty deep digging to find some of this information. information. This is from a 1993 paper in the, let me see if I can get the name of it, the journal Africa Today, Volume 40, number three, neocolonialism through population control, South Africa and the United States by Professor Monica Bahadi Kumba. And this entire article, I'm not going to read much of it because, again, we're running long, but I actually recommend people to find it. few pages long. But what she's talking about here is US AID's usage of high levels of funding

for population control mechanisms, as she calls them in the paper. And, you know, this is up to you to decide for yourself. That's why I want you to read the paper. But she lays out a pretty compelling case of the usage of these population control measures in primarily black countries in order to reinstate the, or maybe not reinstate, but kind of reiterate the colonial relations between the United States and other countries. Very interesting paper. I wish that we had more time to talk about it, but particularly the first three pages of this paper. Highly recommend everybody to look into it. So very interesting, another note to look at in terms of population, but there's also the ways that the money is being used. Again, looking at Africa,

there was a program called the U.S. President's Malaria Initiative, which was a program to try to streamline malaria research, malaria tracking, malaria treatment within the continent of Africa. And USAID was overseeing $30 million worth of research funding, which, as somebody who came out of science, let me tell you, $30 million for programs like this go a really long way. But what happened? USAID did not put that money into African-based organizations. They instead gave them to organizations based in Seattle to go in and do their research

in Africa, which African-based critics as well as members of the African diaspora in places like the United Kingdom called this scientific colonialism, which is another very interesting thing to think about. And the last thing that I want to talk about, because it's, again, we're running a bit long, and I have a lot more to say. But the last thing that I wanted to talk about was bringing up food security and nutrition. One of the things that we have to consider is the way that the money is transforming the way that people are getting their food. So when people have actually looked at countries where USAID is using money in order to partner with institutions to bring food to these developing countries, global south countries,

what they see in almost all of the situations that they were looking at was that subsistence farmers are dispossessed of their land, large agribusiness basically grabs the land in these countries, and it leads to incredible profits for these countries because they're partnered with an institution that has vast sums of money and needs quite a bit of food for the programs that they do, and we see the individuals that were in the subsistence farming as well as small, small, perhaps family farms being really squeezed out of the economy, which causes even more precarity for these individuals from an economic sense, even if there's more food in total coming into the country.

And that was from a book that I was looking at neocolonialism and the poverty of development in Africa by Dr. Mark Langan. But like I said, I've got a lot more, but I'll cut it there because of none, I haven't talked for a while, and I'll let you talk for a little bit before we wrap up. Well, there's so much to talk about, obviously, you know, I didn't really want to go into one country in specific, but maybe pull some of the threads that have been raised already and look at the regional focus for the Middle East again,

which I've, you know, talked a little bit about. But I thought focusing on actually U.S. allies is very interesting, because, of course, we're sort of aware of, you know, the more imperialist designs, you know, with military, you know, engagement and invasion and occupation. But what are, you know, what is the USAID and the whole apparatus of U.S. development and foreign aid? And there are all these different streams of it from the State Department to USAID and so on that are being channeled and funneled into the region. What do they look like? And I was struck really when I started researching a little bit to find out more about the history of these initiatives, how many regional interplays there are.

So some of the things that were talked about by Amanda about engaging with youth hip hop, you know, as a kind of cultural venue in which to foster U.S. goals of undermining these regimes. We find that there are similar kinds of programs with similar groups and agencies. associations, NGOs, or for-profit companies like that creative associates international who have tons of programs all across the Middle East and North Africa from a variety of funding sources, including USAID as well as the Department of State. And the main focus in these areas, especially U.S. ally countries like Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan. these are regimes that are allied with the United States, focus on youth and youth development

and particularly talking about resiliency and education, but you see a few buzzwords about resiliency, which is basically a word for how can they resist, how can we foster a kind of culture of resisting the lure of radical Islam basically is what it is all about. And the youth are, you know, kind of looked at as at risk and vulnerable because they could be recruited into, you know, jihadist organizations or countering the U.S. by being involved in more radical resistance to, you know, U.S. goals in the region. So they've targeted various communities, in fact, even in, you know, particularly,

particularly, for example, in a place like Morocco, they've targeted particular communities where there seems to have been, you know, a fair amount of recruitment to, you know, jihadist organizations elsewhere. And they've put in place various kinds of training programs, paraeducational reading skills programs, but above all, trying to recruit local religious leaders and, you know, families and others to, monitor who seems to be exhibiting risk factors as they describe it for potential violent extremism. And you see that there's a continuity basically between the countering violent extremism programs that they run domestically in the United States by trying to recruit local Muslim religious leaders and mosques to do surveillance within their communities and alert authorities to groups, individuals who seem like they might be radicalizable and to try and intervene and establish various programs to de-radicalize. And so basically a lot of these

development programs in places like Morocco, Tunisia, and Jordan that are targeting youth have the explicit goal of de-radicalization. And that's the approach that they're looking at. And one of the very fascinating things I noticed about a program that's been rebranded, and they're always branding them. You know, it started off being the Tunisia Resilience and Community Empowerment Program or Trace. I think that gave the game away. I think they'd had to change the name to Ma'an, which means together in Arabic. Let's do it together. You know, Trace sounded a little bit too much like they were actually trying to monitor and track people, you know, as an acronym.

I think they changed it. You know, they particularly indicated in the literature on this that they had developed some of these kind of programs of de-radicalization based on, you know, working with gangs in Los Angeles. And so we see that there, you know, something that Brett mentioned in response to Amanda's discussion of hip-hop is that, you know, the incubation of these programs of managing, you know, subjected and subaltern popular.

populations that are seen as dangerous, you know, goes from first looking at the, you know, colony within in the, in the black ghettos and places that the Black Panthers already identified as colonialism within the U.S. and incubating various techniques to manage and control youth, stop gangs and intervene in those that using the same kinds of programs and techniques and insights in the Middle East to manage and deal with a population that they regard as potentially threatening and dangerous. So under a lot of these umbrella of educational reading programs and other things that are about resilience, which involves a lot of psychological counseling and changes in family dynamics, trying to kind of prevent marginalization as they see it, because they think that

that's the risk or the danger for radicalization, as they call it. So that seemed to be kind of the global orientation of USAID and U.S. Department of State kinds of programs and outreach into U.S. ally countries is particularly targeting where young populations have been recruited to join in fighting against the U.S. in Afghanistan or places like that. So, you know, I guess my main point here is that those security objectives that they identified and were very open about at the outset when they described U.S. AID programs in the Middle East region are clearly directed towards security surveillance and not what we would consider. They're clothes within some framework of development and enhancing, you know, resilience and other factors of

personal development and so on, but they really are about monitoring, identifying, and as far as possible, preventing what they see as radicalization. Can I say one quick thing? Adnan, since you mentioned that we should look at U.S. allies as well as countries that the U.S. wants to exert, you know, regime change, aspirations onto, it reminds me of some information that I found regarding the Philippines, and this is prior to the Deterre regime, and for individuals interested in the Philippines, they should check out the guerrilla history feed. Here's another plug for the show. We recently interviewed Joma Sison, founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines. It was an amazing conversation, so you should find that in our feed. But in any case,

the Philippines prior to Deterre being in power was a pretty firm U.S. ally. I mean, yeah, there was some tensions on certain things, but certainly the Philippines was one of the U.S. as allies within the region. And the Philippines was getting huge, huge amounts of money from the Millennium Challenge Corp, which was funded in large part by U.S. aid as well as the State Department. They were getting somewhere in the vicinity of $400 million per year from this, program with the things that they had to do in order to get this program. And this is why it's interesting when we're talking about U.S. allies and how U.S. aid can influence them. The conditions,

it was conditional aid, and it required the Philippines to, among other things, maintain economic freedom. I'll pause there for a second and think about how the U.S. would constitute economic freedom. They also had what they called a trade policy indicator, which was a measure of how open that country's borders were to international trade. They looked at things like average tariff rates and non-tariff barriers like trade quotas, procurement procedures, etc., etc., etc. And they had to meet all of these targets in order to get these huge amounts of aid. And this is a country that is already an ally of the United States, but the U.S. is still going to be influencing its power on these countries around the world, including places like the Philippines, in order to ensure that

the United States has favorable trade relations, favorable security agreements, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This was just a dovetail with your last point at none. Yeah, I think this has been a really great discussion today on, you know, like how this agency of the U.S. that purports to have these very, like, lofty liberal goals of humanitarian aid and development and promotion of human rights, how we need to look at that, like, much more critically as an arm or a conduit by which, like, U.S. imperialism exerts itself. So I thank you all for like like coming on today and uh like bringing these case studies um and having this discussion with me similarly thanks for coming on you know from our side thanks for coming on our show

uh so i guess let's just go around the horn one more time and let the listeners know how they can find all of us uh once more so again listeners if you're interested in my ramblings you can follow me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1-9-95. You also can find Gorilla History on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A with two R's. A lot of people mess that up. And you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history.

And that helps us keep the show running, pay for platform fees and books and all of that. stuff. Adnan? Yeah, I enjoyed this conversation and thank Amanda so much for joining us for this discussion and for us to engage with her. Really important to understand the dynamics of this. And you can find out more about my work by connecting on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein. And also, I'd like to encourage people, particularly if you are interested in the Middle East and Islam, World to check out my other podcast called The M-M-L-L-L-I-S. Yeah, and I just want to say, Amanda, thank you so much for having us on. I really am a fan of your work.

It's really important. You put up with a lot of shit, and not only because of your politics, but I also think it's because you're an outspoken woman with independent mind frame, and that draws the ire of a bunch of weirdos and creep. So keep fighting, and thank you so much for having us on. And this entire discussion, I think, points to the necessity of real journalists and independent left media because the sort of discussion we had today you will never, ever find on any mainstream or corporate funded media site. But as for me, everything that I do can be found at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com, all three of the shows I participate in as well as our social media outlets. And Amanda, I would love some time to have you on RevLeft for a one-on-one conversation as well.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And for the guerrilla history listeners, my name is Amanda. I'm cat content only on Twitter. I have a podcast which you can find on patreon.com slash radio free Amanda. It's a podcast that may or may not be funded by the CIA, the NED, the State Department, or whatever people are accusing me of that day. We're going to be able to be. We're going to be able to be. Thank you.