Guess who funded the right wing 'orange revolution' in Ukraine

The AP has finally come out with a story about the funding behind the Orange Revolution which is under way in Ukraine (via Dominon).

As is to be expected, it’s the same folks who were busy funding democracy movements in Venezuela. In this case a lot of the money was routed through the Eurasia Foundation, the Centre for Political and Legal Reforms, the International Republican Institute, many NED funded organizations such as American Center for International Labor Solidarity, Center for International Private Enterprise, the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, the Europe XXI Foundation, the Open Society Foundation – Ukraine, the National Democartic Institute For International Affairs, the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, the Ukrainian Center for Economic and Political Research (Razumkov Center), and others….

Many of the groups such as Center for Ukrainian Reform Education were specifically producing pro-market tv and radio programs as well as creating school materials and holding workshops for journalists. Another funded group is the International Centre for Policy Studies which actually has Mr Orange himself, Yushchenko, on its supervisory board.

All of this just goes to show that the US and it’s foundations are doing a lot of their groundwork. They are investing heavily in the intellectual framework to support neo-liberalizing countries, the media environment to support those ideas and their proponents, and the capacity building of pro-market political movements. This is how they get to the point where an election is close. It’s not too dissimilar to how we on the left function. We’ve got academics, media organizations, NGO’s, conferences, lawyers, human rights groups and media watch dog groups. We do smaller campaigns, we engage in education and public outreach, we try sometimes to win elections, sometimes change things by popular uprising in the streets, and sometimes by other means.

They of course, have $30+ million dollars to drop per country without batting an eye. We don’t have those resources, so we’ve got to be more creative and out organize them.

Back to what happened in Ukraine. When it first hit the air, i was very skeptical. Why was this event so quickly front page news. The answer, i’m pretty sure, is that one of these groups hired a Washington PR firm. The story was so quickly picked up by all the networks and very focused on a single set of messages. Hiring a PR firm in washington is not uncommon, it was how Kuwait sold the first Gulf War.

The primary justification for the protests was that the election was unfair, there was fraud. How did they know this, the exit polls showed one thing, while the final vote tally showed the incumbent winning. Who funded those exit polls? Turns out it was four foundations and a handful of western european governments.

The four foundations involved included three funded by the U.S. government: The National Endowment for Democracy, which receives its money directly from Congress; the Eurasia Foundation, which receives money from the State Department, and the Renaissance Foundation, part of a network of charities funded by billionaire George Soros that receives money from the State Department. Other countries involved included Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

The main group claiming electoral fraud is the Committee of Voters of Ukraine. They are funded by the same foundations which have been promoting a broader neo-liberal agenda. It is not too dissimilar to how there are US groups loosely connected to the democratic party doing electoral fraud work. But in the US the power balance is such that the democratic party establishment would rather keep it’s power and ‘safe districts’ than risk upsetting the system by exposing the extent of the gerrymandering and fraud.

Those groups who did want to push forward protests and take to the street to demand electoral justice have been left high and dry. They didn’t the millions for PR firms and the media networks build up to call people in to the streets. It’s our fault, we could have been organized. The democratic party leaning groups stopped when the order came down from on high that this election was not to be contested, despite the exit polls pointing to fraud, and widespread reports of irregularities.