Going back to President Ronald Reagan's speech to the British Parliament in June of 1982, Reagan proposed the establishment of an independent government agency to be Command Central for western propaganda and insurgency for export to eastern bloc countries (allegedly). The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was the agency that was created for that purpose.

If we in the alternate media understand nothing else, at a minimum, we understand that there is precious little truth to be found in the mainstream media and in our political circles. There are plenty of lies, distortions, misdirection, sensationalism and sheer nonsense, but very little truth. The wasteland of mainstream public discourse begins to make sense in the context of a covert "Battle of Ideas and Systems" that nobody bothered to tell us about - but to which we were all involuntarily conscripted.

"Low intensity conflict is as much a war of images, ideas and deception as it is a war of bullets and bombs. The ability to create images that obscure reality is a powerful weapon..." Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer "War Against The Poor, Low Intensity Conflict and Christian Faith", Orbis Books, 1990, p. 4-5

The idea for NED was put forth in the spring of 1982 by William Brock, then U.S. Trade Representative and Chairman of a private organization called the American Political Foundation.

NED is a government chartered and funded agency. They receive a relatively small budget so it would seem that they are actually a "pointer" organization. They set or pass through the policies and then "point" at the non-profits (NGO's), Think Tanks and political parties that will carry out the policy (propaganda and actions).

In the age of global communication and transnational cyber-networking, as exemplified by the anti-free trade movement, NED decided to start its own global citizens’ movement . The “movement’s” objective is to “offer new ways to give practical help to democrats who are struggling to liberalize authoritarian systems and to consolidated emerging democracies.”

Since 1983, when President Ronald Reagan launched what he called a “crusade” to foster “free market democracies” and bring the “ magic of the marketplace ,” both USAID and NED have channeled U.S. government development and public diplomacy funding into the democratization programs of the international institutes of the Republican and Democratic Parties, the AFL-CIO labor union, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce , as well as a wide range of institutes, political parties, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) abroad. In the mid-1990s, the U.S. government and quasi-governmental NED concluded that the democracy-building strategy needed an overhaul. Taking its cue from the anti-globalization and other transborder citizen movements, NED began to establish networks of center-right foundations, research institutes, youth groups, parliamentarians, and NGOs. In 1999 NED, with U.S. government and U.S. foundation support, organized the founding assembly of the World Movement for Democracy in New Delhi. With NED as its “secretariat,” the World Movement for Democracy functions, according to NED, as a “network of networks,” much as the anti-globalization forces are described as a “movements of movements. ”

NED’s second president, Carl Gershman, a former executive director of the Social Democrats USA, a splinter group of the Socialist Party, asserted in August 1984 that direct federal aid to private organizations would allow the United States to “engage in the competition in the world of ideas.” He complained that “the word ‘democracy’ has been appropriated by its enemies” and justified the new agency: “While only Washington can provide adequate funding, the nongovernmental nature of the endowment allows for more flexibility.” NED and its advocates talked as if the idea of freedom could not compete without a government subsidy. But people in East Europe were bitterly opposed to Soviet rule not because they received American-subsidized pamphlets but because they hated being oppressed.

Gershman became head of SD-USA shortly after the Socialist Party-USA split into two factions in the early 1970s: a left wing led by Michael Harrington, and a right wing led by Gershman, Tom Kahn, and Rachelle Horowitz. The right faction morphed into SD-USA, which in the early 1970s rallied around Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the hawkish Democrat from Washington State whose staff was made up of several future key neoconservative figures, including Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and Elliott Abrams. Like many of these neoconservatives, Gershman was tapped to serve in the Reagan administration. In 1984, Gershman took over the helm of the NED, a congressionally funded organization created by Ronald Reagan in 1982 to support groups that promote democracy in the Soviet Union and other communist countries (see GroupWatch Profile: SD-USA; and "Loose Cannon," Cato Institute, 1993).

In 1984 at the request of Senator Malcom Wallop, the GAO did a study titled, "Events Leading to the Establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy" . Why he requested the study can be inferred from the description of how the legislation for NED was passed. It was slipped in the backdoor after it was rejected through the front door (See Adobe pages 14-15).