Mike Benz is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, a free speech watchdog dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet. Through educational reports, legal assistance, and public policy analysis concerning developing threats to digital liberties, the Foundation seeks to provide nonpartisan insights and assistance to all peoples taking a stand for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the free exchange of ideas online. Benz is is a former State Department official with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters. Mr. Benz founded FFO as a civil society institution building on his experience in the role of championing digital freedom around the world in the public sector. See Also: his July 15+ minute summary of The Whole-of-Society Censorship Framework.

I’ve done several lecture series on the early 2017 formation of the censorship industry in America. In one of those lectures I go through this meeting in early 2017 by one of the administrators of the National Endowment for Democracy which if folks are not familiar, is our premier CIA cutout. [See Also: NED If the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Is Subverting Democracy—Why Aren’t Some of the Left Media Calling It Out?, Jeremy Kuzmarov, CovertAction Magazine, 4 Mar 2022]

This was literally an organization formed in 1983 in a letter from the CIA director William Casey at the time to the then Attorney General when the Republican Reagan administration was complaining about the powers that the CIA had lost under Jimmy Carter and after the Church Committee Hearings in the late 1970s. They wanted to get those CIA powers back but were not able to get it through the Democratic Congress.

So they could establish—instead of having the CIA do it—a nonprofit NGO which happens to be funded by the government and back-channeled by the government and accountable to Congressional Committees. But technically it’s a private NGO and we’ll call it the National Endowment for Democracy and it will do what we don’t have the political power to do to directly and we’ll simply back-channel with them. That National Endowment for Democracy has four different cores. But it’s got two political spindle groups; one of them is for Democrats one of them is for Republicans.

To answer the first question, Who does the CIA serve? You can simply look at the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy. It is the big multinational corporations and big banks. On the board of it are the representatives of everything from McDonalds to Walmart to Microsoft to Exxon Mobile. They represent the College of Corporations and financial firms who are the beneficiaries of US foreign policy action.

Every multinational company depends on the US State Department, depends on the Pentagon, depends on our Intelligence Services to work as this trifecta in order to pry open markets for their goods and services. In order to influence the course of legislation in foreign countries to either get bills passed or to kill bills that might threaten that College of Corporations profits.

I experienced this myself when I was at the State Department and I got calls from Google lobbyists about what the State Department needs to do in upcoming negotiations to protect Google, our US national champion in the IT sector. So they all have a vested interest in putting favors in the favors bank for the US government and providing co-sponsor funds to taxpayer allocations in order to overthrow countries, in order to meddle in foreign elections, in order to pump up different interest groups or lobbying groups within foreign countries.

That is who the CIA serves, that is who the State Department serves, that is who the Pentagon serves. But there is this negotiation and this is often the role of donors and these large oligarchs. They will make these large campaign contributions. They will provide this sort of War Chest for the president. The president will then staff the CIA, will staff the State Department, will staff the Pentagon with the people the oligarchs paid for with their donor dollars. Then the CIA and the State Department and DOD will go out and inflict damage on whoever happens to stand in the way of those corporations and banks. That’s what we just call American foreign policy for democracy.