Confirmed: Omidyar’s NGOs Clearly Partner in Regime Change

10 Comments

1. 

   Marie2 on March 1, 2014 at 9:39 pm

   “Omidyar’s NGO?”  That’s an irresponsible exaggeration.  As is concluding that the funding from Omidyar in 2011 was intended for regime change and any of those funds played any role in the 2014 protests.

   Not saying Omidyar is a good or even decent guy, but can’t say that about any of the “libertarianish” Silicon Valley gazillionaires.  Many of whom seem to partner and split as regularly as Ukraine senior politicians.  They all seem to have delusions that their big lucky break means that they are the ones to rule the world.  They’re only the 21st century generation of Kochs. Omidyar does appear to be less ideological and more naive than Thiel, but that may be like saying that Paul Ryan is less extreme that Ted Cruz.  Doesn’t matter.

   (Have to wonder if Thiel and/or his longtime Ukrainian Jewish associate have funded any NGOs in Ukraine.  Or any of the other eBay, Paypal, Facebook gazillionaires.)    

2. 

   Oui on March 2, 2014 at 3:00 pm

   billmon @MoA: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine – Color Revolution By Force

3. 

   Oui on March 2, 2014 at 3:00 pm

   Moon of Alabama post #190

   More on the Omidyar ‘intervention’. The Intercept (Omidyar’s media venture), has piece by Glenn Greenwald. Here’s part of what he has to say:

   (1) The Pando article adopts the tone of bold investigative journalism that intrepidly dug deep into secret materials and uncovered a "shocking" bombshell ("Step out of the shadows.... Pierre Omidyar"). But as I just discovered with literally 5 minutes of Googling, the Omidyar Network's support for the Ukrainian group in question, Centre UA, has long been publicly known: because the Omidyar Network announced the investment at the time in a press release and then explained it on its website.

   In a September 15, 2011 press release, the Omidyar Network "announced today its intent to grant up to $3M to six leading organizations focused on advancing government transparency and accountability" including "Centre UA (Ukraine)". The Network then devoted an entire page of its website (entitled "New Citizen (Centre UA)") to touting the investment and explaining its rationale and purpose (the group, claims the Network, "seeks to enable citizen participation in national and regional politics by amplifying the voices of Ukrainian citizens and promoting open and accountable government").

   The upshot is that Greenwald doesn’t seem to have a problem with a billionaire funding anti-government ngos (even if they do talk about ‘transparency’ etc, being their objective).

   (3) Despite its being publicly disclosed, I was not previously aware that the Omidyar Network donated to this Ukrainian group. That's because, prior to creating The Intercept with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, I did not research Omidyar's political views or donations. That's because his political views and donations are of no special interest to me - any more than I cared about the political views of the family that owns and funds Salon (about which I know literally nothing, despite having worked there for almost 6 years), or any more than I cared about the political views of those who control the Guardian Trust.

   I love it, “Omidyar’s political views are of no special interest to me”. Well jolly good for him. More liberal bullshit.

   Posted by: William Bowles | Mar 2, 2014 7:11:37 AM | 190

4. 

   Oui on March 2, 2014 at 3:01 pm

   Moon of Alabama post #193

   @William Bowles: My research and rebuttal here – Confirmed: Omidyar’s NGOs Clearly Partner in Regime Change.

   Unwittingly, the saga of the faked black-ops sniper video published by RFERL on 20 February 2014, is connected with the publication by Mark Ames and response of Marcy Wheeler to the NGOs and media outlets under responsiblility of billionaire Omidyar.

   Posted by: Oui | Mar 2, 2014 7:37:10 AM | 193  

5. 

   Oui on March 2, 2014 at 3:02 pm

   Moon of Alabama post #196

   @#193:

   Oui, has this info been communicated to GG? Reading through his piece on The Intercept once more, I get the feeling that GG was caught hopping on this one and totally out of the loop, what with all the guff about ‘not knowing about it’ and having to ‘catch up’ with news on Omidyar’s funding of subversive organisations. If not, then he is an amoral bastard, especially if the claims on your page are correct (about PANDO etc). I can’t believe that GG would get in bed with a billionaire without doing some kind of background check on him, if only to protect his own arse.

   Posted by: William Bowles | Mar 2, 2014 8:44:27 AM | 196  

6. 

   Oui on March 2, 2014 at 3:03 pm

   Moon of Alabama post #198

   Re Bandera et al. As it happens, my maternal grandfather came from what was then the Ukraine and possibly now is part of Belarus or maybe Poland, or even the Ukraine. Who knows?

   My mother, back in the 80s managed to track down, one, yes the one surviving relative of the Nazi occupation who wasn’t exterminated, an uncle of hers who was a professor of history at Kiev uni. There is no record of what happened to them. My grandfather came to the UK sometime in the 1890s to escape from the Cossack pogroms. He died in Manchester shortly after Hitler invaded the SU in 41.

   I think we simply do not comprehend what WWII means to the Russian people, who lost anywhere between 20 and 30 million people. There is no way in hell that Russia will permit the remnants of the Nazi onslaught to govern in the Ukraine. Period.

   At the same time, it’s indicative of the total failure of the Soviet Union to deal with the legacy off WWII that’s come back to haunt us, and it seems, right across Europe. It’s also the total failure of the Western left, such as it is, to offer a viable alternative to the current barbarism.

   Posted by: William Bowles | Mar 2, 2014 8:58:09 AM | 198

7. 

   seabe on March 3, 2014 at 10:08 pm

   Chris Floyd: Oligarchs Triumphant: Ukraine, Omidyar, and the Neoliberal Agenda

   “This seems so elementary that it’s almost embarrassing to point it out. Yet for the most part, anyone who raises these kinds of questions about Omidyar’s media enterprise has been immediately shouted down, sometimes vociferously, by those who otherwise evince a savvy skepticism toward Big Money and its agendas. Many of those assailing the Pandodaily report about Omidyar and Ukraine pointed out that “this is the world we live in” — a world dominated by Big Money — and you have to make the best of a bad lot. And anyway, news outlets have always been owned by rich and powerful interests, and First Look is no different.

   Well yes, exactly. And thus First Look — owned solely by a neo-liberal billionaire, who, as Jeremy Scahill has pointed out, takes a very active interest in the daily workings of his news organization — should be subject to the same standards of scrutiny as any other news outlet owned by the rich and powerful. But this doesn’t seem to be happening; quite the opposite, in fact.”

8. 

   seabe on March 3, 2014 at 10:18 pm

   Paul Carr, stating the obvious: On the importance of keeping investors out of the newsroom, and not treating your readers like fools

9. 

   seabe on March 3, 2014 at 10:59 pm

   One more, because if there’s one thing that this exercise has done it’s introduce me to many good radical writers (not that I didn’t know of Floyd before). This one is new (and also links to Moon of Alabama):

   http://catsnotwar.blogspot.co.at/2014/03/the-intercepts-interference-notes-on.html?m=1

10. 

    Oui on March 4, 2014 at 9:44 am

    .
    h/t seabe Oligarchs Triumphant: Ukraine, Omidyar and the Neo-Liberal Agenda

    Oligarchs Triumphant: Ukraine, Omidyar and the Neo-Liberal Agenda  by Chris Floyd @EmpireBurlesque

    The Western intervention in Ukraine has now led the region to the brink of war. Political opposition to government of President Viktor Yanukovych — a corrupt and thuggish regime, but as with so many corrupt and thuggish regimes one sees these days, a democratically elected one — was funded in substantial part by organizations of or affiliated with the U.S. government, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (a longtime vehicle for Washington-friendly coups), and USAID. It also received substantial financial backing from Western oligarchs, such as billionaire Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and sole bankroller of the new venue for “adversarial” journalism, First Look, as Pando Daily reports.

    Yanukovych sparked massive protests late last year when he turned down a financial deal from the European Union and chose a $15 billion aid package from Russia instead. The EU deal would have put cash-strapped Ukraine in a financial straitjacket, much like Greece, without actually promising any path for eventually joining the EU. There was one other stipulation in the EU’s proffered agreement that was almost never reported: it would have also forbidden Ukraine to “accept further assistance from the Russians,” as Patrick Smith notes in an important piece in Salon.com.  It was a ruthless take-it-or-leave-it deal, and would have left Ukraine without any leverage, unable to parlay its unique position between East and West to its own advantage in the future, or conduct its foreign and economic policies as it saw fit. Yanukovych took the Russian deal, which would have given Ukraine cash in hand immediately and did not come with the same draconian restrictions. Smith adds:

    [U.S.] foreign policy cliques remain wholly committed to the spread of the neo-liberal order on a global scale, admitting of no exceptions. This is American policy in the 21st century. No one can entertain any illusion (as this columnist confesses to have done) that America’s conduct abroad stands any chance of changing of its own in response to an intelligent reading of the emerging post-Cold War order. Imposing “democracy,” the American kind, was the American story from the start, of course, and has been the mission since Wilson codified it even before he entered the White House. When the Cold War ended we began a decade of triumphalist bullying — economic warfare waged as “the Washington Consensus” — which came to the same thing.

    American policy is based upon — dependent upon — a raging, willful, arrogant ignorance of other peoples, other cultures, history in general, and even the recent history of U.S. policy itself. The historical and cultural relationships between Ukraine and Russia are highly complex. Russia takes its national identity from the culture that grew up around what is now Kyiv; indeed, in many respects, Kyiv is where “Russia” was born.  Yet one of the first acts of the Western-backed revolutionaries was to pass a law declaring Ukrainian as the sole state language, although most of the country speaks Russian or Surzhyk, “a motley mix of Ukrainian and Russian (sometimes with bits of Hungarian, Romanian and Polish),” as the LRB’s Peter Pomerantsev details in an excellent piece on Ukraine’s rich cultural and linguistic complexity.  

    See my new diary – Putin Orders Troops Back to Base; East-West Détente.