Why is Ecuador Reneging on Asylum for Snowden?

Julian Assange has found a safe harbor in Ecuador but apparently all is not well between Assange and the socialist Ecuador government that is now accusing Assange of illegally arranging Snowden's asylum in Ecuador.

Edward Snowden's plan to seek sanctuary in Ecuador is falling apart

As whistle-blower waits in limbo, Ecuadorean frustration at the 'grandstanding' of ally Julian Assange has put in doubt his quest for asylum

The plan to spirit whistle-blower Edward Snowden to sanctuary in Latin America appears to be falling apart amid tension between Ecuador's government and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

President Rafael Correa halted a bid to help Snowden leave Russia amid concerns Assange was usurping the role of the Ecuadorean government, according to leaked diplomatic correspondence.

He declared invalid a temporary travel document which could have helped extract Snowden from his reported location in Moscow.

Correa declared that the safe conduct pass issued by Ecuador's London consul - in collaboration with Assange - was unauthorised. Other Ecuadorean diplomats privately said the WikiLeaks founder could be perceived as "running the show".

Yesterday Correa said he had spoken with US Vice-President Joe Biden about Snowden, and that Biden had asked Ecuador to reject the fugitive intelligence leaker's asylum request.

Correa said the conversation took place on Friday and that Biden "passed on a polite request from the United States to reject the request".

According to the leaked diplomatic correspondence, obtained by the broadcaster Univision and shared with The Wall Street Journal, divisions over Assange have annoyed Ecuador's government.

What's really going on here?  The US is using its foreign aid hammer and Joe Biden is the messenger.

US aid to Ecuador questioned amid Snowden asylum bid

For its own good, Ecuador might want to reconsider rolling out the red carpet for NSA leaker Edward Snowden as he crisscrosses his way through anti-American countries while seeking asylum, some say.

If Ecuador's President Rafael Correa does give Snowden the green light to call the Latin American country home -- in defiance of the U.S. -- analysts warn that Correa would be biting the hand that helps feed his country. The U.S. government has been sending Ecuador money for the past seven decades.

National security analyst Aaron Cohen told Fox News the U.S. should consider cutting off that aid if Ecuador approves Snowden's asylum request.....

During the past 50 years, USAID, the main American foreign aid agency, has given millions of dollars for education and economic growth. In the past five years alone, Ecuador has received $144.4 million.....

While the amount has steadily decreased from $35 million in 2009 to an estimated $12 million in aid requested for 2014, cutting ties with America could become more costly for Correa than he anticipated.

In recent months, Ecuadorean officials have made trips to Washington, jockeying for preferential treatment for some of its country's key native products like frozen broccoli and fresh-cut roses.

Favored political status, which breaks down to more jobs for Ecuadoreans and cheaper goods for Americans, could be one of the first things on the chopping block if Ecuador grants Snowden asylum.

At the end of the day, tyrannical statist and socialist governments will always support each other over liberty, transparency, disclosure, truth and justice.  We shouldn't be surprised if Ecuador turns Assange over to the US or facilitates his liquidation in cooperation with the CIA.

The US has two big hammers that it uses to whip nations into compliance 1. the trade hammer and 2. the foreign aid hammer.  The US can and has ruthlessly crushed exports from non-compliant nations.  As for foreign aid, it's well documented that most foreign aid is nothing but a defense contractor subsidy.

America's $2.3 Trillion Dollar Foreign Aid is Mostly a Defense Contractor Subsidy

Meanwhile, the Evil Empire marches on in its ruthless pursuit to crush liberty and free trade everywhere.

America's $2.3 Trillion Dollar Foreign Aid is Mostly a Defense Contractor Subsidy

Here's a 'Connecting the Dots Moment' for Americans to ponder:  It's a well documented fact that Congress wiped out the Social Security Trust Fund over the decades to the tune of at least $2.5 trillion and left a worthless pile of IOU's, here.  It's also well documented that foreign aid, according to 2007 figures, totaled an astounding $2.3 trillion.  How would Americans feel if they knew that the government they elected and trusted plundered their Social Security and that their retirement funds landed in the laps of defense contractors and corrupt foreign officials?  

Flushing $2.3 trillion in American tax dollars down the foreign aid toilet, here, is not only an act of grand theft but also a gargantuan welfare program for defense contractors.  The $2.3 trillion figure quoted in the link is based on 2007 data and hundreds of billions have been added to the foreign aid tab since 2007.  Still, it has been estimated that 2/3 of foreign aid lands right in defense contractor laps.

Two Thirds of US Foreign Aid Is Really Military Aid

Foreign aid is one of the biggest scams ever because gobs of American taxdollars end up lost, missing, stolen  unaccountable and untraceable.  Nobody really knows what happens to unaccountable foreign aid dollars.  Our government that disburses the money doesn't even know or, more likely, refuses to disclose who got the money.

Revealed: How $6.6billion of taxpayers' money sent to Iraq by Bush may have been STOLEN

It is thought to have been the biggest international cash airlift of all time, when $12billion in aid was flown by the Bush administration to postwar Iraq.

And now, for the first time, investigators auditing the cash have admitted that more than half of that huge amount may have been stolen when it got there in 'the largest theft of funds in national history'.

Iraq isn't the only recipient of massive foreign aid that is riddled with scandal.  Although $90 billion in aid has poured into Afghanistan since 2001, here, nobody really knows where that money went and Afghan and US officials are determined to keep it that way.

Karzai blocking probe of missing U.S. $billions in Afghanistan

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is blocking efforts by U.S. officials to locate billions of dollars given to aid Afghanistan's economy, stymieing efforts to combat money laundering of drug money, corruption and funding terrorists.

Karzai is prohibiting U.S. Treasury agents from accessing the Afghan government's central bank by allowing and even contributing to “hostile working conditions” for advisers there, according to a new report by the U.S. Inspector General's Office for Afghanistan Re construction.

Afghanistan is just one of many corrupt nations that are the recipients of tons of US foreign aid and even the NYT chirped in on the corruption in Afghanistan, here. Furthermore it is estimated that Afghanistan will need an additional $6-7 billion in aid over the next 10 years, even if aid dollars are slowing down a bit.  Reuters reported that a staggering 90% of Afghanistan's budget comes from aid, here.

More than 90 percent of Afghanistan's $17.1 billion national budget comes from foreign donation...

How did Afghanistan survive before the era of BIG aid?   Just fine! Heck, it's heroine trade could comfortably bankroll any nation which, of course, raises the issue of precisely why America is so interested in Afghanistan.  It's widely believed and documented that the CIA, frequently dubbed Cocaine Import Agency, is the biggest drug dealer on the planet, here.

As fiscal and economic woes pile up in America, most Americans remain absolutely clueless as to what is really going on and what their government actually does.

US Foreign Aid: A $2.3 Trillion Grand Theft

It's no secret that US foreign aid is a monstrous scam that operates like a crime syndicate. Exactly who gets the gobs of money and why remains a mystery. One thing is certain however. Billions of US foreign aid dollars literally disappeared in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan

Vast sums of aid continue to be stolen in Afghanistan

Despite years of supposed effort to stop money laundering out of Kabul airport, billions continue to flow from the country unchecked.

In the summer of 2010, the US decided to do something about the enormous sucking sound being generated by the bulk cash shipments funneling through Afghanistan's Kabul airport and on to Dubai, Zurich, and London – every point of the compass, really.

So, the US embassy in Kabul created a "bulk cash flow action plan" and the Karzai government said it was on board. The results since? Well, around $4.5 billion flowed out of Afghanistan in 2011, according to the Congressional Research Service, the vast majority of it unmonitored and unregistered. That's about 22 percent of gross domestic product, an astonishing amount of capital flight.

Iraq

Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times, documented the mysterious disappearance of $6.6 billion from Iraq.

Missing Iraq Money May Have Been Stolen

US Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion, sent by the planeload in cash and intended for Iraq's reconstruction after the start of the war.

After the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that US officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, US Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash - enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.

Because vast amounts of foreign aid are doled out by the Department of Defense and the State Department, accountability is a missing factor in these US engineered money laundering and bribery schemes. To be sure, the bribing of foreign public officials is all part of the game for two reasons. A lot of foreign aid comes right back to US defense contractors and multi-national corporations are constantly in search of foreign resources to exploit and plunder.

The scandal known as US foreign aid is nothing new.  It's been going on for decades.  In fact, in 2007 foreign aid costs were documented at $2.3 trillion, here.  

The West has spent over $2.3 trillion on foreign aid in the past 50 years and despite all the money thrown at the problem of global poverty very little has changed. This provocative statement is what William Easterly’s book, The White Man's Burden, is all about.

William Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University and was the senior research economist at the World Bank for more than 16 years. So if there's anyone who could write a book on the subject this man would seem to be it.

Trillions of dollars just don't vanish into thin air. Somebody got the money for some sinister and evil purpose and those folks would typically include defense contractors, foreign government officials and US contractors.

THE SCANDAL THAT IS FOREIGN AID

The US Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department entity that administers foreign aid, has admitted that it really has no idea how much US taxpayers’ money is used for its intended purpose and how much lines the pockets of corrupt politicians or winds up in Swiss banks....

Corruption has always been the bane of foreign aid. Consider Sudan, a sub-Saharan country that gets close to $1 billion a year and which ranks first on the list of corrupt governments. A researcher for the Council on Foreign Relations reported just a couple of months ago:

"[S]ince 2005, [Sudanese] state officials and government contractors have stolen an estimated $4 billion from treasury coffers—an amount equivalent to 30 percent of the country’s annual economic output. In a particularly egregious example, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning squandered millions of dollars as grain contracts, meant to stave off an anticipated food shortage, was instead awarded to shell companies."...

Ten American for-profit government contractors each received over $200 million from USAID last year and together received $3.19 billion to administer “development” projects; those companies are often run and staffed by former USAID employees under what might be described as a second retirement system. By the time they take out their overhead, fees for the lawyers, lobbyists and public relations specialists, conduct environmental and feasibility studies, pay for first class travel for inspection visits and to attend high-end conferences at the world’s best watering holes, little of the taxpayers’ money is left to do what the dollars were intended for.

Worse, these Beltway bandits become a breeding and feeding ground for left-leaning, progressive, anti-capitalist do-gooders to spread their gospel among the downtrodden countries of the world.

One thing is absolutely certain: trillions of dollars squandered on foreign aid did not benefit humanity or the poor and starving. These folks are just as poor and starving as they were 50 years ago before US foreign aid. The entire foreign aid racket is just another lucrative taxpayer funded scheme for politically connected insiders and campaign contributors who feed off of statism, cronyism and fascism.