🇺🇲 Creative Associates International (CAI): It’s Not Exactly the CIA, But Close Enough

A Nicaraguan man poses at a USAID event about LGBT issues in 2018. Source | CAI

By Alan Macleod

You have likely not heard of them, but Creative Associates International (CAI) is one of the largest and most powerful non-governmental organizations operating anywhere in the world. A pillar of soft U.S. power, the group has been an architect in privatizing the Iraqi education system, designed messenger apps meant to overthrow the government of Cuba, served as a front group for the infamous Blackwater mercenary force (now rebranded as Academi), and liaised with Contra death squads in Nicaragua. As such, it has functioned as “both as an instrument of foreign policy and as a manifestation of a broader imperial project,” in the words of Professor Kenneth Saltman of the University of Illinois, Chicago.

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🇺🇲 In America, Black deaths are not a flaw in the system. They are the system

Whether it’s police violence, poor medical care, or simply trying to breathe, we suffer from an underlying condition: racism

 Gwen Carr, racial justice activist and mother of Eric Garner, at a press conference calling for a ban on police chokeholds on Tuesday. Photograph: Scott Heins/Getty Images

Derrick Johnson

We die driving our cars. We die playing outside. We die babysitting. We die eating ice cream. We die sleeping in our own beds. We die and die and die at the hands of the police who are sworn to serve and protect us.

Even then, we are not done dying. We die giving birth. We die trying to breathe. We die when doctors under-treat our heart attacks and dismiss our calls for help.

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