VHeadline commentarist Arthur Shaw writes: The International Republican Institute (IRI) is an arm of the imperialist regime in Washington. The IRI's main job is to corrupt governments, politics, and civil society of foreign countries by the massive distribution of bribes which are also called "endowments."

The IRI's code term for corruption is the "democracy." When IRI corrupts, it announces to the world that it "promotes democracy." When the IRI corrupts absolutely, IRI then announces it "strongly promotes democracy." Vice versa, to promote democracy, for IRI, means to corrupt.

IRI is a two-faced and hypocritical animal which does in other countries the very same acts that the imperialist regime in Washington denounces as corruption if performed in the USA. In other words, what is corruption inside the USA is "promoting democracy" outside the USA. What is promoting democracy inside the USA, is anti-American outside of the USA.

For example, one of numerous US laws on politics is known as the Federal Elections Campaign Act (FECA) found at 2 USC 441e of the US code. Section 441e of FECA says it is a felony for any foreign national to give a US citizen or resident "anything of value" if the gift is " in connection with" any election within the USA. It is also a felony for a US citizen or resident to accept "anything of value" from a foreign national "in connection with" any election within the USA.

Some rulings in the hundreds of cases decided under FECA found that such trivial things as the temporary loan of a pickup truck by a foreigner to a staff member friend of a political committee in an election constitutes "anything of value" and constitutes "in connection with" an election, sufficient to send the foreigner and US citizen to a vicious, AIDS-infested, rape-dominated, torture-practicing US prison for a violation of FECA. In almost all of the FECA cases, the judge waxes philosophically about the alleged rationale of FECA to prevent the corruption of the US government and political system.

The very thing that Section 441e prohibits and precisely what US courts denounce as corruption is virtually the only thing that the two-faced, hypocritical, no good, and duplicitous IRI does all the time.

IRI has conducted political, ideological, genocidal, other neutralization operations in more than 100 countries, including Honduras. IRI calls its genocide and neutralization operations contributions to the war of terror waged by US imperialism against much of the world. Using Section 441e language, are these IRI operations "in connection with" elections in other countries? "For 25 years, IRI has been helping to spread democracy through trainings by volunteer experts from all over the world on political party and candidate development, good governance practices, civil society development, civic education, women's and youth leadership development, electoral reform and election monitoring, and political expression in closed societies," IRI boasts on its web site. Most of those operations sure sound like they are "in connection with" elections held in other countries.

Again, using Section 441e