Reply #8: Honduran President Zelaya earns high marks for governance, U.S. agency scorecard shows [View All]

[Downwinder]

The MCC Scorecard

The U.S. taxpayer-funded agency called the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which oversees a multi-billion dollar foreign-aid fund, was established in 2004 under the Bush administration to help spur development in poor nations through programs injected with a strong dose of neo-liberal economic theology.

MCC is currently in the final year of a five-year $215 million aid program for Honduras. The MCC Honduras program is designed to fund agricultural and transportation projects that “will increase the productivity and business skills of farmers and their employees who operate small- and medium-sized farms, and will reduce transportation costs between targeted production centers and national, regional, and global markets,” according to the MCC’s description of the aid compact.

Each year, as part of its assessment of countries participating, or seeking to participate, in its aid programs, MCC issues what it calls country “scorecards” that assess the economic and political conditions in those nations based on a comparison to other nations with similar per-capita incomes .

A score above the median (the middle point) in that comparison is considered a passing grade by MCC, for the purposes of assessing performance, while a score below the median is considered a failing grade.

The scorecard is developed from a range of data and reports prepared by a variety of organizations (none of them socialist in leanings), such as the World Bank, Freedom House, UNESCO and the Heritage Foundation.

The results of the scorecard assessment are released annually, but because of the dated nature of the data, the scorecard largely represents a trailing assessment; in other words, the scorecard released this year represents, in large measure, an assessment of a nation’s performance in 2008. The scorecards grade across three major categories, which are defined as “ruling justly,” “economic freedom,” and “investing in people.”

The most recent MCC scorecards, released earlier this month, seemingly were completely overlooked by the mainstream press, particularly the U.S. media outlets who continue to print propaganda promoting the justness of the Honduran coup based on the pretense that Zelaya was a wild-eyed socialist who was leading Honduras to ruin.

And there might be a good reason for the media silence with respect to the scorecard for Honduras.

The most recent scorecard for that Central American nation (the fiscal year 2010 report released on Nov. 9) shows that during the period covered, primarily 2008, when Zelaya was still in power, Honduras received passing grades on every measure of “economic freedom,” save one.

In fact, some of those grades were near the top of the class with respect to similarly situated nations. For example, Honduras in the most recent MCC scorecard, ranked in the the 89th percentile with respect to is regulatory quality and in the 98th percentile in terms of its trade policy

More: http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2009/11/honduran-president-zelaya-earns-high-marks-governance-us-agency-scoreca