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The Rich vs. the Rest of Us: Hungry and Sick Kids Edition [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-09
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, in his quest to cut government spending beyond the bone to help pay for tax cuts for him and his fellow billionaires and millionaires, has decided an agency that constitutes less than 1 percent of the United States’ annual spending and distributes billions of dollars of desperately needed aid around the world must go.
No matter who gets hurt, no matter who sufferers, no matter who dies, no matter how it weakens us on the world stage.
Hey, oligarchy has its costs, and do suffering and dying children really count if they’re not ours? I’m asking for the voters who decided that putting four-time indicted, twice impeached, sexual assaulter, tax fraudster, wannabe fascist dictator, convicted felon, President Donald Trump back in office and setting his co-president Musk loose to destroy as much of our government as he can get away with was a good idea.
We’re talking about the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). A pair of New York Times opinion pieces – one by regular columnist Nicholas Kristof and the other by Samantha Power, who was administrator for the agency during the Biden administration – took aim at the Trump/Musk effort to destroy it.
In his piece, titled “The World’s Richest Men Take on the World’s Poorest Children,” Kristof writes, “To billionaires in the White House, it may seem like a game. But to anyone with a heart, it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.”
From Power: “We are witnessing one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in U.S. History.”
She said that Trump, Musk, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (boy has he folded before Trump like a cheap suit) “have imperiled millions of lives, thousands of American jobs, and billions of dollars of investment in American small businesses and farms while severely undermining our national security and global influence – all while authoritarians and extremists celebrate their luck.”
Who said these guys aren’t accomplishing anything?
Trump has signed an executive order freezing foreign aid pending its review by the administration. On Friday, a U.S. District Court judge issued a temporary restraining order pausing the imminent administrative leave of 2,200 USAID employees and a plan to withdraw nearly all of the agency’s overseas workers within 30 days, pending further arguments in the case.
USAID, which was established by President John F. Kennedy and later authorized by Congress, provides things like food, medicine, health programs, humanitarian assistance, and emergency response in more than 100 countries.
Power said this work has “generated vast stores of political capital,” making these countries more likely to be our allies. She said the USAID has become “America’s superpower” in dealing with world affairs.
She said that’s why countries like Russia and China hate the organization. During her tenure “we saw a significant uptick in attacks by China and Russia on the agency. … In the last six months of the Biden administration, we documented more than 80 foreign propaganda campaigns targeting USAID’s work in local languages in every region of the world.”
Well, Trump is a Russian puppet, and Musk has jumped with both feet into that propaganda campaign and he does loves Nazis, so maybe this shouldn’t be so surprising.
You know who else is lying about USAID? The Trump administration. (I’m shocked. Shocked.)
The Washington Post reported that the administration used nearly a dozen false or misleading claims to justify dismantling the organization, including ones taken from Right-wing websites that lacked content, at best, or were outright false.
You can read about their campaign of lies here.
Kristof said, “the Trump administration braids together cruelty, ignorance, and shortsightedness, and that combination seems particularly evident in its assault on American humanitarian assistance.”
Musk and Trump have viciously attacked USAID. The former called it “a criminal organization,” “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” “evil,” and that it’s “Time for it to die.”
Trump said USAID was “run by radical lunatics.” To this Kristof (it really isn’t a fair fight between these two) counters, “Is it radical lunacy to try to save children’s lives? To promote literary for girls? To fight blindness?”
Nowadays, I guess that depends on which political party you belong to.
Noting work done in battling sex trafficking of children of Cambodia and the Philippines, Kristof asks, “Does Trump believe that rescuing children from rape is a radical lunatic cause?”
To be fair, this is Trump. Considering his history I’m not sure which side of the issue of raping children he comes down on.
Also to be fair, Kristof admits USAID has its flaws and some of the criticism directed at it has been justified. But why not just fix the damn thing instead of killing it and letting those receiving legitimate aid suffer and maybe die? Why would you stop all aid and cause a crisis when you can continue it until you’ve done your studying and come up with an alternate plan if needed?
Power notes that the agency has “meticulously documented” all of its programs and expenditures online and “It is perhaps not a coincidence that one of the first acts of the men intent on killing the agency was to have the USAID website go dark.”
Yeah, I don’t think that’s a coincidence at all.
Ian Bremmer, the president and founder of the Eurasia Group, a geopolitical consulting firm, told NBC News that USAID “is a big organization in a huge government, and clearly there are lots of inefficiencies, plenty of programs that I’m sure any sensible American would find that we’re spending too much money on or shouldn’t be continued.”
But, he added, “If you ask me does an organization like USAID scream for reform, along with pretty much every part of the U.S. government, the answer is, of course yes. But the idea that the organization is somehow criminal or evil or that all the money is wasted is, on its face, ludicrous.”
You can read Kristof’s column here.
You can read Power’s column here.
NBC News had an interesting story titled, “How Elon Musk boosted false USAID conspiracy theories to shut down global aid.” Its subhead reads, “Musk drove fringe viewpoints on USAID into the mainstream on X as the Trump administration halted the humanitarian relief agency’s work.”
You can read the NBC News report here.
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Here are a couple of things you might want to consider in all this.
First, Newsweek reported that during a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability in September, USAID Inspector General Paul K. Martin told congress that the agency was examining its relationship with Starlink, which is owned by Musk.
Starlink is a satellite internet system that provides high-speed broadband internet to remote and rural areas around the world.
According to Newsweek, in 2022 USAID and Starlink collaborated to provide 5,000 Starlink terminals to Ukraine to aid in its defense against Russia’s invasion into that country.
Starlink’s activity in Eastern Europe has been criticized, with many Russian operatives having claimed to have access to Starlink despite Musk’s assurances that only Ukraine was using the service, Newsweek reported.
In September, Ukrainian forces downed a Russian drone that had a Starlink terminal integrated with its systems, raising questions as to how secure Starlink’s operations during the Ukraine war are, Newsweek said.
So maybe Musk’s attack on USAID has to do with something other than just spending philosophy.
Also, this is another example of the America First bullshit spewing from guys like Trump and Musk. You may think it’s great if we cut off this funding to other countries, but the fact is that in 2024 USDA purchased more than a million metric tons of U.S. crops, including soybeans, rice, and wheat, for a total of more than $510 million, Reuters reported.
That’s a lot of lost business, but not the first time Trump has screwed American farmers. During his first term, he imposed tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese imports. China retaliated with tariffs on American products.
It also shifted more of its soybean purchase to other countries, hurting U.S. farmers to the extent that they were given $23 billion in government subsidies to help them stay in business, the Times reported.
That bailout was 92 percent of the tariff proceeds the United States collected during that trade war with China, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. So much for a big payoff from tariffs.
***
I don’t understand how Musk and Trump can do this on their own, considering that Congress controls spending in this country. Maybe in the end their efforts won’t hold up.
Like so many other things over the next four years, this is about who we are. We’d like to think we aren’t the country that cuts off aid to starving, sick children, but if Trump – who a plurality of voters chose to be president -- and Musk get their way that’s exactly what we’ve become.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be that country.
Kristof is right. It’s sickening.
***
Thank you for reading my post. You can see my other writings on my blog: Musings of a Nobody. Please share and subscribe for free via email on its home page.
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