On the one-month anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate.
For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing thousands of programs, including ones that provided food, water and medicine around the world. They’d culled USAID’s staff and abandoned its former headquarters in the stately Ronald Reagan Building, shunting the remnants of the agency to what was once an overflow space in a glass-walled commercial office above Nordstrom Rack and a bank.
There, the crew of newly minted political figures told the office manager to create a moat of 90 empty desks around them so no one could hear them talk. They ignored questions and advice from career staff with decades of experience in the field.
I like how the title is written as if the deaths were an unforeseen consequence of the celebrated cuts, when the reality is that they knew it would cause deaths and celebrated that too.
But not rich people, which is all that matters for the Trump administration.
Trump is cutting aid to the poor every way he can, no amount saved is to petty, and no amount of human suffering is to high.
That’s the ultimate Republican way, and the majority of Americans support it until it hits themselves.
Because USA has become a society where sociopathy is celebrated as the ultimate expression of freedom.
But the joke is on them, because the tax cuts they think they too will benefit from, are designed to benefit the 1% the most.But not rich people, which is all that matters for the Trump administration.
Oh, no. Poor people matter to them too. Especially when they’re suffering and dying. MAGAts love that almost as much as making the rich richer.
Sadly, the cake had not been inoculated with cholera so the people who most deserved it were not among the victims.
Click bait headline! This is exactly what I was hoping to read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_diplomacy
Curiously, the three other global leaders in Medical Diplomacy are Cuba, China, and Taiwan. One of the biggest critiques of Trump’s cuts to USAID has been “you’re opening up inroads for evil foreign influence peddling campaigns”.
And there’s been a certain confirmation of this, from the African side of the conversation.
Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture.
~ Dr Lubinda Haabazoka, Director of the University of Zambia Graduate School of Business and former President of the Economics Association of Zambia
In South Sudan, specifically, Chinese diplomats have been aggressively peddling direct aid and coordinating international aid.
Meanwhile, the American administrations have persisted in its campaign of economic sanction as a tool to pressure players in the region
