Trump’s greatest crime is practically invisible — Estimates show that the dismantling of USAID has killed at least 600,000 to date. It could get much worse
Trump’s greatest crime is practically invisible
Is it like paying the exit fee from subscription proprietary software?
How many were they killing as the subscription fee?
And they will still claim that communism is the biggest killer with capitalism only saving lives.
It is incredible how cheap USAID was and what an outsized impact it had. Basically what that means now is America has lost any soft power it has. The parts of the world that aided US companies and interests due to the US providing aid to their countries have no motive in continuing to do so, and coups and overthrows won't always work if enough people continue to hate your guts.
Basically if and when China steps up in providing aid, then Basically China will fully replace the US on the world stage.
I actually predict that there will be a ww3 of some kind when the US gives one last desperate attempt to hold onto power, and it won't be a pretty sight.
China's "helping" by investing heavily all along the silk road, full on newly built ports in Africa, and any nation who wants to become the new cheap labor market so China doesn't have to, and can grow, usually by ripping off other nations technologies.
You know the surveillance state in China? You know those bitch ass tech bros in the US and elsewhere? The ones who claim we need a bigger more invasive surveillance state in the West else China will win?
They are the ones who salivated at selling and providing all the tech to China and continue to do so. Do you remember when Google initially flat out refused China's heavily curtailed and monitored version of Google for their own market and Google initially refused because it was too authoritian? Well a few years after that they came crawling back for those sweet sweet Chinese monies and gave them all they wanted and much more.
So ripping off is bullshit. They playing them like a fucking fiddle and developing their own tech on top of it, which is exactly what happened in all other developing nations. Japan was once seen as nothing but a cheap low-quality copycat from the 1920s to the 1960s before they suddenly became the smartest most creative people in the room... and the same shit was being flung at the Chinese until they became the massive powerhouse they are now.
China is obviously going to help building infrastructure to benefit their own shit. But the major difference is China hasn't bombed anyone or established overseas military bases... yet. Anything can happen in the future.
China will also absolutely want authoritarianism to be spread and have their fingers in the data of all countries they trade with. The west is no different. They have been trying to get Apple to give them full access to any iPhone on the planet, even those belonging to people who have never left their hometowns and never will in countries nowhere near the UK. How is this better than what China wants?
Not just Trump. These decisions were heavily pushed by Elon Musk. He is a stain on human civilization.
Not just Trump and Elon... But also the entire nexus of capitalism and its state. Literally destroying human civilization.
and now he's gonna be a trillionaire. ugh. Kill off 600K people, tank a company, and get a trillion dollars. since incompetence if being rewarded, i should be a quintillionaire.
I mean, credit to the guy, he did invest early and hard in MAGA.
USAID has a complicated history. On the one hand, preventing deaths by starvation is absolutely laudable and something that every rich nation should be trying to do. However as a tool for soft power, USAID was used to turn subsistence farmers off of their land so that US companies can buy it or so that the country becomes entirely reliant on the US and will do whatever they say, and that’s pretty evil.
That being said, cutting USAID overnight is the stupidest way to go about fixing the problems that USAID creates (and obviously Trump doesn’t care about the evil side anyway).
Hey, I spent some of 2009 and also 2013-2014 in Kenya working alongside USAID folks
Not calling you a liar but could you please educate me? My experience was that the goal was the opposite.
Now, wading through shitty opportunistic local capitalistic scumbags was an issue, but a separate one.
Well, to be fair, I live in America. USAID helping world hunger is good and I support that. And we could have done a bit more. And USAID manipulating foreign production to maintain my countries dominance is also to my benefit. Very much so.
It's not evil. It's morally ambiguous at best.
I want to help people, and I want my representation to do the same, but not to the point that it undermines my own countries dominance, and therefore my own livelihood. Because the other country wants that same power to themselves for their own benefit. And probably not to my own benefit.
I think it's fare to say that the next country will give way less of a shit about my well being. That's my problem. My representation failed miserably.
It's not evil at all. It's actually a very reasonable and a very human way of looking at the scenario.
Between this and the Americans who died from his botched COVID response, Trump has killed way more people than Osama Bin Laden.
Trump's playing in the big league of nutty mass-killing autocrats. He has already outdone Idi Amin and has people like Mao, Stalin and Hitler in his sights. I bet he'd take pride in that too, particularly the Hitler bit.
Combine all the people he killed during COVID, cutting USAID, and RFK junior insanity and the death toll will be higher than American WWII casualties.
Oh, wait, Pedonald already came pretty close, according to some estimates, with just the failed COVID response. Maybe him and his thugs are going for many multiples of that - it's at least 2x WWII deaths (405K) if you estimate about 300K for failed COVID response + 600K for USAID. The damage from RFK junior being an unqualified dumbass is probably hard to estimate just yet.
Oh, and then there is this: https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/excess-deaths/103566/
This was excess deaths per year, annually, before COVID. JFC, conservatism really is a death cult.
Trump's shuttering of USAid has a murder rate of 88 people per hour.
Of the 600,000 people who've died, 400,000 are children. These are mostly food aid deaths, we still haven't seen the consequences of disease control ending (HIV, TB, Malaria, and others.)
They're estimating 22 million death total by 2030. So this disaster is unfolding and accelerating.
Orange Mussolini always liked attention, wanted to be famous……. History will put him up there with Mao and Stalin as causing most deaths
The fact that I can't load the replies you got tells me that the evil chuds I've already blocked previously are out in force on this post. Some people delight in the idea of yanking help from people who aren't white, male gamers. Whatever they're saying, block 'em and don't get discouraged. Lemmy is just as bad as some of the worst reddit communities the way literal children try to get attention with poorly-educated hot takes.
I've realised the supreme power of blocking out the clown sounds. It's so liberating. Literally chatting with tiny thinkers just ends up making me angry all day. Now it's a different story, one with conversations and considered viewpoints.
Seeing what happens when the US just stops helping makes me realise: The good they did as a superpower over the decades isn't talked about as much as the bad. Obviously now, there is plenty of that, too.
Fuck these goddamned mass murders. I am so fucking sick of America.
🤨 you are?
Did hell freeze over or something?
I don't agree with nor represent my government, and if you made any effort to actually read news or stories that aren't sensational headlines you would know that this country feels massive disapproval towards our government.
If you can't stand the bloodthirsty morons who call themselves patriots, congratulations, about 2/3 to 3/4 of the country shares your feelings.
The entire MAGA ideology is to kill off anyone that they can’t profit from.
Take all their money, and then kill them? That's not a government.
It is, however, what led to Batman...
Between COVID and this… fuc&. That’s a lot of ppl with zero accountability. Sounds like America.
I have been across the internet yelling at dumb liberal dipshits about this (conservatives too, but their response is about what you would expect, I figured though at least liberals would have an idea how serious this is.) and it still largely goes unappreciated how much harm this has done and will do, and it is not being reported and probably never will be, because it's perceived as largely impacting people with darker skin living in less developed areas.
The death tolls will radically increase in the coming years. Even if we restored USaid to full funding tomorrow, the interruption will continue to ripple for years and years.
The blood on the hands of the people who cut this program is going to be at biblical levels and they hold a hatred that cannot be overstated. This is a sheer malevolence that should lead to trials at the Hague followed by public crucifiction.
On the larger sites I always get pushback on this, saying that "We have to let countries learn to manage themselves." And "That money should stay in this country." and the like. If your feelings resonate with those statements, you aren't just morally decaying, you don't understand the strategic power of these kinds of programs and probably learned everything you want to know about geopolitics from Hearts of Iron games, and you certainly need to better understand the numbers involved. But you won't even look it up will you. Putting "What does USAID do" into your search bar gets a little too close to caring, and maybe feeling some of that blood on your hands as well, doesn't it?
edit: The few replies or messages I've gotten here tell me that indeed, empathy, kindness and any kind of human connection to others have been algorithm'd out of a lot of you fucks.
Thinking is too shallow when it comes to this. Yes, there is absolutely the direct results: starvation, death, and malnutrition.
And for whatever reason people seem ok with that to save US $ and force the other country to pick themselves up by their bootstraps.
The shallow thinking avoids the indirect issues. The starvation leads to instability. The instability can cause war and fighting on a local level that can damage US interests and trade. It can spill over into neighboring countries causing the same issues. Increase radicalization and terrorism. They’ll blame the “West”, likely justifiably, for supporting some dictator that steps in to crush opposition yet protect the West’s interests in whatever resource they’re stripping from the country or ag product like chocolate they’re making people grind at growing and underpaying for. It could have the country(ies) switch allegiances to competitors like China. All of this can directly increase costs to the US or indirectly to the US via regional instability disrupting trade. That’s ok, they’ll just pass the cost on to consumers while business profits are protected. It beats spending any tax money on things.
This is typical reductionist and oversimplified thinking by the Right. Just punish people into changing behavior, nevermind the indirect costs.
The thing is, these arseholes don't see the poor, the needy or basically anyone who can't do them a favour or help them in any way to accumulate wealth, as people. We're nothing to them, less than nothing and they don't care if we die.
The irony is that the majority of MAGA is impoverished themselves. They're fucking crabs in a bucket
Pedo Antoinette doesn’t GAF
KILLING people is PRO LIFE!
I’m sure he loses sleep over it.
/s
Eesh... some of the comments here, are in the same boat:
Lies so big not even their inverse are true.
Feel free to prove your counterclaim.