this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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The Guardian is part of the imperial media ecosystem and you should be very skeptical of any story they publish. Of course they were going to mourn the loss of one of the empire's greatest tools and try to spin some sad tale about the maybe 1% of the USAID's budget that was going to legitimate aid as a cover for the nefarious shit they did with the other 99%. You shouldn't fall for this kind of transparent emotional manipulation. At best what this was, was blackmail: "Let us continue to destabilize governments and meddle in the affairs of other countries, else we cut off aid to people in need."
If you check how much money USAID spent in various Eastern European countries, you know where you got all this Russophobia. NAFO and similar are looking for new jobs 😁
Nice.
I'll repeat what I said: tell that to the poor sods who depend on it to make their lives less shit.
What you're saying essentially is: for the sake of stopping the US meddling with other people's affairs, let's cut everybody off the support USAID provides: it will sting a little for them but the world will be better off.
Well, maybe. But if that's what we want to do, how about we ramp it down slowly so those who depend on it have time to find alternative ways of not dying? How about not letting Musk and Trump abruptly stop all assistance without warning?
And this has nothing to do with the Guardian: when you shut down USAID all of the sudden, people get hurt. That's just a plain fact.
Or are you saying nobody benefits from USAID?
Are you daft? Do you just imagine "US dominance" is some abstract concept. Look, the Nazi's fed people. They actually had mess halls and they cooked food and some people ate that food for sustenance. Should we dismantle the Nazi regime or should we ramp it down slowly because some people rely on it for food? Like, actually listen to yourself.
No, just because a CIA front uses some money to help people doesn't mean we should protect it from total and rapid destruction while it spends billions of dollars funding death squads, regime change goons, torturers, and assassins. Get a fucking grip.
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.
US foreign aid is like the former, with the additional element that it actively prevents anyone from teaching themselves how to fish.
Now with USAID gone and BRICS offering a real alternative to the Bretton Woods institutions, resource rich and overexploited countries have a real chance of teaching themselves how to fish and become sovereign.
Ramping it down slowly gives the regime change apparatus time to comfortably transition into whatever its next incarnation is going to be. Trump and Musk, being the egotistical, short-sighted dumbasses that they are, taking a wrecking ball to the whole thing throws this part of the imperialist apparatus off-balance and at least for a time cripples their ability to do damage with this particular tool until they can reorganize themselves. The more sudden and chaotic the changes the better. Dysfunction, chaos and internal conflict within the imperial machine is a net good for the rest of the world.
You have to take a bigger picture view on these things. Even if you want to overlook their role in regime change and narrative control (including financing psyops like NAFO that literally doxx and threaten people's lives), USAID is a vital lynchpin for maintaining US neocolonial domination around the world. It keeps countries dependent on foreign aid, fosters corruption and prevents real, sustainable development.