Trump’s USAID closure a ‘travesty’ 

SUMMARY:

Barack Obama and George W. Bush have criticized the closure of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), as a study warned it could result in “a staggering number” of avoidable deaths—more than 14 million over five years.

The former U.S. presidents made rare public criticisms of the Trump administration as they took part in a video farewell for USAID staffers on Monday on its last day as an independent organization.

In March, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announce . . . 83% of USAID’s programs were cancelled. The agency is being folded into the state department, where it is to be replaced by a successor organization called America First.

A study published in the Lancet found the cuts could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, with a third of those among children.

MY TAKE: 

In my last newsletter, I reported the worrisome drop in Americans who feel pride in their country. This is exactly why. Trump is making Americans complicit in his passive genocide of 14 million people. He’s driving a car that we’re all sitting in, sees a horrible traffic accident with a family lying bleeding on the asphalt begging for help. We beg him to stop and help, but he just cranks up the radio and drives on, bragging,

“I’m the best driver in the world. No one has seen a driver as good as me.”

According to the article, “USAID funding for health care, nutrition, humanitarian aid, development, education and related sectors have helped prevent more than 91 million deaths in low- and middle-income countries over the past two decades, the multinational group of researchers calculated.” What kind of human being cuts aid that accomplishes that? When two ex-presidents from different parties ask him not to cut the aid and he does it anyway, this reveals his values and the values he wants to impose on the rest of us.

Former president Bush, in a video message to the group, addressed the cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), which is credited with saving more than 25 million lives:

“Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you.”

Of course, many of those millions who will die are Black and Brown people who live in countries Trump considers “shitholes,” so to Trump and the GOP, they are expendable.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “Bush and Obama Ask Trump to Save14 Million Lives (He Says . . . Nah).” The Guardian