President Donald Trump abruptly eliminated the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the first month of his second term. In ending USAID, Trump exposed the life-or-death control over the world’s resources being hoarded by U.S. oligarchs and their politicians.
Photo by Melinda Donnelly under Creative Commons - Deed Attribution 2.0 Generic license
Whether it’s access to factual news or food, water, and necessities to sustain life, these resources are ours and must be freely shared globally. Collectively, we must stop the ruling class from profiting off of human suffering.
USAID is yet another example of capitalism’s many contradictions. USAID saves lives, but at a price: making U.S. capitalists the sole funders of the world’s healthcare centers and medical services to poor and exploited people. At the same time, USAID also kills millions more in the violent counterrevolutions resulting from the decades of anti-working class propaganda funded by USAID.
As exploited workers ourselves, we should not allow capitalists to be the only source when it comes to meeting the needs of billions of people who are at their most desperate.
According to National Public Radio’s Dr. Michael Wilkes, “Shutting down USAID’s free HIV treatment programs cuts off lifesaving medication for 15 million people across Sub-Saharan Africa.”
By permanently ending 90% of USAID, and firing staff without public input, review or oversight, Trump has forced us to immediately confront the multiple, negative consequences of his actions. As only one example, the World Health Organization (WHO) predicts over a million people will now die from what are otherwise preventable diseases as a result of USAID being terminated.
This crisis is the result of decades of American capitalists being allowed to monopolize other countries’ resources, then holding those resources for ransom.
With the economic power of Russia and China on the rise, and the U.S. empire in decline, Steve Bannon and other Trump advisors have concluded that neoliberal projects such as USAID have become too expensive to continue. Instead, as Elon Musk contends, our multi-billions funding services and oversight are now better invested in tax cuts to U.S. billionaires, especially those loyal to Trump and Musk.
As of yet, no local money or programs have been created to replace USAID’s support, predatory as it may be. Along with the program itself being lost, so too are the jobs of USAID’s health educators, agricultural advisors, physicians, nurses, and public health experts.
With no substitute immediately available, people will suffer and die, which is unacceptable to us, the majority inside the U.S. We demand our money formerly used to fund programs like USAID not go to make billionaires richer, but instead be used to simply feed, house and provide for people inside the U.S. and worldwide.
As the working class, we are able to offer other workers around the world a better, more sustainable alternative than USAID’s opportunism. We already produce more than enough to meet our needs inside the U.S., which is why our surplus is exported globally. Let’s use our surplus to meet the needs of our class, the workers and exploited, not those of the ruling class.
As a global community we already share research, information and treatments to save lives, not to personally profit off crises.
Socialist China demonstrated this in 2020, as the first nation to map the Covid virus genome. Rather than sell this information to the highest bidder, China freely shared this life-saving information with the rest of the world, immediately saving time and money and enabling every nation to benefit. Other countries quickly developed treatments as a result of China’s research, and fewer people suffered and died needlessly.
The same outcome can be applied to feeding, housing and providing healthcare to our global community. By removing extortion and personal profit from how USAID is currently run, its success can be more accurately measured by how many hungry people are fed, rather than by how many more billions in profit are extracted by corporations exploiting that hunger.
Why should we allow capitalists to brandish near-dictatorial control over those of us in need?
To imperialists, USAID’s most important value above all others was in the access it provided to the U.S. government with first identifying and then eliminating any worker-led organizing or liberation movements in countries receiving USAID assistance, such as:
- Cuba’s counter-revolutionary media group, CubaNet, based in Miami, received $500,000 from USAID to target Havana’s youth with pro-imperialist propaganda.
- Radio Martí and TV Martí received over half a billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to broadcast anti-socialist propaganda to Cuba’s workers inside their own country.
- In Belarus, 60% of the independent news and information was created, not by the people of Belarus, but by USAID.
(For more on USAID-funded “independent media,” please click here for an excellent Mint Press piece on the subject.)
Until Trump ended the program, America’s ruling class squandered a quarter of a billion dollars in our money, not on prenatal care or STEM education, but on training USAID’s network of 6,000 reporters working at 1,000 news and journalism outlets globally.
USAID was run as a Ponzi scheme against both other governments and our international working class. Like any pyramid scam, once USAID was accepted, escaping its control or attempting to pay back the debt it demanded became nearly impossible by design.
Even the comprador class suffered. Nicaragua Investiga, a pro-imperialist propaganda outlet formerly funded by USAID, is now begging Trump to refill their bank accounts so they can continue promoting regime change benefiting American oligarchs, from Latin American to Eastern Europe.
By ending USAID, Trump and Musk have abandoned the fiction that the U.S. government is interested in helping anyone other than the ruling class.
In place of neoliberalism, Trump now simply demands other countries immediately hand over their resources or face annihilation. He demonstrated this very bluntly recently in the Oval Office by threatening Ukraine’s President Zelensky with a potential “World War III” if the U.S. wasn’t given majority ownership over Ukraine’s rare earth minerals.
Likewise, last month Trump declared he’d personally oversee “turning Gaza into a Riviera“ but not before first ethnically cleansing the region of all Palestinians. Trump then highlighted his threat by posting on his own right-wing social media platform, Truth Social, an A.I. generated video of himself and fellow war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu sipping cocktails together at a gentrified Gazan poolside resort.
Meanwhile among all this disruption, U.S. Democrats scramble to restore domestic support for their formerly stable, candy-coated version of imperialism. However, they are failing to promote the “good qualities” of a parasitic program like USAID responsible for furthering the under-development of so many other countries and the fatal consequences resulting from decades of U.S.-imposed austerity and war.
No one in need should have to forfeit their equality and sovereignty in order to receive any service or resource. The DNC and GOP fund assassinations and genocide, provide weapons and training to counter-revolutionaries, and actively destabilize pro-liberation movements around the world.
Capitalists should not dictate who gets to live or die, or who succeeds or fails.
As members of the Peace and Freedom Party, we know we all benefit when hundreds of millions of people inside the U.S., and billions more worldwide, live stable, healthy lives, and with their needs met.
Nationalizing countries’ resources, their workforce and economies means all countries, including the U.S., keep their wealth to fund workers healthcare, job training, housing, and cradle-to-grave education where they live. This is why we’re both socialists and internationalists, not capitalists.
We value people as human beings; we don’t treat each other as commodities to profit off, steal from or extort.
If you want to help us in this work, join the Peace and Freedom Party, organizing to win since 1967.
(For more on USAID’s impact within the U.S., please click here.)
-- wirtten by Joe Delaplaine
