[WaPo] Trump moves to wrest control of USAID as Musk says, ‘We’re shutting it down’

Scrolling through here, you see the human far-right troll-bots just spamming the thread. You get a shot here and there from the other side (the one that might mention unelected gajillionaire [who bankrolled Trump's re-election] Elon Musk is shutting down the federal agency that was investigating Starlink's activity in Eastern Europe.

 

You seriously think Donald Trump gives a s**t about anyone other than himself or Ivanka.
That's stupidity on another level.

 

@rimrocker faints.

 

Michael Benz? You mean "Frame Game" ? The guy that has been associated with the Trump administration for 8 years .... and has ties to White Nationalists, has said that the Jews control the media and are responsible for the decline of the white race... has called himself a white identitarian, and has said white people need to unite as a race?

That guy?

You claiming that guy?

You should be ****ing ashamed; I am for the country--- but you do you.

 

This is a pretty good article. Trump's game plan is to show he puts America First, damned be everything else, even if that particular "investment" is intended to serve our interest elsewhere. It's easy to go after small potatoes rather than tackle larger programs that Americans enjoy (such as Medicare and Social Security). Even if it's not legal for the executive branch to flex is authority over Congress created program, if the legislative branch is okay looking the other way for a little while and they can waste their time fighting in court, the end result will still be that they did what they could to ensure resources stay in America until we solve our **** here.

 

I don't think this is it.

USAID is another tool in the toolkit to maintain US hegomony through soft power. To think a admin that has expressed happiness about returning to "manifest destiny" wants to end American global hegomony just doesn't make sense.

Maybe they think they can maintain global hegomony through only using hard power with no chill by going full storm trooper to force poorer countries to allow us to extract labor and resources from them instead of doing that endeavor through some good will which is actually. Ore cost effective than going full storm trooper.

GOP voters(not reffering to you here just to be clear) are stupid in a sense that believe USAID exists as a altruistic endeavor. In fact Trump's entire narrative of prior administrations doing bad deals for Americans because of being "too nice" is absurdly naive. Like someone has to be a very naive person to believe we got USAID for the sole purpose of feeling good about ourselves.

No the purpose of gutting USAID is privatization.

See the American capital class is stuck with their maximization of wealth. They have maximized efficiencies, maximized economy of scale etc. There is no more sincere genuine innovation. Just charlatan salesmen trying to create the next pump and dump now. The only next viable step to obtain a new level of wealth is ransacking the federal government and replacing it private entities like Palantir so public money gets funneled into private capital to an entire new absurd level.

The cyberpunkification of America is accelerating

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/usaid-clinical-trials-funding-trump.html

The stop-work order on U.S.A.I.D.-funded research has left thousands of people with experimental drugs and devices in their bodies, with no access to monitoring or care.

Asanda Zondi received a startling phone call last Thursday, with orders to make her way to a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, where she was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection.

The trial was shutting down, a nurse told her. The device, a silicone ring inserted into her vagina, needed to be removed right away.

...

The stop-work order was so immediate and sweeping that the research staff would be violating it if they helped the women remove the rings. But Dr. Leila Mansoor, a scientist with the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (known as CAPRISA) and an investigator on the trial, decided she and her team would do so anyway.

“My first thought when I saw this order was, There are rings in people’s bodies and you cannot leave them,” Dr. Mansoor said. “For me ethics and participants come first. There is a line.”

In the communities where her organization works, people have volunteered for more than 25 years to test H.I.V. treatments, prevention products and vaccines, contributing to many of the key breakthroughs in the field and benefiting people worldwide.

That work relied on a carefully constructed web of trust that has now been destroyed, Dr. Mansoor said. Building that trust took years in South Africa, where the apartheid regime conducted medical experiments on Black people during the years of white rule. Those fears are echoed in a long history of experimentation by researchers and drug companies in developing countries and in marginalized populations in the United States.

 

GOP lawmaker, an avowed anti-communists who voted for Trump 3 times, warns
if the US pulls out of USAID programs, China will move in fast

Gutting USAID programs would make it easier for China to implement its one-belt-one-road program that stretches around the globe.

​

 

Cleverly disguised "I'm-a-moron-who-installs-Malware and I don't know what USAID is" post

 

but it’s ok to be a “black identitarian” and to say that black people need to “unite as a race”?

both are ridiculous in todays world. Equally ridiculous.

I don’t even know who Benz is. However, we have students and professors on our college campuses, who all vote dem, saying much worse things about Jews than that.

 

So you are referencing a KNOWN Russian influencer.....a Putin b****?