Not just Trump. These decisions were heavily pushed by Elon Musk. He is a stain on human civilization.
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.
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.
Wanting to dominate others is a trait of sociopaths, and not something that most humans want.
More of a geopolitical ‘tragedy of the commons’ in my opinion, but hey, you do you amigo.
That person wouldn’t be allowed to write Superman
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.
This isn’t 600,000 recorded deaths to date, its an estimate based on the reduction in budget. Reducing the budget reduces maximum capability, which means its estimated that 600,000 people would have died by now.
The 600,000 estimate is how many actual recorded deaths THIS YEAR can be attributed to reduction in USAID.
So more than 600,000 people have died, only 600,000 can be blamed on MAGA.
The other estimates are forecasts, but the 600,000 number is to date. Says so in both the headline and the article.
No. Go read the source material more carefully. I’ve checked like 5 of the trackers and not a single one I’ve read reports a single actual, verifiable death. Ita pure math. That doesn’t mean there aren’t deaths, it just means this is a purely mathematical estimate. The discussion should be “is this estimate reasonable”, not “lets assume this estimate is reasonable and talk about how bad Trump is”.
Well I though reading the methodology of the source material was more accurate, but I guess fuck me right?
Fuck these goddamned mass murders. I am so fucking sick of America.
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
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 people you disagree with aren’t idiots, they don’t care about strategic power or geopolitics. You understand people may have different values than you right?
Yes and those values are bad.
People care about people suffering, they dont care about our countries ability to bully other nations through various means.
Yah you’re right, USAID’s exertion of soft power is bullying just like drone strikes and ground invasions. Jesus christ you’re one of them. I sometimes wish there was a divine judge out there. Don’t bother replying, I will get too mad at another inhuman, selfish, mindless drone scraping for excuses to not care about others.
Moooooo, ma, moo, moo.
Get off your high cow.
Sure, get angry rather than grapple with an idea you disagree with.
Between COVID and this… fuc&. That’s a lot of ppl with zero accountability. Sounds like America.
Pedo Antoinette doesn’t GAF
I’m sure he loses sleep over it.
/s
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.
I dunno, I can’t get quite as outraged over indirect deaths caused by essentially pulling back on charity to foreigners. It’s about one step off from accusing western nations of being responsible for all the deaths in North Korea, just cause the west didn’t directly intervene.
The general population of the USA is not that concerned with foreigners / international politics and issues. If the politics of the states is meant to reflect the will of the people, them opting to refocus their funding / efforts to domestic areas isn’t that surprising or off brand.
Yes, other people, especially the prior beneficiaries of that charity, will view it as ‘wrong’. But they’re hardly an unbiased stakeholder. Like yes, this likely diminishes the USA’s soft power globally… but the states doesn’t really care about that anymore anyhow. Having a ‘land’ buffer zone between them and other geopolitical powers was beneficial in yester-years war dynamic. Now it may be much less important for them to maintain – especially if the rest of those countries are so neutered that they can’t realistically defend their own sovereignty, be it militarily, culturally, or otherwise.
