Be careful what you dismantle

 

+ Trump and Musk’s surreal assertion that the US was spending $50 to $100 million on “condoms for Hamas,” which apparently stemmed from the fact that they didn’t know the difference between the Gaza province of Mozambique and the Gaza Strip, is even more absurd when you realize that the entire Middle East has only received a sliver of funding from USAID for any contraceptive aid (and that peaked during Trump’s previous term), with most of the resources going to Africa, Asia and Latin America…

+ Elon Musk: “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

+ Alex Rubinstein: “Not to make too big a deal of it but the idea that USAID is/was filled with “radical-left Marxists” is kind of insane given that much of their job was to enforce neo-liberal economic shock therapy.”

+ Why was USAID an early target of Musk’s slash-and-burn raid on federal agencies? According to reporting in The Lever: “Musk is trying to shut down USAID as the agency was investigating its oversight of a public-private partnership involving equipment from Musk’s company. Various USAID webpages mentioning Musk’s company are now not accessible on its website.”

+ Trump and Musk seem intent on unplugging all the measures the US government has implemented since the Great Depression to prevent the rise of militant movements of disenfranchised and poor people here and abroad. Be careful what you dismantle, boys.

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR