The United States Agency for International Development is intrinsically incompetent for several reasons – and has been since its’ inception. President Kennedy‘s motive was admirable but misguided – the same way President Johnson‘s War on Poverty and Affirmative Action was well-intended (certainly not passed to “keep the N—-s happy for the next 50 years” – LBJ) but failed.
The only thing currently appearing on the USAID webpage is the notice of closure. Wikipedia’s first sentence describes USAID, interestingly as “an independent agency of the United States government.” Apparently lost within the narrative under the section Creation, the very last sentence describes USAID “As an official component of U.S. foreign policy, USAID operates subject to the guidance of the president, secretary of state, and the National Security Council.”
That being the case, administrations of both Parties and Congress since its inception have failed in their responsibility to oversee how our taxes have been spent by such a rogue bureaucracy. USAID didn’t become “a whole bowl of worms” during just the Biden Administration – he just multiplied the number of maggots devouring our hard earned dollars.
Ironically, the motto of USAID is “From the American People.” If USAID had a symbol it would have to be the screw – or the middle finger. In foreign countries its’ symbol would be the court fool – or the sledgehammer.
“USAID’s decentralized network of resident field missions is drawn on to manage U.S. government programs in low-income countries for the following purposes:
– Disaster relief
– Poverty relief
– Technical cooperation on global issues, including the environment
– U.S. bilateral interests
– Socioeconomic development” (that’s American for making you be “like us” or, as Bush, Jr. would say “exporting democracy.”) – wikipedia
USAID‘s mission is to solve every problem for every country in the Third World. A more utopian agenda is impossible to imagine. (Utopia: “1. an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect; 2. an impractical scheme for social improvement. Example: misplaced faith in political utopias has led to ruin.” – Merriam Webster Dictionary
USAID is the misguided offspring of the illegitimate largesse of a government’s benevolence at taxpayers’ expense (see: Not Yours to Give by Colonel David Crockett, compiled by Edward S. Ellis; wikipedia).
Aside from the paradigm that the government can’t solve every (some say any) problem, USAID suffers from the malady most presidents’ suffer from in determining foreign policy – cultural myopic ethnocentrism.
Myopia is a condition in which visual images come to a focus in front of the eye resulting in defective vision of distant objects.
Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s own culture is superior to others, and is the standard by which other cultures should be measured. It can also refer to the tendency to view the world from the perspective of one’s own group. Manifest Destiny is America’s most egregious example in its’ treatment of the American Indian, followed almost as egregiously by President Bush, Jr.‘s (the Yale cheerleader) disastrous invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq giving America two twenty-year lost wars. Bush, Jr.’s supercilious machismo invasion of those two countries are the icon of cultural myopic ethnocentrism.
Authors Rachel Garst and Tom Barry‘s book Feeding the Crisis: U.S. Food Aid and Farm Policy in Central America, 1990 is just one example of how USAID has evolved from a benevolent interloper of the 20th century into the godfather of Socialist agendas in the 21st.
“When people are hungry they become dissatisfied and unhappy. Eventually, this unrest could lead to instability. Upheaval in the Third World inevitably has an effect on the United States, which depends on those countries for natural resources. Clearly, U.S. food efforts contribute to the world’s economic and political stability.” – AID policy statement.
This is a noble statement – and entirely false. A comprehensive review of political instability throughout the world’s history shows hungry, dissatisfied populations don’t cause political instability. They are too busy trying to survive! It is when those populations standard of living begins to increase that they see the dichotomy between their political situation and others more advanced that they are able to create instability – but it is almost always instigated by leadership from outside.
Secondly, the U.S. doesn’t depend on that many foreign nations for “natural resources.” America is a country rich in natural resources due to its’ unique geography of extensive, navigable waterways (more than any other country) and north-south mountain ranges providing more watershed for agriculture than in any other country. America can grow more food and get it to market faster than any country in the world.
The United States is in dire circumstances when it comes to Strategic Minerals because the top 8 or 9 in the world exist only in the Soviet Union (Russia) and the other two are in Africa (see: Strategic Studies Institute’s Strategic Minerals in the New World Order by Kent Hughes Butts, November 30, 1993)
Garst and Barry write:
“Twenty years ago, it was basic needs and local market-oriented industry; today it is the free market, the (U.S.) private sector, and an all-out [U.S.] export push… which some leaders are beginning to challenge the U.S. conditions attached to the trade, saying the agreements amount to “blackmail” and foreign intervention in the internal affairs of their countries. Not only do these food measures adversely affect the poor, but have serious consequences on small-farm agriculture and national food security. The foreign ministries of agriculture are starting to question U.S. “benevolence” urging their government to reject U.S. food aid and all its attendant conditions.”
As a Special Forces detachment commander in the 1980s, I contacted the USAID representative in a Central American country regarding BYU‘s Benson Institute for Small-Scale Agriculture program in which a family of seven could grow a nutritionally balanced assortment of crops and still have enough left for capital gains. It had been used successfully in several South American countries. He arranged a meeting for us with that country’s Minister of Agriculture who patiently listened to my presentation and promised to consider it.
As we left the Minister’s office, the USAID rep whispered to me “He has no intention of implementing this plan.” “Why not?” I asked. “Because that would enable the campesinos to become economically independent – and neither the President nor the Minister want that to happen.”
It is not an ironic coincidence that Trump created D.O.G.E. The word is a double entendre meaning the acronym for government efficiency but also historically the title of Doge was applied during the Enlightenment in Venice and Genoa for a magistrate “a civil or judicial official vested with limited judicial powers; a municipal, state, or federal officer commonly authorized to issue warrants, hear cases and conduct preliminary or pretrial hearings.”
That’s what Elon Musk is doing. And from initial appearances, doing a damn fine job. Trump and Musk are doing what no politician of the UniParty has ever had the spine (or inclination) to do – actually represent the American people. In Washington, D.C. – the City of Dis, that’s dangerous terrain to occupy.
May the saints preserve them in doing so.
see also:
– The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen In Our Lifetime, 2005; by Jeffrey D. Sachs
– War is a Racket, 1935 by former Marine Commandant Smedley Butler
– Why Nations Go To War 1985; by John G. Stoessinger
– Peaceful Conflict: The Non-Military Use of the Military, 1967; by Edward Bernhard Glick
– The Economics of Crisis, 1968; by Eliot Janeway
– How Democracies Perish, 1985; by Jean-Francois Revel
– Trading With the Enemy: An Expose’ of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 by Charles Higham, 1983
– Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 2020; by James C. Scott
– “Foreign Aid” is Neither: Another Government Dirty Secret, this blog site dated January 26, 2021
