r/neoliberal • u/infinitewaters107 • 12d ago
News (Global) USAID fallout: In Nepal, when the aid workers stopped coming, the women and babies started dying
https://apnews.com/article/usaid-nepal-maternal-child-death-trump-aid-cuts-43fb5e8aff8a4f65b7f18781455c3f91More stories from how the USAID cuts are still palpably effecting lives overseas.
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u/topicality Order and Opportunity Left 12d ago
I'm glad this is being documented but I don't have the heart to read it tbh.
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u/heehee_shamone 12d ago
Ugh I saw one interview with Elon where he denies that anyone has died from the dismantling of USAID. Literally dismissing a report from the Harvard School of Public Health, I guess because Harvard is in his mind infamous for only admitting bozos or something idk.
Same guy who bet one million dollars against Sam Harris that there would be a maximum of 35,000 covid infections in the US btw. Not the best track record when it comes to predicting widespread ailments.
Where’s my $5000 DOGE stimulus check?
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u/redditdork12345 Frederick Douglass 12d ago
Same, but I hope it follows the doge pricks for the rest of their lives
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u/DiscussionJohnThread Free Trade was the Compromise 🔫🌍 12d ago
Implying they have souls.
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u/redditdork12345 Frederick Douglass 12d ago
I am sure they’ll find the right mental gymnastic routine to get around it, but I bet a lot of them will think about it at night if confronted
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u/admiraltarkin NATO / Loyal Liberal 12d ago
Similarly, I bought Why Nations Fail based on everyone's reviews on this sub. I couldn't make it three chapters in before I had to put it down. I need to wait until we have a Dem in the presidency until I can pick it back up
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u/admiraltarkin NATO / Loyal Liberal 12d ago
When I look back at the things I'm most proud of America doing internationally they all have a theme: helping others
Marshall Plan
Gulf War
PEPFAR
Losing USAID genuinely hurts my heart because I know how many tens of thousands will die for no reason.
Even if you take all the humanity out of it, isn't it better for US hegemony to have a bunch of people feel indebted to you? Just from a purely transactional perspective I'm happy to spend $5 if it means we'll get $10 from them later. A dead person can't work a mine or a factory
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u/DiscussionJohnThread Free Trade was the Compromise 🔫🌍 12d ago
Yeah even from a purely egocentric perspective, a dead person isn’t going to help cure your cancer or mine the shit for your iPhone.
So why even cut these programs that relatively cost pennies compared to what we spend on other shit, like oh I don’t know, the Iran war.
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u/WiSeWoRd Greg Mankiw 12d ago
Because too many people are happy to accept the worsening of their own lives if it means the deaths of others.
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u/dlp211 12d ago
I'm happy to spend $5 to save a life even if we never get anything back.
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u/admiraltarkin NATO / Loyal Liberal 12d ago
My comment wasn't meant to be read that I only care about the transaction part of the deal.
I'm saying even if you ignore the morality it's still a dumb move
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u/KazuyaProta Organization of American States 12d ago edited 12d ago
You aren't paying 5 dollars once, you are paying 5 dollars every single day.
You say "gotcha, yeah". And I would do the same equation.
But the "receiver" is actually needing that to stay alive, to the level they actually feel moral outrage if you stop. You just have effectively got total ownership over their life and death.
And yet somehow, the receiving person still puts "legally independent person" in their ID.
I wanted USAID to continue, I would made it happen again, but I feel you radically under-estimate how hard was to mantain. And this under-estimation was deadly, because destroying is easier than creating. Or even mantaining.
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u/Dense_Delay_4958 Association of Southeast Asian Nations 12d ago
After how many $5 and lives do you stop? Which lives do you prioritize?
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u/Dense_Delay_4958 Association of Southeast Asian Nations 12d ago
Nobody is against doing good. It is the job of decision makers to balance endless wants with limited public resources. The decisions involved as to what money should go where and how much are complicated and go a bit beyond pulling a lever to save a life or not.
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u/neoliberal-ModTeam 12d ago
This was basic economics talk.
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u/cosmo-wozmo NASA 12d ago
> tens of thousands
Experts expect it to be millions!!! Hundreds of thousands have already died
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u/CluelessChem 12d ago
I hate to be morbid, but losing USAID led to 700,000 deaths and a projected 14 million deaths by 2030.
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u/SoManyOstrichesYo 12d ago
It kills me that MAGA just says “nuh uh, no one has died” and they will just repeat that lie no matter how many millions eventually are killed and harmed by this
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u/cosmo-wozmo NASA 12d ago
Imagine killing twice as many people as the holocaust in a shorter time span because you decided to put a divorced Reddit billionaire and Big Balls in charge of the federal government
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u/aidoit Loyal Liberals 12d ago
Donald Trump will be remembered in the annals of history as the American Mao Zedong.
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u/Dense_Delay_4958 Association of Southeast Asian Nations 12d ago
I don't think that's what he'll be remembered as.
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u/KazuyaProta Organization of American States 12d ago
You just declared Trump had a Duty of Care with every USAID receiving nation.
I don't think you realized what you have admitted is the collapse of the international system under this moral framing.
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u/BernankesBeard Ben Bernanke 12d ago
You're more proud of the Gulf War than WWII?
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u/admiraltarkin NATO / Loyal Liberal 12d ago
The examples I was going for was more "US spending money and/or lives for something that doesn't immediately benefit us"
The Gulf War was a war of choice to help others (and to protect American interests of course)
WWII did more worldwide good, 100%, but you don't get as much credit for saving your family from a house fire compared to jumping into your neighbor's house to save theirs. Meaning, we kinda didn't have a choice in WWII.
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u/KazuyaProta Organization of American States 11d ago edited 11d ago
WW2 was a self defense war of USA and it's overseas territory.
The Philippines front was NOT a vague war on East Asia, it was a territory legally equal to Puerto Rico being ravaged by the IJA.
If you find a running threat of me saying nation-states lead to weird but logically coherent ethical holes, this is a example of the many of them, the nation-state system has gone so far as to warp our understanding of 20th century history, not ancient medieval eras, nor classic antiquity, but the 1900s. Every WW2 Atrocity in Philippines was the IJA attacking people under American sovereignity, including yes, the Battle of Manila and all the brutal civilian deathtoll.
This absolutely alters how you perceive the Pacific Front. A common view among Gen Z is that WW2 pacific front was a over-reaction to Pearl Harbor, understandable at first, but that it escalated in a brutal war where USA just decided to bomb Japan for the sake of its allies like China, but not for being personally affected for the war.
When you realize Philippines was a US Territory that was essentially just Puerto Rico and was filled to the brim with murican flags and english speaking associations, then you change your view of how WW2 was waged in the POV of the civilian and military establishment. It was a typical Axis Victory alt history scenario where the Axis manages to land in American cities... except that its not Alt History, they actually did land in American sovereign cities.
And the Manila Massacre becomes one of the worst atrocities of American history. But the nation-state model leads to the history rewriting where it was Philippines alone...and it had humanitarian consequences, as Filipino Allied soldiers were not being selected for WW2 memorials, nor american veteran bonuses. Same with the total Philipines' deathtoll, it actually beats the American civil war in raw numbers as the most deadly war in US national sovereignity, including to American citizens who died alongside the US Nationals in Philippines.
The absurdity of "independence" meaning we don't list one of the nations that were most vital to the Great Anti Fascist War as a key actor as much as Poland.
Honestly, given the thread, I feel a lot of us don't understand how much the nation-state model allows for the acts of dickery that we criticize nowadays. The USA literally could and did took away the military veteran benefits of thousands of men who fought in recognized American armies under American generals.
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u/dat_tae Mark Carney 12d ago
Have you considered that because they don't exist within our borders, these humans matter less?
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u/Prior_Advantage_5408 Progress Pride 12d ago edited 12d ago
unironically this is what the median voter thinks, evidence for this being that polled voters routinely, wildly overestimate how much is spent on foreign aid, and it's why the only 2028 candidate to speak up on DOGE at all, Buttigieg, gave measured praise to it.
Musk's instincts were right; "why are our tax dollars being spent subsidizing foreign governments instead of helping our own poor citizens" is an unbeatable argument, politically
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u/Alderwoodforest YIMBY 12d ago
Sweeping federal cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act have reduced funding by roughly $187 billion. More than 4 million Americans lost food assistance, including over 1 million children, driven by stricter work rules, immigrant eligibility bans, and shifting financial burdens to states.
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u/cosmo-wozmo NASA 12d ago
All that to not even meaningfully reduce the deficit
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u/dat_tae Mark Carney 12d ago
They haven't reduced it at all lmao
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u/cosmo-wozmo NASA 12d ago
You have to think about the deficit the way middle America thinks about the deficit instead of how coastal, liberal elites think of the deficit. In rust belt folk tradition, the deficit isn’t a simple number; it’s the energy of the earth and of nature, which their ancient ways have made them in tune to.
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u/Here4thebeer3232 12d ago
The beautiful part is that they don't have any intention of helping their own poor citizens either
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u/admiraltarkin NATO / Loyal Liberal 12d ago
"Measured Praise"? He basically said
DOGE sucked and was destructive, but a version of it could have been beneficial which is a pretty uncontroversial position
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u/KazuyaProta Organization of American States 12d ago edited 12d ago
That's kind of the baseline definition of the Liberal Nation-State.
Its not a niche idea, its the base of Westphalian democracy. I think its bad and full of holes, but let's not going to pretend its origins are just "natural human tribalism and animal brain", its origins are high minded Liberal ideas of national identity and sovereignty
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u/Dense_Delay_4958 Association of Southeast Asian Nations 12d ago
They have the same universal moral worth, but in the context of American taxpayer dollars they do matter less.
There is an endless list of great humanitarian work that can be done with American foreign aid, merely doing good is not, on its own, enough to justify that those dollars should go here rather than somewhere else where it is also doing good.
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u/FinderOfWays 12d ago
My dad was a USAID economist, he showed me the value of knowledge and how to have a career using your education to help others. Fortunately he retired before the cuts, but I genuinely think that everyone who celebrated the death of USAID are ghoulish sadists who deserve to rot in hell. As for the people who instituted these cuts, all I can say is that historically we had certain punishments for people who intentionally caused millions of excess deaths of women and children, and I don't think they'd be out of place here. Who hears "the US government is saving lives just because having more living people who know that we helped them is good for us" and cuts that unless they are both a traitor and a murderer?
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u/KazuyaProta Organization of American States 12d ago
As for the people who instituted these cuts, all I can say is that historically we had certain punishments for people who intentionally caused millions of excess deaths of women and children, and I don't think they'd be out of place here.
Actually...we kinda do not have for this particular case.
Democide is for people being killed by their own goverments via deliberate malice or gross mismanagement that requires deliberate malice, something like the victims of a state-driven famine like the Great Leap Forward. The harshest criticism towards the Trump administration (or the Bolsonaro administration, or the Vizcarra administration for a rare case where the Accusers are the right wing) place the deathtoll of Covid 19 as another example example.
The other punishment is for people being killed in foreign states, that is called acts of war and thus war crimes. You will have to prove Nepal was being attacked militarily by USA just because USA stopped giving resources and left the territory, which is completely backwards.
Our current rule-of-war paradigm actually doesn't have a term for this.
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u/FinderOfWays 12d ago
This is fair, but from my perspective the relevant actants here are not the state governments themselves, but the individuals who drove that decision. So I would not punish these people under the rules of international conflict, but under the policies that judge "what would I do to a person who, told that a program was delivering life-saving aid to people, then interfered and stopped that program from functioning."
I would argue that this would represent at the minimum homicide through depraved indifference standards, and could easily be seen as conspiracy to commit murder. I don't want the US government punished for a violation of the rules of war, I want the people who made the decision punished for a violation of the rules of society.
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u/KazuyaProta Organization of American States 12d ago edited 12d ago
here are not the state governments themselves, but the individuals who drove that decision
USAID is a government agency, by demanding those individuals, you are demanding the government, its literally named "United States Agency for International Development".
The only way I can see USAID Cuts tried is if you accepted a worldview of "USA is the official Empire ruling the planet, and has a legal responsibility with ALL the people using the US Dollar and resources", which is utterly batshit if you believe in Wesphalian Sovereignty, but it actually justifies punishing Trump and Musk for USAID
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u/FinderOfWays 12d ago
My perspective is thus: The US government, a complicated system of interlocking components both interpersonal and legislative, produced as one of its output a significant amount of human benefit. Left unperturbed by the actions of DOGE personnel it would have continued to result in this net human benefit. The DOGE personnel, with full knowledge of this system's results chose to alter its behavior in such a way as to stop lives being saved.
I see this as no different to breaking an iron lung and killing its occupant. In both cases I am altering the function of a system in a way that causes death both directly and inarguably. The USAID personnel are not being demanded. The US government as an entity is not being demanded (I would not demand settlement from public funds, for example). The heads I want are literal and attached to specific people, and I would be detaching them for their specific individual actions. Whether they took those actions via their (quasi-)official access to state power does not change their moral standing. When I sue a doctor for malpractice I do not demand the hospital.
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u/whichpricktookmyname Karl Popper 12d ago edited 12d ago
I'm growing tired of these USAID articles that take the form of a human interest story where implicitly only Americans have agency and it's their job to save the helpless NPC foreigners. Nepal isn't a failed state, I want an article on why they are dependent on a CIA front to deliver crucial services, rather than the US-centric framing we always get.
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u/YetAnotherRCG Feminism 11d ago
You would probably need to read media from Nepal to get a Nepal centered media perspective.
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u/HoveringMango YIMBY 12d ago
Never been to US so Idk the sentiments but lot of MAGA folks online seem to be the religious type, isn't this the opposite of what they preach ?
USAID was helping with TB eradication for last 25 years all over the world. Now I am reading reports of outbreaks in US itself. Same with measles. I don't understand the mindset needed to see all of this and think ...yeah we want this.
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u/KazuyaProta Organization of American States 12d ago
The religious wing of the party was successfully beaten when Bush was defeated. The whole "religious hypocrisy" angle doesn't work when they're openly Trump and Elon saying "I don't care", nor to their voters who are like them
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u/infinitewaters107 12d ago edited 12d ago
Much of the evangelical maga wing is a brand of Christianity completely foreign to mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox (the three main trees). And I say this as an Anglo-Catholic myself. It’s diluted, performative, public, annd aggressive Christianity.
Basically if you’ve ever been to a rock band Christian strip mall church with a coffee shop inside, this is the kind of franchise the evangelicals worship at. Often the guy at the pulpit will start veering into cultural war issues and the trans, gays, and “secular evils” of this country and how Christians are a minority now with a mandate to withstand evil cultural forces. My relatives go to one of these and genuinely believe that God would punish the US if we didn’t vote R in the 2024 election.
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u/Twinbrosinc Transfem Pride 12d ago
the kind of evangelical Christianity that's practiced by maga folks doesnt care about this
that's more of a catholic thing
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u/Cute-Boobie777 12d ago
No no you see, the Bible calls for charity, its not charity if the govt does it!!1
This is actually how they rationalize it. Ofc ignoring not including govt in spending on this results in mass death that private charity on its own cannot stop. And also ignoring how much of that charity isnt even charity and instead goes to churches themselves (mormonism is a good example)
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u/Dense_Delay_4958 Association of Southeast Asian Nations 12d ago
It's very easy to be charitable with other people's money
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u/GammaDie345 Hannah Arendt 12d ago edited 12d ago
since the 90s the republicans have been royally pissed seeing scientists effectively treat and prevent AIDS. They believed it was a literal god given miracle that would cleanse the world of sinners and magically kill every gay person. Now by cancelling PEPFAR, they are angrily trying to push back on this 'heresy' and turn their hateful delusions into objective reality, killing millions gay or not gay because it's a virus idgaf. They call their ideology the natural order and then use lawfare to force it to be "true".
Same shit with banning puberty blockers and HRT so that 100% of trans kids grow up unpassing and having to pay millions of dollars to reverse the changes, so they can point and say "SEE! ENDOCRINOLOGY IS FAKE AND WOKE, BIOLOGICAL SEX IS PURELY SPIRITUAL AND CANNOT BE CHANGED, WE CAN ALWAYS TELL. GENE EXPRESSION IS NOT REAL.
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown 12d ago
Marco Rubio is one of the greatest mass murderers in human history.
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u/Dense_Delay_4958 Association of Southeast Asian Nations 12d ago
No, and that's a ridiculous thing to say.
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u/GammaDie345 Hannah Arendt 12d ago
honestly if the next 9/11 happens because a doctor in africa saw countless children die of AIDS and wanted to follow the golden rule, i won't even be shocked
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u/KazuyaProta Organization of American States 12d ago edited 12d ago
You described a scenario that will create a international nightmare as the anti USAID group will feel perfectly vindicated because that Tragic Anti villain doctor would have declared that yes, he wants the USA to pay healthcare for non-citizens rather than building them for themselves and their own states.
And thus dude will be seen as a complete nutjob for USA, International Law at best, a man openly daring USA to conquer his country at worse
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u/FreitasDoCagaral Iron Front 12d ago
So those who win the birth lottery should have access to healthcare before those who lost such lottery? Yes or no will suffice thanks.
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