HOLLOWING OUT THE SOUL OF AMERICA

Let us live for the day when this country will reclaim its heart.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that 83 per cent of the USAID funding will be cut.

And people will die because of it.

This from today’s article in The Hill:

"Contract terminations announced earlier this month will end grants for HIV treatments and prevention, tuberculosis, polio, malaria, Ebola and other diseases. Nutrition assistance for infants in developing countries was also stopped.

A former USAID official warned that cutting the agency’s programs could lead to “preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale.”

These cuts are not efficient. They are morally criminal.

The bogus justification for such defunding, of course, is that humanitarian expenditures such as those do not further the interests of the United States. Yet what are our “interests” at this point in our history? Tax cuts for the uber wealthy? Any money saved in this Musk-inspired rampage will not be used to eradicate the debt; it will be used to to extend the Trump tax cuts. According to the Congressional Budget Office, extending them will cost $4.6 trillion over a decade! Is that, pray tell, in our interest?

I know I’m one of millions of Americans devastated by the destruction and trauma inflicted by all this. No, empathy is not our “fundamental weakness.” Story after story of heartbroken federal workers – not just heartbroken because they lost or might lose a job. Heartbroken because they were thrown off mission. They had been part of a project that mattered - to make our government and our country better - something I suspect Elon Musk knows very little about.

Of course not everything was perfect, and of course there was waste and abuse in our government. But there is no reason to see Musk or his band of reckless techies - none of whom know anything about government, forensic accounting, or the programs they are so callously destroying - as anything even approaching responsible stewards of our public good. People who fit that description - people who dedicated their lives to that purpose - are the ones they got rid of!

Our government should not be run like a cold and calculating business. It should be run like a healthy, responsible, well functioning family. You don’t feed a starving child because it’s good business; you feed a hungry child because it’s the right thing to do. Helping people thrive is good for the soul and ultimately good for the world.

Now comes the news that so many life-saving projects around the world are being cancelled. Many of us had held onto the hope that Rubio would keep the humanitarian core of the USAID intact. Was there reason to suspect that some USAID programs might be CIA fronts? Yes, probably; but did they actually get rid of those? You have to wonder whether those might be the ones that survived!

The bro cabal now in charge does not have either the economic or political health of our democracy in mind. Their goal is to starve the government and feed their own. They aren’t trying to make our government work better, or to be more “efficient.” If they wanted that, they wouldn’t be firing everyone who knows how to run things. Making our government work better for its people is not what they are after.

Such people are not our friends. and it is very sad to see the likes of Marco Rubio bend his knee before them. I’ve almost never agreed with Rubio’s politics, but I rarely doubted the sincerity of his convictions. He is now the opposite of everything he has previously stood for, becoming the latest example of formerly principled people who got too close to Trump’s orbit and became a shadow of who they once were.

America’s strength does not lie in the riches of our billionaires, but in the power of our conscience, our ideals and our principles. Without those we are nothing. Let us live for the day when we reclaim them all.