Why The World Two Richest Men are Taking On The World Poorest Children
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Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof today took aim at President Trump’s freeze of U.S. foreign aid, which has been enthusiastically abetted by multi-billionaire Elon Musk.
In Kristof’s column today, he wrote that “to anyone with a heart, it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.”
The foreign aid cutbacks jeopardize people’s lives worldwide, including the 20 million women, children and LGBTQ people receiving HIV-fighting antiretroviral medications that are funded by the nation’s foreign aid agency, USAID.
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The World’s Richest Men Take On the World’s Poorest Children
By Nicholas Kristof
The world’s richest man is boasting about destroying the United States Agency for International Development, which saves the lives of the world’s poorest children, saying he shoved it “into the wood chipper.”
By my calculations, Elon Musk probably has a net worth greater than that of the poorest billion people on Earth. Just since Donald Trump’s election, Musk’s personal net worth has grown by far more than the entire annual budget of U.S.A.I.D., which in any case accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. It’s callous for gleeful billionaires like Musk and President Trump to cut children off from medicine, but, as President John F. Kennedy pointed out when he proposed the creation of the agency in 1961, it’s also myopic.
Cutting aid, Kennedy noted, “would be disastrous and, in the long run, more expensive.” He added: “Our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperiled.”
Perhaps that’s why Russia has praised Trump’s move.
In contrast with Kennedy, the Trump administration braids together cruelty, ignorance and shortsightedness, and that combination seems particularly evident in its assault on American humanitarian assistance.
One person has already died of bird flu in the United States, and there is growing concern of a pandemic — yet Trump’s suspension of foreign aid has interrupted bird flu surveillance in 49 countries, according to the Global Health Council, a U.S.-based nonprofit.
Remember the American panic over the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014? (Trump was particularly hysterical back then.) In the end, an Ebola pandemic was averted — in part because of U.S.A.I.D.’s work in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
As it happens, another Ebola outbreak has just been reported in Uganda, with 234 contacts identified so far. U.S.A.I.D. would normally help suppress it — but now Trump and Musk have put it out of commission.
Another hemorrhagic fever, called Marburg virus, broke out in Tanzania last month. Aid workers are rushing to contain the virus, but again Trump has made the United States AWOL, leaving the world a little more vulnerable.
A disclosure: In 2012, U.S.A.I.D. made some games for India and Africa based on a book my wife and I wrote, “Half the Sky.” U.S.A.I.D. did not pay us anything for this, and the games did a good job promoting deworming, girls’ education and safe pregnancy.
I’ve seen U.S.A.I.D. operate all over the world, and it’s a mixed picture. It is fair to complain that U.S.A.I.D. is endlessly bureaucratic and that too much of the aid goes to so-called Beltway bandit American contractors rather than to needy people abroad.
Yet there’s no basis for the White House mythology that U.S.A.I.D. is an enclave of woke waste, reflected in Trump’s claim that it spent about “$100 million on condoms to Hamas” (he doubled his previous claim of $50 million).
Hmm. Male condoms cost the U.S. government 3.3 cents each, so that would be three billion condoms. By my calculation, for Hamas to use up that many condoms in a year, each fighter would have to have sex 325 times a day, every day.
That might wipe out Hamas as a fighting force more effectively than Israeli bombardment.
In any case, the actual amount of U.S. assistance spent on condoms for Gaza in recent years appears to have been not $100 million but $0
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