Summary
Trump’s move to defund USAID is causing unintended consequences for American farmers and businesses.
The Washington Post reports that USAID purchases billions in U.S. agricultural products, with American farms supplying 41% of its food aid.
The funding freeze has already halted $340 million in food shipments, leaving tons of wheat stranded in Houston.
Experts warn this decision directly harms American jobs and businesses, as much of USAID’s aid is administered through U.S.-based organizations employing American workers.
The Washington Post reports that USAID purchases billions in U.S. agricultural products, with American farms supplying 41% of its food aid.
I did not know this myself.
Basically all of foreign “giving” by America is done by purchasing American goods and giving them in exchange for goodwill, soft power, regional stability, favorable trade deals, or other political capital.
Many Americans don’t understand any of that and think their tax money is going in the form of a check to people who don’t care and don’t give us anything in exchange. And it’s not like this is a secret, it’s just kinda gauche for the government to explicitly state it
That’s the thing about how headlines mislead. When they say, “US sends $x in aide or weapons,” what they really mean is that the US is subsidizing an American lobby group. Not to say that is bad thing, just that it gives the wrong impression.
Everyone knows international aid is to support local economies
I don’t think anything is backfiring
They write these stories like this isn’t the result he is looking for. The point is to crash, not rebuild; nothing the Trump administration is doing is geared to help, rebuild, or make America great. That’s not how they make money. The more I see, the more I hear the more I am convinced the whole point is to destabilize and rebuild to get rid of that pesky constitution.
Maybe I am just angry or doomsaying, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look that way, and to make matters even worse, people just can’t wrap their heads around the whole organized minority rules over the unorganized majority thing.
They write these stories like this isn’t the result he is looking for. The point is to crash, not rebuild;
I’m noticing a slightly different pattern with these actions. I don’t think trump and his cronies were actually seeking to hurt farmers, but something else.
- hurt everyone temporary to see who screams.
- Those that scream that are opponents, continue to deny them the government benefit
- Those that are allies, extract concessions and/or pledges of fealty before returning the same benefit they had before.
- For those that don’t scream, or don’t scream loud enough, simply pocket the benefit for himself and his own goals.
nothing the Trump administration is doing is geared to help, rebuild, or make America great.
Agreed.
Demarcating between enemies and allies (coerced or otherwise) is most definitely a primary goal.
Basically pull all the cables and see what breaks that you care about.
Then just fix that.
Basically pull all the cables and see what breaks that you care about.
Then just fix that.
Yes. In IT we call this the “scream test”. This feels like that with added corruption.
Incidentally, Musk did exactly that at Twitter. He blamed the developers for his own recklessness (“I was told we had redundancy across our data centers. What I wasn’t told was that we had 70,000 hard-coded references to Sacramento. And there’s still shit that’s broken because of it”) when the infrastructure team strongly warned him ahead of time that this needed to be done carefully to avoid issues.
Which indicates that he learned nothing. Now he’s doing the same to the federal government.
What Musk didn’t isn’t what is acceptable as a “scream test” in IT. “Scream test” is only use after exhausting all other avenues of identifying any live processes still in use. Additionally, its broadcast weeks or months in advance so folks can be on the lookout for a process of theirs that is failing they didn’t know was on the servers in question. Further, the “scream test” is just powering down the server, or possibly disconnecting it from the network. Either task can be un-done quickly to restore service in the event a live process is found that needs to be preserved.
Musk just ripped shit out in the middle of the night with no easy way to restore service. What he did was like ripping out your own organs to see if you die from it? Appendix? Apparently not needed. Liver? Why am I dead now?
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
I thought as the OP did (Trumps goal was to overwhelm and destabilize the U.S.)… your response gave me pause.
I guess we’ll find out who was right in 4 years…
And on the way down, connected rich people have already shorted select industries’ stocks, then will buy in bigtime after the crash to profit on the long way back up.
The rich get richer.
EDIT: the way back up won’t be so long, as theh recovery will be aided by big bailouts (or bail-ins) at the taxpayers’ expense. So we’ll get screwed not one, not two, but THREE ways.
Capital leverages instability to transfer wealth to itself from the working class.
Having control over the levers of chaos means that they can not only leverage instability whenever and however they want, they are also singularly able to predict when the chaos will subside. This increases their economic power exponentially.
That’s basically what all the instability of the early 20th century was all about. On one end of the spectrum, you had communists and socialist looking at the old order and then reacting by destroying it all. On the other end of the political spectrum, you had the far right movements of the Nazis in Germany who saw the writing on the wall with the socialist wave moving in and instead wanted to create a counter movement to all the socially minded. The wealthy capitalists, millionaires, monarchs and historic aristocracy were more than willing to back the far right conservative movements who were willing to work with them than to let communists in who clearly just wanted to get rid of all the old wealthy class.
The same thing is happening all over again. Different playing field, new dynamics but still the same old ball game. Modern wealth can’t work with the current system and they know things have to change so its better to back the far right than to let any kind of social democratic system take over. They’d rather destroy everything because they know that whoever is first to build whatever that remains will be the new kings and rulers of the future. Rather than accommodate and grow in any democratic system, they’d rather watch the world burn and then take over the masses who will crawl out of the ashes.
Destabilization is 100% the point. Create problems, sell solutions. Make the people reliant on the government for everything so they fully own and control you.
the deep fucking irony of who’s always complaining about welfare queens…
destabilize and rebuild
destroy and cash-out.
It’s almost leftist cliche to say the system is full of contradictions. Nobody intentionally builds a system full of contradictions, but you get there by not paying attention to what you’re doing.
Which is to say that they don’t plan to do that. They just don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
“gambit”
Sure, let’s call it that.
The famous chess move: king’s gambit. Sacrifice your king for victory. Wait a minute . . .
President Musk would be just fine sacrificing Trump.
It’s a 30D chess move!
It’s the normalization blues
Donald Trump may have thought that defunding the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would only hurt foreigners – but it turns out he could actually be mistaken.
😮
“May have thought” - that would be to strong for him. Thinking has never been his strong point. He reacts to what people around him tell him. He picks up ideas at random and turns them into executive orders.
Right, he probably only “may have thought” what Musk told him to do, which was to hurt USAID for investigating Starlink+Russia
Farmers are going to get hammered with retaliatory tariffs on exports too. Time for them to find out I guess.
But they just wanted to have someone to punch down on the trans, the brown people, and force everyone to go to their church, that’s all!
If they didn’t learn last go around, do we expect them to this time. I remember during his first term, his tarrifs made China reduce purchasing (I forgot which crop) from the US. Instead, they looked to other countries like Brazil. To combat the lost revenue to farmers, he created a fund to aid them.
Soybeans
I watched a great video about this yesterday: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SS2dSOiMN6g
Tariffs and other limitations on exports from the USA to China have only helped to make China stronger and reduce its dependence on the USA, either by relying on other countries or by them producing a better product domestically.
That’s also a major part of the reason why DeepSeek-R1 was much cheaper to train than OpenAI’s equivalent models. The USA restricted exports of high end Nvidia GPUs and AI accelerators to China, so people in China had to do the same job with cheaper, lower-end hardware.
China is already far ahead in many industries. They have electric vehicles that can go 600 miles on a single charge, while most EVs in the USA barely get half of that. People in other countries are enjoying their cheap Chinese vehicles, but they’re banned in the USA and we end up with more expensive vehicles that aren’t as good.
Removed by mod
I don’t know if him opening the dams flooded any farms, but come summertime, they’re going to be hurting as the reservoirs empty out long before they should have.
I mean, if they vote for Democrats, they might turn gay or woke.
goke
Well, it’s what they voted for in their blind hatred of everything that made America great.
Seriously, only people permanently stuck in adolescence with bullshit Libertarian notions about government believe that you can BREAK government and things will turn out well.
Only a dumbfuck Randroid type (or maybe the random leftist veering on wrapping all the way around the horseshoe) thinks that burning it all down is going to lead to better things…it’s easy if you are totally ignorant to think that “government doesn’t do anything for ME” as an actual thing you believe.
… “government doesn’t do anything for ME” as an actual thing you believe.
This happens because people take completely for granted all of the things government quietly does for them.
It’s kind of the same as “Why do we even have an IT department? Everything works, what are they even doing?”
Such an apt analogy - this actually happens all the time in corporations. IT tends to just get treated as a cost center, most especially if everything is running smoothly. Stupid people at companies will often just look at the price of that and think it’s time to fuck with it…
It’s almost the same thing with vaccines. A whole lot of dumbasses think vaccines “never did them no good”, because vaccines are a victim of their own success, and most people alive today have not really seen how bad it can get without them [1].
Idiots can then try to pin the state of health we have, largely thanks to vaccines, on other things like septic systems, “eating healthy”, etc…
[1] I’ve anecdotally noticed that for the most part, you didn’t see older generations going for that anti-vax shit. It seems to have started with some (younger) boomers, a lot of Gen-Xers and on down. But again, that’s because it’s an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of thing. Some of the older people (like Greatest Generation) saw how life can be incredibly cruel w/o vaccines…sadly, all that wisdom is dying out and our education system sucks, so this wisdom was not passed on to enough people. Critical thinking is probably as bad as ever, and we are probably on the verge of FAFO…
Toxins and crystals and essential oils, oh my!
“Haw haw!”
Surely they’ll still buy those goods and give them to Americans. They aren’t just dissolving programs and making money disappear, couldn’t be.
I had some nutjob on a local group tell me that Trump has removed federal taxes as if I and everyone else can’t clearly see that we’re still paying the same federal taxes on my paystubs. I can’t believe how brainwashed some people have become.
Also tangentially related but I filled out my tax return today and owe a lot more this year thanks to his bullshit 2018 tax bill that capped SALT deductions, removed the child tax credit, and only gave temporary cuts to people who aren’t in the 1%. I can only imagine that his supporters are either retired, unemployed, or on social security to also not realize how much more he’s forcing us to pay to the government.
Yeah, they couldn’t possibly be cruel or incompetent, not them!
According to AOC this whole cutting nonsense is because they need to come up with up to 4 billion dollars to get the votes to pass their new tax reduction plan for the rich.
Trump: “If food prices are so high, what if we just… keep all the food here? That will bring them down, right?”
Dustbowl 2025, fuck yeah! Bringing back the classics!
(Farmers won’t or can’t spend money to plant -> too many fallow fields -> giant walls of airborne topsoil)
Murph!
Similarly, weapon shipments to Israel and Ukraine are subsidies of American weapons manufacturers.
I wonder which party farmers and defense contractors tend to vote for?
A fair amount of those weapons needed to be used anyway as well. This gets them used, and builds up a fresher stockpile creating/maintaining jobs.
Not only that, the dollar amount of the aid is the cost for replacements, not the cost of the old stock. Zelensky said the current value of the stocks they have received is only a fraction of what the US has said they actually donated in aid.
They didn’t need to be used. They could have been destroyed instead.
Well sure, and to commit genocide I’d rather they have been destroyed, but in the case of Ukraine, it’s better than destroying them.
Yeah, I agree for Ukraine.
Not only is it better to give them to Ukraine than to just destroy them, it also lets American generals and weapons manufacturers learn how they work in a real combat situation, and in conditions they may not have much experience with.
With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, American generals and weapons manufacturers have some experience with desert warfare. But, Ukraine gives them a chance to see how their systems do in sub-zero weather in winter. They also get to see how their systems do against a near-peer enemy, vs. how they do against guerillas and militias.
The war in Ukraine is a very smart “investment” for the American military and for American military companies. They get to learn lessons while not having any American soldiers at risk, and while massively damaging an enemy like Russia.
Giving them to Israel is bullshit though. Not only is Israel in the midst of an ethnic cleansing campaign, there also aren’t many useful lessons to be learned by another campaign of smashing civilians, guerillas and militias in a desert.
aren’t many useful lessons to be learned by another campaign of smashing civilians, guerillas and militias in a desert.
Just got me laughing thinking of a multi million dollar munition being shot at civilians with no defences (okay not that part, but the next part) and the military contractors being like, yep, the missile works when there’s (edit: zero) counter measures to stop it, in conditions we’ve tested a hundred times before in combat. Guess we don’t learn anything this time!
Yeah, sometimes you have to laugh so you don’t cry.
dorks.
