At the request of US president Donald Trump, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been through USAID’s books. There they claim to have found an organisation funding myriad dubious campaigns and groups around the world. Among many other activities, it’s been backing drag shows in Ecuador and transgender operas in Colombia. It’s dished out $84million to Chelsea Clinton through the Clinton Foundation. It also gave $54million to the controversial NGO, the EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with the notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology in ‘gain of function’ experiments that are alleged to have made Covid-19 more transmissible.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
Economics |
Samizdata quote of the day – USAID’s demise is nothing to mournFebruary 10th, 2025 |
 12 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – USAID’s demise is nothing to mournLeave a Reply |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
It would appear from more-complete reporting that the claim that USAID “dished out $84million to Chelsea Clinton through the Clinton Foundation” is perhaps slightly-unfair to the lady.
While USAID has indeed made copious grants to the Clinton foundation, notionally in support of its humanitarian programmes, and while Chelsea Clinton is one of the directors of the foundation, it does appear to be true that she does not take an income from the foundation, so the suggestion that she was somehow personally ‘dished out’ $84 million does not appear to be true.
No doubt she enjoys significant in-kind benefits from the Foundation such as expenses, travel, accomodations, staff and the like – money in vast quantities seems to follow and fall into the lap of this woman wherever she goes – but in this one case the accusation does not seem to have much merit. It might be better to spend some time investigating just where all that grant money did go.
llater,
llamas
I think USAID was quite considerably worse that it is being made out to be. Drag shows in Equador, condoms in Gaza, I mean it is just the usual fare of nonsense, corruption and graft that you’d expect. But I think this agency is quite a bit worse than that.
For example, there is quite credible evidence that they were involved in what amounted to a coup in Bangladesh most recently. Mike Benz, quoted in this article explained that when a job was too dirty for the CIA they got USAID to do it. I know Tucker Carlson isn’t popular here, but he interviewed Benz and I think it is quite illuminating. I think I mentioned it here before, and it needs that caveat that I disagree with a lot of what Benz says here, policy-wise, but it is surely informative to here a bit of an insiders view of this vile agency.
USAID is not an aid agency at all. It is “USA International Development” the “AID” in the name is surely meant to deceive us. And by “international development” they mean manipulate foreign government in overt and covert ways. For my part I don’t think the USA should give ANY foreign aid at all to anyone, if Americans want to help foreign governments and their people they can get out their own checkbooks. But this isn’t even an aid agency. It isn’t about feeding the hungry and healing the sick, it is about getting compliant foreign politicians in place, or ensuring access to oil fields, or keeping foreign markets open or ensuring American military access to resources.
In other words, according to Fraser, USAID is about promoting US interests abroad.
I beg to disagree. I start from the axiom that Anglo-American “progressivism” is best understood as a suicide cult, and therefore can never be beneficial to the American people (as distinct from the American Establishment).
Nothing that i know about USAID falsifies this suspicion. (But there is much that i do not know.)
From the Soiked article:-
Although a US judge has submitted a ‘very limited’ temporary order blocking the moves, things do not look good for USAID.
US (invariably democrat) Judges. Is there nothing they can’t do?
Whatever USAID was intended to be, it ended up being a giant taxpayer-funded slush fund for the DNC and their highest level members.
It’s an interesting response from the leftists, for years they’ve been bitching about US interference in other countries but USAID, as a CIA front, was set up specifically for that purpose.
Liberal tears being shed about “independent” media being shut down in Russia after USAID funding was withdrawn seems a bit of cognitive dissonance to me.
And it’s not just nasty old Putin that is being interfered, apparently a Norwegian “refugee” organisation was being bankrolled as well.
This answers a great puzzle – why “opposition movements” in various countries do not attack governments “from the right”.
For example, there was no traction in Israel or Hungary (or elsewhere) against the government Covid lockdowns or “vaccines” (the injections are not vaccines by the traditional definition of that word) – no mass movement. Just a few brave souls – who could get no funding for a mass movement.
And in RUSSIA the increasingly pro Islamic policy of Mr Putin has gone virtually unopposed by “opposition” groups – I hope it is not “Islamophobic” to point out that Islam was the great enemy of the Russian people for about a thousand years, yet Mr Putin now gets on very well with external Islamic powers (such as the Islamic Republic of Iran) and with most (although certainly not all) Islamic figures inside Russia – in spite of the fact that Mr Putin butchered many Muslim civilians some years ago, and the media Mr Putin controls is very pro Islam (and filled with hatred for Israel), and he gives high positions to his Islamic allies. Yet even the late Mr Navalny, who made his name in Russia by denouncing Putin for letting in more and more Muslims into Russia from the Central Asian Republics (and elsewhere) went very quiet about these matters, and tried to reinvent himself as a “liberal” – which was a 180% turn from what Mr Navalny had been when he started.
Why does the “opposition” in such countries as Israel, Hungary and Russia ignore an open goal? Why do they just parrot the international leftist line on everything?
The answer is now horribly clear – these “opposition movements” (in Europe, in Israel, and so on) were being funded by the American government and other “Progressive” Western paid for organisations – they were not organic, they were not from the ground up, they were creatures of USAID, the CIA, the European Union (and others) and the Social Media companies (especially the ones owned by Mr Zuckerberg) so OF COURSE they parroted the leftist “Progressive” line on everything and never attacked the governments in Hungary, Israel, Russia and-so-on “from the right”.
There was no MONEY in attacking these governments “from the right” – but there was lots and lots of money in waving European Union flags (notice how these flags are always present in “opposition movement” events – even in Georgia which has never been part of the European Union) and talking about “Diversity and Inclusion”, LGBTQ….. “Equity” and so on.
Of course, the ordinary opposition activists do NOT know this – they are protesting against corruption, or brutality (or whatever) and then they are told (by the social media networks and so on) that they should wave European Union flags and talk about LGBTQ….. and “Diversity and Inclusion” and all the rest of it – and so they do – that is what they were taught that an “opposition” person should do and say.
For example, never attack Mr Putin for the mass abortions in Russia – but, rather, attack him for not having even more abortions (and for not allowing children to be sexually mutilated so they will never have children of their own). Never attack Mr Putin for NOT being a sincere Orthodox Christian (as he pretends to be), but rather go into an Orthodox cathedral dressed up like lunatics and scream abuse and “feminist” slogans (hardly a way to win friends and influence the ordinary Russian people).
That things like USAID are puling the strings is something the ordinary activists do NOT know – the ordinary activists are quite sincere, they are victims.
Paul, just for history’s sake: unlike the rest of the West, in Israel the opposition to the COVID shots came from the Left* – although that is not to say that it was not financed by the usual suspects, USAID included: the best evidence of that is the fact that these were the same people who’d been demanding for years that Bibi step down because of the fabricated legal charges against him, who protested against the judicial reform prior to the October 7th massacre, and are the same people who are now demanding an end to the war in Gaza supposedly because of the hostages.
*Personally, I was cautiously agnostic about both the danger of COVID itself and the shots that were supposed to prevent it, before becoming increasingly skeptical about both.
More generally, it is never, anywhere, about the actual proclaimed issues, but rather about removing democratically elected governments the global Left does not like.
Lastly, you keep using the word ‘were’, while all of this is still ongoing, everywhere.
I have to wonder whether we might charge USAID with war crimes.
Of course, that’s (probably) a slight exaggeration, but for all the USA’s (largely justifiable, IMHO) complaints about how useless its NATO allies have been, one might counter that at least they hadn’t tried to undermine the USA’s constitution, unlike USAID’s efforts in many NATO countries.
Yes Alisa – there was no opposition from-the-right in Israel, not to the lockdowns, not to the smearing of Early Treatments, and not to the injections.
It was indeed incredibly depressing. Especially as some of the leading critics of the whole approach were Israeli medical scientists – who had zero influence on the protest movement.
I am reminded of Bavaria – where the only opposition to the lockdowns came from hippie types, who wanted to get rid of advanced civilization.
“If you are against our Covid policies” (said the CSU government in Bavaria) “then you are on the side of these lunatics rioting in the streets – people who openly say they want to destroy civilization, have most people die, and have the few survivors live in communes”.
An impossible position for any critic of tyranny to be in.
Alisa yes – “the issue is never the issue” (Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals”) – what these leftist protest movements say they want is always a cover for what they really want – they want to impose totalitarianism (total tyranny from the cradle to the grave).
And yes – this vicious insanity is carrying on, internationally.
USAID started off as a work-around on the restrictions put on the CIA after the Church committee hearings then gradually morphed into being 50% a slush fund for the DNC. USAID is also the tip of the fetid iceberg. Wait until DOGE gets sunk into other departments like the DoE and realizes how many billions have been spent on dubious green initiatives and quid-pro-quo advertisements at media organizations (like the NY Slime and Washington Compost).