The WHO has a budget of over $4 billion dollars; we are talking about $25 million here. Surely they could pay for this instead of paying a brigade of useless analysts to estimate amounts needed.
It would be nice if the US provided the money, but I do not understand why it would be their responsibility in the first place. Germany, France, etc., paid only $2 million, they could afford more. anAnd I say that as a European myself. Europe has to finally up their game instead of throwing pocket change in the ring, when in fact the Americans did all the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, we act as the moral instance in all of this and now that the US isn't playing ball anymore the emperor stands naked.
Not to sound inhuman (well I'm going to sound inhuman anyways), but DR Congo is perhaps the most irrelevant country geopolitically for the 115 million population it has. The stability of DR Congo does not make a difference to the stability of Africa on the whole in any way - if DR Congo were to descend into civil war (like it has before), it won't make a difference in any way, except for perhaps Rwanda. DR Congo could disappear one day and the world would continue moving forward like nothing else happened.
This is a country with hundreds of ethnicities and sub-ethnicities, that should not exist as a cohesive entity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Con...). The three decades it existed without a civil war, it was under the autocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko, under whose regime corruption and extrajudicial killings were rampant, as is typical with any autocratic regime. Following which, the army took control, which led to civil war and even more corruption and extrajudicial killing, which continues till today. This country is a money pit, something the Soviets learnt during the Cold War, and the Chinese today, and any initiative to uplift this country is going to end up in a blackhole. After all, how the heck is anyone supposed to establish anything longlasting in Africa's own backyard bullpen?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Con...
This reminds me of some early human remains they found in a cave Georgia (the country). It looked like one human lost teeth and in those times that would basically mean death by starvation. But the evidence suggests someone chewed the food for this person and they survived longer.
We thrive as humans because we look out for each other even when it seems irrelevant.
It is most certainly likely that the person who chewed the food for the person who lost his teeth was of the same tribe as the latter. We thrive as humans in a tribe, whose members look out for each other. The smaller the tribe, the more tightly we look out for each other. For bigger groups, mere tribalism won't work - that's when democracy shines. But then you always have the looming threat of your democracy descending into tribalism with political factions.
Africa is a mishmash of extremely poorly drawn borders, decided on the whims of arrogant aristocrats in hall rooms in Europe, without paying any attention to the inherent tribal cultures that were present in Africa - and the DRC is the most evident example of this. That's why you have a tiny country like Rwanda being able to support a significant rebellion in Eastern DRC, why DRC has more than 700 communities, with no community making even 10% of the population, why the government is unable to create any form of integration within the country. Like on what basis can the government unite the people together? "We all suffered under Leopold II of Belgium together"??
> but I do not understand why it would be their responsibility in the first place
The world is a fucking complex mess and it's all just state. All things are set up in a certain way at this point in time and interact. As a leader in this setup it's simply not sensible to point at a single thing and say "Weeeellll, this seems like it's not how it is for others — and I really don't like that!" and then just stop doing it, and use that as justification to disregard the total amount of additional suffering this course of action causes.
If you do, you are at best unfit to have any power but possibly also just evil.
nonsense. it is time to dismantle the current state of affairs and to start thinking about better ways to approach things. Sure, we can keep all the things rolling as they are. Every once in a while something will flare up in Africa, we send money, we do the work, everything is back to normal a year later, we do it again.
Or maybe we start to question if there is a better way to do things. I don't want to say Trump is doing everything right, but at least he tries. He got the Rwandan president and the Congolese at one table and told them to stop the bullshit.
If Trump ends the war and gets Western countries into the DRC to do proper mining, the DRC will be one of the richest nations of all time, and they will finally have enough resources to educate their population on the dangers of fucking bush meat.
That is a misreading so fantastic, that I hesitate to react at all. I'll rephrase:
If an actor with power changes something with regards to the state of the world – which they obviously should, if they don't what are they doing? — the rational can not be "I think this singular thing is unfair, I will not do this anymore". If everyone did that, the world would collapse.
There is no concept of "fairness" that you can simply presume (and if it mattered at all, which it does not, it would certainly not be the US that draws the short straw). Everything is state and connected. You are not in kindergarten. This is the state of the world you have to work from, if you aim to be a serious and trustworthy actor, and the amount of suffering you willfully cause is not a detail.
(And just so we don't get side tracked, what I was responding to is exactly: "but I do not understand why it would be their responsibility in the first place")
The difficulty here lies in the fact that there’s a leap involved from “someone should do something” to “you in particular should do something”. If everyone in the room expects you in particular to do something and never does things themselves, nor even appreciates your doing of things, it is correct and reasonable to point out that it’s not really a sustainable, fair, or reasonable reaction to get angry when “you in particular” stops doing the thing. Seems pretty obvious and straightforward on its face.
But, you see, it's not obvious or straightforward — because everyone does do something themselves. There are all these millions, billions of interactions and setups, past and ongoing, that have let the world to exactly the state it is in right this second.
It's entirely idiotic to then say "But hey, look at this single thing, I now decide to judge to be of utmost importance, what are you doing here right this second!?" Well maybe jack shit. And that may not be optimal, or it might be. But the important thing is: Any actor can find any amount of those isolated instances where someone did less/worse/different/bad, and then proceed to demand retribution on that basis and sabotage absolutely all cooperation in the process. But that is obviously idiotic.
> You are not in kindergarten. This is the state of the world you have to work from, if you aim to be a serious and trustworthy actor, and the amount of suffering you willfully cause is not a detail.
I think it is very kindergarten-ish to shove $25M into the DRC on an almost yearly schedule. Almost like the kindergarten teacher telling Max not to take the shovel from Sarah every single day. I also think it is kindergarten-ish to look at Ebola in Congo and scream for US money (especially when the argument for that is that it make you a less serious and trustworthy actor if you don't).
We are not in kindergarten; we are, in fact, in the real world, and all nations have to face their own problems. The justification for Trump's fund slashing doesn't matter. Sure, people will suffer, but they suffered from Ebola only a year ago. Is it so difficult to tell your people not to eat monkeys and bats? These are solvable problems, and looking at Trump and thinking that he is the problem here is... kindergarten-ish.
The amount of money they're asking for is so laughably small, the fact that nobody has stepped up so far can only be explained with apathy.
It's so small, lots of smaller cities could fit that in their budget without a second thought. The list of individuals to which that is an inconsequential amount of money is thousands strong.
Chump change to prevent something that could develop into a global threat to health and trade? What a steal.
It's not a stable region, but you don't have to hand deliver the money to them. There's already people dealing with the outbreak. They/the WHO say they need around $25m to do it, but so far have only received a fraction of that.
I voted conservative, too. Actually conservative, meaning the Democratic party - not tear-it-all-down hate-everything-about-America revanchist Republican.
At least we've seemingly gotten an answer to the anthromorphic principle thought experiment of why we were (individually) born in this time - it's the most populous time in human history looking backwards and forwards. At this rate I doubt we'll be getting off this rock. That civilization-bootstrapping energy stored in easily-accessible oil deposits isn't coming back any time soon.
Leaving aside that USAID was hugely important to US soft power and the hopefully universal goal of preventing Ebola outbreaks, other people being shitty isn't an excuse to be shitty ourselves.
Thanks for asking. My non-tax medical aid dollars go to Project C.U.R.E. They haven't responded to this specific event yet because international ocean shipping isn't well suited to first response situations, but they'll eventually have supplies to help.
If you saw an guy on the floor gasping for someone to help with his asthma inhaler while other people simply walked by, would you walk by thinking yeah I could help him but other people aren’t so tough cookies, I’m not either.
Fill in any situation where someone is in need, one has the ability to help with little inconvenience, but one choose not to because other people aren’t helping.
It’s not right or wrong, it’s just the decisions we’ve made about the kind of world we choose to live in.
Think about other problems like hunger or health care in the United States. These are problems we have created for ourselves! We could choose to fix them and instead choose not to.
Indeed, most of the problems in the worlds are there because we don't actually want to fix them.
There's more than enough resources to provide every single person a reasonable existence; We just don't think the homeless, for instance, should be freely helped to get housing. Nah, can't have that, how else can we point to "those" people as examples of the kind of life not conforming gets you?
We'd rather millions go to bed hungry instead of not propping up national markets by destroying food and providing subsidies.
Some problems are much easier to solve than others. The problems you are bringing up are far more intractable and far harder and more expensive to solve.
> In the past, the US Agency for International Development, USAID, has provided critical support to respond to such outbreaks. But, with funding cuts and a dismantling of the agency by the Trump administration, the US is notably absent, and health officials fear it will be difficult to compensate for the loss.
It receives relatively little attention now, but in terms of sheer numbers the cuts to the USAID program have had and will continue to have the largest death toll of anything this administration does.
I'm sure the economic suicide will have its victims, and who knows how many have died in detention facilities, but it would be damn-near impossible to match up the the loss of human life seen in poor countries without access to the basic supplies and medical care that USAID delivered.
I hope you're not implying they're already digging mass graves. Some are unaccounted for--they're probably in Guatemala or something. Some will die. But I don't see the gas chambers being built for, like, another six months at least.
If you mean short term impacts that may be true, but I wonder if the medicaid, aca and likely medicare cuts will have material impacts on mortality. It will not be as easy to attribute, and therefore it’ll be hard to quantify (you might say that’s “convenient”), but the number of people impacted will be well into the tens of millions.
> if you mean short term impacts that may be true, but I wonder if the medicaid, aca and likely medicare cuts will have material impacts on mortality. It will not be as easy to attribute, and therefore it’ll be hard to quantify (you might say that’s “convenient”), but the number of people impacted will be well into the tens of millions.
I think these can't possible be commensurate - just consider how many more HIV cases there will be without US funding for overseas HIV prevention.
I’m not so sure. 630,000 total HIV deaths annually. What percent are impacted by USAID and then how much growth in HIV deaths without USAID? My tens of millions comment is the people whose health care will potentially be impacted short term (medicaid and aca changes; Medicaid is currently 70 million people. ACA is 24 million) plus potential aggressive efforts to move medicare people to medicare advantage and you have another 68 million potentially exposed (that number isn’t actually that large today because a majority of those people will likely pass before the medicare changes have a negative impact, but over time, as people enter the system with worse coverage, the deaths will climb).
Please understand I’m not saying I’m right about this but just that the vast number of people impacted by the admin’s policies re domestic health care makes me think it could be greater than USAID.
I am very genuinely interpreting all of this and I recognize you are just reviewing the data.
HIV deaths are a lagging indicator, so any effect of today's policy will be delayed - as a general matter. But HIV in newborns will lead to death within a year if untreated, and adults with untreated HIV/AIDS will die from other communicable disease sooner than if they were treated.
Since US hospitals public obligation in the US to treat people who are gravely ill, we're 'only' going to see a marked increase in deaths attributable to chronic disease, and I don't think the Medicaid cuts will survive in their current state.
But it's true I don't have numbers on this and won't have a chance to get them this morning. Please share if you have a sense of comparative DALY/QALYs lost through USAID funding cuts vs Medicaid changes.
I really don't have a concrete sense. My comment was very much predicated on the sheer number of folks who would be negatively impacted by the changes to existing domestic healthcare programs. And to put a fine point on my own comment in case you think I'm attempting to downplay USAID impacts, both of these things are materially negative from a healthcare perspective.
It will be impossible to effectively quantify the impacts on mortality of the medicaid/medicare/aca changes, but they are (if implemented) going to impact great numbers of people and their health. USAID absolutely the same as you're pointing out and those impacts will be much more measurable. You're going to have about as good a linear test as you can get given how abruptly that funding will disappear (abrupt in contrast to the long, drawn out medicaid/medicare/aca changes (though the initial aca changes, assuming they do happen, will likely be the most abrupt of the three domestic programs because they will happen cleanly on January 1, 2026)).
The US is not responsible for fixing every world issue. Just because they've helped in the past doesn't make them morally responsible for every current and future crisis.
No but keeping Ebola from becoming a world wide problem is in the US interests and USAID was a very cheap way to advance that goal. We funded USAID out of decency (and to gain a reputation for decency, which is worth a lot of money) sure, but also to protect ourselves.
There you go again -you want the US government to solve the world's problems.
Also, you're passively calling the WHO an infective organization because it can't handle this outbreak on its own without US funding. That implies it's a useless organization and therefore the US was justified removing funding.
Maybe you should be advocating for the 194 member states of the WHO to contribute more so the world doesn't need to rely on the political winds of the US election cycle.
I replied to one of your sibling posts. You can re-interpret these facts as you wish, but the WHO was working in December and radically transformed in February.
I think that indicates inefficacy and poor insight, but not in the WHO.
Good thing it's called the World Health Organization and not the American Health Organization, that way the 95.9% of the world that is not America can contribute to it.
> Good thing it's called the World Health Organization and not the American Health Organization, that way the 95.9% of the world that is not America can contribute to it.
First, imagine that your boss/largest customer decided, on a whim, to reduce your remuneration by half on the first of January. Where are you making up that money if there's nowhere else in the world that you can immediately turn to?
Anyway, other nations are spending more.
The World Health Organization and UN are just politically convenient names. These organizations were created by a victorious America to project power, like the takeover of UK military bases and exportation of US culture in the Marshall Plan.
How reprehensible that we throw away such power without receiving anything in exchange.
>> It receives relatively little attention now, but in terms of sheer numbers the cuts to the USAID program have had and will continue to have the largest death toll of anything this administration does.
> The US is not responsible for fixing every world issue. Just because they've helped in the past doesn't make them morally responsible for every current and future crisis.
Your answer doesn't quite respond to the GP but instead feels like an expression of political opinion.
From a moral stance, the action of stopping something seems quite distinct from a position in which the thing had never occurred.
I'm not a highly religious person so I may well be wrong about this, but my understanding of Christian principles (as you referenced in your Bible quote) is that you, the individual, should do these kind things to other individuals personally; and in that act of doing so personally, you become closer to God.
What we have instead is that taxes are collected by an entity with the monopoly on violence (and of course, it's understood that the people making more than you are not paying their "fair share") whether you like it or not, spent by people who generally have boundless disdain for the very people who pay those taxes, on people and causes on the other side of the planet. There's no connection between people, or between people and God, in this scenario.
> I'm not a highly religious person so I may well be wrong about this, but my understanding of Christian principles (as you referenced in your Bible quote) is that you, the individual, should do these kind things to other individuals personally; and in that act of doing so personally, you become closer to God.
Why not read the verse and see that this refers to collections of people? The source material is readily available, no reason to speculate.
I have read the source material. It says nothing about the morality of an intermediary forcibly redistributing wealth.
Again, the onus is on the individual to act kindly. If anything, handing that duty off to a third party is a reduction of morals. You are also speculating if you claim that there is a moral equivalence between the two.
I think we're going to disagree, which is fine, but I'll post the text and let others assess what the meanings of 'nations' is in the context of the quotation.
31“When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the [c]holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. 32All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. 33And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left.
[...]
41“Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: 42for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; 43I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’
44“Then they also will answer [d]Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?’ 45Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ 46And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
It's simple self-interest. Sure, sit on your money and smile while your neighbors die of Ebola. It won't happen here? Sure it could. When the chumps in DC tear down the infrastructure that managed things like this, then we become massively vulnerable.
No dollar was ever spent by the US government outside of the US if not in self interest. Failing to see these cuts as sabotaging US interests is very, very naïve.
Perhaps the American taxpayer could be incentivized to continue financially supporting the DR Congo in other ways? Maybe they could apply to become a protectorate or somesuch. You can't have your sovereign cake and eat it, too.
In other words: if a country cannot actually exist without being propped up by another, at some point it may be better for everyone to just break the illusion. Like someone complaining that they can't afford to live in a nice apartment in Brooklyn anymore because their trust fund got cut off; in the long run, it's better to base expectations around reality.
We disagree on the unspoken missions of those agencies, I guess. From what I've seen, the unspoken mission is actually providing sinecures for political allies. Or have you forgotten about a worldwide pandemic that happened just a few short years back which revealed that the top priority of many authority figures in public health organizations was to make themselves look good and their opposition bad?
Why are so many people blind to the idea that the name and stated purpose of an organization can and many times do differ from the actual real-world outcomes that organization produces?
> Or have you forgotten about a worldwide pandemic that happened just a few short years back which revealed that the top priority of many authority figures in public health organizations was to make themselves look good and their opposition bad?
I don't remember this because it did not happen.
However, I do recall our own (Trump-run) CDC putting out ineffective testing materials, while the (admittedly Trump-supported) WHO made the testing resources the whole world, including the US, relied on in the first months of the pandemic.
> I don't remember this because it did not happen.
There was a whole-of-government approach to silencing factually true statements about the pandemic because it either made officials look bad or Trump look good. There was a whole Supreme Court case around this that was sidestepped on grounds of standing, not on the facts of the case.
Anthony Fauci, a prominent NIH official who was the initial public face of the government's response to the pandemic, was revealed to have exhibited a significant lack of candor around the origins of Covid and his involvement in funding gain-of-function research. This was discovered by a House subcommittee formed by a Democratic majority and continued by a subsequent Republican majority.
>There was a whole-of-government approach to silencing factually true statements about the pandemic because it either made officials look bad or Trump look good. There was a whole Supreme Court case around this that was sidestepped on grounds of standing, not on the facts of the case.
> Anthony Fauci, a prominent NIH official who was the initial public face of the government's response to the pandemic, was revealed to have exhibited a significant lack of candor around the origins of Covid and his involvement in funding gain-of-function research. This was discovered by a House subcommittee formed by a Democratic majority and continued by a subsequent Republican majority.
These are very peculiar claims that I, despite very close following of factual news sources, have not seen.
Containing Ebola where it happens is of value to the world; if the places where it happens can't contain it, the consequences of spread are pretty costly for everywhere it ends up.
The article says they're looking for $25M or so. If any cases make it to the US, that much money will only cover a small number of patients. In 2014, $1M covered two patients. [1] Much better to spend the money on containment overseas than not spend it overseas and have (more) cases arrive here. It's also much better for the country where the outbreak is occuring. If said country could manage the response on its own, that would be great, but outside help in outbreaks is a good thing anyway --- there's valuable exchange of information between doctors and nurses from different areas in addition to filling the need for additional capacity for care.
This is a bad take, even if we step away from your comparison of a body of millions of people to a someone living in Brooklyn with a trust fund.
> Perhaps the American taxpayer could be incentivized to continue financially supporting the DR Congo in other ways? Maybe they could apply to become a protectorate or somesuch. You can't have your sovereign cake and eat it, too.
We weren't asked about the abrupt change. I am sure that the average taxpayer supports maintaining lives overseas at minimal costs. She also probably wants pandemics not to infect her children on US shores.
> In other words: if a country cannot actually exist without being propped up by another, at some point it may be better for everyone to just break the illusion.
On a geopolitical sense, this is absurd. Just consider Poland: do they wish Ukraine didn't exist because of the amount of resources they expend on Ukraine's defense?
> even if we step away from your comparison of a body of millions of people to a someone living in Brooklyn with a trust fund
The article claims 57 cases and 35 deaths. Globally, Ebola killed 15k people over the past 50 years[0]. In the last big outbreak in the DR Congo, it infected less than 4k people in a country of roughly 100 million.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your sentence, but your way of phrasing ("a body of millions") seems to dramatically overstate the impact.
> We weren't asked about the abrupt change.
There was a hotly contested election with one side promising abrupt change and the other side promising a maintenance of the status quo. It's really not like they were hiding their intentions. Broadly speaking, the electorate wanted to take a wrecking ball to what they saw as Washington excess, whether that characterization is fair or not.
> Just consider Poland: do they wish Ukraine didn't exist because of the amount of resources they expend on Ukraine's defense?
Poland shares a border with Ukraine, who is being invaded by a nation that has also been a historical aggressor against Poland. I don't believe this is a good comparison to the US funding healthcare in the DR Congo.
> Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your sentence, but your way of phrasing ("a body of millions") seems to dramatically overstate the impact.
You compared a sovereign nation to an apartment, sorry I was unclear.
> There was a hotly contested election with one side promising abrupt change and the other side promising a maintenance of the status quo.
There's good polling about this sort of thing - Americans don't want to cause the death of other people. You may construe the electioneering to mean otherwise, but I was not alluding to this.
> Poland shares a border with Ukraine, who is being invaded by a nation that has also been a historical aggressor against Poland. I don't believe this is a good comparison to the US funding healthcare in the DR Congo.
I disagree, because allowing infectious disease to fester slowly allows the development of antibiotic resistance and magnification of problems that could otherwise be contained.
In a sense, we're all closer to infections in the developing world than we recognize - despite the US efforts to dismantle the system that has surveilled these infections up to now.
A sovereign nation in name only, who cannot adequately protect its people against disease without Uncle Sam's backstop.
> Americans don't want to cause the death of other people
Your concept of causation here is tortured. Americans are not spraying Ebola from airplanes. Can you equally say that you caused the death of a beggar who you passed by without sparing a dollar?
> Your concept of causation here is tortured. Americans are not spraying Ebola from airplanes. Can you equally say that you caused the death of a beggar who you passed by without sparing a dollar?
I can say that, having promised to deliver medication to someone, a capricious cut in medication supply will be causative in whatever change may result. And that is exactly the setting in which this poll was conducted.
First, what you propose may work only if happenings in other countries don't affect the US, which I very much doubt.
Second, in most of these countries, it is actually the drip-feed of supposed western "help" that props up corruption and prevents any real change. The "aid" is a form of control, not actual help.
If western nations wanted to actually help, they would support the Grand Inga dam project [1] to actually lift people out of poverty. Instead, they oppose it on environmental grounds, never mind that their industrialization was built on the back of massive pollution.
I'm not sure if I follow. Are you positing that American spending on foreign aid uplifts middle-class Americans and make material improvements to their lives?
Facts my friend, facts. You may not like them, you may think they are out of context and/or misused, but they are still facts.
Another fact is that the money saved went to fund a (small) portion of the big beautiful bill, which doesn't exactly focus on helping the average american Joe.
even worse, the local services have also been gutted and lobotomized, so once one of these outbreaks gets to CONUS, they'll be praying hard and dropping like flies.
You’re surprised a virus with reservoirs in local wild animals has periodic outbreaks? And seem want to imply it’s some conspiracy or lie? Okay you do you.
The WHO has a budget of over $4 billion dollars; we are talking about $25 million here. Surely they could pay for this instead of paying a brigade of useless analysts to estimate amounts needed.
It would be nice if the US provided the money, but I do not understand why it would be their responsibility in the first place. Germany, France, etc., paid only $2 million, they could afford more. anAnd I say that as a European myself. Europe has to finally up their game instead of throwing pocket change in the ring, when in fact the Americans did all the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, we act as the moral instance in all of this and now that the US isn't playing ball anymore the emperor stands naked.
> but I do not understand why it would be their responsibility in the first place
The original rationale for aid activities was to promote global stability, strategic interest, economic benefits, and humanitarian relief.
You can argue that those things things are no longer necessary. But you also need to bear the consequences of losing those benefits.
Does Europe not enjoy the benefits of global stability?
Not to sound inhuman (well I'm going to sound inhuman anyways), but DR Congo is perhaps the most irrelevant country geopolitically for the 115 million population it has. The stability of DR Congo does not make a difference to the stability of Africa on the whole in any way - if DR Congo were to descend into civil war (like it has before), it won't make a difference in any way, except for perhaps Rwanda. DR Congo could disappear one day and the world would continue moving forward like nothing else happened.
This is a country with hundreds of ethnicities and sub-ethnicities, that should not exist as a cohesive entity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Con...). The three decades it existed without a civil war, it was under the autocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko, under whose regime corruption and extrajudicial killings were rampant, as is typical with any autocratic regime. Following which, the army took control, which led to civil war and even more corruption and extrajudicial killing, which continues till today. This country is a money pit, something the Soviets learnt during the Cold War, and the Chinese today, and any initiative to uplift this country is going to end up in a blackhole. After all, how the heck is anyone supposed to establish anything longlasting in Africa's own backyard bullpen?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Con...
This country is Panem Manifest.
This definitely sounds inhuman.
This reminds me of some early human remains they found in a cave Georgia (the country). It looked like one human lost teeth and in those times that would basically mean death by starvation. But the evidence suggests someone chewed the food for this person and they survived longer.
We thrive as humans because we look out for each other even when it seems irrelevant.
It is most certainly likely that the person who chewed the food for the person who lost his teeth was of the same tribe as the latter. We thrive as humans in a tribe, whose members look out for each other. The smaller the tribe, the more tightly we look out for each other. For bigger groups, mere tribalism won't work - that's when democracy shines. But then you always have the looming threat of your democracy descending into tribalism with political factions.
Africa is a mishmash of extremely poorly drawn borders, decided on the whims of arrogant aristocrats in hall rooms in Europe, without paying any attention to the inherent tribal cultures that were present in Africa - and the DRC is the most evident example of this. That's why you have a tiny country like Rwanda being able to support a significant rebellion in Eastern DRC, why DRC has more than 700 communities, with no community making even 10% of the population, why the government is unable to create any form of integration within the country. Like on what basis can the government unite the people together? "We all suffered under Leopold II of Belgium together"??
> but I do not understand why it would be their responsibility in the first place
The world is a fucking complex mess and it's all just state. All things are set up in a certain way at this point in time and interact. As a leader in this setup it's simply not sensible to point at a single thing and say "Weeeellll, this seems like it's not how it is for others — and I really don't like that!" and then just stop doing it, and use that as justification to disregard the total amount of additional suffering this course of action causes.
If you do, you are at best unfit to have any power but possibly also just evil.
nonsense. it is time to dismantle the current state of affairs and to start thinking about better ways to approach things. Sure, we can keep all the things rolling as they are. Every once in a while something will flare up in Africa, we send money, we do the work, everything is back to normal a year later, we do it again.
Or maybe we start to question if there is a better way to do things. I don't want to say Trump is doing everything right, but at least he tries. He got the Rwandan president and the Congolese at one table and told them to stop the bullshit.
If Trump ends the war and gets Western countries into the DRC to do proper mining, the DRC will be one of the richest nations of all time, and they will finally have enough resources to educate their population on the dangers of fucking bush meat.
That is a misreading so fantastic, that I hesitate to react at all. I'll rephrase:
If an actor with power changes something with regards to the state of the world – which they obviously should, if they don't what are they doing? — the rational can not be "I think this singular thing is unfair, I will not do this anymore". If everyone did that, the world would collapse.
There is no concept of "fairness" that you can simply presume (and if it mattered at all, which it does not, it would certainly not be the US that draws the short straw). Everything is state and connected. You are not in kindergarten. This is the state of the world you have to work from, if you aim to be a serious and trustworthy actor, and the amount of suffering you willfully cause is not a detail.
(And just so we don't get side tracked, what I was responding to is exactly: "but I do not understand why it would be their responsibility in the first place")
The difficulty here lies in the fact that there’s a leap involved from “someone should do something” to “you in particular should do something”. If everyone in the room expects you in particular to do something and never does things themselves, nor even appreciates your doing of things, it is correct and reasonable to point out that it’s not really a sustainable, fair, or reasonable reaction to get angry when “you in particular” stops doing the thing. Seems pretty obvious and straightforward on its face.
But, you see, it's not obvious or straightforward — because everyone does do something themselves. There are all these millions, billions of interactions and setups, past and ongoing, that have let the world to exactly the state it is in right this second.
It's entirely idiotic to then say "But hey, look at this single thing, I now decide to judge to be of utmost importance, what are you doing here right this second!?" Well maybe jack shit. And that may not be optimal, or it might be. But the important thing is: Any actor can find any amount of those isolated instances where someone did less/worse/different/bad, and then proceed to demand retribution on that basis and sabotage absolutely all cooperation in the process. But that is obviously idiotic.
> You are not in kindergarten. This is the state of the world you have to work from, if you aim to be a serious and trustworthy actor, and the amount of suffering you willfully cause is not a detail.
I think it is very kindergarten-ish to shove $25M into the DRC on an almost yearly schedule. Almost like the kindergarten teacher telling Max not to take the shovel from Sarah every single day. I also think it is kindergarten-ish to look at Ebola in Congo and scream for US money (especially when the argument for that is that it make you a less serious and trustworthy actor if you don't).
We are not in kindergarten; we are, in fact, in the real world, and all nations have to face their own problems. The justification for Trump's fund slashing doesn't matter. Sure, people will suffer, but they suffered from Ebola only a year ago. Is it so difficult to tell your people not to eat monkeys and bats? These are solvable problems, and looking at Trump and thinking that he is the problem here is... kindergarten-ish.
Unfortunately, the country has been under many conflicts, one after another. Doesn't help the situation at all.
in hindsight it would have probably cheaper to buy their government
The amount of money they're asking for is so laughably small, the fact that nobody has stepped up so far can only be explained with apathy.
It's so small, lots of smaller cities could fit that in their budget without a second thought. The list of individuals to which that is an inconsequential amount of money is thousands strong.
Chump change to prevent something that could develop into a global threat to health and trade? What a steal.
Is the problem not that it's in a war zone?
It's not a stable region, but you don't have to hand deliver the money to them. There's already people dealing with the outbreak. They/the WHO say they need around $25m to do it, but so far have only received a fraction of that.
I voted for the nice lady
I voted conservative, too. Actually conservative, meaning the Democratic party - not tear-it-all-down hate-everything-about-America revanchist Republican.
At least we've seemingly gotten an answer to the anthromorphic principle thought experiment of why we were (individually) born in this time - it's the most populous time in human history looking backwards and forwards. At this rate I doubt we'll be getting off this rock. That civilization-bootstrapping energy stored in easily-accessible oil deposits isn't coming back any time soon.
Everyone keeps talking about “The Pandemic” what you fail to understand is that it was merely “A Pandemic”
so all these other countries could provide the funding they need, but wont?
Leaving aside that USAID was hugely important to US soft power and the hopefully universal goal of preventing Ebola outbreaks, other people being shitty isn't an excuse to be shitty ourselves.
So giving them billions of dollars was shitty?
Helping these folks should be something we want to do as humans, not as part of our political cycle, or something our government forces us to do, IMO.
Has any critical commenter here contributed funds to this new ebola outbreak? Or do you just want to mandate that other people donate?
Thanks for asking. My non-tax medical aid dollars go to Project C.U.R.E. They haven't responded to this specific event yet because international ocean shipping isn't well suited to first response situations, but they'll eventually have supplies to help.
How do you choose to help?
[0] https://projectcure.org/
Can't the Congo itself fund a $23 million effort to save its own citizens?
No, because they’re resource cursed. Not everyone has the luxury of a working government.
They are also at war, they are fighting against the Rwanda-funded M23.
If you saw an guy on the floor gasping for someone to help with his asthma inhaler while other people simply walked by, would you walk by thinking yeah I could help him but other people aren’t so tough cookies, I’m not either.
Fill in any situation where someone is in need, one has the ability to help with little inconvenience, but one choose not to because other people aren’t helping.
[dead]
It's not easy to replace a $25 billion global organisation in a few months.
Yes, that’s exactly what’s happening.
It’s not right or wrong, it’s just the decisions we’ve made about the kind of world we choose to live in.
Think about other problems like hunger or health care in the United States. These are problems we have created for ourselves! We could choose to fix them and instead choose not to.
Indeed, most of the problems in the worlds are there because we don't actually want to fix them.
There's more than enough resources to provide every single person a reasonable existence; We just don't think the homeless, for instance, should be freely helped to get housing. Nah, can't have that, how else can we point to "those" people as examples of the kind of life not conforming gets you?
We'd rather millions go to bed hungry instead of not propping up national markets by destroying food and providing subsidies.
We make it hard on ourselves: With spare change, we could house every homeless person in a tent in a temperate environment in a remote location.
Instead, we house a tiny few in nice apartments in high COL cities.
The whole point of civilization is wealth inequality
"fix them"?! You mean throw millions of our dollars at other country's problems every year.
A million here, a million there, after awhile it starts to add up.
Some problems are much easier to solve than others. The problems you are bringing up are far more intractable and far harder and more expensive to solve.
Domestic hunger is really not a hard problem to solve. Rice, beans, and vegetables cooked in bulk and handed out at every fire station.
OK they’re harder but they’re also potentially more important and valuable to solve.
They’re still solvable but we simply do not value solving them.
> In the past, the US Agency for International Development, USAID, has provided critical support to respond to such outbreaks. But, with funding cuts and a dismantling of the agency by the Trump administration, the US is notably absent, and health officials fear it will be difficult to compensate for the loss.
...
It receives relatively little attention now, but in terms of sheer numbers the cuts to the USAID program have had and will continue to have the largest death toll of anything this administration does.
I'm sure the economic suicide will have its victims, and who knows how many have died in detention facilities, but it would be damn-near impossible to match up the the loss of human life seen in poor countries without access to the basic supplies and medical care that USAID delivered.
> who knows how many have died in detention facilities
If you're talking about ICE, it's officially 15 so far this year. [0]
While this outbreak is bad for DR Congo, I wonder whether they will be able to contain it within their borders without adequate support.
[0] https://www.borderreport.com/hot-topics/border-report-live/b...
That doesn't count any of the 1,800 missing from Florida's recently-closed detention center.
I hope you're not implying they're already digging mass graves. Some are unaccounted for--they're probably in Guatemala or something. Some will die. But I don't see the gas chambers being built for, like, another six months at least.
If you mean short term impacts that may be true, but I wonder if the medicaid, aca and likely medicare cuts will have material impacts on mortality. It will not be as easy to attribute, and therefore it’ll be hard to quantify (you might say that’s “convenient”), but the number of people impacted will be well into the tens of millions.
> if you mean short term impacts that may be true, but I wonder if the medicaid, aca and likely medicare cuts will have material impacts on mortality. It will not be as easy to attribute, and therefore it’ll be hard to quantify (you might say that’s “convenient”), but the number of people impacted will be well into the tens of millions.
I think these can't possible be commensurate - just consider how many more HIV cases there will be without US funding for overseas HIV prevention.
I’m not so sure. 630,000 total HIV deaths annually. What percent are impacted by USAID and then how much growth in HIV deaths without USAID? My tens of millions comment is the people whose health care will potentially be impacted short term (medicaid and aca changes; Medicaid is currently 70 million people. ACA is 24 million) plus potential aggressive efforts to move medicare people to medicare advantage and you have another 68 million potentially exposed (that number isn’t actually that large today because a majority of those people will likely pass before the medicare changes have a negative impact, but over time, as people enter the system with worse coverage, the deaths will climb).
Please understand I’m not saying I’m right about this but just that the vast number of people impacted by the admin’s policies re domestic health care makes me think it could be greater than USAID.
edit: grammar and spelling
I am very genuinely interpreting all of this and I recognize you are just reviewing the data.
HIV deaths are a lagging indicator, so any effect of today's policy will be delayed - as a general matter. But HIV in newborns will lead to death within a year if untreated, and adults with untreated HIV/AIDS will die from other communicable disease sooner than if they were treated.
Since US hospitals public obligation in the US to treat people who are gravely ill, we're 'only' going to see a marked increase in deaths attributable to chronic disease, and I don't think the Medicaid cuts will survive in their current state.
But it's true I don't have numbers on this and won't have a chance to get them this morning. Please share if you have a sense of comparative DALY/QALYs lost through USAID funding cuts vs Medicaid changes.
I really don't have a concrete sense. My comment was very much predicated on the sheer number of folks who would be negatively impacted by the changes to existing domestic healthcare programs. And to put a fine point on my own comment in case you think I'm attempting to downplay USAID impacts, both of these things are materially negative from a healthcare perspective.
It will be impossible to effectively quantify the impacts on mortality of the medicaid/medicare/aca changes, but they are (if implemented) going to impact great numbers of people and their health. USAID absolutely the same as you're pointing out and those impacts will be much more measurable. You're going to have about as good a linear test as you can get given how abruptly that funding will disappear (abrupt in contrast to the long, drawn out medicaid/medicare/aca changes (though the initial aca changes, assuming they do happen, will likely be the most abrupt of the three domestic programs because they will happen cleanly on January 1, 2026)).
The US is not responsible for fixing every world issue. Just because they've helped in the past doesn't make them morally responsible for every current and future crisis.
No but keeping Ebola from becoming a world wide problem is in the US interests and USAID was a very cheap way to advance that goal. We funded USAID out of decency (and to gain a reputation for decency, which is worth a lot of money) sure, but also to protect ourselves.
Sounds like a job for the WHO - maybe the UN can do it's job.
> Sounds like a job for the WHO - maybe the UN can do it's job.
Ah, the WHO that has recently lost money from its largest contributor, a contributor that unexpectedly stopped its contributions without explanation.
There you go again -you want the US government to solve the world's problems. Also, you're passively calling the WHO an infective organization because it can't handle this outbreak on its own without US funding. That implies it's a useless organization and therefore the US was justified removing funding.
Maybe you should be advocating for the 194 member states of the WHO to contribute more so the world doesn't need to rely on the political winds of the US election cycle.
I replied to one of your sibling posts. You can re-interpret these facts as you wish, but the WHO was working in December and radically transformed in February.
I think that indicates inefficacy and poor insight, but not in the WHO.
> the US government to solve the world's problems
It's called leading. You've voluntarily thrown in the towel on US leadership. Good job.
Good thing it's called the World Health Organization and not the American Health Organization, that way the 95.9% of the world that is not America can contribute to it.
> Good thing it's called the World Health Organization and not the American Health Organization, that way the 95.9% of the world that is not America can contribute to it.
First, imagine that your boss/largest customer decided, on a whim, to reduce your remuneration by half on the first of January. Where are you making up that money if there's nowhere else in the world that you can immediately turn to?
Anyway, other nations are spending more.
The World Health Organization and UN are just politically convenient names. These organizations were created by a victorious America to project power, like the takeover of UK military bases and exportation of US culture in the Marshall Plan.
How reprehensible that we throw away such power without receiving anything in exchange.
[1] Helpful example - we initially blocked penicillin production in other countries, despite having joined WHO, in furtherance of American interests https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-cold-wars-lasting-effec...
> (and to gain a reputation for decency, which is worth a lot of money)
And how is America's reputation for decency doing these days, a mere year into cutting some of this funding?
>> It receives relatively little attention now, but in terms of sheer numbers the cuts to the USAID program have had and will continue to have the largest death toll of anything this administration does.
> The US is not responsible for fixing every world issue. Just because they've helped in the past doesn't make them morally responsible for every current and future crisis.
Your answer doesn't quite respond to the GP but instead feels like an expression of political opinion.
From a moral stance, the action of stopping something seems quite distinct from a position in which the thing had never occurred.
That which you did not do for the least of these, you also did not do for me.
I'm not a highly religious person so I may well be wrong about this, but my understanding of Christian principles (as you referenced in your Bible quote) is that you, the individual, should do these kind things to other individuals personally; and in that act of doing so personally, you become closer to God.
What we have instead is that taxes are collected by an entity with the monopoly on violence (and of course, it's understood that the people making more than you are not paying their "fair share") whether you like it or not, spent by people who generally have boundless disdain for the very people who pay those taxes, on people and causes on the other side of the planet. There's no connection between people, or between people and God, in this scenario.
> I'm not a highly religious person so I may well be wrong about this, but my understanding of Christian principles (as you referenced in your Bible quote) is that you, the individual, should do these kind things to other individuals personally; and in that act of doing so personally, you become closer to God.
Why not read the verse and see that this refers to collections of people? The source material is readily available, no reason to speculate.
https://biblehub.com/nkjv/matthew/25.htm
I have read the source material. It says nothing about the morality of an intermediary forcibly redistributing wealth.
Again, the onus is on the individual to act kindly. If anything, handing that duty off to a third party is a reduction of morals. You are also speculating if you claim that there is a moral equivalence between the two.
I think we're going to disagree, which is fine, but I'll post the text and let others assess what the meanings of 'nations' is in the context of the quotation.
--
https://biblehub.com/nkjv/matthew/25.htm
31“When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the [c]holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. 32All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. 33And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left.
[...]
41“Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: 42for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; 43I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’
44“Then they also will answer [d]Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?’ 45Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ 46And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
It's easy to demand that other people be generous with their resources.
>> That which you did not do for the least of these, you also did not do for me.
> It's easy to demand that other people be generous with their resources.
This is a reference to the Bible, a sentence that Jesus delivered.
It's simple self-interest. Sure, sit on your money and smile while your neighbors die of Ebola. It won't happen here? Sure it could. When the chumps in DC tear down the infrastructure that managed things like this, then we become massively vulnerable.
I think helping control ebola pays a few dividends for the US. It was not completely selfless.
No dollar was ever spent by the US government outside of the US if not in self interest. Failing to see these cuts as sabotaging US interests is very, very naïve.
Perhaps the American taxpayer could be incentivized to continue financially supporting the DR Congo in other ways? Maybe they could apply to become a protectorate or somesuch. You can't have your sovereign cake and eat it, too.
In other words: if a country cannot actually exist without being propped up by another, at some point it may be better for everyone to just break the illusion. Like someone complaining that they can't afford to live in a nice apartment in Brooklyn anymore because their trust fund got cut off; in the long run, it's better to base expectations around reality.
This is the type of short-sighted ignorance that will ultimately doom us.
The unspoken mission of USAID and the CDC is to deal with these issues "over there" before they get "here."
Think all these HIV drugs now on the market were tested on American or Europeans?
We disagree on the unspoken missions of those agencies, I guess. From what I've seen, the unspoken mission is actually providing sinecures for political allies. Or have you forgotten about a worldwide pandemic that happened just a few short years back which revealed that the top priority of many authority figures in public health organizations was to make themselves look good and their opposition bad?
Why are so many people blind to the idea that the name and stated purpose of an organization can and many times do differ from the actual real-world outcomes that organization produces?
> Or have you forgotten about a worldwide pandemic that happened just a few short years back which revealed that the top priority of many authority figures in public health organizations was to make themselves look good and their opposition bad?
I don't remember this because it did not happen.
However, I do recall our own (Trump-run) CDC putting out ineffective testing materials, while the (admittedly Trump-supported) WHO made the testing resources the whole world, including the US, relied on in the first months of the pandemic.
> I don't remember this because it did not happen.
There was a whole-of-government approach to silencing factually true statements about the pandemic because it either made officials look bad or Trump look good. There was a whole Supreme Court case around this that was sidestepped on grounds of standing, not on the facts of the case.
Anthony Fauci, a prominent NIH official who was the initial public face of the government's response to the pandemic, was revealed to have exhibited a significant lack of candor around the origins of Covid and his involvement in funding gain-of-function research. This was discovered by a House subcommittee formed by a Democratic majority and continued by a subsequent Republican majority.
>There was a whole-of-government approach to silencing factually true statements about the pandemic because it either made officials look bad or Trump look good. There was a whole Supreme Court case around this that was sidestepped on grounds of standing, not on the facts of the case.
> Anthony Fauci, a prominent NIH official who was the initial public face of the government's response to the pandemic, was revealed to have exhibited a significant lack of candor around the origins of Covid and his involvement in funding gain-of-function research. This was discovered by a House subcommittee formed by a Democratic majority and continued by a subsequent Republican majority.
These are very peculiar claims that I, despite very close following of factual news sources, have not seen.
What are your sources for these claims?
Containing Ebola where it happens is of value to the world; if the places where it happens can't contain it, the consequences of spread are pretty costly for everywhere it ends up.
The article says they're looking for $25M or so. If any cases make it to the US, that much money will only cover a small number of patients. In 2014, $1M covered two patients. [1] Much better to spend the money on containment overseas than not spend it overseas and have (more) cases arrive here. It's also much better for the country where the outbreak is occuring. If said country could manage the response on its own, that would be great, but outside help in outbreaks is a good thing anyway --- there's valuable exchange of information between doctors and nurses from different areas in addition to filling the need for additional capacity for care.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/cost-...
This is a bad take, even if we step away from your comparison of a body of millions of people to a someone living in Brooklyn with a trust fund.
> Perhaps the American taxpayer could be incentivized to continue financially supporting the DR Congo in other ways? Maybe they could apply to become a protectorate or somesuch. You can't have your sovereign cake and eat it, too.
We weren't asked about the abrupt change. I am sure that the average taxpayer supports maintaining lives overseas at minimal costs. She also probably wants pandemics not to infect her children on US shores.
> In other words: if a country cannot actually exist without being propped up by another, at some point it may be better for everyone to just break the illusion.
On a geopolitical sense, this is absurd. Just consider Poland: do they wish Ukraine didn't exist because of the amount of resources they expend on Ukraine's defense?
> even if we step away from your comparison of a body of millions of people to a someone living in Brooklyn with a trust fund
The article claims 57 cases and 35 deaths. Globally, Ebola killed 15k people over the past 50 years[0]. In the last big outbreak in the DR Congo, it infected less than 4k people in a country of roughly 100 million.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your sentence, but your way of phrasing ("a body of millions") seems to dramatically overstate the impact.
> We weren't asked about the abrupt change.
There was a hotly contested election with one side promising abrupt change and the other side promising a maintenance of the status quo. It's really not like they were hiding their intentions. Broadly speaking, the electorate wanted to take a wrecking ball to what they saw as Washington excess, whether that characterization is fair or not.
> Just consider Poland: do they wish Ukraine didn't exist because of the amount of resources they expend on Ukraine's defense?
Poland shares a border with Ukraine, who is being invaded by a nation that has also been a historical aggressor against Poland. I don't believe this is a good comparison to the US funding healthcare in the DR Congo.
[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7326525/
> Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your sentence, but your way of phrasing ("a body of millions") seems to dramatically overstate the impact.
You compared a sovereign nation to an apartment, sorry I was unclear.
> There was a hotly contested election with one side promising abrupt change and the other side promising a maintenance of the status quo.
There's good polling about this sort of thing - Americans don't want to cause the death of other people. You may construe the electioneering to mean otherwise, but I was not alluding to this.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/05/01/majorities-of-...
> Poland shares a border with Ukraine, who is being invaded by a nation that has also been a historical aggressor against Poland. I don't believe this is a good comparison to the US funding healthcare in the DR Congo.
I disagree, because allowing infectious disease to fester slowly allows the development of antibiotic resistance and magnification of problems that could otherwise be contained.
In a sense, we're all closer to infections in the developing world than we recognize - despite the US efforts to dismantle the system that has surveilled these infections up to now.
> a sovereign nation
A sovereign nation in name only, who cannot adequately protect its people against disease without Uncle Sam's backstop.
> Americans don't want to cause the death of other people
Your concept of causation here is tortured. Americans are not spraying Ebola from airplanes. Can you equally say that you caused the death of a beggar who you passed by without sparing a dollar?
> Your concept of causation here is tortured. Americans are not spraying Ebola from airplanes. Can you equally say that you caused the death of a beggar who you passed by without sparing a dollar?
I can say that, having promised to deliver medication to someone, a capricious cut in medication supply will be causative in whatever change may result. And that is exactly the setting in which this poll was conducted.
Two things:
First, what you propose may work only if happenings in other countries don't affect the US, which I very much doubt.
Second, in most of these countries, it is actually the drip-feed of supposed western "help" that props up corruption and prevents any real change. The "aid" is a form of control, not actual help.
If western nations wanted to actually help, they would support the Grand Inga dam project [1] to actually lift people out of poverty. Instead, they oppose it on environmental grounds, never mind that their industrialization was built on the back of massive pollution.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Inga_Dam
Where foreign aid is concerned, I would much rather that my tax dollars go into building the Grand Inga Dam over the kind of "aid" you describe.
You have a good point except slightly misguided.
The rich wants more tax breaks so they can gobble up more money and own more assets at US citizens expense.
How’s that sound?
I'm not sure if I follow. Are you positing that American spending on foreign aid uplifts middle-class Americans and make material improvements to their lives?
Wow, magas are really something
Facts my friend, facts. You may not like them, you may think they are out of context and/or misused, but they are still facts.
Another fact is that the money saved went to fund a (small) portion of the big beautiful bill, which doesn't exactly focus on helping the average american Joe.
America first. Certainly those resources have been shifted to help Americans. Right guys?
Stopping Ebola from becoming a global disease helped Americans.
Keep Ebola in Congo! /s
even worse, the local services have also been gutted and lobotomized, so once one of these outbreaks gets to CONUS, they'll be praying hard and dropping like flies.
[dead]
The Trump cult is really, in fact a death cult.
[dead]
Ok it was said to be solved. Yet another lie? Unsurprised.
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1...
You’re surprised a virus with reservoirs in local wild animals has periodic outbreaks? And seem want to imply it’s some conspiracy or lie? Okay you do you.
They said in the past the issue was solved. Solved means solved.
There is no better tell than use of the anonymous "they".
Are you calling me a liar?
https://www.nhsinform.scot/illnesses-and-conditions/infectio...