It used to be said of the Republican party, we know what they are against. What are they for? Now we know what they are for: suffering, sickness and death. It is the party of cruelty, operating from the theatre called the White House.
Consider the most blatant example: the cancellation of global programs under the USAID agency. Here is how Stephanie Nolen's reporting begins in the New York Times:
"Starting Wednesday afternoon, a wave of emails went out from the State Department in Washington around the world, landing in inboxes for refugee camps, tuberculosis clinics, polio vaccination projects and thousands of other organizations that received crucial funding from the United States for lifesaving work.
"This award is being terminated for convenience and the interest of the U.S government," they began.
The cancelled contracts include support for the UNICEF program to immunize against polio, a project that operates the only source of water for a quarter million people escaping warfare in crowded camps, several projects countering malnutrition, and two contracts that would have paid for malaria tests, bed nets that protect against malaria-bearing mosquitoes and malaria treatments that would have protected more than 53 million people. Plus the projects that got the most attention: cancellation of an HIV protection program and one that tracks Ebola infections.
Nearly all the cancelled monies were to support projects in Africa, furthering the racism that is the bottom line for nearly everything the Chaos administration is doing.
"People will die," said the executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, "but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut."
So the suffering and death--the Rs hope--will not be televised.
These are not program budgets that were just trimmed a little. Though the amounts are not huge, they represent the financial lifeblood of these projects and in many cases the groups that manage and deliver them. So not only aid but the infrastructure for future aid is being summarily destroyed. They amount to 90% of the USAID programs, and this on top of the cutoff of funds that left food grown by American farmers rotting on the docks instead of on its way to feed the desperately hungry, and the mass firings of USAID personnel in Washington, who were given 15 minutes to clean out their desks and vacate the building.
These programs add up to a small dent in the federal budget. The US spends about $20 billion a year on all humanitarian and health projects. Comrade Musk can make more than that in a day. Of course, this is not his money we're talking about, since he doesn't pay taxes.
This at a time when the global effort to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and greatly limit tropical diseases is one of the unsung successes of our time. Many of these programs are in war-torn areas, where there are no available alternatives. Only those individuals with exceptional dedication and courage have been capable of the relentless tasks involved in saving and bettering lives. Now their efforts are dishonored and their work vaporized in a moment. And who else suffers?
Black lives. Babies. Old People. Women.
Update 3/3: Pro Publica has added its reporting on the impact of cancelled programs, quoting local authorities who estimate the resulting deaths as in the hundreds of thousands. Talking Points Memo reports that a USAID health official, now placed on leave, has released a series of memos with the details of cancelled programs and impacts, many either previously unknown or contrary to public statements and assurances to federal court judges made by the Chaos administration.
The Chaos administration and their angry white male billionaires and mere millionaires are ignorantly but also maliciously targeting those same vulnerable populations in the United States. The Republican budget plan to slash support for Medicaid, and its threats against Medicare and Social Security will attack the health and lives of the old and disabled.
The Chaos chief of health, currently backtracking on his callous disregard for a child's death from measles, is threatening the same populations plus children with anti-immunization rhetoric and the beginning of the disappearance of federal support for them. For instance, the yearly meeting of scientists to discuss formulations for next year's flu vaccine was cancelled.
At the turn of this century, measles was declared eradicated from the United States. Now there is a measles epidemic, because of doubts fostered about vaccines and the resulting lack of immunizations. There is at this moment a strong epidemic of flu across the US, with hospitals overrun with seriously ill patients. The chief reason for it is that too many people did not get their flu shots. Measles kills children, flu kills old people.
Even the apparently patternless firings of federal employees, which is cruel enough in its execution and lack of real rationale, hits the most vulnerable the hardest.
PBS pulled together some research about federal employees with very interesting results. See how you would answer these questions:
What proportion of federal employees work in Washington?
How much has the "bloated" federal workforce grown since the 1960s?
What agency has the most employees?
What is the job category with the most employees?
Some eighty percent of federal employees do not work in Washington (or near it in VA and MD). Only twenty percent do.
The federal workforce has grown--well, not at all--since the 1960s. It's always been around 2 million employees. It's varied from 1.8 to the current 2.2 to 2.4 million.
The agency with the most employees is the Veterans Administration, and the job category with the most employees is: nurses. Not exactly bureaucratic pencil-pushers.
The idea we're supposed to buy is that one completely ignorant but very wealthy and reportedly drug-addicted white man and his equally clueless techboys can instantly--in minutes-- discern waste even without knowing a damn thing about what these people do or why their work is vital. But waste isn't really the point anyway.
Here's some other facts not covered in the PBS piece. About 20% of federal workers identify themselves as black, which is higher than the proportion of blacks in the general population (but as 60% of federal employees, whites are also overrepresented, as are Asian Americans.. Latinos at 10% are underrepresented from their 20% of the population.)
Blacks hold 18% of senior executive level jobs in the federal government, and 11% everywhere else. That's a significant if not huge difference. Whites hold 60% of those positions among federal employees, but 75% as a whole. Disabled workers are also overrepresented in federal jobs versus the general job market.
The percentage of women employees is slightly less in federal government than all jobs, both under 50% of the total. However, women do better in so-called independent agencies. For example, about 65% of employees of the Social Security administration are women. Across the board it seems they hold something like 40% of supervisory positions or less, but at Social Security, 62% of supervisors are women. By amazing coincidence, half of Social Security workers are reportedly to be fired.
Though these numbers are not wildly out of proportion with the rest of the American workforce, I've observed that government employment on all levels has helped to raise the standard of living and status of minorities and women at least since the 1960s. The federal government especially but also city governments, mostly through merit-based employment (Civil Service tests, or example) and some affirmative action or at least less prejudice, seemed to me to have been the earliest in offering secure and well paying work to minorities and women, as well as the disabled and the older working population. Government jobs (including the Post Office) I believe were a major pathway to the middle class for minorities as well as white working class families, especially with the decline of manufacturing jobs.
But angry white supremacist and misogynist billionaires and the angry white males that elected them don't like these trends. They don't want black and women supervisors. They want fewer black faces in their television commercials.
Then there are the unions representing federal government workers, which the Chaos administration is also attacking. The decimation of labor unions that followed from the loss of manufacturing jobs was a major factor in severing the white working class from the Democratic party. Any weakening of any unions furthers that separation, and limits a major source of money and votes for Democrats. So politics is part of this, too.
But the casual cruelty, the disrespect and disdain, the callous disregard, and even the sadism are the clearest features of all these policies, including the planned deportations and bungling rendition of immigrants and refugees, who just happen to be primarily people of color, and include lots of women, children and old people. We even see this in the attitudes toward Ukraine and Gaza, and the casual imperialism that values nothing else, like the real estate developer's attitude towards land and forest life, or a community's life.
"People will die..." "...for convenience."
This is the most inhuman side of human behavior. It is seen mostly in times of acute danger and stress. There are pockets of stress in the US, such as in the rural areas most affected by opioid addiction, and the underlying if unacknowledged dread of climate distortion, but there is no real accounting for this cruelty in high places, except itself.
But thanks to them, suffering and death will increase in this country and around the world, especially among the most vulnerable. We were fighting the good fight to limit it, and now we're not. The theatre of cruelty deliberately prevents it, with not even an attempt to justify these actions--compounding the contempt. "...and the interest of the United States government." So now the United States will own it.
