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To me the most fascinating thing about US AID being terminated as an independent organization, is the sheer and complete panic among leftist. "Independent" media I used to respect has apparently been spun into a full blown panic over it. They appear to be operating under the delusion that the "AID" is USAID is actual help, of which a tiny minority might be, and not a deep state slush fund for unaccountable NGO, corruption and graft.
Like Bill Krystol, neocon never Trumper, came out swinging. Then it was quickly discovered the foundation he draws an income from is funded by USAID. Which, to me, immediately made something clear. You are constantly subjected to a series of talking heads who are wrong about everything if you pay attention to the mainstream media. And they are always introduced as working at some important sounding institute, like that lends them credibility. How many of those assholes are just psyop puppets funded entirely by USAID to influence public opinion on policy at home?
That aside, I'm noticing the talking points getting distilled, and they are every bit as nonsensical as you can imagine, some more than others.
"It's a coup!" I mean where to even begin on this. Was it a coup when Clinton fired all the federal attorneys? Was it a coup when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers? Was it a coup when Gerald Ford fired a bunch of security state apparatchiks, including Kissinger? No, it's the duly elected Executive executing their lawful authority to implement their agenda. It's preposterous that a branch of the executive should believe it's some sort of independent entity completely outside the executive's authority. Come back when the military has dissolved congress and arrested the supreme court.
"It's a smash and grab!" To which I just heard the cohost go "There is no grab." There is this heavy implication that Elon Musk is somehow pocketing the money. Nobody ever comes out and states it directly. But the weasel words are there. "Musk has conflict of interest!" "He's looting the nation!" "The worlds richest man is just getting richer!" A baseless bullshit smear, which is why they just darkly hint at it.
"Nobody voted for this!" I mean this is the most insane one, and if they somehow big-lie it into sticking, it will erase all the faith in humanity I gained over the last few months. All I fucking see from people who voted for and supported Trump is euphoric glee that he's doing exactly what he said he would do. After being lied to and lead along by controlled opposition our entire lifetimes, and maybe the entire lifetimes of our parents too, a guy is actually making good on all the promises he, and the Republican party broadly, has made for decades.
There is some serious galaxy brained mushy reasoning going on here, like Trump never promised to shut down (or roll into the State Department) USAID specifically, therefore nobody voted for it. But he ran on draining the swamp, stopping foreign aid as long as there are still unmet challenges at home, shrinking the federal government, stopping waste and corruption. It's like if a guy ran on starting a war with Cuba, and then when Havana get's bombed, normies start shouting "Nobody voted to bomb Havana!" I mean, alright, but they voted for the guy who's #1 issue was starting a war with the country Havana is in. Pretty reasonable to think that was on the table and a high likelihood. Nobody ever votes on day to day tactical decisions of a strategic campaign promise.
Personally I think this speaks to the larger conceit among liberals when it comes to their Message: Liberals are automatically right, and everyone who does not heed the wisdom of our words is just too stupid to understand what we are saying so we need to say it louder.
At no point in all this political discussion have I seen liberals consider that maybe their words have been heard and understood and have been found wanting. That the foundational reality the liberals aim at creating is not one that people want to live in, and that the path to get to that reality is even more broken than the end result. A nanny state run by Sorkins fantasy West Wing archetypes is great to a liberal, but when I watch that show I see careerist egoists unable to resist sticking their grubby fingers in everything they don't even have the interest to understand.
I recently did a long post on my Tumblr about this, making an analogy to a classroom:
I've seen a lot of Youtube video on this, too. That they didn't do enough to point out how Trump is an evil, racist fascist campaigning on pure hate and desire to hurt people, and how the Democratic party stands for joy, hope, and everything that is good in the world. The metaphorical teacher just isn't giving the lesson properly for the dummies in the back of the class. Or they're being drowned out by lies and disinformation pouring from far-right pipelines like x.com, and we need more censorship and fact-checking.
I have seen people, on Tumblr, Reddit, and Youtube, who do indeed consider that. They do hold that a lot of voters did understand what the Democratic party was selling, and rejected it in favor of Trump. That their words have been found wanting… which is why Trump voters aren't stupid, but evil. Because if you knowingly, with full understanding, choose the "indisputably fascist" Trump and his party of pure hate over Harris's "flawless campaign of joy and unity" with all the objectively correct policies, knowingly choose lies over truth, knowingly choose fascism over democracy, then you're a Nazi. It's not that everyone on the other side is "just too stupid" — it's that they're either stupid or evil. The former just need to hear the message louder and more often, until they finally get it. The latter need to get what they deserve, just like Corey Comperatore.
If the voters don't like what the Democratic party is selling… then the voters are wrong, and it's the voters who are the problem needing fixed.
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People did vote for this, but they shouldn't have been allowed to. This is democracy out of control, something that the constitution was carefully crafted to prevent. Musk is running around shutting down agencies with no accountability to the bureaucracy or the courts. I don't know whether anyone except Trump can actually stop him.
If Congress, which is the body which actually passes laws, wants to stop him, Congress can. Except, to raise the idea is to immediately understand how ridiculous it is, because Congress hasn't exercised real policymaking judgment in more than a vestigial way for half a century. It's all been seconded (in a dubiously-legal manner, not made any more impressive by everyone refusing to take responsibility for calling it out) to the executive, who now is demonstrating the truth of the proverb "what the hand giveth, so it may take away."
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Neither of those are elected bodies. If the demos can't overrule bureaucrats or judges, you don't live in a democracy. I would be more sympathetic to the rule of law argument if those said institutions hadn't been trampling over them with their own regulations and rulings - again, with no democratic input whatsoever.
But if bureaucrats or judges can't overrule the demos, you have the 'two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner' issue.
I asserted a couple of weeks ago that it is not really possible for society to exist without abstract & concrete conflicts between people. In many issues, someone is going to have to lose. Democracy makes sure that the losers are the minority rather than the majority, which is preferable.
To put it another way, it is strictly better that the two wolves vote to eat the single sheep than for the sheep to order both wolves put to death.
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I think the perspective of many on this forum is that the bureaus are themselves staffed with wolves, so this is of no help, in their eyes.
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In the end, there is no substitute for good judgment, and no technology (social or otherwise) that can make up for bad decision-making.
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Accountability to the bureaucracy? Why should there be accountability to a bureaucracy!
That's not a Yes, Minister gag, is it?
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Because they are the experts. In addition to @Capital_Room's posts, there's Scott's "On Priesthoods" that goes into this.
Let's take forestry. The amount of logging or controlled burns you can do in a year is regulated by the states' forestry departments. How do they determine this? They do the science thing: compile and analyze the historical data on forest recovery, seek the opinion of external experts in local and international academia and come up with a number: you can log at most X% of forests per year, you have to burn the protected forests every Y years, pest extermination requires Z dollars per year.
If a governor is lobbied by the loggers' union to increase the logging to X+M%, by the real estate developers and insurance companies to reduce the burns to once every 2*Y years, if he promises to cut down the spending on pest extermination by 50% and then tries to force the forestry service to do all this, then his actions are deleterious!
His job is to harmonize the constraints imposed by various experts, not to choose one set over the other for political reasons.
I thought controlled burns were an example of the "experts" in state bureaucracies being terrible at their jobs and consistently screwing things up. Or at least that's somewhat true for California.
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That presumes much. First it presumes that these people even have expertise. Next it presumes that the incentive structure within the organization will lead to the right results. Third, it assumes that there are not other sources of expertise that may even be greater.
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I suspect these four words are as close to Shiri's scissors as we can get in the real world.
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Not sure why you think there aren't checks and balances. The Republicans just control the majority of the House, Senate, and Supreme Court in addition to the Presidency. Balances don't impact consensus policies. There's some court cases about things the Trump administration has done so far and maybe that will have some impact. But it's misleading to claim Trump is doing anything without the approval of Congress. Congress can't pass legislation quickly, sure, but also they would rather stay out of sight and let Trump take the fall for anything that goes wrong.
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Musk is acting on behalf of the executive branch as a government employee, and DOGE is an executive branch agency. If the executive branch doesn't have oversight and control - up to and including the ability to shut down - its own agencies (again, USAID was created by an executive order!) then we don't have a representative constitutional government with checks and balances.
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I don't see why this isn't a perfectly reasonable outcome under the constitutional framework (except insofar as the entire way the presidential election works is not the way it was meant to). The people did not directly vote for this, they voted for a representative (Trump) who said "yeah I'll get that done for you". Said representative is perfectly entitled to shut down these agencies, as he is the chief executive and they are a part of the executive branch of government. All of that seems to me to be perfectly in line with the Constitution. Whether it's wise or not is open to debate, of course, but I don't think one can accurately describe this as democracy having exceeded constitutional limits.
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A point that @Capital_Room has made over and over and many more times.
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I mean, the alternative is watering the tree of liberty.
In which case, the accelerationist inside me agrees.
No, the alternative is a representative constitutional republic with checks and balances, which has worked for the US and other advanced countries. Direct democracy means that 51% of the people have unlimited power, which invariably leads to disaster. The average person is not smart enough to be making these kinds of decisions.
This just seems like missing the forest for the trees. You are upset that unelected super powerful bureaucracy that functionally had no checks imposed upon them are being destroyed while worrying about a tyranny of the majority?
Yes tyranny of the majority is a problem. But so is giving a bunch of unchecked power to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats for decades.
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Your preferences are being checked and balanced at this very moment. 51% of the people having unlimited power is certainly preferable to 10% or much less of the people having unlimited power, which appears to have been the situation prior to the last election.
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I mean, the government is made up of average people (at best). All this does is pander to the myth that all the midwits who've found their way into federal employment are somehow our betters. And how does USAID even fit into a model of "Representative Constitutional Republic with checks and balances"? Reportedly they defied all request for information, or any external oversight at all. None of them were elected. If anything appointing a senate approved cabinet appointment like Marco Rubio as their direct administrator is restoring representative constitutional republic checks and balances.
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yep agreed on this criticism. I'm dont fully understand why all this money is routed via Rockefeller Philanthropy, but doesn't seem like an open-and-shut case as DataRepublican posted (https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1886161143108149298)
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Fine, it's not even that hard.
https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/048e5c98-b0fa-a961-a9af-d62ab817259c-C/all?section=transactions-over-time
You can see for yourself just how much money USAID, as well as the Department of State have given Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors.
And the image associated with the accusation is right here Is your claim that it's entirely a fiction? That it showing how money flows from RPA, which has taken upwards of 50m from USAID as documented on the government's own website, and then through Hopewell Fund, and ultimately ending up at Defending Democracy?
Don't like the screenshot? The accusation with a link to the full dataset. It's right here.
https://datarepublican.com/expose/?eins=831567380
And if you don't believe that, you can pull up Hopewell's 2023 Tax Return. Schedule I, Part 2, and there it is, $2m to Defending Democracy. It's a lot of donations, but they are sorted alphabetically.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/473681860/202423179349304767/full
"Show you work" he says.... pffffft.
Listen, none of this was a fiction. It's just collated data from public tax returns. It's not even that hard to check yourself. Goto the IRS website or propublica. Actually the IRS was giving me problems with 404's and search results that hang, so you know...
I think you are looking at "Trailing 12 Months". Try "All Fiscal Years" to get a better picture. FY2022 was a banger of a year too, with 20m coming in from USAID. Also, money is fungible.
Money is fungible
Hey, did you know money is fungible?
I mean there isn't even the fiction that these are monies in briefcases of envelopes. There isn't even a blockchain to distinguish where specific money paid then got paid back out to. They're just numbers on a computer somewhere. There is not even a concept of "The specific money USAID paid us for 'immigration' did not in a round about way goto Defending Democracy".
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I've graded a fair number of papers and showing money going from USAID to RPA to Hopewell to DDT is worth more than 0 points on the "show your work" part. Money is fungible. Washing public money in a web of NGOs who lend to other NGOs who lend to other NGOs doesn't make the money non-public or nonUSAID money nor would it be unsupported to claim the end recipient benefits and has an interest in the initial award.
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"You can't actually demonstrate how Kristol is getting the money from USAID because it is all put in one big pot and laundered" is not exactly making the argument for USAID or Bill Kristol.
Why does USAID need to fund grants by sending them through the Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors? If an organization is deliberately obfuscating its funding flows, the burden of proof is on that organization to prove that it is all on the up-and-up. Legally, when USAID gives money to the Rockefeller Foundation, it is legally the Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors money. Maybe USAID tells them to use that money only for a certain specific groups that does not include Bill Kristol. Maybe not. Maybe there are all kinds of hidden favors and log rolling and kickbacks in how Rockefeller Advisors disperses their funds. The public cannot audit the Rockefeller Foundation, so all we have is the official legal flows, which is that USAID gives money to the Rockefeller Advisors and Rockefeller Advisors gives some money to Bill Kristol. If you want to conclude otherwise the burden-of-proof is on Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors to completely open up its books.
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