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U.S. Regime Change Engine Masquerading as a “Do Gooder” Charity: Why Defunding USAID Makes a Lot of Countries Breathe Easier

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the [U.S.] Government, and I’m here to help.” [Ronald Reagan]

For Ronald Reagan that was the beginning of an eight-year crusade to cut social welfare programs that brought much needed aid to America’s poor. For the world’s countries that have been on the receiving end of America’s “generosity,” it means something quite different but just as ‘terrifying.’ The “aid” program in question is a $40 billion (annually) behemoth which operates under the title of USAID and dispenses its largesse to 130 countries—Europe and Eurasia getting the lion’s share ($17.2 billion). Since 2022, most of it, 14.7 billion in 2023, going to line the pockets of Ukrainian oligarchs and Ukrainian President Zelensky.

The sound bites from USAID’s vast propaganda apparatus paint a rosy picture of aid workers bringing relief to desperately poor countries. The reality is quite different. Client states who have experienced the destabilization and unrest that occurs when USAID comes calling tell it like it is — “At best, maybe 10% of the money reaches real projects that help people in need (there are such cases), but the rest is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda,” [El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele]

Former Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obra is another of a few world leaders who have survived despite USAID “humanitarian visits” —“The US government, specifically through USAID, has for some time been financing organizations openly against the legal and legitimate government I represent. This is clearly an interventionist act, contrary to international law and the relations which should prevail between free and sovereign states”

But that state of affairs is not what most of the world’s main stream media want you to believe. In the wake of President Trump’s plan to close down USAID, the media’s pants are on fire. Here’s NBC News singing the blues — “USAID cuts devastate lifesaving programs.” CNN was also down in the dumps — “USAID’s extremely uncertain future risks global aid efforts, especially in Ukraine”

To receive such glowing press, USAID spends more than $250 million every year bankrolling 6,200 reporters at 1,000 news or journalism organizations under the guise of “promoting independent journalism.” Not surprisingly 90% of Ukrain’s media has been compromised [Oksana Romanyuk, director of Ukraine’s Institute for Mass Information.

Sometimes even those whose living depends on USAID inadvertently tell the truth — “If you are funded by the U.S. government, there are certain topics that you simply would not go after, because the U.S. government has its interest that are above all others.” [Leila Bicakcic, CEO of Center for Investigative Reporting, a USAID-supported Bosnian group).

As USAID is being dismembered, the rats are leaving the sinking ship. One laid off former employee told Fox News —“it’s not a generosity project. This is a national security agency and effort at its core.”

It all started in 1961 with President John F. Kennedy, who, overlooking his 600 attempts on the life of Cuban President Fidel Castro and on the strength of his creating the Peace Corps, was generally considered a compassionate humanitarian peace-loving president. Typical of most U.S. presidents during the cold war and after, his concern for the poor and downtrodden was secondary to his devout anti-communism. JFK, like every cold warrior, saw a “commie” under the bed of every world leader who refused to go along with the U.S. fantasy of a world-wide Communist plot. USAID was his answer to that illusory threat. Founded to bolster conservative pro-US governments and to destroy national liberation movements, it orchestrated regime operations in Latin America, Africa, Asia and eastern Europe.

USAID is a global phenomenon. Operating in tandem with the CIA, it has spread chaos and confusion all over the world destabilizing governments and replacing democratically elected leaders with dictators. Haiti is a tragic example. In 1991, USAID backed opposition groups and death squads contributing to the destabilization and eventual overthrow of Haiti’s democratically elected leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide. USAID’s meddling had dramatic and for the Haitian people devastating consequences as the country erupted in political turmoil and violence. By 2024, Haiti was ranked fourth as the country with the highest crime rate in the world. [World Population Review]

Cuba’s brush with the “do-gooders” at USAID was a similar catastrophe. After spending billions on unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Castro, in 2014, President Obama bragged about a “new beginning” for relations between the two countries. As his lies were being broadcast around the world, USAID was running a fake HIV-prevention workshops designed to create the “perfect excuse” for their intelligence gathering and recruitment activities.

It’s not only the global south, countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, but countless other places in central America that have seen their people reduced to poverty, their country ransacked when USAID came calling.  In the Mideast, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen have been destroyed by USAID’s regime change operations. Ukraine is on the verge of disappearing. Even former Soviet republics and satellites, like Georgia and Romania have felt the heavy hand of the spooks at USAID.

One might call it social engineering at the butt of a rifle as USAID uses aid as a weapon to interfere in the political life of other countries. Millions of the world’s people have found their way of life shattered, their future prospects grim as USAID mounts regime change operations, color revolutions, bankrolls friendly media and spends billions of American taxpayer dollars making the world unsafe for countries that don’t march to the tune of America the Beautiful.

As USAID is being dismembered, one has to ask: Will anything change. Will wishes come true and US humanitarian aid be reimagined as a force for good? “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

Fear Thy Neighbor

“I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border, do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.” [Vice President Kamala Harris, June, 2021]

The U.S. has spoken. Is anybody listening?  We have already seen that prospects for a sane and humane solution to the border controversy aren’t on the agenda of the new administration. Failure seems to be bi-partisan. In  one term, Joe Biden deported more immigrants than Trump did in his first term. Kamala Harris, when she was the democratic presidential campaign, doubled down on Republican talking points praising a bill (never passed) to authorize $650 million to continue building Trump’s border wall.

On the campaign trail, Trump, at his most bellicose, announced — “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals [undocumented immigrants] in the history of America.”

After a trip to the grocery store, particularly if you bought eggs, you might be wondering why people would risk their lives to come to the U.S. The mainstream media has the answer — The range of reasons why people move to the US from different parts of the world… Some are seeking economic opportunities. Others are fleeing violence, persecution or climate disasters. [CNN, April 15, 2023]— But who is to blame for all this misery? According to the mainstream media, if it’s not the immigrants themselves, it’s the failure of their leaders (most of them hard liners installed by the US).

No mention of the part the U.S. empire plays in the life-or-death struggles to reach the border. You won’t hear the truth from the former vice-president (or the present one for that matter), not President Trump or the media folk. The U.S. has a sordid history of intervention in and destabilization of Central America starting almost from the moment the empire came into being.

It started in 1823 when James Monroe, the fifth U.S. president and his plutocrat buddies decided they owned the entire American continent. The Monroe Doctrine, which survives to this day, warned former colonizers, the European powers, that there was a new sheriff in town. South America would henceforth be considered the U.S. back yard.  No more take-overs by outside forces. The U.S. was bent on endless self-enrichment.

The CIA is the US advance man organizing invasions and coups in Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia  and Venezuela to name their most egregious operations. These coups replace democratically elected governments with dictators, usually military strong men. The people are the big losers. Austerity is the new normal, social programs get the axe. Economic inequality is rampant as the rich get richer and poverty increases. Desperation sets in and people take to what they decide are greener pastures. Can you blame them for believing it lies across the border?

Not surprisingly, two of the countries whose governments were targeted by U.S.-supported coup d’etats have the highest rates of people trying to immigrate to the U.S. Decades ago the US toppled a democratically elected government in Guatemala and set off a series of civil wars which to this day has led to endless misery in the lives and fortunes of its people. In 2022, 675,000 undocumented Guatemalans crossed the border into the U.S.

Venezuela is another country that has suffered mightily from US efforts to effect regime change. Ten years ago, Barack Obama slapped punishing sanctions on Venezuela aimed at their economy. As per usual, the people were the losers. In 2016, President Trump tried to replace democratically elected President Maduro by naming an “interim president.” He also put a $15 million bounty on Maduro’s head. Biden continued the vicious assault. His Secretary of State announced “[the U.S.] does not recognize Nicholas Maduro as the president of Venezuela.” Biden one-upped Trump by raising the bounty on Maduro to $25 million. As a result, the U.S. must take “credit” for 82% of Venezuelans living in poverty, 53% in extreme poverty. Disease and death are rampant. The U.K. also has blood on its hands. True to its reputation as a U.S, lap dog, the U.K has frozen $1.95 billion of Venezuelan gold reserves in its central bank.

The evil genius of the U.S. is boundless. Even though Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, U.S. sanctions have cut a crater-sized hole in its oil exports which are 95% of its revenues. From being one of the most prosperous countries in South America it has become one of the poorest. In 2022, 270,000 Venezuelans fled their decimated country and entered the US as undocumented immigrants.

Perhaps the saddest story of all is what happened to America’s neighbor, Mexico, with whom it shares a one-thousand-mile border. It’s the Bad Neighbor policy on steroids. This tale of horrors dates back to the nineteenth century when the U.S. stole over half of Mexico and created the states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming. In the early part of the twentieth century, the U.S. Congress passed a series of immigration acts which wreaked further havoc. One was especially cruel forcing the repatriation (expulsion and deportation) of 300,000 to 2 million Mexicans who lived in the U.S. Unbelievably over half were American citizens.

The worst was yet to come. In 1954 one of America’s war criminal presidents, Eisenhower, hauled out Operation Wetback. That’s right a nice touch of racism to add to the shameful proceedings. Operation Wetback used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century and some were American citizens, Operation Wetback sent them back to Mexico.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. A bi-partisan screwing was next on the U.S. imperial agenda: the War on Drugs and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). The War on Drugs was President’s Nixon’s (R) nifty idea. Nixon declared drugs to be “public enemy number one” giving him the excuse to dump a massive amount of money into militarizing the Mexican border (not the Canadian border) and throwing in a miniscule bit of funding for drug treatment programs. Everyone agrees 50 years later that like all the shooting wars the US has fought and lost, this one too has been an abysmal failure creating sky high rates of violence among emboldened drug cartels, but not stopping or even slowing the drug trade. The War on Drugs was used as a way to steal valuable Latin American farmlands and resource-rich areas, criminalize the indigenous population living there, make way for wealthy American capitalists to move in.  Where dirty dealings are afoot, count in the CIA. In 1998, the CIA’s own Inspector General concluded that the CIA was aware of and ignored the drug smuggling operation allowing drug cartels to blanket Los Angeles with crack cocaine setting off the “crack epidemic” of the 1980s.

Count on “I feel your pain” Clinton (D) to inflict more pain on Latin America. As his contribution to the U.S. bad neighbor policy, he created the world’s largest free trade zone between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. It was meant to reward corporate thugs (mostly his campaign donors) whose “generosity” catapulted him into the White House. The Mexican people were collateral damage.  Job losses in agriculture and mining soared. Millions of Mexicans were forced off the land and into U.S-run sweatshops in the cities. With no check on their labor practices, unions being excluded, U.S. employers paid starvation level wages.

America being America, its own people didn’t escape the effects of this ruinous policy. “You implement NAFTA, the Mexican trade agreement, where they pay people a dollar an hour, have no health care, no retirement, no pollution controls and you’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country.” [Ross Perot, libertarian presidential candidate in 1992]. He was right. The U.S. lost upwards of 850,000 jobs from 1993-2013. Jobs losses and the decline of workers’ wages in both countries devastated families and whole communities.

Desperate people make desperate choices. From 1993, the year before NAFTA to 2000, annual immigration from Mexico increased from 370,000 to 770,000. With annual immigration on the rise, the total number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in the United States increased from about 2.9 million in 1995 to 4.5 million in 2000. The upward trajectory has continued.  By July of 2023 11.7 undocumented (the left-leaning media prefers to call them “unauthorized) immigrants were in the U.S.  Four million (37%) come from Mexico.

What does the U.S. do now? President Trump has promised to extend Biden’s recent get-tough policy on immigrants. By January 23, three days after his inauguration 1,000 immigrants had been rounded up and were headed for deportation. His future plans include restoring the “remain in Mexico” policy, end “catch and release, invade” sanctuary cities, including schools and churches, declare a state of emergency allowing federal troops to mass at the border and declare drug runners “terrorists.” In a final irony, Trump has announced that he will cut off all U.S, aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador which after Mexico are the leading countries of origin for undocumented immigrants. How do you think that will work?

How about the U.S. boasting about its generosity to poor nations? In reality the U.S. is very miserly when it comes to doling out money to its neighbors. All the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (with the exception of Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia who get zero) split $2.5 billion in US foreign aid. Not nearly enough to restore the damage U.S. interference has caused the people of Latin and Central America. Quite the reverse, U.S. foreign aid is directed towards shoring up the rule of military dictators and comes with massive strings attached. Little of it goes to humanitarian assistance. In an ironic twist, U.S. “generosity” often results in conflicts and violence promoting migration rather than stemming it.

It’s a different story when Israel and Ukraine come calling.  Between 2022-2024 Ukraine, considered the most corrupt country in Europe, has been gifted with $183 billion in foreign aid. Israel is a perennial beneficiary of taxpayer largesse. In one year from October 2023 to October 2023, the U.S. spent $17.9 becoming Israel’s partner in the war crime of genocide. [Cost of War Project, Brown University] Two countries thousands of miles away that have little or no strategic value to the U.S. are the recipients of $200 billion taxpayer dollars while the U.S. starves the neighbors it has pauperized and creates a major problem for itself.

Will the new President solve the immigration problem with his tough guy, take no prisoners approach? The U.S, has been down this road before. With little success. What do you think are the chances for success this time around?

Looking for the American Dream

It must be around here somewhere. Doesn’t it strike you as bizarre that America’s leaders always seem to be looking for something that doesn’t exist, that they know doesn’t exist, but they keep looking for anyway, especially when election time rolls around.

Notable examples proliferate but one stands out. Its 2004 and the U.S. has just finished destroying Iraq, a country that posed absolutely no threat to the U.S. and once had the second largest economy in the Arab world. In 2003, claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (it didn’t), the US invaded Iraq, killing over 200,000 Iraqi civilians while displacing 9.2 million. 4,400 American soldiers came home in body bags and 32,000 were wounded many grievously, casualties of a lie that destroyed a country.

Not everyone was horrified by the slaughter and mayhem. In 2004 at a black-tie dinner for the national press corps, President Bush narrated a skit about the fruitless search for WMDs in Iraq (fruitless because there weren’t any). Bush looked behind furniture in the Oval Office — “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.” Looking somewhere else — “No, no weapons over there.” It mercifully ended after several more unfunny scenarios.

You know who thought it was hilarious? The journalists who populate the U.S. mainstream media. Imagine their dismay when they awoke the next morning to find that the entire world deplored and disdained their shocking lack of feeling for the carnage and death of innocents the US had caused. The best they could hope was that they like the WMDs had not been outed by the cameras.

It’s two decades later and the U.S. is on the hunt again — this time looking for the American Dream which a whole slew of politicians and rich folk tell the 99% that’s what they’re living in. In case you didn’t get the memo, the American Dream is an ironclad guarantee that all Americans have the opportunity to succeed and improve their lives.

That’s why we’re looking for it. Despite the fact that the American leadership hierarchy has always been rife with virtual gangsters living in the lap of luxury in their tidy sinecures of big economics (location of corporate looting which has gone since the founding) and big tech, big education, big healthcare (new entries in the gangster capitalism sweepstakes). The American Dream has been fighting for its survival for decades, if not centuries. Over one hundred years ago, President Woodrow Wilson (he was the one who campaigned on the promise to keep us out of war, then began the presidential tradition of embroiling U.S. soldiers in devastating wars after his election, this time WWI) was dragged, undoubtedly kicking and screaming, to that realization: “The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly.”

More recently in 2008 when Senator Charles Grassley (fancy that, a Republican) tried to increase taxes on private equity firms (which control $6 trillion in assets) from a measly 15% to a slightly less measly 35%, he was stymied when Blackstone (the world’s largest PE firm) poured $9 million into lobbying congress. No doubt about it, the American Dream is becoming harder to find as politicians get richer.

Let’s ask the 99%. Is the American Dream is working for them?  Seems we don’t have a lot of happy campers out there. In a New York Times poll taken right before the election, 45% of Americans said the economy was not working for them. Considering that the average American blue-collar worker is the victim of wage stagnation making virtually the same as a worker made 50 years ago and in the same 50 years $50 trillion dollars changed hands — from the bottom 90% to the top 1% — it’s hardly shocking.

When all else fails, we can count on the future. Can’t we? A new administration headed by what passes for a member of a different party (although speculation abounds that there’s only one party in the U.S. with two wings) Hardly an encouraging sign that the president elect’s cabinet is stuffed with —you guessed it — billionaires. It turns out he, his vice-president, cabinet nominees and his transition team are worth $613 billion. More bad news. America’s 815 billionaires added $280 billion to their already bloated wallets in the week after the election? Whose American Dream is it really?

Wait a minute. I may have found it. Aren’t the politicians, usually on the campaign trail, always telling us that healthcare is a human right? How better to improve your life than to have good healthcare? The state of U.S. healthcare today makes it clear that as usual the U.S. does not practice what it preaches— “The US is failing one of its principal obligations as a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its people…The status quo—continually spending the most and getting the least for our health care dollars—is not sustainable...Too many Americans are living shorter, sicker lives because of this failure.” [Commonwealth Fund] Affordability and availability of medical care, two imperatives of the Dream have gone missing. Maybe that’s why Americans have the shortest life expectancy among wealthy nations. The entire U.S. healthcare system is awash with profiteers who get fabulously wealthy trading on the sickness and suffering of sick Americans. One example should suffice. Nine drug company executives became billionaires during the pandemic as a result of their monopolies on COVID vaccines. Despite a number of eminent virologists crusading for the use of cheaper, possibly more effective remedies, the fix was in and big pharma maintained its hold on pandemic remedies.  How life-saving were big pharma’s remedies? Over one million Americans died during the pandemic.

It seems that the American Dream like so much else in America is reserved for the 815 U.S. billionaires and the rest of the 0.1%. For them, healthcare is their American Dream.

In our thus far fruitless search for the American dream, perhaps we should pay attention to U.S. leaders who claim they know where it’s located. The president elect knows or at least he knew in 2016: Trump — “We want the American Dream. We want to own our own home” Gotcha. At last, we found it. No doubt about it, home ownership must be the key to the American dream. But there’s a fly in this particular ointment. The top 1% of the US population owns around 2/3 of the country’s privately held land [US Department of Agriculture] That leaves a puny one-third for the 99%. Not American Dream territory unless you belong to the 1% club.

Looking high and low for the American Dream has yielded no results. Maybe in education? Oops. The US education system compares unfavorably with other wealthy countries, failing to make it it into the top ten highest ranked education systems. Doesn’t sound too dreamlike, does it? Could it be that America’s failure to have a first-class education system stems from a lack of equal access especially for students in the bottom 50% of the population. How do you create an education system which gives all students equal access to excellence in a country that is number in the world for its wealth and income inequality? The simple answer is you don’t.

We may have exhausted the possibilities. Economic access? Nope not there. Healthcare? Definitely not there. Home ownership. You gotta be kidding me. What about the president elect? Will he make a difference? Judging by his cabinet picks —billionaires as far as the eye can see the American Dream is DOA. “They’ve [the president and his cabinet picks] have already announced plans…to further enrich large corporations and wealthy elites…while advocating for cuts to vital programs that working and middle-class Americans depend on.” [David Kass, Americans for Tax Fairness]

Maybe George knows where the American Dream is hiding. Although come to think of it he didn’t have much luck with WMDs.