https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcla7WoWIpQ
The USAID Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID/OTI) began its program in Haiti in January 2010 as part of the post-earthquake response, supporting short- and medium-term activities aimed at stabilizing Haiti through support for community revitalization, improved governance, and economic strengthening.
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... the following november the election represented a potential flashpoint for instability but also an opportunity for haitians to determine their own future. usaid coordinated the first televised presidential debates and supported voter education campaigns including a mobile strategy using text messages to help with political awareness ...
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Ironic because it's rather clear who USAID was endorsing [2] because his opponent (who lost) [3] ran specifically on a platform of a "more independent Haitian state, one less reliant upon and subject to foreign governments and NGOs." The USAID (and Bill/Hillary Clinton) backed candidate was roiled in numerous claims of corruption, subsequent vote rigging, backing Haitian criminal gangs, and was ultimately sanctioned by the US and Canada for involvement in cocaine trafficking into the US. Incidentally, as the video also mentions, USAID spent their money not on the people, but the government - they built the units for this lovely fellow's government to reside in as the Presidential Palace was severely damaged in the quake.
[1] - https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...
Nonetheless, your investigation is important. We need way more testimonials to get to the bottom of these things. Are programs like USAID a grift, or are the people cancelling it the grifters, or is the answer the dreaded middle?
This is the only way we’re going to re-find the spirit of this country (because it is absolutely absent at the moment). Americans have always been proud of programs that carry the legacy of the Marshall Plan.
I don’t want to get rid of a program just because it failed, anything can fail. We need to know if the people getting rid of these things even believe in goodwill and charity. They may not, in which case debating the finances and accounting is the obvious distraction.
This is less about if we have the money in the room, and more so about did we put people with the right fucking hearts in the room.
An uncharitable person will fight goodwill even if it’s free.
By the way the same thing was true, to a smaller degree, of the Marshall Plan. 5% of all its funding went straight to CIA front organizations [1] helping to ensure Europe developed in the "right" way. The same thing continues today where USAID was doing all it could to try to undermine Hungary. It's like all this rhetoric about democracy being about the will of the people suddenly becomes meaningless when the will of the people is not equivalent to the will of the US. And I don't think this is conducive to a stable world order, to say the least.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#Funding_for_CIA_...
Charity is great but when it comes from NGOs demanding cultural subjugation to American culture and restrictions on how the money works, this leads to resentment, instability and war.
Of course, most Americans would probably not just want to hand out money willy-nilly without any restrictions.
Thus, in my opinion, the entire premise of USAID is flawed, save for a select few endeavors to a small cadre of countries.
The entire diplomatic purpose of USAID is to build up good will abroad, but that's simply not working. No amount of money handed to whomever is going to change the fact that, within recent history, America has undertaken several pre-emptive wars and managed them poorly.
IOW I probably agree that the premise of USAID is flawed. However wiping it off the face of the earth over a matter of days is a massive over-reaction to the problem and is going to kill people short-term that didn't need to be killed if we had decided to take a deliberate approach to dismantling it.
> The entire diplomatic purpose of USAID is to build up good will abroad, but that's simply not working. No amount of money handed to whomever is going to change the fact that, within recent history, America has undertaken several pre-emptive wars and managed them poorly.
That is just so damn true. We do such a fantastic job of creating enemies of America.
Security wise U.S. cannot even if they can intervene with socially bad policy except to prevent widespread civil arrest etc which is why CIA exists. U.S. pre-emptive wars were good for the military-industrial apparatus that keeps them in power & made sure others can't get those places. In global strategy terms, I suspevt Web3 & DeFi should be seen as an economical third party that reduces Chinese & Russian share of the Western economical pie at times dollar weakens.
The public can never understand that you need to be "though" to win because might makes right in statescraft & geopoli, so the U.S has to censor the internet including inside NATO to prevent economical ties' risk of dying due political pressure. It's understandable. If the game is played classified, and most humans hesitate to pull a gun's trigger, they have no idea about the world inside the entities that protect them. They cannot see that it's a very very zero-sum world, hobbesian world.
This is different from human history because WWII ±25 years we boiled over the techno-industrial pot, and nowadays all of the seemingly evil work of US & its agencies is, actually, necessary for the survival of mankind.