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If we aren't in a new Gilded Age, what are we in? After all, we now have an administration with no less than 13 billionaires in it, including the richest man on planet Earth (as well, of course, as President Donald J. Trump)! Together, they possess more money than the gross domestic products of 174 different countries. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich reminded us recently, "The share of the nation's wealth owned by the richest 400 Americans has quadrupled while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has dropped to 1.3 percent" The richest 1 percent of Americans now has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined." And if that isn't impressive, tell me what is.
Even then, at least for our billionaire president, it's never enough -- not when a foreign government, eager to kiss his you-know-what, offers him nothing less than a luxury "palace-in-the-sky" jumbo jet worth a mere $400 million to be used as the new Air Force One and then retired to Trump's future presidential library foundation. What a deal! Why would anyone say no to that, especially from a country -- Qatar to be exact -- that's already offered so much to so many figures in his administration like Attorney General Pam Bondi, who once upon a time lobbied for the Qataris (and she's anything but alone in her Qatari-ness)? Oh, and just by happenstance, the Trump Organization and his sons, who have functionally been lobbying the world for more wealth during his second term in office, only recently struck a deal to develop a golf resort in" yep, Qatar!
So, consider the new definition of generosity on this planet of ours offering Donald Trump a magnificent gift of any sort. But as TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, whose new book, Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire & Espionage, is due out at year's end, reminds us today, when a billionaire like Donald Trump runs your government, he puts into effect what he's learned in life, which is to give to the rich, not the poor. So it should be no surprise that, the second time around, his America is taking back so much of the money that the U.S. Agency for International Development once gave to the poorest and often sickest people on this planet. And believe me, there's a certain plain (or do I mean plane?) and grim truth in doing that. Tom
The Self-Liquidation of U.S Global Leadership
Why the World's Richest Nation Is Killing the World's Poorest Children
By Alfred McCoy
With the Oval Office looking more like a middle school classroom every day, let's recall the way, once upon a time, we responded to childhood taunts from a playground bully. You remember how it goes. Your nemesis says mockingly that you're a this-or-that and you shout back: "Takes one to know one!" Indeed, it does. This month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said of his fellow billionaire Elon Musk: "The world's richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world's poorest children."
Elaborating, Gates explained that Musk, as head of his self-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had decided to put "U.S.A.I.D. in the wood chipper" by cutting 80% of its global humanitarian programs and that, he pointed out, will mean "millions of additional deaths of kids." To help undo the damage, Gates announced that he'll be spending down his own $200 billion fortune over the next 20 years to promote public health in Asia and Africa so that "children [are] not being malnourished or women not bleeding to death or girls not getting H.I.V."
Amid the blizzard of executive orders and bizarre budgetary decisions pouring out of the Trump White House, Gates put his finger on the cuts that really matter, the ones that will do lasting damage -- not just to their unfortunate victims but to America's sense of global leadership as well.
In President Donald Trump's transactional diplomacy, only the hard power of mineral deals, gifted airplanes, or military might matters. And yet, as we learned in the Cold War years, it's much easier to exercise world leadership with willing followers won over by the form of diplomacy scholars have dubbed "soft power." As the progenitor of the concept, Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, put it: "Seduction is always more effective than coercion. And many of our values, such as democracy, human rights, and individual opportunity, are deeply seductive." He first coined the term in 1990, just as the Cold War was ending, writing that "when one country gets other countries to want what it wants," that "might be called co-optive or soft power, in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants." In his influential 2004 book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Nye argued that, in our world, raw military power had been superseded by soft-power instruments like reliable information, skilled diplomacy, and economic aid.
Actually, soft power is seldom soft. Indeed, Spanish steel might have conquered the New World in the sixteenth century, but its long rule over that vast region was facilitated by the appeal of a shared Christian religion. When Britain's global turn came in the nineteenth century, its naval dominion over the world's oceans was softened by an enticing cultural ethos of commerce, language, literature, and even sports. And as the American century dawned after World War II, its daunting troika of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines would be leavened by the soft-power appeal of its democratic values, its promise of scientific progress, and its humanitarian aid that started in Europe with the Marshall Plan in 1948.
Even in these uncertain times, one thing seems clear enough: Donald Trump's sharp cuts to this country's humanitarian aid will ensure that its soft power crumbles, doing lasting damage to its international standing.
The Logic of Foreign Aid
Foreign aid -- giving away money to help other nations develop their economies -- remains one of America's greatest inventions. In the aftermath of World War II, Europe had been ravaged by six years of warfare, including the dropping of 2,453,000 tons of Allied bombs on its cities, after which the rubble was raked thanks to merciless ground combat that killed 40 million people and left millions more at the edge of starvation.
Speaking before a crowd of 15,000 packed into Harvard Yard for commencement in June 1947, less than two years after that war ended, Secretary of State George Marshall made an historic proposal that would win him the Nobel Peace Prize. "It is logical," he said, "that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace." Instead of the usual victor's demand for reparations or revenge, the U.S. gave Europe, including its defeated Axis powers, $13 billion in foreign aid that would, within a decade, launch that ruined continent on a path toward unprecedented prosperity.
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