Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

It’s one of the greatest preventable mass deaths in modern history: around two people every minute of every day, day and night, week after week, soon to be year after year.

In the time it takes you to read this article, several dozen children will have died because of actions taken—with full knowledge of this consequence—by South African immigrant Elon Musk, Big Balls and his teenage buddies, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio.

Children who wanted to live as desperately as do yours and mine, whose parents grieve them every bit as much as we would grieve the death of our own kids, are dying as you read these words.

Even worse, Musk and Rubio keep lying about the blood on their hands. Nobody knows if Rubio is drinking himself to sleep to deal with the guilt, but according to The New York Times Musk is taking mind-numbing drugs at a level that would make Charles Manson blush.

Marco Rubio says:

“No one has died because of USAID [cuts]. … No children are dying on my watch.”

Elon Musk proclaimed, as The New York Times notes in an article titled “Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.”:

“No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.”

Musk has called USAID—the agency administering programs like George W. Bush’s PEPFAR which have saved tens of millions of lives, most in Africa—“a criminal organization,” adding that it was, “Time for it to die.”

But why?

Musk and his family fled white-ruled South Africa in 1989 as the transition to majority Black rule was well underway. Could that have something to do with his antipathy toward USAID?

Back in 1986, after overturning the veto of apartheid-fan Ronald Reagan, a Democratically-controlled US Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, which empowered the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to play a leading role in undermining South Africa’s brutal white supremacist apartheid regime.

USAID’s anti-apartheid effort was led by Timothy Bork, Mission Director, General Counsel, Director of the Office of the Sahel and West Africa, and Deputy Assistant Administrator for the agency; he spent nineteen years with USAID tackling apartheid in South Africa.

Bork’s and his colleagues efforts were ultimately successful in bringing down apartheid. USAID redirected much of its South Africa funding toward supporting South African Black-led grassroots organizations, trade unions, educational institutions, and legal defense groups.

• USAID funded legal assistance for South African political prisoners and anti-apartheid activists.
• It supported Black trade unions, which were central to mass resistance against apartheid.
  It provided resources to community development and education programs that were racially inclusive.

This was all possible because the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 codified sanctions against South Africa and mandated that U.S. aid could only support efforts to end apartheid and empower that country’s Black majority.

• USAID implemented this by funding programs that strengthened the capacity of the anti-apartheid opposition, including Nelson Mandela’s ANC-aligned civil society.
• It also funded programs in South Africa that emphasized institution-building and human rights education, thus helping prepare the groundwork for democratic governance.

In the early 1990s, USAID played a direct role in supporting the transition to democracy in South Africa:

• It helped fund election infrastructure for the 1994 democratic elections.
• It provided support for the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC).
• It funded civic education campaigns to help previously disenfranchised South Africans understand their voting rights.

According to Princeton Lyman, the former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, USAID programs were the essential core that built the non-governmental infrastructure in that country that led to the end of apartheid and whites-only rule.

USAID historical documents chronicle how over $500 million was spent between the mid-1980s and early 1990s on democracy, governance, education, and civil society development to end apartheid in South Africa. Their successful efforts, made possibly by the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 included:

• Economic Sanctions: The Act banned new U.S. investments in South Africa, prohibited bank loans to the South African government, and restricted imports of certain South African goods, including coal, uranium, and agricultural products.
• Air Travel Restrictions: It barred South African Airways from landing in the United States.
• Assistance to Victims of Apartheid: The Act authorized support for Black South Africans, including scholarships, community development, and legal aid.

The Act’s sanctions and USAID’s implementation efforts to support the indigenous anti-apartheid movement created massive economic pressure on South Africa, producing a decline in foreign investment and trade. This economic strain, combined with internal resistance and international condemnation, led to the end of the apartheid regime on May 4, 1990 and the formation of that nation’s first truly democratic government in 1994.

Is that why, on February 2 of this year, Musk proudly tweeted about his effort that would lead to the eventual death of millions of children:

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

As Bill Gates told The Financial Times:

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one. I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money.”

Associate Professor of Global Health at Boston University, Brooke Nichols, has done the math and it’s pretty bulletproof. She estimates that at least 300,000 people have already died because of Musk’s, Trump’s, and Rubio’s gutting USAID, most of them children. Her Impact Tracker that documents the consequences of these cuts estimates that 103 people are dying every hour.

Not only is this a human tragedy that should horrify every American (although white supremacists seem to be celebrating it), but it’s also doing very real damage to America’s “soft power” around the world. China is rushing into many of the countries where USAID operated to provide relief and infrastructure, with an eye to building relationships that could lead to new trading partners and new access to valuable minerals and other resources.

Is surrendering our political and moral leadership in Africa and other underdeveloped parts of the world, simply payback by a cabal of South African immigrants for the loss of their white-run government? Is Trump’s offering sanctuary and government-funded flights into America to white (and only white) South Africans further proof of this?

Or did they do it merely to kneecap our government’s soft power that’s kept Russia and China at bay in much of the developing world? Was it a favor to Putin or Xi?

Or was it simply a drug-fueled whim? “Hey, let’s just kill a few million people for fun!”

While the death and damage Musk, Trump, and Rubio are causing is well documented, few in our media are asking the essential question: “Why?”

Why are these men celebrating the death of, so far, hundreds of thousands of children and the eventual death of millions, along with the golden opportunity for expanding political power they’re handing to Russia and China?

I don’t know their reason (the cost of USAID is pretty minimal and won’t have any meaningful effect on our deficit or debt), but it’s a pretty essential question we should all have the right to know the answer to.

What rationale or logic do you think is behind this?