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04/02/2025

Bye bye USAID: why I won’t mourn its death

 FG, 4/1/2025

The infernal couple in red ties - Donald II and Baby Marco - in tune with Adolf Musk, have decided to liquidate USAID, which they consider a den of fanatics - a kind of radical left Marxist Al-Qaeda inside the Beltway. Social media is full of the lamentations of thirty-somethings in the Global South, who see their dollar livelihoods slipping away. I can only applaud this decision by the MAGAlomaniacs. 

Here’s why: in my distant youth, in the happy 60s, I lived in downtown Tunis. On my way home from school around noon, I’d stop at the now-defunct boulangerie - an industrial bakery with no store, where you bought bread straight from the oven - to buy “bâtards”, “Italian bread” or, more rarely, “baguettes”. Around 1963-1964, the bread became inedible. When you opened it, a green crumb appeared. Rotten flour. I asked the baker, “What’s going on?”  Looking disgusted, he pointed to a pile of flour sacks piled up in a corner. The text printed on the sacks read “Graciously donated by the people of the Unted States of America – USAID” and - underneath - the two hands intertwined, with the stars and stripes flag in the background.


Quite simply, USAID was generously offering us rotten wheat flour. One more reason to vomit at the Yankees, who had started bombing North Vietnam and landing troops in South Vietnam. Today, USAID no longer poisons us with rotten flour, but with empowerment programmes: youth empowerment, women’s empowerment, LGBTQ+ empowerment, in short, empowerment with all the sauces, including ketchup. They’ve bought into the Arab Spring generation, in stiff competition with German, Swedish, Canadian, French and Japanese foundations, without forgetting our Emirati brethren. Blessed be Donald, Marco and Adolf, who will deliver us from this scum of the earth and their Monopoly money.

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