Summary
The Trump administration has canceled 90% of USAID’s foreign aid contracts, including critical programs that provide lifesaving therapeutic food to malnourished children.
Mana Nutrition’s CEO reports that ready-to-ship boxes of peanut paste that could save approximately 300,000 children are now stranded in a Georgia warehouse.
Despite Secretary of State Rubio’s claims that “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” would be spared, numerous essential health programs have been terminated, including those preventing diseases like polio, HIV, and Ebola.
These cuts contradict claims about targeting “wokeness” or “waste,” instead showing a reckless abandonment of America’s global humanitarian commitments.
I suspect it’s at least partly due to the fact that both the US and Canada are too fucking large. Frankly speaking someone in California has to put in a decent amount of work to get to DC, this means that California can be more easily ignored by the Feds. The fact of the matter is that there isn’t much folks can do short of attacking federal agents, simply because there’s no way for most regions to put pressure on the Congress or the President. Even our so called representatives are almost always in DC or their isolated little shithole communities.
Except that California’s GDP is insane. It’s also the home of all the tech billionaires. We live in an age where communication is no longer really affected by distance, and even still that’s why so many governments have representatives, and if you don’t like them there are options much of the time. Americans are great at constantly reinforcing the systems they claim to hate.
Also, plenty of right-wingers in economically barren states get representation and are listened to because they make a fuss(ok it’s more like a temper-tantrum, but it does the job).
When it comes for putting pressure on folks we are still instinctually led by in person tendencies. It’s the whole “you wouldn’t say that in person” thing, if a politician fears being tard, feathered, and hanged then they tend to be a lot more amiable to the common folks.
Also these ain’t mutually exclusive things, frankly speaking I think every House district should have a home office where the representative is forced to live and operate out of where they can do votes and seat meetings. This puts them well within stabbing distance of those they should be representing, it would also allow better tracking of whomst they meet with. If they need to present a bill or meet in person they can take a train, should help get a proper rail network established.
If this seems like it’d be hard on the geriatrics, that’s the point. If they can’t handle the stress of it all and drop dead that’s a feature not a flaw, they could drop out at any time.
While I still think it’s not a very strong excuse, the distance thing, I do very much agree with the rest.
I lost track of what was supposed to be my point. Probably should’ve illustrated it at the end of my comment. My underlying thesis is that it’s easy to just ignore emails, mail, phone, and text. It’s a lot harder to ignore folks in person. So the distance ain’t the core issue per se, but it’s exaggerating a very notable issue with the DC bubble.
And yea most of what I was saying was in regards to their accessibility not changing all that much unless you happened to live right there.
I agree with the needing to live amongst their constituents. They don’t use the same infrastructure, experience the same weather effects, or otherwise need to engage with much of what their policies affect. Protest shouldn’t be the way things get done; having a representative that actually represents in the first place should be the play. Luckily, those two things can be made possible in the same way.
Yep, also it’d be annoying for lobbyists groups. Rather than having a maybe a handful of teams in DC wining and dining nearly every Congress Critter they’d have to spread them across nearly every district. Which opens up the possibility of elimination of corporate lobbyists simply by running them out whenever they get setup.