Photo: U.S. Embassy.

I believe it would be a good thing if Trump and his crew of fascists, fools and billionaires cut the military budget in half. If USAID does actually get shut down, I would also be fine with that. After all, both of these entities—especially the military—are major parts of US imperialism and why the US has been at war for the last eighty some years without pause. Does this mean I am fine with cutting all the food and medical programs USAID ran around the world? Of course not. It does mean I am fine with ending the campaigns of subversion USAID was a part of. It also means I am good with the ending of so-called development projects that mostly served to transfer US public funds to private US corporations involved in those projects; projects which often misunderstood the lives and cultures of the people Washington insisted it was helping. Projects which also tended to benefit the wealthiest and often corrupt elites in those nations while further impoverishing other citizens.

My father was an officer in the US military from 1954 through 1979. His unit worked in concert with the National Security Agency (NSA) after he got his commission. This meant that he was assigned to different parts of the world over his career. With the exception of Vietnam, his family accompanied him on assignments that lasted more than a couple months. We spent three years in what was then West Pakistan from 1963-1966 and three years (1970-1973) in Frankfurt am Main in what was then West Germany. His other assignments were in the United States and Alaska before it became a state. Most of the stateside assignments were at Fort Meade, MD. Where the main NSA compound is. The first time I heard the acronym USAID was in Pakistan when the base Little League team my brother and I played on played against a team made up of boys whose fathers were beginning preliminary work on a giant hydroelectric program on the Indus River. The fathers all worked for USAID or a corporation hired by USAID.

I mention my childhood in this manner to tell a quick anecdote. When we lived in Germany, I was in high school. Several of my friends lived in a military housing area known as HICOG, which originally housed military and civilian members of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany—the occupation authority established in 1949 when the responsibility for running the US occupation of the defeated Germany switched from the military to the State Department. By the time I lived in Frankfurt, this housing was reserved for US government employees working for the CIA, USAID, the State Department and middle ranking members of the Foreign Service.

One day when a friend and I were hanging out, we got to talking about our fathers’ jobs and where we had traveled to because of those jobs. I mentioned my dad’s connection to NSA and being in Pakistan. My........

© CounterPunch