The Massachusetts left cannot build a new grassroots movement for democracy based on blue falsehoods and misdirections
In my HorizonMass editor’s note of February 6, I advised people on the Massachusetts and overall American left, including but definitely not limited to members of the Democratic Party, to “Stay Calm And Think”— explaining that it was important for us to not leap immediately into action against President Donald Trump because it was very difficult to separate fact from fiction as his second administration began. And I specifically pointed out that propaganda is coming at us from all directions, making the task of deciding how to respond even more difficult than it would usually be, “Republicans, Democrats, the harder right, and the militant left are all spewing out millions of words and images about the current political situation. Most of which is patent nonsense layered with the most obnoxious propaganda conceivable when looked at critically and with the broad public interest in mind.”
As I wrote those lines, I could already hear mainstream Democrats saying “Democrats don’t do propaganda.” Leading to my first prescription until my promised “next missive”—this follow-up column—being “read extremely widely on issues of the day to get out of whatever ‘information silo’ you’re trapped in.”
Which was to say to such Democrats, “yes, your party leadership absolutely does create propaganda constantly whether in or out of power … and you would know that if you weren’t trapped in an ‘information silo’ with like-minded Democrats.” Precisely the kind of mind trap that the algorithms that run social media platforms are designed to lock users into, whatever their political views.
An example is naturally in order. There are many to choose from, but it seems appropriate to focus on a very current illustration of propaganda by leaders of the Democratic Party: their breathless defense of the United States Agency for International Development, better known by its acronym USAID—which is presently under threat of reorganization and possible dissolution by President Donald Trump with help from the world’s richest man (who is open about his net worth anyway), Elon Musk, and the new government contractor he advises, the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization (a.k.a, the Department of Government Efficiency).
Trump has taken to claiming that USAID is run by “radical left lunatics, criticizes it for financing programs that “are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” and argues that its funds have been misused—saying “billions of dollars have been stolen.”
Democrats (and even some old-school Republicans like Peter Wehner writing recently in the Atlantic) have responded that the USAID is a humanitarian organization … full stop. Followed by clearly justified expressions of shock and anger that the Trump administration may actually manage to fire much of the agency’s staff and shut it down.
And it is demonstrably true that real aid is delivered to real humans in need around the world by USAID. It is also true that many lives will be ruined if that kind of assistance from the US government is now going to abruptly cease.
The problem is that humanitarian aid has never been the sole mission of USAID (or its predecessor projects starting with the Marshall Plan post-WWII). And how could it be? The projection of “soft power” by a major geopolitical player to weaker and poorer countries never just involves doing the right thing for people in need. Thus, for a capitalist nation like the US, a key mission for the agency and all projects like it is to help expand markets for American corporations.
Meaning that much of what USAID does is work hard to open the economies of nations in regions like West Africa that were made poor over hundreds of years by the major colonial and neocolonial powers of the global north—often including but not limited to the US—to the ungentle ministrations of US-based multinationals. There is plenty of evidence of this fact for those who care to look in academic literature and in the more independent reaches of the global press.
For a quick overview of that often hidden side of USAID’s work, I can recommend readers to a 2021 article in Current Affairs magazine by international development worker Saheli Khastagir entitled “Aid for Profit: The Dark History of USAID.”
Here’s one of its more damning passages:
Partnerships with multinationals are justified on the basis of their size and resources, but often those corporations make problems worse (or just don’t have the ability to address them). Child labor in cocoa supply chains is a prime example. Big Chocolate companies like Hershey’s, Mars, Mondelez (the company behind Cadbury), and Nestlé have partnered with USAID to address this issue. All the big chocolate corporations have a Child Labor Monitoring and Remediation System (CLMRS) in place. These plans particularly focus on the two largest cocoa-producing countries, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. Between 2012 to 2016, Nestlé alone invested around $10.9 million in child labor monitoring. It also invested more than $21 million between 2012 to 2018 in school building. In both cases, the goal was to reduce child labor in the company’s supply chain.
And yet child labor has not only not been reduced, it has increased! A new study by NORC at the University of Chicago has found that in these two largest cocoa growing countries, child labor has increased by 13 percentage points between 2008-09 to 2018-19, even as cocoa production has grown by 62 percent. Meanwhile, all the big chocolate companies talk of sustainable farming, about uplifting the lives of the farmers. Mars has a Cocoa for Generations program, Hershey’s has a Cocoa for Good strategy. They are all committed to doing good for the farmers while doing good for themselves. Yet the rewards stay concentrated amongst the big businesses (in the U.S., more than 74 percent of the chocolate industry is controlled by just four businesses), cocoa production is still linked to deforestation and child labor, and the farmers see very little of the billions of dollars they are helping make. An average African farmer makes $0.78 a day from cocoa, while the chocolate industry is worth more than $100 billion a year in sales and is projected to reach up to $171.6 billion by 2026. Around 60 percent of the world’s cocoa comes from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where very little of it is consumed. The profits accrued are shared as little as possible.
There are several other examples of this kind of corporate malfeasance with full government support in Khastagir’s piece, but its main point is simple: USAID has been responsible for helping major corporations make the structural conditions for working people worse in countries all over the world since it was founded in 1961 … by President John F. Kennedy’s Democratic administration, mind you. So it’s very much worth considering that what direct humanitarian aid that agency does provide might not be necessary in many locales if it didn’t give multinationals free reign in more effectively looting nations already impoverished by previous looting.
And that is why I counseled people on the Bay State and American left to work hard to figure out what the hell is actually going on before moving to attempt to blunt and eventually reverse the many actions of the Trump administration—plus the actions of successive administrations from both major political parties since at least the 1980s—in the service of the billionaires that now control most of the wealth in the US. Because in my single example of the crisis facing USAID, the Republicans trying to destroy it are not entirely wrong that the agency needs major reform and the Democrats who support it are not entirely right that it simply needs to be put back to the way it was prior to the start of the second Trump administration.
A forward-thinking left would likely take a more nuanced position: USAID needs to be either heavily reformed or replaced by a new agency to ensure that providing humanitarian aid is its sole mission … with a strong focus on nations (and America’s so-called “territories”) harmed politically, economically, socially, culturally, and/or environmentally by US-based corporations (and sometimes direct US military conquest) over generations.
How we might build such a left—in essence a new grassroots movement for democracy—in a period of right-wing and capitalist ascendancy will be the subject of my next column in this series.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
