Apparently food aid isn't about aiding those without food. Rather, it's all about subsidizing the Pentagon's
budget:
"The secondary reason for food aid is food," Rep. Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who introduced the bill, said in an interview Thursday. "The No. 1 reason is military readiness."
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There we have it, that's the reason for a bill that's just been passed by the House. Who gives a shit about the people dying of starvation in other countries when we could screw up the system to make sure that we've got plenty of things that go bang?
The background to this is an absurdity called the Jones Act. This, among other provisions (for example, insisting that cargo between two US ports must be carried on US-owned, crewed, built and flagged ships) insists that food aid being sent off to the starving elsewhere must be carried on those US-built, owned, crewed and flagged ships. You'll not be surprised to find out that said US ships are rather more expensive than those using cheaper labor, or those using rather newer, more fuel efficient, engines.
But there we have it from the horse's arse, one of our elected Solons, that this is actually the point. We
want to make food aid more expensive so that, for however much we decide to spend on food aid, we can alleviate less starvation.
The specific thing that this bill does is raise the percentage of such aid that must be carried on those Jones Act ships, thus making the food aid system even more inefficient. Quite rightly the Obama Administration opposes this change. Don't, however, think that this is a respectable Democrat arguing with idiot Republicans: the AFL/CIO is over on the Jones Act side here. It's not a party partisan dispute,
it's one about the ability to use food aid to favor certain pockets instead of the purpose of food aid, to feed the hungry.
Comment: So, the Western military alliance, which the U.S. promised Russia would be disbanded with the end of the Cold War, not only expanded right up to Russia's borders, it blitzed numerous countries when its original raison d'état no longer existed, and now it's again being justified under the pretext of 'keeping the West safe from Russian aggression'.
Can there be any doubt that the Western alliance seeks world domination by 'containing Russia'?
Can there be any doubt that Russia gave the West a tremendous opportunity in 1990 to really end wars and build a humanitarian world system? But the U.S. regime instead took that opportunity to expand its domination - "full-spectrum dominance" - over the whole world.
All that has changed is that Russia now knows for certain that the U.S. regime is fundamentally untrustworthy.