Millions dead? How did that happen?

Every morning a new horror hatches such that you forget the day before, or the year before, with its daily minor cataclysms.

Trump is on the computer holding a machine gun warning Iran that they are gonna get some if they don’t come around. Diesel is over five bucks. No peace on the horizon, captain! Trump said he had former FBI Director James Comey arrested for seashells on the seashore the very same day.

It’s hard to keep up with shooting citizen protestors dead in the streets of Minneapolis, while disregarding measles vaccines amid an outbreak, while destroying crop export markets with tariffs.

So a friend writes to remind us that not so long ago Elon Musk was running around with a chain saw terrorizing federal agencies. His squad of special deputy bros got their hands on your data while putting the hammer to public assistance programs of any kind.

One of the chief casualties of that orgy was the US Agency for International Development. Republicans have lusted over killing the program since President Kennedy created it in 1961 to build goodwill around the world during the Cold War.

They finally got the job done. USAID was shut down, and an estimated 14 million people could die as a result from disease and hunger. Functions were eliminated or shifted to other agencies. The Food for Peace program was slated by the Trump Administration for elimination. It remains to be seen if it survives in a new farm bill.

Maybe it’s only 10 million people who die. You can live with 10 million dead. Or let’s say it’s just five million dead, mainly children. Many are in Africa. We are pro-life but it is a matter of degree. Children are going to die, snowflake. 

Food aid for Ethiopia slated to end in June puts 3 million people in danger. That is not considering death in Sudan, involved in full-scale civil war in large part because of hunger, religion and failed agricultural systems. We help to maintain inroads for adversaries and an environment for instability.

The architecture for these world food programs was shaped by Herbert Hoover in post-war reconstruction, and by Iowans Henry Wallace and Harry Hopkins. They brought peace to Europe and built world markets for the bounty of American agriculture. They were refined and strengthened by Midwesterners Humphrey, Dole, McGovern, Harkin and Durenburger. Musk was able to dismantle it all in a matter of weeks. He moved on to harassing Open- AI’s Sam Altman over who gets to control this dystopia, and the rest of us are left wondering what is in the Epstein files.

People are going to die in Ethiopia. Millions. Of course people are going to die. Sen. Ernst had to point that out to Iowans who must have forgotten. Food assistance in Iowa has been cut by $1 billion over the next decade. Get used to it, plebes.

“Hungry people are dangerous people,” famous farmer Roswell Garst of Coon Rapids declared.

You can get radical on an empty stomach, or when you see children starving to death. Or when the government shoots you to death for peacefully protesting.

Or when they take away your right to equal representation. We won a revolution over that.

We almost forgot that 20,000 USDA workers disappeared, including those working on avian flu outbreaks. The government fired and then — oopsie — tried to rehire the bird flu workers but doesn’t say how many came back. Why would you go back to work there when a madman is aiming for your neck with a chainsaw?

Oh, and grant cuts through the National Institutes for Health halted at least 387 clinical trials involving 74,000 patients last year, according to a paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. We don’t know how many of those patients died who otherwise might have lived. Iowa research into such things as cochlear implants, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease was canceled from loss of NIH funding.

Only 46 people died while in the custody of Immigrations Customs Enforcement last year, from what we know. Not that many. Not compared to 3 million dead Ethiopians, anyhow. Nearly all the 46 deaths were preventable with medical care, but why should immigrants get decent health care when you can’t afford it? Those ghosts won’t keep you awake at night if 14 million don’t.

USAID had a $65 billion annual budget. That is what one month of war in Iran costs just for the military, from what we know, not including the Israeli contribution to widespread death and famine across the Middle East of late, and not including the economic disarray. The Houthis are there to remind us occasionally that there is a war going in Yemen, too. Bread might have worked better than bombs, but who can tell now?

What was it we were talking about? Gutting the Voting Rights Act? I forgot. The war should end in a couple weeks. Remember that Trump loves farmers. He said so.