American trillionaire Mr. Elon Reeve Musk is not only the wealthiest person on the planet but also an icon of global far-right white supremacist politics. He is also known for spreading reactionary and racist rhetoric under the guise of freedom of speech. As a supporter and promoter of U.S. President Mr. Trump, he was rewarded with the task of leading the federal initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was launched on 20 January 2025 and shut down on 4 July 2026. Within eighteen months, under Mr. Musk’s leadership, the department achieved its goal of shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and eliminating its $40 billion budget—all in the name of efficiency and austerity. There is unlimited money for imperialist war machine but no money for humanitarian aid is the governing principle of American capitalism.
A dashboard (https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=title&order=asc) created by Boston University Professor Brooke Nichols reveals the human toll of this shutdown. More than 262,915 adults and 518,428 children have died due to the discontinuation of USAID funding. It is estimated that 14 million people might ultimately die as a result of this halt to U.S. foreign aid. These deaths and widespread destitution stem from preventable diseases such as diarrhea, HIV, malaria, malnutrition, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other tropical illnesses. Ultimately, this dashboard of deaths, destitution, and disease reveals much about American governing elites and their capitalist model of development.
The devastating impact of the USAID funding shutdown reveals the true nature of individuals like Mr. Musk, as well as the arrogance of wealthy people and rich countries waging a class war on the poor and marginalized worldwide. It also exposes the small hearts of the rich and affluent nations like the United States. The arrogance of wealth, coupled with a culture of alienation and commodification, has transformed figures like Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump into passionately inhuman beings, driven by the raw animal spirit of American capitalism.
Imperialism is the driving force behind the animal spirits of capitalism, which not only kills people in Yankee imperialist wars and conflicts abroad but also claims American citizens lives at home. Hunger, homelessness, poverty, malnutrition, and food and health insecurity are on the rise due to federal budget cuts to domestic welfare and safety-net programs. Cuts to programs like Medicaid lead to thousands of preventable diseases and deaths among poor Americans who lack access to healthcare. Private healthcare and its insurance industries are designed to turn sickness into a profitable business, not to serve the poor. The privatization of public services such as healthcare is a mechanism for securing the profits and wealth of the rich. Poor Americans are as disposable as poor people in Afghanistan or Africa. Profit over people is the operational and ideological foundation of capitalism, which serves the rich by marginalizing the poor.
As the popular saying goes,
“Rich people never leave meat on the bones of their dinner table to keep the flies away”
Yet they justify this miserly qualities in the name of table manners and elite etiquette. Disdain for the poor is integral to the everyday lifestyle of wealthy individuals and wealthy nations. The destruction of USAID and the dismantling of its humanitarian programmes expose the ideological crusades that ruling elites like Mr. Musk are waging against working people.
Historically, USAID was used primarily as an imperialist tool. However, whatever little remained after achieving imperial foreign policy ambitions, the aid agency still played a crucial role in life-saving humanitarian programmes in poor and vulnerable regions across the globe. Ultimately, Yankee imperialism and its capitalist pursuits treat human beings as entirely disposable.
The disposable culture of capitalism helps to normalise imperialist wars led by US leadership, irrespective of their political or ideological affiliations. American capitalism orchestrates imperialist wars to subdue people, their everyday lives, and their creativity—all in service of the capitalist and imperialist US establishment. The deaths and destitution of people in distant lands do not disturb the American public. Bombing campaigns waged in the name of democracy, human rights, and women’s rights have become a standard feature of the American imperialist playbook. The techno-individualistic ideology underpinning American capitalism serves as the governing norm, producing a reckless and cruel approach to governance in which humanitarian crises are seized as opportunities to dominate, domesticate, and destroy every condition for the growth of radical consciousness that could enable a progressive transformation free from inequalities and exploitation.
Even in its minimalist form—providing welfare budget and aid to meet basic human needs—the distribution of wealth stands as an anathema to capitalism. For capitalism, crisis is a more valuable tool and opportunity than prosperity, human health, peace, or solidarity. Fearing peaceful, prosperous, and healthy populations, capitalism actively promotes policies that undermine these very conditions. Finally, it ensures that crises and existential threats to human life are perpetuated on a regular basis to ensure that human being can be used like commodities. Such crises cultivate compliant minds, as people become preoccupied with physical survival. By contrast, healthy, prosperous, and peaceful social conditions breed radical consciousness, promoting the desire for profound social, political, and economic transformation. Therefore, continuous struggle for survival is a better condition for capitalism than prace and stability which can breed struggles for total transformation of capitalist states, governments and societies across the world.
The class war against the poor and marginalized reveals that capitalism is not an alternative. No alternative exists within capitalism or the capitalist system. Crisis, commodification, domestication, hegemonic dominance, exploitation, and inequalities are not only inherent but also integral to the survival and expansion of capitalism. Therefore, to seek an alternative within capitalism is like seeking salvation through religion only after death—it is futile. Socialism, with its humanist ideals of shared peace and prosperity, a society based on sharing, care, and solidarity, and the collective foundations of human happiness and security, is the only available alternative. The choice is between barbaric capitalism, which treats life as a disposable commodity, and socialism, which considers no human alien. The collective survival of life and the planet depends on our choice. Let’s make that choice.
