Welcome to Confronting Capitalism.

I'm Melissa Nashach, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at NYU

and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy.

Vee, today we're talking about why the Eagles are the best football team in the world.

Actually, nope.

I don't think we're talking about any such subject. Oh, my gosh. What's your team? Yeah, they stump, the Cleveland Browns, and I will not

tolerate any jokes about it. Okay. All right. I can't tease you about that one. That's already

too much of his cell phone. Yeah. We could actually do an entire podcast around how the Cleveland

Browns defy the laws of probability in every possible

respect. It should be impossible for a football team to be this bad for this long. That's another

discussion. Okay. Well, today our actual topic is USAID, which depending on who you ask is either the world's most generous and important source of humanitarian aid, a front for the CIA, the crux of Americans foreign policy, or my personal favorite, a haven for radical left Marxists, in which case we're really, they're behind on paying us.

We've won.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk have made USAID one of their early targets in their plan to alter the federal government.

USAID was hit on the second day of the Trump administration when Trump put

out a 90-day spending freeze on foreign assistance. Almost all USAID contractors and staff have since been

fired or put on leave, and many of the organizations that relied on USAID have shut down.

So Vivek, let's start by establishing our terms.

When was USAID created and for what purpose?

Well, the agency was created by John Kennedy in 1961.

And it was part of this larger initiative that Kennedy was launching to steer and guide development efforts

in the Global South. And he was thinking particularly at that time of Latin America. He also

launched the Alliance for Progress around that time, which was part of the larger effort to nurture

...