Mike Benz and Cenk Uygur debate the question of abolishing foreign aid on a livestream Saturday hosted by ZeroHedge. Benz said: “I just mentioned to you a scandal from the Obama USAID-not ancient history-where HIV programs in Latin America were used as, quote, ‘the perfect excuse’ by USAID to recruit paramilitary guerrillas in order to topple the government.” “PEPFAR-that’s the HIV program that Bush started-reportedly saved 25 million lives. You’re saying some of those reports might be inaccurate, and maybe it didn’t,” Cenk Uygur said. “But are you saying it saved no lives? It saved 23 million lives? 12 million lives? Whatever the number is, it’s a giant number.” “It’s kind of weird that that corresponds with the breakout of about a dozen different civil wars in African countries and the sudden presence of giant U.S. military and special forces boots on the ground that coincided during that period,” Benz replied. “As Henry Kissinger wrote in his 2000 book-and this is also echoed by Peter Hotez in his article series Vaccines as an Instrument of Soft Power-it was actually humanitarian interventions in public health that allowed us access to boots on the ground in places that we would otherwise be barred by the local government.” “If it’s really public-facing and it’s really saving babies-show us the baby,” Benz said. Cenk joked: “I’ll bring the baby next time. Keep the healthcare, lose the CIA.” Here’s the full conversation:

CENK UYGUR: To attack a program that has a proven track record of doing monumentally good things and saving millions of lives because it has some bad parts in it is not the right way to go. Take out the bad parts and keep the overwhelmingly good parts in one of the best parts of the U.S. government. MIKE BENZ: Where’s the proof? You mentioned, for example, the public health programs and how many lives they saved. I just mentioned to you a scandal from the Obama USAID-not ancient history-where HIV programs in Latin America were used as, quote, the perfect excuse by USAID to recruit paramilitary guerrillas in order to topple the government. How many lives do you think that program publicly reported that it saved? You would not, if you were just reading the press release or an NGO assessment digesting whatever stats that those HIV prevention programs put out, you would have said, Hey, they saved 100,000 lives in that program. They didn’t save those lives at all. I would like to see one award, number one program that you can identify. Give me the grant number, the award ID, and show me what it actually did that was- CENK UYGUR: So look, PEPFAR-that’s the HIV program that Bush started-reports are that it has saved 25 million lives. You’re saying some of those reports might be inaccurate, and maybe it didn’t save 100,000 lives in one country when they said they did and it was a covert program instead. But are you saying it saved no lives? It saved 23 million lives? 12 million lives? Whatever the number is, it’s a giant number. MIKE BENZ: It’s kind of weird that that corresponds with the breakout of about a dozen different civil wars in African countries and the sudden presence of giant U.S. military and special forces boots on the ground that coincided during that period. Because, as Henry Kissinger wrote in his 2000 book-and this is also echoed by Peter Hotez in his article series Vaccines as an Instrument of Soft Power-it was actually humanitarian interventions in public health that allowed us access to boots on the ground in places that we would otherwise be barred by the local government. For when you need to put in tens of thousands of public health workers, you need security forces. You need military support for them as well. And then you pump up an economy that ends up lobbying the local government for governance change-as we did all over Africa during the AIDS outbreak. This was seen as a way-one of the reasons the State Department and USAID and the DOD loved the AIDS program-was because it gave us a chance to get U.S.-favored institutions, U.S. vassal institutions on the ground in Africa without any other justification around terrorism, or around drugs. It gave us a pretense for a humanitarian intervention. And what I would like to see is honest numbers. If it really did what it said it was doing, they should have no problem showing us all PEPFAR-related programs that were coordinated with DOD-all PEPFAR-related programs that coordinated with the U.S. State Department, with the Central Intelligence Agency, with the NGOs. If it’s really public-facing and it’s really saving babies-show us the baby. I want to see it. CENK UYGUR: I’ll bring the baby next time. Keep the healthcare, lose the CIA.

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