Biden to Zelensky: ‘Our $210 billion not enough…send 18 year olds to die in our Russian proxy war
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL, 2 Dec 24
In 34 months of Russian war in Ukraine provoked by US NATO expansion, the US has squandered $185 billion of our precious treasure to keep Ukraine men dying by hundreds of thousands in a lost US foreign misadventure.
But as President Biden heads for the White House exits, he’s demanding and will get another $25 billion from Congress, making the total cost pushing a quarter trillion dollars.
Not a single military or administration strategist believes that will make any difference in American’s unwinnable proxy war. Even Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan fessed up “Our view has been that there’s not one weapon system that makes a difference in this battle. It’s about manpower, and Ukraine needs to do more, in our view, to firm up its lines in terms of the number of forces it has on the front lines.”
Biden concurred and now demands Zelensky lower the draft age from 25 to 18. Zelensky lowered the draft age last April from 27 to 25, also at US, urging, but it has done nothing to stem the inexorable Russian advancement fueled by overwhelming manpower. Why? Upwards of 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers have deserted. They are voting against senseles war with their feet.
After squandering $185 billion of US treasure and a half million Ukrainian men, Biden wants more, more, more of both.
Biden could toss a trillion dollars and another half million young Ukrainian cannon fodder into the US proxy war without a prayer of victory on America’s terms.
But a worse fate awaits all of us. By allowing Ukraine to fire long range US missiles into Russia, Biden is risking nuclear war. If that occurs, all discussion about a squandered quarter trillion on weapons and another half million dead Ukrainian youth will be moot.
The Technology for Autonomous Weapons Exists. What Now?
The hypothetical escalation that could result relates to another kind of weapon of mass destruction: the nuclear weapon. Some countries interested in autonomy are the same ones that have atomic arsenals. If two nuclear states are in a conflict, and start using autonomous weapons, “it just takes one algorithmic error, or one miscommunication within the same military, to cause an escalating scenario,” said Hehir. And escalation could lead to nuclear catastrophe.
In the future, humans may not be the only arbiters of who lives and dies in war, as weapons gain decision-making power.
UNDARK, By Sarah Scoles, 11.26.2024
One bluebird day in 2021, employees of Fortem Technologies traveled to a flat piece of Utah desert. The land was a good spot to try the company’s new innovation: an attachment for the DroneHunter — which, as the name halfway implies, is a drone that hunts other drones.
As the experiment began, DroneHunter, a sleek black and white rotored aircraft 2 feet tall and with a wingspan as wide as a grown man is tall, started receiving radar data on the ground which indicated an airplane-shaped drone was in the air — one that, in a different circumstance, might carry ammunition meant to harm humans.
“DroneHunter, go hunting,” said an unsettling AI voice, in a video of the event posted on YouTube. Its rotors spun up, and the view lifted above the desiccated ground.
The radar system automatically tracked the target drone, and software directed its chase, no driver required. Within seconds, the two aircrafts faced each other head-on. A net shot out of DroneHunter, wrapping itself around its enemy like something from Spiderman. A connected parachute — the new piece of technology, designed to down bigger aircraft — ballooned from the end of the net, lowering its prey to Earth.
Target: defeated, with no human required outside of authorizing the hunt. “We found that, without exception, our customers want a human in that loop,” said Adam Robertson, co-founder and chief technology officer at Fortem, a drone-focused defense company based in Pleasant Grove, Utah.
While Fortem is still a relatively small company, its counter-drone technology is already in use on the battlefield in Ukraine, and it represents a species of system that the U.S. Department of Defense is investing in: small, relatively inexpensive systems that can act independently once a human gives the okay. The United States doesn’t currently use fully autonomous weapons, meaning ones that make their own decisions about human life and death.
With many users requiring involvement of a human operator, Fortem’s DroneHunter would not quite meet the International Committee of the Red Cross’s definition of autonomous weapon — “any weapons that select and apply force to targets without human intervention,” perhaps the closest to a standard explanation that exists in this still-loose field — but it’s one small step removed from that capability, although it doesn’t target humans.
How autonomous and semi-autonomous technology will operate in the future is up in the air, and the U.S. government will have to decide what limitations to place on its development and use. Those decisions may come sooner rather than later—as the technology advances, global conflicts continue to rage, and other countries are faced with similar choices—meaning that the incoming Trump administration may add to or change existing American policy. But experts say autonomous innovations have the potential to fundamentally change how war is waged: In the future, humans may not be the only arbiters of who lives and dies, with decisions instead in the hands of algorithms.
For some experts, that’s a net-positive: It could reduce casualties and soldiers’ stress. But others claim that it could instead result in more indiscriminate death, with no direct accountability, as well as escalating conflicts between nuclear-armed nations. Peter Asaro, spokesperson for an anti-autonomy advocacy organization called Stop Killer Robots and vice chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, worries about the innovations’ ultimate appearance on the battlefield. “How these systems actually wind up being used is not necessarily how they’re built,” he said.
Many American startups like Fortem aim to ultimately sell their technology to the U.S. Department of Defense because the U.S. has the best-funded military in the world — and so, ample money for contracts — and because it’s relatively simple to sell weapons to one’s own country, or to an ally. Selling their products to other nations does require some administrative work. For instance, in the case of the DroneHunters deployed in Ukraine, Fortem made an agreement with the country directly. The export of the technology, though, had to go through the U.S. Department of State, which is in charge of enforcing policies on what technology can be sold to whom abroad.
The company also markets the DroneHunter commercially — to, say, a cargo-ship operators who want to be safe in contested waters, or stadium owners who want to determine whether a drone flying near the big game belongs to a potential terrorist threat, or a kid who wants to take pictures.
Because Fortem’s technology doesn’t target people and maintains a human as part of the decision-making process, the ethical questions aren’t necessarily about life and death.
In a situation that involves humans, whether an autonomous weapon could accurately tell civilian from combatant, every time all the time, is still an open question. As is whether military leaders would program the weapons to act conservatively, and whether that programming would remain regardless of whose hands a weapon fell into.
A weapon’s makers, after all, aren’t always in control of their creation once it’s out in the world — something the Manhattan Project scientists, many of whom had reservations about the use of nuclear weapons after they developed the atomic bomb, learned the hard way.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. escalation could come from robots’ errors. Autonomous systems based on machine learning may develop false or misleading patterns.
…………………………………………………………………….The hypothetical escalation that could result relates to another kind of weapon of mass destruction: the nuclear weapon. Some countries interested in autonomy are the same ones that have atomic arsenals. If two nuclear states are in a conflict, and start using autonomous weapons, “it just takes one algorithmic error, or one miscommunication within the same military, to cause an escalating scenario,” said Hehir. And escalation could lead to nuclear catastrophe.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Hehir and the Future of Life Institute are working toward international agreements to regulate autonomous arms. The Future of Life Institute and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots have been lobbying and presenting to the U.N. Future of Life has, for instance, largely pushed for inclusion of autonomous weapons in the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons — an international agreement that entered into force in 1983 to restrict or ban particular kinds of weapons. But that path appears to have petered out. “This is a road to nowhere,” said Hehir. “No new international law has emerged from there for over 20 years.”
And so advocacy groups like hers have moved toward trying for an autonomy-specific treaty — like the ones that exist for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. This fall, that was a topic for the UN’s General Assembly.
Hehir and Future of Life aren’t advocating for a total ban on all autonomous weapons. “One arm will be prohibitions of the most unpredictable systems that target humans,” she said. “The other arm will be regulating those that can be used safely, with meaningful human control,” she said.
……………………………………… with the current lack of international regulation, nation-states are going ahead with their existing plans. And companies within their borders, like Fortem, are continuing to work on autonomous tech that may not be fully autonomous or lethal at the moment but could be in the future. …………………
Sarah Scoles is a science journalist based in Colorado, and a senior contributor to Undark. She is the author of “Making Contact,” “They Are Already Here,” and “Countdown: The Blinding Future of 21st Century Nuclear Weapons.” https://undark.org/2024/11/26/unleashed-autonomous-weapons/?utm_source=Undark%3A+News+%26+Updates&utm_campaign=c63b00e0ff-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5cee408d66-185e4e09de-176033209
White House Pressing Ukraine To Draft 18-Year-Olds for War
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently hinted that the US was pressuring Ukraine to expand conscription, saying Ukraine’s biggest problem in the war was the lack of manpower.
The pressure from the US comes as polling shows the majority of Ukrainians want peace talks to end the war,
by Dave DeCamp November 27, 2024 , https://news.antiwar.com/2024/11/27/white-house-pressing-ukraine-to-draft-18-year-olds-for-war/
The White House is pressuring Ukraine to increase the size of its military by lowering the minimum age of conscription from 25 to 18, The Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
A senior Biden administration official said the outgoing administration wants Ukraine to start drafting 18-year-olds to expand the current pool of fighting-age males. The pressure from the US comes as polling shows the majority of Ukrainians want peace talks with Russia to end the war.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently hinted that the US was pressuring Ukraine to expand conscription, saying Ukraine’s biggest problem in the war was the lack of manpower.
“Our view has been that there’s not one weapon system that makes a difference in this battle. It’s about manpower, and Ukraine needs to do more, in our view, to firm up its lines in terms of the number of forces it has on the front lines,” Sullivan said on PBS News Hour last week.
Last month, Serhiy Leshchenko, an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Ukraine was under pressure from US politicians to lower the conscription age. “American politicians from both parties are putting pressure on President Zelensky to explain why there is no mobilization of those aged 18 to 25 in Ukraine,” he said.
Zelensky signed a mobilization bill into law back in April that lowered the conscription age from 27 to 25. A few weeks before the mobilization bill became law, Zelensky received a visit from US Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who complained that not enough young Ukrainian med were being sent to the frontline.
“I would hope that those eligible to serve in the Ukrainian military would join. I can’t believe it’s at 27,” Graham said. “You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving — not at 25 or 27. We need more people in the line.”
The Biden administration’s push for Ukraine to draft younger men comes as it is doing everything it can to escalate the proxy war before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20. President Biden is seeking another $24 billion to spend on the conflict even though it’s clear there’s no path to a Ukrainian military victory.
Biden administration advancing $680m arms sale to Israel, source says
November 27, 2024, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241127-biden-administration-advancing-680m-arms-sale-to-israel-source-says/
The Biden administration is pushing ahead with a $680 million arms sales package to Israel, a US official familiar with the plan said on Wednesday, even as a US-brokered ceasefire in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah has come into effect, Reuters reports.
The package, which was first reported by the Financial Times, includes thousands of joint direct attack munition kits (JDAM) and hundreds of small-diameter bombs, according to the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The news comes less than a day after the ceasefire agreement ended the deadliest confrontation in years between Israel and the Hezbollah group, but Israel is still fighting its other arch foe, the Palestinian group, Hamas, in the Gaza Strip.
However, the package has been in the works for several months. It was first previewed to the congressional committees in September then submitted for review in October, the official said.
The package follows a $20 billion sale in August of fighter jets and other military equipment to Israel.
Reuters reported in June that Washington, Israel’s biggest ally and weapons supplier, has sent Israel more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs and thousands of Hellfire missiles since the start of the Gaza war in October 2023.
The conversations about the latest arms package had been going on even as a group of progressive US senators, including Bernie Sanders introduced resolutions to block the sale of some US weapons to Israel over concerns about the human rights catastrophe faced by Palestinians in Gaza.
The legislation was shot down in the Senate.
Biden, whose term ends in January, has strongly backed Israel since Hamas-led gunmen attacked in October 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.
Most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people has been displaced and the enclave is at risk of famine, more than a year into Israel’s war against Hamas in the Palestinian enclave. Gaza health officials say more than 43,922 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive.
The Antisemitism Awareness Act Is the Death Knell for Free Speech
Mike Whitney • November 21, 2024, The Unz Review
Freedom of speech is the principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins….Ben Franklin.
The Antisemitism Awareness Act is a wrecking ball designed to pulverize the First Amendment. While the alleged intention of the bill is to make Jewish students feel safer on campus, the real purpose is to put an end to the anti-genocide demonstrations that have broken out across the country and to prevent the criticism of Israel. The proposed bill invokes a dodgy legal mechanism to derail the protests and to silence Israel’s critics. By using a broad and ambiguous definition of antisemitism, the bill compels university administrators to crackdown on free speech invoking sketchy claims of discrimination. Political analyst Paul Craig Roberts summed it up like this: “if universities …don’t suppress student protests against Israel’s massacre of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon they will lose their accreditation and federal financial support.” In short, universities are being encouraged to quash the free expression of political ideas to preserve their federal funding. This helps to illustrate how Zionist lobbyists are now engaged in a full-throated assault on constitutionally protected civil liberties, namely free speech.
The bill—which already passed the House with a sizable majority—shows how the charge of antisemitism can be used as a coercive political tool to silence Israel’s critics. That is why civil liberties organizations—like the ACLU, PEN America, the Alliance Defending Freedom and even Jewish groups like Bend the Arc and T’ruah—strongly oppose the bill based on free speech grounds. Even so, this attack on constitutionally protected rights has a good chance of passing the senate due to the arm twisting of powerful interest groups that have their tentacles wrapped tightly around both houses of congress. Here’s a brief summary from political analyst Guy Christensen:
The House just passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act which will shut down college protests against Israel and silence all future criticism of the state of Israel. The law literally redefines antisemitism as criticizing the state of Israel and makes it a violation of Title 6 to do so. The purpose of this is to allow politicians to pull federal funding from colleges who don’t stop these college protests and let their students continue to criticize Israel.
We must speak out against the Antisemitism Awareness Act. This is insanity. These people are full-on Zionists trying to silence free speech here in America, trying to silence criticism of the oppression of the Palestinians, criticism of the state of Israel that murdered 14,000 children.
Like I said, the guy who wrote the bill, Mike Lawler, is funded by AIPAC $180,000 (he said to NBC News when talking about this bill.) When you hear “River to the sea, Palestine will be free” that is calling for the eradication of the Jews in the state of Israel. (They are) Literally trying to make it illegal to criticize Israel.
If you don’t know how Title 6 works, all federally funded programs and institutions must follow it or they won’t receive any more federal funding. This includes US colleges and K through 12 schools who are very strict about following Title 6 because they need that funding. They can’t go without it. So, if we let this become law, it would force US colleges to shut down all these protests immediately.
This contends for the most outrageous bill for Israel the government has ever tried to pass. I will not vote or say a kind word about any politician who voted in favor of this bill…. (your representative ) care more about Israel than they care about your free speech. What they are doing is incredibly dangerous. Zionists are scared because American public opinion is changing. Students across the country are protesting against Israel. You know they’re scared because this is one of the boldest things they’ve ever tried to do…..AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby is behind all of this. Ban AIPAC Stop the Antisemitism Awareness Act. We have to protect our free speech and our right to protest against evil. YourFavoriteGuy@guychristensen_
Not surprisingly, President Donald Trump—whose campaign was given $100 million by a strident Zionist donor—confirmed that he will aggressively implement the blatantly unconstitutional law by cancelling the funding of any college that tolerates the anti-genocide protests. He further stated that he will prosecute the universities for, what he calls, “violations of the civil rights law.” In other words, it is not the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians that have been killed by Israel who are the victims, but the Jewish university students who feel “unsafe.” (Note—Trump refers to the protestors views as “antisemitic propaganda”)…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………more https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/the-antisemitism-awareness-act-is-the-death-knell-for-free-speech/
Donald Trump’s quick trip to absolute dictatorship
November 27, 2024: The AIM Network. Noel Wauchope, https://theaimn.com/donald-trumps-quick-trip-to-absolute-dictatorship/
Comparisons are odious, particularly between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. I must be plain from the start, that these individuals have had completely different aims and ideology.
The comparisons I’m making here are just about methods of gaining absolute power. And here, I think, there are parallels. And we can learn, from Hitler, how Trump could well go about attaining dictatorship status – way faster than people realise.
Trump and Hitler do have this in common – a reckless ruthlessness about destroying institutions and crossing boundaries. And both had earlier associations with street violence – Hitler with his Brown Shirts, and the Beer Hall Putsch, and Trump, less obviously, with the Proud Boys and the Capitol attack on January 6th 2021.
Hitler became dictator by very quickly using legitimate political mechanisms, and Trump will be able to do the same.
Hitler, moving towards purging his movement of the Brown Shirts, gained much public support, and business interests saw him as a force to stop street violence, and a protector and support of property and business. Meanwhile, largely thanks to the genius of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda machine flourished, exploiting the latest technology, – radio, and aircraft – “Hitler over Germany”. By 1933 the German economy was recovering, and Hitler’s success in elections did in fact drop, but his National Socialist Party still held a third of the seats in the Reichstag.
Here’s where it got interesting, and it all took just 7 and a half weeks.
30 January 1933 – Hitler was appointed Chancellor. The role of the Chancellor, while being symbolically like the role of the British Prime Minister, was in fact, quite limited. The real power was in the President. President von Hindenburg, bowing to pressure, was persuaded that Hitler could indeed be controlled, by giving him the status of Chancellor.
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27 February 1933 – the German parliament (Reichstag) building burned down. Without going into the discussion on who caused the fire – it was the trigger for Hitler to persuade von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree – Emergency Decree for the Protection of the German People, on 28 February, declaring a state of emergency, and abolishing most civil liberties, including the rights to speak, assemble, protest, and due process.
23 March 1933, Hitler proposed the Enabling Law to the Reichstag. This new law, passed on 24 March, gave Chancellor Hitler the power to rule by decree rather than passing laws through the Reichstag and the President. He was now effectively the dictator.
We could go on from there – listing Hitler’s dictatorial actions – National Socialists the only party permitted, trade unions disbanded. Any autonomous states lost those powers – officials appointed as state governors – and much, much more.
July 1934 – Hitler becomes “Fuehrer” – the finishing touch. With the death of President von Hindenburg, Hitler abolishes the now powerless position of “President”.
What has all this got to do with Trump?
Admittedly, the burning down of the Reichstag was a key factor, and we’re not expecting Capitol Hill to burn down. But the thing is that Hitler was at least a super-opportunist, even if the Nazis did not purposely cause this event. If it hadn’t been this event, probably something else could be triggered for a “state of emergency”. So, it would also be very beneficial to Trump- and save a lot of time, if some suitable “event” were to justify Trump, (also a super-opportunist) to declare emergency powers.
In the meantime, Trump is already working on removing the powers of the Department of Justice, and has various avenues open for him to take quick executive action. The President can issue executive orders. There are checks and balances, but these rely on the Supreme Court, and the Congress. So, Trump, with a majority in Congress has freedom – ‘I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president’.
Trump’s plan for a radical reorganization of the executive branch starts with ending “the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.”
Trump will be very careful about which officials he appoints – due to constitutional “checks and balances”. He’d need to pick a compliant Acting Attorney General. The obstacles to be eliminated include an independent Justice Department, independent leadership in administrative agencies and an independent civil service. Trump’s plan would substitute loyalty to him for loyalty to the Constitution.” In 2020 Trump called for the “termination of … the Constitution.”
In the USA, theoretically, there are constraints on the President’s power. But, as in Germany in the 1930s, the leader has already arranged for the administration and every government department to be run by his sycophants.
Also, as in Hitler’s Germany, Trump has extraordinary influence over media, especially social media. Hitler had the brilliance of Goebbels to swamp the public with his lies and spin. Trump is almost one better – he does it all himself.
So – there are similarities between Hitler and Trump in the way to gain absolute power. There’s the opportunism, the clique of dedicated sycophants, the inspired exploitation of new technology, of new media, the reckless crossing of normal boundaries, and the background of violence, (with the potential for violence again).
The differences between them are striking. Hitler had a coherent almost mystical theory – involving war – to gain world domination for the master “Aryan” race, and to eliminate the Jews and other “Untermenschen”. To a large extent, Hitler’s close associates shared that dream, even if jostling for power between each other– Goebbels, Hess, Himmler, Goering, Speer, von Ribbentrop, Heydrich, Bormann. They more or less held to Hitler’s philosophy, and feared Hitler if they stepped out of line. Quite a few, though not all, stayed with Hitler until the very bitter end.
I can’t see Trump’s associates having that kind of dedication. From his previous presidency, there is a long list of former allies who turned against him.
Donald Trump seems to have no coherent theory or aim – other than to be super-powerful and rich, and take revenge on his opponents. He admires dictators, hates China, doesn’t like war, and fears nuclear bombs. If Trump has any philosophy at all, apart from him being at the top, it would be for a world economy dominated by American business. War is not Trump’s chosen method to win, but building up weaponry, and the threat of war – a sort of global bullying is his favoured method.
Trump’s top associates are currently dedicated to him – but are closely connected to billionaires, and not necessarily sharing philosophies. There’s Elon Musk, obsessed with the control of space, and the colonisation of Mars, John Bauer who devised the case for presidential absolute immunity from prosecution, Stephen Miller determinedly anti-immigrant, Fox News employee Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sceptic of public health, Dave Weldon, anti-abortion doctor. What they do seem to have in common is big egos, and rather questionable qualifications for the jobs that they’ll be getting.
So, unlike Hitler, Trump doesn’t seem to have a team dedicated to a single-minded cause. In the short run, things might look good for the new Republican administration, and even for the American public. Dictatorships can do that, for a bit – as the workers found, in the early years of the Hitler administration, and of the Mussolini one in Italy. But it’s anybody’s guess how the new Trump dictatorship will finally work out.
What Project 2025 Would Do to the Environment – and How We Will Respond
The policy playbook from the Heritage Foundation would strip away our rights to clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet.
By Earthjustice November 12, 2024, https://earthjustice.org/article/what-project-2025-would-do-to-the-environment-and-how-we-will-respond
When Donald Trump takes office for the second time in January, we expect his administration to dramatically dismantle environmental protections. We see the shape of what’s coming not just from battling his first administration, but because of the blueprint laid out in Project 2025.
Project 2025 is 900 pages, and 150 of them are about how to destroy the environment. This deregulatory agenda, written by former Trump government officials and Heritage Foundation staff, would strip away our rights to clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet.
Earthjustice is built for moments like this. We’re the legal arm of the environmental movement, with more than 200 attorneys wielding the power of the law to defend the planet and its people. We filed more lawsuits on behalf of clients against the last Trump administration to protect the environment than any other organization – and we won 85% of our cases.
We’ve shown that we can take on the Trump administration’s worst ideas and win.
We’ve studied the proposed tactics in Project 2025, including undermining government staff who are charged with safeguarding health and environmental protections. We are prepared to defend the environment and communities from what comes next, no matter how long it takes. Here are some of the Project 2025 recommendations we’re most concerned about:
Taking a hatchet to bedrock environmental laws
What Project 2025 says:
- Gut the Endangered Species Act (ESA): Project 2025 would rewrite the most successful legal tool we have for protecting wildlife in ways that would harm imperiled species. It specifically calls for removing protections from gray wolves and Yellowstone grizzlies.
- No need for national monuments: Another proposal would repeal the Antiquities Act, which would strip the president of the ability to protect priceless public lands and waters as national monuments.
- Weaken the Clean Air Act: Project 2025 would nix the part of the law that requires the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set health-based air quality standards.
- Less say for communities in environmental decisions: The plan would undermine key portions of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which ensures you have a voice in major projects built near you.
Why we’re prepared:
- Defending endangered species: The Trump administration went after both Yellowstone grizzlies and the Endangered Species Act itself. Both times, Earthjustice went straight to court. One of our cases spared the grizzlies from planned trophy hunts, and the Biden administration subsequently reversed some damaging changes to the ESA.
- Defending national monuments: When the Trump administration gutted Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, Earthjustice immediately sued. Protections for the monuments have now been restored. We also helped defend the monuments from a later legal challenge by the state of Utah that attacked the Antiquities Act itself.
- Defending NEPA: This summer, when 21 state attorneys-general sued to block important updates to NEPA, we intervened to fight back. The updates will ensure that critical infrastructure needed for the clean energy transition is built quickly and equitably and is resilient to climate change.
More mining and fossil fuel development on public lands
What Project 2025 says:
- Prioritize oil and gas: Project 2025 tells the agencies that manage federal lands and waters to maximize corporate oil and gas extraction. It calls for approving more pipelines like Keystone XL and Dakota Access.
- Willow? Make it bigger: The agenda explicitly aims to expand the Willow Project, which is already the largest proposed oil and gas undertaking on U.S. public lands.
- Target iconic landscapes: The project also calls for drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and mining in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness, among other irreplaceable natural treasure
Why we’re prepared:
- Fighting on all fronts: Under the Trump administration, Earthjustice challenged an aggressive extractive agenda at every turn. Our victories included winning protections for 128 million acres of ocean and hundreds of thousands of acres of sage-grouse habitat threatened by oil and gas development.
- We’ve defended many of the places Project 2025 targets:
- We have been defending the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from fossil fuel development since the 1980s, and we celebrated last year when the government canceled a set of illegal oil leases
- Our litigation and advocacy has helped secure a 20-year mining ban in the Boundary Waters.
- Currently, we are fighting the Willow Project in court.
- Undermining science and the regulation of toxic chemicals
- What Project 2025 says:
- Trust the chemical companies: Project 2025 tells the EPA to be more open to industry science and to stop funding major research into toxic chemical exposure.
- Make it harder to regulate chemicals: The plan calls for the EPA to meet an absurdly high standard of proof that a chemical is hazardous before deciding to regulate it. This would give chemical companies greater freedom to put toxic substances into our air, water, and products.
- Forever chemicals are fine: Project 2025 would walk back the determination that PFAS — the “forever chemicals” linked to reproductive harms, developmental delays, and increased risk of cancer — are a hazardous substance.
Why we’re prepared:
- Fighting for the full use of the law: The government has the authority to protect us from harmful chemicals under a critical law called the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA. Earthjustice is fighting to force the Biden administration to use this law more effectively.
- Pushing for transparency: When the Trump administration EPA understated the risks of deadly chemicals, Earthjustice sued under TSCA.
- Taking on PFAS: Earthjustice has fought for an array of protections against PFAS. We have helped protect communities from PFAS incineration, defended the public’s right to know about PFAS releases, pushed for stronger state laws regulating PFAS in water, and more.
Ending government efforts to address the climate crisis
What Project 2025 says:
- The plan’s authors are climate skeptics: The document refers pointedly to “the perceived threat of climate change.”
- Climate solutions? Don’t need ‘em: Project 2025 calls for undoing many of the clean energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate solutions bill in history. It also supports Congressional efforts to repeal the law entirely.
- Shut down climate research: The plan would get rid of more than a dozen government offices and agencies that study climate change.
Why we’re prepared:
- Confronting government with climate reality: We have fought every administration in recent decades to include climate change impacts in various decisions. Earlier this century, we joined in a suit that became a landmark Supreme Court ruling, Massachusetts v. EPA, which found that carbon emissions are air pollutants and consequently the EPA must set limits on such pollution. We will defend the necessity to combat climate change — but further delays will hurt us all. An analysis from Energy Innovation found that enacting Project 2025 would increase carbon emissions by 2.7 billion tons by 2030 — equivalent to the annual emissions of India. These policies would cost households $32 billion in higher energy costs, result in 1.7 million lost jobs, and decrease the U.S. GDP $320 billion per year by 2030.
- Fighting for science: Earthjustice has previously defended the critical role of scientific experts within the government. In 2020, we won a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s illegal decision to remove independent science advisors from the EPA.
Eliminating environmental justice programs
What Project 2025 says:
- Environmental justice is not the government’s problem: Project 2025 questions whether the government should address the ways that communities of color and low-income communities are disproportionately exposed to dangerous pollution.
- Get rid of staff who work on these issues: The plan calls for disbanding offices with the Department of Justice and the EPA that focus on environmental justice.
Why we’re prepared:
- An environmental justice first: In 2021, after years of pushing by Earthjustice and our partners, the Justice Department opened its first-ever environmental justice investigation, looking into whether an Alabama county was managing sewage in a way that disproportionately harmed Black communities.
- Raising our voice: We helped advocate for billions of dollars of funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to go to the communities that need it most.
What You Can Do
- Take action: Join Earthjustice to fight back against Project 2025
From Genocide Joe to Omnicide Joe
Instead of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to adopt a U.S. policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, two years ago Biden signed off on the Nuclear Posture Review policy document that explicitly declares the opposite. Last year, under the euphemism of “modernization,” the U.S. government spent $51 billion — more than every other nuclear-armed country combined — updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come.
the Biden administration has said it did not want to cross its own red lines—and then has repeatedly proceeded to do so.
Biden’s recent green light for Ukraine to launch longer-range missiles into Russia is another jump toward nuclear warfare.
Norman Solomon 25 Nov 24, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/genocide-joe
Whether heralded or reviled, Biden’s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.
President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Biden’s crucial role earned him the name “Genocide Joe.”
That nickname might seem shrill, but it’s valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticks—and candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.
Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: “Omnicide Joe.”
In contrast to the Genocide Joe sobriquet, which events have already proven apt, Omnicide Joe is a bit anticipatory. That’s inevitable, because if the cascading effects of his foreign policy end up as key factors in nuclear annihilation, historians will not be around to assess his culpability for omnicide—defined as “the destruction of all life or all human life.”
That definition scarcely overstates what scientists tell us would result from an exchange of nuclear weapons. Researchers have discovered that “nuclear winter” would quickly set in across the globe, blotting out sunlight and wiping out agriculture, with a human survival rate of perhaps 1 or 2 percent.
With everything—literally everything—at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president’s to-do list. But that hardly has been the case with Joe Biden since he first pulled up a chair at the Oval Office desk.
In fact, Biden has done a lot during the first years of this decade to inflame the realistic fears of nuclear war. His immediate predecessor Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of two vital treaties — Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies — and Biden did nothing to reinstate them. Likewise, Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration, and Biden let it stay dead.
Instead of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to adopt a U.S. policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, two years ago Biden signed off on the Nuclear Posture Review policy document that explicitly declares the opposite. Last year, under the euphemism of “modernization,” the U.S. government spent $51 billion — more than every other nuclear-armed country combined — updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come.
Before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Biden showed a distinct lack of interest in actual diplomacy to prevent the war or to end it. Three days before the invasion, writing in the Financial Times, Jeffrey Sachs pointed out: “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized—NATO enlargement—there has been no American diplomacy at all. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”
While Russia’s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin’s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington’s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace—or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.
From the outset, Biden scarcely acknowledged that the survival of humanity was put at higher risk by the Ukraine war. In his first State of the Union speech, a week after the invasion, Biden devoted much of his oratory to the Ukraine conflict without saying a word about the heightened danger that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.
During the next three months, the White House posted more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine. They all shared with his State of the Union address a stunning characteristic — the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers—even though many experts gauged those dangers as being the worst they’d been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
With occasional muted references to not wanting a U.S. military clash with nuclear-armed Russia, during the last 33 months the Biden administration has said it did not want to cross its own red lines—and then has repeatedly proceeded to do so.
A week ago superhawk John Bolton, a former national security advisor to President Trump, summarized the process on CNN while bemoaning that Biden’s reckless escalation hasn’t been even more reckless: “It’s been one long public debate after another, going back to ‘Shall we supply ATACMS [ballistic missiles] to the Ukrainians at all?’ First it’s no, then there’s a debate, then there’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians Abrams tanks?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, then it’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians with F-16s?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, and it’s yes. Now, ‘Can we allow the Ukrainians to use ATACMS inside Russia?’ After a long debate, now it’s yes.”
Whether heralded or reviled, Biden’s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.
Biden’s recent green light for Ukraine to launch longer-range missiles into Russia is another jump toward nuclear warfare. As a Quincy Institute analyst wrote, “the stakes, and escalatory risks, have steadily crept up.” In an ominous direction, “this needlessly escalatory step has put Russia and NATO one step closer to a direct confrontation—the window to avert catastrophic miscalculation is now that much narrower.”
Like Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as the Democratic and Republican phalanx of Ukraine war cheerleaders on Capitol Hill, Bolton doesn’t mention that recent polling shows strong support among Ukrainian people for negotiations to put a stop to the war. “An average of 52 percent of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible,” Gallup reported last week, compared to only 38 percent who say “their country should keep fighting until victory.”
Biden and other war boosters have continued to scorn, as capitulation and accommodation to aggression, what so much of the Ukrainian population now says it wants—a negotiated settlement. Instead, top administration officials and laptop-warrior pundits in the press corps are eager to tout their own mettle by insisting that Ukrainians and Russians must keep killing and dying.
Elites in Washington continue to posture as courageous defenders of freedom with military escalation in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have already died. Meanwhile, dangers of nuclear war increase.
Last week, Putin “lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks,” Reuters reported, “and Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles…. Russia had been warning the West for months that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire U.S., British and French missiles deep into Russia, Moscow would consider those NATO members to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine.”
For President Biden, the verdict of Genocide Joe is already in. But if, despite pleas for sanity, he turns out to fully deserve the name Omnicide Joe, none of us will be around to read about it.
Ironic Dependency: Russian Uranium and the US Energy Market
November 27, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.com/ironic-dependency-russian-uranium-and-the-us-energy-market/
Be careful who you condemn and ostracise. They just might be supplying you with a special need. While the United States security establishment deems Russia the devil incarnate helped along by aspiring, mischief–making China, that devil continues supplying the US energy market with enriched uranium.
This dependency has irked the self-sufficiency patriots in Washington, especially those keen to break Russia’s firm hold in this field. That, more than any bleeding-heart sentimentality for Ukrainian suffering at the hands of the Russian Army, has taken precedence. For that reason, US lawmakers sought a ban on Russian uranium that would come into effect by January 1, 2028, by which time domestic uranium enrichment and conversion is meant to have reached sustainable levels.
The May 2024 Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act, signed by President Joe Biden as law H.R.1042, specifically bans unirradiated low-enriched uranium produced in Russia or by any Russian entity from being imported into the US. It also bars the importation of unirradiated low-enriched uranium that has been swapped for the banned uranium or otherwise obtained in circumstances designed to bypass the restrictions.
At the time, Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm struck a note of hollering triumphalism. “Our nation’s clean energy future will not rely on Russian imports,” she declared. “We are making investments to build out a secure nuclear fuel supply chain here in the United States. That means American jobs supporting the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to a clean, safe, and secure energy economy.”
This does not get away from current circumstances, which see Russia’s provision of some 27% of enrichment service purchases for US utilities. The Russian state-owned company Rosatom is alone responsible for arranging imports of low-enriched uranium into the US market at some 3 million SWU (Separative Work Units) annually. Alexander Uranov, who heads the Russian analytical service Atominfo Center, puts this figure into perspective: that amount would be the equivalent of the annual uranium consumption rate of 20 large reactors.
Given this reliance, some legroom has been given to those in the industry by means of import waivers. H.R.1042 grants the Department of Energy the power to waive the ban in cases where there is no alternative viable source of low-enriched uranium available to enable the continued operation of a nuclear reactor or US nuclear energy company and in cases where importing the uranium would be in the national interest.
The utility Constellation, which is the largest operator of US nuclear reactors, along with the US enrichment trader, Centrus, have received waivers. The latter also has on its book of supply, the Russian state-owned company Tenex, its largest provider of low-enriched uranium as part of a 2011 contract.
No doubt knowing such a state of play, Moscow announced this month that it would temporarily ban the export of low-enriched uranium to the US as an amendment to Government Decree No 313 (March 9, 2022). The decree covers imports “to the United States or under foreign trade contracts concluded with persons registered in the jurisdiction of the United States.”
According to the Russian government, such a decision was made “on the instructions of the President in response to the restriction imposed by the United States for 2024-2027, and from 2028 – a ban on the import of Russian uranium products.” Vladimir Putin had accordingly given instructions in September “to analyse the possibility of restricting supplies to foreign markets of strategic raw materials.” The Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom confirmed that the ban was a “tit-for-tat response to actions of the US authorities” and would not affect the delivery of Russian uranium to other countries.
In a Russian government post on Telegram, the ban is qualified. To make matters less severe, there will be, for instance, one-time licenses issued by the Russian Federal Service for Technical and Export Control. This is of cold comfort to the likes of Centrus, given that most of its revenue is derived from importing the enriched uranium before then reselling it. On being notified by Tenex that its general license to export the uranium to the US had been rescinded, the scramble was on to seek a specific export license for remaining shipments in 2024 and those scheduled to take place in 2025.
In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Centrus warned that any failure by Tenex “to secure export licences for our pending or future orders […] would affect our ability to meet our delivery obligations to our customers and would have a material adverse effect on our business, results in operations, and competitive position.” While Tenex had contacted Centrus of its plans to secure the required export licenses in a timely manner, a sense of pessimism was hard to dispel as “there is no certainty whether such licenses will be issued by the Russian authorities and if issued, whether they will be issued in a timely manner.” The sheer, sweet irony of it all.
Project 2025 calls for massive changes to Hanford nuclear cleanup
Project 2025 calls on the EPA to be an ally of DOE against the state, instead of being an independent regulator.
the bulk of Project 2025 was written by former Trump officials and allies.
Project 2025 sees reclassifying high-level wastes into low-activity wastes
The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint proposes reclassifying radioactive waste as something less dangerous so it can be disposed of more cheaply.
John Stang, November 20, 2024,
https://www.cascadepbs.org/politics/2024/11/project-2025-calls-massive-changes-hanford-nuclear-cleanup
ill the next presidential administration tinker with the Hanford nuclear reservation’s complicated cleanup of radioactive wastes?
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative blueprint for the future, offers some strong hints that cleanup plans for the nation’s most polluted nuclear site might change with or without the approval of the Washington Department of Ecology.
One Project 2025 idea recommends reclassifying highly radioactive wastes into something less dangerous so cheaper methods can be used to dispose of them. Another proposal is to speed up the cleanup by rerouting money to Hanford from a couple of huge Biden-era appropriations for jobs and infrastructure programs elsewhere. The third Hanford-related idea in Project 2025 posits that the state of Washington and the legally negotiated cleanup deadlines and standards are obstacles to completing the cleanup faster.
Gov. Jay Inslee’s office, the Washington Attorney General’s Office and the state Ecology Department all declined to comment on Project 2025’s plans for Hanford. However, Attorney General and Gov.-elect Bob Ferguson and Attorney General-elect Nick Brown recently held a press conference to announce the AG’s office and have spent months reviewing Project 2025 in preparation for possible litigation with the Trump administration. Ferguson and Brown said the ball is in the Trump administration’s court on whether it will provoke legal battles with Washington.
As attorney general, Ferguson — frequently with other attorneys general — filed several dozen lawsuits against the first Trump administration, losing only two or three. “No one has a record like that except Perry Mason,” Inslee said at a Nov. 6 press conference.
Arguably the most radioactively and chemically contaminated spot in the Western Hemisphere, the Hanford nuclear reservation’s cleanup is governed by a 35-year-old legal agreement called the Tri-Party Agreement. The state of Washington and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have repeatedly used this contract to force a sometimes foot-dragging U.S. Department of Energy to meet its legal standards and schedule to clean up the highly radioactive site.
But Project 2025 says the Washington government poses significant legal and political obstacles to cleaning up Hanford.
“Some states (and contractors) see [nuclear cleanup] as a jobs program and have little interest in accelerating the cleanup. [DOE’s nuclear cleanup program] needs to move to an expeditious program with targets for cleanup of sites. The Hanford site in Washington state is a particular challenge. The Tri-Party Agreement among DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Washington State’s Department of Ecology has hampered attempts to accelerate and innovate the cleanup,” the 900-page Project 2025 document says. Nuclear cleanup is addressed on pages 394-396.
Project 2025 continues: “Hanford poses significant political and legal challenges with the State of Washington, and DOE will have to work with Congress to make progress in accelerating cleanup at that site. DOE and EPA need to work more closely to coordinate their responses to claims made under the TPA and work more aggressively for changes, including congressional action if necessary, to achieve workable cleanup goals.”
In other words, Project 2025 calls on the EPA to be an ally of DOE against the state, instead of being an independent regulator.
In reality, Washington has been the greatest force to push the federal government to stick to its legal schedules and meet agreed-upon cleanup standards. Hanford has had problems over the past three decades with keeping to the schedules and getting its engineering up to snuff to prevent future breakdowns.
The Project 2025 document does not elaborate on why it believes Washington’s Ecology Department is a hindrance. Washington’s congressional delegation has strongly supported the state and the Tri-Party Agreement on Hanford cleanup issues.
Project 2025 is a detailed master plan put together by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation on how the Trump administration should govern. Much of it is highly controversial, focused on issues like immigration and crime. Presidential campaigner Donald Trump claimed he was unfamiliar with it. However, the bulk of Project 2025 was written by former Trump officials and allies.
Vice President-elect JD Vance wrote the foreword for another book authored by Project 2025’s leader Kevin Roberts, titled “Dawn’s Early Light.” The New York Times wrote that Vance’s foreword said the Heritage Foundation has been “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” Roberts wrote the foreword to the Project 2025 document. The New York Times recently wrote that Roberts plans to meet soon with Trump.
On Saturday, Trump named Chris Wright, CEO of Denver-based fracking company Liberty Energy, as his Secretary of Energy nominee. Wright is a major opponent of fighting climate change. For his first term, Trump’s selection for Energy was Rick Perry, who had called for abolishing the DOE when he ran for president, and was unaware that he would be in charge of cleaning up radioactive nuclear sites when he became energy secretary. Trump recently selected former New York congressman Lee Zeldin as the EPA’s head administrator. As a congressman, Zeldin boosted cleanup of Long Island Sound and wanted the United States to leave the Paris climate accords. But his environmental resume is thin beyond that.
The U.S. government set up Hanford in 1943 to create plutonium for the nation’s atomic bombs, including those exploded in New Mexico and over Nagasaki in 1945. That development work created many billions of gallons of chemical and radioactive wastes, the worst 56 million gallons of which were pumped into 177 underground tanks. About a third of those tanks leak. At least a million gallons of radioactive liquid has leaked into the ground, seeping into the aquifer 200 feet below and into the Columbia River, roughly seven miles away.
In 1989, the Washington Department of Ecology, DOE and the EPA signed the Tri-Party Agreement to govern Hanford’s cleanup with the state and EPA as the regulators enforcing that contract. The agreement has been modified many times. It originally called for Hanford to begin converting the underground tank wastes into glass in 2009 and finish by 2019. After several delays due to budget and technical problems, glassification is scheduled to begin in August 2025. The glassification project’s budget has grown from $4 billion to $17 billion, and is expected to expand to more than $30 billion. Legally, glassification is supposed to be finished by 2052, although future negotiations may push that back.
While the tank wastes are Hanford’s biggest program, the site has numerous other contamination problems. The entire 584-square-mile site is supposed to be cleaned up by 2091.
In 2020, DOE, the EPA and the state began four years of secret negotiations to revise the Tri-Party Agreement. Last April, the three parties unveiled tentative revisions. The three now are reviewing public comments on those proposed revisions before taking the changes to a federal judge for approval.
Those changes would not set a new completion date for glassifying the tank wastes, which is likely to be part of another negotiation. Right now, DOE expects glassification to be done by 2069, which is 17 years beyond the current legal deadline, according to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office.
Project 2025 calls for finishing all of Hanford’s cleanup by 2060. It recommends a massive study and remapping of the cleanup of Hanford and other nuclear sites across the nation. DOE has done this type of review a few times over the past 30 years, usually when a new presidential administration comes on board.
Hanford’s 56 million gallons of tank wastes consist of highly radioactive wastes and lesser radioactive wastes (dubbed “low-activity wastes”) mixed together in many of the same tanks. Hanford’s high-level wastes amount to 5 million to 6 million gallons. The Tri-Party Agreement calls for two plants to be built for dealing with low-activity wastes and a third to be built for handling high-level wastes. So far, one low-activity waste plant has been built.
That low-activity waste plant is scheduled to begin glassification in August 2025. A plant to separate high-level wastes from low-activity wastes along with the facility to glassify the high-level wastes are expected to be ready in the 2030s. These plans are all part of the current Tri-Party Agreement, with the revisions also calling for a newer approach for handling the radioactive waste: turning it into a cement-like substance called grout.
Grouting is easier and cheaper than glassification, but has not been extensively tested with Hanford’s chemically complex tank wastes. The grout must be shipped off-site, likely to disposal sites in either Utah or Texas. DOE and the state are still figuring out what type of grouting technology to use. Part of this agreed-upon new approach would reclassify any high-level wastes in 22 tanks aimed toward grouting into low-activity wastes.
Project 2025 sees reclassifying high-level wastes into low-activity wastes as a major step toward speeding up cleanup, although it does not address whether DOE should be able to reclassify wastes beyond the 22 tanks.
“A central challenge at Hanford is the classification of radioactive waste. High-Level Waste (HLW) and Low-Level Waste (LLW) classifications drive the remediation and disposal process. Under President Trump, significant changes in waste classification from HLW to LLW enabled significant progress on remediation. Implementation needs to continue across the complex, particularly at Hanford,” the Project 2025 document said.
Still unknown is whether the state — which has been skeptical about widespread use of grout — would go along with grouting high-level wastes beyond those 22 tanks. One indication of the Ecology Department’s reluctance is that the high-level waste glassification plant and the waste separation facility have been kept in the proposed Tri-Party Agreement revisions.
Meanwhile, Project 2025 calls for appropriating more money toward Hanford’s cleanup. However, that money would be taken from projects nationwide covered by 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act and 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
The Infrastructure Investment Act provides money for federal highways, transit, research, hazardous materials work, broadband access, clean water projects and improving electric grids.
The Inflation Reduction Act covers greatly reduced insulin costs, a huge number of climate change-related projects including reducing greenhouse emissions, drought-related measures for the western states, boosting subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, supporting vaccine coverage, increasing tax enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service, and paying for new energy projects.
Biden seeking extra $24bn for Kiev – Politico
https://www.rt.com/news/608270-biden-ukraine-aid-politico/ 27 Nov 24
The “long-shot” funding request was reportedly sent to Congress on Monday
Outgoing US President Joe Biden has quietly asked Congress to allocate an additional $24 billion in Ukraine-related spending, according to a report by Politico on Tuesday.
The funding pitch includes $16 billion to backfill US stocks depleted by deliveries of weapons to Kiev and $8 billion to pay US arms producers for contracts in support of the Ukrainian military, the news outlet said, calling Biden’s bid a “long shot”.
The report is based on a document produced by the White House Office of Management and Budget, which was sent to lawmakers on Monday, according to Politico’s sources on Capitol Hill.
The Biden administration previously vowed to spend every dollar already approved for Ukraine before the president leaves office on January 20. Last week, he also wrote off some $4.7 billion in forgivable loans given to Kiev. The money was part of a tranche approved by Congress in April, with $9.4 billion provided as a “loan” to appease lawmakers, who opposed continued funding of the Ukraine conflict.
President-elect Donald Trump claimed during the election campaign that he would end the Ukraine conflict in 24 hours if voters grant him a new term in office. Some of his allies have accused the “lame duck” Biden of trying to corner the next administration into a continued conflict with Russia.
Republican Senator Mike Lee reacted negatively to the new funding request from the White House, especially as it came days after Biden’s unilateral move on the loan.
”Congress must not give him a free gift to further sabotage President Trump’s peace negotiations on the way out the door. Any Biden funding demands should be DOA,” he wrote on X.
Elon Musk, a key Trump supporter, who will lead an effort to reduce government waste in the incoming administration, has called the request “not ok” and said the money would be “funding the forever war,” if lawmakers authorize the spending.
Trump’s Cabinet Picks Aren’t Looking Good For Peace In Ukraine
Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 25, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/trumps-cabinet-picks-arent-looking?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=152120142&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Conventional wisdom about the outgoing Biden administration’s reckless escalations in Ukraine these past few days is that things will cool down once Donald Trump takes office, but Trump’s cabinet picks aren’t really selling this idea.
While Trump did campaign on ending the war in Ukraine, the president elect has given multiple cabinet appointments to strategists who say that the way to achieve that peace is to substantially escalate aggressions against Russia. Michael Tracey has been doing a great job compiling footage of Trump’s recent cabinet picks advocating extreme measures which happen to be in perfect alignment with the nuclear brinkmanship of the demented outgoing president and his handlers.
Sebastian Gorka, who Trump has named as his next senior director for counterterrorism, is on record saying that Trump has told him he plans on saying to Putin, “You will negotiate now or the aid that we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts.”
Mike Waltz, who Trump has selected as his next national security advisor, promotes a similar vision. Waltz says Russia can be pressured to come to the negotiating table via increased energy sanctions combined with “taking the handcuffs off of the long-range weapons we provided Ukraine.” Biden has since removed those very “handcuffs” by authorizing Kyiv to use US-supplied long-range missiles to attack Russia.
If it seems like these remarks from Trump’s incoming administration work very nicely with the actions of the outgoing administration, then you may find it interesting that Waltz just told Fox News Sunday that the two administrations are working “hand in glove” as the presidency changes over.
“Jake Sullivan and I have had discussions, we’ve met,” Waltz said. “For our adversaries out there that think this is a time of opportunity, that they can play one administration off the other — they are wrong. We are hand in glove. We are one team with the United States in this transition.”
This would seem to be an oblique reference to Russia specifically, since that’s the only US adversary with any hope that the incoming administration might be a bit less hawkish toward it than the outgoing one, and since years of mass media coverage went into spinning narratives about Trump being a pawn of Vladimir Putin.
But Trump was never a pawn of Vladimir Putin. Contrary to the narratives of both Democrat-aligned punditry and Republican-aligned punditry while he was in office, Trump spent his entire term ramping up cold war aggressions against Russia which helped pave the way to the war and brinkmanship we are seeing in Ukraine today. Tracey recently shared an audio clip of Gorka on X Spaces back in January 2023 exuberantly boasting about the way Trump ordered the US military to kill hundreds of Russian mercenaries in Syria in 2018. Putin himself cited the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty in 2019 when defending his decision to hit Ukraine with a new type of intermediate-range missile the other day in response to its use of US- and UK-supplied long-range missiles to strike inside Russia.
Other cabinet appointments who have taken extremely hawkish positions on Russia include secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio, secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth, CIA director nominee John Ratcliffe, and National Security Council appointee Doug Burgum. But it’s those comments from Waltz and Gorka which I find most concerning, because they explicitly refer to escalatory strategies that Trump might employ once he takes office.
This all comes out as we get news that US and European officials recently discussed providing nuclear weapons to Ukraine under the gamble that Putin will not escalate against the west before Trump takes office. The more aligned the Trump administration’s posture toward Russia appears to be with that of the Biden administration, the less safe a gamble this appears to be.
It seems likely that the Trump administration will end the Ukraine proxy war at some point down the road in order to reallocate those resources toward preparation for war with Iran and/or China. But it is not at all clear that this will happen soon enough before soaring escalations spin out of control into the single worst-case scenario that could possibly unfold on this planet.
Christian Nationalism Marches on With ‘Bible-Infused’ Texas Curriculum
“What we’re seeing here in Texas with these lessons is a larger national push to promote the idea that American identity and Christian identity are woven together, are one in the same,” said one professor.
Jessica Corbett, Nov 22, 2024, Common Dreams
Parents, teachers, and other critics of Christian nationalism were outraged by a Texas board’s Friday vote to approve a “Bible-infused” curriculum for elementary school students—part of a broader right-wing push to force Christianity into public education.
“They chose politics over what’s best for students, promoting an evangelical Christian religious perspective and undermining the freedom of families to direct the religious education of their own children,” declared the Texas Freedom Network, accusing the State Board of Education (SBOE) of ignoring warnings from religious studies experts, national media attention, and overwhelming negative feedback from the people they’re elected to serve.”
Like a preliminary vote Tuesday, eight of the SBOE’s 15 members voted to approve Bluebonnet Learning, instructional materials proposed by the Texas Education Agency. Three Republicans joined all four Democrats in opposing the curriculum. The deciding vote in favor of it was cast by Leslie Recine, a Republican recently appointed by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to temporarily fill a vacant seat.
“In a state as diverse as Texas, home to millions of people from countless faiths and beliefs, the Texas Republicans on the State Board of Education voted to incorporate Biblical teachings into the state curriculum—completely undermining religious freedom,” said Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa in a statement after the final vote.
“This move has ultimately violated parents’ rights to guide their children’s faith while presenting teachers with additional needless challenges,” Hinojosa argued. “Our public schools should be focused on equipping students with the education and skills they need to succeed beyond grade school whether it’s pursuing a higher education or entering the workforce. The teaching of religious doctrine should stay in our places of worship where it belongs.”
Although the curriculum isn’t required, The Texas Tribunereported, “the state will offer an incentive of $60 per student to districts that adopt the lessons, which could appeal to some as schools struggle financially after several years without a significant raise in state funding.”
“Christian nationalists have bought their way into every governing body of the state, including the SBOE. And they will not stop with inserting Biblical content in English textbooks.”
Bluebonnet Learning features lessons from Christianity in reading and language arts materials for kindergarten through fifth grade………………………
Zeph Capo, president of the Texas arm of the American Federation of Teachers, urged districts “to resist the dollars dangled before them and refuse to use Bluebonnet Learning materials,” arguing that they violate the code of ethics for the state’s educators and “the separation of church and state by infusing lessons with Bible-based references more appropriate for Sunday Schools than public schools.”…………………………………………………………………….
Noting the current “moment of profound political division,” the union leader added that the vote “is the latest evidence that Christian nationalists have bought their way into every governing body of the state, including the SBOE. And they will not stop with inserting Biblical content in English textbooks. We can anticipate what will come next, whether that’s the erasure of contributions of marginalized populations in social studies or the minimalization of climate change in science.
The curriculum push coincides with an SBOE effort to restrict library materials. The ACLU of Texas said on social media that “the same politicians censoring what students can read now want to impose state-sponsored religion onto our public schools.”
The Tribunereported Thursday that “10 members on the board responsible for determining what Texas’ 5.5 million public schoolchildren learn in the classroom voted to call on the Texas Legislature, which convenes in January, to pass a state law granting them authority to determine what books are appropriate for school-age children.
Earlier this week, Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, toldFox 4 that he supports teaching religion in public schools, but in a fair and unbiased way, and he doesn’t agree with the state proposal…………………………………………………………..
At the federal level, Trump—who is set to return to the White House in January—has advocated for dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. For now, he has named Linda McMahon, a former wrestling executive accused of enabling sexual abuse of children, as his pick for education secretary. https://www.commondreams.org/news/christianity-in-schools?utm_source=Common+Dreams&utm_campaign=08cb74510b-Weekend+Edition%3A+Sun.+11%2F24%2F24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-3b949b3e19-600558179
Inside Project Esther, the right wing action plan to take down the Palestine movement
The Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther” claims to combat antisemitism but in fact, aims to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement as a first step in a crusade against all domestic dissent in the U.S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPar-qf5FwY
By Mitchell Plitnick November 22, 2024 , https://mondoweiss.net/2024/11/inside-project-esther-the-right-wing-action-plan-to-take-down-the-palestine-movement/?ml_recipient=138796694236038510&ml_link=138796674607744710&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-11-23&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy. He is the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. Mitchell’s previous positions include vice president at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Director of the US Office of B’Tselem, and Co-Director of Jewish Voice for Peace. You can find him on Twitter @MJPlitnick.
The Heritage Foundation got a lot of publicity during this election cycle for its infamous Project 2025. But that’s not the only project they intend to carry out now that Donald Trump is returning to the White House.
Project Esther is a new proposal from Heritage that claims to lay out a plan to combat antisemitism in the United States. In fact, it aims to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement as a first step in a crusade to, ultimately, restrict activism against American policy of all sorts, foreign and domestic. .
It’s not a new enterprise, of course. Disingenuous accusations of antisemitism have been weaponized by the Zionist movement and the State of Israel for a century or more but Project Esther means to unify and coordinate the cynical use of the fight against real antisemitism in order to completely destroy the movement for Palestinian rights.
But that is only its initial ambition. As the full plan makes clear, the people who produced this scheme see it as the key to devastating movements against both American imperialism abroad and white supremacy domestically.
What is Project Esther?
The Project Esther document describes its purpose this way: “Named after the historic Jewish heroine who saved the Jews from genocide in ancient Persia, Project Esther provides a blueprint to counter antisemitism in the United States and ensure the security and prosperity of all Americans.”
It should raise concerns right away that the document treats the story of Esther as historical. Most biblical scholars agree that the story is apocryphal, or at best allegorical. Only the most puritanically fundamentalist approach to the Book of Esther would treat it as history.
The key strategy Project Esther proposes is to identify the Palestine solidarity movement as the “Hamas Support Network,” and organizations in the movement as “Hamas Support Organizations.”
This strategy carries two key effects. One is to discredit the Palestine solidarity movement and all the organizations within it by associating it with Hamas, an organization most of the American public identifies as nothing but a terrorist organization, based on decades of misrepresentations of the group and its goals.
The second aim is to attack the ability of organizations to function by casting them as supporters of terrorism, and specifically of an organization that has been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization. This would make it impossible for those organizations to legally raise money or complete legal business transactions.
Unsurprisingly, the “Hamas Support network” purportedly revolves around American Muslims for Palestine and prominently includes Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Completing the picture are funding organizations such as the Open Society Institute, Tides Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
This demonization of the movement combines with the conspiratorial thinking that permeates the entire world in 2025 to take aim at many common tactics of activism.
After laying out allegedly “sinister” exploitation of the “open society” the United States ostensibly has, Project Esther makes the mere use of press releases, social media posts, letters to and meetings with elected officials, and other common tools of activism sound illegitimate simply because Palestine solidarity activists are using them. Again, they do this simply by talking about these activities being conducted by “Hamas Supporting Organizations.”
After establishing this, they state, without evidence, “It should be obvious at this point even to the casual observer that there is an active cabal of Jew-haters, Israel-haters, and America-haters in Washington—all apparently aligned with the far left, progressive movement.”
A political witchhunt
Throughout the document, in addition to erasing the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the writers attempt to paint the movement as a threat not only to Israeli apartheid—which, of course, it is—but also to democracy in the United States.
The conspiracy that Project Esther tries to paint also reaches into the United States government. The document names Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, Ayana Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Greg Casar, Andre Carson, Hank Johnson, Jan Schakowsky, Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal, Bernie Sanders, Chris Van Hollen, and Elizabeth Warren as being part of or supporting the “Hamas Caucus.”
There is a lot to be read into who is on that list and who is not.
Anyone who follows Congress would immediately see that the range of Democrats listed is very wide. It includes some like Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman whose stances on Palestine have featured very prominently in their political images and stances.
But others on the list have been cautious about Palestine, sometimes standing for Palestinian rights, sometimes not, but even when they do, it has been with relatively little fanfare. That would include some like Jayapal and Casar, and even some like AOC and Pressley who have tried, on one hand to appease their left-wing base on Palestine but have generally been more cautious than Tlaib, Bowman, and Bush.
More telling though is the absence of any Republicans. Before Bernie Sanders’ current effort at passing a Joint Resolution of Disapproval on sales of certain arms to Israel, no senator has been more active in slowing, delaying, and questioning aid to Israel than Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.
In the House, Rep. Thomas Massie routinely breaks with his party to vote against military aid and other bills related to Israel. Yet neither his name nor Paul’s appear in the Project Esther document.
If, as the authors claim, votes against Israel in Congress are forms of antisemitism, and Project Esther is all about going after antisemitism in the guise of anti-Israel resolutions, where are Massie and Paul in this document?
Their absence clearly reveals the game. The document also attacks outgoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whom Project Esther says “called for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ouster for no apparent reason other than Netanyahu’s being on Israel’s political right.”
Schumer did make such a call and did so because he believed that Netanyahu was leading Israel down a disastrous path with his attempt at a judicial coup that threatened to strip away Israel’s thin veneer of democracy even within its 1948 borders. It wasn’t ideological, or even political; it was Schumer trying to save the apartheid state from itself, as he demonstrated shortly thereafter by attending Netanyahu’s despicable address to Congress.
Project Esther’s selective criticism shows its fundamental aim is certainly not to protect Jewish safety, and is politically broader than just the Palestine solidarity movement it targets.
Return to McCarthyism
Project Esther wants to pull out all the stops in its attempt to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement.
Its initial focus is very squarely on the academy, where the document makes clear it hopes to establish a new standard in universities and lower-level schools that treat critical examination of both Israel and the United States as unacceptable. So most of its first tactics revolve around many of the efforts we’ve already seen in universities, twisting existing anti-discrimination laws to defend Israel, using “naming and shaming” and doxing tactics, lawfare, and, of course, congressional activism.
But Project Esther seeks to expand on this, and it goes to great lengths to try to equate the growing movement in support of Palestinian rights with the rise of pro-Nazi elements in the United States prior to World War II.
They note how, in response to the rise of the pro-Nazi Bund in the U.S., various elements came together to fight them. These included organized crime figures from the so-called “Jewish gangland,” as they note, “Jewish gangsters like Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, and Meyer “Mickey” Cohen—sometimes at the behest of their rabbis—happily coordinated “less than kosher” activities, pro bono, to disrupt and thwart the Bund.” That partnership with organized crime echoes Donald Trump’s own association with vigilante racist groups like the Proud Boys.
They further cite the creation of the House Un-American Activities Committees (HUAC) as a key element in the fight against both support for Nazism and Communism. “New York Democratic Congressman Samuel Dickstein, a Lithuanian-born Jew, worked with Texas Congressman Martin Dies to establish the House of Representatives’ Special Committee on Un-American Activities, also known as the Dies Committee, charged with uncovering Nazi and Communist activities inside the United States.”
The Dies Committee became HUAC in 1945 when it became a standing House committee, and it went on to commit some of the worst violations against civil rights in the United States of the 20th century.
This is what Project Esther would re-create if given the opportunity. And they are well aware that they have the opportunity right now. Written with Joe Biden still in office, and with too many Democrats doing their part to help create fertile ground for this plot, Project Esther states, “Our hope is that this effort will represent an opportunity for public–private partnership when a willing Administration occupies the White House.” That willing administration will arrive on January 20.
It only starts with Palestine solidarity
Speaking with Zeteo, Professor Joseph Howley of Columbia University, an anti-Zionist Jew, said, “[F]ar-right Zionist hegemonists have wanted for years to make being an anti-Zionist or non-Zionist or Israel-critical Jew illegal. This year they’ve succeeded in getting universities to make it policy …. Now they want to make it federal law.”
Once that is accomplished though, the aim is clearly against all possible dissent.
Jewish Voice for Peace’s executive director Stefanie Fox told Zeteo, ““It has never been clearer that defending Palestinian solidarity organizing is one of the most critical frontlines of democracy defense today… this McCarthyite initiative is led by Christian Nationalists, who directly threaten the safety and freedom of all marginalized people, including BIPOC peoples, religious minorities, queer people and women.”
Fox is right, and it goes even further. Project Esther intends to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement as a first step toward crushing dissent of all kinds against white supremacy within the United States and American military and imperial hegemony internationally. There is a very narrow band of people who will be safe from this effort if it’s not stopped.
Immoral Senate votes down resolutions to end US weapons fueling Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL, 24 Nov 24
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tried but failed to pass his 3 Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRD) aimed ending billions in US weapons used by Israel to obliterate habitable life for 2,300,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
Sanders and fellow Independent Angus King of Maine were joined by 17 Democrats hoping to persuade President Biden to stop violating the Leahy Law which forbids sending US weapons to states or groups committing war crimes, human rights violations and ghoulishly, genocide. The vote was engineered by a small contingent of moral Democrats to send a message to Biden they’re growing weary of shoveling over $20 billion in weaponry to assist Israel committing the worst genocide this century. They also heeded the 77% of pre-election Democratic voters who want an end to all US weapons to Israel.
Republican senators wanted no part of following the Leahy Law to extinguish the flames of genocide devouring Gaza. They all voted the resolutions down.
Kudos to my Illinois Senator Dick Durbin who voted for all 3 resolutions. Raspberries to my Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth who voted to keep the weapons train rolling into Israel in spite of opposition from virtually the entire civilized world save for Israel and America.
Biden worked feverishly to defeat the resolutions. He’s determined to end his presidency an unabashed, morally degraded enabler of genocide. Trump may be even more ravenous in supplying weaponry to Israel come January 20. But at the rate Biden is going, all the Palestinians in Gaza may be dead and gone by then.
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