With Trump, there is always something new to distract. Like tonight.
“I am much better looking than her.” That doesn’t even work in a high school election. Trump, the buffoon, would almost be funny if this wasn’t so serious. With Trump, it’s easy to let today’s bright shiny thing distract from the issues that are most important; in fact, he banks on it. So, we won’t let him distract us. We’ll keep our attention on Project 2025. It’s so important that it’s one of the few times Trump has backed down. For a man who usually doubles down and keeps going, no matter how unpopular (family separation at the border), crazy (insisting he never had sex with Stormy Daniels), or dangerous (aligning with strongmen like Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán) his takes are, Trump’s reversal on Project 2025 is remarkable. As Americans learned more about it, the crescendo of anti-Trump sentiment over it led Trump to try to distance himself. We’ve discussed Trump’s strong ties to the Heritage Foundation and the Project previously. A hidden camera recording made by British journalists that was released this week has one of the Project’s co-authors, Russell Vought, bragging that the group was secretly drafting “the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating ‘shadow’ agencies. He claimed that Trump has ‘blessed’ his organization and ‘he’s very supportive of what we do.’” Vought complained that the Republican Party “was too focused on ‘religious liberty’ instead of ‘Christian nation-ism.’” (Our deep dive with Christian nationalism expert Amanda Tyler is here.) You wouldn’t expect to see people wasting money and staff time on a massive project if it’s just a fantasy, not the real thing. Not only is the Project 2025 plan, all 900+ pages of it, there for anyone to read, Vought said he was preparing for Trump’s next administration with “a team of staffers working to draft regulations and executive orders that would translate Trump’s campaign speeches into government policy.” That sounds like they’re all in. ProPublica, the same nonprofit journalism enterprise that uncovered Justice Thomas’ and Alito’s extracurricular activities with billionaires, reported last week that secret training videos for implementing Project 2025 have been created. They wrote that the 23 videos, containing more than 14 hours of content, were validated by a person with access to them. Just some of the contents of the videos include:
ProPublica reported that based on their review of the videos, “29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration, or on his 2024 reelection campaign.” JD Vance wrote the introduction to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ new book. Vance is promoting Heritage’s proposed war to protect “conservative” values. Roberts is the guy who said that the coming revolution would be "bloodless if the left allows it to be.” That’s the man the Republican nominee to be vice president of the United States wrote a foreword for. Vance’s support guarantees continuity for the policies espoused in Project 2025 if Trump wins in November: “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
We’ve discussed some of the specifics of Project 2025 over the past months here in the newsletter, and we understand its authors are serious when they say their goal is to provide “both a governing agenda and [a process to get] the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.” That agenda is bad news for Americans who want to continue living in a democracy. The document itself is so comprehensive, so voluminous, that there is always something new hidden in its depths for us to discuss. For instance, Project 2025 targets the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA’s website bills it as “a science-based federal agency within the Department of Commerce with regulatory, operational, and information service responsibilities with a presence in every state and our territories.” That doesn’t sound like something that should be dismantled. But NOAA oversees the National Weather Service, so Project 2025 is on the attack against it because they claim it is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and, as such, a threat to “future U.S. prosperity … It should be broken up and downsized.” Project 2025 says that each of NOAA’s functions “could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.” If you rely on NOAA for warnings about tornadoes or hurricanes this is particularly alarming. The office that tracks hurricanes is singled out as a home of “climate alarmism” on page 676. We all rely on the science that is essential to prepare for the weather. The authors of Project 2025 are so worried about the truth behind climate change, that they’re willing to compromise our safety to deny it. In fact, they come right out and say it: appointees have to agree with the Trump administration’s aims here—denying science and climate change—if they want a job in the agency. They must be “wholly in sync” which “particular attention” paid to who gets appointed. This chapter was written by Thomas Gilman, a former Chrysler CEO. Gilman served as Trump’s chief financial officer and assistant secretary in the Commerce Department from 2019 to 2021.
It won’t be business as usual if Trump wins. The combination of devastatingly bad policy shifts and the immediate preparedness to implement them following the inauguration laid out in Project 2025 represent strong reasons to reject a new Trump presidency. Even Trump himself was smart enough to figure that out, hence his efforts to claim he knows nothing about the work being done on his behalf by his current and former associates. So, make sure that you’re registered to vote and in active status, and help the people around you do the same; it’s a great time to start making plans to vote together and to celebrate your role in protecting democracy together. Voting should be joyous.
In July, Donald Trump told his “beautiful Christians” they wouldn’t “have to” vote anymore if he won because he will have fixed everything. If any of your friends or family are hesitant about committing to vote this fall, make sure they understand that if they don’t, if it’s up to Donald Trump, they may never have that option again. We’re in this together, Joyce |
Sunday, August 18, 2024
More on what Project 2025 will destroy
We Need the Truth about Trump, Sisi, and the Missing $10 Million
For YEARS, activists and human rights groups have questioned and challenged U.S. military aid to the Egyptian government, which looks like up to $1.3 BILLION in “foreign military financing” each year.
Someone should have turned the funding stream off at multiple opportunities — and we may now know one reason it wasn’t, at least during the Trump years: In 2015, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi allegedly gave the then-candidate’s presidential campaign a $10 million boost.
Explosive Washington Post reporting has uncovered a multi-year FBI investigation that found $10 million in cash leaving a state-run Egyptian bank around the same time Donald Trump suddenly loaned his campaign — you guessed it — $10 million.[1]
We're left with 10 million questions. However, we don’t have the answers because Attorney General Bill Barr, one of Trump’s key political appointees, quashed the investigation before it could come to a conclusion.
The idea that Trump may have engaged in a pay-for-play scheme is only the latest in a long list of potential crimes, conflicts of interest, misdeeds, and negligence in U.S. foreign policy — but, nothing will change if we sit on the sidelines. That’s why we’re demanding answers now.
| ACT NOW |
“Foreign military financing” effectively gives foreign governments U.S.-taxpayer-funded grants to buy U.S.-made weapons and military equipment. This “security” assistance also enables those governments to suppress dissent and ignore human rights in too many countries across the globe — and when it comes to Egypt, abuse by the Sisi regime is well documented.
A 2020 report from our own State Department highlighted the Egyptian government’s significant human rights violations, including forced child labor, extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and torture.
The situation was already deeply troubling. Now, add in allegations of corruption and a race to the White House.
When you’re talking about corruption in the 2020s, $10 million may not seem like a big deal, but it’s a HUGE sum for a presidential campaign. That kind of money can cover the costs of extensive field operations in key battleground states, allow you to flood television, radio and digital channels in Iowa and New Hampshire with your messaging, or even buy ads during the Super Bowl. With the elections coming down to a handful of electoral college votes, any one of those tactics could have a pivotal payoff— and we deserve to know who’s writing the checks.
We were unequivocal that soon-to-be-former Senator Menendez should resign after allegations arose that he accepted bribes from the Egyptian government last year. That's why we similarly demand a full and thorough investigation of these allegations into Donald Trump by the Department of Justice and Congress.
We refuse to accept a world where U.S. foreign policy is for sale. And if you believe in justice and accountability too, we need you to speak out now.
Together, we’ll remind the world that U.S. foreign policy is NOT up to the highest bidder.
Thank you for working for peace,
The Win Without War team
1. The Washington Post, “$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt” (gift link)
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Informed Comment daily updates (08/18/2024)
Polio Pause: UN Calls for Urgent Ceasefire to allow 640K Children to be Vaccinated, as Gaza Polio Victim Confirmed Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A ten-month-old child in Gaza has been confirmed stricken with polio, as several other children have displayed symptoms consistent with the disease, which can cause paralysis and death. Polio had been eradicated in Gaza years ago, but the highly unsanitary conditions created by the Israeli military’s indiscriminate destruction of Gaza […] |
Partners in Genocide: Israel is slaughtering Palestinians with Western Arms ( Middle East Monitor ) – While many are earnestly pointing at the devastation of war, the rampant human rights violations and the deliberate relegation of international and humanitarian law, there are those who see war from an entirely different perspective: profits. For the merchants of war, the collective pain and misery of whole nations […] |
Biden lost the Vote of this Pastor over Gaza. Harris must earn it Back ( New Jersey Star-Ledger ) – I cannot see President Biden without seeing 40,000 dead Gazans. He rightly stepped aside after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, but he continues to lose a far more disastrous debate with Israel’s Prime Minister, weakening the basic principles of US foreign policy. Alongside his humiliating failure to achieve […] |
Old posts you may have missed
Biden lost the Vote of this Pastor over Gaza. Harris must earn it Back
Biden lost the Vote of this Pastor over Gaza. Harris must earn it Back
( New Jersey Star-Ledger ) – I cannot see President Biden without seeing 40,000 dead Gazans.
He rightly stepped aside after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, but he continues to lose a far more disastrous debate with Israel’s Prime Minister, weakening the basic principles of US foreign policy. Alongside his humiliating failure to achieve any “red lines” on civilian casualties, Gaza is having significant, long-term moral impacts on Christianity and Judaism.
So far, Democratic Convention organizers — and nominee Kamala Harris — have not agreed to any airtime for Gaza. Yet simply saying “Trump would be worse” to the Uncommitted million primary voters, and the protesters outside, will devalue whatever feel-good effect she may achieve.
As a Holocaust survivor’s son, I was raised to despise antisemitism and support Israel. Over five Middle East visits, however, I learned that Israel is not the beleaguered little guy, but a country enabled by blank-check US support to operate without normal political consequences. Our billions in military aid strengthen the most repressive elements of Israeli society, which denies most Palestinians citizenship. Thus, while criticizing Israel’s government is not antisemitic, the worldwide rise in antisemitism reacting to Gaza is alarming and unsurprising.
To a Presbyterian ethicist, Gaza clearly violates the “Just War” principles of proportionality, avoidance of civilian casualties, and goal of a just peace. Israel’s use of enormous bombs is indiscriminate as the Israeli Army authorizes massive casualties in pursuit of combatants — including 17,000 children, so far.
Aryeh Neier, the co-founder of Human Rights Watch, concludes that yoking one-sided onslaught and deliberate starvation constitutes a genocide. Destroying universities, schools, mosques, churches, libraries, and hospitals — a cultural genocide — makes “just peace” less likely.
Diplomats’ resignations underline our complicity and isolation as Israel’s defender at the United Nations, blocking humanitarian aid and ceasefires. Both Christianity and Judaism — assumed to influence US and Israeli policy — are discredited when basic moral intuitions are disregarded.
Virtually no one excuses atrocities by some Hamas fighters in the October 7 “jailbreak,” nor endorses the intolerance in Hamas’ survival under Israel’s blockade since its legitimate electoral victory in 2006.
But the “Islamic fundamentalist” label, part of demonizing Hamas, is cheap, as US policy empowers Israeli Settler fundamentalism. Settlements put over 500,000 Israelis on West Bank and East Jerusalem land, preempting any “two-state” solution. Biden’s seeking help from the Saudi government — effectively a Taliban with oil money — reinforces religious fundamentalism. It contributes to a disastrous US Middle East policy, and also suggests that much religious belief is pitiless tribalism.
The prophetic core of Judaism, carried into Christianity, confronts unjust uses of power by whoever wields it. Biden’s reflexive condemnation of the university protesters as “antisemitic” revealed his inability to adjust to Israel’s far right turn.
By contrast, look at the brave Jewish Voice for Peace members who fear that Zionism is becoming idolatrous, distorting Jewish ideals. Similarly, the Israeli veterans’ organization, Breaking the Silence, persuades me that the long military occupation of Palestine numbs Israelis to Palestinian human rights.
For Christians, fear of being called antisemitic is the dominant filter for information on Israel, Arabs, and Islam.
This weakens Christianity’s universal approach, the understanding that God “has made from one ancestor all the nations” (Acts 17:26 NRSV) and, from St. Paul, that before God, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, … slave or free, …male and female…” (Galatians 3:28).
Both fundamentalist and mainstream Christians allow the dehumanization of Arabs to poison our perceptions of Muslims, whose hopes for freedom we saw in the Arab Spring and the women’s rights protests in Iran. Islamophobia numbs us to the collective punishment of Palestinians, ironically including the abandonment of the Palestinian Christians.
The lack of honest interfaith dialogue also hurts Christianity and Judaism. Already in 1971, Christian and Jewish scholars published, The Death of Dialogue and Beyond, to avert tensions over Israel/Palestine. Lessons of the Holocaust were invoked, such as how unaccountable power does inevitable evil, and are reconfirmed in Gaza.
Peace — anywhere, anytime — requires justice.
Will Kamala Harris continue to enable genocide? If so, my faith will require me to say “never again” with my vote.
The Rev. Christian Iosso, PhD, is interim minister of the Connecticut Farms Presbyterian Church in Union. A New Providence native, he served as an ethicist for the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Reprinted from the New Jersey Star-Ledger with the author’s permission.
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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:
AP Video: “US VP Kamala Harris speaks about Israeli strike on Gaza school”
Partners in Genocide: Israel is slaughtering Palestinians with Western Arms
Partners in Genocide: Israel is slaughtering Palestinians with Western Arms
( Middle East Monitor ) – While many are earnestly pointing at the devastation of war, the rampant human rights violations and the deliberate relegation of international and humanitarian law, there are those who see war from an entirely different perspective: profits.
For the merchants of war, the collective pain and misery of whole nations is dwarfed by the lucrative deals of billions of dollars generated from weapons sales.
The great irony is that some of the loudest advocates of human rights are, in fact, the ones who are facilitating the global arms trade. Without it, human rights would not be violated with such impunity.
The Geneva Academy, a legal research organisation, says that it currently monitors about 110 active armed conflicts worldwide. Most of these conflicts are taking place in the Global South, though many of these cases are either exacerbated, funded or managed by western powers or western multinational corporations.
Of the 110, 45 armed conflicts are taking place in the Middle East and North Africa region, 35 in the rest of Africa, 21 in Asia and six in Latin America, according to the academy.
The worst and bloodiest of these armed conflicts is currently taking place in Gaza, one of the poorest and most isolated regions in the world.
To estimate the future death toll resulting from the war in Gaza, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, the Lancet, undertook a thorough research entitled “Counting the dead in Gaza: Difficult but essential“.
The approximation was based on the death toll figure produced as of 19 June, when Israel had then reportedly killed 37,396 Palestinians.
The Lancet’s new number was horrifying, even though the medical journal said that its conclusions were based on conservative estimates of indirect deaths vs direct deaths that often result from such wars.
Should the war have ended on 19 June, 7.9 per cent of the population of the Gaza Strip would die because of the war and its aftermath. That’s “up to 186,000 or even more deaths,” according to the medical journal.
Palestinians in Gaza are not dying because of an untraceable virus or a natural disaster, but in a merciless war that can only be sustained through massive shipments of arms, which continue to flow to Israel despite the international outcry.
On 26 January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) resolved that it had enough evidence to suggest that genocide was being committed in Gaza. On 20 May, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, added his voice, this time speaking of deliberate acts of “extermination” of Palestinians.
Yet, weapons continued to flow, mostly coming from western government. The main source of weapons is, unsurprisingly, the United States, followed by Germany, Italy and Britain.
Despite announcements by some European countries that they are curtailing or even freezing their weapons supplies to Israel, these governments continue to find legal caveats to delay the outright ban. Italy, for example, insists on respecting “previously signed orders” and the UK has suspended the processing of arms export licenses “pending a wider review”.
Washington, however, remains the main supplier of arms to Tel Aviv. In 2016, both countries signed another Memorandum of Understanding that would allow Israel to receive $38 billion of US military aid. That was the third MoU signed between the two countries, and it was intended to cover the period between 2018 to 2028.
The war, however, prompted US policymakers to go even beyond their original commitment, by assigning yet another $26 billion ($17 billion in military aid), knowing full well that the majority of Gaza victims, per United Nations estimates, are civilians, mostly women and children.
Therefore, when the US urges an end to the war in Gaza while continuing to flood Israel with more weapons, the logic seems utterly flawed and entirely hypocritical.
The same hypocrisy applies to other, mostly western countries, which brazenly pose as defenders of human rights and international peace.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world’s top ten exporters of major arms between 2019 and 2023 include six western countries. The US alone has a 42 per cent share of global arms exports, followed by France at 11 per cent.
The total arms export of the top six western states amounts to nearly 70 per cent of the global share.
If we consider that the vast majority of armed conflicts are all taking place in the Global South, the obvious conclusion is that the very West that purportedly champions global peace, democracy and international law is the very entity that also fuels wars, armed conflicts and genocide.
For the Global South to take charge of its future, it must fight against this obvious injustice. They cannot allow their continents to continue to serve as mere markets for western arms. The blood of Arabs, Africans, Asians and South Americans should not be spilled to sustain the economies of western countries.
True, it will take much more than limiting the arms trade to end global conflicts, but the free flow of weapons to conflict zones will continue to feed the war machine, from Gaza to Sudan and from Congo to Burma and beyond.
One can continue to argue that Israel must respect international law, and that Burma must respect human rights. But what use are mere words when the West continues to provide the murder weapon, with no moral or legal accountability?
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.—
Bonus video added by Informed Comment:
Here’s what’s in the US’s $20 billion weapons package to Israel | Al Jazeera Newsfeed”
Polio Pause: UN Calls for Urgent Ceasefire to allow 640K Children to be Vaccinated, as Gaza Polio Victim Confirmed
Polio Pause: UN Calls for Urgent Ceasefire to allow 640K Children to be Vaccinated, as Gaza Polio Victim Confirmed
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A ten-month-old child in Gaza has been confirmed stricken with polio, as several other children have displayed symptoms consistent with the disease, which can cause paralysis and death. Polio had been eradicated in Gaza years ago, but the highly unsanitary conditions created by the Israeli military’s indiscriminate destruction of Gaza have allowed it to fester once again.
UN Secretary General António Guterres issued a statement, saying,
- “Gaza is in a humanitarian freefall.
Just when it seems the situation could not get worse for Palestinians in Gaza, the suffering grows – and the world watches.
In recent weeks, the poliovirus has been detected in wastewater samples in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah.
That means the virus is now circulating, with hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza at risk.
Polio does not care about dividing lines – and polio does not wait.
Preventing and containing the spread of polio will take a massive, coordinated and urgent effort.
The United Nations is poised to launch a vital polio vaccine campaign in Gaza for more than [640,000] children under the age of 10.
The World Health Organization has approved the release of 1.6 million doses of the polio vaccine.”
Guterres points out that in order to vaccinate 640,000 Palestinian children in Gaza, the UNRWA and other health workers on the ground will need to administer the shots in two rounds: “The vaccination effort will include 708 teams at hospitals and primary health care centres – many of which are barely functioning — and by 316 community outreach teams throughout Gaza.”
Polio experts will have to join other health workers in Gaza, a very dangerous environment in which the Israeli Army often fires on medics, journalists and other non-military targets. Because of this indiscriminate behavior on the part of the Israeli military, the only practical way to mount such an inoculation effort is to have a ceasefire in Gaza.
Guterres said, “above all, a successful polio vaccination campaign needs safety. Safety for health workers to do their jobs. Safety for children and families to get to the health facilities. And safety for those health facilities to be protected from bombardment. I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign.”
He is calling it the “polio pause.”
Even just keeping the vaccines refrigerated is a daunting task.
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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:
Top News | 'He’s Not Going to Run Unopposed': Sanders Rejects Schumer for Majority Leader
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