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Tag: US

  • ‘Heinous’: Children Among 100 Killed by Israel Bombing of Gaza School Just Hours After US Weapons Approval

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    Original article by JON QUEALLY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Relatives of Palestinians killed by the Israeli attack on Nuseirat refugee camp mourn as the bodies are brought to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on August 10, 2024. (Photo by Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images)

    “It is hard to comprehend how the Biden administration can justify rewarding Israel with new weapons, despite Israel’s persistent defiance of every single plea the Biden administration has made urging a modicum of restraint.”

    Just hours after the Biden administration Friday announced approval of $3.5 billion in military funds for Israel and shipments for new weaponry, an Israeli bombing of a school-turned-shelter in Gaza has killed 100 people or more, including scores of civilian men, women, and children in what was described as a “bloody massacre” that struck during morning prayers, leaving body parts scattered “in pieces” and healthcare workers overwhelmed with the dead and wounded.

    The Palestinian Authority’s Fatah government in the Occupied West Bank released a statement Saturday describing the attack on the al-Tabin school in Gaza City as a “heinous bloody massacre” that represents the “peak of terrorism and criminality” by the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    “Committing these massacres confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt its efforts to exterminate our people through the policy of cumulative killing and mass massacres that make living consciences tremble,” said the PA.

    “If the ICC doesn’t take action now, then when?”

    Footage taken by volunteers working alongside Palestinian medical units in Gaza City showed wounded small children and adults being taken to local hospitals as well as scenes of carnage from the scene of the bombing [Warning: Images are graphic]. Gaza journalist Motasem A. Dalloul also posted his reporting from the scene, including footage of the carnage [Also graphic].

    Al-Jazeera spoke with witnesses at the scene of the massacre, one of whom said many of the dead—which included women, children, and old people who had been praying and others sleeping when the missiles struck—were collected afterward “in pieces”:

    – YouTube

    youtu.be

    Tamer Kirolos, a regional director for Save the Children, called Israel’s attack on al-Tabin the “deadliest attack on a school since last October.”

    “It is devastating to see the toll this has taken, including so many children and people at the school for dawn prayers,” Kirolos said. “Civilians, children, must be protected. An immediate definitive ceasefire is the only foreseeable way that will happen.”

    Just hours before the bombing, the U.S. State Department announcement that a $3.5 billion tranche of funds—part of a larger $14.1 billion in overseas military aid approved by Congress earlier this year—would be released to the Israeli government for weapons procurement.

    As CNN reported, while some of those weapons purchases made possible by the fund may take years, the “supplemental funding also allocated billions of dollars’ worth of equipment that the Pentagon can draw from its own stockpiles to send directly to Israel on a much faster timeline.”

    Unverified reporting indicated that at least one of the missiles dropped on the al-Tabin school overnight may have been a U.S.-made MK-84 bomb weighing 2,000 pounds.

    On Friday night, after the State Department announcement but before news of the latest bombing in Gaza broke, Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the human rights and advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), was among those confounded by the U.S. government’s continued determination to arm the Israelis in the face of the human suffering in Gaza and the repeated massacre of civilians, day after day and month after month.

    “It is mind-boggling that despite the overwhelming evidence of the IDF’s unprecedented crimes in Gaza that has shocked the conscience of the entire world, the Biden administration is greenlighting the transfer of additional lethal weapons to Israel,” said Whitson in a Friday night statement following news that the State Dept. had greenlit the release of taxpayer funds for a new round of weapons destined for Israel.

    “It is hard to comprehend how the Biden administration can justify rewarding Israel with new weapons, despite Israel’s persistent defiance of every single plea the Biden administration has made urging a modicum of restraint,” she said, “and despite the very apparent fact that such sales violate black letter U.S. laws prohibiting weapons to gross abusers like Israel.”

    Making a similar argument in a Saturday morning post on X, Sami Abou Shehadeh, leader of Israel’s leftist Balad Party, said that while President Joe Biden “could have stopped the genocide” by using his leverage of military aid to force the Israelis in a different direction, instead “he just released $3.5 billion for more weapons to kill civilians.”

    Shehadeh warned that without any internal opposition “to the genocide” by Israel’s Zionist political parties, Netanyahu’s policies would continue, even as the region inches toward further destabilization over the crisis in Gaza that has also spread to Lebanon and beyond. Calling for the International Criminal Court to intervene, he asked, “If the ICC doesn’t take action now, then when?”

    Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and co-founder of Progressive International, asked the same on Saturday.

    “Israel has now killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and wounded well over 92,000 others,” said Varoufakis. “Thousands more lie, uncounted, under the debris. Some 10,000 Palestinians have been abducted by Israel’s occupying forces. Question: Where is the ICC indictment?”

    “It is truly horrific,” Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s policy director told Common Dreams via email Saturday. “Last night’s massacre was another example of how Blinken and Biden have blood on their hands.”

    Referencing a separate decision by the State Department to suspend an investigation into documented abuse violations by the “notorious” Netzah Yehuda Unit within the IDF, Jarrar said the “decisions of sending weapons to Israel and not sanctioning Israeli human rights abusers are not just corrupt policy decisions, they are criminal acts.”

    Update: This article has been updated from its original to include additional comment from DAWN.

    Original article by JON QUEALLY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

  • GOP Budget Plans Spotlight Party’s Top Priority: Handouts for the Rich

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    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on July 23, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

    “Republicans would rather protect their billionaire friends at the expense of everyone else,” said the chair of the Joint Economic Committee.

    Budget proposals released by congressional Republicans in recent months lay bare the party’s desire to slash taxes for wealthy Americans and large corporations at the expense of key government programs and services, including nutrition assistance, environmental protection, and Medicaid.

    That’s according to an analysis released Wednesday by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee (JEC), which examined budget plans the GOP has released as Congress works to craft and pass government funding bills for the coming fiscal year.

    The JEC specifically cites a Fiscal Year 2025 budget proposal published in March by the Republican Study Committee, a panel comprised of three-quarters of the House GOP caucus.

    The plan, the JEC Democrats noted Wednesday, “claims to balance the budget by cutting Medicare spending, raising the retirement age for Social Security, capping funding for Medicaid and CHIP, and cutting the rest of non-defense discretionary spending by 31% across the board.”

    “This would drive up health costs for American families by increasing premiums for [Affordable Care Act] healthcare plans and getting rid of protections for people with pre-existing conditions,” the new analysis says. “It would also prohibit Medicare from negotiating down prescription drug costs.”

    A separate proposal from Republicans on the House Budget Committee claims it would finance “large tax cuts for the wealthy by both slashing key services and assuming that their tax giveaways lead to unrealistic levels of economic growth,” the Democratic report says.

    “Analyzing this budget with more reasonable economic assumptions instead shows that budget would likely require the government to eliminate most federal services within a decade,” the report adds.

    Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the chair of the JEC, said in a statement Wednesday that “Republicans’ extreme proposals are dangerous for America.”

    “While Democrats are fighting to invest in families, Republicans would rather protect their billionaire friends at the expense of everyone else,” said Heinrich. “Kicking 42 million kids off of health insurance, gutting federal investments in public safety, denying veterans hospital care, and getting rid of [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] benefits that help people afford groceries is unconscionable. Americans deserve better.”

    The analysis from JEC Democrats comes as Republican nominee Donald Trump attempts to posture as an ally of the working class despite his history of assailing labor protections and backing tax cuts for the rich.

    Trump has called for an extension of the tax cuts he signed into law in 2017—changes that overwhelmingly benefited wealthy Americans. An extension of the tax cuts would add $4.6 trillion to the deficit of the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

    The former president’s advisers have also reportedly discussed reducing the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%, a change that would give the largest 100 U.S. companies a tax cut of $48 billion per year.

    Trump has floated proposals that are ostensibly geared toward helping working-class Americans, including exempting tips from taxation—a proposal specifically aimed at hospitality workers—and eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits.

    But earlier this week, UNITE HERE—a union that represents hospitality workers—endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over the Republican candidate, warning that “another Trump presidency would mean four chaotic years of defending against his attacks on unions, working people, immigrants, women, and others.”

    As for Trump’s proposal to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, an analysis by the Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman found that the move would reduce “Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance (HI) revenues by $1.5 trillion over the next decade,” harming the programs’ finances while providing “little or no benefit” to lower-income households in 2025.

    “Less than 1% of the lowest-income households (those making about $33,000 or less, would get any tax cut at all,” Gleckman observed. “But about 28% of middle-income households would get a tax cut. Among the top 0.1 percent, about 20 percent of households would get a tax cut.”

    Gleckman found that “in dollar terms, the biggest winners would be those in the top 0.1% of income, who make nearly $5 million or more.”

    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

  • Watchdog of Far-Right GOP Issues ‘The Definitive Guide to Project 2025’

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    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts speaks at the National Conservative Conference in Washington D.C. on July 8, 2024. (Photo: Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images via AFP)

    “It’s a clear threat to our democracy, as our government could be weaponized against us as part of a concerted effort to control how we live our live,” said the vice president of Media Matters for America.

    A watchdog organization that monitors the Republican Party and the far-right movement at its core released a document Thursday characterized as “the definitive guide to Project 2025,” a sweeping policy agenda crafted by more than 100 conservative groups and alumni of former President Donald Trump’s administration.

    The 67-page report published by Media Matters for America lays out in detail Trump’s close ties to Project 2025 and examines specific policy proposals included in the agenda, which—if implemented—would affect every area of American life, from the workplace to the environment to reproductive rights and other fundamental freedoms.

    “Project 2025 lays out an extreme far-right agenda that would impose draconian restrictions to the lives of everyday Americans,” Media Matters vice president Julie Millican said in a statement. “If enacted, not only would it gut the checks and balances that our country relies on, but it’s a clear threat to our democracy, as our government could be weaponized against us as part of a concerted effort to control how we live our lives.”

    “Project 2025’s extremist goals make clear what’s truly at stake,” Millican added.

    “Project 2025 looks like an albatross that Trump will find hard to get rid of.”

    Contrary to the Republican presidential nominee’s claim that he “knows nothing about” Project 2025 or who’s behind it, Media Matters noted that “Trump and his allies are deeply connected” to the initiative spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation.

    The new report points to Trump’s remarks at a 2022 Heritage event, where the former president declared that the group would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” The Washington Post revealed Wednesday that Trump traveled to the event via private jet with Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation.

    “CNN reported that there are ‘nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump,’” Media Matters observed in its new analysis. “The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee nominated Project 2025 author Russ Vought as the policy director of the RNC’s 2024 Committee on the Platform… John McEntee, a Project 2025 senior adviser, said in April he would ‘integrate a lot of our work’ with the Trump campaign later this year.”

    The report spotlights plans outlined by Project 2025 and the Trump campaign to purge the federal workforce and replace career civil servants with Trump loyalists dedicated to implementing the far-right movement’s assault on abortion rights, climate regulations, labor protections, and more. Trump allies have already begun screening “thousands of potential foot soldiers” to replace federal employees across the U.S. government.

    “This posture toward witch hunts against federal bureaucrats recalls the days of disgraced Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade, which resulted in massive purges of left-wing federal employees as well as those perceived to be gay or gender-nonconforming,” Media Matters noted, adding that “MAGA media, including Project 2025 allies, have openly celebrated McCarthy’s destructive legacy.”

    The report also points with alarm to “a blog published to The American Conservative, a Project 2025 partner, [that] advocated for repealing the 22nd Amendment to allow Trump to serve a third term.”

    The Media Matters report came as the University of Massachusetts Amherst released new national survey data showing that Project 2025’s policy proposals are “deeply unpopular” with U.S. voters.

    Tatishe Nteta, provost professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll, said Thursday that “Project 2025 looks like an electoral liability” for Trump and the GOP, which has been accused of injecting Project 2025 policies into government funding proposals currently before Congress.

    Nteta said that given the results of the new survey—conducted between July 29 and August 1—”it is no surprise that the Democratic Party has sought to link” Project 2025 with Trump or that the GOP nominee has attempted to “move away from any and all association with the unpopular 900-page playbook.”

    “Large majorities of Americans oppose the key pillars of Project 2025, such as the replacement of career government officials with political appointees (68% opposed), restricting a woman’s right to contraception (72% opposed), and eliminating the Department of Education (64% opposed),” said Nteta. “While our politics are usually divided by class, generational, racial, gender, and partisan identities, among these groups we find strong opposition to many of the policies associated with Project 2025.”

    “Even former Trump voters exhibit opposition to many of these policies,” Nteta added, “a bad omen for the Republican Party and Trump campaign.”

    Just 8% of Trump 2020 voters support Project 2025’s proposal to strip emergency contraception access from tens of millions of women across the U.S., according to the new poll. Only 18% of Trump voters said they support “firing federal employees and replacing them with political appointees loyal to the president.”

    More than half of Americans say they have heard about Project 2025, the new survey shows—a finding that UMass Amherst professor Jesse Rhodes described as remarkable given that Heritage Foundation reports are “usually incredibly obscure.”

    “For the most part, Americans don’t like what they are hearing,” said Rhodes, a co-director of the new poll. “It’s no wonder Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025, but unfortunately for him, because dozens of his former administration officials worked on the report, this is going to be hard to do. Project 2025 looks like an albatross that Trump will find hard to get rid of.”

    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

  • As Venezuela Court Probes Election Results, US Declares Victory for Right-Wing Opposition

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    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished form Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro greets the president of the country’s Supreme Court of Justice, Caryslia Rodríguez, in Caracas on July 31, 2024. (Photo: Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images)

    Venezuela’s foreign ministry hit back at the U.S. State Department, accusing it of spearheading a “coup attempt.”

    The U.S. State Department has formally recognized opposition candidate Edmundo González as the winner of Venezuela’s election as the nation’s highest legal body began an investigation of the vote at the request of President Nicolás Maduro, who says he prevailed in the contest that is now under intense global scrutiny.

    In a statement released days after Venezuela’s election authority, Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE), declared Maduro the winner with just over 51% of the vote, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed late Thursday that “it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election.”

    “Now is the time for the Venezuelan parties to begin discussions on a respectful, peaceful transition in accordance with Venezuelan electoral law and the wishes of the Venezuelan people,” said Blinken, the top diplomat of a country that has repeatedly attempted to overthrow the Maduro government and hammered the country’s economy with sanctions. “We fully support the process of reestablishing democratic norms in Venezuela and stand ready to consider ways to bolster it jointly with our international partners.”

    Venezuela’s Foreign Affairs Ministry quickly hit back, saying Friday that it “rejects the serious and ridiculous statements attributed to United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in which he pretends to assume the role of the Venezuelan electoral authorities, demonstrating that the U.S. government is leading the coup attempt against Venezuela, promoting a violent agenda against the Venezuelan people and their institutions.”

    Blinken’s statement accepting the right-wing opposition’s claim of a decisive victory came a day after Maduro asked Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice on Wednesday to audit the presidential contest in the face of vocal concerns from regional leaders, election observers, and leading human rights organizations.

    In a joint statement issued Thursday, the presidents of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico said they are “closely following” the vote-counting process and called on the CNE to “move forward expeditiously and publicly release the data broken down by voting station”—something the Maduro government indicated it will do but has yet to provide.

    Meanwhile, the Carter Center—an organization whose founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, once praised Venezuela’s election system as “the best in the world”—argued that the 2024 contest “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.”

    “In the limited number of polling centers they visited, Carter Center observer teams noted the desire of the Venezuelan people to participate in a democratic election process, as demonstrated through their active participation as polling staff, party witnesses, and citizen observers,” the group said in a statement earlier this week. “However, their efforts were undermined by the CNE’s complete lack of transparency in announcing the results.”

    The Carter Center also preemptively raised doubts about the legitimacy of the Venezuelan high court’s assessment of the election.

    “You have another government institution, which is appointed by the government, to verify the government numbers for the election results, which are in question,” Jennie Lincoln, who led the Carter Center’s election delegation to Venezuela, told The Associated Press. “This is not an independent assessment.”

    The tense and high-stakes dispute over the rightful winner of Venezuela’s election has set off violence in the streets of the nation’s capital and sparked fierce debate over the path forward for the Latin American nation’s government.

    Some on the progressive left, both in Venezuela and internationally, view the right-wing opposition’s claims to victory as yet another in a long line of attacks on Venezuelan democracy by pro-corporate and fascist forces, while others—including left-wing regional leaders such as Chilean President Gabriel Boric—have expressed deep suspicions about the legitimacy of the contest, particularly given the CNE’s lack of transparency surrounding the vote count. CNE has attributed the delayed rollout of full results to a cyberattack.

    “The international community, and especially the Venezuelan people, including the millions of Venezuelans in exile, demand total transparency of the election records and the process, and that international observers not affiliated with the government report on the accuracy of the results,” Boric wrote on social media. “From Chile, we will not recognize any result that is not verifiable.”

    Others in Latin America have stood by Maduro, including Bolivia’s government, which is led by a left-wing president who recently faced an attempted coup.

    Venezuela’s opposition, led by María Corina Machado, continues to insist it won Sunday’s election, producing its own website purporting to demonstrate that González defeated Maduro with 67% of the vote.

    On Thursday, Machado—who was barred from participating in the presidential contest—took to the pages of the U.S. business press to proclaim that she can “prove Maduro got trounced.”

    “Maduro didn’t win the Venezuelan presidential election on Sunday. He lost in a landslide to Edmundo González, 67% to 30%,” Machado wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. “I know this to be true because I can prove it. I have receipts obtained directly from more than 80% of the nation’s polling stations.”

    Maduro has pledged to release the full election results in the coming days and blamed Machado and the U.S. for stoking unrest and violence.

    “If the U.S. government is willing to respect sovereignty and stop threatening Venezuela, we can return to dialogue,” Maduro wrote in a social media post on Thursday.

    “Venezuela is not your colony,” Maduro said.

    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished form Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

  • Trump vs. Harris: what each presidency would mean for the green transition

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    https://www.energymonitor.ai/features/trump-vs-harris-what-each-presidency-would-mean-for-the-green-transition/

    Trump and Harris’s environmental policies chart starkly different climate futures for the US and the world. Credit (from left): Stephen Maturen/Getty Images and Allison Joyce/AFP via Getty Images

    The presidential candidates for the world’s largest fossil fuel producer have starkly different climate policies.

    All eyes are on the US elections in November this year, with the decision of the 160+ million voters in the country to play a major role in determining the world’s trajectory towards a net-zero future.

    According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), even with current pledges for emissions reduction, the planet is hurtling towards a rise of up to 2.9°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. This would be catastrophic, and, one report indicates that the crisis could cost $178trn in global economic loss by 2070.

    Projected 2030 emissions must fall by an additional 28-42% to limit warming to 2°C, per UNEP estimates. This means that global decisions on decarbonisation in this decade will have ramifications for this century of humanity.

    …

    Trump dismisses ‘green new scam’

    Under a Trump administration, net-zero goals are expected to be in severe jeopardy.

    During his former presidency, Trump not only reversed more than 100 Obama-era environmental protections but also pulled the US out of the landmark 2016 Paris Agreement, through which countries are working together to keep global emissions below the threshold of a 2°C rise.

    During his campaign for re-election, Trump has dismissed rising environmental regulations as a “green new scam” and made no secret of his intentions to support the fossil fuel industry yet again.

    Speaking to a Fox News journalist at a town hall event in Iowa, he shared plans to expand oil drilling on “day one” and also promised to “drill, baby, drill” in his presidential nomination speech on 18 July.

    Moreover, at an April dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, he was reported to have asked oil industry executives to donate $1bn to aid his presidential campaign, citing benefits for them on avoided taxation and regulation as he plans to reverse environmental rules.

    The projections are dire. According to analysis by Carbon Brief, a climate policy and science website, Trump’s likely policies would add four billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, which would cause global climate damages worth more than $900bn, as per the latest US government evaluations.

    …

    Harris hailed a ‘climate champion’

    Harris, on the other hand, has a long history of enforcing climate action and is widely expected to carry on the legacy of the IRA.  

    She was an early co-sponsor for the Green New Deal, a comprehensive proposal for systemic decarbonisation in the US, including creating a 100% renewable energy grid and millions of green jobs.

    Most notably, ahead of her brief presidential election campaign back in 2019, Harris unveiled a $10trn plan to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2045, including policies such as working to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies.

    She also pledged to tax polluting industries and said she would establish an independent Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability that would represent and support frontline communities, and monitor government compliance.

    “Success in the presidential election in November would likely lead to Harris continuing to build on this existing climate legislation and defend against Republican criticism,” says Gregory.

    …

    https://www.energymonitor.ai/features/trump-vs-harris-what-each-presidency-would-mean-for-the-green-transition/