Dear John,

It looks like Project 2025 couldn't take the heat.

The far-right "presidential transition project" to remake the U.S. officially ended its work after a backlash against its backwards prescriptions.

But the project's ideas are still out there, and that includes a call for a massive increase in Pentagon spending. And Congress may be all too ready to oblige.

As Lindsay Koshgarian writes, even as violence continues in too many places, there's no justification for a Pentagon budget that looks like World War III - especially when diverting some of those funds toward climate resilience, housing and jobs could make us so much safer.

That spending is too often rationalized as part of the Pentagon's response to China, but it doesn't have to be that way. Together with the Quincy Institute and Justice is Global, the Institute for Policy Studies released a blueprint for a progressive foreign policy with China.

At the NPP blog, IPS New Mexico Fellow Aspen Coriz-Romero writes about the latest F-35 jet fighter debacle, in which an F-35 crashed into a hillside in Albuquerque - roughly $109 million up in flames.

And Hanna Homestead writes about the horrific police killing of Sonya Massey, reminding us that police killings since 2015 have numbered more than the number of U.S. troops killed in all 20 years of the post-9/11 wars.

The end of Project 2025 is a welcome rebuke to far-right ideals - and a reminder that we still have a long way to go.

In solidarity,

Lindsay, Alliyah, and Hanna

TRADEOFF: ARMS RACE VS. CLEAN ENERGY JOBS

The U.S. continues to fund wars abroad. Secretary of State Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin just visited the Philippines, where they agreed to boost the country's military by $500 million yearly for five years–a total of $2.5 billion. That total is enough to create over 14,000 clean energy jobs in the U.S. for one year. In a time of worsening wildfires and frequent heavy floods, the climate crisis is the most urgent threat we face.

The Pentagon is also the world's top institutional greenhouse gas emitter. Instead of fueling violence against people and our planet, it's time to put our resources toward a livable future for generations to come.

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https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2023/12/05/hunger-strike-permanent-ceasefire/

Photo by Darkest, courty of GoodFon.com

POLICE CROSS THE LINE (AGAIN)

On July 6, Sonya Massey was shot and killed by Sangamon County Deputy Sheriff Sean Grayson in her home in Springfield, Illinois.

Sonya Massey’s murder is an egregious yet all too common example of lethal police violence in America, where police-perpetrated killings are a major cause of violent death. According to the best data available, at least 9,893 people have been shot and killed by police in America since 2015. For context, approximately 7,000 U.S. soldiers died in two decades of the Global War on Terror.

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Photo courtesy of @beth_avedon/ X

THE RED LINE

On July 24, thousands gathered outside of the capitol to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress, and the Biden administration’s continued military funding in Israel. The demonstrators condemned Netanyahu’s crimes against humanity by issuing a notice of a ‘citizen's arrest’ against the Israeli Prime Minister.

400 Jewish protesters with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) were arrested during a sit-in the day before Netanyahu’s address, demanding the “U.S. enact an immediate weapons embargo on the Israeli government,” in light of the 14 billion dollars of U.S aid going to Israel, following a package the senate passed in April.

Vice President Kamala Harris and around 100 members of congress did not attend the speech.